Alberto "Finally" Gone-zales

Good riddance to Alberto Gonzales, the Worst.Attorney.General.Ever. His shameful tenure as the most partisan hack to ever run the Justice Department is finally coming to a close. Only the Worst.President.Ever would have kept someone like Gonzales in office so long after it became clear that he was using the Jutice Department as a partisan tool to promote Republican and Bush administration objectives. Such abuse of executive branch powers had not been seen since the days of Richard Nixon.
Unfortunately, we still have George W. Bush who will select the next AG and he is already being urged by his remaining base of supporters on the far-right to tap someone who will be an in-your-face insult to liberals and moderates who objected to Gonzales in the first place. My prediction is that we will have a long-drawn out confirmation battle and essentially will not have another AG other than the acting AG for the remainder of Bush's term.

In other news, it seems that right-wing moral crusader and Republican Senator from Idaho Larry Craig got himself arrested last month for lewd behaviour in an airport men's room.
So what is it with Republican politicians anyway? First we had Mark Foley and then Sen. David Vitter and now Sen. Larry Craig. They sure can pick 'em, can't they!

San Antonio: The Movie

I recorded some Erroll Flynn movies off of AMC last week (Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Adventures of Don Juan) and decided to look up what other films Flynn did. I was surprised to find that he did a western called "San Antonio." It was apparently a pulp western (1945) probably filmed on a studio backlot and had little to do with actual San Antonio. Still, I thought it was neat that there was a film called San Antonio that I had never heard of before.

Hillary crushes Rudy

Looking at state-by-state poll results, Chris Bowers at Open Left crunches the numbers and determines that even in the worst case scenario, the “weakest” Democrat, Hillary Clinton, would crush the “strongest” Republican, Rudy Guiliani in the electoral college by 335 to 203.
And I hardly believe that Connecticut or Ohio are going to go Red next year.

The surge is not “working”

The surge is working! That’s the latest hue and cry coming from the warbloggers who are constantly looking at their tea leaves for any signs of “progress” in Iraq. The increased troop levels on the ground in Baghdad have helped to tighten security and have reduced the number of insurgent attacks and corresponding deaths among the civilian population.
But so what?
Sure the surge is “working” in that respect. But that is NOT why we had the surge in the first place. The stated purpose of the surge was not to just heighten security and reduce violence, it was to provide breathing space for the Iraqi government to work out a political solution that would end the Civil War and provide a stable situation so that the U.S. can finally leave. And unfortunately, that is not happening.
Without the political progress that it was meant to foster, the surge is pointless. Its effect will be temporary and as soon as we end the surge the insurgents will rush back in to fill the void and the fighting will continue. We will have accomplished NOTHING.
So NO, in the only area that really matters, the surge is NOT working.

Republicans are broke

Dems Crushing GOP in Congressional Fundraising

House Republicans are flat broke, and there's no sign of better cash days in the near term.
Less than 15 months from Election Day, the House Republican campaign arm -- the National Republican Congressional Committee -- continues to effectively run a negative balance. The committee has just $1.97 million in its accounts, as of July 31, according to FEC reports it filed this week. But the NRCC is also sitting on a debt of $4.1 million.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is awash in cash. It has $21.3 million in its accounts, for a better than 10 to 1 cash edge over the NRCC, and it has out-raised its GOP counterpart through July. The DCCC raised more than $40.5 million so far this year. The Democratic committee has $3.5 million in leftover debt from 2006, which was down from $9.3 million at the end of last year.

What's worse for Republicans, the FEC just issued a report on fund-raising by individual candidates for the House and Senate, and the vast majority of the money is flowing to Democrats: House Democratic candidates raised $94.2 million through June 30, while House GOP candidates took in just $63.6 million.

CD anniversary

CD celebrates 25th anniversary

It was August 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turned 25 years old on Friday -- and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.

I didn't get my first CD until 1990 and I won’t be getting rid of them anytime soon. I still have my record collection and most of my cassettes boxed up somewhere for that matter. I just don’t trust computer hard drives for storing all of my music. I had a hard drive crash on me a couple of years ago and we lost a lot of digital pictures that weren’t backed up.
But it is probably only a matter of time before everything is stored on multiple hard drives and CDs will be cast aside like all those old floppy disc drives.

Speaking of anniversaries, my 18th wedding anniversary is this weekend as is my son's 4th birthday and two weeks later we will be going to College Station for my 20th college reunion.

Where's our football team?

San Antonio is the 7th largest city in the United States. That’s right, seventh. We have an estimated population of 1,256,509 that just bumped us ahead of San Diego for the No. 7 spot. That means that there are only six cities in the U.S. that can claim to be bigger than San Antonio: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Phoenix.
That’s it. Everyone else is smaller, including San Diego, Dallas and San Jose which fill out the top 10. Detroit even got bumped down to No. 11.
I’m just blown away by this fact. My wife is not impressed because she grew up in Houston, the No. 4 city. But I grew up in small-town South Texas so I feel like I am in a metropolis.
The nice thing about San Antonio is that even though it is so large, it still has a small-town feel to it. But this also leads to a lot of disrespect from other parts of the country. For example, there is the anamoly that San Antonio has been short-shrifted on professional sports teams. Lets look at the professional sports teams (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) in each of the top 10 largest cities (I include Anaheim with L.A. because it is practically a suburb, the same with Arlington and Dallas.):

New York Yankees
New York Mets
New York Giants
New York Knicks
New York Islanders
New York Rangers

Los Angeles Dodgers
Anaheim Angels
Los Angeles Lakers
Los Angeles Clippers
Los Angeles Kings
Anaheim Ducks

Chicago Cubs
Chicago White Sox
Chicago Bears
Chicago Bulls
Chicago Blackhawks

Houston Astros
Houston Texans
Houston Rockets

Philadelphia Phillies
Philadelphia Eagles
Philadelphia 76ers
Philadelphia Flyers

Arizona Diamondbacks
Phoenix Cardinals
Phoenix Suns
Phoenix Coyotes

San Antonio Spurs

San Diego Padres
San Diego Chargers

Texas Rangers
Dallas Cowboys
Dallas Mavericks
Dallas Stars

Is there anything wrong with this picture? Los Angeles doesn’t currently have a football team, but they’ve had two in the past and San Diego is less than two hours away.
San Antonio, on the other hand, doesn’t have a baseball, football or hockey team. All we have is a basketball team, which just happens to be the reigning NBA champions. There is no question that San Antonio could support at least one and probably more professional sports franchises. The overwhelming response to the brief stay of the New Orleans Saints after Hurricane Katrina proved that. But for now we are a one-team town with no prospects for change in the near future.

Rove: Draft dodger/tax evader

All of the news stories say that Karl Rove is coming back to Texas after leaving the Bush administration and plans to live in Ingram so that he can be near his son who is attending Trinity University in San Antonio. Ingram is a little Hill Country town just down the road from Kerrville about an hour’s drive northwest of San Antonio.
The interesting thing is that Rove doesn’t actually have a home in Ingram. He has a cottage. From his Wikipedia entry: "The residence that Rove claims on Texas voter registration rolls consists of two small rental cottages, the largest of which is 814 square feet. The cottages were part of the River Oaks Lodge that Rove and his wife, Darby, once owned on the Guadalupe River near Ingram. The Roves sold the lodge in 2003, after renovating it, but kept the two cottages, which the lodge rents to guests."

Rove had been using the lodges as his “place of residence” so that he could avoid paying property taxes on his million-dollar home in Washington, D.C. But that came to an end in 2005 when the District of Columbia changed its law and Rove ended up having to pay $3,400 in back taxes. I doubt that Rove plans to stay in the Hill Country for long. He sold his Austin residence a few years ago and now owns another million dollar house in Florida.
I read through Rove’s biography on Wikipedia trying to glean any sense of humanity that I could empathize with. He apparently suffered some hard breaks growing up with his biological father abandoning the family shortly after he was born. His adoptive father and mother divorced when he was 19 and then his mother committed suicide when he was 31.
He was a college drop-out who appears to have used his on-again, off-again college status as a means to avoid the draft.

In December 1969, the Selective Service System held its first lottery drawing. Those born on December 25, like Rove, received number 84. That number placed him in the middle of those (with numbers 1 [first priority] through 195) who would eventually be drafted.
On February 17, 1970, Rove was reclassified as 2-S, a deferment from the draft because of his enrollment at the University of Utah in the fall of 1969. He maintained this deferment until December 14, 1971, despite being only a part-time student in the autumn and spring quarters of 1971 (registered for between six and 12 credit hours) and dropping out of the university in June 1971. Rove was a student at the University of Maryland, College Park in the fall of 1971; as such, he would have been eligible for 2-S status, but registrar's records show that he withdrew from classes during the first half of the semester. In December 1971 he was reclassified as 1-A. On April 27, 1972, he was reclassified as 1-H, or "not currently subject to processing for induction". The draft ended on June 30, 1973.

Rove was one of the major architects of the Iraq War, but did everything he could possibly do to avoid the War in Vietnam.

What if....

I like this post from Atrios and I've provided a cleaned-up version below:

Imagine if the Bush administration had gone into Iraq, found a nuclear arsenal, the ponies had appeared, happy fun time Democracy spread through the Middle East like wildfire, 6 months and a few billion bucks later we mostly got the hell out of there, having to wade through piles of rose petals on the way out, and a grateful Iraqi population lived happily ever after in their secular pro-Israel, pro-US Democracy.
Just imagine.
Now imagine just how marginalized all of the war opponents would have been? Imagine how none of these people would've ever appeared on the teevee again, having been proved so wrong that none of them were ever welcome back as participants in our mainstream public discourse again.

Oh wait, that part isn't hard to imagine, because even though they weren't proved wrong, it's already the case.

I share Atrios' frustration in that the people who were dead wrong about every aspect of the Iraq debacle are still being treated like experts by the media while the critics of the invasion who practically nailed every problem before it developed are still sidelined and ignored.

Rove cuts-n-runs

It’s hard to believe that Karl Rove is abandoning President Bush during his time of need. Now that Bush is at the lowest point of his presidency in public opinion polls, Rove has decided it’s time to cut-n-run. Rove should stick around and take his lumps with Bush since this disaster of a presidency is largely of his making. This notion that he can slip away and shed responsibility for this mess with the lame excuse that he needs to spend more time with his family is pathetic.
Rove is one of those political figures with whom I have a difficult time imagining any redeemable qualities. He is right up there with Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed and Kenneth Starr among the people in politics who I like the least. There are lots of people in politics who are just as hard-right and just as partisan, but nevertheless have certain traits or characteristics that I can still find admirable. While I might disagree with their politics, I still imagine that I could like them on a personal level. Rove has never struck me that way. Perhaps that is unfair, but this latest move strikes me as the height of the “I’m out for me, the heck with everybody else” mentality that is the core of today’s Republican political philosophy.

Don't blame it ALL on Bush

George W. Bush may very well be the worst president in U.S. history. But Democrats are making a mistake if they try to pin all the blame for everything that is wrong with his administration on him personally. We should not focus so intently on Bush. Sure, he's exceedingly stubborn and unwilling to change even in the face of overwhelming public disapproval, but just replacing Bush with some other Republican is not going to make things better. In fact, it could make things much worse.
The real culprit that we are up against is the Republican governing philosophy. It has been especially awful under George W. because he had a Republican-controlled Congress for most of his presidency and was thus unfettered in his pursuit of Republican goals. Fortunatley, Bush's incompetence prevented him from fully achieving all of the Republican's goals, but we might not be so lucky if another Republican president is elected. Imagine how bad Ronald Reagan might have been had he not been somewhat constrained by a Democratic Congress.
Look back at the string of awful presidents we had during the early part of the 20th Century: Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover. Do you think that it was coincidence that we just happened to get three really bad presidents in a row? Not if you realize that it wasn't Harding, Coolidge and Hoover as individuals that were so bad, it was the Republican philosophy of making government serve the interests of big business and not regular people that made them so bad.
If we allow people to think that it was all Bush's fault individually they might conclude that there is no problem electing another Republican like Guiliani or Romney or Thompson, as long as it's not George Bush. But Bush was only a part of the problem, and a small one at that. Remember that Bush did fine as Texas governor mostly because he was following a conservative Democratic governing philosophy under the tutelage of Bob Bullock and Pete Laney. It was only after he jettisoned that philosophy in favor of a non-compromising partisan Republican one that started to spiral downward.

Bridging the gap

When the bridge in Minnesota collapsed last week it focused the nation’s attention on our strained roadways and our penchant for putting off and delaying necessary maintenance on our infrastructure.
Now, U.S. Rep. Oberstar is proposing a 5-cent gas tax increase to fund bridge inspections and repairs. The bill would hike the federal gas tax to 23.4 cents a gallon from 18.4 cents and raise an estimated $25 billion over three years.
I’m glad to see someone taking responsibility and proposing a solution. We can’t continue to let our nation’s infrastructure deteriorate and someone has to pay for it one way or another.
Quite frankly, with the way that gas prices are jumping around these days, I doubt that anyone would even notice a 5 cent increase in the gas tax.
Nevertheless, President Bush has come out against the increase apparently because he thinks all tax increase are bad no matter what. I guess he would prefer to spend the money in Iraq reparing bridges that the insurgents blew up so that they can blow them up all over again.
Fortunately, we only have to put up with Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility and failed presidency for 18 more months. I just hope no more bridges collapse before then.

Hall of Fame conundrum

In light of Barry Bonds’ breaking the home run record, it will be interesting to see how the baseball Hall of Fame responds to the steroid scandal that has plaugued professional sports for the past decade and a half.
When Hank Aaron broke the Babe’s record in 1974, it was pretty much a given that anyone with 500 or more home runs would be in the Hall of Fame. You had players like Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, Ted Williams, Ernie Banks, Eddie Matthews and Mel Ott. They were soon joined by Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, Willie McCovey and Eddie Murray.
The Hall also opened its doors to players who were just shy of the 500 mark such as Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, Willie Stargell, Dave Winfield and Carl Yastrezemski. In fact, you had to go all the way down the list to poor old Dave Kingman at 442 to find someone who apparently did not pass muster with the high priests of the Hall of Fame.
Since then, however, there have been a whole slew of ballplayers who have raced past Kingman into the elite realm of baseball power hitting. Along with Bonds, the list now includes Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey Jr., Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Frank Thomas, Alex Rodriguez, Fred McGriff, Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Gary Sheffield, Jose Canseco and Jeff Bagwell. Will any or all of these players be locks for the Hall of Fame? Or have they all been too tainted by the steroids scandal? We already saw Mark McGwire get passed over last time during his first year of eligibility. What about Slammin’ Sammy and Griffey Jr.?
Some of the players such as Palmeiro and Canseco have openly admitted to past steroid use. Would it be fair to keep them out of the Hall because they were honest, while possibly enshrining others who may have lied or covered up past use? And what if a player just worked out at the gym a lot and never used steroids, but now people are suspicious and won’t vote for him? What a mess.
We may just have to look back at the 1990s as the Juiced-ball era and just accept that it was a period when steroids were rampant and may have impacted players’ performances, similar to the way we view the Dead-ball era during the early 1900s.

New Home Run King

Barry Bonds broke the home run record last night, hitting his 756th career blast off of the hapless Washington Nationals during a home game in San Francisco.
It’s kind of sad and ironic that Bonds will likely never be inducted into the Hall of Fame despite holding the career home run record. But the taint of the steroid scandal is too strong for most people to ignore. Despite Bond’s denials and/or protestations of ignorance, people will always believe that he benefitted from an illegal drug that enhanced his strength and stamina beyond normal means. One could argue that steroids alone are not enough to make a great ballplayer and that it still took a boatload of talent for Bonds to get to where he is today. Just look at all the other players who we know or suspect took steroids and fell far short of breaking the home run record. But you can’t get past the fact that without steroids, some of those home runs that piled up over the years would have fallen short of the fence and been recorded as flyball outs instead.
Unlike, for example, Pete Rose who broke Ty Cobb’s career hits record fair and square. The scandal that felled Rose - gambling - had no impact whatsoever on his performance on the field and thus, in my opinion, should not have resulted in permanent banishment from the Hall of Fame.

Here is how the baseball home run list shapes up now. I guess I haven’t been paying attention lately because I was surprised by the number of current players who are now in the top echelon. Active players are in bold with their ages in paretheses, but only A-Rod is considered to be a future threat to the home run record at this point.

1. Barry Bonds (42) 756
2 Hank Aaron 755
3. Babe Ruth 714
4. Willie Mays 660
5. Sammy Sosa (38) 604
6. Ken Griffey Jr. (37) 589
7. Frank Robinson 586
8. Mark McGwire 583
9. Harmon Killebrew 573
10. Rafael Palmeiro 569
11. Reggie Jackson 563
12. Mike Schmidt 548
13. Mickey Mantle 536
14. Jimmie Foxx 534
15. Willie McCovey 521
16. Ted Williams 521
17. Ernie Banks 512
18. Eddie Mathews 512
19. Mel Ott 511
20. Frank Thomas (39) 505
21. Eddie Murray 504
22. Alex Rodriguez (31) 500
23. Lou Gehrig 493
24. Fred McGriff 493
25. Jim Thome (36) 490
26. Manny Ramirez (35) 489
27. Gary Sheffield (38) 478

Realists vs. Fantasists

Fantast — n. an impractical dreamer. (Webster’s New World Dictionary)

Michael Ignatieff, a former Harvard professor and now a member of the Canadian parliament, pens a mea culpa about his support for the Iraq War in this week’s New York Times Magazine.
It is an intersting and reflective piece that makes a point I’ve been stressing for some time — that the war supporters have grasped onto an impractical and unrealistic fantasy with regards to their expectations for Iraq.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little.

It would be nice to live in a fantasy world where the United States could galavant around the world righting wrongs, overthrowing dictators, establishing democracies and other superhero pursuits. But that is not the reality and people who ignore reality inevitably run into trouble.
That doesn’t mean we can’t do things to oppose dictators or support the creation of democracies, but we have to do it from a foundation based in reality. Right now the President of the United States and his enablers (the 30 percent or so of the population that still supports him) are living in a fantasy world. They continue to believe - four and half years later - that we are “winning” in Iraq and that we are “making progress.” They warn of dire consequences if we pull out, just as they boasted of glorious triumphs during the earliest stages of the conflict. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul said it well during the latest Republican Debate in Iowa as Josh Marshall notes:

It's sort of obvious now that he said it. But I had not quite thought of it that way. The same people now continually raising the stakes on the price of redeployment from Iraq with increasingly lurid tales of genocide, ethnic cleansing and regional implosion are pretty much exactly the same people who gamed us into this mess in the first place with another bunch of fairy tales.

Brothels, bad movies and textbook censors

A lot of famous people have died in the last few days starting with Marvin Zindler, the Houston-based TV news personality whose claim to fame was exposing the infamous Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange many years ago. The movie “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” was based on the Chicken Ranch story and one of the characters in the film is based on Zindler. I became familiar with Zindler from watching him on TV whenever I was in Houston visiting my in-laws. In his later years, he was mostly known for his hyped up restaurant health inspection reports during which he delighted in knocking establishments for “Slime in the Ice macine.” The news reports said he did his last newscast from his hospital bed the day before he died at age 85.
On the same day, it was reported that the reknowned director Ingmar Bergman died. That brought back memories of my college film class when I was forced to watch his movie “Cries and Whispers.” It was horrible. Just awful. Yuck! It was the one film in the class that I truly disliked. I’ve never seen any of his other films, so I hesitate to dismiss all of his works, but I clearly did not understand what the film critics saw in that particular movie.
Finally, today I noticed the NYTimes had an obituary for Norma Gabler, who with her husband led the successful crusade to influence and intimidate school textbook publishers into reflecting their conservative viewpoints.
What struck me from reading the obit is that I would have agreed with the Gablers on many points. The thing that first set them off was a textbook that omitted the words “Under God” from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I agree that was an outrageous abuse of “political correctness.” Likewise, when they discovered other inaccuracies in textbooks or noted imbalances - such as the famous case where a history textbook spent more time on Marilyn Monroe than on George Washington - I could see their point. So in one respect, they did a good thing by forcing the textbook publishers to be more accurate and aware of the educational needs of their audience.
Unfortunately, the Gablers took it too far. They weren’t satisfied with just correcting inaccuracies in the textbooks. They also insisted on forcing conservative ideology into the books and censoring things that they did not like such as coverage of Vietnam or Watergate or Evolution. But the success they had in these areas also forced liberal groups to get active in textbook editing to counter their more extreme efforts, so perhaps in that respect their overall legacy was a positive one.

Tearing down the wall

One thing I am fairly confident in predicting as a result of Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal, is that the storied paper’s unhinged, wingnutty editorial/opinion section will be unaffected. I can’t see how Rupert Murdoch could make the WSJ opinion section any worse. The big tragedy is what the takeover will do to the vaunted and highly respected news section of the paper. Murdoch is sure to tear down the wall that seperates the wingnutty opinion section from the rest of the paper, thus infecting the news department with his brand of right-wing ideologically driven “reporting” as evidenced by Murdoch’s other ventures including the slimy New York Post and the godawful Fox News Channel. He will then declare the end result to be “Fair and Balanced.”
When that happens, it will be a sad day in journalism.

Unplugged, Part II

OK, so I wasn’t really back so much. Just as I was getting caught up on work from my last vacation, I ended up taking another short vacation when my brother-in-law came to town with his family. We’ve had a lot of fun the last few days going to Natural Bridge Caverns, the River Walk and the San Antonio Zoo. Then we took turns babysitting each other’s kids so that the couples could go out and do things like eat at nice restaurants and watch movies in real theaters.
My other brother-in-law was in town too for Army training and was able to drop by one evening for dinner. So we’ve had a good time, but now it is finally time to get back to business. And this time I mean it! Really.