Champions, again!

This photo sums up the Cavs series nicely, I think. Tim Duncan stuffing the ball back in LeBron James’ face in Game 1. That’s when you had the first inkling that it would be a sweep.
I do want to add, however, that I am not a LeBron basher. I went into this series kind of down on LeBron because I thought he was too arrogant, cocky and immature. But after seeing how he handled himself throughout the series, my respect for him has gone up. I think he definitely has what it takes to be a super-duper-star in the NBA.
I’m very happy that the Spurs swept the series. I didn’t want it to go to a Game 5. And we have Manu Ginobili to thank for that. In the fourth quarter last night it turned into the Manu show - with some support from Duncan, naturally. But without Manu’s effort at the end I think the Cavs might have slipped the noose and forced another game. Besides hitting all of his free throws, which were crucial, Manu made two exceptional drives to the basket and hit a big 3-pointer. But the play I liked the best was an assist. Manu had the ball at the top of the key, beyond the 3-point line when he suddenly gave a head fake and then fired a bullet pass right through the heart of the Cavs defense to Fabricio Oberto who had just inched away from his defender and was standing under the basket. Oberto made the easy basket and drew a foul for a 3-point play. Brilliant!
Tony Parker was of course great through the first three quarters and richly deserved his MVP trophy while Tim was just happy to get ring No. 4.
Are they a Dynasty? Damn straight! The Spurs are the most successful sports franchise of the past decade. The core of their team is locked up - assuming Duncan re-ups in ‘08 - through at least 2010. I can’t see the Spurs making any major adjustments over the off season. Duncan, Parker and Ginobili are all superstars. Bruce Bowen is hands-down the best defender in the NBA. Oberto has stepped up to be a valuable addition as a center who fits well with the rest of the team - he practically has a mindmeld going with Manu.
Robert Horry says he wants to play one more year and get his 8th championship ring. Michael Finley has some more good years in him and Brent Barry rounds out one of the best benches in the league with a roster full of 3-point aces. Even Francisco Elson and Jaques Vaughn have held their own as subs who can step in to give the stars a break. The only player on the team who seems to be expendable at this point is probably Beno Udrih.
I think the Spurs will be back next year whether the national media likes it or not. And this business of not giving the Spurs the R-E-S-P-E-C-T that they deserve is starting to make them look rather silly.

MVP prediction

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Tony Parker will be the NBA Championship Series MVP, especially if he outscores Tim Duncan in Game 4. So far, Parker has been the high-point scorer, including last night when he was having an off night. Duncan has been consistent, but Parker has overshadowed him in every game so far.
As for Bruce Bowen, I think he deserves a special award for the defensive hex he has put on LeBron James. The problem with being an excellent defensive player is that most people only notice when you screw-up. Otherwise, all your work is just expected.
Last night’s game was a real struggle for the Spurs. Nothing was going in. Poor Manu didn’t score a single basket the entire game until he hit a few free throws in the final seconds. Fortunately, Bowen and Brent Barry stepped up to nail four and three three-pointers, respectively, to make up for Manu’s sputtering offense. Still, that only kept the team just barely ahead of the Cavs, who fortunately were struggling even worse than the Spurs to make their shots. All in all it was an ugly game, but a sweet victory nonetheless.

Beatles influences

It’s the 40th anniversary of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” album and the accolades keep coming.
My introduction to the Beatles came in the mid-80s in college when I picked up a two-album collection called Rock 'n' Roll Music.
It was an awesome compilation put together by George Martin himself. I was literally blown away. I recorded the double-album onto a compact disc and played it in my car until the tape was literally worn out. To this day, “Twist and Shout” is probably my favorite all-time Beatles recording. My first Beatles album I purchased after that was “Abbey Road” followed by “The White Album.” By the time I finally got around to getting “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” it didn’t have the same impact it might have if I had bought it first.
But I had also been exposed to Sgt. Pepper’s years earlier in the form of the critically-panned movie that starred Peter Frampton and the Bee-Gees. I thought the movie was great (I was 12 at the time) and had no clue that all the music was by the same band.
The Express-News had an editorial in today’s paper commemorating the anniversary and in it they note that The Beatle’s musical foundation was based on “Elvis, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.” Elvis and Chuck Berry, sure. They even recorded a version of Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.” But Bo Diddley? What about Little Richard whose falsetto “woooooooo” was constantly immitated by Paul? And what about Buddy Holly? If we are going to talk about musical influences, you have to mention the kid from Lubbock, Texas. Paul has said many times that they chose the name Beatles (Silver Beetles initially) because they wanted to be like Buddy Holly and The Crickets.

Chiggers

I had to laugh at this Nacho Guarche cartoon the other day. Considering the infestation of chiggers we are dealing with here this spring, his suggestion of replacing the Spurs’ coyote mascot with a chigger actually has some merit.
Chiggers are nasty little bugs that live in the tall grass and undergrowth and leave little red welts wherever they bite. My wife and little boy are especially susceptible to them.
I’ve been spraying pesticides and clearing brush in our back area, but it only seems to have put a dent in them so far. But I’m planning a major “surge” this week and I’m confident that my backyard will soon be liberated from these parasitic pests.

A positive Spurs column

After reading the New York Times’ front page slobbery kiss-up to LeBron James that barely even mentions the San Antonio Spurs, I was pleasantly surprised to find this excellent column in the Washington Post:

Duncan's Exclusive Company

Now that LeBron James has become ABC's savior of the NBA Finals -- and LeBron says he is honored to be compared to Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Oscar Robertson and Gandhi -- we interrupt this homeroom crush for some genuine education.

The San Antonio Spurs are going to school Cleveland and win their fourth title, in six games or fewer, because they have the best player on the floor in the series. Tim Duncan, despite getting less love than jury duty, is maybe the largest difference-maker since Jordan....

When the Spurs are finished polishing off Cleveland, Duncan will not only eclipse Bird's three rings, he will join Magic and Michael as the only leading men with more than three championships with the same franchise since Bill Russell. Four decades after Russell, Duncan would join a class of three....

The perception of Duncan mirrored his team; he was coming off a season in which his body was breaking down and there simply were too many quick, young big men to rise over.

As usual, his detractors missed the importance of Duncan. His game has never been about explosiveness; it's about efficiency. His degree of difficulty has nothing to do with hang time and more to do with angles and trajectory, all the skill-level amenities missing from contemporary front-court players...

Drama is at a premium for Duncan, too; he's had the same coach, Gregg Popovich, his entire career. Often expressionless and unemotional since his days at Wake Forest, where the Duke student section referred to him as "Spock," there is a monotony to the way Duncan plays and carries himself that doesn't resonate in a culture run by celebrity.

He gets penalized for consistently playing and living between the lines while so many of his look-at-me peers obliterate the boundaries and become more popular for it. Polarization sells; professionalism is so '90s....

LeBron James reinvigorates the "Next Michael" debate after a sterling week of basketball. Meanwhile, if anyone wanted to look long and hard, Tim Duncan belongs at the top of that class more than Kobe, more than Dwyane Wade and certainly more than LeBron. More than any of them, he's won at a higher level.

Damn straight. Tim Duncan is a better ballplayer than James, who, to be fair, is still far too young and immature to make a good comparison. Duncan is just not as flashy. He is not the kind of player who is ever going to do a 360-degree spin, behind-the-head dunk. If Duncan has a clear shot at the basket, he is going to very carefully push the ball into the basket - very efficient, not very exciting. Duncan doesn’t play to the crowd, he plays to win.

Maverick McCain

Why isn’t John McCain doing better in the Republican primary race? I predicted earlier this year that McCain would be the GOP nominee in 2008. He has the most experience; solid name recognition; he’s the closest thing to a Reaganite conservative in the race; he is firmly in the “pro-life” camp on abortion; he is an ardent defender and apologist for the War in Iraq; etc, etc.
So how is it that he now finds himself lagging behind the liberal former Mayor of New York and the used-to-be-liberal former Governor of Massachussetts?
Is it because of his reality-based position on the immigration issue? I thought it was quite admirable that he stood up to the bullying of the other GOP candidates to defend the compromise legislation now in Congress. None of the other candidates have a realistic approach to the issue. All they can do is mouth idealistic pieties and pretend like this would somehow make the whole problem go away.
I suppose the immigration issue is the best indication as to why McCain is not doing well. His willingness to break away from the lock-step formation of the party faithful on issues such as immigration, gun control, campaign finance reform and the environment has given him the “Maverick” label which is would be an advantage in a national campaign, but is actually a disadvantage in a primary race.
But is this really enough to overshadow McCain’s solid conservative positions on other issues? According to his Wikipedia entry, McCain has “a strong pro-life voting record, a strong free trade voting record (including a 100% rating from the Cato Institute), wanting private social security accounts, being against socialized health care, supporting school vouchers, supporting the death penalty, supporting mandatory sentencing, and supporting welfare reform.”
All in all, a miserable record by my standpoint, but apparently not pure enough to suit the party faithful. So how is it that they would instead turn to a guy who is pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control, etc. etc. as the alternative?
I’m flummoxed. I just don’t understand these people.

Senate succession

I have to agree with Matthew Yglesias that the Wyoming law on U.S. Senate succession is fair.
The sudden death of Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., might have given Democrats an opportunity to expand their razor-thin majority in the Senate, but state rules in Wyoming require that the governor, a Democrat, appoint a replacement from the same party as the prior office holder.
Other states should consider adopting this kind of rule.

Jefferson indicted

As I suspected, the reason Democrats didn’t immediatly jump up and denounce Rep. William Jefferson after his indictment and demand that he be stripped of his committee assignments was so that he could do so on his own.
Hopefully, Jefferson will now have the decency to resign from Congress and not drag his constituents and his party through a protracted fight. In the meantime, everyone should remember that when former Speaker Tom DeLay was indicted the Republican response was to award him a choice seat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Bush's surge

Bush’s surge in Iraq is cleary not working and even the Wall Street Journal can see the writing on the wall.

Can the Iraq 'Surge' Be Salvaged?

When the Bush administration decided to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq, the strategy rested on an unspoken trade-off: U.S. troops would risk greater casualties to tamp down violence and buy the Baghdad government time to make the political compromises needed to reconcile the country's warring factions.
But a resurgence of sectarian violence and attacks on U.S. troops, coupled with little to no progress on crucial Iraqi political goals, is already spurring discussion about whether the current strategy can succeed.

Unpatriotic

In another thread at All Things Conservative my old friend Mark Harden has been having a grand old time calling me a “dumbass” and “unpatriotic” because I had the temerity to challenge Bill’s assertion that the sudden dismissal of terrorism charges against a 20-year-old Gitmo detainee (Age 15 at the time of his incarceration) is somehow supposed to be a sterling example of our “fairness.”
I asked how it was fair that this kid was left to rot at Guantanamo for 5 years before ever being brought up for a trial, only to have all the charges thrown out on a technicality.
Either way you look at the case it is a travesty. If the kid did nothing wrong, it’s a travesty that he spent the past five years at Gitmo. If he is truly a threat to the United States, then it is a travesty that they can’t seem to get their act together and bring charges against him.
And the last thing anyone would say about this case is that it is a sterling example of U.S. jurisprudence and “fairness.” But I’m apparently unpatriotic for saying that.

Banished

It seems I’ve been banished from my perch as one of the liberal punching bags over at All Things Conservative. I was in a bit of a snit the other night when Bill threw up one of those inane posts questioning whether Hillary Clinton has had plastic surgery recently. I sniped that it was a sexist thing to obsess about and noted that it never seemed to be a big issue that Ronald Reagan dyed his hair black for eight years. Well, Bill took that as a personal attack and went ballistic calling me “pathetic” and claiming that I always say something insulting whenever I post a comment over there.

Mike, you get pissed off at just about everything I write. You do so because you are either an angry, sad person, or you just want to rock the boat. It's getting old.
So you can take your sexist comment and shove it. How dare you sling that kind of insult at me.

He went on to conclude that “We don't HAVE to hear from YOU on EVERY single post.”

So I have to interpret that as a “you’re not welcome around here anymore, take your ball and go home” comment. And it is Bill’s blog so I will respect his wishes.

In the meantime, I suppose I should spend more time posting on my own blog.

The Conservative media

I’ve recently been reading David Brock’s book The Republican Noise Machine which presents a thorough history of how the rightwing came to totally dominate the news media today, all while pretending to be struggling against an all-powerful (and non-existent) elite liberal power structure.
I guess that I am just used to the strange dichotomy of conservative domination of the media while they continue to harp about the “liberal media,” but when it gets spelled out in such detail as in Brock’s book it starts to make your head spin.

Here is a little test. Go to Google and type in Conservative columnists. The first item to pop up will be a link to Townhall.com which features a collection of no fewer than 60 conservative columnists in a single convenient location.
Now do the same thing with Liberal columnists and the first thing you see is a link to a site called BoycottLiberalism.com which presents a list of the Top 25 liberal columnists in America. They apparently had to struggle to come up with 25 names for their list since almost half of them are not columnists in the traditional sense at all.

1 Frank Rich - NY Times
2 Maureen Dowd - NY Times
3 Paul Krugman - NY Times
4 Seymour M. Hersh - The New Yorker
5 Nicholas Kristof - NY Times
6 Eleanor Clift - Newsweek
7 Helen Thomas
8 Bill Moyers - Wide Angle (PBS)
9 David Corn - The Nation
10 Jesse Jackson - Chicago Sun Times
11 Noam Chomsky - Khaleej Times
12 Michael Kinsley - Washington Post
13 Bill Press - MSNBC / Sirus Radio
14 David Broder - Washington Post
15 Julianne Malveaux - USA Today
16 Molly Ivans - Fort Worth Star-Telegram
17 Ronald Brownstein - LA Times
18 E.J. Dionne - Washington Post
19 Juan Williams - NPR
20 Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe
21 Joe Conason - New York Observe
22 Walter Cronkite - NPR
23 Susan Estrich - Creators Syndicate
24 Robert Sheer - (formally LA Times)
25 Arianna Huffington -

Seymour Hersh, for instance, is an investigative journalist and not a columnist and he is only published infrequently in the New Yorker, not weekly or even monthly. Likewise, NPR and PBS folks like Bill Moyers and Juan Williams don’t have regular print columns. Molly Ivins passed away recently. Robert Sheer got canned by the LA Times. Walter Cronkite stopped writing his column after an all-too brief run. I’m not sure that Jesse Jackson still writes a column and as for Noam Chomsky, I don’t know what the Khaleej Times is supposed to be, but he is certainly not published regularly in any forum that most Americans would be able to find.

The truth is as I said long ago, the voices of the left are continuing to grow fewer and weaker and conservative domination of the media continues to grow unabated. And we will continue to hear conservatives whine about the “Liberal media” until the day that theirs are the only voices that are ever heard.

Comic survey results

The Express-News finally ran a story the other day about the comics survey it conducted several months ago.
The good news is that Zits topped the list and Luann ranked in the top 10 along with Garfield and Baby Blues. Pickles also slipped into the top 10 wich was filled out with a bunch of old standards like Family Circus, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois, and Hagar the Horrible.
Garfield was the top choice of the 18 and younger crowd while Zits won the votes of folks between 18 and 54. Family Circus won in the 55 and up category.
The losers, those that ranked in the bottom 10, included Bizarro, Cathy, Dilbert, Tumbleweeds, the Amazing Spider Man, Prince Valiant and all of the political comics including Doonesbury, Nacho Guarche, Mallard Fillmore and Prickly City.
This wasn’t entirely fair, however, since many of these comics have the distinct disadvantage of not being in the daily comics section. Dilbert, for example, was banished years ago to the wastelands of the E-N Business pages and most comics readers probably assume that Scott Adams must have retired along with Bill Watterson and Gary Larson. Tumbleweeds and Prince Valiant are both Sunday only comics that don’t appear in the daily section. Neither do Doonesbury, Nacho and Mallard, which are all found on the Op-Ed pages.
So the biggest losers would have to be the daily comic section strips that hit the bottom including Bizarro, Cathy, Amazing Spider Man and Prickly City.
I can’t explain why Bizarro would be ranked so low. I think it is a pretty good strip and probably comes closest to touching that magic spot once occupied by The Far Side (although it is still a good distance away, I will admit). Cathy was once one of my favorite strips back in the 1980s when it first came out. But sometime in the 1990s it started to become tiresome and repetitive and I lost interest. However, being tiresome and repetitive is pretty much status quo on the comics page these days (See Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, Hagar the Horrible, etc.) so that doesn’t explain why it would end up in the bottom section. The Amazing Spider Man is just awful. It is obviously written by complete morons who come up with stupid plots and stupider dialogue. But it is also the strip that my three-year-old son insists that I read to him everytime he sees me with the paper, so maybe that is the target age range they are shooting for.
Finally, there is Prickly City and I have to say that its bottom ranking is very well deserved. It is horribly drawn and consistently offensive with the sole purpose of spreading rightwing propaganda. It is, however, slightly better than Mallard Fillmore.

The Madness of King George

It’s going to get worse

That’s was President Bush’s message today during his press conference.

President Bush warned Americans to expect "heavy fighting" this summer during a critical time in his war strategy.
Answering reporters' questions at a White House news conference, Bush said the developments would occur once U.S. military reinforcements are in place in mid-June.
"We can expect more American and Iraqi casualties," Bush said.

Meanwhile, there are reports that Bush is planning for a second surge later this fall.

So, to summarize, things are going very badly in Iraq. The first surge is not working. Bush is warning that we will see more casualties throughout the summer. And they may be planning a second surge on top of the first one by the end of the year.

Is Bush crazy!?! Up until now I have questioned Bush’s competence and judgment, but not his sanity. But this is truly demented if he is planning to push ahead with his war and send even more troops in the face of the highest level of opposition to the war ever recorded.

Top 100 Actors

Here is the list of my Top 100 Favorite Actors along with a representative movie that underscores why I like them. I'm working on a list of Top 100 Actresses that I will post later. I pulled this together pretty quickly so I may have some additions and deletions later on. You can quibble that it’s not necessarily the best actors by any means (Tim Conway is included but not Laurence Olivier, for example), but they are the ones that I personally like the best to date. In alphabetical order:

Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run)
Fred Astaire (Royal Wedding)
Kevin Bacon (Stir of Echoes)
Alec Baldwin (The Shadow)
Antonio Banderas (Mask of Zorro)
Orlando Bloom (Lord of the Rings)
Humphrey Bogart (Casablanca)
Ernest Borgnine (The Wild Bunch)
Marlon Brando (The Godfather)
Yul Brynner (The King and I)
George Burns (Oh, God)
Nicolas Cage (National Treasure)
James Cagney (Yankee Doodle Dandy)
Jim Carrey (The Mask)
John Cleese (A Fish Called Wanda)
George Clooney (Oh Brother Where Art Thou)
Sean Connery (From Russia With Love)
Tim Conway (Apple Dumpling Gang)
Gary Cooper (High Noon)
Kevin Costner (JFK)
Bing Crosby (Going My Way)
Russell Crowe (The Insider)
Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July)
Billy Crystal (Running Scared)
John Cusack (Grosse Pointe Blank)
Matt Damon (Bourne Identity)
Robert DeNiro (Taxi Driver)
Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean)
Leonardo DiCaprio (Catch Me If You Can)
Kirk Douglas (Spartacus)
Robert Duvall (The Paper)
Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry)
Erroll Flynn (The Adventures of Robin Hood)
Henry Fonda (The Oxbow Incident)
Harrison Ford (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
Michael J. Fox (Back to the Future)
Morgan Freeman (Million Dollar Baby)
Clark Gable (Gone With the Wind)
Richard Gere (First Knight)
Mel Gibson (Lethal Weapon)
Cary Grant (Arsenic and Old Lace)
Hugh Grant (Knotting Hill)
Gene Hackman (The French Connection)
Tom Hanks (Apollo 13)
Charlton Heston (The Ten Commandments)
Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate)
Bob Hope (The Princess and the Pirate)
Hugh Jackman (X-Men)
Samuel Jackson (Pulp Fiction)
Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive)
Danny Kaye (The Jester)
Gene Kelly (An American In Paris)
Val Kilmer (Willow)
Kevin Kline (January Man)
Don Knotts (The Incredible Mr. Limpet)
Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot)
Peter Lorre (Maltese Falcon)
Ewan MacGregor (Star Wars)
Steve Martin (All of Me)
Lee Marvin (Dirty Dozen)
Ian MacKellen (Lord of the Rings)
Steve McQueen (The Great Escape)
Viggo Mortensen (Hidalgo)
Eddie Murphy (Beverly Hills Cop)
Liam Neeson (Rob Roy)
Paul Newman (The Sting)
Jack Nicholson (As Good As It Gets)
Al Pacino (Author, Author)
Gregory Peck (To Kill A Mockingbird)
Sean Penn (Sweet and Lowdown)
Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line)
Brad Pitt (Twelve Monkeys)
Richard Pryor (Stir Crazy)
Anthony Quinn (The Guns of Navarone)
Robert Redford (Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid)
Kenau Reeves (The Matrix)
Burt Reynolds (Hooper)
Kurt Russell (Tombstone)
Peter Sellers (The Pink Panther)
William Shatner (Star Trek)
Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now)
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Total Recall)
Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump)
Will Smith (Men in Black)
Wesley Snipes (Blade)
Kevin Spacey (L.A. Confidential)
James Spader (Stargate)
Sylvester Stallone (Rambo)
Jimmy Stewart (It’s a Wonderful Life)
Donald Sutherland (MASH)
John Travolta (Primary Colors)
Dick Van Dyke (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)
Eli Wallach (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)
Denzel Washington (Crimson Tide)
John Wayne (True Grit)
Orson Welles (Citizen Kane)
Gene Wilder (Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)
Robin Williams (Good Morning Vietnam)
Bruce Willis (Die Hard)

A Spurs appreciation

I'm really, really hooked on the San Antonio Spurs. They are one of the best basketball teams ever and it is thrilling to watch them play. So it really amazes me that they seem to be constantly dissed by the rest of the nation as either boring or now, in a bizarre flip-flop, as a team of thugs and cheaters.
I guess when you have a reputation as "good guys" for as long as the Spurs have had, it doesn't take much for people to latch onto to turn that around quickly. It reminds me of the political hype from presidential campaigns where sweeping judgments and stereotypes of candidates are based on flimsy and sometimes false evidence. But all it takes is for the charge to get repeated enough times and it sticks.
The Spurs remind me a lot of the 1998-2000 New York Yankees team I loved so much. They don't rely on a superstar to pull them through every game. Instead, they just play great as a team.
What is so great about the Spurs team is that they have so much depth off of their bench. The team is naturally built around their superstar Tim Duncan. But they also have two other superstars in Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili who can carry the team if Duncan is having an off night.
In addition, they have perhaps the best defensive player in the league in Bruce Bowen and then to top it off they have a whole bench full of key role players like Elston Howard and Fabarico Oberto to provide picks and blocks.
But their secret weapon is the fact that they have no fewer than five guys who are absolutely deadly from the 3-point range: Michael Finley, Bruce Bowen, Robert Horry, Brent Barry and, of course, Manu Ginobili. When they start hitting their three-point shots, it doesn't take long for a close game to turn into a 12-15 point blowout.

The Spurs just finished off the Phoenix Suns, who were probably the best team they will face in the playoffs. That means unless they fall apart and/or someone gets very lucky, they have a clear shot from here on out for their fourth NBA title.

Iraq vs. Texas

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story the other day about a dispute between the Iraqi government and a Texas company hired to build an electric utility plant south of Baghdad. The plant is currently shuttered and unused with gleaming new equipment just collecting dust.
The Texas company, Southeast Texas Industrial Services Inc., ran into lots of problems trying to fulfill the $283 million contract beginning with security issues. The construction site was the target of multiple insurgent attacks and the Iraqi government failed to provide effective security. In addition, the Iraqi government was constantly behind in making payments for the project almost from the beginning. Finally, when the Texas company was forced to spend millions providing their own private security in order to get the work done they were accused of cheating when they tried to pass those costs on to the Iraqi government.
But what I found most interesting about the story was the role of the Bush administration via their representatives at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Who do you suppose they sided with in this dispute? The Iraqi government, of course. They accused the Texas company of being “unreliable” and “incompetent.” How’s that for an ironic twist. Of course, they can’t side against their puppet regime in Baghdad and any extra money that must be ponied up is ultimately going to come out of U.S. coffers in the end. So it is really no surprise that they would give the American company the back side of their hand in this dispute.

Assault on Reason

The man who should be president has written a new book!

JFK assumptions were wrong

This is really cool!
A new study by a former FBI ballistics expert is casting fresh doubts on the Warren Commission's conclusion that John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin.

The "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James...

They found that the scientific and statistical assumptions Guinn used -- and the government accepted at the time -- to conclude that the fragments came from just two bullets fired from Oswald's gun were wrong.

"This finding means that the bullet fragments from the assassination that match could have come from three or more separate bullets," the researchers said. "If the assassination fragments are derived from three or more separate bullets, then a second assassin is likely," the researchers said. If the five fragments came from three or more bullets, that would mean a second gunman's bullet would have had to strike the president, the researchers explained.

Eventually, the house of cards that the Warren Commission based its conclusions on will collapse and the officials who have been propping it up all this time will be forced to admit that there was more than one gunman (i.e. a conspiracy).

This can’t be good

An area the size of California in Antarctica melted in 2005.

Vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface, NASA said on Tuesday.
A new analysis of satellite data showed that an area the size of California melted and then re-froze -- the most significant thawing in 30 years, the U.S. space agency said.

I’m sure this is just more global warming alarmism. Nothing to see here. Not to worry. Go back to what you were doing. Never mind.

Express-News publishes inaccurate editorial

The San Antonio Express-News published an outrageous and inaccurate editorial yesterday attacking Democrats over ethics reform.

I suspect the editorial was written by Jonathan Gurwitz since it contains the same error that appeared in his column that same day. But that is still no excuse to publish false information.
They have the gall to use the fact that more Republicans keep coming under scrutiny from the Ambramoff lobbying scandal as a springboard to attack Democrats over ethics reform. Here is how they try to accomplish this:

House Minority Leader John Boehner forced the two congressmen to resign key assignments on the Intelligence and Appropriations committees.
That's more than can be said of the Democratic leadership. Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., is the target of an 18-month bribery probe that uncovered $90,000 in cash in the lawmaker's freezer. Yet Jefferson still sits on the Homeland Security Committee.

The problem here is that the Democrats DID take action to discipline Congressman Jefferson after the FBI probe was revealed last year. The whole gist of the editorial is false.
The Democratic leadership stripped Jefferson of his seat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
It was only after he was re-elected to his seat in November, despite strong national Democratic support for his primary opponent, that he was grudgingly allowed to take a seat on the Homeland Security committee. What more could the Democrats do? He is the legitimately elected representative for the people of the 2nd District of Louisiana and they still deserve representation in Congress even if they have poor judgement in who they send to represent them. Until the Justice Department gets off its duff and pushes forward with an indictment of Jefferson or something, the Democrats’ hands are tied.
And as I mentioned earlier, I suspect the reason the Justice Department is sitting on this investigation is because they know that it looks bad for Democrats to have Jefferson in their midst and allows Republicans to continue to claim that the “culture of corruption” in Washington is bi-partisan. That is the result of Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales’ politicization of the Justice Department.

I’m curious if the E-N will run a correction once this is pointed out to them. We shall see.

A convoluted column

Jonathan Gurwitz’ latest column in the E-N is a partisan screed that veers off in all kinds of strange directions.
He starts off by setting up a classic strawman argument:

Invariably in politics, someone comes along to declare that his party has a monopoly on virtue while the opposition has the sin syndicate.

And who would that someone be, Jonathan? Nobody in particular? Just a nameless strawman that you can proceed to knock over?

He jumps off from that to create a bogus presumption:

And invariably in public discourse today, the presumption is that conservatives are dirty, rotten scoundrels while liberals are pious, incorruptible angels.

That’s funny. I always thought that liberals were supposed to be the dirty, unpatriotic hippies - moral degenerates, spaced out on drugs, etc. Now we are pious angels. Interesting.
I think Jonathan may be spending too much time reading liberal blogs or something. It has certainly put him in a pissy mood.

Jonathan goes on to acknowledge the Republicans’ overwhelming complicity in the Abramoff scandal, but then dismisses it as only being representative of the DeLay era, as if that were some brief period long since forgotten on Capitol Hill.

Then, suddenly, he veers off to rant about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 15 years ago complaining about the “smears” that “continue to dog him today.” He implies strongly that Democratic objections to Thomas “conveniently fit some stereotypes about race.”

I take offense at this suggestion. I remember the Clarence Thomas hearings quite well and even wrote several letters to the editor of my local paper protesting his nomination. My complaint had nothing to do with “personal peccadilloes” or “salacious gossip,” but rather with the fact that he little more than one year’s worth of experience as a jurist. I compared the situation to a rookie baseball player in his first season in the Major Leagues suddenly being enshrined in the Hall of Fame and I noted a number of African-American judges with far more impressive credentials and lengthier resumes who were far more worthy of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. But it was clear from the start that Thomas had been selected chiefly because of his extreme right-wing political views and nothing else.

But why we were suddenly talking about Clarence Thomas was unclear until this line:

They forget that his chief inquisitor in Senate confirmation hearings, Joe Biden of Delaware, has a verifiable history of dishonest and unattributed scholarship.

And this has what to do with Thomas’ fitness to serve on the high court?
No, wait, what Jonathan is upset about is the different treatment that Thomas and Biden recieve today:

Thomas is greeted with derision when he speaks at law schools across the country. Biden is once again a Democratic candidate for president. Why the differing treatments?

Is Thomas really greeted with derision everywhere he goes? I find that hard to believe.
And Biden being a presidential candidate again, so what? He still doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of winning. He hasn’t been taken seriously as a presidential candidate since the Neil Kinnock plaigirism charge clobbered him in 1988.
I fail to see some great disparagement in treatment here. So what is next?

Jonathan then returns to his bogus presumption:

Because in this partisan tale, conservatives are dim bulbs and moral hypocrites while liberals are imbued with an endless reservoir of virtue — and the grace of never having to say you're sorry.

Yeah, whatever. So what’s next?

According to this presumption, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales must resign, though no one can point to any law that was broken in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. But Rep. William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson, in whose freezer the FBI found $90,000 in marked cash last year, occupies a seat on the House Homeland Security Committee.

What?!!? This is ridiculous! Talk about comparing apples and oranges. Does Jonathan expect anyone to take this lame argument seriously?
Gonzales has been called on to resign by Republicans and Democrats alike because he either lied to Congress or failed to peform his job adequately in overseeing the U.S. Attorney offices under his direction. Heck, even the editors at the National Review have called for Gonzales to go. We don’t have to wait for a criminal indictment or conviction before we can expect to have honest and competent leadership at the Department of Justice.
And Rep. William Jefferson? Every Republican partisan’s favorite Democrat? Sure he is on the Homeland Security Committee. But Jonathan fails to note that he is no longer on the powerful Ways and Means Committee after Democrats stripped him of that role when the whole FBI sting operation was first revealed. Democrats also withdrew their support for Jefferson during the mid-term elections and supported his primary opponent instead. Unfortunately, Jefferson won re-election regardless.
So now, what would Jonathan have the Democrats do? Refuse to grant him committee assignments? Does Jonathan think the people in Jefferson’s Louisiana district are not worthy of full representation simply because he does not like the person they picked to be their representative? Personally, I wish the feds would hurry up and throw the book at Jefferson so that he can be forcibly removed from the House and replaced with someone without the taint of corruption.
But after hearing about recent revelations of the politicization of the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales, I can’t help but wonder if they are purposefully sitting on this case because they know it helps Republicans to keep Jefferson around so that they can continue to claim that the flood of corruption and scandals in Washington are “bi-partisan.”

Sheesh! But Jonathan is not through. He goes on to whine about a bogus Internet story that alleged that George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of any president, not that such a study is needed to give people that impression.
What this has to do with anything is unclear, but a few short paragraphs later he seems to imply that the people behind the bogus Internet story are responsible for the tough questions being faced by the marriage-challenged Republican presidential candidates this year.

Now the purveyors of this brand of hypocrisy are taking their wares on the presidential campaign trail. The Republican front-runners, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, face persistent questions about their personal and professional lives.

Still following Jonathan’s logic here? Yeah, neither am I.

But wait, now it seems that this whole line of thought was meant as jumping off point so that Jonathan could raise all kinds of spurious accusations against the Democratic presidential candidates:

the Democratic candidates have to worry about more than just perceptions of the two Americas — the one where multimillionaires like John Edwards get $400 haircuts and the one inhabited by the rest of us common folk.
Depending upon what the meaning of the word "is" is, personal life is a serious problem for Hillary Clinton. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's embellished Major League Baseball résumé is a character issue, as are Sen. Barack Obama's real estate deals.

What fun! He got to put in the dig about John Edwards’ expensive taste in hair salons and raise the old “meaning of the word ‘is’” canard to smear Hillary. In addition, he gets to whack Gov. Richardson for an old resume snafu and he gets to make a shady reference to some obscure real estate deal that involved Barak Obama. Nevermind that the same stories that exposed the transaction also noted that “there have been no allegations that Obama ... broke the law or committed any ethics violations.”

Jonathan finally concludes this convoluted mess of a column with the observation that “voters have a way of sorting out the hucksters in both camps.”
Let’s hope they can also sort out the B.S. from the wisdom in columns such as this.

50 ways to lose your money

The E-N reported this weekend that the Texas Lottery has a new $50 scratch off game for gamblers who just can’t seem to throw their money away fast enough.
The odds for winning the million dollar prize are astronomical — 1 in 618,000. You have a much better chance of being killed in a car wreck on your way over to cash in your winning ticket.
But what people don’t seem to realize is how bad their odds are of winning anything. The odds to just break even (i.e. to win $50) are greater than 1 in 6. That’s crazy!
Imagine walking up to someone and handing them $50 for the chance to roll a six-sided die. Let’s say you are trying to roll a six. If you don’t hit it on your first try, they put your money in their pocket and walk away. If you do luck out and roll a six, then you get your money back. Whoop-de-doo!
In order to double your money and win $100, the odds are 1 in 20. As an old D&D player, I’m very familiar with 1-in-20 odds because a 20-sided die is used quite a bit in fantasy roleplaying games. Needless to say, I would be extremely poor if I had to shell out $50 everytime I missed rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die. Try it some time!

Conservatives are no longer influential

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

Isn’t this a democracy?

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

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

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

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

Mission Unaccomplished

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

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

Worst President Ever

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

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

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

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

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

Severe failure

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

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

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

Wasting our money

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

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

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

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

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

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

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

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

OSHA gone AWOL

From the New York Times yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hostage situation

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

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

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

A dilemma for the NRA

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

Boris Yeltsin memories

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

D.C. representation

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

Lax gun laws

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

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

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

The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

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

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

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

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

Do you want to fight?

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

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

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

Who won in Iraq?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apology accepted

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

JFK column

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

JFK assassination battle will never end

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

Political Odyssey Pt. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hidden gems

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

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

Collapse of the Bush Administration

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

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

B.C. - R.I.P.

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

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

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