Daily Show: Debate between George W. Bush and George W. Bush (Real video).

Charlie is the second person I've noticed in the last 24 hours remarking on the parallels between what's going on in Iraq and Bloody Sunday. You'll excuse me if I'm not elated yet by our glorious victory.

I've mentioned Leon Holmes before, but just in case you've forgotten what a fruitcake Bush has nominated to the court, check out Ruminate This for more.

Aunt Lowey's Handy-Dandy Blog has good news for tea-drinkers.

Tim Dunlop responded to the news last week with the delightful headline, Administration officals confirm that Chomsky was correct:

We were told pretty regularly in the run up to war that arguing with the President, questioning the motives of the Administration, speaking out against the war, or arguing in favour of other, non-war, approaches was unpatriotic.

What word do we now use to describe the fact that the reasons given publicly for invading Iraq were false? Gee, I don't know, what do we call it when the Administration lies to the people in order to stage a war...how about impeachable?
[...]
So what Chomsky had gleaned from largely unheralded sources is now being confirmed by Administration officials via a major media outlet. Which is not to say that I agree with every inference Chomsky makes. And it is interesting to note that concern at such actions has come from rather more mainstream sources: the ABC article quotes, for instance, former CIA director, James Woolsey saying, "I don't think you should go to war to set examples or send messages."

Read the whole thing.

In The Guardian, Polly Toynebee senses a threat:

The threat to our TV from this corrupter of politicians

Now is the time for the Lords to earn its ermine. There are few occasions when its lack of democratic legitimacy is an advantage - but the communications bill is one. Over the next weeks, the Lords can exercise its duty to protect the citizens against the shabbier venalities of democracy. (Though that may not be what Tony Blair meant when he chose to leave them 100% unelected).

With both Labour and Conservative leaders in humiliating thrall to the menacing might of Rupert Murdoch, this is the legitimate time for the unelected Lords to rebel against the elected Commons and stop Murdoch seizing yet another slab of the British media.

Yesterday saw the opening skirmishes over the communications bill: the Lords will vote on it in a few weeks. This vast and baggy bill, packed with important but uncontentious technicalities, contains two momentous threats to the future quality of broadcasting. The key clauses have one sole function - to remove all obstacles to Murdoch seizing Channel 5, overshadowing ITV and, within a short time, providing the main competition to the BBC. The bill abolishes the requirement for owners of TV companies to be British or EU citizens. (Murdoch took US nationality to take over Fox TV: the US bans foreign ownership.)

The other crucial clause removes existing laws that prohibit anyone who owns 20% or more of newspaper readership from buying into TV. Murdoch already owns over 40% of Britain's newspaper readership, as well as his mighty Sky satellite empire.

There are a lot of things about America that Britons wish they had, but wall-to-wall Murdoch is not one of them. Personally, I kinda like Channel 5 the way it is.

The lovely Charles Pierce sat in for Alterman again, and this time he is looking at Sid Blumenthal.

The Daily Howler was pretty disgusted with Diane Sawyer's interview with the Dixie Chicks in which she kept hectoring them to take it all back, and also links to this article in Slate, in which Jim Lewis says:

For what it's worth, I have profoundly mixed feelings about the war, and if I were to sit down with Natalie Maines, I'm sure we'd have much to disagree about. But, just so you know, I'm proud that the Dixie Chicks are from Texas. What's more, I'm embarrassed that Diane Sawyer is a member of my profession.

I'm grateful that the Dixie Chicks were over here reminding the British that not all Americans are idiots.

Troops out of Saudi Arabia
America has begun a historic reshaping of its presence in the Middle East, announcing a halt to active military operations in Saudi Arabia and the removal of most of its forces within weeks.

I figure to make it exactly four weeks: Tomorrow around noon I'm going to stand up straight, do some neck exercises, and spend about an hour and a half in the shower washing my hair. That's right, I haven't been able to wash my hair for four weeks. I have it twisted up so I don't have to cope with it, but it's such a sin to treat beautiful hair this way, I can't stand it. Looking in the mirror is a trauma (made even worse by the fact that gravity is at its most unkind, cosmetically speaking, when you are facing the floor). I still can't see much through the bubble, which still won't dissipate for another couple weeks or so, but it will be such a relief to have my hair sweeping across my back again. Well, of course, it will be an even bigger relief to be able to lift my head up.

And then I will put the screen back on top of my PC and go back to posting at The Sideshow.

Last night I made the mistake of reading Talk Left without making sure I had some Fats Waller in the drive first. It all sent me to bed with bad dreams. Like this post predicting Senate confirmation of right-wing fruitcake Jeffrey Sutton. And yeah, they did it. Why? If they can filibuster Owens, why not Sutton as well? I can't help the feeling that these guys still think it's just a game - they can refuse to confirm Estrada and Owens because of some procedural excuses about how they didn't play the game correctly, but when they get someone who is open about how unsuitable for the job he is, they just go, "Oh, okay." Sure, they voted against him, but they knew damn well that wasn't gonna be enough.

Then there is the article on revoking attorney-client privilege. Actually, it's worse than that - it's revoking the right of unpopular people to have legal representation:

Lynne Stewart, a New York human-rights lawyer with a taste for radical politics, is accustomed to representing unpopular clients.
She never dreamed it would become illegal.

Stewart was in Seattle on Monday as part of a national campaign to drum up support—not for a client, but for her own case. Stewart was a member of the court-appointed defense team for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in connection with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. After his conviction, Stewart continued as one of the lawyers representing Abdel Rahman. The Seattle visit came just over a year after her arrest April 8, 2002, when she was taken from her home without warning. Federal agents combed through her office, seizing files on all of her cases, and Attorney General John Ashcroft proudly announced that Stewart had been charged in a four-count criminal indictment with aiding and abetting a terrorist organization—solely for her work in representing Abdel Rahman.

Stewart's case, now winding its way through pretrial motions toward a January trial, stands as a critical test for the Bush administration's newly reserved right to violate lawyer-client confidentiality in order to wage the war on terror. It also has a significant First Amendment component. Stewart's indictment charges her with discussing Abdel Rahman's case with a Reuters reporter—even though no gag order barred her from doing so; with talking while an interpreter was speaking with her client during a consultation in his prison cell, thereby preventing the Justice Department from taping their conversation in Arabic; and with allowing the interpreter and client to speak in Arabic about nonlegal matters. If convicted, she faces 40 years in prison.

THE CHARGES STRIKE at the heart of the U.S. Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantee that all people accused of a crime are entitled to effective representation by an attorney. Courts have long held that attorney-client confidentiality is essential to that right; without the ability to speak freely about what they have, and have not, done, defendants are severely impaired from learning their legal status and options, and attorneys cannot mount the best defense. But Stewart's case has broader implications. In the future, attorneys will be less willing to represent clients like Abdel Rahman.

And since Stewart's indictment, Ashcroft has gone even further, declaring noncitizens, and later, U.S. citizens as well, "enemy noncombatants" so as to hold them indefinitely without charges, denying access to any attorney at all.

There's yet another item to add to my I Wasn't Paranoid Enough file. Oh, and this doesn't look much like America, either.

There's a post over at Pandagon that kinda makes me inarticulate with fury:

Saddam Paid Better

This story from the London Times is telling. Our goal in Iraq is nation-building, but the people of Iraq will not simply accept "slightly better than Saddam" as an end target. Or, in this case, slightly worse than Saddam.

The wages of skilled workers were to be cut to $22 (£13.80) a month, those of the unskilled to $10. Graduates and trained professionals, who had been working as translators and drivers for about £1.30 a day, found themselves being paid 50p or less. The effect was immediate: less than three weeks after liberating Iraq’s second-largest city, the British forces had a strike on their hands.

The pay was being cut to conform with standards imposed across Iraq by the United States. “This is cruelty,” Vahan Gregor, a civil engineer who used to have his own company, said. “The rate is not even enough to pay for the lift into work. A packet of decent cigarettes costs more than a day’s pay. A packet of nappies is one month! Is this fair? Even under Saddam, it was better than this.”

The more we get into the "freedom" part of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, the less confidence I have that we can deliver on that promise.

“I am so disappointed with the British,” Ahmed Ali, a former geography teacher who has been working for the UK force, said. “If you make an agreement, you should keep to it — not reduce pay after one week. Mr Bush talked so much about freedom and how we would live in great conditions after the war. Well, that was all bullshit.”

That's a freakin' fantastic sentiment.

I could rant for pages if I only knew where to start.

Richard Cohen joins William Raspberry on the "Gee, did I get fooled?" wagon.

American Stranger has now set up a temporary site while working on a redesign of blah3.

The weekly Sunday talk-show breakdown at Liberal Oasis is heartening. First there's Lincoln Chafee saying this on Face the Nation:

…I'm trying to figure out why these conservatives are pushing the bigger and bigger tax cuts when traditionally conservatives have been opposed to deficits.

And all I can figure is that if we get these big deficits, then the pressure will be on to strangle…what is called the “wasteful social spending.”

Whether it's Section 8 [housing for the poor] or Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security [or] Head Start programs or Pell grants.

And I think that's the tactic. Once we get these deficits, then we can attack these so-called wasteful social spending programs…

[But] I think these social programs have made a lot of people's lives a great deal better.

(Why is that guy a Republican?)

Then there's Senator Bob Graham on This Week doing exactly what Democrats should have been doing all along:

We have virtually abandoned the war on terrorism.

We have withdrawn military intelligence capabilities from Afghanistan, and because of that, Al Qaeda has been able to regroup……we have not taken on the A-Team of [terrorism] -- Hezbollah, [Hamas and Islamic Jihad] -- in Syria and Lebanon…

…we have allowed our alliances, which are going to be absolutely critical to winning the war on terrorism, to disintegrate.

I don't think that’s a very impressive national security record.

That's what we need to hear!

A letter at Altercation:

Name: Marie Foster
Hometown: Spokane, WA
I keep holding up my hand to try to get anyone’s attention to the recent rules signed by Bush reversing the way that the BLM evaluates our public lands. This was an executive decision that says now that the BLM CAN NOT consider any set asides of public lands for recreation or wildlife preservation or conservation. If any piece of land has commercial value that is what is going to determine how our lands are managed.

Recreation et al is no longer an equal value to extractive ones (mining, logging, grazing etc.)

This is a further move towards privatization of EVERYTHING which is the neoconservative agenda as promoted by people like the CATO institute.

Please! I implore you to use the popularity of your site to publicize this.

There are dozens of things like this going on that most of us simply don't have time to talk about, because there are just so damn many of them.

I learn many things from Charles Kuffner, who refers to a post by Mark Evanier at his cool, new, Movable-Typed site, where he commented on the Tim Robbins/Today issue. Mark is willing to give Today the benefit of the doubt (and I'm not), but he does say:

I just think it's funny that, intentional or not, Robbins got cut off while he was going after Corporate America on NBC, just like a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Tim Robbins got cut off while he was going after Corporate America on NBC.

Diane at Karmalised wants to know how John McCain can have forgotten about North Korea before but now suddenly remembers it and wants to know why no one else has paid attention to it.

All this spin about celebrities having opinions on politics when they are "only" actors and presumably have no more expertise than anyone else has a lot of drawbacks, to be sure - the most obvious one being that, as American citizens, they have every right to say what they think, just like all the other talking heads do. But what really gets me is the idea that all the other talking heads are somehow more qualified. The people who are criticizing Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins are, of course, people who have done no more research into the issues than Sarandon and Robbins have done - in fact, they appear to have done considerably less. Who are O'Reilly or Hannity or Limbaugh to express any opinions on politics? Do they actually know anything? Do they read the Congressional Record every day, comb through legislation, check out the historical background of trends, study peer-reviewed research? Of course they don't - these guys aren't I.F. Stone, y'know.

Let's face it, it's infuriating to watch over and over as the op-ed columnists and political talk-show hosts who have become celebrities (and pull down nice salaries) for supposedly telling us what we don't know actually know far less than we do, and have done far less work to find out, too. They get paid to spout their uninformed opinions - the rest of us have to spend precious time digging out that information for ourselves and do it out of our own pockets as well. First you pay for a television, a radio, newspaper subscriptions and what have you in order to learn this stuff, and then you still have to go out and do research to find out what's really going on.

George F. Will's son once dragged him to a Springsteen concert. (As I recall, this was during the Born in the USA tour.) He couldn't avoid being impressed by the energy of Springsteen on stage. So without doing a lick of research, without even checking out Springsteen's lyrics, he wrote a whole column about how Bruce was the voice of Reagan's America. It apparently hadn't crossed his mind that Springsteen might have had other views - he couldn't even bother to look. Of course, Will was wrong.

I'm invited to appear on talk shows from time to time, not because of my expertise so much as because I come from a group with the colorful name of "Feminists Against Censorship". Because the people involved in the production of these shows don't actually know much, they still think that's a counter-intuitive idea. What's really annoying is that I'm often put up against some "expert" who has a degree in psychology who is there to say what the research on pornography "really" says. The problem is that of the two of us, I'm the only one who has read the research. The interviewers will talk to me about my personal opinions - they regularly ask me whether I like pornography, as if that mattered when the issue is censorship - but they will ask the professional shrink what the "facts" are. The professional shrink will then regurgitate something they probably read in a newspaper article written by someone who had only talked to anti-pornography activists. It's a rare occasion when I manage to get back in long enough to say something to make clear to the audience that the "expert" doesn't know what he's talking about. So to the presenters and production staff on these shows, someone who has no real knowledge of the subject is the "expert", but the fact that I've actually read the research myself doesn't matter.

Strangely, to the readers of newspapers, the idea that reporters and regular op-ed columnists have real knowledge of what they are writing about - that they have done more to find these things out than someone who isn't paid to do so - really does matter. No one needs to watch the news or buy a paper just to hear gossip from the ignorant, since they can get that down the pub any day of the week. Besides, if we're the ones who are going to do the work of finding that stuff out, how come we're not the ones who are getting paid for it? It's enough to really piss you off.

This is, of course, Bob Somerby's beat, and he's on the case over that Raspberry article I cited earlier - the one where Raspberry admits he was snowed by Colin Powell, and says:

Here, the secretary of state was telling the jury masquerading as the U.N. Security Council, you see the chemical and biological labs at one of the production sites. And here, you notice, the trucks are gone—just hours before the U.N. inspectors are due on the scene. Here are the time-lapse photographs, taken by satellite and spy planes…I believed it—and for much the same reasons I believed the prosecution’s DNA evidence against O.J. Simpson. That is to say, I didn't understand most of it, but I was terribly impressed by the certitude of those who said they did.

If he didn't understand it, what qualified him to be paid to write about whether or not he was convinced by it? Somerby quite rightly says:

That last past is certainly true, by the way; Raspberry did have lots of company. Many Americans were convinced by Powell’s U.N. presentation. But Raspberry is an important columnist at our most important political newspaper. As such, he’s supposed to have better skills, better contacts, and more experience than “hundreds of thousands of Americans.” In fact, those Americans rely on Raspberry’s diligence and expertise—rely on him and others like him to perform the analyses they can't conduct. But even now, if you read his column, the pundit still doesn't mention the specific problems with Powell’s presentations at the U.N.—problems which were publicly examined in February and March. Even now, he doesn't seem up to speed on the debate about what Powell did.

As we've said, we at THE HOWLER have always assumed that Saddam had WMDs. Raspberry now seems to have some doubts—and he seems to have major doubts about Powell. (“Powell’s spellbinding display looks more and more like prosecutorial hokum.”) But it’s hard to believe that this is the way our major analysts actually reason. But as noted: Americans pay a price, every day, for the work of this puzzling crew.

And that price includes a "president" who "won" without getting the requisite votes, who lied during the campaign with impunity and has been doing so ever since, right up to lying us into a diplomatic disaster and a war that has very likely hurt American interests for decades to come, not to mention a stunning loss of our Constitutional rights and our economic security as well. (Thanks to these people, the loss of those museums, libraries, and even lives are not to be treated as having any importance.) Most Americans, who simply don't have the time to research the facts behind "the news", have no idea what's been done to them. It's a pity Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon didn't have regular columns in The Washington Post, or a drive-time radio show, and a seat on Meet the Press, so someone could have told them.

Interview with Roger Ebert:

Ebert: I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class. I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out. If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing. Oddly enough, the people who mostly seem to hear them are the right wing, so that Fox News can put on its ticker tape in Times Square a vile attack on Michael Moore, and Susan Sarandon is a punchline. These are people who are responsible and are saying what they believe. And there are people on the other side who also speak out, and it's the way our country works. You know, if you're good enough to be the best actor of your generation, which is probably what Sean Penn is, you're probably not dumb. And anyone who's ever heard Susan Sarandon speak for a while knows that she's pretty smart. I write op-ed columns for the Chicago Sun-Times, and people send me e-mails saying, "You're a movie critic. You don't know anything about politics." Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.

Q: When the Susan Sarandons and Sean Penns speak out, they do so at some risk to their career options, don't they?

Ebert: There's an interesting pattern going on. When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right. People just tell me to shut up. That's the message: "Shut up. Don't write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?"

Via Smart Remarks.

I just don't get it. Andy Sullivan and his readers seem to be having an epiphany of sorts, but what on earth ever made them think that the Republican Party was the party of tolerance? (Via Smythe's World .)

Toles, on-target again.

An amusing Flash thingy

An amusing cartoon

Pontificator says:

In light of the fact that thousands of poor people are about to lose their health care, I'm really glad we're cutting taxes on the wealthy:

Millions of low-income Americans face the loss of health insurance or sharp cuts in benefits, like coverage for prescription drugs and dental care, under proposals now moving through state legislatures around the country.

State officials and health policy experts say the cuts will increase the number of uninsured, threaten recent progress in covering children and impose severe strains on hospitals, doctors and nursing homes.

But those officials, confronting a third straight year of fiscal crisis, say they have no choice but to rein in Medicaid, the fast-growing program that provides health insurance for 50 million people.

Many state officials are pleading for federal help as they face an array of painful trade-offs, often pitting the needs of impoverished elderly people for prescription drugs and long-term care against those of low-income families seeking basic health coverage.

This is payback for Bush's campaign contributors, and Republican class warfare against the poor. As Bush pays off his buddies at Halliburton and the Hair Club for Growth (or whatever the latest trendy right wing business lobbying group is called), the poor , having already had their votes stolen in 2000, now get their health care stolen as well. [...]
I say, let's filibuster the whole damn tax cut.

Matthew Langer at Untelevised writes:

What's better: a tax and spend liberal, or a tax cut and go fuck yourself conservative? Obey gets it right below.

When the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dedicated its new emergency operations center this month, it bore the name of a surprising benefactor — Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus.

The reason: Almost two years into a massive war on terrorism, having faced one public health threat in the anthrax attacks of 2001 and facing another in a contagious, pneumonia-like disease called SARS, the federal government was unable to equip the center in a timely fashion on its own.

So it had to turn to a private donor for nearly $4 million.
[...]
"They are so desperate to preserve their budget-busting tax cuts that they are looking for places to shortchange," said Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

I just left this comment over at Gary Hart's weblog

I'm surprised at the way Democrats have failed to take control of the "Homeland Security" issue, given that the administration has fallen down on it entirely. I'd like to see a forthright critique of the way the White House program has given short shrift to our first-responders (e.g. firefighters) while instituting and encouraging numerous policies that at best make our lives more annoying and at worst deprive us of our Constitutional rights. Someone needs to ask why this administration cuts veterans' benefits on the one hand while "securing" our borders by putting peacenicks and Green Party activists on "no-fly" lists.

The Republican Party shouldn't be allowed to get away with pretending that incessant military flexing is an appropriate - or effective - substitute for on-the-ground attention to what known fundamentalist terrorists (whether Islamist or far-right Christianist) are up to in the United States. This is an administration that forbade our intelligence services the freedom to investigate Al Qaeda; "detaining" people merely because their families come from Muslim countries is not going to fix the problem.

From the moment Bush entered the White House, he has embarked on a program of weakening American security on every front, including protecting us from terrorism. He needs to be called on it.

While we all realize how difficult it is these days for anyone to get a message out through the right-wing gatekeeper media we now have, it's nevertheless shameful that the Democrats have actually done so little to hammer the point that Bush's "national security" program has left us less secure than ever. Since they like to repeat the mantra of "9/11" with such frequency, we should never miss a chance to demand an answer to the question of why the FBI and CIA were prevented from pursuing Islamic terrorists at a time when Al Qaeda was known to be plotting something big and allied intelligence all over the world was sending continual warnings and naming names - that the administration ignored.

The Republicans used to make continual cracks about how Clinton's response to terrorism was just to drop a bomb in the desert or fire up some camel's ass. Well, dropping a lot more bombs on a desert and sending thousands of troops to climb up some camel's ass isn't such a big improvement when you get right down to it - nor is destroying our Constitution. Democratic campaigners who can't be bothered to say so are making a big mistake.

When Rush speaks, there's more evidence for David Neiwert to write about at Orcinus:

One of the lessons I've gleaned from carefully observing the behavior of the American right over the years is that the best indicator of its own real agenda can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left. (Remember how during the Florida fiasco it regularly accused Al Gore of attempting to steal the election through court fiat?) When it accuses liberals of "fascism," it almost always has done so in an effort to obscure its own fascist proclivities -- and it reminds the rest of us just whose footsoldiers are in reality merrily goosestepping down the national garden path.

Julian Sanchez notes something you might want to think about from Will Saletan:

According to the court's statement of facts, the appellant, Ami Smith, "was involved in an incestuous relationship with her paternal uncle," which "began while [she] was still a minor." She "was eighteen years old when charged," "entered a guilty plea to one count of incest and was sentenced to three years supervised probation," for the violation of which she was subsequently sentenced to serve five years in jail. Laws against sexual abuse apply only to the perpetrator. Laws against incest apply in theory to both participants, and in this case they applied in fact. If you want to justify incest laws, don't tell me why Ami Smith's uncle belongs in jail. Tell me why she belongs there, too.

The Talking Dog has a nicely steamed rant about the Bushistas and their lying about WMDs.

Just in case you've been wondering: The IRAQ BODY COUNT Database (via Failure Is Impossible).

Max reminds you:

WITH THE THOUGHTS YOU'D BE THINKIN', YOU COULD BE ANOTHER LINCOLN . . . Yesterday our leader told us that " . . . this nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war." Thus far the cost of the war is estimated at $20 billion. The deficit for Fiscal Year 2003 is projected at $246 billion. Moreover, as a matter of deliberate policy, the President proposes to further increase the deficit this year by close to $40 billion. Over ten years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Bush Budget would reduce surpluses and increase deficits by $2,710 billion. And so it goes.

(By "the President" he really means George W. Bush.)

Dwight Meredith looks at a criticism of Paul Krugman and finds it...dishonest.

Why I love Lisa English

See, this is what happens when you're an American administration that lies through its teeth about everything. You lack the credibility to convince me of your name.

Great post over at Seeing the Forest about the difference between what the Bushies say and what they do:

Bush shows up in New York after 9/11 and promises billions of dollars for reconstruction and for the fire and police departments. It never shows up. Bush says his tax cuts won't cause deficits, as a way of getting Congress to vote to pass the tax cuts. Of course, they caused the biggest deficits in history. Bush does a photo-op at an environmental site, later they cut the funding. Bush talks about being the "Education President" and later cuts funding. Bush talks about patriotism and supporting the troops, then cuts the budget for veterans' benefits. Need I continue? The only relationship between what these guys say and what they do is they say whatever is necessary to trick the public into believing one thing while they do another thing.

Under the Soviet system, people came to realize that they could not trust government sources of news. They learned to look for what was being done. Under Saddam Iraqis learned to trust what they saw instead of what they heard.

By now the pattern is clear. By now we should all be learning not to waste our time and energy refuting their arguments. That's just getting yourself bogged down in the fog and smoke. That's just looking "over there" when they point their finger and shout, "Look over there!" Their "facts" and arguments are just trees. See the forest. The forest is this: they lie. They just lie. They say whatever their polls and focus groups tell them to say. Learn to see only what they do.

I keep meaning to warn those of you who don't look at a lot of weblogs that happen to be on Blogspot that permalinks to articles on other Blogspot blogs are working intermittently at best, and if you click on them and they don't work, the thing to do is go to the main page and scroll down. Permalinks to this weblog, as far as I can tell, aren't working at all. I'm told that the way to fix that is to use the "republish" facility, but when I try that I just get an error message.

Also, I've noticed all week that I keep going to some pages on Blogspot and seeing an earlier version of that page - and then I hit "Refresh" and discover that the page has been updated and for some reason it's giving me a version I've already seen. I know it's a pain in the tail, but you might want to try that before you conclude that a particular weblog hasn't been updated since last time you looked.

Five more days....

If there's anyone left who still hasn't seen Bruce Springsteen's remarks defending the Dixie Chicks, you can find them at his website here, (And if you scroll down the page, you can watch a video of Bruce & the E Street Band doing "Waitin' On Sunny Day").

Find out why there's such resistance in some circles to the Bible as Metaphor at Sisyphus Shrugged. You might also want to check out another good catch of hers, an article she links on Another Unworthy Judicial Nominee.

From Under a Blackened Sky:

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that one can go to extreme lengths to prove a point, but there's a world of difference between going to the library for six hours and emerging with 15 articles to win a five-minute argument in round two, and blowing the shit out of another country seulment pour encourager les autres.

Yeah, what you said.

I can't bear the thought that you might miss this wonderful comment from Charles Pierce in Altercation:

Pace, E.J. Dionne and Jonathan Alter, but there isn’t a public figure alive more worthy of undistilled invective than Newt Gingrich, recently resurrected intellectual satrap of the unpleasant, the uninformed, and (very likely) the unshod. I know all of us good liberals are supposed to be battling this out in our shiny armor on the higher plain of our ideals but, sakes alive, how can we do this when somebody rolls back the stone and out staggers, blinking at the daylight, the greasy adulterous king of the Undead, come now to play the role of advisor to Emperor C-Plus Augustus and the rest of the lads and lassies?

Remember the heady days of ’94, before Bill Clinton outmaneuvered Newtie until he left Congress wearing a barrel? Newtie — who has yet to learn that a string of adjectives is not an argument — was a towering intellectual figure on the landscape.

He, of course, became this during his days as a historian at Western Georgia University And Auto Parts Emporium, where you can find the History Department because there’s a really OLD Desoto up on blocks out front. (He himself apparently considered himself, “definer of the rules of civilization,” a dreamy exercise not unlike all those 13-year old girls who scrawl, “Mrs. Brad Pitt” across their notebooks.) Read some of the stuff — especially in the newsweeklies. It’s hilarious, I tell you.

Of course, at home, the Definer wasn’t much to speak of: he dumped Wife No. One while she was recovering from cancer; Wife No. Two, who has MS, got the heave-ho when Newtie’s chronic Comely Aide Syndrome flared up again. My only advice to Wife No.Three is not to sneeze in her husband’s presence until their 50th anniversary.

Now, consider Al Gore, who’s had two fewer wives, and who actually knows what he’s talking about, is the subject of quasi-educated ridicule from the Panchitos and the Dulces of the world. Meanwhile, a swaggering bag of old sins like Newt Gingrich maintains a serious role in our public discourse, rising this week to take a bite out of Colin Powell who, whatever you may think of him, has forgotten more about foreign policy than ever was known by Newtie, who was barely able to negotiate a truce with Dick Armey, for pity’s sake.

Meanwhile, you can forget about the invasion of Syria for a while. If Bechtel does for Baghdad what it’s done for Boston and the Big Dig, the U.S. Army is going to find itself driving in circles for 10 years, searching in vain for an off-ramp.

The man sure has a way with words.

Boy, I'm glad I don't work for this guy:

Thou shalt not notice class differences, bub.

"Getting canned sucks. But I understand that difficult business decisions must be made in difficult times, and I'm glad I'm not the one who has to make those difficult decisions. But if I was... I'd probably cut the private service that comes in to water and dust and turn the plants in the publisher's office, before I'd cut a local cartoonist. In other words, I'd cut something only the privileged few who enter the publisher's office see, before I'd cut something 190,000 readers see."

St. Paul Pioneer Press via Romanesko

Update 4-25-03: "From KIRK ANDERSON, Editorial Cartoonist, formerly of the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
I'm glad my farewell memo ("Axed PiPress cartoonist's farewell: 'PEOPLE NOT PLANTS!'") made it to your site [Romanesko, not MWOWWWW]. The publisher, Harold Higgins, received it less enthusiastically than the rest of the staff; he promptly killed my last cartoon (drawn yesterday, would've run today). Also, he killed a little boxed editor's note saying this was my last day and why I was leaving."

From Liquid List

The FBI confirmed yesterday that several months ago, its agents confiscated a package sent by one AP reporter to another. The package contained an unclassified FBI document that the reporter had obtained in researching an article.

The FBI also said that it's Office of Professional Responsibility had opened an inquiry into the seizure, which took place without a warrant and without notification of the parties involved. Federal Express, who was carrying the package, reported originally that it must have fallen off a truck.

Reminder: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Iraq 'may have to quit Opec'

Iraq may have to leave the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries so it can pump out extra oil to pay for the country's reconstruction, says a former Iraqi oil minister who is now a key adviser to the American government.

Is that an Intended Consequence?

Only five more days of this. I can't wait to sit up straight again. To be able to look at people's faces. To sleep on my side!

BBC NEWS: Bush targets illicit diamonds

US President George W Bush on Friday signed up to new legislation that tries to curb the illegal trade in "blood" diamonds.

I guess de Beers was really pissing Pat Robertson off, eh?

Originally I only glanced at Brad DeLong's article about Apple being due for some major redesign work - I've never liked Macs much when I've had to work with them - but this morning I fancied another look and it was kind of fun to read and try to visualize that stuff.

Someone who writes to Oliver Willis has done some first-hand research into what kind of sex Rick "man on dog" Santorum approves of.

Seth Finklestein has been taking a close look at all that censorware legislation.

Hesiod has posted a whole bunch of stuff at Counterspin that I've been too pissed off to write about, but definitely check out this one about how CONSERVATIVE POLITICS KILLS PEOPLE. It's true, you know, and in more ways than this.

God, talk about your missed chances! JACK STRAW discloses today in The Times that he would have resigned with Tony Blair had many more Labour MPs joined the revolt against war in Iraq in the crucial Commons vote on March 18.

This Times story is apparently only in the print edition, but the headline is: "As ITN reporter Terry Lloyd is laid to rest, the Americans finally admit they fired on his car." Lloyd is the only ITN reporter to be killed while reporting in the network's history. But he's not the only reporter to die at the hands of American forces in Iraq. Proportionately speaking, a hell of a lot of reporters seem to have been killed by the US in this invasion. I wonder what causes that?

Southwest Pilots Fired For Flying Naked

DALLAS, 4:53 p.m. CDT April 25, 2003 - Two Southwest Airlines pilots are now jobless after they allegedly flew a Boeing 737 without wearing their uniforms, or much of anything else, for that matter.

I'm sure this is all Clinton's fault.

Vaara has posted one of George W. Bush's favorite portraits of George W. Bush over at Silt, not to mention a photo of George shaking hands with the artist, a former gay porn star. You gotta see this thing.

All I want is some leadership,
Guys and gals who are sane -- not flipped,
A Prez who's got a grip,
Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?

All I want is a guy like Gore,
One who won't try to screw the poor,
Instead of Bush, the boor,
Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?

--MadKane

From Public Nuisance

A long post at Oxblog makes the long-since cliched argument that the NY Times displays liberal bias. The offending article is here the offense committed seems to be that it actually refers, repeatedly, to Iraqis being killed. The level of bias displayed by this article is truly appalling - why, this far left propaganda actually claims that people get killed in wars. It even makes the outrageous assertion that some of those killed are noncombatants.
[...]
The Times has been guilty of violating that informal embargo on suggesting that the war was in reality violent. That is enough for Mr Adesnik to find a pervasive "anti-military prejudice". He doesn't actually question the accuracy of the article, but the fact that the Times is telling the truth when other publications have the good taste not to mention it is apparently adequate proof of their bias.

Go read this funny post at Soundbitten.

Skimble is full of juicy goodness: on poor Ken Lay losing money and Sharon Bush selling out, but more importantly two stories on media, in which a journalist is forbidden to blog and Penguin Books goes after the Regnery market. Eeyew, gross.

From Epicycle:

I heard a while ago that the CDDB, that wonderful online database of CD track titles used by many audio players, had been bought by Gracenote and would probably become a licensed service, but apart from frowning at the idea of further media consolidation it didn't really sink in... Evidently this has happened at some point since I last played a new CD, as today my venerable but much beloved CD Valet player greeted me only with "invalid response returned from server". It turns out that Gracenote have reformatted the database, changed the access protocol, and installed some kind of key-exchange system with licensed players to protect their investment.

However, as I hoped and suspected, the original database is still very much alive in the form of freedb.org. They use the same protocols, ports and syntax as the original cddb.com service, and all that old software needs is the names of the new servers. Unfortunately, in the case of CD Valet, that meant a trip to the registry armed with a hexadecimal calculator, but thanks to the clearly named keys a minimum of head-scratching ensued before the player was once again displaying track titles.

That's easy for him to say.

Emma has found another stunning example of why "there are no female geniuses".

More scary vote-scam stories in Florida

Out of Touch
You press the screen. The machine tells you that your vote has been counted. But how can you be sure?
BY WYATT OLSON

Emil Danciu says he smelled victory a year ago. He's slouched in his chair and looks a bit out of place seated in front of his daughter's office desk. He's faced with a phalanx of framed baby photos. Charlotte Danciu, a Boca Raton attorney who specializes in adoption and juvenile law, has decorated the corner office with scores of framed snapshots of tots and adoring parents.

Her father, a calm man of 72, is dressed casually in shorts, polo shirt, and sneakers.
[...]
Early last year, Emil Danciu was one of four candidates vying to win two seats on the Boca Raton City Council. A long-time civic activist, he had spearheaded the drive to preserve public land in Boca Raton in the '80s. He served as mayor from 1985 until 1993, when he lost by 99 votes. In Boca's polarized political camps of development versus slow growth, Danciu represented the latter.

Danciu lost that race, an election mired by glitches in the county's new touch-screen voting computers. Later that fall, during the primary, similar machines by a different manufacturer exhibited some of the same problems in Broward County. Now, a growing number of computer scientists are sounding the alarm over the nation's growing reliance on computerized voting machines that provide no paper trail.

Some experts contend that the Danciu election underscores the problems in dealing with paperless recounts and the dubious reliability and security of this new technology. At the same time, exit polling by media outlets -- which is one of the few methods available to detect ballot-box anomalies -- is waning. The nation's switchover to touch-screen computers will likely speed up as billions of dollars authorized by Congress become available for the new technology.

"I quite definitely thought I'd win," Emil Danciu recalls of the election held on March 12, 2002. "We had a good group put together, and we had all the supposedly good things you're supposed to have in a campaign. We had a decent amount of money."

His daughter interjects: "I was the unofficial campaign manager, I guess you could say. All of the polling that was done indicated that he'd win because of this antidevelopment sentiment that was being expressed in Boca. But the real telling factor was that all of the big developers were calling him the weekend before the election trying to get on his good side, offering him money, offering him signs."

The Dancius learned that an opposing camp had conducted a poll about two weeks prior to the election and found Danciu about 17 points ahead. "Like everybody else does, we had a mole in the other operation," Charlotte explains. "This poll was taken by the Chamber of Commerce people, the people with all the money."

Even the exit polling they conducted on Election Day was encouraging. "They were overwhelmingly indicating that he would be the victor," she says.

The Dancius gathered at their headquarters on Federal Highway on election night with friends and campaign workers. It was the first election to employ the new touch screens made by Sequoia, which had been touted as offering quick returns. "We kept waiting and waiting, but Boca couldn't get any results out," Charlotte says. Finally, she and a few others drove to the office of Theresa LePore, the supervisor of elections for Palm Beach County. "There was an army of reporters and an army of people from Sequoia," Charlotte says. "At that point, they said they couldn't tabulate the votes because they'd lost 15 cartridges. They were just missing, and the system was built so it wouldn't give a final tally until you turned in all the cartridges. Then they claimed a poll worker had taken them home, and then they found them."

The Dancius were stunned when the totals did come in: Danciu had received 2,863, which was a few thousand votes short of the two winners, Susan Haynie at 6,044 and Bill Hager at 5,446. Even more perplexing was the fact that Danciu had lost in his own home voting precinct.

For about a decade, Emil Danciu says, the slow-growth candidates had been "on the short end by a couple hundred votes, at most. All of a sudden, here's a 2,000-vote spread between us and them. That was really strange to us."

Charlotte continues: "What really alarmed us was the next day when we started getting phone calls from voters who had gone into the voting places -- people we didn't even know -- and pushed Emil Danciu's name only to end up with a check mark by Susan Haynie's name. They repeatedly tried to vote for him, but another name, particularly Haynie's, came up. They couldn't get their vote registered. They were telling wild stories about poll workers unplugging and kicking the machines. They didn't know whether their votes ever counted. Some were told to vote again."

Haynie and Hager were certified as winners by LePore's office. Charlotte Danciu, then joined by lead attorney Rob Ross, filed suit contesting the results on March 25, 2002, in Palm Beach County Circuit Court.

Their case was bolstered, they believed, when Councilman Al Paglia lost his seat by four votes to Lizbeth Benacquisto during a runoff contest held March 26 in Wellington, a town of 42,000 in central Palm Beach County. Although Paglia and Benacquisto were the sole candidates on the ballot, 78 so-called undervotes were registered, meaning 78 voters used the machine but did not cast a ballot. That struck Paglia as odd because he'd garnered 45 percent of the votes during the primary run against three challengers. And then, he too began hearing stories from voters that the Sequoia touch screens had acted erratically. On Paglia's behalf, Charlotte Danciu and Ross filed suit on April 5 contesting the Wellington election.

The candidates' legal team was convinced that independent computer experts could ascertain whether something had gone wrong inside those ballot machines. The experts, however, would never get the chance.

(There's a lot more - go for the print-friendly page when you get there. I gave the main URL because I've noticed that now some papers are making it harder to get the print version without going there from the originating page.)

Here's the thing about the ensuing discussion of having the machines print voting receipts:

• First of all, a machine could give you a receipt for how you really voted but send different information for tabulation. That is, you don't know that your receipt is telling you the truth.
• Secondly, if only the receipt is hard-copy, it means the real voting information, being purely digital, can fall apart in transmission; collecting receipts after the fact is a much more complicated process than simply hand-counting hard-copy ballots that are already on-site.
• Thirdly, receipts make it too easy to violate the privacy of the voting booth, which can potentially lead to problems like having a parent or spouse (or roommates, classmates, drinking buddies, or whoever) demand that you prove you voted the way they think you should have. Worse, it leads to potential nightmare scenarios of party thugs waiting for you as you leave your polling place and demanding that you prove you voted "correctly". (I mean, you know, we've already been told that saying you want to see someone besides Bush in the White House is "treason" - just how far-fetched is that scenario, given the riot to prevent ballot-counting by Republican operatives in the last election?)

So what you want is for the ballot itself to be hard-copy, printed out after you've verified it onscreen. This means you get to make sure you haven't made any errors, no rubbish about stray pencil-marks, etc. You have a nice clean, easily-readable ballot (by machine or eyeball), each one uniform and consistent. You read it and check to make sure it still says what it's supposed to say and then put it in the ballot box yourself. If there are problems like close races or computer errors, hand-counts are easy.

The ballot itself is what matters. Don't get distracted with talk about receipts.

A uniter, not a divider

Thanks, Mr President
Bush's actions are helping Europe to fashion a new sense of identity

Jeremy Rifkin

Love him or hate him, but at least acknowledge the fact that President Bush has a knack for bringing the most unlikely people together. Could anyone have imagined that Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims - historic foes for centuries - would unite in a Baghdad mosque to oppose US occupation of their land and vow to work hand in hand to remove the infidels from their ancestral ground? Equally impressive, President Bush's Iraq policy has helped millions of Europeans, who often find themselves at odds with each other on the most banal considerations of life, to find their common identity in opposition to the war.

I was thinking about this last week, as EU leaders met in Athens to welcome 10 central and eastern European countries into their ranks. It was supposed to be a joyous occasion. Unfortunately, while officials from the old and new Europe stood side by side at the foot of the Acropolis posing for photos, many continued to express concern over the rift that has been created between European powers in the wake of the earlier failed diplomatic efforts leading up to the war. Some wondered out loud whether the growing division and bitterness among European nations might even derail the future prospects of the EU itself. While European leaders engaged in a collective handwringing, they failed to notice that an extraordinary transformation has occurred among ordinary people all over Europe in the course of the past several months.

The Iraq crisis has united Europeans and armed them with a clear sense of shared values and future vision. Millions have taken to the streets in the largest unified public protests in European history. People from every political persuasion, from every demographic category and from the entire rainbow of ethnic persuasions, joined together to condemn the unilateral policy of the Bush White House in Iraq and, by so doing, provided the first dramatic expression of a new European identity.

Bartcop posted a letter offering a blatantly phony excuse for the cut-off:

Subject: RE: Tim Robbins Appearance

Dear Mr. Sinton,

Thanks for writing.

I assume you did not actually watch this, but instead read it on the internet. I would caution you that the story being circulated is wrong. Mr. Robbins was in no way censored on Today.

Our computer automatically sends the program to a commercial everyday at 8:25:25.

Interview subjects are warned that this is a hard-time, but on occasion they do not see the clock and keep talking into a commercial break. That is the peril of a live interview. Our apologies for what appeared to be cutting off Mr. Robbins.

This was not a decision made by either Mr. Lauer or the show. There is nothing we can do except apologize when this happens. However, it is a moment that we immediately remedied, by continuing our interview into the next half-hour. Mr. Robbins was given a second segment moments later... and the last word. He was neither censored, nor offended.

Sincerely,
Tom Touchet
Executive Producer

Yeah, right, no one in the control room was telling the presenter that he only had 10 seconds left, so he kept right on asking questions? Sorry, no. Bart doesn't buy it, and neither do I.

Agenda Bender notes the relationship between sex and spying in the Leung scandal and says:

They need to start screening FBI agents for heterosexual tendencies. Straight hijinks have caused no end of security breaches in recent years.

It's a thought. Don't miss this post, either, with a marvellous rant about a major bit of anti-gay fuckwitticism.

I am still capable of being surprised

Another one from Eschaton; I knew a lot of creepy things about Opus Dei, but I didn't know this:

Of course, Rick Santorum probably is one of those catholics who doesn't think too much of the Pope, so maybe he isn't too worried about the loyalty charge. Santorum supports the death penalty, supported the war in Iraq, belongs to a church which has ignored the Vatican II reforms, has praised Opus Dei, an order which forbids giving alms to the poor, and has criticized Catholic Charities for not being Catholic enough.

Blimey, how on Earth can you even think you're a Christian and be opposed to charity? Have these people ever read the gospels? I mean, as far as the material world was concerned, this was, like, Jesus' biggest Thing.

Atrios says:

Newt Gingrich Bitch Slap

It's all been a bit weird. I'm shocked at just how many people have kicked him back into whatever hole he crawled out of.

James Baker.

Former Secretary of State James Baker, who has close ties to President Bush, blasted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich yesterday for trashing Secretary of State Powell's efforts before the Iraq war. Gingrich's comments "were totally inappropriate," Baker told the Daily News. "They came from someone with no foreign policy or national security experience, and who was in effect forced to resign."

Richard Armitage and Karl Rove.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage opined: "It's clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy."

Word is that the White House, in the person of counselor Karl Rove, also had a little chat with the former speaker after the Tuesday foray.

One wonders if he had been getting uppity in recent weeks so they decided to hand him a rope.

What I think is that they needed someone expendable to float some stupid spin to blame State (and Clinton) for the mess they'd made, and see if it took off - and when it didn't they stamped on him quick to try to look good and disassociate themselves from it. The best thing about this story is that the "blame Clinton" meme didn't even work among most of their most ardent brown-nosers in the Stepford Press.

Big Tent

Well, now we know. Calling Santorum an "inclusive man" is about as truthful as calling Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a "man of peace" -- even Sharon's admirers know he's a warrior. But being president makes you very powerful, and means you're almost never called a liar, even when you're lying.

--Joan Walsh in Salon

"Even when" he's lying. Heh. It's really kind of amazing how much Bush fits inside of the caricature of the always-lying politician at a level I've never seen before. Watching him and his cronies, you'd never guess that there really are politicians who are honestly in the job because they want to be public servants.

But yeah, it's pretty obvious from this debacle that the Republicans aren't even a little bit embarrassed about their ardent desire to intrude in the bedroom. As Charles Dodgson pointed out the other day, Santorum was describing privacy as a lifestyle choice, an absurdity that even the profoundly self-deluding Andrew Sullivan couldn't manage to rationalize his way around.

Not only is Santorum damaging the Republican position among gays and their families, he is busy damaging it among Catholics. Most Catholics support John F Kennedy's position; in fact, they take it for granted. It was a critical event in the emergence of Catholics as an equal, proud minority. Now Santorum, with Bush's apparent blessing, is intent on destroying that compact. In fact, in this case, he is going much further. Even strict Catholics who believe homosexual sex is a grave sin nevertheless draw the Thomist distinction between sins and crimes. Just because something may be a sin doesn't mean it should mean jail. In fact, many things - especially in the private realm - fall into that category. But by arguing for the criminalization of gay sex, Santorum goes beyond even the traditional position and heads for a theocratic one. The more he seems to represent the face of the Republican party, the more fair-minded people will simply leave it, fear it, or vote against it. As they should.

Yeah, Andrew, and that means you, too. When are you going to take the leap, dammit?

Guest Lecturer
PAUL KRUGMAN
"What Went Wrong?"

Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, and award-winning Princeton University economist, is one of the leading thinkers on economic issues and the current state of American fiscal and foreign policy. His lecture will look at rising economic inequality in the U.S. and the future of American politics.

RealPlayer archive link here.

E. J. Dionne on Freedom-Fried Republicans:

I never thought the United States would need a Franco-American Anti-Defamation League. But who would have imagined that guilt of being French-by-association would become the stuff of McCarthyism-lite in 2003?

A nameless White House aide was quoted recently in the New York Times offering this thoughtful, considered critique of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry: "He looks French." Substitute almost any other racial, ethnic or religious group for "French" and imagine the outcry against bigotry. But there was no outcry.
[...]
The Club for Growth has made itself famous by running ads against Snowe and Ohio Republican George Voinovich for forcing the Senate to reduce Bush's tax cut to a measly $350 billion. I bet it never occurred to you that this vote had anything to do with the foreign policies of French President Jacques Chirac. The Club for Growth begs to differ.

"President Bush courageously led the forces of freedom," the ad goes. "But some so-called allies like France stood in the way. At home, President Bush has proposed bold job-creating tax cuts to boost our economy. But some so-called Republicans like" -- the Maine ads mention Snowe; the Ohio ads, Voinovich -- "stand in the way."

Now follow this train of -- forgive the word -- logic. Bush fought for freedom. France got in the way. Like France, Snowe and Voinovich are getting in the way of Bush's tax cut. Unsubtle implication: Like France, they must be the enemies of freedom. In case you miss that link, the ad pictures a French flag flying next to the offending senator. Moore wants you to think that Snowe and Voinovich look French, too. That must make them un-American. After all, only the un-American would oppose the commander in chief's tax cuts.

Moore is not out there on his own. The White House has done nothing to discourage him from French-frying these Republicans. His campaign is only part of a broader strategy, deployed at critical moments since Sept. 11, 2001, to associate opposition to Bush with a lack of patriotism.

It goes back at least to May of last year. Remember when Democrats (and some Republicans) were urging an independent inquiry into what the U.S. government knew about the terrorist threat before the attacks? Rep. Tom DeLay, then the House whip, opposed an independent investigation with this line: "We don't need to hand the terrorists an after-action report." Suddenly, an attempt to tell the American people what happened became a way of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Any Democrat who subsequently got too far out of line -- for example, Kerry and Sen. Tom Daschle -- was quickly tarred as an un-patriot. Now even Republicans aren't safe. And, hey, there's no need anymore to accuse your opponents of being soft on terrorists or Saddam Hussein. All you have to do is tie anyone you disagree with to the French.

That doesn't look American to me.

Sure. Junk like democracy and "We the People" is a nice fiction the royalists are happy to deploy when they need to throw a few high-sounding phrases around to keep the citizens feeling proud of their heritage, but they don't mean any of that. "Individual freedom" and "rights" are good terms to dazzle the libertarians and keep them on board - well, the thicker ones, anyway - but they don't mean any of that stuff, either. When it gets down to the cheese, this is about one thing: The Republicans have an absolute right to run the country, and anyone who says otherwise is "a traitor".

This editorial in The Washington Post suggests that Ehrlich may actually be trying to do something that's in the interests of the state of Maryland, but here's the problem: Without money, it's awfully easy to make promises and then say regretfully that the money just isn't there at the moment. George Bush's refusal to do right by the states has made that a certainty on too many issues. And I can't help thinking that when the crunch comes, juvenile offenders are not going to be the priority item on the shopping list. Republicans in particular are prone to forgetting that money invested now in borderline kids is likely to save us a whole lot more later.

From The Register-Guard, A call for clarification: Mosman should explain '86 memos on gay rights:

Being nominated for a federal judgeship these days is like being asked to lie down in a dissecting pan.

By the time the class - in this case, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee - is done with the frog/nominee, there probably won't be anything that hasn't been exposed, poked, prodded, magnified and analyzed.

Michael Mosman, the U.S. attorney in Portland, is getting his turn under the scalpel, with his views on gay rights drawing the most extreme scrutiny. If he hopes to win confirmation to the vacancy created when U.S. District Judge Robert Jones moved to senior status two years ago, Mosman should accede to demands that he explain controversial memos on gay rights that he wrote as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1986.

Mosman, nominated by President Bush at the suggestion of U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, was once expected to win easy, swift confirmation. Then Basic Rights Oregon, a gay-rights advocacy group, disclosed that Mosman had authored two "bench memos" urging Powell to uphold Georgia's anti-sodomy law against a claim that police invaded a man's privacy by arresting him in his home. Powell was part of a 5-4 majority that upheld the Georgia law in a ruling that gay-rights groups still regard as one of the most damaging decisions against gays in American history and that the justice later confessed that he recalled with regret.

Mosman has declined comment on the memos.

The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab."

-- James Ellroy, intro to American Tabloid (1995)

From Demagogue:

What's In A Name?

The Washington Times reports, under the unintentionally amusing headline "Annan Irks U.S. by Urging Respect for Law," on UN Secretary General Koffi Annan's demand that U.S. forces in Iraq uphold their responsibilities as an "occupying power" as set forth in the Geneva and Hague Conventions.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration takes exception to this designation, preferring to think of itself as a "liberating force" - a category not covered by either the Geneva or the Hague Convention.

Apparently, just as one man's "terrorist" is another man's "freedom fighter," one man's "occupying power" is another man's "liberating force." Fortunately for us, the "one man" who gets to decide which is which always seems to be the President of the United States.

WHITE HOUSE: WE LIED, says MWO, referring to this story:

To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had another reason for war — a global show of American power and democracy.

And MWO has questions:

So why didn't the Bush Regime tell the American people it would be committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths as a gamble - and not in response to an imminent threat?

Well, because they are lying bastards, that's why.

Addendum: Check out what Josh Marshall says about all this in Practice to Deceive.

CNN's Reliably Narrow Sources
Media show's exclusive guestlist reinforces biases
By Steve Rendall, at FAIR.

From Bohemian Mama:

The scary thing is, I don't think they do care. I think they are yahoos who have no sense of connectedness with the rest of the world, whose only goals are power and dominance and who don't even give a damn that they are putting our country at risk economically, security-wise and in world opinion. Do we really want these people leading our country? How can Bush have such high job ratings? What is going on? Someone please explain it to me because I just don't get it.

Pssst! It's the illiberal media.

Lisa English reminds us that our legislators are about to resume their, um, habitation of the halls of Congress, and you can let them know what you think of them. Wouldn't it be cool if they came back to work and found mountains of mail demanding the return of our civil liberties? You can write now.

From Nathan Newman, a good suggestion:

Norman Thomas, the old Socialist leader, was once asked about flag burning as a tactic. His answer was that the left needed to wash the flag, not burn it, and restore it to the dignity of the ideals that so many people wish it to be. That is a message that more progressive activists need to follow in these tough days.

I love the idea of demonstrators holding ritual flag-washing ceremonies.

I have to admit, I'm the sort of person who watches cop and lawyer shows and worries about what message people are taking from them about what really happens in real cases of a similar type. Charles Dodgson might be asking the same question:

On yesterday's Law and Order, we had yet another case where the DAs had an open-and-shut case which they vacated when crusading DA Serena Southerlyn, checking up on one last little detail (completely irrelevant to the case against the actual defendant) figured out that someone else was the real killer. On Law and Order, this seems to be happening now once every few weeks.

Meanwhile, in Tulia, TX, it took years of activism to start to overturn dozens of convictions based entirely on the uncorroborated and laughable testimony of one rogue cop.

It's possible that real New York DAs are as punctilious as the Law and Order crew. But given recent developments in the Central Park jogger case, where coerced confessions let the real attacker go free for years, I feel entitled to some doubt.

Who cares? It's only a TV show.

But it's TV shows like this which give a whole lot of Americans these days their ideas about how the justice system works...

I'm not the sort of person who thinks that seeing violence on TV turns people into criminals. But I do feel a lot better when I see that not all cops, judges, and prosecutors are being portrayed as straight-arrows the way they were when I was a kid, 'cause you can be sure that plenty don't fit that description. Nevertheless, there are an enormous number of people who just can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that being charged - or convicted - doesn't necessarily mean you're actually guilty. A lot of those people sit on juries. Some of them even sit on the bench.

Carla Binion has a well-documented exploration of the White House propoganda campaign, at Smirking Chimp, Bush lies and manipulates public and Congress:

In a May 2003 article for The American Prospect, Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken write "it is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president . . . More distressing even than the president's lies, though, is the public's apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it."

The Bush administration lied and deceived its way into the Iraq war. (See below list of links to articles that detail the Bush administration's lies.)

Bush has also misled the public with fallacy and deceptive rhetoric. In The Progressive, April 2003, editor Matthew Rothschild talks about Bush's manipulation of language. Rothschild quotes a line from Bush's February 10 speech to a conference of religious broadcasters: "Before September the 11th, 2001, we thought oceans would protect us forever."

Later that day at an informal press conference, Bush repeated the "ocean" catchword, saying: "The world changed on September 11 . . . In our country, it used to be that oceans could protect us—at least we thought so." He used the "oceans" example again in his March 6 press conference.

Rothschild asked Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon, what he makes of Bush's rhetoric. Miller replied: "This notion of unprecedented vulnerability is absolutely crucial to the Bush team's anti-constitutional program. The true meaning of anything Bush says is connotative. What that statement really means is, 'We were safe, now we're in danger, and the danger is so severe that you must give me all possible power. What the oceans once did now only I can do."

Rothschild notes the Bush description is irrational, because oceans haven't really served as a buffer since Pearl Harbor. In fact, says Rothschild, the Soviet Union's intercontinental ballistic missiles were aimed at the U.S. for years despite the oceans' barrier.

However, when words are used in ways that manipulate public fear, facts and rationality are beside the point. The aim of the corruption of language—whether conscious or unconscious—is to confuse rather than clarify, and to cause the listener to believe an illusion rather than the truth.

In his article, "Fallacies and War," Dave Koehler points out misleading public arguments the administration uses to justify war. For example, the Bush team often presents the false dilemma—claiming there are only two possible options when, in fact, more choices are available.

Kohler refers to the statement Bush issued right after 9/11: "You're either with us or with the terrorists." As Kohler says "Countries can be both against terrorism and not an ally of the U.S . . . Many countries are showing they are both against a preemptive war and against the current Iraqi regime." Bush said the U.N. must vote for war or face irrelevance. As Kohler points out, the U.N. can simultaneously survive and disagree with Bush.

[...]
According to Huxley, Hitler said the masses run on instinct and emotion rather than facts and are easy to manipulate, while society's intellectuals and independent thinkers insist on factual evidence and logic and easily see through fallacies. Huxley says Hitler encouraged the masses to attack or shout down intellectual dissenters rather than engage them in logical debate, because the rational dissenters would likely win any argument on the basis of fact.

Bush supporters have tried to silence dissent. Media bulldogs such as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage often use Hitler's suggested technique of attacking and shouting down antiwar voices.

Go read the rest.

Charles Kuffner wonders if this description of Tim Robbins' appearance on The Today Show is representative of how it really played:

"We're sending out messages on an almost daily basis that they have no right to protest against this President" said Robbins. To which Lauer responded with a question about the Dixie Chicks and their controversial comments against the President. Robbins responded - pointing to the fact that the protest and banning of the Dixie Chicks was by Clear Channel Radio and it's connection with the Bush Administration. This conversation was unheard of in the current environment. Robins was talking serious politics on a morning chat show - and clearly hackles went up. By 8:24 Robins was explaining "We're fighting for freedom for the Iraqi people right now so that they can have freedom of speech, yet we're telling our own citizens they have to be quiet"

Lauer could have called it quits there -but he went on "When you see pictures of Iraqi's dancing and celebrating -does it change your mind?" "No" Said Robbins - "I'm ecstatic that they feel this freedom, I hope we have the resolve to get in there and make it work."

It was at this point that something happened that has perhaps never happened before in the history of morning television.

The music swelled under Robbins... Mid-sentence answering a question that had been asked just 10 seconds earlier... "We have a terrible track record" said Robbins, clearly not able to hear that music was coming up to literally 'play him off the stage'.

The camera cut to a wide shot. Lauer was leaning in and very much in conversation. Either Lauer was ignoring what must have been the deluge of invectives in his earpiece, or he just determined that he wasn't finished with this line of questioning.

But the music ended. The bumper music ended and the studio was in the two shot as Robbins said..."It's for some reason not in our best interest to keep it going and pursue it to the next level." Lauer nodded, and the camera faded to black as Robbins - mid sentence - had his microphone turned down.

A conversation about free speech. An anchor asking reasonable questions. A guest responding in equally reasonable tones. No attempt to close out the discussion - to say "Well thank you Tim". This was not a filibuster. Robbins was not hogging the spotlight. Someone in the control room simply decided that it was time to pull the plug. And without grace or ceremony, or even the face saving of letting Lauer say "We're out of time" as morning shows do on so many occasions.

A conversation about free speech and free expression was cut off mid sentence as the network went to black.

Television history was made, as million of Americans got to watch in real time just how powerful and inescapable censorship can be. Robbins wasn't revealing troop locations, or giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Remember the war has been won - by all accounts. He was discussing freedom, free speech, and why his appearance has been canceled at the Baseball Hall of Fame. NBC should invite him back and let him finish his thought - or admit at least who was on the phone to master control demanding that they pull the plug.

Did anyone see it? Because if this is what happened...wow.

Matt Yglesias is surprised that Andrew Sullivan is surprised at Rick Santorum's anti-gay remarks:

Sullivan's key mistake on this has been, it seems to be, believing that "the Christian Right" is something distinct from, though in some sense related to, the Republican Party in the same way that "the academic Left" hovers somewhere in the fringes of practical liberal politics. The religious right is by no means co-extensive with the GOP, but it is one of the Republican Party's constitutive elements (akin to, say, the AFL-CIO on the left) and many if not most Republican congressmen and Senators just are members of the movement, and outside of the Northeast virtually all GOP politicians are dependent on it for electoral support. To be sure, most Republicans manage to keep their discourse on the subject within the bounds of polite conversation, but the idea that the government needs to spend its time regulating our sex lives is every bit as integral to conservative ideology as is the proposition that our taxes should be cut.

I imagine that over the years Republican thinking on this issue will change somewhat, but the fact of the matter is that it's a conservative party, not a libertarian party, so it's pretty much bound to advocate the maintainance of whatever counts as a "traditional" attitude toward sexuality and family issues at the moment.

Yes, and this is why I keep wondering how dumb you have to be to still support the Republicans. People who believe in personal freedom and free markets don't have a party that really represents them, but given the choices you have, you have to pick one or the other; people who choose the party of intolerance are saying either that they really don't value personal freedom all that much or else that they don't really have a clue who it is they are supporting.

CalPundit finds more reasons to suspect there is something wrong with this picture:

WHO IS GEORGE GALLOWAY?....Via Instapundit, the Christian Science Monitor has more about George Galloway, the British MP accused of taking money from Saddam Hussein in return for his "vociferous opposition" to U.S. and British plans to invade Iraq.

This is truly a bizarre story. On the one hand, you have this from the Monitor story:

David Blair, the British reporter who first broke the story, told the BBC: "I think it would require an enormous amount of imagination to believe that someone went to the trouble of composing a forged document in Arabic and then planting it in a file of patently authentic documents and burying it in a darkened room on the off-chance that a British journalist might happen upon it and might bother to translate it. That strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable."

OK, that sounds reasonable. But on the other hand, Galloway was supposedly paid $10 million, with the most recent payment of $3 million coming in January.

$10 million!

What could possibly have lead the Iraqis to think that a fringe lefty like Galloway had any influence at all, let alone $10 million worth? What's more, the first of the three large payments is said to have been made in April 2000, well before anyone was talking about attacking Iraq. What was the point of that?

And how did David Blair come across these documents? His story is here, but it raises as many questions as it answers. He just happened to be rummaging through boxes at the Foreign Ministry office in Baghdad while looters were running wild and found this stuff? Everything else was destroyed but these documents mysteriously survived intact?

Very weird. If Galloway ever turns his cell phone back on, perhaps we'll learn more. In the meantime, at least it's more interesting than yet another Laci Peterson update.

Sounds more and more like the Security Services have been up to no good again.

From Scoobie Davis:

I got a chance to hear firsthand part of Diane Sawyer’s interview with The Dixie Chicks on Hannity's show. I find the whole episode discouraging. What I find so disheartening is that the main issue of discussion is whether Natalie Maines is sufficiently remorseful about her “disrespectful” comments about George W. Bush. This framing of the debate in these terms was due mainly to the efforts of the Clear Channel propaganda machine. The rabble that listen to Clear Channel stations are sufficiently whipped up; Sawyer mentioned the slew of detailed death threats that The Dixie Chicks received. Sawyer mentioned how one of the Chicks said it was not an issue of her career but the safety of her child and her family.

The point, of course, is that The Dixie Chicks aren't being attacked by patriots, they're being attacked by Republicans who had no trouble at all saying far worse things about Bush's predecessor when our troops were in the field - and without a shred of evidence for their claims. Maines merely expressed dislike or disagreement with Bush, which is a lot harder to argue with than, say, claims that Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster. A simple opinion like Maines expressed is a far cry from, oh, an impeachment proceeding. Of course, the Republicans would like to pretend it is treason to support the replacement of George W. Bush - they've already tried to suggest as much in response to John Kerry's early campaigning.

Got that? It's treason to want to hold an election and get rid of George W. Bush.

Future Senator Jim Capozzola (D-PA) has some questions for Rick Santorum:

If we, as a pluralistic -- an almost supremely pluralistic society -- are to accept, collectively, regardless of our differing faiths or even absence of faith in God or any other higher being, your views on homosexuality, compatible as they are with your conscience and your faith, why stop there?

Why not go a few steps farther to ensure the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage?

Shall we outlaw contraception?

Shall we outlaw divorce, or at the very least, remarriage after divorce?

Shall we outlaw adultery and make it a crime against the state?

Shall we outlaw premarital sexual relations between men and women?

Shall we make cohabitation illegal?

Shall we outlaw all forms of what is commonly known as sodomy, even among married couples?

Shall we insist that all married couples procreate and investigate those who do not?

Shall we outlaw the marriage of infertile women and sterile men, and insist on premarital fertility tests?

Shall we outlaw the marriage of women beyond their procreative years?

Where does it end, Sen. Santorum? Tell us, sir, where does it end?

Arlen Specter provides more reasons to support Capozzola in '04.

Meanwhile, Bartcop supplies a clip of Jon Stewart's reaction to Santorum.

Habla usted Clear Channel?

If the FCC allows the two biggest Spanish-language media companies in the U.S. to merge, it'll create a media conglomerate that will dwarf all competitors -- and could help GOP-friendly radio titan Clear Channel deliver Hispanic votes for Bush in '04.

By Eric Boehlert in Salon (via Altercation). Tapped has some comments.

A prominent Republican fund-raiser who once said former President Bill Clinton was "a lawbreaker and a terrible example to our nation's young people" pleaded guilty yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court to production of child pornography.Via Atrios.

If you're having trouble getting blah3, try this address instead.

Is this sick enough for ya?

From Ceefax:

BBC condemns US media's coverage of war

The US media's credibility was undermined by it's "unquestioning" coverage of the war in Iraq, BBC director-general Greg Dyke has said.

In a speech at the University of London he said he had been "shocked" by the US news broadcasts.

Since the attacks of September 11, many networks had swapped impartiality for patriotism," Mr. said.

He singled out Fox News, accusing it of a "gung-ho" attitude.

Good piece in the NYT by Bob Herbert that sums up the death penalty issue nicely:

Delma Banks Jr. had eaten his last meal and, in a controlled panic, was starting to count off the final 10 minutes of his life when word came last March 12 that his execution was being postponed because the Supreme Court might want to review his case.

Last Monday the court decided that yes, it would hear Mr. Banks's appeal. This should throw a brighter spotlight on a case that embodies many of the important things that are wrong with the death penalty in the United States.

Here are just some of the problems. There is no good evidence that Mr. Banks, who was accused of killing a 16-year-old boy in a small town in Texas in 1980, is guilty. A complete reading of the record, including facts uncovered during his appeals, shows that he is most likely innocent.

There is irrefutable evidence of gross prosecutorial misconduct. The key witnesses against Mr. Banks were hard-core drug addicts who had much to gain from lying. One was a paid informer, and the other was a career felon who was told that a pending arson charge would be dropped if he performed "well" while testifying against Mr. Banks. The special incentives given to the two men for their testimony were improperly concealed by prosecutors. Both witnesses have since recanted.

And, as in so many capital cases, the race issue runs through this one like a fatal virus. Mr. Banks, who had no prior criminal record and has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence, is black. The victim, the prosecutors and all the carefully selected jurors were white.

It is time to pull the plug on the death penalty in the United States. Shut it down. It is never going to work properly. There are too many passions and prejudices involved (and far too many incompetent lawyers, prosecutors, judges and jurors) for it to ever be administered with any consistent degree of fairness and justice.

Absolutely must-read piece by Scott DiBerardino at Long story; short pier about radio, in which he introduces (at length) an article he wrote a few years ago about pirate radio. From the introductory section:

Subterradio’s gone; Dunifer lost; Clear Channel won the Oklahoma land rush Clinton sparked when he signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act into law. Decades of law and regulation designed to keep broadcasters mindful of their responsibilities to local communities were undone, and stations could suddenly be traded like million-dollar baseball cards, and radio now sucks worse than ever. The micropower struggle I wrote about in 1996 had one notable victory, of sorts: the FCC grudgingly set up a low-powered FM broadcasting license that was compromised enough to make no one at all happy. (In a shocking display of indecorous hardball, NPR fought strenuously against it.) —You might also remember a flap over internet radio, which is still trying to make some noise.

Pirate radio still flies its Jolly Rogers, and LPFM community stations are doing some good, but the fight has moved on: to television, now. FCC Chairman Michael Powell wants to do to television what the 1996 Telecommunications Act did to radio. And it might seem like there’s nothing to save on television—after all, the news is all winnowed down to a couple of points of view, the right and the far right, and whole chunks of the upper channels are blasted wastelands, some Big Content corp leveraging its back catalog of panned and scanned movies and clipped TV reruns down its own boutique cable pipeline into your house—but keep in mind: things can always get worse. And they will.

What’s disheartening to note is the shift in the battleground: with radio, it was a fight for the chance to say what we want, over who had a hold on the transmitters, and whose voices got a chance to be heard. With television, for God’s sake, it’s a fight for the chance to watch what we want. We’ve given up on the means of production. It’s out of our league and out of our hands. We’re struggling to record what we want when we want, to find shows that aren’t numbingly dumb or bowdlerized not for content but to make room for new ads, to dredge up some news that looks like it came from the planet we’re currently living on. We’re being lectured by network execs about minimizing our bathroom breaks when commercials are on.

Things can always get worse.

An illuminating paragraph from the article itself, about the pirate station that had so few resources that much of the time it ran on "autopilot":

Think about it: this CD player, loaded with somebody’s favorite CDs and set on random shuffle, has been delivering what some folks think is the best radio Portland has to offer.

Like the man says, music radio hasn't been much good for a long, long time.