Reassuring quote

This is the best thing Hillary has said during the entire campaign:

"Anyone, anyone, who voted for either of us should be absolutely committed to voting for the other because it would be the height of political foolishness to have voted for one of us and what we stand for and then either to stay home or not vote for a Democrat and instead vote for Sen. McCain."

Discouraged and disgruntled

I know how Maha feels. I’m discouraged too.
It has been clear since before the Texas primary that Hillary Clinton can’t win the Democratic nomination for president, but the national media keeps going along with her charade that she still has a chance and that it is a tight race. For each primary race since then, Hillary has carefully set the bar low enough that she can easily cross it, while ignoring the fact that it gets her no closer to the nomination. She has to win every contest here on out by 20 points or better to even come close to catching Obama. She won Pennsylvania by 10 points and declared it a great victory and the media went right along.

By contrast, the bar is constantly set higher and higher for Obama. He doesn’t have to just stay close in Pennsylvania. He has to win it outright. Winning in North Carolina won’t be enough, he has to win Indiana too.
Hillary is set to win by less than 10 points in Indiana and lose North Carolina by a wider margin, but she will play up the Indiana victory as a huge defeat for Obama and one more excuse for her to press on.
If Hillary would just act like she’s on the same team with Obama and quit trying to tear him, and by extension the Democratic Party, down then together they could shred John McCain. McCain is a terrible candidate. But if they just let him coast until November while they concentrate on clawing at one another, he will build up a following that will be harder and harder to peel away the closer we get to the election.

I used to like Hillary and I respected her a great deal. Now I can hardly stand to listen to her speak and usually change the channels if she comes on. She is starting to veer into Ralph Nader territory for me. It would be the ultimate betrayal of her principles if she helps McCain to win, just like Nader betrayed everything he once stood for by helping worst president ever George W. Bush to defeat environmental champion Al Gore.

I’ve lived through too many presidential elections where I’ve seen the Democratic nominee get slimed mercilessly by the Republican spin machine and the compliant media. Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and now Barack Obama. People don’t even know who they are before the start of the campaign and by the end they can’t say their names without spitting. That is how good the Republican spin machine is at villifying people.
The Republican base is demotivated this cycle because of the war and the economy. But all they need is the flimsiest excuse to vote against someone like Obama or Kerry or Dukakis and people like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater specialize in giving them that excuse.
They don’t need help from Hillary Clinton, but they are getting plenty of help anyway this year.

Disney movies

I bought 101 Dalmations Platinum Edition recently bringing my total number of Disney animated films on DVD up to 42.
(uh oh, here is the inevitable list)

101 Dalmations (Platinum)
Alice in Wonderland
Aristocats, The
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Bambi (Platinum)
Beauty and the Beast
Bug’s Life, A
Cars
Chicken Little
Cinderella (Platinum)
Dinosaur
Dumbo
Finding Nemo
Fox and the Hound, The
The Heffalump Movie
Home on the Range
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The
Incredibles, The
Jungle Book, The (Platinum)
Lady and the Tramp (Platinum)
Lilo and Stitch
Lilo and Stitch II: Stitch Has a Glitch
Lion King, The (Platinum)
Little Mermaid, The (Platinum)
Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The
Meet the Robinsons
Melody Time
Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers
Monsters Inc.
Peter Pan (Platinum)
Piglet’s Big Movie
Pocahontas
Pooh’s Grand Adventure
Ratatouille
Rescuers, The
Rescuers Down Under
Robin Hood
Sword in the Stone
Tigger Movie, The
Treasure Planet
Wild, The
Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo

And on VHS tape I have:

Aladdin
Emperor’s New Groove, The
Fantasia
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Toy Story I & II

And I have the following Disney non-animated or partially animated movies on DVD:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Air Buddies
Apple Dumpling Gang, The
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Escape to Witch Mountain
Return from Witch Mountain
Gus
Love Bug, The
National Treasure
Pirates of the Caribbean I, II & III
Tron

And on VHS:
Mary Poppins

I am anxiously awaiting the release of Sleeping Beauty Platinum Edition this Fall followed by the Pinocchio Platinum Edition early next year.
Other Disney animated films I need to get to finish out my collection include:

Hercules
Tarzan
Mulan
Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Fun and Fancy Free
Three Caballeros, The
Make Mine Music
Saludos Amigos
Song of the South
Black Cauldron, The
Great Mouse Detective, The
Oliver & Company
Brother Bear

I generally stay away from the multiple sequels (Bambi II, Cinderella III, etc.) with a few exceptions such as the Winnie the Pooh movies which my kids love.
I may get more of the sequels later on, but they are not a high priority until I get all the main titles first.

Having this many Disney movies on DVD means, of course, that my kids are completely spoiled when it comes to watching TV. Films that I might have seen once on TV when I was growing up are now available to them as many times as we will allow. But I don’t see that as being a bad thing necessarily. Right now their TV viewing is pretty much limited to Disney movies and PBS anyway.

Movie Break

We went to see our first movie as a family over the weekend. A big thumbs up for “Horton Hears a Who” which is by far the best Dr. Seuss story every put to film (not counting Chuck Jones’ made-for-TV masterpiece “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”).
Technically, our first family movie together was “Cars” which we went to see two years ago when Isabel was just a few months old. She slept in her car seat through the whole movie.
The kids did very well and now Nathan (age 4) wants to go back and see “Kung Fu Panda” later this summer.
He is not so sure about the new “Speed Racer” movie which we saw a trailer for as well. He is also dead set against seeing “Wall-E”, the new Pixar movie because the trailer was loud and scary. But we will see them both eventually anyway as I am a huge Pixar fan and was a Speed Racer fan as a youth.
I noticed that the new Indiana Jones movie is coming out soon and a new James Bond film is set to come out in the fall. Other films I am looking forward to seeing eventually include Iron Man and Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

We’re No. 1 (in incarceration)

Ineresting story in the New York Times today. There’s a lot to chew on here and I am excerpting it at great length....

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
By ADAM LIPTAK

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

...The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

....It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”

No more.

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.
....
Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”

The article doesn’t address how much it costs taxpayers to house all these non-violent offenders in our prison system, but you can be assured that it isn’t cheap.

McCain's budget nonsense

Why don’t stories like this get more attention?

McCain Tax Cuts Would Bloat Deficit Or Take Huge Spending Curbs
By LAURA MECKLER
April 22, 2008; Page A6

Sen. John McCain is proposing tax cuts that would either cause the federal deficit to explode or would require unprecedented spending cuts equal to one-third of federal spending on domestic programs.

.... Altogether, he proposes more than $650 billion in tax cuts a year, much of it benefiting corporations and upper-income families. That includes the cost of extending tax cuts implemented under President Bush that he voted against twice.
To help pay for it all, the Arizona senator says he would cut $160 billion a year from a federal discretionary budget that totals a little more than $1 trillion. He hasn't specified where the cuts would come from.

With military spending -- about half the total -- likely to rise or perhaps stay even, most if not all of the cuts would have to come from domestic programs. The discretionary budget, which excludes entitlements such as Medicare or Social Security, covers areas such as medical research, federal prisons, border security, student loans, food inspections and much else.
The $160 billion figure is equal to the total budget in 2007 for the departments of Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice and State.

The chances of cuts of this magnitude are "nonexistent," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that promotes fiscal discipline. "There's not a consensus to cut back on the functions of government that much," he said. "Those are very, very deep cuts."

When he talks about cutting spending, Sen. McCain usually focuses on congressional earmarks, home-state projects that members of Congress insert into spending bills. His stump speech mentions a museum commemorating the Woodstock festival in New York and the infamous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska. But earmarks total only about $18 billion a year, according to independent estimates.
Sen. McCain and his aides haven't said where he will get his $160 billion in annual discretionary-spending cuts.

Stories such as this make it clear that John McCain is not a serious presidential candidate. He doesn’t have the foggiest clue as to what to do about the massive deficits that the Republican policies of the past eight years have left us with other than to make outrageous (and ultimately false) claims that he will slash vital government programs to nothing. And even if he did, it would not be enough to cover the massive tax cuts that he is proposing we tack on top of Bush’s already massive and fiscally irresponsible tax giveaway to the wealthy.
But McCain has a “free ride” to spout these outrageous claims while the so-called-liberal media obsesses over “bittergate”, flag lapel pins and other meaningless tripe.

Republicans for Hillary!

The election results in Pennsylvania last night were just awful. You couldn’t have asked for a worse scenario for the Democrats. Doña Clinoxte won by just enough to keep her tilting at windmills for the rest of the primary season, but not enough to make any difference in the ultimate outcome of the race.
I really can’t understand why any Democrat would be supporting Hillary at this point in the race because it is ultimately self-defeating.
However, it is quite easy to understand the motivation of these Hillary supporters:

Sandra Reed of Gettysburg has been a Republican since she was old enough to vote.
But, Tuesday, she and her husband, Vernon, went to the Adams County Courthouse and became Democrats.
"We were registered Republicans, and we will always be Republicans, but we want to help Hillary get the No. 1 position for the Democrats," said Reed, 70. "So, we are switching for the primary to vote for Hillary, then we will switch back and vote for McCain."

Lovely. They go on in the article to explain that they got this idea from listening to Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is no dummy. But clearly a lot of Pennsylvania Democrats are.

Fortunately, the Spurs won Game 2 with the Phoenix Suns last night, so I have lots to be happy about. Now if I can just blot out the whole election debacle for another month or two....

Chicken Expression

The following is a Letter that Sharon at Bluedaze has written to the Wise County Messenger in response to the above photo at a Chicken Express in Bridgeport, Texas.

Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.  — Robert Fulghum

Sometime during April, Wise County watched as the Bridgeport Chicken Express displayed the following on their marquee:

Try the Hillary Special
Two fat thighs
Two small Breasts
And a left Wing!

Let's forget about the political message — we don't care to do business with Democrats — and look at the many, negative messages this sign sends our youth.
Disparaging remarks about other people's physical attributes is acceptable behavior.
As many as 86 percent of American children are bullied at school. Later in life, children who were bullied suffer from poor self image and emotional problems while children who bully others are at a greater risk of breaking the law. On campus homicide and suicide has increased 500 percent in the past four decades.
Men are judged by their accomplishments women by their thigh and breast size. 
If a girl is born with the genetic predisposition to have full thighs or small breasts, there is little she can do about that other than dieting or surgery.
One in five women has an eating disorder and up to 20% of those affected will die as a result. Ninety-five percent of those who have eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25.
More than 360,000 women and teenagers underwent surgery to have their breasts enlarged with silicone or saline implants in 2005.  Any surgery involves risks, and, since breasts implants have a shelf-life, all of those women will face at least one more surgery. The risks from implants increase over time and include ruptures, silicone migration, bacteria or mold that can grow in saline implants and escape into the body, cognitive problems, pain, hardening of implants, loss of sensation, and financial burdens from repeated surgeries.
John McCain has male pattern baldness over which he has no more control than Hillary has over her breast size. Maybe he has a small penis but I'm sure Chicken Express would never display a sign denigrating any man because of physical attributes over which he has no control.

[o]ur children are watching us
They put their trust in us
They're gonna be like us
So let's learn from our history
And do it differently — The Dixie Chicks, I Hope

I hope Wise County businesses will show more responsibility and give our children a better example to watch...

Here is the contact info:

Chicken Express
802 Hwy. 380
Bridgeport, Texas 76426
Phone: 940-683-5012
Fax: 940-683-5012

Media bias exposed

The excellent investigative journalism in the New York Times over the weekend that exposed the Pentagon’s habit of programming former military brass, winding them up and sending them out to dispense propaganda disguised as “independent analysts” has gotten the cold shoulder treatment from the news outlets that have benefitted most from this scheme.
What I thought was most interesting about the article was that the first analyst featured in the NYTimes front-page photo montage was San Antonio’s own Ken Allard who is now a regular columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. But as it turns out, Allard comes out of the article smelling like a rose because he was critical of the way the Pentagon and the news outlets handled the situation.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.
As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.
“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

Well, good for Allard, although I have to admit I was a little disappointed because I was looking forward to slamming the Express-News editorial board with this story.
Nevertheless, Allard continues to be a rah-rah supporter of the war in Iraq to this day as is the E-N editorial board.

In other developments of media bias, CNN has decided that Glenn Beck needs more help bashing liberals at the 24-hour news network, so they have hired former Fox pundit and Bush administration mouthpiece Tony Snow to be conservative commentator. They are already featuring Snow prominently on their Web site such as this inane exchange with Larry King in which Snow predicts a McCain victory in November!

One note of good news, the Wall Street Journal is adding liberal Thomas Frank to its lineup of regular columnists. Frank is the author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”.

Spurs in playoffs

Even if the Spurs end up getting knocked out in the first round this year, their Game 1 performance against the Suns will still make it all worthwhile. I couldn’t be happier for my team right now.

Hillarycrats

It has long been clear that Hillary Clinton cannot win the Democratic presidential primary race. So what is still motivating so many Democrats to continue supporting Clinton’s quixotic campaign at this point? Obama is well ahead now in the national polls. He is regularly raising twice as much money as Clinton and he keeps picking up new superdelegates and new endorsements on a daily basis.
But in the Pennsylvania primary tomorrow, the polls still show Hillary winning by as much as 10 points.
The Democrats in Pennsylvania could do us all a big favor by finally putting Hillary’s mortally wonded campaign out of its misery. Why do they insist on continuing to prop it up just to keep this painful charade going for another month or more? Why do Pennsylvania Democrats hate the Democrats?

Of course, there is still a chance that Obama could win tomorrow and force Hillary out of the race once and for all. But I’m not going to hold my breath at this point. I am assuming she will pull out a narrow victory - but only gain a slightly larger and ultimately insignificant number of pledged delegates - and then spin it to be a major victory for her side that should totally redifine the dynamics of the presidential race. Nonsense.

We need Hillary and the Hillarycrats to abandon this futile crusade and get back on the right side. Quit doing the Republicans’ dirty work for them and start defending the party’s eventual nominee for this fall’s election. Maybe the Clinton’s will sit down after tomorrow, refigure the math one more time and come to the same conclusion most everyone else did long ago. Then perhaps they will make a graceful exit from the race and allow the party to start the healing process before we get any further into the campaign season.

Letter to ABC

The following is a letter to ABC News signed by a distinguished collection of liberal journalists. I wholly concur with the sentiments of the letter.

We, the undersigned, deplore the conduct of ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson at the Democratic Presidential debate on April 16. The debate was a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world. This is not the first Democratic or Republican presidential debate to emphasize gotcha questions over real discussion. However, it is, so far, the worst.

For 53 minutes, we heard no question about public policy from either moderator. ABC seemed less interested in provoking serious discussion than in trying to generate cheap shot sound-bites for later rebroadcast. The questions asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos and Mr. Gibson were a disgrace, and the subsequent attempts to justify them by claiming that they reflect citizens' interest are an insult to the intelligence of those citizens and ABC's viewers. Many thousands of those viewers have already written to ABC to express their outrage.

The moderators' occasional later forays into substance were nearly as bad. Mr. Gibson's claim that the government can raise revenues by cutting capital gains tax is grossly at odds with what taxation experts believe. Both candidates tried, repeatedly, to bring debate back to the real problems faced by ordinary Americans. Neither moderator allowed them to do this.

We're at a crucial moment in our country's history, facing war, a terrorism threat, recession, and a range of big domestic challenges. Large majorities of our fellow Americans tell pollsters they're deeply worried about the country's direction. In such a context, journalists moderating a debate--who are, after all, entrusted with free public airwaves--have a particular responsibility to push and engage the candidates in serious debate about these matters. Tough, probing questions on these issues clearly serve the public interest. Demands that candidates make pledges about a future no one can predict or excessive emphasis on tangential "character" issues do not. This applies to candidates of both parties.

Neither Mr. Gibson nor Mr. Stephanopoulos lived up to these responsibilities. In the words of Tom Shales of the Washington Post, Mr. Gibson and Mr. Stephanopoulos turned in "shoddy, despicable performances." As Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher describes it, the debate was a "travesty." We hope that the public uproar over ABC's miserable showing will encourage a return to serious journalism in debates between the Democratic and Republican nominees this fall. Anything less would be a betrayal of the basic responsibilities that journalists owe to their public.

Spencer Ackerman, The Washington Independent
Eric Alterman, City University of New York
Dean Baker, The American Prospect Online
Steven Benen, The Carpetbagger Report
Julie Bergman Sender, Balcony Films
Ari Berman, The Nation
Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium
Michael Berube, Crooked Timber, Pennsylvania State University
Joel Bleifuss, In These Times
Sam Boyd, The American Prospect
Lakshmi Chaudry, In These Times
Joe Conason, Journalist and Author
Brad DeLong, Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal and UC Berkeley
Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly
Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber, George Washington University
James Galbraith, University of Texas at Austin
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University, TPM Cafe
Merrill Goozner (formerly Chicago Tribune)
Ilan Goldenberg, The National Security Network
Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films
Christopher Hayes, The Nation
Don Hazen, Alternet
Michael Kazin, Georgetown University
Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist
Richard Kim, The Nation
Ezra Klein, The American Prospect
Mark Kleiman, UCLA/The Reality Based Community
Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed
Ari Melber, The Nation
Rick Perlstein, Campaign for America's Future
Katha Pollitt, The Nation
David Roberts, Grist
Thomas Schaller, Columnist, The Baltimore Sun
Mark Schmitt, The New America Foundation
Adele Stan, The Media Consortium
Jonathan Stein, Mother Jones Magazine
Mark Thoma, The Economist's View
Michael Tomasky, The Guardian
Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks
Tracy Van Slyke, The Media Consortium
Kai Wright, The Root

Fox News could have done a better job moderating the Democratic debate. ABC has really shot itself in the foot here. Gibson should be demoted from his anchor chair. Stephanopoulos should be fired.

Smoke gets in their eyes

Like Ann, I could be described as “desperately optimistic” about Barack Obama’s chances for election in November.
All the signs point to a big Democratic victory in November - fundraising, turnout percentages, Bush’s unfavorability, etc.
But the one thing that troubles me are these damn polls that show John McCain leading Obama in so many states.
What is wrong with these people?!? How can Bush have a 70 percent unfavorability rating while, at the same time, McCain, who promises to carry out Bush’s same policies for the next four years, has a 64 percent favorability rating?
It doesn’t make sense. Are people really this dumb? Don’t answer that!

It’s like someone getting a report from their doctor that if they don’t stop smoking Marlboros they will die from lung cancer. So, they start smoking Winstons instead.
That’s how stupid it is.

I think too many people fail to look at the big picture when casting their votes. They allow themselves to be distracted by totally irrelevant issues - Obama’s former pastor, for example - until it clouds out the more important issues - like the war in Iraq and the tanking economy.
What we need is better media coverage that will blow some of this smoke out of the room and give people a clearer picture of what this election will mean. Unfortunately, much of our media tends to behave like a big fog-making machine, further clouding the picture worse than it is.
Our only hope is that the prevailing winds that are beyond the control of the media and the GOP spin machine will be strong enough to clear some of this mess out before we get stuck with four more years of the same thing.

Good reading

I bought a book this weekend that really sums up a lot of what I have been trying to say on this blog for the past year.
The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing by Greg Anrig gets right to the point I’ve been wanting to make: It’s not just Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove and DeLay, etc. It is the whole rightwing ideology that underlies their actions that needs to be addressed.

Mark Schmit said it well in a review of Anrig’s book:

As even the most committed conservatives have begun to recognize the scale of the debacle, foreign and domestic, of the seven years during which they have held unchecked power, they have begun to plot a slick escape from the consequences. "Oh, that?" they will say. "That wasn't conservatism. That was something completely different." It started out as conservatism, they say, but was corrupted by the culture of Washington, by Jack Abramoff or Tom DeLay. Or, they say, so sorry, we misjudged George W. Bush, failed to see how incompetent he was. Or, as in recent tributes to Karl Rove on his resignation from the White House, they will admit that the single-minded focus on winning elections, bending all policy to that purpose, destroyed the conservative soul. If they have the chutzpah of Rove himself, they will blame Hillary Clinton.

If there were any justice in the world, such claims would take their place in history alongside those of the old Marxists who, as Alan Wolfe noted in these pages last year ("Why Conservatives Can't Govern," July/August 2006), insisted that the only problem with communism was that it had never been properly implemented. The noble dream, they argued, should not be judged by its real-world manifestations. Maybe so. But in the real world, ideologies are judged by their consequences.

Such justice is unlikely for the recent American right, however, and the evasion of responsibility has been made easier by Democrats' nearly total focus on individual actors: George W. Bush and, to a lesser extent, Rove and Dick Cheney. Thus the spate of books with titles like The Lies of George Bush and Bush's Brain. Now Rove is gone, DeLay is gone, and in sixteen months Bush and Cheney will join them, but their brand of conservatism may never be held to account for its failures in practice.

Like I’ve said before, we can’t focus entirely on these individuals (although they have certainly earned their infamy and vilification) and risk allowing a new group of right-wingers like John McCain to step in and continue the same failed policies that have been so disasterous for our economy and our foreign policy.

Humble Pie

My latest music purchase is a greatest hits compilation of Humble Pie.



My friend Anne sparked my interest earlier this year by linking to a video of their song “30 Days in the Hole”, which was the first time I had ever heard it.



Now I’m hooked. Last year, I got into The Faces which was the band that helped launch Rod Stewart and Ron Wood’s careers. Now I am learning about all these connections between the two bands - Humbe Pie’s lead singer Steve Marriott had originally been in a group called the Small Faces with the core rhythm section of what would become The Faces. When Marriott left, he was replaced by Stewart and Wood. But Marriott got together with Peter Frampton and launched Humble Pie.

Anyhow, Marriott is an incredible singer (supposedly the inspiration for Led Zepplin) and it is a shame that he was killed in a house fire sometime back.

Endless war cheerleading

The San Antonio Express-News has been cheerleading for Bush’s war in Iraq since Day 1 and today is no different. Their editorial today is no different and, what’s worse, they devote the ENTIRE Other Views section to three op-ed pieces by rightwing warhawks — Cal Thomas, Rich Lowry and Ken Allard.
How is that for fair and balanced? Way to go Jonathan Gurwitz! You totally rule Bruce Davidson’s world.

Today’s editorial is a particulary loathsome piece of garbage. The title is “Don’t hastily discard hard-won Iraq gains”.
Hastily?!?!? Hastily?!?!?!?!? We’ve been over there for five years now!!! What the HELL are they talking about hastily!!!???!!!! Idiots!!!
The subhead says “U.S. forces have purchased modest progress at a tremendous cost, but the alternatives may be worse”.
Modest progress my rear! If we’ve been there five years, spent $300-plus billion dollars, sacrificed 4,000 U.S. soldiers lives, and yet if we leave anytime in the next year things will supposedly go to hell in a handbasket.... How can they call that progress?
And as for alternatives that could be worse, what could possibly be worse than having our military mired in that hellhole for another four years? (a certain guarantee if John McCain is elected).
And yet, any thought of us leaving Iraq at any time in the near future is constanly equated with failure and retreat. This time next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, we will hear this same song-and-dance routine from Gen. Patraeus or whoever the current general in charge is. It never ends, just like this video illustrates:

Look who’s back!

My old sparring partner Mark Harden has resurfaced in the Letters to the Editor section of the San Antonio Express-News.

Mark is in a tizzy because in a news story on Saturday about a local woman being appointed to the board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) the E-N failed to denounce the group as an Islamofascist terrorist organization! Such shoddy journalism!!!

Mark claims that CAIR “was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation for providing material support to Hamas, an officially designated terrorist group. But Mark neglects to mention that case ended in a mistrial.

After 19 days of deliberations, a jury in 2007 were unable to come to a definitive conclusion and the case ended in a mistrial. On Nov. 4, 2007 the LA Times reported: "The nation's biggest terrorism finance case ended so badly for the government that it has thrown into question the Bush administration's original order to shut down the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development six years ago."
Experts found the jury's inability to come to a definitive conclusion evidence of weakness in the government's ability to provide clear enough evidence against the charity.
The LA Times reported: "If the government can shut them down and then not convince a jury the group is guilty of any wrongdoing, then there is something wrong with the process," Georgetown University law professor David Cole said. [9]
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the criminal trial derailed the government's long-publicized assertions about Holy Land. "From the beginning, the allegations were highly suspect and only got worse," said Turley, who has handled a number of national security cases.
"Indeed, Turley said, if the government had begun with the troubled criminal case, it might never have succeeded in closing down the foundation administratively because its disputed evidence would have come to light years ago."
Some jurors were skeptical of the government's case. The LA Times reported: "The government's allegations not only proved unpersuasive but engendered skepticism among some jurors.
"The whole case was based on assumptions that were based on suspicions," said juror Scroggins, who added: "If they had been a Christian or Jewish group, I don't think [prosecutors] would have brought charges against them."

Mark also references American Islamic Forum for Democracy , a rightwing lobby group with little support outside of rightwing circles, in a further attempt to tarnish CAIR.
It seems little wonder then that CAIR feels compelled to keep an Urban Legends section on its website to try and combat the wild accusations that get thrown at it (and then published in newspapers) on a regular basis.

Charlton Heston

Here is a good retrospective on Charlton Heston.
I’ve always liked Heston despite his conservative political advocacy. I don’t let a person’s politics affect the way I look at their art or music. I was annoyed that Heston became such a strong public advocate for the NRA at a time when the organization was becoming much too extreme in its advocacy - assault weapons, cop-killer bullets, plastic guns, etc. But I also think he should get more credit for being one of the celebrities to embrace the Civil Rights movement early on.
My favorite Charton Heston movies are fairly obvious:

The Ten Commandments
Ben-Hur
Planet of the Apes
Omega Man

But then I was surprised by how few of Heston’s pictures I’m really familiar with. I know I have seen others, but I don’t remember them as well and would need to watch them again for a full appreciation. So here is a list of Heston movies I would like to revisit or see for the first time:

Arrowhead
Touch of Evil
El Cid
Major Dundee
The Agony and the Ecstasy
Will Penney
Soylent Green

The last time a saw Heston was probably in Michael Moore’s film “Bowling For Columbine” and my reaction was quite the opposite of what Moore intended. Moore took his film crew to Heston’s residence in Hollywood and tried to do one of his gotcha seens aka “Roger and Me” only to have it backfire on him. Heston came across as gracious and welcoming while Moore came across as crass and vindictive. In the end I left the theater feeling sympathetic for Heston (although still not sympathetic with his views) and thinking that Moore had behaved like a total jerk.

You say Goodbye, and I say Hello

I have finally decided to de-link All Things Conservative from my blogroll.
It was nearly three years ago that I welcomed ATC to the San Antonio blogging community. It almost immediately became more popular than my meager blogging effort and attracted a bevy of regular readers. But a couple of months ago its proprietor Bill Crawford inexplicably walked away from the site and for many weeks after it just sat there like a bloated corpse collecting comment spam like flies.
Then, a week ago or so, it was gone. Wiped out. Deleted. Three years worth of labor down the memory hole, only to be replaced with what can only be described as a sick joke of a website - a nameless, barren, non-descript site that looks less than half-finished and claims to be devoted to debunking global warming theories, but in truth, if you scroll down, is just a template for random advertisements. Pathetic.
It’s hard to understand why someone would devote three years of their life building up a blog like that only to turn around one day and delete the whole thing. I had contributed a few guest posts at the site over the years and had been one of the regular commenters, contributing to countless lengthy debates on a myriad of topics.
All gone. Just like Bill who just vanished without a word. Poof!
So it goes in the World Wide Web sometimes.

On the other hand, I’d like to formally welcome a new blog to the San Antonio blogging community called maximum volume. The anonymous author is a good friend of mine who I will say is very well connected and should have a lot of insightful things to say on many topics. Hopefully, with a little positive feedback we can encourage him to post more often on his new blog. So check him out.

Wasteful spending in context

Here is a fine example of why I think groups like Citizens Against Government Waste are a joke.
The CAGW has just released its annual “Pork Report” in which it breathlessly reports that "Congress stuffed 11,610 projects" worth $17.2 billion into a dozen spending bills.”
The fact that they had to comb through more than 11,000 projects and they only come up with $17.2 billion is telling. We spend more than that in less than two months in Iraq. These people aren’t fighting waste! They are finding some left over pocket change under the sofa cushions. Big deal!!

The GAO report should put those people to shame. The GAO did not question the need for any of the 95 weapons systems it looked at. It did not question the bloated costs of any of these programs. All it did was look at cost overruns — money above and beyond the initial pricetags which you know are already inflated — and here is what they found:

The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average.

$295 billion!!! Compared to $17.2 billion for 11,610 programs most of which are probably easily defensible as needed or necessary spending. The $295 billion is not for any programs. Zero!! We don’t get squat for this money. It is simply cost overruns. Bad management. Incompetence. The hallmark of the Bush administration, and Republican policy in general. At least with the $17.2 billion in so-called pork barrell projects we will get a lot of roads and bridges and museums and so forth.

And the $295 billion pales in comparison to the estimated costs of the Iraq debacle, now coming close to $5 trillion.

Next week, the Iraq war enters its sixth year. As casualties mount (about 4,000 American soldiers killed since the start of the war in March 2003), so do the bills.
"The cost is going up every month," says Linda Bilmes, an expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She estimates the short-term, "running cost" has reached $12.5 billion a month. That's up from $4.4 billion a month in 2003. Add in long-term factors, such as the care of veterans and interest on federal debt incurred as a result of the war, and the cost piles up to $25 billion a month nowadays.
Last September in a phone interview, Ms. Bilmes estimated the war's total price tag as easily exceeding $2 trillion. In a book published last month, she and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from Columbia University, New York, estimated the total long-run cost at $3 trillion in 2007 valued dollars. If you add in Afghanistan and various costs to the economy, the sum reaches $4.95 trillion.

From now on, whenever I hear any Republican complain about paying taxes my standard response will be, “Yeah, paying for Bush’s war is a pain, isn’t it?”
Because, after all, that is what every last one of our tax dollars is going to go towards for the rest of our natural lives.

One more MB video

The first one is my nephew. The second is my son. My other brother-in-law, Alan, took this video.

Mutton Busting II

My brother-in-law Mark took this video of my son riding the sheep at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

And here is my nephew just moments earlier...