No More Mister Nice Blog

Tuesday, June 17, 2003   So it turns out that the prescription drug plan is hated by * Rush Limbaugh, * the Heritage Foundation, and * the libertarians at Capitalism Magazine. And yet it looks as if Bush will sign whatever prescription drug bill gets through Congress. I'm a bit puzzled by this. I've never known Bush to offend his base. I guess he and Rove think they'll win a lot of seniors' votes while possibly losing a handful of votes to, perhaps, the Libertarian Party in '04. And I half-suspet that the ex-drunk has become a bit excited at the realization that he's running up the deficit in the utterly heedless way he used to run up bar tabs. I really do think he's drunk on deficit spending -- he understands the far-right theory that damn-the-torpedoes deficit spending is a surefire way to bankrupt the federal treasury, after which huge cuts in social programs will be all but inevitable, and he's figured out that running up deficits is fun. So who knows? Maybe we'll (temporarily) get a few more social programs out of him -- even as he keeps the tax cuts coming. But it's all going to be pretty awful when the bill comes due. posted by Steve M. | 5:29 PM |   You might be interested to know that in Christopher Hitchens's Atlantic Monthly review of Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, the word "I" or some form of it ("I've," "I'd") appears a rather remarkable 91 times. Yes, I know: Hitchens figures prominently in Blumenthal's book. But doesn't that mean he shouldn't be reviewing the book for The Atlantic? When did it become acceptable to assign reviews to writers with a vested interest in the failure of the book under review? If Hitchens can review The Clinton Wars for The Atlantic, and Joseph Lelyveld can review it for The New York Review of Books, shouldn't some publication hire Bill Clinton to review Ann Coulter's next book? Shouldn't Howell Raines get to review the next volume by Andrew Sullivan? Should David Denby and Anthony Lane step aside at The New Yoker while Mia Farrow reviews the next Woody Allen movie? Should The Source assign DMX to review Ja Rule's latest CD? Or is hiring a reviewer with an axe to grind acceptable only when the target of the axe is connected with the Clinton administration? posted by Steve M. | 2:57 PM |   The FBI has just issued crime statistics for 2002. An FBI press release is here. Comparisons of 2002 and 2001 crime in dozens of major cities are here (warning: this is a PDF file). Here are some of the results, according to the press release: ... overall violent crime decreased 1.4 percent. Among individual violent crimes, murder and forcible rape both showed increases, 0.8 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively. ... Law enforcement agencies, collectively, within three of the Nation's four geographic regions reported data that showed decreases in their Crime Index in 2002. Those in the Northeast reported the greatest decline, 3.3 percent;followed by the Midwest, 2.1 percent; and the South, 0.1 percent. The agencies in the West reported data that showed a 2.9-percent increase in that region's Crime Index. The volume of violent crime overall decreased in all four regions. Violent crime was down 2.8 percent in the Northeast, 1.3 percent in the South, 1.2 percent in the Midwest, and 0.6 percent in the West. As for property crime, the overall total in the West rose 3.4 percent, and that in the South increased slightly (0.1 percent). Conversely, the volume of property crime reported by agencies in the Northeast declined 3.4 percent, and that reported by agencies in the Midwest decreased 2.2 percent. By region, the number of murders in the West rose 5.2 percent, and the number in the South increased 2.1 percent. The Northeast saw a 4.8-percent decline in the number of murders and the Midwest, a 2.8-percent decrease. I don't get it. For years, conservatives have told us that the decadent, depraved Bill Clinton embodied our national moral decline -- some argued that he influenced others to commit crimes. But now he's out of office. Shouldn't we be seeing a steady, inexorable decline in crime? Conservatives have also argued that residents of "red" (Bush) states have stronger moral values than residents of "blue" (Gore) states. If that's the case, why the increases in the crime index in Plano and Lubbock, Texas, while the crime index declined in New York City and Boston? Conservative gun advocates have argued that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons reduces crime. But many states now permit concealed carry of weapons. Why isn't crime, especially violent crime, skyrocketing in states and localities that don't? Shouldn't thugs naturally be gravitating to places where citizens walk around gunless? Why did murder, in fact, decline in the gun-law-friendly North and Midwest, while rising in the South and West? It couldn't be that conservatives are feeding us a lot of malarkey -- could it? posted by Steve M. | 1:26 PM |   Isn't it strange that the very same people who were prepared to give the United Nations weapons inspectors months and even years to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are screaming after just a few weeks that our failure to discover them is proof of a hoax? --first paragraph of the latest column by syndicated right-wing pundit Mona Charen No. Saddam's regime was in power when the UN inspectors were there; it isn't now. U.S. and British forces control the country. They have the run of the place. It should be a hell of a lot easier for them to find what they're looking for than it was for inspectors in the Saddam era, shouldn't it? Soldiers have had no trouble finding horrific prisons and mass graves. Why no WMDs? And isn't it amazing that the very same people who believe Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction also believe that Hillary found out the truth about Monica only two days before Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony? --beginning of the second paragraph of Charen's column No. Then again, it's hard to answer this question because the group to which Charen refers -- "people who believe Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction" -- simply does not exist. Everyone knows the Kurds were gassed more than a decade ago. Everyone knows Saddam has had banned weapons. The question is whether there were still banned weapons in Iraq at the time of the war (opponents of the war are split on this question) and (more important) whether those weapons, if they existed, posed an imminent threat to America or U.S. interests (two wars, no deployment by Saddam against U.S. troops marching on his own turf -- it sure looks as if he was never going to send anthrax in an ICBM to Disneyland, doesn't it?). And it beats the hell out of me how all this relates to what Hillary Clinton knew, or believed, or couldn't bring herself to believe before her husband fessed up. Good Lord, is this the best the GOP can do? posted by Steve M. | 11:50 AM | Monday, June 16, 2003   In The New York Review of Books, Edward Sheehan reminds us of one reason that Palestinians are a bit cranky: Israel is building a security fence around the West Bank that effectively appropriates land while isolating Palestinians. Near Qalqilya the fence deviates from the green line [the internationally recognized border between Israel and the West Bank] to protect the Jewish settlements of Zufin, Alfe Menashe, and Oranit, in effect incorporating them into Israel proper while isolating the Arab villages of Jayus, Ras Atiya, Daba, Ras Tireh, and Habla and cutting them off from their farmlands. The mayor of Qalqilya told me that thousands of his people have fled abroad in search of work, and that thousands more have become "internal refugees" chased from their land and reduced to penury. "Fifteen aquifer wells in the area of Qalqilya have been taken by the Israelis, who have diverted the waters for their own use," the mayor said. "This destroys our agriculture and our source of income. Qalqilya is being choked to death." Western aid officials in the West Bank told me that the Israelis are working twenty-four hours a day to complete the fence, apparently intending it to form a new border of the West Bank before peace negotiations get underway. As Jonathan Cook wrote recently in the International Herald Tribune, Little attention has focused on this wall, mainly because it is assumed it follows the Green Line.... But Sharon admitted in a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that the wall will be at least 1,000 kilometers long (625 miles), whereas the Green Line is only 360 kilometers long. . Why does it need to be so long? Because Sharon is less interested in preventing suicide bombers than in creating a tiny de facto Palestinian state before the road map forces a bigger one on him. Palestinians call the fence the "apartheid wall." Gideon Levy, writing in Ha'aretz, describes the effect of the wall on one village: During the first week of September, the farmers discovered papers scattered about in their fields: They were the expropriation orders. A map was enclosed, too. Khaled [a hydrologist and activist] says that from the papers and the map that they received, it turns out that the width of the fence will be 55-58 meters, and that 292 dunams [about 75 acres], along 4,100 meters, will be expropriated from the village. "Afterward we discovered that 600 dunams will be requisitioned along 6,000 meters," said Khaled.... "These are not barren lands, these are cultivated lands," he emphasizes. There are 120 hothouses, each one producing 35 tons of tomatoes (or cucumbers) a year. Seven wells, which the residents of the village share, have also remained beyond the wall. Seven-hundred dunams [175 acres] of orchards and 500 dunams [125 acres] of fruits and vegetables and 3,000 dunams of olives and the rest are grazing lands.... The hydrologist explains: "There are 65,000 days of work for this community [Jiyus] to be found beyond the wall." And what will happen in the summer, he asked, to those whose water is in wells on the other side? "If these fields aren't irrigated, there will be an environmental catastrophe. In any case, six of the seven paths to the village fields had already been blocked by the Israel Defense Forces - even before the advent of the fence. Even now it takes two hours in each direction to reach the plots, and the whole day is wasted on how to reach the field and to return. The cultivation of the land is a family project. What will happen if they impose a tax on us for crossing over? ..." Ran HaCohen, writing for Palestinechronicle.com, tells similar stories; on view at the link is a map meant to show just how much land the wall will exclude from Palestinian control: Leaving the lion's share of the West Bank outside the Wall in Israeli hands, even what looks like two contiguous Bantustans are in fact crisscrossed by chains of Israeli settlements and roads-for-Jews-only. None of this justifies terrorism -- but it certainly justifies anger. posted by Steve M. | 11:37 PM |   The American military sweeps are accompanied by an episodic "hearts-and-minds" campaign orchestrated by the army's Psychological Warfare Unit. US soldiers were distributing coloured leaflets yesterday showing a picture of Iraqi children dutifully sweeping the streets under the watchful eye of an American Humvee armoured car. --Independent (U.K.) (Spotted by Billmon at Whiskey Bar.) posted by Steve M. | 10:59 PM |   From Britain's Telegraph: America's rebuilding of Iraq is in chaos, say British The American-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is "in chaos" and suffering from "a complete absence of strategic direction", a very senior British official in Baghdad has told The Telegraph. The comments paint a grim picture of American incompetence and mismanagement as the Coalition Provisional Authority struggles to run post-Saddam Iraq. "This is the single most chaotic organisation I have ever worked for," the official said yesterday. The source revealed that Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, had "fewer than 600" staff under his control to run a country the size of France in which the civil infrastructure was on the point of collapse. "The operation is chronically under-resourced and suffers from an almost complete absence of strategic direction," he added.... Some April salaries remain unpaid and the electricity supply remains extremely unreliable. The heavy-handed presence of American soldiers and, perhaps more importantly, the lack of any visible Iraqi partnership in Government is further fuelling resentment.... posted by Steve M. | 10:51 PM |   Not satisfied with the field of Democratic presidential candidates? Maybe this guy should be persuaded to run. If we want to talk about what's wrong with having a nation dominated by the Republican Party, the story of what the GOP did to him -- in spite of the fact that he proved his loyalty to his country decades ago by losing three limbs in Vietnam -- is a pretty good place to start. posted by Steve M. | 4:46 PM |   What's issue #1 right now among the right-wingers who congregate at FreeRepublic.com? The road map? Tax cuts for low-income workers? Disappearing WMDs in Iraq? Nope. Issue #1 is: Hillary's book tour -- should I protest it in a devil suit? Check out excerpts of the Freepers' debate: ok...no devil suits at our FReeping, it just makes ourside look silly and foolish. :o) ***** You are not up to speed on the history of the "Devil Suit" or the fact that its appearance (and its wearer) drives Hillary crazy. ***** Personally, (I am not kidding either) I went on line looking for a Hillary mask..They run between $19.50 -$ 41.00 Now I want to call and see how much a witch costume costs to rent! ***** Suit yourself....but when this hits the 5pm news on WGN, Chicago NBC, ABC & CBS....I assure you the only person that will have appeared to be there protesting is you. They will make no mention of me and my daughters or anyone else that the media deems "mainstream" being there. It will all be about the woman in the witch suit. ***** Heck, if I thought it'd not be lost on them, I'd show up on the 28th in my full Pooh Bear suit with a sign that read "Hillary's book should be put under Children's Fantasy" ***** I thought the message was to the general population??? I thought we were trying to expose Hitlary for what she really is???? My bad....so all you care about is if SHE gets the message??? The rest of the undecided voting citizens that might see the way the media portrays this, be damned???? Sounds counter-productive to me....Hitlary KNOWS what/who she is....it's the rest of the world I want to expose her to, so therefore, I protest with the rest of the world as my audiance and not some lying loathsome radical left wing commie live in a fantasy world power hungry money grabbing calling her a snake or witch would be too good for her "senator". See my point???? Who are you trying to get your message to??? The voters or "Senator Hitlary"??? ***** ...the more I think about my Pooh Bear costume...it might be the perfect costume on so many levels....representing "fantasy/fiction" (where Hitlary's book belongs) and a "big POOH" (which everything she writes is a big pile of!)...of course, the twisted & intelligent line of thinking on that one would DEFINITELY be lost on the majority of the uneducated left. ;o) ***** Well, we could just sing "ding dong the witch is dead"...but then, that's not true (unfortunately) and well, we might be viewed as REALLY radical extremists forumlating a plot of murder, and I don't want to be put in the same class as the Clintoons. :oP ***** We could just thow water on her and see what happens, though! ***** I was in Walmart a bit ago and Hitlary's book was right there staring me in the face (I made sure as childish as it was that I flicked it hard with my finger)...then I turn to the magazine rack and the WITCH is on the front cover of TIME...sign on to MSN today and she's on the front page there!!! She's getting her message out in a BIG way!!! (or at least her ugly face) I did find it funny that on the time cover the headline was something to the effects of "Hillary Clinton tells her story" that's what it is alright.... A STORY..not fact, not history...A STORY!!!! ...Dressing up in the theatrics is great....as long as it's done by people that are NOT overly emotional.... Remember: The law not only permits these people to roam around free, it allows them to vote and own property. posted by Steve M. | 1:37 PM |   Thank you, Atrios, for spotting the story about plans to rush the environmental review of the Ground Zero monument in lower Manhattan in time to "allow [officials] to lay the cornerstone of a 1,776-foot tower in August 2004, during the Republican Convention" -- and thanks to Thorswitch at Different Strings for posting a scan of the article in its original form, with the headline "Goal Is To Lay Cornerstone at Ground Zero During GOP Convention" (in the online incarnation, this point is obscured). Maybe -- maybe -- public exposure short-circuited this attempt to put a GOP brand on September 11. But I'm sure there's going to be a lot more where this came from. I put nothing past these people. A Bush acceptance speech at Ground Zero, delivered via bullhorn? Bush's name put in nomination by a 9/11 firefighter or Pfc. Jessica Lynch? Think of the most shameless, nakledly partisan idea you can imagine and know that someone involved in the campaign has seriously considered it. posted by Steve M. | 12:42 PM |   Elsewhere in the letters to the Times Magazine, Nicole Boyd of New York writes this about an article on Howard Dean: I am curious about why you decided to go with a cartoon image to illustrate this article. Perhaps Dean's long-shot status would change if you gave him a full-page photo. It seems to me that the press has a responsibility to increase face recognition of presidential candidates to facilitate a true democratic process at election time. Obviously, Dean wouldn't suddenly find himself neck-and-neck with Bush if the Times ran a photo of him rather than a cartoon, but the point she's trying to make is correct: The nine Democrats who want to run against Bush look silly and insignificant in large part because the press is portraying them as silly and insignificant. Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler regularly talks about the way the press settles on "a story it likes" and persists in telling that story regardless of whether the facts support it. In the 2000 presidential campaign, the press settled on a story that Al Gore would do anything to win, especially lie, while Bush was what he said he was, a "compassionate conservative" (as opposed to a nasty far-rightist), and was a bit dim but essentially honest. That storyline took a while to evolve. This year, however, I'm afraid the Beltway press has decided on a story it likes already -- more than a year before the election and many months before the first primary. The story is: Bush has become something more than human; 9/11 did for him what Excalibur did for King Arthur, what radiation did for Spider-Man, and now he is a breathtakingly strong leader, an amazingly popular politician, and simply too great for any mere Democrat to beat. Consider the lead story in the Sunday New York Times, "Fund-Raising Push by Bush Will Put Rivals Far Behind" by Richard Stevenson and Adam Nagourney. It's bad enough that the article, apart from a grumbling Howard Dean quote near the end, presents Bush's fund-raising as a wholly innocent activity (which is certainly not the way fund-raising was depicted during the Clinton presidency). What's worse is that Bush is depicted as nearly godlike -- even in the process of grubbing for campaign cash: ...Mr. Bush seems well on his way to shattering the fund-raising record he himself set in the 2000 race, when he took in $100 million in his fight for the Republican nomination, redefining standards for modern-day presidential fund-raising. Even coming close would confirm what many strategists consider to be among Mr. Bush's biggest advantages over the field of Democrats: his ability to command huge sums of money with a minimal investment of time and energy. As Mr. Bush breezes in and out of fund-raisers packed with donors whom aides describe as falling over one another to write checks, the nine Democrats have been largely forced off the campaign trail to deal with fund-raising demands that have emerged as a tremendous drain on their time and resources.... "No one is turning down any of the calls or saying, `I don't want to contribute,' " said one of Mr. Bush's most active fund-raisers, reporting on the responses to the solicitations that began two weeks after the president declared major combat operations in Iraq to be complete. "It's just a matter of finding someone who hasn't already gotten calls from other people making calls."... Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri typically spends eight hours a day trying to round up money, an aide said, making the kind of personal telephone solicitations that would be unthinkable for Mr. Bush, who will probably spend 25 minutes or so on stage at the Hilton before his motorcade whisks him back home. "The fundamental difference is that Bush himself spends no time on it," said Steve Elmendorf, a senior adviser to Mr. Gephardt. "He gets on a plane, shows up for 15 minutes and leaves. And each of these candidates spends volumes of time on the phone asking for money."... Watch for this Bush-as-god stuff -- you'll see a lot more of it in the next seventeen months, which is why I don't hold out much hope for the Democrats in '04. posted by Steve M. | 12:14 AM | Sunday, June 15, 2003   A couple of reasonably good letters to The New York Times Magazine in response to a recent article on "Hipublicans" -- allegedly hip GOP college kids: If I were to bump into the Democratic National Committee chairman, Terry McAuliffe, I would staple John Colapinto's article to his forehead (May 25). These conservative campus groups are well organized and financed! The political right is stealing the hearts of kids. Why can't the leaders of the left stop reveling in their glorious past and fight this conservative wave head on. There are people on the left, like myself, who would laugh at Charles Mitchell's dorm-room decor, then ''deconstruct'' it Hunter Thompson-style. William Kleppel Mount Kisco, N.Y. ******* I was puzzled by the way the conservative movement portrays itself as under attack by liberals. The president of the United States is a conservative. The majority leader of the Senate is a Republican. I'm not sure what these college students think they are fighting for except preservation of the status quo. Zaahira S. Wyne Fredericksburg, Va. But Robert L. Mills of Monroe, Connecticut, a defender of the Hipublicans, writes this: ...Young people also have little patience for the concept of victimization. The victim culture doesn't add up, and college kids are quick to sense it. Young people have little patience for the concept of victimization? Has this letter-writer listened to any commercial rock music of the past ten years? Would someone please e-mail Mr. Mills an MP3 of "Crawling" by Linkin Park? (And actually, I think there's a fairly thin line between youthful self-pity and the youthful interest in justice -- both derive from a focus on fairness that older people tend to lose.) posted by Steve M. | 11:40 PM |   Iraq is in most respects further along the road to recovery than we could have expected before the war. All major public hospitals in Baghdad are again operating. Sixty percent of Iraq's schools are open. Nationwide distribution of food supplies has resumed. Despite some damage to the oil wells, petroleum production exceeds domestic needs, and exports should begin again soon. More Iraqis are receiving electric power than before the war. --George Ward, former coordinator for humanitarian assistance in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq, writing in Friday's New York Times The press communiqués put out by ORHA, America's Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, have the tone of a publicity agent's handout. Every little step, such as paying doctors an emergency $20 wage, is declared a historic leap toward democracy. On the ground it is hard to see much improvement. The phones are still broken, power still sporadic, money scarce, prices soaring, shortages everywhere, and security largely absent. Iraqis observe, by way of contrast, that during the Gulf War of 1991, when bomb damage was far more extensive, there was hardly a pause in the payment of state salaries. --Max Rodenbeck, Middle East correspondent for The Economist, writing from Baghdad in The New York Review of Books posted by Steve M. | 11:07 PM | Friday, June 13, 2003   Hillary Clinton's book is selling, and conservatives just can't stand it. No one's more upset than Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online -- he posted this yesterday to NRO's blog The Corner, then posted a link to this, from blogger Donald Sensing. Let me try to sort out the stupidity from the nonsense. First, Goldberg: The "leak" to the Associated Press was bogus and almost certainly came from Simon and Schuster. It helped book sales, generated buzz and was timed perfectly. The idea that they were angry didn't pass the laugh test. OK, Jonah probably gets one right -- but so what? The controlled leak is a common practice in publishing, the movie biz, the music biz.... Simon and Schuster claims they printed 1 million copies. People I've talked to say this is probably a lie. Maybe, maybe not -- but if not, it looks as if S&S should have. Simon and Schuster claimed yesterday that they sold 20 percent or 200,000 copies of the book on its first day. Not only do I think this is impossible, given purely anecdotal information, I'm confident it is impossible that Simon and Schuster could actually know if they sold that many books. Such numbers are notoriously difficult to collect months after the fact. The idea that S&S got same-day data strikes me as bizarre. How come we've never gotten same day info like this before? Will we ever get it again? I don't think so. Even Goldberg's blog-mate, Richard Brookhiser, knows this is nonsense. Publishers can get continually updated information from the major chains and "the clubs" (e.g., Sam's Club at Wal-Mart), as well as from national distributors. Publishers also know that X% of a typical book's total sales (I don't know the exact percentage, but it's widely known in the book biz) will take place at Barnes & Noble -- and can estimate total sales from that. What baffles me about this is that Goldberg's mother, Lucianne, has been in the book business, as an agent and writer, for decades. Why isn't he able to glean this information? If they really printed 1 million copies, why does S&S need to order another 300,000 copies? Why is it saying that they're making another reprint order next week on top of that? Surely, they don't think the 800,000 books remaining on the shelves constitutes a low supply? Books aren't blogs -- they don't generate new copies automatically. It takes a while to print, bind, and ship books. S&S now is anticipating inventory shortfalls a couple of weeks from now. Now, Sensing: I predicted this morning that Hillary Clinton's book, Living History, set for June 9 release, will wind up in the remainder bins at bookstores by the end of June. Sensing updated this, citing "a book-industry insider." His insider said, I don't disagree with the spirit of your prediction, but I think the end of June timeframe is aggressive [for the book to start being remaindered]. I'll say. Even bomb books don't hit the remainder tables until about a year (or more) after publication. Some books are "remaindered in place" (alternate name: "shared markdown") -- these are newer books that are selling slowly. Publisher and bookseller agree to each take less money per copy, and the book stays on the new-book shelf, but at a significantly reduced price (usually 50% off). A true reminder is marked down much lower -- well under $10.00 (Hillary's book at 50% off list price would be $14). In the book business, a first run of 100,000 is considered the benchmark for a large run. It is common for the number of first-run books actually printed to be very much smaller than the hype-ridden number first announced. Sensing's insider also updates this: BTW, in regard to first print runs, of course for a Harry Potter, or John Grisham, where the publisher doesn't need to hype, you can take those initial printrun numbers literally. And it looks as if Hillary Clinton -- like, say, Colin Powell a decade ago -- may be in that category. It's also common for the list price of major-hype books to be inflated so that they can immediately be discounted by retailers, with the result that the actual sale price is what the publisher wants to charge to begin with. Example: J. K. Rowling's next Harry Potter book, due out June 21, lists at $29.99; Amazon is pre-selling it for $17.99. Amazon does not list Living History, but Barnesandnoble.com does, list price given as $28, preselling for $19.60. Yes, but if you buy Living History six months from now, you'll probably pay full price for it -- and even today you might pay full price at an independent bookshop. What is Sensing saying? That people who bought the book at discount didn't "really" buy it? The book is selling. Deal with it. posted by Steve M. | 1:44 PM |   Conservatives are shocked, shocked, that Hillary Clinton acknowledges the help of professional writers in her new book. TBOGG, quite sensibly, responds by pointing to An American Life, Ronald Reagan's last Great Communication. Did the Gipper write it himself? Well, do yourself a favor: If you're in a big bookstore, check out the acknowledgment of the writers in Hillary's book. Then go find a copy of Reagan's book and note the similarities in what Reagan says about Robert Lindsey, author of the bestseller The Falcon and the Snowman and collaborator on Marlon Brando's memoir. Now do you think Ronnie wrote his own book? posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM |   I see that Matt Drudge is whining again about the cost of John Kerry's haircuts ("Sen. John Kerry was back at Salon Christophe Thursday, sources tell DRUDGE, this for an $80 trim"). Don't forget what I told you last year: Bush may not spend much on his hair, but when it comes to cowboy boots, apparently money is no object. (UPDATE: Sorry -- I misread that; Bush's father was the boot buyer.) (If the link to my blog doesn't work, go to Tuesday, December 03, 2002, 2:01 PM.) posted by Steve M. | 9:52 AM |   When I was listening to NPR's report on the child-credit bill this morning, did I hear Democratic congressman Martin Frost use the "debt tax"? That's not bad -- it's a memorable term for the burden GOP deficit spending imposes on citizens. Unfortunately, it sounds like "death tax," the conservative-PC term for the estate tax -- nevertheless, I'd be very happy if "debt tax" became part of our political language. posted by Steve M. | 9:24 AM |   The Washington Post story I quote directly below says that the House version of the new tax-cut bill "would provide the same tax credit for those low-income families" as the Senate version. Of course, that's a tad inaccurate -- as The New York Times puts it, Over the furious objections of Democrats who were not allowed to bring up an alternative measure, House Republicans voted not to include language from a bill passed by the Senate last week that would immediately send checks of up to $400 per child to families with minimum-wage incomes. While those families, making between $10,500 and $26,625, could get the increased credits under the House bill, they could have to wait until next year and claim a refund when filing their tax return. Um, that's a big difference. Why didn't the Post story mention it? ******* Oh, well maybe this is the reason: A newer WashPost story says, House Republicans said the bill doesn't prohibit the Treasury Department from issuing checks to low-income families later this year, leaving open the possibility that the final version negotiated between the House and Senate will include rebates for those families this fall. "We intend to get these checks out as quickly as possible," said John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. A House Ways and Means Committee aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the committee made a practical decision not to write in instructions for Treasury to send advance refunds and allow low-income families to claim the bigger refund in 2004. They did not want to delay checks already scheduled to go to 25 million families, and a second round of checks would be costly and burdensome to the Internal Revenue Service. So, instead of ensuring that low-income families get refunds, they voted to just to make it possible (but not inevitable) for low-income families to get refunds -- and then claimed they did so because they really, really care -- about people who need the credit less, some of them a lot less. Oh, and I love the part about wanting to spare the IRS a second round of check-mailing because it "would be costly and burdensome." The debt this year is going to be $400 billion, payable by our kids? Shouldn't these guys have been worrying about what's "costly and burdensome" a long time ago? posted by Steve M. | 9:17 AM |   I fear the Democrats are about to have another Elmer Fudd moment... The House narrowly passed an $82 billion bill yesterday providing tax relief for 6.5 million poor families, along with tax cuts for military families and astronauts who die in shuttle missions. The 224 to 201 vote sets up a fight with the Senate, which adopted a more modest $10 billion bill last week. The Senate version would provide a $1,000 per-child tax credit for families earning $10,500 to $26,000 a year until 2005.... The House bill would provide the same tax credit for those low-income families, but for 10 years. It would give members of the military an additional $800 million in tax breaks for housing, death benefits and dependent care.... The House's decision to broaden and extend the proposed tax cuts could doom the enhanced child credit for low-income parents altogether. The reason is that several senators are threatening to filibuster the House version because it exceeds their preset budget limits.... --Washington Post Not long ago, the Democrats were urging Bush to establish a Department of Homeland Security. He refused, then changed his mind and made it seem like his idea -- and then the Democrats began fighting the bill that established the department because it denied collective bargaining rights to federal workers who already had them. And so the Democrats looked like bad soldiers in the war on terror -- just in time for the '02 elections. Clever Democratic plans blows up in their faces. An Elmer Fudd moment. Now we have the Democrats shaming the Republicans for denying the child tax credit to low-income workers. But the Republicans are about to lead the Democrats to the dynamite again: the Dems can't filibuster even a budget-busting bill that provides this tax cut without looking bad. But I bet they're going to do it. Elmer Fudd redux. posted by Steve M. | 7:21 AM | Thursday, June 12, 2003   Two letters to The New York Times in response to this Thomas Friedman Op-Ed piece: To the Editor: Re "Read My Lips" (column, June 11): There is an obvious problem with Thomas L. Friedman's premise. Everyone wants lower taxes, but many of us do want service cuts because the federal government has assumed responsibilities and has made promises it simply cannot afford without stifling our economy. Mr. Friedman's assumption that no one wants service cuts reflects the kind of elitist thinking that we find so maddening here in the "red states." PETER BRUIN HAYS III Estes Park, Colo., June 11, 2003 • To the Editor: Re "Read My Lips," by Thomas L. Friedman (column, June 11): Yes to no new services, and let's get rid of some of the old ones while we're at it. We have had way more than enough "services" for decades! It's about time that somebody finally understands! I hope to see those bumper stickers in 2004. Of course, I hope that people would realize what the slogan means: a cut in services means a cut in expenses means a cut in government intrusion into our daily lives! Isn't it about time that we rewarded ourselves with freedom again? Disclaimer: the government has likely refined its methods of intrusion, so it could feasibly cut back and still intrude more. So let's cut the budget even more and not let that happen. PAUL MCCORD Macon, Ga., June 11, 2003 Which services don't these people want? Which services do they consider "intrusion"? Would they be so kind as to tell us? I've said it before and I'll say it again: I've had it with this vague, nonspecific whining about government excess. You want to cut government? Tell me the list of programs you want to eliminate. The rest of us are citizens, too, and we just might want the services you turn up your nose at. And we need to know what you want to cut because we know you think service cuts are the easy way to solvency -- and you may well be wrong. We don't know if your preferred list of cuts will balance the books unless you tell us what the list is. So put your damn cards on the table. posted by Steve M. | 11:08 PM |   Polling Report tells us that Bush's approval rating is below 60% in the three most recent polls it's reporting -- from Zogby, Quinnipiac, and Investor's Business Daily/Christian Science Monitor. Oh, and even Fox News's polling unit says that the number of Americans who think the economy will get worse exceeds the number who think it's getting better. posted by Steve M. | 2:33 PM |   FoxNews.com has a recurring feature called Tongue Tied, which is intended to expose "politically correct" speech and similar offenses to fair, balanced right-thinkers everywhere. But Fox apparently has no plans to expose its own bizarre "politically correct" term for certain kinds of terrorist attacks -- the ones you and I know as "suicide bombings." It's taboo to use that term at Fox. The politically correct term at the right-wing news network is "homicide bombings"; that's what they're called here, here, and here. The conservative argument for this PC usage is that "suicide bombing" doesn't adequately suggest malign intent. That's nonsense. In standard English, a "bomber" is always someone whose intent is to harm life or property; a "bombing" is always a malign act. (We have a completely separate term for the benign use of explosive devices -- "demolition.") A "suicide bomber" is a threat to peace because he or she is a bomber. There's another reason to criticize the use of the term "homicide bomber" -- logically, a bomber who detonates a lethal bomb and doesn't seek to die in the blast is also a "homicide bomber," but politically correct right-wingers don't use the term to refer to such people. For example, Eric Rudolph was recently arrested in connection with a series of bombings; victims in two of these bombings died. Yet Fox News doesn't call speak of "homicide bombings," or call Rudolph an (alleged) "homicide bomber," in this article, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one. Why not? Obviously, a suicide bombing is an act that's distinct from most other bombings -- it's intended to cause harm and strike fear without leaving a perpetrator to prosecute or question; the perpetrator can attack a shoot-to-kill roadblock with impunity, having no intention of surviving. Everyone understands this. Everyone knows why suicide bombings are particularly devastating. But right-wing political correctness compels Fox News to ignore what everyone knows. posted by Steve M. | 1:17 PM |   Well, I was close. At the end of this post (Wednesday, May 14, 2003, 12:59 P.M., if the link is bloggered), I said that all the hate and bile in Andrew Sullivan's New York Observer review of Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars wouldn't prevent Blumenthal's publisher from using a few of Sullivan's sentences as a blurb: "The account Mr. Blumenthal gives of the haplessness and priggishness of Kenneth Starr is riveting stuff. ...The insane attempt to actually bring down a President over perjury in a civil suit has not yet been more vividly evoked. ... Brutally revealing about the stupidity, bigotry, malevolence and extremism of the right-wing forces that became obsessed with President Clinton." In fact, Farrar Straus Giroux has an ad for Blumenthal's book in the Arts section of today's New York Times, and there it is, right below quotes from Robert Dallek, UPI, Eric Alterman, and AP: "Brutally revealing." --Andrew Sullivan, The New York Observer Heh-heh-heh. posted by Steve M. | 9:24 AM | Wednesday, June 11, 2003   BuzzFlash linked this story from Pensacola, Florida, today: One of the area's most vocal abortion opponents, who has been missing since Thursday, is wanted on sexual misconduct charges involving a 15-year-old girl. John Allen Burt, 65, of the 5300 block of Taf Lane in Milton, was charged Monday with one count of lewd or lascivious conduct, three counts of lewd or lascivious molestation and one count of contributing to the delinquency or dependency of a child, according to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office. Monday's warrants were issued because of an incident that occurred within 24 hours of Burt's disappearance Thursday, said Deputy Jerry Henderson, Sheriff's Office spokesman. The incident involved a 15- year-old girl staying at Our Father's House, a shelter for unwed mothers that Burt operates from his home. In the course of the investigation, Santa Rosa sheriff's deputies have located more victims, Henderson said.... Burt was last seen driving a 1996 dark-green Chevrolet van with the "Choose Life" Florida specialty tag CCA2K.... The article gives a few highlights of Burt's anti-abortion career: February 1985: John Burt, along with two other abortion opponents, is arrested at the office of Dr. Bo Bagenholm on misdemeanor and felony charges for entering the office to speak to patients. March 1985:Burt stuns TV viewers when he tries to show an aborted fetus during a live interview.... March 1986: Burt is arrested on burglary, two counts of battery and resisting arrest without violence after he and others storms into the Ladies Center [abortion clinic] to destroy medical equipment. He is sentenced to 141 days in jail, which he serves while awaiting trial, and is put on probation.... August 1988: Burt is sentenced to two years of house arrest for violating his probation because he drove John Brockhoeft past The Ladies Center. Federal agents stopped Brockhoeft hours after he left Burt's home and found explosives in his car. Brockhoeft was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Burt said he had no idea Brockhoeft planned to bomb the clinic.... August 1991: John Burt and two others are arrested as they try to cut down a fence at The Ladies Center.... But there's more, as the Associated Press points out: In 1993, Burt was leading a protest at a Pensacola abortion clinic when Michael Griffin, who had volunteered at Our Father's House, fatally shot Dr. David Gunn. Burt was with Paul Hill in 1994 when Hill photographed an abortion doctor he later shot and killed. Hill was convicted of murdering Dr. John Bayard Britton and his bodyguard, James H. Barrett and received a death sentence. Z Magazine also describes Burt as a former Klansman (as does Planned Parenthood). Yet as the 1996 Pensacola News-Journal article quoted here points out, Burt's home for wayward girls is registered with the state Department of Education, but it is not regulated or accredited by either state of Santa Rosa [county] School District officials....Under Florida law, Burt does not need a state license to keep girls in his home because it is religious and accredited with the Palatka-based Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, a private group that oversees 25 homes around the state. Please remember this the next time some right-winger says that liberals have made America hostile to religion. Clearly the government bent over backward to accommodate this criminal ex-Klansman (and terrorists' friend), simply because he invoked God when establishing his facility. The 1996 Pensacola News-Journal story says, While staying at Burt's home, the girls cannot have boyfriends, read romance novels, gossip or wear skirts above the knee. Their mail is read by school staff. They have to attend church....Discipline can be harsh. Girls who break rules receive licks from a wood paddle propped up in a corner of Burt's office. And maybe it's just a short step from there to sexual assault. posted by Steve M. | 11:27 PM |   I see that Molly Ivins, in her column yesterday, was calling for more use of wind power. Hey, I'm all for that -- and oddly enough, George W. once was, too: When he was governor, Texas passed a law requiring utility companies to get 3% of their energy from renewable sources by 2009, which led to pretty good growth in the use of wind power in the state, and he did endorse an extension of the tax credit for wind power once he was in the White House. (It it perhaps not a coincidence that Enron had somewhat significant investments in wind power, some of which were apparently improperly concealed.) Nevertheless, Bush hasn't really done a thing to encourage the use of wind power, and nobody else is doing much, either. Still, I have to ask: What the hell ever happened to solar energy? I spent last week on vacation in the Southwest. I've spent a fair amount of time in Southwest over the past few years. You know what? It's pretty damn sunny there. Hot, too -- big need for air conditioning there. Yet, except on national park land, I don't think I've ever seen a single solar panel in the Southwest. I know many, many people in this country hate government spending and hate anything that smacks of 60s/hippie/green/groovy culture, but we're letting all this potential energy go to waste. Government needs to prime the pump and make solar competitive, in the interests of energy independence and the environment. Sell it as part of the war on terror -- I don't care. We need to get red-staters past the notion that putting solar panels on your house makes you a pinko. posted by Steve M. | 10:58 PM |   Don't you find it comforting that the person who put this together is walking around free? posted by Steve M. | 4:43 PM |   The BBC reported this on Sunday: The number of children in Iraq suffering from diarrhoea and related diseases appears to have risen dramatically in the past year, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) said on Sunday. The incidence of diseases such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid was 2.5 times higher this May than for the same month last year.... Lovely. Mission accomplished? (Thanks to Cursor for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 11:37 AM |   A story in the house organ of the Republican Party, The Washington Times, claims that a Supreme Court vacancy is unlikely this year: Any prospects for a partisan fight this summer over confirming President Bush's first Supreme Court nominee appeared to dim recently after justices agreed to hear a contentious case in September, signaling that the bench will remain unchanged at least until then. The author of the article acknowledges the conventional wisdom that one or more vacancies will occur, but dismisses the CW: Most analysts expecting a retirement consider Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 78, or Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, 73, the most likely to depart, even though each plays a key role in the most sharply split cases and both still write books and pursue activities outside the court. The true dark horse is Justice John Paul Stevens, who at 83 is an avid tennis player said to abhor letting a conservative Republican choose his replacement. Sources who have contacts with Chief Justice Rehnquist said they doubt he plans to quit, and he bandies words with those brash enough to raise the question.... Justice O'Connor's only public comment about her position on the court was to dampen speculation she might be elevated to chief justice. When asked, she replied, "I'm too old," the Christian Science Monitor reported. "It's very possible that they won't retire," said Artemus Ward, author of "Deciding to Leave: The Politics of Retirement From the United States Supreme Court." "Why retire when you're at the top of your game?" he said. Now, here's the interesting part: After the chief justice visited Mr. Bush at the White House in December, both parties let it be known his mission was a hunt for allies to raise judicial salaries. Skeptics of that account consider the visit a pretext for a nominating-strategy session. I think they've had a long-term plan to use the GOP Senate majority combined with high postwar Bush approval ratings to ram through a couple of knuckledraggers starting this summer -- but now they see that Bush's ratings aren't in the 90s, and that the recent tactics of combative Judiciary Committee Democrats aren't upsetting the public at all. I think this Rehnquist-Bush meeting was a nominating-strategy session, and what was discussed was "Whoo-ee, we're getting our asses kicked on lower-court nominees, so let's wait until after the '04 elections to pack the Supreme Court." The WashTimes article goes on to say, Because no one expects a vacancy during next year's presidential campaign year — absent death or disability — the next two weeks would be the last real chance for an appointment until June 2005. So maybe Schumer, Leahy, et al. have won a significant battle. posted by Steve M. | 11:05 AM | Tuesday, June 10, 2003   There was a good story on NPR's Morning Edition today about new rules being proposed by the Bush administration: BOB EDWARDS: The Bush administration will allow states to seek exemptions from a policy that blocks road building in a national forest. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Ray says the so-called roadless rule will be amended, and the nation's two largest national forests will be exempted altogether. NPR's Elizabeth Arnold has been following the story. Good morning. ELIZABETH ARNOLD: Good morning, Bob. EDWARDS: This roadless rule protects nearly 60 million acres of forest. What will this policy change mean? ARNOLD: Well, Bob, the Bush administration inherited this rule. They never really liked it, they never defended it in court, and they wanted to get rid of it, but the Clinton administration really bulletproofed it, with unprecedented public comment, they simply made it hard to get around, and this last December the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it, so now the Bush administration is sayong, "OK, fine, we'll live with it, but in some amendments this fall we'll exempt the two largest national forests, both in Alaska, the Tongass and the Chugach, and we'll let the governors get around it, too, under exceptional circumstances, like to reduce the risk of wildfire." So, in short, they're gutting it, without really doing away with it, and what it really means is more access to forest that's been off limits to new roads and logging. EDWARDS: In Alaska, didn't Ray say that 95% of the forest will still remain roadless there? ARNOLD: Well, he did, Bob. He was talking about the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska. But to put that in context, you need to know that two thirds of the Tongass is actually rock and ice -- it's basically glacier. So, some thirty-plus timber sales that are already in the works there represent a pretty good portion of what's left of that forest.... Arnold went on to explain that the forests in question are far from populated areas, so it's not really necessary to prevent wildfires in them -- fires are appropriate in these forests and are allowed to happen, and as a result the forests aren't overgrown. So this isn't about dangerous wildfires at all. Arnold also pointed out that Undersecretary Ray is a former timber-industry lobbyist. It seems obvious what's going on. So how come the New York Times story on this rule change has the utterly misleading headline "Bush to Prohibit Building Roads Inside Forests"? posted by Steve M. | 11:46 PM |   Tonight on ABC News, Peter Jennings reported on the two Israeli attacks in Gaza. What followed was this exchange with ABC's White House reporter, Terry Moran: JENNINGS: Terry, the president is the patron of this latest attempt to make peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Do you think he was somewhat surprised today? MORAN: Totally surprised, Peter. The White House was really taken aback by these attacks. Is this possible? Is it really possible that the president of the United States and his advisers are so ill-informed, so unable to comprehend the world around them, that they couldn't imagine that this would happen? Maybe it's just spin -- but I can't imagine why, if you were the White House, you'd want to feed the press a story that makes you look impossibly naive. So I think Moran is telling the truth -- and I find it rather astonishing. posted by Steve M. | 10:37 PM |   Iraq had a weapons program. Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced with time we'll find out that they did have a weapons program. --President Bush at a Monday Cabinet meeting Watch what he and his underlings say from now on. Watch how often they say Iraq had a weapons program. That fudges the issue: Of course the Iraqis had one when they gassed the Kurds. Did they have a weapons program after that? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they had one in recent years but it wasn't active, and wouldn't have been as long as the sanctions were in place. But if Bush and his subordinates know there was no active program in recent years, and they always say simply that Iraq had a weapons program, they're telling the strict truth but deceiving the public. It all depends on what the definition of had is. posted by Steve M. | 7:14 PM |   The Associated Press tries to count civilian deaths in Iraq: At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll — if it is ever tallied — is sure to be significantly higher.... Here's the methodology, which explains why the actual toll is almost certainly much higher: The AP count was based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals — including almost all of the large ones — and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when fighting was dying down and coalition forces announced they would soon declare major combat over. AP journalists traveled to all of these hospitals, studying their logs, examining death certificates where available and interviewing officials about what they witnessed. Many of the other 64 hospitals are in small towns and were not visited because they are in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Some hospitals that were visited had incomplete or war-damaged casualty records. Even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story. Many of the dead were never taken to hospitals, either buried quickly by their families in accordance with Islamic custom, or lost under rubble. The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in Iraq's largest cities and most intense battles aren't reflected in the total.... Comment at the Free Republic thread devoted to the article, from someone who, presumably, was very, very far from the war zone: Sounds good. Small price to pay for freedom. Great job US Military. Thanks, pal. If a future president ever insists that blowing up your house and killing your whole family is necessary to preserve freedom, it's good to know you've given your OK. posted by Steve M. | 7:03 PM |   About That Bridge They Are Buying: The media is swallowing the entire Hillary hype oyster in one gulp. Take the "million copy" claim.  There is no way to prove such a number has been published. Take the "lines around the block for the book signing" report. In New York that many nutballs would turn out for Charles Manson.... --Catty comment posted this morning at Lucianne Goldberg's Lucianne.com (translation: "Please, God, pretty please, let Hillary's book be a failure!") Clinton Book Sets Barnes & Noble Record WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs set a Barnes & Noble sales record for nonfiction books on its first day on store shelves, the company said Tuesday. Clinton signed over a thousand copies of the book, "Living History," at a promotional event at a Barnes & Noble store in midtown Manhattan Monday, the first day the book was on sale. The company said the former first lady's White House memoirs sold more than 40,000 copies in the first 24 hours it was available, instantly making it an in-house best seller. Nationwide sales figures for other booksellers were not immediately available. Late Monday, publisher Simon & Schuster, which paid $8 million for the tome, announced it would print an additional 100,000 copies, on top of an extraordinary initial printing of 1 million copies.... --AP story posted at Yahoo News this afternoon Har-de-har-har. Barnes & Noble has no motivation to fake sales numbers (nobody in New York media wants to be caught telling stretchers these days) -- if B&N says Hillary broke a record, she broke a record. And S&S has no motivation to reprint the book unless it thinks its warehouses could be out of stock soon. So this baby is really selling. Forty thousand copies at one chain in one day is a nig number in book publishing. (Books that sell 50,000 or 60,000 copies in total routinely make the lower rungs of the New York Times bestseller list.) Like her or not, she did it. posted by Steve M. | 6:09 PM |   Here's the lead story in this morning's print edition of USA Today: Guard, Reserve short on recruits ...The nation's largest auxiliary forces — the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve — are beginning to have trouble meeting their recruiting targets. As of April 30, the Guard was nearly 6,000 recruits short of where it needed to be on that date to meet its Sept. 30 target of enlisting 62,000 soldiers, Pentagon statistics show. If the Guard can't reverse the shortfall, it will mark the first time since 1998 that it has failed to fill its ranks. The Army Reserve is also lagging behind and was more than 700 soldiers short of where it needed to be in April to meet its Sept. 30 goal of 42,000. Defense officials and civilian analysts say the numbers demonstrate that the unusually intense use of part-time soldiers over the past year and a half is beginning to seriously affect the Guard and Reserve.... "I think it is reasonable to conclude that people are looking at the last 19 to 20 months of mobilization and they are voting with their feet," says Tom White, a former secretary of the Army. "I think we're seeing the leading edge of a problem." ...The demands on National Guard and Reserve troops, most of whom have full-time civilian jobs, have been unrelenting. Some units, including military police and nation-building soldiers known as civil affairs specialists, have been on active duty almost constantly since the Sept. 11 attacks.... Several thoughts come to mind: * This is typical of the contemporary management class, isn't it? They hire people at one level, dump the responsibilities of higher-level workers on them without actually promoting them or giving them raises, and assume enough of them will just grumble and take it. * Bush does this and still maintains the reputation as the commander-in-chief who's loved by his troops, in contrast to his evil peacenik predecessor. Did Clinton shortchange reservists? If he did, he didn't do it in a period of permanent war. And if recruitment of reservists fell short in 1998, remember that that was during a roaring economic boom. (And yet recruitment goals were met in 1999 and 2000, apparently.) Conditions for reservists are now alienating potential recruits despite lousy economic conditions. * This is really a disgrace. Bush wants massive simultaneous troop deployments in more countries than he himself can find on a map, yet he and Rumsfeld pretend that we can have domino wars (and the subsequent occupations) without the use of big, big numbers of full-time servicemembers. That requires lots of taxpayer money -- and maybe a draft -- but the administration won't say so. (America, of course, doesn't want a draft or higher taxes.) * The worst enemy of this administration is itself. Democrats are too pitiful to mount effective opposition, and the public is still largely pro-Bush -- but the administration's ability to carry out the neocons' mad imperialist plans is threatened by Bush's utter refusal to grasp the fact that things cost money, and by Rumsfeld's fixation on the idea that the military can do anything it wants with low troop strength. Sooner or later, this will all come crashing down on their -- and our -- heads. posted by Steve M. | 1:43 PM |   So maybe the war wasn't about the oil -- at least not in the way you might expect: Employees of South Oil, Iraq's leading oil producer before the war, are now idle because looting has brought most of the company to a standstill. "The other day, there was looting and sabotage at the North Rumaila field," Mr. Leaby said. "The day before that, at the Zubayr field. For three months, I've been talking, talking, talking about this, and I'm sick of it." This is now the state of the Iraqi oil industry, custodian of the world's third largest oil reserves — an estimated 112 billion barrels — and the repository of hope for the United States-led alliance and the Iraqi people themselves. Money from oil, the Bush administration has said repeatedly, will drive Iraq's economic revival, which in turn will foster the country's political stability. Many Iraqis agree. Yet from the vast Kirkuk oil field in the north to the patchwork of rich southern fields around Basra, Iraq's oil industry, once among the best-run and most smartly equipped in the world, is in tatters. Looting, sabotage and the continued lack of security at oil facilities are the most recent problems the industry and its American overseers must address in order to get petroleum flowing again, especially for export.... --New York Times It sure seems as if no one's in a rush to turn this situation around: Last Tuesday, Halliburton workers at Garmat Ali tested for the first time the new pumps and filters they started to install a week earlier to send water to the refinery to wash the oil. A half-dozen burly Halliburton workers, some with ponytails and neon-bright bandanas, struggled to secure a large hose to a concrete platform using chains and ropes. Someone turned on the pump, and water gushed out of the open hose. "Now we're talking!" said Roger Davis, the Halliburton safety coordinator at the site. But the equipment the Americans have brought is only "5 percent of what we had before," said Adnan Hussein, a South Oil engineer who works at Garmat Ali. The other equipment still needed is for injecting water into the Rumaila fields. The Army Corps of Engineers has not set a date for starting that project.... At South Oil's headquarters, Mr. Leaby questioned how any repairs could hold when security was so threadbare. "Every minute, we have something missing," he said. "Every time we fix something, it gets looted." Is this yet another result of Donald Rumsfeld's obsession with keeping troop strength low? And do the high muckamucks at Halliburton not care because the contract to pump the oil is the real asset they wanted? Do they not care how much they pump, or how soon, because this contract is lucrative no matter what? posted by Steve M. | 9:47 AM |   Yesterday, AARP ran a full-page ad in The New York Times asking Congress and the president to agree on a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare. One line from the ad jumped out at me: "Every effort should be made to reduce gap in coverage." As Robert Pear's story in yesterday's Times explains, the Republican proposal for prescription drugs "would leave a big gap for some people. Under the Senate bill, for example, Medicare would share drug costs up to $3,450 a year, but would not provide further coverage until a beneficiary's annual drug costs reached about $5,300." Why does the GOP plan in the Senate do that? I guess I understand the notion of covering both ordinary and extraordinary expenses, but why exclude what's in the middle? What's the logic behind that? Now, look at the wording of that line from the AARP ad: "Every effort should be made to reduce gap in coverage." It's almost as if the AARP thinks this gap is some sort of natural phenomenon, something like cancer or tornado damage that we simply can't eliminate but should do our best to minimize. It isn't. People made this gap. It doesn't have to exist at all. posted by Steve M. | 9:30 AM | Monday, June 09, 2003   More book news from Publishers Lunch: With all the announcements relating to books for conservatives, it’s worth noting the launch this fall of [Henry] Holt’s American Empire Project, a line of "short, argument-driven" books that will examine "the increasingly imperial cast of America’s government and policies." Developed by editors and historians Tom Engelhardt and Steve Fraser, the line from Metropolitan Books begins with Noam Chomsky’s HEGEMONY AND SURVIVAL, said to be his first "wholly new book in over 10 years." Henry Holt isn't huge, but it's part of Holtzbrinck, which also owns Farrar, Straus & Giroux and St. Martin's. (In the past, Holt has published, and paid big money to, the likes of Sue Grafton, Thomas Pynchon, and, yes, Al and Tipper Gore.) posted by Steve M. | 7:10 PM |   You may have read about the Al Franken/Bill O'Reilly dust-up at BookExpo America on Saturday, May 31 (here's Newsday's account; here's some commentary from CalPundit and his readers) -- but Michael Moore was aapparently also quite entertaining the following day. Herean account of Moore's talk from an e-mail sent out June 1 from BEA by the folks at Publishers Lunch: Fireworks from Saturday’s political lunch still resonated at this morning’s author breakfast, as moderator Walter Isaacson told the audience, "There won’t be quite as much heat as there was at lunch, but hey it’s breakfast." But it did begin with a rousing ovation before anyone even said a word, and clearly much of that enthusiasm was directed towards speaker Michael Moore—as underscored when Madeline Albright took to the podium later and declared, "What a blast to be here with Michael Moore." More amusing than aggressive, Moore himself began by saying, "Now if you don’t mind I’d like to finish that Oscar speech…" He noted that "success has made me extremely grateful to Mr. Bush for the tax cut" and told the President he’s got a new plan "to spend my entire tax cut to help defeat you next year." (Interested candidates can go to spendmikestaxcut.com.) Moore’s fall book is tentatively titled, DUDE, WHERE’S MY COUNTRY? (given a chance a vote by applause, the audience favored that title heavily over the alternate, LEAVE NO MILLIONAIRE BEHIND), and includes such helpful chapters as "How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-law." Moore’s thesis is that most people in the country aren’t really conservative in all their policies, but that "They just don’t want to give up their tax money." By his reckoning, the key for liberals in prevailing is to "quit trying the moral argument. When you’re a conservative it’s all me, me, me. How does it affect me?" His notion is that humane policies towards issues like health care and day care make for a happier, more prosperous work force, and in turn will help conservatives make more money. Other popular Moore one-liners included references to "the Fox Nuisance Channel" and a hunch that "Saddam found the same travel agent that Osama did." Later in the morning Moore drew long lines having his picture taken at the Warner booth, where at one point he was observed singing a duet of "O Canada." He quipped, "Just in case I have to move." And, from the same e-mail, here's an account of Franken/O'Reilly/Ivins: The MediaTalk lunch on Saturday was full of fireworks. Originally conceived as a "fair and balanced" presentation with two on the left, Molly Ivins and Al Franken, facing off against two on the right, Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson, was thrown off-center by Carlson's absence. Former Democratic Congresswoman and AAP head Patricia Schroeder, who moderated, said, tongue in cheek, that it was perfectly fair and balanced to her. Ivins, whose "BUSHWHACKED" is coming soon from Random House, kicked off the conversation talking about her new tool to analyze the health of the US economy, the Doug Jones Average (reusing some of her material from the book awards the night before). Doug Jones is the symbol of the "average American." And, no surprise, she found the "Doug Jones Average" falling, citing a host of failures of the Bush government, often in the field of environmental protection, to take the side of the average American against the powerful. She closed with a powerful, and inflammatory, quote from Mussolini defining fascism as "corporatism," when corporations wield government's power. "The bottom line is that old Doug Jones is getting screwed." (Ivins also won over booksellers with a story about Barnes & Noble that had shelved her book SHRUB in the gardening section.) Bill O'Reilly, the fabulously successful author ("The O'Reilly Factor" and "The No-Spin Zone") and talk-show host whose "Who's Looking Out for You?" is coming soon from Doubleday Broadway, was greeted by smaller but still fervent pockets of applause. He said his book was "a very personal book, not a political book—I don’t really write political books…. It’s a personal book about you." He immediately claimed separation from Rush Limbaugh by saying "I'm a problem solver." O'Reilly's prescription for a better world is about individual responsibility. He disdains government help as ineffective and counterproductive. Baiting the next speaker a few times, O’Reilly said "We name names—we don’t call names." Al Franken was the last to speak. His new book, coming from Dutton, is "LIES, and the Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right". Franken started out, deadpan, saying "God asked me to write this book because he was so pissed off at George Bush" for claiming God was on HIS side. It turned out, though, that Franken had a very pointed agenda, and O'Reilly was the target, which is hinted at by the fact that O'Reilly is the cover image of "LIES..." Franken told a lengthy story, the gist of which was that O'Reilly lied on C-Span about awards his TV work had earned, and persisted in the lies in the face of questioning and evidence. Of course O'Reilly was operating at two distinct disadvantages. One was that the audience was, judging from the applause and outbursts, largely on the political side of Ivins and Franken. But, perhaps even more telling was the difference in skills and attitudes of the participants. Franken is a skilled comedian: quick with his wit and sure with his timing. Ivins is a political writer with a caustic and humorous edge. O'Reilly seems to have almost no sense of humor at all, and certainly none when he himself is involved, since that is the subject he seems to take MOST seriously. From this observer's point of view, that might for a very unfair fight, even before you get to who had the right side on the facts and merits. Congresswoman Schroeder had her hands full keeping things on a relatively civil plane. The direct attacks by Franken on O'Reilly, and his shrill defense of himself, left Ivins where she almost never would find herself -- the person in "the middle." To a plea from the last questioner from the audience that we find ways to "come together," not much hope came from the platform. Franken said, basically, it is time for liberals to fight back, although he said he considered himself a "nice guy" and wanted to "promote civility." This brought a harumph from O'Reilly and, mostly, cheers from the floor. Schroeder's closing appeal was that each of the speakers send their books to the others. I have a feeling that Ivins and Franken will enjoy the swap, Ivins will skip O'Reilly's and Franken will mine it for material for his next book. posted by Steve M. | 6:25 PM |   Remember deficit hawks? Warren Rudman? Ross Perot? Lead or Leave? Whatever happened to those flinty folks, anyway? I've been thinking that they were all forcibly transported to one of Dick Cheney's undisclosed locations, but, lo and behold, one emerged in yesterday's New York Times Magazine -- Pete Peterson, railing against his fellow Republicans: Coming into power, the Republican leaders faced a choice between tax cuts and providing genuine financing for the future of Social Security. (What a landmark reform this would have been!) They chose tax cuts. After 9/11, they faced a choice between tax cuts and getting serious about the extensive measures needed to protect this nation against further terrorist attacks. They chose tax cuts. After war broke out in the Mideast, they faced a choice between tax cuts and galvanizing the nation behind a policy of future-oriented burden sharing. Again and again, they chose tax cuts. The recent $10 trillion deficit swing is the largest in American history other than during years of total war.... You might suppose that a reasoned debate over this deficit-happy policy would at least be admissible within the ''discussion tent'' of the Republican Party. Apparently, it is not. I've seen Republicans get blackballed for merely observing that national investment is limited by national savings; that large deficits typically reduce national savings; or that higher deficits eventually trigger higher interest rates. I've seen others get pilloried for picking on the wrong constituency -- for suggesting, say, that a tax loophole for a corporation or wealthy retiree is no better, ethically or economically, than a dubious welfare program. For some ''supply side'' Republicans, the pursuit of lower taxes has evolved into a religion, indeed a tax-cut theology that simply discards any objective evidence that violates the tenets of the faith. Peterson, like all deficit hawks, also whacks the Democrats (for "dubious" social programs -- presumably anything introduced or proposed after 1960). Still, his condemnation of GOP orthodoxy is a hell of a lot more full-throated than what most Democrats seem able to muster. (I wonder if Peterson's article helped inspire this John Kerry statement.) Elsewhere in the Times Magazine, this is not a bad explanation of why Bush tax policy is bad for you -- by all means share it with centrist friends who might not grasp that reduced federal taxes mean reduced federal revenues, which mean reduced money for state and, ultimately, local programs, which is why the local prison is turning away prisoners and the local roads are filled with potholes. What's missing from the article is what's missing from all refutations of right-wing tax orthodoxy: a challenge to the notion, implicit in all right-wing thinking, that we can have all the government services we need and lower taxes because there's just so much government waste. No conservative is ever expected to prove that this is so. Instead, we get dishonest proof-by-anecdote -- in this case, the vile Grover Norquist sneering at tax-sponsored sex-change operations. Look, I've heard of these operations being paid for out of government funds, and you can certainly argue against that, but does Wisconsin, say, fully fund 88 such operations a day, 365 days a year, at $100,000 a pop? Because that's how many sex-change operations would have to be dropped from Wisconsin's budget to close the $3.2 billion budget gap the Times article tells us it has. And I don't know that Wisconsin (ex-governor: Tommy Thompson) has ever funded even one such operation. But nobody ever calls a guy like Norquist on something like this. Nobody ever shoves a budget under his nose and says, "OK, show me all the cuts you'd make to balance this and pay for your wish list of tax cuts." Nobody ever does this to him, and it should be done to him as often as humanly possible. posted by Steve M. | 1:51 PM |   Real life has intervened. I'm utterly swamped. I'll try to post soon. posted by Steve M. | 11:08 AM | Sunday, June 08, 2003   I saw this photo in USA Today while I was on vacation. I'm so glad the grown-ups are in charge now -- aren't you? posted by Steve M. | 11:35 PM |   A couple of posts ago I cited this story, in which Judith Miller and William Broad quote skeptics who doubt that the alleged mobile weapons labs in Iraq really were meant to produce WMDs. Now I see that there's this, from The Observer: Tony Blair faces a fresh crisis over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, as evidence emerges that two vehicles that he has repeatedly claimed to be Iraqi mobile biological warfare production units are nothing of the sort.... The Observer has established that it is increasingly likely that the units were designed to be used for hydrogen production to fill artillery balloons, part of a system originally sold to Saddam by Britain in 1987. The article lists some reasons for skepticism about the WMD story. You've read some of these before, but not all of them: * The lack of any trace of pathogens found in the fermentation tanks. According to experts, when weapons inspectors checked tanks in the mid-Nineties that had been scoured to disguise their real use, traces of pathogens were still detectable. * The use of canvas sides on vehicles where technicians would be working with dangerous germ cultures. * A shortage of pumps required to create vacuum conditions required for working with germ cultures and other processes usually associated with making biological weapons. * The lack of an autoclave for steam sterilisation, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons. * The lack of any easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank. Canvas sides? That's the one that strikes me as bizarre. (A British scientist quoted in the article feels the same way.) posted by Steve M. | 11:25 PM |   One more story of note from Saturday's New York Times -- "As Budgets Shrink, Cities See an Impact on Criminal Justice" by Fox Butterfield: The Portland police budget has been cut by more than 10 percent in the last three years, and the strain is showing. Station houses now close at night, and the 960-member force is down 64 officers. With no money for overtime, undercover drug officers sometimes simply stop what they are doing — for instance, tailing suspects or executing search warrants — when their shifts end... Crime here is rising, and Chief Kroeker says he is not surprised. In the first four months of the year, shoplifting is up 10 percent from the same period in 2002, car break-ins have increased 12 percent, the number of stolen cars has risen 19 percent and home burglaries have jumped 21 percent, police figures show.... The police commissioner in Seattle, R. Gil Kerlikowske, said that because of budget cuts he had reduced his force by 24 officers and 50 civilians this year and put a freeze on the hiring and training of new officers. The city now has about 1,250 officers, a police spokeswoman said. Burglaries, car thefts and shoplifting are up 18 percent this year, Mr. Kerlikowske said, though violent crime has remained steady. In Minneapolis, Robert K. Olson, the police chief, has cut 118 officers from his 900-member force this year because much of the money for the city's police comes from the state, which is running a budget deficit. Chief Olson said he had lost another 81 police officers because President Bush had essentially eliminated a Clinton administration program that provided money to add 100,000 police around the country.... You know, if we actually had an opposition party in this country, this might become a political issue. posted by Steve M. | 10:54 PM |   I was stunned when I read in yesterday's New York Times that Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas had given a speech "drafted by the Bush administration and amended in negotiation with Mr. Abbas's aides." Is this really how we expect to win peace in the Middle East -- by insisting that as many Arab and Muslim leaders in the region as possible are visibly lapdogs of the U.S.? posted by Steve M. | 10:51 PM |   A little more about the L.A. Times story I just posted, about the Iraqi who said that Iraq's WMD program was essentially on hold prior to the war: According to the Times, The interview with the former senior Iraqi intelligence officer was arranged by a family member of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Majid, who was married to one of Hussein's daughters and who headed Iraq's secret weapons programs until he defected to Jordan in 1994. He was executed after he returned to Baghdad in 1995 under promises of safety. Recall what Seymour Hersh said about Hussein Kamel in his watershed New Yorker article "Selective Intelligence": In August, 1995, General Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of Iraq’s weapons program, defected to Jordan, with his brother, Colonel Saddam Kamel. They brought with them crates of documents containing detailed information about Iraqi efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction—much of which was unknown to the U.N. inspection teams that had been on the job since 1991—and were interviewed at length by the U.N. inspectors. In 1996, Saddam Hussein lured the brothers back with a promise of forgiveness, and then had them killed. The Kamels’ information became a major element in the Bush Administration’s campaign to convince the public of the failure of the U.N. inspections. Last October, in a speech in Cincinnati, the President cited the Kamel defections as the moment when Saddam’s regime “was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirty thousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. . . . This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.” A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel’s story “should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself.” The full record of Hussein Kamel’s interview with the inspectors reveals, however, that he also said that Iraq’s stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, which were manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, in many cases in response to ongoing inspections. The interview, on August 22, 1995,was conducted by Rolf Ekeus, then the executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, and two of his senior associates—Nikita Smidovich and Maurizio Zifferaro. “You have an important role in Iraq,” Kamel said, according to the record, which was assembled from notes taken by Smidovich. “You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.” When Smidovich noted that the U.N. teams had not found “any traces of destruction,” Kamel responded, “Yes, it was done before you came in.” He also said that Iraq had destroyed its arsenal of warheads. “We gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons,” Kamel explained later in the debriefing. “I don’t remember resumption of chemical-weapons production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. . . . All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.” I think Saddam wanted to make these weapons again, but never did so. posted by Steve M. | 10:41 PM |   Hey, I'm back -- tanned, rested, and still disgruntled. Had a nice time, but I missed this.... Oh, where to start? Maybe the land of Lucianne. Today one of her "Must Reads of the Day" is "Iraq Had Secret Labs, Officer Says" from the L.A. Times. Here's the part of the story that gets posted at the top of the thread on her site: BAGHDAD -- Saddam Hussein's intelligence services set up a network of clandestine cells and small laboratories after 1996 with the goal of someday rebuilding illicit chemical and biological weapons, according to a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer. The officer, who held the rank of brigadier general, said each closely guarded weapons team had three or four scientists and other experts who were unknown to U.N. inspectors... Smoking gun? High fives in Bush country? Humiliation for liberal skeptics? Er, not quite. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the original story that Lucianne.com chose not to excerpt: The officer, who held the rank of brigadier general, ... insisted they did not produce any illegal arms and that none now exist in Iraq. But he said the teams met regularly and put plans on paper to quickly develop weapons of mass destruction if U.N. sanctions against Iraq were lifted. "We could start again anytime," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he fears for his life. "It's very easy. Especially biological." "The point was, the Iraqis kept the knowledge," he explained during a lengthy interview Friday in which he offered tantalizing details of secret programs. But U.S. weapons hunters "will never find anything here. Only oil." ...He said that U.N. sanctions and inspections in the 1990s crippled Iraq's ability to build illegal weapons and that Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear programs were effectively eliminated in the mid-1990s.... The Iraqi intelligence officer said that the secret weapons groups were created in late 1996 and 1997 because the regime's unconventional arms programs had been dismantled or destroyed by then and that U.N. inspectors knew most of those who had worked in them.... Kind of a comedown, no? The right was so ready to wave huge stockpiles of WMDs in our faces, and now they're crowing because one Iraqi says there used to be WMDs in Iraq -- and that the sanctions we said were an effective deterrent actually were an effective deterrent. (If you can't read the story, use "clipjoint" as both member name and password.) Oh, and, by the way, this guy might not even be telling the truth: It's possible that the officer's story contains falsehoods meant to deceive or confuse U.S. investigators. He refused to show the documents he said he had saved or to take a Los Angeles Times reporter to any of the safe houses where he said the weapons teams had operated.... The Iraqi officer agreed to speak to two reporters because he said he wanted them to provide a satellite telephone that would not be tapped by U.S. intelligence so he could call Iraqi spies hiding overseas. He said he also wanted to see if he could gain access to $600,000 he said is in a Chase Manhattan Bank account. The reporters refused.... A real Boy Scout, this one. Look, I don't think Saddam was a nice guy. As I said last month, I think it's quite plausible that Saddam had a WMD program and abandoned it in an attempt to get sanctions lifted -- and if that's what was going on, it means the sanctions were a very effective anti-proliferation tool. I think this source is telling a story that's reasonably close to the truth -- even if he's just making stuff up. ************ Meanwhile, Judith Miller took a small taste of crow yesterday, coauthoring this story: Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment. "Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process." ... The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons. Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon. Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank.... One more story embarrassing to the administration that, alas, conveniently winds up in the Saturday paper.... posted by Steve M. | 7:53 PM | Friday, May 30, 2003   I'm going to be at a few undisclosed locations over the next week or so, so I won't be posting, but I'll be back around June 8 with lots of fresh vitriol. Thanks to everyone for reading (and linking).... posted by Steve M. | 10:57 AM |   Next time we need troops for a war in the Gulf, can we please send these people first? LIKE most of the students at Hummer camp, Maria del Carmen Grimmelmann tends to gush. "It moves me," Mrs. Grimmelmann, 51, said of the supercharged Hummer H2 she and her husband, Frank, bought earlier this year. "You know when you go shopping and nothing moves you?" she asked. "Then there's the time you see something, and right away know it's perfect. It's like falling in love. When I'm driving it, I feel empowered. It's the car that opens the sea for me. Now I know how Moses felt."... WEDNESDAY, AFTER LUNCH Mark Mills and David Paschen, a 50-year-old recreational vehicle dealer from Chesterton, Ind., acquaintances for all of one day, are barreling up and down mud hills following a caravan of Hummers. Mr. Paschen is playing befuddled straight man while Mr. Mills doles out zingers. Why did you buy a Hummer, Dave? "I turned 50, and I decided if I was ever going to do it, this was the time," Mr. Paschen replied. Mr. Mills interjects, "His wife said he could." Mark, why did you buy a Hummer? Well, he had a BMW sports car and had considered an H1, but there were complications. "I don't want to say I'm a fat guy," he explains. "But I'm a fat guy. The seats in that H1 aren't very big." Besides, the H1 was twice the H2's price. "I only have so much money," Mr. Mills said. Kidding!... Mr. Chance, a man with the erect bearing and basso voice of a somewhat younger Charlton Heston, explained the Hummer appeal over dinner. "The last G.M. car I liked was a '57 Chevy," he said. "I think it's so important that car designers create passion. Europe does it — BMW, Mercedes, Ferrari. They create passion and make you willing to write a check. There's no logic. If I had sat down and done a cost-benefit analysis, I would have been, `No-o-o.' Of course, I took delivery in California, and gas went to $2.50. So that's a statement of passion or stupidity, I don't know which."... Yeah, I'm so dang proud to be an American after reading this.... posted by Steve M. | 10:05 AM |   Is there anyone left who still hasn't seen "What a Tangled Web We Weave...," Billmon's compendium of WMD quotes? If you haven't, go to the link immediately. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM |   Watch how fast Paul Bremer changes his story in this interview with Claire Shipman of ABC News: CLAIRE SHIPMAN: But still, no matter how quickly we won the war, wouldn't it have made sense for example to have an enormous police or military police operation ready to go here, to simply keep order? PAUL BREMER: Well, the police in a postwar period, the police are called the army. That's what the Army is here for. And we did have a pretty big one. Right? Today we had 54,000 troops here in Baghdad. That's a pretty big police force. We also have got an entire brigade of MPs that have been brought in. We've got a pretty good-sized police force. That's not a problem. CLAIRE SHIPMAN: But they certainly weren't operating the way they might have as soon as the war ended. PAUL BREMER: Look. Military men are not trained to be policeman. But in an immediate postwar period, that's the role that they have to assume. Hey, we didn't need cops -- we had soldiers! Lots of soldiers! Er ... but hey, you can't expect soldiers to be cops! posted by Steve M. | 8:51 AM |   One more deck of non-Pentagon-approved playing cards. posted by Steve M. | 8:36 AM | Thursday, May 29, 2003   Media conservatives know how to keep the average right-wing Joe angry: When all else fails, just make stuff up. This morning, the first "must read of the day" at Lucianne Goldberg's Web site was a story about an incident on a Qantas flight: 2 flight attendants stabbed on plane A snarky comment followed on the site: Wonder where the hijacker could be from? Here’s some of what was said in the Lucianne.com discussion devoted to this story: Any bets that his name is Mohammad or Abu?! I also am expecting that the culprit's name is going to turn out to be something like Mohammed Abdullah, or Mustafa Jihadi, or Ahmed Intifada, or some such. The Austrailian news agency is reporting the highjacker is an Aussie. However, like Richard Reid, he could very well be an Aussie Mooslim. This is BOUND to be a Muslim terrorist wanna-be. If the liberals would unwad their panties and get on board with checking all Mooslim and Arab looking men between 17-50, we'd solve a lot of problems. While Americans and our allies boldly determine the course of the 21st Century, the Death Cult Horde (presuming this was in fact an Islamist savage) appears to have regressed from the stone age to the stick age. Yo ,, ye dang Leftist Media and Quantas you can't hide this stuff anymore We The People know Islamic Terrorist Savages are out there !!! Islamic raghead or Australian raghead, you can bet that he was one. Er, apparently not. Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald: Government sources said the assailant called out about "God's will or Armageddon when he was interrogated by federal police after the plane returned to Melbourne. He had been quiet but one source said that, during the attack and after he had been detained, he began talking about "God and the end of the world", saying that "God had spoken to him"…. Witnesses who saw the man after he was arrested, his hands bloodied and in handcuffs, described him as "just a normal looking Australian". It was believed he recently had resigned or been sacked from a job. Federal police said he would be charged under the Federal Aviation Act…. Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon said: "We do not believe at this stage that this is terrorist-related in any way." If there’s any clarification of this at Lucianne.com, I haven’t seen it. posted by Steve M. | 6:51 PM |   Someone at Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins Publishers actually got paid cash money to decide that the subtitle of Dick Morris's forthcoming book should not be Duplicity, Destruction, and Deception in American Politics, Media, and Business, but rather Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Life. Or vice versa. From the link, I can't be sure. I guess we'll have to wait until the book comes out next month to find out what the final decision was. Isn't the suspense just killing you? I know it's killing me. posted by Steve M. | 5:18 PM |   US troops firing a tank-mounted machine gun have killed two civilians and injured two others in the Iraqi town of Samarra after they tried to drive through a military checkpoint, US Central Command said. The news came as the US military announced it was investigating another incident in Samarra, about 60kms north of Baghdad, on Monday in which three young men were allegedly shot and killed by US troops.... ...Officials at the hospital where the three dead youths were taken said they had been firing in the air to celebrate a wedding, as is the Iraqi custom. --Herald-Sun (Australia) posted by Steve M. | 4:16 PM |   There's nothing I can add to what TBOGG says here about privatization. posted by Steve M. | 2:06 PM |   Bush Signs Tax Cut Bill, Dismissing All Criticism --headline in today's New York Times "Dismissing All Criticism" -- is it really necessary to add that? In Bush's case, isn't that a bit like adding "Continuing to Breathe Oxygen"? Has there ever been a millisecond in Bush's presidency when he wasn't "Dismissing All Criticism"? posted by Steve M. | 1:26 PM |   It looks as if the Bush administration's lying disease, unlike SARS, may be communicable across an ocean...  A dossier compiled by the government on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was rewritten to make it "sexier", a senior British official has told the BBC.... The intelligence official told the BBC the dossier had been "transformed" a week before it was published on the orders of Downing Street. He said: "The classic example was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. "That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable. "Most things in the dossier were double source but that was single source and we believe that the source was wrong." ... --BBC posted by Steve M. | 12:24 PM |   RIOTING IN IRAQ The police station in the tense Iraqi town of Hit smouldered on Thursday, a day after it was set alight in what residents said was a riot over intrusive weapons searches by Iraqi police and US soldiers.... ...24-year-old Amer Aziz, who said he represented the young men of Hit, said the trouble began when police and American troops began a house-to-house search for guns on Wednesday morning. "The Iraqi police were very rough with our women," he said. "They forced their way into houses without knocking, sometimes when women were sleeping. This is a very conservative town." Uproar ensued in the Sunni Muslim town of 155,000 as angry residents surged into the streets, burning police cars and throwing stones and handmade grenades at the Americans. Aziz said a parley had taken place in the afternoon, when townsfolk told the Americans to leave or face suicide attacks. "I convinced the young men to withdraw and then the Americans withdrew," he added. Another young man, 26-year-old Ahmed al-Mashhadawi, said a hand grenade had been thrown at a US tank as it left town. "We killed one soldier and wounded others," he said. The U.S. military said on Wednesday it was checking what happened in Hit, but has not confirmed any casualties.... --Reuters, via NZOOM.com (New Zealand) posted by Steve M. | 11:20 AM |   You probably already know about the report, commissioned and then suppressed by the Bush administration, that (as Reuters says), "measured the present value of the federal deficit at over $44 trillion." Just in case you're not clear how much money that is, that's $160,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. (The U.S. population is roughly 275 million.) And, as Reuters notes, The study estimated that closing the budget gap would take an immediate and permanent across-the-board tax increase of 66 percent, the paper reported. Great. posted by Steve M. | 10:25 AM |   PRIORITIES STRAIGHT I'm not breaking any news here -- this is a front-page story in both the print and online New York Times -- but this just makes me furious: A last-minute revision by House and Senate leaders in the tax bill that President Bush signed today will prevent millions of minimum-wage families from receiving the increased child credit that is in the measure, say Congressional officials and outside groups. ... after studying the bill approved on Friday, liberal and child advocacy groups discovered that a different group of families would also not benefit from the $400 increase — families who make just above the minimum wage. Because of the formula for calculating the credit, most families with incomes from $10,500 to $26,625 will not benefit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group, says those families include 11.9 million children, or one of every six children under 17. And in case you're not clear about what's important to our right-wing government, realize this: a provision to give these families the tax break was agreed on, but an important swing senator, George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said he could not approve any bill that exceeded $350 billion. To satisfy him and the Senate, Ms. Tinsworth [a Ways and Means Committee spokeswoman] said, the child credit provision was dropped, along with other costs. ...A spokeswoman for Mr. Voinovich said the senator would have been happy to extend the child credits, but believed that the entire package should not pass $350 billion. The tax writers were free to reduce the dividend tax cut, noted the spokeswoman, Marcie Ridgway. (emphasis mine) Free to reduce it? They were free to eliminate it. Hell, they were free not to do engage at all in another round of tax giveaways to the non-needy. But they know what's important, right? posted by Steve M. | 9:33 AM | Wednesday, May 28, 2003   The Baghdad bunker which the United States said it bombed on the opening night of the Iraq war in a bid to kill Saddam Hussein never existed, CBS Evening News reported Wednesday. The network quoted a U.S. Army colonel in charge of inspecting key sites in Baghdad as saying no trace of a bunker or of bodies had been found at the site on the southern outskirts of the Iraqi capital, known as Dora Farms. "When we came out here, the primary thing they were looking for was an underground facility, or bodies, forensics, and basically, what they saw was giant holes created. No underground facilities, no bodies," Col. Tim Madere said.... --Reuters So who said there was a bunker there? Ahmed "Tommy Flanagan" Chalabi? posted by Steve M. | 11:14 PM |   A lot of Iranian citizens want to reach out to the U.S. and the West. As The Guardian points out, no good deed goes unpunished: The Pentagon's pronouncement that it would seek to "destabilise" Iran's Islamic republic has given the country's clerics ammunition to portray their liberal opponents as traitors. Hardly a day passes without warnings in the official press against reformists accused of sowing divisions. "America is trying to undermine our national unity by provoking chaos and political differences as well as creating a crisis," said Mohammed Baqer Zolqadr, the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards. Washington's rhetoric could not have come at a more awkward time for President Mohammed Khatami and his allies in parliament. As the political and constitutional battle between reformists and Islamists comes to a head, the US intervention is a distraction and a pretext for muffling dissent.... Great. And these are people who want to be our friends. posted by Steve M. | 11:10 PM |   In a little item about Hillary Clinton's forthcoming memoir, Matt Drudge says this: Clinton raised eyebrows in 1996 when she failed to acknowledge a single person in her bestseller, IT TAKES A VILLAGE. Here is the complete text of page 319 of It Takes a Village: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It takes a village to bring a book into the world, as anyone who has written one knows. Many people have helped me to complete this one, sometimes without even knowing it. They are so numerous that I will not even attempt to acknowledge them individually, for fear that I might leave someone out. Instead, I would like to thank those who encouraged and advised, read and reacted; those who typed and retyped, edited, copyedited, proofread, designed, set type, and printed; and those who kept the engines of daily life humming the whole time. The opinions expressed in this book are my own, as is the responsibility for any errors it may contain. Yet I am indebted for my ideas -- and for any contribution they make to public and private debates and agendas -- to a long line of family and friends, teachers and classmates, colleagues and mentors; to the many tireless and often unheralded experts whose work I have been privileged to know; and most of all, to the millions of families and children who are building tomorrow’s villages. No she didn't say, "I worked with a ghostwriter." (Most nonwriters who work with ghostwriters don't.) No, she didn't mention anyone by name. But she did thank people -- lots of people. posted by Steve M. | 11:01 PM |   The left has its share of wackos, but the right has -- and takes very, very seriously -- people like Robert George, who defends Rick Santorum's recent remarks on sexual matters in this National Review Online piece. The problem with George isn't that he thinks that a Supreme Court endorsement of an absolute right to privacy would be open the door to legalization of consensual adult incest and other rare but nasty behaviors -- you can find centrists who've argued the same thing. No, the problem with George is that he considers any sexual act apart from intercourse to be "intrinsically non-marital" -- even if it takes place between a husband and wife. To George, the things lawfully wedded spouses do that aren't intercourse are “sexual misconduct,” “illicit sex acts,” and “immoral sex acts.” It's entirely likely that Senator Santorum agrees. You know, maybe we should spend a little less time wondering about what might happen if there's an expansion of the right to privacy -- and a little more time wondering what the limits on our private behavior would be if people like Robert George and Rick Santorum had their way. posted by Steve M. | 7:15 PM |   Don't you just love the sheer glee with which this tells you how to get a huge tax deduction on the biggest frigging brontasaurus of an SUV you can possibly buy, including SUVs so fuel-inefficient "they fall outside the scope of the rating system"? Here's a sample passage: The deduction for SUV purchases was already pretty hefty, but it came in three parts: A $25,000 equipment deduction, plus 30% of the remaining price (courtesy of the 2002 economic stimulus bill), plus the standard five-year depreciation schedule on the remainder. On a $72,000 Range Rover, the deduction came to about $45,000 the first year, for a tax savings of more than $16,000. It's so much easier -- and cheaper -- to write the whole thing off. Simply multiply the purchase price by your tax rate. The tax savings on that same Range Rover? More than $25,000 in the top brackets. In contrast, those who buy ultra-efficient gas-electric hybrids for personal use get a tax deduction of $2,000, worth at most $700. What a country! Munch my dust, granola-eaters! The all-GOP federal government rocks! posted by Steve M. | 4:34 PM |   How big was the tax cut Bush just signed? A hell of a lot bigger than $316 billion or $350 billion. Who says so? Some liberal? No -- Senator Bill Frist. The Daily Howler quotes Tony Snow's interview of Frist on last weekend's Fox News Sunday: FRIST: I’m very hopeful that they won’t be temporary, that this $350 billion tax plan will, indeed, be made permanent, will grow to what it really is, is an $800 billion tax relief package for the American people. SNOW: So, in effect, the president got a bigger tax cut than he requested in the first place? FRIST: He did. And they're not satisfied. They want even more: FRIST: Remember, the budget that we passed in the Senate and in the House had, not a $350 billion package, but a $1.2 trillion tax relief package. That is the goal. This is really the first iteration, that first step. If you're under 45, I think you can just kiss Social Security goodbye. (Partial transcript of the Fox News interview here.) posted by Steve M. | 2:46 PM |   Somewhere, in a parallel universe, everything is hunky-dory. How do I know this? I know this because Donald Luskin of National Review Online apparently lives in that parallel universe. Here he is writing about Paul Krugman's forthcoming book: Think, for a moment, about how good things have been lately, and how hard a catastrophist like Krugman has to work to make them seem bad. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was a brilliant victory (Krugman: " ... it did the terrorists a favor ... "). President Bush signs into law today an historic pro-growth tax bill, enacted thanks to the support of cross-over Democrats (Krugman: " ... the administration ... actually wants a fiscal crisis ... "). Even the crisis in corporate malfeasance seems to have been overcome (Krugman: " ... they can get away with even more self-dealing than before ... "). No recession! No corporate crooks! And everyone in the Middle East loves us! What a cool universe! Wish I lived there.... posted by Steve M. | 10:53 AM |   In Monday's Washington Post, Howard Kurtz reported that an internal New York Times e-mail had revealed the identity of the principal source for reporter Judith Miller's dubious claims of WMD "smoking guns" in Iraq -- Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, bosom friend of the D.C. neocons. ("She ... noted that the Army unit she was traveling with -- Mobile Exploration Team Alpha -- 'is using Chalabi's intell and document network for its own WMD work. . . .'") Now we learn from the New York Observer (scroll past the Jayson Blair story) that the Times's Kuwait bureau during Gulf War II employed Ahmed Chalabi's niece: The New York Times has quietly ended its relationship with Sarah Khalil, who helped set up the paper’s Kuwait bureau for the war—and who is also the niece of Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress.... In an e-mail exchange with Off the Record, chief Washington correspondent Patrick Tyler—currently reporting from Baghdad—explained that he hired Ms. Khalil, a former staffer with the AFP news agency in Cairo, in January, while setting up the Kuwait bureau for the war. Mr. Tyler said he met Ms. Khalil, the wife of a Kuwaiti-based businessman and the mother of two small children, while working for The Washington Post in the 1980’s and hired her as an assistant "whose work was confined to Kuwait." This, Mr. Tyler said, included arranging visas for war correspondents and directing supplies into war zones. "The politics of postwar Iraq were not even on the horizon," Mr. Tyler said. "I certainly didn’t expect to be covering them. Chalabi was not in the news or even in the region. When he came across the horizon after the war, Sarah and I had a discussion about Chalabi’s rising profile and the appearance of conflict." According to sources at The Times, editors and senior writers in The Times’ Washington bureau objected to Ms. Khalil’s presence and demanded that Mr. Tyler relieve her of her duties.... Curious. posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM | Tuesday, May 27, 2003   When Ann Coulter steps over the line and says something so outrageous that even fellow conservatives can’t defend it, their usual response is to say, well, after all, Coulter is an entertainer -- her stock in trade is comic hyperbole. You’re not supposed to take her seriously, as you would a more sober-sided conservative essayist. One of those indefensible Coulter remarks came a few days after 9/11. Coulter said of Muslims in her weekly column, We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. An exaggeration, right? Bitter, angry hyperbole, not meant to be taken seriously -- right? So why was William F. Buckley -- the sort of conservative we’re all supposed to take seriously -- saying nearly the same thing in his National Review Online column today? Buckley had read a New York Times article about Islam-hating Evangelicals who want to preach Christianity to Muslims. The article makes clear that the goal of these people is conversion: On a recent Saturday in a church fellowship hall here, evangelical Christians from several states gathered for an all-day seminar on how to woo Muslims away from Islam. It also makes clear that they don’t have much respect for Islam: "The Koran's good verses are like the food an assassin adds to poison to disguise a deadly taste," writes Don Richardson, a well-known missionary who worked in Muslim countries, in "Secrets of the Koran" (Regal Books, 2003). "Better to find the same food, sans poison, in the Bible." This month, he is scheduled to speak on Islam at churches in five American cities. Buckley thinks what they’re doing is terrific: The program initiated by sundry evangelical Christian ministers to accost Islam by teaching the tenets of the Christian faith to those who seek to bring that faith to Muslims is very good stuff, overdue.... One evangelist, from Beirut, advocates assembling passages from the Koran that establish that Islam is "regressive, fraudulent, and violent," to quote the Times report by Laurie Goodstein. "Here in the Koran it says slay them, slay the infidels. In the Bible there are no words from Jesus saying we should kill innocent people."... Diplomacy is fine and is necessary but it sometimes demands politically correct professions of equality of faith, at the expense of right reason. Ronald Reagan saw through to this problem when he said that the Soviet Union was an evil empire and that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history. Something like that needs to be said about Muslims, to the extent that they are identifiable as agents of terrorism. We know William F. Buckley thinks we should invade Muslim countries and kill their leaders -- we’ve just invaded two of these countries and tried our damnedest to kill their leaders, and he was all for it. And now we know he wants the people left alive converted to Christianity -- or, at the very least, told how sick and vile and morally repugnant their religion is, in contrast to the moral glories of Christianity. So what’s the difference between him and Coulter? posted by Steve M. | 11:32 PM |   Is there a Gulf War II Syndrome? The U.K.'s Evening Standard seems to think so: The Government was facing growing criticism over claims that four soldiers who received multiple vaccinations before the Iraq war could be suffering from a potential "Gulf War II Syndrome". Stephen Cartwright, 24, of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, and Tony Barker, 45, from Leeds, were among the four men threatening to sue the Ministry of Defence after suffering "severe physical and psychological symptoms". Their solicitor Mark McGhee said all four had received multiple inoculations in one day, contrary to Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon's statement to the Commons earlier this year. Mr McGhee, of Manchester-based law firm Linder Myers, said: "It is my understanding that specific guidance was given to medical officers that these inoculations were not to be administered on a multiple basis." Mr Hoon told MPs in January that "a key lesson" learnt from the 1991 Gulf War was the importance of ensuring that troops should not receive a number of different vaccinations in a short timeframe. Mr McGhee, who has dealt with more than 400 veterans from the first Gulf War, said the symptoms reported by the four soldiers were "identical" to those of so-called Gulf War Syndrome.... It'll be interesting to see whether the pro-war pundits in America who tell us to "support the troops" will change their tune if our soldiers begin to lodge similar complaints. posted by Steve M. | 4:55 PM |   It occurs to me that the real-life GOP policy that most resembles Orwell's "We are not at war with Eurasia. We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia" isn't the one-war-after-another approach to international relations (addition isn't really the same as substitution), but the policy on budget deficits. USA Today points this out today to traveling salesmen all over America: The current president's tax cut also would have been impossible if the House Republican majority that arrived in 1995 had passed the first piece of legislation proposed in its ''Contract with America'' campaign document. Spurred by Newt Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who became speaker of the House for two terms, conservative House Republicans wanted to pass a constitutional amendment requiring that the president propose a balanced federal budget each year and that Congress enforce it. ...''If Newt Gingrich and friends had been successful in implementing their 'Contract with America,' everything they do this year would be illegal,' '' [Stan] Collender [of the Federal Budget Consulting Group] said. ''The president would have to submit a balanced budget. They couldn't increase the debt. That's a real turnabout. It's an abandonment of discipline.'' ...Republicans who wrote the tax-cut legislation acknowledged it will require more borrowing. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., said the borrowing is warranted by the costs of war and terrorism and the struggling economy. He called it ''an investment deficit.'' ''You can spend a deficit dollar in peace as an investment in national strength, (to) make sure the economy is strong,'' Thomas said. Thomas, of course, endorsed the Contract with America, including the "Fiscal Responsibility Act" (which called for "a balanced budget/tax limitation amendment ... to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses"). Can you think of any Repubs from that period who didn't? (UPDATE: When I first posted this, I omitted the USA Today link. It's there now.) posted by Steve M. | 1:55 PM |   Don't even bother reading the newspaper over the next few months (or year-plus): Neal Pollack lists every possible future scenario and their likely outcomes (which are all the same). The only cloudy spot on his crystal ball, in my opinion: Wouldn't the U.S. government want the sham Iraq melodrama to last approximately a year and a half, so the 9/11 anniversary bash-cum-2004 Republican convention (and the subsequent campaign) can be conducted in an atmosphere of utter national terror? posted by Steve M. | 12:02 PM |   A stray thought: It's obvious now that the Bush administration would like to turn the Iranians into our new Antichrists. Do you think the Bushies will have the gall to exploit the fact that the name of the man who's currently Iran's most powerful mullah, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is awfully similar to that of the now-deceased Ayatollah Khomeini? Will they suggest (without actually saying so) that Khomeini, America's #1 demon a generation ago, is the guy we need to fight? Oh, and another thing: A year from now, do you think most Americans will think Iran was behind 9/11? Do you think they'll think 9/11 was masterminded by Khomeini, a guy who died in 1989? posted by Steve M. | 11:07 AM |   Remember this? In the mid-1980s, ... Congress tightened rules about how much money can be written off on luxury automobiles used for business -- but excluded vehicles with a gross weight of 6,000 pounds or more, partly an attempt to help farmers afford tractors, large trucks and other heavy equipment. But many SUVs, including the 6,400-pound [Hummer] H2, fall into that heavyweight category, and now a new class of small-business owners and the self-employed, such as construction company executives, doctors, real estate agents and lawyers, is qualifying for [a tax] deduction. Well, the deduction -- nearly $38,000 for a vehicle that costs $50,000 to $60,000 -- just cleared Congress: Congress on Friday substantially widened a tax break that has been used by small businesses as an incentive to purchase the largest sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks. Supporters including President Bush said the business equipment tax break, which was quadrupled to $100,000 in the $350 billion tax cut bill that narrowly cleared Congress, is good for the economy. It passed on Friday, when it was assumed that you wouldn't be paying attention. I see The New York Times is reporting today that respect for the military is extremely high right now among young people. I guess that's good, because if we're subsidizing Hummers, kids are going to have a lot of opportunities to see their heroes in action in the foreseeable future. ******* The article on young people's trust in the military, incidentally, includes yet more evidence of the success of Bush's Great Deception: In Mr. Sunderdick's class, Vietnam seemed very distant history. Even the teacher was born after Saigon fell. Several students said they thought that the Iraq war was much more like World War II, a war with a clear rationale waged by a country intent on defending itself, reflecting the effectiveness of the Bush administration's case for going to war. "We actually got attacked," a student, Jessica Cowman, said. "In Vietnam, it wasn't an attack on us. We got hit in World War II, at Pearl Harbor, and we got hit in New York and at the Pentagon. It wasn't like that with Vietnam." Another student, Stephanie Isberg, said: "People are more personally affected, especially by 9/11. My uncle almost died. So I have a more positive viewpoint about going in and taking out terrorists than I probably would have if nothing had happened." Saddam = Osama. 2 + 2 = 5. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM |   Here's how a couple of recent mountaineering events were reported on last night's broadcast of ABC's World News Tonight: In another part of the world, it is climbing season on Mount Everest, and records there are falling like never before. Today a Sherpa scaled the mountain in record speed -- ten hours and fifty-six minutes from base camp to peak. The previous record was set just three days ago. And then today another Sherpa reached the top of the mountain -- his thirteenth time there, also a record. What's wrong with this? Well, Sherpas aren't camping equipment. Sherpas are people. They have names. Reporting this story without giving the Sherpas' names is an insult. Damn "liberal" media. (The New York Times reports on these and other Everest events in today's edition and gives the names of the climbers. The speed champ is Lhakpa Gela and the thirteen-time climber has the single name Appa.) posted by Steve M. | 9:11 AM | Monday, May 26, 2003   In the middle of an article in yesterday's New York Times, I ran across this statistic: Medicaid, the nation's largest health insurance program, pays for one-third of all births, covers one-fourth of all children and finances care for two-thirds of nursing home residents. I knew about the nursing homes -- a lot of senior citizens spend down their assets to qualify for Medicaid. You'd think we'd have better, more direct ways of helping people pay for nursing-home care, but there it is. It's the other statistics that are really appalling, though: One out of every three births in this country is to a mother on Medicaid? One out every four children is on Medicaid? In a country with no nbational health-care system, we have that many young families that can't get coverage any other way? That's a disgrace. posted by Steve M. | 11:07 PM |   It seems that fashionable Euro-bashing has made it to the arts pages of The New York Times. This is from an article in today's Times about the Eurovision Song Festival: The Eurovision performers are clad in overly self-conscious leisure wear, and their movements are choreographed with the accuracy of a Bavarian glockenspiel figurine; they smile with such unnatural intensity that they look as if they're on the verge of a manic episode. The singer seemingly becomes one with the song and can't get out. In short, a typical Eurovision broadcast looks like a cross between a chewing-gum commercial and a Leni Riefenstahl film. Look, I'm an American, and I'm proud of the amazing popular music we made in this country over the last hundred years -- but it sure doesn't look as if we're going to another century like the last one. We used to have a right in this country to sneer at European pop, but not anymore. "Choreographed with the accuracy of a Bavarian glockenspiel figurine"? "A cross between a chewing-gum commercial and a Leni Riefenstahl film"? These phrases could describe any video or live performance by Michael Jackson or any of the dozens of acts influenced by him in the past two decades, from his sister Janet through Britney Spears, Cristina Aguilera, and all the boy bands (and no, that music isn't completely dead -- the first solo album by Justin Timberlake of 'NSync went double platinum within the past year). "They smile with such unnatural intensity that they look as if they're on the verge of a manic episode"? Sounds like a good description of this guy, or any number of other American Idol contestants. And notice who came in third in this year's Eurovision contest -- t.A.T.u., the pop-music world's current champions of épater les bourgeois. Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, Madonna, 2 Live Crew, Marilyn Manson -- not only did America make great pop music, but we regularly had pop stars who were the best in the world at shock (with a little competition from Brits like David Bowie). But now the shock crown has passed to two Russians -- they're not even from a country that was in the Coalition of the Willing! -- whose fake sapphic-schoolgirl act has made them superstars worldwide, even in America. So sneer no sneers at the Eurovision Song Festival -- we have Creed and Nickelback. (UPDATE: Yeah, sorry -- Nickleback is a Canadian band. OK -- Darryl Worley, then.) posted by Steve M. | 11:05 PM |   "The Republican Party just agrees with the way I feel compared with the Democratic Party, which is right now almost a communist party...." --Richard Wibalda of Las Vegas, quoted in The New York Times yesterday I don't want to hear another Republican complaining about people who call Bush or other conservatives "fascists" or "Nazis." You have a problem with that? Well, I have a problem with idiots on your side who think the Democratic Party is "socialist" or, God help us, "communist." You repudiate these people and I'll repudiate the people who say Bush is a Nazi. posted by Steve M. | 10:16 PM |   As you were reading Adam Clymer’s front-page story in yesterday’s New York Times on the GOP’s push for political dominance, did you get the feeling that Clymer doesn’t quite realize that the GOP already has political dominance in this country, at least on the national level, and has had it for a long time? Let’s review, class: In all but two of the twenty-two-plus years since Reagan’s inaugural, the GOP has controlled the White House, both houses of Congress, or both. In six of those years it controlled the White House and the Senate. GOP nominees have controlled the Supreme Court without interruption since the early 1970s. The GOP seems kinda dominant to me. But I guess Clymer’s point is that voter identification with the GOP still isn’t truly high and the GOP still doesn’t have big majorities in Congress and state legislatures. Yet at the national level, at least, it’s hard to imagine how much more the GOP could accomplish with a big majority. The complete elimination of taxes? Internment camps for Democrats? Clymer’s follow-up on the Democrats in today’s Times is dispiriting, but I don’t think he’s too far off the mark. He acknowledges a long period of GOP dominance -- duh -- and runs through the list of Democratic problems many of us complain about: too little money, no structure of think tanks, no coherent foreign-policy message. He does quote one idiot, though, whose message he seems to agree with: A veteran Democratic consultant looked at the 2004 presidential field and found it symptomatic of a basic party problem: "Sometimes we're so respectful of our diversity that we take completely preposterous people seriously. We always run the risk of the follies of the absurd when people want seriousness." In particular, he said Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio, the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York and former Senator Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois were not real potential nominees but "products of the silly season." Excuse me -- the presidential campaigns of ideological fringe-dwellers such as Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, and Alan Keyes don’t seem to have done much harm to the GOP, so why should we accept that these Democrats are hurting their party? Maybe the real problem here isn’t the candidates. Maybe it’s that Democrats like this idiot are so willing to speak ill of fellow Democrats into a reporter’s open mike. Oh, and Pat Moynihan, the spiritual father of all self-hating Democrats, is quoted here: One month before his death, apparently determined not to let the approach of the grave interrupt his long history of fragging, Moynihan bashed Democratic presidential candidates for agreeing to oppose the partial-birth abortion ban. Now, doesn’t the GOP platform call for a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions, including for victims of rape and incest? Does this ever seem to hurt Republicans? Think that lack of political fallout might be partly attributable to the GOP tradition of not stabbing fellow party members ion the back? Bob Shrum, the Democratic consultant, gets it right in Clymer’s second article: "It's probably a weakness that we're not real haters. We don't have a sense that it's a holy crusade. We don't have a sense that it's Armageddon." Line that up with what Clymer says about the Republicans’ comeback after Watergate: Mr. Reagan's nomination in 1980 (after his near-miss in 1976) was the biggest step on the road back. His success convinced suspicious conservatives that the political deck was not stacked against them, and they enlisted in the Republican Party and ultimately took it over. Nancy Sinnott Dwight, a Midwestern moderate who ran the Congressional campaign committee, said, "For us to prevail, the party was going to have to be hospitable to people far to our right." Democrats appealing to their base: bad. Republicans appealing to their base: a blueprint for dominance. Got it? ********** The Republican college students on the cover of the magazine in yesterday’s Times dream of GOP dominance, but it’s odd -- they’re not like earlier generations of hectoring young right-wingers. They reject racism. They don’t oppose immigration. They advocate the free-speech rights of Eminem. One young conservative woman rejects marriage and family; one young conservative man advocates gay marriage. Is it me, or are these people liberals? Ah, but no: They despise taxes, they love guns, and they want a strong and aggressive foreign policy. But didn’t our elected officials in D.C. just lower taxes, reject renewal of the assault weapons ban, and give us two snazzy wars? If these kids loathe liberalism, which they see everywhere around them on campus, why don’t they just get the hell off campus? Why don’t they get jobs and join the rest of us in the real America, where George Bush is considered a war hero and Max Cleland is considered a traitor? I sometimes wish a few of our better colleges would go solidly right-wing. Then these conservative kids could matriculate where they feel wanted -- and they wouldn’t have to annoy us for the rest of their lives with their permanent sense of grievance at having had to live for four years in the same geographic space with regular performances of The Vagina Monologues. ********** Six New York City firehouses were closed on Sunday. Remember New York City firefighters? America’s heroes? Remember Bush with a bullhorn telling them, “I can hear you”? Yup, those guys. Six of their firehouses were closed on the orders of Republican mayor Mike Bloomberg, The Republican president’s economy is hurting the city; he and the Republican Congress aren’t offering much serious help to “first responders,” even in New York City, and the Republican governor of New York isn’t much help either. You think maybe Democratic presidential candidates should be talking about this, or even showing up at the firehouses to meet with protesters? This is from a New York Times story: At Engine Company 212 in Williamsburg, there were about 100 protesters by 8 a.m., chanting in English, Polish and Spanish and setting up sidewalk barbecues to grill hamburgers. Two conga drummers arrived and began beating out rhythms. Suddenly, Paul Veneski, 38, of Williamsburg, an unemployed truck driver, slipped into the firehouse through an open cellar door and opened the garage's large red door. Other protesters — among them Bronislawa Hupalo, a rail-thin 80-year-old — charged in and struggled to jam it open with discarded lumber. . Mr. Veneski then chained himself to the fire truck. His 12-year-old daughter, Jennifer, cheered him on. Later in the three-hour standoff, she offered her father hamburgers through a small space in the door. Apparently, trying to save firehouses runs in the Veneski family. Mr. Veneski's father, Adam Veneski, a local grocer, stormed this very firehouse when it was threatened with closing in 1975, the family said. These aren't Hollywood liberals. These are ordinary Americans. But not even local boy Al Sharpton showed up, much less Kerry or Kucinich or Dean. Too bad. posted by Steve M. | 10:05 PM | Friday, May 23, 2003   I probably won't be posting till Monday night. Enjoy the weekend.... posted by Steve M. | 2:06 PM |   So Texas will soon have, as this Reuters story points out, a new, remarkably restrictive abortion law: it limits the facilities in which some abortions can be performed (already only 6% of Texas counties have abortion facilities), mandates a 24-hour waiting period for all abortions, and requires state-sponsored counseling that, among other things, insists that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer -- even though this myth has been debunked by the National Cancer Institute and other researchers. Oh, and as an added screw-you to pro-choicers, there's this: The Texas legislature voted down an amendment that would have exempted women who became pregnant through rape or incest from going through the waiting period. Why? During debate in the Texas Senate, Bob Deuell, a Republican from Greenville, said the exemption would "undermine the reflection period," adding that some women who gave birth after being raped or through incest have considered their children a blessing. (Thanks to Kos for pointing this out.) posted by Steve M. | 2:01 PM |   You think Bush's tax cut is less than half the size of the one he first proposed, but it's actually bigger than the one he first proposed. David Rosenbaum explains in today's New York Times: ...the $320 billion figure, which is expected to clear the Senate today, is artificial. No one expects that tax breaks for married couples and a bigger tax credit for children, popular features of the bill, will be allowed to expire after next year. This is what lawmakers call a sunset. It was put into the measure to hold down the 10-year cost. Nor, barring a political upheaval that puts Democrats in the White House and in control of Congress, is it likely that the lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains will be allowed to expire after 2008, another sunset in the bill. If these elements of the tax cut are calculated on a 10-year basis, the cost in lost revenue stands to be over $800 billion, more than what the president proposed, according to the first analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priority, a liberal research institute. More important, the tax reduction this year and next year under the Congressional agreement is significantly larger than what the president originally proposed. The Congressional tax staff estimated that the agreement would lead to a tax cut of $61 billion in the 2003 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, and $149 billion in 2004. The Congressional Budget Office reported that the president's plan would have lowered taxes by $35 billion in 2003 and $117 billion in 2004. I'm grateful to Rosenbaum for pointing that out, I'm grateful to him for making it his lead, I'm glad the Times put that on the front page (above the fold) and Web site title screen (big headline) ... but even in this article we get Bush as Mighty Hero: But even more, the president succeeded because of a set of tactics that involved remaining flexible in his goals, taking advantage of division among Democrats, campaigning vigorously in the states of crucial senators and knocking the heads of Congressional leaders who often seemed more interested in pride of authorship than in enactment of legislation.... The tax bill, said Senator Robert F. Bennett, Republican of Utah, was the latest example of Mr. Bush's talent as a political strategist. Mr. Bennett, chairman of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, continued: "The president looks at the economy and looks at the electorate and grasps that the electorate wants to see someone doing something. They don't care about the details. So here is Bush with the political smarts to understand that the best medicine is to be seen as a leader making bold strokes, moving out on an issue where others are temporizing." Oh, and there's an unrebutted cheap swipe at Bill Clinton: "By the force of his personality," Mr. Bennett said, "[Bush] stepped into the squabble between the House and the Senate and brought everyone into the room and said, `You're going to get this done before Memorial Day.' Clinton would have stood at a board with a Magic Marker and worked through the details. Bush was more interested in getting a bill than he was in what was in the bill." Let's see: Clinton presided over a recession-free eight-year presidency. He used the first budget cycle of what looked for a while as if it would be a de facto Gingrich presidency to begin the process of destroying Gingrich's credibility, turning Newt and his mighty Contract with America into national jokes. But he's the bumbler. Meanwhile, Bush is Top Gun: he drives the economy off a cliff, but he does it on time. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM |   In the article Adam Nagourney published yesterday in The New York Times about John Edwards's effort to reach out to rural voters in his presidential campaign, was this necessary? The prepared text for Mr. Edwards's speech that was e-mailed to reporters included stage directions for the senator — instructing him to "point if you can see" windmills in the distance, as he talked about their potential to generate inexpensive power for farmers. President Bush's speeches, by contrast, are spontaneous outpourings of the soul, and contain no pre-planned bits of stage business whatsoever. Is that what Nagourney wants us to believe? Of course, the Times does tell us about Bush stage management -- there was, after all, that big front-page story last Friday about the crafting of Bush's image. But that article was meant to make you see Bush stage management as a mighty show of strength ("... using the powers of television and technology to promote a presidency like never before"), not as tawdry and dishonest image manipulation. We see the same skew in coverage of Democrats and Republicans as they raise funds: Clinton at a fund-raiser is a money-grubbing sleaze, whereas Bush ... well, note the first seven words of this Times article on a Bush fund-raiser, also from yesterday's paper: President Bush flexed his political muscles tonight.... And what's particularly dishonest about discussing windmills in a speech and choosing to gesture to windmills if some are visible? Does it change the truth value of any statement in the speech about wind power? Does it suggest something that's untrue about the presence or absence of windmills in rural areas? What the hell is wrong with doing this? The article also includes this cheap shot from a GOP operative: Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, suggested that Mr. Edwards would have a tough time presenting himself as the candidate of rural America. "I guess they wrote that speech at John Edwards's Georgetown mansion," Mr. Dyke said. But ... but ... but I thought Americans didn't like "class warfare"! I thought we didn't resent rich people for being rich, as long as they "keep it real," like Jenny from the Block. Isn't that what Republican David Brooks told us only a few months ago? posted by Steve M. | 9:40 AM |   A press release about Bookspan's new conservative book club points out that Brad Miner, who will head the club, wrote a book in 1995 called Good Order: Right Answers to Contemporary Questions. To paraphrase Molly Ivins, that title probably sounded better in the original German. posted by Steve M. | 9:08 AM | Thursday, May 22, 2003   LIBERAL MEDIA? Interesting point made by Bob Harris in Tom Tomorrow's blog: ...if the media really was in liberal hands, then centralization of that power would be absolutely terrifying to the right wing. It would be all you ever heard about. And yet those guys are strangely silent. On their websites, neither Bill O'Reilly nor Rush Limbaugh so much as mention the issue, even once, at least as far as I can find. Point this out to people with ears and brains. It really should be the end of the "liberal media" argument. posted by Steve M. | 11:37 PM |   Can't decide what to do with your Bush tax cut? Maybe you ought to buy your hometown cops a hazmat suit. This is from a report by Brian Rooney on ABC News last night (it's not on the Web). You know this nonsense is going on, but here's another reminder of how absurdly skewed our priorities are: ROONEY: When the nation goes on higher alert, the Los Angeles Police Department increases patrols at the airport, the port, and the list of 605 potential targets. But they try to do it all without spending extra money, because it’s not in the budget, and the federal government has not delivered promised help. WILLIAM BRATTON, LOS ANGELES POLICE CHIEF: We’re now, what, almost two years away from 9/11, and we’ve still received almost nothing in the way of federal government reimbursement. ROONEY: Bratton says the added burden of training and staffing an antiterrorism squad costs tens of millions of dollars a year. It’s the same in San Francisco, where tighter security for the city’s landmarks and antiterrorism efforts have cost about $50 million, with no help from the federal government. The city of San Jose has spent $23 million. RUDY GONZALEZ, MAYOR OF SAN JOSE: ...The whole amount we’ve gotten back is about $207,000, and we just -- it befuddles us. We just don’t understand how the process works. ROONEY: They can’t look to the state for help, because the state of California is running a $30 billion deficit. The last time the country went on orange alert, during the Iraq war, it cost Los Angeles $4 million, all paid by a city in financial trouble.... posted by Steve M. | 11:13 PM |   REGNERY VIRUS SPREADS From Publishers Lunch, more news about Random House/Crown's all-right-wing imprint: Crown has hired Jed Donahue, who has been working at Regnery Publishing since 1997, as an editor for their Forum imprint, starting next month. Prior to working with such authors as G. Gordon Liddy, William F. Buckley, Oliver North, and Pat Buchanan, Donahue was an assistant to George Will. posted by Steve M. | 3:28 PM |   Some people think Saif Al-Adel is now al-Qaeda's military chief. Some people think he's the brains behind the Saudi Arabia bombings. And some people think Iran is giving him aid and comfort. I don't know what to make of this, but this ABC News story by Leela Jacinto sorts through some theories. (Warnings of an Iran/al-Qaeda connection are coming from the Bush administration, but these warnings, Jacinto says, have been "noticeably weak on details, with senior U.S. officials declining to go on record with concrete proof of the Iranian government's supposed support for the shadowy terrorist network." Surprised?) posted by Steve M. | 1:44 PM |   Elifat Rusum Saber, 14, has been nauseated, tired and bleeding from the nose since her brother brought home metal and chemicals from the neighboring Tuwaitha nuclear research center two days after the fall of Baghdad. --Los Angeles Times U.S. military inspection teams have concluded that material looted from Iraq's main nuclear facility at Tuwaitha poses little or no danger to the people who stole it... --The Washington Times So, which one of these leads triggers your bullshit detector? posted by Steve M. | 12:54 PM |   The thing that upsets me about this is that it won't work its way into conventional wisdom -- the conventional wisdom will still be that we took great pains to avoid harm to civilians, and that our efforts were successful.... Surveys pointing to high civilian death toll in Iraq Preliminary reports suggest casualties well above the Gulf War. Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war, according to researchers involved in independent surveys of the country.... Such a range would make the Iraq war the deadliest campaign for noncombatants that US forces have fought since Vietnam. Though it is still too early for anything like a definitive estimate, the surveyors warn, preliminary reports from hospitals, morgues, mosques, and homes point to a level of civilian casualties far exceeding the Gulf War, when 3,500 civilians are thought to have died.... "The biggest contrast between Afghanistan (where an estimated 1,800 civilians died during the US-led campaign there in 2001) and Iraq is that Afghanistan was predominantly an air war and this was a ground/air battle," says Reuben Brigety, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. "Air wars are not flawless, but if you have precision weapons you can do a lot to make them more accurate," he adds. "The same is not yet true of ground combat. It is clear the ground battle took a toll; ground war is nasty." Dr. Brigety and his colleagues in Baghdad say they are especially concerned by the wide use of cluster bombs during the war in Iraq.... --Christian Science Monitor (Link from Rational Enquirer and Cursor.) posted by Steve M. | 12:26 PM |   Interesting point made by someone posting a comment to this item at the Daily Kos: ...when you look at the list of recessions since then, you'll see that it happens overwhelmingly during Republican adminsitrations! For example: Years: Dem/Repub Prez: Recession length: '45-'53 Dem (Truman) 11 months '53-'61 Rep (Ike) 27 months '61-'69 Dem (JFK/LBJ) 1 month (ended at start of JFK) '69-'77 Rep (Nixon/Ford) 27 months '77-'81 Dem (Carter) 6 months '81-'93 Rep (Reagan/Bush) 24 months '93-'01 Dem (Clinton) 0 months '01 - PT Rep (W) 6+ months Add them up and you get: 18 months/28 years for Democrats 84 months/29 years for Republicans Go here and scroll down to the "Tough Times" chart for the numbers being used here. (And how long is it, "officially," that the Bush economy was/has been in recession? Surely more than six months....) posted by Steve M. | 11:53 AM |   Big drop in Bush's approval rating -- nine percentage points in five weeks: President Bush’s approval rating, which spiked during the war in Iraq, has dropped back to prewar levels and below, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found that the economy was by far most Americans’ biggest concern. THE PRESIDENT still enjoys broad-based support, with 62 percent of those surveyed last Wednesday through Friday saying they approved of his performance. That was a drop, however, when compared to Bush’s support in the same poll a month ago, when 71 percent backed the president as the U.S. invasion of Iraq dominated news coverage. And it was below levels as high as 67 percent in surveys conducted before the war. Approval of Bush’s handling of the economy could not command even a majority. Forty-eight percent backed the president, compared with 44 percent who disapproved, a margin only slightly above the survey’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.... Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed, 64 percent, said there were better ways to boost the economy than tax cuts. Twenty-nine percent thought tax cuts were the answer.... Golly, I thought we were all so besotted with the man, especially after seeing him in a flight suit, that his approval rating would skyrocket. That's what we were told, wasn't it? What will be the conventional-wisdom explanation for this -- that more people would have expressed approval, but the manly sight of Bush gave them the vapors, and they still haven't recovered so they can't answer survey questions? posted by Steve M. | 10:02 AM |   Men with men, men with dogs, married couples with birth control ... you know, Rick Santorum didn't include membership in the Democratic Party in the list of icky perversions he thinks Jesus hates and legislators could outlaw, but I'm sure a lot of other people would: The Texas Republican Party chief told colleagues last week that she was deliberately using language in public statements that connoted "criminal wrongdoing" in a Democratic walkout that shut down the state House. She acknowledged at another point in the conversation that the act was not criminal, but that it "probably should be," according to a tape of a conference call with party leaders obtained by the Chronicle. State GOP Chairwoman Susan Weddington also said she believed that "God will protect the work we're doing" in support of Republican efforts to seek major changes in state government, including cuts in health care and other services. Weddington, a Christian activist from San Antonio who has headed the state GOP since 1997, said in an interview Wednesday that she was referring to her own personal faith and not suggesting that God was taking sides in political battles. "I just have a trust that God will protect me from the people who attempt to malign," she said.... --Houston Chronicle (Link from BuzzFlash.) posted by Steve M. | 9:37 AM | Wednesday, May 21, 2003   Ken Auletta's New Yorker piece on Fox News isn't online, but you're not missing much -- it's endless, it's dull, and Ailes plays Auletta like a Stradivarius, feeding him details that make Ailes seem both bred for greatness (dad thickening Young Roger's skin by berating him after he falls in a manure pile while relearning to walk after being hit by a car) and, for all his pugnaciousness, a model of traditional GOP values ("Also on his desk are two Bibles -- 'They're old friends,' he says"). This is the noxious hero-in-a-suit journalism that was perfected at Tina Brown magazines throughout her heyday; the subject of the profile may be a son of a bitch or a nutjob -- and Ailes, with his petty acts of vengeance and permanent sense of grievance, is clearly both -- but his flaws are seen as part of what makes him, you know, larger than life. Feh. There's one detail in the profile that I find interesting, though: Auletta reports that last year Fox News had profits of $70 million, on revenues of $325 million; CNN's profits were $250 million, on revenues of $1 billion. If this is true, then why does CNN -- and why does anyone else -- give a damn that Fox's ratings are higher? CNN is obviously giving advertisers what they want -- perhaps an environment for their ads that doesn't bear a resemblance to a saloon brawl. Remember, we’re not talking about an evil cabal of liberals conspiring to make Fox less profitable -- we’re talking about the chieftains of big business voting with their wallets for CNN over Fox. If Roger Ailes is so smart -- and so pro-GOP -- why isn’t his network rich? (UPDATE: I suppose I'm missing the rather obvious point that CNN's reach is genuinely global, and the reach of Fox News isn't, or isn't yet. But it seems to me that a larger operation doesn't guarantee larger profits. And it also seems to me that The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Doormat aren't exactly what you want on your U.S. channel as a foundation for going global. CNN became an overseas presence years ago as it was giving Americans something that was more or less real news.) posted by Steve M. | 11:47 PM |   I missed this story over the weekend. Good Lord, do we have to resort to the wooden stake? Senate GOP to resurrect Pickering nomination Republicans plan in coming weeks to take up the nomination of U.S. District Court Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. of Mississippi... --Washington Times OK, let's review... "The Racist Skeletons in Charles Pickering's Closet" People for the American Way on Pickering. Joe Conason on Pickering. Bob Herbert on Pickering. Enough already -- give him the hook. And if he ever does get approved, make him the de facto running mate of every Northern, Midwestern, and Western GOP senator who votes for him (and you know every single one of them will). Forget the South -- you'll just stir up Stars 'n' Bars pride if you attack a Southern Repub for voting for this guy. Everywhere else in the country, though, I think his history will tarnish the reputation of senators who voted for him. And yes, I think this is true even in states like Maine that have very small nonwhite populations -- people don't like racism anymore. posted by Steve M. | 4:37 PM |   IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT THE DEFINITION OF "WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION" IS It's fascinating to be this far into the post-Saddam period and still to be arguing about weapons, about terror, and about Saddam. According to one school, the total effect of the whole thing has been to expose WMD claims as a sham, ratchet up the terror network, and give Saddam a chance at a populist comeback. I don't think that this can be quite right. I still want to reserve my position on whether anything will be found, but I did write before the war, and do state again (in my upcoming Slate/Penguin-Plume book) that obviously there couldn't have been very many weapons in Saddam's hands, nor can the coalition have believed there to be. --Christopher Hitchens in Slate, May 20, 2003 It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true. Saddam has been willing to risk his whole system and his own life rather than relinquish this goal. --Christopher Hitchens in the Mirror, September 25, 2002 There is not the least doubt that [Saddam Hussein] has acquired some of the means of genocide and hopes to collect some more... --Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, September 26, 2002 (And I shall add that any "peace movement" that even pretends to care for human rights will be very shaken by what will be uncovered when the Saddam Hussein regime falls. Prisons, mass graves, weapon sites... just you wait.) --Christopher Hitchens in The Stranger, January 16 - 22, 2003 You can get through any conversation or chat show by pulling a solemn face or adopting a serious tone and saying: "Well, the government hasn't made its case on weapons of mass destruction and there's no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaeda and, anyway, we need another UN declaration." Those who have been getting through the past month by saying this are in danger of looking foolish in the extreme a few weeks from now.... On the weapons issue, for example, it is perfectly obvious that the Iraqi regime has something to hide.... --Christopher Hitchens in the Mirror, January 16, 2003 posted by Steve M. | 11:17 AM |   "Eighty percent of the barrels are where they were before." --Colonel Tim Madere of the U.S. Army's V Corps, commenting on the fact that 20 percent of the known radioactive material stored at the Tuwaitha nuclear facility in Iraq isn't where it was before, and is in fact unaccounted for, as quoted in a Reuters story Yeah, colonel, the glass is half full, isn't it? posted by Steve M. | 10:11 AM |   Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday low-yield nuclear weapons may be useful in destroying deadly chemical and biological weapons stocks as he pressed Congress to lift a 10-year ban on research and development of smaller nuclear arms. The Senate was debating whether to allow research on low-yield weapons with about one-third the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II, which Democrats said would signal the United States was pursuing new battlefield weapons and would spur an arms race.... --Reuters I've been upset about this for months -- last fall, I linked this story (from Popular Mechanics) about the "tiny nukes." It cites a skeptic, who seems thoroughly reasonable in his doubts: Rob Nelson, a physicist with the Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security, and an expert on nuclear weapons design, has looked carefully at the relationship between the depth of a primary-powered explosion and geological damage. He argues that the sort of deep penetrator proposed by [Stephen] Younger [of the Defense Department] would, in fact, release rather than contain radioactive fallout. While it is true that most material would remain within the blast area, a radioactive cloud seeping from the crater would release a plume of gases that would irradiate anyone in its path. He has calculated that a weapon with a yield of about 0.1 kiloton--about one two-hundredth the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima--would have to penetrate to a depth of 230 ft. to fully contain the explosion in the manner that Younger has described. Nelson cautions that if it were used to root out terrorists near a major Third World city such as Baghdad, the casualties could be in the hundreds of thousands. I'm grateful to Yahoo for pointing me to this Jane's report on the nuclear bunker-busters. It's actually rather sanguine about these weapons -- to the point of being Strangelovian: How much radiation is acceptable to release into the environment is, of course, debatable. During the era of US nuclear testing, explosions got progressively deeper as the acceptable amount of released radiation was continually reduced. Eventually, nuclear devices were only exploded at depths greater than 1,000 feet because of concerns over low-level seepage. Comparable depths for nuclear bombs dropped from airplanes can never be achieved. Some analysts, however, might argue that such tight standards are not required in a wartime setting. With that nod to the notion of an "acceptable" level of nuclear fallout in civilian areas, the report goes on to explain just what might happen if such a weapon were used: In the example above of attacking Tarhunah, a half-kiloton bomb would spread highly radioactive debris over a circle of 300m diameter. The 5kT bomb would do the same over a 700m diameter circle. Both bombs would also release significant fallout that could travel tens of miles before falling to earth. Of course, the crater walls as well as the immediate debris field have also trapped a significant amount of radioactivity that would otherwise land as fallout far from the explosion. If the fallout landed uniformly over a one square kilometre area, the radiation from the half-kiloton explosion would produce three rems per hour, 24-hours after the detonation, while the 5kT bomb would produce 50 rems per hour under the same conditions. These are significant amounts and threaten the health and safety of the populations far from the target. An eight-hour exposure to the larger bomb's fallout would kill about half the people exposed. It is also likely that the exposure levels would be higher from breathing in or otherwise ingesting the fallout, causing even greater harm. All these calculations assume that the nuclear weapon will survive being driven deep into the earth. In fact, a warhead will see, on average, forces well over 10,000 times the force of gravity as it ploughs through the earth. Yahoo also links a Federation of American Scientists report. I won't pretend to understand the science in either the Jane's report or this one, but here's the FAS's conclusion: ... the use of any nuclear weapon capable of destroying a buried target that is otherwise immune to conventional attack will necessarily produce enormous numbers of civilian casualties.... it is simply not possible for a kinetic energy weapon to penetrate deeply enough into the earth to contain a nuclear explosion. The FAS also makes a point that should be obvious: ...by seeking to produce usable low-yield nuclear weapons, we risk blurring the now sharp line separating nuclear and conventional warfare, and provide legitimacy for other nations to similarly consider using nuclear weapons in regional wars. posted by Steve M. | 9:52 AM | Tuesday, May 20, 2003   More than 300,000 Iraqi children face death from acute malnutrition, twice as many as before U.S. and British forces invaded the country in March, the United Nations UNICEF agency warned on Wednesday. --Reuters Aren't you proud? You can justify a war -- you can even justify civilian casualties -- if, ultimately, the suffering of innocents is diminished. The old Iraq regime was awful. It caused a lot of suffering. So why the hell can't we manage to improve on it? (Link from Rational Enquirer.) posted by Steve M. | 11:27 PM |   HOW WE PROTEST, HOW THEY PROTEST Here's a Philadephia Inquirer report on protests at a Rick Santorum commencement speech. And here's a Rockford (Ill.) Register-Star report on protests at a commencement speech by reporter Chris Hedges. Let's compare and contrast: ...about 80 students and faculty paraded out of the celebration tent during yesterday's ceremony to protest the day's speaker, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. Dozens of other students hooked rainbow-colored tassels onto their mortarboards, along with the university's regular-issue crimson and gray tassels, as a silent protest of Santorum's recent controversial statements about homosexuals. Outside campus, along City Avenue, 15 more protesters, some St. Joseph's alumni, held up posters that read: "Just Say No To Rick" and "Republican, Catholic, Gay." Another read: "Stop! Fundamentalist Extremism," and had photos of Santorum and Osama bin Laden.... Just before Santorum received an honorary degree, the protesters stood and left. Some students jeered them. ******* Hedges began his abbreviated 18-minute speech comparing United States’ policy in Iraq to piranhas and a tyranny over the weak. His microphone was unplugged within three minutes. Voices of protest and the sound of foghorns grew. Some graduates and audience members turned their backs to the speaker in silent protest. Others rushed up the aisle to vocally protest the remarks, and one student tossed his cap and gown to the stage before leaving. Mary O’Neill of Capron, who earned a degree in elementary education, sat in her black cap and gown listening. She was stunned. She turned to Pribbenow and asked him why he was letting the speech continue.... After his microphone was again unplugged, Pribbenow told Hedges to wrap it up.... Spontaneous reaction led 66-year-old Gerald Kehoe of rural Boone County down the aisle in his first time to protest anything.... A student who rushed the stage could face reprimand although he still received his diploma. Maybe this is apples and oranges -- Santorum's speech, to judge from the reports, wasn't controversial, while the Hedges speech was unexpectedly controversial. The reaction to Santorum was planned, while the response to Hedges was spontaneous. But Santorum, however mild-mannered his presentation may have been, nevertheless despises harmless acts engaged in by many of the graduates he was asked to address, or acts engaged in by their friends and relatives. Yet the protest against him was polite. Hedges, by contrast, was silenced -- several ways. Some walked out on Hedges. Others turned their backs on him. But that wasn't good enough for the rest, was it? posted by Steve M. | 6:32 PM |   I had a brain glitch a couple of posts down -- I should have referred to Sydny Miner as Brad Miner's wife, not his husband. Calm down, Senator Santorum. (Thanks to Phil for pointing this out.) posted by Steve M. | 3:56 PM |   Many of the people I spoke to said that they hoped there would not be any killings in revenge for all the blood spilled in this country during the last thirty years. As far as I'm aware, these settlings of scores have not yet begun, at least not in Baghdad. But I suspect they will come. In Kosovo, after NATO troops arrived in June 1999, many Serbs who had done absolutely nothing wrong, and enjoyed good relations with their Albanian neighbors, also thought everything would be okay; and for the first few weeks at least, they were right. But later, of course, they were wrong. --Tim Judah, writing from Iraq in The New York Review of Books, April 30, 2003 Iraqis have begun tracking down and killing former members of the ruling Baath Party.... The killers appear to be working from lists looted from Iraq's bombed-out security service buildings, which kept records on informants and victims alike. But others are simply killing Baathist icons or irksome party officials identified with the Hussein government. The singer Daoud Qais, known for his odes to Hussein, was shot dead on Saturday. So was the president of the Iraqi Artists Union. --Washington Post, May 20, 2003 I suppose we'll be told that things could be worse -- or that this is actually a good thing. After all, the Iraqis are "just" killing people associated with the old regime. For now. posted by Steve M. | 2:12 PM |   This is from Publishers Lunch: Bookspan has announced the planned launch later this year of a book club featuring books for political conservatives. Author and former literary editor for the National Review (as well as editor-in-chief of National Review Books) Brad Miner was named editor of the new club, and will serve as an executive editor at Bookspan as well, acquiring conservative books for the company's other clubs, too. The club doesn't have a name yet -- Bookspan will need a moniker that distinguishes it from the almost 40-year-old Conservative Book Club, part of Eagle Publishing (which also owns conservative publisher Regnery). According to the Eagle website, their club currently has an "all-time high" of 80,000 members. As this press release notes, Bookspan is a big name -- it runs the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Quality Paperback Book Club, the Literary Guild, the History Book Club, and a number of other clubs. Curiously, Miner's wife, Sydny, edited Hillary Clinton's books Dear Socks, Dear Buddy and An Invitation to the White House for Simon & Schuster. (This post originally referred to Sydny Miner as Brad Miner's husband. That was a dumb error -- I meant to say "wife." My apologies.) posted by Steve M. | 1:46 PM |   You've got to read Bob Somerby's Daily Howler. Long before we were all blogging, Somerby was out there, fighting to record the rightward drift (and the drift to inanity) of American political discourse. Usually he preaches like an Old Testament prophet; today, by contrast, watch him go for the bullet points, with equally devastating results. posted by Steve M. | 1:18 PM |   Barry (Ampersand) at Alas, a Blog points out this nice analysis of what happens to jobs under Democratic and Republican presidents, with a couple of very clear charts. Funny thing: under "pro-business" Republicans, there's more unemployment and there's less job growth. Surely you guessed that the Clinton years looked good economically, but you'll be pleasantly surprised to see some of the numbers for Carter.... Barry also points out the Web site of RAWA -- the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the people who were trying to tell us about the horrors of women's lives under the Taliban long before Karl Rove taught George W. how to pronounce "burqa." RAWA is absolutely not pleased with what's going on in Afghanistan now; if you scroll down on the title page of RAWA's site you'll see a remarkable list of "recent reports from Afghanistan," garnered from the world press. As Barry says, if you don't want to read the articles, just read the headlines; they form a sort of lousy prose-poem of neglect and horror. Here's the current top ten headlines from RAWA's list: HRW: Sharp Rise in Press Attacks in Afghanistan An overview of the situation in Afghanistan after “liberation” "Climate of fear" rules Afghanistan UN reports serious rights violations in NW Afghanistan US Admits 11 Civilians Dead In Bombing Raid On E Afghanistan Afghanistan: the Taliban's smiling face Afghan Police Accused of Rights Abuses Afghanistan has been well and truly betrayed Afghan poor sell daughters as brides Afghan Warlords Killing at Will posted by Steve M. | 12:46 PM |   Saturday's New York Times featured this Panglossian column by Bill Keller about Bush's religiosity. The letters column of today's Times has some nice replies, especially the first one: In "God and George W. Bush" (column, May 17), Bill Keller suggests that the president's faith is "highly subjective." Mr. Keller adds: "It enjoins him to try to do the right thing, but it doesn't tell him what the right thing might be. It is faith without a legislative agenda." This is the most disturbing aspect of Mr. Bush's moral crusade, because it absolves him of looking for guidance to any source other than his "heart." If Mr. Bush thinks that something is right, the argument goes, it must be simply because God would not steer him wrong. The religious right, whatever its hypocrisies, at least likes to work from a "playbook," the Bible, and thus operates on some recognizable and debatable set of principles. I am far more scared by the unwavering faith that George W. Bush maintains in his own moral judgment to the neglect of all else (save political expediency, of course). BILL FAGELSON Austin, Tex., May 17, 2003 posted by Steve M. | 9:34 AM |   Yeah, I've disagreed with him on a number of things, but I like Chuck Schumer. This is from Jeffrey Toobin's (disappointing) New Yorker piece on judicial battles in the Senate: The hearing on Leon Holmes showed that the Democrats were willing to fight on lower-profile nominees, too. Feinstein said, “Let me begin, Mr. Chairman, by saying that I have never voted against a district judge, and, in reading this record and listening to the comments that this man has made, I do not see how anyone can divine from these comments that he has either the temperament or wisdom to be a judge.” ... Feinstein went on, “In 1980, he wrote a letter to the editor stating that abortion should not be available to rape victims because conceptions from rape occur with the same frequency as snow in Miami.” ... Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, went next: “We checked the almanac. It snowed in Miami once in the last hundred years. Thirty-two thousand women became pregnant last year because of rape.” Touché. posted by Steve M. | 9:21 AM | Monday, May 19, 2003   Nancy Franklin's article in this week's New Yorker is a paean to PBS documentaries, which I do sometimes find admirable but not necessarily, you know, paean-worthy -- but I like what she says to start with: One day in mid-April, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, still overseas, said, “To our viewers, here’s your chance to weigh in on the war in Iraq. Our Web question of the day is this: Where do you think Saddam Hussein is?” We were given three choices—hiding in Iraq, dead, left the country—and were encouraged to log on and vote with our fingers. Cable news has a habit of treating viewers like children on a long car trip, giving us diverting, time-killing games to keep us focussed on the TV instead of thinking our own thoughts or punching our little brother. Count the out-of-state license plates; tell us where you think Saddam Hussein is. posted by Steve M. | 11:34 PM |   I don't really understand why people hate Ari Fleischer so much. Getting angry at Ari is like blaming Goodyear if you're trapped under the wheels of a bus -- the blame lies with the idiot who's driving. Does Ari Fleischer dish out lies and abuse? Sure. That's his job. That's what Bush et al. hired him to do. His replacement will be just as bad, if not worse. He'll get in a little R&R over the summer and still have a year to crank out a book that will come out just in time for the '04 elections. Meanwhile, Fox News will hire him and he'll deliver "fair, balanced" coverage of the presidential campaign. Do I have links for this? No, I'm just making educated guesses. posted by Steve M. | 7:25 PM |   The New York Times/Jayson Blair affair made the cover of Newsweek? For the love of God, why? Right-wing Times-haters must be beside themselves with glee, but why does Newsweek think the average American gives a damn? Consider the fact that, despite gobs of publicity, the new novel by that other plagiarist, Stephen Glass -- you know, the white one, the one whose compulsive dishonesty didn't lead to suggestions that fewer members of his ethnic group belong in newsrooms -- is, as I write this, #4,196 on the Amazon.com bestseller list. That means it's not selling much better than, say, Edgar A. Falk's 1,001 Ideas to Create Retail Excitement. In other words, the public isn't buying. I don't think the general public cares if one journalist and/or news organization screws up, beyond noting that it happened and expecting all concerned to try to get right what they got wrong -- and, really, the general public shouldn't care. posted by Steve M. | 4:00 PM |   Remember the reverse domino theory? George Packer summarized it in The New York Times Magazine in March: Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. Er, not quite: A suicide bomber attacked a northern Israel shopping center Monday, killing at least four other people and wounding 15, police said. It was the fifth anti-Israeli suicide bombing in three days.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 1:21 PM |   Newsday reports this: Well-informed court observers say that there could be two Supreme Court resignations next month, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, bringing the greatest upheaval on the court in 32 years. Rehnquist's resignation is considered likely, though not certain, while O'Connor's is considered likely by some court insiders and less so by others. The White House, however, is preparing for the possibility of two or three vacancies, because if Rehnquist is replaced by a sitting justice and O'Connor also goes, two seats but three positions will be open. Yet another seat could open up if Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 83, retires, but that is considered unlikely. Think things are going to get ugly? Consider this, and realize how ugly they could get: While the speculation in Washington is that Justice Antonin Scalia would be elevated to chief justice, objections are being raised within the administration because of his age. Though Scalia is a very youthful 67, some feel a younger person should become chief justice to ensure long-term impact. For some of the highly ideological conservatives who have, at least until now, held sway over President George W. Bush's court nominations, that person would be Justice Clarence Thomas, 54, who if anything has positioned himself to the right of Scalia. They say that despite his controversial background, the White House has not yet dismissed the idea. I really think this could happen -- followed by a massive Right-Wing Conspiracy Message Discipline Special in which GOP apparatchiks use every print and broadcast outlet available to denounce everyone who says a discouraging word about Thomas as a racist (or, if nonwhite, as a dweller on the Democrats' "plantation"). Oh, and, of course, if Thomas is nominated, I'd like a dollar for every media reference to the choice as "bold." The article lists possible nominees -- though I wonder if the Bushies are going to throw a curveball at us and nominate Viet Dinh for something. Dinh came to the U.S. as a refugee, which makes him the perfect human-interest story for the GOP. And he's ideologically perfect, too: He's a Federalist Society honcho who recently left the Justice Department, where he was, as AP notes, "a key author of laws increasing government enforcement and surveillance powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks." It's relatively easy for Democrats to find nonwhites who will denounce Clarence Thomas or Miguel Estrada. I don't think they could manage to fight off Dinh. (Dinh's really young, so maybe it's not his time yet, but choosing someone of his age would be "bold," too.) posted by Steve M. | 11:06 AM |   More vandalized culture in Iraq? One of the greatest wonders of civilisation, and probably the world's most ancient structure - the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Iraq - has been vandalised by American soldiers and airmen, according to aid workers in the area. They claim that US forces have spray-painted the remains with graffiti and stolen kiln-baked bricks made millennia ago.... Ur is believed by many to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham. It was the religious seat of the civilisation of Sumer at the dawn of the line of dynasties which ruled Mesopotamia starting about 4000 BC. Long before the rise of the Egyptian, Greek or Roman empires, it was here that the wheel was invented and the first mathematical system developed. Here, the first poetry was written, notably the epic Gilganesh, a classic of ancient literature.... --Observer (U.K.) (Thanks again to the Rational Enquirer.) posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM |   The Los Angeles Times reports this: At least 1,700 Iraqi civilians died and more than 8,000 were injured in the battle for the Iraqi capital, according to a Los Angeles Times survey of records from 27 hospitals in the capital and its outlying districts. In addition, undocumented civilian deaths in Baghdad number at least in the hundreds and could reach 1,000, according to Islamic burial societies and humanitarian groups that are trying to trace those missing in the conflict. Again, that's Baghdad alone. The article explains the survey methods used at hospitals and other care facilities, and the method for arriving at that figure of 1,700 seems careful. Meanwhile, an estimate of 1,000 additional undocumented deaths comes from the Red Crescent: Haidar Tari, director of tracing missing persons for the Iraqi Red Crescent, estimated there could have been up to 3,000 ... undocumented burials, perhaps one-third of them involving civilians. The Red Crescent has half a dozen teams working in districts where large numbers of dead were buried, but has not yet gained access to some areas under U.S. military control, including a large swath of land near the airport. Hardest to trace will be people who died while traveling, Tari said. Their relatives might not have known when they left home, or where they were headed, and thus have no idea where to look. "On one stretch of highway alone, there were more than 50 civilian cars, each with four or five people incinerated inside, that sat in the sun for 10 or 15 days before they were buried nearby by volunteers," Tari said. "That is what there will be for their relatives to come and find. War is bad, but its remnants are worse." (As usual, use "clipjoint" as both member name and password if you're not already registered.) (Thanks to Rational Enquirer for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 9:51 AM |   EARTH TO SAFIRE ... EARTH TO SAFIRE .... Four Palestinian suicide bombings. Suicide bombings in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Near-total societal breakdown in Iraq. Scary times, no? Not in whatever Cloud-Cuckooland William Safire is writing from. Here's the lead of the column he published today: Worried about having nothing new to worry about? Upset that Baghdad turned out to be a cakewalk and SARS didn't lay everybody low? Idiot. posted by Steve M. | 9:35 AM |   Your pro-war friends who smugly remind you that not as many museum artifacts were lost or destroyed in Iraq as originally feared need to read this: ...Basra University remained one of the few things that seemed to function well here, according to students and teachers. It has long been a source of pride for Basra, a city of 1.5 million people. Now, a library that professors say contained two million volumes dating back to 1015 is a mess of twisted metal shelves atop ashes from the books set ablaze by looters. The blue dome that professors say housed the oldest astronomy department in the Middle East is still there, but inside there is nothing but rubble. The law school, the economics department, the art school, the Arabic studies wing — all are ruined. The damage goes beyond what would be caused in mere burglary, crossing over into wanton destruction.... Volumes dating back to 1015 -- gone. But hey, the oil is secure, right? posted by Steve M. | 9:24 AM | Sunday, May 18, 2003   Last month, I expressed skepticism about certain documents an ABC News correspondent found virtually undamaged in a Baghdad building, despite the fact that the building had been bombed and looted, and despite the fact that other documents in the building had been burned or shredded. Now Swopa at Needlenose sifts through some stories, including that one, and notes that you can often find the fingerprints of the Iraqi National Congress (and some of its U.S. pals) when a story from Iraq seems (from the Bush administration's point of view) too good to be true. Interesting. And let's not forget, of course, that Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that dramatic stories fed into the pipeline by the INC often don't pan out: With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe. The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A. Misstatements and inconsistencies in I.N.C. defector accounts were also discovered after the final series of U.N. weapons inspections, which ended a few days before the American assault. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in political science at Cambridge University, compiled and examined the information that had been made public and concluded that the U.N. inspections had failed to find evidence to support the defectors’ claims.... posted by Steve M. | 7:36 PM |   If you've read a lot of his work, it's fairly obvious that Christopher Hitchens is repulsed by women -- but is his peculiar misogyny so all-consuming that it would find its way into a review of a book on the writing of the King James Bible? Yup. Writing about Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries in The New York Times Book Review, Hitchens says of the year 1604, The once refulgent reign of Queen Elizabeth had come to a stale and frustrated end in the preceding year, and a new monarch had been imported from Scotland, emerging from the rather questionable uterus of the old queen's former rival, the amorously notorious Mary, Queen of Scots. Excuse me? "Rather questionable uterus"? How can a uterus be questionable? And what on Earth does this have to do with the Bible? I suspect that, for Hitchens, all uteruses are questionable. Not content with merely critiquing tales of Mother Teresa's saintliness, he wanted (scroll down) to call his book about her Sacred Cow; it was ultimately published as The Missionary Position. Years ago, he appeared on U.S. television -- Nightline, as I recall -- and repeatedly denounced Princess Diana as "that loathsome Spencer woman." (Sorry -- I don't have a link for this, but it's a vivid memory, and I'm uncertain only of whether the adjective was "loathsome," "repulsive," or "vile.") Katha Pollitt can't quite remember whether he used to refer to women as "douchebags." And while he was not the only person to loathe Bill Clinton from the left, he was probably the only leftist (rather than liberal or liberal-centrist) to embrace the far right wholeheartedly, and the proximate cause was not Clinton's advocacy of welfare reform or NAFTA but his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens has, as they say, issues -- though I never expected them to surface in this context. posted by Steve M. | 9:34 AM |

archives October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 links MAIN PAGE E-MAIL NO MORE MISTER NICE BLOG ATOM FEED * Spencer Ackerman (Attackerman) * (the other) Roger Ailes * Alas, a Blog * Alicublog (Roy Edroso) * Alterdestiny * Eric Alterman's Altercation * AlterNet PEEK * AMERICAblog * The American Street * Americans United for Separation of Church and State * Annie's Annals * Applesauce * Atrios (Eschaton) * Attytood (Will Bunch's Philadelphia Daily News blog) * Bad Attitudes * BAGnewsNotes * Balloon Juice * Bark Bark Woof Woof * bastard.logic * Steve Benen (Washington Monthly) * Michael Berube * Bill's Big Diamond Blog * Birmingham Blues * bjkeefe * Blue Gal * Blue Wren * Break the Terror (now at a new address) * Bulworth * BuzzFlash * A Cautious Man * Ta-Nehisi Coates * Juan Cole (Informed Comment) * Comments from Left Field * Cormulley.com * Betty Cracker * Crooked Timber * Crooks and Liars * Cup O' Joe (formerly PSoTD) * Daai Tou Laam Diary * The Daily Howler * Daily Kos * Scoobie Davis * D-Day * Dear Leader Blog * Dependable Renegade * distributorcap NY * Doghouse Riley (Bats Left Throws Right) * Donkey Mountain * Kevin Drum (Mother Jones) * Eccentricity * David Ehrenstein's Fablog * Emptywheel * Fafblog * Feministe * Feministing * Firedoglake * First Draft * FiveThirtyEight * Freedom Camp * The Garlic * ginandtacos.com * Glenn Greenwald * The Heretik * The Huffington Post * Hullabaloo * If I Ran the Zoo * The Impolitic * Instaputz * Interesting Times * Isebrand * Jack & Jill Politics * Jesus' General * Lady Insignificant (D. Sidhe) * Lawyers, Guns and Money * Leftblogistan * Left I on the News * L'ennui melodieux * Liberal Oasis * Liberal Values (Ron Chusid) * Liberty Street * A Lie a Day * The Mahablog * Making Light * Lance Mannion * Media Matters * Memeorandum * Mojo (Mother Jones blog) * MyDD * MyRightWingDad.net * Needlenose * Newshoggers * News Hounds * The New York Crank * Norwegianity (now at Wordpress) * The November Blog * The Phil Nugent Experience * Nur al-Cubicle * Online Blogintegrity * Operation Yellow Elephant * Opinions You Should Have * Orcinus * Pam's House Blend * Pandagon * Paperwight's Fair Shot * Pere Ubu's Debraining Machine * PERRspectives * pesky'apostrophe * The Plum Line (Greg Sargent) * Polling Report * The Poor Man * The Raw Story * The Reaction * The Republic of T. * Right Wing Watch (People for the American Way blog) * Rising Hegemon * The Rude Pundit * Rumproast * Runnin' Scared (Roy Edroso at Village Voice) * The Ruth Group * Sadly, No! * salto mortale * Seeing the Forest * Shakesville * ShortsandPants * The Sideshow * Situation Vacant * Skimble * skippy the bush kangaroo * Slacktivist * Something to Consider * Stoutdem * Suburban Guerrilla * Talking Points Memo * TalkLeft * TAPPED (American Prospect) * TBogg * Think Progress * This Modern World * Tome of the Unknown Writer * uggabugga * The United States of Jamerica * Vagabond Scholar * Very Early 3rd Millennium * Wampum * War and Piece (Laura Rozen) * The Washington Independent * Welcome Back to Pottersville * Whiskey Fire * Why Now? * Oliver Willis * James Wolcott * Wonkette * World O'Crap * Matthew Yglesias * You Forgot Poland! * The Zen Cabin "The Manipulator" (New Yorker article on Chalabi) "How Chalabi Played the Press" (Columbia Journalism Review article) "Defectors' Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts" (New York Times article on Chalabi and Iraqi National Congress) Ann Coulter's original New York Observer interview ("My only regret with Timothy McVeigh...") (also here) "Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President" (from Scotland's Sunday Herald) "Yankee Go Home: Who's leading the anti-war movement? Congressional Republicans" (1999 Slate compilation of GOP antiwar quotes) "The Press vs. Al Gore: How lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election" by Eric Boehlert (from Rolling Stone) America's Taliban (Coulter, Falwell, etc.) in their own words Language: A Key Mechanism of Control (Gingrich's guidelines, still in use today) John Scalzi's "I Hate Your Politics" Column IS IT ANN COULTER -- OR IS IT DAVID DUKE? IS IT CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -- OR IS IT DWIGHT SCHRUTE? SORELY MISSED: * Americans Are Dumb * Anti-Coulter * Billmon (Whiskey Bar) * The Blog Report at Salon * Busy, Busy, Busy * Cursor * Greg T. * Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness * The Jed Report * Little Green Fascists * Main and Cenral * Martini Republic * MaxSpeak * mfinley * Mykeru * Nathan Newman * The News Blog (R.I.P. Steve Gilliard) * Nitpicker * The Rational Enquirer * Rittenhouse Review (R.I.P. Jim Capozzola) * Tristram Shandy (now at Instaputz?) * Slannder (anti-Ann Coulter) * SullyWatch * Jon Swift * Too Sense (but Adam "dnA" Serwer is now at TAPPED) * wastedirony.com * Cintra Wilson