And so does this story; the clam-up in the White House is getting comical. Mark Kleiman has a great round-up of the Traitorgate posts and articles, including printing a letter from Dwight Meredith on the subject. Josh Marshall has some thoughts of his own (which you should definitely read) and sees some serious business - but he's laughing at the right's attempt to spin it. (He's got the lovely exchange from the morning press gaggle which is...well, go there and read.) Meanwhile, on the long and fascinating thread at CalPundit, a poster named Kelly says:
Yes, this should be a bipartisan issue. But so far, it's not. Greg claims that Republicans don't pray for scandal in the White House. Neither do I any more than I pray for things to fall when I drop them. Scandal in this White House is as reliable as gravity.
And, just what would the Republicans be saying if a Democratic administration had done this? Do you happen to remember the reaction when Dana Rohrabacher held hearings about supposed transfer of sensitive technology to China? The very day that he made the allegations that something had been transferred to China he insisted that President Clinton should resign.
In the end, it turned out that nothing of significance had been transferred to China. In this case, I think we already know that the White House has revealed the identity of an undercover CIA operative. I'm waiting for Bush (and Cheney) to resign. I'll expect those letters on my desk in the morning.
An appropriate response, given that one poster has suggested that the center of gravity is around Wilson being a hack for a left-wing rag (he had a single article published in The Nation last February). Wilson is also being described as some sort of Clinton administration appointee, although he worked for Presidents Reagan and Bush (the real one) and was sent to Niger by Cheney. Bob Novak furiously back-tracked on Crossfire but both Time and Brokaw have already corroborated the story with their own. Novak's spin: It's no big deal. But even Don Imus is pretty upset about burning a CIA operative's cover, and a crack in the wall of talk radio means something. And Atrios, back from his stint on Mike Signorile's radio show, has the goods from last July in Newsday:
Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."
That's not how he sounded on Crossfire, which kinda makes one wonder what happened between then and now.
Will it go anywhere? Who knows? But let's do remind people that the case against the administration here is still a whole lot better than the the case for invading Iraq was. After all, Karl Rove has a history of doing "bad things".... 12:33 BST
Bits
Bad Attitudes says Ashcroft has finally nailed a "terrorist". Is there no adult supervision at any level of federal law enforcement? No one to say, Oh, for Christ's sake, throw a scare into the poor kid and kick her out the door? (Also: White House admits environmental regs save billions.)
"Dean" David Broder believes the Dean candidacy and the California recall mark The Return Of Discontent. Forgive me if I find this analysis a bit naive and simplistic.
Karin Chenoweth says Maryland's governor is weak on academic freedom.
Newtation: LiberalOasis has a detailed rebuttal to Gephardt's suggestion that Howard Dean supported Gingrich while real Democrats were fighting him, clearly showing that Dean did not side with Newt on Medicare cuts. That doesn't mean liberals should be in love with Dean's position, but then we already knew he isn't really a liberal. In any case, Dean was absolutely right when he said, "That is flat-out false, and I'm ashamed that you would compare me with Newt Gingrich. Nobody up here deserves to be compared to Newt Gingrich." LO quotes extensively from an article detailing Dean's position at the time, which even describes him as referring to the "Contract on America". That's no Newt-supporter.
Seeing the Forest: There have been some who doubted that the Bush administration operates to benefit The Party rather than the country. The latest news in the scandal over the "outing" of a covert CIA agent will show them they have been wrong about that. Dave notes that an investigation - if the party doesn't block it - "might reveal how many of her foreign contacts have been imprisoned or executed as a result of this leak. It might reveal how many WMD purchases occurred because of this leak." But, he reminds us, the Republicans control everything, and they have blocked every single investigation into any suspicious, unethical, or apparently incompetent performance within the government, including of the failures that led to Al Qaeda's disastrous success on 9/11, so it will be surprising if anything really comes of this latest investigation. (Also: more on just how far-right the folks who own the voting machines are.)
Get your daily epigram from The Roycrofters. Among other things.
Moon watch: John Gorenfeld's weblog helps you keep track of the holy-father owner of The Washington Times, who is, as you know, the Messiah. (Via Eschaton.)
And speaking of Atrios, Glenn Reynolds SO doesn't get it: And I guess if it weren't for the palpable desperation on the part of people looking for a scandal with which to tar Bush -- reminiscent of numerous right-wing Clinton critics from about five or six years ago -- I might be more inclined to say "more" instead of "less." Atrios explains it for the hard of thinking:
Let me spell it out for you Glenn. This isn't about now-Solicitor General Ted Olson making shit up under the name "Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short" writing for a Scaife-funded right wing attack mag, or Gary Aldrich claiming the White House Christmas tree was decorated with crack pipes and dildos, or Dan Burton blowing up watermelons.
This is one SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL accusing TWO TOP WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS of committing rather serious felonies. If the allegations are true, it's also about a president who, at least knowing about this after the fact, kept these people around for months during a time of war.
Paul Waldman in The Washington Post on Why the Media Don't Call It as They See It: Why didn't the media go after the administration sooner on this issue? Aren't reporters, especially in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, all too ready to show their skepticism about our leaders and what they say? Fat chance. As usual, nothing said about the mysterious fact that the media's reticence about calling someone a liar only seems to apply if the someone is a Republican.
Nathan Newman: The key here is that Ashcroft is not looking for new legislation, a la the Patriot Act. Instead, he seeking to twist the meaning of a combination of statutes to create an "Official Secrets Act" that the Congress deliberately DID NOT create. Nathan is referring to this article by John Dean about how Ashcroft is trying to help the government cover up its own malfeasance. (Also: Lieberman Right on Clark talks about why it is reasonable to ask for more evidence of Clark's loyalty to a party he actively worked against as recently as two years ago; plus defining examples of what "judicial activism" and "the poverty line" mean.)
"Pardon me boy, is that the Chickenhawk Escape train?" is the title of a post at Bartcop Nation linking to this story that says: During President Bush's two-day stay this week at the ritzy Waldorf-Astoria in New York — where he was seeking international support for the U.S. resolution on Iraq — a special escape train was idling beneath the hotel, ready to whisk him to safety at a moment's notice in the event of a terrorist attack, it was reported Friday. And I liked the little map at the bottom of another post in the thread showing:
Regrettably, this was doodled by Rob, so it rhymes better in British. And anyway, I take issue with his decision to use "Condoleeza", which doesn't scan very well, instead of "Rice", although at the moment I can't think of a good line to go with it. Or Rove. Oh, well.
Dubya
He cannot help but lie
Cheney
He doesn't even try
Condoleeza
Could not be sleezier
And Colin Powell
Helped whitewash
My Lai
For more of what Tuli Kupferberg calls "parasongs", see MadKane. 14:17 BST
The Washington Post has broken the Valerie Plame leak story wide open. CalPundit has comments, as do Josh Marshall and Mark Kleiman, with more to come, I suspect, in the next 24 hours. Conservo-blogger John Cole is calling for a perp walk if this turns out to be true, and it sure looks like several senior White House officials will be facing a Grand Jury. It should be an interesting Sunday talk cycle if Russert et al manage to wake the fuck up and jump on this story. [...] BadDude has a Franklin that says Rove goes down on this. Any takers?
The comment threads everywhere are fascinating, so if you have a chance, take a look; some commenters point out that "White House officials" shouldn't have known Plame was a CIA operative in the first place, and that how they knew is itself worthy of investigation. Counterspin Central is keeping track of the other side of blogtopia (Y!SITP!), and notes that while the righties have been remarkably quiet, Arthur Silber has chimed in from the West Coast (with even more links). Back on the home team, Road to Surfdom also chimes in. 01:08 BST
Untelevised is having a moment of euphoria at the NYT actually coming to the defense of a Democrat, but maybe first he should have looked at this piece in which Frank Rich really reaches to find a stupid put-down of that same Democrat. (No, Frank, letting James Carville feed you a joke doesn't make you a phony. But this sort of faux integrity probably does.)
Road to Surfdom has a sharp rejoinder to Gephardt for his attempt to Newt Howard Dean.
Monkey Media Report, all over Clark and Edwards, recommends this transcript from Democracy Now for another take on Wesley Clark, and also recommends "an in-depth, highly readable, 7,400-word debate between the editors of two intelligent political magazines" - or, rather between the editors of The New Republic and The American Prospect about John Edwards' poor chances of securing a spot at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket. VP seat? Maybe. (Meanwhile, this is cute.)
Symbolism over safety: P.G. Gandy at Open Source Politics explains late-term abortion and why "partial-birth" is an erroneous term - and, by the way, which of our leading candidates has been prepared to say so. (No surprises on who that is.)
Charles Dodgson is watching while the government plays more games with Moussaoui. We all know the score: He's not allowed to present a full defense, and if the judge insists he be allowed to, the government will just keep refusing until the judge is forced to dismiss the case - and then they will subject him to the fancy new no-defense military tribunals that Bushcroft created for the purpose. Because everyone knows that an adequate defense, including their testimony, might lead to an acquittal, at least on charges of direct participation in the Sept. 11th conspiracy -- and goodness knows we can't have that... Charles also sums up what anyone who can think already knows about Bush's latest demand to the UN: Someone's come along to bail him out every other time that he's gotten himself into trouble, so dammit, there's just got to be someone out there whose job it is to bail him out now. And to do it his way, too, without dropping even the merest hint that he, himself, might bear some responsibility for the mess...
Not Geniuses explains why the Republican view of charity doesn't work, and also says: Great. They sometimes use the PATRIOT Act for its intended purpose, you know, when they're not using it for other purposes.
The Plame Affair - Hellblazer writes the movie proposal. (And also provides a link to Friday's Guardian leader, Weapons of War - and I just don't see how anyone can dissent from this position anymore.) 12:21 BST
Culture
Greg Beato compares two cult icons in Word of Oaf: Bill O'Reilly vs. Ludacris. What does O'Reilly have against Ludacris? It almost sounds like jealousy. Or maybe it's something else. When a guest on O'Reilly's show asked him if any hip-hop figure might make an acceptable Pepsi spokesperson, O'Reilly replied "Chubby Checker." Also: Anabaptist Coulter - with footnotes!
Ken MacLeod and Dave Hitt are having a smoke-in: The Big Lie is that it's to protect workers in the hospitality industry. But talk to any nicotine nanny long enough and they'll admit their real agenda - they want to make it so difficult to smoke that people will quit. It won't work. They'll only succeed in annoying the hell out of us, and annoyed smokers calm down by lighting up. It's true, you know - if you really want to make sure someone smokes themselves to death, be sure to hassle them about their smoking. (Hint: Smokers already know their smoking is bad for them, and they know it better than you do.) 12:10 BST
Saturday, 27 September 2003
Yet still I love my country
"In Unequal Protection, author Thom Hartmann tells a compelling, can't-put-it-down story that tracks the history of the loss of democracy in America. It starts with the birth of the modern corporation with the founding of the East India Company in 1600, through the Boston Tea Party revolt against transnational corporate domination of the early American economy, the rise of corporations during the Civil War, the ultimate theft of human rights before the Supreme Court in 1886, and into the modern-day theft of human rights in the US and worldwide by corporate interests and the politicians they own."
My grand love affair with the writings of Dwight Meredith is not entirely frustrated: I thought it a bit odd that Mr. Bush would bring up 9/11 in a Labor Day speech. My wife, who is far more perceptive than I, responded that it was not surprising at all because 9/11 is Mr. Bush's "little black dress." Elsewhere, Dwight hints that perhaps it doesn't matter if school kids put their hands over their hearts and recite The Pledge if they can still do this. (And thanks to Lean Left and Jeanne D'Arc for providing him the space).
What is past is prologue: Bob Somerby refuses to stop warning you about the sloth and dishonesty of the Stepford Press, and assures us that nothing has changed since the 2000 campaign. He also has a few words to say about Saletan's remarkable belief that attempting to sort out who is lying and who is not shows an uninterest in the truth, and we shouldn't care since, hey, everybody lies sometimes. And, of course, any criticism of Bush is just plain crazy!
The Memory Hole finds it not too easy to use the Freedom of Information Act, and there's something we really need to know: I sent the National Security Agency a Freedom of Information Act request asking for files on Project Bojinka. (Bojinka was the plot by radical Islamists—led by WTC-bomber Ramzi Yousef—to 1) blow up a dozen US passenger jets in mid-flight, 2) assassinate President Clinton and the Pope, and 3) ram hijacked passenger planes into US landmarks, including the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, the White House, CIA Headquarters, and the Sears Tower.) The plot was discovered in 1995 when authorities in the Philippines raided Yousef's apartment.
You already know that Off the Kuff is blog central for news about the Texas Dems, right? Meanwhile, he also isn't happy about the latest hold-up on the US no-call list. (We have one here, and I like it a lot.)
Moved to words: Leah on the death of Edward Said: So let me credit it now; Edward Said was first, last and always, a humanist. His own rendering of the only viable solution for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict may seem impossibly idealistic, or, as some Israelis would no doubt view it, a clever ruse to destroy the essentially Jewish nature of the Israeli state, but in view of the horrors of the last three years, its fundamental humanism cannot be denied.
Click for the slide show, some of those photos are wonderful.
I'm just amazed at the amount of entertainment news in the last 24 hours. Robert Palmer is gone at a mere 54 years old (that link is to his website, which of course wastes your time on unnecessary Flash for straight text, but I thought "Some Guys Have All the Luck" was a cool song), professional amateur George Plimpton bites the dust, and then there is the good news: A new series of Doctor Who is in the offing - by the guy who did Queer as Folk.
Tresy at Corrente quotes Jack Betty on what it will mean if Bush wins in 2004: You can preside over the most catastrophic failure of intelligence and national defense in history. Can fire no one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic buck-passing. Can oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically toxic. Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the independent commission you finally accede to. You can start an unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians—adjusted for the difference in population, the equivalent of 80,000 Americans. Can occupy Iraq without a plan to restore traffic lights, much less order. Can make American soldiers targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and planters of remote-control bombs—and taunt the murderers of our young men to "bring it on." There's more, read it. And Lambert points to David Corn in The Nation on The Other Lies of George Bush.
Scalzi on Liars: The Bush administration is really the first presidential administration to wholeheartedly embrace the talk radio concept that truth should not get in the way of the larger picture of absolute victory, however that victory may be defined. Other presidential administrations have lied, of course. They all lie. And some lie really, really big -- look at Nixon. But at the very least Nixon and his cronies lied because the alternative was jail time. Members of the Bush administration appear to lie because it doesn't occur to them that they might simply tell the truth. Or to put it another way, they don't appear to affirmatively decide to lie; rather they appear to have to affirmatively decide not to lie.
Everything you need to know about the case for invading Iraq: HogBlog thinks about "new brooms", notes that Andrew Gilligan was accurate after all, and says: So all the intelligence was wrong, and all the dossiers were bollocks, and Britain and the US were led into the invasion of Iraq with a string of fabrications and fuckups. [...] So I guess pretty much all the prominent Bushistas are lying, lying liars, lying lying liar-pantsed lying liarriffic liars. And they lied. It's hard to spin this into anything but a blanket condemnation of the entire run-up to war and everyone involved. The Bush administration systematically deceived the general public into supporting an untimely, poorly-thought-out war on fabricated grounds. Go read it all. (Via Electrolite Sidelights.)
After a day of not being able to post, I was informed last night by numerous pals in America that they couldn't get The Sideshow to load. It seems to be loading from here (on a different ISP), so I'm not sure how that happened. You might want to mail me and let me know (when you see this) whether you've had this problem or not.
Nathan Newman on Paying for the Bullets: This is a bipartisan sickness but Daschle points to the real problem, which is that countries are still trying to force Iraq to pay back loans used by Hussein to buy weapons from foreign countries to kill his own people [...] So the Iraqis get to pay for the bullets used to kill their families many times over. They get to pay back Europe for the weapons Hussein used against them and they get to pay back the US for the weapons used to bomb their families.Also, Nathan disagrees when Atrios criticizes this Salon article about the Iraq occupation, and more on blue states/red states and who gets funding from where and why.
Smythe's World doesn't trust most stories about "Political Correctness" outbreaks, but he thinks he's found something that can't be defended.
MWO wonders if Tom Friedman is waking up with this article, in which Friedman says: But when it comes to the political and economic sacrifices and strategies that are also required to fight this war successfully, they are cowardly wimps. That is why our war on terrorism is so one-dimensional and Pentagon-centric. It's more like a hobby — something we do only until it runs into the Bush re-election agenda... They also link to the Tim Noah article exposing the Draft Hillary movement as Republicans.
Matt Yglesias thinks a roll-back of the Bush tax cuts is necessary to help pay for the war, but dissenters suggest cutting certain programs instead. Matt looks at their un-shopping list and thinks they might just be wrong. He is prepared to argue. "The primary problem facing America today is:
A: The schools are bad. B: Rich people don't have enough money." But we are dealing with people who really appear to be kept up nights by the worry that rich people don't have enough money. (Matt also has a pointer to a Gitlin profile of David Brooks.)
Josh Marshall muses on the meaning of Bush's plummeting approval ratings: Credibility of course is unitary. And the erosion has ricocheted from foreign policy to domestic policy and back again in escalating fashion. Suddenly the White House's explanations for why the country has fallen back into half trillion dollar deficits are ringing hollow. I guess he's talking about the press. To anyone who was paying attention, they never rang true.
Testify! muses on Josh Marshall's position on Howard Dean.
Let's face it, trying to be a "conservative" when it makes no sense has driven Andy completely Upminster. An Age Like This finds another wonky Sully statement and says, Andrew Sullivan is one of those cretins who make me vaguely ashamed of being gay. Who would want to be associated in any way with this not over-bright nitwit who doesn't seem to realize that his position is just about as intelligent as, say, Jews for Hitler? Also, the problem of Incurious George.
Um, yes, well, the ISP had a little FTP problem which made it hard for me to post. Last time I looked it was working again, so let's try to get it back together.
The Liquid List is taking bets on what stories the White House will try to hide each week by releasing them at the end of the Friday news cycle. Every Wednesday at The Liquid List, I'll put out a call out for bets on The Rove Hour. You will use the comments section to enter your guess on the humiliating or outrageous story that the Bush administration or the Republicans will attempt to bury on Friday afternoon. That's when all those lazy journalists are wrapping up the least-read Saturday edition of their papers, before they head out to the Hamptons or Rehoboth Beach or wherever.
Sign me up: Interesting Times wants you to take The Pledge to remember that the goal is to get Bush out, and that Democratic in-fighting on behalf of individual candidates should not distract us from this vital aim. Get with the program, guys!
Best of the Blogs: Was this a speech to the UN or a speech to the American people? Unrepentant for his lies, continuing to blur the distinction between Iraq and terrorism and, oh so confident about those WMDs that have never been found. Using AIDS and the sex-slave trade to soften the emotions of the audience. A bunch of disingenuous blather projected from a fundamentalist Christian perspective.
Slacktivist wants David Horowitz to know that things aren't in the Bible just because evangelical fruitcakes imagine them to be there. In fact, "It would be nice if journalists stopped pretending these people speak for all Christians everywhere." Hell, yes. (Also, a good post on Pilger's recent bit of research on administration statements about Saddam's weapons.)
(I just felt like having a graphic there, so I borrowed one from Lois, who remembered to wish Bruce a happy birthday yesterday, unlike some people you could name.)
Jeanne D'Arc and CalPundit find out that "No Child Left Behind" really stands for "No Public Schools Left At All."
Everybody is on Safire's case. Check Josh Marshall out for the longer version, but for the lazy, there's Elton Beard doing the Shorter William Safire: My transcendent hatred of the Clintons having imbued me with preternatural mind-reading powers, I can discern in their support of Wesley Clark's candidacy a Machiavellian scheme to install Hillary in the White House. But even Elton couldn't get it down to just one sentence, so there are bonus points added. (The last Shorter Tom Friedman, on the other hand, is entertainingly succinct.)
Jeff Cooper has a few words to say about these 36 words in Bush's speech to the UN: The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction. It used those weapons in acts of mass murder and refused to account for them when confronted by the world. What Jeff doesn't say is that the regime of Saddam Hussein simultaneously cultivated ties to the US, who cultivated ties right back, while they were also cultivating ties to the Mujahadeen, and while they did not seem to have any problem with Saddam committing mass murder, which they certainly knew about. If these are good reasons to bomb Iraq, aren't they equally good reasons to bomb his co-conspirators who at present occupy the White House?
"I'm eating cookies. In Republican-world, that means I'm protecting the soldiers." That's from the nice little post at Pandagon on how Republicans Are Great On Defense. (Be sure to catch his 22 Attacks post, as well. And he gives a fine example of his new word, "ridiculosity". Ah, hell, it's all good, read from top to bottom.)
Skippy. Hm, I can't paraphrase this and there's really not a single quote to sum it up, and anyway it's one of those things that makes me wanna spit. Bush. History. "napoleonic." Grrrr. (But read the rest of the page, because Skippy makes ya feel better. And has a short but sweet review of Big Lies.)
I didn't realize that Mark Crispin Miller has a weblog. Naturally, his permalinks weren't working when I tried it, but he's got a couple of posts up that dovetail with my previous entry. One looks at oddities in the 2000 presidential vote-count in Volusia County:
A remarkable exchange concerning Diebold's voting machines in Volusia County, Florida. On January 17, 2001, Lana Hines, a county elections official sends out an inquiry as to how Al Gore ended up with a vote-count of -16,022. That's NEGATIVE 16,022—which just happens also to have been the total number of votes cast for various independent and third-party candidates who also ran. (It was the largest number of such votes cast in Volusia County's history.)
Mark, Follow up research on Wally O'Dell from Diebold. His attempts to isolate his personal political views from the corporations don't fit with the facts. Personal donations to campaigns can be searched at the FEC or through some other websites like CommonDreams.org. Try searching the board and senior executives of Diebold and see if you can find any Democrats. More surprising, there is a concerted pattern of donations to one candidate outside Ohio. Many of Diebold's executives gave money to the North Carolina Senatorial candidate Lauch Faircloth.... on the same day!!!!
An added twist is that Lauch Faircloth has alwasy been openly opposed to allowing all Americans to vote. He is a leader of CNP, the Christian reconstructionists who believe only Christians should be allowed to vote. How can a voting machine company have so many executives line up behind a candidate who is opposed to counting all the votes? It certainly gives you some scope for interesting questions to good old Wally O'Dell!
Not only is the country's leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year.
As if the public image of punch-card voting machines had not already been bruised and battered enough, on Sept. 15, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals went for the K.O. Punch-card voting, a three-judge panel of the court said in its ruling halting the California gubernatorial recall election, is an embarrassment to our high-tech times: "Just as the black and white fava bean voting system of revolutionary times was replaced by paper balloting, and the paper ballot replaced by mechanical lever machine, newer technologies have emerged to replace the punch-card, including optical scanning and touch screen voting."
You know, I like the idea of voting in presidential elections with beans. I think everyone should be given beans with the candidates' names on them (with helpful color-coding for each candidate), and put the bean of choice into the Official Ballot Box, and then the unused beans in a leftover box, and if there are any problems later they count all the beans to make sure that the number of beans in the Official Ballot Box matches the appropriate number of discard beans. That would make it a whole lot harder to cheat. (Do you think we could give everyone beans as a poll-watching exercise? Hm, that's a lotta beans....)
But according to Bev Harris, a writer who has spent more than a year investigating the shadowy world of the elections equipment industry, the replacement technologies the court cited may be worse -- much worse -- than the zany punch-card systems it finds so abhorrent. Specifically, Harris' research into Diebold, one of the largest providers of the new touch-screen systems, ought to give elections officials pause about mandating an all-electronic vote.
See? What we need is beans!
Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. And when you get in that way, you are able to overwrite the audit log, which is supposed to log the transactions, and this [audit log] is one of the key things they cite as a security measure when they sell the system.
If they're not going to fix that, every good hacker in the world should be auditing the voting just to make sure another bunch of votes - what was it? 6,000 votes in Volusa County or something? - don't suddenly disappear without an explanation.
There's nothing -- no security in this?
No, in fact in the memo, [Ken Clark, an engineer at Diebold] says specifically that they decided not to put a password on it because it was proving useful. They were using the back door to do end runs around the voting program. And he named two places where they were doing this, Gaston County, N.C., and King County, Wash.
Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.
Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company's management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services, which brought in the FBI.
At Ruminate This, Lisa English says the docs have finally figured out what's wrong with her son Jesse and that she hopes to return to her keyboard around Friday, but in the meantime the proprietor of Wampum is sitting in and has posted about the NYT article in which Michael Powell shifts "mercurially from peevish to clueless to victimized" as he whines about how people are just cruelly objecting to his machinations without any regard for his tender feelings and he just might want to take his toys and go home to spend more time with his family. I love this bit from the article: "We didn't initiate this as a deregulatory plank of an agenda, which is the way it is portrayed," he said. "Trust me. Every chairman knows you don't want to tinker with the media. It's the third rail." So it was just an accident that he tinkered like hell with it and the changes he wanted fit so neatly with the insane deregulatory agenda. I see.
The Horse! Not a mere flashing red light this time, but a mushroom cloud for the announcement that a new CNN/USA Today poll shows Clark polling ahead of Bush at 49% to 46%, with Kerry also beating Bush, and Dean and Lieberman within the margin of error. (Reading further, I see the wingers are having humor-impairment problems again, complaining that Wesley Clark said something that was not true. Because, of course, it was a joke. Also, check out the major outbursts of racism from Rush, recently; MWO thinks you should contact ESPN and let them know this guy has no place in their line-up. Personally, I agree with the reader who suggests that people mail the NYT when it prints rubbish like this piece of tripe by serial-dissembler Katharine Seelye about Democratic candidates.) 15:01 BST
Our friend Mr. Toast of Two Glasses wants help building a list comparing Clark's and Dean's positions on the issues.
We had no idea that part of our AAA dues were being spent on lobbyists who oppose just about everything having to do with public transportation. - Tom Magliozzi, co-host of Car Talk on NPR. So, what's a driver to do? I dunno, maybe this. (Via The Green[e]house Effect.) 02:30 BST
Monday, 22 September 2003
Eye-candy
Bra of the week: I don't actually want one of these (too impractical, even in my most whimsical mood, but I'll keep it in mind for after I win the lottery); however, I thought it looked sexy, and of course it coordinates nicely with the fabulous fruits-of-the-forest Sideshow color scheme. But check out the picture of the full cup version, not because of the bra (which I didn't like as much), but for the interesting decoration the model is wearing.
Begging to Differ thinks Lileks has a killer argument against the anti-invasion position on Iraq. Well, he might, if (a) Saddam had really kicked the weapons inspectors out, (b) they'd had any real intelligence beside the rubbish they made up, (c) Saddam had ever tested a nuke or had any delivery systems, (d) Saddam's old bio/chem weapons weren't too old to be any use after five years, (e) invading Iraq hadn't been more likely to make things worse than better (and it has), or at least (f) Saddam had somehow turned out to have WMD after all. It's no good talking about things that were true when Clinton said them in 1998, because a lot of time has passed since then and some of those things could no longer be true. And people who are willing to blather these weird after-the-fact rationalizations for invading a country on only the vaguest information and conjecture are no better than death-penalty advocates who don't think finding good evidence against the accused first is necessary before you give him the needle. You're talking about killing thousands of people, you don't just do it on a coin-toss. As to the bizarre analysis of liberal psychology that was made up for this occasion, that might also hold a little bit more water if Bush really had wiped out Al Qaeda, but he certainly has not. He'd already blown it in Afghanistan before the Iraq invasion started, so there was never any reason to believe he was going to perform miracles in Iraq. Believe me, no one is jealous of his war.
Danny Goldberg grades the candidates on their Teen Spirit.
A letter from a reader at Friday's Bartcop says: How about doing disabled veterans a favor and ask all Democratic presidential hopefuls to promise not to reduce present or future veteran's disability benefits? At first I thought this was a good idea, and then I realized it was a great idea.
At Thursday's Bartcop: Marc Perkel announces today that he is in the process of applying for non-profit status to turn the Church of Reality into a 501c3 tax exempt church. Perkel hopes to have his application approved in the next 120 days.
(I wish everyone would write to Bartcop and MWO and ask them to please permalink their front pages. I don't expect them ever to permalink individual sections, but it would be nice if you could rely on a link to a current item still going to the right page if someone looks for it a few days later.) 13:00 BST
Ed Weathers: The nation's attorney general is on the ropes and swinging wildly: John Ashcroft is fighting out of his weight class. Compared to your local librarian, our U.S. Attorney General is a pipsqueak, a flyweight. Too right; librarians have been kicking ass on free speech for a long time. Like Emma, for example, who is pretty worried about the Hatriot Act herself.
Joe Conason in The Guardian, The BBC's bullies can dish it out, but they can't take it: To an American, there is much that sounds awfully familiar about Beebwatch - the series launched last week by the Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore to root out "soft left" bias in the BBC. Moore's determination to inflict daily humiliation on the network coincides neatly with efforts by Rupert Murdoch and the Tory opposition to deprive Britain's great broadcasting institution of its licence fee, just as its charter is coming up for renewal.
A Bartcop reader returns to Arrakis in My plan, our plan, THE plan: So if Dubya is Rabban (and the comparison is too scary to ignore), and the Harkonnens are the Bushes and the Atreides are the Clintons, who is Feyd? [...] If we want to solve this riddle, we need to find out who is playing the role of the Baron. When I saw that Monkey Mail post today that said Cheney had urged Clark to run, the bells went off. Is this true? Did Cheney urge him to run? Have you heard anything more about this? If he did, then I'd say we have our fat man. Maybe Cheney's undisclosed location is Geidi Prime.
This is cool, and I'd like to thank whoever did it, too. Talk Left is one of the best and hard-working-est weblogs around and I'd hate to see it die for lack of computing power.
Drug War Rant finds out why government studies of marijuana's medical usefulness always seem to get negative results; here is an interesting quote:
Some of the first patients to smoke Health Canada's government-approved marijuana say it's "disgusting" and want their money back.
"It's totally unsuitable for human consumption," said Jim Wakeford, 58, an AIDS patient in Gibsons, B.C.
DWR says:
The United States government also grows marijuana. It's a monopoly under the direction of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) which has no interest in helping medical marijuana studies. In fact, they tend to insure that any "scientific" studies reflect their point of view (as the recent ecstasy debacle shows). They grow the only pot which can legally be used for research.
At present, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) contracts to Dr. ElSohly at the University of Mississippi to grow marijuana at an outdoor, fenced facility with 24-hour armed guards. The product that is grown is seeded, leafy, low-potency material with stems included. The product is sent to Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina for rolling into standardized cigarettes, usually with about 4% THC
So...marijuana that is too low-quality to work just, um, doesn't work. 01:41 BST
Saturday, 20 September 2003
Scattered brain
Dublin showed signs of being beautiful but I didn't see enough of it to really find out. Which seems a real shame since it is the only time I have ever been to Ireland at all, but there you are. In any case, the City College has one hell of a great debating society, the students were sharp and fast, and of course our side won overwhelmingly.
[Does some quick catch-up reading.]
Okay, Tom "Boy, Am I In Denial!" Friedman is just getting weirder and weirder:
It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.
And why is that? Why, it failed to endorse our war, thereby "making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war." I guess Bush's own ultimatum wasn't good enough. Charles Dodgson spells it out:
More seriously, Friedman distorts (or more properly, ignores) the actual motives of the French -- they were taking us at our word that the casus belli was Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (not weapons "programs", but actual weapons), and pointing out quite properly that we had not shown convincing evidence of the threat, as it happens, for very good reasons. So, so far, Friedman argues that France has shown itself to be our "enemy" for failing to endorse our lies.
Meanwhile...
Digby advises the Republicans to loosen their corsets.
The DNC now has a blog, but Sasha Undercover is pissed at them because of a terrible error in their blogroll.
Wampum has heard from Lisa English, whose son is ill and has had to be hospitalized. We have hopes for a speedy recovery - and, of course, for Lisa's return to blogging.
Billmon looking hard at My Lai massacre cover-up artist Colin Powell in War Crimes.
Scared yet? This from the Guardian, via Eschaton: Saudi Arabia, in response to the current upheaval in the Middle East, has embarked on a strategic review that includes acquiring nuclear weapons, the Guardian has learned. 09:39 BST
Arrrr!
It's now officially International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so don't forget. If you need help, their official site has a handy English-to-Pirate translator.
Demosthenes takes a look at "the bizarre loathing that Paul Krugman inspires in the right" as seen in "analysis" of his interview on CalPundit by right-wingers.
A week ago I quoted Stuart Moore about, among other things, Dick Cheney's corruption. Owen Boswarva wrote to remind me that it's all much worse than it seems:
Of course, Halliburton's depredations are not confined to obvious markets like Iraq.
Today the UK House of Commons Public Accounts Committee released a report criticising the Ministry of Defence over the private finance deal it negotiated with a company called Devonshire Management Limited (DML), for the construction of dock facilities in Plymouth necessary to the upgrade of British nuclear submarines.
The project has produced a cost overrun in excess of £300m. Under the agreed terms this bill will be picked up by the UK taxpayer, without penalty to the contractor DML.
51% of DML is owned by Brown & Root, a division of Halliburton.
Michael Tomasky: Like everyone in that park -- like everyone everywhere -- I knew we had entered a new period of history. But two years on, this new period looks far more like what preceded it than it ought to, and when history eventually gets around to rendering judgments about what opportunities were squandered or missed or contemptuously dismissed, its j'accuse will be directed squarely at the current administration, whose ideological imperatives have trumped practical reality at every turn.
Thom Hartmann looks at another spooky goal of Cheney's little friends at PNAC: Three years ago, Wolfowitz, Kristol, and their colleagues suggested this is something the Pentagon should be thinking about. Not just germ warfare, but gene warfare.
Buzzflash interview with Paul Krugman: Again, I think it comes back to press coverage. Just this weekend, I was looking at something: There's an enormous scandal right now involving Boeing and a federal contract, which appears to have been overpaid by $4 billion. The Pentagon official who was responsible for the contract has now left and has become a top executive at Boeing. And it's been barely covered in the press –- a couple of stories on inside pages. You compare that with the White House travel office in 1993. There were accusations, later found to be false, that the Clintons had intervened improperly to dismiss a couple of employees in the White House travel office. [...] Right now, I'm trying to understand what a petroleum industry expert is telling me, when he says that some of the market futures suggest that the market is pricing in about a one-in-three chance that unrest in Iraq spreads to Saudi Arabia. And if that happens, of course, then we're talking about a mammoth disaster.
...at CalPundit, where Kevin Drum is covering a hell of a lot of ground and, not incidentally, has done a fine interview with Paul Krugman that really gets down to the cheese:
The main theme of The Great Unraveling is how much Bush lies. But Reagan lied, Clinton lied, Johnson lied, all presidents lie. What's the difference between them and Bush?
Actually, I miss Reagan. I never thought I'd say that, but....
Reagan lied a little bit, and his policies were often crazy, but they wouldn't do 2 -1 = 4. They'd say, if we have our tax cut we'll have this wonderful supply side thing and the economy will boom and it will pay for itself, which was a crazy theory, but it wasn't a blatant lie about the actual content of the policy.
Bush says, I've got a tax cut that's aimed at working people, ordinary working people, and then you just take a look at it and discover that most of it's coming from elimination of the estate tax and a cut in the top bracket, so it's heavily tilted toward just a handful of people at the top. It's just a flat lie about what the tax cut is.
So this is different, this is really more extreme. We're not talking about disagreements about policy at this point, we're talking about people who insist that things that are flatly not true are true, that black is white, up is down.
And, naturally, the comments (of which there are many) run the range of political commentary from thoughtful to fruity, complete with the usual right-wing nuttiness (perennial favorite: "Social Security is a pyramid scheme"). Only about halfway through them I was stopped cold by this one by someone called Mitch H.:
Greetings from the other side of the echo chamber wall. Dipping in on this side occasionally reminds me why I hang out in the right-wing echo chamber. Namely, I agree with Krugman on a number of economic issues, but I don't like living my intellectual life stewing in a paranoid bog of conspiratorial fury.
Krugman is so convinced that the current environment is so much fouler than 1970; it strikes me that either he doesn't remember 1970 very well, or else he has some strange nostalgic affection for Nixon-era wage and price controls, race riots, rising crime rates, military decay, and the daily prospect of nuclear annihilation.
Personally, I hate deficits, am in favor of reinstating the estate tax, rescinding the tax cuts, dumping steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies, and so on. But I *don't* want to listen to a pack of rabid haters echo my economic opinions back at me like it's five minutes to midnight and the four horsemen are in the stables getting ready.
The trouble with hanging out in the right-wing echo-chamber is that you end up thinking things were as bad in 1970 as Mitch is making it sound. As if a temporary infliction of wage and price controls in any way compared to what Bush has done to our treasury. (It's worth bearing in mind that ordinary taxpayers were not generally hurting because of that brief period of wage/price stasis; in fact, the reason Nixon brought them in was because he knew it would help him in the election, and he was right. It's not as if Americans were losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands as they have been under Bush.) Yes, Nixon did what most Republicans do, which is make things worse (why does no one ever ask why crime tends to rise under Republican administrations?), but Bush outstripped Nixon a long time ago.
Someone called Gordie says:
Not suprised that he sees vastly more lying on the right as he evolves further left.
Of course, Krugman hasn't moved to the left, and therein lies the tragedy: that he is seen by these people as "liberal". Throughout the comments Krugman's attackers go after him for what they don't seem to realize is a (real) conservative answer to Social Security; I have criticisms of it, too, but I at least know that the probem with it is that he's not willing to look at it as a liberal. (Look, folks, raising the retirement age only works if you can ensure that people will remain as healthy, functional, and employable after they are 65 as they were before. In real life, this doesn't usually happen to most folks - and that's especially the case for people who are stuck in low-end physical labor.)
DC Hoo says:
My goal in taxation is to establish a system that gives people the best chance to better themselves. Everyone agrees that taxes are costs that discourage more work, earning and investing. When you have progressive taxation, you place an additional hurdle for someone to cross in climbing the ladder of success.
Who is this "everyone" who agrees that taxes are only costs that discourage more work, earning and investing? This is an extremely narrow understanding of how taxes operate and what can be done with them. In fact, taxes sometimes encourage and facilitate these things rather than hindering them. Nor can it honestly be said that progressive taxation necessarily puts much of hurdle in the way of "climbing the ladder of success" - and certainly the benefits of progressive taxation do a great deal more to clear your path upward. (Quite frankly, if a little bit of progressive taxation is all that stops you from getting up that ladder, you'd be back down to a lower rung as soon as the next economic fluctuation comes along, anyway.) And, as other posters observe, comparative studies show upward income mobility in the US to be no better - and perhaps lower - than it is in the more highly-regulated and progressively-taxed western European countries.
In a later comment, DC Hoo says:
Everytime someone's marginal tax rate increases their incentive to work an extra or save more declines. Someone could decide that 31% isn't high enough to stop working while someone else could decide that 15% was too high. So even changing from the 10-15% bracket produces negative incentives. That's the problem with progressive taxation.
Is it? We're talking about top marginal rates - money made by people who won't even notice if it's gone. They don't need it to live, and they don't even need it to live large. They may be working to be able to say they make even more money, but they aren't working for the money itself. And, remember, they kept working even when the top marginal rate was 90%. So, no, this isn't even remotely believable; no one stops working just because their top marginal rate is higher. They just kvetch more about what they regard as a point of principle.
Elsewhere at CalPundit, Kevin also provides a map of which states pay in more than they get out of the Fed, and vice versa, with a discussion of the free-loader states, and also a reminder of what we mean when we talk about Bush lies. Oh, and here's another one. 13:17 BST
Blogging is light because...
...there's just a helluva lot on the table this week, between doctors and FAC and extra work and other stuff, so I'm losing a lot of keyboard time. Meanwhile, go read Kathryn Cramer on What Republican Strategists Want the Democratic Faithful to Know (and, of course, the Shorter David Brooks at BusyBusyBusy). And Tapped points to a Sean Wilentz piece on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision halting the California recall based on the Supreme Court's reasoning in Bush v. Gore (and let's see if the Supremes reverse it). And LiberalOasis says "The Bushies are learning that they can't say whatever they feel like anymore." And Kos has the dope on who recent polls show as the real Democratic front-runner. And Pandagon taking Saletan apart for pretending that the Democrats are worse than the Republicans. See, there's plenty to read. 12:12 BST
Tuesday, 16 September 2003
From the annals of the Bush Crime Family
When I came back yesterday I had a brief moment to check Atrios before having to do something else and noticed the horrifying news that L. Jean Lewis had been appointed as chief of staff in "the traditionally nonpartisan Defense Department’s inspector general office." I didn't have to read further to know why Atrios was using extreme language (and why MWO has the red light flashing). Even more than Jeff Gerth, Lewis is the woman who created the phony Whitewater scandal. Lewis abused her position at the Resolution Trust Corporation to illegally push the Whitewater clean-up forward in hopes of affecting the 1992 presidential election. She had no qualifications for the RTC job and her current resume now includes this partisan corruption, and then:
At the time Starr took over the independent counsel's job in August 1994, Lewis was also being investigated by the RTC's inspector general for the above infractions as well as several others -- including illegal leaks of confidential financial records to the press and using her government office to market a line of "Presidential BITCH" T-Shirts and coffee mugs mocking the first lady. One of Starr's first actions as independent counsel was to assume control of that investigation. Nothing has been heard from the independent counsel's office regarding L. Jean Lewis since that day. Perhaps it is time for the bulldog scandal hunters in the press corps to ask Starr why that is.
Appointing an operative like this to the job of investigating corruption in the awarding of Defense contracts can ONLY mean one thing: THEY ARE STEALING MONEY. The Party knows it is operating with impunity now, and is becoming more overt and blatant with its corrupt practices. Just two more examples: The Party appoints CONVICTED FELONS John Poindexter and Elliott Abrams to key positions.
How much of the Defense budget is being funneled straight into the pockets of the Bush Crime Family? (Haliburton, Carlyle Group, etc.) How much is being funneled into The Party. (Remember, Bush is raising $170 million to campaign during the PRIMARIES - even though he has NO OPPOSITION.)
Here is the action question -- What are you doing about this? Are you telling people? Are you writing to people and letting them know they can get news at websites like BuzzFlash and Seeing the Forest? Are you registering people to vote? Have you committed to bring at least one new voter to the polls?
Those of you who've already read Conason, Lyons, and Toobin on the subject already know the woman's infamous history. Those who don't can be grateful that Atrios, David Neiwert and MWO have dug up the background so you don't have to. Go read it now, and then take Dave's suggestions to heart. 10:42 BST
Big stuff
Ampersand looks at some of the problems with the defense of copyright that isn't a defense at all, and the libertarian error of believing that there can be any symmetry between aspiring artists and record companies in making contracts.
Washington Post Ombudsman Michael Getler comes back from his holiday and addresses a certain little subject, all too briefly: A Style story Aug. 8 by Ann Gerhart about Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Kennedys referred to the "grave disarray of the Democrat Party." A slew of readers sent incensed messages pointing out that the correct name is Democratic Party. The Post chose not to run a correction; a mistake, in my view, compounding the initial mistake. The construction used in the story is viewed by some as a pejorative used by some Republicans, and letting it stand gives ammunition to those who say they see bias in the paper. I'm pleased to know that "a slew" of readers did indeed complain, but I'm inclined to write to him and say this ain't good enough.
Nathan Newman is having a little tiff with Tapped on the subject of unions. Tapped still doesn't appear to get that unions serve you in your job even if you aren't in a union; where unions are strongest, so are state and local worker protections for everyone. Also, a bit of good news in Congress.
You should be reading Ruminate This anyway, but just in case you were wondering how to phone the free Congressional switchboard to make your views known, don't forget that Lisa now has the number (1-800-839-5276) at the top of her page.
I think I've mentioned before that perhaps the most important observation in the 1990 Home Office report on pornography was that, for all that people claimed to know just how men are affected by seeing sexual material, no one had ever done any studies on how men use porn or what they think about it. This was such an obvious gap that, of course, lots of people then did studies on it, right? Um, no. And when David Loftus decided it was something that ought to be done, he could find no funders for the project. So he did it on the cheap, with all the shortcomings that can be expected from an out-of-pocket project of this nature - but even so, Watching Sex is a good start. 17:32 BST
Reading
Eyeball news: Everyone is ecstatic with how much the vision in my right eye has improved since the op, and I have been discharged. The end.
Josh Marshall talks about how the moderate Republicans aren't staying behind Bush on the elimination of overtime, and how this is likely a signal of his political weaknesses in other areas, too. 17:17 BST
Sunday, 14 September 2003
Advice
Don't assume that policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated goals. Do some homework to discover the real goals. Don't assume that the usual rules of politics apply. Expect a revolutionary power to respond to criticism by attacking. Don't think that there's a limit to a revolutionary power's objectives.
Dr. Plokta led me astray: He invited us to join him in a drink for his 40th birthday at a place that serves cocktails named after the Seven Deadly Sins. I asked what he was drinking and he said, "Envy." "I want one," I said. Later I had Sloth. The former tasted like an Andes chocolate mint but there was too much booze in it for my taste. Sloth was milder and tasted like, well, a bunch of chocolate and cream, although it also contained Bacardi. I don't really drink much so I was a bit stumbly on the way home. Mike, who also doesn't drink much, had already had five different sins, so I bet he was even stumblier.
Al Franken wonders just how religious Bush really is: And we tracked down the transcript and Bush was totally defensive and it seemed to me from the transcript that he really didn't read the Bible every day. He just said he did –- which is, like, a very weird thing to lie about.
NME invites you to watch the video of Johnny Cash doing Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" here.
This obituary for John Ritter doesn't mention it, but of course he put on a great performance as Ted the Robot in Buffy.
I see Gary Farber is posting again after an absence of more than a month. Hasn't come to his senses yet, either.
Scoobie Davis links another fun-filled Jack Chick tract, and while you're there you might want to read Scoobie's reaction to Bill O'Reilly's complaint about "smear culture".
I learn from Demagogue that Alabama Governor Bob Riley has his own Ten Commandments, in the form of a plaque. The Birmingham News says, "The state Historical Commission installed the panel display in the old Supreme Court library room in the Capitol. Riley said it is similar to displays in the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Capitol and it has the blessing of Attorney General Bill Pryor." Not good enough for the ever-popular Roy Moore, who said: "To put things around the Ten Commandments and secularize it is to deny the greatness of God." (Check out the story on Timothy Lynch's Ashcroft article, too.)
Someone please help Elayne with this. It's rendering her page a real pain in the tail to read. 1:06 BST
You've really got to read this Paul Krugman article: I don't use the word ''crusade'' lightly. The advocates of tax cuts are relentless, even fanatical. An indication of the movement's fervor -- and of its political power -- came during the Iraq war. War is expensive and is almost always accompanied by tax increases. But not in 2003. ''Nothing is more important in the face of a war,'' declared Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, ''than cutting taxes.'' And sure enough, taxes were cut, not just in a time of war but also in the face of record budget deficits. Nor will it be easy to reverse those tax cuts: the tax-cut movement has convinced many Americans -- like Tinsley -- that everybody still pays far too much in taxes.
Ken MacLeod with a reminder that the US still can't seem to kick the Mujahadeen habit: Apart from the Chechen rebels (not classified as a terrorist organisation as late as 2001, and currently holed up in the former Soviet and now US sock-puppet state of Georgia) right now the US has a cosy relationship with a gang of anti-Iranian muj terrorists in the north of Iraq, and with another gang of pro-Iranian muj terrorists in the south (where, according to Riverbend, they've been given the job of guarding the border with Iran).
Moral equivalence watch: Matt Singer is accused of partisanship: Tom Delay is, in my mind, one of the most offensive figures in the history of Washington politics. When I raised that with several Republicans on my campus, their response was to say, "Well, what about Daschle then?" 13:01 BST
Speaking of all the important things our government needs to do in order to protect us, it appears they are changing the Oath of Allegiance that naturalized citizens recite. Here it is, as explained by David Scott Marley at Scratchings:
The spooky part is that the line
... I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic ...
is being altered to
Where and if lawfully required, I further commit myself to defend the Constitution and laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic ...
Huh? Why the qualifier? Just why does our Department of Homeland Security want to put limits on the defense of our Constitution?
Okay, dumb question.
My god, the last thing they want anyone to do is support the Constitution. (Via Electrolite sidelights.) 13:24 BST
It's everyone's fault but theirs. 'The terrorists', domestic enemies, cultural declension, the French, perhaps tomorrow the decline of reading, the end of corporal punishment in the schools, permissive parenting, bad posture, rock 'n roll, space aliens. The administration is choking on its own lies and evasions. And we have to bail them out because the ship of state is our ship.
"I guess insulting much of the world and then asking for help wasn't such a great idea," says Angry Bear, along with another list of things gone wrong. It's enough to make you wonder if David Icke doesn't have a point after all.
I want the old future back, 'cause this one bites. 12:48 BST
In Ashcroft's America
As you may recall, our Attorney General of Integrity, in order to keep us safe from terrorism, has insisted on persecuting people who are simply not to his taste.Peace Tree Farm recaps:
Dubya went to Columbia SC for a speech on October 24, 2002.
Amongst the crowd of Bush supporters assembed near the site of the speech at the local airport was longtime peace advocate
[Brett] Bursey.
When Bursey held up his "No War for Oil" sign prior to the event, he was arrested by local authorities for trespassing.
Those charges were soon dropped, but in the late spring of 2003, on the insistence of the Attorney General himself, South Carolina federal prosecutor Strom Thurmond Jr. indicted Bursey under an obscure statute having to do with
entering a restricted area near the president.
This prosecutorial adventure drew attention even in the halls of Congress, prompting Barney Frank and 10 other House members to write a letter of protest and consternation to Herr Ashcroft.
The federal magistrate in South Carolina, in ordering a continuance to obtain further discovery, also denied Bursey a jury trial.
The new news is that the judge in the case is insisting that the prosecution provide any information about security arrangements that might be useful in the preparation of the defense case. The prosecution pretends it has no information that could be useful to the defense. The judge came as close to laughing this claim out of court as decorum permits.
In between being outraged at yet another insult to our Constitution, I wonder why the whole of Congress has not yet risen up against this creep's incredible propensity for wasting our resources on things that, even seen in the best light, are trivia. People who were known associates of Al Qaeda were flown out of the country without being questioned as soon as the flight ban was lifted, but the courts should be concerning themselves with people who hold up peace signs. Not to mention those people dying of disease who smoke a bit of pot to ease their pain. Oh, yeah, and hookers, let's not forget them. I mean, whoa, they are a real threat to security, eh? But not as big a threat as Ashcroft is. 12:00 BST
Atrios remembers common sense: Two years later, I'm really fed up with the idea that asking questions about 9/11 is being a 'conspiracy theorist.' There is a conspiracy out there - a conspiracy to not let people find out just what the hell happened and why. The degree to which the conservatarians get uncomfortable when things are brought up makes it clear they know there's something stinky going on.
This came to Love graphically in 1997 when Maude Jones, a 30-year-old London woman, called him begging help to obtain Taxol. The drug could have cured her breast cancer, but her NHS region did not prescribe it because of its stratospheric cost.
There is no patent on Taxol. The U.S. government discovered it. But Bristol-Myers, because it performed minor work calculating dosage levels, holds the intellectual property rights on dose-related data, even though the data was originally collected by government. Even without a patent, Britain's data protection laws give Bristol-Myers lock-up control on Taxol in the UK for ten years.
Bristol-Myers takes no chances with its cancer monopoly. Taxol comes from the yew tree. While Western drug companies have long argued that rainforest plants are theirs for the taking without paying royalties, Bristol-Myers obtained from Congress the exclusive right to harvest yew trees on U.S. government lands, about the only place it grows on the planet. For these public assets, B-M paid nothing.
But Maude Jones paid. Ultimately, the company was shamed into offering her the medicine for free -- if she moved to America. However, doctors concluded the offer was probably too late. As her family already faced bankruptcy, Maude (not her real name) phoned Love to say she had chosen to die.
From her death, Love hoped South Africans, Americans and Europeans would discover, "a helpful solidarity." In AIDS and breast cancer, the stricken North and South share a horrific commonality as the new landless peasantry in the apartheid of intellectual property rights.
This is what the pharmaceutical houses are really talking about when they whine about the huge costs of research and development for new drugs that force them to charge such high prices. You've already paid for those drugs with your taxes, and they are made from your property, but by some magic they own the right to let you die. 17:31 BST
Americans didn't pay much attention to politics in the '90s, and we're all paying for it now. (I'm as guilty as the next idiot.) It really is true: If you don't remember history, it comes back to bite you -- hard.
Comics from the '80s might not seem like the best place to start for historical perspective, but indulge me for a minute. In our last column, we discussed Howard Chaykin's ground-breaking American Flagg! series, which combined an innovative home-base setting -- the Chicago "PlexMall" living/working/shopping quarters -- with an international political backdrop.
The second Flagg! storyline took Reuben Flagg to Brazil where, in one bit of casual satire, he passed a street sign labelled "United Fruit Avenue." In issue #11, a reader wrote in to complain about Chaykin's perceived homophobia, and cited the sign (calling it "United Fruit Boulevard") as an example. Editor Mike Gold replied:
"I have a policy of not explaining jokes: no sophisticated gag in any of our books is likely to be understood by our entire readership. But the point is, you missed the point entirely with 'United Fruit Boulevard.'" [...] Allen Dulles, United Fruit trustee and CIA head. The twisting of facts to make Arbenz's Guatemala seem closely allied to the Soviet Union. The rapid invasion of a small country. The use of American troops to pursue a private company's agenda. Huge amounts of American money pouring into the small country post-invasion.
Is any of this sounding familiar yet? [...] There's no easy way out of Iraq, now. If we pull our troops out, we condemn the country to anarchy, civil war, and a continued existence as the haven for anti-American terrorists -- a situation we ourselves have created with our arrogance and our uninvited invasion. If we stay, we're a constant occupying presence for the Iraqis to hate, and the terrorists to stage attacks against.
But none of that matters to United Fruit -- I mean, to Halliburton. They get the lucrative contracts and, eventually, control of the oil flow, either way. Regardless of what kind of corrupt, anticompetitive process got them those contracts in the first place. Regardless, even, of whether they actually do the jobs they're contracted for, and whether our exhausted, relief-starved soldiers get food and water.
If it doesn't matter to Halliburton, it doesn't matter to Dick Cheney. The American media are always careful to note that Cheney stepped down as Halliburton's chief executive when he decided to run for Vice-President. But his tax returns show that he still receives "deferred compensation" from them -- between $100,000 and $1 million per year. In my book, that's an employee, and a pretty highly placed one at that.
And if it doesn't matter to Dick Cheney, it doesn't matter to George W. Bush.
Make no mistake: this is big corporations using the government to fight their wars. It's an administration filling its friends' pockets and strutting arrogantly around the globe, while ruining our nation's economy. It's legalized graft; it's blood spilled to make the richest few even richer. It's war profiteering.
Moore ends with a call to arms for more politically-oriented entertainment, and says comics are the perfect medium for it:
So let's make some noise.
'Cause I don't know about you, but I don't want the Iraqi people living in United Fruit's Guatemala. And I sure as hell don't want to live in Dick Cheney's private PlexMall.
I'd classify this piece as Must Read, so go do it. You need to know. 20:52 BST
Things to read
From Drug War Rant, more on police corruption in the drug war, prosecutorial abuse, and this: Sorry, we didn't mean to include ourselves. Officials in Colfax, Illinois voted to drug test all city employees. When they realized that would include the board members, they voted to exempt themselves. What few consider is that, except in safety critical occupations, drug testing is ineffective, often counter-productive, and insulting. And drug testing schemes do not test for workplace impairment. If I was a Colfax city employee, I would deliver my clean urine sample to each of the board members individually, along with my resignation.
The introduction to an interview with Jello Biafra reminds us of his political career: A prankster, he ran against Diane Feinstein for mayor of San Francisco in 1979 on a platform that included banning cars from city limits, making police run for reelection in the neighborhoods they patrolled, and establishing a "Board of Bribery" in an attempt to set standard public rates. He came in fourth out of ten. In 2000, Biafra was drafted for the Green Party Presidential primary and chose Mumia Abu-Jamal as his running mate. He ended up encouraging supporters to vote for Nader, and he got the concept of a "maximum wage" debated on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. He says his mission is to help "bring the spirit of punk rock and roll into the Greens--make the party rock." 18:42 BST
Bush bites man
Best of the Blogs has a lot of fascinating stuff up there, like this:
Shrub Bush looked like a man who just woke up with a bad hangover in a trailer park outside Gopher Poop, Arizona to find himself married to a one-legged hooker named Irma with eight kids, a mangy German Shepherd and a trailer mortgage. How in God's name did things get this bad, his beady little eyes seem to be saying? Cheney said he was fixing me up with a "pushover" but I should have paid more attention. And it was definitely a mistake to let Rummy pick up the check; everybody knows you don't get much for ten bucks these days.
It's kind of sad in a way to see a man who has spent his entire life as a pampered underachiever suddenly realize that he has big, big grownup problems of his own making that no one can fix for him. For someone who is accustomed to playing cards with people who deliberately let him win, this will not be easy. Picking up after himself has never been Shrub's best thing.
But, there our hero was last night, all super-serious, the smirk and swagger conspicuously missing, admitting that everything, every single word, every tiny little syllable he has said so far on the subject of Iraq has either been wrong or an outright lie.
Conservatives who were thrilled by the New York Times decision to make David Brooks, senior editor of The Weekly Standard, a regular Tuesday columnist, opposite Paul Krugman, may be a little less excited after reading his inaugural column. He writes about the "infuriating" way the Bush administration changes it mind without ever admitting it.
And they found an editorial at the NYT discussing Presidential Character - or, in George Bush's case, a lack thereof. The Times takes him apart pretty good, but they are still pulling their punches and refusing to face the obvious:
It is useful at times like this to look back on the road that brought a president into trouble and try to divide bad luck from bad guesses, and both from the wrong turns that stem from the innate nature of the presidency itself. In the case of Iraq, there is a little of each. Early in his term, Mr. Bush was stuck with trouble that was not of his making, including both the terrorist attack and the sinking economy. His judgment about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq appears to have been wrong — and, worse, hyped. But over all, it was a bad guess that was shared by intelligence experts from the Clinton administration and many allies.
Excuse me? A bad guess or bad luck?
This is bloody war we're talking about here, you don't just guess whether it's a good idea!
Sure, a lot of people might have thought Saddam had WMD - but that's what the weapons inspections were for. And anyway, by the time Bush actually launched the invasion, some of us had had time to think about it and realized that he couldn't have nukes (or we'd already know), and if he'd had chemical or biological weapons, they were past their sell-by date. Add that to the fact that you have to invent evidence to make the damn thing sound plausible, plus the fact that no one else really wants to have anything to do with it, and you don't need to guess; you already know invading is a bad idea.
And who on earth needs to "guess" whether, if we invade Iraq and take it over, the Iraqis will thank us? Who needs to guess whether they wanted us to take over their oil? Who needs to guess whether they would be singing our praises if we went in there, wrecked their infrastructure, and slashed their salaries?
Who knows, maybe BushCo really believed our victims would welcome us with open arms, but that would only be testimony to their incredible stupidity. Meanwhile, they couldn't even agree among themselves why we were invading, and they still won't own up to why they actually did it.
You certainly can't call it "bad luck" that Saddam didn't actually have a stronger army and an arsenal that could cream Israel in 45 minutes, either. Bush was willing to risk the lives of thousands, maybe millions of people, on, um, a guess and a coin-toss? And that's okay? Thousands of people have been killed and many more horrifically wounded in a war that never had to happen. I'm sorry, this can't just be dismissed as "a bad guess." (Oh, and nice try about 9/11, but you're in denial if you think Bush's security policies didn't make it a whole lot more likely than it was under his predecessor.) 17:17 BST
Great lines
From the Democratic debate:
Sharpton on Bush not finding Osama: "This guy has out more videos than a rock star, but George Bush's intelligence agencies can't find him."
Moderator: Governor Dean, there is some concern that due to Vermont's ethnic make-up, you won't be able to understand concerns of minorities, particularly black people.
Dean: If the percentage of minorities in ones state predicts how well they connect with minorities, Trent Lott would be Martin Luther King.
Unfortunately, we still had more of Lieberman bashing Dean (who rose to the occasion, I'm pleased to say) and various bits of infighting, but everyone tore a piece out of Bush, even Lieberman. And it was on Fox! 15:29 BST
Liberal media watch
Atrios, having a tiff with Tapped about how the media treats "racial identity", notes that, "Salon is the only media outlet I've seen which has dared to address the racial politics of the Texas redistrcting shenanigans head on, while MEChA is now a household word. There's something wrong here." Atrios is absolutely on the right side of this one, folks.
Nigel Richardson admits he was snowed by anti-Michael Moore smears, but he's all better now. He also answers the question of whether Moore is the left's equivalent to Ann Coulter: Moore gets angry because kids get shot, Coulter gets angry because liberals get to write for newspapers. Yeah, they're really both as bad as each other....
Teresa Nielsen Hayden puts it bluntly: I'm not going to call you a sucker for voting for him. I'm telling you that he thinks you're a sucker. That's when he thinks about you at all, which isn't often. 16:01 BST
DINO
Zell Miller has written a book, which appears to be about how the Democratic Party is too liberal. He says:
Through an analysis of the campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Mr. Miller questions whether the Democratic Party can any longer field a serious presidential challenge.
Bra of the week: I don't actually want one of these (too impractical, even in my most whimsical mood, but I'll keep it in mind for after I win the lottery); however, I thought it looked sexy, and of course it coordinates nicely with the fabulous fruits-of-the-forest Sideshow color scheme. But check out the picture of the full cup version, not because of the bra (which I didn't like as much), but for the interesting decoration the model is wearing.
Drug War Rant finds out why government studies of marijuana's medical usefulness always seem to get negative results; here is an interesting quote:
