Blame Bush for New Orleans catastrophe

When The Levee Breaks I'll have no place to stay.
- Led Zepplin

New Orleans is now a swamp. A pair of breaches in the levee that separated it from Lake Pontchartrain has allowed water to flood the city up to 20 feet deep in some sections. After thinking they had been spared the worst effects of Hurricane Katrina after it jogged east at the last moment (slamming hard into Mississippi), New Orleans found itself in an even worse predicament:

...it was not the water from the sky but the water that broke through the city's protective barriers that changed everything for the worse. With a population of nearly 500,000, New Orleans is protected from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain by levees.
When the levees gave way in some critical spots, streets that were essentially dry in the hours immediately after the hurricane passed were several feet deep in water on Tuesday morning. Even downtown areas that lie on higher ground were flooded. Mayor Nagin said both city airports were under water.

But it didn’t have to happen
this way. As Eric Boehlert point out, the flooding could have been avoided if President Bush had not diverted millions of dollars from a federal program designed to build up the levees in order to pay for his tax cuts and for the war in Iraq.

In 1995, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars."

*" In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness."

*" On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”"

*"The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history."

*" One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday."

*"The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House....In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be.

So Bush saves a few hundred million dollars by scrimping on funding for flood protection in New Orleans and now as a result we will have to pay billions and billions of dollars in disaster relief aid.
Is there no end to the blundering incompetence and short-sightedness of this administration? This is, without a doubt, the worst presidential administration this country has ever seen.

Hit songs of 1983

Found at Roscoe's Excuse:

Rules of play:

A. Go to http://www.musicoutfitters.com.
B. Enter the year you graduated from high school in the search function.
C. Bold for the songs you like, strike through the ones you hate and italicize your favorite. Do nothing to the ones you don't remember (or don't care about).


1. Every Breath You Take, Police
2. Billie Jean, Michael Jackson
3. Flashdance... What A Feelin, Irene Cara
4. Down Under, Men At Work
5. Beat It, Michael Jackson
6. Total Eclipse Of The Heart, Bonnie Tyler
7. Maneater, Daryl Hall and John Oates
8. Baby Come To Me, Patti Austin and James Ingram
9. Maniac, Michael Sembello
10. Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), Eurythmics
11. Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, Culture Club
12. You And I, Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle
13. Come On Eileen, Dexy's Midnight Runners
14. Shame On The Moon, Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band
15. She Works Hard For The Money, Donna Summer
16. Never Gonna Let You Go, Sergio Mendes
17. Hungry Like The Wolf, Duran Duran
18. Let's Dance, David Bowie
19. Twilight Zone, Golden Earring
20. I Know There's Something Going On, Frida
21. Jeopardy, Greg Kihn Band
22. Electric Avenue, Eddy Grant
23. She Blinded Me With Science, Thomas Dolby
24. Africa, Toto
25. Little Red Corvette, Prince
26. Back On The Chain Gang, Pretenders
27. Up Where We Belong, Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes
28. Mr. Roboto, Styx
29. You Are, Lionel Richie
30. Der Kommissar, After The Fire
31. Puttin' On The Ritz, Taco
32. Sexual Healing, Marvin Gaye
33. (Keep Feeling) Fascination, Human League
34. Time (Clock Of The Heart), Culture Club
35. The Safety Dance, Men Without Hats
36. Mickey, Toni Basil
37. You Can't Hurry Love, Phil Collins
38. Separate Ways, Journey
39. One On One, Daryl Hall and John Oates
40. We've Got Tonight, Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton
41. 1999, Prince
42. Stray Cat Strut, Stray Cats
43. Allentown, Billy Joel
44. Stand Back, Stevie Nicks
45. Tell Her About It, Billy Joel
46. Always Somethmg There To Remind Me, Naked Eyes
47. Truly, Lionel Richie
48. Dirty Laundry, Don Henley
49. The Girl Is Mine, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney
50. Too Shy, Kajagoogoo
51. Goody Two Shoes, Adam Ant
52. Rock The Casbah, Clash
53. Our House, Madness
54. Overkill, Men At Work
55. Is There Something I Should Know, Duran Duran
56. Gloria, Laura Branigan
57. Affair Of The Heart, Rick Springfield
58. She's A Beauty, Tubes
59. Solitaire, Laura Branigan
60. Don't Let It End, Styx
61. How Am I Supposed To Live Without You, Laura Branigan
62. China Girl, David Bowie
63. Come Dancing, Kinks
64. Promises, Promises, Naked Eyes
65. The Other Guy, Little River Band
66. Making Love Out Of Nothing At All, Air Supply
67. Family Man, Daryl Hall and John Oates
68. Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', Michael Jackson
69. I Won't Hold You Back, Toto
70. All Right, Christopher Cross
71. Straight From The Heart, Bryan Adams
72. Heart To Heart, Kenny Loggins
73. My Love, Lionel Richie
74. I'm Still Standing, Elton John
75. Hot Girls In Love, Loverboy
76. It's A Mistake, Men At Work
77. I'll Tumble 4 Ya, Culture Club
78. All This Love, Debarge
79. Your Love Is Driving Me Crazy, Sammy Hagar
80. Heartbreaker, Dionne Warwick
81. Faithfully, Journey
82. Steppin' Out, Joe Jackson
83. Take Me To Heart, Quarterflash
84. (She's) Sexy + 17, Stray Cats
85. Try Again, Champaign
86. Dead Giveaway, Shalamar
87. Lawyers In Love, Jackson Browne
88. What About Me, Moving Pictures
89. Human Nature, Michael Jackson
90. Photograph, Def Leppard
91. Pass The Dutchie, Musical Youth
92. True, Spandau Ballet
93. Far From Over, Frank Stallone
94. I've Got A Rock 'N' Roll Heart, Eric Clapton
95. It Might Be You, Stephen Bishop
96. Tonight I Celebrate My Love, Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack
97. You Got Lucky, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
98. Don't Cry, Asia
99. Breaking Us In Two, Joe Jackson
100. Fall In Love With Me, Earth, Wind and Fire

George W. Bush: Setting new lows in popularity

George W. Bush is not the most unpopular president of all time, but he is getting there.

On Friday, Gallup announced that the president's approval has reached a new low of 40 percent, while his disapproval has soared to a new high of 56 percent....
Of the 12 presidents who've served since Gallup started polling in the late 1930s, Bush has entered the ranks of the most unpopular. He's now more unpopular than FDR, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Ford, and Clinton ever were, and has matched the highest disapproval rating of his idol, Ronald Reagan.

Bush's disapproval rose five points in August alone. At his current pace of losing favor, he could speed past two more presidents within the next month: Jimmy Carter, who peaked at 59 percent in mid-1979, and George H.W. Bush, who hit 60 percent in the summer of 1992. That would leave the current Bush just two more men to pass on his way to the top spot: Richard Nixon, who reached 66 percent before resigning in 1974, and Harry Truman, who set Gallup's all-time record at 67percent in January 1952.

Can Bush break the record? The experts say it's nearly impossible in a political climate so much more polarized than the one the men he's competing against faced. To increase his disapproval ratings among Republicans, Bush would have to lose a war, explode the national debt, or preside over a period of steep moral decline. Moreover, as his friends have learned, it's a lot harder breaking records when you have to do it without steroids.

But don't count Bush out—he thrives on being told a goal is beyond his reach. The president is an intense competitor and stacks up well against the historical competition:
• Reagan was old and amiable; Bush is young, vigorous, and has a smirk in reserve.
• Both Carter and Bush 41 were one-term, rookie presidents with no clear plan to gain disfavor and who had to rely entirely on external events going south. Bush 43's chances don't depend on luck: He has a proven strategy to fail at home and abroad.
• Nixon had to achieve his disapproval ratings almost entirely through scandal, with little help from the economy or world events. The Bush White House is much more versatile: They won't let scandal distract them from screwing up foreign and domestic policy. Already, 62 percent of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction—the highest level in a decade—even before the Bush scandals have begun to take a toll.
• Truman might seem tough to beat, because Bush has no popular generals to fire. But Truman had several historic achievements under his belt that kept his unpopularity down, such as winning World War II and presiding over the postwar boom. Bush's record is free of any such ballast. In a pinch, the Bush camp can also make a good case that polling on Truman was notoriously unreliable, and that Bush deserves a share of the modern-day record if he reaches Nixon's level.

With gas prices about to soar to new stratospheric highs, I imagine that Bush’s disapproval ratings will be tagging right along behind.

Disney wobblers

I found a weeble in my last box of cereal that looked like a little green worm with eyes. As it turned out it was supposed to be Squirt, the young sea turtle character in Disney’s Finding Nemo movie. Disney has created a set of 50 of these toys they call Wobblers that they are giving away in a promotion with Kelloggs.

I’m a sucker for lists and so I was facinated with how they came up with the 50 Disney characters to be represented in this collection celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the company’s theme parks.

Here is the complete list according to the back of my cereal box:

Classic characters
Mickey Mouse
Donald Duck
Goofy
Pluto
Minnie Mouse
Daisy Duck
Chip and Dale
Peter Pan
Peter Pan
Tinkerbell
Captain Hook
The Crockodile
Pinnochio
Pinnochio
Jiminy Cricket
Dumbo
Dumbo
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Snow White
Dopey
The Witch
Bambi
Bambi
Thumper
Alice in Wonderland
Alice
Mad Hatter
Cheshire Cat
Lady and the Tramp
Lady
Tramp
101 Dalmations
Lucky
Cruella de Vil
The Fox and the Hound
Copper
Todd
The Little Mermaid
Ariel
Ursula
Sebastian
Aladdin
Aladdin
Genie
Lago
The Lion King
Simba
Timon
Pumba
Toy Story
Woody
Buzz Lightyear
Little Green Man
A Bug’s Life
Flick
Heimlich
Monster’s Inc.
Sully
Mike
Finding Nemo
Nemo
Dory
Squirt
Flounder
Bruce

Are these supposed to be the 50 most popular characters? That seems like a lot, but there must be thousands of Disney animated characters and even with a list like this there are dozens of glaring omissions - like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. I’m assuming the collection was being put together before the release of The Incredibles movie which would explain their absence, but I’m still surprised that Lilo and Stitch were left out.
(Note: The Winnie the Pooh set is apparently offered seperately)

To get an idea of how many characters they had to leave out just look at this list of Disney animated movies that are not represented in the wobbler collection:

Cinderalla
Sleeping Beauty
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Rescuers
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver and Company
Beauty and the Beast
Pocahantas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
The Emperor’s New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range

And that’s not counting the partially animated movies like Song of the South, Pete’s Dragon, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Mary Poppins.

But who knows? Maybe they will issue a second set before long and this time include the rest of the Dwarves.

Knocking down strawmen

A disappointing column this weekend by Jonathan Gurwitz.
It started off promisingly enough with his acknowledgment that there are “principled reasons to question and oppose the U.S.-led offensive in Iraq.”

He even seems to hint further down that his own unwavering position in support of the war could change when he says that the question of whether or not the war was worth it “... is not a liberal or conservative exercise. It is a judgment arrived at by evaluating factors that can and do change over time.”

But have those factors changed enough to affect his position? Or perhaps he will address some of those “principled reasons” for opposing the war and explain why he is still 100 percent behind the President.

Unfortunately, Gurwitz fails to address either of these issues in the rest of his column. Instead he decides to go after some easy targets - namely, some of the more extremist protesters camped out at Crawford. In this way, he manages to construct three straw men using slogans that he read off of some of the protesters’ signs and then proceeds to knock them over one by one. This also gives him an excuse to raise the specter of anti-semitism that has been exciting right-wingers recently in their efforts to smear Cindy Sheehan.

But it also allows him to skirt the more serious issues facing the United States as we try to figure some way out of this quagmire Bush has led us into. Like how are we going to afford the $1 trillion price tag that this war will present us with if it continues to drag on for two or three more years. And how are we going to fill the gaps in our military as recruiting efforts continue to lag behind?

The art of condemnation

I've been having a long and sometimes heated argument over at All Things Conservative about the right-wing effort to smear Cindy Sheehan as an anti-semite.
It has gotten to the point where I have been accused of being an anti-semite myself because I will not condemn Sheehan as an anti-semite.
The charges apparently stem from an e-mail that Sheehan supposedly wrote in which she says:

"...(my son) was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel."

There has been some question as to whether Sheehan actually wrote those words. She apparently is now claiming that her e-mail was altered and changed by somebody else who wanted to make her look bad. But assuming that she did write the above during a fit of anger, is it proof or evidence that she is racist against Jews as many on the right now allege?

Another commenter at ATC insists that the above statement is "accusing Jews at the highest levels of American government of manipulating policy to get the United States to go to war to defend Israeli interests."
He then goes on to claim that anyone "who can't see that this is bald anti-Semitism, consistent with right-wing extremism, Nazism, Islamic extremism and every anti-Semitic theory going back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," is "beyond the pale of intelligent debate."

I don't agree with the statement above. I don't believe we went to war in Iraq to defend Israeli interests.
But it is true that we would go to war to protect Israel if they were ever seriously threatened. And it is also true that the security of Israel was one of the factors raised by the Bush administration prior to launching their invasion of Iraq. The long-range missiles that Saddam was said to have in violation of U.N. dictates were said to be a threat to Israel - they were certainly no threat to the U.S.

But even if we did go to war to protect Israel, does it mean that someone who opposes that war is necessarily racist towards Jews?
To frame this question differently, I posed the following analogy: Let's say the mother of a soldier killed during the First Gulf War is angry and says she did not want her son to die defending Kuwait. Does that mean she is racist towards Kuwaitis?
Of courst not.

I for one am not happy with a lot of things that Israel does right now, but it is not because it is a Jewish state. Rather it is because they are currently guided by the right-wing Likud Party which, in my opinion, is screwing up things over there just as badly as the Republicans are screwing things up around here. The fact that I am critical of the Republicans and their political agenda does not make me anti-American.

But defending Cindy Sheehan right now is not a popular thing to do at a lot of right-wing blogs. She has become a real pariah for the right and they are looking for anything they can grab to try and tear her down.
But the point about Sheehan is not what her views and prescriptions are for resolving Middle East conflicts. It is simply the fact that she is there taking a stand. She is not a politician or a spokesperson for the Democratic Party. She is not a polished speaker with an army of handlers watching over her constantly to make sure she never says anything that is politically incorrect. She is just an average citizen who had the courage to stand up in the glare of the national media and say that enough is enough.
In that sense, she is like Rosa Parks was for the Civil Rights movement. She is a symbol that people can rally around. It did not matter what Rosa Parks views on race relations were. Likewise, I could really care less about what Sheehan has to say on the political topics of the day. So attacking her for holding some wrongheaded ideas on certain subjects is just missing the point and shows a lack of understanding about the significance of her role in this ongoing debate.
Republicans are finally starting to lose this political battle back home and that is why there has been rumbling recently that they will have a major drawback of troops next year in time for the 2006 mid-term elections. They had better do something quick because Bush's poll numbers are in total freefall right now and while he may not be running again he is going to be an albatross around his party's neck at this rate.

Fox News fighting the Terrist threat

Found at Political Animal -
A very disturbing story in the LA Times today about a family in California that has been living in fear for the past two weeks after the idiots at Fox News broadcast their address in a report that falsely claimed it to be the home of a terrorist connected with the recent subway bombings in London.

In what Fox News officials concede was a mistake, John Loftus, a former U.S. prosecutor, gave out the address Aug. 7, saying it was the home of a Middle Eastern man, Iyad K. Hilal, who was the leader of a terrorist group with ties to those responsible for the July 7 bombings in London.
Hilal, whom Loftus identified by name during the broadcast, moved out of the house about three years ago.

This should give you an idea of the intelligence level of people that Fox News chooses to interview and have comment for their broadcasts.
Since that broadcast the Vorick’s have been afraid to go to work and leave their children at home....

A driver yelled a profanity at the family and called them terrorists as they barbecued on their patio Aug. 14. Some drivers have stopped and photographed the house, Randy Vorick said.
Last weekend, someone spray-painted "Terrist" on their home. Police, who have regularly patrolled their house since the day after the broadcast, now station a squad car across the street.

This should give you an idea of the intelligence level of the kind of people who get their news from Fox News.

Personally, I think Fox News should have to pay the overtime cost for the police officer who is now stationed across the street from the home to protect the Vorick family.

Punished for speaking the truth

President Bush has canned another member of his administration for daring to speak an unwelcome truth.

Lawrence A. Greenfeld, who was appointed by Bush in 2001 to head the Bureau of Justice Statistics, was demoted for resisting the administration’s attempt to downplay a study that highlights racial profiling during traffic stops.

Greenfeld was ordered to delete references to racial disparities in a news release prepared to announce a study on the treatment of different ethnic groups during police traffic stops.
The survey of 80,000 people, which was eventually issued in April without a news release, found that minority drivers were three times as likely to have their vehicles searched during traffic stops as white drivers.
Greenfeld fought the order and was eventually called to the White House and urged to resign six months before he was eligible for full pension benefits...

I’m trying to come up with a list of “Heroes of Conscience” from this administration - people who risked their jobs and their careers to stand up for the truth in the face of an administration that cares most about advancing its right-wing political agenda.

In addition to Mr. Greenfeld above, I’ve included:

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill who lost his job for disagreeing with Bush about the ill effects of his tax cuts which failed to boost the economy and have left us with record budget deficits once again.

Former economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey who was canned for having the audacity to suggest that the war in Iraq may cost as much as $100 billion - a figure we now know is at least three times and perhaps ten times too small.

Who have I left out?

Update

I just noticed that Bob Herbert's column in the NYTimes today is about this topic.

Radical cleric

As if it wasn’t already obvious, Pat Robertson has completely flipped his lid.

CNN.com - Robertson: U.S. should assassinate Venezuela's Chavez - Aug 23, 2005

More here.

I still remember when a lot of people in Texas were ready to elect this guy as our president. Of course, I can't say that we are that much better off with George W. Bush.

Cost of the Iraq War

$1.3 trillion is the estimated cost of the war in Iraq over the next five years according to Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary of Commerce who now teaches budgeting and public finance at Harvard University.

That’s counting the $258 billion that has been spent so far plus:
* $460 billion for military operations through 2010
* $315 billion for veterans health care benefits just for those soldiers participating in the Iraq war.
* $220 billion to finance the additional debt all this spending will produce
* $119 billion impact on the economy due to the increase in oil prices resulting from the instability in the Middle East caused by the Iraq war.

Oh, and then there is the little matter of the 2,000 U.S. military personnel killed and 14,500 wounded.

All of this just because President Bush is such a big-hearted person and wanted to spread “peace and freedom” to the Iraqi people.

High gas prices

It cost me nearly $50 to fill up my truck (Ford F-150) this morning on the way to work. I paid $2.43 a gallon at the cheapest place I know to find gas (Sam’s Club with my 5 cent per gallon discount).
This is beyond ridiculous. It is outrageous!

And as if things weren’t bad enough already, it looks like they are only going to get worse.

Oil prices rose more than $1 a barrel on Friday, bouncing back from a dip this week as markets reacted to a fire at a massive refining complex in Venezuela and developments in Ecuador, where protesters had forced a halt to production.

One analyst quoted in the story says she expects the price of oil - currently at $64 per barrel - to reach $70 a barrel very soon.

So why are gas prices so high? The experts say it’s because global demand is so high. But shouldn’t we have seen this coming a long time ago and taken steps to deal with it before now? What about the new energy bill?

Bush officials are whining that it is not their fault. They say that no one can turn around gas prices instantly, and that Bush fought for years to enact his new energy bill that will take years to produce results.

''This is a problem that took decades to develop; it's not going to be solved overnight,'' Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said.

But Fadel Gheit, an energy analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. in New York, says our current government policy is not focused on encouraging consumer behavior that reduces the nation's dependence on petroleum, especially imported oil. He notes that the energy bill signed into law by President Bush doesn't do enough to define the nation's energy strategy.

"The only effective strategy is based on encouraging conservation because that's the only thing you can control," said Gheit. "You need incentives to encourage conservation."

This is not new. Average gasoline prices are nearly 40 percent higher today than when Bush was sworn into his second term seven months ago and they are 75 percent higher than when he first took office in January 2001. And now all we have in response is an energy bill that gives huge tax breaks to oil companies that already are enjoying record profits.
But what do you expect when you elevate a pair of oil men to the White House. Bush and Cheney are popping champagne bottles as gas prices rise ever higher knowing that their bank accounts just keep getting fatter and fatter as a result.

But at least we are making sure that the good people of Iraq have cheap gas prices:

What do you mean high oil prices? Gasoline in Iraq costs 5 cents a gallon

Drivers in Iraq pay as little as 5 cents a gallon for gasoline, according to the International Monetary Fund's first assessment of the Iraqi economy in 25 years.
Thanks to generous government subsidies on petroleum products - which the IMF criticized as a threat to the country's fragile economy - Iraq has some of the cheapest gas in the world.

Iran can make matters worse

Interesting story on A4 of the Wall Street Journal today:
Iran Holds Big Bargaining Chips in Dispute
Tehran May Use High Oil Prices, Iraqi Turmoil as Leverage in Nuclear Talks With the West

“Iran’s role as both an oil producer at a time of record prices and as a player in the politics of neighboring Iraq have made it trickier for the Bush administration to get tough on Tehran in the nuclear showdown. The administration has threatened to seek United Nations sanctions against Iran in the fall if the country refuses to accept international oversight of its nuclear program.”

Notice how our being stuck in this Iraqi quagmire has weakened our position in dealing with a more serious threat. Here we have the Iranian mullahs openly saying they will revive their nuclear-enrichment program and the best we can do is threaten them with U.N. sanctions sometime in the fall.

”The nuclear standoff comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Bush administration. In Iraq, the administration is scrambling to help the country’s factions overcome differences and hammer out a constitution, taking a crucial step toward solidifying the country so U.S. troops might eventually withdraw.
Iran, which shares a long border with Iraq, has huge sway over much of Iraq’s now-dominant Shiite population, and it could disrupt the constitutional process if it so chose. Western diplomats in Tehran say Iranian officials have been blunt in recent weeks on that point, threatening to cause problems in Iraq if the Bush administration tries to punish Iran with international sanctions.”

The story goes on to note that the most powerful man in Iraq today is the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose approval has been central to every political twist and turn. And Sistani is much closer to officials in his native Iran than he is with the U.S.

”When Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, visited Iraq recently he visited Mr. Sistani - an audience so far denied to top U.S. officials. ‘It didn’t exactly please us to see the Iranians getting face time with Sistani,’ said a senior American diplomat in Iraq.”

But that is not the only leverage that Iran has right now. You think oil prices are high now? Just wait until they start messing around with oil shipments in the Middle East.

”Officials in Tehran have suggested that they might move to crimp tanker flows through the crucial Strait of Hormuz, which would have far more serious consequences. Around 15 million barrels of oil a day, and a large percentage of the world’s gas supplies, flow through Hormuz.”

Quiz time

Who said the following:

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"

Was it:

A) Howard Dean
B) John Kerry
C) Hillary Clinton
D) Tom DeLay
E) None of the above

For the answer click here.

San Antonio High Schools

If we stay put long enough, and I have no intention of moving anytime soon, our son may one day go to Sandra Day O’Connor High School. Knowing that we also have a high school here in town named after Ronald Reagan, that got me wondering about the names of other area high schools.
It seems that the local school officials have had a tendency to name schools after famous historical and political figures - particularly presidents and Supreme Court justices - with about a 4-1 preference for Republicans.

For instance we have six schools named after former presidents - three Republican:

Ronald Reagan
William Howard Taft
Theodore Roosevelt

and one Democrat:

John F. Kennedy

Plus two named for founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were both members of the Democratic-Republican Party which is not directly linked to either of the two modern day parties.

Then we have six schools named after former Supreme Court justices.
Of these, two were Federalists - the nation’s first poltical party:

John Jay
John Marshall

one was appointed by a Democrat:

Thomas C. Clark

and three were appointed by Republicans:

Oliver Wendell Holmes
Earl Warren
Sandra Day O’Connor

Then we have two schools named after famous military figures:

Douglas MacArthur, who nearly ran for president as a Republican,
and Robert E. Lee, leader of the Confederate forces during the Civil War.

Finally we have one school named after the inventor Thomas A. Edison
and one named after Winston Churchill, who was the British Prime Minister during WWII (and the leader of Great Britain’s Conservative Party).

We also have one school named after G.W. Brackenridge, a leading citizen of San Antonio from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Plus a few other that I haven’t yet figured out what their names stand for - people or places? - including:

Judson
Harlandale
McCollum

I don’t know if we have any junior high or elementary schools named after famous people. Most, I believe, are named after local figures like former school superintendents and the like.

I’d be curious to know how they come up with these names when they are building new high schools.

Tips for visiting Disney World

The next time we go to Disney World we are going to save up enough money to stay in one of the Disney Resort hotels. The convenience of having ready access to the parks without having to rely on taxis or a once-a-day shuttle service would be well worth it.
This time we stayed at a hotel that was just two miles away from Disney because of the special deal we got that included our free airplane tickets. But the shuttle service offered by the hotel would leave every morning at 7:45 a.m. and would not return before 6 p.m. or 10 p.m. respectively. This was not ideal for a 2-year-old who needed to sleep late after a long-day at the theme park with no afternoon nap. Also, despite its close proximity to the park, the shuttle would make numerous stops at different hotels so the trip would take at least a half hour. So we only took the morning shuttle one time and relied on alternative (and thus expensive) transportation for the rest of the trip.
If you are going to wind up paying $40 a day for taxis two and from the park you might as well add that to the cost of your hotel and upgrade to a Disney resort where the shuttles are more frequent and go to all the parks.

I would recommend that at least one time during your trip you go to the park early enough to see the opening ceremonies at Magic Kingdom at 9 a.m. While all the people are crowded around the front entrance waiting for the gates to open they have a troup of actors come out and do an opening song-and-dance number just before the train arrives carrying Mickey and all the other Disney characters.
Then once the park opens you have at least two hours where there is almost no waiting in lines for rides and shows until the crowd finally builds up by late morning.
Once the crowds build up you can still utilize the parks’ nifty FastPass feature to get on some rides. You go to the ride where there is a long line and you scan your park pass into a machine that spits out a ticket assigning you a time to come back - usually about an hour later - when you can then skip ahead of the line and be seated almost immediately.
All of the rides don’t have FastPass options and you are only allowed to have one FastPass ticket at a time, but it is still a nice way to avoid some of the long lines and give yourself more time to enjoy the rest of the park.
Of course, there are some times when standing in a line - provided that it is under shade - isn’t such a bad thing.

We found it convenient to carry a backpack with all of our son's diapers and wipes as well as his snacks and sippy cup. Other items I would recommend carrying include sun screen, a water bottle and an umbrella. There are lots of water fountains around the park where you can refill your bottle throughout the day and remember that it usually rains every afternoon around 4 p.m.
You may also want to carry a notepad and a pen, especially if you have small children, because the Disney characters are happy to sign autographs while having their pictures taken.
The other nice thing about staying at the Disney resorts is that if you buy things they can deliver them to your room rather than you having to lug them around the park for the rest of the day.

What I’m reading

I found a copy of What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America at Half-Price Bookstore the other day and have just started reading it.
It is a facinating, although somewhat depressing book, from my perspective. I could easily see how you could ask “What’s the Matter with Texas?” since the Lone Star State was also once a populist stronghold where progressive ideas held some sway.

Here is an excerpt:
Hard times, instead of snapping people back to reality, only seem to stoke the fires of the conservative backlash. Indeed, those segments of the working class that have been hardest hit by the big economic changes of recent years are the very ones that vote Republican in the greatest numbers. We seem to have but one way to express our anger, and that’s by raging along with Rush—against liberal bias in academia, liberal softness on terrorism, liberal permissiveness, and so on. Our reaction to hard times is thus to hand over ever more power to the people who make them hard. In fact, the election of 2002 provided a perverse incentive to the men who gave us the dot-com bubble and the Enron fiasco: Keep at it. The more you screw the public over, the more they will clamor to cut your taxes. The more you cheat and steal, the angrier they will become—at the liberal media that expose your cheating and stealing.

I’ll have more to say on this topic as I get further into the book.

Old School Democrat

You scored as Old School Democrat. Old school Democrats emphasize economic justice and opportunity. The Democratic ideal is best summarized by the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Old School Democrat 90% New Democrat 75% Green 55% Foreign Policy Hawk 40% Socially Conservative Republican 15% Libertarian 15% Pro Business Republican 15% What's Your Political Philosophy? created with QuizFarm.com

Why Cindy Sheehan matters

Cindy Sheehan has every right to be angry. She lost a son in a war that turns out to have been based on a lie - that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed an imminent threat to our national security.
Whether President Bush knowingly propigated this lie, or was just duped by somebody else's lie does not matter - the results are the same.
Ever since Mrs. Sheehan decided to protest against the war outside Bush's vacation retreat in Crawford, Texas, she has been hailed by the left and vilified by the right.
The other day she gave an angry speech to a group called Veterans for Peace in which she at one point referred to President Bush as a "lying bastard" and later on used the word "bullshit".

For this she has been condemned by the right and called "a hate-filled, foul-mouthed toady of the anti-war movement".
This of course is coming from the same people who laughed when President Bush referred to a New York Times reporter as a "Major Leage a--hole" ("Big Time!" chimed in Vice President Dick Cheney). Or who thought it was no big deal when, on the floor of the Senate, Dick Cheney told a Democratic Senator to go and F@@@ himself.
It may not have been politically wise or correct to call President Bush a lying bastard, but Cindy Sheehan is not a politician. She is something much worse in the eyes of the Bush administration - she is a grieving mother who has not been consoled by all of the happy talk coming out of Washington about how we are advancing freedom and democracy with our military presence in Iraq.

Once it was determined that there were no WMDs in Iraq - the slender reed upon which Bush based his decision to invade - the rationale for our military intervention was cut down at the knees. They have since tried to shift the focus to promoting democracy and freedom - but quite frankly that is B.S., just as Sheehan said.
Given the choice, I think there would be very few people who would be willing to sacrifice their lives or the lives of their children and loved ones for that reason.
It may sound callous, but that is the truth. If our national security is not at stake, and we now know without a doubt that it was not, then folks are not going to line up to fight somebody else's battle. We all want the Iraqi people to live in peace and freedom, but we cannot step in and transform their society for them. We can give them aid and assistance. We can impose sanctions and support worldwide efforts to negotiate changes, but unless there is a genocide underway or some other extreme circumstance, we do not spend 100s of billions of dollars and lay down the lives of thousands of our soldiers.

Bush and Co. know this and they have been hoping that they can keep everyone distracted with the "War on Terror" so that we will not notice what has been going on. The war that they thought would last just a few weeks has now dragged on for two years and looks to have no clear end in sight. Now their worst fear is being realized in the form of Mrs. Sheehan and these other families who have lost loved ones and who are now demanding answers.
The answers won't be forthcoming because there are no good answers. The Bush team is currently trying to ratchet down expectations of what they hope to accomplish in Iraq and are busy making plans for a major troop withdrawal in time for the 2006 mid-term elections. Unfortunately for the Bush administration, Mrs. Sheehan is not going to go away any time soon and the rightwing efforts to vilify her are falling flat. Perhaps that is because she has already lived through the worst possible torture, so any name calling by Bush denizens today falls far short of having the desired stinging effect.

Mistaken identity

It looks like I was right to doubt the reports a while back that said the new Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the students involved in the 1979 hostage taking of U.S. embassy workers.

Here is the latest:
CIA finds Iranian president likely not hostage-taker

A CIA report has determined with "relative certainty" that new Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not involved in the taking of U.S. hostages in 1979, two government officials told CNN.

I don’t know that this will make any real difference in U.S. - Iranian relations, however.

Lubbock, Texas is 2nd Most “Conservative” City

According to this study, my former home and birthplace of Lubbock, Texas is the second most conservative city in the U.S.
At first, I was intrigued by the study that purports to list the most conservative and most liberal cities in the country wondering what criteria they used to make these ideological determinations. Unfortunately, all they did was look at the 2004 voting records and assigned the “conservative” label to cities that voted heavily for Bush and the “liberal” label to those that voted for Kerry. (Yawn) So it really doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.
But just for fun, here is the list they came up with:

Top 10 Liberal Cities:
1) Detroit, Michigan
2) Gary, Indiana
3) Berkeley, California
4) Washington, D.C.
5) Oakland, California
6) Inglewood, California
7) Newark, New Jersey
8) Cambridge, Massachusetts
9) San Francisco, California
10) Flint, Michigan

Top 10 Conservative Cities:
1) Provo, Utah
2) Lubbock, Texas
3) Abilene, Texas
4) Hialeah, Florida
5) Plano, Texas
6) Colorado Springs, Colorado
7) Gilbert, Arizona
8) Bakersfield, California
9) Lafayette, Louisiana
10) Orange, California

Out of 237 cities in the survey, San Antonio ranks as the 64th most conservative and 175th most liberal. Austin, by contrast, ranks as the 145th most conservative and 93rd most liberal.
Of course, these rankings would have been very different had the Republicans been running a non-Texan at the top of their ticket, which just shows the weakness of the methodology used in this so-called study.

Still, I find it amusing that I have lived and worked in some of the most conservative places in the country and despite the fact that my demographic makeup would place me squarely in the middle of the conservative fold (white, middle-aged, male, married), I have maintained a decidely liberal outlook on life.

The authors of the study make a big point about the racial makeup distinguishing the cities in each group - with the liberal cities having large black populations and the conservative ones being mostly white. They go on to make a lot of observations about why this is - mostly things we have heard before. But the thing that has intrigued me lately is why this continues to matter and how long it can last.
It is a historical fact that the Civil Rights movement drove most conservative southerners out of the Democratic Party and into the welcoming arms of the Republicans. But surely this should start to settle out over time as the initial shock of desegregation wanes from one generation to the next. I would hope that my children are less inclined to have hangups over race than I do just as I have had less than my parents.
Indeed, I would think that most people would not consider race as a primary factor in their choice of a political party today. Still, we have this obvious political divide that simple surveys like this highlight.

Having lived in very conservative communities such as Lubbock and Kerrville (even more conservative than Lubbock had it been included in the list) I truly believe it is not outside the realm of possibility for there to be a major political shift in the near future. If you look around Lubbock at some of the nearby communities you find places with names like Roosevelt and New Deal and you begin to realize that this area used to be a Democratic stronghold just a few generations back. And then you realize that things haven’t changed that much - the area is highly dependent on government programs like agricultural subsidies for cotton and federal emergency relief funds that helped rebuild much of the downtown area after a massive tornado tore through the city in the early 1970s.
As Republicans continue to demonstrate at both the federal and state level that they are incapable of governing in an efficient manner (ballooning federal deficits and a stagnant economy - two special sessions and still no clue as to how to adequately fund public education) their support among the highly practical people who live in these areas is going to erode and no amount of terror alerts is going to scare them back into the fold.

Roberts making social conservatives nervous

Other than a complementary copy of USA Today that I could pick up at the front desk of our hotel each morning, I was pretty much cut off from my normal avalanche of news consumption during my vacation. For the plane ride home I happened to pick up a copy of the Financial Times which I never read and was pleasantly surprised to find it chock full of interesting and well-written articles.
I found this piece on John Roberts’ Supreme Court nomination to be especially well done. It’s not really about John Roberts so much as it is about the gay rights controversy now before the Supreme Court.
The author of the piece, Patti Waldmeir, talks to two people representing either side of the debate - “Alan Chambers is a former gay evangelist who spends his life trying to persuade homosexuals to turn straight. Phyllis Hunt is a lesbian preacher who ministers to those who are gay and proud of it.” - to set up the article before delving into the political aftermath resulting from the Lawrence vs. Texas decision authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy that struck down Texas’ anti-sodomy laws in 2003.

I have previously outlined my theory on sexual orientation here. I believe that if more people could accept that sexual orientation is largely a matter of biology and not “choice” they would be more accepting of it. In the case of Chambers, it seems clear to me that he would fall into that sub-group of people on the edge between gay and straight, while Hunt likely falls into the middle of the gay/lesbian pool. The sad part of the story is that while Chambers is now married to a woman and has adopted two children, his efforts have helped to deny that same privilege to Mrs. Hunt whose efforts to adopt a child with her partner were stymied by laws preventing gays from adopting children.

To the dismay of many social conservatives, Anthony Kennedy has become a driving force in the move to grant equal rights and protections to gays. His majority opinion in the Lawrence vs. Texas case was sweeping and may have inadvertently fueled the push for gay marriages that followed shortly thereafter.
The Lawrence case to me would seem like a no-brainer. Regardless of your views on homosexuality, who would support giving the police and the government the power to barge into your bedroom and enforce someone else’s code as to how you and any other consenting adult should behave? Kennedy wasn’t being a liberal in his decision, he was being a libertarian.
But the irony of the case was that in striking such a resounding blow for gay rights, the Lawrence case unleashed a series of actions and reactions that very likely helped to put George W. Bush back in the White House in 2004. By rushing out to push for gay marriage in states like California, Massachusetts and Hawaii, the gay community prompted a backlash from social conservatives who placed anti-gay marriage referendums on the ballots designed to draw out their supporters and build up support for Bush and his radical Republican cohorts.

Now we have those same social conservatives suddenly concerned to find that their new knight in shining armor has done pro-bono work on behalf of gay rights groups in the past. Does this mean that Roberts will turn out to be more like Anthony Kennedy than Antonin Scalia? No one can be sure, but it has some on the far-right suddenly nervous. Kennedy is, after all, the one who wrote this infamous phrase in the Lawrence decision:

"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life."

Scalia has ridiculed this idea calling it the “sweet-mystery-of-life passage” while Robert Bork complains that it is less an argument than a 1960s oration and an ode to radical personal autonomy.
I find it most disturbing that we have people on the Supreme Court who find personal autonomy to be a radical notion. Those on the right don’t want you to define your own concept of existence because they already have their own neatly constrained definition that they want to shoehorn everyone into. Is Roberts on their side, or not? We may not find out for some time, especially if the Bush administration succeeds in suppressing any more information about Roberts that might prove problematic for his swift approval.

Disney adventures

We made it back from a week-long trip to Disney World on Saturday, a day later than we expected. Our flight had been scheduled to leave at 9 p.m. but was delayed more than two hours due to bad weather. So I was more than happy to volunteer to be bumped from the flight when they announced that they were overbooked. We got a free night at an AmeriSuites, some food vouchers for breakfast and lunch, a 10:30 a.m. flight the next morning and travel vouchers for another flight we can use anytime during the next year.
When we flew into Orlando on Aug. 1 we were immediately met by a thunderstorm that had blown in off of the coast. We asked our shuttle driver if it was supposed to rain a lot and he said it rains everyday there around 4 p.m. Sure enough, almost like clockwork, we got rain storms every afternoon. Fortunately, they would not last too long and did not spoil our vacation.

There is far more to do in Orlando than can be covered in a week. We spent a day and a half at Magic Kingdom, a day and a half at Epcot and one day at Animal Kingdom. We will have to visit Disney’s fourth theme park - MGM-Disney - on our next trip.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much there was to do even when you are avoiding all of the bumpy, roller-coaster rides. With my son not yet 2 and my wife 5-months pregnant, we were limited on what rides we could go on. No Space Mountain or Big Thunder Mountain Railroad rides for us. Instead, we did the traditional rides like Flying Dumbo, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup ride and a lot of the laid back, slow-moving coaster or boat rides that take you on a tour of Winnie the Pooh’s 100 Acre Woods or Peter Pan’s NeverLand.

Disney World is enormous. They say there are enough Disney employees to populate a moderate-sized city and surely enough animatronic characters to populate a small town. I’ve always loved history so I made a special point of going to see the American Presidents show at Magic Kingdom where they have animatronic characters on stage representing every president from George W. to George W. While I enjoyed the performance, it managed to put my son to sleep which was actually a good thing. It was the only time we managed to get him down for an afternoon nap during the entire vacation.
Even better was a history show at Epcot featuring an animatronic Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. They did a big overview of American history that managed to showcase or mention every historical figure with the odd exception of Abe Lincoln. (Abe was featured prominently in the President’s show at Magic Kingdom.)
Even more impressive to me than the animatronics, however, were the 3-D movies. The Mickey’s Philharmagic show (featuring Donald Duck) was terrific with the best 3-D effects I have ever seen (supplemented with spritzing water and smellovision built into the stadium seating). However, it was a little too intense for my son who quickly shed his 3-D glasses and buried his head in mommy’s shoulder the first time a character popped out of the screen. We realized only later that it was the first time he had ever been in a movie theater and seen anything bigger than a widescreen TV.

Bonilla wants a new address for the White House

I was both embarrassed and flustered to read last week that my Congressman - Henry Bonilla - has introduced legislation in the House to change the name of 16th Street NW in Washington, D.C. to Ronald Reagan Boulevard.
There really is no excuse for something like this. Bonilla is not stupid so I don’t know whether he is doing this just to try and further ingratiate himself with his party’s core of right-wingers who worship Reagan like some kind of demi-God or whether he is just demonstrating that he can be a first-class jerk.

First, there is no dearth of honors that have already been heaped on our 40th president who has the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in D.C. dedicated to him. But that is not enough for the cultish Reagan worshipers out there who won’t stop until they get Reagan’s mug chiseled onto Mount Rushmore next to Washington and Lincoln. There is already an organized effort by radical conservatives to have something named after Reagan in every county in the United States. So far they have succeeded in naming more than 63 streets, buildings, schools, etc. after him.
But 16th Street in D.C. is going too far. The significance of 16th Street is that it has given the White House its historic address, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Second, the District of Columbia is one of the most heavily Democratic areas in the nation and having some Republican congressman from Texas waltz in and rename one of their major thoroughfares after a Republican icon is little more than a slap in the face.

Fortunately, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee which has jurisdiction over Bonilla's legislation, recognizes this and has called Bonilla’s bill "ridiculous" and said he would put it in the "appropriate file."
"If Congressman Bonilla wants to name anything else, he has to look at his own district in San Antonio," Davis said.
I certainly hope not. If Bonilla really wants to honor the memory of Ronald Reagan then perhaps he should join with his widow Nancy Reagan in supporting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research to help patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases. But since he refuses to do that then maybe he should just shut up and quit embarrassing his constituents back home.

I see via The Jeffersonian that some angry D.C. residents want to retaliate by renaming The Riverwalk for former D.C. mayor Marion Berry. Cinncinnatus has an even better idea of renaming some streets in the city’s heaviest Republican areas after former President Bill Clinton. But the one name I would like to see changed is the one that hangs on the offices for the 23rd Congressional District from Texas.

Vacation

I'll be on vacation next week with no access to a computer. Back on Aug. 8.

In the meantime, here is a random list of 25 songs off of my IPod to fill the rest of this space:

Moonlight Becomes You - Bing Crosby
Love or Confusion - Jimi Hendrix
I'll Be Seeing You (In All The Old Familiar Places) - Bing Crosby
Tombstone Blues - Bob Dylan
Slither - Velvet Revolver
If I Can't Have You - Bee Gees
Body and Soul - Coleman Hawkins
Soul Kitchen - The Doors
Pardon Me - Incubus
Rockin' Chair - Louis Armstrong
This Little Girl of Mine - Ray Charles
Lester Leaps In - Count Basie Orchestra
We're An American Band - Grand Funk Railroad
Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams - Bing Crosby
That'll Be The Day - Buddy Holly
You Make My Dreams Come True - Hall & Oates
She's No Lady - Lyle Lovett
Runnin' With The Devil - Van Halen
Good Vibrations - Beach Boys
Dreamtime-Shake It Up - John Waite
Don't Be Cruel - Elvis Presley
Walk On - U2
Riverboat Shuffle - Frankie Trumbauer Orchestra featuring Bix Biederbecke
You Got Lucky - Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
Oye Como Va - Santana

Why we went to war

Over at TPMCafe today, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson goes point-by-point through the lies and deceptions being propogated by the GOP to cover up their complicity in the Valerie Plame scandal.

FACT 1--Valerie (Plame) Wilson was undercover and occupied a sensitive position.

FACT 2--Valerie (Plame) Wilson's relationship with the CIA was not known until revealed by Robert Novak's column.

FACT 3--Valerie Plame Wilson did not send her husband on the trip to Niger.

These are things that should be obvious to anyone living in the “reality-based community” as opposed to the fantasy world inhabited by most Bush apologists these days.

But the thing I found most interesting was a discussion by one of the commenters trying to understand the real motivation behind the Bush administration’s rush to war in the first place.

I've been thinking bsout this for a while trying to come up with a plausible reason.  My first assumption is that nothing we have been told so far is it: Building Democracy in Iraq?  Please, Cheney barely tolerates democracy here, he could give a rats ass about it in Iraq.  There has to be a real politik reason; Cheney, Rumsfeld - these guys cut their teeth under Kissinger.  WMD?  If anything the Bush admin knew better than anyone that they didn't exist.  Oil?  Sure it is about oil, everything in the Middle East is, but still why invade?

Here is the scenario that I think makes sense, assuming that Bush, Cheney et al aren't total fools this is my guess as to what happened:

1) The stuff we did in the 90s (bombings and so on) was more effective at destroying Sadaam's WMD capabilities than we realized.

2) It was very much in Sadaam's interested to make sure that no-one realized this. His power rested on both Iraqis and his neighbors thinking he was still strong.

3) After 9/11 the CIA, State Department and UN started looking at Sadaam more closely and began to see how much of a paper tiger he was. (Both Kay and Blix have said they knew he had no WMD)

4) Everyone in the Bush admin who looked into this realized it too, the CIA and State department working independently came to the same conclusions.

5) Sadaam called Bush's bluff and said the inspectors could come in. The last thing Bush wanted was for the inspectors to prove once and for all that Sadaam was toothless.

6) Hence the rush to war.

7) The real motivation for the war wasn't that Sadaam was strong and a threat; it was just the opposite, he was becoming too weak! We need a balance of powers in the Middle East - Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Saudia Arabia.

8) The plan was to quickly topple Sadaam, put Chalabi in power and have a new, more reliable ally as our counterweight to Iran (remember we backed Sadaam in the war with Iran).

9) That blew up in their faces, both because they didn't prepare for the aftermath and didn't understand just how much of a mess Iraq's infrastructure had become.

10) What also didn't help is that Chalabi was playing them for fools while secretly working for Iran.

Ultimately I can see a valid motive here, allowing Iraq to disinigrate into chaos as Sadaam crumbled from within would leave it ripe for take over by Iran. But here is the thing, by doing it the way they did they totally lost any chance of success. The likely end result is now Iraq aligned with Iran, with at best an independent Kurdistan in the north aligned with Turkey (how ironic is that? The thing Turkey most feared may now very well be in their best interest! Losing a little territory along the border and their Kurdish citizens may be worth having another staunchly secular regime with decent Oil revenue opposed to Iran as a neighbor).
If we had waited for Sadaam to crumble under the weight of his own corruption and Iran tried to move in to the void we could have put together a coalition of Arab states to join us in protecting Iraq from the Persian aggressors.

A very interesting analysis. I don’t agree with it entirely, but it makes a lot of very valid points.
I think there is no question that the timing had mostly to do with the Republican’s desire to have the public perception that they were taking a strong and aggressive stand against terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. This was especially important on the eve of the 2002 mid-term elections when Republicans were trying to regain control of the Senate. And once they committed to that aggressive course of action they set the ball rolling on a track where they could not turn back without undermining that desired public perception. Backing down in any way and allowing U.N. inspectors to prove that there were no WMDs would have been seen as a political victory for Democrats who were challenging Bush’s post-9/11 leadership in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election.
Supporting the war became a political imperative and at that point the truth became expendable. Intelligence that supported the war scenario was thrust front and center regardless of how shaky its credibility (i.e. the centrifuge tubes, the mobile bioweapons lab, etc.) while intelligence that ran contrary was ignored and/or refuted vigorously - which of course is what led to the outing of Valerie Plame’s identity.

GOP selling pork for votes

In yet another ugly display of arm-twisting, bribery and threats, House Majority Leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay assured passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) last night by holding the vote open 47 minutes past the traditional 15-minute deadline.

The 217 to 215 vote came just after midnight, in a dramatic finish that highlighted the intensity brought by both sides to the battle. When the usual 15-minute voting period expired at 11:17 p.m., the no votes outnumbered the yes votes by 180 to 175, with dozens of members undeclared. House Republican leaders kept the voting open for another 47 minutes, furiously rounding up holdouts in their own party until they had secured just enough to ensure approval....

This sounds awfully similar to the bribery and threats that the GOP used to pass its Medicare boondoggle last year.
We may not know right away (or ever) if House members were threatened the way they were during the Medicare vote, but it is clear that bribery was on the table.

The last-minute negotiations for Republican votes resembled the wheeling and dealing on a car lot. Republicans who were opposed or undecided were courted during hurried meetings in Capitol hallways, on the House floor and at the White House. GOP leaders told their rank and file that if they wanted anything, now was the time to ask, lawmakers said, and members took advantage of the opportunity by requesting such things as fundraising appearances by Cheney and the restoration of money the White House has tried to cut from agriculture programs. Lawmakers also said many of the favors bestowed in exchange for votes will be tucked into the huge energy and highway bills that Congress is scheduled to pass this week before leaving for the August recess.

Remember how Republicans were supposed to restore integrity and honesty to government back when they took control away from entrenched Democrats? Yeah, me neither.

Easy Rider

My brother-in-law who is serving with the Louisiana National Guard in Iraq is scheduled to come back home in November. His wife (my sister) has promised to let him get a Harley-Davidson when he gets back which will become his primary mode of transportation to and from work. She and the four kids have laid claim to his truck during his absence.
As you can see from this photo, he is already eagerly anticipating the new “Easy Rider” lifestyle he will be adopting when he gets back stateside.

Quagmire update

John Derbyshire over at NRO is one conservative who occassionaly makes sense - and thus makes his ideological cohorts uncomfortable. Here he is today making a salient point about the unexpected length of Bush’s war in Iraq:

...it is a fact that no American, in March 2003, thought we would have a huge army planted in Iraq 2 and a half years later. The administration did not even hint at such a possibility...

Our war against the Empire of Japan, 1941-45, lasted 1,347 days. The current war in Iraq, against a rabble of Arab hooligans, has lasted 861 days. If it lasts as long as WW2, it will end on November 25 next year. Do you really think it will have ended by then? Do you really think that Zarqawi and his gangs are as formidable an enemy as the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces? Do you really believe we are doing this right? Really?

Cheap Sunglasses

Ray-Ban
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

I would like to thank the person who left his Ray-Ban sunglasses at the Sears Parts & Service Center in College Station, Texas about 17 years ago.
I was working there that summer while finishing college and found the glasses on the counter. I placed them on a shelf underneath the register and there they sat for the next several weeks. Eventually, I claimed them for my own.
They are really nice sunglasses - smokey black lenses and a wire frame that wraps around your ears to hold them in place - much more expensive than I could have afforded back then.
Up until that point I was never able to hold on to a pair of sunglasses longer than a couple of months before I would lose them. I probably went through a dozen pair of cheap, $5 sunglasses before I latched on to this pair and never let go. The fact that I still have these glasses after 17 years is quite amazing to me. I’ve always assumed that if I had bought them myself I would have lost them long ago.
Funny how that works.
Today they are a bit worn and one of the lenses pops out on occasion, but I dare not let them go. It’s not like I found these glasses, after all. It’s more like they found me.

Accepting the challenge

Nigel Tufnel
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

I’ve picked up the gauntlet that has been thrown down over at All Things Conservative. I’ve been having a lengthy and spirited debate (scroll down to comments) with Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist for Spinal Tap, over whether Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert agent with the CIA at the time that she was outed by high-level officials in the Bush administration.
I outlined my argument here, and Nigel has challenged my logic as being faulty. We have been going round and round for a couple of days and now he has offered the following challenge:

Here's a deal -- and Bill can vouch for my trustworthiness.

If Rove is indicted and convicted of a crime related to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, I will author a post on Rhetoric & Rhythm fully conceding my erroneous understanding of the act and of Rove's crime and fully acknlowledging your brilliant analysis.

If Rove is indicted but not convicted of a crime related to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, indicted for any lesser charge (to include obstruction of justice, of which he may very well be guilty), or not indicted for anything at all, you will author a reciprocal post on ATC acknowleding your erroneous understanding of the act and of Rove's non-crime and fully acknlowledging Bill's brilliant analysis.

I have accepted his challenge with certain provisions. I think it is possible that Rove could escape indictment and/or conviction without disproving that Plame was covert. So I offered this amended challenge on my part:

Let's say that if Rove is not indicted, or is indicted but not convicted of a crime related to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act because it is determined that Valerie Plame was not considered covert under the law, then I will author a mea culpa piece for ATC.
Or regardless of what happens to Rove, if it is determined through the course of the investigation that Plame was not a covert agent under the law, I would concede and admit that I was wrong.

We are still haggling over the details. Nigel thinks I’ve given myself too much wiggle room, but I’m willing to accept whatever determination the special prosecutor and the grand jury make regarding Plame’s covert status.

Needless to say, I am basing my position on my own non-lawyerly interpretation of the government statute that defines what a covert agent is. But I am also confident in that my position is supported by a lot of former intelligence agents who should know better than most.

The safe choice

Unless somebody turns up a photo of John Roberts dressed in women’s lingerie and spike heels while being spanked by his dominatrix, it is highly unlikely that his confirmation to the Supreme Court will see much turbulence.
While I imagine there will be a large number of Democrats who will vote against Roberts on principle, I think they are not likely to launch a filibuster unless something very sinister suddenly turns up to tarnish Roberts’ squeaky clean image.
Earlier I had advised Bush to pick a conservative out of the 90 percent pool of acceptable nominees and not the 10 percent of far-right nutjobs who would be sure to spark a confirmation fight. Now it seems as if Bush took this advice - sort of - and went with the most extreme conservative he could find in that 90 percent segment. Roberts may be the most conservative jurist who did not prompt a filibuster fight with Democrats.
I think it is interesting that Bush decided to break precedent by not choosing a woman to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the high court. When Thurgood Marshall, the first black jurist, retired, Bush Sr. opted to replace him with another black judge, although his ideological opposite. But Bush Jr. decided not to replace the first female jurist with another woman leaving Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the only female on the nine-member court. That could change, of course, if William Rehnquist still steps down later this summer as expected.
There is still much to be learned about John Roberts and initial opinions will likely change, but right now it looks as if Bush made a safe choice by picking the most conservative person he could find who would not spark an all-out confirmation battle.

Important questions

Now that we know who Bush's nominee is for the Supreme Court it is time to start asking the important questions.

Has he ever smoked marijuana?
Did he pay Social Security taxes for his nanny and his housekeeper? What about the gardener and the pool boy's immigration status?
Did he ever dodge the draft?
Has he ever cheated on his wife or been otherwise unfaithful in his marriage?
Did he ever sexually harass a female subordinate?
Has he ever bounced a check or failed to pay his taxes on time.

These and other important questions will have to be addressed before we can be sure that this is the right person to fill lifetime appointment on the highest court in the land.

Rove's Last Stand

Rove's Last Stand
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

This is courtesy of Billmon

Too funny.
But reinforcements may be on the way! Is that a Supreme Court nominee coming over the horizon just in time to distract the ravaging hordes?

Killing the innocent

For the first time it looks like the government may be about to own up to the fact that a man was executed for a crime he did not commit.

... 25 years ago ... a 19-year-old drug dealer named Quintin Moss was gunned down from a slow-moving car... And the man convicted of the killing, Larry Griffin, was executed 10 years ago.
Yet the city's top prosecutor has decided to re-investigate the murder as if it just happened, out of new concerns that the wrong man may have been put to death for the crime.
...
should Ms. Joyce, the St. Louis circuit attorney, demonstrate Mr. Griffin was not the killer, as the report and even some members of the victim's family contend, it would be the first proven execution of an innocent person, so far as death penalty advocates or opponents can recall.

This would be a significant step in the debate over capital punishment. It is surely not the first time that an innocent person has been executed by our justice system, but it would be the first time that such an outcome has been officially acknowledged.
Still, it is important to remember that for true opponents of the death penalty the killing of innocents is only part of the problem. The death penalty is wrong even when its target is definitely guilty of the crime. Jesus did not insist on seeing proof that Mary Magdalene was innocent of the prostitution charges levied against her before he challenged the mob to let someone without sin cast the first stone.

Once a covert operative...

How does one stop being a covert operative for the CIA? I mean other than having Karl Rove leak your name to the media?
The truth is that one can never stop being a covert operative without exposing all of your intelligence sources to the possibility of retaliation and undermining any and all of your past covert activities.

One of the lamest, but apparently popular, defenses of Karl Rove being bandied about by Bush apologists lately is that there could not have been a crime committed in this case because they claim that Valerie Wilson was not a covert operative at the time that her name was leaked to the media. In fact, they go on, she had not been working overseas for more than five years by that point and therefore no longer met the definition of a covert agent. To bolster this claim they point to this definition of a covert agent in the National Security Act of 1947:

The term “covert agent” means—
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States...

I want to call your attention to the comma in the above sentence that immediately precedes the ‘and’ in the (i) sub-definition. By placing the comma there it means the next portion of the sentence is a separate thought and is not needed to understand the meaning of the preceding portion of the sentence. But conservatives reading this definition have conveniently ignored the comma and treat the ‘and’ as meaning that the two segments must be combined to complete the meaning.

This is crucial because with the comma the definition is more inclusive and has a broader scope of what a covert agent is - including agents whose identity is classified as well as agents who works overseas now or in the past five years. Without the comma the definition can be read more exclusively to limit it to agents who meet both criteria - their identiy is classifed AND they must have worked overseas in the past five years.

Now this latter definition is not only incorrect, but would also be detrimental to our nation’s intelligence gathering capabilities. Imagine a rule that says after five years of inactivity information on our covert intelligence agents is suddenly part of the open record and “fair game” for anyone who wants to disseminate it in the mass media. The people who are positing this interpretation are either not thinking it through clearly (and to be charitable that is what I assume for most of them) or they are complete idiots.

So let’s stop and think about this a little bit more. If we really had such a thing as a five-year statute of limitations on protecting our covert agents and it could be clearly demonstrated that Valerie Wilson has not been actively working overseas for at least five years, then it would seem to be an open and shut case. So please explain why the Justice Department has spent the better part of two years and millions of taxpayer dollars pursuing this case. Because if that is the case then the only real scandal is why the special prosecutor is wasting our time and resources (not to mention throwing journalists in jail).

The truth of the matter is that Valerie Wilson was a covert agent at one time as this article makes clear:
 
The investigation was triggered when CIA lawyers asked the Justice Department to look into who revealed the identity of Wilson’s wife, who worked overseas under deep cover posing as a private industry energy analyst.

And the fact that she recently took time off to raise a family and had not been overseas in the past five years (assuming that is the case) is beside the point.
Plus, it is also highly likely that she was able to continue working as a covert agent while stateside by keeping in contact with her foreign sources via telephone and e-mail.

But all of that is now lost thanks to loose-lipped Karl Rove. Once he decided to fire up his signature smear operation against Ambassador Joseph Wilson he wasn’t about to let a little thing like our nation’s national security interests get in the way of his scoring political points against a critic of the administration.

Blaming the media

So Karl Rove is supposedly claiming that Plame’s CIA identity was just some rumor that had been floating around in the press corps? Some gossip he overheard and then passed along innocently to a national newspaper columnist?

Rove testified last year that he remembers specifically being told by columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of a harsh Iraq war critic, worked for the CIA.

How interesting. But that’s not what Novak has said:

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

I wonder who has been lying to the Grand Jury, Rove or Novak?

So far this case has been exciting a lot of commentary from the local blog community.

Eddie Rodriguez at The Red State has been working hard to debunk the avalanche of spin coming out of the White House on this issue.

The other day Bill Crawford at All Things Conservative helpfully reprinted the GOP “talking points” that try to smear Ambassador Joseph Wilson by repeating a lot of lies and misrepresentations of things he has said in the media. What exactly this has to do with the outing of his wife as a CIA agent I’m not sure. Perhaps they believe that the public will think that it is OK to expose our CIA operatives’ identities as long as their relatives’ reputations have been adequately besmirched first.
Josh Marshall sums it up pretty well here.

Now today, Bill is jumping all over the strange “Rove blames media” story claiming it completely vindicates him and puts the onus on Democrats for ever criticizing poor Rove in the first place.
But over at B & B Peter Bryant gives us a different analysis of the same story:

If we believe the Rove-friendly account in today's papers, someone had already spread around Plame's CIA job to both Novak and Rove. Who? Rove, by the account in the Washington Post, has conveniently forgotten.
If we don't believe the Rove-friendly account, then this timing is extremely suspicious.

Congrats to Peter on having his piece cross-posted at TPM Cafe.

For those who desperately want to believe Rove’s story that some reporter was responsible for outing Plame first there is still one big question that must be answered - How did a journalist with no security clearance get ahold of this classified information in the first place? And how convenient that they should happen to get it right at a time when it helps the White House in their effort to damage the credibility of a top critic of their Iraq policy.

Losing confidence

The Wall Street Journal poll that is out today has Bush down to a 46 percent approval rating with 52 percent saying the country in on the wrong track.
The Journal says that Bush's standing has been hurt by Iraq, his Social Security privatization scheme, and most recently by the Karl Rove scandal. The Journal story further warns that Bush "faces further political peril" if his Supreme Court nominee becomes embroiled in a protracted partisan battle.

Meanwhile, in another WSJ story we learn that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is spending more and more of his time focused on Karl Rove and what he told Time reporter Matthew Cooper. I think an indictment is almost inevitable at this point.
I expect to hear Bush announce soon that he has "full confidence" in Rove, which is always a sure signal that someone is about to get axed.

Even if Rove stays though, Democrats are trying to raise the heat index on him by pushing legislation to revoke his security clearance. Imagine if the president's top aide had to excuse himself everytime any confidential security matter was being discussed. At least Rove can always take a job with the Journal's editorial board where they are waiting to give him a medal for blabbing about one of our CIA operatives.

The Ideal Supreme Court candidate

Judge Sonia Sotomayor
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

Here is Bush’s ideal Supreme Court nominee. A Hispanic female with lots of judicial experience who was first appointed to the bench by Bush’s father. Plus she is guaranteed to have an easy confirmation.

Of course, this presumes that Bush wants an easy confirmation process. But there are many reasons why he would rather appoint someone more extreme and provoke a fight. First, it would satisfy his base of extremist religious right fundamentalists. Second, it would distract the public’s attention away from the mess in Iraq, Bush’s failed domestic agenda and the Karl Rove scandal.

Karl Rove: From Powerbroker to Pariah

It looks like
Ambassador Joseph Wilson was right again. Wilson pointed the finger at Karl Rove as the White House culprit who outed his wife from the CIA more than two years ago.
Now we are finding out that Rove was indeed the source for at least Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper who learned from Rove that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA more than three days before Robert Novak’s column ran exposing that fact for all the world to see.
So far the White House is is refusing to comment on the unfolding scandal.

For two years, the White House has insisted that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a CIA officer's identity. And President Bush said the leaker would be fired.
But Bush's spokesman wouldn't repeat any of those assertions Monday in the face of Rove's own lawyer saying his client spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified in a newspaper column.

Well, that’s OK, because Billmon has helpfully compiled a long list of relevant quotes from White House officials over the years denying Rove’s involvement. Lies, lies and more lies.

Now the only question is why Rove is still a member of the administration after Bush said long ago that he would fire whoever was responsible for the leak? Surely, Bush would not go back on his word!

I think it is just a matter of time now before Karl Rove joins Ken Lay on the list of GOP pariah’s whose name is never spoken by the president.

White House hypocrites

After chastising Democrats for suggesting that we need to set a timeline for withdrawing the bulk of our troops from Iraq, it now seems that the Bush administration has been secretly planning to do just that all along.
A secret memo uncovered by the British media reveals that the White House is looking to pull most troops out by early 2006:

"emerging U.S. plans assume that 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006," allowing a reduction in overall U.S.-led forces in Iraq to 66,000 troops. The troop level is now at about 160,000, including 138,000 American troops, according to a military spokesman in Baghdad.

This is good news because it means that maybe, just maybe, the Bush team is not as stupid as they have pretended to be lately. I’ve had a hard time understanding why Bush has been so stubborn about setting a timeline or even defining the terms of victory in Iraq.
The polls have shown that support for the war is plummeting the longer it drags on. Right-wingers whine that this is because the so-called liberal media hasn’t been cheerleading loudly enough on the sidelines, but the truth is that even when our subservient media bows down to the GOP agenda and obediently refuses to show pictures of the coffins and bodybags coming home, they can’t completely cover up the fact that more than 1,700 U.S. troops have been killed and more are dying everyday.
It amazes me the number of times in recent weeks where I have had casual conversations with very conservative Republicans who, upon learning that I am a liberal Democrat (quite rare in these parts), confess their reservations about the war in Iraq. They may not agree with me that we should never have gone in in the first place, but they do agree that it is high time that we started getting out.

So if pulling out would be politically popular why are they refusing to say they would even consider it? This new memo makes things a little more clear. As long as they start pulling out before the 2006 mid-term elections they can benefit from that politically. In the meantime, they can continue to blast Democrats for being terrorist sympathizers, weak on defense, cut-and-run cowards and so forth even while making plans for a massive drawdown early next year.

In fact, the White House seems to be even more anxious to pull out than their counterparts in the Pentagon, according to the memo.

The memo, posted on the newspaper's Web site, notes a debate between U.S. officials at the Pentagon and military leaders in Iraq, saying that officials in Washington favor "a relatively bold reduction in force numbers," differing with battlefield commanders, "whose approach is more cautious."