A liberal blogger

It looks like my post the other day ilicited a reaction from my old friends at ATC.

In related news, ATC read Mark Harden points out this statement from a liberal blogger:
The Iraq war was a disaster and no matter what happens from this point forward that fact will not change.
The Left is so open-minded. 
So, by this theory, if no one dies in Iraq tomorrow, that'll be a disaster?  Nice.

That’s funny. Bill is still so upset with me that he won’t even refer to me by name anymore. I’m just “a liberal blogger” now.

Here is Mark’s comment:

Here is a good example of the "stick my fingers in my ears, nyah nyah nyah, I cannot hear about good things happening in Iraq!" psychological denial from the left:

The Iraq war was a disaster and no matter what happens from this point forward that fact will not change. We’ve already spent too much in blood and tax dollars for even the rosiest outcome to compensate. No matter what happens at this point, it was NOT worth it.

"No matter WHAT happens..." Now, there is an "open mind" for ya...

Posted by: Mark Harden | November 14, 2007 at 02:11 PM

To correct their misunderstanding of my post, I did not say that it would be a disaster tomorrow if no one dies. I said the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a disaster period. And there is no good news that can come out of Iraq at this point that can change that reality for most Americans.
It would be great if the Sunnis and the Shia would all join hands tommorrow and sing “Kumbaya”, but even if they did it would mean little to the average American and would not justify Bush’s decision to sacrifice the lives of thousands of U.S. servicemen and blow through nearly $1 trillion in U.S. taxdollars.
The stakes for the U.S. fell to nothing once it was demonstrated beyond any doubt that Iraq did not pose any kind of threat to the U.S. or event to its neighbors.
The sad thing is that many people saw before the invasion that there was no threat, but the Bush administration was intent on going to war at all costs. Well, now we are finally starting to get a clear picture of those costs and most Americans don’t like it. That is why Bush and the Republicans in Congress have less than a 30 percent approval rating today.

More Bush Budget Bluster

President Bush has issued the 5th veto of his presidency just days after having his 4th veto overridden by Congress.

Bush rejected a $606 billion bill to fund education, health and labor programs, complaining that it is too expensive and is larded with pork.

Wow! $606 billion! That’s a lot of money. Those porkers! But wait! How big a difference is there between this bill and the amount that Bush wants to spend?

He said that the bill spends nearly $10 billion more than his proposed budget

Nearly $10 billion?!? Bush is vetoing this bill and posing as a fiscal conservative for less than $10 billion? That’s chickenfeed compared to the amount that Bush wants to spend in Iraq!

Why $10 billion is so small that the Bush team can’t even keep track of it over in Iraq. That’s about the same amount that they lost track of last year. I guess Bush is going to make up for the money they lost track of in Iraq by chopping it out of domestic spending bills back home. Thanks, Mr. President! You’re incompentent and we suffer for it!

Oh, and then there is this...

At the same time, Bush signed a $459 billion annual Defense Department spending bill that increases the Pentagon's budget 9.5 percent to fund operations other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A 10 percent increase (nearly $5 billion) on military spending NOT RELATED to Iraq and Afghanistan. And that is not counting the $200 billion we are spending in Iraq this year alone! So who is spending money like a teenager with his parents’ credit card?

The education-health bill he rejected included entitlement spending for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, as well as $150.7 billion in discretionary spending. Congress sought to restore $3.6 billion that Bush had cut from those discretionary programs in his proposed budget and add $6.2 billion on top of that, for a net 4.3 percent increase in spending. Among the additions was more money for Bush's own No Child Left Behind school-accountability program.

So Democrats are trying to add back in funds for Bush’s own education program and Bush is vetoing it.

Oh, and Bush is decrying the earmarks in the bill even though some of the biggest pieces of pork are sponsored by Republicans. I suppose if the Democrats wanted to be mean they could make up the $10 billion difference by stripping out all the earmarks sponsored by Republican lawmakers.

Billions and billions and billions...

Some interesting news today in the WaPo.
'Hidden Costs' Double Price Of Two Wars

The economic costs to the United States of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far total approximately $1.5 trillion, according to a new study by congressional Democrats that estimates the conflicts' "hidden costs"-- including higher oil prices, the expense of treating wounded veterans and interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars.

That amount is nearly double the $804 billion the White House has spent or requested to wage these wars through 2008, according to the Democratic staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee. Its report, titled "The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War," estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have thus far cost the average U.S. family of four more than $20,000.

Meanwhile, the wingnuts are flustered because more people aren’t acknowledging that the surge has been a success in light of the fewer number of deaths this past month in Iraq. Nevermind that there has still been little to no progress towards the kind of reconciliation necessary to establish any kind of long-term government solution for the debacle over there. I’m thrilled that there are fewer deaths, but since we should have been out of there several years ago anyway it is not something I’m going to celebrate as some kind of vindication of Bush’s policies.
The Iraq war was a disaster and no matter what happens from this point forward that fact will not change. We’ve already spent too much in blood and tax dollars for even the rosiest outcome to compensate. No matter what happens at this point, it was NOT worth it.

At this point, Iraq is like a money-losing salvage operation with the sole purpose of saving face for Bush and Republicans. To claim now that the Iraq invasion was a success would be like someone going out and using modern technology to raise the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean and then sailing it back to England and claiming the voyage was not a disaster after all.

The cultural divide

I see from Taegan Goddard's Political Wire that there is a new survey out purporting to show a measurable difference in the forms of entertainment preferred by self-described conservatives and liberals.
According to the survey, conservatives prefer Fox News while liberals like MSNBC and Comedy Central (The Daily Show, Colbert Report). No real surprise there.
But conservatives allegiance to Fox News also carries over to the Fox network despite its heavy reliance on profane, anti-authority shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy and MADtv. However, conservatives definitely do not want their MTV with 82 percent saying they never watch it. Of course, I don’t either since they stopped showing music videos.

The survey seems to bolster some stereotypes by noting that Liberals tend to like “cerebral material” such as documentaries, the arts, and educational programming as well as comedies and dramas. Conservatives, on the other hand, prefer action/adventure shows and sports programming. They also like game shows and reality shows that liberals tend to avoid.
On the music front, liberals like a broad range of genres including world, punk, Latin, hip-hop and rap, blues, reggae, electronica, R&B and soul, jazz, folk and traditional music. But Rock was still the most popular genre among liberals at 67 percent. Conservatives, meanwhile, seem to dislike most forms of music with the exception of country and gospel.
Overall, liberals seem to be more diverse in their tastes while conservatives seem to be most notable in what they won’t watch or listen to.
But I disagree with the sentiment expressed here that “you can safely bet that if conservatives like it, liberals hate it.” I certainly like action/adventure shows and sports as much as the next guy or gal. It’s just not the only thing I watch 24-7 like some seriously close-minded people.

Not so Random Notes

The Express-News has a regular feature on its Op-Ed section every Sunday called Random Notes that hasn't been so random since it was taken over by right-wing columnist Jonathan Gurwitz. And now even more so during the past few weeks when I've noticed that my good friend Bill Crawford is getting credited with contributing items for the section.
Perhaps I'm just overly sensitive, but it would appear now that most of the "random notes" are carefully chosen items meant to either laud President Bush and/or zing the Democrats/liberals.
But I also find it ironic that Bill, who writes the rightwing blog All Things Conservative would now be a regular contributor to the section when he has regularly bashed the E-N on a consistent basis. In fact, his blog used to be called Anti-Express News Blog and he still celebrates to this day anytime there is a story about newspaper circulation numbers going down.
Ironic, but not all that surprising considering the E-N's consistently pro-Republican editorial stances over time.

Numb to it all

I read about this in the WSJ this morning and was shocked dumbfounded apalled, OK I guess I’m just numb to it by now. Anyway, here it is:

The Committee had invited Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a former Guantanamo Bay prosecutor, to testify about his experiences. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Asked last week to appear before the panel, Col. Couch says he informed his superiors and that none had any objection.” But Counch’s appearance was blocked by Cheney-backed Pentagon counsel William Haynes:

Yesterday, however, [Couch] was advised by email that the Pentagon general counsel, William J. Haynes II, “has determined that as a sitting judge and former prosecutor, it is improper for you to testify about matters still pending in the military court system, and you are not to appear before the Committee to testify tomorrow.“

Haynes has been a forceful advocate and key architect for the administration’s harsh interrogation techniques. Couch’s potential testimony posed a serious danger to Haynes’ work.

$9 trillion debt

Wow! US debt tops $9 trillion for first time

Congratulations George “Worst President Ever” Bush and all the “fiscally conservative” Republicans out there. Heck uv a job!
I’m sure we will reach the $10 trillion mark before Bush leaves office the way we are gushing funds for the Iraq boondoggle.

I think President Bush has made our country worse off in just about every conceivable way during his tenure. Militarily we are weaker, with an Army that is overstretched and in desperate need of about two or three years downtime to recover. On the foreign affairs front, more people hate us today than ever before.

And now with the stock market plunging and the economy on the brink of yet another Bush recession, we are saddled with $9 trillion in public debt that will make it very hard to dig ourselves out of our current predicament.

Fortunately, the electorate seems to have finally regained its senses beginning in 2006 and has been pitching out Republicans and electing Democrats at every opportunity. Nevertheless, we will still have to suffer through another whole year of the Bush nightmare before we can begin to see very much relief.

Veto override

It looks like Bush will have a veto overriden for the first time.
Unfortunately, it is not for the SCHIP bill. Republicans can’t be bothered to fight for children’s health care. But a nice pork bill for their home districts?? No problem!
Actually, it was stupid and hypocritical that Bush chose to veto this $23 billion water infrastructure bill that had passed the House and Senate by overwhelming margins. Especially when at the same time he is demanding that we spend an additional $200 billion on the boondoggle in Iraq.
The veto override in the House wasn’t even close at 361-54 and unless the Republican’s in the Senate can be forced to bite the bullet this one is almost certain to be overriden later this week.
I imagine there will be more to follow provided that Bush continues to veto bills such as this one.

A sample of things to come

The Democratic tidal wave that began in 2006 has not slowed down if yesterday’s elections are any indication.
The very red state of Kentucky overwhelmingly elected a Democratic governor, while the very red state of Virginia gave Democrats control of the state Senate for the first time in 12 years. Democrats also held strong in state elections in New Jersey. The only bright spot for Republicans seems to be an upset victory in the Indianapolis mayors race and the re-election of Haley Barbour as governor of Mississippi.
In Texas, the constitutional amendment funding cancer research that had been opposed by wingnuts passed overwhelmingly, as did all of the amendments as I expected.

In other news, there was an odd scuffle in the U.S. House yesterday that I got to see in part on C-SPAN when far-left Rep. Dennis Kucinich brazenly put forward a resolution calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. The Democratic leadership attempted to table the measure only to have Republicans put the House through a long drawn out vote in which each GOP member took turns one at a time switching their vote from Yes to No so that the measure would remain alive. Apparently, they thought by doing so they could embarrass Democrats by forcing a debate on Cheney’s impeachment.
Well, I have news for the clearly out-of-touch GOP leadership. If that measure had been put up for a straight up or down vote by the people, it would have passed overwhelmingly. Cheney is a deeply unpopular figure today and I have no doubt that a majority of people would say “Sure, let’s impeach the SOB.” Fortunately, for him, it doesn’t work that way, and the Democratic leadersip did not want to waste more time on the matter so they had it sent to committee where it will be buried.

Bush passes Nixon

Good news for fans of former President Richard Nixon!
No longer will he bear the historical ignominy of being the most unpopular president of modern times. That ill distinction is now where it rightly belongs, with George W. Bush.
I think it is only right that the worst president ever should also have the distinction of being the most unpopular president. Nixon was pretty bad, but at least he did not combine his malfeasance with gross stupidity and boneheaded incompetence.

I agree with Robert Novak!

Robert Novak wrote a column today that I never expected to read... a glowing tribute to former President Jimmy Carter. At least with respect to his efforts to bring peace in the long-running struggle between Israel and the Palestinians.
It is partly a review of the new Jonathan Demme documentary “Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains.” But it also makes some stinging points about the current administration that I would not have expected to come from the pen of Mr. Novak. This line in particular stands out:

“...the former president's clarity on the Palestinian question contrasts sharply with George W. Bush's refusal to face reality...”

Bush’s “refusal to face reality” is the key to why his entire presidency has been an unending disaster. The refusal to face reality about WMDs (or lack thereof) in Iraq. The refusal to face reality about the war in Iraq. The refusal to face reality that his massive tax cuts for the rich have left us with an enormous deficit in a time of war. The refusal to face reality with respect to global warming and many other scientific issues that fail to mesh with his fundamentalist warped view of the world.

Novak goes on to make some very reality-based observations about the Israeli-Palestinian situation including this one:

”...Carter repeatedly and unequivocally states what Palestinian and Israeli peace advocates view as undeniable: to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace, with all its benefits for the world, Israel must end its illegal and oppressive occupation of the West Bank. That is a prerequisite that neither President Bush nor congressional leaders of both parties can approach for fear of being labeled anti-Israeli or even anti-Semitic (as Carter has been).”

Sour mood

47 million Americans lack health insurance, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute.

The number of Americans lacking health insurance rose by nearly 8.6 million to 47 million from 2000 to 2006, with children and workers from every income level losing coverage, a new report said on Thursday.
The increase was "driven primarily by the continued erosion in employer-provided health insurance," said the report by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.
In 2006, 2.3 million fewer Americans received health benefits from their employers than in 2000, the report said, noting the decline does not take the population increase into account.
Nearly 60 percent of the nation's children are covered by the insurance provided by their parents' employers, but 3.4 million fewer children had benefits in 2006 compared with 2000.
"Public health insurance is no longer offsetting these losses," said the report by the nonpartisan think-tank.

Is it any wonder that people are so unhappy today? Pretty much since Bush took office, the national mood has been in a downward spiral. Why? The war, for one. It was supposed to last six months. You know, a cake walk, rose petals thrown at our feet, etc. All bullshit.
The surplus that Clinton left us? The promise of finally starting to chip away at our national debt that has been spiraling out of countrol since the Reagan years? All gone. Instead, we are spending hundreds of billions every year on the Iraqi boondoggle while Republicans, at the same time, insist that we can’t afford comparatively tiny increases in domestic spending back home.
It does not compute. You can’t continue to support spending hundreds of billions in Iraq year after never-ending year, while telling us that we can’t afford to fix problems at home and expect the nation’s mood to do anything but bottom out.

Happy Halloween!

Life is a Rock

I had this song on a Ronco record collection when I was a kid and I nearly had the lyrics memorized (or at least what I thought were the lyrics). Now someone has put together a custom video for the song that is truly hilarious.

Fox in the hen house

Here is a story that spells out more clearly than any other I’ve read in a while what is really wrong with the Bush administration and the core of the Republican Party today:

The nation’s top official for consumer product safety has asked Congress in recent days to reject legislation intended to strengthen the agency, which polices thousands of consumer goods, from toys to tools.

On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.

Ms. Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistle-blowers and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.

The measure is an effort to buttress an agency that has been under siege because of a raft of tainted and dangerous products manufactured both domestically and abroad. In the last two months alone, more than 13 million toys have been recalled after tests indicated lead levels that sometimes reached almost 200 times the safety limit.

Ms. Nord’s opposition to important elements of the legislation is consistent with the broadly deregulatory approach of the Bush administration over the last seven years. In a variety of areas, from antitrust to trucking and worker safety, officials appointed by President Bush have sought to reduce the role of regulation and government in the marketplace.

Republicans are not interested in practicing good government. Their ideology precludes it, so rather than using the government to protect the interests of the people as it is supposed to do, they shut it down and attempt to undermine it at every point. Bush has filled our government with these kinds of ideological cronies such as Mrs. Nord who are looking out for the best interests of their former and probably future employers and not the interests of the people.
It is truly despicable.

Gurwitz hearts Rudy

Jonathan Gurwitz has a throwaway column today, which is fine and to be expected every once in awhile. He spends the better part of it quoting humorous comments from Stephen Colbert.
But he closes off the piece with a paen to his favorite presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. He is overly excited about the following quote, as if it offers some kind of refreshing directness and steadfastness not found in the statements of other candidates. Here is the quote:

"If I come out here and I take a poll and I try to figure out what you all believe, and then I just repeat to you what you all believe, then I'm a follower. I may be a good actor if I do it well, but I'm a follower.

"What you're entitled to from me is what I really believe, the sum total of my intellect, my experience, my education, my conscience, my heart, my mind. And then you have a right to agree with that, disagree with it, partially agree, partially disagree and then figure out if I'm the right person for you to support.

"But for me to twist myself all up to try to figure out exactly what you want to hear and today say one thing and the next day another thing and a year from now — if you do that too long, you lose the sense of what leadership is all about."

That’s fine and all, but he didn’t really say anything there, now did he? It’s not like he was clarifying or defending any of his social positions that conservatives might have concerns with. He just talked around them. But that somehow makes him less of a tailor and straddler, according to his fawning fan Mr. Gurwitz.

15 Laterals

I don't think the Marx Brothers could have come up with a game-ending play this crazy...

Modern Jacobinism

I nearly missed reading this op-ed in the Sunday NYTimes. It draws some rather sharp distinctions between the Bush/Cheney/Rove wing of the Republican Party today with the Jacobins who ruled France in the wake of the French Revolution.

The Jacobins shared a defining ideological feature. They divided the world between pro- and anti-Revolutionaries — the defenders of liberty versus its enemies. The French Revolution, as they understood it, was the great event that would determine whether liberty was to prevail on the planet or whether the world would fall back into tyranny and despotism.
The stakes could not be higher, and on these matters there could be no nuance or hesitation. One was either for the Revolution or for tyranny.
....
Confronted by a monarchical Europe united in opposition to revolutionary France — old Europe, they might have called it — the Jacobins rooted out domestic political dissent. It was the beginning of the period that would become infamous as the Terror.

Among the Jacobins’ greatest triumphs was their ability to appropriate the rhetoric of patriotism — Le Patriote Français was the title of Brissot’s newspaper — and to promote their political program through a tightly coordinated network of newspapers, political hacks, pamphleteers and political clubs.

Even the Jacobins’ dress distinguished “true patriots”: those who wore badges of patriotism like the liberty cap on their heads, or the cocarde tricolore (a red, white and blue rosette) on their hats or even on their lapels.

Insisting that their partisan views were identical to the national will, believing that only they could save France from apocalyptic destruction, Jacobins could not conceive of legitimate dissent. Political opponents were treasonous, stabbing France and the Revolution in the back.

To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches undertaken in 1792 — “domicilary visits,” they were called — were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin leader, “when the homeland is in danger.”
....
If the French Terror had a slogan, it was that attributed to the great orator Louis de Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.” Saint-Just’s pithy phrase (like President Bush’s variant, “We must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself”) could serve as the very antithesis of the Western liberal tradition.

On this principle, the Terror demonized its political opponents, imprisoned suspected enemies without trial and eventually sent thousands to the guillotine. All of these actions emerged from the Jacobin worldview that the enemies of liberty deserved no rights.

No End In Sight

I’d love to see this movie at some point.

E-N diverts blame for SCHIP failure

The San Antonio Express-News has another editorial out today that is a piece of work.
It trys to make the case that the blame for Congress’ failure to pass an SCHIP extension should fall equally on both Republicans and Democrats.
Nonsense.
Nearly 80 percent of Americans support this legislation that a small minority of rightwing Republicans have been blocking. Democrats have already made many compromises in the legislation resulting in thousands of children being excluded from the program because their parents make too much money or because they are LEGAL immigrants. How many more children does the Express-News want to see kicked off of the program before they will concede that the Democrats have compromised enough?
When you read the editorial, they spend 90 percent of it talking about how Republicans have failed to compromise. And yet the headline of the piece is “Both sides to blame for SCHIP gridlock”. What do they chide Democrats about? Not rescheduling the vote because a few Republican congressmen were going to miss it. Would rescheduling the vote have made any difference? Would these Republicans have come back and changed their votes if the Democrats had put it off longer? Not likely. It made no difference ultimately because they were still short the votes necessary to override Bush’s promised second veto. But this slim reed of criticism was good enough for the editorial board to lay blame equally on both sides. They have to be “fair and balanced” after all.
What is really going on here is that while the editorial board nominally supports SCHIP, they are at heart a partisan Republican outfit that endorses Republican candidates almost exclusively across the board. So they are trying to bend over backwards to shield Republicans from the public’s justifiable anger on this issue and divert it unfairly onto the other side.

Importance of Social Security

Via Kevin Drum, I found this informative article on Social Security that is worth a careful read:

Social Security has never been more important to more Americans than it is now. Private pension plans continue to dwindle -- currently covering only about 20 percent of private-sector employees -- and the national rate of savings hovers around zero. We just can't afford to cut Social Security benefits further. There's no way to make up for the loss.

Social Security benefits are vital to nearly all recipients. About a third of the elderly rely on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income; two-thirds count on it to supply at least half of their income. The program lifts 13 million elderly beneficiaries above poverty.

Without Social Security, 55 percent of the disabled -- and a million children -- would live in poverty. The program is particularly important to women and minorities. It provides 90 percent or more of the incomes of almost half of all unmarried women age 65 and older (including those who are widowed, are divorced or never married), and it is the sole source of income for 40 percent of elderly African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

Social Security is the nation's most effective anti-poverty program. But it's much more than that. For every worker it provides a solid base on which to try to build an adequate level of retirement income. To weaken that foundation would be grossly irresponsible.

Grossly irresponsible! That’s the Republican Party’s mantra these days. It’s George W.’s middle name. The radical right can’t tolerate effective government programs that do what they are supposed to do! It undermines their entire anti-government philosophy! That is why they want it privatized. Not that they think it will work better that way. They don’t really care one way or the other about that. They just can’t stand having it continue as a successful government program.

Amendment election

We have another Constitutional Amendment election coming up next week - Nov. 6.
I hate Constitutional Amendment elections. Most people are far too busy with their daily lives to take the time to study up on all these issues and make any kind of informed decisions. That is why we elect representatives to go to Austin in our stead. It’s their job to make these decisions for us. If we don’t like the decisions that they are making, then we pitch them out at the next election.
But this business of putting everything into an amendment and bringing it up for a statewide vote is ridiculous. The Texas Constitution needs to be chunked in the trash and written anew. The only problem is that I am scared to death of the kinds of people who would get in there and write the new Constitution. The chances of them making it worse than it is already is very high.
People like Cathie Adams of The Eagle Forum who made news today by coming out in opposition to a $3 billion bond proposal to support cancer research.

A well-known social conservative is urging Texans to oppose a $3 billion bond proposal for cancer research, warning the money could be used for controversial embryonic stem cell testing.
Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, cautioned fellow Republicans in an email this week that the borrowed money — $300 million annually over 10 years — might not stay in Texas and could be used for research on human embryos.

Good Lord! This nutcase puts more value onto a collection of leftover cells in a petri dish sitting in a fridge at a fertility clinic than she does in the hundreds of thousands of people suffering from cancer who could potentially be saved or have their lives prolonged by this funding. It’s disgusting.

And yet, thousands of people will now vote against this proposition because this woman told them to.

Rightwing anger

One thing I learned during my time as the house liberal at ATC, is that anger seems to be a defining characteristic of many rightwingers today. They are almost always angry about something and their list of things they dislike and/or hate is long and extensive: Liberals; Democrats; Hollywood; Illegal Immigrants; Muslims (i.e. Islamofacists); enviromentalists; gays; atheists; criminals, poor people, etc.
I guess the reason I’m not a rightwinger is I have a hard time building up that kind of anger and sustaining it for any length of time. Somedays I get up and find that I’m really not that angry at anyone (which can hamper my blogging).
But rightwingers don’t seem to have this kind of difficulty. Not only are they clear on who or what they hate, but they are consistent with it. They won’t watch a movie if it has an actor or actress that they don’t like (and there are lots of those). They won’t listen to music if the singer has expressed an opinion they disagree with (ditto). They won’t read newspapers or watch TV shows that have expressed opinions in the past that they disagree with. They won’t send their kids to schools where they think they might be taught by people with opinions contrary to their own. They won’t shop at stores or eat at restaurants where they have found reason to be offended or upset.
Eventually, they can become very isolated and before long all their news of the world is being funneled to them through a very select group of heavily filtered outlets - talk radio; right-wing blogs; Fox News; Ann Coulter books...
This, of course, makes it very difficult to have any kind of fulfilling discussion with them since they deem any news sources outside of their little sphere (i.e. the MSM) as false, blasphemous and suspect.
I thought at one time that I could establish a dialogue by reaching out and presenting the other side with a real flesh and blood person whom they could interact with rather than just dealing all the time with caricatures spoon fed to them by rightwing manipulators and propagandists. But I think what I underestimated was this need that many on the right have for being angry all the time. No matter how I argued any point, whether aggressively or conciliatory, they always came back the next day more angry than before. Eventually, the whole framework collapsed and I found myself pitched out on my rear and banished from the site - my comments deleted.
So while I still hold out hope that there can be dialogue and productive debate between the two sides, I’m a little more cynical about how quickly this can happen.
But there are also some who believe that this intransigence is more of a political ploy than a natural condition. Digby calls it the The Art of the Hissy Fit
and notes how it has become a pattern for rightwingers to shift debate in their favor by throwing wall-eyed hissy-fits over nonsensical and trivial matters. I saw it happen a number of times at ATC where someone would raise a stink about something and then insist that all liberals must jump through a series of hoops to be cleansed or else be condemned and defamed in a sort of ritual humiliation. The hypocricy of these exercises was rank, but pointing this out only increased the other side’s anger, thus coming full circle.

A baseball bet

I’m not one who normally gambles. In fact, I have a deep and personal dislike for certain types of gambling such as the state-run lotteries which I think are regressive forms of taxation that prey on the poor and the stupid.
Nevertheless, I recently made a wager with a friend over the outcome of the Baseball playoffs - winner buys lunch.
I figured that I had screwed up the bet because I picked the Yankees to go all the way and win the World Series, while my friend picked the Cleveland Indians. I even went so far as to concede the bet and offered to buy my friend lunch (an offer that has so far been ignored).
But now, looking back on our wager, I think I may have conceded too soon. While I blew my Yankees vs. Indians prediction, I correctly predicted that the Red Sox would beat the Angels in the first round of the playoffs. I also correctly picked the Diamondbacks to beat the Cubs in the first round of the National League playoffs, although I screwed up and picked the Phillies over the Rockies.
Meanwhile, my friend also picked the Red Sox in the American League first round, but he completely blew his National League predictions going with the Phillies and the Cubs. So by my estimation that comes to two correct picks each - a virtual tie.
We re-upped our predictions at the start of the second round of the playoffs and I went with the Red Sox and the Diamondbacks while he went with the Indians and the Rockies. So it looks like we are still tied. So since my initial concession has been rebuffed, I guess I will declare our wager a draw and leave it at that.

Hysteria on the right

Via Digby
I see that Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria is throwing cold water on the right-wing’s latest thrill fantasy about needing to launch a war with Iran.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Iran does pose some problems for us right now, but we really need to keep things in context and not allow neo-con whackjobs like Podhoretz to scare us into a frenzy. The fact that Podhoretz, who Glenn Greenwald rightly identifies as a psychopath, is now an advisor to the Giuliani campaign should tell us all we need to know about which direction he would take us.

Alleged terror financing case falls flat

The Bush Justice Departments big terror financing case just collapsed.

The U.S. Justice Department suffered a major setback in another high-profile terrorist prosecution Monday when its criminal case against five former officials of a now-defunct Islamic charity collapsed into a tangle of legal confusion.
U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish declared a mistrial, but not before it became clear that the government's landmark terrorism finance case -- and one of its most-costly post-9/11 prosecutions -- was in serious trouble.
His decision came after jury verdicts were read to a packed courtroom indicating that none of the defendants had been found guilty on any of the 200 combined counts against them. Jurors had acquitted defendants on some counts and were deadlocked on charges ranging from tax violations to providing material support for terrorists.
However, during routine polling of the jurors to determine that their votes were accurately reflected in the findings, two said they were not. When efforts to reconcile the surprise conflict failed, Fish declared the mistrial.
The case presented to a Texas jury of eight women and four men relied heavily on Israeli intelligence and involved disputed documents and electronic surveillance gathered by federal agents over a span of nearly 15 years. Fish's order ended a two-month trial and 19 days of jury deliberations over allegations that Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its former leaders provided financial aid to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
President Bush announced in December 2001 that the Texas-based charity's assets were being seized, and in a Rose Garden news conference accused the organization of financing terrorism. Monday's outcome, however, raised serious questions about those allegations as well.
"I think it is a huge defeat for the government," said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor specializing in 1st Amendment cases and terrorism prosecutions.
"They spent almost 15 years investigating this group, seized all their records and had extensive wiretapping and yet could not obtain a single conviction on charges of supporting a terrorist organization."
According to one juror interviewed Monday afternoon, the panel was evenly split on most of the disputed charges and not close to convicting anyone.
Juror William Neal, 33, who said his father worked in military intelligence, said that the government's case had "so many gaps" that he regarded the prosecution as "a waste of time."
It was unclear Monday whether the government would seek to retry all five defendants, but supporters viewed the outcome as vindication.
"My father was singled out for feeding, clothing and educating the children of Palestine," said Noor Elashi, the 21-year-old daughter of defendant Ghassan Elashi, Holy Land's former chairman. "I am the daughter of an American hero," she said.

This is a story that will be viewed differently depending on whether you are wearing right-tinted or left-tinted goggles. Rightwingers will see a travesty in which terrorists are being allowed to go free and they will blame the U.S. Justice system and claim that it just proves how we can’t fight terrorism in the courts.

Those on the left will also see a travesty, but one in which an innocent and peaceful charity organization was persecuted and villified by a reactionary Bush Justice Department desperately looking for a scapegoat’s scalp to hang on its belt.

Bush destroying conservatism

Gary Kamiya at Salon.com asks the very salient question What is up with conservatives these days? Are they just stoooopid or what?

The real question is: After seven years of George W. Bush, why would any genuine conservative still support his party?
Bush's presidency has made a shambles of real conservatism. Let's leave aside the issues on which liberals and conservatives can be expected to disagree, like his tax cuts for the rich, expansion of Medicare or his position on immigration, and focus solely on ones that should be above partisan rancor -- ones involving the Constitution and all-American values. On issue after Mom-and-apple-pie issue, from authorizing torture to approving illegal wiretapping to launching a self-destructive war, Bush has done incalculable damage to conservative principles -- far more, in fact, than any recent Democratic president. And he has been supported every step of the way by Republicans in Congress, who have voted in lockstep for his radical policies. None of the major Republican candidates running for office have repudiated any of Bush's policies. They simply promise to execute them better.

There is very little that is “conservative” about the Bush administration. They are most certainly not fiscally conservative with the way they have allowed the federal budget deficit to explode. They are most certainly not prudent or cautious in their handling of U.S. foreign policy. They have little to no respect for tradition or established principles.

As I’ve said many times before, they are not “conservatives”, they are right-wing radicals. They want to make radical changes to our governmental institutions that would have the primary effect of further enriching their small cadre of political supporters at the expense of everyone else in the nation.

A lot of old school conservatives like William F. Buckley abandoned Bush a long time ago. But the majority of self-described Republicans remain stubbornly in lockstep marching toward the cliff. Many will see their political fortunes go splat after the next election.

What a mess

It’s hard to believe that Mr. 25 percent Approval Rating expects us to cough up another $46 billion to finance his boondoggle in Iraq.

New reports out today confirm that the Bush administration is far too incompetent to keep track of the money it has recieved so far.

The U.S. State Department is unable to account for most of $1.2 billion in funding that it gave to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police, a government report said Tuesday.
"The bottom line is that State can't account for where it went," said Glenn D. Furbish, who was involved in putting together the 20-page report for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR).
The Department of State's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) "did not have the information needed to identify what DynCorp provided under the contract or how funds were spent," the report said.

And it’s not just this one contractor that’s the problem, according to the NYTimes:

A pair of new reports have delivered sharply critical judgments about the State Department’s performance in overseeing work done by the private companies that the government relies on increasingly in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out delicate security work and other missions.

A State Department review of its own security practices in Iraq assails the department for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA, according to people who have been briefed on the report. In addition to Blackwater, the State Department’s two other security contractors in Iraq are DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

At the same time, a government audit expected to be released Tuesday says that records documenting the work of DynCorp, the State Department’s largest contractor, are in such disarray that the department cannot say “specifically what it received” for most of the $1.2 billion it has paid the company since 2004 to train the police officers in Iraq.

But I’m afraid this is the best we can expect from a Republican administration today. They think their only job is to pass out government booty by the billions to their favorite private contractors and then don’t bother to follow up and make sure the funds are used properly. I’m sure they see that as unneccessary government intervention in business. But the result is that we are flushing our money down the drain in Iraq.
And unfortunately all of this is not new:

Corruption within the Iraqi government is costing the country billions of dollars, the US official monitoring reconstruction in Iraq has said.
Stuart Bowen told the BBC that Iraq was facing a second insurgency of corruption and mismanagement.
He said Iraqi government corruption could amount to $4bn (£2.1bn) a year, over 10% of the national income, with some money going to the insurgency.

And more here:

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 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.

U.S. officials have previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time that inspectors have found that projects officially declared successes - in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections - were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

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, about three-quarters of the generators 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.

Waste. Fraud. Corruption. And all of it being put on Uncle Sam’s credit card for our children and grandchildren to pay for someday. Thanks Republicans!
And they wonder why they are struggling in opinion polls these days. It must be that nasty liberal media.

Beginning To Wonder

Ann, another exile from ATC, has just set up her own blog.
She has decided to call it Beginning To Wonder which is similar sounding to my friend Robert's Beginner's Mind, but probably not based on the same Budhhist inspiration.
I will look forward to reading lots more of Ann's posts now that she has discovered this new outlet. ATC's loss is the rest of the blogosphere's gain!
Give 'em hell, Ann!

Pelosi unfairly attacked

Jonathan Gurwitz’ latest column in the Express-News is a partisan screed attacking Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi over matters of foreign policy.
Gurwitz begins with a trumped up accusation that Pelosi created a tempest during her visit to Syria last April:

Pelosi created an international tempest by claiming to bear a message for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, one stating his country was prepared to engage in peace talks with its longtime enemy without preconditions. That would have marked a significant departure from six decades of Israeli practice.
Olmert did not make such a departure, which forced the Israeli Foreign Ministry to issue a clarification that contradicted Pelosi's supposed communiqué.

First, we don’t know what was actually said between Pelosi and Olmert. After her meeting with Assad, all Pelosi said was that Israel was ready to negotiate for peace. She did not elaborate further and has not since. She did not say there were no preconditions or any other such nonsense that would have been a “significant departure” from Israeli policy.
Furthermore, Olmert’s “clarification” afterward did not contradict Pelosi, as Gurwitz implies, but simply reaffirmed these preconditions.
I personally think that Olmert’s “clarification” was brought on at the urging of the Bush administration which was looking for any excuse to undermine Pelosi for partisan political reasons.

Pelosi had, in fact, brought up quite a few of these “preconditions” with Assad during her meeting, accroding to the NYTimes.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her delegation said they had frank words with President Bashar al-Assad and other senior Syrian officials here on Wednesday, pressing the president over Syria’s support for militant groups and insisting that his government block militants seeking to cross into Iraq and join insurgents there.
Delegation members said that they sought to persuade Mr. Assad to distance himself from Iran, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

So the only real tempest that came from the meeting was that which was drummed up by the rightwing noise machine that had been desperately attacking Pelosi over the Syria trip from the moment it was announced.

That also calls into doubt Gurwitz’ next accusation that Pelosi “glossed over Assad's totalitarian tendencies and his regime's routine violation of human rights.”
That is a highly unfair and partisan charge that is unsupported by the reporting at the time of the meeting.

The rest of the column tries to lay the blame for the timing of the Armenian genocide resolution on Pelosi. The resolution, which Gurwitz admits has merit and should be approved, has come up time and time again only to be knocked down for fear that it would strain relations with Turkey. Apparently, there is never a good enough time to do the right thing in this case. It has once again been set aside due to foreign policy concerns. We are now even more indebted to the Turks than we have been in years past thanks to Bush’s blundering in the Middle East.

Poisoned discourse, Part II

Well, I didn't learn my lesson the first time and I went back to commenting over at All Things Conservative. That was clearly a mistake. The atmosphere for political discourse is at the lowest level I have ever seen it. It is sad, but I must consider the efforts to make ATC into a forum for a right/left dialogue to be a failure.
Bill Crawford made it clear today what he thinks about the situation.

The debate in this country is too partisan, and the blame for this lies squarely on the doorstep of Liberals.

When I tried to respond to the above linked post, my comment was deleted.
Since Bill feels that my comments at his site are abusive and disrespectful towards him, I will refrain from making them. I want to apologize for any percieved disrespect or discourteousness on my part.
And my other one-time friend at ATC, Mark Harden, should be pleased by my self-imposed exile from the site since he has been campaigning for my banishment for the past several months.
What I don't understand is why now? We've had this discourse going for more than four years. Why has it deteriorated to this level now?
Digby has some timely thoughts on that question which I think are instructive.

I don't know if you have noticed, but something truly ugly seems to be bubbling up from the primordial ooze of the conservative movement...
Clearly, people on the right are very, very angry right now and they are lashing out at their most hated enemies: Americans who disagree with them.

What I think we are seeing is the result of pent-up frustrations over the war in Iraq which has not gone as they expected and the realization that Hillary Clinton is likely to be our next president along with a veto-proof majority in Congress.
But whatever the reason, it has become practically impossible to carry on any kind of politcal discussion between right and left that does not quickly deteriorate into namecalling and hurt feelings.

But at least one good thing may come out of all this. The one other liberal commenter at ATC, Ann, is using this most recent blowup as the impetus to start her own blog. I will link to it as soon as she gets it up and running.

13 votes short

154 Republicans and two Democrats voted to uphold Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). That was just 13 short of the two-thirds majority needed to override.
Republicans should pay a heavy price at the polls for this outrage. At a minimum, Democrats need to extract 13 seats from Republicans in the 2008 elections, perhaps more.
Bush has used his veto power exactly four times during his two terms in office: twice to derail legislation in support of stem cell research; once to make sure our troops stay mired in the Iraqi muck for all eternity; and now to shoot down a bill extending health insurance to 10 million children who currently have none.
Now Democrats are planning to introduce legislation that will have a few meaningless alterations, but will essentially cover the same number of kids. It is expected that Republicans will cave at that point and allow it to pass. But as far as the electorate is concerned, the damage is already done.
This was a monumentally stupid thing for our president to do to his own party.

Rats and sinking ships

Republicans are fleeing Congress by the truckload. Everyday seems to bring news of a new Republican retirement and it is just adding to the electoral woes of the party.
Some members, like former Speaker Denny Hastert can’t even wait until the end of their current term to bailout. Good riddance.

Here is the latest list of retirements:

Republicans

Senate
Wayne Allard, 63, Colo.
Larry E. Craig, 62, Idaho
Pete V. Domenici, 75, N.M.
Chuck Hagel, 61, Neb.
John W. Warner, 80, Va.
(Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas*)
* Hutchison is not up for re-election until 2012, but she may step down in 2009 to run for Texas governor.

House
Terry Everett, 70, Ala.
J. Dennis Hastert, 65, Ill.
David L. Hobson, 70, Ohio
Duncan Hunter, 59, Alpine
Ray LaHood, 61, Ill.
Charles W. "Chip" Pickering, 44, Miss.
Deborah Pryce, 56, Ohio
Jim Ramstad, 61, Minn.
Ralph Regula, 82, Ohio
Rick Renzi, 49, Ariz.
Jerry Weller, 50, Ill.
Heather A. Wilson, 46, N.M.

Democrats

Senate
None leaving

House
Tom Allen, 62, Maine
Mark Udall, 57, Colo.

The two Democrats leaving the House are running for Senate seats in their respective states.

Military duress

While rightwingers continue to delude themselves about the toll the Iraq war is having on our military, the evidence that it has been detrimental keeps piling up.

In order to achieve our recruiting and retention goals we have resorted to offering extravagent bonuses:

There are new signs that an American military in distress is reshaping itself to cope with the destructive fallout of Iraq — and to look beyond it, even as President Bush insists on dispatching Americans to go on fighting and dying there. Young officers have been offered big cash bonuses to stay in an Army struggling to retain them. The Marines, meanwhile, are trying to move out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, a more popular mission where they could focus on America’s real enemies — al Qaeda and its allies, the Taliban — instead of trying to police a civil war.

The unprecedented bonuses — up to $35,000 — are a sign of desperation. Lengthy and repeated tours in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan have created critical shortages of younger officers in such important specialties as military intelligence, aviation — and even in the infantry as more and more men and women choose to leave the service rather than re-enlist. The Washington Post reported that when its expansion plans are factored in, the Army is projecting a shortage of 3,000 captains and majors annually through 2013.

And we have lowered our educational and moral standards for recruits:

The number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds has grown about 65 percent in the last three years, increasing to 8,129 in 2006 from 4,918 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.
During that time, the Army has employed a variety of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits. It has offered larger enlistment cash bonuses, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on its aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions.
It has also increased the number of so-called ''moral waivers'' to recruits with criminal pasts, even as the total number of recruits dropped slightly. The sharpest increase was in waivers for serious misdemeanors, which make up the bulk of all the Army's moral waivers. These include aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide.

In the meantime, our military capability is eroding, according to then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace.

Strained by the demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a significant risk that the U.S. military won't be able to quickly and fully respond to yet another crisis, according to a new report to Congress.
The assessment, done by the nation's top military officer, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, represents a worsening from a year ago, when that risk was rated as moderate.

And more recently, the Marine Corps commandant has expressed similar concerns:

Commandant Gen. James Conway said Monday he is concerned about the Marines Corps' ability to respond to security flare-ups around the world on short notice because of the demands put on it by the Iraq war.

But that would be OK if we really had to be in Iraq for the sake of our nation’s security. But is the Iraq war making us safer? Not according to The director of the National Counterterrorism Center:

The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the primary US organization responsible for analyzing terror threats, told NBC News that the nation is probably not "tactically" safer from the threat of terrorism following the invasion of Iraq.
Asked by reporter Richard Engel if the war in Iraq had created a "giant recruiting tool" for terrorists, Center head Scott Redd said that "in the short term, that is probably true. But the question is you've got to look at this, I believe, in the long term strategic view."
"Tactically, probably not," Redd said in response to a question about whether the US is generally safer after having invaded Iraq. "Strategically, we'll wait and see."

No joy in Muddville

It looks like I will owe someone lunch pretty soon. I made a friendly wager with a blogging buddy over the baseball playoffs and so far my picks haven’t panned out.
I put all my money on the Yankees to go back to the World Series this year only to see them get bounced out in the first round by the Cleveland Indians. And in the National League I was betting on the Arizona Diamondbacks who fell to the Colorado Rockies in Round 2.
The Yankees haven’t won a World Series since they benched Chuck Knoblach in 2001. I’ve referred to this in the past as The Knoblauch Curse.
I was betting that this might be the year that the Yankees would finally overcome that curse, but it was not to be. The team is little recognizable from the Yankee squad that won three consecutive World Series titles between 1998-2000. Only Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte remain. And I suppose you can count Roger Clemens who came in at the end of that era.
But the other big factor is Joe Torre, the manager, who has been at the helm since 1996, the first year the Yankees won the World Series during their most recent streak.
But now that Torre failed to guide the Yanks past the first round of the playoffs again there is much talk that Yankees owner George Steinbrenner will can him.
That would be an incredibly stupid move and guarantee that the Yankees would drop out of playoff contention for the forseeable future while they struggle to rebuild from the ground up.
Torre is currently the 8th winningest manager in Major League Baseball history with 2,067 victories for a .539 percent Win-Loss percentage. He has managed to get the Yankees to the playoffs every year since 1996 and made it to the World Series six times, winning four. That is an incredible managerial record any way to spin it.
Steinbrenner should take a lesson from history and look at a manager even higher up on the win list than Torre - Sparky Anderson, the skipper for the Cinncinnatti Reds during the hey-day of the Big Red Machine. Sparky led the Reds to four National League Championships in eight years and two World Series victories. But in 1978 the Reds management decided to shake things up and sent Sparky off to the struggling Detroit Tigers. It took a few years, but by 1984 Sparky was back in the World Series with a championship team while the Reds floundered during that period.
If the Yankees stick with Torre and continue to ride the wave he has been on they might pick up a few more pennants and World Series crowns before it is all over. But waves like that don’t come along everyday so they had best not jump off too soon.

A nightmare with no end

Gen. Ricardo Sanchez gave his assessment of the Iraq quagmire and didn't pull his punches:

In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top American commander called the Bush administration’s handling of the war incompetent and warned that the United States was “living a nightmare with no end in sight.”

In one of his first major public speeches since leaving the Army in late 2006, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez blamed the administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current “surge” strategy as a “desperate” move that will not achieve long-term stability.

“After more than fours years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” Mr. Sanchez said. “There was been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” he said, adding later in his remarks that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”

Al Gore: Nobel Laureate

Congratulations to the man who should be president.

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work to raise awareness about global warming.

Now let's just hope that the Supreme Court doesn't take his Nobel prize away and give it to George W. Bush.

Give ‘em hell, President Carter!

You’ve got to love the spunk of our former president and Nobel Laureate.

Carter: Cheney is a disaster for our country.

He’s a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world. […]

You know he’s been a disaster for our country. I think he’s been overly persuasive on President George Bush and quite often he’s prevailed. It was one of his main commitments to go into Iraq under false pretenses, and he still maintains those false pretenses are accurate.

Recently, I’ve been reading Ron Suskind’s excellent book “The One Percent Doctrine” which details how the so-called Cheney Doctrine has derailed our nation’s efforts to hunt down al-Qaeda as our military and intelligence assets were diverted toward pursuing the neo-con fantasy of war in Iraq.
Based on this book, I would have to say that President Carter is being overly kind and diplomatic in his assessment of the noxious Dick Cheney.

SCHIP defended

The Center for Public Policy Priorities makes the case for the bipartisan SCHIP legislation that Bush vetoed and details how the McConnell-Lott-Cornyn Alternative Hurts Texas.

More on the Rock Hall of Fame

It is inevitable that there will be lots of disagreements over who should and should not be in the Rock Hall of Fame. Just look at all the arguments every year about the Baseball Hall of Fame where you at least have some objective standards (stats) to go on. But unless you are looking strictly at album and record sales, the Rock HoF is almost entirely subjective.
When I look over the list of performers currently enshrined in the Rock Hall of Fame, I come across more than a dozen names of performers who I have never heard of and would have to google or wiki to find out who they are. That includes people like LaVerne Baker, Jimmy Reed, Clyde McPhatter, Lloyd Price, The Moonglows, The Flamingos, Solomon Burke, The Dells, Buddy Guy, Little Willie John and Gene Pitney.
That’s not to say that they don’t merit being in the Hall of Fame, just that if it were left up to me they probably would not have been included.
Then there are a few that I simply don’t like such as Patti Smith and the Sex Pistols. I’m not a big fan of punk music. But that’s just me. I’m not big on heavy metal and rap music either, although I have a better appreciation and higher tolerance level for those genres. Pretty soon, I imagine, the Rock HoF will start filling up with rap and hip-hop acts that I am only vaguely familiar with. It started last year with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and it is only a matter of time before we see Run DMC, LL Cool J and Dr. Dre take their turns at the induction podium.
In the meantime, it seems to me that a lot of really great rock performers have been left behind including some of my all-time favorites.
Here is a list of performers who I assume would be eligible - they have to have had a recording out at least 25 years ago - who have yet to be nominated for the HoF:

Boston
Cheap Trick
Heart
Rush
Foreigner
Deep Purple
KISS
Electric Light Orchestra
Bachman Turner Overdrive
REO Speedwagon
J. Geils Band
Peter Frampton
Alice Cooper
Steve Miller Band
KC and the Sunshine Band
Yes
Styx
Toto
Neil Diamond
Abba
Genesis
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Rick Springfield
The Faces
Los Lobos
Journey
Moody Blues
Billy Squier
Asia
Loverboy
Gordon Lightfoot
Daryl Hall and John Oates
The Go-Go’s
The Cars
Def Leppard

And here are a few that I think will or should be shoe-ins when their time comes:

Nirvana
Pearl Jam
Public Enemy
Nine Inch Nails
Metallica
INXS
Peter Gabriel
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Smashing Pumpkins
Guns N Roses
Rage Against the Machine
The Black Crowes
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Green Day
Beck
Stone Temple Pilots
White Stripes

Oops, They did it again

I can’t believe for the second year in a row the Express-News has published an editorial whining about the inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
It mirrors the editorial they did last year. In that editorial, they dissed Billy Joel and Van Halen as unworthy inductees to the Rock Hall of Fame. I responded here. This year they are disparaging John Mellencamp and Donna Summers among others.
If their point was to simply say that the Hall of Fame should be reserved for huge talents like Elvis Presley and The Beatles, that would be fine. But they shoot themselves in the foot when they venture to say who they would like to see in the Hall of Fame instead. Last year it was The Stooges and the Ronettes. This year they laud Kurt Cobain, Liz Phair and The White Stripes.
They are especially down on the Dave Clark Five, one of the British invasion bands of the early-to-mid ‘60s. To be honest, I didn’t know much about DCF either and would have dismissed them as unworthy as well. But when you look at their history you see that they were the second most popular British band next to the Beatles in the early years and had a huge following back then. They sold more than 100 million records and had 30 hit singles. Compare that to The Stooges, The Ronettes, Liz Phair and even the White Stripes (who I happen to like). I don’t think combined they come close to the popular success that the Dave Clark Five had.
Somebody on the E-N editorial board is obviously a music snob. What surprises me is that they would allow them to write these pieces every year and submit them as the consensus view of the entire editorial board.

Pow Mike!

This is one of my most prized keepsakes from my youth. An autographed picture of Burt Ward (aka Robin) that I got in 1974 in Kokomo, Indiana. Ward was making an appearance at a local auto dealership and my parents took me out to see him.
The Batman TV show had been canceled six years prior to my getting this autograph, but the show was still aired regularly in re-runs and would continue to be through much of my childhood.

Impeach Judge Sharon Keller

This is just sickening.

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judges were ready to work late the evening Michael Richard was executed.
They were expecting an 11th-hour appeal that — unbeknownst to them — Presiding Judge Sharon Keller refused to allow to be filed after 5 p.m.

Judge Keller was notified by one of the condemned man’s attorneys asking if they would accept the late appeal after the Supreme Court had ruled earlier in the day on lethal injections. Keller responded by shutting the doors promptly at 5 p.m. and the execution was carried out later that evening.
There is now a moratorium on executions in Texas until the Supreme Court deals with the lethal injection issue, but Judge Keller through her actions made sure to get one more killing in that should not have gone ahead.

I agree with these folks. Judge Keller should be impeached.

Another Udall in the Senate

It's great news about Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., planning to retire. That means another clear pickup opportunity for Democrats. U.S. Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., is now considered the frontrunner for the seat assuming that former Gov. and presidential candidate Bill Richardson doesn't throw his hat in the ring. Udall's cousin, Mark Udall, a congressman from Colorado, is already the frontrunner to replace retiring Republican Sen. Wayne Allard in that state.

Business rejecting Republican brand

More evidence of the Republican collapse in the Wall Street Journal the other day.

The Republican Party, known since the late 19th century as the party of business, is losing its lock on that title....

New evidence suggests a potentially historic shift in the Republican Party's identity -- what strategists call its "brand." The votes of many disgruntled fiscal conservatives and other lapsed Republicans are now up for grabs, which could alter U.S. politics in the 2008 elections and beyond....

Some well-known business leaders have openly changed allegiances. Morgan Stanley Chairman and Chief Executive John Mack, formerly a big Bush backer, now supports Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. John Canning Jr., chairman and chief executive of Madison Dearborn Partners, a large private-equity firm, now donates to Democrats after a lifetime as a Republican. Recently, he told one Democratic Party leader: "The Republican Party left me" -- a twist on a line Ronald Reagan and his followers used when they abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago to protest its '60s and '70s-era liberalism....

polling data confirm business support for Republicans is eroding. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in September, 37% of professionals and managers identify themselves as Republican or leaning Republican, down from 44% three years ago....

the number of Americans who share some classic Democratic concerns has risen. Three-quarters of the population is worried about growing income inequality, Pew found, while two-thirds favor government-funded health care for all. Support for a government safety net for the poor is at its highest level since 1987, Pew said.

"More striking," Pew concluded, was the change in party identification since 2002. Five years ago, the population was evenly divided -- 43% for each party. This year, Democrats had a 50% to 35% advantage.

Republicans are doomed

A new ABC/Washington Post poll has Bush’s approval rating at 33 percent. His lowest ever in that poll.
The poll also shows the public favoring Democrats on most issues foreign and domestic:

Most Americans oppose fully funding President Bush's $190 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a sizeable majority supports an expansion of a children's health insurance bill the president has promised to veto, putting Bush and many congressional Republicans on the wrong side of public opinion on upcoming foreign and domestic policy battles.

Congress has a pathetic 29 percent approval rating, but when they break it out by party affiliation Republican lawmakers are at 29 percent and Democratic lawmakers are at 38 percent.

And when the two parties are pitted directly against one another, the public broadly favors Democrats to handle Iraq, health care, the federal budget and the economy.

The reason Democratic lawmakers get low marks is because a majority of Americans think they haven’t done enough to end the war in Iraq.

Overall, 55 percent of Americans want congressional Democrats to do more to challenge the president's Iraq war policies, while only a third think the Democrats have already gone too far. The level of agitation for more action in opposition to the war has not dissipated since August 2005, when Democrats were the minority party in Congress.

I wouldn’t want to be a Republican running for election in 2008 if the war in Iraq is still going on.

Who is Sheldon Adelson?

The New York Times had a very interesting story over the weekend about the new rightwing political actiona group called Freedom's Watch.
Freedom’s Watch has been serving as the rightwing counter to MoveOn.org and its campaign against the Iraq War. The group recently launched a $15 million advertizing blitz to support the “surge” and also counterattacked MoveOn.org over the controversial Petraeus/Betray Us ad.
What I found most intersting, however, was the section talking about who is behind this new group:

Among the group’s founders are Sheldon G. Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, who ranks sixth on the Forbes Magazine list of the world’s billionaires; Mel Sembler, a shopping center magnate based in St. Petersburg, Fla., who served as the ambassador to Italy and Australia; John M. Templeton Jr., the conservative philanthropist from Bryn Mawr, Pa.; and Anthony H. Gioia, a former ambassador to Malta who heads an investment group based in Buffalo, N.Y. All four men are long-time prolific donors who have raised money on behalf of Republican and conservative causes.

Who is Sheldon Adelson? Only the third richest man in the U.S. and sixth richest in the world according to Forbes. His net worth is $28 billion, which is more than three times that of leftwing boogieman George Soros.
We have heard lots of sniping from the right about the millions of dollars that Soros has donated to liberal groups like MoveOn. So how come we don’t know anything about this guy Adelson who makes Soros look like a pauper?

The reason, I believe, is that billionaires who support Republicans are a dime a dozen and thus not interesting to our sensationalist media. However, a billionaire who supports Democrats is extremely rare and thus it’s your classic ‘man bites dog’ story that gets all the attention.
But it also leads rightwingers to falsely believe that they are somehow at a disadvantage when someone like Soros gives money to liberal causes. The truth is that Soros’ funding of leftist groups is drop in the bucket compared to the gusher of money that flows into rightwing coffers from the likes of Sheldon Adelson and Richard Mellon Scaife.

Cornyn’s dishonest op-ed

Sen. John Cornyn had a thoroughly dishonest and disgusting op-ed in the Express-News today.

In Texas, we pride ourselves on taking care of those in need. It's only natural that we take such a strong interest in the well-being of our children...

Yeah, right. Texas ranks 37th in the U.S. in children’s healthcare. That’s certainly something to be proud about.
He goes on to mouth a bunch of garbage about he thinks reauthorizing SCHIP is such a big priority. But then he claims that the bill that just passed overwhelmingly in the Senate would be “disasterous.” Why? Because, he claims, it increases funding “at the expense of quality service, ease of access and state control.”

Bullshit. Where does he get this? By making the bogus argument that having more children eligible for SCHIP funding would burden doctors and reduce access and care. So what is he saying? That it is better for these kids to go without care so that others will have easier access? No wonder Texas ranks near dead last in children’s healthcare with that attitude!

Next Cornyn complains that under the new legislation a $1 billion surplus in the SCHIP fund that Texas is sitting on would be redistributed. But why is Texas, near dead last in child healthcare, being so stingy with its SCHIP money?

As a result of this careful application and decreased spending due to the economic downturn of 2003, Texas has about $1 billion in surplus SCHIP money to help children receive coverage.

But it’s NOT helping children receive coverage if it is being held onto as surplus. And just because there was an economic downturn doesn’t mean there was a corresponding downturn in children’s healthcare needs!

Healthcare is a business. If we put more money into the SCHIP program, more doctors will pop up and extend their hands to accept that money. I guarantee it. But if we don’t spend the money, then naturally the supply of doctors will diminish.

Senate veto-proof’s SCHIP

The Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) with a 69-30 veto-proof majority.
But in order to get that many Republicans to cross over, Democrats had to water the bill down considerably and abandon efforts to expand the vital program even further to cover children of legal immigrants and some young adults who don’t have health coverage.
The Democrats managed to pitch enough children over the side to satisfy Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. But it wasn’t enough for Texas’ other Senator, John Cornyn.
Cornyn, I have to say, has really surprised me since taking office. I really thought he was more of a moderate, mainstream Republican when he was elected and assumed he would be an improvement over the noxious right-wing hardliner Phil Gramm. But I was obviously mistaken as Cornyn set out from day one to align himself with the far-right of the Republican Party. And now, even in an election year when he will likely be facing a strong challenge from Democrat Rick Noriega, a decorated Iraq War veteran, Cornyn is not doing anything to moderate his positions. In fact, he seems to be grasping even harder to the fringe wing of his party.
I truly hope that the coming Democratic tidal wave of 2008 will flow down here in Texas again (like it did in 2006) and wash this sorry excuse for a Senator out of this hallowed office.

Republicans are broke

They are out of ideas, out of time and out of money.

A crucial GOP fundraising committee is nearly broke, according to its latest monthly filing with the Federal Election Committee last week.
The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) reported $1.6 million in cash on hand and $4 million in debts as of Aug. 31. The group helps bankroll House campaigns for GOP candidates.
Its counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, reported $22.1 million, more than 10 times its Republican counterpart.... 
Senate Republicans are in a state of relative poverty, also. The National Republican Senatorial Campaign has just over $7 million on hand, according to the new filings. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has more than $20 million.

The thing about Republican financiers is that they don’t like to waste their money. They are not going to give money to the GOP out of the goodness of their hearts. They are betting the Republicans are going to lose big time in 2008 and they don’t want to waste their money in that futile effort. So they are cutting them off now, which is in effect a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Nevertheless, Democrats had better not count on coasting to victory from here on out. They will still need to give it everything they’ve got to make sure that it stays a blowout election.
The rest of the presidential campaign season will simply be time for people to become accustomed to the idea that Hillary Clinton will be our next president.

Where the money goes

The Express-News editorialized about the children’s health care bill that President Bush is threatening to veto.

The plan, being debated in the House and Senate this week, would boost the program's current $25 billion budget to $60 billion over the next five years.
President Bush recommends a $5 billion increase over five years and has said he will veto anything over that amount.

Got that? Democrats want to boost children’s health care by $35 billion, but Bush says he will veto any increase over $5 billion because we can’t afford it.

Why can’t we afford the additional $30 billion?

That’s obvious. Because we need to to fund the never-ending war in Iraq, of course.

The Defense Department is seeking an additional $42.3 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total request for 2008 to nearly $190 billion, according to prepared testimony Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is to present to Congress this afternoon.

I’m glad we got that all straightened out.

Economic consequences of anti-immigrant hysteria

Interesting story in the NYTimes today.
A lot of towns that succumbed to the anti-immigrant hysteria last year have apparently seen it come back and bite them in the ass.

A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.
Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.
The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.
With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.
Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.
So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.