Attack, attack, attack

A letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune last week pointed out a basic flaw in two Republican lines of attack against John Kerry:

Republicans charge that Kerry is the most ardent liberal member of the the Senate. They also charge him with being an indecisive flip-flopper on every issue. How can he be both?

Obviously he can’t be both and in fact neither allegation is true. The flip-flop canard is ridiculous on its face. Any politician can be accused of flip-flopping and there are far more examples of Bush flip-flops than Kerry.
But it is not surprising that a Party that values conformity and adherence to a strict ideology would find fault in someone who is willing to reflect on past decisions and perhaps change their mind.

Another more recent line of attack against Kerry is the charge that he has few legislative accomplishments during his 20 years in the Senate. But this is a highly hypocritical charge coming from Republicans who claim to be in favor of smaller and more limited government. Would they like Kerry better if he had a long list of pork-barrell projects that he sponsored during his legislative career?
It is also galling coming from Bush and Cheney as noted by Atrios:

In 11 years in the House, Cheney sponsored just 2 pieces of legislation that became law.

Here is Congressman John Spratt (D-SC) quoted in a Kerry press release:

“Dick Cheney served in the Congress for 11 years. I served with him for most of these years. In that time, he only passed two bills. One was to build a flood plain on the Colorado River and the other was a bill to help a constituent. What’s even more telling about Dick Cheney’s record in the House is not what he supported but what he opposed – things like Headstart and funding for seniors. It seems pretty dishonest for Bush and Cheney to be attacking John Kerry - who passed 57 bills in the Senate – for his legislative accomplishments.”

Look at the numbers

Michael Kinsley Does the Math in his latest Washington Post column and finds that Democratic presidents have a much better record than Republicans in nearly every category since 1960.

”It turns out that Democratic presidents have a much better record than Republicans. They win a head-to-head comparison in almost every category. Real growth averaged 4.09 percent in Democratic years, 2.75 percent in Republican years. Unemployment was 6.44 percent on average under Republican presidents and 5.33 percent under Democrats. The federal government spent more under Republicans than Democrats (20.87 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 19.58 percent), and that remains true even if you exclude defense (13.76 for the Democrats; 14.97 for the Republicans).

What else? Inflation was lower under Democratic presidents (3.81 percent on average, compared with 4.85 percent). And annual deficits took more than twice as much of GDP under Republicans as under Democrats (2.74 percent versus 1.21 percent). Republicans won by a nose on government revenue (i.e., taxes), taking 18.12 percent of GDP compared with 18.39 percent. That, of course, is why they lost on the size of the deficit. Personal income per capita was also a bit higher in Republican years ($16,061) than in Democratic ones ($15,565). But that is because more of the Republican years came later, when the country was more prosperous already.”

Kinsley even anticipates Republican complaints that they were born again under Ronald Reagan and should be looked at from that point forward. But even reworking the numbers starting in 1981 changes only one result...

“The Democrats pull ahead of the Republicans on per capita personal income.”

Turning the corner to where?

You almost have to feel sorry for the Bush campaign.
Here they go and launch their new campaign theme that states "We've turned the corner and we're not turning back" and on the same day the Commerce Department reports that the economy is sputtering once again.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. economy slowed dramatically in the spring to an annual growth rate of 3 percent, as consumers, worried about higher gasoline prices, cut back their spending to the weakest pace in three years, the Commerce Department reported Friday.

It does us no good to "turn a corner" when we've been going the wrong direction all along.
The Bush team really has nothing positive to work with so expect lots more negative attacks from that side.

Record deficit - again

Here is the big news that the Bush administration sat on until today so that the Democrats couldn’t use it to criticize the president during their convention:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House projected Friday that this year's deficit will hit a record $445 billion, further fueling a campaign-season dispute over President Bush's handling of the economy.
The figure easily surpassed last year's $375 billion, making it the largest-ever in dollar terms.

Kerry is going to have such a mess to clean up when he moves into the White House next year.

Sandy Berger: smeared then cleared

Remember those news reports right before the Democratic convention that said former Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger was being investigated for stealing classified documents relating to the 9/11 investigation from the National Archive? They quoted annonymous sources charging that Berger had snuck the documents out hidden in his pants and socks? It made great fodder for lots of editorial cartoons and conservative commentators.

Well, nevermind.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the 9/11 Commission on which he serves. At worst, Berger admits that he inadvertently took some photocopies of some material that was later returned. He denies stuffing the documents in his pants.


“Officials looking into the removal of classified documents from the National Archives by former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel Berger say no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
...
The conclusion by archives officials and others would seem to lay to rest the issue of whether any information was permanently destroyed or withheld from the commission.

Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said officials there "are confident that there aren't any original documents missing in relation to this case." She said in most cases, Mr. Berger was given photocopies to review, and that in any event officials have accounted for all originals to which he had access.”

Just another non-story that was blown all out of proportion by our so-called-liberal media and conveniently served the purposes of the Bush administration.

Update
The right-wing web site Newsmax.com has put out a story headlined Archives Denies Report That Berger Is in the Clear.

But if you read the story you see that the headline and lead paragraph are misleading. The spokeswoman for the Archive is not denying or disputing the WSJ story. She is only reaffirming a “no comment” statement that she probably gave to the WSJ as well.
Apparently the WSJ has better sources for their story and they did not let a “no comment” from the Archive’s PR flack prevent them from finding out what is really going on like NewsMax has done.
But NewsMax is not a real newsgathering organization. It is a propaganda tool and should be viewed as such. Unfortunately, many conservatives rely on websites like NewsMax and DrudgeReport to get all their information and so they stay constantly misinformed and do silly things like voting for Bush.

War in Iraq: Have to vs. Want to

One thing John Kerry said tonight summed up my whole frustration with the Iraq war situation. That is when he said that our standard for going to war in the future should be only when we have to and not because we want to.
That is what I felt from the beginning and is the reason why I opposed the war. I never felt like we had to go to war. I never felt that there was an imminent threat hanging over us at any time. But I did feel like George W. Bush and the Republicans very much wanted to go to war.

* They wanted to go to war because it would take the country's attention away from the poor economy.
* They wanted to go to war to advance their ideological foreign policy goals of remaking the Middle East in their own image.
* They wanted to go to war because it would boost the president's popularity and make the Democrats look weak during the mid-term elections (and it worked!).
* They wanted to go to war because they were convinced that it would be a quick and easy victory.
And they thought this because they viewed the intelligence data through ideological blinders - ignoring intelligence that didn't match their predetermined beliefs and embracing that which did regardless of its strengths or merits.

Obama's keynote address

Now I know why the Republicans can't find someone to run for the Senate in Illinois. They might as well just concede the seat to Barak Obama after his masterful keynote speech at the Democratic Convention last night.
While we were in Chicago the media was still all abuzz about former Bears coach Mike Ditka nixing a Senate run. And then during the week they were touting this other local politician Jerry Dillard as a possible candidate before he bowed out too.
I don't blame him. No one wants to be the sacrificial lamb to get steamrolled by this guy.

Snippy vs Foul-Mouthed

A good politician never lets the public see them get riled by a journalist or a political opponent. Of course, nobody is perfect and Teresa Heinz Kerry is no exception.

But the attention being paid to this non-story is really ridiculous. When I first heard that Sen. Kerry's wife had told a right-wing editorial writer who was harassing her to "shove it," my first thought was 'Wow, she's awfully polite.' I mean, just a few weeks ago we had Vice President Cheney telling a Democratic Senator to go F### himself. And Cheney didn't even feel the need to apologize afterwards.

To understand Mrs. Kerry's frustration with this particular "journalist" one needs to know the context of the situation. The reporter in question is actually the editorial page editor for a right-wing paper in Heinz-Kerry's home state of Pennsylvania that has been hounding her for months over her family's philanthropic foundation. I wrote about this issue here at eTalkinghead.

My Kind of Town

Chicago is my kind of town. Seriously. I loved it. It is right up there with Boston and New York on my favorite towns to visit list now. We spent all of last week living out of a hotel room in downtown Chicago and never ran out of things to do. And that was all on foot with my 11-month old son in tow which did limit some of our options (no movies or broadway shows and not many late nights out). Other than one trip on the L (Chicago’s subway) out to the Cell to watch a White Sox vs. Tigers game, we spent the entire trip hiking around Chicago on foot and being constantly amazed at the fun things we found to do.
First, the newly opened Millennium Park is fantastic. So it was four years behind schedule and $450 million over budget. Big deal. “The Bean” sculpture alone is worth that small price. That is going to be drawing tourists from around the world for generations. That and the giant face fountains where kids run about gleefully as parents sit back and gawk. I wish that San Antonio had something like that downtown next to the Alamo.
We saw Picasso’s and Monet’s at the Art Institute of Chicago, visited “Sue” the world’s largest Tyranesoarus Rex skeleton at The Field Museum and also went through the special exhibit on The Forbidden City in China featuring relics from the Quin-long era - early 1700s. We ate several styles of Chicago pizza and had some great steak at Harry Carry’s restaurant (the late sports broadcaster from Chicago).
The White Sox game was a lot of fun and I got to see Ivan (Pudge) Rodriguez get his 2,000th career hit with the Detroit Tigers. I still can’t believe how stupid the Texas Rangers were for trading him away. I’m sure watching him lead the Florida Marlins to a World Series crown the next year must have been painful. He is currently the batting leader in the American League.
All in all is was a great trip and Nathan did exceptionally well. We did break down and buy a stroller on the second day which saved our aching backs. I also enjoyed reading the two local papers all week - the Tribune and Sun Times - although the Trib’s editorial page was almost as bad as the Wall Street Journal’s.

On Vacation

I’m leaving tomorrow for a week-long vacation in Chicago. The hotel has wireless and broadband Internet access, but since I don’t have a laptop it doesn’t do me any good. So I will most likely be offline for the duration. Should be a fun trip, especially with an 11-month old in tow.

Blood Saves

My brother-in-law, who works for the blood bank in Houston, sent me this link to their new web site. It’s a pretty cool site and hopefully it will encourage more people to donate blood.
I especially like their new TV commercials.

Where are all of the conservative bloggers?

Oh, I know the web is chock full of ‘em. I mean the ones I first butted heads with here in Texas when I first set up this blog a year and a half ago.

When I first ventured out into the blogosphere in January 2003, the first folks I ran into were the guys at Burnt Orange Report and Charles Kuffner at Off the Kuff. They’re still there and going strong, but they are also liberal Democrats like me. What I am concerned about are all the conservative Republicans I first ran into who have been dropping like flies recently. What’s going on??

* My fellow San Antonian Mark Harden at InSane Antonio hasn’t updated his blog since May 17. I suspect that he is just distraught by the near certainty of a Kerry victory in November and just can’t bring himself to write about it anymore.

* Then there is Courtney, also of San Antonio, who has been on an extended hiatus since Nov. 28, 2003.

* Beldar of BeldarBlog hasn’t been heard from since April 19.

* Kevin Whited, who runs the popular PubliusTX Weblog, recently shut down his more politically oriented site Reductio Ad Absurdum for “maintenance and redesign.”

* And Owen Courreges, who sparred with me on a number of occasions over the Republican mid-decade re-redistricting power grab, has stopped updating his self-titled blog now that he is too busy being a regular contributor at Chronically Biased, which also features Kevin and Rob Booth of Slightly Rough. I also noticed recently that Owen is listed as a contributor at the newly launched Redstate which is trying to be the Republican response to the mighty Daily Kos.

* Then I was saddened to learn recently that Joe Kelley who runs The Sake Of Argument site has been hospitalized with pneumonia and spinal meningitis.

That leaves Owen and Jed at Boots and Sabers which is still going strong. However, Jed, the Texas-based half, has lately been a bit pre-occupied with law school leaving it to the more prolific Owen, who is based in Wisconsin, to do most of the posting. And Owen naturally focuses most of his attention on politics in Wisconsin.

So Texas would seem to have a shortage of conservative bloggers. Go figure.

Remembering Ken Schmidt

I was shocked to learn the other day that Ken Schmidt died over the weekend as a result of a kayaking accident. Ken was the chief photographer at the Kerrville Daily Times when I worked there in the mid-1990s. He was also the long-time staff photographer for the Kerrville Folk Festival.

Ken was without a doubt the best photographer I ever worked with in my 15-year career as a journalist. Flipping through my portfolio of stories from that period I am amazed at how his photos stand out above all the rest. Every reporter wanted Ken to take the photos for their story. He could make a shot of a county commissioners meeting look interesting. He had an eye for framing a shot and/or picking out one person in a room and catching an expression on their face that would tell much of the story.

But Ken was all about action. He preferred to cover stories that were exciting - car wrecks, fires, sporting events, and so forth. I always felt privileged when I could get Ken to go out and shoot a photo for one of my stories. When I interviewed George W. Bush during his first run for governor, Ken took so many good shots that they decided to run a spread of them accompanying my story. There were many times when I would be working on a feature story and Ken would come out of the dark room and show me the photo he took for the story and I would think ‘Wow, now I have to write a piece that will live up to this.’

When I knew Ken, he was one of the most fun-loving people I had ever met. He was always planning his next outing or telling stories of his most recent adventure. I take some solace in the fact that he died doing something that he loved. He certainly packed more good times into his 41 years than most people do who live to be 100.

When most people think about dying they imagine spending eternity in paradise. But I imagine that if Ken had the choice he would choose to be reincarnated so that he could take another go around at life because Ken’s attitude was that he was already living in paradise.

Why do these conservatives hate America???

The AP has a story today about a group of big-shot conservatives who meet on a regular basis in Washington, D.C.
Normally, I suppose, they just blow kisses at the Bush administration and so it is generally not very newsworthy. Plus the meetings are private and closed to the media. But this time the key speaker had some nasty things to say about the Bush team’s little misadventure in Iraq...

“Nearly 150 conservatives listened in silence recently as a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations ticked off a litany of missteps in Iraq by the Bush White House.
"This war is not going well," said Stefan Halper, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Reagan.
"It's costing us a lot of money, isolating us from our allies and friends," said Halper, who gave $1,000 to George W. Bush's campaign and more than $83,000 to other GOP causes in 2000. "This is not the cakewalk the neoconservatives predicted. We were not greeted with flowers in the streets."

Note the guy’s No.1 complaint: ”It’s costing us a lot of money!”

I guess only wimpy liberals complain about things like the deaths of more than 850 U.S. troops.

But this is the part of the story I liked the best...

“The marquee speaker sent by the administration was Eric Ciliberti, who spent several weeks in Iraq this year and told the audience of broad progress being made there.
Ciliberti complained to the group that those in the news media were not reporting the positive developments out of Iraq. Ciliberti did not return several calls late in the past week from a reporter seeking his account.”

So here is an administration official who will tell this group of privileged conservatives meeting in private all about the positive developments in Iraq but he won’t return phone calls from reporters seeking his account of events. And then he has the nerve to whine that the media is not reporting about the positive developments in Iraq. How typical.

How convenient!

Pentagon: Bush record accidentally destroyed

WASHINGTON -- Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

Oopsie! I’m sure it was just an accident. Oh darn! I guess we will never know for sure whether Bush actually fulfilled his National Guard duty back then.

Investigative partisanship

In the Washington Post yesterday,
Congressman Henry Waxman layed out the despicable record of the Republican Congress when it comes to investigating alleged wrongdoings in the executive branch...

“During the Clinton administration, Congress spent millions of tax dollars probing alleged White House wrongdoing. There was no accusation too minor to explore, no demand on the administration too intrusive to make.

Republicans investigated whether the Clinton administration sold burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery for campaign contributions. They examined whether the White House doctored videotapes of coffees attended by President Clinton. They spent two years investigating who hired Craig Livingstone, the former director of the White House security office. And they looked at whether President Clinton designated coal-rich land in Utah as a national monument because political donors with Indonesian coal interests might benefit from reductions in U.S. coal production.

Committees requested and received communications between Clinton and his close advisers, notes of conversations between Clinton and a foreign head of state, internal e-mails from the office of the vice president, and more than 100 sets of FBI interview summaries. Dozens of top Clinton officials, including several White House chiefs of staff and White House counsels, testified before Congress. The Clinton administration provided to Congress more than a million pages of documents in response to investigative inquiries....

When President Clinton was in office, Congress exercised its oversight powers with no sense of proportionality. But oversight of the Bush administration has been even worse: With few exceptions, Congress has abdicated oversight responsibility altogether....

Republican leaders in Congress have refused to investigate who exposed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked after her husband, Joe Wilson, challenged the administration's claims that Iraq sought nuclear weapons. They have held virtually no public hearings on the hundreds of misleading claims made by administration officials about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda.
They have failed to probe allegations that administration officials misled Congress about the costs of the Medicare prescription drug bill. And they have ignored the ethical lapses of administration officials, such as the senior Medicare official who negotiated future employment representing drug companies while drafting the prescription drug bill.

The House is even refusing to investigate the horrific Iraq prison abuses.... Compare the following: Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.

There is a simple but deplorable principle at work. In both the Clinton and Bush eras, oversight has been driven by raw partisanship. Congressional leaders have vacillated between the extremes of abusing their investigative powers and ignoring them, depending on the party affiliation of the president.”

The point of government, Part II

Well, there is quite a bit to chew on from the comments to the previous post. I invite anyone interested to go back and read those comments as I will now try and address some of the points that were made. And let me add that I greatly appreciate the intellectual weight and civil tone of all of the posts.

First, I’m glad to see that K2 appears to have backed off on his contention that “The whole point of government is not to spend money.” It is, in fact, about little else. Of course, upholding the Constitution is the primary reason for spending all the money. That point was never in dispute. So what politics comes down to is who should be in charge of the pursestrings. K2 thinks it should be the Republicans based on his misperception that Republicans favor smaller government and less spending. However, as we have seen during these past four years, a Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican president have taken a $236 billion federal surplus and turned it into a $400 billion-plus deficit.

I guess I could just declare victory at this point and go home, except that K2 now says the point is irrelevant and goes on to make a number of other assertions that need to be addressed.
The gist of K2’s argument is that government is inherently bad and that taxation and regulation are burdens upon the economy that prevent hardworking Americans from becoming wealthy. He also contends that a vast array of federal programs including Medicare, Social Security, agriculture subsidies, scientific research, USDA meat inspections, protecting the environment and welfare, should be left up to the states and goes so far as to imply that the Constitution requires this. However, if that were the case one would assume that the Supreme Court would have at some point in the past 200 years declared these federal programs unconstitutional. The fact that it has not done so leads me to beleive that K2’s assertion in this case is without foundation.

One area I would like to jump into is this whole notion of pitting capitalism against socialism as if the two were totally incompatible. The reality is that capitalism works best when it is tempered with socialism. The neverending argument comes in determining how much of each is necessary or desirable to achieve the ideal economic formula. K2 gives us the analogy of cattle to a farmer to illustrate his contention that socialism leads to a loss of freedom and ingenuity.

I will put forth a different analogy to make my point. Let us look at the U.S. economy as a car where capitalism is represented by everything that makes that car go - the engine, the drive shaft, the steering column, the brakes and so forth. Socialism is represented by everything that goes into the car to make the ride more comfortable, but is superfluous to making it go. That would be the cushioned seats, the plush interior, the windshield to keep the bugs out of your face, shock absorbers, power steering, power brakes, power windows, power locks, the A/C and heater, the radio and cd player, and on and on....

I think this is a great example of the growth of government and the increasing expectations of the people it serves. How much is too much? When you go to buy a car, what do you expect it to have at a bare minimum? I just bought a new car last year. It was the first car I’ve ever bought that had power locks and power windows. I used to think those were silly extras that I would never need. Now they are practically standard on every car and I personally love the convenience.
The government is the same way. Without some of the social programs in place, capitalism would be a bumpy ride. But too many programs weighs everything down and hinders our forward progress. So we are constantly struggling to come up with the proper balance. When K2 urges the elimination of welfare, ag subsidies, Medicare and Social Security - it’s like trying to sell the American people a car with metal seats and no shock absorbers. They are not going to be happy. They won’t buy the car and they won’t vote for your candidate. That is the reality.

I stand by my assertion that FDR’s New Deal saved capitalism. After the car wreck that was the Great Depression, people weren’t going to buy that kind of jalopy anymore. The government had to change the formula to keep it viable.
K2 argues that our nation’s industrial might helped us to win WWII and not high taxes, but he fails to consider what it was that built up our industries at that point - government spending. When the government comes and tells your company to build as many gadgets as possible and they will buy them all, then of course the business is going to grow. That is exactly what was happening back then. We needed tanks and planes and jeeps and bombs and medical supplies and fuel and all kinds of things and our industrial production blossomed as a result.

I’m not going to get into economic theory and political philosophy. K2 can quote Friedrich Von Hayek and Milton Friedman and I’ll quote John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith but then I don’t know where that would get us.
But I would like to recommend that anyone who is interested in the theory behind welfare check out Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. The book makes the argument that welfare was put in place not to lift people out of poverty, but to keep them from becoming restless and prone to riots which would be damaging to capitalism. It is quite an interesting read for folks on both sides of the political spectrum.

I will make one last point about bureaucracies which is that they are not exclusive to the public sector. If you have ever worked in or dealt with a large private corporation you will find that bureacracies are inherent in almost any large organization.
I think K2 acknowledged this when he said “I feel that government is inherently flawed, in that it is run by people.” I would just say that in some ways, government bureaucracies are preferable because they at least have an obligation to serve the public. Private bureaucracies have no such obligation and can be a nightmare to deal with.
K2 says he is most concerned about the restrictions on his freedom that government imposes. This is commendable and I believe necessary to have people who will stand up and say ‘enough’ to government expansion (even if they don’t always get their way). But they should understand as well that we would not be any more free without government, in fact, I believe we would be less so. People are always going to try and impose their will upon one another and the government serves to restrict that imposition as much if not more than it facilitates it. I think both Robert and Alan were trying to make similar points along that line.

Finally, as to Robert’s jibe about my having once been a “rabid right-winger,” that is not entirely accurate. While it is true that I was enamored with Ronald Reagan while in college and voted a pretty much straight Republican ticket in 1984, my political views were not fully formed at that time. As my knowledge and understanding of world events grew during that time, my political inclinations leaned left (aided in part by my revulsion of the Iran-Contra scandal). But I think I have always maintained a healthy dose of realism or pragmatism. I’m still ticked at Michael Moore, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins (to a lesser degree) for supporting that idiot Ralph Nader in 2000 and delivering the White House to GW Bush.
You have to realize that Robert has been living up in Vermont for some time and is under the misperception that he is a moderate because he occasionally disagrees with his socialist congressman Rep. Bernie Sanders.

Oh, and one last word of advice, or rather a request directed to K2... Please, please, please don’t get Robert started on Microsoft!!!! Sheesh!

The point of government

Commenter K2Aggie07 recently took takes issue with a snarky comment I made over at Boots and Sabers and makes the following argument:

“The whole point of government is not to spend money. The point of our government is to uphold the Constitution for the United States.”

That would seem to be a sensible statement until you consider what it really means to “uphold the Constitution.” How do you “…establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare…” without spending money? What do those things mean anyway?

Provide for the common defense seems simple enough. That means the military and that is a hefty chunk of change in and of itself. But it probably also includes the CIA, the State Department and our network of ambassadors, and our foreign aid programs all meant to provide stability in other parts of the world so that events don’t get out of hand and threaten our interests.

Establish justice… I suppose that would be our courts and criminal justice systems – including police officers, prisons, the FBI, etc.

Ensure domestic tranquility? I suppose that could be the public parks, national monuments, public libraries… How about roads and bridges? Our highway system? Rails, mass transit, sea ports, airports? What about the education system? There sure wouldn’t be a lot of domestic tranquility with a bunch of uneducated kids roaming the streets everyday. What about public utilities – electricity, water, sewer, garbage disposal. Yes, I know that there are lot of private companies out there that can and do provide these essential services, but it still falls upon the government to make sure that those services are made available to everyone.

And then there is promoting the general welfare. What a great catch all that is! Medicare, Social Security, nursing homes, agriculture subsidies, scientific research to cure diseases, USDA meat inspections, protecting the environment and, of course, the scourge of the radical right – welfare itself!!!

And I haven’t even mentioned one of the Republicans’ favorite government programs – the Small Business Administration – which doles out millions in corporate welfare every year. And I’m sure there are dozens more worthy government entities that have their hands outstretched every year at budget time. I haven’t named one single thing that doesn’t cost money.

Do we really need all of these programs? K2 seems to be enamored with life in the U.S. prior to the Great Depression…

“Prior to the great depression the government gave *no* (as in, none, zero) support to the poor. It was left up to private charities and churches. And you know what? People survived. Want to know how? They worked for what they got, and the government didn't tax 50% of their income. In fact, if you get into the economics of it, by pre-great depression standards (or any standards for that matter) the only reason Americans aren't filthy rich is because fully half of our income goes to support an over-stuffed fat beaurocratic leeching self-righteous government.”

Ah yes, I remember when I used to think that life was so simple. Everything was wonderful back in the good old days before big, bad bureaucrats screwed everything up. Liberals bad, conservatives good, blah, blah, blah. But then I graduated from college and moved out into the big, complex, real world.

Prior to the Great Depression, America was not the world power that it is today. In fact, it was questionable whether or not the country was going to make it at all. We had managed to pull ourselves together after a bloody Civil War, but the Great Depression nearly brought an end to capitalism as we know it. It was Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal that saved capitalism. Conservatives should honor his name rather than bitch continuously about his accomplishments.

We won World War II because the government spent money by the bucket loads and taxed the beejeezus out of folks to pay for it. But it was worth it. When everything was said and done we were the strongest and most powerful country in the world. And we still are, for the most part, in spite of Bush’s best efforts to weaken us with his ill conceived tax cuts which have wiped out our surpluses and left us with record deficits while shipping our troops out on this WMD snipe hunt without enough support and equipment.

Then there were the social programs like Social Security and welfare and Medicare that have freed people from having to spend all their time and efforts caring for elderly and sick relatives. With that burden lifted people suddenly found their standard of living dramatically improved. They were able to spend their time and money pursuing other things that helped to grow the economy.

Capitalism works and America is a great country today because of these programs. That is what the radical right fails to understand or refuses to see. And since the radical right has taken control of the Republican Party today, it is left to the Democrats to uphold the standards of good government that have kept our nation strong all these years. That is why, as I noted in my previous post, real conservatives should appreciate the things Bill Clinton accomplished, especially in light of the miserable failure that George W. Bush has been. Clinton reduced the size of government, decreased government spending and balanced the federal budget. Bush has increased spending, grown the size of government and left us with a record budget deficit, all while presiding over a pitiful economic performance to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose more jobs than were gained during his tenure.

In conclusion, I would just say that I much prefer living in a country like the U.S. that provides all of these government services and programs as opposed to any other country in the world, and I suspect even K-2Aggie would have to agree with that.

A flag waving mea culpa

I was getting upset recently when I kept seeing businesses all over town that were still flying their flags at half-mast. I figured the flags would have been raised after Reagan's funeral was over. When they were not I suspected some folks of making a political statement. ("We liked Reagan so much we are going to leave our flags at half-mast longer than anyone else", or something like that.)
Then I figured that maybe there had been some government edict come down to leave them at half-mast til the end of the month. But they were still down on July 2! Now I was really getting ticked!!
Well it turns out that I was wrong. The U.S. flag code says flags should be flown at half-mast for 30 days after the death of a president. So for Reagan that means through July 5. So I'm a little ashamed for thinking all those bad things of those people. As long as we have the same observances for all presidents then I have no right to complain. My apologies.

Bill Cosby's "tirade"

Bill Cosby had some good advice for everybody the other day.
Unfortunately, the Associated Press labeled his comments as a “tirade” and the rest of the national media has jumped on that bandwagon to portray him as some kind of crank with nothing but “harsh words” for the black community.
Now, I’m sure that Cosby could have phrased his comments more delicately and he could have been more politically correct, but when you get to be his age I’m sure you start to lose patience with those kinds of niceties and you just cut to the chase.
Now I realize that Cosby was addressing the black community with his comments, but I believe that we could all benefit by listening to what he had to say. Pretending that his criticisms only apply to poor blacks really misses the point.
It is not like poor blacks are the only ones who have a problem with keeping their kids in school and out of prison, finding jobs and dealing with domestic violence.
I still believe that government has a role and a responsibility to help people who are down and out, but it makes that job a lot easier when the folks needing help are actively working to pick themselves up rather than sitting around blaming the system for all their problems.

More evidence of Bush's economic leadership

Oh dear, it looks like Bush’s economic recovery, such that it is, is stalling once again. Such a shame.

“The nation's expanding economy produced 112,000 new jobs in June, the Labor Department reported today, far fewer than expected and well short of the numbers generated in the previous three months...

“The 112,000 job growth number was a bit of a shock to economists, who had predicted steady increases in the range of 240,000 for June. The most significant slowdown occurred in the manufacturing sector, which shed 11,000 jobs after four months of growth. Five thousand government jobs were lost and construction employment was flat.
All of June's job growth came in service industries.”

Oh goody! More service sector jobs!

As Atrios notes, it takes at least 140,000 jobs just to keep up with population growth in the job market.

A president that conservatives can admire

Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis, has an Op-Ed in the NYTimes today that makes the obvious point that conservatives should rethink the Clinton presidency and admit that he was a better president than they have given him credit for.

Here are some of Clinton’s accomplishments (as summarized from the article) that should have pleased any fair-minded conservative:

*Bringing the federal budget into surplus is obviously an achievement. After inheriting a deficit of 4.7 percent of gross domestic product in 1992, Mr. Clinton turned this into a surplus of 2.4 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 — a remarkable turnaround...

*Clinton achieved his surplus in large part by curtailing spending. Federal spending fell to 18.4 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 from 22.2 percent in 1992. Although he raised taxes in 1993, he cut them in 1997. He even reduced the capital gains tax — something his predecessor, George H. W. Bush, tried but failed to accomplish.

*Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996, the only time in American history when an entitlement program was abolished.

*Clinton was also steadfast in his support for free trade. It is doubtful that anyone else could have persuaded Congress to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement.

*...he reappointed Alan Greenspan, a Republican, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, thereby helping to bring inflation down to its lowest sustained level in a generation.

By contrast, Mr. Clinton's Republican successor has caused the surplus to evaporate, raised total federal spending by 1.6 percent of G.D.P., established a new entitlement program for prescription drugs and adopted the most protectionist trade policy since Herbert Hoover.

I think he makes a very persuasive argument. If you want to go back to the good old days of balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility... vote Democratic!

Actors who sing vs singers who act

Why is it that we are more accepting of singers who try to become actors than we are of actors who try to become singers?

Look at all of the singers who have gone on to have successful acting careers, even going so far as to win Oscar recognition for their work:

Bing Crosby - Best Actor for “Going My Way”
Frank Sinatra - Best Supporting Actor for “From Here To Eternity”
Barbara Streisand - Best Actress for “Funny Girl”
Diana Ross - Oscar nominee for “Lady Sings the Blues”
Cher - Best Actress for “Moonstruck”
Will Smith - Oscar nominee for “Ali”
Queen Latifah - Oscar nominee for “Chicago”

And then there are others who went on to have solid film careers:

Dean Martin
Tina Turner
Dolly Parton
Olivia Newton John
Kris Kristofferson
Mark Wahlburg
Jennifer Lopez
Whitney Houston
Ice Cube

Even Elvis Presley and Madonna have had better film careers than most actors have had singing careers. Oh, you will have the occassional singer whose movie will bomb - like Maria Carey in Glitter or anything Britney Spears has been in so far. But given time they may eventually get a good role and suddenly they are respectable.

Now compare that with the derision and scorn that is heaped on actors who dare try to record their voices on anything other than a novelty record:

Eddie Murphy
Bruce Willis
David Hasselhoff
William Shatner
Leonard Nimoy
Jennifer Love Hewitt

Even the ones who avoid singing and opt to just play bass guitar with a band like Kenau Reeves and Russell Crowe are given no respect.

I can think of only one actor who went on to have any success as a singer. That would be Jim Nabors (i.e. Gomer Pyle) who became popular on the gospel circuit.
Am I leaving anyone out?

Why are we so picky about our singers, but not so much with acting?

I figure it is because we tend to listen to songs over and over again, but we don’t watch a particular perfromance in a movie with the same amount of repitition. I’m sure the first time most people heard Eddie Murphy’s song “Party All the Time” they probably thought it was pretty good, but by the 10th or 20th time it starts to wear thin.

Top movie songs

The American Film Institute’s latest list purports to reveal the top 100 songs in movies during the past 100 years.

The top 10:
Over the Rainbow (THE WIZARD OF OZ)
As Time Goes By (CASABLANCA)
Singin' In The Rain (SINGIN' IN THE RAIN)
Moon River (BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S)
White Christmas (HOLIDAY INN/WHITE CHRISTMAS)
Mrs. Robinson (THE GRADUATE)
When You Wish Upon a Star (PINOCCHIO)
The Way We Were (THE WAY WE WERE)
Stayin' Alive (SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER)
The Sound of Music (THE SOUND OF MUSIC).

As always, I could quibble with the order. For instance, I would bump up Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” ahead of “Moon River” and I wouldn’t include “The Way We Were” or “Stayin’ Alive” in my Top 10.

But my biggest gripe, as always, is with the blatant ommissions. Looking over the list of 400 nominated songs there are quite of few deserving tunes that didn’t make the cutoff for the Top 100. Most significantly, in my opinion, are the Disney and Pixar tunes:

Chim Chim Cher-ee (Mary Poppins)
The Bare Necessities (Jungle Book)
Friend Like Me (Aladdin)
Under the Sea (The Little Mermaid)
Whistle While You Work (Snow White and the Seven Dwarves)
You’ve Got A Friend In Me (Toy Story)

Then there are these shocking ommissions:

If I Only Had A Brain (Wizard of Oz)
Ghostbusters (Ghostbusters)
I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow (O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
Live and Let Die (Live and Let Die)
The Time Warp (Rocky Horror Picture Show)
You’re the One That I Want (Grease)

And finally, songs that were not even on the list of 400 nominees:

Spoonful of Sugar (Mary Poppins)
Oompa Loompa (Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)
The Maladjusted Jester (The Court Jester)
Yellow Submarine (Yellow Submarine)

I’m sure I will think of more...

UPDATE:
Pink Elephants on Parade (Dumbo)

Rowland pays while Bush plays

The resignation of Connecticut Gov. John Rowland was probably inevitable and therefore not surprising. If anything, I was mostly surprised that he held on for so long in today’s media culture where the hint of a scandal can sometimes produce a feeding frenzy.

But this wasn’t really a feeding frenzy, at least not on a national level. The charges leveled against Rowland - that he lied about getting gifts and favors from friends, state contractors and state employees - didn’t get too many people excited outside of the Nutmeg State.

I had an inkling that it would come to this, however, because of my personal experience with the typical Connecticut Yankee’s intolerance for these types of scandals. In April of 1992, I was working as a young reporter for a chain of weekly papers along the Connecticut coastline.

Once I was called to fill in for a vacationing reporter at one of the papers and cover a legal hearing in the upscale community of Madison where the local chief of police was in the process of being drummed out of his job. His crime? When the department got new police cruisers from a local dealer (Three 1991 Ford Crown Victoria’s), the chiefs car came with a trunk-mounted, 10-disc compact disc player that the dealer had thrown in.

Now this was back when having a cd player in a car was still kind of unique, and a 10-disc changer was something out of Star Wars. At the hearing I covered, the prosecuting attorney grilled the local dealer about how much the 10-disc changer cost (he refused to say) at a time when AM/FM radios with cassette decks was the standard.
I remember sitting there watching this hearing unfold thinking ‘What’s the big deal’? But obviously folks in Connecticut took this kind of stuff very seriously.

So when I saw what Rowland was charged with I knew his days were numbered. Here is the NYTimes summary:

“(Rowland’s wealthy friends) fixed up his cottage in bucolic Litchfield, where Connecticut's movers and shakers summer, complete with a hot tub given to him by a state employee. The governor got thousands of dollars in Cuban cigars and French champagne, a vintage Ford Mustang convertible and free or discounted vacations at the estates of friends -- contractors who won substantial business from the state.”

So while I’m not trying to defend what Rowland did, I think I can say that a certain former Texas Governor should be thankful that the folks in the Lone Star State were much more lenient about such things.

The rich get richer...

There is at least one constituency group that has made out like gangbusters these last few years under President Bush, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Millionaires

The WSJ reported Tuesday that the number of millionaires in the U.S. is up 14 percent. The 2004 World Wealth Report revealed that the U.S. and Canada added more new millionaires last year than Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East combined.

“In the U.S., rising stock markets, strong real estate prices, wealth-friendly tax cuts and low interest rates combined to create strong returns for the wealthy.”

And needless to say, they aren’t exactly spreading this wealth around (except for their donations to the Bush election campaign). Meanwhile, the economy continues to lose jobs as it sputters along while the government racks up record deficits.

Tortured reasoning

Here is an interesting article in Slate about President Bush’s chief legal counsel Alberto Gonzales.
Gonzales, a political appointee from Texas, was apparently the author and co-author, respectively, of two of the infamous memos that try to provide justifications of the torture of foreign prisoners.

The thing that caught my attention, though, was the headline Slate used for the story out on their front page:

Bush’s Execution-Lovin’, Torture-Denyin’, Treaty-Hatin’ Lawyer

It would be funny if it weren’t so true.

Celebrity endorsements update

Time to update my running list of celebrity endorsements for this year’s presidential campaign.

Needless to say, John Kerry is the runaway favorite among most celebrities.
According to The Hill:

“A horde of celebrities has asked if they can help the Kerry campaign defeat Bush in November. There were so many requests, in fact, that it’s almost more celebrity help than the Kerry campaign needs or can use.”

Here are the latest additions to the Kerry celebrity endorsement list:

Jon Bon Jovi
James Gandolfini
Steve Buscemi
Richard Belzer
Robin Williams
Billy Crystal
Neil Diamond
Robert Redford
Tom Hanks
Danny DeVito
Dave Mathews Band
The Eagles
Sheryl Crowe
Bruce Springsteen
Emmylou Harris
Blink 182
Willie Nelson
John Mellencamp
Wyclef Jean
Whoopi Goldberg
Ben Affleck
Rhea Perlman
Ben Stiller
Dustin Hoffman
Richard Gere
Jessica Lange
John Williams (film score composer)
James Brolin
Ted Danson
Mary Steenburgen
Jason Alexander
Christina Applegate
Oliver Stone
Sharon Stone
Angelica Huston
Tobey Maguire
Brad Pitt
Christian Slater
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Barry Manilow
Jack Nicholson
Martin Sheen
Maya Angelou
Michael Douglas
Wesley Snipes
Goldie Hawn
Sally Field
Christopher Reeve
John Travolta
Annette Bening
Kevin Spacey
Alan Cumming
Ed Begley Jr.
Steve Harvey
Leslie Ann Warren

And those previously mentioned:

Meg Ryan
Leonardo DiCaprio
Jennifer Aniston
Kevin Costner
Barbara Streisand
James Taylor
Larry David
Carole King
Dennis Hopper
Kathleen Turner
Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds
Moby
Aaron Sorkin
Quincy Jones
Penny Marshall
Bette Midler
Jerry Seinfeld
Uma Thurman
Stephen Stills
Chevy Chase
Kevin Bacon
Paul Newman
Kate Hudson
Russell Crowe
Harvey Weinstein
Jennifer Garner
Robert DeNiro
Michael J. Fox
Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary)


As for the Bush campaign, the list is sparse by comparison. A web search only came up with three new names I had overlooked before:

Golfers Ben Crenshaw and Fuzzy Zoeller
and comedian Dennis Miller

Previously mentioned were:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
Bruce Willis
Tom Selleck

I’m sure there are a few more out there but so far they aren’t making themselves too visible.

Summing up the outrages

It is difficult to summarize all of the outrages of the Bush administration into just one paragraph, but Eric Alterman makes a good effort:

“It’s hard to say which is the best representation of what this war is doing to and has done to this country.  Is it the lies that were told to get us into it?  Is it the fact that we are picking up innocent people off the street and torturing them?  Is it that we have suspended the most basic civil liberties in our own country?  Is it that the work of professional intelligence agencies has been corrupted?  Is it that we have drawn resources away from the fight against Al Qaida which has completely regrouped?  Is it that we are creating more terrorists?  Is it that more than 700 Americans have been killed and thousands have been seriously injured?  Is it that thousands of Iraqis have been killed but nobody is keeping an account of the numbers of their deaths?  Is it that we are now more hated around the world than we have ever been?  Is it that we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars while actually decreasing our security?  Is it that we are doing all this while starving the most crucial homeland security programs?  Is it that everyone who told the truth about what was being planned has been dismissed and seen their characters attacked?  The usually soft-spoken and moderate intelligence analyst and author Thomas Powers does not exaggerate when he notes that Bush and the neocons have "caused the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in modern U.S. history." 

And that is just the foreign policy outrages.

Emperor Bush has no clothes!

A group of 26 former diplomats and military officials have joined forces to oppose Bush's reelection campaign.

"Prominent members include retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East during the administration of Bush's father; retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., ambassador to Britain under President Clinton and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan; and Jack F. Matlock Jr., a member of the National Security Council under Reagan and ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991."

"We agreed that we had just lost confidence in the ability of the Bush administration to advocate for American interests or to provide the kind of leadership that we think is essential," said William C. Harrop, the first President Bush's ambassador to Israel, and earlier to four African countries."

Finally more people are starting to come forward and admit that the emperor has no clothes. The group is supposed to issue a formal statement on Wednesday so I will link to that when it becomes available.

Too little, too late

After presiding over a miserable economy for the past three and a half years and watching a record surplus turn into record deficits, the Bush administration is now pointing to some long overdue good economic news as proof that they deserve a second term in office.

Is that the way it work in the real world? If CEO Bush went before his Board of Directors after producing such miserable results would he walk away with a big fat bonus and a contract extension?

But the real irony, as laid out in this Washington Post article is that Bush’s lousing up of our foreign policy is now overshadowing any positive news on the economy.

I still believe that a chief motivation for the Bush team’s headlong rush into war with Iraq was Karl Rove’s belief that it would take the public’s attention away from Bush’s inept mishandling of the economy. And guess what? It worked!

“Voters fixated on Iraq so far are not willing to see the improving economy through a positive prism, according to pollsters and Bush campaign aides.”

G'n'R + STP = Velvet Revolver?

This news makes me want to go out and buy a music CD for the first time in two years. The former members of Guns ‘N’ Roses - minus Axel Rose and Izzy Stradlin - have joined with former Stone Temple Pilots lead singer Scott Weiland to form a new group called Velvet Revolver. Their first album has gotten some good notice. Too bad there are no decent radio stations left where I can listen to it on air.
I’ve also heard that Van Halen has reunited with Sammy Hagar and released some new music. I never even heard anything from the last Van Halen album that featured some non-Roth, non-Hagar frontman.

Ronald Reagan dies

Former President Reagan died today at age 93.

I was in high school when Ronald Reagan was shot shortly after being elected president. It was one of those startling moments that shake you out of your day-to-day existence and force you to pay attention to the rest of the world. I remember the detailed diagrams in TIME magazine showing the path and trajectory of each bullet and where all the wounded people - Reagan, James Brady, the Secret Service agent and the police officer - were all standing. I remember thinking that Reagan could still die even though he survived the initial shooting and wondering what that would mean.

My family was pretty much apolitical when I was growing up. I used to tell my parents who they should vote for before I was old enough to vote myself. (I don't know if they actually took my advice.) In 1980, I told them to vote for Jimmy Carter, probably because he was the incumbent who I was familiar with. But by 1984, the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in, I had been completely won over by Reagan. I had a picture of Reagan and campaign bumper stickers in my dorm room at Texas A&M. I used to clip out cartoons that lauded Reagan and lampooned poor Walter Mondale. I couldn't understand why anybody would vote for Mondale over Reagan.

The landslide that year for Reagan meant I was pretty much in tune with the rest of the country. But during his second term a number of things happened that gave me second thoughts. I read a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. I became facinated by the Kennedy assassination conspiracy and became convinced that a shadowy right-wing cabal had gotten away with the murder of the century. And then the Iran-Contra scandal hit the news. At first I was willing to give Reagan the benefit of the doubt. I still liked Reagan and hadn't shifted my allegiance at that point. But I remember him coming on television shortly after the news of the scandal first broke and explaining that the arms that had been shipped to Iran were just a tiny shipment that could all fit on one airplane. It seemed reasonable to me, no big deal, no harm done. But then I found out that was not really the case. The arms sent to Iran were much more substantial than what Reagan had claimed. Was he lying? Was he misinformed? Either way my confidence in Reagan was shattered and I began to have a lot of second thoughts about my politics.
By 1988, I had done a complete turnaround and was supporting Dukakis for president (after voting for Jesse Jackson in the primary).

However, I still liked Reagan. He was just hard to dislike. He was so full of optimism and pride in America that he had become an icon for our country, not just for conservatives, but for everyone. Today I think Reagan was a great leader for our country who, unfortunately had some wrong-headed ideas that took us in bad directions, but for the most part his impact on the country was positive. He did leave us with a huge national debt, but he also helped to make the country stronger - in spirit if not materially.

By direct contrast, George W. Bush has made our country weaker. He has presided over a deep recession and a long jobless recovery and he has led us into a tar pit in the Middle East that has aggravated our friends and enemies alike. In many ways, Bush is the Republican version of Jimmy Carter. What the Democrats need - and I'm hoping John Kerry can be - is a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan. We need to restore our faith and pride in our country and repair our tarnished image around the globe. Rather than an aggressor nation that bullys smaller countries and conducts pre-emptive invasions, and then abuses foreign prisoners, we should be the "good guys" who are there to help and lead through example. If the Democrats can take those positive aspects of Reagan and apply them to good government policies, I think they will retake the White House for the next eight years.

From Bush - “Unprecedented Negativity”

From the Washington Post...

“Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising...

“...Scott Reed, who ran Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign that year, said the Bush campaign has little choice but to deliver a constant stream of such negative charges. With low poll numbers and a volatile situation in Iraq, Bush has more hope of tarnishing Kerry's image than promoting his own.”

Bush is currently running a nasty, negative campaign because he has nothing positive to run on - absolutely nothing. The economy has been lousy for his entire presidency, he is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs, he squandered the surplus on tax cuts for the rich which have failed to revive the economy and the Iraq war is without a doubt a complete and utter debacle.

Why would anyone want four more years of this?

You tell 'em, Al!

Al Gore's speech the other day at New York University was the kind of no nonsense rhetoric that I would like to hear more of from Democrats in the coming months.

“From its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of "preemption." And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat - and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President...

“President Bush said in his speech Monday night that the war in Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror." It's not the central front in the war on terror, but it has unfortunately become the central recruiting office for terrorists. The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States.”

I imagine this is just a taste of the kind of address Gore will be giving at the Democratic Convention this summer.

Apparently unable to rebut the substance of the speech, The Republican National Committee has tried to dismiss Gore's criticism by attacking MoveOn.org, the group that sponsored his speech. In a statement, the RNC opined that Gore’s credibility was undermined by his association with MoveOn.org. However, I would respond that the RNC’s credibility is greatly diminished by its association with George W. Bush.

A favorite tactic of the Republican spin machine recently has been to spread the lie that MoveOn.org sponsored ads comparing George W. Bush to Hitler. What actually happened was that the group sponsored a contest to find the best ads critical of the Bush administration and out of 150 submissions there were two that had made the Hitler analogy. These ads were rejected and were never used by the MoveOn.org. The organization addresses this smear here, not that it will make any difference to the lying liars who continue to spin this tale.

Campaigning on failures

I guess when you have nothing but failures to show for your four years in office you have to make the best of them. In this New York Times story from yesterday, the Bush administration is sending its minions out to campaign by touting programs that Bush tried to cutback or eliminate:

- Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million.

- Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced recently that the administration was awarding $11.7 million in grants to help 30 states plan and provide coverage for people without health insurance. Mr. Bush had proposed ending the program in each of the last three years.

- The administration also announced recently that it was providing $11.6 million to the states so they could buy defibrillators to save the lives of heart attack victims. But Mr. Bush had proposed cutting the budget for such devices by 82 percent, to $2 million from $10.9 million.

In each case, the additional spending that is being touted represents a failure by the Bush administration to curtail or end a program that it was opposed to. They were unable to accomplish these cutbacks even with total Republican domination of all branches of the federal government. That is what I would call incompetent. Bush can’t even even lead within his own party, much less so on the world stage.

That brings us to another recent news story where the U.S. Faces Growing Fears of Failure in Iraq.

This really should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed Bush’s career over the years. He almost always fails in his various ventures and then sits back and waits for his daddy’s wealthy friends to come and bail him out. I’m just not sure who is supposed to bail us out this time, other than the U.S. taxpayers, of course, who get stuck with another $25 billion for Bush’s Iraqi Quagmire.

"357 Channels and Nothing On"

It looks like I might still have a few programming options on next season’s television schedule - but not many.
The number of shows that I watch regularly has been slowly dwindling and the shift away from quality television programming to cheap, brainless “reality” shows means I will have that much more free time in the evenings.

With the series finales of “Friends” and “Frasier” now past and the finale of “Angel,” the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” spinoff, later tonight one might think the networks would be scrambling to come out with some worthy replacement shows. But on first glance at the new fall schedules being announced this week, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Other than the “Friends” spinoff “Joey,” while I will check out, the only new show on the schedule that even looks remotely interesting is “Lost” scheduled for Wednesdays on ABC. It is some kind of adventure series set on a deserted island and stars Matthew Fox of “Party of Five” fame as well as Dominic Monaghan who was a hobbit in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m sure ABC will axe the series after airing only a handful of episodes since I have shown some interest in it now.

Other than that, there are no shows on ABC that interest me (except possibly the “Wonderful World of Disney” depending on what is showing). I haven’t watched anything on Fox since I got bogged down with the second season of “24” and the cancellation of “Angel” means I won’t be wasting my time tuning into the WB Network again.

I understand that UPN has decided to renew “Star Trek: Enterprise” for one more season so I will continue to faithfully tune them in once a week as a devoted Trekee.

NBC still has “ER” on Thursday nights and CBS has renewed “Judging Amy” and “Joan of Arcadia,” and that is about it. There are a few others shows that I would normally find worthy but for various reasons I have not found the time or the desire to watch them regularly. They include “The Simpsons,” “West Wing,” and “Alias.”
I also watch “60 Minutes” on occasion depending on the topic.

Finally, I have a friend who is such a devoted fan of “The Amazing Race” that he has applied to be on the show for its sixth season. So I will probably break down and watch an episode or two next season to see what it is all about.

Here is my tentative viewing schedule for next fall:

Monday: Nothing
Tuesday: “Judging Amy”
Wednesday: “Lost”
Thursday: “Joey,” “E.R.”
Friday: “Star Trek: Enterprise,” “Joan of Arcadia”
Saturday: “Amazing Race”
Sunday: Nothing

Not an isolated incident

From a report
by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC)

This is just chilling.....

“The agency said arrests allegedly tended to follow a pattern.

"Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property," the report said.

"Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people," it said. "Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles."

I can understand that seeking out insurgents during the heat of battle can be a tense and hazardous duty and I would expect our soldiers to take every precaution to protect and defend themselves, but what is the purpose behind these gestapo tactics? What is that supposed to accomplish other than spread fear and resentment among the masses.
And when we are gathering our prisoners in this manner it is little wonder that -

“...some coalition military intelligence officers estimated that "between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.”

Yes, innocent civilians. Not insurgents, not terrorists, but the very people we are supposed to be liberating and introducing to democracy.

And the worst part about the ICRC report aside from how their warnings were ignored by the Bush administration was the answer they got back from military officials in response:

“The ICRC report said the agency was told that in general that the prisoner abuse in Iraq by U.S. military personnel is "part of the process" during interrogation.”

That’s right. Just part of the process.

Here is the process...

“The report cites abuses - some "tantamount to torture" - including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution."
"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from person who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value.'"”

So this was not just an isolated instance and court marshalling a few guards who had the misfortune and poor judgement to have their pictures taken during some of the abuses is not going to do anything to address the real problem.

“U.S. President George W. Bush said the mistreatment "was the wrongdoing of a few," but the Red Cross report backs up with detail the neutral agency's contention that the abuse was broad and part of a system, "not individual acts."”

More Bush lies. No surprise there.

Arrogance and Incompetence

Fareed Zakaria, international editor for Newsweek, sums up the “arrogance and incompetence” that has been the hallmark of President Bush’s administration:

“On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.
Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.”

Speaking of taking responsibility, Zakaria notes earlier in the article that it has little meaning at Bush Corp.

"I take full responsibility," said Donald Rumsfeld in his congressional testimony last week. But what does this mean? Secretary Rumsfeld hastened to add that he did not plan to resign and was not going to ask anyone else who might have been "responsible" to resign. As far as I can tell, taking responsibility these days means nothing more than saying the magic words "I take responsibility."

“After the greatest terrorist attack against America, no one was asked to resign, and the White House didn't even want to launch a serious investigation into it. The 9/11 Commission was created after months of refusals because some of the victims' families pursued it aggressively and simply didn't give up. After the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, not one person was even reassigned. The only people who have been fired or cashiered in this administration are men like Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill and Larry Lindsey, who spoke inconvenient truths.”

President-elect John Kerry

Pollster John Zogby predicts election victory for Kerry!! Woo Hoo!!

He gives four reasons summarized as follows:

1. Bush has bad re-election numbers for an incumbent president with the latest poll showing Kerry up 47 - 44 in a 2-way race.

2. There are few undecided voters at this point and most of those tend to break for the challenger against the incumbent.

3. The economy is still the top issue for voters next to Iraq and both situations have veered out of control for the president. The economy is improving too little, too late to make a difference to most voters and Iraq is a quagmire.

4. Historically, Sen. Kerry is a good closer and always performs well in the final weeks of a campaign.

The Abu Ghraib - Guantanamo link

I find it interesting that most of the details of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal were reported as early as Jan. 21, 2004 and yet there was no uproar until the mass distribution of the photos sparked by the 60 Minutes II television show.

Now we have fresh turmoil in Washington where fingers are being pointed and accusations are flying about who didn't tell whom about the brewing scandal. President Bush claims not to have known anything about it before the 60 Minutes show which raises a number of questions.

Is he really that poorly informed by his staff? Did they just not think it was a big deal?

Anthony Lewis in The New York Times today draws the obvious link between our refusal to honor the Geneva Convention accords with respect to the prisoners at Guantanamo and our leaders' seeming indifference to the mistreatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

More disturbing is the very real possibility that this issue was not taken seriously because it is all too common and par for the course in the netherworld that makes up our military intelligence gathering operations.

Disney censoring Michael Moore

Good news for Michael Moore, the Academy Award-winning documentary film maker, best-selling author and leftist rabble-rouser.

It looks like the clowns at Walt Disney Co. are trying to do the same thing for Moore’s latest film project that Bill O’Reilly and Fox News did for Al Franken’s book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.”

In the same way that the Fox News lawsuit created publicity and helped boost sales of Franken’s book, Disney’s efforts to prevent the distribution of Moore’s new anti-Bush documenatary "Fahrenheit 9/11" is sure to create buzz and drive up interest in the film.

I’m not a huge fan of Moore. I though he was an idiot for supporting Ralph Nader’s campaign during the 2000 elections. I liked his last film “Bowling for Columbine” for the most part, but I thought his interview with Charlton Heston at the end of the film went over the top. If Moore had simply done a straight-up interview with the celebrity icon turned gun nut it would have worked. But when he pulled out a photo of a girl killed by a gun accident and started hounding Heston with it I had to cringe. I came away feeling sympathy for Heston, and I don’t think that is the reaction that Moore had intended for the scene.

The problem with Moore is that while his in-your-face aggressive attitude is good for rallying the faithful, it does little to convert those on the outside and rather tends to drive them away. Still, it is not bad for the left to have a few folks like that around. The right has people like that coming out of their ears.
So while I don’t always agree with him, and I don’t like his style, I still want to see his new movie and Disney’s inept attempts at censorship only heightens that desire.

The battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people is over.

We lost.

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) -- Dhia al-Shweiri spent several stints in Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, twice under Saddam Hussein's rule and once under American. He prefers Saddam's torture to the humiliation of being stripped naked by his American guards, he said Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press.

When you have people like this comparing us unfavorably to Saddam, it's no wonder they aren't throwing rose petals at our feet.

And 11 more U.S. troops were killed this weekend. Almost one year to the day since President Bush did his little "Mission Accomplished" victory jig aboard that U.S. aircraft carrier. It looks like May isn't going to be much better than April.

Clinton, unlike Bush, had his priorities straight

From the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire (page A4):

“When the two spoke privately at inauguration time, Clinton put al Qaeda at the top of his list of national-security concerns, with Iraq behind the Mideast, North Korea and India and Pakistan, according to one outsider who recently heard Clinton’s account. It is confirmed by several former Clinton aides from the time.
Bush, by contrast, already had called for regime change in Iraq.”

That sounds about right. Too bad Bush insisted on being the anti-Clinton in all respects.

Wolfowitz underestimates U.S. troop deaths in Iraq

From the Associated Press:

“Asked how many American troops have died in Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz , the Pentagon's No. 2 civilian and an architect of the military campaign in Iraq, estimated Thursday the total was about 500 - more than 200 soldiers short.
Wolfowitz was asked about the toll at a hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee. "It's approximately 500, of which - I can get the exact numbers - approximately 350 are combat deaths," he responded.
"He misspoke," spokesman Charley Cooper said later. "That's all."
American deaths Thursday were at 722 - 521 of them from combat - since the start of military operations in Iraq last year, according to the Department of Defense.”

How pathetic! One of the chief chickenhawks responsible for this Iraqi quagmire and he can’t be bothered to keep straight the number of American soldiers who have been forced to pay the ultimate price for his and Bush’s folly!

First they try to prevent the media from publishing photos of the stream of coffins being shipped back from Iraq. Now they are trying to keep broadcasters from airing a special NightLine segment that will honor all of the fallen soldiers from the conflict.

Bush's manipulation and abuse of science threatens the well being of our nation

Scientific American magazine has a withering editorial assailing the Bush administration for its political manipulation of science. They make an apt comparison between the current ideology-driven administration and the Soviets of the 1930s:

“Starting in the 1930s, the Soviets spurned genetics in favor of Lysenkoism, a fraudulent theory of heredity inspired by Communist ideology. Doing so crippled agriculture in the U.S.S.R. for decades. You would think that bad precedent would have taught President George W. Bush something. But perhaps he is no better at history than at science.”

The Bush administration’s efforts to impose their fundamentalist ideology in place of sound science was well documented recently by the Union of Concerned Scientists in a report signed by 62 leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, 19 recipients of the National Medal of Science, and advisers to the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations.

The report details instances where the administration “misrepresented the findings of the National Academy of Sciences and other experts on climate change. It meddled with the discussion of climate change in an Environmental Protection Agency report until the EPA eliminated that section. It suppressed another EPA study that showed that the administration's proposed Clear Skies Act would do less than current law to reduce air pollution and mercury contamination of fish. It even dropped independent scientists from advisory committees on lead poisoning and drug abuse in favor of ones with ties to industry.”

The Bush administration responded to the report by having John Marburger, George Bush's science adviser, issue a strongly worded defence of the president's science policy.

This past week, the Economist magazine took a look at the back and forth and found that while “some of Marburger’s responses look justified—for example, his denials that the Bush administration overruled scientific advisers in acting to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Some, however, have a whiff of spin about them.” And in other instances he is simply unconvincing such as with the accusations of committee-packing, the rebuttal merely states that the UCS report is wrong in all instances, without explaining why.

The Economist, which is based in England, tends to be a slightly moderate to conservative publication (they support the war in Iraq, for instance), so their perspective is refreshingly free of American political bias. So I halfway expected to read a wishy-washy “both sides are bad” type of summation of the issue, but instead they end thier piece with this rather frightening denunciation of the Bush administration:

“To the extent that it is aimed at environmental and bioethical questions, which have long divided America on party-political lines, this disagreement could be seen as business as usual. However, it is not limited to those fields. There is a widespread feeling among scientists that Mr Bush is ignoring scientific results and opinions he does not like in other areas, too. In August 2003 the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform made claims similar to those of the UCS report. But it also observed widespread scientific unease about the feasibility of the missile-defence systems proposed by the administration. This report has gone unanswered by Dr Marburger, as has a report made in July 2003 by the American Physical Society (APS), a professional organisation for physicists in America. The APS report concluded that boost-phase missile defence, one element of the system planned by the Bush administration, would be ineffective.

“These are serious accusations. Suppressing research into stem cells is causing that research to move abroad, which will damage America's biotechnology industry. But that will not be fatal to America's future, and opponents of stem-cell research might argue that it is a price worth paying for their beliefs. Monkeying with defence is a different matter. America's current military prowess has been achieved, in large part, because the country has listened to and lauded its physicists and engineers. Spending billions on technology that most of them believe will not work is, at the least, a dubious approach. Politicians can cheat nature no more effectively than scientists can.”

Kerry's medals

The recent news reports that has Republicans questioning the validity of John Kerry's combat medals made my jaw drop.
Could they really be that stupid?? Then I saw this offensively stupid letter to the editor in the local San Antonio daily :

Medals meaningless

I expect other former servicemen have reached the same conclusion as I: John Kerry's military awards in Vietnam are undeserved.
First, three Purple Hearts, with confusion among observers on whether Kerry was under enemy fire. Even Kerry's superior officer was dubious about the validity of his claim that his scratches were caused by enemy fire. No hospital time.
Next, a Bronze Star for hauling a man, who had fallen overboard, out of the water. A commendable action, but not particularly heroic and certainly not deserving a Bronze Star.
Finally, a Silver Star, one of the nation's highest military awards, for killing an enemy soldier. Apparently, naval officers forgot that killing the enemy is the primary objective of military personnel. If every soldier, sailor and Marine who killed an enemy were awarded this honor, the medal would be cheap indeed.
Remembering the battles that our young men have fought, where (unrewarded) exceptional valor was (and is) a common virtue, Kerry's adventures seem pale in comparison.

Charles D. Wood

This is really outrageous!! If you are going to question the validity of one of Kerry's medals they you are essentially questioning the validity of every medal earned by any and all of our service people. And this coming from an administration led by someone who blew off the last year and a half of his National Guard service and filled with chicken hawks like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who avoided military service for themselves. And the one guy with any military credibility - Colin Powell - is ignored and shunted aside during preparation for the Iraq invasion.


My father recieved the Silver Star for actions he took in Vietnam. When his squadron was cut off from their base in the middle of the Tet Offensive with no means of communication, he and another pilot ran out in the midst of sniper fire to push an abandoned jeep back into their compound so they could use its radio. By doing so they were able to call for reinforcements which kept the whole unit from being overrun.

I'm obviously very proud of what my father did in Vietnam and the idea that somebody would question whether he really deserves his medal really makes my blood boil. If this is the tactic that Republicans want to take in this campaign they will lose very badly.

As I've said before, the difference between Kerry's military service and Bush's military service can be summed up by the simple observation that while Kerry's superiors were pinning medals on his chest for valor in combat, Bush's superiors in the National Guard were scratching their heads wondering where the hell he was half the time.

Too close to home

My brother-in-law’s Louisiana National Guard Unit is being called up for duty in Iraq. He leaves on May 9 for three months of training at Fort Hood followed by one month of testing somewhere else before beginning a 12-plus month tour overseas.
Needless to say I am not happy about the situation, although I am very proud of by brother-in-law for his service. He and I don’t see eye-to-eye on politics, but that has never been an issue between us. I’m sure that other than being separated from his family, he doesn’t have a problem with the deployment and is very supportive of the whole operation.
But it will still be a hardship on both him and my sister as he is forced to leave her at home with their four young children - my three nieces and one nephew. My prayers are with them.

I have already come to the conclusion that we need to start pulling out of Iraq. We have scoured the country for WMDs and found nothing. We captured Saddam Hussein, killed his two sons and scattered the remnants of his government. So now it is time to declare victory and go home. Pass the baton to the United Nations and let the Iraqis have the government that they choose rather than one we want to force on them. Unfortunately, that government will probably be closer to the religious oligarchy they have in Iran than to anything we would prefer, but Bush should have thought about that before plunging us into this mess. (Or he should have at least listened to someone with half a brain who actually does think once in awhile.)

The Knoblauch mystery is solved!

The NY Times finally answers the mystery of what happened to Chuck Knoblauch?
Knoblauch dropped off the radar when his contract was not picked up by the Kansas City Royals. But now the former New York Yankee is happily retired from baseball and living in Houston.
Well, I’m happy for him. He had a great career that was unfortunately cut just a bit short by his throwing problem which happened to coincide with the deteriorating health of his father.
I think it would be great if Knoblauch could be lured out of retirement to join his old teammates with the Houston Astros this season.
It is pretty obvious that the Yankees are missing him now that they have traded away Alfonso Soriano and are left with a gaping hole at second base.

Too bad Bush didn't listen to Colin Powell

Back when Bush tapped Colin Powell to be Secretary of State, everyone thought it was a brilliant move. Unfortunately, we now know it was just a political calculation and that Bush never had any intention of actually listening to Powell or heeding his advice on foreign policy matters.

The new Bob Woodward book notes that Powell warned Bush about the war's cost to no avail.

"You're sure?" Powell is quoted as asking Bush in the Oval Office on January 13, 2003, as the president told him he had made the decision to go forward. "You understand the consequences," he is said to have stated in a half-question. "You know you're going to be owning this place?"

Yeah, we certainly own it now and the Bush administration is finally starting to have buyer's remorse. Now suddenly, after months of denigrating the United Nations as being inconsequential, Bush is going back to the U.N. with hat in hand begging them to bail us out of this Iraqi quagmire.

This is yet another fine example of a classic Bush flip-flop, but the subservient media is oddly portraying it as Bush and Blair "staying the course."

Things in Iraq have gone from bad to worse these past two weeks and we would be lucky if the U.N. does agree to come in and pull our bacon out of the fire.

Mood music

My friend Robert at Beginner's Mind asks about music that people use to change their moods.

I guess when I listen to music it doesn't put me in a mood so much as it transports me back to a time and a place when I first heard it. Music can be very nostalgic. I have certain music that I associate with my childhood. Some that dates to junior high school. Some that takes me back to high school days and some that is from college.

Whenever I hear Elvis Presley's "That's Alright, Mama" I'm back in elementary school - Elvis having been one of the first albums I ever got. If I hear the Kingston Trio singing "Tom Dooley" or Herb Alpert and the Tiajuana Brass playing "Tiajuana Taxi" I am transported back to my childhood listening to my father's recorded music from Vietnam on his reel-to-reel player.

The Bee Gee's "Tragedy" and "Play that Funky Music" by Wild Cherry transports me back to junior high days in Victoria riding the bus to school and listening to the local rock radio station each day. Same goes for "Barracuda" by Heart and "Rich Girl" by Hall & Oates.

But to alter my mood, I suppose one song that always makes me happy to listen to is "When Jimmy Falls in Love" by Vance Gilbert. Or the soundtrack to Walt Disney's Dumbo - particulary "Pink Elephants on Parade." I also love a particular version of "If I knew you were coming I would have baked a cake" sung as a duet by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on Crosby's radio show.

Of course, you can't always make yourself happy just by listening to music. Sometimes when you are really down or heartbroke the old adage "misery loves company" applies and you want to know that you are not alone. That is when Hank Williams Sr. is most effective. The guy knew something about misery and could put it in a song so that it was both catchy and sincere.