Conservatives are no longer influential

Time Magazine has just come out with its annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World and just looking at the cover of the issue I can tell it is sure to infuriate my conservative friends.
There are practically no conservatives in the list at all, but lots of liberals and Democrats.
Most prominently topping the list this year is Democratic presidential contender Barak Obama. Hillary Clinton is in there too. But you won't find Rudy Guiliani and you won't find John McCain.
George W. Bush isn't in there either. In fact, the only member of his cabinet to make the list was Condolezza Rice.
Nancy Pelosi made the list, and so did Al Gore. But the only Republican politicos are Michael Bloomberg - the liberal Republican mayor of New York - and Arnold Schwarzenegger who is lauded for his environmental advocacy.
The closest thing to a conservatie in the list is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts - and quite frankly I think Anthony Kennedy deserved that spot more since he is obviously the influential swing vote in every major decision now.
But as if this sparcity of rightwingers weren't bad enough, Time rubs salt in the wound by adding a whole host of liberals certain to make the rightwingers' blood boil inlcuding Rosie O'Donnell, George Soros, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney and Michael J. Fox.
And while rightwingers will surely be outraged and will dismiss the list as liberal bias by the so-called MSM, I think it is just being honest about the current predicament that conservatives are in. Thanks to four years of broken promises and false optimism in Iraq, the public no longer trusts what most Republicans say. I mean, who else on the Bush team has a shred of credibility left these days? Dick Cheney? Karl Rove? Alberto Gonzales?
So I think the Time list is just being honest about the wingers current and future predicament.

Isn’t this a democracy?

President Bush carried through with his threat to veto the Iraq spending bill because Democrats included a timeline for withdrawing troops by October. This was no surprise.
What disturbed me, however, was this quote from Bush’s speech in which he tried to justify his veto:

Bush said the legislation was dangerous because it “substitutes the opinion of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders.”

Excuse me, but I thought this was supposed to be a democracy. Aren’t the politicians the ones who represent the people, while the military commanders are supposed to be working for the people?
In any other country where the military commanders were allowed to overrule the elected representatives of the people it would be rightfully criticized as a military coup and not a democracy.

Of course, Bush is an elected politician exercising his legitimate authority to veto the legislation and Republicans still have enough votes in the Congress to sustain the veto, so we are still operating in the realm of a democracy. But his explanation that military leaders should hold sway over political leaders is disturbing nonetheless, especially in light of the right wing’s recent flirtations with the idea of a military coup in this country.

Mission Unaccomplished

Happy Mission Accomplished Day!
It's been four years since President Bush strutted across the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to declare an end to major combat operations in Iraq. If he had had the good sense to start pulling troops out of Iraq at that point he would probably be a very popular president today and Republicans would still control both branches of Congress. But he stubbornly decided to press on with the most definitely unaccomplished mission and is now four years later he is preparing to veto a $124 billion funding bill because it includes non-binding language setting up a timetable to begin withdrawing troops in another year.
Bush passed up many more opportunities when he could have declared victory and gone home to the point where we are mired in a no-win situation that is hopelessly spiraling more and more out of control.
U.S. casualties in April were the highest for 2007 and I'm afraid they won't be the highest for the year. Meanwhile, our economy is beginning to buckly under the dead weight of so much deficit spending and our military has been stretched far past its limits. Recently it was reported that the U.S. chose not to confront China over a recent anti-satellite missile launch because we knew we couldn't back up our threats with our military mired in Iraq.
Have I mentioned before that Bush is the worst president ever?

Update
ThinkProgress has an excellent chart showing the "progress" in Iraq since Bush declared Mission Accomplished.

Worst President Ever

The evidence just keeps pouring in.
Here is the latest example:

The Bush administration killed a proposal to clamp down on the student loan industry six years ago following allegations that companies sought to shower universities with financial favors to help generate business, according to documents and interviews with government officials.

The proposed policy, which Education Department officials drafted near the end of the Clinton presidency and circulated at the start of the Bush administration, represented an early, significant but ultimately abortive government response to a problem that this year has grown into a major controversy.

....the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry faces an array of investigations into questionable business practices that some officials believe could have been curtailed by the 2001 proposal.....

The abandonment of the 2001 proposal underscores what some consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers believe is lax federal oversight of the financial aid system by a department they say is too cozy with the industry. More than a dozen senior department officials either previously worked in the student loan business or found high-paying jobs in the sector after they left the agency.

Severe failure

A government commission in Israel has issued a report that is highly critical of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for his retaliatory invasion of Lebanon last year.

A government commission that probed Israel's summer war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon accused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday of "severe failure," saying he hastily led the country into the conflict without a plan.
A copy of the report obtained by The Associated Press cited a "severe failure in the lack of judgment, responsibility and caution."

Wow! That sounds awfully familiar. Do you suppose Olmert was following the Bush administration’s playbook a little too closely?
It’s refreshing to see that people in Israel are just as critical of Olmert as I was.

Wasting our money

It could not be more painfully obvious after reading this NYTimes story that we are just wasting our money in Iraq.

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.
.....
At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.

I would imagine that the projects in the areas now deemed "too unsafe to visit" are probably not faring much better and most likely are doing far worse.

most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq’s parlous security emsituation, but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect.

And we can't even blame the problems on the terrorists. Apparently it is just plain old incompetence - a hallmark of the Bush presidency - that is at fault here.

OSHA gone AWOL

From the New York Times yesterday:

Seven years ago, a Missouri doctor discovered a troubling pattern at a microwave popcorn plant in the town of Jasper. After an additive was modified to produce a more buttery taste, nine workers came down with a rare, life-threatening disease that was ravaging their lungs.

Puzzled Missouri health authorities turned to two federal agencies in Washington. Scientists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates the causes of workplace health problems, moved quickly to examine patients, inspect factories and run tests. Within months, they concluded that the workers became ill after exposure to diacetyl, a food-flavoring agent.

But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with overseeing workplace safety, reacted with far less urgency. It did not step up plant inspections or mandate safety standards for businesses, even as more workers became ill.

On Tuesday, the top official at the agency told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing that it would prepare a safety bulletin and plan to inspect a few dozen of the thousands of food plants that use the additive.

That response reflects OSHA’s practices under the Bush administration, which vowed to limit new rules and roll back what it considered cumbersome regulations that imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers. Across Washington, political appointees — often former officials of the industries they now oversee — have eased regulations or weakened enforcement of rules on issues like driving hours for truckers, logging in forests and corporate mergers.

Since George W. Bush became president, OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say. It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.

The agency has killed dozens of existing and proposed regulations and delayed adopting others. For example, OSHA has repeatedly identified silica dust, which can cause lung cancer, and construction site noise as health hazards that warrant new safeguards for nearly three million workers, but it has yet to require them.

“The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency,” said Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University who has written extensively about workplace safety. “If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”

Agency officials defend their performance, saying that workplace deaths and injuries have declined during their tenure. They have been considering new standards and revising outdated ones that were unduly burdensome on businesses, they said, adding that they have moved cautiously on new rules because those require extensive scientific and economic analysis.

“By the time the Bush administration is done — we have a good record already — we will have a better record,” said Edwin G. Foulke Jr., the agency’s head, in a recent interview.

On diacetyl, Mr. Foulke said “the science is murky” on whether the additive causes bronchiolitis obliterans, the disease that has been called “popcorn worker’s lung.” That claim is echoed by some industry officials, but a number of leading scientists and doctors agree with scientists at the national occupational safety institute that there is strong evidence linking the additive to the illness.

Without an OSHA standard, which would establish the permissible level of exposure for workers, companies can set any limit of exposure they want.

Instead of regulations, Mr. Foulke and top officials at other agencies favor a “voluntary compliance strategy,” reaching agreements with industry associations and companies to police themselves.

Administration officials say such programs are less costly, allowing companies to hire more workers and keep consumer prices down. The number of voluntary agreements has grown in recent years, but they cover a fraction of the seven million work sites that OSHA oversees, or less than 1 percent of the work force. Sixty-one food plants out of the tens of thousands across the country participate; industry representatives say other businesses are taking steps to protect workers on their own.

Critics say the voluntary programs tend to have little focus on specific hazards and no enforcement power. Because only companies with strong safety records are eligible, they argue, the programs do not force less-conscientious businesses to improve their workplaces. A 2004 study by the Government Accountability Office found some promising results from such programs, but recommended against expanding them until their effectiveness could be assessed.

“OSHA has been focusing on the best companies in their voluntary protection program while doing nothing in the area of standard setting,” said Peg Seminario, the director of occupational safety and health at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “They’ve simply gotten out of the standard-setting business in favor of industry partnerships that have no teeth.”

While labor organizations and public health experts argue that the agency has been lax in recent years, some industries have applauded its efforts. Construction companies, for example, are pleased that OSHA recently decided to relax the standards for handling explosives.

The agency had long been the target of businesses that criticized its rules as arbitrary, costly and confusing. Three of the biggest industries regulated by OSHA — transportation, agribusiness and construction — have given more than $630 million in political campaign contributions since 2000, with nearly three-quarters of that money going to Republicans. The Bush administration has promised to address their concerns.

This is so typical of Republican politics today. Dismissal and denial of science — it’s “murky” — and total subservience to the needs and wants of industry and big business, which just happens to foot the bill for their political campaigns.
We might just as well shut down OSHA for the remainder of the Bush administration. It’s clear that public health and safety would be no worse off with its absence.

I would like to try an experiment. Lets take a big batch of diacetyl and send it to all the Republican politicians. We can explain that scientists have linked the substance to bronchiolitis obliterans, but not to worry because some industry hacks and a Bush appointee have said that the “science is murky.” So, go ahead, take a big whiff!

A hostage situation

The Shrill One turns it up a notch in his New York Times column today.

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

I have been saying for sometime that the proper name for the current mission in Iraq should be Operation Cover Bush’s Ass and I believe that moreso now than ever. There is no reasonable expectations of turning Iraq into a pro-Western democracy at this point and the sole purpose for our troops to stay in Iraq is to keep the country from spiraling into total chaos before Bush finally leaves office. The only problem is that the difference between “total chaos” and the current situation will be hardly perceptible.

A dilemma for the NRA

Virginia’s “liberal” gun laws made it perfectly legal for Cho Seung-Hui to purchase a semi-automatic handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition despite having been declared "an imminent danger to himself because of mental illness" by a judge in December 2005.
This news must surely pose a dilemma for the NRA. Will they support efforts to restrict gun sales to mentally deranged people? After all, such a law could concievably impact the vast majority of their membership.

Boris Yeltsin memories

I remember quite vividly where I was when Boris Yeltsin became a household name in this country. It was the morning of August 19, 1991 and my wife and I were in New Hampshire at a quaint little bed & breakfast in the White Mountains where we were celebrating our first anniversary which had been on Aug. 18.
While we had been at the B&B we were essentially cut off from the world - no TVs, no radios, no newspapers - nothing to distract from the beautiful mountain scenery that was surrounding us. But on the morning of the 19th when we came down for breakfast we found the proprietor of the B&B in the kitchen intently listening to a radio. We were shocked to learn that there had been a coup in the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev was under house arrest. And as if that wasn’t frightening enough, we learned at the same time that there was a major hurricane bearing down on us just off the coast of Rhode Island. Yikes! You take a few days off from keeping up with the news and all heck breaks loose!
By the time I saw a newspaper there were pictures of Yeltsin astride the tank outside the Kremlin and it was clear that a new star had been born. The coup turned out to be the final death throes of the old Soviet system and it all turned out for the better. But for a short time there it seemed like it could have been a lot worse.

D.C. representation

I just watched on C-SPAN as the House passed a bill giving the District of Columbia a representative with full voting rights in the House. The Legislation also gives Utah an additional Congressional seat as part of a bi-partisan compromise, thus raising the total number of House members from 435 to 437.
Despite this show of good will and the obvious merits of giving the more than half a million D.C. residents full representation in our government, the majority of Republicans in Congress voted against the bill. Jerks.
The last time this issue came up, they succeeded in defeating it by tying the bill down with an NRA-backed measure to undermine D.C.'s ban on semi-automatic weapons.
I’m not sure what happens next - whether the bill faces a Republican filibuster in the Senate or a veto threat from our illustrious Commander-in-Chief. But hopefully this will mark the long overdue culmination of an effort to grant D.C. citizens their full rights under the Constitution.

Lax gun laws

Today my friend Bill Crawford says:
The question on everyone's mind today is, do stricter gun laws prevent crime?

While I disagree with his answer, I think it is also the wrong question to ask.
This is the question on most people’s minds today:

The Big Question: Is there a link between America's lax gun laws and the high murder rate?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

The massacre at Virginia Tech has, yet again, focused attention on the culture of guns and the ease of obtaining firearms in America, an unending source of amazement to most of the rest of the world. Roughly 29,000 people are killed by firearms every year - 10 times as many as died on September 11, 2001. Of the victims, some 11,000 are murdered, 17,000 use a gun to commit suicide, and almost 1,000 die in accidents. Some sub-statistics are even more disturbing. Every day three children under 19 die from a gun wound. Across the country, roughly 1,000 crimes involving firearms are committed every 24 hours. The rampage of Cho Seung-Hui, the deadliest mass shooting in US history, will merely add one suicide and 33 murders (at the latest count) to these grim totals.

Robert Reich made this astute observation today juxtaposing the easy access to semi-automatic handguns with strict regulation for anti-depressant medications:

In the United States, if you are seriously depressed, you can purchase anti-depressive drugs like Prozac, but only if you have a prescription from a doctor. Anti-depressants are enormously beneficial to millions of people but they are also potentially dangerous if used improperly. So you have to see a doctor and get an assessment before can go to a drug store and purchase one.
But in the United States, in places like Virginia, a seriously depressed or deranged person can walk into a gun store and buy a semi-automatic handgun and a box of ammunition. The only limitation in Virginia is you cannot buy more than one handgun a month and you must present two forms of identification. You don’t need permission from a doctor or counselor or anyone in the business of screening people to make sure they’re fit to have a gun.
We can debate the relative benefits and dangers of anti-depressants and semi-automatic handguns, but if 30,000 Americans were killed each year by anti-depressants, as they are by handguns, it seems likely that anti-depressants would be even more strictly regulated than they are now.

I would support a ban on semi-automatic handguns similar to the one they enacted in Australia back in 1996.
There is absolutely no need for anyone in the general public to own a semi-automatic handgun. They are not used for hunting. You don’t need one to defend your house against a burglar. The only thing they are really good for is committing mass murders. At the very minimum, access to these types of weapons should be heavily regulated requiring licensing and extensive background checks so that collectors and sporting enthusiasts might still have access to them, but not so that a mentally deranged college student can walk in on a moment’s notice and walk out with one plus a box of 50 cartridges in under 20 minutes.

Do you want to fight?

Before I heard about the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech, this is the story that had me upset.

Sounding almost as amused as frustrated, Duncan accused Crawford of having a "personal vendetta" against him and said the veteran referee asked him whether he wanted to fight.
"Before he gave me the two technical fouls, he made a call and I was shaking my head, and he walks down and stares at me," Duncan said. "He says, 'Do you want to fight? Do you want to fight?' I didn't say anything to him there, either."

This ref apparently has a history of these types of incidents and a reputation as being a hot-head. I hope it is not too much to expect that he WILL NOT be officiating any Spurs games during the play-offs.

Who won in Iraq?

Foreign Policy Magazine’s March/April 2007 issue asks the question “Who Won in Iraq?” and comes up with a Top Ten List of people, nations and ideas that can claim victory. Needless to say, George W. Bush isn’t listed in there anywhere.

1. Iran: After nearly 25 years of wrestling with Saddam Hussein, Iran’s Shiite rulers have the war to thank for their newfound power.
For Iran, the war in Iraq turned out to be a strategic windfall, uprooting Baathism and pacifying a nemesis that had been a thorn in its side.

2. Moqtada al-Sadr: How a radical Shiite cleric became the most powerful man in Iraq.
The Americans would like to see Moqtada off the scene; many moderate Shiite leaders would like to see him dead. Yet Sadr appears unassailable.

3. Al Qaeda: The terrorist network was on life support after Sept. 11 — until a new front opened in Baghdad and revived its mission.

4. Samuel Huntington: The man who envisioned a clash of civilizations looks more prescient than ever.
Paul Wolfowitz has lost. Sam Huntington has won.

5. China: The United States’ missteps in Iraq have given a rising superpower in the East room to grow.
Commitments in Iraq mean the U.S. military now has fewer resources to build up the capabilities to win a potential war with China over Taiwan.

6. Arab Dictators: The Middle East’s strongmen were under pressure to reform. Now, they rest easy.
As the U.S. has become mired in bloody chaos in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have wound up back in Washington’s good graces. But it’s not because they’ve become more democratic.

7. The Price of Oil: The war in Iraq triggered record oil prices, and the region’s petrostates will enjoy the windfall for years to come.

8. The United Nations: Suddenly, the global body’s brand of multilateral diplomacy doesn’t look so bad.
The United Nations is likely to be more effective than the spasmodic interventions of a solitary and inattentive superpower.

9. Old Europe: Four years on, Europe’s naysayers are looking wise beyound their years. But can they do any more than sit back and gloat?
Old Europe’s ambassadors crisscross the globe politely suggesting, “Well, we told you so.”

10. Israel: The war in Iraq eliminated several of Israel’s biggest enemies — even if it made a few new ones along the way.

Apology accepted

I was glad to see that the Rutgers team has accepted Don Imus’ apology for his racist and sexist remarks made on his now defunct radio program. It’s too bad that the rest of the country can’t be as forgiving.
This whole mess has left a bitter taste in my mouth as the relentless crusade to tar and feather Imus went overboard in my opinion and has now left him looking more the victim than the perpetrator. I’m disgusted right now with the hypocricy of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, two supposed preachers who can’t seem to find it in their hearts to forgive Imus, but have been quick to beg our forgiveness for their past transgressions.
Rather than healing a wound, Jackson and Sharpton have only succeeded in further inflaming tensions with this vendetta. I think Imus deserved to be taken down a notch or two over this incident. He deserved a swift kick in the butt, a slap upside the head and a stern warning not to do it again. But by forcing his show to be canceled they have effectively set him up as a sacrificial lamb and thus a sympathetic figure.

JFK column

This is a column I wrote for the Kerrville Daily Times that was published on Nov. 22, 1993. For my own edification I will be posting my old columns into my blog as time allows.

JFK assassination battle will never end

I’m not one of those people who can recall what I was doing when President John F. Kennedy was shot. That fateful day in our nation’s history took place nearly two years before I was born.
Still it has had a profound, if somewhat delayed, impact on my life. From the time I crawled out of the crib until sometime during my junior year in college I had given no more thought to the assassination of our 35th president than I did to the death of Julius Ceasar. It was just another piece of history.
Then one day, almost innocently, I checked out a documentary video about the assassination from a library. Little did I know that this was a documentary put together by critics of the “official version” of events that day. It was 1986, still several years before the fuss over the 25th and now the 30th anniversary and before the release of Oliver Stone’s film “JFK.”
Sitting down to watch the film I was naive enough to not even realize there was a controversy about what really happened that day. Needless to say, the things the film purported to show me came as quite a shock. Up until that point I had never had any reason to doubt the government. (At the time I was also woefully ignorant about Watergate.) I can still recall having the very strange sensation of being cast out of my safe and sheltered existence. The very neat and tidy little picture of the world that I had in my head had just developed a crack.
I returned to the library that day and checked out every book I could find about the assassination. I read them all, both pro-conspiracy and pro-lone gunman theory. It became almost an obsession for the next several months. If my history books had lied to me about this, what else might they have lied about? What else might they be trying to cover up or keep secret?
I had experienced a loss of faith, a loss of trust and a loss of innocence; much like that which people who were living at the time of the assassination had experienced.
After a while I could see what the defenders of the Warren Commission’s lone gunman theory were trying to do. They were trying to repair that broken picture in my head. They were desperately trying to pick up the pieces and patch things back together, constantly reassuring me that everything was still OK, that things had not gone terribly wrong with the world.
But it was too late. The seeds of doubt had been planted. The preponderance of evidence weighed against the Warren Commission’s neat and tidy version of events. The critics were too relentless, too driven. Some of them, for sure, were off-the-wall, paranoid and fanatical, but many of them were serious. Too serious to be ignored or dismissed. None of them could tell me what really happened that day, but they did a good job of punching holes in the Warren Commission’s official version.
Today the controversy surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy continues to divide our nation into two groups — those who trust and those who doubt. Each year on the anniversary of the assassination it has become a ritual for these two groups to meet on the battlefield of public opinion and duke it out.
The doubters have been winning as of late if recent polls are any indication. They made major gains when the Oliver Stone film was released, but the defenders of the Warren Report are not giving up. This year they are rallying around a new book with the self-important title “Case Closed” that once again attempts to prop up the lone gunman theory. They also have most of the “establishment” media on their side which is holding nothing back in showering praise on the new book and continuing to heap scorn and derision on the “conspiracy theorists” and “assassination buffs.”
It is a battle that will never end. We are no longer dealing with the simple facts of a homicide investigation, but with the tenets of two very different philosophies. Depending on which philosophy a person adopts will affect which evidence they will see as the most valid and which eyewitness testimony is the most credible.
I may not have been around when President Kennedy was shot, but I will always remember when it first affected me. Like a shockwave reverberating forward through time it changed my view of the world and made me more cynical, but perhaps also more realistic.

Political Odyssey Pt. 2

As I noted in Part 1 of my Political Odyssey, I began my political life as a Republican after being raised in a mostly apolitical family.
But during my junior and senior years in college, things began to change rapidly.
The Iran-Contra scandal broke in the fall of 1986 when I was starting my senior year at Texas A&M. Then-President Ronald Reagan at first denied any involvement, but about a week later he reversed course. I remember watching the nationally-televised speech Reagan gave on Nov. 13, 1986, trying to explain what had happened and why. He made it all sound so innocent and stressed that we were only talking about a very small amount of arms sent to Iran, just enough to fit into one cargo plane.

I authorized the transfer of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran. My purpose was to convince Tehran that our negotiators were acting with my authority, to send a signal that the United States was prepared to replace the animosity between us with a new relationship. These modest deliveries, taken together, could easily fit into a single cargo plane.

At first I was satisfied with this explanation. I was more than willing to give Uncle Ronnie the benefit of the doubt. But it soon became clear that Reagan had not been honest. We weren’t talking about a “small amount of defensive weapons” that “could easily fit into a single cargo plane.” We were talking about thousands of TOW missiles that took weeks to deliver in multiple shipments:

In January 1986, North and Secord negotiated on behalf of the United States the sale of 4,000 TOW missiles to Iran. Ghorbanifar agreed to pay $10,000 for each TOW. The terms and conditions negotiated by North and Secord required an initial sale of 1,000 TOW missiles for $10 million, and subsequent sales of an additional 3,000 TOW missiles for $30 million. North falsely informed DoD and the CIA that Secord would receive only $6,000 per TOW, or a total of $6 million. The Defense Department established its price as $3,700 per TOW missile for its sale to the CIA and the price to be paid to the CIA by Secord.
Between February 7 and February 18, 1986, Khashoggi deposited $10 million into the Enterprise's Lake Resources account. On February 10-11, 1986, $3.7 million was transferred from Lake to a CIA account for the weapons. Between February 17 and 27, 1986, 1,000 TOWs were shipped to Iran.

The full impact of Reagan’s lie took awhile to sink in, but the immediate effect was still jolting. My faith and trust in Reagan the man had been profoundly shaken. This ultimately had the effect of jarring me loose from my ideological underpinnings at that time. I suddenly found myself politically adrift. It was around that time that I decided I needed a better foundation and I turned to my history books to find a new hero. I eventually settled on John F. Kennedy. I began reading books on the Kennedy era including Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Vietnam, Watergate, etc. All the stuff that my history books had glossed over or skipped was suddenly becoming very relevant to me.
Then one weekend when I was home on break I went to the local public library and on a whim I checked out a video documentary about the Kennedy assassination. I was only vaguely aware at the time that there was any controversy surrounding the events of that period and was expecting mostly a historical overview. What I got instead was an eye-opening examination of the contradictions and inconsistencies in the official record that to this day leave unanswered one of the most important questions of the last century. Who shot JFK and why?
That video sparked my interest and I began to seek out as many books on the topic as I could find. I read books on both sides of the conspiracy issue - both pro-Warren Commission and pro-conspiracy theory. There was little question in my mind where the preponderance of the evidence pointed and I ended up siding with the majority of Americans who to this day believe Kennedy was killed as the result of an organized conspiracy. Who was behind that conspiracy is still debatable and I don’t pretend to have any definitive answers, but my suspicions were and still are that a right-wing cabal of anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia bosses and rouge elements in our own government conspired to pull off the crime of the century.
My research into the JFK assassination led me to believe that some of the same elements had conspired to pull off the subsequent assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King as well. I was incensed that THEY could get away with this. Even though I did not know who THEY were, I was nevertheless placing the blame on the right-wing side of the political spectrum and that was shoving me squarely into the left-wing side. It was a strange place to be for an Aggie in the Corps of Cadets but I felt the need to not only learn more about these issues, but to also do something about them.
As I became more and more enamored of JFK, RFK, MLK, etc., I became more and more disenchanted with Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Richard Nixon and the whole cast of characters who were making the news everyday in the growing Iran-Contra scandal.
I had never been to a College Republicans meeting, though I had faithfully supported the Republican ticket in 1984 and 1986. But by 1987 I was going to Aggie Democrats meetings and even got involved with the local chapter of Students Against Apartheid - quite possibly the only member of the Corps to ever be affiliated with the group. And I continued to read all kinds of left-wing political literature of that period much of which still influences my thinking to this day. They include:

“Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” by Noam Chomsky
“Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World” by Jonathan Kwitney
“The Power Game: How Washington Works” by Hedrick Smith
“Rise of the Counter Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power” by Sidney Blumenthal
“Tales of a New America: The Anxious Liberal's Guide to the Future” by Robert Reich
“The Media Monopoly” by Ben Bagdikian
“On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency” by Mark Hertsgaard

When the 1988 election season rolled around, my politics had done a complete 180’ from 1986 and I was anxious to not only vote for Democrats, but to actively work in their campaigns. When the Democratic primary rolled around I found myself supporting Jesse Jackson just to make a political statement - not because I had any illusions that he could win. After Michael Dukakis emerged as the candidate, I volunteered to work in his campaign in College Station. One of my talents was writing letters to the editor and when I had written all that I was allowed in any given month, I would turn around and ghost write letters for other people to send in.
Alas, all my efforts were for naught as Dukakis went down to defeat against the Willie Horton-fearmongering and shameless flag-exploiting campaign of George Bush the Elder. I was deeply disappointed but rather than turning away from politics I turned my efforts instead toward the state and local arena and supported the full slate of Democrats running for state office in 1990 including Ann Richards for Governor, Bob Bullock for Lt. Gov., Jim Hightower for Ag Commissioner, Garry Maruo for Land Commissioner and John Sharp for Comptroller. I also railed against a local Republican state rep trying to run for the state Senate (he lost) and worked in the campaign of a local attorney trying to win the vacant state rep seat (he lost too).
By the time Ann Richards and her group won, I was newly married and on my way to New England where I would soon get an entirely different perspective on politics.

Hidden gems

Remember those songs you used to listen to all the time and now you never seem to hear anymore? I’m talking about those hidden gems on albums that never got released as singles and never had any radio play. Songs that you only know about because you used to listen to the album or cassette constantly. But now you don’t even have a record or cassette player anymore and if you haven’t replaced those albums on CD you probably haven’t heard these songs in years.
Here is a list I put together of hidden gems I still cherish from the early to mid ‘80s:

Dragon Attack - Queen (Play the Game)
Rage in the Cage - J. Geils Band (Freeze Frame)
It’s Your Life - Loverboy (Get Lucky)
I Got the Six - ZZ Top (Eliminator)
Carry Me Away - Rick Springfield (Working Class Dog)
Can’t Stop the World - Go Go’s (Beauty and the Beat)
Don’t Worry Baby - Los Lobos (Will the Wolf Survive)
Too Much Information - The Police (Ghost in the Machine)
I Can’t Take It - Cheap Trick (Next Position Please)
Through Being Cool - Devo (New Traditionalists)

Collapse of the Bush Administration

Joe Klein has apparently had enough and goes off on the Bush administration in the latest issue of Time Magazine:

The epic collapse of the Bush Administration.
The three big Bush stories of 2007 — the decision to “surge” in Iraq, the scandalous treatment of wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for tawdry political reasons — precisely illuminate the three qualities that make this Administration one of the worst in American history: arrogance (the surge), incompetence (Walter Reed) and cynicism (the U.S. Attorneys).
Iraq comes first, as always. From the start, it has been obvious that personal motives have skewed the President’s judgment about the war. Saddam tried to kill his dad; his dad didn’t try hard enough to kill Saddam. There was payback to be had. But never was Bush’s adolescent petulance more obvious than in his decision to ignore the Baker-Hamilton report and move in the exact opposite direction: adding troops and employing counterinsurgency tactics inappropriate to the situation on the ground. “There was no way he was going to accept [its findings] once the press began to portray the report as Daddy’s friends coming to the rescue,” a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission told me. As with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine. Iraq was invaded with insufficient troops and planning; the surge was attempted with too few troops (especially non-Kurdish, Arabic-speaking Iraqis), a purposely misleading time line (“progress” by September) and, most important, the absence of a reliable Iraqi government.
General David Petraeus has repeatedly said, “A military solution to Iraq is not possible.” Translation: This thing fails unless there is a political deal among the Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds. There is no such deal on the horizon, largely because of the President’s aversion to talking to people he doesn’t like. And while some Baghdad neighborhoods may be more peaceful--temporarily--as a result of the increased U.S. military presence, the story two years from now is likely to resemble the recent headlines from Tall ‘Afar: dueling Sunni and Shi’ite massacres have destroyed order in a city famously pacified by counterinsurgency tactics in 2005. Bush’s indifference to reality in Iraq is not an isolated case. It is the modus operandi of his Administration. The indifference of his Environmental Protection Agency to the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions was rejected by the Supreme Court on April 2.
On April 3, the President again accused Democrats of being “more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than providing our troops what they need.” Such demagoguery is particularly outrageous given the Administration’s inability to provide our troops “what they need” at the nation’s premier hospital for veterans. The mold and decrepitude at Walter Reed are likely to be only the beginning of the tragedy, the latest example of incompetence in this Administration. “This is yet another aspect of war planning that wasn’t done properly,” says Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “The entire VA hospital system is unprepared for the casualties of Iraq, especially the psychiatric casualties. A lot of vets are saying, ‘This is our Katrina moment.’ And they’re right: this Administration governs badly because it doesn’t care very much about governing.”
Compared with Iraq and Walter Reed, the firing of the U.S. Attorneys is a relatively minor matter. It is true that U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President, but they are political appointees of a special sort. They are partisans, obviously, but must appear to be above politics--not working to influence elections, for example--if public faith in the impartiality of the justice system is to be maintained. Once again Karl Rove’s operation has corrupted a policy area--like national security--that should be off-limits to political operators.
When Bush came to office--installed by the Supreme Court after receiving fewer votes than Al Gore--I speculated that the new President would have to govern in a bipartisan manner to be successful. He chose the opposite path, and his hyper-partisanship has proved to be a travesty of governance and a comprehensive failure. I’ve tried to be respectful of the man and the office, but the three defining sins of the Bush Administration--arrogance, incompetence, cynicism--are congenital: they’re part of his personality. They’re not likely to change. And it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead.

B.C. - R.I.P.

B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart died the other day at age 76, reportedly while sitting at his desk working on storyboards for future comic strips. I think he might have appreciated that he died on Easter Sunday considering his very aggresive Christian evangelizing through his comic strips during his later years.
I was never a big fan of B.C. but it had the advantage of having always been around. It was a nearly omnipresent comic strip, in every paper I ever read as my family moved around from one place to the next as I was growing up. In recent years it had become an irritant because of the way Hart injected it with his right-wing political views - couched in holier-than-thou Christian Coalition smarminess. But I would often read it just to see what kind of outrageous thing he would say each day, otherwise the strip would have been relegated to the growing pile of gag-a-day, boring, long-past-their-due-date strips that I regularly skip over each day (Marmaduke, Hi and Lois, Snuffy Smith, etc.)
Now that Hart is gone I hope that his strip will be gracefully retired and allow for more room on the static comic pages for some of the fresh, new strips that are hungry for a chance to breakthrough. Unfortunately, the Syndicate may have other plans as this quote from the AP story implies:

Richard Newcombe, founder and president of Creators Syndicate said “B.C.” and “Wizard of Id” would continue. Family members have been helping produce the strips for years, and they have an extensive computer archive of Hart's drawings to work with, he said.

Great! The heart and soul of B.C. is gone, but they’re going to continue cranking out daily strips using rehashed and recycled drawings stored in a computer database. I hope that most newspapers will have the good sense to drop the strip if that is what they are going to pull. There are already far too many “zombie” strips out there that continue to haunt our comics pages long after the original creative talents behind them have departed this world.

Recess appointment abuse

President Bush made some more “recess appointments” the other day, bypassing the Senate to install several people to positions that they would have otherwise been able to fill.
This is an abuse of the executive power granted in the Constitution. Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution says: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”
But the positions that Bush is filling did not become vacant during the Senate recess. The authors of our Constitution added that provision because back in 1780s the U.S. Congress did not tend to meet for long periods of time. There would be long delays between sessions of Congress, thus government vacancies might go unfilled for lengthy periods during which time the Congress was not around to give its advice and consent. So the recess appointment was created to allow the President to fill those vacancies temporarily.
But times have changed and today the Congress is in session pretty much year around. Therefore, one should assume that the recess appointment provision should rarely be used. But quite to the contrary, it seems to be used with ever increasing frequency as Presidents have struggled with opposition parties controlling the other branches of government.
It is a bipartisan issue with both Republican and Democratic presidents taking advantage of this loophole to bypass their political adversaries in the appointment process. Although presidents all the way back to Washington have used recess appointments, it seems to have really taken off during the Reagan years when Uncle Ronnie bypassed the Democratic Congress repeatedly by making 243 recess appointments. Bill Clinton made 140 such appointments during his two terms.
But Bush Jr. may be the worst of all. Even with a Republican Congress during the first six years of his presidency, Bush has made 167 recess appointments so far.
Lately, he has been very blatant in making in-your-face recess appointments of officials who were already reviewed and rejected by the Senate. That is clearly contrary to the spirit, if not the letter of the law. I truly hope that someone will challenge him on this and get it before the Supreme Court because it is an abuse of power that should not be tolerated from Republican or Democratic presidents.

Money makes the World Go Around...

The financial reports for the 2008 presidential candidates are out and they contain quite a few surprises, not least of which is Barack Obama’s matching nearly dollar for dollar the fundraising strength of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Hillary brought in a record-breaking $26 million, but was no doubt surprised to find Obama hot on her heels with $25 million and with a wider contributor base to boot.
That bodes well for Obama. He looks to be in the race for the longhaul.
Meanwhile, the Republican field has been shaken by the surprisingly strong performance by the Flip-Flop King Mitt Romney who raked in a cool $23 million, nearly double that of John McCain, the one time Conventional Wisdom frontrunner.
McCain is clearly in trouble with just $12.5 million in his first campaign fundraising haul. And Rudy Giuliani, the current frontrunner in all the polls, is not doing too much better with just $15 million. To put that in perspective, consider that Giuliani is just barely hanging even with John Edwards who raised $14 million.
So Hillary clearly has the advantage at this point as she is leading in both the money race and in the polls. But Obama is a major factor in the race and isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Meanwhile the Republicans have a mixed bag with a guy raising tons of money but with little poll support, while their frontrunner in the polls is being left in the dust by the Democrats.

Blogroll deletion

It is with great sadness that I must remove
The View From the Nest from my San Antonio blogroll. I do so only because the owner, The Rantin’ Raven, requested it on account of the fact that he inexplicably shut the site down and deleted it entirely. The Ranting Raven’s politics and mine are 100 percent polar opposites, but that did not prevent us from becoming blog buddies. I also had the pleasure of meeting Raven in person, along with his lovely family, at the San Antonio Blogger Bar-B-Q that he helped organize a couple of years ago.
I hope that Raven’s decision to delete his blog was not because he recieved threats or any other kind of nastiness like that. And I hope that he will eventually find his way back to the local blogosphere where he should know that he will be sorely missed.

On a positive note, I want to take this opportunity to note some recent additions to the local blogging community including Intimations of Mortality authored by a local attorney; Walker Report by a councilman from Balcones Heights; and Dig Deeper Texas by a group of civic-minded activists.

Great expectations

Baseball season has started again and I’m looking forward to an enjoyable year.
Fortunately, I’m not a Cubs fan like at least one unhappy fellow I know.
I’m not sure how well the Astros will do without some more pitching support now that they have lost Andy Pettite and perhaps Roger Clemens. The first game didn’t go well with Roy Oswalt pitching a good game only to have Brad Lige and another closer lose it in the final innings. But it’s only the first game of the season.
It was kind of a strange start to the season with a lot of unexpected finishes. The Yankees got off to a good start with a 9-5 victory over the Devil Rays (are they supposed to be any good yet?). But the Chicago White Sox lost to the Indians 12-5 and the Boston Red Sox were whooped 7-1 by the hapless Kansas City Royals.
I always like this time of the year when the baseball season is fresh and the basketball season is gearing up for the playoffs. The Spurs have looked really good lately and my level of expectation for their chances in the playoffs has gone up accordingly.

Catching up...

I’ve been out sick for the last couple of days...
Lot of interesting news stories have come out during that time:

High Court Faults EPA Inaction on Emissions

The Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration yesterday for refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, siding with environmentalists in the court's first examination of the phenomenon of global warming.
The court ruled 5 to 4 that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Air Act by improperly declining to regulate new-vehicle emissions standards to control the pollutants that scientists say contribute to global warming.
"EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. The agency "identifies nothing suggesting that Congress meant to curtail EPA's power to treat greenhouse gases as air pollutants," the opinion continued.
....
The Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement that the ruling "repudiates the Bush administration's do-nothing policy on global warming," undermining the government's refusal to view carbon dioxide as an air pollutant subject to EPA regulation.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Anthony Kennedy stepping into the pivotal swing role once occupied by Sandra Day O’Connor. It’s nice to think that even after Bush got two of his horrible picks onto the Supreme Court, we can still get good decisions like this one through.

Prosecutor Posts Go To Bush Insiders

About one-third of the nearly four dozen U.S. attorney's jobs that have changed hands since President Bush began his second term have been filled by the White House and the Justice Department with trusted administration insiders.
The people chosen as chief federal prosecutors on a temporary or permanent basis since early 2005 include 10 senior aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, according to an analysis of government records. Several came from the White House or other government agencies. Some lacked experience as prosecutors or had no connection to the districts in which they were sent to work, the records and biographical information show....
No other administration in contemporary times has had such a clear pattern of filling chief prosecutors' jobs with its own staff members, said experts on U.S. attorney's offices. Those experts said the emphasis in appointments traditionally has been on local roots and deference to home-state senators, whose support has been crucial to win confirmation of the nominees.
The pattern from Bush's second term suggests that the dismissals were half of a two-pronged approach: While getting rid of prosecutors who did not adhere closely to administration priorities, such as rigorous pursuit of immigration violations and GOP allegations of voter fraud, White House and Justice officials have seeded federal prosecutors' offices with people on whom they can depend to carry out the administration's agenda.

The Bush administration has clearly abused their power when it comes to selecting U.S. Attorneys. If the law is such that the U.S. attorneys “serve at the privilege of the president” then I think after this administration that law needs to be changed. Every new president can pick their own people for the U.S. Attorney slots (with Senate approval), but after they are in place the administration needs to back off and let them do their jobs. This nonsense about ranking the attorneys based on their fealty to the Bush administration’s political agenda is unconscionable and should not be tolerated. If we need a new law to keep this kind of abuse from happening in the future then so be it.

How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War

Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.
In February 2002, the CIA received the verbatim text of one of the documents, filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search, the interviews show. Many low- and mid-level intelligence officials were already skeptical that Iraq was in pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The interviews also showed that France, berated by the Bush administration for opposing the Iraq war, honored a U.S. intelligence request to investigate the uranium claim. It determined that its former colony had not sold uranium to Iraq.
Burba, who had no special expertise in Africa or nuclear technology, was able to quickly unravel the fraud. Yet the claims clung to life within the Bush administration for months, eventually finding their way into the State of the Union address.

I still want to know who created the phony document and why.

Sing me a song

When my son was little we began singing him songs at night before bedtime. My wife would handle the bulk of the singing, but I would get my turn on occasion as well and it soon became apparent that my song repertoire was pathetically shallow. For someone who loves music as much as I do and has such an extensive record/CD collection, I seem to have committed to memory the full lyrics of very few songs. I know about a dozen Christmas carols, but you obviously can’t sing those year round. I also know the standard patriotic anthems (Star Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful), college fight songs (Aggie War Hymn) and an assortment of Mother Goose tunes. But after that it gets to be slim pickings. I know the full lyrics to Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues” and The Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon,” but after that I have just bits and pieces of song fragments in my head. At first you can get away with singing just what you know and then faking the rest, but after awhile the kid starts to catch on and corrects you when you don’t sing it the same way from one night to the next.
So I was thrilled when my inlaws bought me a book a while back with the lyrics to more than 100 classic American folk tunes. I was able to bone up on a number of songs from that collection adding “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “Camptown Races,” “Home On the Range,” “Blue Tail Fly (Jimmy Crack Corn)” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and a number of others to my staple. But I’m still looking for more and recently I began trying to learn some of the Disney classics. When I was little I had the soundtrack to Walt Disney’s “Dumbo” and I recently took that record and transferred it to CD. “Pink Elephants on Parade” and “When I See an Elephant Fly” are both favorites now after my son listened to the record a number of times, but he also began requesting the stork song - “Look Our For Mr. Stork.” So I set out to find the full lyrics recently on the Internet and to my surprise found that they were not available — at least not in English. I did find the lyrics in Japanese. Fortunately, the new Dumbo DVD which I recently purchased has the lyrics transcribed in a special music extra feature, so I copied it down and now for the first time presumably I will make them available on the Internet:

Look Out For Mr. Stork from Disney’s Dumbo (1941)

Look out for Mr. Stork
That persevering chap
To come along and drop
A bundle in your lap
You may be poor or rich
It doesn’t matter which
Millionaires, they get theirs
Like the butcher and the baker
So look out for Mr. Stork
And let me tell you friend
Don’t try to get away
He’ll find you in the end
He’ll spot you out in China
Or he’ll fly to County Cork
So You’d better look out for Mr. Stork.

Express-News unbalanced

I’ve touched on this topic before but now I’m going to take a more comprehensive look at the editorial “balance” on the pages of the San Antonio Express-News.
Yesterday (March 26) we had the tag-team of George Will and Austin Bay, two nationally-syndicated hard-right columnists taking on locally-based and non-syndicated Kathy Clay-Little. Will’s topic was about how liberals are all hateful and mean while conservatives are saintly and proper. Bay, to his credit, had a non-partisan column about how Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe is a bad man and applauding recent efforts by neighboring countries to oppose him.
Clay-Little, typical of most local E-N columnists, was focused on a relatively uncontroversial local issue, that being efforts by the local community college to attract more African-American males into its student population.
On Tuesday, we had two more hard-right, nationally syndicated columnists teaming up against a lone, borderline liberal. First up was National Review editor Rich Lowry with yet another anti-Global Warming screed complete with a political cartoon mocking Al Gore. Then we had Mona Charen lauding Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson as the savior of far-right conservatives in 2008.
On the other side is Froma Harrop. Who? Yeah, that’s what I said. She is a syndicated columnist based in Rhode Island. She had a good column about illegal immigration that sympathizes with both the plight of illegal immigrants and the struggles of working-class Americans whose jobs they are taking while placing blame equally on Republicans and Democrats alike.
Do you see a pattern here? So far we have a 2-1 mismatch each day, and that is putting it lightly.
On Wednesday we will have locally-based hard-right columnist Jonathan Gurwitz squaring off against wishy-washy Boston-based Ellen Goodman who only writes a political column once in a blue moon. The rest of the time she is like a cross between Ann Landers and Erma Bombeck, writing about feel-good, non-controversial domestic issues. On Thursday, they will trot out New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd whose sharp tongue can sometimes skewer the right, but not consistently. For some reason, the E-N editors believe that only Northeastern women (Harrop, Goodman, Dowd) can speak for the left. They adamantly refused to run Molly Ivins’ columns while she was alive and did not acknowledge her untimely death to cancer earlier this year.
The one and only hardcore lefty in the lineup - Mansour El-Kikhia is considered highly controversial because of his ethnic background, his Muslim faith and his shrill rants against the Bush administration, which generally raise more hackles among readers than enlightenment. While I have no problem with El-Kikhia’s views being published once a week, I am disappointed that his is often the only voice on the left challenging the hard-right views of the current administration. And as if to provide a direct counter to El-Kikhia, the E-N recently ran out and signed up right-wing military analyst and former NBC talking head Ken Allard to do a regular column. We wouldn’t want people to think that the paper is too liberal, now would we?
Most of the local editorial columnists on the E-N staff — the above-mentioned Kathy Clay-Little, Maria Anglin, Gloria Padilla, Victor Landa, Paula Allen — stick to non-controversial, local issues in their columns. The same goes for editorial page editors Bruce Davidson and Robert Seltzer and Washington correspondent Gary Martin. I can’t remember the last time Davidson wrote a column that I thought was worth reading. Martin’s columns are just collections of news tidbits and updates, void of any actual opinion. Seltzer comes across as an aging liberal who is too timid to express his views very forcefully and tries to couch everything with humor. His latest column from last Sunday very boldly took on Donald Rumsfeld — six months after he left office — and compared him to the Slim Pickens character in “Dr. Strangelove.” Hardy-har-har!
The one bright spot on the editorial page is relatively new columnist Rebecca Chapa who seems to be slowly gaining more confidence about expressing her liberal views in her columns. Last week she actually came out against the War in Iraq — four years into the mess. Of course, if she gets too carried away, the E-N will just have to run out and hire a couple more right-wing scribes to maintain the proper (im)balance.
Next we come to the actual editorials that supposedly represent the consensus view of the paper. These have been consistently pro-Iraq war and pro-Republican over the past four years. The E-N has supported President Bush for election each time and seems to have an unwritten policy of endorsing incumbents and/or Republicans in every race.
They will occassionally take a liberal position on a piece of legislation or a particular social policy, but this is then undercut by their endorsements of politicians who oppose those views come election time. Whether or not they actually see and recognize this inconsistency is a mystery to me.

Taking the Fifth

This can't be good news for the Bush administration.

The senior counselor to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will refuse to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the unfolding U.S. attorneys scandal, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, her attorneys said today.
Monica M. Goodling -- who is on an indefinite leave of absence from Gonzales's office -- also alleges in a sworn declaration that a "senior Department of Justice official" has admitted he was "not entirely candid" in his Senate testimony and has blamed Goodling and others for not fully briefing him.

How can the U.S. Congress fullfil its oversight responsibilities for the Justice Department if senior members of the Attorney General's staff refuse to testify before the Judiciary Committee? This is outrageous and not just a little problematic for the White House.
The Bush apologists have been claiming that this is all partisan politics and insisting that no crime was committed. If that is true, why would someone Plead the Fifth? What kind of incriminating things were going on at the Justice Department? Maybe it is time to appoint a special prosecutor for this case.

Why do conservatives hate America?

OK, well, not ALL conservatives. But certainly most of the ones who claim to be conservatives today.
But, you say, we thought conservatives were all super-patriots who love their country with every fiber of their being!
You see, it is not their country that they love, it's the symbolism. They love the flag. They love the Star Spangled Banner and the Pledge of Allegiance. They love anything that is Red, White and Blue and songs like "God Bless the USA."
But they hate our government. They hate our Constitution and the Bill of Rights (except for the 2nd Amendment). They despise our social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. They are always running down our public schools, our health care system, our Postal Service, our national media, and so forth. They can't stand most of the people in this country. They always seem to be angry about something. They always have a group of people that they blame for every problem - liberals, minorities, poor people, gays, environmentalists, and so on.
If you listen to conservatives today, the U.S. has the "Can't Do" spirit. We can't educate our kids right, we can't run a postal system properly, we screw up anything we try to do unless it's bombing foreign countries that have annoyed us in some way.
Conservaties today have no faith in the American people to do anything right. The only thing they really trust is the almighty dollar. They believe that big, greedy corporations are the only things that can do anything right, and when they don't they just blame the government for interfering. Or they blame the liberal media for calling it to their attention in the first place.

Unprepared and incompetent

Accountability is hell for this worst-of-all administrations.

The U.S. government was unprepared for the extensive nation-building required after it invaded Iraq, and at each juncture where it could have adjusted its efforts, it failed even to understand the problems it faced, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

In a stinging, wide-ranging assessment of U.S. reconstruction efforts, Stuart W. Bowen Jr. said that in the days after the invasion, the Defense Department had no strategy for restoring either government institutions or infrastructure. And in the years since, other agencies joined the effort without an overall plan and without a structure in place to organize and execute a task of such magnitude.

Purge scandal

The thing that is most striking about this U.S. Attorney Purge scandal is how it had nothing to do with “Democratic attacks” or “liberal media hype” as many conservatives are wont to allege. Instead, it was essentially a case of Republicans shooting themselves in the foot in their feverish rush to take partisan advantage of a juicy little nugget that had been slipped into the Patriot Act.
No president had ever before had the unrestricted power to appoint U.S. Attorneys without having to worry about making sure they will pass muster with the Senate. So in an excercise that has now come back to bite them in the ass, the Bush Justice Department set out to rank all 93 Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys based on their loyalty and fealty to the Bush administration. Those who had shown too much independence by pursuing corruption investigations of Republicans or who failed to use their office to hound and harass local Democrats in their districts were marked for eventual ouster.
This presented immediate problems because they knew it wouldn’t look good if they cam right out and said they were firing the attorneys for political reasons. So they tried to claim it was for performance reasons only to have the affected attorneys object because of the stain that would place on their careers. Most weren’t willing to take that kind of a fall for the administration and they fought back. Democrats only got involved after the fight spilled over to a larger audience. Now the whole thing has erupted into a major scandal with Bush threatening to ignore Congressional supoenas for his top aides and a mysterious 18-day gap appearing in the flood of e-mails that the Justice Department was forced to turn over.
In the meantime, Alberto Gone-zales is toast just waiting to be cut loose once his replacement is found. Bush’s assurances that the attorney general has his full support reminds me of how the President lied when he said Donald Rumsfeld would remain his Secretary of Defense at the same time that they were flying Robert Gates to D.C. to be sworn in.

Four years and counting...

Some folks inherit
star spangled eyes,
Ooh, they send you down to war.
And when you ask them,
"How much should we give?"
They only answer "More! More! More!"

Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival

We are asking our soldiers to fight and fight and fight in a “war” that has no end. The Bush administration never had a clear objective in mind beyond toppling Saddam Hussein and securing the Iraqi oil fields. Now they don’t know how to get us out of this quagmire and they are not sure that they want to.
There are some obvious political benefits for a Republican administration during wartime. They have an open checkbook for as much military spending as their hearts’ desire and they have a built-in excuse to ignore domestic issues like healthcare and the environment. The war also helps to overshadow and cover up a stagnant and flagging economy weighed down by the massive deficits that are being piled up due to the administration’s fiscal irresponsibility (i.e. cutting taxes when the funds are needed elsewhere).
The war helped cover up the many faults and weaknesses of the Bush presidency during the first term and helped him to squeak by for a second term.
But the 2006 midterms showed that the public’s patience is finally spent. Bush’s anemic approval ratings are dragging down his party and threatening to undermine Republican electoral hopes in 2008. Yet, for some reason Bush and company cannot bring themselves to admit error or to change course in any way in Iraq. When public sentiment clearly demanded an orderly withdrawal, Bush pressed ahead with a surge of more troops. And as before, there is no plan to ever allow the “surge” to recede. Bush will continue to demand “More! More! More!” from our soldiers until he is finally out of office. His legacy to our nation will be a thoroughly spent and exhausted military operation in the midst of a festering crisis.

Rightwing Hypocricy

I wanted to pull my hair out after reading Cal Thomas’ op-ed in the Express-News the other day. Thomas (no relation, thank God) is an insufferable high priest of the religous right and is always scolding Democrats and liberals for being tolerant of immorality.

Here he is talking about the Clinton impeachment mess back in 1998:

Democrats are in danger of becoming known as the party of adultery, kinky sex and moral relativity. Instead of cutting their losses and rebuilding their party on a foundation of integrity, Democrats risk going down with the ship and suffering titanic losses because of a debauched captain. It may take them a generation to recoup.

Now fastforward to 2007 and we see Thomas addressing the possibility that Republican evangelicals may throw their support behind serial adulterers like Rudy Guiliani and Newt Gingrich.

That substantial numbers of conservative evangelical voters are even considering these candidates as presidential prospects is a sign of their political maturation and of their more pragmatic view of what can be expected from politics and politicians. It is also evidence that many of them are awakening to at least two other realities -- (1) they are not electing a church deacon; and (2) government has limited power to rebuild a crumbling social construct.

So when Democrats were willing to support President Clinton in spite of his adultery in 1998, we were the “Party of Adultery” and were sure to suffer “titanic losses because of a debauched captain.”
But when Republicans are preparing to support their own debauched captain just a few years later, it is a “sign of their political maturation.”

The depth of the far right’s hypocricy is just mind-boggling.

Let’s Not Impeach the President

Some of my friends are adamant that we should impeach President Bush for a multitude of reasons. While I am sympathetic to most if not all of their reasoning for this from an emotional standpoint, I have to object on the simple grounds of practicality.
Right now, President Bush is extremely unpopular across the country with approval ratings stuck in the low-30s. The NYTimes just had a story the other day about the disarray in the Republican Party over this dilemma and what it will likely mean for their 2008 presidetial hopes (not good).
So, just as a matter of practicality, why would Democrats want to impeach Bush and have him replaced by someone who would come in with a clean slate (assuming we don’t end up with Cheney which would be even worse) and the chance to rebuild GOP fortunes in time for the 2008 election? Why would we want to remove this albatross from around their neck?

There was a Senate election a number of years ago, and I can’t recall which one offhand, but the Republican frontrunner was suddenly hit with a sex scandal in the midst of the campaign and his numbers fell dramatically. Suddenly, the Democrats had a great shot at a seat where they otherwise would have been uncompetitive. But then the worst possible thing happened. The Republican candidate quit. The next thing you knew he was replaced with some no-name guy who didn’t have all the negative baggage. The Democrats faltered and the GOP held onto the seat. Needless to say, I was very disappointed.
If someone can make the case that having Bush remain in office for the remainder of his term is so detrimental to the country - even after being neutered by the Democratic takeover of Congress - that it is worth the risk of losing the 2008 presidential election, then I’d like to hear it.

If we were to go forward with an impeachment campaign it would have the immediate effect of polarizing the country and this could only bolster Bush’s support by making him a more sympathetic figure. It would take the attention away from the things Democrats need to be concentrating on and make them seem no better than the Republicans who impeached Clinton. And furthermore, it would probably have the same end result - i.e. a hard-fought conviction in the House followed by an acquittal from the closely divided Senate where the Republicans would remain in lockstep and a few Liebermanesque Democrats would cross over to be the deciding votes.

Confessions

This is getting a bit ridiculous. Now we are supposed to believe that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is responsible for personally beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in addition to plotting every single terrorist plot carried out or concieved during the past dozen years?

Perhaps this snarky post at Eschaton is not so far off afterall.

Now if we can just get him to confess that Osama bin Laden is really just his alter-ego - and show us the Osama Halloween mask he has been using all these years - then we can declare victory in the War on Terror and send everyone home.

Alberto Gonzalez won't resign

I'm embarrassed that Alberto Gonzalez is from Texas!
What a huge disappoint he has been as attorney general. And I thought that John Ashcroft was bad!
Gonzalez has been the ultimate toady for this administration and now it turns out that he can't even do that without screwing things up.

Halliburton abandons U.S.

Halliburton, the oil conglomerate once run by Dick Cheney, is moving its headquarters from Houston to Dubai.
Inquiring minds would like to know if this has something to do with dodging taxes and/or subpoenas.
Fortunately, Congressman Henry Waxman is on top of things. As is Sen. Patrick Leahy and congressional hearings will soon follow.
If the law is such that a company like Halliburton can actually avoid taxes by moving its headquarters out of the U.S. and relocating to a foreign country, that is one outrage I hope this Democratic Congress will address. It is the corporate equivalent of burning the flag and spitting in our soldiers’ faces. Let’s see some legislation to address this and then let the Republicans filibuster it or Bush veto it. But put them on record defending this kind of corporate malfeasance.

Another Supreme Court outrage

When will the madness end??

Just days after former Vice President Al Gore received an Academy Award for his global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” the United States Supreme Court handed Mr. Gore a stunning reversal, stripping him of his Oscar and awarding it to President George W. Bush instead.

For Mr. Gore, who basked in the adulation of his Hollywood audience Sunday night, the high court’s decision to give his Oscar to President Bush was a cruel twist of fate, to say the least.
But in a 5-4 decision handed down Tuesday morning, the justices made it clear that they had taken the unprecedented step of stripping Mr. Gore of his Oscar because President Bush deserved it more.

“It is true that Al Gore has done a lot of talking about global warming,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority. “But President Bush has actually helped create global warming.”

Heh!

A surprising rebuke

Did Michael Barone really say that?

Lawmaker's Intervention in Law Enforcement Crosses Line
The emerging scandal surrounding the dismissals of eight former U.S. attorney should signify to American voters the depth, breadth, and permeation of corruptio in the Bush administration
When a U.S. senator (to wit, Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican) feels free to call a prosecutor at home and hang up on him for resisting political pressure in the course of executing his prosecutorial duties, the line between politics and law enforcement has been so thoroughly violated that it no longer exists.
As was revealed in Tuesday's congressional hearings on the scandal, David Iglesias described the phone call from Domenici as follows:
"He wanted to know if the [indictments] would be filed before November. ... I gave an answer to the effect of I didn't think so. ... He said, "I'm very sorry to hear that," and the line went dead, the telephone line went dead. I thought to myself, did he just hang up on me? ... He didn't call back; I didn't call back. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that something bad had happened, and within six weeks I got a call from [senior Justice Department official] Mike Battle saying that it was time for me to move on."
Domenici would not have made that call had either a Democrat or a law-abiding Republican been in the White House. He would not have had the temerity to throw his weight around to such an outrageous extent.
What's going on in Washington is not sufficiently removed from the routine doings of a tawdry Third World dictatorship to give any American comfort.

When normally staid, conservative lumps like Barone start sounding this shrill, something must be up!

Update
It looks like Barone really didn't say that. Somebody hacked into his web site and planted the above post.
I should have known that it would be totally out of character for a "conservative without a conscience" like Barone to suddenly be bothered by anything a Republican administration would do. Next time I hear of a conservative like Barone making sense, I'll know better than to assume that it is true.

Rightwing meltdown

It hasn’t been a very good day for “conservatives,” that’s for sure.
It started with Iraq war cheerleaders touting how “the surge” has managed to stem violence in Baghdad, only to have the story literally blow up in their faces.
Then there was all the follow-up coverage on the Walter Reed hearings. The scandal is how our injured war veterans have had to pay the price for the Bush administration’s refusal to take responsibility for adequately funding their war of choice. If you want to know what it means to try and run a war on the cheap, without raising taxes, here it is in the starkest of terms.
Next, we have the first day of hearings in the fired federal prosecutors story that I mentioned yesterday with yet more revelations of Republican lawmakers trying to pressure attorneys for partisan political advantage.
And then, of course, there is the BIG news of the day with the guilty verdict handed down against V.P. Cheney’s chief of staff in the Valerie Plame CIA Leak scandal.
And as if this wasn’t bad enough, conservatives were left with the rank day-old smell of Ann Coulter’s juvenile antics at the CPAC convention which some are trying to excise through a petition.

That was then, this is now

Does everyone remember the huge deal that Republicans made in 1993 over the so-called Travelgate non-scandal?

The White House Travel Office is in the residential section of the White House, and as such, staffers serve strictly at the pleasure of the president. Historically, a change of administrations usually resulted in a brand new Travel Office staff. Despite the established presidential privilege of replacing staffers at will, Congressional Republicans alleged that friends of President Bill Clinton, including his cousin Catherine Cornelius, had engineered the firings in order to get the business for themselves.

But a three-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House turned up squat evidence of any wrongdoing and even rabid Clinton-hater Kenneth Starr came up dry on this subject during his desperate search for dirt to use against the Clintons.

Now we have what appears to be a very real abuse of power by the Republican Party and this administration in their mass firings of U.S. attorneys across the country. The latest news reveals that a Republican Senator and a Republican Congresswoman from New Mexico may have pressured the U.S. Attorney in their state to speed up an investigation involving a Democratic state senator in hopes of revealing an indictment before the November mid-term elections (which the Republican Congresswoman just barely won). The U.S. attorney resisted, sticking with his schedule to move ahead with the case that December, and shortly thereafter he was canned.

I would not expect hypocritical Republicans to bat an eye over this issue, but I should think that the rest of the country needs to sit up and take notice. Perhaps they will when these now-former U.S. attorneys appear before a House subcommittee next week to testify about their sudden dismissals.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

So Eric Alva, the first soldier to be injured in Iraq, - who also happens to be from San Antonio - now turns out to be gay. And he is speaking out against the military’s moronic “Dont Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

He is the same soldier who was invited to speak at the Texas Republican State Convention in 2004. The Republicans were delighted to have their photos taken with Alva back then and to glam off of his hardships. But I’m sure they will be avoiding him like the plague now.

The policy is indeed moronic, especially during a time when our military forces are stretched to the breaking point. Consider that we are forcing soliders to rush back to Iraq for second and third tours much more quickly than they would be scheduled otherwise. That we are taking all kinds of extreme measures to bulk up our military such as lowering standards for education and criminal records and at the same time this:

Since 1993, the Department of Defense has fired more than 11,000 service members under ìDonít Ask, Donít Tell.î On average, 2 -3 people are dismissed under the law every day. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) at least 800 of those had skills deemed ëmission-criticalí by DoD, including more than 300 linguists, of which at least 55 were proficient in Arabic.

That’s really sad. And yet the general public’s bigotry toward gay people persists unabated. Last night when one of the local TV networks ran a story about Alva they included a call-in poll question on whether gays should be allowed to serve in the military. 60 percent of respondents said no. Morons.

In the bubble

I thought this was particularly disturbing the other day.
If Laura Bush thinks there is just one bombing a day in Iraq, what does her husband think? Just how thick is that bubble they are living in anyway?

The 2008 Cakewalk

There was an amusing story in the New York Times the other day about how the supreme ayatollahs of the Christian Right are having trouble finding a presidential candidate to support in 2008.
They don’t like John McCain who once described them as “agents of intolerance.” Nor do they like the thrice-married adulterer Rudy Guiliani who is pro-choice and pro-gay rights. And they are not real happy with the Massachusettes liberal, I mean Republican, Mitt Romney either, despite his efforts to woo them.
Candidates whom they might like better such as Sen. Sam Brownback of Kan. and Rep. Duncan Hunter of Calif. don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning the nomination. So they are desperately looking for someone else to recruit into the race like South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (who would have no better chance than Brownback).
It is, I think, a hopeless cause. President Bush has thoroughly wrecked the Republicans’ chances of victory in ‘08 with his spectacular failure in Iraq, his doubling of the national debt, his incompetent bungling of the Hurricane Katrina response, and much more. It is no surprise that no one connected to the Bush administration is running for president in ‘08. Everyone knows that Cheney was never going to run, but if he had he would be toast right now as he is even more unpopular than Bush. Condoleezza Rice has probably shot her future White House chances in the foot and everyone else in the administration is too busy running for cover to consider running for higher office at this point.
The 2008 election is going to be the cakewalk for Democrats that Iraq was supposed to be for the U.S. Hilary, Obama, Edwards, Dodd - it doesn’t matter. We could nominate the proverbial Yellow Dog and win in a walk next year.
The thing that we need to be concerned about is what happens after that. The smarter Republicans have already thrown in the towel for ‘08 and are busily plotting to undermine and vilify whoever the Democratic winner is so that they will be a one-term president (i.e. Jimmy Carter) who will lay the foundation for a resurgent Republican who will have the favor of the Religious Right to triumph in 2012 (i.e. Ronald Reagan).
But I’m hopeful that we will have a repeat of a different history and that the Democratic nominee will be more like an FDR taking the reigns of government away from the failed Herbert Hoover of our time. But the battle over which of those scenarios will play out is already underway.

Al Gore gets his Oscar

I was glad to see "An Inconvenient Truth" win the Oscar for Best Documentary film last night. The groundswell of support for the film also gave Melissa Ethridge the Oscar for Best Song (However, I think Beyonce gave the best performance of a song during the Oscar ceremony).
Al Gore conducted himself well. He let the director take most of the credit for the film and then was short and concise when given the microphone himself. I thought the routine he did earlier with Leo DiCaprio was hilarious. After Leo prods Gore to make a "big announcement," Gore finally pulls out a speech that sounds like he is announcing his candidacy for president only to be drowned out by the music because his time ran out.

I thought it was interesting that just after Will Ferrell and Jack Black did a funny sketch about how comedians are never nominated for an Oscar, Eddie Murphy (who won the Golden Globe) is passed over for the Best Supporting Oscar.
It was a good night for Martin Scorsese who finally got his directing Oscar as well as Best Picture for The Departed. But Pixar's Cars definitely got robbed in the Animated Film category by the penguin movie Happy Feet.
The one other film I've actually seen this year - Pirates of the Carribbean 2 - won for Best Visual Effects.

I thought Forest Whitaker, who won for Best Actor, gave the best acceptance speech of the night. I was pulling for Leo. I think him and Tom Cruise are two of the best actors out there who still haven't won an Oscar.
I also thought Ellen DeGeneres did a pretty decent job as the Oscar Host. She wasn't gut-bustingly funny, but she wasn't irritating either. She was a comforting presense throughout the night. I did like when she tried to end the show on time only to be scolded by the producers for leaving out the most important awards categories.

The awards were distributed pretty evenly which is always nice to see. None of the top films went away empty handed. Unlike last year, I actually want to see the Oscar winner this time as well as several others like The Queen.