Blast from the past

A friend of mine e-mailed me this picture the other day. I'm not sure where he got it, but a copy of it is in my high school yearbook. This is the Premont High School UIL champs for 1981. I'm the guy standing on the ladder. My buddy Rod Denton is the one hanging upside down on the goalpost. The other people on the goalpost from left to right are Johnny Chapman, Adriana Garcia and Ronnie Lozano. The two guys laying down at the bottom of the picture are John Pease on the left and Bruce Buterbaugh on the right. Together we made up the group improvisation team known as The Monkees (All except for Adriana, that is). We got the nickname Monkees from the high school principal because we were always goofing off, kind of like we were doing in this photo.
The guy who sent me this photo is Michael Guerra. He is the one kneeling in the first row, third from the left. Michael is an attorney who lives and works in Falfurrias. He is also a former mayor of Falfurrias. Another good friend of mine in this picture, and a fellow Aggie, is Jose Johnson who is standing third from the left in the back row. Jose is an IT specialist with the South Texas Medical System in Harlingen.
Ronnie Lozano is an air traffic controller living in Dallas somewhere. Rod Denton is an EMT/firefighter living in Corpus Christi. Johnny Chapman passed away in a car accident several years ago. I don't know what John Pease and Bruce Buterbaugh are up to these days.
Wow. That was 26 years ago.

Disturbed blogger

Today at ATC, my friend Bill is recommending a new blog that he says is by a marine serving in Iraq. But I find no evidence of that when looking at the site. In fact, the bio on the site says the author is a retired marine. Furthermore, it is one of the most vile, hateful, paranoid sites I've seen in quite some time. Here is how the guy describes himself in his bio on the site:

I am a retired Marine who is dedicated to fighting the revisionist liberals who seek to prop up DROP-TROU Clinton's bogus legacy, elect Hitlary, and destroy the USA with Socialism. Basically, I've never met a liberal I didn't come to hate. I vow to continue gut-punching the Left into submission. This is a frigging DEATHMATCH libs and guess what...you're gonna lose.

Lovely. The fact that Bill finds a site like this to be worth recommending these days is one of the reasons why I'm taking a sabbatical from commenting at his blog.
I suppose it is good that the guy is a retired marine and not currently serving. The idea that someone who wants to see more than half the U.S. population dead would be issued guns and charged with defending the country is rather disturbing.

Shifting blame and avoiding responsibility

Paul Krugman's latest column in the New York Times goes along way toward explaining what is going on in Iraq right now.

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”
Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.
What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.
Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”
No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.
After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.
And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.
All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.
In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.
Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

Another MoveOn ad

MoveOn.org has another ad out today and it has greatly upset my friend Bill Crawford at ATC.
What I don’t understand is how the above-linked ad could be considered “anti-American filth” that provides “aid and comfort to the enemy.”
The ad is very straightforward and only deals in facts and figures, all easily verifiable. So what is the problem?
Is it because they say that Bush has betrayed our trust? That is a very common charge leveled at politicians. I can’t say that because I never put any trust in the man to begin with, but if I had I would definitely be saying now that said trust was betrayed.
Bill goes so far as to compare the MoveOn.org ad with the SwiftBoat Vets campaign against Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 election. He even references me as someone who was “apoplectic” over the ads. But my problem with the ads against Kerry is that they were verifiably untrue - blatant falsehoods that were repeated over and over again by the so-called liberal media.
I have already said that the ad against Gen. Patraeus was in poor taste because of its use of a juvenile play on his last name that charged him with betraying his country. That is a far more serious charge to level against a soldier than it is to say that a politician betrayed the trust of his/her constituents.
But beyond that, the ad itself was an accurate recitation of the facts and contained nothing that could be demonstrated to be false or misleading.

I would also note that in today’s New York Times there was a full-page ad by a group supporting Republican presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani that bashed the Petraeus ad and tried to tie it to Hillary Clinton. So, out of this controversy the NYT got two full-page ads. Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
It’s like I’ve always said, the media has a definite bias... in favor of making money.

Global warming credibility

There he goes again. My friend Bill Crawford is touting yet another “study” denying the existence of man-made global warming.

Global warming is a natural event whose effects are not bad at all, according to a new study by two eminent climatologists.
Researchers Dennis Avery and Fred Singer said climate change is more likely to be part of a cycle of warming and cooling that has happened regularly every 1500 years for the last million years.

Wait a minute! Did they just say “two eminent climatologists”? Are they referring to Dennis Avery and Fred Singer?
These guys aren’t climatologists! Avery is, at best, an agriculture economist who now works at a right-wing think tank. He is not a scientist who spends his time in the lab conducting research. He spends all his time writing B.S. columns and traveling around giving speeches touting right-wing causes.
At least Fred Singer is a scientist, but his degree is in physics which is not exactly a related field of study. And then there is the fact that Singer is also a prominent denier of the connection between solar radiaton and melanoma and the connection between second-hand smoke and lung cancer. So take that for what it’s worth.
This is not an ad hominem attack pointing this out either. If you are going to make scientific claims and challenge the research of other scientists, you had better have at least a basic background in climate science before doing so.

But here is a guy who actually does have some credibility on this issue.

In an interview with the BBC, Professor John Marburger, Bush’s chief science adviser, said it was an “unequivocal” fact that climate change is man-made and that greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are to blame.

Marburger said he “strongly agrees” with the IPCC reports and “supports its conclusions.” He added:

I think there is widespread agreement on certain basics, and one of the most important is that we are producing far more CO2 from fossil fuels than we ought to be. And it’s going to lead to trouble unless we can begin to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we are burning and using in our economies. […]

The CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and there’s no end point, it just gets hotter and hotter, and so at some point it becomes unliveable.

The surge bust

If you look back at what the Bush administration was saying about the surge at the first of the year, it is clear that it failed to achieve any of the goals that had been set out. Regardless of whether “security” in Baghdad has been enhanced is beside the point. The issue was not whether or not more troops would provide more security - that was a given - it was whether or not providing that window of added security would make any difference to the Iraqi government in its efforts to reconcile differences between feuding factions and get on track to take back control of their country. That clearly did not happen.
E&P points out some other areas where the surge fell short of its goals:

The president said then....
“To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq’s constitution.”

None of this happened.

Interestingly enough, Bush also said this at the time...
"I’ve made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people -- and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people.”

Bush already lost the support of the American people a long time ago. He is only still clinging to power because our political system is so slow to respond to changes in the electorate. There was a huge shift in the political power structure in 2006, but not enough to completely dislodge Republicans who still have the power to block the majority’s will with vetoes and filibusters. However, it looks like a second GOP bloodbath is just around the corner as analysts are now predicting six Republican Senate seats are likely to go blue and maybe more.

It was known from the very beginning of the surge that the troops levels could not be maintained at that level very far into 2008. Now it appears that Bush is planning to take our already strained military and push it past the breaking limit by extending the surge all the way into next summer, at which point he will grudgingly reduce troop levels back to their pre-surge level.
And this, he will pretend, is supposed to be the middleroad-compromise position. Harry Reid is right to throw that back in his face.

Gurwitz strikes back

My friend Bill Crawford quotes at length today from the latest op-ed piece by the E-N’s Jonathan Gurwitz.

Jonathan contrasts the Democratic senators’ praise of Gen. Patraeus when he was tapped by Bush in January to lead U.S. forces in Iraq, with their skepticism of his testimony nine months later claiming that we have made great progress in Iraq.

That's how you get 54 senators who praise you to the heavens turn around and consign your mission to hell.

But Jonathan knows full well that these are two different things. The first issue is that Patraeus is a good, honorable soldier who follows orders well. The second issue is what those orders should be. Patraeus is perfectly capable of leading our troops to drawdown from Iraq and refocus our efforts on the real al-Qaeda in Pakistan rather than the copycat version in Iraq.
He can make recommendations on how we should proceed with the current mission, but it is up to our political leaders to decide whether we should continue to pursue that mission or change to something else.

Jonathan is also being disingenuous when he says:
If they really believed Iraq was a lost cause, they'd cut off funding for the U.S. military presence rather than passing defense budgets and supplemental appropriations with hundreds of billions of dollars for continued operations.

Of course, they have tried to pass budgets that limit funding for the war but have been unsuccessful due to Republican filibusters and veto threats.

We went into Iraq with the goal of dismantling Saddam’s WMD program - something that turned out to be non-existent - and the goals for Iraq have been constantly changing ever since. The current rationale is that we have to “defeat” al-Qaeda in Iraq, the copycat version of al-Qaeda that did not exist before we invaded. How this will protect us from attacks by the real al-Qaeda which is not in Iraq is never addressed. Neither are the cost-benefit dynamics of the operation explained. If we spend five years, $500 billion and 5,000 U.S. troop deaths to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq, will it be worth it? What if it takes 10 years, $1 trillion and 10,000 U.S. casualties? What then?

But back to Jonathan’s column... He goes on to make the charge that Democrats want to accumulate power in Washington more than they want to achieve victory in Iraq.

the little Caesars in Washington have as their primary objective not losing: not losing a majority, not losing any more seats in the minority, not losing a campaign, not losing power.

How about not losing the support of the American people as President Bush has with his rock-bottom 36 percent approval rating? Congress has low approval ratings too, but that has more to do with their inability to respond to public sentiment on the war. Those “little Ceasars” are our elected representatives. While I respect Gen. Patraeus for his service to our country, he is not elected to that position and his primary job is to follow the orders of those who were elected.

Best 100 TV Shows

Time Magazine’s TV critic has come out with his list of - The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME. I’ve reprinted the list below with my own coding.
A * means I agree with the choice (a ** means I really, really agree); a # means I disagree with the choice and a ? means I have not seen enough of the show to have an opinion.

*24
*60 Minutes
?The Abbott and Costello Show
*ABC's Wide World of Sports
?Alfred Hitchcock Presents
*All in the Family
?An American Family
#American Idol
?Arrested Development
*Battlestar Galactica
#The Beavis and Butt-Head Show
?The Bob Newhart Show
?Brideshead Revisited
?Buffalo Bill
**Buffy the Vampire Slayer
*The Carol Burnett Show
?The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
*A Charlie Brown Christmas
*Cheers
*The Cosby Show
*The Daily Show
*Dallas
?The Day After
?Deadwood
*The Dick Van Dyke Show
*Dragnet
?The Ed Sullivan Show
?The Ernie Kovacs Show
?Felicity
?Freaks and Geeks
?The French Chef
*Friends
#General Hospital
?The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
?Gilmore Girls
*Gunsmoke
?Hill Street Blues
?Homicide: Life on the Street
?The Honeymooners
?I, Claudius
*I Love Lucy
*King of the Hill
?The Larry Sanders Show
*Late Night with David Letterman (NBC)
*Leave It to Beaver
**Lost
#Married... With Children
#Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
*The Mary Tyler Moore Show
*M*A*S*H
*The Monkees
**Monty Python's Flying Circus
#Moonlighting
*MTV 1981-1992
?My So-Called Life
**Mystery Science Theater 3000
*The Odd Couple
?The Office [American]
#The Office [British]
?The Oprah Winfrey Show
**Pee Wee's Playhouse
?Playhouse 90
*The Price Is Right
?Prime Suspect
?The Prisoner
#The Real World
*Rocky and His Friends
*Roots
*Roseanne
*Sanford and Son
*Saturday Night Live
?Second City Television
?See It Now
*Seinfeld
*Sesame Street
?Sex and the City
?The Shield
*The Simpsons
?The Singing Detective
?Six Feet Under
#Soap
?The Sopranos
#South Park
*SpongeBob SquarePants
?SportsCenter
**Star Trek
?St. Elsewhere
#The Super Bowl (and the Ads)
#Survivor
*Taxi
*The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
**The Twilight Zone
#Twin Peaks
*The West Wing
?What's My Line?
*WKRP in Cincinnati
?The Wire
?Wiseguy
**The X-Files
?Your Show of Shows

I think it’s a pretty good list overall but there are some problems.
Following is my revised list of the Best 100 TV shows:

24
60 Minutes
Abbott and Costello Show, The
Alice
All in the Family
Andy Griffith Show, The
Angel
Baretta
Batman
Battlestar Gallactica
Beverly Hillbillies
Beverly Hills 90210
Bewitched
Boston Legal
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Captain Kangaroo
Carol Burnett Show
Charlie Brown Christmas, A
Charlie's Angels
Cheers
Cosby Show
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Crossfire
Daily Show
Dallas
Dick Van Dyke Show
Dragnet
Dukes of Hazard
E.R.
Emergency
Enterprise
Flintstones, The
Friends
Gilligan's Island
Gunsmoke
Happy Days
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Honeymooners, The
I Dream of Genie
I Love Lucy
Incredible Hulk, The
Judging Amy
King of the Hill
Kung Fu
Laverne and Shirley
Law and Order
Leave it to Beaver
Little House on the Prairie
Looney Tunes Show, The
Lost
M*A*S*H
Mary Tyler Moore Show, The
McNeil Leher News Hour
Melrose Place
Millenium
Mister Roger's Neighborhood
Monkees, The
Monty Python's Flying Circus
Mork and Mindy
MTV 1981-1992
Munsters, The
Muppet Show, The
Mystery Science Theater 3000
Nash Bridges
Night Stalker, The
Northern Exposure
Odd Couple, The
One Day at a Time
Our Gang
Party of Five
Pee Wee's Playhouse
Price is Right, The
Providence
Rocky and His Friends
Roots
Sanford and Son
Saturday Night Live
Scooby Doo
Seinfeld
Sesame Street
Simpsons, The
Six Million Dollar Man, The
Sliders
Smothers Brothers Show, The
Spongebob Square Pants
Star Trek
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Voyager
Starsky and Hutch
Taxi
Three's Company
Tonight Show, The
Twilight Zone, The
Wall Street Week
Welcome Back Kotter
West Wing, The
Wonderful World of Disney, The
X-Files, The
Xena: Warrior Princess

Poisoned discourse

Two of the seven soldiers who wrote an op-ed for the New York Times recently that was critical of the Iraq war were killed the other day in a vehicle accident in Baghdad that also killed several other soldiers.
Somehow it just doesn't seem right, but then nothing about this war is.
We were supposed to have the flags flown at half-mast yesterday in San Antonio for another local kid killed in the war, but it also happened to be the sixth anniversary of 9/11 so the flags were all at half-mast anyway.
This war that should never have been started has dragged on too long and has become a quagmire in more ways than one. It is a quagmire in the sense that we cannot withdraw the troops without leaving behind a bloody, chaotic mess. But it is also a quagmire at home where many people have invested a great deal into supporting the war and many more have invested a great deal into opposing it. The longer this thing drags on the more these people dig into their positions.
The vast majority of Americans have soured on the war and want to bring the troops home. But our democracy is so skewed and unrepresentative right now that it is nearly impossible for our government to respond to the will of the people. Democrats do not have a large enough majority to overcome Republican-led filibusters and presidential vetoes, so they are helpless to change the course of the war or make any meaningful changes. So they are in a bit of a fix. Even though the Democrats are on the same side with the majority of Americans, they are still being vilifed on ones side by the Republican opposition as "traitors" and "defeatists" and derided on the other side by frustrated war opponents for not doing enough to end the war.
All of this has served to poison the atmosphere for political debate between the two sides. It's hard to have a meaningful discussion or dialogue with someone who starts out with the assumption that you are a traitor and a terrorist appeaser. Likewise, it does not advance the discussion to assume that the other person is a bloodthirsty warmonger.
Things have gotten so bad at All Things Conservative, my friend Bill Crawford's blog where I have been a frequent commenter from the start, that I have decided to step back for a time and not comment over there. Lately, Bill's blog posts have devolved into a never-ending stream of vicious swipes at Democrats and Liberals (or the Left) and my comments are not helping to moderate the discussion. Instead of debating the issues of the day, we end up just yelling at one another. That, or writing the other person off and ignoring their comments altogether. Either way it does not make for a very enjoyable or fulfilling exchange and since I do not go there to pick fights I will refrain from commenting and instead concentrate on my own neglected blog here.

Petraeus ad controversy

Here is the text of the MoveOn.org ad that ran in the NYT on Monday.
While I agree with about 95 percent of what the ad says, I think it was juvenile and unnecesarily insulting to make the play on Petraeus’ name in the headline and final sentence of the ad. The “Petraeus/Betray Us” word play only served to give Republicans an opening to go on the the attack and play their favorite victimhood game. Now they get to ignore all the legitimate points in the ad and instead act all haute about the personal attack on Gen. Petraeus’ honor.
It is phony outrage, of course. The ad is extremely mild compared to the vicious attacks that Republicans typically make on military veterans who take positions opposed to the Bush administration. But that still doesn’t mean that Democrats should condone stooping down to their level.

This only serves to distract from Petraeus’ actual testimony yesterday in which he set the stage for a permanent U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid has responses to the testimony here and here. Also, Speaker Pelosi’s blog response is here.

It’s not just Bush

This story in the Wall Street Journal shows why Republican political fortunes are currently in freefall. And the big news is that, even though Bush is certainly the worst president ever, it is not ALL his fault.

For Republicans hoping the 2008 campaign will bring a fresh start after the troubled tenure of President Bush, there are sobering signs: Evidence indicates that the party’s problems with the American electorate are much bigger than the president and won’t go away when he leaves office.
Recent voter surveys, including private polling done by a leading Republican strategist, suggest a broader erosion of Republicans’ appeal. In particular, three groups crucial to Mr. Bush’s goal of a “permanent Republican majority” are drifting away: younger voters, Hispanics and independents.
The reasons include the Iraq war, conservatives’ emphasis on social issues such as gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research, and a party-led backlash against illegal immigrants that has left many Hispanic and Asian-American citizens feeling unwelcome. The upshot is that Republicans face structural problems that stem from generational, demographic and societal changes and aren’t easily overcome without changing fundamental party positions.

So the Republicans are losing the support of young people, Hispanics and Independents, thanks in large part to Bush’s debacle in Iraq, but also because when people look at the GOP today they see a hard-right concentration of holier-than-thou moralists and scolds, many of who later turn out to be flaming hypocrites (Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley, David Vitter, Larry Craig). The story notes that self-identified liberals and moderates in the GOP shrank from 42 percent of the party in 1997 to just 25 percent today. And the right-wing ideologues who are left are not about to make the kinds of concessions necessary to bring those voters back into the fold.

And this isn’t just the “liberal media” pointing this out. It is coming directly from Republican pollsters and strategists.

"The state of the Republican Party is worse than any time since Watergate, and arguably this is worse than Watergate,” says party strategist Vin Weber, a former congressman, “because that was about an event, whereas this may reflect a trend."

The GOP’s hardline stance on cultural and domestic issues is driving young people out of the party, and that is a trend that unless reversed will eventually spell doom for the party.

In the current survey, 17% of Republicans are 18 to 34 years old, down from 25% in 1997. Republicans 55 and older constitute 41% of the party -- up from 28% a decade ago.

Equally worrisome is how the GOP’s hardline stance on immigration is driving Hispanics and Asian-Americans away.

The Fabrizio survey found that just 2% of Republicans are Hispanic, along with 1% who are black. “We’ve made no progress in 10 years,” the pollster says -- not a good sign “in a nation that is becoming more heavily minority.”

Of course, none of this will benefit Democrats unless they can present a more attractive alternative - something I think they can do. They will have their big chance to prove themselves in 2008 after winning the White House and larger majorities in the House and Senate. But it won’t be easy. They will have to deal with a hostile media. A public with a zero attention span on most issues. And a determined opposition party that will be chipping away everyday looking to take advantage of every little chink in their armor.

Alberto "Finally" Gone-zales

Good riddance to Alberto Gonzales, the Worst.Attorney.General.Ever. His shameful tenure as the most partisan hack to ever run the Justice Department is finally coming to a close. Only the Worst.President.Ever would have kept someone like Gonzales in office so long after it became clear that he was using the Jutice Department as a partisan tool to promote Republican and Bush administration objectives. Such abuse of executive branch powers had not been seen since the days of Richard Nixon.
Unfortunately, we still have George W. Bush who will select the next AG and he is already being urged by his remaining base of supporters on the far-right to tap someone who will be an in-your-face insult to liberals and moderates who objected to Gonzales in the first place. My prediction is that we will have a long-drawn out confirmation battle and essentially will not have another AG other than the acting AG for the remainder of Bush's term.

In other news, it seems that right-wing moral crusader and Republican Senator from Idaho Larry Craig got himself arrested last month for lewd behaviour in an airport men's room.
So what is it with Republican politicians anyway? First we had Mark Foley and then Sen. David Vitter and now Sen. Larry Craig. They sure can pick 'em, can't they!

San Antonio: The Movie

I recorded some Erroll Flynn movies off of AMC last week (Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Adventures of Don Juan) and decided to look up what other films Flynn did. I was surprised to find that he did a western called "San Antonio." It was apparently a pulp western (1945) probably filmed on a studio backlot and had little to do with actual San Antonio. Still, I thought it was neat that there was a film called San Antonio that I had never heard of before.

Hillary crushes Rudy

Looking at state-by-state poll results, Chris Bowers at Open Left crunches the numbers and determines that even in the worst case scenario, the “weakest” Democrat, Hillary Clinton, would crush the “strongest” Republican, Rudy Guiliani in the electoral college by 335 to 203.
And I hardly believe that Connecticut or Ohio are going to go Red next year.

The surge is not “working”

The surge is working! That’s the latest hue and cry coming from the warbloggers who are constantly looking at their tea leaves for any signs of “progress” in Iraq. The increased troop levels on the ground in Baghdad have helped to tighten security and have reduced the number of insurgent attacks and corresponding deaths among the civilian population.
But so what?
Sure the surge is “working” in that respect. But that is NOT why we had the surge in the first place. The stated purpose of the surge was not to just heighten security and reduce violence, it was to provide breathing space for the Iraqi government to work out a political solution that would end the Civil War and provide a stable situation so that the U.S. can finally leave. And unfortunately, that is not happening.
Without the political progress that it was meant to foster, the surge is pointless. Its effect will be temporary and as soon as we end the surge the insurgents will rush back in to fill the void and the fighting will continue. We will have accomplished NOTHING.
So NO, in the only area that really matters, the surge is NOT working.

Republicans are broke

Dems Crushing GOP in Congressional Fundraising

House Republicans are flat broke, and there's no sign of better cash days in the near term.
Less than 15 months from Election Day, the House Republican campaign arm -- the National Republican Congressional Committee -- continues to effectively run a negative balance. The committee has just $1.97 million in its accounts, as of July 31, according to FEC reports it filed this week. But the NRCC is also sitting on a debt of $4.1 million.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is awash in cash. It has $21.3 million in its accounts, for a better than 10 to 1 cash edge over the NRCC, and it has out-raised its GOP counterpart through July. The DCCC raised more than $40.5 million so far this year. The Democratic committee has $3.5 million in leftover debt from 2006, which was down from $9.3 million at the end of last year.

What's worse for Republicans, the FEC just issued a report on fund-raising by individual candidates for the House and Senate, and the vast majority of the money is flowing to Democrats: House Democratic candidates raised $94.2 million through June 30, while House GOP candidates took in just $63.6 million.

CD anniversary

CD celebrates 25th anniversary

It was August 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turned 25 years old on Friday -- and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.

I didn't get my first CD until 1990 and I won’t be getting rid of them anytime soon. I still have my record collection and most of my cassettes boxed up somewhere for that matter. I just don’t trust computer hard drives for storing all of my music. I had a hard drive crash on me a couple of years ago and we lost a lot of digital pictures that weren’t backed up.
But it is probably only a matter of time before everything is stored on multiple hard drives and CDs will be cast aside like all those old floppy disc drives.

Speaking of anniversaries, my 18th wedding anniversary is this weekend as is my son's 4th birthday and two weeks later we will be going to College Station for my 20th college reunion.

Where's our football team?

San Antonio is the 7th largest city in the United States. That’s right, seventh. We have an estimated population of 1,256,509 that just bumped us ahead of San Diego for the No. 7 spot. That means that there are only six cities in the U.S. that can claim to be bigger than San Antonio: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Phoenix.
That’s it. Everyone else is smaller, including San Diego, Dallas and San Jose which fill out the top 10. Detroit even got bumped down to No. 11.
I’m just blown away by this fact. My wife is not impressed because she grew up in Houston, the No. 4 city. But I grew up in small-town South Texas so I feel like I am in a metropolis.
The nice thing about San Antonio is that even though it is so large, it still has a small-town feel to it. But this also leads to a lot of disrespect from other parts of the country. For example, there is the anamoly that San Antonio has been short-shrifted on professional sports teams. Lets look at the professional sports teams (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) in each of the top 10 largest cities (I include Anaheim with L.A. because it is practically a suburb, the same with Arlington and Dallas.):

New York Yankees
New York Mets
New York Giants
New York Knicks
New York Islanders
New York Rangers

Los Angeles Dodgers
Anaheim Angels
Los Angeles Lakers
Los Angeles Clippers
Los Angeles Kings
Anaheim Ducks

Chicago Cubs
Chicago White Sox
Chicago Bears
Chicago Bulls
Chicago Blackhawks

Houston Astros
Houston Texans
Houston Rockets

Philadelphia Phillies
Philadelphia Eagles
Philadelphia 76ers
Philadelphia Flyers

Arizona Diamondbacks
Phoenix Cardinals
Phoenix Suns
Phoenix Coyotes

San Antonio Spurs

San Diego Padres
San Diego Chargers

Texas Rangers
Dallas Cowboys
Dallas Mavericks
Dallas Stars

Is there anything wrong with this picture? Los Angeles doesn’t currently have a football team, but they’ve had two in the past and San Diego is less than two hours away.
San Antonio, on the other hand, doesn’t have a baseball, football or hockey team. All we have is a basketball team, which just happens to be the reigning NBA champions. There is no question that San Antonio could support at least one and probably more professional sports franchises. The overwhelming response to the brief stay of the New Orleans Saints after Hurricane Katrina proved that. But for now we are a one-team town with no prospects for change in the near future.

Rove: Draft dodger/tax evader

All of the news stories say that Karl Rove is coming back to Texas after leaving the Bush administration and plans to live in Ingram so that he can be near his son who is attending Trinity University in San Antonio. Ingram is a little Hill Country town just down the road from Kerrville about an hour’s drive northwest of San Antonio.
The interesting thing is that Rove doesn’t actually have a home in Ingram. He has a cottage. From his Wikipedia entry: "The residence that Rove claims on Texas voter registration rolls consists of two small rental cottages, the largest of which is 814 square feet. The cottages were part of the River Oaks Lodge that Rove and his wife, Darby, once owned on the Guadalupe River near Ingram. The Roves sold the lodge in 2003, after renovating it, but kept the two cottages, which the lodge rents to guests."

Rove had been using the lodges as his “place of residence” so that he could avoid paying property taxes on his million-dollar home in Washington, D.C. But that came to an end in 2005 when the District of Columbia changed its law and Rove ended up having to pay $3,400 in back taxes. I doubt that Rove plans to stay in the Hill Country for long. He sold his Austin residence a few years ago and now owns another million dollar house in Florida.
I read through Rove’s biography on Wikipedia trying to glean any sense of humanity that I could empathize with. He apparently suffered some hard breaks growing up with his biological father abandoning the family shortly after he was born. His adoptive father and mother divorced when he was 19 and then his mother committed suicide when he was 31.
He was a college drop-out who appears to have used his on-again, off-again college status as a means to avoid the draft.

In December 1969, the Selective Service System held its first lottery drawing. Those born on December 25, like Rove, received number 84. That number placed him in the middle of those (with numbers 1 [first priority] through 195) who would eventually be drafted.
On February 17, 1970, Rove was reclassified as 2-S, a deferment from the draft because of his enrollment at the University of Utah in the fall of 1969. He maintained this deferment until December 14, 1971, despite being only a part-time student in the autumn and spring quarters of 1971 (registered for between six and 12 credit hours) and dropping out of the university in June 1971. Rove was a student at the University of Maryland, College Park in the fall of 1971; as such, he would have been eligible for 2-S status, but registrar's records show that he withdrew from classes during the first half of the semester. In December 1971 he was reclassified as 1-A. On April 27, 1972, he was reclassified as 1-H, or "not currently subject to processing for induction". The draft ended on June 30, 1973.

Rove was one of the major architects of the Iraq War, but did everything he could possibly do to avoid the War in Vietnam.

What if....

I like this post from Atrios and I've provided a cleaned-up version below:

Imagine if the Bush administration had gone into Iraq, found a nuclear arsenal, the ponies had appeared, happy fun time Democracy spread through the Middle East like wildfire, 6 months and a few billion bucks later we mostly got the hell out of there, having to wade through piles of rose petals on the way out, and a grateful Iraqi population lived happily ever after in their secular pro-Israel, pro-US Democracy.
Just imagine.
Now imagine just how marginalized all of the war opponents would have been? Imagine how none of these people would've ever appeared on the teevee again, having been proved so wrong that none of them were ever welcome back as participants in our mainstream public discourse again.

Oh wait, that part isn't hard to imagine, because even though they weren't proved wrong, it's already the case.

I share Atrios' frustration in that the people who were dead wrong about every aspect of the Iraq debacle are still being treated like experts by the media while the critics of the invasion who practically nailed every problem before it developed are still sidelined and ignored.