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.