NASA animation here; technical background.

NOTE Thanks to alert reader Nick.

The Amazin' Froomkin makes a great start:

Among the questions being asked around Washington and the blogosphere this morning:

* If the reason Bush returned to Washington is that he is more effective here, then why didn't he come back two days ago?

* If the White House considers the return from vacation largely symbolic, then what is the symbolism of his long vacation during a war?

* Could Bush and the federal government have done more to prepare for hurricane recovery? Unlike the Asian tsunami, this hurricane was forecast days ahead of time.

* Did any of his previous budget decisions allow the hurricane to cause more damage than it might have otherwise?

* Are National Guard troops and equipment required to restore order in this country many thousands of miles away. [Interesting ".". This isn't a question, is it?]

* Will he and his administration meet this disaster quickly and effective with the appropriate civilian and military resources and manpower?

* Will the White House provide the bold leadership and vision that the nation requires?
(via WaPo)

Dunno about the last question, though. The last thing we want from President Shit Magnet, at this point, is "bold leadership" into another quagmire.

This is from YubaNews. Read the captions and take a couple of minutes to just compare. And then keep in mind it was taken yesterday.

One of my students just told me he's been activated by the National Guard for 2-4 weeks to go south and help with Katrina cleanup.

Um, folks, if they're calling up National Guard units from Missouri doesn't that suggest that -- despite all protests to the contrary -- that Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama (who have thousands of guardsmen in Iraq) don't really have enough guardsmen on hand to help with the Katrina disaster?

They've been saying that all day but they're apparently quietly going around calling up units from other states.

Why do they lie to us like that?

I'm so glad to finally know what is required to make the Bush administration open up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Just to review, it requires presidential approval ratings lower than Nixon's, a catastrophic major disaster, and $3 per gallon gas!

I'm thinking W's approval ratings might be hitting the 20s soon folks.

As Atrios frequently says, pass the popcorn.

Expanding on Riggsveda's earlier post (back) read to the end to get the real nightmare scenario:

The problems caused by floodwaters will only get worse, according to [Louisiana State University Hurricane Center researcher Ivor van Heerden] and the earlier tabletop exercises. For one, if the water in the city does rise to the height of levees along the lakefront, it may be difficult to open floodgates designed to keep the lake out that would now be needed to allow the lake to leave. Van Heerden said the rising floodwaters also would cause major pollution problems in coming days, as they float dozens of fuel and chemical storage tanks off their fittings, severing pipelines and allowing the material to seep into the floodwaters.

"In our surveys of the parish, a lot of the storage tanks we looked at weren't bolted down with big bolts," he said. "They rely on gravity to hold them down. If an industrial property is 5 feet below sea level and the water gets to 5 feet above sea level, that's 10 feet of water, and I'm certain many we looked at will float free.

"You'll see a lot of highly volatile stuff on the surface, and one spark and we'll have a major fire," he said.
(via Times Picayune)

Savage irony, eh?

Bush fights a war in Iraq for oil (back), and the port of New Orleans floods because Bush cut the flood control money to pay for the war (back). And then, the same oil we fought so hard to seize in the Mideast, floating on the floodwaters, catches fire...

Bringing the war back home...

Can't these guys get their stories straight?

"If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. "They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition."

A one-time oilman, Bush has rejected charges that the war in Iraq is a struggle to control the nation's vast oil wealth. The president has avoided making links between the war and Iraq's oil reserves, but the soaring cost of gasoline has focused attention on global petroleum sources.
(via AP)

Gee, looks like the "no blood for oil" tinfoil hat types were right all along, doesn't it? Who knew? Guess I'm going to have to buld me some giant puppets after all...

Of course, Bin Laden—isn't this the first time Inerrant Boy has mentioned that name in awhile?—or Zarqawi aren't going to take over; an Islamic theoracy is. That being the "noble cause"...

August 31 (AP) - As the residents of New Orleans reeled from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, governments around the globe, moved by their plight, rushed to provide relief assistance. Many of these nations themselves had recently experienced great suffering and remembered the US government's acts of kindness towards them.

First to rush aid to the scene was Sri Lanka, devastated last year by a tsunami. "We vividly recall President Bush's stirring words while vacationing in Crawford," said Sri Lankan President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. "More than that, we remember how he put the resources of the richest country in history at our disposal to help us get back on our feet, and we wanted to return the favor, in our own humble way. Of course a per capita aid contribution of 10 cents would be the equivalent of a day's wages at one of our textile sweatshops, so we could not afford to be that generous. So we started thinking of in-kind donations. At first we were going to give a container ship of disposable sunglasses, but then we were reminded how Bush wound up digging really deep to help us. So we're sending flip-flops instead."

The aid proposal has its critics, who say that, because they manufacture millions of flip-flops yearly, they barely cost Sri Lankans anything at all. To them, President Kumaratunga says, "Hey, they dry out quickly and protect your feet while wading. Besides, these puppies would cost them $5.98 at Wal-Mart."

Kumaratunga adds that more aid may be forthcoming. "If we're browbeaten into it, we may wind up sending each New Orleans resident their own colorful beach ensemble."

Other countries are also doing their part. The French have perhaps the most imaginative idea: they are sending the gift of laughter. "We recall how, when Parisians were dying from a record-breaking heat wave, pundits in your country wrote humorous editorials making fun of them," said President Jacques Chirac. "This really helped put our suffering in perspective. As a people with a profound respect for the works of Jerry Lewis, we know the cleansing power of making fun of ourselves, and we know Americans do too. So we're sending our best French comics--both of them--to provide, how you say, comic relief, no?"

President Chirac then ad libbed his own bit: "Eet ees wet in New Orleans. How wet ees eet? Eet's so wet, the Superdome ees now sponsored by Lipton Cup o' Soup! Honh! Honh! Honh!"

But the most touching outpouring of assistance came from beleaguered Iraq, whose interim government pledged to help provide security assistance, since the US National Guard, which normally fulfills the security role, is committed elsewhere, leaving looters to run rampant through the streets of New Orleans.

An Iraqi spokesperson who spoke under promise of strict anonymity from an undisclosed, heavily fortified compound somewhere in the Middle East, clarified that Iraqi security would not actually try to stop the looters, but instead would focus solely on safeguarding the highest priority installations: oil refineries. "Freedom, it is, how you say, untidy, yes?" he said with a shrug. "Free people, they free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They also free to liff their lives and do wonderful things, and that's what's going to happen here."

He went on to add, however, that Iraqi security forces are authorized to detain and torture any New Orleans resident for any reason whatsoever. Torture practices will include urinating on the Bible and taunting prisoners with "whose God is bigger now, you son of a pig?"

Sexual humiliation, however, has been ruled out. "We were told on good authority that stripping prisoners naked, putting dog collars on them, and taking photos is considered a 'good time' in your country," he said.

"Who knew?"

I'm not posting anything here for awhile, because nothing I have to say is as important as what Lambert and famer have highlighted previously on the gutting the Bush administration gave to Louisiana's flood control and hurricane protection research in the last 2 years, here, here, and here. And it's getting worse. Maybe this will be the tragedy that will open the country's eyes to just how dangerous Bush is. Because drowning his own people isn't enough for him: his plans also include suffocating them, too.

UPDATE: The report from the BBC is that 80% of New Orleans in underwater. The Times-Picayune has outlined a nightmare scenario of things to come.

Letter to the editor: Friday, June 17, 2005 (via Lex-Nex search)

The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
METRO - EDITORIAL; Pg. 6
State's support for Bush doesn't seem to matter

Re: "Bush opposes Louisiana's bid for oil royalties: Officials in shock as plan to restore coast takes a hit," Page A-7, June 16.

President Bush has just told Louisiana to go jump in the Gulf.

First Bush convinced the House to cut $20 million out of $37 million that was supposed to go to Louisiana's coastal restoration and flood control. Then, to add insult to injury, we read in The Times-Picayune that Bush is against giving coastal states up to $500 million a year out of royalties from oil and gas drilling off our coasts. Coastal states generate more than a quarter of the oil and gas consumed by the United States, but Bush opposes the Senate's plan to share that income.

Inland states now collect 50 percent of royalties from oil, gas and coal mined on federal lands within their borders, but apparently President Bush doesn't think Louisiana deserves the same treatment.

This is our president, Louisiana. We helped him win his second term in office, and this is how he thanks us. Our dwindling coastline just isn't Bush's concern. Nor is the prospect of New Orleans under 20 feet water.

No, Bush would rather spend $151 billion (so far) on the war in Iraq and give massive tax cuts to the wealthy than protect Louisiana from falling into the Gulf of Mexico.

David Morris
New Orleans

*

President Bush, left, plays a guitar presented to him by Country singer Mark Wills, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.

Watch that middle finger, there, pal...

Here:

8:04 P.M. - Mayor Nagin: Unhappy that the helicopters slated to drop 3,000-pound bags into the levee never showed up to stop the flow of water. Too many chiefs calling shots he says.

7:59 P.M. - Mayor Nagin: Pumps at 17th street canal has failed and water will continue pouring into the city. Nine feet of water is expected on St. Charles Avenue that will be nine feet high. Water is expected to spread throughout the east bank of Orleans and possibly Jefferson Parish.

6:41 P.M. - Efforts to stop the levee break at the 17th Street Canal have ended unsuccessfully and the water is expected to soon overwhelm the pumps in that area, allowing water to pour into the east bank of Metairie and Orleans to an expected height of 12-15 feet.

1:30 P.M. Some six-thousand National Guard personnel from Louisiana and Mississippi who would otherwise be available to help deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are in Iraq.

Even so, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said the states have adequate National Guard units to handle the hurricane needs.

11:54 A.M. - Kenner mayor asking for more National Guard.

11:21 A.M. (AP) - The White House says President Bush is cutting short his vacation to return to Washington [tomorrow] to monitor the hurricane recovery efforts.

11:01 A.M. - Break in 17th Street Canal Levee is now 200 feet wide and slowly flooding the City of New Orleans. Huge sand bags are being airlifted to try to stem the rush of water in that area.

11:01 A.M., the sandbags are going to get dropped at the 17th Street Level (the level that broke because Bush slashed the funding to maintain it (back)).

8:04 P.M, the sandbags haven't been dropped, and New Orleans is about to be flooded with 9 feet of water.

So who's accountable for not dropping the sandbags?

Why, Bush's own, Federal, Army Corp of Engineers.

Meanwhile, Louisiana's own National Guard (what remains of it) attempts to fill the gap with concrete highway barriers.

Let's pray to God, as we understand God, for them.

Somebody has to be the first to say this, and it's probably not me, but I haven't actually seen it anywhere so will take the rap. Because it is a hard, hard thing to say:

New Orleans is dead.

It was a semi-stupid place to put a city anyway, everybody has long admitted. When you can't even bury the dead in the ground because the water table is so high the caskets simply bob to the top like corks, this is a clue. When the living put up with yellow fever on a hideously regular basis for centuries. Where every living thing is dependent on constantly-working pumps just to keep what's currently going on from making everybody grow gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

At any rate everybody who has stopped to think about it has realized for years that New Orleans was doomed. But a city is a huge investment and something you don't just walk away from casually. So we build yet another dike, and raise the levees yet again, and put in more pumps, and hope to scrape by by the skin of your teeth just one more time.

It didn't help, of course, that Bush did what he did to FEMA, and stole the money for the Ponchartrain levee improvements to give to his rich friends and make dead Iraqis, but we've covered that elsewhere and this post is not about that shit, for once. If Gore or Kerry were in office as they should be, the facts would be the same.

Time to admit that the end has come. By most accounts the damage is now in the $25 billion range, and I suspect that is a serious underestimate that doesn't take into account the degree of contamination from pollution, the level of damage already in place from the Formosa termite and other wood-eating pests, and the astronomical levels of mold and mildew that would follow even if they could actually pump out all the water already accumulated there. Which I suspect they cant. Damn gravity anyway.

Time to decide what to do next, rather than waste more money than absolutely necessary giving the once glorious, now hideously ruined, corpse the ICU treatment. Pull the plug. Now. Go inland a ways, either west towards Baton Rouge or north of Ponchartrain, and use that $25 billion to create a new city from scratch. Get today's incarnation of Pierre l'Enfant to lay out a liveable plan, and go for it. Because otherwise you're going to have Gaza On the Mississippi with refugees living in tents for years waiting to return to a town that just isn't there any more.

Yeah, they won't get invited to so many dinner parties and maybe the Kewl Kidz will mak e fun of them. So?

A majority of Americans — including more than three-quarters of Democrats and nearly six in 10 independents — say the Democrats in Congress have not gone far enough in opposing the war, or, for that matter, in opposing Bush's policies more generally.
(via AP)

Philly's own Will Bunch follows the money (via the man in the grey turtleneck (here)

Yes, if you follow the money it turns out Bush took the money that should have been spent on New Orleans levees and pissed it away in Iraq. In fact, the very levee that burst, 17th Street, was a victim of Bush cutbacks:

It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.—Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.

[...]
With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.
[...]
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.

But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to
order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.

The 2004 hurricane season, as you probably recall, was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history.

One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions:
(via Attytood)

Remember how, over and over again, Bush fucks the Blue state cities, especially the port cities? Because they're not part of the base?

Remember the idea that the war in Iraq has an opportunity cost (back)?

The Katrina disaster—the dead, the billions in damages, the loss of a city—is the opportunity cost of Bush's war in Iraq.

Just follow the money.

That $8.6 billion that Bush just [cough] "lost" (back) would have bought New Orleans a lot of flood control, wouldn't it...

Yeah, Bush better end his vacation two days early. He's got some 'splainin' to do...

UPDATE Will Bunch also in Editor and Publisher!

Let them eat cake:

"The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday."

Great job, George! Put more people in poverty again, did you? Let's see how the nation's tradeable labor pawns played out on the White House gameboard:

"Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003...

The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold -- 11.3 percent of the population. Since then, the poverty rate has increased steadily from 11.7 percent in 2001, when the economy slipped into recession, to 12.5 percent in 2003...

The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year...

Tim Smeeding, an economics professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, says the nation has experienced a shift from earnings income to capital income and capital gains, which aren't reflected in the Census Bureau's latest numbers.
''Most of that growth in the economy over the last couple of years has gone to higher income people and has taken the form of capital income -- interest, rents, dividends,'' Smeeding said."

And how low does a family's income have to be for them to be considered "living in poverty? I dare you to live on it:

"For instance, a family of four with two children was considered living in poverty if income was $19,157 or less. For a family of two with no children, it was $12,649. For a person 65 and over living alone, it was 9,060."

Nice, eh? And remember, these numbers are only about people who slipped below the thresholds, not the many who exist in that fiscal twilight just above them. What is $9000? How much do you think Jack Welch throws away on a night on the town since he retired in luxury?

This is pretty good progress for you George, even accounting for your usual slothful approach to work. Why, it was only just last year we saw the same upward trend, though I have to say, it probably wasn't nearly steep enough to suit your constituency, of whom Jack Welch was one of the most avid.

It's not everyone in your position who's been able to stuff the maw of the ravenous rich with the bodies of the poor; sent the excess and expendable cannon fodder of the trailer parks and tenements to the flesh shredders of a trumped-up war courtesy of a deadwagon load of transparent lies anyone could have seen through except a nation in love with its own victimhood; broken the national budget to enrich the wealthiest while passing laws to entrap the unfortunate in endless, hopeless debt; hid with one's yellow tail between one's legs inside the comfort of some faux auxiliary assignment during one's youth while others died, then pulled the same abracadabra routine in middle age as an incompetent schmutzbag in "president's" clothing; and systematically proceeded to dismantle every existing Constitutional safeguard for its citizens except for the one allowing rampant deadly weapons to metastasize throughout the country.

And all while posturing as a paragon of morality and Christianity, spouting shibboleths and saber-rattling in the best Old Testament tradition, none of which would the bovine American public think to contrast to the institutionalized torture mandated by the "few bad apples" whose tree's branches twine upward into the highlest levels of the Pentagon and West Wing. No, as your usual dumb luck would have it, no lie or rampant contradiction that falls regurgitated from your mouth is ever deemed too absurd for my fellow citizenry to swallow like starved fledglings.

These are indeed accomplishments for which you can be proud, George. And after having worked this hard to fashion hell on earth for so many others, maybe one day you'll be able to enjoy the fruits of that labor yourself.

Cross-posted at It's My Country, Too.

Looks like New Orleans didn't dodge the bullet after all...

Hurricane Katrina and its rains have passed, but this city is filling with flood waters.

The sense of relief that residents felt Monday morning when the city was not immediately inundated by a storm surge overflowing its protective levees was replaced late Monday night and Tuesday morning with dread because of a levee that was damaged by the hurricane.

Water flowing from the damaged levee near Lake Pontchartrain could have equally catastrophic effects, only unfolding more slowly.

The damage to the 17th Street Canal and its levee means that the water from Lake Pontchartrain is now free to flow down to inundate hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings here.

Once it flows in, the water will not drain from New Orleans because of the very levees that protect the city and that largely held during the hurricane. Those levees, built to keep water out, are now keeping the water in, and reports from across the city indicate that water levels are rising.

New Orleans normally uses pumps to get the water out when necessary, but the city has been without power since the hurricane struck with 140-mph winds around daybreak Monday.
(via WaPo)

Not good news.

The levee protecting it burst open across a 2-block length, under the strain of the floodwaters in Lake Ponchartrain, and now 80% of New Orleans is underwater.

Over 75,000 are in shelters.

Volunteers from everywhere are lining up to go down there and help out.

Think of what could be accomplished if millions of people could be mobilized to pitch in and rebuild the devastated areas? Why can't we have a national service that would require a yearly week's worth of time from everyone to be spent on civic works, time that could be job-protected, and supported with stipends, and that would exempt people from their financial and professional obligations for that period? Think what we could do to repair our infrastructures, or bring needed services to people who can't afford them, or enhance and expand our arts and sciences?

When you think of how easily and painlessly the country turned out millions of dollars and thousands of gallons of blood overnight after 9/11, it seems an utter waste of resources not to rally all that goodwill and potential for civic service.

Just as I suspected.

From this a.m.'s NYTimes:

"The region that produces and refines a major portion of the nation's oil and natural gas was largely shut down by Hurricane Katrina yesterday, further tightening strained energy markets and sending prices to new highs...

Crude oil prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange closed at $67.20 a barrel yesterday, up 1.6 percent, after touching a high of $70.80 a barrel in earlier electronic trading.
Natural gas futures soared 11 percent after operations at a major hub in Louisiana were temporarily halted. They closed at $10.85 a thousand cubic feet, after reaching a high of $12.07. Disruptions at refineries also pushed futures for gasoline and heating oil to record highs on Nymex. Gasoline contracts closed up 6.9 percent at $2.06 a gallon while heating oil gained 3.9 percent, to $1.91 a gallon..."

You knew Big Oil wasn't going to miss this chance. And here's our Little Man, offering us up on the altar of the free market to please his gods at Exxon and Mobil:

"President Bush alluded to the energy situation today during a appearance in El Mirage, Ariz., where he was speaking on Medicare.
"You just got to understand that the situation we got ourselves into, dependency on foreign sources of oil, took a while to get there, and it's going to take a while to become less dependent," Mr. Bush said."

Not one fucking word about conservation, or reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Not one word.

But over at Clusterfuck Nation, Jim Kunstler and his guest columnist are thinking about it, you can bet the farm. In a piece rebutting the authors of the popular book Freakonomics, who wrote about peak oil in a rather soothing way, Dmitry Podborits quotes this point and responds:

"The authors claim:

"If oil prices rise, consumers of oil will be (a little) worse off. But, we are talking about needing to cut demand by a few percent a year. That doesn't mean putting windmills on cars, it means cutting out a few low value trips. It doesn't mean abandoning North Dakota, it means keeping the thermostat a degree or two cooler in the winter."

It appears to me that the authors somehow missed in their analysis that the decline of, say, 5% per year in consumption of fossil fuels (against the backdrop of, say, 1% of overall population growth due to demographic reasons and mass migration away from the areas hit the hardest) would translate into a roughly 50% of fossil fuel usage reduction after 10 years. That's the core of the PO argument with which the authors "are not necessarily arguing with" -- that past peak, the oil production will continue to fall, as it will take ever-increasing heroic expenses to keep it flat, and any successes in keeping it flat will be necessarily temporary.
So, in a dozen of years in this scenario -- probably still within the economic life time of a brand new Hummer H2, which has by then recently descended from a factory conveyer somewhere in the state of Michigan on the day the oil has peaked (that day will be known only post factum, of course), purchased through an employee incentives discount and financed on credit, the owner will have to cut a nonessential 50% of his overall driving, keep the thermostat a mere 25 or 30 degrees lower and face doing more of the same in subsequent years, all without abandoning North Dakota, or making any other lifestyle changes."

Yesterday on NPR they were predicting that gasoline would reach $3.00 a gallon very quickly now that Katrina has offered Big Oil the opportunity. And if it does, you'll never see $1.50 a gallon again. Ever. It will go back down to, oh, say, $2.75, and everyone will be so relieved they'll completely miss the huge ratchet upwards that never really went back down. That's how it's worked for decades now. And unlike in Europe, where they have a huge cushion for price manipulation because of high gas taxes, we hardly tax gas at all, and when it goes up, that's pretty much it...we're stuck.

Lay in a good supply of blankets, folks. I hear animal fat burns real good.

To be fair—which we always, always try to be—the answer is only some. But with Taft's misdemeanors in Ohio, an arrest warrant being issued for Connecticut's Rowland (and he's already in jail on another charge!), and now Kentucky's Fletcher issuing pardons to everyone in sight.... Well, the state Republicans seem to have about as much respect for the law as the national ones, don't they?

I mean, who's next? Arnold?

Broke my arm shearing a sheep. Fortunately no hospital, just the good old local doc. If I don’t write, it ain’t because I’m not pissed off about a lot things… but this cast is a mofo. Still pissed off about plenty of things: the uranium mine at Church Rock and coal fired power plant plans are alive and well and they’re damming the Rio de los Animas, one of the last wild rivers in Colorado and New Mexico. Fortunately I can still talk easily, so the hell-raising will continue. Onward to ‘06!

Still alive, I should probably have said.

That would be the Able Danger imbroglio.

The famous chart, on which Atta was identified as...well, that's not clear to me, but certainly a person of interest in relation to Al Queda, and this a year before 9/11, has been a subject of controversy. Which chart, was one initial question, were there more than one, isn't it strange that Curt Weldon would have lost track of it, even, was there ever a chart?

Now, the truth can be told, and NewsMax is there to tell it.

Missing Able Danger 'Atta' Chart in 2002 Video

A copy of the Able Danger chart that identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist operating inside the U.S. a year before the 9/11 attacks is clearly visible in a video of a 2002 speech by delivered by Rep. Curt Weldon to the Heritage Foundation.

The Pentagon, the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee are currently seeking evidence that the bombshell chart, featuring a photo Atta, ever existed - as claimed by three members of the Able Danger team, along with Rep. Weldon. But so far, no physical evidence of the controversial document has surfaced.

Until now.

A third of the way through his May 23, 2002 address on data fusion techniques, the video shows Rep. Weldon unfurling a copy of the now missing document and displaying it to the Heritage audience.

"This is the unclassified chart that was done by the Special Forces Command briefing center one year before 9/11," he explains. "It is the complete architecture of al Qaeda and pan-Islamic extremism. It gives all the linkages. It gives all the capabilities. . . ."

Well, all I can say is, "wow."

There is just one problem with the tape, which NewsMax, to its minimal credit, does report. Naw, I'm not going to tell you. More fun, if you try and guess.

You can find out about he whole delicious story by clicking here.

On a related matter, a ways back, I did a post about Judge Coughenour, who sentenced the millennium bomber, Ahmed Ressam, and the not terribly well known story behind the sentencing, which includes the valuable intelligence developed from Ressam's cooperation.

At the end of the post, I promised a Part 2.

I have not forgotten, nor run out of steam. I didn't post the already-written second part because of the sudden development of the Able Danger story of deep mining intelligence being ignored prior to 9/11, a subject that had a direct bearing on the story I was trying to tell. While watching the gathering Able Danger storm, I decided to do some journalism myself, by talking, or at least trying to, some of the principals involved. Thus, the delay. But it is only a delay.

When Katrina roared ashore way down yonder in New Orleans, do you think old "Bleeding Heart Brit" checked his Exxon/Mobil stocks and said to himself, "Hmmm, time to sell"?

This is where about 8,000+ of New Orleans' poorest residents have taken shelter, in the Superdome. The NYTimes reports now even that imposing structure is taking damage from Katrina:

"Strips of metal were peeled away, creating two holes that were visible from the floor of the huge arena. Water dripped in and people were moved away from about five sections of seats directly below.
Others watched as sheets of metal flapped visibly and noisily. From the floor, more than 19 stories below the dome, the openings appeared to be 6 feet long."

They're stuck sitting in the stadium seats because the authorities don't want to risk the possibility that the field may flood, which will start to get damned old in about 24 hours. I thought it odd that they closed the dome at 11 p.m. last night for "curfew"---what happens if someone didn't make it there in time? Did they just leave them stuck outside?

God help these folks, and all the rest down there.

"We're bringing the war back home
Where it ought to have been before!
We'll kill all the bees
And spiders and flies
And we won't play in iceboxes lying on their sides
We'll wash our hands after we wee.
And if we're a girl, before!
And we'll march,march,march, et cetera!
'Til we never do march no more!"
---Firesign Theatre, from "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers"

And down in Crawford, the pro-war mouseketeers, not content with spreading the love in Iraq, are supporting the troops in their own lovable way by playing war across the road from "The Bitch in the Ditch":

"With five days left until the end of anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan's vigil near President Bush's ranch, Crawford became protest central Saturday as supporters and opponents of the Iraq war rallied, marched and simmered in 101-degree heat.
A handful also got themselves arrested, including a protester whose anti-Sheehan sign was deemed unnecessarily offensive by organizers of a large pro-Bush rally. The man carrying the sign became violent when he was asked to put it down.
Ken Robinson, of Richardson, Texas, who described himself as a Vietnam veteran, was carrying a sign at a “You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy!” rally. The sign read, “How to wreck your family in 30 days by ‘b**** in the ditch' Cindy Sheehan.”
Kristinn Taylor, an event organizer with FreeRepublic.com, heard about the sign and rushed up to Robinson.
“This is our rally and you can't do that here,” he said, only for Robinson to insist he was within his rights...
“Just get outta here!” Robinson yelled, and aimed a kick at Taylor's midsection. Taylor called for security, and a young Woodway policeman quickly showed up.
“I have the right to freedom of speech,” Robinson said.
Robinson continued to protest loudly as police handcuffed him and led him away."

They eat their own. Bless this food, Lord.

I'm feeling so dyspeptic this morning, I half suspect they deliberately gave Al Gore's daughter's name to this terrible storm heading for the gulf coast. Probably not; I think we can still trust that the National Hurricane Center is still staffed with actual scientists.

Before I write another word, let me add Corrente's name to all other blogs that are reminding anyone who is in the path of this storm - LEAVE, IMMEDIATELY; TURN ON YOUR RADIO OR TV, FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS OF YOUR LOCAL FIRST RESPONDERS; TAKE WHAT YOU CAN, BUT GET OUT, NOW.

IF ANY OF YOU KNOW ANYONE IN THE AREA, CALL EARLY, SEND AN EMAIL, HOPE YOU DON'T GET A RESPONSE BECAUSE THOSE ABOUT WHOM YOU ARE CONCERNED HAVE LEFT, BUT IN CASE NOT, TELL THEM TO LEAVE.

Let us all hope and pray in whatever way makes sense that "Katrina" never makes landfall.

Better the discontents of civilization than the discontents of a level five hurricane.

For New Orleans, already located below sea level, this has always been the nightmare scenario.

At the risk of being accused of politicizing a hurricane, the fact is the threat here has a political dimension. The potential harm being outlined on CNN et al is of a magnitude previously unknown on American soil. If we're lucky enough to escape its full impact, should we not be able to realize, without having to live through the actuality, that what is happening in the gulf is a harbinger of our changed circumstances on this planet, the implications of which far outweigh those of 9/11, about which we have been endlessly told, changed everything, and required us to change our way of thinking about everything.

Journalists are supposed to pay attention; you could say that such is a definition of their job. It has been the lamentable task of blogs on the left to point out how poor is both the quantity and the quality of attention paid by professional journalists to so many vital subjects. So, I've been collecting a category of "People Who Are Paying Attention." The journalism quotient is fairly low, but it is there.

One of the bright stars among the cohort is Chris Mooney. Most of you probably know who he is, that he's focused his recent career on first-rate reporting and analysis of stories and issues in the field of science, and that he has his first book coming out next month, The Republican War On Science."

We were lucky enough to receive an advance copy of the book, and an interview with Chris, and we'll be posting on both through-out next week; I'll leave it at that for now. I don't want to use the potential disaster as an advertisement.

However, Chris Mooney, who grew up in New Orleans, was paying attention back in May, 2005 to the implications of the announced expectation from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of another hyper-active hurricane season in the gulf, and he wrote a typically astute, and, one hopes, not a prescient article about it in the American Prospect.

Currently, pretty much every long-term trend cuts against the safety of New Orleans. Levees are subsiding; coastal wetlands (which can slow storm surges) are continually disappearing; and sea levels are rising. And then there's global warming -- a warmer world with warmer ocean temperatures should theoretically experience worse hurricanes. Most importantly, the Atlantic Ocean appears to have entered an active hurricane cycle, with the potential to fling storms at the Gulf Coast for years to come. This puts New Orleans on the vanguard among U.S. coastal cities (including New York) that will have to think hard about their growing vulnerabilities in the coming years. The process of deciding how to save an entire coastal metropolis has begun, but the discussion has largely been confined to experts, and not nearly broad or ambitious enough yet.

Yes, models of global warming are predictive of what we've seen happening in the gulf, and though Mooney is too honest not to note that "active hurricane cycle," which may or not be caused by global warming, surely there is something odd about the total lack of coverage by all the big media outlets of this particular implication of both the increased severity and the increased occurrences of hurricanes? Or, maybe not so odd. Tune in next week.

Read the whole article here; you'll be discomforted, but glad you did.

UPDATE Talked to a friend of mine who grew up in New Orleans. The 28-foot surge against the 18-foot levee is pretty frightening; add to that that New Orleans has a 72-hour evacuation plan but Katrina blew up in 48 hours. Then, if the Mississippi bursts the banks the Army Corp of Engineers built for it, a lot of oil refineries could go.... So, I guess we need to pray to God as we understand God that the worst does not happen.—Lambert

The Emperor has no clothes!

That's terrible!

Emulate Lauren Bush's simple act of charity (back), check your attic, your garage, your closet, and send your "vintage" empty suit(s) to the White House!

Here's the address:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Act now!

NOTE If you want to follow up and make sure your empty suit arrived, here are the numbers to call:

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461

I keep seeing comments here and elsewhere that Dem elected officials should somehow "show support" for Cindy Sheehan by showing up in Crawford.

Doesn't anyone see that's the worst thing that could possibly happen?

It would change a grassroots, citizen-activist form of direct action into yet another photo-op, and take all the focus off the campsite and put it on the politician. The press knows the scripts for that story very well.

If the Beltway Dems—who, let us never forget, represent half the country by population though not in seats, due to Republican gerrymandering and election fraud—truly want to help Cindy Sheehan, these elected officials can do it by doing the job we elected them to do, and they don't need to travel to Crawford to do it. Right there on Capitol Hill, they can introduce bills, investigate, break stories, call for votes, amend bad bills, throw sand in the gears, and in general do what an opposition party should do: Oppose!

NOTE Now if a Republican were to go to Crawford, that would be entirely different. And that will happen when Crawford freezes over....

UPDATE Morans, via Atrios.

More light at the end of the tunnel. Not.

But whatever euphoria officials may have hoped would accompany Sunday's presentation was dampened by the Sunni refusal to back the charter. Even several last-minute amendments were not enough to unify the committee.

Sunnis account for only 20 percent of Iraq's estimated 27 million people, but they are in a strong position to derail the constitution. If two-thirds of voters in any three provinces reject the charter in the referendum, the constitution will be defeated. Sunnis have the majority in at least four provinces.

Iraqi Civil War? We have ignition... [Though in deference The Base, perhaps we should say the Iraqi "War Between the States"...]

After two months of talks, negotiators for the Shiite-Kurd bloc and the Sunnis remain divided over fundamental issues that include:

- Whether Iraq should be turned into a federal state or decentralized by granting more power to provincial authorities;

- How the country's oil wealth will be divided;

- Whether Baath Party members should be purged from government; and

- Whether Iraq will be considered an Arab or Islamic nation.

The deadlock came despite frantic U.S. efforts to secure a political consensus that hopefully would deliver a massive vote for the charter - taking the steam out of the Sunni-led insurgency and enabling a withdrawal of U.S. troops to start next year
(via AP)

So, what's the issue here, anyhow? Why are people so pessimistic?

After all, the only issues that aren't decided are who has the power and who gets the oil money!

I'm sure everything will work out just fine.

NOTE Of course, the only schedule that really matters to Bush is the 2006 midterms.

Preening Presidential hopeful and Washington General Senator Biden (D-MBNA) just doesn't get it:

However, Biden also expressed doubts that Iraq's unity could hold without genuine consensus on a draft constitution. If it does not, he said, the only choice would be to support the Kurds and Shiites and try to prevent Sunni areas from becoming a terrorist haven.

"At this point, we have to choose between bad options: Leave with chaos in our wake or stay and squander more American lives," Biden said. "Without the Sunnis, this is a losing game."
(via LA Times)

In the words of the old joke, Senator, "What do you mean we?" In case you've forgotten, this is Bush's war of choice. He owns it, 100%, and everyone of the 2000 American bodies needs to get hung around His neck. And your job is to help do that. Because you know what? If the Republicans win again... Well, that wouldn't be good, would it?

Digby has it exactly right:

hy are people so unwilling to admit what they are seeing before their eyes, even today? The Republican party is corrupt, incompetent and drunk with power. And no matter what their intentions, they are incapable of setting things right. We have seen this over and over again.

Yet still I see a flurry of earnest discussion about how we should deal with Iraq and what plans should be implemented --- as if they have real world implications. They do not. As I wrote earlier, I think there is political value in doing this as it pertains to positioning for the next election. But I have no illusions, and never have, that anyone in the Bush administration gives a damn what we think or will follow any policy advice from liberals, hawks or otherwise. They do not operate that way.

[The liberals] are not going to affect Bush administration policy. There is still a chance they could affect politics, however, if they will just stop pretending that the Republicans are operating on a logical basis in which they can find some common ground.

I think this is where we separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls. If, after all you've seen these last five years you still believe that the Bush administration can be given the benefit of the doubt, that they will do the right thing, change course, follow sage advice, reevaluate their strategy, bow to the facts on the ground --- then you have the same disease the Bush administration has. As Ben Franklin said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Actually, that's an A.A. slogan, but let that pass.

Listening, Hillary?

AskMen.com's "Model of the Week" is—drumroll please—a twofer!

Two of the Bush spawn children girls:

The quote from Jenna:

[JENNA] "We [work] really hard to make sure we accomplish everything we want in life, but we don't think about being the president's daughter; we don't think about that, really."
- Jenna Bush, on her and her sister's attitudes towards their positions [as Residential Daughters].

And we know that "accomplish everything we want in life" does not not NOT mean serving a tour of duty in Iraq! Aaw, isn't that precious? Just like her Dad!

And now, Neil's daughter Lauren:

"My friends and I are collecting prom dresses to give to girls who can't afford them for their proms."
-Lauren Bush, on the importance of charity

Well, that says it all, doesn't it.... Maybe when She gets done, She and her friends can collect burkhas for the women of Iraq, 'cause they're sure going to need them!

Focus-grouped, soulless, and commercial (back)...

Think Progress has the PDF. Roberts in 1986:

I must recuse myself from this matter, in light of pending discussions with Mr. Ayman's firm concerning possible future employment. [page 2]

Yet, in July 2005 Roberts was, at the very same time, ruling (for Bush) on a challenge to Bush's procedures at Guantanomo Bay, and being interviewed (by Bush) for possible future employment on the Supreme Court.

The conflict of interest seemed pretty obvious in 1986. So, why didn't Roberts recuse himself in 2005?

Aaaw, but Roberts has such cute kids!

Atrios was right to assess Roberts this way: made man.

They seem to have been, um, lost. By Bush's lawyers!

A file folder containing papers from Supreme Court nominee John Roberts Jr.'s work on affirmative action more than 20 years ago disappeared from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library after its review by two lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department in July, according to officials at the library and the National Archives and Records Administration.

Archivists said the lawyers returned the file but it now cannot be located. No duplicate of the folder's contents was made before the lawyers' review. Although one of the lawyers has assisted in the Archives' attempt to reconstruct its contents from other files, officials have no way of independently verifying their effort was successful.

It is rare for the Archives to lose documents in its care and the agency has requested an investigation by its inspector general, said Sharon Fawcett, the assistant archivist for presidential libraries.
(WaPo via Bradenton News)

Well, I'm sure it's just a coincidence. The kind of thing that could happen to anyone. But it would be nice if the investigation were complete before Robert's hearing, wouldn't it?

And while we're at it, could we get the lawyer's story on the record? Did they lose the papers in a cab? Make airplanes out of them? Did they use them as toilet tissue? What? Hey, these lawyers work for Gonzales—maybe we could torture them!

NOTE Thanks to alert reader chicagodyke, who pointed me to Unknown News. Somehow, in all the hurly-burly, I missed this one.

This is the car for you:



The Citroen "Deux Chevaux"—two horsepower, two-stroke engine.

Saw one in Old City the other day, and had this curbside conversation with the owner:

"How's the mileage?"

"Huh?"

"How many miles per gallon do you get?"

"I don't know."

Guess he's not spending a lot of money on his gas fix, now is he?

Not only that, he's not helping his pushers buy big new yachts—or finance fundamentalist schools and the next jihad.

What's not to like?

UPDATE Actually, 9 hp, 56 mpg. And the article says 37 mph, but I remember seeing them blasting along French highways going a hell of a lot faster than that. Probably late models.

Kevin points us to this Marc Cooper post providing us with yet another example of Rumsfeld's faulty recollection of U.S. history. If you recall, Rumsfeld has had major problems getting historical facts straight in the past. This hilarious example from a couple of years ago has still got to take the cake.

Did Rumsfeld not take any U.S. history in school?

Isn't it a travesty that someone in his position could know so little about his own country's history?

Or is history like everyone else to them -- just grist for the mill or yet another thing they'll twist or mangle or distort wildly in order to assist in the administration's latest agitprop effort?

As the Kansas City Star is still, I believe, registration, I post this in near-entirety:

A Kansas City municipal judge on Thursday dismissed a disorderly conduct case against a Vietnam veteran who spit tobacco juice on Jane Fonda’s face four months ago.

Police cited Michael Dean Smith, 54, of Gladstone after the April 19 incident at Unity Temple on the Plaza, where the actress was signing copies of her memoir.

Smith, who served as a Marine in Vietnam in 1970, said he was expressing his anger at Fonda for her actions opposing the war, particularly a 1972 visit to North Vietnam, where she was photographed at an anti-aircraft battery.

Once the judge dismissed the charge, it became a closed record, prohibiting prosecutors and court officials from commenting on why the case was thrown out. Smith’s attorney also declined to comment Thursday.

Smith said he had planned to plead guilty.

“I did it, and I was going to pay for it,” he said Thursday.

But at a court appearance last month, a judge “took the case under advisement” and told Smith he would dismiss the charge in one month if Smith stayed out of trouble.

Smith stood before the judge for less than a minute Thursday as the charge was dismissed. Smith then filled out paperwork to get his $100 bond back.

“It’s over and that’s that,” Smith said afterward.

One day after the incident, Fonda told police she didn’t want to press charges.

Police charged Smith anyway because an off-duty officer working at the event witnessed the disorderly conduct. The officer chased Smith outside and arrested him on the sidewalk.

The spitting tapped a vein of deep emotion across the country. News of the incident sparked national media coverage. The Star received hundreds of e-mails, with supporters outnumbering those who condemned Smith’s actions about 3 to 1.

Smith was one of 900 people at the April event organized by Rainy Day Books. He purchased Fonda’s book, stood in line about 90 minutes and presented her the copy. At book signings, Rainy Day has patrons write their names on sticky notes to give to the authors.

On Smith’s note, he wrote Jodie. Fonda looked up, smiled and asked, “Are you Jodie?”

Smith faced Fonda as she signed his book. He spat at her, spraying tobacco juice on the right side of her face, neck and blouse. He then jumped off the stage and ran.

Smith said Thursday he still had no regrets.

“I still feel it was the right thing to do,” he said. “If I didn’t think it was the right thing to do, I wouldn’t have done it.”

So somebody who spent more time in Vietnam than George W. Bush ever did, really did get spit on upon her return. And the guy who did it, while believing it was "the right thing to do," still ran away afterwards. And the judge let him the fuck off any charge whatsoever.

Please note though, that they counted the emails they got in response to the original story. They might just count the ones they get after this one too.

The view from the top:

[GREENSPAN] Our most valued policy asset: the increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks."
(via AP)

The view from the bottom:

he administration and some political commentators seem genuinely puzzled by polls showing that Americans are unhappy about the economy. After all, they point out, numbers like the growth rate of G.D.P. look pretty good. So why aren't people cheering?

About employment: it's true that the economy finally started adding jobs two years ago. But although many people say "four million jobs in the last two years" reverently, as if it were an amazing achievement, it's actually a rise of about 3 percent, not much faster than the growth of the working-age population over the same period. And recent job growth would have been considered subpar in the past: employment grew more slowly during the best two years of the Bush administration than in any two years during the Clinton administration.

It's also true that the unemployment rate looks fairly low by historical standards. But other measures of the job situation, like the average of weekly hours worked (which remains low), and the average duration of unemployment (which remains high), suggest that the demand for labor is still weak compared with the supply.

Employers certainly aren't having trouble finding workers. When Wal-Mart announced that it was hiring at a new store in Northern California, where the unemployment rate is close to the national average, about 11,000 people showed up to apply for 400 jobs.

Because employers don't have to raise wages to get workers, wages are lagging behind the cost of living. According to Labor Department statistics, the purchasing power of an average nonsupervisory worker's wage has fallen about 1.5 percent since the summer of 2003. And this may understate the pressure on many families: the cost of living has risen sharply for those whose work or family situation requires buying a lot of gasoline.

Some commentators dismiss concerns about gasoline prices, because those prices are still below previous peaks when you adjust for inflation. But that misses the point: Americans bought cars and made decisions about where to live when gas was $1.50 or less per gallon, and now suddenly find themselves paying $2.60 or more. That's a rude shock, which I estimate raises the typical family's expenses by more than $900 a year.

You may ask where economic growth is going, if it isn't showing up in wages. That's easy to answer: it's going to corporate profits, to rising health care costs and to a surge in the salaries and other compensation of executives. (Forbes reports that the combined compensation of the chief executives of America's 500 largest companies rose 54 percent last year.)

(Krugman via the New York Times)

11,000 people for 400 jobs at a Walmart? That's cold...

The Wecovery: Call it a dildo, 'cause we got fucked.

It's an ill wind ...

In the United States, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are seen as the catalyst for a period of fear, war and economic worry.

But in the oil-rich Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, Sept. 11 is increasingly viewed as the event that kicked off a galloping economic boom, when Arabs divested from America and reinvested at home.

Arab investors pulled pull tens of billions of dollars out of the United States. They were angered by perceived American hostility toward Arabs. They worried their assets would be frozen by U.S. counter-terror measures. And U.S. markets happened to be plummeting while economies in the Gulf were on the upswing, buoyed by rising oil prices.

The results have been spectacular.

Since late 2001, economies in the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries - Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia - have soared, with stock markets up a collective 400 percent. Over the same period, the Standard & Poor's 500 rose 24 percent.

Most of the credit for the wealth influx here is due to the near-tripling of oil prices since 2001 to current levels of more than $67 a barrel.
(via AP)

So, all things work together for good, don't they? After 9/11, all the Arabs get rich, and the Republicans get to abolish the Bill of Rights, start putting a theocracy in place, and dominate all three branches of of government, completely disenfranching 50% of the population. Really, what's not to like? Mission accomplished!

Lone star checkmate:

On one side of the road, the grieving mother of a soldier son cut down in his prime. On the other side of the road, a self-indulgent, insensitive little man masquerading as president of the United States.

Continue reading here






*

My shed is painted, finally. I settled on a nice blue with white Darwin fish on two sides that contains the word “EVOLVE.” My goats live in and around it. Subtle message.

The next time some demented religious quack appears on your television screen advocating the assasination of, oh, lets say George W. Bush for instance - well, you can thank Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcast Network for changing the tone of our national discourse. Praise the Power Lord.

Yepper, you'll have Diamond Pat and his like-minded confederacy of theo-caudillo cranks to thank for dropping the tv broadcast discourse bar as low as it will go with respect to international terrorism advocacy from a so called Christian nation perspective.

See, it's like this: Pat, he's a real trail blazer (het, het, het, snicker). Of course if Robertson had proposed the assassination of Russia's Pooty Poot or former Canadian Prime Minister Jean french fry and gravy Poutine (ha, ha, ha) or Tony Blair or Ariel Sharon or any number of other world leaders he'd probably be placed inside a sweaty black zip-lock bag, chained to a millstone, and skidaddled off to Egypt for some further probing and examination and general all-round bone snapping workover. An ill-tempered German Shepherd would be salivating six inches from his shriveled nutsack as I write this here now.

But no. Mr. Squinty will be back. Blowing it out his blowhole as always. Homicidal ravings and all. And his servile easily bewitched audience of clodhopper crusaders will carry on as before. The Cakewalk News Network (CNN) and the MoonShine Bottling Company (MSNBC) and FoxNoise will continue to drop a dime on their favorite radical fundamentalist(s) jackass cleric(s) whenever the purported Christian perspective is required for one more installment of whatever bark-n-blather junk journalism theater production happens to be dripping off the back of the cable "news" tv info-tainment garbage truck on any given day.

Deborah James writes:

The Christian Broadcasting Network should also be investigated for the potential illegality of using federally licensed airwaves to call for an assassination. In light of the $550,000 fine against CBS for the accidental airing of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," it would be extremely ironic if the CBN were not similarly punished for airing a call for terrorist homicide.

[***]

For years the US government has been working to create a climate hostile to the democratically elected government of Venezuela -- Pat Robertson's statements are, unfortunately, consistent with the actions of the Bush administration. The administration supported the 2002 coup against President Chávez, and has continued to fund coup leaders in their efforts to remove President Chávez from office after the coup.

Recently, the US has stepped up efforts to isolate Venezuela in the region (although these efforts have been largely rebuffed by other Latin American leaders.) Last week, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld continued the Bush administration's rhetorical assault against President Chávez, re-issuing old and unsupported claims regarding Venezuela.

Yet in August 2004, President Chávez won a referendum on his presidency by 59%, results which were certified by the Organization of American States (OAS) and Carter Center as free and fair. His popularity currently stands at over 70% -- much higher than his US counterpart's, and one of the highest in Latin America. There is complete freedom of press, assembly, speech, and civil rights in the country, and there are no serious human rights organizations that have argued that these rights have been reduced under Chávez, nor do they compare unfavorably to other regional governments.

The policy of America's governmental antipathy towards Venezuela stems more from that country's creation of an alternative economic vision than unsubstantiated concerns regarding democracy. President Chávez has embarked on a series of economic reforms, such as funneling billions of oil industry profits into massive programs for health care, education, literacy, and clean water, and promoting regional integration, which fly in the face of Bush's failed efforts to promote corporate globalization by establishing a Free Trade Area of the Americas.

The US "free trade" economic model has failed to deliver growth in the region; according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Latin Americans have experienced less than .5% per capita economic growth overall in the last 25 years. Meanwhile, Chávez's economic policies (combined with oil profits) have made Venezuela the fastest growing economy in the region. But the American government's dislike for Chávez's vision certainly does not give anyone a license to kill.

[...]

Robertson's comments have little basis in US or Venezuelan reality. He stated that if Chávez were to be assassinated, he didn't "think any oil shipments will stop." President Chávez has repeatedly stated that oil shipments from Venezuela - which represent approximately 15% of US imports - will continue steadily as long as the US does not commit violent acts of aggression against Venezuela's sovereignty. Articles quoting his repeated declarations on this topic are available here.

Venezuela is expanding exports to other countries, including China, the Caribbean, and South America, but has maintained shipments to the US, which light up our Eastern Seaboard with heating oil and keep 14,000 Venezuelan-owned Citgo gas stations in business. Chavez has also offered to provide lower-cost gasoline to struggling Americans. But in the case of an attack on the physical integrity of the Venezuelan leader, the immediate cessation of exports from the US's fourth largest source would be all but guaranteed.

The US government’s ongoing hostility towards President Chávez have created the climate in which a Republican leader feels comfortable in calling for the US to kill an elected head of state as part of US foreign policy on the cheap. Robertson’s comments should be a clarion call for a new foreign relations policy with Venezuela – one based on respect for a thriving democracy and an important economic ally.

[...]

Under Title 18 of US Code Section 1116, "whoever kills or attempts to kill a foreign official, official guest, or internationally protected person shall be punished." Section 878 of the same title makes it a crime to "knowingly and willingly threaten" to commit the above crime.

[...]

The 1973 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons makes it a crime to commit a "murder, kidnapping, or other attack upon on the liberty of an internationally protected person;" [including] a "threat to commit any such attack."

[***]

Deborah James is the Global Economy Director of Global Exchange, www.globalexchange.org, and a frequent traveler to Venezuela. She is reachable at deborah@globalexchange.org.

The human rights group Global Exchange is encouraging citizens to call the White House to ask the Bush Administration to "condemn the call for terrorist homicide. [The administration] must investigate the legality of calling for the assassination of a democratically elected foreign head of state, and abide by international law in prosecuting terrorist activity." The public comment line at the White House is (202) 456-1111.

Entire article here

Also on topic:
Oil Fat Cats vs. Hugo Chavez by Juan Gonzales (NY Daily News)

Hugo Chávez and Petro Populism by Christian Parenti (The Nation)

What's Really Bothering Pat Robertson About Chavez by Russell Shaw (Huffington Post)

"Violence Needed Against Chavez, Venezuela Opposition Leader Says. Dictatorship Must Follow" - See: Everybody Loves Hugo by Tresy (Corrente)

*

Interesting, and true:

A federal prosecutor said he will reconvene a grand jury in a case involving the jamming of Democratic phone lines in 2002 - raising the possibility that other Republicans might be implicated.

Phone lines were bombarded with electronically generated calls, jamming lines set up for voters seeking rides to the polls on Election Day. Two GOP operatives have pleaded guilty in the case and a third is scheduled for trial.

A grand jury has indicted James Tobin, former regional director for the Republican National Committee, for allegedly orchestrating the jamming. Tobin, who was the regional chairman for President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, has pleaded innocent.

"Based on what I know, [Ooh! How very parseable!] the whole phone-jamming scheme was concocted by one person, and that was [made man and state GOP executive director in 2002] Chuck McGee [who pled guilty and served seven months], who did this without authorization," Lamontagne said.
(via AP)

Well, I'm sure the Republican leadership couldn't possibly have known anything about this, even though James Tobin was working for Bill Frist at the time, because they would never countenance anything like election fraud, let alone get caught doing it.

And I'm sure the Republicans are paying Tobin's $700,000 worth of trial lawyer's fees (back) out of pure Christian charity, and not to buy Tobin's silence.

NOTE Josh Marshall's been tenaciously pursuing this story since 2003.

UPDATE Xan points out that Republican election tampering by phone jamming isn't the exception, but the norm. They'll say anything, do anything, as long as they get to hold onto power. Because they know if we ever get to lift off the lid, the stench is going to knock a lot of heads back.

Here:

I have never been much of a revolutionary. Even when I was young I tended to cringe at any kind of earnest, "to the barricades" kind of thinking. I tend to think in smaller strategic and tactical terms rather than large sweeping movements. However, I have come to realize that this is one of those times when something has to happen from the ground up. Washington has become a kind of aristocrisy, with all the attendant inbred, insular, corruption that eventually befalls a ruling elite.

The biggest sickness in our politics is this top down, elitist mentality in which people are fed a diet of information, entertainment, products and ideas that are focus grouped, soulless and commercial --- and which are then filtered through a ruling media class that is so psychologically cramped, so emotionally sterile, so stuck in their own feedback loop that they are presenting a totally distorted version of reality. It's important that we look elsewhere for wisdom and leadership.
(via Digby)

Two, three, many Cindy Sheehans!

But and also: We need to start avoiding the "focus grouped, soulless, and commercial" wherever it is found, not just in politics as it is conventionally understood. That goes for food, music, sex, even money—experiences and emotions we all share that become "psychologically cramped" and "emotionally sterile" to the extent that we have allowed our minds and hearts and tastes to be colonized by the large corporations that the Republicans service. (I think a Christian might call these artificial persons "thrones and dominions.") Cramped and sterile for us, but very very profitable for them. I think this goes for everybody, cockroach people or not.

Dammit, a real tomato tastes better than a corporate tomato, no matter what. And every single one of us eats a tomato one at a time. Plus, when you go to a farmer's market, you're helping the farmers as against the factory farms, and you're getting to talk to people, too.

Any alert readers who are also lawyers? Can you answer this?

I mean, we expel kids from school for writing up violent fantasies, but apparently a so-called Christian can call for a hit on national TV, before an audience of 1 million, and nobody says Boo.

So, did Robertson break any laws? I mean, besides the laws of his God of choice.

What an asshole:

In other resort news, Bush, who caught no fish on Tuesday, also didn't tip his fishing guide.
(via WaPo's Froomkin)

Our Godly Preznit caught no fish?! I'm surprised He didn't just "cast the net on the right side of the boat" (John 21:6)

After what we know, from campaign 2004 and the Social Security bamboozlepalooza, about how the White House works, can anyone seriously believe that Bush's "private meeting" with parents of the war dead wasn't (a) tickets only and (b) 100% scripted?

Didn't think so.

Damn, those White House script writers are good, though. And our oh-so-skeptical press laps it right up:

After his speech, Bush met for three hours with 68 members of 19 families who have lost loved ones in Iraq or Afghanistan.

" 'The president made me feel like he cares,' Ann Thurber said. 'My son wasn't just lost in the numbers for him. He felt our grief the way we do.'

" 'I think he feels it every time a soldier dies,' her husband added. 'A little of him dies with them. It's like they're his kids, too.' "
(Idaho Statesman via The Amazin' Froomkin)

"It's like they're his kids"...

Well, it isn't very much "like" that, because Babs and Jenna aren't serving, are they?

That Kool-Aid sure is powerful stuff....

Who said triangulation was dead? Party like it's 1996! AP's Ron Fournier:

One Clinton jets to Alaska and Iraq with Republicans, and enthusiastically sponsors legislation with GOP lawmakers who impeached her husband. The other plays golf with former President Bush and accepts assignments from the current one.

Sen. Clinton flew to Alaska last week with a Senate delegation that included Republicans John McCain of Arizona, a potential 2008 candidate, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who as a member of the House in 1998 helped present the case for impeachment.

She also traveled with both Republicans - the three serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee - to Iraq seven months ago, a trip that aides hoped would establish her as a terrorism hawk.

Clinton and the elder Bush have forged an almost familial relationship, according to some Clinton associates who say he has long sought a father figure. Others say the bond is due more to the fact that Clinton and Bush belong to an exclusive club of ex-presidents.

What else is driving the Clintons into the arms of Republicans? They understand that voters are tired of gridlock and partisanship, so reaching out to the GOP can help their causes and further their ambitions. For the ex-president there is also the part of his personality that hungers to convert enemies into friends, critics into colleagues.
(via AP)

God knows, I want a Democrat in the White House, and part of me chortles at the picture of the wingers frothing and stamping at our first woman President...

But still.... The impeachment proceedings were part of a slow-moving, media-fuelled, winger-funded coup against a Democratic elected President—a coup which, if you think of Florida 2000 as part of the gameplan, succeeded.

So, do you really want to hang out in the same beer halls these putschers hang out in? Hillary, and you DLC types, WTF?

NOTE Not that I would want to lick Lindsay Graham anyhow. Eew.

But then you may rather not deal with the rising tide of putrescent media offal filling up our nation's public avenues of discourse with commerce, government, and hog fighting, and you may be sick of hearing about the numerous crucifixions and imprisonings of Christians across the country, or their endless besigement as noted by the tender pleadings of peacemonger Pat Robertson or his brethren-under-the-skin like Gary North, Larry Pratt, Rousas John Rushdoony, , and Andrew Saldlin. And in that case I say, get thee hence to The Unencyclopedia, where they roll in the dying carcass of what's left of television "entertainment", and make you enjoy it, too:

"E(xtreme)M(akeover):H(ome)E(dition) was a popular TV show airing during the early part of the 21st century. Every week, for an excruciating 60 minutes, the show embarrassed average people down on their luck by exploiting them for higher ratings and lucrative endorsement deals. The presumed premise of the show was to give a deserving family a ridiculously expensive mansion, fashionable furniture, drug money, pimped-out car and a closet full of designer shoes for free. But the real premise of EM:HE was to showcase the acting of the moderately talented cast members.
Close-ups during highly emotional segments were de rigueur, especially when crocodile tears were flowing with reckless abandon. In a recent episode, homeless shelter residents were forced at gunpoint to shop for winter clothing at a local Wal-Mart. Upon exiting the store, the poor folks were publicly humiliated when EM:HE cast and crew played a game of "Frisk the Indigent Shopper."
At the end of each episode, Donald Trump would show up with a meat-ball pizza and fire the family. The producers then took everything back and moved the family out as part of a government-sponsored witness relocation program. All products used on the show were sold for pennies on the dollar on eBay, with the proceeds going to Ty Pennington's Hair Plug Fund. "

You don't have to put up with all this bad news. Go enjoy yourself.

Last Wednesday's ad hoc coalition of Cindy Sheehan supporters came together with only 2 days' notice to create over 1600 candlelight vigils across the country, which were attended by numbers in the "tens of thousands".


Last week's vigil in Chestnut Hill brought out over 100 people.

In the hope that this energy can be stoked to build enough momentum to evolve into a truly powerful national peace movement, some of the original organizers are continuing the vigils, including a small group in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, of which I have made myself a part. I don't know that it has a name yet, but 20 of us showed up last night at 7:30 to keep vigil on the sidewalk in front of Borders and across the streets, holding candles and signs, and waving at the cars that honked in support (the SEPTA bus driver came through the intersection again, honking like mad and giving the thumbs up).

It's a small thing, but it makes people think when they pass by, and in a country where avoiding thought is what got us into this mess (and so many others) in the first place, it isn't too small a thing. Anyone can do it, just about anywhere. All it takes is a candle, a sign, and the willingness to set aside 1 hour a week to stand up and be seen. Not much of a sacrifice, compared to those being made in Iraq.

"So long as I'm the president, we will stay, we will fight, and we will win the war on terror," Bush said.

---Bush: Terrorists converging on Iraq, US must stay, Reuters 8/24/05

"I don’t think you can win it."

---Bush in answer to Matt Lauer's question, "Do you really think we can win this war on terror in the next four years?" on Today, 9/2/2004.

Crucifixion Coalition Inc. pilot, and chronic strabismus sufferer, Diamond Pat Robertson has - as each and every one of you already know - been vigorously backpaddling his cuckoo-canoe away from the fast and furious white-water thrills and spills of international state sponsored terrorism.

Assassination to be more precise.

Yes siree. And who can blame the crazy cluck. Afterall, once ya start ordering up hits on national television, well, next thing you know everyone will be doin' it. How'd ya like to turn on your tee-vee one sunny morning to find Soledad O'Brien soliciting the assistance of some yet unidentified bravo willing to drag Billy "the haircut" Hemmer into a bathroom stall and strangle him with his own shoelaces? How'd you like that, huh? Don't answer that.

In any case, the Rev Marion Gordon Patrick Robertson, has since, as I noted above, artfully backed away from his previous excitable fulminations. Rather, Robertson, skulking ahead, has now downgraded his earlier call to murder and mayhem to mere kidnapping. Whew.

"I said our special forces should go 'take him out,' and 'take him out' could be a number of things, including kidnapping."

UPDATE: Pat is apparently working his way down the list of potential felonies he might inflict upon the elected leaders of sovereign nations. Listen to what he's saying now:

11:30 pm: "I said our special forces should go 'knock him out,' and 'knock him out' could be a number of things, including aggravated assault."

midnight: "I said our special forces should go 'burn him out,' and 'burn him out' could be a number of things, including arson."

12:20 am: "I said our special forces should go 'bugger him out,' and 'bugger him out' could be a number of things, including rape."

12:50 am: "I said our special forces should go 'bum him out,' and 'bum him out' could be a number of things, including breaking into his apartment and stealing his stereo."

No more bossa nova for you Mr. Hugo!

Jeebus Christo, huh? By 4am Mr. Pat's "special forces" will be issuing citations for the plastic lawn flamingoes in front of Chavez's mango tree. You there in Venuzuela, this is a zoning abomination. Halt in the name of special forces!

By this time tomorrow evening I fully expect the invitation to "take him out" to be fully devalued. Redressed to little more than a fashion violation - or - perhaps - something like this.

*

American Legion legionaire revisits extremist roots:
Disgruntled American Legion goosestepper Thomas Cadmus declares war on non-violent democractic declarations of dissent. At least those declarations of dissent that he finds unpleasant. By whatever means it takes:

the group's national commander called for an end to all “public protests” and “media events” against the war, constitutional protections be damned.

And there's much more -- John McKay also revisits American Legion chief Alvin Owsley's infamous roman salute to Italian fascism (circa 1930's). -- so Read all about it!... via archy: Street fighting thugs.

Another comparison comes to mind here as well. Circa 1938. Head of the American Legion's "Constitutional Defense Committee", one Charles B. Swift, was famous for announcing and organizing meetups and hootenannies and git-to-know-yas in which legionaires might mingle and cavort and generally whoop it up with like-minded fellow far right nativist and pro-fascist gracioso luminaries belonging to such notable outfits as the Silver Shirts, Christian Front, and Knights of the White Camellia.

One such mixer organized by Swift featured Silver Shirt "field marshall" T. Roy Zachary who, in May of 1938, during a joint German American Bund/Silver Shirt rally in Chicago, announced his willingness to assassinate president Roosevelt should no one else step to the plate on behalf of the home team. All of this of course eventually earned T. Roy and his fellow parade ground martial churls a front row seat at the Dies Committee hearings.

Hip hip hoo-ray for the 'W'ing-nutter way.

addendum (Comment note): Bryan, who also comments here frequently, makes the following observation at archy with respect to American Legion damn the Constitution nozzel Thomas Cadmus:

And people wonder why I refuse to join veterans organizations.

The guy who made the speech spent his two year draft commitment in a Munich beer hall. He pull[ed] basic in Kentucky and then was shipped to Germany as an Armor Recon Specialist. He was a Specialist 5th, which means he didn't even have to give orders. comment here

And I think we all know what Munich beer halls were famous for. Too bad "commander" Cadmus, apparently, does not.

And: U.S. Navy vet Bob Geiger has a message for legionaire Cadmus:

I hurt every day when I read the names of those who have been killed in Iraq. My loyalty is with them, not with you and your misguided organization, which seems to have decided that the best way to help in the war on terror is to seize the very rights we veterans have always protected and toss them in the toilet. - continued reading at: The Yellow Dog Blog

*

Holy cow! Why isn't the press going bananas over this?

Oh yeah, and W is now less popular than Nixon was at the height of Watergate.

Um, why am I not hearing this trumpeted from the rooftops?

Indeed.

Why not?

I'm reading aWol's latest in Idaho:

[BUSH] There are few things in life more difficult than seeing a loved one go off to war.
(via AP)

Vivid imagination these yellow elephants have, yes?

NOTE I don't see any reporting on whether these events were tickets-only, and, if so, who doled out the tickets and who kept the blacklist (back). Not that I'm angry about it.

UPDATE Looks like alert reader Sonoma found out where the radio controls are. Here's what Inerrant Boy said next:

[BUSH CONTINUES] ".. a loved one off to war. My mother (applause) has often spoken, eloquently, of her great trial of the spirit, during my father's tour of duty overseas. It was a combat tour during another war, one that saw our nation's best and bravest assume the burden of selfless duty to God, and liberty, and country.

I sometimes reflect upon the fate of the nameless patriot who assumed my place in a later war, whose cause I so deeply supported. Surely his mother, perhaps even his wife, too, endured the same agonies of the soul as did my mother. Did he live, or die? Was his body torn, his spirit shattered? These questions have, at times, intrigued me for decades. The answers, I know now, will never come. (applause) The only certain knowledge I shall ever possess is the memory of my abject cowardice; of my dereliction of duty during wartime, even in the safe refuge that birth, wealth, and privilege had afforded me.

Yes, I stumbled, but I did not fall. And the moral imperatives conferred upon a sitting president in a time of war is absolute. (applause) The opposition party in congress themselves recognize this absolute fact. By their enduring silence, in the face of the great cause for which I have led the nation to war, my redemption has been effected. In their own hearts, they know this cause to be just. Why else have they forsworn criticizing my actions? Why else has the Democratic party, in congress assembled, unquestioningly supported my initiatives down the line? The answer, I trust, is apparent to all but those who will not see.

I testify before you today that the Lord has sustained me. In all my trials, in my weakness, and in my strength, the Lord has been my shepherd. In turn, I have sustained my people. Blessed be the Lord, our saviour." (applause)

(The Idaho Statesman via The Amazin' Froomkin)

AP tries to help Robertson out of a jam. Note the word "apologized" in the lead:

Religious broadcaster [sic] Pat Robertson apologized Wednesday for calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, only hours after he denied saying Chavez should be killed.

''Is it right to call for assassination?'' Robertson said. ''No, and I apologize for that statement. I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.''
(via AP)

A pillar of Republican theocracy, with 1 million viewers on ABC, calls for Chavez to be assassinated, and that crazy Chavez—He takes it seriously! After all, Chavez just had to listen to the clamor of the rest of the theocracy denouncing Robertson's fatwa to know—oh, that didn't happen? (back). Damn.

Anyhow, Robertson, like the good Republican that he is, is just lying again, even in his apology. He didn't call for Chavez to be killed because he was frustrated. Robertson called for Chavez to be killed because he wants Chavez's oil. Here's the original quote:

'You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don't think any oil shipments will stop.''

Right. Nice to see Robertson taking the lessons of "starting a war" in Iraq to heart, isn't it?

But let's not rely on what AP says. Let's look at what Robertson his telling his own, um, flock. Did Robertson really apologize?

Oddly, or not, the so-called Christian Broadcasting Network has nothing about Robertson's "apology" on its front page. (They are, however, doing their level best to prepare for the next war. Ater all, wars in our own hemisphere are so much easier!)

However, CBN does have Robertson's press release, if you search for it. It's really not much of an apology. Especially if you read down to the end. After quoting Bonhoeffer (!), Robertson says:

There are many who disagree with my comments, and I respect their opinions. There are others who think that stopping a dictator is the appropriate course of action. In any event, the incredible publicity surrounding my remarks has focused our government’s attention on a growing problem which has been largely ignored.

So, no apology at all, right? Surprise! AP got it wrong!

I think it's time for Robertson, the theocracy, the Republican Party, and a large slice of the Beltway Dems to take The First Step: "We admitted we were powerless over oil."

I mean, what are we going to do when the golf courses start going brown? Invade Canada for their water?

Congrefs shall make no Law respecting an establishment of religion...

(via L A Times)

By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — In the blue and gold elegance of the House speaker's private dining room, Jeremy Bouma bowed his head before eight young men and women who hope to one day lead the nation. He prayed that they might find wisdom in the Bible — and govern by its word.

"Holy Father, we thank you for providing us with guidance," said Bouma, who works for an influential televangelist. "Thank you, Lord, for these students. Build them up as your warriors and your ambassadors on Capitol Hill."

Nearly every Monday for six months, as many as a dozen congressional aides — many of them aspiring politicians — have gathered over takeout dinners to mine the Bible for ancient wisdom on modern policy debates about tax rates, foreign aid, education, cloning and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

Through seminars taught by conservative college professors and devout members of Congress, the students learn that serving country means first and always serving Christ.

Okay (heavy sigh) for anyone who might read this and say "What's the big deal?" please try this exercise: Go through this and, everyplace it says "Christian", substitute in your mind the word "Muslim." Or "Mormon." Or "Flying Spaghetti Monsterism" (or its heretical offshoot known as "Pastafarianism").

Do you want adherents of any of those sects using US Government property to persuade the people who actually do the work of legislating that their first allegiance should be to their notion of the True Faith rather than the best interests of all the people?

Christ on a crutch and Buddha on a pogo stick, I want it a requirement that these people have to spend at least six months living in a country where their religion is a despised, if not illegal, minority faith. (Saudi Arabia comes to mind.) Evidently pure exercise of empathy is beyond their beautiful minds.

Ignored in Media Matters' coverage of Batshit Pat's denial that he'd ever advocated assassinating Hugo Chavez, was the claim in the same interview by Thor Halvorssen, former Venezuelan ambassador, that Chavez had "attempted to assassinate" President Carlos Andrés Pérez" in 1992. Googling "Chavez assassinate Perez" turned up nothing to substantiate Halvorssen's apparent lie (Chavez did lead a failed coup attempt), but it did turn up this interesting pronouncement from Halvorssen's former boss:

Violence Needed Against Chavez, Venezuela Opposition Leader Says. Dictatorship Must Follow

Caracas, Venezuela. July 28, 2004 - Venezuelan opposition leader, and two time president Carlos Andres Perez, made a series of statements calling for violence and hinting at an eventual dictatorial period that the Venezuelan opposition must implement if current President Hugo Chavez is to be removed from office.

"I am working to remove Chavez [from power]. Violence will allow us to remove him. That's the only way we have," said Perez in an interview published Sunday in El Nacional, one of Venezuela's main daily newspapers.

Perez, who was speaking from Miami, denied being involved in a plot to assassinate Chávez, but said Chavez "must die like a dog, because he deserves it.
...
"We can't just get rid of Chavez and immediately have a democracy... we will need a transition period of two or three years to lay the foundations for a state where the rule of law prevails… a collegiate body (junta) must govern during that transition and lay the democratic foundations for the future," Perez said.

"When Chavez falls, we must shut down the National Assembly (Congress) and also the Supreme Court. All the Chavista institutions must disappear," the opposition leader added.
(via Venezuelan Analysis)

More here. Perez, we will recall, was the darling of neoliberals who wound up being impeached for rampant corruption, paving the way for Chavez's later electoral landslide. Twelve years later he's calling from US soil for the assassination of his elected successor and the reimposition of dictatorship, while an almost certainly US-backed effort to unseat him is underway in Venezuela, all without raising an eyebrow here, diplomatically or otherwise.

Chavez claims that the US wants him dead, and he's dismissed as a nut. As William Burroughs said, a paranoid is someone in possession of all the facts.

chirp, chirp:

But other conservative Christian organizations remained silent [about Pat Robertson's call to assassinate Hugo Chavez], with leaders at the Traditional Values Coalition, the Family Research Council and the Christian Coalition saying they were too busy to comment.
(via NYT)

I guess that's because Chavez isn't a blob of cells in a petri dish or a brain-dead woman in a swing state.

UPDATE Robertson backpedals lies, says, "I didn't say 'assassinate' [false] I said 'take him out,' and I meant 'take him out' to dinner". Or words to that efffect.—Lambert

Here's a buried nugget from WaPo:

Large sections of the Roberts files that have been made public have been heavily redacted with black ink.
(via WaPo)

How odd. And how very odd we're not hearing about this ...

"Bush Administration Distances Itself From Religious Broadcaster's Call for Assassination"

Weird, huh? What's the "religion" here? Christianity? I'm going through the Sermon on the Mount in my mind as I write this, and I'm almost certain there's nothing about assassination in it...

And now read this highly parseable non-denial denial from unindicted felon (back) Donald Rumsfeld:

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, appearing at a Pentagon news conference, said when asked: "Our department doesn't do that kind of thing. It's against the law. He's a private citizen. Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time."

Rumsfeld said he knew of no consideration ever having been given to assassinating Chavez.

"Not to my knowledge and I would think I would have knowledge," Rumsfeld said.
(via AP)

"Our department"?! Some other department, perhaps?

"Not to my knowledge"?! Sounds like Rummy's already gotten himself lawyered up...

Yglesias has some fine examples.

Until we truly know how the text reads, only the most superficial analysis is possible, right?

NOTE I visited Hewitt's site to see what he had to say about this; he'd gotten what turned out to be a cheap link from Memeorandrum based on a content-free one-liner; how very wingerly!

So, OK, I'm incensed that the greatest of weeklies, the New Yorker, actually covered Hewitt, a well-funded cog in the Republican Noise Machine, before covering the roots, unfunded blogging scene here in, um, the Eighth Borough, home to 10 of the top 50 liberal blogs. WTF?

Man, every time you think these guys can't sink to a new low...

Unlike earlier wars, nearly all Arlington National Cemetery gravestones for troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are inscribed with the slogan-like operation names the
Pentagon selected to promote public support for the conflicts.

Families of fallen soldiers and Marines are being told they have the option to have the government-furnished headstones engraved with "Operation Enduring Freedom" or "Operation Iraqi Freedom" at no extra charge, whether they are buried in Arlington or elsewhere. A mock-up shown to many families includes the operation names.

The vast majority of military gravestones from other eras are inscribed with just the basic, required information: name, rank, military branch, date of death and, if applicable, the war and foreign country in which the person served.

Nadia and Robert McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in June 2004, said "Operation Iraqi Freedom" ended up on his government-supplied headstone in Oceanside, Calif., without family approval.

"I was a little taken aback," Robert McCaffrey said, describing his reaction when he first saw the operation name on Patrick's tombstone. "They certainly didn't ask my wife; they didn't ask me." He said Patrick's widow told him she had not been asked either.

"In one way, I feel it's taking advantage to a small degree," McCaffrey said. "Patrick did not want to be there, that is a definite fact."

The owner of the company that has been making gravestones for Arlington and other national cemeteries for nearly two decades is uncomfortable, too.

"It just seems a little brazen that that's put on stones," said Jeff Martell, owner of Granite Industries of Vermont. "It seems like it might be connected to politics."

The Pentagon in the late 1980s began selecting operation names with themes that would help generate public support for conflicts.
(via AP)

Yeah, the least they could have done was ask. But these guys aren't really into that, have you noticed?

What next? Tombstones out of those stupid made-for-TV blue backdrops Bush uses at his photo ops?

Though give 'em credit—"Operation Iraqi Freedom" looks a hell of a lot better on a tombstone than "Operation BOHICA," let alone "Operation Islamic Theocracy"...

Carving a marketing slogan onto a soldier's gravestone without even asking—the essence of modern Republicanism.

NOTE This is real belly scraping the ground stuff too (via Atrios) And we'd better not tell Santorum about it...

+++

MJS, he of MortalJive: The Rest Is Silence, left what follows in the comments thread of Lambert's last compilation of all the things we are not angry about, but I think it deserves wider distribution:

Some folks claim that Democrats don't stand for anything--this meme conjures in my mind images of townspeople griping about a knight while he holds off a dragon. Standing up to the baser, untoward and unsavory ravenous conmen of our world is a pretty good start from where I sit.

Stand up between the wage monster and the wage-earner, the wildlife slayer and the wildlife, the wilderness destroyer and what's left of the wilderness.

Stand between our lives and the cowardly war mongers, between the penis and vagina patrol and you-get-the-idea...

These straw men, these hollow men, the fake men and fake god-lover, the phony doctor and his phony crowd-whippin' diagnosis "from afar", the war merchants, the bought news stations and the bought news reporters, the dirty congress person covered in pork grease--the natural opponent of the Lord of the Flies is the liberal, the intellect, the valiant and the clear eyes of reason and decency--common decency, not some arbitrary "decency" for prudes.

Stand between me and those freaks who want to tell me what to believe, what to say, who I can make love to: this is what a proud liberal democrat can stand for, and this is what I admire in those who do (in case anybody cares).

+++
MJS

We do care, we care very much.

In a similar vein, don't miss this "Toast To Noble Causes."

Dominionist activist lawyer John W. Whitehead steals other people's words and pretends they're his own.

See: The Right Wing Constitutional Lawyer/Plagiarist

Apparently the great and glorious Intelligent Designer failed to outfit Mr. Whitehead, for the long haul anyway, with enough original multiplying fruitfullness of his own. Hence, JWW, it would certainly appear, has been reduced to accessorizing his treatsies with entire sentences plucked from others more bountifully blessed orchards.

John W. Whitehead (Rutherford Institute) - for all of you not familiar with the Christian Reconstructionist (Dominionist) movement - is an ideological disciple of such splendent theocrat mountbanks as R.J. Rushdoony and Gary North (among other notables).

As Frederick Clarkson notes: "The Rutherford Institute was founded as a legal project of R. J. Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation, with Rushdoony and fellow Chalcedon director Howard Ahmanson on its original board of directors." ( see: The Public Eye Magazine, Vol. VIII, Nos. 1 & 2, March/June 1994 - Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence )

"Thou shalt not steal" ~ Exodus 20: 15

Perhaps some charitable Christian order of some variety or another will drop one of those 4000 pound marble obelisks with the ten commandments drilled into the rind on the floor of Whitehead's office. Just as as a reminder. Kind of like a enormous inexorable posty-note from hell.

*

(New things we are NOT ANGRY about are in blue.)

We at Corrente have worked humbly and tirelessly to bring civility in American
political discourse to the next level.

So that's why, when alert reader acorn expressed his sincere surprise and distress that "you folks on this site are so full of hatred and anger," I felt acorn's distress keenly.

Readers, I was mortified.

So, in the spirit of "brighten the corner where you are," I decided to make a list of the things that we aren't angry or hateful about.

And whaddaya know? It's a very long list:

1. We are not angry at Bush for his war of choice in Iraq.
1. We are not angry at Bush because 2,000 Americans have died in Iraq, together with many thousands of Iraqis.
2. We are not angry at Bush because in Iraq "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
3. Nor are we angry at Bush because the WMDs were not found.
1. Nor angry that the aluminum tubes story was not true.
2. Nor angry that the drones story was not true.
3. Nor angry that the bioweapons story was not true.
4. Nor angry that the "yellowcake uranium" story was not true.
4. Nor are we angry at  Colin Powell because nothing he said in his UN speech to justify the war was true.
5. Nor are we angry at Bush for claiming that Iraq and 9/11 were connected when they were not.
6. Nor do we hate the members of the press who enabled Bush's war of choice.
1. Especially we do not hate Judy Miller whose WMD reportage helped Bush "fix the facts"
1. Nor her boss, Bill Keller.
1. Nor his boss, Arthur Sulzberger.
7. We are not angry at Donald Rumseld because his "Revolution in Military Affairs" resulted in sending our troops into urban warfare in Iraq without proper armor.
1. Nor do we hate Donald Rumsfeld because after three years the problem is not yet corrected.
2. Moreover, we do not hate Donald Rumsfeld for using an automatic signature machine to sign condolence letters to the parents of dead soldiers.
3. And furthermore, we do not hate Donald Rumsfeld for taking souvenirs from the Pentagon site on 9/11, a felony.
8. We are not angry at Alberto Gonzales for writing memos purporting to justify torture.
1. Nor are we angry at the higherups who set up torture camps and then let their subordinates take the blame when the truth came out.
1. Nor do we hate the higherups who got promotions after torture occured on their watch
2. Neither do we hate the doctors and psychiatrists who violated their Hippocratic oaths by abetting torture at Gitmo.
3. And if the torture techniques we have spread in Iraq are ever used in this country, we promise not to get angry about it.
9. We are not angry at the Republicans for losing $8 billion dollars meant for Iraq.
10. We are not angry that Iraq has become what it was not before the war, a training ground for terrorists.
11. And we promise we will not get angry if Iraq ends up as an Islamic theocracy.
1. And we further promise not to get angry that 2,000 Americans will have died to make that happen.
12. And we promise never to hate the members of the White House Iraq Group (Hughes, Libby, Card, Matalin, Wilkinson, and Rove), who worked together to make it all possible.
1. Even if Bush gave them all promotions. Every single one of them.
2. We are not angry at Bush for stealing election 2000 in Florida by using the "felon list."
1. Nor do we hate those who helped him to do so.
1. We do not hate Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
2. We do not hate Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Bush's brother
3. We do not hate the freepers who staged the "bourgeios riot" to intimidate the vote counters, not even Buckhead.
4. We do not hate the majority in Bush v. Gore, not even Antonin Scalia
5. We do not hate Al Gore for not getting all the votes counted.
2. Nor are we angry at the Republicans for claiming a "Bush Mandate" in 2000.
3. Neither are we are angry at the press for dropping the story.
3. We are not angry at Bush for stealing election 2004 in Ohio by preventing Democrats from voting
1. Nor do we hate those who helped him to do it
1. We do not hate Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell
2. We do not hate any Republican election official
1. We do not hate Tom Noe and his wife, Bernadette, even though they steered contracts to Diebold for machines that left no paper trial.
2. We do not hate the Republicans in Warren County who closed their building during the count, claiming a terrorist threat when there was no threat
3. Nor do we hate any of the electronic voting machine manufacturers
1. We do not hate them, even though they are all Republican contributors
4. Nor do we hate any of the authorities that certify electronic voting machines
1. We do not hate them, even though they too are all Republican contributors
2. Nor are we angry at the press for refusing to cover the story.
4. We are not angry at Bush for making all his appearances before screened audiences of Republicans only.
1. We do not hate Bush for doing this during the campaign.
2. We do not hate the Republicans for removing citizens who visibly did not support Bush from campaign events.
1. We do not even hate the Republicans for removing schoolteachers and then stripsearching them.
3. We do not hate Bush for doing the same thing during his Social Security barnstorming
1. Nor are we angry because we, as taxpayers, must pay for events that we will never be allowed to attend.
4. Nor are we angry because White House political operatives removed citizens from a barnstorming rally while impersonating Secret Service agents.
1. Nor are we angry that the White House will not tell us the name of this operative.
5. Because we consider hypocrisy the tribute that vice plays to virtue, and a natural part of the human condition, we do not hate any Republican who exhibits it, not even those put forward to us as moral exemplars
1. We do not hate Rush Limbaugh, even though he had a 30-a-day Oxycontin habit
1. In fact, we do not even hate Rush Limbaugh because he got his housekeeper to buy his drugs for him.
2. We do not hate Bill Bennett, even though he had a million-dollar gambling habit.
3. We do not hate Bill O'Reilly, even though we can't forget the word "loofah."
4. We do not hate Newt Gingrich for handing his wife the divorce papers when she was in a hospital bed recovering from cancer.
5. We do not hate Henry Hyde for his "youthful indiscretions."
1. Or Robert Livingstone
1. Or Arnold
6. Especially we are not angry at the Republicans for spending $70 million investigating a blowjob.
7. We do not hate war-backers who do not or have not served their country in the military
1. We do not hate any administration official who has not served the country in the military.
1. Above all, we do not hate Dick Cheney for having "other priorities."
2. Nor do we hate Bush, even though his missing year in TANG has never been explained.
3. Nor do we hate those Republican war-backers who do not ask their eligible adult children to serve.
1. Not even Bush.
4. Especially we do not hate Jonah Goldberg, even though he says he can't serve because he has a job and kids.
8. We do not hate gay Republicans who back a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.
1. Not even Ken Mehlman.
1. Let alone "Jeff Gannon."
6. Nor are we angry that Bush used Homeland Security as a pork barrel in the red states while leaving blue state cities unprotected against nuclear attack.
7. We are never angry at Beltway Dems even when they are gutless and feckless.
1. Especially we are not angry at John Kerry for taking the Swift Boat attacks lying down.
2. Nor are we angry at John Kerry for not keeping the Ohio 2004 in the forefront of the public mind.
1. Even though he solicited contributions for doing precisely that
3. Nor are we angry at Tom Daschle for losing the 2002 mid-terms because he wouldn't confront Bush on the war.
4. Nor are we angry when Joe Lieberman attacks other Democrats on FOX.
5. Nor are we angry when the Democratic Leadership Council calls war opponents "anti-American."
1. Not even when they don't call Republican war opponents, like Chuck Hagel, anti-American.
6. Nor do we hate any Democrat who voted for Bush's war of choice in Iraq, not even John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or Evan Bayh.
1. Even though the Democratic netroots had Bush dead to rights on this one from the start.
7. Nor are we angry at any Beltway consultant, not even eight-time-loser Washington General Robert Shrum.
8. We do not hate Rush Limbaugh, or any Republican, or any member of Little Green Footballs, even when they call us traitors and call for our exile or summary execution.
9. We do not hate any member of any Republican think tank, not even the Discovery Institute.
10. We do not hate the right wing for calling political operatives "scholars."
11. We do not hate any so-called Christian.
1. Not the so-called Christians at the Air Force academy who called their fellow pilot a "filthy Jews."
2. Nor Pat Robertonson, who supports assassination as a way to get rid of Hugo Chavez.
12. We are not angry at the billionaires who funded the right.
1. We do not hate Richard Mellon Scaife, who funded the attacks on President Clinton.
2. We do not hate R.J. Rushdooney, who funded the Dominionists
3. Nor do we hate Koch, Olin, Coors, or Bradley
1. Nor the Bush Rangers and Pioneers, even though many of them are criminals
13. We are not angry that 50 million Americans don't have health insurance.
14. We are not angry that the No Child Left Behind Act is designed to destroy public education by requiring tests but not funding the teaching for the tests.
15. We do not hate Doctor James Dobson, or any other theocrat, not even Reverend Moon, or Reverend Moon's backers on Capitol Hill.
16. Nor are we angry that Bush is trying to destroy Social Security.
17. Nor are do we hate the CEOs who make hundreds of millions of dollars while their companies fail and workers lose their jobs.
1. In fact, we don't even hate Bush's top contributor, Enron's Ken Lay, who is not yet in jail.
1. Even though Enron's market manipulation caused California Democrat Gray Davis to lose the governorship to a Republican.
18. Nor are we angry that ...

NOTE I'd like to throw in the links, but it's late and I must retire to my tiny cot in the room under the stairs in The Mighty Corrente Building. And you know what? I'm going to sleep just fine...

UPDATE I forgot to say that I don't hate Karl Rove for being an Episcopalian.

UPDATE This post met with a reasonably enthusiastic response, so I thought I'd update and repost it. Maybe this bill of particulars against the malAdministration can become a permanent feature at the renovated Mighty Corrente Building (a "book," in CivicSpace parlance) that we can maintain and add to.

I also note that this is not yet a list for RDF's "cockroach people," who are probably NOT ANGRY about a lot of different things. We should add those things.

So Atrios points us over to MediaMatters for word that, just this morning, Radical Cleric Pat Robertson quite openly and casually called for the murder of Hugo Chavez, the duly elected (twice), coup survivor (once) and landslide winner of a recall election president of Venezuela.

Now why, one might ask, if one had just recently beamed in from that newly discovered Kuyper Belt object out past Uranus, would a cleric, even a Radical one, propose such an act which is, last we checked, clearly and repeatedly forbidden by the User's Manual of the sect for which he purports to yammer?

Hmm, what else as RC Robertson been up to lately, publicity-wise? Ah, what have we here? The Richmond VA Times-Dispatch I do believe:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson's "age-defying" diet shake is causing quite a stir.

Robertson recently teamed up with General Nutrition Corp., a Pittsburgh-based health-food chain, to distribute the shake nationally.

That's caused at least one evangelical watchdog group to claim Robertson is abusing his nonprofit status and a scorned bodybuilder who used the shake to help lose nearly 200 pounds to threaten legal action.

Trinity Foundation, a Dallas-based religious media watchdog organization, has been critical of past Robertson pursuits, including his African gold and diamond mines and Kalo-Vita, a marketing company that sold vitamins and cosmetics.

Trinity's president, Ole Anthony, claims Robertson improperly used his tax-exempt, nonprofit ministry to market his shake on his show and CBN's Web site.

"It wouldn't exist unless it was promoted on the donor-paid-for airtime," Anthony told The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk. [snip details of other sordid acts involving a washed-up bodybuilder who thought he had an endorsement deal.]

Robertson's attorney, Louis A. Isakoff, said..."Dr. Robertson, as a private individual, certainly has the right to engage in personal business ventures," Isakoff wrote.

As for Busch, he said he won't bad-mouth the shakes.

"It tastes delicious. The bad thing is (Robertson) is a liar," [screwed-over bodybuilder Phil] Busch said. "It works tremendously, though."

Of course now everybody will be talking about Robertson's call to Assassinate a President for Jesus rather than his Screw a Trusting Viewer and Abuse Your Tax-Exempt Status problems. What, you thought Karl Rove had some kind of a patent on the wave-the-red-flag technique?

Hmm, speaking of Rove, how is ol' Ratfucking Traitor anyway? He gone home to spend more time with his family yet?

Oh, puh-leeze:

Bush said the only acceptable outcome is "total victory over the terrorists and their hateful ideology." He did not define what [H]e meant by total victory.
(via WaPo)

I'll bet He didn't.

But the article is silly. As we all know, the only war Bush really cares about is the one against us: "Total victory" means Republican dominance over all three branches of government for a generation and the rolling back of the New Deal! Iraq, GWOT, GSAVE, or whatever they're branding it these days... War is the continuation of politics by other means, eh?

NOTE The headline is in honor of the Boston Glob's famous headline about Jimmy Carter..

As usual, the Beltway Dems didn't hammer home the fact that we beat Bush and won the first battle on Social Security. So now we're going to have to climb the mountain all over again.

And pray God no bills ever come to the floor. Because if a Social Security "reform" [gag] bill ever reaches a conference committee, Republican abuse of power will mean that the entire program is doomed.

[Rove is] planning Bush's fall agenda, which will include a renewed push for Social Security overhaul.
(via WaPo)

The Republicans just never stop, do they? They're like zombies, always marching forward...
Je repete:

The Democrats have a plan. It's called "Social Security."

The Republicans have a plan. It's called "hand your guaranteed retirement over to our campaign contributors from Wall Street."

Apparently so:

The draft also stipulates that Iraq is an Islamic state and that no law can contradict the principles of Islam, Shiite and Kurdish negotiators said. Opponents have charged that last provision would subject Iraqis to religious edicts by individual clerics.
(via AP)

Well, our theocrats should like this, right? At least in principle. There is the little matter of basing a Constitution on the Koran instead of the Bible, of course...

Whoops, wrong God!

As if the Republicans didn't know that... Heck, the numberless cadres of The Department of Changing the Subject operate on that very principle. Still, the science is interesting:

Asians and North Americans See the World in Different Ways

Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.

Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.

The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.

The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, Nisbett said.
(via AP)

Ultimately, I have a lot of faith in the American people's ability to cut through the crap—except for the ones who have really drunk the Kool-Aid; for them, nothing short of deprogramming will do. Remember that Clinton's ratings were never higher than during the attempted coup by the House Republicans during Whitewater. You can't fool all of the people all of the time, and Bush has been kept afloat only by the exceptional viciousness of his political team, a spirit of rally round the flag, and the fecklessness of the Beltway Dems.

That said, I think a lot of the issues we face in communicating our message come from this foreground/background thing. 9/11, for example, has been a "bright, shiny object" dangled to hypnotic effect by Rove for quite some time. However, material like the Downing Street Memo—"the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy"—is background material, contextual. The Downing Street Memo gives the lie to everything Bush has said or done since the twin towers fell, but it's not the fish; it's the moving stream.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" He's in the background...

Over at Yellow Doggerel Democrat, Steve Bates picks up the story on those murderous WalMart employees who held a suspected shoplifter on the blistering sidewalk at a Texas store until he died:

"...one of the Wal-Mart employees had Driver in a choke hold as other employees pinned his body to the ground.
"He was begging, 'Please, I'm burning, let me up,' " Portz said of Driver. "He'd push himself up off the blacktop, like he was doing a push-up.
"About 30 people were saying, 'Let him up, it's too hot,' " Portz said. He said another employee brought a rug for Driver to lie on, but one of those holding Driver said he was fine where he was. "After about five minutes, (Driver) said, 'I'm dying, I can't breathe, call an ambulance,' " Portz said.
Employees struggled with Driver before he was handcuffed, Martin said.
"There was a struggle, and when they finally succeeded after getting him detained in handcuffs, he continued to struggle," Martin said.
After Driver was handcuffed, Portz said one employee had his knee on the man's neck and others were putting pressure on his back.
"Finally the guy stopped moving" and the employees got off him, Portz said. "They wouldn't call an ambulance.
"I looked at him and said, 'Hey, he's not breathing,' but one guy told me (Driver) was just on drugs. I told them his fingernails were all gray, and finally they called an ambulance." "

So tell me...was it the low wages, the shitty working conditions, the management inequities, that drove them to it? Or do you think these people were all just born so dumb and mean? Don't worry, Bentonville...Andy Stern's dream may yet come true, and you and your minions will reap your rewards.

Meanwhile, the story Xan pointed to yesterday on the Pittsburgh protesters is getting some legs.

And Clear Channel does its masters' bidding over in Salt Lake City, pulling down the curtain on Cindy Sheehan's right to be heard.

And Iraq continues to devolve into a nightmare of Vietnam-ish proportion with blinding speed, and some Democrats start to get the idea that maybe they were lied to. Smells like...victory!

Yes, it's a brand new day, and as Lambert pointed out in his excellent post just below, we are not angry about any of it.

Because we here at Corrente have access to the best Canadian drugs, and you can't tell the outrages apart without a chemical lobotomy.

Here, too (Raleigh/Durham/Fayetteville, NC).

Apparently, only a Republican can say the unsayable. And get SCLM coverage, that is:

"We're past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam," Hagel said. "The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

Allen said that unlike the communist-guided North Vietnamese who fought the U.S., the insurgents in Iraq have no guiding political philosophy or organization. Still, Hagel argued, the similarities are growing.

"What I think the White House does not yet understand - and some of my colleagues - the dam has broke on this policy,," Hagel said. "The longer we stay there, the more similarities (to Vietnam) are going to come together."
(via AP)

Hillary? Evan? Joe? All you "responsible" Beltway Dems? Perhaps you need to reconsider your carefully crafted positions? And to think of all that money you threw away on consultants....

Here's a Republican saying the best way to support the troops is to bring them home—better get on the bandwagon before it's too late!

So I'm over at MSNBC looking for something else entirely, and I run across this item, which is datelined from Pittsburgh, PA:

Two women protesting the war in Iraq were taken to a hospital Saturday after police broke up an unauthorized march involving about five dozen people on a busy one-way street near an Army recruiting station.

Sgt. Clint Winkler, a supervisor on duty, told The Associated Press that one woman who would not leave was subdued with a Taser. He also confirmed that a police dog bit another woman on the leg when she refused police orders to disperse. Both women and a man involved in the march were arrested, Winkler said.

“They were told to disperse, peacefully disperse, and failed to do so, so we started down the sidewalk — officers in front, K-9’s behind us, and started pushing the crowd down the sidewalk,” Winkler said. He said the march broke up after the arrests.

The recruiting station was not open at the time.

Now we will momentarily overlook the Abu Graib/Gitmo-style use of force--TASERS AND POLICE DOGS FOR GOD's SAKE--against what are said to be some 60 people with the temerity to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, outside an office that wasn't even open, goddamit. But this is a wire service/AP report of an incident. Let's first see how the local media covered this event:

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Go. Look. Seek. You will find...

::crickets::

Not one single word on the front page of their website about this event, as of 11:11 AM CDT anyway.

I was originally going to rant about the papers that ran the headline "Patriotic Camp Counters Peace Mom Protest" but apparently the AP already caught a good deal of shit about this and changed "Patriotic" to "War Backers." (Not everybody got with the program, ex. front page of Atlanta Journal-Constitution) You get the feeling there's a fight going on at the wheel of the Titanic?

NOTE: Edited to put the damn "h" on Pittsburgh, which should have been removed way back when they took the "h's" off all the other "burg" towns, dammit.

More yellow elephants:

"If you believe the liberal media's reporting on the American military effort in Iraq, you're almost forced to be ashamed of America," the Media Research Center, a conservative media-watchdog group, said in a recent message to potential donors.

In return for a donation, the organization will send a specially inscribed military-style dog tag to a soldier in Iraq. "Don't believe the liberal media!" the dog tag says. "I'm just one of millions of Americans who realize that powerful elements in the media are undermining the war effort."
(via AP)

Hey, sending a set of dog-tags is easy! Cheap, too! A lot cheaper than putting your own skin in the game...

But it is great to see how all the fundamentalist mega-churches have turned their sanctuaries into recruiting centers for the GWOT, or the GSAVE, or whatever Bush is calling it these days.

Oh, that's not happening? You mean all these guys are doing is sending Republican promotional trinkets to the troops? Say it isn't so! Hey, at least they could chip in for some armor....

(AP via Thompson family, Peter Mountain)

''He loved explosions,'' explained his wife, Anita Thompson.
(via Times

Well, who doesn't?!

Interesting little piece of self-dealing here:

HELLMOUTH, TX - [Armstrong and Bush] were accompanied [on their bike ride] by a small group of staff and
Secret Service agents and a film crew from the Discovery Channel, Armstrong's Tour de France sponsor, which had exclusive media access for the ride. Footage was shot for a program on Armstrong to air this week.
(via AP)

We're already used to the tickets-only Republican Partei rallies where only those who have sworn fealty to Inerrrant Boy are deemed worthy to touch the hem of His garment—but "the President of all the people" granting exclusive access to The Imperial Presence so a potential supporter's made-for-TV movie gets a ratings boost .... Well, that's a new low even for Bush, isn't it? (Does put a stay in the Lincoln bedroom to shame, doesn't it? My goodness, Nedra, where's the outrage?)

Or maybe President Shit Magnet's handlers were worried about the PR disaster that would ensue if Bush fell off His bike during the ride (yet again?). That would be the charitable reading.

Come to the True Daddy my foolish moonstruck flock.

Today's Sunday sermon takes a walk-back through the mucky pasture of the modern conservative movement's cowed and dewey eyed reverence for the True Daddy Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Thanks to mw for the extensive excerpts below. Many of which are not posted online.

So, here we go, and again, thanks to mw for all the tireless digging:

There is a Moonie explanation for everything.

Lying. One of the central tenets of the faith is the doctrine of Heavenly Deception. Good must deceive evil. The non-Moon world is evil. It must be lied to so it can help Moon take over. Then it can become good under Moon's control. In the Bible, Jacob lied to Isaac. God rewarded Jacob by making him the father of the nation of Israel. Closer to home, you lie to your children about Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny, don't you? ~ [from Robert B. Boettcher's "Gifts of Deceit"; Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park and the Korean Scandal. (1980) Amazon Books]

Lying. One of the central tenets of you know who elses, well, call it faith if you like...

******

The Unification Church. Sugar true-daddy to the Right.

From "Moonstruck: The Reverend and his Newspaper" by Ann Louise Bardach, an article that was originally to have appeared in Vanity Fair in 1992 but was killed. The article finally saw print in 2004 when included in the book "Killed, Great Journalism Too Hot to Print" by David Wallis. Tina Brown was Bardach's editor

Some insiders say that the Unification Church was the number one contributor to conservative causes throughout the 1980s. In 1984, the church gave $750,000 to the Conservative Alliance, a group spearheaded by the late Terry Dolan. It was transaction riddled with irony: the Church fiercely condemns homosexuality and Dolan, a closeted gay man, was already sick with AIDS. Two years later the church bailed direct-mail king Richard Viguerie out of financial trouble with a whopping $10 million. Observers saw the transactions as a reward for a long friendship; Viguerie handled the Church's direct mail business since the late '60s. In 1988, the church made a $50,000 contribution to George Bush's re-election campaign. .......

******

[From] U.S News and World Report March 27, 1989
Rev. Moon's Rising Political Influence - His empire is spending big money trying to win favor with conservatives.

On New Year's Day, 1987, South Korean mystic Sun Myung Moon, who considers himself to be the son of God, told his Unification church followers that he wanted to expand the church's political influence in the United States. His aim, Moon said, was "the natural subjugation of the American government and population."

The church and its businesses have spent as much as $300 million buying political clout. Through its 100,000-circulation Washington Times, Insight, a weekly newsmagazine, and a host of organizations that it funds, the church has become a major player in conservative politics. The church, which insists it doctrine stems from Christianity, is now trying to gain a foothold in right wing Christian circles through a new organization, the American Freedom Coalition. Moon's chief lieutenant, South Korean former attaché Col. Bo Hi Pak, boasted last year to conservative activist David Finzer: "We are going to make it so that no one can run for office in the United States without our permission."

Moon's bid for political power is disquieting because the church's theology runs counter to American democratic tradition. Moon claims that on Easter, 1936, when he was 16, Jesus appeared to him and told him that he had been chosen by God to complete the mission that Jesus had been unable to finish because of the Crucifixion. This mission, spelled out in his lectures in the text of The Divine Principle, consist in creating an "automatic theocracy to rule the world." Moon says, "Separation between religion and politics is what Satan likes most." But former Unification official Michael Warder says, "Within the Moon movement, there is no foundation for the ideas of freedom, the rule of law and the dignity of the individual as they are understood in the West."
...

The church's first and most expensive foray into the political arena was the Washington Times. The newspaper has lost more than $200 million since it was founded in 1982, but it has given the church needed prestige in Seoul and become a well read publication beyond its target audience of Washington conservatives. Claims by Washington Times editors that the paper is politically independent of the church were shattered in 1984 when James Whalen, its first editor and publisher, quit in protest of church attempts to assume direct control. Then in April, 1987, Editorial Page Editor William Cheshire and four colleges resigned over church interference with the newspaper's editorials. The Washington Times latest editor, Arnaud de Borchgrave, claims that the newspaper "has nothing to do with the church." But the paper and its sister publication, Insight, remain owned by News World Communications, whose president is Pak. While separate from the church's local ministry, it is an integral part of Moon's overall empire.
....

The church has been building political organizations since the early '80's.
..

These organizations try to connect the church with the names of influential conservatives, who, according to former church official Warder, "provide legitimacy to Moon and his movement." In 1984 Joseph Churba, who had served for a year in the Reagan administration's Arm's Control and Disarmament Agency, was looking for someone to fund his Center for International Security. Through CAUSA, Pak agreed to aid a new organization, The International Security Council, with Churba as its president. The ISC's purpose, Churba stated, would be to counter Soviet attempts at "global hegemony."

Churba has recruited other Reagan officials, including former ACDA Director Eugene Rastow and former deputy U.N. Ambassador Charles Lichenstein. Lichenstein who is also a Heritage Foundation senior fellow, is chairman if ISC's International Advisory Council. The gnomelike Churba extols the "selfless commitment" of Rev. Moon to the project. He believes that the church has gotten a "raw deal" from the media because of "leftist Communist disinformation about its objectives and long term goals." But while the ISC states its link to CAUSA in its organizational brochure, it does not do so in its journal, Global Affairs, in the position papers it sends out to the press, or in the full page ads it has run opposing U.S.-Soviet arms-control agreements.

More tolerance. Through this method of recruiting, the church has established a network of affiliated organizations and connections in almost every conservative organization in Washington, including the Heritage Foundation, the largest of the conservative think tanks and an important source of government personnel during the Reagan administration. Although Heritage officials deny it, the foundation has dramatically changed its policy toward the Unification Church. In the early 80's the foundation, wary of the church's aims, prohibited staff or fellows from being associated with Unification Church organizations or taking money from the church or church-financed institutions.

As the Washington Times has become the voice of capital conservatives, the Heritage Foundation has become far more tolerant of church ties. The foundation accepts the participation of Lichenstein and other senior fellows in church-funded enterprises and allows its staff members to go to church conferences.

The Unification Church's newfound influence has occasioned intense debate among conservatives. One group of worried young conservatives meets regularly in private to compare notes about the problem. But little of the debate has surfaced in public forums. "Most people are afraid to address the issue because they don't want to publicize the extent of the church's involvement," says Amy Moritz of the Conservative National Center for Public Policy Research.

Because almost all conservative organizations in Washington have some ties to the church, conservatives also fear repercussions if they expose the church's role. That happened when one organization, the Capital Research Center, published a newsletter last November warning of the church's attempt to create a "centralized world theocracy." One of its board members, who was also on the board of the International Security Council, resigned in protest, and conservatives charging that the paper was creating discord on the right, besieged the center with angry calls. "We got a very, very strong reaction -- almost as if we were the enemy -- because we raised the issue," says CRC Chairman Willa Johnson, a former president of the Heritage Foundation.

******

"centralized world theocracy" eh? Just exactly how would that work? From Sun Myung Moon's own book "The Master Speaks" this masterplan (bold emphasis mine):

"My dream is to organize a Christian political party including the Protestant denominations, Catholics and all the religious sects. Then the communist power will be helpless before ours. We have to purge the corrupted politicians and the sons of God must rule the world. The separation between religion and politics is what Satan likes most. ...Upon my command to the Europeans and others throughout the world to come live in the U.S., wouldn't they obey me? Then what would happen? We can embrace the religious world in one arm and the political world in the other. With this great ideology, if you are not confident to do this, you had better die!" ~ link (quote/excerpt also appears in "Unholy Alliance" by Carolyn Weaver, Mother Jones magazine, January 1986)

******

Weaver also reproduces a letter from the Rev. Tim LaHaye (author of the "Left Behind" series) in which LaHaye cheers Moon henchman (and Washington Times exec) Bo Hi Pak for his glorious assistance on behalf of "the Master's plan". From "Unholy Alliance" by Carolyn Weaver (1986):

"Dear Bo Hi," began the Reverend Lahaye:

[...]

Bo Hi, I am encouraged! Amid the bad signs I see today, I also detect a lot of good signs. The secretary of education, Don Regan, Ed Meese, Pat Buchanan and many others. Even physical ailments to three of the 76 (year old) flaming liberal Supreme Court justices.

After wishing boils and plagues upon "activist" judges ... the letter concludes:

Once again, my friend, I am in your debt for your generous help to our work. You don't know how timely it was! This move and reorganization of the whole ministry to free me for more time in Washington and ACTV activities has been extremely expensive, much more so than I originally thought. But I see daylight down the road and feel it is part the Master's plan. As soon as I can afford it, I plan to hire a PR firm to give more coverage for ACTV, get our message to the people.

God Bless you! Let's plan to sit together at the first CBS shareholder's meeting when Jesse Helms makes his move to take it over.

your friend,
Tim

ACTV being the "American Coalition for Traditional Family Values". Meanwhile, from Time Magazine, June 14 1976, "The Secret Sayings of Master Moon", (page 49), comes this divine directive (bold emphasis mine):

FUTURE PLANS (1976): Once our movement arouses the interest of the people in a nation, through mass media it will spread all throughout the world… So, we are going to focus our attention on one nation from where to reach the world. For that purpose I chose the U.S.

The present U.N. must be annihilated by our power. That is the stage for Communists. We must make a new U.N.

If the U.S. continues its corruption, and we find among the Senators and Congressmen no one really usable for our purpose, we can make Senators and Congressman out of our members… I have met many famous, so-called famous, Senators and Congressmen; but to my eyes, they are nothing. They are weak and helpless. We will win the battle. This is our dream, our project. But shut your mouth tight.

"shut your mouth tight" or John Bolton will make sure someone shuts it for you.

For more on the "dream, ...project" read Bush & the Rise of 'Managed-Democracy' by Robert Parry, February 12, 2005.

delenda est Arbusto - ceterum censeo.

Go in peace.

*

If you're goin' to Smear Boat Harbor, Be sure to toss some flowers in the air; If you're goin' to Smear Boat Harbor, You're gonna meet some gentle people there. For those who come to Smear Boat Harbor, Summertime will be a love-in there


Frank Rich:

The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan

CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms. Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not attack inside the United States in 2001.

[...]

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real."

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political support for the Iraq war.

When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. ~ continue reading: Frank Rich/NYTimes (log-in not required)

Feel the love.

*

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Ron at Why Are We Back In Iraq

Let's sing: Happy birthday to Ron, happy birthday to Ron, happy bithday, happy bithday, happy birthday to Ron... and on and on and on.... onward down the road. Happy birthday to yooo.

And, speaking of rollin' down the highway, mile markers disappearing in the rear view mirror, the Brad Blog is off to Camp Casey. See: 'Operation Noble Cause' is Underway!

In other long and winding road news:

Army Planning for 4 More Years in Iraq
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON - The Army is planning for the possibility of keeping the current number of soldiers in Iraq — well over 100,000 — for four more years, the Army's top general said Saturday.

[...]

Schoomaker, who spoke aboard an Army jet on the trip back to Washington from Kansas City, Mo., made no predictions about the pace of political progress in Iraq. But he said he was confident the Army could provide the current number of forces to fight the insurgency for many more years. The 2007-09 rotation he is planning would go beyond President Bush's term in office, which ends in January 2009. ~ Yahoo news/AP

*

Or Bush had his training wheels on.

Anyhow, in a well-timed pre-Sabbath Day gasbag move, Bush, in a pathetic attempt to gain a little lustre by associating with real winner—and, no doubt, change the subject from the fact that the Army is planning for keeping troop strength in Iraq at current levels until 2009—broke his vacation schedule to go biking with seven-timeTour de France laureate Lance Armstrong.

[Excuse me a moment. My B.S.S. is spiking again. Where's that damn bucket?]

After all, Bush's history with bicycle riding is, well, about as good as his history with wars of choice. Remember the time Bush was riding too fast in the rain, and took out a cop? Remember the compulsive risk taking? Remember when Bush's flaks
blamed a spill on "wet, loose soil" in Crawford when it hadn't rained in a week?

I'll give 'em wet, loose, soil...

Of course, it would be too much to ask of AP's Judy Miller-Lite, Nedra Pickler, that she point out that President Shit Magnet's bike habit, as we document above, is subject to the usual relentless PR, bungling, and mendacity that we've come to expect from the WhiteWash House.

But before Our Nedra gets out her own kneepads and starts gobbling, can't she at least take a minute to make sure her stories make sense? And where were her editors on this one? Holed up under the same desk as Sulzberger, or what? Get a load of this:

It's not clear whether Lance Armstrong will have to abide by the standard rules for biking with President Bush when the two famously competitive Texans take their first ride together Saturday. The first rule: Don't pass the president.
(via AP)

Jeebus. "Famously competive"?!??!

Armstrong, now, is an actual winner. He stays in front of the pack because he's the best.

But Bush orders his subordinates not to pass him. In what way is that "competive"? Bush—and our Nedra—seem to confuse rigging the game with actually winning it. (Making such a distinction in 2006 might help AP with its election coverage, don't you think?)

In truth, the "No Pass Zone" that Bush has established around His Person is reminiscent of an Imperial court: Any courtier who values his head must never beat the Emperor at anything; the Emperor must always win. In what sense is that "competive"? Seems like one sign of a very weak ego, to me.

"Famously competitive," Nedra? Famously competitive, My Aunt Fanny.

Here, in her hometown paper.

A tip of the Ol' Corrente Hat to the man in the grey turtleneck for mainstreaming the word "clusterfuck" when applied to Bush's war of choice in Iraq.

Aside from being a fine example of the vivid and concrete language that Corrente, as part of its programme to bring American discourse to the next level of civility, promotes, the noun "clusterfuck" really is the term of art for our Iraqi predicament. The term originated in (where else) VietNam:

Marine slang -- A clusterfuck was any group of Marines big enough to draw enemy fire, or several Marines close enough together to be wounded by the same incoming round. More generically, a clusterfuck was something that was all screwed up, i.e. "That blocking operation was a giant clusterfuck!" Whenever three or more CAP Marines gathered in the open, talking or working on something, somebody was sure to call out "clusterfuck!" and one or more guys would walk away.
(Capmarine.com)

Clearly, Bush's war of choice in Iraq is "all screwed up"; that makes it a clusterfuck by definition. However, the term is even more a propos.

Tactically, Bush's war of choice in Iraq is a clusterfuck. The analogy to "Marines close enough together to be wounded by the same incoming round" is clear. In Vietnam, "in the open" meant being exposed in the rice paddies or jungles. In Iraq, "in the open" means (1) urban warfare where (2) troops (and contractors) must be supplied by trucks which (3) are not armored thereby making them vulnerable to (4)the "income rounds" of IEDs placed along the roadside. Nice work, Inerrant Boy. (And the resonance to the words of Matthew 18:19, "wherever two or three are gathered together," is heartbreaking.)

Strategically, Iraq is a clusterfuck, too. Look again at the definition: "close enough together to be wounded by the same incoming round." Well, if the "incoming round" is a loose nuke in a shipping container (back) Bush will have managed to clusterfuck not just 2000 soldiers in Iraq, not just tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, but one or another Blue major ports. (Not that such an object lesson of the unquenchable fire from heaven (back) purging the country of gays, non-Christians, ESLers, and Democrats would make our theocrat rulers anything but joyful.)

Paranoid scenario, you say? Tinfoil hat time? Seriously, does anyone think that a progression from small IEDs, to large IEDs, to missiles fired against ships in Jordan is going to stop there? Bush's war of choice has made Iraq a training ground (back) for these guys, worse than Afghanistan ever was (and OBL—remember him?—was blowback from Afghanistan).

That asshole has put all of us in the crosshairs...

That General must be nuts. There's no way the Republicans would keep the troops in Iraq over two election cycles. They're goal is to get out, then hang the clusterfuck round the Democrats neck (the ol' "Stab in the back" theory, back that worked so well for the right in Germany in the '30s). Anyhow:

The Army is planning for the possibility of keeping the current number of soldiers in Iraq - well over 100,000 - for four more years, the Army's top general said Saturday.

In an Associated Press interview, Gen. Peter Schoomaker said the Army is prepared for the "worse case" in terms of the required level of troops in Iraq. He said the number could be adjusted lower if called for by slowing the force rotation or by shortening tours for soldiers.

Schoomaker said commanders in Iraq and others who are in the chain of command will decide how many troops will be needed next year and beyond. His responsibility is to provide them, trained and equipped.

About 138,000 U.S. troops, including about 25,000 Marines, are now in Iraq.

Schoomaker's comments come amid indications from Bush administration officials and commanders in Iraq that the size of the U.S. force may be scaled back next year if certain conditions are achieved.
(via AP)

Interesting, if true.

See, we can't provide you with new, more powerful antibiotics, because that would imply that bacteria have evolved and adapted to the old, less powerful antibiotics.

One of the reasons why Ignorance-Is-Bliss Design makes me so crazy is that science never claims that all mysteries have been solved. There are plenty of things that are too complicated too understand, right now. And somehow the I.D. folks convert this into a proof of a divine hand in creation.

It's like your teenager comes home and says "Hey, this math homework is too complicated for me to understand...."

So, what do you say? "Son, that just proves there is a God!"

Or do you sit down and try to solve the problem?

Here at Corrente, we work tirelessly to bring the next level of civility to American political discourse, so I just have to say that it's highly unlikely that Republican Senator Rick Santorum has had, is having, or is in quest to have, any form of sex with trisexual Republican Senator Sam Brownback (back). We just don't believe the rumors—any more than we believe that Bush fucks goats.

But—just as in the evolution vs. I(diot's) D(elight) controversy—don't all Americans deserve to know what the debate is about"? Heck, it's a "pluralistic society" (except for gays and non-fundamentalist Christians (as if there were any such thing))....

Of course, a simple denial from either Senator would do wonders to defuse the controversy....

Krugman:

There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn't change the outcome. And the next election may be worse.

In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.

[The DNC and the Conyers] reports show that votes were suppressed by long lines at polling places - lines caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines - and that these lines occurred disproportionately in areas likely to vote Democratic. Both reports also point to problems involving voters who were improperly forced to cast provisional votes, many of which were discarded.

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.
(via Times)

Yep. The Republicans are acting like they will never lose power,like they will never be held to account.

Krugman has called his shot. And 2006 isn't so very far away, is it?

I never said that!

Via Bark Bark Woof Woof - Fat-assed dope smuggler Rush Limbaugh lies about previous lies about Cindy Sheehan: "I've Never Said This"

By the way: Did I say Rick Santorum was caught on video having sex with a Brownback? Of course, I've never said this. People are actually saying I said this. People are saying that I am accusing Senator Rick Santorum of engaging in backchannel relations with a representative of the sunflower state. What I said was: "Rick Santorum." And then I said "Caught on video!" And then I said "In Kansas." And then I said "Having sex with Sam Brownback?" Obviously none of these statements have anything to do with one another. Not that I'm aware of. Now, I ask you... is that the same thing as saying that Senator Brownback was captured on film fondling a Catholic mans nuts? I don't think so. And anyone who says otherwise is a moonbat.

Also at Bark Bark Woof Woof: Friday Blogaround/various links

And go read archy: The three faces of Cindy

*

While America shops, Iraq continues to crumble into a chaotic purgatory of murder, kidnapping, crime, torture, and sectarian violence. Just this morning on NPR's All Things Considered, Phillip Reeves interviewed the relative of a Sunni recently murdered by Shiites who guiltily noted that when he hears of Shias narrowly escaping assassination attacks, he wishes they had "got him". He admits he would have joined in anti-Shiite attacks himself except that he is married and waiting on the birth of his son. Then, later, there is the description of the smell of the city morgue, stifling in the high heat of the Iraqi summer with a record number of bodies, many of them bearing the mutilations of torture.

In an August 17 story, Robert Fisk of The Independent, stated that last July was the bloodiest month on record for Baghdad Iraqis since the start of the war: 1,100 Iraqi bodies were brought into the city morgue during that month. (The NPR report has raised that to 1,700.) As Fisk states, it's impossible to assign reasons for all of the deaths; some were simply criminal acts, some were misogynistic honor killings, some involved no foul play at all. But as both his report and the NPR story point up, the deaths by violence, and by sectarian violence in particular, are skyrocketing, and we would know more, if only our own government, in collusion with our media, was not so intent on hiding the truth from us. Nothing brings this home more clearly than this paragraph, reproduced here from the Fisk article thanks to Kevin at PA For Democracy:

"Doctors have been told that bodies brought to the mortuary by US forces should not be given post-mortem examinations (on the odd ground that the Americans will have already performed this function)."

This means that verifications of causes of death are often ommitted. Not that the fools responsible for this abbatoir care enough to keep track.

We are witnessing a deliberate and concerted effort to hide the costs of this illegal war by a criminal element that has wholly overtaken the government of our nation and is ensuring the same criminality will thrive in the puppet government of the new Iraq.

Go to D.C. on September 24 and make your voice heard over their lies.

We don't link to via The Poorman nearly as often as we should...

Language is not static, it changes with time and the times. I have noticed, while reading right-leaning blogs, that certain words I had thought I had understood appear to now mean quite different things... And so, in the interest of world peace:

rac·ism n.
Disagreeing with or disliking Michelle Malkin

sex·ism n.
Disagreeing with or disliking Michelle Malkin

ho·mo·pho·bi·a n.
1. Making fun of Jeff Gannon
2. Making fun of The Claremont Institute’s John Hindraker’s gay-porny nom de keyboard
3. Disagreeing with Andrew Sullivan when Andrew Sullivan is agreeing with Bush

The Left n.
1. You.
2. Jane Fonda and Noam Chomsky.
3. Everybody less conservative than me and all Democrats except Zell Miller.
4. Everybody less conservative than me and all Democrats except Zell Miller and present company.
5. Nobody, really.
6. Everybody I hate.
7. A quantum superposition of the above definitions.

ter·ror·ists n.
1. Those that engage in acts or an act of terrorism.
2. The Left

I hope this helps.

There's a few more I clipped in the interest of brevity, so go read. The original is always better than the copy, plus he has some rude links attached to various terms, people and body parts.

Why not start the day with a quote from El Che:

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

Not “by any means necessary”—it’s not pitchfork and torches time—but we damn sure have to shake the tree. Too many apples still hanging and waiting to fall.

And let’s not forget:

"One has to have a great dose of humanity, a great dose of the feeling of justice and of truth not to fall into extreme dogmatism, into a cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as motivation."

Food for thought on a Friday morning. Or, if you prefer, a little Emma on patriotism:

What, then, is patriotism? "Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels," said Dr. Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.

Gustave Hervé, another great anti-patriot, justly calls patriotism a superstition--one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion. The superstition of religion originated in man's inability to explain natural phenomena. That is, when primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature.

Patriotism, on the other hand, is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

Now, off into another day. ¡En a la victoria!

By Jason Leopold:

Deal involved tools that could be used for weapons

Scandal-plagued Halliburton -- the oil services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney -- sold an Iranian oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, say Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies' business dealings.

Halliburton was secretly working at the time with one of Iran's top nuclear program officials on natural gas-related projects and sold the components in April to the official's oil development company, the sources said.

In early August, a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame arguably could have been significantly longer if Halliburton, the Pentagon contractor whose military unit just reported a 284% increase in its second-quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, were not providing Iranians with the means to build a nuclear weapon.

With Iran's new hardline government now firmly in place, Iranian officials have rounded up relatives and close business associates of Iran's former president and defeated presidential candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani, alleging the men were involved in widespread corruption of Iran's oil industry, specifically tied to the country's business dealings with Halliburton.

[...]

Now comes word that Halliburton, which has a long history of flouting US law by conducting business with countries the Bush administration said has ties to terrorism, was working with Cyrus Nasseri, vice chairman of the board of Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran's largest private oil companies, on oil and natural gas development projects in Tehran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran's nuclear development team and has been negotiating Iran's nuclear development issues with the European Union and at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran's controversial nuclear program is at the heart of deals with US energy companies to develop the country's oil industry," Financial Times reported.

[...]

Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran's nuclear secrets and accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton, Iranian officials said. During the first round of interrogations in the judiciary, a huge network of oil mafia has been exposed, according to IPN.

It's unclear whether Halliburton was privy to information regarding Iran's nuclear activities. Halliburton sources said the company sold centrifuges and detonators to be used for a nuclear reactor and oil and natural gas drilling parts for well projects to Oriental Oil Kish.

A company spokesperson did not return numerous calls for comment. A White House spokesperson also did not return calls for comment.

[...]

Halliburton received a subpoena last year from a federal grand jury in Texas in connection with a Justice Department investigation into allegations that the firm violated US sanctions law prohibiting American companies from directly doing business in Iran. That case is ongoing.

Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while Cheney was chief executive of the company, in possible violation of U.S. sanctions.

According to a February 2001 report in the Wall Street Journal, "Halliburton Products & Services Ltd. works behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is non-American. But, like the sign over the receptionist's head, the brochure bears the company's name and red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the world." ~ continue reading here

Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

~ Tom Lehrer, "Wernher von Braun" full text of lyrics

*

Could be!
Who knows?
There's something due any day;
Will we know right away,
Soon as it shows.

Who knows?
It's only just out of reach,
Down the block, on a beach,
Under a Texas tree...

I'm literally astonished at Murray Waas's post in which he contends that we should have some sympathy for Judith Miller because she's protecting a source. I'm even more astonished that no one in the lefty blogosphere has commented on this post that I can tell. Where are you guys?

Okay, so here are some questions that Waas's post raises: Am I the only one who thinks that your loyalty to a source ends when that source has committed a crime? Am I the only one who believes that protecting a source is something you do when that source is likely to receive absolutely undeserved consequences?

Okay, so how could you make such a claim in this case? Furthermore, if you haven't committed a crime, why would you continue to protect the source? Waas gets offended that lefty bloggers are "jumping to conclusions" in arguing that Miller must be covering up her own role in a crime.

What other conclusion -- that Judith Miller is keeping silent in order to hide her own criminality -- could one draw in this case, honestly?

I'm just not a "thou must always protect a source" Kool-Aid drinker I guess.

Waas is willfully missing the forest for the trees here. You protect a source that deserves to be protected. Otherwise, you burn the source -- especially if they've committed a crime in giving you the information.

And notice the "grief" spin in the lead:

The grieving woman who started an anti-war demonstration near President Bush's ranch nearly two weeks ago left the camp Thursday after learning her mother had had a stroke, but she told supporters the protest would go on.

Cindy Sheehan told reporters she had just received the phone call and was leaving immediately to be with her 74-year-old mother at a Los Angeles hospital.

''I'll be back as soon as possible if it's possible,'' she said. After hugging some of her supporters, Sheehan and her sister, Deedee Miller, got in a van and left for the Waco airport about 20 miles away.

Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey died in Iraq, said the makeshift campsite off the road leading to Bush's ranch would continue.

The camp has grown to more than 100 people, including many relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq. After Sheehan left, dozens of the demonstrators gathered under a canopy to pray for her mother.
(via Times)

I love the spin in the headline, too: "Protestor Leaves Crawford to Tend to Ill Mother."

Protestor? How about... Citizen!

NOTE Why is the Times pulling stories off the AP wire if Jodie Will-Whore-Em's on the scene? But then, she's probably inside the Bush compound anyhow. On her knees. Praying, of course.

From America's finest new source, The Onion:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with new "Intelligent Falling" Theory
cientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue "so they can make an informed decision."

"We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids," Burdett said.

How wrong I was to think that I(diot's) D(elight) was beyond parody!

I put "noble cause" into the anagram server and came up with these:

BONE CLAUSE
BLUE CANOES
BUNCO LEASE
CLONE ABUSE
NOBLE SAUCE
OCEAN BLUES
SALE BOUNCE
USABLE ONCE

Personally, my favorite is the last. "Usable once" as in "Won't get fooled again!"

Nicole Devenish, some "White House Communications Director" or other:

And I think anyone that is trying to make a point, and she obviously, in addition to being grieving the loss of her son, is making a point. She can rest assured that we've heard that side of the argument. And in the consideration about the best way to protect America and keep people safe here at home, we believe that engaging the enemy in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is the best way to do so.
(CNN via the Amazin' Froomkin)

Um, did anyone think to ask the Iraqis how they feel about being a "place like" the kind of place we fight our enemies? How noble!

And that flypaper theory sure worked real well for the UK, didn't it?

And wasn't the war supposed to be for freedom, or something? Maybe democracy, I forget. I mean, after that WMD thing didn't pan out.

Morans. Complete morans.

I'm not hearing any answers out of Crawford.

For some reason.

Muskogee Phoenix (Oklahoma) columnist Mary deJuliis describes visit to Camp Casey:

It was a very diverse crowd that gathered to support Cindy and protest the Iraq War in Camp Casey. The group changed as people had to return to their jobs and new people arrived. There were groups and organizations there that represent military families, several who had also lost loved ones in Iraq, some with family members currently serving in Iraq or shipping out soon.

[...]

There is no way I can express my feelings to the families of all 1,841 KIAs (the count when I left for Crawford,) so I paid my respects to Cindy and the other grieving moms and wives who I found at Camp Casey. I was very moved by the more than 1,841 white crosses that lined the side of the country road from the campsite back towards Crawford. Each one represented a fallen soldier. They were placed along the side of the road, three or four back, and went for about a mile. Each cross or star of David had a soldier's name. They were hard to look at going as far as the eye could see to a bend in the road without thinking of your own children. And there are so many soldiers who have come home injured. War isn't a video game. It isn't a movie. They don't get back up when it's over.

The president had to pass the crosses and protestors when he attended a GOP fundraiser Friday afternoon (Aug. 12) at a nearby ranch. We protestors were backed farther away from the road, roped off with police tape for about four hours with Secret Service, state and county law enforcement officers. A helicopter flew overhead lower than others that we were accustomed to. The helicopter had an agent riding outside with a weapon trained on us, but once the motorcade passed he moved on as well. The motorcade went by us twice very fast, and a few of the vehicles had rifles pointed out open windows. I was thankful no one made any sudden moves.

Oh, now I get it; dove hunting. het, het, het - group smirk!

Read entire column here: Muskogee Phoenix

And this, via Dan Froomkin (WaPo), an excerpt of an exchange between CNN White House reporter Dana Bash and anchor Paula Zahn:

"BASH: In a word, no, there is nothing new and at this point there are no plans for the president to meet with her [Sheehan]. And, in talking to White House officials, they say it's about setting precedent.

"They say that this is where the president is going to live forever and this is his home and that ironically or I should say actually surprisingly no one has ever done this before. He's been here for four-plus years and no one's ever tried this and they don't want to set a precedent.

"They don't want to say, yes, he will meet with somebody because they're protesting outside his ranch because they say that that could encourage other people to do it.

Source: Froomkin/WaPo/"Hurricane Cindy", (page 3).

See, it's like this: Dear WarLord & Co. is apparently under the impression that you know who is going to carry on as you know what (Supreme Precedent), uh, forever. Like totally! Forever and ever.... Yoiks. (As if anyone is going to give a hot-shit-goddammed where the stupid son-of-bitch flitters off to once he departs -forever - his current oily foremost perch.)

*

There’s been a lot of talk about my mention of “cockroach people” and how to reach them.

Principles of cockroach people:

1. Avoid the Man. If the light shines on you, scatter.
2. Survive. Some of you will be stomped and gassed. Make sure the rest survive.
3. Don’t believe what you hear or read. Promises are just words.
4. There are more of you than there are of them who would destroy you.
5. Very few people like cockroaches. Beware of those who claim they do.
6. Gather what you need to survive.
7. The cockroaches have survived every attempt to eradicate them; they will prevail.
8. When the chance comes, move in a mass to secure food and territory.

The analogy is Oscar Zeta Acosta’s (of blessed memory, unless he’s hiding somewhere in a dark corner awaiting the right moment). I'd quote from it, but gave my copy away to a Navajo guy who did actually read it, pass it on, and is now calling himself Che, organizing on the rez. It isn’t a perfect analogy, but consider:

Blogs, newspapers and rallies can at best motivate the more visible vermin (as in the eyes of the Partei) to bring the others into the light. In a sense, we are all cockroach people, pests, vermin, the sworn enemies of the bugman and his exterminators. And proud, too. But it is up to those of us who are coming into the light to meet with the others at every chance. In the cities there are bars, jails, fairs, churches. It takes time. Just remember:

We are all outlaws, vermin in the eyes of the Partei. When outlaws organize, peacefully and en masse, and declare the legitimacy of their existence and their views, one person, one block, one neighborhood, one county at a time, the bugman and his crew quickly discover they can’t spray us all.

I recall a somewhat cheesy but provocative book called The Hephaestus Plague, where the cockroaches actually do take over.

Look, everybody can visit a jail, a peace and justice church, and neighborhood association, yard sale etc. One person at a time.

And if you don’t like the term cockroach people, try another. Whatever works for you. But there is a vast underground waiting to be tapped. Tap it however you can. '06 approaches.

Reports on folks' vigil experiences have been coming in. Lambert opened it up last night, and early this morning farmer reprinted and posted some items from fellow bloggers.

Based on the number of events that were filled or almost filled to capacity last night in my local area, the candlelight vigils seemed a success. The one we went to was aiming for 100, but registration and participation exceeded that.



The one I attended was full of folks from all walks of life, but one contingent was noticeably lacking: the youngest adults, the very people whose lives are most at risk thanks to this cannon fodder-happy administration.



We had an opportunity to get the word out about the upcoming D.C. anti-war mobilization the weekend of September 24, and meet some folks who have been participating in activist events since the Vietnam era. Here was the sign I wore, an old Vietnam era anti-war poster:



We had only a few hecklers, one being a car flying past whose driver yelled "Go to hell"! (Hah! You're already there, buddy.) It was heartening that many other people who drove by honked in solidarity, including a city ambulance and a SEPTA bus driver who banged away merrily at his horn all the way through the intersection.



The upshot was that we will continue to meet each Wednesday and maybe pull more local folks into it. I want to especially thank the Borders store that graciously allowed us to take up their sidewalk space and utilize their much-needed restroom facilities.

More stories to come.

Early returns: Two posts on local Sheehan vigils (including photos). Submitted below. Thanks to Nur-al-Cubicle and Susie for their links.

1- Nur-al-Cubicle: Brighton, NY

Also this T-shirt: (enlarged photo from Nur-al-Cublcle's Brighton photos post linked to above): Homeland Security Since 1492

2- Susie, from Philly, at Suburban Guerrilla

UPDATE(S):

3- From eRobin, Trenton NJ, via fact-esque

4- From Pamela (Studio City, CA) via the Democratic Daily. Includes additional coverage here

a letter:



read entire letter here: Operation Truth

*

I hope people who have attended a candlelight vigil will share their experiences.

NOTE Or is it, "Better to light one Republican than curse the candles"? I keep forgetting. Anyhow, it's late, and I need to retire to my tiny room under the stairs in The Mighty Corrente Building...

The first impulse of a Republican faced with opposition—and by "opposition" we mean anything other than bending... bending the knee in fealty—is to slime and defend, and so with Cindy Sheehan. We saw the usual frothing and stamping and sWifting from the freepers and Rush "But How Could I Serve? I Had A Boil On My Ass!" Limbaugh. But that didn't work out so well. Maybe people are getting tired of the act; and then again, a mother who lost her son to Bush's war isn't all that easy to attack, even in these times. Not even for nudnik.

Clearly more sophisticated Noisemakers were needed. Enter Raygun's biographer, Edmund Morris, with a more effective rhetorical strategy. We'll pass over Morris's shameless attempt to pass off some incoherent jottings from "Dutch" as empathetic, and get to the meat of the argument.

You see, it's not about policy, and it's certainly not about the facts. It's about emotion:

Cindy Sheehan's attempt to have President Bush tell her - again - how sorry he is about the death of her son in Iraq is escalating into a protest more political than personal. As such, it is a legitimate expression of antiwar sentiment. [Fine word, "legitimate"!] But the individual [never collective!] cry for attention at the heart of it - "Mr. President, feel my pain!" [mad props to Morris for the subliminal reference to The Clenis!] - is misguided. Ms. Sheehan cannot expect a commander in chief to emote on demand. [Lo! The straw man springeth!]

Maybe one day some such document will reveal what President Bush really feels about his own "honored dead." For the meantime, he is our elected [cough] president, with the business of a nation to run. Ms. Sheehan has gotten more time with him than most grieving mothers, and if she felt, during those unsatisfactory minutes, that there was a glass wall around him, it unfortunately comes with the job. A president has to protect himself from emotional predators, or he'd be sucked dry within a week of taking office.
(via Times)

Amazing. Pray, Mr. Morris, who is the predator here? Cindy Sheehan, or the President who lied his way into a war, using appeals to fear, playing on people's faith, and branding opponents as traitors, and now wants to "get on with his life"? Who is the emotional predator?

Morris, accomplished Republican shill that he is, is, of course, lying. The very first sentence is a lie. Cindy Sheehan does not want Bush to tell her "how sorry he is." And the last sentences are lies. Sheehan is not asking about Bush's "real feelings." Sheehan is not asking for "time" with Bush.

What Cindy Sheehan wants is accountability. That's how democracy works, right? She wants answers to questions:

"I want to ask the president, why did he kill my son?" Sheehan told reporters. "He said my son died in a noble cause, and I want to ask him what that noble cause is."
(CNN)

What is the "noble cause" for which Casey Sheehan died?

What is the "noble cause" for which Casey Sheehan died?

What is the "noble cause" for which Casey Sheehan died?

Morris doesn't answer Cindy Sheehan's question. So he lies about what Cindy Sheehan wants.

I wonder why?

Bush hasn't answered Cindy Sheehan's question.

I wonder why?

I hasten to add that I'm talking real pigs here, not metaphorical ones:

The spread of a pig-borne disease in southwest China and the high death toll have thrown the spotlight on the widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics in Asia, giving the bacterium added resistance.

Streptococcus suis, which has rarely spread to humans in the past and should have been relatively easy to control if treated early with antibiotics, has infected 214 people in Sichuan province in recent weeks, killing 39 -- a mortality rate of nearly 20 percent.

"Streptococcus suis is not a very resistant bacterium -- we can normally kill it by penicillin. But the government has suggested using much stronger antibiotics... Maybe the bacterium has mutated to a more resistant strain," microbiology professor Li Mingyuan, of Sichuan University, told the South China Morning Post recently.

Scientists blame bacterial resistance in Hong Kong to improper and overprescription by doctors, many of whom readily dispense antibiotics to patients who may just have colds or the flu -- for which antibiotics are totally useless as they can't fight viruses.

"Bacteria are just living things, they want to live. If you put a lot of pressure using particular antibiotics, they will become resistant and continue to live. They will mutate, use all means to get around it," said microbiology professor Margaret Ip at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong.
(via AP)

Interesting, eh? Just as, over 100 years ago, Darwin was inspired to consider natural selection by observing and collating how animals like horses and dogs were bred by us for desired characteristics, so today we can see evolutionary pressures in action, as bacteria evolve to survive our antibiotics. Bacteria just want to live...

Unless, of course, you're an I(diot's) D(elight) true believer. In that case, bacterial resistance is just coincidence or too complicated to understand, like a watch in the field. So, ID fans, be sure to use weak antibiotics next time you're in the hospital! After all, iatrogenic disease is all part of God's plan....

How low can the Republicans go? You remember the party line the Republican Noise Machine took with Karl Rover— it's OK to out a CIA operative, since no laws were actually broken! (We'll see about that.) So, now that Republican Governor Bob Taft of Ohio has been charged with 4 misdeameanors, how long do you think it will be before the Republicans are saying misdemeanors are OK? Heck, anyone can be charged with a misdemeanor, so, really, only felonies matter!

And you know what the misdemeanors were for? Undisclosed campaign contributions in the form of golf outings. Jeebus.

Golf—the Republican version of Thug Life.

Bob Taft: Keepin' it real!

Piggybacking on Riggsveda below:

Tonight, I'm a-vigilling as well.

Although, I linked to this already, as happens on group blogs, the post, (which contained other wonderful links and can be found here) rolled away too soon, so, for inspiration, please do not miss what the Heretik hath wrought to honor Cindy Sheehan.

The Heretik, intrepid communitarian that he is, has provided a fine enlargement, with instructions for downloading; just click here, and imagine how, with the right printer and a little ingenuity, you might find a way to use this image if you, too, are a-vigilling tonight.

A link I failed to make in my original post, is to a fine piece, "Radical Grief," on Mrs. Sheehan and the meaning of politics in a democratic republic by Michael at Reading A1; in it, all kinds of deserving fools get their comeuppence, don't miss it. This followup "Political Theatre," is pretty damned good, too.

Finally, at the risk of pushing something too hard, just because I liked it a whole lot, if you missed Farmer's "The Crawford Diaries," here's a second chance.

Cindy Sheehan has asked that those who support her cause start candlelight vigils in their own communities across the country. Tonight is your chance to stand up and be counted. Helping coordinate this event (as if you couldn't tell from the graphic) are MoveOn.org, Democracy For America, and True Majority. As MoveOn's site says:

"Our vigils will be simple and dignified. Together, we'll acknowledge the sacrifices made by Cindy Sheehan, her son, Casey and the more than 1,800 brave American men and women who have given their lives in Iraq—and their moms and families."

Simply click this link, enter your zip code and the distance you're willing to travel, and a page of events will appear. (It's already set to show Philly events, but you can personalize it for your area by just entering your own zip.) To sign up, just click on the event you want to take part in.

I'm going.

UPDATE: Problems with the site link for the event list. Try this instead. If you keep having problems, keep trying. It seems become accessible and then not by alternate seconds.

SECOND UPDATE: For those in the Philly area, a vigil at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown will be attended by Celeste Zappala, who also lost her son in Iraq last year. Celeste is from Philadelphia, and spoke at a MoveOn.org event here last October along with Al Franken and Jessica Lange. She was a moving and powerful speaker, and had us all in tears. She has joined in support with Cindy Sheehan. If I hadn't already registered with a different vigil, I would definitely be there.
To get there, follow this link.

So as reported this morning on BBC, and by ITV, who came into possession of the leaked documents via the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and later in CNN, we see that the boy shot by London police for a terrorist was actually a commuter with the bad luck to be non-Anglo. And not only was he not wearing a big heavy coat, he was not running, didn't jump over anything, took a slow escalator to the subway, and was sitting down when they repeatedly shot him to death. The description of the video paints a picture nothing like the "ticking bomb" that supposedly led to an unfortunate, frantic split-second decision to kill him. In fact, it looks as thought there had been plenty of time to verify his identity, or at least apprehend him without gunplay:

"ITV News, citing documents and photographs, reported that de Menezes was not carrying any bags when he entered the Stockwell Tube station and was wearing a denim jacket, rather than a bulky coat as police had previously said.
De Menezes walked at a normal pace, did not vault any barriers and even stopped to pick up a newspaper, ITV News reported.
He descended to the train slowly on an escalator, then ran toward the open subway car and took a seat, according to ITV, which based its account on a document outlining what was captured on surveillance footage.
At about the same time, armed officers were provided with positive identification that de Menezes was either Hamdi Issac, also known as Osman Hussain, one of the suspected bombers from the day before, or another suspect, at which point he was shot, ITV News reported."

And when did this fatal misidentification occur?

"According to the network, the crucial mistake that led to de Menezes' death may have occurred that morning as he left his apartment, when surveillance officers spotted him and he was misidentified as a possible terrorist.
London police were authorized to shoot and kill suspects they believed might try to set off more subway bombs. Shortly after de Menezes' death, police justified their actions by saying he was acting suspiciously and tried to run from officers, forcing detectives to make a split-second decision to shoot him."

So they had a considerable amount of time to verify their identification, but didn't, then covered their fuck-up over with a thin layer of fine bobbie manure. Well done, lads. Worthy of L.A. and New York's finest. And to the defense that was raised earlier, that the cops risked the possibility that he could have been carrying a bomb and would have had time to blow up himself and those around him if they had confronted him, I'd say, if he was carrying a bomb, how likely would it have been that shooting at him could have set off that bomb? I mean. Please.

Lone Star nutter launches Operation Cross Stomper... mows down memorial to fallen.

Some 800 white wooden crosses, bearing the names of soldiers killed in Iraq like her son, have lined the road near the area where Sheehan has pitched a tent. Witnesses said they saw a truck dragging a pipe and chains drive over some of the crosses on Monday night.

[...]

Charles Anderson, a 28-year-old Iraq war veteran from Virginia Beach, Virginia, called the vandalism of the crosses a "sacrilege."

"These crosses represent five of my comrades in my battalion who are no longer with us," he said at a news conference with Sheehan. ~ Reuters/alertnet.org

Larry Northern: winner of the "Jackboot Jollies" criminal mischief achievement badge for distempered loco-motion in a shiny moving object:

Larry Northern, 59, of McLennan County, was charged Tuesday with Criminal Mischief Over $1,500 and under $20,000 after a pickup truck tore through a row of white crosses erected by anti-war protesters gathered near the President’s ranch in Crawford.

Bail was set at $3,000. Northern later posted bond and was released.

The crosses bear the names of U.S. military personnel who have died in the war in Iraq.

Witnesses said the driver swerved the truck in and out of the makeshift memorial Monday night. ~ KWTX/tv

Let's all congratulate cross stomper Larry for his brave show of manly force in the face of a defenseless makeshift memorial standing beside a ditch. The Taliban didn't care much for crosses either. Or women who dare to question the motives and decisions of the Dear Mullah. They were plenty fond of pick-up trucks though. As I recall they had all kinds of boing-eyed god-fearin' fun raising holy rolling hell in pick-up trucks.

And speaking of congratulations, and so forth, John archy McKay is offering fabulous prizes (which could be just about anything fabulous as you might imagine) to anyone who can report on a variety of such congratulatory tidings and or rationalizations offered in the form of three arguments (from the usual clangor horns) in defense of Larry's wild hair up his ass ride:

We know that in a very short while Malkin, O'Rielly, Coulter, and the freepers will have beatified Northern, so I'm offering fabulous prizes to the first readers who can find examples of each three of these arguments in use, to [the] first to find all three, and to anyone who can find all three being used by the same person. Special honorable mentions go to anyone who finds any other particularly outrageous defenses of Northern's action.

UPDATEThe winning entries are rolling in.... find out what the Freepies are saying...hurry: Fabulous contest update.





Likewise, according to high placed senior sources close to the source, I've come to understand that the flyblow from Waco will be awarded a specially designed Freeperkorps "Dove-n-Cross Smiter"* drive-by desecration badge in honor of loony Larry's hit and run heroics. A snappy fully extended arm-length salute is in order.

Larry can show off his new gee-gaw to his pals at the: LT Dillon Gun Club: (click "hall of fame" link and scroll down).

And that concludes the Cult of the 'W' man-child tantrum award presentation for August 17, 2005. Congratulations to Larry Northern...a real credit to his flag.

Also related: Fred Mattlage has invited Camp Casey onto his property.

Bush neighbor allows war protesters to camp on his land

That should confuse the Freepers - (see "Fabulous contest update" link above) - at least for a few days. (Larry Mattlage was the guy with the excitable talking shotgun.)

Disclaimer: Just to be on the safe side... beware high placed senior sources close to the source. Sometimes they make things up. Like badges. If ya know what I mean. het, het, het ~ farmtoons/editor

*

Tell me it's not a great country:

The Bush administration is expected to abandon a proposal to extend fuel economy regulations to include Hummer H2's and other huge sport utility vehicles, auto industry and other officials say.

Automakers have had powerful incentives to produce such vehicles because they are exempt from fuel regulations, have had rich profit margins, and many consumers can claim tax breaks for them.
(via NY Times)

Talk about a hedonic treadmill... Half the country's mainlining oil, and the rest of us are enabling them.

... between the crosses, row on row:

On Monday night, the police arrested a local resident who had used a truck to mow down about half of the 500 small wooden crosses hammered into the roadside dirt. The crosses were put back in place by Ms. Sheehan's supporters on Tuesday morning.
(via Times)

Assholes.

NOTE And speaking of assholes, you know who Bill "Helen" Keller sent to Crawford? Why, none other than Lizzie Bumiller, Girl Reporter! Gag me with a spoon...

That sensitive singer-writer, alert reader MJS, throws the following lyrics over the transom of The Mighty Corrente Building:

DEAD HORSE
(sung to the tune "Old Paint")

I ride a dead horse, I’m bleedin’ in the sand
I’m goin’off to Crawford, and Cindy Sheehan
She stands in the wilds, the wind beneath her hair
Her face is all sunburn, and wrinkled with care

(chorus)
Stand your ground, Mistress Cindy, stand your ground to let us know
For they’re hidin’ and runnin’ from the son you let go

Old George Bush had two daughters and a wife
One went bar hoppin’, the other suffered strife
His gal, she cried in that moment, she was weak
For to now she is crying alone by the creek

(chorus)
Stand your ground, Mistress Cindy, stand your ground to let us know
For they’re hidin’ and runnin’ from the son you let go

When I sing, all the soldiers come to life
Riding dead horses in the deepest part of night
Send my heart off to Cindy, send my soul to her dear son
And we’ll ride to Texas, to see the shadows run

(chorus)
Stand your ground, Mistress Cindy, stand your ground to let us know
For they’re hidin’ and runnin’ from the son you let go

Stand your ground, Mistress Cindy.... I like that. Catchy.

People can pray wherever, whenever, however they like. It's a spiritual thing.

So "prayer in the schools" is, quite literally, always possible. Right there in the public square.

So what's the big deal here? I just don't get it....

Famous Correntian troll nudnik, in response to the issue of election fraud in Ohio that was brought up below, commented thusly:

"Dead horse. Find a new one."

True. Having the right to representation in government is so yesterday, I don't know why we all haven't gotten on with our lives sooner. Yet there remain the stubborn holdouts, like famous Correntian not-a-troll, Tinfoil Hat Boy, whose response was so quotable I just decided to reproduce it in its entirety here:

"A new horse? Or a new dead horse? Because I've been riding around on a few dead horses lately - several are hobby horses - because I'm a liberal America-hater living in the tired old problems of the past, totally incapable of solving the problems of the present.

THB's top ten list of dead horses: (All old news and not worthy of any further discussion. These horses have been beaten so many times it's not even fun beating them anymore. They are so yesterday, they're practically the day before yesterday.)

2004 Presidential Election "irregularities."
Downing Street Memo.
Rove Co. Plame Leak.
Illegal diversion of $700 million from Afghanistan to Iraq.
$8 Billion missing in Iraq.
Jack Abramoff + Tom DeLay.
Cheney's super double secret energy task force.
RNC bankrolling the defense of Tobin, NH dirty trickster.
Bush AWOL during Vietnam.
Torture, torture, torture.

And when the fuck is media-whore and liberal whack-job Cindy Sheehan going to get over it? Casey is dead. Like a dead horse. Move on."

Indeed.

To paraphrase Jon Stewart, getting Canada mad at you is like pissing off Mr. Rogers. You have to work at it. So give Bush credit where credit is due:

Ottawa has pulled out of softwood lumber talks scheduled to take place next week, signalling its displeasure with the U.S. government's refusal to comply with a NAFTA ruling that would have put an end to punitive duties on Canadian timber....

Last week, a NAFTA appeals panel ruled against Washington's claim that Canadian softwood lumber poses a material threat of injury to U.S. producers. It is the third time that NAFTA has ruled against the U.S.

Under the 11-year-old North American free-trade agreement, the trade dispute should have come to an end, with Washington obliged to cancel the duties on Canadian lumber. Despite the NAFTA finding, the United States said it has no intention of scrapping duties on Canadian softwood — which exceed 20 per cent for some companies — and have no plans to refund the $5-billion in levies collected since 2002.
(via Globe and Mail)

Here's the fun part:

Canadian government officials were livid, accusing the U.S. of ignoring its responsibilities under the free-trade agreement and threatening to retaliate with billions of dollars of sanctions on American goods.

As a commenter pointed out in my earlier post, Canada exports more oil to the US than Hugo Chavez or the House of Saud. Canadians already pay $4/gal for gas; wouldn't it be amusing to see Bush voters pay rebates to Soviet Canuckistan for the same privilege?

Not long ago Bill O'Lielly urged Americans to boycott Canadian products over Iraq, much to the amusement of the Globe and Mail journalist, Heather Mallick, who was his guest. Be careful what you wish for, Bill; you just might get it.

Such a sad, sad story in the Nashville Tennessean today. It's a book review, of a new contribution to great literature (AND Deep Political Perceptive Thought) by one of the greats in both fields:

Sen. Trent Lott accuses Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of betraying him during a GOP revolt in a new, tell-all biography that expresses little remorse for the racially tinged remarks that led to Lott's loss of power and Frist's ascension.

Frist, a Tennessee Republican who replaced Lott as the GOP leader, comes off as traitorous. The book generally divides other Republicans into either heroes or villains, depending on whether Lott saw them as allies or enemies during his downfall.

So sad, so very sad. Heroism and tragedy are the themes of all great literature, are they not? As illustrated by the wonderful old song about the woman who saw a snake freezing on the ground, and picked it up and warmed it in her bosom, until it recovered enough strength to bite the crap out of her:

"I saved you," cried the woman
"And you've bitten me, but why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die"
"Oh shut up, silly woman," said the reptile with a grin
"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in."

Mark Crispin Miller is the author of The Bush Dyslexicon, a searing look at the Dauphin's malaprops and what they reveal about his real feelings, and more recently, Cruel and Unusual, about the innate anti-Americanism that underpins Bushco's motivations and actions. He also wrote and performed the one-man show "A Patriot Act", an 80 minute tour de force that blew me away when I first saw it.

In this August's Harper's cover story "None Dare Call It Stolen", he takes on the monkey business of Ohio's presidential election shenanigans, and just when everyone thought all those wacky conspiracy theorists the left likes to pretend don't really belong to us had gone to ground for good, here comes Mark with the damning truth. If you haven't read it, get it.

But whether you have or not, if you're within listening distance of NPR station WHYY (90.9) you have a chance to listen to him talk about this and other things dear to our hearts on Marty Moss-Coane's great show Radio Times this morning at 10:00 a.m. If you can't get it where you live, don't despair. Check in on the website later today and hear it via internet in the archives, or if you're more techhie than me, listen in via your iPod. It's all at the website.

What will the tour guide tell the children?!

[make up your own thought bubbles]


|
|
|



Blame it on THB.

*

Oh goodness. Am I sounding shrill? I'm so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?

Still, "shit magnet" is a reasonable translation of Froomkin's headline today: "Troubles Follow Bush." Eh?

NOTE Just as Krugman is the reason to keep reading the poor old Times, so Froomkin is the reason to keep reading WaPo. Well, Froomkin and Walter Pincus. Sad, sad.

... but it can sure take the sting out of being unhappy.

Maybe one way to open up a discussion of—gasp—class in American is to quote the following:

Money can buy happiness, according to new academic research in the United States.

But the old saw that financial gain doesn't a happy life make seems partly true, as wellbeing appears in proportion to a person's relative wealth compared to their peers.

The study, by academics from Pennsylvania State and Harvard University, finds that richer people tend to be happier than poorer people.

But the data revealed that the green-eyed monster jealousy influences how people gauge how happy they are.

"The higher the income of others in one's age group, the lower one's happiness," said Glenn Firebaugh a sociological researcher at Pennsylvania State University, one of the report's co-authors.

The reseach contains a worrying message for society, as the close observance of others' income, a "keeping up with the Joneses" trend, forces people to continually increase their income, the report said.

"Rather than promoting overall happiness, continued income growth could promote an ongoing consumption race where individuals consume more and more just to maintain a constant level of happiness," said Firebaugh.

The research, contained in the report "Relative Income and Happiness : Are Americans on a Hedonic Treadmill?" is being presented at the American Sociological Association Centennial Annual Meeting this week in Philadelphia.

Firebaugh and Harvard researcher Laura Tach based their findings on 20 to 64 year olds, adding controls for race, marital status, educational level, ageing and health.
(via AP)

A "hedonic treadmill" driven by envy. Well, I guess that would explain the McMansions and the SUVs, wouldn't it? I guess the oil for all that would be the "noble cause"...

On the one hand, the envy reminds me of the old Russian joke about the genie that appeared to the Russian peasant and granted him exactly one wish; whereupon the peasant wished that his neighbor's cow would die....

However, it also seems true to me that class distinctions have become vastly greater since the VRWC started running the country. For most people, incomes have been flat since the '70s. But for the very rich, incomes have multiplied. (It's another power curve.)

Meaning that, to the 1000 or so oligarchs who are running the country, we are all cockroaches. It should be possible to work through issues that are the reverse of wedge issues. Pursuit of happiness issues, centering on universal experiences... Food, music... Money... Sex... Love... All of which, in similar ways, are being corrupted and diminished by our corporate overlords.

Democrats are about the pursuit of happiness. I rather like that. In additioan to life and liberty, of course.

One's a President, and one's a bust. But which one?

Finally, a mainstream newspaper (though not Pravda on the Potomac or Izvestia on the Hudson) does a little reporting on this crucial issue:

President Bush and his top advisors have never said the United States wants to establish permanent military bases in Iraq. But they have never ruled out the possibility either.

"Intense opposition to U.S. plans to establish long-term military bases in Iraq is one of the most passionate motivations behind the insurgency," [Larry Diamond, a former consultant to the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq] wrote last week on the liberal website TPMCafe.com. "Neutralizing this anti-imperial passion — by clearly stating that we do not intend to remain in Iraq indefinitely — is essential to winding down the insurgency."

Leaks from the Pentagon have deepened the uncertainty. In May, the Washington Post reported that military planning did not envision permanent bases in Iraq but rather stationing troops in nearby Kuwait. But the report noted that the Pentagon was also planning to consolidate U.S. troops in Iraq into four large fortified bases.

On the theory that concrete speaks louder than words, critics see such work as a sign the administration is planning to stay longer than it has acknowledged.

John E. Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, points to another indication. Although the United States is systematically training Iraqis to fight the insurgents, he notes, the Pentagon has not taken key steps — like making plans for acquiring tanks or aircraft — to build an Iraqi military capable of defending the country against its neighbors.

To Pike that means that although the United States might reduce its troop level in Iraq, the fledgling nation, like Germany or South Korea, will require the sustained presence of a large American contingent, perhaps 50,000 soldiers. "We are building the base structure to facilitate exactly [that]," he says.
(via AP)

Lovely. Of course, with these guys, when they say "no decision has been made," everybody in the world (except maybe 500 pundits in DC) knows they're lying. Just like in how these guys went to war in the first place. Two days after 9/11, they want to use it as an excuse to invade Iraq, which is what they'd wanted to do all along. And now they have the nerve to tell us that "no decision has been made"? Puh-leeze.

That's the Heretiks' prediction, anyhow...

NOTE And no remarks about W hiding behind the skirts of his women. For one thing, Condi, typically, wears jodphurs...

Really?!?

Not really.

Iraq's parliament, pushed to the brink of a midnight deadline, gave negotiators an extra week on Monday to complete a draft constitution after weeks of intensive talks failed to bridge sectarian and ethnic rifts.

In the end on Monday, refusal by leaders of the Sunni minority to grant wide autonomy -- and control of oil income -- to the southern Shi'ite majority appeared to break any accord.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, a Shi'ite Islamist, said the sticking points had been federalism and sharing out revenues.
(via AP)

As Bob and Ray once said: "There in stately splendor, far above the squalid village below, they fight their petty battles over power and money."

Except the splendor isn't so stately:

Delayed again by a typical Baghdad power blackout, and with nerves frayed after what had sounded like mortar blasts nearby earlier in the evening, the National Assembly voted unanimously for a motion from the speaker to grant just a week, to August 22.

Meanwhile, Bush dismounted Condi his exercise bike to emit a handler-crafted statement:

Bush Downplays Constitution Delay
"Their efforts are a tribute to democracy and an example that difficult problems can be solved peacefully through debate, negotiation, and compromise," Bush said in a statement.
(via AP

Yeah, like Inerrant Boy knows what "debate, negotiation, and compromise" even mean. Gimme a break.

Translation: He couldn't muscle what He wanted from the Iraqis.

So tell me again what the "noble cause" is? I keep forgetting.

UPDATE Meanwhile, our Ambassador in Iraq thought he could speak all on his own without checking in with Dear Leader in Hellmouth,TX. And what's his alibi? The weather. The AFP headline is priceless:

Iraq misses constitution deadline, US ambassador blames weather
"We recognize that the three days lost because of the recent sandstorm set back the schedule of deliberations," [US ambassador Zalmay] Khalilzad said in a statement,
(via AFP)

But don't worry, there's no, um, crisis:

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari downplayed a possible political crisis after the failure to meet the deadline.

"This is not a political crisis, but just a problem and can be overcome," he told reporters after the parliament session which was also attended by Khalilzad.

He said the main issues that were unresolved were federalism and distribution of national wealth.

Uh, right. Everything's resolved except who gets the money and who has the power. Damn, I've forgotten what that noble cause was, again. Funny.

And I grant that the sandstorm was awful. Still, when the Framers were writing the Constitution in Philly, in Independence Hall, they nailed the windows shut. And in Philly, in the summer, that's no picnic. Something tells me that if there was an agreement to be had, a sandstorm wouldn't have gotten in the way....

Run, do not walk, run, I tell you, to view what the Heretik hath wrought. I will say no more; never has a post spoken more eloquently on behalf of its subject.

May we also point you to a Corrente exclusive, "The Crawford Diaries," brought to us through the good auspices of the farmer, in what we hope might become the first of a series.

Turning to the issue of NARAL's misbegotten ad on the potential Supreme Court Justiceship of John Roberts, Mark Kleiman, who had offered a brave and brilliant defense of the ad's content, offers an equally interesting parry in response to the original post by, Jim Lingren, one of the conpirators at the Volokh site, who asks why, since Justices Breyer and Ginsburg had come down on the side of Operation Rescue in a different decision, would it not be fair to say about them what NARAL tried to say about Judge Roberts? Professor Kleiman explains why not here.

Atrios already linked to this "Crooked Timber" post once, but the comments thread has lengthened, and Ted Barlow's original post, which provoked a response from Eugene Volokh, to which "Henry" response, spun off this not to be missed thread are equally as worthy.

Check out this delicious morsel, a memo from "Lucianne" to "Hugh" re Cindy-you-know-who, which Ted claims a little bird spirited into his mail box; he reports, you decide. You'll be glad you did.

And finally, the "Bad Magician" has made an appearance under a certain tree in Texas and sometime commentator, and now full-blown blogger, MJS was there to catch the action; if you missed the result in our comments section last week, or the link provided at Jesus' General, here's your second chance; don't pass it up, and while you're there , look around at all the other interested stuff MJS has going on there.

Xan posts, below, on Paul Krugman's Times article calling out our wartime-on-old-people president for his lies and deceptions regarding Social Security.

Yesterday, as we celebrated the most successful and important public program ever created in the US, many other folks no longer interested in the issue thought Bush's campaign against it was dead in the water and was pretty much over. But in Reuters' report this morning there's this:

"Social Security, the New Deal-era program credited with keeping millions of elderly people out of poverty, turned 70 on Sunday with Americans rallying around it and President George W. Bush as determined as ever to give it a makeover."

Deep in the bowels of Crawford, the Dauphin dozes, while waiting for his henchman to reconstruct the attack:

"Republican lawmakers have put off any action on Social Security until the fall.
Bush has scaled back the number of his Social Security speeches as he tried to give room to House of Representatives Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas to work on a broad proposal to include such ideas as retirement savings incentives.
Charlie Black, a Republican political strategist, said Bush's lower profile should not be mistaken for waning interest.
"I don't think he's lost any of his zeal for Social Security reform," Black said. "The action has sort of shifted to the Hill now and the Ways and Means Committee so we'll have to kind of see what they can come up with."

Be forewarned. This is a battle we can't afford to lose, because once changes are made, it will never be restored.

And 'bout damn time, some might say.

(via NYT) (aw, go ahead and register already--otherwise how are you going to protest when they go to Pay-for-Pontificating in September?)

Many pundits and editorial boards still give Mr. Bush credit for trying to "reform" Social Security. In fact, Mr. Bush came to bury Social Security, not to save it. Over time, the Bush plan would have transformed Social Security from a social insurance program into a mutual fund, with nothing except a name in common with the system F.D.R. created.

In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. Oh, I'm sorry - was that a rude thing to say? Still, the fact is that Mr. Bush repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false. The falsehoods ranged from his claim..."

After which he deliniates a number of prevarications, on a wide range of subjects, pretty well defined as "every time Dear Leader flaps his lips" which is no more than the plain truth, innit now?

I like it here. It's quiet.


I kin do some reflectin' and some cogitation-izin'.

Dear Diary,
I thought it important to write you at this pertnint time.

Nah.

Dearest Diary,
How are you this evening?

Nooo. Try agin'...

Dear Diary,
It's me, George. George Bush. George W. Bush.

No, no, no that don't sound right neither. To formal. Too inty-LECTUAL. Need to be more plain speakin-like. This diary writin' thing ain't as easy as I thought it would be. Havin' a hard time gettin' started here. 'Specially with all that fugue music piano playing upstairs. And all that marching back and forth is makin' the floorboards rattle. Makes me jumpy. I don't like feeling jumpy. I like it when Condi plays that rag-time. I like that. I like that song she plays from that movie... "The Sting". Yeah, I like that movie song. I like that a lot. Kinda jaunty. A jaunty theme song. Yep. I like feelin' jaunty. I like theme songs too. Don't like feelin' jumpy. Jess jaunty. Good 'en jaunty. ... jaunty be good!... het, het, het, het, het.... git down... You like that too Barney!, het, het ...yeah... Ok ok, where was I... diary, writing to the diary... here we go...

Dear Diary,
Today is August. Sunday. Sunday night in August. The 14th Sunday in August. In the year of our Lord 2005.

I decided to write to you about my struggle. The hard work I do here. Hard work and relaxation. I like to do hard work and relax. Get it all down on paper. Yep. My Struggle. That's a good name for a book. Run that idea'r by Karen. See if she likes it too.

I like writing to you diary. This is fun. Barney likes it too. I like dogs. I like to come down here when it gets too noisy in the house. Come down here. Me and Barney in the bunker. Get away from it all. Like a vacation house inside a vacation house. Do some thinkin' 'bout stuff. Do some writin'. Get my proorities in order. Gotta have proorities. Gotta have proorites in a orderly fashion. Keep it simple. Keep it orderly. Be on time.

Still got that scary mother camped out there on the road somewhere. I got my people keepin' an eye on her though. Keepin' a vigil. Remain vigilant. Operation Wide-Awake Vigilant. That's what we call it here. I like to remind people to remain vigilant. Resolute. Steely resolute! Yep, I'm a steely resolute person. Noisy upstairs. Hard to write with all that racket. Saudis is clog dancing and hootin it up with the twins again. I can hear em' all up there now. They sure as hell is wide-awake.

Barney hear em too? Don't be gittin' skittish Barney, eat yer brownie there, Laura made it fer ya special. Maybe I should go up there and tell em to settle down. Nah, maybe not, that wouldn't be good... can't do that, wouldn't be the right thing to do, wouldn't be diplomatic. Wouldn't be neighborly. Gotta love yer neighbor like ya love yerself. 'Specially if yer neighbor has sevr'al billion dollars worth a oil squirtin' up outta their back yard sand box. het, het. What the hell, they like to watch the twins do that high-kickin' cowgirl can-can dancin' anyway, het, het, that is pretty entertainin'. Reminds me of the time I was.... uh, ah, nevermind... wheres my magic marker... I like my magic markers... Barney, git over here!... git now... don't be peein' on my mom's bench press!... I told you before about that....

Dear Diary. Resumin' my entry here: Night time, August 14. Took Barney for a walk. Outside. I like to go outside too. Both Barney and I like to go outside. Starry night. The stars shine bright. Deep in the heart of Texas. I like poems. I like jaunty poems. I lke bluebonnets and poems. And starry nights. I like walkin' in the bluebonnets. I don't tell a lot of people that but I feel comfortable tellin' you Diary.

Walked hand in hand through the bluebonnets with my good friend the Crown Prince Abdullah. A jaunty walk. I like jaunty walks. About a week or two ago. I like to call him "Dooley". King "Dooley" Abdullah the Saudi sandman. LOL. The monarch, the future. Praise be unto Allah. We had a nice time.

I like the way he squeezed my hand once when I almost tripped in a stump hole. Caught my balance, assured me everything would be ok. Gave me a good feelin' in my heart. Made me feel secure. Sprinkle a little of that magic Saudi sand in my eye at night and I drift off like a lazy slug-a-bed. LOL! Did i mention Prince Turki gave Laura a solid gold bowling ball the other afternoon. He sure did. Big shiny one too. A real beauty. I can hear it rolling around in the hallway upstairs right now. Cheney likes to watch the twins get tight 'en chase it around in their underwear. I'm surprised that ain't gave the old fool another blowout! LOL! Just kiddin'. I kid Uncle Dick.

I should probbly erase that last pary-graph. 'Specially that part about Preznit, I mean Vice Preznit Cheney, and the twins and the bowlin ball...that sounds a little weerd...het, het... that part about the sandman is probbly a little comp-ro-mizin' too.... damn... can't erase magic marker... I shouldn't a done that... oh, George... maybe I kin erase it with some lighter fluid.... smear it around... smear it around...uh boy... I don't need this.... and that sceery mother is still out there in the dark. I kin sense the lights of the 'campment, the biv-oo-ak, as Rummy likes to call it. I kin sense it out there. She's gonna be lookin' fer me tomorrow too. Huntin' me like a dirty animal! Tryin' to question my steely re-solve. Who does she think she is anyway!!

Maybe I should close the road. Close the road like they done in Gaza! Send in a helicopter gunship to blast her peace-creep ass outta there. Git that neighbor fella up the road to plant some rattle-snakes in their porta potties...heh heh... holy shit... that'd take some explainin' - heh heh - heh heh -- ok, feelin' woozie here... what would The Monarch do? I needa' settle down... settle, settle... Barney!, I asked ya not to do that sort of thing to my moms leather medicine ball... it looks obscene...

Moms. Sceery moms. Some people out there even comparin' the one up the road to Jesus. I seen it on the internets this afternoon. Some people sayin' maybe even Jesus sent her. Holy son-of-a-bitch. I can't be lobbin' mortars at Jesus fer Christ's sake!

Git a hold of yerself bucko. It's jess one mom. Jess a reg'lar sceery mom. Ain't no messenger of the peace God or nuthin freeky like that. Some kinda pilgrim maybe, at the most, but not some kind of emmy-sary of the Lord. I needa' git a hold a that weasle stomping despot Ratzinger in the morning. See if he's got any line on this. Strangle this outrage in it's crib. Git those two bootleg pulpit hicks in Virginia off their fat asses too. This is bullshit.

Screechin mother of Jeziss where the hell is that screwfly Rove when I need him. Time to put an end to this angel of peace bullshit. Next thing ya know some nut will recognize the bitch on a slice of toast or a grilled ham steak and the whole business will be all over... all over the Larry King Show and... oh shit....!

BARNEY! Didn't I ask ya nice before not ta do that sort a thing on my moms favor-ite blood stained rubber wrasslin' mat! It was a gift from the Harris County Department of Corrections. Now we're gonna have to go outside agin' and get all shwetty and overheated....

Dear Diary,
How's it going. Look, I gotta go. Gotta go now. Things are gettin' ugly here and Barney's digestive system is actin' funny. The crazy noise upstairs has gone silent ----- yup, silent... and i'm not even sure what time it is. I think it's Monday. I gotta get a bead on things here before the sun comes up or I'm gonna be screwed. Screwwwwd! Do some brush clearin' if ya know what I mean. I really like you diary. Yer a good friend. Had a good time talkin' with ya. I'll be back diary.. I'll be back... you can count on me.... operation steely resolve.... yeah, thats it... I'll have to talk with Karen about that one too... this is my struggle diary.... my struggle. Yours truly, GW.

*

I'd always wondered what an "activist judge" was, aside from a winger hate figure, but fortunately now I know:

At the rally Sunday, Mike Miller, 54, of Gallatin echoed many of the speakers comments on judicial power, saying he believes Supreme Court justices try to create laws with their rulings instead of interpreting the Constitution.

''Activist justices -- we're trying to find out what we can do to stop that activity,'' he said. ''Our laws are based on the Ten Commandments.''
(via Times)

So, any judge who believes (as the Framers most assuredly did) in the separation of church and state is an activist judge.

And there you have it. These guys really want a theocracy, and won't stop until they get one. Yech.

Goin-a-grievin'. Goin' next door. To the Broken Spoke.





Gotta love yer neighbor like you love yerself. Do me some neighborly grievin'. Get me some neighborly love. Sizzlin' outside! Hot. Get me some-a-that hot sizzlin' bar-bee-que. Outside. Yep, raise some dough-nations too, *het, het*. Hard work!

Turn some corners. I like turnin' corners. I likes puttin' that bar-bee-Q food on my family too.

There's that mother from the tv set. I don't like the looks of her or that treason camp there. Scares me. Tryin' to ask me some question about sumpin'.

See, it's like this: there's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widdahs, ...and that's me, and I know what it's like. I'm a mother hugger. Peeple trying to make me look bad on tv in front of the pee-pull. Tryin' to diss-rupt my vay-ca-shun. Don't look at her Laura!...

I'll do the grievin' round here... just pretend ya don't see her there... stay the course! Hard work. Steady now... doin' the hard work... goin' to the neighbors to do some hard work... pro-tectin' the family...

Need me some pills. Gimme me some pills! - Altoid boy! Where's Altoid boy! ...feelin' funny here. Like when I'm ridin' my bike and start loosin' my motor skeels. Sweatin' a couple bullets here... mouth feelin' a little droop-EE. Hoo-boy... stay the course... easy does it... gotta -- stay -- the -- course..... get some Bar-B-Q... some lemonade. Think funny thoughts... turdblossom... *het, het, het,*.... turdblossom, that is a funny soudin' word ain't it... I like that song too, what's it called, the "Turdblossom Special"... yeah, I like that... that's a good song...

Sceery world out there. Terr'ist. People who hate us fer our - freedum. Hate us fer our freedum en are stuff. See: I'm a come-PASH-nit - I'm a come-PASH-nit - con-serv'tive. Hard work. Settin' big goals. Doin' hard work. My shee-rona. My Scotty has a pretty face... yeah...that...that there treason camp just goes on and on and on don't it... Who are these people anyway... why ain't they throwin' rice and rosewater at my... my MOTOR-cade? Weren't they screened before they was allowed into Texas? Who screened these people? Evil doers tryin' to under-mine my REE-solve. I do have some experience on border defense. After all, that was my unit's mission. Still, be a lot easier if I was the dick-tator instead a crazy Uncle Dick. No one followin' Uncle Dick around a'tryin' to sceer 'im... questioning his bold vision... challengin' his strategery... makin' him talk to sceeeery mothers. Hold me Barney! Atta good boy... heh, heh.... we'll get through this... turn the corner... turn the corner with me Jeeziss.....

There's the Broken Spoke Ranch right up there! Right there straight up ahead! Stay the course driver.... stay the course... stay the cooorse! -- steady as she goes, almost home free... home free on the range... Gonna get me some BAR-B-Q and some cream corn. I like me that cream corn too. Skim me off me some creamy donations while I'm at it. Smoke some con-tree-butions outta some holes... spell out a few bold new initiatives... help clear some brush from some a-them numbered offshore accounts while I'm at it...*het, het*

Drivin' right up the dusty drive-WAY now... here we go... end of the trail... and.... here we is. Schweet!

NOT lookin' for-werd to that ride home none neither... but... here we is... we is here anyways... Mission - Accomplish'd...! *het, het, het* ~ *snicker, snicker, snicker*.

******

Sometimes, One Woman is All it Takes

*

Kevin picks up on exactly the quotation that came to mind when I read this piece in the WaPo about the administration's "reality adjustment" on Iraq:

Summer 2002, a senior Bush official to Ron Suskind: "[Establishment liberals] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

Summer 2005, a senior Bush official to Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer: "What we expected to achieve [in Iraq] was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

Just like the brilliant Frank Rich column already mentioned by Lambert this morning, the administration is really in hip-deep and W apparently is the only one still bravely sticking to his guns. Everyone else in this administration is loudly whispering about the walkback of expectations.

I like the historical parallel that Rich makes here as well:

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.

We also now know the pullout is imminent folks. When Bush the Liar says "no decision has been made" you know that a decision has been made.

Remember how many times Bush in the fall of 2002 insisted that the decision hadn't been made to go to war?

BTW, aren't the Vietnam parallels extremely apt now?

I must admit that I find myself really upset when CNN runs their "A Soldier's Story" segments on Sundays. I really get upset when they tell us the brief bios on the twenty or so soldiers that have died during the week. I cried a bit last week as they listed all of the men and described how many wives and children they were leaving behind.

What a fucking disaster. But we'll be out soon -- and Iraq will collapse into civil war behind us.

And after our skedaddle from Iraq you can bet that W, Dick, Ann Coulter, and the Republican noise machine chorus will tell America that it's the Democrats' fault or the soldiers' fault or the fault of the career military people at the Pentagon or of the anti-war protesters or of Cindy Sheehan or Dan Rather or Peter Jennings or some such outrageous claptrap because it would never, ever, ever, ever be the fault of Dear Leader, would it?

Well, of course not. It just couldn't be W's fault, right? He's perfect.

And you know what the most outrageous part will be?

There will be a huge number of Americans (not just Glenn Reynolds) who will actually buy it.

(A Kos diarist posts the reasons why the following story is sourced from Rummy. My extreme White House-ology talents make me think that Cheney Cheney'ed himself with that "last throes" comment, and Bush locked Cheney into his coffin and gave the ball to Rummy. Couldn't have happened to a nicer chickenhawk.)

Anyhow, choice quotes from Pravda on the Potomac this morning, on A1:

U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq
Administration Is Shedding 'Unreality' That Dominated Invasion, Official Says
(via WaPo)

"Honey, I've changed!"

"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning. [i.e., the last three years is the beginning]"

(Note that "absorbing" is a Rummy word; that's what tipped off the Kos diarist.)

U.S. officials say no turning point forced a reassessment. "It happened rather gradually," said the senior official, triggered by everything from the insurgency to shifting budgets to U.S. personnel changes in Baghdad.

Shame about the dead, though. Too bad they didn't die gradually.

"We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic," said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. "That process is being repeated all over."

Yes, it's a shame about the dead. Too bad they didn't die slowly.

On security, the administration originally expected the U.S.-led coalition to be welcomed with rice and rosewater, traditional Arab greetings, with only a limited reaction from loyalists of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

And you can bet that if our welcome was anything like that, there would have been a photo op and a wave of planted stories. Instead, we had to organize the Saddam statue-toppling photo-op all by ourselves. (Rice and rosewater, eh? That's how the Israelis were welcomed into Lebanon by the Christian Maronites (here) So I wonder where that little piece of delusional thinking came from?)

[According to Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle East Institute,] the initial ambitions may have complicated the U.S. mission: "In order to get out earlier, expectations are going to have to be lower, even much lower. The higher your expectation, the longer you have to stay. Getting out is going to be a more important consideration than the original goals were. They were unrealistic."

Yes indeed, a shame about the dead. Too bad they died realistically.

Let's give a warm welcome to the Bush administration as it joins the reality-based community!

NOTE Watching how the White House and the Republican Noise machine try to extricate themselves from the P.R. quagmire will be interesting. After all, everyone who had the "unrealistic" views on Iraq was promoted, and everyone who had realistic views was fired, demoted, and/or shunned. So who will have the "accountability moment"? I think Rove's "stab in the back" machinery will be fired up sooner rather than later. They can't wait for the 2006 election to blame the Dems for their debacle; they need a cover story right now.

Digby refreshes our collective memory:

[L]ast year at this time, if you'll recall, Max Cleland went down to Crawford and wheeled his chair right up to the gate. The Democrats got all nervous that it was too ... undignified. Max was getting a little bit shrill, you see, and looked like he might be getting ready to force the secret service to push him off the property in his wheelchair. How indelicate.

No, this was a grassroots move started by one individual who felt strongly enough to put herself on the line. No leftwing group could have ever orchestrated anything this successful.
(via Digby)

Leaderless resistance...

(And, yes, Clusterfuck is the precise technical word, the term of art.)

Frank Rich throws a thunderbolt. The whole thing is great. I focussed on this part:

The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.

Yep. Bush needs to be out of Iraq before the mid-terms—and Rove has already prepared his "stab in the back" strategery (back) to blame the Dems for Bush's debacle. (Surprise, Hillary, Evan, and the rest of you Beltway Dems slithering into position for 2008; Rove will hang that on you whether you voted for the war on not.)

NOTE Incidentally, Trudy Rubin called her shot over a year ago. "Tell it to the widows. Now that it comes time for Inerrant Boy to do exactly that with Cindy Sheehan, He can't.

NOTE And if you buy this, that Bush will have cut and run by the midterms, that has implications for the anti-war movement. Good to keep the pressure for withdrawal on, but it's no longer the main battle. We have to be where the hockey puck is going to go next, not where it is now.

Today's the day. Be there!


And thanks to Lambert and all my fellow Correntians for being kind enough to "sticky" this post to get the word out.

Watch this space for info on the DC Mobilization Against The War, next!

As eRobin at Fact-esque says,

"This is the party that the DNC/DCCC/DSCC should have organized to happen on the National Mall and across the country. When people talk about the Dems being dinosaurs, it is partly because of massive, embarrassing failures of imagination like this.
So you know what will get the press on August 14th? This. "

She's right. Don't let "Justice Sunday--The Retread" get all the publicity. Bloggers and citizens! Let us eat cake! It's our solemn duty:


If you live in the Philadelphia area, and you care about what your government is trying to do to Social Security, come out and join with others who are working to save it---meet great people, stuff your face with good eats, and talk with some of your local candidates and representatives to exchange ideas on how to do it.

Join us at an old-fashioned
Sunday picnic in the park to say "Happy 70th Birthday, Social Security!"

Sponsored by
Montco DFA
and
Philly for Change,
the party will be held at Fort Washington State Park in Flourtown, PA on August 14.

We'll have food, fun, and good company.

Please RSVP here.

$5 per person suggested donation. Please note that alcoholic beverages are prohibited in Pennsylvania State Parks and that pets must be leashed at all times. Sorry.

Please RSVP here.

The Flourtown Day Use Area is located on West Mill Road between Stenton Ave and Bethlehem Pike in Flourtown. Click here for a map.

A special thank you to Our Host Committee for helping to make this event possible

Sen. Leanna Washington • Josh Shapiro • Lee Nelson • Mary Clark Thompson • Frank and Maggie Moya • Ben Burrows • Kevin Shaw • Ruth Damsker • Ginny Schrader • Joe Hoeffel • Patrick Murphy • Lois Herr • Paul Scoles

Thank you!

For those interested in using SEPTA, it's a piece of cake (!) Take the R7 Chestnut Hill East (30 mins.) to the end of the line and pick up the 94 bus. Hop off at Mill Rd (Flourtown Shopping Center, 6 mins on the bus) and walk west on Mill Rd ~0.2 mile (5 mins.) to the picnic area. Both the R7 from Center City stations and buses from Chestnut Hill run hourly on the half-hour (10:30, 11:30, 12:30, etc.) all day Sunday.

I sure hope we don't have a spike in oil prices and a collapsed housing bubble at the same time... Of course, I don't drive, let alone drive an SUV, and I don't own a house, let alone a McMansion, but a lot of people would be in a lot of pain...

And you can believe that Bush (when he isn't exercising or on vacation or both) is bending every effort to make sure the perfect shitstorm doens't happen 'til 2009, at which point he'll be safely retired and hiring a ghostwriter for his book deal.

From alert reader ck:

How about planting 1800 white crosses across the road from Cindy's ditch -- each one inscribe with a name of dead soldier?

Just so Dear Leader could see them every time he passes -- and the world could see the wing nuts descrating the memorials to the fallen.

It won't affect Bush, of course; he's a sociopath. But it might make the issue very concrete for the people who see it.

UPDATE This looks like good coverage: Crawford's The Lone Star Iconoclast. Apparently the counter-protestors melted in the Hellmouth heat....

UPDATE OTOH, maybe Keep It Simple, Stupid is the right idea. I keep thinking about the event, but isn't the real point Sheehan's questions? And the lack of answers? So, that's the message. Damn, I got seduced by my own giant puppet concept. I have met the Giant Puppet Loons, and they are me!

UPDATE Remember the purported letter from a relative of Cindy Sheehan that The Oxycontin Kid read over the air? Will Bunch did some digging, and it turns out the letter is of dubious provenance. I haven't been over to Attytood in awhile, and it's lookin' good—throwing that red meat!

It's always nice to be noticed. Especially by the Inkwire:

Chris Bowers, a progressive local blogger and former political consultant, calls Philadelphia "arguably the lefty blogging capital" of the country. How so? He has just finished a study for NDN, a Democratic group. Based on stats kept by Blogads.com, a site that manages and tracks blog advertising, he found that 10 of the 50 most-popular liberal sites are written here.

The list would start with Eschaton and include Bowers' My DD, Whiskey Bar, the Booman Tribune, Fables of the Reconstruction, Suburban Guerrilla, the All Spin Zone, Corrente, the Rittenhouse Review, and the Tattered Coat, he says. Not all take Blogads; he used other traffic indicators as well.
(via Inquirer)

"As long as they spell the name right...."

Meaning, let's take the mentions we get... Sure, we're from all around the country, not just Philly, and The Mighty Corrente Building is simply too mighty to be confined to a merely terrestrial location, but hey, it's always nice to see the name in print.

There are other interesting facts in the article—like Atrios has 120,000 readers a day, where we get, say, 2000. That's what, three orders of magnitude? Showing what we already know, that the network of internet linkages follows a power curve; a few behemoths, and then the "long tail." Meaning, I think, that we're going to have to display adaptability and learn to develop new forms of linkage. Perhaps more point to point (i.e., local to local) than hub and spoke (where the guys at the top of the power curve are hubs). Since, after all, the traffic is just a means to the end of spreading the message. Kinda like, oh, Committees of Correspondence. Brings me back to the old E.P. Thompson days....

NOTE I'm convinced, though without evidence, that the left blogosphere has been instrumental to the mysterious inability of the malAdministration to get traction after "election" 2004. Slowly but surely we are getting people to think critically. That's done on a very granular level. I don't think it's sufficient for only the top 10 or the top 40 to be sending a message, it has to be pervasive at all scales.

Here's an interesting link from alert reader jack. Emily Gertz writes at WorldChanging:

The internet's been great for helping me make new friends in San Francisco and Toronto... all from my home office chair in Brooklyn.

But it hasn't done much for putting me in touch with the hundreds of people who live within a few blocks of my apartment.

Enter Neighbornode, an intriguing project developed by John Geraci that uses urban density and geographic proximity to faciliate hyperlocal networks.

Neighbornodes are group message boards on local wireless networks. And local here means really local -- the nodes transmit a signal for about 300 feet. When you get online using your nearest Neighbornode, you have access to the node's bulletin board, where you can both read and post. Not on the node? Can't read the board.

Nodes are also extensible -- several Neighbornodes in close proximity can form a "supernode" and transmit community information street by street, while remaining geographically grounded in the local nabe.

From finding out why the nearest laundromat has shut down (big local quality of life issue, trust me!) to why the cops were on the block last night, from where the good yard sale is to changes in local zoning, to simply making a few friends right nearby, there are all sorts of down-to-earth reasons it might be good to shift attention from the cross-continental, trans-oceanic network for a bit, and get better connected with the local neighborhood.
(via WorldChanging)

I think she's right. Note well, that if you or anyone wanted to be a 21st Century block captain (for the good guys, naturally), this technology could help you do that.

Of course, RDF writes in comments:

I made the startling discovery several years ago that the people I'm trying to organize don't generally read the papers.

The problem is finding the locus and modus to reach the ones who are being well and truly fucked by the Powers That Be. What Oscar Zeta Acosta called the "cockroach people" in his classic "The Revolt of the Cockroach People."

Now, I don't think the cockroach people are any more likely to have WiFi than they are to be reading the papers. How to connect to them?

Incidentally, I think that most people are "well and truly fucked by the Powers That Be." Heck, that's what living in an oligarchy means. There are terrible gradations, it is true. I've only been grindingly poor for a couple years, and now I have what would, I guess, be called a "good job." But you know what? To the Powers That Be, I'm just another cockroach.... FWIW, I think we have to get all the cockroaches to, um, connect... 'Cause otherwise we'll get stomped one by one.

NOTE If Mayor John Street would ever get of his ass and wire Philly, the neighborhood nodes would be very easy to create. I wonder why he doesn't? Montreal has a grass roots effort to wire the island, I wonder why Philly can't?

So now the governor of NM—Bill Richardson, a “Democrat,” unlike Owens of CO who is unabashedly a right wing loonie—has declared a state of emergency along the border with Mexico. This, he says, will allow them to build new, bigger, more hazardous fences than already exist, along with other goodies designed to draw the line in the sand ever deeper. Ahhh, treaties. (I’m thinking Guadalupe-Hidalgo, here) As any Native American will tell you, treaties ain’t worth spit.

Howard Zinn is right in his recent attacks on nationalism (see The Progressive). Build the fences ever higher and higher, but make sure to suck the profits dry from the poor on the other side. The fences with CAFTA will be more metaphorical but just as real. Speaking of The Progressive and Mexico, in case you missed this in the June issue:

The small town off El Alberto, in central Mexico, has built an obstacle course that mimics crossing the border illegally into the United States. For $13.50, tourists scramble down trails, wade in a river, and try to dodge La Migra. If the mock migrants are caught, their hands are tied behind their backs, and they are loaded onto trucks. “Some get very scared,” says guide Ponciano Alfonso Martinez Flores. “They say they don’t want to play anymore.”

Me, either. I’m tired of playing. We must run these leeches out of office in ’06, me hearties. Viva la gente!

From the publisher of America's largest daily, left at the hotel door across America:

The best way to support our troops in Iraq is to insist that Bush bring them all home. Alive. Sooner rather than later.
(via USA Today)

And that's the way it is...

NOTE Al. More money for reportage, please? The poor old Times is on the ropes, and at some point the stench from that Judy Miller thing is going to choke them. Even if they beat the rap with Fitzgerald, the newsroom must be hell on earth.

Is there a link to the video?

Put down your coffee first.

NOTE Thanks to alert reader Tinfoil Hat Boy.

Great headline—"Bush Motorcade Passes War Protesters." Doesn't it always?

President Bush and his motorcade passed the growing camp of war protesters outside his ranch Friday without incident.

The motorcade didn't stop.

Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who started the vigil along the road leading to Bush's ranch, held a sign that read: "Why do you make time for donors and not for me?"

On Friday, Bush arrived before noon at a neighbor's ranch for a barbecue that was expected to raise at least $2 million for the
Republican National Committee.

About 230 people were attending the fundraiser at Stan and Kathy Hickey's Broken Spoke Ranch, a 478-acre spread next to Bush's ranch. All have contributed at least $25,000 to the RNC, and many are "rangers," an honorary campaign title bestowed on those who raised $200,000 or more for Bush, or "pioneers," those who have raised $100,000 or more.

(via AP)

Sheehan asks a good question, doesn't she: "Why do you make time for donors and not for me..."

And her question pretty much sums up Bush's Reign of Error, doesn't it?

NOTE Via Kos, here's a blog from one of the participants at Crawford, and from another participant. More from TruthOut. Farmer has links,art.

Here's hoping the Giant Puppet Loons stay away—I have the feeling the Right Wing Attack Machine is going to show itself for exactly what it is, on national television, for all to see. As the Clash would say, Give 'Em Enough Rope...

Somehow, even through all the outages and that Chinese government thing, I always thought of Google as a different kind of corporation. Another illusion—shattered. A strong draft of UK-grade irony here.

NOTE Or is it blogger is Googled? I always forget.

UPDATE The blogger's curse (back) I cast on Google doesn't—like, so often, blogger itself—seem to be working (or maybe it is, just more slowly than I wanted). Via alert reader Alice Marshall, Google now has a new Vice President: Scott "Sucker MC" McClellan lacky and Caryle Group Associate Dan "I am the Mouth of Bremer" Senor. Yech.

Of course, hiring Senor doesn't tell us anything we don't already know,really. After all, the news page at Google skews right (I use Yahoo now, anyhow) and we long ago noticed that repugnant little marketing scut Biz, in full blogger triumphalism mode during the Superscript Affair, citing Tech Central Station as an exemplar of "swarm intelligence" (should have taken a screen shot, sorry).

Are you ready for the country? Because it's time to go.

What a surprise. As was clear from its initial reaction to the third inconvenient ruling in the Canadian softwood lumber dispute, the U.S. has officially declared its intention to blow off NAFTA when it doesn't rule its way:

Canadian anger boiled over yesterday at the U.S. government's refusal to comply with a landmark NAFTA ruling that should have spelled an end to punitive softwood duties on lumber from Canada.

Federal and provincial officials accused the United States of reneging on the 11-year-old North American free-trade agreement, with Ottawa renewing threats to slap billions of dollars of sanctions on American goods if Washington doesn't recant.

One senior Canadian government official called the U.S. dismissal of the NAFTA ruling a "slap in the face."
(via The Globe and Mail)

I hope Canada does retaliate. Force is the only thing these gangsters respect, even if it means pulling down the entire edifice of international relations that the rest of the world has struggled to create since WWII. From Florida to Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to Terry Schiavo to Valerie Plame to steel tariffs to this, I can't think of a single example of the Bush Administration submitting itself to the rule of law, so it's silly to think that further jawboning or appeals to decency will elicit anything other than contempt from them.

In this context, perhaps "Cindy Sheehan is [indeed] our Rosa Parks". What will be our Selma?

Tony Norman is an oft-overlooked columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch. Today he takes a calm, dispassionate look at Radical Cleric Jerry Falwell's latest crusade (aka Fundraising Pitch) which Reverend J. calls "Vote Christian in 2008!"

(Not to give away any hints, but the major target of this mailing is a certain New York senator, so powerful in Eeee-vil that merely trying to speak her name caused her prospective Republican opponent to be stricken mute for almost a half a minute on live TV the other day.)

But Tony's larger topic is the Radical Rev's overall take on things: (via PP-G)

The sentimental history of America as imagined by Christian fundamentalists like Falwell has always been an interesting diversion from real life. If it weren't such a proven money-maker for cynical preachers whose talent for fleecing the credulous can never be underestimated, it would be laughable in its heretical audacity.

Jesus as preached from far too many pulpits on Sunday morning is nothing more than the sanctified lawn jockey of a resurgent American empire. He isn't even accorded the dignity of questioning the assumptions of the political and religious operators that have appropriated him as their official mascot.

...The Jesus that many Christians want to parade in the American public square like an organ-grinder's monkey will mostly be called upon to bless football games, debutante balls and occasional military incursions into hostile Islamic countries.

...Vote Christian so that the sanctity of life will be absolute and that godly men will always be in place to ensure that our nuclear arsenal is second to none in its destructive capability.

Can ah heer an AYE-men!

Via AP: Aug. Death Toll for Reserves in Iraq Soars

WASHINGTON - The National Guard and Reserve suffered more combat deaths in Iraq during the first 10 days of August — at least 32, according to a Pentagon count — than in any full month of the entire war.

GOP Death Cult's Hideaway Circle 'W' Ranch



Camp Casey - Crawford, Texas

What can you do? 1. Go To Crawford [Vets for Peace]
Many of us are heading to Crawford. David Cline, the national President plans to arrive there by the end of the week. Elements of Arlington West are on the road right now. At this time, VFP National is not calling for a mass convergence on Crawford. We do need members to go and act as an advance party to support Cindy and prepare for a mass turnout. But right now we think the best tactical approach is to allow the confrontation between the President and Gold Star Parents For Peace like Cindy, Sue Neiderer, and military families with love ones in Iraq to develop. Too many other people in the mix can distort the story and the opportunity. We are there to lend support. Soon it will be time to bring in the re-enforcements. So in other words if you can’t make it right now, don’t worry, we will need you later. Those who can make it, get there as fast as you can.

Please let us know if you plan to go just to keep us informed of who we have on the ground. You should also visit this link from the Crawford Peace House for more information (lodging etc.).

> Crawford Peace House
includes: Crawford protest info

> Code Pink; Women for Peace
> One Million Reasons.org
> Military Families Speak Out
> Gold Star Families for Peace
> Veterans for Peace

[AP photo above]:

Thu Aug 11, 6:53 PM ET A plaque with the numbers of soldiers killed and wounded in the Iraq war sits by a mass of crosses honoring those soldiers, Thursday, Aug. 11, 2005, along a road leading to President Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch.

*

Just asking...

But it's a tenable theory. Heck, Barbara Bush scares me, and I didn't have to grow up with her.

Too busy dealing with the coming indictments to do the math, I guess:

The Republican Party says it still has a zero-tolerance policy for tampering with voters even as it pays the legal bills for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to thwart Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

The Republican National Committee already has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded innocent, a team of lawyers from the high-powered Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly. The firm's other clients have included former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.
(via AP)

It's just like joining the mob, isn't it? The wise guys make sure that you get a lawyer. More from fear of what you might reveal that implicates them, of course.

I continue to be amazed at the lack of US media interest in this story. You would think that our government kidnapping the citizen of a neighboring democracy and sending him to be tortured, by an official supporter of terrorism no less, simply because of a signature on a rental lease agreement, would have some newsworthiness. Too bad Arar wasn't a pretty white woman. Still, this Times lede does capture the literally Kafkaesque world that we now inhabit:

Foreign citizens who change planes at airports in the United States can legally be seized, detained without charges, deprived of access to a lawyer or the courts, and even denied basic necessities like food, lawyers for the government said in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.

I guess we shouldn't be surprised that a government that claims the right to imprison suspects without any due process on grounds of national security would claim immunity from legal process on the same ground when the tables are turned. Still, it takes a bit of chutzpah to claim "clear and unequivocal evidence" that the plaintiff, now walking around free, is a terrorist. Sending him to Syria to be tortured is just what you do with obviously guilty people, you see.

Welcome to America. Have a nice trip.

Is it just me or is there something a little strange about this story? Starting with the fact that you can only find it on (1)very short scrolls on US cable news, with no particular attention drawn to it despite it having happened yesterday morning, (2) The Hindustani Times and (3) Reuters.comUK:

An Oklahoma man was taken into custody after he tried to carry a bomb on board an airplane on Wednesday in Oklahoma City, an FBI spokesman said.

Charles Alfred Dreyling Jr., 24, was detained on Wednesday morning after a security screener using an X-ray machine saw the device in his luggage as he tried to board a flight to Philadelphia at Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City.

"Although the investigation is in its initial stages we have found no apparent connection to any type of terrorist activity or group," FBI spokesman Gary Johnson said.

Johnson said the screener saw an "improvised explosive device" in Dreyling's carry-on luggage.

Oh, and the other slightly puzzling item: Isn't "trying to get on a plane to Philly with an IED in your carryon" sorta "terrorist activity" by default? One suspects if a 24 year old male of slightly darker skin tone, or the name Muhammed rather than Dreyling, were involved, the matter might get a bit more play.

I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with the surprising number of chemical plants that have been catching fire and/or blowing up lately....must be time to replace the tinfoil lining in my headwear.

What is wrong with this picture?

"Cindy Sheehan phoned me from Texas a few minutes ago to say that she's been informed that beginning Thursday, she and her companions will be considered a threat to national security and will be arrested."

Has the whole country gone mad? A woman who parks herself miles out of sight of the White House goons, on a public road, is scaring the bejeesus out of our "wartime president"?

And are we so pitiful now that we can put up with, even defend, the institutionalized torture and murder of prisoners by our military, yet cringe in trembling fear at the thought of an about-to-be-divorced soldier having an affair?

"A four-star general who was relieved of command this week said Wednesday through his lawyer that the Army took the action after an investigation into accusations that he was involved in a consensual relationship with a female civilian.
The lawyer, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said the case "involves an adult relationship with a woman who is not in the military, nor is a civilian employee of the military or the federal government."
The general, Kevin P. Byrnes, was relieved Monday by the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, just a few months before General Byrnes was scheduled to retire as head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command. "

Evidently, the answer is yes. According to the NYTimes article this is taken from, "...dozens of members of the military are disciplined every year for adultery and related offenses". Amazing, isn't it, the speed with which the Pentagon acts when sex rears its ugly head. And not violent, coerced, brutal sex, but sex between consenting adults.

So little grieving women and men in love now form the vortex of danger against which our president and his military must gather the force and vigilance of the nation.

And speaking of threats to national security, I sure am glad that whole Iraq thing is keeping us safe in the meantime.

Talk to nearly anyone here in Canada, and #1 on the list of grievances against the United States--higher than Iraq, higher than mad cow--is the imposition of duties on imports of Canadian softwood lumber. Hypocrisy being the U.S.'s greatest export, it should come as no surprise that the taxpayer-subsidized timber industry and its shills in the Bush Administration have been objecting to "unfair" competition from Canadian softoods, flouting the North American Free Trade Agreement to block free trade in it. Negotiations over the issue for years having produced nothing but the usual my-way-or-the-highway instransigence from the Bush Administration, Canada finally took the U.S. to court over the issue. Today it won:

Canada is claiming a major victory in the softwood lumber dispute with the United States following a key ruling by a NAFTA panel and is demanding quick repayment of billions of dollars in penalties collected by Washington.

An extraordinary challenge panel under the North American free-trade agreement has dismissed U.S. arguments that an earlier NAFTA ruling in favour of Canada violated trade rules.

Analysts have previously said such a win could be the final blow to the U.S. industry's claims that Canadian producers are unfairly subsidized.

Trade officials said they hope Wednesday's decision will hasten a negotiated end to the dispute that began more than four years ago and has seriously threatened Canada's $10-billion softwood-export sector.

“We are extremely pleased that the (panel) dismissed the claims of the United States,” Trade Minister Jim Peterson said in a statement. “This is a binding decision that clearly eliminates the basis for U.S.-imposed duties on Canadian softwood lumber.

“We fully expect the United States to abide by this ruling, stop collecting duties and refund the duties collected over the past three years.”
(via The Globe and Mail)

Canadians have such a puckish sense of humor, as the article goes on to make clear:

But Washington is insisting that more negotiations are needed before the long-running dispute can be wrapped up.

“We are, of course, disappointed with the (panel's) decision, but it will have no impact on the antidumping and countervailing duty orders,” said Nenna Moorjani, press secretary for U.S. trade representative Rob Portman.

“We continue to have concerns about Canadian pricing and forestry practices. We believe that a negotiated solution is in the best interests of both the United States and Canada, and that litigation will not resolve the dispute.”

Mr. Peterson and his U.S. counterpart have resumed talks aimed at negotiating a solution to the softwood dispute, which has already seen Canadian producers pay about $5-billion in antidumping and countervailing duties.

A trade official said the battle may not be over, because the Americans still have some options outside NAFTA, including a formal constitutional challenge.

Canada has been fighting the combined countervailing and antidumping duties through legal channels as well as in high-level negotiations since Washington began collecting duties in 2002.

Although Canada has won many of legal battles under the NAFTA, as well as at the World Trade Organization, that has had little real effect in the dispute.

The Bush Family Motto: What's Mine is Mine, What's Yours is Mine, and the Rest is Negotiable. Look for sudden resignations from the NAFTA panel in the weeks to come, followed by a third appeal from the United States. Either that, or Mr. Thompson finds a horsehead in his bed. Nobody messes with Georgie "The Smirk."

The proudest military tradition this nation has is the fact that the guys with the guns have always, through thick and thin, subordinated themselves to control by the elected representatives of the people. Examples from ancient Rome to more recent events, usually in smaller and warmer countries to the south, suggest that this will not go on forever if the military is abused and misused just too damn far.

(via ChicagoTribune, which is registration but this is most of the story:)

An Air Force Reserve colonel could face criminal charges for allegedly vandalizing cars at Denver International Airport bearing pro-Bush bumper stickers.

Lt. Col. Alexis Fecteau, director of operations for reserve forces at the National Security Space Institute in Colorado Springs, is believed responsible for defacing at least 10 parked vehicles between December and June, police spokesman Sonny Jackson said Tuesday.
[snip] Jackson said Fecteau is suspected of blacking out the Bush bumper stickers and then spray painting an expletive and the president's name on the vehicles.

[snip] The bait vehicle was equipped with a camera that captured an image of the suspect and his car. Then a detective was able to find footage from a camera monitoring cars leaving the parking lot and traced Fecteau using the car's license plate, Jackson said.

Police have referred the case to prosecutors, who are considering filing criminal charges, he said.

Does anybody here really think they are going to let this go to a trial in open court? Naw, I didn't think so either. Military tribunal on the other hand...although I would need to see what part of the UCMJ deals with the subject of Frustration Vandalism.

Dateline Baghdad (via the NYTimes - login not required):

Baghdad Mayor Is Ousted by a Shiite Group and Replaced | By JAMES GLANZ | Published: August 10, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 - Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city's mayor and installed a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d'état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

"This is the new Iraq," said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. "They use force to achieve their goal."

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq's capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

"If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that," said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.

"We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone," Mr. Makkia said. "This is not a coup."

SCIRI (Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution In Iraq)

Flashback Judy Miller's boyfriend and other Sciri recollections:

Several blocs within the alliance are vying for top government positions. The most powerful are SCIRI and the Dawa Party. Also trying to leverage their power are followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; Mr. Chalabi; and a group of independent candidates who have won the favor of the top Shiite authority in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Over the weekend, SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim met with Chalabi and offered to make him the top financial overseer in Iraq, responsible for the oil, trade, and finance ministries in exchange for him withdrawing, according to the SCIRI official. A spokesman for Chalabi confirmed the meeting but would not say what was discussed.

[...]

Chalabi's assertiveness, for example, may be rewarded with control of billions of dollars of oil revenue and trading contracts. If Jaafari wins as prime minister, other groups in the alliance may insist that no one else from his party get a top post. SCIRI may also demand control of several ministries, particularly the interior ministry.

Chalabi had only about 15 supporters on the UIA list. But earlier this month he teamed up with the followers of Mr. Sadr, adding about 30 supporters. Chalabi's spokesman says other UIA members also back him, and puts the number at around 80.

The alliance of Sadr and Chalabi couldn't have been between two people of more disparate ideologies.

Chalabi is a secularist and was once the darling of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, which used his information to build a case for war in Iraq and envisioned him one day leading the country. He fell out of favor last May over allegations that he was passing intelligence information to Iran. He has also struggled to shake off charges that he embezzled funds from Petra Bank in Jordan, which he founded and which later collapsed. He adamantly denies the allegations.

By contrast, Sadr's Mahdi Army led bloody uprisings against the US last spring and summer, and is avowedly religious, even setting up religious courts based on sharia, or Islamic law, just months after war ended. Sadr boycotted the election but his supporters ran as independents. - [see: "Power plays preoccupy Iraqi leaders", February 22, 2005 edition Christian Science Monitor ]

Chalabi bonhomie and Bu$hCo's fabulous nest of bungling yeggs:

In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.

As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, ...

[...]

In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which grew to be Jordan's third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992, he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies; once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense Policy Board. [ more Bu$hCo bubble follies... revisit the LIE FACTORY (page 2), Mother Jones.com, 2004. ]

Way to go Bill Keller, you silly dolt. Judy and her boyfriend(s) sure took your ass for a moonshine ride in the boondocks didn't they? Het, het, snicker, snicker... Way to go Arty Sulzberger you stupid Likudnik jackass. Way to go "New York Times"! Your glorious, prized, winning leaders, have certainly earned you your consignment to the Sukr Brigade!

The New York Times needs a revolution. I demand a clean break.

Meanwhile: this is the way the AP is reporting the ouster: "Five U.S. Soldiers Killed in Attacks In" [in something anyway], By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer [emphasis added below is mine]:

The mayor of Baghdad, Alaa al-Timimi, was fired and responsibility for managing the city transferred to the provincial governor, government spokesman Laith Kubba said. He refused to say why the provincial council sacked the mayor.

"sacked"... see AP item. (A Karen Hughes "Public Diplomacy" Sack-a-Shit Production)

*

How can Bush speak when he keeps gritting his teeth like that?

HELLMOUTH, Texas (AP) - President Bush said Tuesday he was "deeply suspicious" of Iran but was not ready to seek United Nations sanctions against Tehran for its suspected nuclear weapons program.

Speaking to reporters at his Texas ranch, Bush said the newly elected president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had indicated a willingness to continue discussions with European nations.

Haw. Wish He's been talking that way on Saddam's supposed WMDs. Of course, you can hardly blame Bush for wanting the war. After all, there were mid-term elections to win!

"The man said he wanted to negotiate," Bush said following a meeting with his top economic advisers.

Haw. The first part was the gritted teeth part. This part is the grinding-teeth-to-powder part.

He added that if Iran does not cooperate, U.N. sanctions are "a potential consequence."
(via AP)

Haw. That part was the not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper part.

Honestly, does anyone believe for a minute, a nanosecond, that Inerrant Boy would be even using the word "negotation," let alone threatening "UN sanctions" if He hadn't bogged the troops down in a losing war in Iraq?

Worst of all, Bush has set himself, and the country, up for diplomatic defeat: Nobody will believe any American intelligence, and rightfully so, since Bush set out to politicize the intelligence agencies, and has visibly succeeded. And we're negotiating from a position of weakness, since (absent a nuclear strike, or an Israeli raid) Bush has no military leverage at all.

Yes, the term of art is indeed clusterfuck.

From alert reader scaramouche (lightly edited):

Judge Roberts, if someone who is a party to an upcoming case on the Supreme Court's calendar invites you to go duck hunting, what will you do?
(via President Boxer)

Aux duckpits, citoyens!

They're not lying.

They're marketing.

Just asking....

And don't tell me "Intelligent Design," OK?

NOTE Assuming, arguendo, that Novak is, in fact, alive.

In case you didn't think the hebrephenic-like entertainment media gentry who conjure up stupid new crap for people to stare at on the boob-toob could get any more inane, imbecilic, loutish, dull-witted, obnoxious, or just generally altogether plain-speakin' stupid - consider this slated idiot box blast off:

Coming Soon: Bob Knight, the Reality Star | By RICHARD SANDOMIR Published: August 9, 2005

Knight is loud, successful, demanding, profane and temperamental - just the type of alpha male who would rile his housemates in "Big Brother." He makes funny faces, is known to have tossed a chair and was seen on videotape choking one of his players, Neil Reed, during practice in 1997. - more via the NYTimes (login not required)

Yes! A "reality star" who is for all utile purposes a certifiable jackass. Hot damn!, what a concept. I can't believe no-one has ever thought of something like this before. What will they think of next... Hey, how about a show about this loud, successful, demanding, profane and tempermental jackass who riles his "housemates" and is appointed UN Ambassador!


Speaking of loutish, profane and temperamental: Mr P-Niss intends to try out for Mr. Bobby's alpha male bounceball team. Because Mr P-Niss can bounce two balls at once. And, to make matters even more appealing to the target demographic, Mr P-Niss actually enjoys being choked from time to time. Granted Mr. P-Niss would prefer to be throttled by Miss V-Niss rather than subjected to the funny faces of an a-niss from Tex-iss during prac-tiss...but hey, its TV.... it's E-ESS-P-N! And aything Mr P-Niss can do to help TV deliver groundbreaking documentary reality to more Americans is, well, the least Mr P-Niss can do.


After all, we are at war, somewhere, so I'm told, and we each need to make sacrifices.

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Operation Yellow Elephant alert: Pentagon to expand opportunities for Young College Republicans.

Pentagon Plans to Send More Troops to Iraq - By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON - Anticipating a new burst of insurgent violence, the Pentagon plans to expand the U.S. force in Iraq to improve security for a planned October referendum and a December election.

Although much public attention has been focused recently on the prospect of reducing U.S. forces next spring and summer, defense officials foresee the likelihood of first increasing troop levels. --- more

Steamed Rice:

Rice: Insurgency Losing Political Steam By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer - Mon Aug 8, 9:44 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the insurgency in Iraq is losing steam as a political force, even as Democratic congressmen warned Sunday that violence jeopardizes plans for withdrawing some troops.

Rice, in an article appearing on Time magazine's Web site, argued against viewing the war solely through the rising death toll. More than 1,820 American troops have died in Iraq, at least 30 of them in the last week.

"It's a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that's going on in parallel," Rice said.

"If you think about how to defeat an insurgency, you defeat it not just militarily but politically," she said, adding that she believes the insurgents are "losing steam" politically. more

Lets just say that the insurgency is bursting at the steams... moving along...

"The Judy Line" is apparently ringing off the hook:

Speaking of the Times' Washington bureau, according to another source within the Times, the DC office has put in a dedicated phone line specifically for the purpose of receiving Judy's collect calls from prison -- which are then forwarded to whoever it is she wants to talk to. It's been dubbed "the Judy Line." No word on whether the number is 1-800-4-MARTYR. -- more, Arianna Huffington

Scooter and Judy, two thousand & three, k.i.s.s.i.n.g.:

WHERE'S THE WAIVER? The DCCC's Jesse Lee has the text of a new letter sent by representatives John Conyers, Louise Slaughter, and Rush Holt to I. Lewis Libby. Citing Murray Waas' Prospect report of a meeting between Libby and Judith Miller on July 8, 2003, the Democrats call on Libby to cooperate fully with the Plame investigators by granting Miller a personal waiver to talk about their discussions. Everyone is waiting with baited breath for Libby's response, I'm sure. Meanwhile, the question remains: Will The New York Times' editorialists issue a demand for Libby to hold a press conference to disclose all he knows, as they had earlier demanded of Karl Rove? --- more via TAP

Grassroots turf:

Real Cost of Living [by Hank Kalet]
I have a friend who has been looking for an apartment. She's in her early 30s, has a young son and works in the service industry at a job that relies on tips to make ends meet. She lives with her parents -- but not out of choice. It's because the cost of housing in our area is well beyond her reach.

And she's not alone.

According to a recent study by the Legal Services of New Jersey's Poverty Research Institute titled "The Real Cost of Living in 2005: The Self-Sufficiency Standard for New Jersey," the average adult with two kids has to earn $17.70 per hour or $37,374 a year to be considered self-sufficient in the state.

According to PRI, the self-sufficiency standard is a better model -- which would be $16,090 -- by which to gauge the actual cost of living in a given area. Unlike the federal poverty line, which is calculated nationally based on the cost of food and takes into account nothing else, the self-sufficiency standard attempts to calculate what families need to earn to pay for food, housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, clothing and the normal incidentals that most of us take for granted.

The figures vary from region to region, depending on the cost of various services. In Indianapolis, for instance, a family of three would need to earn $16.25 an hour -- or $33,800 a year -- to be self-sufficient, while in Milwaukee the cost balloons to $20.08 an hour or $41,766 a year.

In Middlesex County, N.J., where I live, the PRI calculates self-sufficiency for a family of three at $45,309, while a family of four would need to earn a little more than $50,000, with the figures rising for larger families with older children.

Let's put this in perspective: That is less than $1,000 a week to cover rent and utilities, food, clothing, transportation and child care.

And, yet, it is almost three times the poverty threshold set by the federal government and, more importantly, more than four times what someone working 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job would earn, meaning that there is no way the federal minimum wage can keep a family afloat economically. --- more

meanwhile... Bu$hCo's Plunder Dome extols latest oily gifting swindle:

Bush Signs Massive Energy Bill Into Law
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - President Bush on Monday signed sweeping legislation that provides billions of dollars in tax subsidies to energy companies, yet does little quickly to ease gas prices or lower America's reliance on foreign oil. -- Associated Press

Truckstop economics:

Fred Stembottom: This Is Angry. I Am Yelling. But I Am a White, Male Truckdriver... Fred Stembottom

I have been reading pages and pages about the DNC and the DLC and I want to tell you why I am so opposed to the direction the DLC has taken the Party in the last 20 years.

I have been advocating, writing letters, talking locally within the Democratic Party for 25 frickin' years now. To no avail.

My message is simple: talk about workers' rights. Unionizing, outsourcing (especially outsourcing!), management cheating (we have ALL been cheated out of portions of our wages by innumerable statistical tricks). SPEAK OF THEM and blue-collar men go absolutely NUTS with recognition of the problems! Followed 5 minutes later with the most intense hunger to do something about it all that you have ever witnessed.

I speak of them to my blue-collar friends all the time! All. By. Myself.

Millions of white, male blue-collar workers go around in right-wing talk radio induced ignorance. Each and every one of them thinks that the problems they have with their employer is unique, puzzling and sure to get better after a change of management ...or something.

What I do: I simply point up how these "puzzling anomalies" are actually well-known and ancient un-fair labor practices. With NAMES!

Speed-ups. Wage stagnation policies. Two-tiered wage systems. Worker isolation. These are some of the names of the classic Unfair Labor Practices that my friends experience everyday. But they don't even know that there are such things as Unfair Labor Practices! --- more via Huffington Post

*

Via AP/Yahoo News

U.S. Embassy Will Close Saudi Offices By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - The U.S. Embassy and consulates in Saudi Arabia will close Monday and Tuesday because of a threat against U.S. government buildings, the embassy said Sunday.

In a statement, the embassy said mission personnel will limit nonofficial travel during the next two days and urged Americans to keep "a high level of vigilance." The statement did not elaborate on the nature of the threat.

"The American Embassy in Riyadh advises all American citizens living in Saudi Arabia that, in response to a threat against U.S. government buildings in the kingdom, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and the U.S. consulate generals in Jiddah and Dhahran will be closed on Aug. 8 and 9," the statement said.

It reminded Americans that, in the past, terrorist groups have targeted housing compounds and other establishments where Westerners may be located.

I'm guessing this is little more than some call to prayer: all aboard Prince Turki's ambassador airways party plane bound for The Prairie Chapel Ranch in Craw-ferd! - perhaps another tiptoe though the bluebonnets - another summer 'Saudi Night', Lone Star, revel yell, Elvis White Panty Party? Woo-hoo! -- het, het, het...snicker snicker...

Like I said, I'm just guessing... I hope I'm right...

Meanwhile ... in other thrilling "total war" news (as if a very bad Little Boy wasn't enough):

Nagasaki Prepares for A-Bomb Anniversary By ERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press Writer:

NAGASAKI, Japan - On the eve of the anniversary Tuesday of Nagasaki's devastation 60 years ago by the "Fat Man" atomic bomb,... Nagasaki Prepares for A-Bomb Anniversary

*

"The first casualty, when war comes, is truth."
---Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917

My father fought in the Pacific Theatre of World War II as an Army sergeant in the Philippines, and then beyond. He was not far from Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped, and right after the peace treaty was signed, he was stationed in Japan itself for a brief period. He never spoke about it, never volunteered information, but if pressed he would tell me something fairly innocuous, like how a Zero suddenly appeared above their camp and sent everyone flying for cover, including the driver of a jeep, whose sudden abandonment of the vehicle sent it careening over him. Thereafter he always carried a scar on his shin from where the tires ran over his leg, and the scar, like the jungle rot in his feet that never quite went away, or his revulsion toward seafood, which had come from a steady diet of fish heads and rice, remained a constant reminder of where he'd been and what he'd done. But when he and his friends got together, or the other veterans in my family, none of them ever exchanged war stories. None of them could even be coaxed into talking about it.

He had been back from the war for almost 8 years by the time I came along. I was still a very young child when I first remember poring over the old photos he brought back, of himself and his friends posing in front of some monument with a nameless Japanese woman who smiled pleasantly for the camera. I remember thinking, even as a child, how unlikely that smile seemed. I remember running my hands over the hilt of the samurai sword he brought back as a souvenir, fascinated by that tangible link to an impossibly alien place, and how, despite all entreaties, he refused to tell me how he'd come by it. He once showed me the helmet he wore in the jungle, with the bullet hole through the gap above the webbing that had held the helmet away from his head, and I thought more than once on how close he had been to never coming home.

The popular take on those days, the post-war 50's and the early 60's, is that they were ones of halcyon innocence and peace, and endless prosperity and opportunity, and in many ways, for many people, they were. But they were also days of incredible paranoia, of enemies under every rock, and if it wasn't the Communists it was the fallout in the icicles dangling from your house, or the Conelrad alerts and Civil Defense drills. My uncle, a classic sailor with fascinating tattoos on his muscular forearms, had by then become a career Navy man, and went from World War II to Korea hardly missing a beat, while Joe McCarthy was hard at work creating the seige mentality that would enable our governments to justify sending us to war for decades to come. By then the phrase used so hopefully during the First World War, that "war to end all wars", was beginning to look a little threadbare. Still, after being fed a steady diet of nationalist propaganda, cover-ups, and re-written history, we were psyched to shrug our collective shoulders with a sigh, accept that this was just the way it would have to be, and ready to embark on the brave new world of industrial slaughter those in power had in mind for us.

Never have a nation's demurs against war rung so blatantly false or for so long. Even now we delude ourselves into thinking that we are never aggressive, never looking for a fight, always being pushed into situations where war is our only option and therefore justified. Here we are, always just minding our own business, and along comes some pushy country just spoiling for a fight. The fact that for the last 60 years those pushy countries have happened to be small, powerless, backward, irrelevant, or all four, has somehow failed to make an impression on a people whose national myth includes standing up for the underdog and playing the part of the hero. That was the story we told ourselves in World War II, and that is the story we continue to tell throughout the subsequent years of evidence to the contrary.
It was in 1975 that in "Home to Roost", her speech on the state of the union immediately after Watergate, Hannah Arendt lamented the desperate lengths to which we went to make ourselves feel good after the humiliation of Vietnam:

"What comes home to roost now is this long education in imagery (i.e., the retreat from uncomfortable truths and quest for lies from which to create positive images), which seems no less habit-forming than drugs. Nothing in my opinion told us more about this addiction than the public reaction, on the street as well as in Congress, to our 'victory' in Cambodia, in the opinion of many 'just what the doctor ordered' (Sulzberger) to heal the wounds of the Vietnam defeat. Indeed, 'Twas a famous victory!' as James Reston aptly quoted in the New York Times, and let us hope that this was finally the nadir of the erosion of self-confidence when victory over one of the tiniest and most helpless countries could cheer the inhabitants of what only a few decades ago really was the 'mightiest power on earth."

So the anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb against human beings is being noted this weekend, and as it inevitably will, the discussion has arisen as to whether it was justified. The usual arguments are made for it: that a million servicemen's lives were saved, that Japan would have never surrendered otherwise, that an example had to be made to ensure their will was broken and they never became a threat again, that Truman warned them and they wouldn't listen. That something good came out of it after all. That like the war itself, it was a moral action justified in the cause of eradicating evil. That it was a lesser evil chosen for a greater good.

My head, much like Hiroshima, wants to explode.

There are plenty of sites on the internet and at the library where you can immerse yourself in the facts and fantasies that surrounded the event, and although I believe the bombings were the greatest atrocities my nation ever committed (and I do not believe they saved my father's life), I'm more interested in the idea of a "moral" war. Chris Hedges, in his wonderful book, Losing Moses on the Freeway, calls on his many years as a war reporter, and interview with a Vietnam vet who went on to become a Bishop in the Episcopal church, to answer those who posit the existence of a moral war. After recounting incidents from the war in which the bishop committed acts he would have never thought himself capable, Hedges says this:

"Bishop Packard discovered in the war the capacity we all have for evil. He discovered the darkness that allows us, when the restraints are cut, to commit acts of brutality against the weak and the defenseless, including children. He discovered the ghoulish delight soldiers can take in killing"

And to answer the suggestion that war can be moral, he says this:

"Wars come wrapped in patriotic slogans, call for self-sacrifice and glory. They come wrapped in the claims of divine providence... It is what is right and just. War is always waged...to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil...
But up close war is a soulless void. War quickly descends to raw barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. It is a state where human decency and tenderness are crushed, where those who make war work overtime to destroy love, where all human beings become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the crying wounded spin us into another universe. In this moral void, blessed by institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions are laid bare. We call for strict adherence to some commandments and laud the purposeful violation of others. Hypocrisy rules. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions. It lets us see."

War is evil. It is the industrial slaughter of human beings we do not know, and when our weapons hit their marks, we can't possibly know whether one of them lays low a deserving victim or not. We cannot help but kill non-combatants, many of whom are children, old people, pregnant women, mothers, fathers, sisters, people who were loved as much as we ourselves are loved, and whose claim to the right to life is as strong and legitimate as any of our own. When we engage in it, for whatever reason, we do evil, and commit sin. Yet, with few exceptions, you seldom hear the institutionalized religions speak out against government when war is waged. How often did you hear the voices of the churches of the land raised in protest and condemnation as Bush pushed the country inexorably toward Iraq? How often do your hear churches, so eager to shut off communion for politicians in favor of choice, threaten the same for those who support and fight the war? The most self-righteous and judgmental of them actually praise it as a just retribution, and support those who engineered and maintain it. Their religion is actually a civic one, and as Hedges states:

"These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is often a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation. The god of war takes over the pulpits and airwaves. Religious leaders line up to bless the enterprise of war."

When religion and the state become one, they enable one another, and the combined force of their authority can push a nation into committing any conceivable horror.

Robert Jay Lifton told Hedges:

"Ordinary men can all too readily be socialized to atrocity. These killing projects are never described as such. They are put in terms of the necessity of improving the world, of political and spiritual renewal. You cannot kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue. Our own campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed this way, as if once we destroy all terrorists we destroy evil."

This is the lesson of Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, and Bagram: when we choose torture because we are "forced to by desperate circumstances", when we drop a nuclear bomb because we must "eliminate the danger posed by Japan for all time", we bargain with demons. The bargain says: "We know we do evil but it's a lesser evil, and we hope we won't have to do this again, but if we do, we hope you forget that we promised you our soul". Hannah Arendt said this about lesser evils:

"Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they choose evil... Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials and the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such."

We have already chosen far too much of the lesser evil, and have been doing so for decades. How much more can we choose before it becomes indistinguishable from the very evil we thought we were running away from?

I spent the last quite a few days catching up on shit that had accumulated, both literally and figuratively, during my previous absence. Wiping the shit off my hands finally today after attending the LANL protests in LA (yesterday was Hiroshima Day, you’ll recall) to sit in front of the computer, what do I discover? Well, according to AP, the good people of California are getting another proposition to vote on. Only this time, it has legs that walk upright. No link, but the AP article says:

Proposition 79, backed by a coalition of consumer groups and unions, would offer prescription drug discounts to uninsured individuals and families making up to four times the federal poverty level — up to $37,000 for an individual and $75,000 for a family of four. It would discourage any companies that refuse to provide discounts from participating in the state's $4 billion Medicaid program, and would allow residents to sue drug companies for "illegal profiteering."

Big Pharma? Illegal profiteering? B-but they make medicines to help people, right? They plow their obscene profits right back into research for new cures, right?

Sheeee-it. I got my hospital bill the other day and—even with some insurance—it’ll take me months to pay it off. And all they did was stitch me up a little and “observe” me for a concussion, which they concluded was light enough to discharge me after a day and night.

It’s a nice start, California, but let’s focus on candidates in ’06 who’ll really talk about the state of health care in this glorious land of greed and profiteering, and then DO something about it. Let’s talk about how to get rid of nukes once and for all, not “strategic nukes” and “increasing nuclear energy resources.”

Now, I’m for another tot or 3 of this bottle of Maker’s Mark you Correntians talked me into trying (good call, btw), and a nap, perchance to dream of the kind of America people like Emma G., and Eugene V. Debs, and RFK and MLK described, not this one where poor people have no options for health care, and our leaders actually discuss “nuclear options” with a straight face.

Of course, then I recall my recent trips to Old Mexico, and tangles with uranium mining and coal power protests and realize that direct action feels good, and maybe tomorrow I might just get back into it. I was going to write about nukes and WMD’s, but after the peaceful actions yesterday, I said the hell with it. Everybody knows who the real threats are... right?

Or am I just getting tangled up in so many issues that my aging brain is blowing neurons faster every day?

Robin Cook has died. He was only 59. It appears to have been a heart attack, suffered while on a mountain walk. He is already being missed.

Mr. Cook was Tony Blair's Foriegn Minister, and then served as Leader of the Labour party in the House of Commons, until his rejection of the Bush administration's determination to invade Iraq lead Cook to resign entirely from the Blair government. Cook was a valiant supporter of the Nato intervention in Kosovo, so the issue wasn't some leftwing fear of using military force.

Th Labour Party can ill afford to lose someone of the intelligence and the integrity of a Robin Cook, and our Democratic Party could afford to develop a few of its own.

Here's some of what Cook had to say at the time of his resignation in a speech to the House he made when he was once again, simply a Member of Parliament.

The present Prime Minister is the most successful leader of the Labour party in my lifetime.

I hope that he will continue to be the leader of our party, and I hope that he will continue to be successful. I have no sympathy with, and I will give no comfort to, those who want to use this crisis to displace him.

I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution.

I do not think that anybody could have done better than the foreign secretary in working to get support for a second resolution within the Security Council.

But the very intensity of those attempts underlines how important it was to succeed.

Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.

edit

The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.

To end up in such diplomatic weakness is a serious reverse.

Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible.

History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition.

The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower.

Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules.

Yet tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened: the European Union is divided; the Security Council is in stalemate.

Those are heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired.

I have heard some parallels between military action in these circumstances and the military action that we took in Kosovo. There was no doubt about the multilateral support that we had for the action that we took in Kosovo.

It was supported by NATO; it was supported by the European Union; it was supported by every single one of the seven neighbours in the region. France and Germany were our active allies.

It is precisely because we have none of that support in this case that it was all the more important to get agreement in the Security Council as the last hope of demonstrating international agreement.

The legal basis for our action in Kosovo was the need to respond to an urgent and compelling humanitarian crisis.

Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.

The threshold for war should always be high.

None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will "shock and awe" makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands.

I am confident that British servicemen and women will acquit themselves with professionalism and with courage. I hope that they all come back.

I hope that Saddam, even now, will quit Baghdad and avert war, but it is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops.

It is entirely legitimate to support our troops while seeking an alternative to the conflict that will put those troops at risk.

Nor is it fair to accuse those of us who want longer for inspections of not having an alternative strategy.

For four years as foreign secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment.

Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes.

Iraq's military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war.

Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days.

We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?

Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months.

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted.

Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.

I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.

Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.

That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.

What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.

The longer that I have served in this place, the greater the respect I have for the good sense and collective wisdom of the British people.

On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain.

They want inspections to be given a chance, and they suspect that they are being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.

Above all, they are uneasy at Britain going out on a limb on a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies.

From the start of the present crisis, I have insisted, as Leader of the House, on the right of this place to vote on whether Britain should go to war.

It has been a favourite theme of commentators that this House no longer occupies a central role in British politics.

Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for this House to stop the commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support.

I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.

I will miss that voice sufficiently to make it hard, though necessary to say, with an intense sense of loss...

Goodbye Mr. Cook. R.I.P

Sometimes you see two stories in completely different places, on seemingly different topics, and realize that whether their authors know it or not (which they almost certainly don't) they actually go together. Rather like the way two signs, one saying "Entrance" and the other saying "Exit", go together if they're posted on opposite sides of the same door.

First, this one, via the NYT

Many in the military are disheartened by the absence of an instantly recognizable war hero today, a deficiency with a complex cause: public opinion on the Iraq war is split, and drawing attention to it risks fueling opposition; the military is more reluctant than it was in the last century to promote the individual over the group; and the war itself is different, with fewer big battles and more and messier engagements involving smaller units of Americans.

The other I found in this item over at dKos, wherein they cite this story from the Guardian:

Juba is the nickname given by American forces to an insurgent sniper operating in southern Baghdad. They do not know his appearance, nationality or real name, but they know and fear his skill. "He's good," said Specialist Travis Burress, 22, a sniper with the 1-64 battalion based in Camp Rustamiyah. "Every time we dismount I'm sure everyone has got him in the back of their minds. He's a serious threat to us."
Some worry that Juba is on his way to becoming a resistance hero, acclaimed by those Iraqis who distinguish between "good" insurgents, who target only Americans, and "bad" insurgents who harm civilians.

This is the first I had heard of "Juba" as an individual, but I know his type. So do you. We've had folks like him in our own history, and more importantly, in our legends, literature and myths. The Swamp Fox. Zorro. Nathan Bedford Forrest. John Galt. Kilroy. Marshall Dillon.

It doesn't matter whether the cause for which they fight is good or evil, as perceived at the time or today. But you know what? Not a single one of those legends was written by a military PR department.

Let all souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.

inscription: Memorial Cenotaph, Hiroshima Peace Park


And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. ~ Revelation 6:4

The following blockquoted material, written by Faubion Bowers, can be found in The People's Almanac (1975), by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace; pages 507-510.

August 6, 1945:

There was a pika, a blinding flash of pink, blue, red, or yellow light -- none of the survivors ever agreed on the color -- brighter than 1,000 suns but coming from a fireball only 110 yards in diameter. In that split second the hypocenter or point of impact reached a heat of 300,000 C. Within a 1,000-yard radius granite buildings melted, steel and stone bridges burned and so did the river below them, roof tiles boiled, and people evaporated, leaving their shadows "photographed" like X-ray negatives on walls and pavements.

In a matter of seconds, 4 sq mi. of central Hiroshima was flattened into extinction. Every clock and watch stopped at exactly the same time: 8:15. Because of ionization, the choking air filled with a sickish sweet "electric smell." The bright blue, sunlit sky turned darkly yellow, and a churning cloud of smoke spurted upward for 50,000'. From a distance it looked like a gigantic mushroom, but to the escaping Enola Gay the shape was more that of grotesque question mark. Capt. Robert Lewis, the co-pilot, exclaimed as he saw it roiling in the air, "My God, what have we done?" The cloud rose so high its heat condensed water vapor. In minutes "black rain," sticky, pebble-sized drops of wet radioactive dust dripped down over Hiroshima, staining the skin of the survivors with red blotches.

Within an hour or so, 100,000 Japanese had died outright. So did 22 American men and women, who were prisoners of war. A 23rd, a young soldier surviving the explosion, was dragged from the rubble of the detention camp and slaughtered by angry Japanese. The population still able to walk around wandered about the smoking ruins in a bewildered daze, unable to find their loved ones, incapable of orienting themselves, as all landmarks had vanished. Amazingly, the survivors felt little pain. It was as if the greater terror of the unknown canceled the lesser horror of suffering. Most of the walking wounded were naked, their clothes having been burned or blown off, but among the sizzled bodies it was impossible to tell men from women. Those who had been wearing white were less scarred than others, since dark colors absorbed, rather than deflected, thermonuclear light. Friends did not recognize each other, because some had lost their faces. Others had "imprints" of their nose or ears outlined on their cheeks. Those who reached out to help the more severly disabled drew back their hands only to find they were holding gobbets of charred flesh. Wounds smoked when dipped in water.

In time, another 100,000 Japanese would slowly die from thermal burns and radiation sickness.

In April 1945, Einstein himself had 2nd thoughts about what he had started. Again he wrote to Roosevelt, asking for extreme caution in the use of the bomb, but Roosevelt died and the letter lay on his desk. By June, 1945, the German James Franck, the Hungarian Leo Szilard, and 57 other top-ranking scientists petitioned from New Mexico that "if the U.S. releases this means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she will sacrifice public support throughout the world and precipitate the race for armaments." [...] ...[Arthur Compton] wanted a nonmilitary demonstration to "warn" and "impress" the Japanese before actually using the bomb.

The Government in Washington argued back and forth. Secretary of War Stimson and some of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that it would save 100,000 American lives and that dropping it by surprise on a "combined military and residential [civilian] target would produce maximum psychological shock." (These were the same reasons Hitler had given for the attack on Rotterdam.) General Marshall wanted the Soviets to join the war against Japan and to save the bomb for use at some possible future date against the Soviets. General Eisenhower felt that the Japanese were already beaten, that acceptable warfare could finish the job and bring about surrender. He said, in short, that the bomb was completely unnecessary and would rouse world condemnation.

Throughout the discussion and disputations, as Compton would later say. "it seemed a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used." The final decision was up to President Truman. When John Toland, author of The Rising Sun, asked him if he had done any soul-searching before deciding, Truman replied , "Hell, no. I made it like that," and he snapped his fingers in the air.

"If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds."

~ The Bhagavad-Gita

*

Was/Not Was:

Hello Dad, I'm in jail!
Hello Dad, I'm in jail!
Hi Dad, I'm calling you from jail!
Hi Dad, Happy birthday. I'm in jail! Jail! Jail!
Hi Dad.

After all those years, I'm in jail now!
I'm in jail! I'm in jail! I'm in jail!
I like it here. It's nice!
I like it!
Hello Dad, I'm in jail!
Hello! Hello Dad! Hi, I'm in jail!
Say hi to Mom, from jail!
I'm in jail!
I'm gonna stay here!
I like it here!
Ha ha-ha ha-ha-ha!
I like it!
Yeah, throw away the key!
I'm in jail!
Hello Dad, I'm in jail!
Hello Dad. Hi Dad, I'm in jail! Jail! Jail! Jail! Jail!
Haaaaaahhhhhh!

First Amendment martyr my Aunt Fanny.

How alien this seems:

Senior clerics called on Saudis Friday to take their "bayah," or oath of allegiance, to [newly crowned Saudi King] Abdullah, saying it was a religious duty.

Tens of thousands of Saudis - tribal chiefs, Islamic clerics, army commanders and commoners - have been flocking to the Riyadh governor's palace to pledge loyalty to Abdullah, vowing to "hear and obey" the new king.

Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Seedes, the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, went so far as to compare the oath to the king to that taken by Muslims to the Prophet Muhammad 14 centuries ago.

"I urge all Muslims to take the 'bayah' because it is part of the creed and a religious duty," al-Seedes said in his Friday sermon, broadcast live on television. He added that those who failed to take the oath would go to their graves as non-Muslims.
(via AP)

Yep, a big draft of Kool-Aid always goes down smooth in The Desert Kingdom.

Meanwhile, in The Delusional Kingdom, remember this from "election" 2004?

"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

Um, I think there's a transcription error. Shouldn't that be "raise your right arm"?
(From the archive vaults buried deep in the bedrock under One Corrente Square)

I sure wish I could find one single Republican who's sorry they took "The Bush Pledge." But it seems that once you've drunk the Kool-Aid, you can't go back... Can any one prove me wrong? Can anyone give me examples of Repubublicans who've successfully undergone deprogramming?

The apology is boring, but the incident must have been riveting. Always nice to watch a winger meltdown (back). Now, if only they'd storm out of the White House:

The incident occurred Thursday as Novak and Democratic operative James Carville were handicapping the Senate candidacy of former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Novak said the opposition of the Republican establishment in Florida might not be fatal for her.

"Let me just finish, James, please," Novak continued. "I know you hate to hear me, but you have to."

Carville, addressing the camera, said: "He's got to show these right wingers that he's got a backbone, you know. It's why The Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching you. Show 'em that you're tough."

"Well, I think that's bull---- and I hate that," Novak replied. "Just let it go
(via AP)

What I like hear is that Carville is ballbusting Novak for being a cog in the Republican noise machine. Seems like some sense is finally seeping into the Beltway 500 (of which Carville is a fully paid-up member).

But my theory on what really happened...

I hear the heat wave we're having has been causing that grey fluid winger replicants have instead of blood to boil over, causing sudden and visible leakage (c.f. Alien). And that's what happened to Novak—right on the set! No wonder he had to leave and go clean himself up, the poor guy... So, if you hear of any more bizarre behavior by winger replicants, now you know why!

Bush is at the ranch, so presumably He's got plenty of free time to dream up something really special...

This story already has about 3 layers of irony attached to it, and it's only 2 weeks old.

If the word "Telesur" does not mean anything to you, it means you a) live in the United States and b) don't read ragtag socialist websites. Because otherwise, you would know that Telesur, a joint venture of the Venezuelan, Argentinian, Uruguayan, and not least, Cuban governments, went on air last month to combat what President Hugo Chavez called "American cultural imperialism". The 24-hour news channel will broadcast across Latin America and carry such heretical points of view as indigneous opposition to hemispheric "free trade" agreements. (Matt Yglesias might want to TiVo that one.)

Now, one would think that, from a FOX news point of view, this would be an unexceptional event. Venezuela currently has something like 43 different channels, all of them anti-Chavez and pro-US, so if there were ever a justification for a station to counter "media bias," this would be it.

But of course, one would be wrong. As in the US, it's not enough for pro-corporate interests to dominate the airwaves, they must control it. Anything less is anathema. So, like treason follows Rove, the launch of Telesur has prompted our own freedom-loving House of Representatives to pass legislation that would bankroll creation of our very own propaganda outlet in Latin America. (The legislation has yet to be taken up by the Senate.)

Meanwhile, demonstrating how a free press works in the United States, a Google search turns up a single significant source of coverage of this imperialistic tit for tat here: The Miami Herald. (The government-run CBC and BBC, by contrast, have run multiple, critical stories about Telesur.) To its credit, the Herald notes not just the unprincipled interference in Latin American affairs that this represents, but also its obvious counterproductiveness:

In a telephone interview from Caracas, Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent anti-Chávez leftist politician and publisher of the daily Tal Cual, said that a U.S. government broadcast to Venezuela and the rest of the region would be ''utterly stupid.'' It ''would amount to playing into Chávez's hands,'' giving him new ammunition to go around the world playing the victim of U.S. aggression, he said.

And indeed, since the Bush Administration's earlier, all-but-transparent efforts to foment a coup against Chavez backfired, his approval ratings have risen to around 75%. But that's the definition of a zealot: doing the same thing again and again, while expecting a different result.

Ham-fisted incompetence like this almost makes me want to donate money to bill-sponsor Connie Mack's re-election campaign.

Yeah, yeah, big tent. But the peasants with pitchforks aren't always inside the tent, know what I mean?

Here's what we at least want. The Kos "litmus test":

[1] Does candidate 'distance himself' from the party and/or its leaders, or is he proud to be a Democrat?

[2] Does he talk like a bureaucrat or like a regular person?

[3] Does she make it clear that she opposes Bush and the Republicans?

[4] Does she back down when the corporate press/media or Republican pundits attack him, or does she stand by her words?

[5] Does he sleepwalk through the campaign, or does he act like he wants to win?
(via Kos)

I thought of The Litmus Test when I read this wretched little crotte-esque effusion from Evan "Buh" Bayh:

Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, a possible presidential candidate in 2008, said Thursday that his party lacks credibility on national security and needs to convince Americans that Democrats are willing to use force when necessary.

"Unless the American people know that we will be good stewards of the nation's security, they're unlikely to trust us with anything else," said the two-term Indiana senator. "That's a very important threshold we have to get over."

"Many Americans wonder if we're willing to use force to defend the country even under the most compelling of circumstances," Bayh said. "The majority of Democrats would answer that question that, yes, there is a right place and a right time. We don't get to have that discussion because many people don't think we have the backbone."

Bayh has spent three days in Iowa, the first presidential caucus state, attending party fundraisers and meeting privately with activists who play a crucial role in Democratic politics.

And now comes the zinger. I've got to stop drinking coffee while I do this; I almost lost another keyboard:

Bayh said he would make a decision on a presidential bid after next year's midterm elections, basing it, in part, on whether he has a realistic chance of winning the nomination.

"Is this a sensible thing to do?" he said. "I've never been a big person for fool's errands. I think you have to conclude you have some prospect of being successful."

Let me clue you in, Evan. (May I call you Evan?) You don't pass the litmus test.

[1] Evan, you distanced yourself from the Party. Merciful heavens! National security should be ours! Take it to the Republicans on armor! Take it to the Republicans on "facts and intelligence were fixed around the policy." Take it the Republicans that the IEDs are made from the ordinance Bush didn't secure after the war because He thought the Iraqis would be throwing us roses! Take it to the Republicans that recruitment numbers are tanking because Iraq is a Bush clusterfuck and everybody, especially the parents, knows it! The Iraq War is theirs to lose, and they're losing it! And everybody outside the Beltway 500 knows it!

[2] Evan, you talk like a bureaucrat. Listen to the man: "A very important threshold we have to get over," forsooth? Words to stir the blood! Nobody cares about all this internal party mechanics stuff, Evan. They care about you, and what you are doing. And one very good surrogate test for you being willing to defend our country is you "become willing" to defend yourself—and your constituents—from attack. The Republicans are following their playbook, and attacking Democrats every day. Politically, economically, culturally, spiritually, in all ways. That's what they do. That's what many of them are paid to do. So why don't you, personally, take a baby step over the threshold yourself, and punch back where they are punching us? But what do we get instead? More mealy-mouthed Beltway consultant-driven palaver about the dirty laundry of process. Gaaah! Just do it!

[3] Evan, you don't make it clear that you opposes Bush and the Republicans. Re-read this: More words to stir the blood:

"I've never been a big person for fool's errands. I think you have to conclude you have some prospect of being successful."

Wow, way to hammer home those Democratic principles, Evan. Way to give me a real reason to vote for you. Way to ... Eesh, this is worse than B.S.S., I've got to stop...

Another Washington General, after raising some money and sucking the media oxygen, is regretfully going to decide not to run. But you know something? The Washington Generals never win anyhow!

Buh-bye, Evan....

Vladimir Putin, unlike our own president, appears actually able to learn from the stupid mistakes of his past:

"A Russian mini-submarine with seven sailors aboard snagged on a fishing net and was stuck on the Pacific floor with only enough air for the seamen to survive one more day, Russia's navy said.
The U.S. Navy is rushing an unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle from San Diego to Russia to help in the rescue efforts, the Navy said...
Russia appealed to the United States and Japan for assistance, the Interfax news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov as saying."

Back in August of 2000, Putin was faced with a similar problem when the submarine Kursk went down, after which he fended off the world's offers of assistance for days, and pulled off a Bush-like feat of silence on the matter.

Perhaps he could teach the Dauphin something about learning from the past, as Bush now appears to be on a course of preparations for yet another Mid-east war of agression with Iraq's neighbor:

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States...
As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections."

Where have we heard that before?

August 05, 2005
CLICK ON IMAGE: for full size easy to read view.





Meanwhile, CNN, itself providing ample evidence by example for the disproof of "intelligent design", has discovered a titilating new topic of discussion to chirp and burble about... namely, vestigial organs. "Male nipples" to be exact. The sheer mention of which apparently arouses a tittering dizzy chucklefest amongst the news gigglers at CNN. Hopefully some gin soaked barbeque-belt Christian evangelical "scientific" spellbinder will be summoned to witness before the CNN flock, at some critical juncture, and explain to all of us heathens what exactly it was that stirred God Him Almighty (baroque prankster that he obviously was) to seemingly pointless fanciful embellishments. At least in this mysterious case. Praise the conceptual design possibilities.

38% The chronic decline of the Texas Souffle. Via AP:

WASHINGTON - Americans' approval of President Bush's handling of Iraq is at its lowest level yet, according to an AP-Ipsos poll that also found fewer than half now think he's honest.

[...]

Approval of Bush's handling of Iraq, which had been hovering in the low- to mid-40s most of the year, dipped to 38 percent. Midwesterners and young women and men with a high school education or less were most likely to abandon Bush on his handling of Iraq in the last six months.

Delenda est ArbustoCo.

*

Truth is becoming increasingly unpopular these days, whether spoken in a courtroom or by scientists refusing to tow the party line.

Leah's post yesterday, in which she dissects the right-wing's dogpile on Judge John Coughenour, U.S. District Judge of Seattle, for daring to give a reasoned, thoughtful statement during his sentencing of "Millenium Bomber" Ahmed Ressam, and for taking a shot at the Bush administration's Cheka-like handling of prisoners since 9/11, should be read with an eye to the impending Roberts appointment. Not for a minute do I believe Roberts won't ultimately become a Supreme Court Justice, because whatever Georgie wants, Georgie gets. But it's worth reflecting that even the best-laid appointments can blossom into surprising outcomes, and Coughenour, who was appointed by the Right's own saint, Ronald Reagan, is now the very same being excoriated by them for his "liberal" behavior.

In the meantime, following on the heels of my own post yesterday, it was interesting to see that Krugman, in today's NYTimes, is remembering Irving Kristol (father of Bill) as the architect of the strategy that led the right to develop think tanks and foster academic research to debunk both economic and scientific findings they found inconvenient to their ideology:

"The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil."

He goes on to tie this in to the support of the right for Intelligent Design, which has gotten yet another goose in the media since Bush's recent remarks in Texas:

"The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom."

Not to mention the ultimately fatal operation to remove truth from the body of science.

As you may remember, federal judges can be impeached, and though such a punishment has been mentioned by at least one blogger in regards to the judge in question, it appears that a coordinated smear campaign is going to suffice to still the roiled waters of rightwing outrage. And no, this is not a case based on what we usually think of as the "culture war" issues, although, in its deepest meaning, this case is centrally about that conflict, as it is about what makes as both strong and ourselves, as Americans.

The case being asserted against U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour is fairly easy to understand. Poor man, he indicted himself with the following words, uttered last week in open court on the occasion of his sentencing of Ahmed Ressam, sometimes known as the millennium bomber, otherwise known as a hapless, Algerian immigrant to Canada who was caught on the eve of 2000 by several alert officials at the Canadian/US border, as he tried to cross, heading south with a car loaded with explosives and a plan to blow up LAX.

Here is what Judge Coughenour had to say about the implications of the Ressum case: (Link courtesy of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

"Okay. Let me say a few things. First of all, it will come as no surprise to anybody that this sentencing is one that I have struggled with a great deal, more than any other sentencing that I've had in the 24 years I've been on the bench.

"I've done my very best to arrive at a period of confinement that appropriately recognizes the severity of the intended offense, but also recognizes the practicalities of the parties' positions before trial and the cooperation of Mr. Ressam, even though it did terminate prematurely.

"The message I would hope to convey in today's sentencing is twofold:

"First, that we have the resolve in this country to deal with the subject of terrorism and people who engage in it should be prepared to sacrifice a major portion of their life in confinement.

"Secondly, though, I would like to convey the message that our system works. We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel, or invoke any proceedings beyond those guaranteed by or contrary to the United States Constitution.

"I would suggest that the message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart. We can deal with the threats to our national security without denying the accused fundamental constitutional protections.

"Despite the fact that Mr. Ressam is not an American citizen and despite the fact that he entered this country intent upon killing American citizens, he received an effective, vigorous defense, and the opportunity to have his guilt or innocence determined by a jury of 12 ordinary citizens.

"Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel.

"The tragedy of September 11th shook our sense of security and made us realize that we, too, are vulnerable to acts of terrorism.

"Unfortunately, some believe that this threat renders our Constitution obsolete. This is a Constitution for which men and women have died and continue to die and which has made us a model among nations. If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.

"It is my sworn duty, and as long as there is breath in my body I'll perform it, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We will be in recess."

I have quoted the judge in full because what he said strikes me as so important, so moving, and so inspiring. Others reacted differently.

Within forty-eight hours, his words, along with the facts of the case, were being disassembled and rearranged into the shape of a bullseye plastered across an e-poster that portrayed this Ronald Reagan appointeee as The Poster Judge for why we need the Patriot Act, and military tribunnals, and anything else Bush & Co deem necessary to convince us that we are AT WAR, and why we should regard any American who has a different view as not merely wrong, but as one who is aiding and abbeting our "violently extreme," (according to the Bush administration's most current nomenclature), enemies around the world.

Since we're all too familiar with such arguments and the copious cross-quoting endemic to rightwing blogs, what follows is a sampler of rightwing opinion on the subject of Judge Coughenour. (Don't be fooled by their tone of authority borne of total knowledge of all relevant facts; be assured there is more to this story.)

Rick Edwards at PowerPundit was early on the scene; you can read his summary here, clearly based on this AP report, which emphasized the differences between the judge and the prosecutor over length of sentence because of Ressam's truncated cooperation with the government.

Michele Malkin riffs off of Hugh Hewitt and Captains Quarters, but the title she choose for her post pretty much says it all:

THE TERRORISTS' LITTLE HELPER: JUDGE JOHN COUGHENOUR

Reckless judicial arrogance was on display in Seattle earlier today during the sentencing hearing for al Qaeda operative Ahmed Ressam, the would-be Millennium bomber.

Hugh Hewitt is all over the actions and statement of Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who is an embarrassment to conservatives and an impediment to winning the War on Terror. The headlines say Ressam was sentenced to 22 years in jail for plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on the millennium. Prosecutors pushed for the max: 35 years. Ressam will get credit for the 5 years he has already been in custody; he may be out and free to do al Qaeda's bidding again in as little as 14 years.

Coughenour used the occasion to pat himself on the back, express his opposition to military tribunals and detention of enemy combatants, and argue in support of applying the full panoply of constitutional rights to foreign al Qaeda conspirators. Hewitt points to Coughenour's sentencing sermon and writes:

Whatever the message the judge hoped to send, the one he in fact did send was to Islamicists all around the globe: Come to America. Try and kill us. Either you succeed and get to your version of heaven, or you'll get a second chance 22 years later after spending a couple of decades setting up networks that can help you with round 2.

The arrogance of this renegade judge's lecture is simply beyond belief. Congress should summon the judge to testify as to his inane remarks, but precede and follow his appearnce with panels comprised of vitims of terror and the families of military killed in the war.

I am ashamed to say Judge Coughenour is a Reagan appointee.

Double-ditto that.

Hugh Hewitt was not content to leave it at that. In an UPDATE to the original post, Hewitt sumarizes past outrages in Judge Coughenour's caseload, and compares Reesam's sentence to those of other "violent extremists," including some Montana militiamen sentenced by Coughenour, the guards at Abu Ghriab, and most interestingly, to Richard Reid, the shoe bomber; remember this one, we'll be coming back to it.

Spurred on by angry emailers, in another post, Hewitt offers ways to fight back against the arrogance of this judge - everything from being sure not to vote for Maria Cantwell to sending the judge an umbrella; it took me a moment to figure out that one - the heavy annual rainfall in Seattle? Silly me, how could I have missed the reference to Lord Chamberlain and - wait for it - appeasement.

Maybe he will get five of Chamberlain's props, maybe 50. But each time an umbrella arrives he will know that a citizen reviewed his self-serving sentencing statement and found it the sort of timorous sophistry that encourages more attacks rather than sending any sort of message of resoluteness to the terrorists.

Not only is this judge "arrogant," he is timorously arrogant.

Go back and read what the judge said and then ask yourself how we got from there to here, from Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, et al, to Bush & Co, wherein self-described superpatriots, most of whom, please note, do not live at the margins of our political culture, no indeed not, can conflate a ringing endorsement of the on-going power of our founding document with foolish, weak-kneed appeasement, and can suggest, in all apparant seriousness, that a federal judge should be hauled in front of a congressional inquiry to answer for comments made from the bench in defense of that document?

Malkin, quoting herself, reminds us of the problems of bringing terrorists to justice in a criminal proceeding - you know, all that secret intelligence that can be exposed in an open courtroom. Although she points to the trial of Ramsi Yussef, at least she doesn't mention the usual talking point endlessly reiterated about it - that our ability to monitor cell phones was exposed and thus, terrorists stopped using them. Never mind that the recent European arrests of suspects tied to the London bombings were tracked by their cell phones. Nevermind that at a certain point, even the dimmest among the Al Queda cadre would have figured out that someone was listening to their cell phone conversations. Never mind that the potential problems Malkin brings up in lieu of that one are equally as dim-witted: Moussaoui may have demanded access to classified documents, or to suspected terrorists in custody overseas, but an American judge had no difficulty denying those requests; nor, thus far, has there been any known instances of "witness" intimidation.

On such slender potential protections of intelligence are we supposed to say "au revoir" to the constitution, as well as to the most minimal standards of human decency.

At Captains' Quarters, a guest blogger added these gems to the conversation:

Just a warning, as if any were needed, that just because a judge is a solid Republican, appointed by the most "Republican" Republican president in decades and confirmed by a staunchly Republican Senate, doesn't automatically mean he can't turn out to be an ass.

And after providing the judge's remarks in full, this final comment:

I rest my case for military tribunals: at least if they were secret, we wouldn't have to listen to boneheaded lectures by buffoons in black!

Why do these rightwingers hate America?

Captain Ed himself arrived in time to add his own unique endorsement to the reviling of Judge Coughenour:

Not only do I endorse everything Dafydd said, I have to add my two cents as an addendum. Please remember that this case got highlighted by the Kerry campaign during last year's election as the model for handling terrorists, as opposed to the wartime approach favored by the Bush administration. This shows that our first instincts were correct, and that the only advantage of using civilian courts to fight international terrorists will be to highlight the damage that Presidents can do when they pick idiots to sit on the federal bench.

However, I will point out something that Judge Coughenour seems to have forgotten in his zeal to hold himself up as a Constitutional protector, as opposed to the rest of us police-state brownshirts. We captured this terrorist on American soil, mostly by luck and the sharp eye of airport security. Under most circumstances, that does mean that the civilian courts would come into play. If we had traced the terrorist using highly-sensitive intelligence capabilities, however, we would have to have exposed them in Judge Coughenour's court, making them unusable after a single prosecution.

edit

Evidently, because of what he was charged with and convicted of, Rassem could have gotten a maximum of 35 years. If Coughenour had given him the max, I would have been disappointed that Rassem couldn't have gotten more, but I would not have held it against the judge; judges cannot impose arbitrarily draconian prison terms -- they are bound by the legal maximums.

But the good judge gave this insect only 63% of what he could have given... and with all the time off and time served, he'll actually be out after serving less than 40% of what he could have been required to serve. This is not simply wrong... it is unconscionable.

If this is the model that Kerry and the pirates have for fighting the war on terrorism, then it's no wonder they've been frozen out of power ever since 9/11.

There is so much misinformation in that statement, I hardly know where to begin; for now, let me only point out that "airport security" had nothing to do with apprehending Ressam, that border agents from both Canada and this country we're responsible for his capture, operating on both American and Canadian soil, and most important, that prosecuting Ressam involved tracking his past movements and contacts using "highly-sensitive intelligence capabilities." We'll come back to that thirty-five year sentence and Kerry cluelessness.

We know that rightwing blogs are powerful, but as of Tuesday evening, when Bill O'Reilly, (as seen here by The Heretik) swivelled that most fearful of media WMDs, his "Talking Points Memo," into position to take aim at Judge Coughenour, was not his fate pretty much sealed?

Based on no particular evidence, O'Reilly surmized that both the sentence and the judge's words were a shot across the Bush bow:

The Factor felt that Judge Coughenour was making a political statement in issuing a light sentence to Ressam. "This guy is sending a message to the Bush administration--'If you keep messing around like you are, because I don't like it, I'm going to give these guys lesser sentences.' I think that's the message here." Benjamin Cardoza Law professor Marci Hamilton agreed that it appeared the judge used his position to issue his own political message. "It sure did look like he set himself up an opportunity to pontificate from the bench? it certainly was beyond what he should have been doing. The point of justice is 'Lady Justice is blind.' It's not supposed to be a political statement."

That's O'Reilly's own formulation of the discussion, no transcript being readily available. God knows, it's no surprise to discover yet again that O'Reilly is a ridiculous figure who is incapable of understanding logic, reason, or how to assemble facts to make a point, and Professor Hamilton seemed as genuinely a dull bulb as her comment above would suggest, but what was truly remarkable about the entire discussion, which included FOX'S Judge-in-Residence, Andrew P. Napolitano, was the total absence of any systematic awareness of the facts of this case, a condition the cross-discussion on rightwing blogs also demonstrated.

O'Reilly mentioned that Ressam had cooperated with authorities, but immediately dismissed that important fact because Ressam had recently stopped cooperating. Naplitano insisted that Ressam's cooperation had been substantial, although the judge seemed to think it resulted from a plea deal, which is just plain wrong. And both the law professor and the Judge had no difficulty with O'Reilly comparing those 22 years to the 35 years the Prosecutors were asking for, when in fact, the actual sentence was 27 years, the original sentence offered by the U.S. government in exchange for Ressam's cooperation, minus time served AFTER Ressam's conviction, a factor that would have been similarly deducted from the prosecutor's desired 35 year sentence, so the actual comparison should have been between 27 and 35 years, or between 22 and 30 years.

Nits not worth picking, you say?

Well, surely the fact that Ressam stood trial and was convicted by a jury is more than a nit, and yet that fact is absent from all rightwing awareness of this case, despite it being explicitly stated by Judge Coughenour in his comments from the bench. And remember that maximum 35 year sentence? Ressam was convicted in early April of 2001, after a three week trial, of nine criminal counts, including conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism; what Ressam was facing at that point was a sentence of between 57 and 130 years in prison. You can make your own conclusions about who is the clueless one, John Kerry or Captain Ed.

Had anyone on the right been interested in finding out the facts of this case, or had they been interested in the trial at the time, they would have had another instance of a Coughenour decision about which to rage. A noted French terrorism expert, knowledgeable about Al Queda, and with direct knowledge of some of the facts of Ressum's history was called by the prosecution. Judge Coughenour heard Jean-Louis Bruguiere's testimony in the absence of the jury, and though the judge acknowledged Bruguiere's superior expertise, his testimony was disallowed as too prejudicial to Ressam, in view of the volume of evidence against the accussed amassed by the prosecution.

Imagine the howls of rage that would have issued from the right, if the right had been paying attention to this trial. They weren't, just as the Bush administration wasn't paying attention to the concerns about Osama Bin Ladin expressed directly to them by departing members of the Clinton administration.

As it turned out, Judge Coughenour was right about the sufficiency of the prosecution's case.

Faced with spending the rest of his life in an American prison, Ressam agreed to cooperate with the US government. However, the severity of the sentence appears not to have been the only factor in his decision.

Through 16 months of detention and trial, Ressam stayed true to his training and maintained the secrets of his jihad. But after his conviction, he was shaky — isolated from family and his Islamist brothers, and still taking medicine for the malaria he had caught in the Afghanistan camps.

He grew attached to his lawyers, in particular to Oliver, a small, light-haired woman fluent in French. He would not shake hands with her, as he did with his male lawyers, but he spoke to her gently.

Her terrorist client, Oliver said, was "very sweet. Very polite."

Ressam confided to his lawyers that he had found the trial surprisingly fair. The judge had treated him respectfully. The experience was not at all what he expected of the country he had been taught to hate.

Ressam also told Oliver he was unsure of the morality of his plan to massacre innocent holiday travelers. He said he needed to study the Quran to see if he had misunderstood passages.

So when Justice Department lawyers offered a deal to reduce his sentence, Ressam was ready to listen. (my emphasis) The terms were simple: His minimum sentence would be cut in half, to 27 years. In return, he had to testify against an associate, Mokhtar Haouari, and others. He had to reveal all he knew about al-Qaida — plots, training, tactics.

Ahmed Ressam became a terrorist turncoat.

On May 10, 2001, FBI Agent Fred Humphries questioned Ressam, the first of dozens of interviews. The information was invaluable — and terrifying. He explained how he was recruited in Montreal and funneled into the bin Laden camps. He talked in detail about training with Taliban-supplied weapons. He informed on Abu Zubaydah, Abu Doha and other top al-Qaida operatives. He provided the names of jihad fighters he had met in the camps. He revealed that he had contemplated blowing up an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.

He also confirmed one of the greatest fears of the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies: The camps had trained thousands of men in chemical warfare.

Ressam told Humphries about putting on a gas mask, then watching as an instructor put a small dog in a box. The man added a small amount of cyanide and sulfuric acid, creating poison gas. The dog convulsed and died.

If you place this cyanide gas box near the air intake of an office building, the instructor had said, many people can be killed.

I'm quoting here from a superb multi-part series, "The Terrorists Within," that a group of staff writers undertook for the Seattle Times on the subject of Ahmed Ressam.

Who gets credit for turning Ressam? Everyone reponsible for Ressam receiving a fair trail, as spelled out in our constitution, everyone - the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, all of them court-appointed public defenders, and finally Judge Coughenor.

Karl Rove, having watched what happened on 9/11, may have prepared for war, but he might have done better, along with all the big honchos of the Bush administration, starting with the President, to have paid attention to that which they had hitherto ignored, and especially a case like Ressam's, of which it could almost be said that a kind of therapy, consisting of everything that is best about this country and its jurisprudence, turned a confirmed Al Queda operative into an astonishingly cooperative informant and witness.

How valuable was Ressam's information? Let us count the ways.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Ressam's solitude has been broken by a stream of visitors, often FBI agents such as Fred Humphries, but also investigators from Germany, Italy and elsewhere.

With federal public defender Jo Ann Oliver at his side, he is told names and shown photographs of suspected terrorists and asked if he knows them.

On several occasions, Ressam has been flown to New York City for similar questioning. There, he is held in a detention center just blocks from Ground Zero.

Ressam did not recognize any of the 19 suicide hijackers from Sept. 11. But he was able to identify student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui of Minneapolis, now in U.S. custody, as a trainee from Osama bin Laden's Khalden camp.

Ressam informed on Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian who was the brains and money behind Ressam's Los Angeles airport plot. He identified Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran the Khalden camp, and Abu Sulieman, who taught bomb-making at the Darunta camp.

Most importantly, Ressam named the previously little-known Abu Zubaydah as a top aide to bin Laden. That helped smash the notion that Zubaydah, also now in U.S. custody, was little more than a travel agent for terrorist wannabes making their way to the al-Qaida camps.

Ressam is expected to testify at the trials of these and other suspected terrorists.

So it is that Ahmed Ressam — the boy who loved to fish in the Mediterranean, the teenager who loved to dance at discothèques, the young man who tried and failed to get into college, who connected with fanatical Muslims in Montreal, who learned to kill in bin Laden's camps, who plotted to massacre American citizens — has become one of the U.S. government's most valuable weapons in the war against terror.

Remember, I promised we'd get back to Richard Reid, the shoe bomber:

Ressam's information was given to anti-terrorism field agents around the world _ in one case, helping to prevent the mishandling and potential detonation of the shoe bomb that Richard Reid attempted to blow up aboard an American Airlines flight in 2001. (link)

Doesn't the Bush administration deserve some credit here, for the turning of Ahmed Ressam? Or, did the intervention of the Bush DOJ contribute to Ressam's truncated cooperation?

That and other fascinating possibilities will be addressed in Part 2, which will be appearing on this blog no later than tomorrow morning.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE Welcome, Kossacks, to The Mighty Corrente Building. Nice work, Leah.

Here.

The famine entry (+1, i.e. good):

Central Africa is having a severe famine.

The drought entry (+1, i.e. good):

Spain is having its worst drought in 60 years.

The Gog (Russia) entry (-1, i.e. bad):

The lack of activity has downgraded this category.

See, in the wacky Alice-in-Wonderland world that these Rapture folks live in, everything bad is good, because the bad things are signs of the End Times!

Famine? Great news! (Except to those starving to death, which doesn't include a lot of these Rapture folks!)

Drought? Great news! (Except to those who are thirsty, which doesn't include a lot of these Rapture folks either.)

So, when we get a "President" "elected" who just totally screws the pooch on anything he touches, it's all good! Because it brings the Rapture closer!

So if you're hungry, or you're thirsty, and Bush brought that on you, remember that the Rapture folks want it to happen, and they all vote Republican.

"Our administration will be creative. We're committed to protecting our environment and improving our economy, to acting at home and working in concert with the world. This is an administration that will make commitments we can keep, and keep the commitments that we make."

---George Bush, June 11, 2001 speech explaining why he won't support the Kyoto Accord or act decisively on global warming.

"Lunn and others are in the midst of a polar bear census in western Hudson Bay. While the work is not yet complete, Lunn says the numbers so far suggest that the population size has fallen since censuses of the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. He says, "We've seen differences. We don't seem to see the same number of adult females and cubs as we used to in denning areas. The adult females and cubs we find tend to be closer to the coast than they used to be, perhaps because there are not as many males near the coast as there used to be. We're not seeing adult males in the same numbers as we used to. There are more problem bears in and around Churchill. Things are changing. It's clear something is going on in the Hudson Bay ecosystem."
What's going on is likely to continue if, as researchers believe, climate change is the driving force behind the changes.
Average air temperatures on Earth are increasing. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, global temperatures have risen an average of 0.6°C (1.1°F), according to the report of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment published in 2004. This report was the result of the work of hundreds of scientists from all over the world.
The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that these temperature increases are due primarily to man-made emissions of certain "greenhouse" gases, such as carbon dioxide. Greenhouse gases trap the heat of the sun in our atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels is the main way humans add greenhouse gases to the environment. Before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere was about 280 parts per million. Today it's between 360 and 380 parts per million. That's a 35 percent increase in about 150 years."

---The Smithsonian reporting for The National Zoo in July/August 2005 on the possible extinction of polar bears resulting from global warming.

"Today, more than 60 leading scientists—including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents—issued a statement calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking. According to the scientists, the Bush administration has, among other abuses, suppressed and distorted scientific analysis from federal agencies, and taken actions that have undermined the quality of scientific advisory panels.
“Across a broad range of issues, the administration has undermined the quality of the scientific advisory system and the morale of the government’s outstanding scientific personnel,” said Dr. Kurt Gottfried, emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University and Chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Whether the issue is lead paint, clean air or climate change, this behavior has serious consequences for all Americans.”"

---February 18, 2004 Statement from The Union of Concerned Scientists on the Bush administration's warping of scientific data, including that on climate change.

"The collapse of a huge ice shelf in Antarctica in 2002 has no precedent in the past 11,000 years, a study that points the finger at global warming says."

---ABC News report August 4, 2005, on the cause of an unprecedented collapse of a massive Antarctic ice shelf 3 years ago.

"Extraordinary efforts by the White House to scupper Britain's attempts to tackle global warming have been revealed in leaked US government documents obtained by The Observer.
These papers - part of the Bush administration's submission to the G8 action plan for Gleneagles next month - show how the United States, over the past two months, has been secretly undermining Tony Blair's proposals to tackle climate change.
The documents obtained by The Observer represent an attempt by the Bush administration to undermine completely the science of climate change and show that the US position has hardened during the G8 negotiations. They also reveal that the White House has withdrawn from a crucial United Nations commitment to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions. "

---June 19, 2005 Guardian article on the Bush administration's undermining of efforts to address global warming at the G8 meeting in Gleneagles.

Sometimes the words just speak for themselves.

"You know only - A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, - And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, - And the dry stone no sound of water. - Only - There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), - And I will show you something different from either - Your shadow at morning striding behind you - Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust." ~ Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Waste Land

The following post contains excerpts from Ghost Wars; The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll. It's intended as a kind of added accompanyment to Xan's earlier post Once Upon A Time which links to Juan Cole's recent reminder of the Reagan Bush administration's covert holy war, once upon a time, in Afghanistan.

"The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny"
If there is one thing that can be said for the entire contingence that characterized the Reagan administration's support of the insurgency in Afghanistan it might be that we helped sow and nurture and reap, to some considerable extent, the harvest of future wrath. We helped placate, fund, and train a revolution, a careless desolation, cloaked in the pretensions of some mottled divine retribution, for which relegated elements would ultimately return to haunt us. We showed the jihadist that, given the necessary tools and training, patience, ruthlessness and resolve, a small group of rag-tag "freedom fighters" could run a super-power out of town on a rail. We made true believers of the true believers. And now we are the occupation. We are the super-power to be uprooted from the sands. As far as the jihadist holy warriors of today are concerned - we are the new Soviet Union.

The CIA had strong contacts dating back decades among exiled nationalists from the Baltics and Ukraine. It knew far less about Soviet central Asia, the vast and sparsely populated steppe and mountain region to Afghanistan's immediate north. Pushed by Casey, American scholars and CIA analysts had begun in the early 1980s to examine Soviet Central Asia for signs of restiveness. There were reports that ethnic Uzbeks, Turksmen, Yajiks, and Kazakhs chafed under Russian ethnic domination. And there were also reports of rising popular interest in Islam, fueled in part by the smuggling of underground Korans, sermonizing cassette tapes, and Islamic texts by the Muslim Brotherhood and other proseltyizing networks. The CIA reported on a May 1984 lecture in Moscow where the speaker told a public audience that Islam represented a serious internal problem. ['Ghost Wars', pages 103-104]

In order to avoid occupying to much territory here (full post contains additional excerpted material) this post can be found in it's entirety here: spectral apparitions

*

Alert reader shirt asks a good question:

Where can I contribute to 2006 and not have that money spent on worthless consultants?

And alert reader ralph has a good answer:

If you want to win, the GOP.

A hint that they're getting a little spooked (you should pardon the expression) by messages reading ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL. on freeway overpasses, notices in agate type in the middle of the baseball standings, "While You Were Out" slips of phone messages, the very fine print at the bottom of TV ads for erectile dysfunction remedies and dietary supplements, and most of the better Internets:

(via More Trustworthy Than the NYT)

The White House denied rumors of wrongdoing by anyone named Karl Rove Monday, saying the alleged deputy chief of staff does not exist.

[snip] McClellan reiterated his denial of Karl Rove's existence 33 times during the press conference. When pressed, he distributed a list of "real, actual political figures about whom I'd be happy to comment." The list included only President George W. Bush and Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta.

[snip] The phantom advisor has come under heavy fire in recent weeks from critics of the administration, who say he should be fired for his role in the scandal. President Bush has pledged that anyone in his administration found to be involved in the CIA leak will be dismissed.

"There is no such organization as the CIA," McClellan said. "This is tinfoil-hat stuff."

Okay, you're right; if he'd won, the title of this post would probably have been different.

But Hackett isn't a hero by virtue of losing an election. He's a hero for running for office. He's a hero for seeing a connection between his experience in Iraq and the value of elective office. He's a hero because he only lost by 4 percentage points, in a district that is somewhere around eighty percent Republican. That is an amazing achievement. As was the money blogs raised for him. That is real power, my friends.

Do not think the Democratic Party has not noticed that organization at the grass roots can produce the money needed to run a modern electoral campaign. And blogs aren't even all that organized. They reach a lot of people with a story about who is deserving and why, and what we 're proving is that when the story is compelling, enough people will contribute $25 to $50 to make a candidate competitive, even against the Republican special interest cash machine.

As it happens Hackett was a great candidate, a veteran, a man who volunteered to go to Iraq even though he had questioned the Bush policy of invasion before it began. None of that protected him from the usual GOP smears, but that's old news for all of us. He showed himself also to be thoughtful, well-informed, tough, unashamedly progressive, and most importantly, able to talk straight to voters.

Representative Schmidt is going to have to run again in 2006, and we should let Paul Hackett know that we'll be there for him if he chooses to run against her again.

Don't take my word for Hackett's loss being a genuine victory; Atrios has a wonderful pre-election quote from Charlie Cook that spells out the nature of that victory.

Daily Kos and My DD have lots more; go and be inspired.

On the other hand, this election did take place in Ohio; need I say more? Probably, I should. But Billmon makes that unnecessary; click here, read and get angry; then read Mark Crispin Miller's article, "None Dare Call It Stolen," in the new Harpers, and when his book on what happened in Ohio in 2004, "Fooled Again," is published, which should be soon, order it through the ever indispensable Buzzflash; I'm guessing it will be added to their list of first-rate premiums.

UPDATE: If you don't want to spring for the single issue of Harper's, though I should add that a subscription is a very reasonable $12 to $14 dollars, and given the quality of critical articles they're running, you should consider becoming a subscriber, here's a pretty good summary of Miller's article.

UPDATE Excerpts from Miller's article are Here.

Back to Schmidt's 3% margin of victory...

Please don't tell me that one county (Clermont) was late getting the vote counted...

And please don't tell me that county used electronic voting machines...

And please don't tell me that there were "malfunctions" in Clermont on election night...

And please don't tell me Clermont is the most heavily Republican county in a heavily Republican district...

And please don't tell me Clermont is Jean Schmidt's home base....

Because then I'd have the sense that the same thing was happening, over and over and over again... As if I was trapped between the pages of the Republican playbook.

Billmon has more.

Typical:

"We began this race way back in late March, and no one had thought we'd be the focus of the national media or be the so-called first test of the Republican Party and the Bush mandate. Well, ladies and gentleman, we passed that test," Schmidt said.
(via WaPo)

A 4% margin in a heavily Republican district doth not a Bush Mandate make.

NOTE But thanks to Jean Schmidt for keeping this golden oldie Google Bomb "live"...

For all you Philip K. Dick fans out there:

"Brain Dead American Woman Gives Birth to Girl

A 26-year-old brain dead pregnant woman kept on life support for almost three months at a Virginia hospital gave birth to a baby girl on Tuesday, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The baby, delivered by caesarean section, weighed one pound and 13 ounces (0.8 kg) and was being monitored in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Virginia Hospital Center, the hospital said in a statement.

The mother, Susan Torres, suffered a stroke on May 7 in the 17th week of her pregnancy due to an aggressive melanoma and was brain dead, her family said...

"The entire staff and administration of Virginia Hospital Center, especially the physicians and nurses caring for Susan Torres and Baby Girl Torres, are delighted with the successful delivery," the hospital statement said."

So glad they finally figured out how to eliminate the middlewoman. And see there, they managed to manufacture a brand-new womb to replace the dead one, so science can march on. The Church is surely pleased.

In all seriousness, this was a choice made by the husband, who said it was based on "what Susan would want". And though I find it shockingly creepy, unlike the Terry Schiavo protesters I can accept his right to make such a private decision, even though it resonates with problems for the future for women and how they are perceived when pregnant. It has been hard enough for pregnant women to maintain some kind of human persona when the world of anti-abortionists is telling they are little more than incubators.

O brave new world, that has such people in't! Where's the exit?

Here.

As of 10:30:

US HOUSE Ohio 2nd Dist
662 precincts of 753 reporting
JEAN SCHMIDT 49,681 50%
PAUL HACKETT 48,811 50%


Of course, Ohio's Second District iswhat, 80% Republican? Some fantastically high percentage, in any case.

So, Bush has already been humiliated (if such a thing is possible). Still, it would be nice to pick up the seat...

And ensure an honest recount, into the bargain....

UPDATE And thanks to the wise, discerning Leadership of the D.L.C.... Oh, wait, that didn't happen, did it? Totally under the DC radar. Thank God, it's the only way they could get anything done. Bob at Swing State says this, and I agree:

UPDATE (Bob) 10:03 Great night to be Howard Dean -- the 50 state strategy is gold: fight in every district, in every state, in every state and things move. People are chanting, LET'S GO PAUL

UPDATE Aw, shoot

US HOUSE Ohio 2nd Dist
753 precincts of 753 reporting
JEAN SCHMIDT 57,974 52%
PAUL HACKETT 54,401 48%

A moral victory. And I strongly stress the word "moral."

Go read Juan Cole.

The American Right, having created the Mujahideen and having mightily contributed to the creation of al-Qaeda, abruptly announced that there was something deeply wrong with Islam, that it kept producing terrorists.

Just....go. Click. Read. Now.

Atrios posts about Santorum's latest salvo against the "pursuit of happiness," prompting a lot frankly predictable posturing from our side about the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers.

First of all, the conservative lament about its presence in the DoI is nothing new. Malcolm Muggeridge was bleating about it at least as far back as 1979 ("There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase the pursuit of happiness is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world."), and for all I know it's been a bete noir of theirs going back even further. Santorum is just riffing on a golden oldie as far as his base is concerned.

Nor is the complaint entirely ill-founded. In one episode of the Sopranos, the one-legged Russian mistress Svetlana lectures Tony about how Americans, unique among their fellows, expect their lives to be happy, and as a result are chronically disappointed--a statement well supported by social statistics regarding alcohol and drug use, divorce, crime rates, homicide, abortion, etc, nearly all of which rank the United States at or near the bottom. Even Tocqueville saw that problem coming.

Rather than wrap ourselves in the flag, it might be more interesting to ask conservatives just what happiness they resist pursuing, if self-restraint is so good. Because, when I look around for examples of conservative self-sacrifice, I don't see a whole lot. Is it recognizing the necessity of long-term fiscal sanity by keeping government spending from exceeding income? Serving themselves in wars they ask others to die for? Supporting sustainable environmental policies that provide a livable world for future generations?

Hell, let's set more modest goals. How about not cheating on your wife? I think there was a commandment about that one--though maybe Tom Delay is having one of his goons have reverse that regulation. Or how about not bearing false witness? How about not unjustly enriching oneself at others' expense?

Here's a question: has any prominent conservative, anywhere, ever urged self-restraint on himself or other conservatives, as opposed to using it as a political weapon against unmarried pregnant women, drug addicts (Rush Limbaugh excepted) or gays? And if self-restraint is a social good, how come liberals who legislate against smoking in restaurants, or harrassing members of the opposite sex onthe workplace, labeled "scolds" and "PC fascists"?

[Update: Fixed meaning-reversing typo.]

From Harry Reid's office, a fine summing up of facts versus Republican fictions in Treasongate. Here (via Kos)

Anything for the base!

Oh, wait. It's not "Creationism"—it's Creationism's stealthy Trojan Horse, "Intelligent Design."

President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported
(via WaPo)

Great to see all those live-saving discoveries we can put down to I.D. I mean, the list is too long to count, right? The electric light bulb, the phonograph, heart surgery, Prozac...

But really, the greatest proof of Idiot's Delight Intelligent Design
is that Inerrant Boy is our President! Allahu Akbar, God is Great!

So the price of oil hit a new record yesterday after the death of King Faud. No doubt the superstitious bone-rattlers that make up the investment community thought the Saudis so bereft by grief that they might shut down the oil fields and market sand paintings instead. What a crock. But what a money-making crock!

As Bush prepares to sign the upcoming energy bill, with its massive giveaways to big oil and no thought at all given to conservation outside of extending daylight savings time, it's useful to remember that, despite skyrocketing prices, U.S. consumption of gasoline keeps rising (up almost 2 1/2% since last year). Not a new fuel efficiency standard in sight, and plenty of tax incentives to buy ludicrously dysfunctional monstrosities like Hummers. Like our houses, our helpings, and our conversations, we like our cars big and loud, and we have no patience for mealy-mouths blathering about conservation, discipline, and sacrifice. So we gave ourselves a president whose idea of sacrifice for the common good is to get out the credit card and go shopping.

In addition, the bill dramatically increases funds for nuclear energy, while the world tsk-tsks at Iran for wanting to do the same thing. Coal, too, gets a boost, but long-gone are the days when that would mean work for miners. Coalbed methane extraction and new terraforming techniques reduce the number and kinds of workers needed while eliminating unsightly mountains and neighborhoods.

No sense looking for a reasonable approach from that bunch of panicky old sheep in the Congress, and useless to expect a logical idea to materialize from the coke-addled brain of a president who thinks science is something that supports the Book of Elijah. Let the kids and grandkids deal with it, just like they can deal with the deficit, rogue nuclear meltdowns, and the collapse of the currency market. "Make a buck while the sun shines" is their motto, and let tomorrow take care of itself.

But just in case, get a Supreme Court justice on the bench who'll rubber stamp your environmental agenda and get behind the energy industries that have been so good to you and yours.

MJS sees treason and betrayal:

ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL. ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL
ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL. ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL
ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL. ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL
ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL. ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL
ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL. ROVE. TREASON. BETRAYAL
Tomorrow, consider posting these simple, easy to use words wherever you go on the Many Internets. You'll be glad you did.

Other revealing clues to what's in a Rove include this poetic anagram interpetation using "treason-betrayal" in each line with Rove added. Reads as follows:
A TREASONABLE TRY
A BETRAYAL RENT SO
ABLE TYRANT [ROVE] AROSE

Of course, for all you "strict constructionist" die hards out there, there are also the dictionary definitions of "rove". For instance: "To wander about at random... [...] To roam or wander around..." and so forth. However, there are other defining characteristics of "rove" which would seem to apply more exactly in this case. As in: "to stretch and twist (fibers) before spinning; ravel out". Or, "a slightly twisted and extended fiber or sliver." Under Karl Rove's picture in the dictionary it might one day read: "A roaming spinner of stretched and twisted fibs."

And then there is the "rover" - for which one definition would include: "a pirate" or a "pirate ship". Which certainly fits the bill when considering the ship of fools of which Mr. Rove just so happens to be an important "reeve". [one definition of "reeve" being: "A high officer of local administration appointed by the Anglo Saxon kings.] "Rove", by the way, used in the nautical sense, is also "a past tense partical of reeve." Heh. Isn't this fun?

But my favorite is the "rove beetle". Rove beetles themselves (the insect variety that is) are not necessarily non-beneficial insects. But, on the other hand, The Karl "Rove Beetle" seems to have evolved otherwise. Only retaining some of the more colorful characteristics of it's less pampered cousins as a kind of lifestyle choice. Being fond of maggots and making the bones disappear comes immediately to mind. Also, eating dung and living upon decaying matter, including corpses - where the Karl Rove Beetle incubates its young (which would explain the Karl Rove Beetle's attraction to Bob Novak) - seems to be the Karl Rove Beetle's preferred office. Which is where, I will suppose, the nickname "turd blossom" might have originated. A turn blossom being a euphemism for a, well, you know, a "cow pie" or "medow muffin". Two of the Karl Rove Beetle's favorite picnic spots from which he draws his elan vital and hatches new generations of shiteaters.

"When disturbed, the Rove Beetle raises the tip of its abdomen and may squirt a foul-smelling mist at its enemies." Eww. Just ask Valerie Plame Wilson or John McCain etc etc... or even that Matt Cooper double super secret agent guy at that fancy-boy magazine outfit.

The Karl Rove Power Beetle is something like something that crawled off of a cow-plop at the Crawford Ranch in Texas and developted an insatiable appetite for yellowcake and media maggots at which point it grew to an enormous size and layed its eggs all over the White House pirate ship. So, be careful where you step if you have to visit that fouled crows nest.

Try to picture it all as some kind of really bad grade B monster movie involving plenty of betrayal, treason, and wandering among messy ports of strange and twisted fibs.

I'm not sure how to stop the monster and save the country but I think it may involve the Air Force and electricity and flinging Judy Miller into the bubbling maw of an angry mountain.

LARK OVER.

O! what a fall was there, my countrymen; Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, Whilst bloody treason flourish'd over us. ~ Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

*

I've got this crazy feeling that I've heard all this somewhere before:

A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years, according to government sources with firsthand knowledge of the new analysis.

The carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House. Administration officials have asserted, but have not offered proof, that Tehran is moving determinedly toward a nuclear arsenal. The new estimate could provide more time for diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. President Bush has said that he wants the crisis resolved diplomatically but that "all options are on the table."

In January, before the review, Vice President Cheney suggested Iranian nuclear advances were so pressing that Israel may be forced to attack facilities, as it had done 23 years earlier in Iraq.

In an April 2004 speech, John R. Bolton -- then the administration's point man on weapons of mass destruction and now Bush's temporarily appointed U.N. ambassador -- said: "If we permit Iran's deception to go on much longer, it will be too late. Iran will have nuclear weapons."

But the level of certainty, influenced by diplomacy and intelligence, appears to have shifted.
(via WaPo)

Not, of course, that "fixing the intelligence and the facts around the policy" are in the Republican playbook. I'm sure that was all just a one-time thing, and they've learned from their mistakes. And after all, this is 2005, so there aren't any branches of government at stake.

So I think we should all just trust the President.

And if He wants to have Dick "Dick" Cheney whip those analysts back into line, then God love him.

NOTE Note that I'm not saying there's no chance Iran has nuclear weapons, or that it would be good if they did. What I am saying is that the ideologues in the malAdministration have so totalled FUBARed themselves, in both intelligence and execution, that there's simply no reason to believe anything they say.

NOTE Funny how this report got leaked on the same day Bush left for the ranch.

I hope Bush has deep enough pockets. Will the buck finally stop somewhere?

Federal prosecutors have declined to press charges of impersonating a Secret Service agent against a White House volunteer who ousted three people from a speech by President Bush in Denver on March 21.

The three, Alex Young, 26; Karen Bauer, 38; and Leslie Weise, 39, said they were told by the Secret Service that the man admitted ejecting them because they arrived at the event in a car with a "No more blood for oil" bumper sticker.

Dan Recht, an attorney for Bauer, Weise and Young, said his clients plan to pursue a civil lawsuit against the man, accusing him of violating their free speech rights and assaulting them.

"We don't know who it was, but we'll find out who it was and we'll sue him," Recht said. "I'm disappointed but not surprised charges won't be filed, but it remains to be seen whether the Secret Service did a thorough investigation."

Young, Bauer, and Weise were bounced from Bush's appearance at the Wings over the Rockies museum at the former Lowry Air Force Base. The event was part of the president's national tour [Bamboozepalooza] to promote changes to Social Security.

The trio, who have been nicknamed the Denver Three, said the event staffer who confronted them was dressed like a Secret Service agent, wearing a suit, radio earpiece and lapel pin that identifies people with security clearance. The Secret Service has said the man was not an agent.

Bauer and Weise say they were pulled aside at the gate and were told by another event staffer to wait for the Secret Service. They said the man who showed up threatened them with arrest if they misbehaved.

Because the president's visit was a public event paid for by taxpayers, considerable debate has erupted over whether it was legal to bar people because of their political speech.

But White House press secretary Scott McClellan backed the trio's ouster, saying in April, "If we think people are coming to the event to disrupt it, obviously, they're going to be asked to leave."
(via Rocky Mountain News)

Though how the Republicans "think" this, without any evidence... Oh, I forgot! The Republicans have a direct pipeline to the All-Seeing and All-Knowing One.

So I think we should just support the President. And I don't see what all the fuss is about. Of course McClellan is right: Any expression or thought that is not expressed or thought by The Godly One is, by definition, disruptive. Especially when the Godly One is on a national tour. At a minimum, these guys are guilty of thoughtcrime, and at the worst, blasphemy. Personally, I'd say the Denver Three were lucky to escape without a beating (back) Looked at in the right way, I'd say the Bush volunteer was doing these guys a favor.

And the loony left should pipe down being taxpayers and not being able to see Our President. Think of it as giving the unchurched an opportunity to tithe.

NOTE Thanks to alert reader nick.

I always wondered exactly what Senator Pat Roberts (R-Wingnut) was up to when he scheduled hearings on Treasongate. Cox News (not AP, not WaPo, not the Times, not even Knight-Ridder) has more

WASHINGTON — As Congress tip-toes into the controversy over the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity, some lawmakers and analysts worry that the criminal investigation of the matter could be undermined by any congressional grant of immunity from prosecution, as has happened in the past in politically charged investigations.

The cases of key Iran-contra figures Oliver North and John Poindexter underscore their worries: both were prosecuted and convicted by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, but their convictions were overturned because Congress had granted them immunity in order to compel them to testify in the congressional investigation of the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages deals.

Walsh, in his final report on the White House brokering arms deals with Iranian terrorists to free American hostages and diverting arms sales profits to anti-government guerrillas in Nicaragua, complained that Congress had "infinitely complicated" his efforts to prosecute North and Poindexter or to force them to testify about the activities of higher-ups in the Reagan administration.

"Immunity is ordinarily given by a prosecutor to a witness who will incriminate someone more important than himself," Walsh wrote. "Congress gave immunity to North and Poindexter, who incriminated only themselves and who largely exculpated those responsible for the initiation, supervision and support of their activities."

Walsh concluded with a word of caution to future lawmakers: "Congress should be aware of the fact that future immunity grants, at least in such highly publicized cases, will likely rule out criminal prosecution."

Consequently, because recent disclosures that senior White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby were sources for Time magazine reports about Plame, some lawmakers and analysts are reprising the warnings of Walsh to the congressional intelligence committee chairmen as they plan hearings on the leak.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., for example, is drafting letters of caution to the chairmen, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas and Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan.

"The (congressional) hearings should not be used as a ruse to provide White House officials with immunity," Lautenberg said in a statement late Friday.

[Senator Roberts] spokeswoman, Sarah Little, said the Senate hearings would look into the two-year probe by Fitzgerald, her comments coming after editorial columns in the Wall Street Journal labeled Fitzgerald a "loose cannon" and an "unguided missile."
(via Daily Sentinel)

The past isn't dead—it isn't even past. But maybe it just seems that way because the Republicans really do have a playbook. And they keep running the same plays over and over again.

From the Archives, in honor of the stealth appointment---what we should not forget:

More Salt In The Wound

Via Buzzflash, an interesting development in the Bolton force-feed: in 2002 he engineered the removal of a UN family agency head whose actions threatened to expose Bush's allegations of Iraqi weapons for the sham they were, and whose proposed plan to send chemical weapons inspectors to Iraq could have ruined the intelligence fakery on which the eventual invasion depended:

"John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.
A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.
Bustani, who says he got a "menacing" phone call from Bolton at one point, was removed by a vote of just one-third of member nations at an unusual special session of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), at which the United States cited alleged mismanagement in calling for his ouster."

Bustani himself revealed some interesting, and by now familiar, Bolton tactics:

"In June 2001, Bolton "telephoned me to try to interfere, in a menacing tone, in decisions that are the exclusive responsibility of the director-general," Bustani wrote in 2002 in a Brazilian academic journal.
He elaborated in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde in mid-2002, saying Bolton "tried to order me around," and sought to have some U.S. inspection results overlooked and certain Americans hired to OPCW positions. The agency head said he refused. "
In March 2002 the US went public to get rid of Bustani, and succeeded in April by threatening the OPCW with the withholding of operating funds. All this, mind you, at a time when Bush repeatedly assured the American public that he was doing everything possible to get Iraq to comply with weapons inspections and to avoid having to go to war. And only 3 months later, the Downing Street memo stated that the US saw "war as inevitable".

Later, when Bustani appealed the termination to the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, where UN agencies go with personnel issues, the tribunal ruled in Bustani's favor, stating his removal was unlawful and awarding him damages.
So Bolton was complicit in the warping and cover-up of information related to the invasion of Iraq in order to facilitate the Bush administration's plans to wage an illegal war, and he used his by now well-known bullying tactics to accomplish that, against a head of an agency that is a family member of the UN, where Bush now wants to appoint him as the representative of our nation.

Do I have it right?

They just can't help themselves, can they?

President Bush plans to sidestep the Senate on Monday and install controversial nominee John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, an administration official said.

The appointment, which is expected during a White House ceremony this morning, would constitute a so-called recess appointment. Bush, who has refused to surrender the fight over Bolton, has the power to fill vacancies without Senate approval while Congress is in recess.

Under the Constitution, the recess appointment during this August's break will last until the next session of Congress, which begins in January 2007.
(via WaPo)

Incidentally, none of us care that Bolton is "blunt, combative." Hey, I don't even care that if Bolton chases U.N. delegates "down the hall" (back)—after $70 million to investigate a blowjob, we've all "moved on," haven't we?

What I do care about is that Bolton lied to Congress (back), and that Bush never released all the documents Dems ask for, some of which would have cleared Bolton of the charge that he used intelligence intercepts for political purposes (probably for the W.H.I.G.).

That, and the fact that to these guys, "reforming" the UN means gutting it, and Bolton is one of the winger loons who believes in exactly that.

Anyhow, I give. Bolton's exactly the guy to represent America as it has become under Bush the Second. I'm sure he'll be a superb appointment.

NOTE Anyone want to start a pool on when the first Bolton puffpiece appears? I give it 45 days.