Where the money goes

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m glad we got that all straightened out.

Economic consequences of anti-immigrant hysteria

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

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So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have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

Al-Qaeda Not In Iraq

While Republicans have been working hard to make sure that our military forces remain stuck in the Iraqi quagmire — so that they can continue to play whack-a-mole with the anti-occupation insurgents in the midst of a civil war — the real terrorist threat — let’s call them Al-Qaeda Not In Iraq — has been slowly rebuilding its operations and regaining its strength.
The fact that the real al-Qaeda is still a threat six years after 9/11 while we pour billions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of U.S. soldiers chasing down an al-Qaeda sock puppet in Iraq is the biggest scandal of our generation.
It disgusts me that whenever Osama bin Laden or one of his lieutenants puts out a video today, the Republican enablers of Bush’s failed foreign policy respond by trying to brush it off and attacking Democrats claiming that we are in essence providing “aid and comfort” to the enemy whenever we criticize Bush’s misguided war efforts.

Filibuster follies

There were three important votes in the Senate today. Each one garnered a clear majority of senators. The bill to give the half million residents of the District of Columbia representation in Congress had the support of 57 senators. A bill to restore habeus corpus rights had the support of 56 senators and so did a bill to provide our troops with an equal amount of downtime with their families as they spend on active duty in Iraq had the support of 56 senators.
But in each case the legislation failed to pass. Why? Because Republicans are filibustering everything under the sun.
As Kevin Drum shows here, the GOP is obstructing legislation at three times the normal rate and are on pace to set an all time record on filibuster usage this term. The same Republicans who were ready to eliminate the filibuster when Democrats used it to block a small handful of the hundred-plus judges that Bush nominated to the federal courts, are now embracing the filibuster with all their might and using it to block every single action in the Senate.
This is an abuse of our democratic process by a party that has lost the support of the American people. One more election, however, and they won’t have the filibuster or the veto to fall back on. The 2008 election will be a bloodbath for Republicans and while I will be happy to see it and believe it is well deserved, I’m also wary of having absolutely no checks and balances in place. As much as I support the Democratic agenda, I still think it is necessary to have a functional and coherent opposition party to keep the other side from overreaching as the Republicans have clearly done recently.

Taxation without representation wins again

I was thoroughly disgusted to see the Republican minority once again blocking legislation that would have finally given residents of the District of Columbia full representation in Congress. The compromise legislation would have given a House seat to D.C. that would most likely go Democratic and one to Utah that would most likely go Republican. Utah was just shy of getting another House seat during the last Census.
The District of Columbia has more than a half million residents which makes it larger than the state of Wyoming and very close to Vermont and North Dakota. And yet, the residents have no voting representation in Congress. The fact that this situation has been allowed to fester for so long is an affront to our democratic system of government. No other democratic country in the world denies representation to the citizens of its capital city.

The excuses given by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for opposing the bill were lame, lame, lame. He claims that because the Constitution says that representation in Congress is for the “people of the several states”, this means that D.C. does not qualify because it is not technically a state. But as it is pointed out here, that even though the Constitution says Congress has the authority to regulate commerce “among the several states”, that has not prevented Congress from regulating commerce in D.C. Likewise, the 16th Amendment gives Congress the power to levy an income tax on the citizens of the “several states”, yet this has somehow not allowed the residents of D.C. to skip out on paying their taxes all these years.

So the half million residents of D.C. pay their taxes, fight in our wars, are bound by our laws, and yet they get no say whatsoever in the drafting and formation of those laws. That is absolutely and without a doubt unAmerican. We had another opportunity to rectify this situation the other day, but 41 Republicans and one Democrat stood in the way. I don’t know what Max Baucus’ problem is, but the Republicans were, in my opinion, acting out of sheer partisan spitefulness. They are afraid that once D.C. gets representation in the House, they will demand representation in the Senate. And the Republicans don’t want to see two more Democratic seats in the Senate, so they are willing to let half a million people continue to be without representation because of their likely political affiliation.
Two prominent black Republicans pleaded with their GOP cohorts in the Mooney Times to support the legislation to no avail.

Here is the full list of Senators who support taxation without representation:

Alexander (R-TN)
*Allard (R-CO)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
*Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Dole (R-NC)
**Domenici (R-NM)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
*Hagel (R-NE)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Lott (R-MS)
Martinez (R-FL)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Smith (R-OR)
**Stevens (R-AK)
Sununu (R-NH)
Thune (R-SD)
**Vitter (R-LA)
*Warner (R-VA)

A * means the Senator has announced plans to retire before or after this term. A ** means the senator is involved in a scandal currently which could force them to step down in the near future.
There will be an accounting during the next election and the results will not be good for Republicans who are likely to lose a half dozen more seats at least. Then, perhaps, we will finally be able to pass legislation that removes this blot from our national conscience.

Greenspan: It's all about the oil

Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan writes this in his new book:

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Of course it's about oil! But we're not allowed to say it. It is blasphemy to even think such a thing and people who do are attacked as heretics. But there can be little doubt that we would not have gone into Iraq if it was not the third largest oil producing nation in the world.

The fact that Greenspan can admit this without getting burned at the stake is a promising development. Maybe we are finally coming out of the Bush Dark Ages and having the scales removed form our eyes. As people begin to see more clearly what has gone on the past seven years they will continue to react with disgust and dismay.

A surprise choice for AG

Hey! It looks like President Bush nominated an attorney general who won’t treat the Constitution like a handy roll of toilet tissue. Good for him!
Beyond that, however, I have to agree with Bill. Michael Mukasey is just going to be keeping the seat warm for whoever Hillary Clinton nominates.

Too little, too late

Poor Lincoln Chafee should have switched parties when he had the chance. Now it makes little difference to anyone. Still, I’m glad to see him repudiating his past GOP affiliation.

Blast from the past

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

Disturbed blogger

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

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

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

Shifting blame and avoiding responsibility

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

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

Another MoveOn ad

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

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

Global warming credibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The surge bust

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

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

None of this happened.

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

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

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

Gurwitz strikes back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best 100 TV Shows

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

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

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

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

Poisoned discourse

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

Petraeus ad controversy

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

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

It’s not just Bush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alberto "Finally" Gone-zales

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

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

San Antonio: The Movie

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

Hillary crushes Rudy

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

The surge is not “working”

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

Republicans are broke

Dems Crushing GOP in Congressional Fundraising

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

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

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

CD anniversary

CD celebrates 25th anniversary

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

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

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

Where's our football team?

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

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

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

Chicago Cubs
Chicago White Sox
Chicago Bears
Chicago Bulls
Chicago Blackhawks

Houston Astros
Houston Texans
Houston Rockets

Philadelphia Phillies
Philadelphia Eagles
Philadelphia 76ers
Philadelphia Flyers

Arizona Diamondbacks
Phoenix Cardinals
Phoenix Suns
Phoenix Coyotes

San Antonio Spurs

San Diego Padres
San Diego Chargers

Texas Rangers
Dallas Cowboys
Dallas Mavericks
Dallas Stars

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

Rove: Draft dodger/tax evader

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

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

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

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

What if....

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

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

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

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

Rove cuts-n-runs

It’s hard to believe that Karl Rove is abandoning President Bush during his time of need. Now that Bush is at the lowest point of his presidency in public opinion polls, Rove has decided it’s time to cut-n-run. Rove should stick around and take his lumps with Bush since this disaster of a presidency is largely of his making. This notion that he can slip away and shed responsibility for this mess with the lame excuse that he needs to spend more time with his family is pathetic.
Rove is one of those political figures with whom I have a difficult time imagining any redeemable qualities. He is right up there with Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed and Kenneth Starr among the people in politics who I like the least. There are lots of people in politics who are just as hard-right and just as partisan, but nevertheless have certain traits or characteristics that I can still find admirable. While I might disagree with their politics, I still imagine that I could like them on a personal level. Rove has never struck me that way. Perhaps that is unfair, but this latest move strikes me as the height of the “I’m out for me, the heck with everybody else” mentality that is the core of today’s Republican political philosophy.

Don't blame it ALL on Bush

George W. Bush may very well be the worst president in U.S. history. But Democrats are making a mistake if they try to pin all the blame for everything that is wrong with his administration on him personally. We should not focus so intently on Bush. Sure, he's exceedingly stubborn and unwilling to change even in the face of overwhelming public disapproval, but just replacing Bush with some other Republican is not going to make things better. In fact, it could make things much worse.
The real culprit that we are up against is the Republican governing philosophy. It has been especially awful under George W. because he had a Republican-controlled Congress for most of his presidency and was thus unfettered in his pursuit of Republican goals. Fortunatley, Bush's incompetence prevented him from fully achieving all of the Republican's goals, but we might not be so lucky if another Republican president is elected. Imagine how bad Ronald Reagan might have been had he not been somewhat constrained by a Democratic Congress.
Look back at the string of awful presidents we had during the early part of the 20th Century: Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover. Do you think that it was coincidence that we just happened to get three really bad presidents in a row? Not if you realize that it wasn't Harding, Coolidge and Hoover as individuals that were so bad, it was the Republican philosophy of making government serve the interests of big business and not regular people that made them so bad.
If we allow people to think that it was all Bush's fault individually they might conclude that there is no problem electing another Republican like Guiliani or Romney or Thompson, as long as it's not George Bush. But Bush was only a part of the problem, and a small one at that. Remember that Bush did fine as Texas governor mostly because he was following a conservative Democratic governing philosophy under the tutelage of Bob Bullock and Pete Laney. It was only after he jettisoned that philosophy in favor of a non-compromising partisan Republican one that started to spiral downward.

Bridging the gap

When the bridge in Minnesota collapsed last week it focused the nation’s attention on our strained roadways and our penchant for putting off and delaying necessary maintenance on our infrastructure.
Now, U.S. Rep. Oberstar is proposing a 5-cent gas tax increase to fund bridge inspections and repairs. The bill would hike the federal gas tax to 23.4 cents a gallon from 18.4 cents and raise an estimated $25 billion over three years.
I’m glad to see someone taking responsibility and proposing a solution. We can’t continue to let our nation’s infrastructure deteriorate and someone has to pay for it one way or another.
Quite frankly, with the way that gas prices are jumping around these days, I doubt that anyone would even notice a 5 cent increase in the gas tax.
Nevertheless, President Bush has come out against the increase apparently because he thinks all tax increase are bad no matter what. I guess he would prefer to spend the money in Iraq reparing bridges that the insurgents blew up so that they can blow them up all over again.
Fortunately, we only have to put up with Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility and failed presidency for 18 more months. I just hope no more bridges collapse before then.

Hall of Fame conundrum

In light of Barry Bonds’ breaking the home run record, it will be interesting to see how the baseball Hall of Fame responds to the steroid scandal that has plaugued professional sports for the past decade and a half.
When Hank Aaron broke the Babe’s record in 1974, it was pretty much a given that anyone with 500 or more home runs would be in the Hall of Fame. You had players like Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, Ted Williams, Ernie Banks, Eddie Matthews and Mel Ott. They were soon joined by Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, Willie McCovey and Eddie Murray.
The Hall also opened its doors to players who were just shy of the 500 mark such as Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, Willie Stargell, Dave Winfield and Carl Yastrezemski. In fact, you had to go all the way down the list to poor old Dave Kingman at 442 to find someone who apparently did not pass muster with the high priests of the Hall of Fame.
Since then, however, there have been a whole slew of ballplayers who have raced past Kingman into the elite realm of baseball power hitting. Along with Bonds, the list now includes Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey Jr., Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Frank Thomas, Alex Rodriguez, Fred McGriff, Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Gary Sheffield, Jose Canseco and Jeff Bagwell. Will any or all of these players be locks for the Hall of Fame? Or have they all been too tainted by the steroids scandal? We already saw Mark McGwire get passed over last time during his first year of eligibility. What about Slammin’ Sammy and Griffey Jr.?
Some of the players such as Palmeiro and Canseco have openly admitted to past steroid use. Would it be fair to keep them out of the Hall because they were honest, while possibly enshrining others who may have lied or covered up past use? And what if a player just worked out at the gym a lot and never used steroids, but now people are suspicious and won’t vote for him? What a mess.
We may just have to look back at the 1990s as the Juiced-ball era and just accept that it was a period when steroids were rampant and may have impacted players’ performances, similar to the way we view the Dead-ball era during the early 1900s.

New Home Run King

Barry Bonds broke the home run record last night, hitting his 756th career blast off of the hapless Washington Nationals during a home game in San Francisco.
It’s kind of sad and ironic that Bonds will likely never be inducted into the Hall of Fame despite holding the career home run record. But the taint of the steroid scandal is too strong for most people to ignore. Despite Bond’s denials and/or protestations of ignorance, people will always believe that he benefitted from an illegal drug that enhanced his strength and stamina beyond normal means. One could argue that steroids alone are not enough to make a great ballplayer and that it still took a boatload of talent for Bonds to get to where he is today. Just look at all the other players who we know or suspect took steroids and fell far short of breaking the home run record. But you can’t get past the fact that without steroids, some of those home runs that piled up over the years would have fallen short of the fence and been recorded as flyball outs instead.
Unlike, for example, Pete Rose who broke Ty Cobb’s career hits record fair and square. The scandal that felled Rose - gambling - had no impact whatsoever on his performance on the field and thus, in my opinion, should not have resulted in permanent banishment from the Hall of Fame.

Here is how the baseball home run list shapes up now. I guess I haven’t been paying attention lately because I was surprised by the number of current players who are now in the top echelon. Active players are in bold with their ages in paretheses, but only A-Rod is considered to be a future threat to the home run record at this point.

1. Barry Bonds (42) 756
2 Hank Aaron 755
3. Babe Ruth 714
4. Willie Mays 660
5. Sammy Sosa (38) 604
6. Ken Griffey Jr. (37) 589
7. Frank Robinson 586
8. Mark McGwire 583
9. Harmon Killebrew 573
10. Rafael Palmeiro 569
11. Reggie Jackson 563
12. Mike Schmidt 548
13. Mickey Mantle 536
14. Jimmie Foxx 534
15. Willie McCovey 521
16. Ted Williams 521
17. Ernie Banks 512
18. Eddie Mathews 512
19. Mel Ott 511
20. Frank Thomas (39) 505
21. Eddie Murray 504
22. Alex Rodriguez (31) 500
23. Lou Gehrig 493
24. Fred McGriff 493
25. Jim Thome (36) 490
26. Manny Ramirez (35) 489
27. Gary Sheffield (38) 478

Realists vs. Fantasists

Fantast — n. an impractical dreamer. (Webster’s New World Dictionary)

Michael Ignatieff, a former Harvard professor and now a member of the Canadian parliament, pens a mea culpa about his support for the Iraq War in this week’s New York Times Magazine.
It is an intersting and reflective piece that makes a point I’ve been stressing for some time — that the war supporters have grasped onto an impractical and unrealistic fantasy with regards to their expectations for Iraq.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little.

It would be nice to live in a fantasy world where the United States could galavant around the world righting wrongs, overthrowing dictators, establishing democracies and other superhero pursuits. But that is not the reality and people who ignore reality inevitably run into trouble.
That doesn’t mean we can’t do things to oppose dictators or support the creation of democracies, but we have to do it from a foundation based in reality. Right now the President of the United States and his enablers (the 30 percent or so of the population that still supports him) are living in a fantasy world. They continue to believe - four and half years later - that we are “winning” in Iraq and that we are “making progress.” They warn of dire consequences if we pull out, just as they boasted of glorious triumphs during the earliest stages of the conflict. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul said it well during the latest Republican Debate in Iowa as Josh Marshall notes:

It's sort of obvious now that he said it. But I had not quite thought of it that way. The same people now continually raising the stakes on the price of redeployment from Iraq with increasingly lurid tales of genocide, ethnic cleansing and regional implosion are pretty much exactly the same people who gamed us into this mess in the first place with another bunch of fairy tales.

Brothels, bad movies and textbook censors

A lot of famous people have died in the last few days starting with Marvin Zindler, the Houston-based TV news personality whose claim to fame was exposing the infamous Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange many years ago. The movie “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” was based on the Chicken Ranch story and one of the characters in the film is based on Zindler. I became familiar with Zindler from watching him on TV whenever I was in Houston visiting my in-laws. In his later years, he was mostly known for his hyped up restaurant health inspection reports during which he delighted in knocking establishments for “Slime in the Ice macine.” The news reports said he did his last newscast from his hospital bed the day before he died at age 85.
On the same day, it was reported that the reknowned director Ingmar Bergman died. That brought back memories of my college film class when I was forced to watch his movie “Cries and Whispers.” It was horrible. Just awful. Yuck! It was the one film in the class that I truly disliked. I’ve never seen any of his other films, so I hesitate to dismiss all of his works, but I clearly did not understand what the film critics saw in that particular movie.
Finally, today I noticed the NYTimes had an obituary for Norma Gabler, who with her husband led the successful crusade to influence and intimidate school textbook publishers into reflecting their conservative viewpoints.
What struck me from reading the obit is that I would have agreed with the Gablers on many points. The thing that first set them off was a textbook that omitted the words “Under God” from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I agree that was an outrageous abuse of “political correctness.” Likewise, when they discovered other inaccuracies in textbooks or noted imbalances - such as the famous case where a history textbook spent more time on Marilyn Monroe than on George Washington - I could see their point. So in one respect, they did a good thing by forcing the textbook publishers to be more accurate and aware of the educational needs of their audience.
Unfortunately, the Gablers took it too far. They weren’t satisfied with just correcting inaccuracies in the textbooks. They also insisted on forcing conservative ideology into the books and censoring things that they did not like such as coverage of Vietnam or Watergate or Evolution. But the success they had in these areas also forced liberal groups to get active in textbook editing to counter their more extreme efforts, so perhaps in that respect their overall legacy was a positive one.

Tearing down the wall

One thing I am fairly confident in predicting as a result of Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal, is that the storied paper’s unhinged, wingnutty editorial/opinion section will be unaffected. I can’t see how Rupert Murdoch could make the WSJ opinion section any worse. The big tragedy is what the takeover will do to the vaunted and highly respected news section of the paper. Murdoch is sure to tear down the wall that seperates the wingnutty opinion section from the rest of the paper, thus infecting the news department with his brand of right-wing ideologically driven “reporting” as evidenced by Murdoch’s other ventures including the slimy New York Post and the godawful Fox News Channel. He will then declare the end result to be “Fair and Balanced.”
When that happens, it will be a sad day in journalism.

Unplugged, Part II

OK, so I wasn’t really back so much. Just as I was getting caught up on work from my last vacation, I ended up taking another short vacation when my brother-in-law came to town with his family. We’ve had a lot of fun the last few days going to Natural Bridge Caverns, the River Walk and the San Antonio Zoo. Then we took turns babysitting each other’s kids so that the couples could go out and do things like eat at nice restaurants and watch movies in real theaters.
My other brother-in-law was in town too for Army training and was able to drop by one evening for dinner. So we’ve had a good time, but now it is finally time to get back to business. And this time I mean it! Really.

Unplugged

OK, I'm back.
I've been on vacation for the past week with no access to a computer since last Wednesday.
We went to Dallas and had a great time going to the Dallas Zoo, the Dallas World Aquarium, Fair Park, West End Market and lots more. We apparently missed out on a lot of rain while we were up there too. We were fortunate to not have any of our trip interrupted by rain, while back home it looks like we got more than four inches.
I've got a lot of catching up to do at work so I won't have much time for posting for a bit. I'm also way behind on national news as I paid little attention to worldly matters during that time. The only bit of news that seeped into my offline vacation realm was the fact that Tammy Faye Bakker died. That's too bad. I think she proved to be more sincere in her faith than her ex-husband did.
More later.

Rats!

I took my son to see his second movie in a theater over the weekend. We went to the new Palladium at The Rim, which I’ve been eager to check out, and saw “Ratatouille,” the latest Pixar masterpiece.
It was a great movie, but just a little too involved at some points for a 3-year-old. A couple of times during the movie, Nathan said he wanted to turn it off and watch something else. That’s something he can do when we are at home watching stuff on the DVD or the DVR, but not at the cinema. He also didn’t understand why we had to be at the theater at a specific time or why we had to wait 10 minutes for the show to start once we got there.
My wife stayed at home with our daughter, Isabel. At 20 months, she is not going to sleep through a movie like she did last year when we went to see “Cars.” But she is not old enough to sit through a movie yet either. In fact, she has shown no interest in TV at all so far, which is fine with us. I think by this age Nathan was already into watching Barney.
I’m sure Nathan will love Ratatouille once we buy it on DVD and he gets to view it multiple times at home. Meanwhile, I’m sure it is without doubt the best movie I will see in the theater this year.

Birthday movies

My wife bought me a whole slew of movies for my birthday so I am stocked up on films that I need to see. Our movie watching habits have changed dramatically since the kids were born. We very rarely go to movies at the theater any more. We almost never rent movies anymore either because we can never be sure when we will have time to sit down and watch a movie. We will occassionally watch a movie on pay-per-view on the spur of the moment, but most of the time I like to buy the used DVDs from Hollywood Video or Blockbuster for my collection and those are the ones we typically see.
For my birthday I got:

Casino Royale (James Bond)
The Da Vinci Code
Flags of Our Fathers
Letters From Iwo Jima
Mission Impossible III
The Good Shepherd
Everyone’s Hero
Tom and Jerry: Shiver Me Whiskers (Mostly for my kids)

I also got some birthday money and went out and bought:

Happy Feet
X-Men III: The Last Stand
Blood Diamond

This will catch me up somewhat on my 2006 movie watching. Here is the list of 2006 films that I now have seen or own (a * means I’ve actually watched the movie):

*Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest
*Night at the Museum
*Cars
X-Men III
*The Da Vinci Code
Happy Feet
Casino Royale
MI III
*Devil Wears Prada
*World Trade Center
The Good Shepherd
Curious George
Blood Diamond
The Wild
Flags of Our Fathers
Letters From Iwo Jima
United 93
*An Inconvenient Truth
Everyone’s Hero

I haven’t seen anything that has come out in 2007 yet but eventually I expect to see:

Ratatouille
Spider Man III
Pirates of the Caribbean III
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
and probably Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Oh, and also Live Free or Die Hard.

Political obstructionism

I’ve always known that Republicans, at least the modern day authoritarian/fundamentalists running the show now, have been far more lock-step partisan than Democrats could ever muster. But this post by Anonymous Liberal really lays it out well and is worth a long excerpt. Hat tip to Ann!

Since at least the beginning of the Clinton administration, the defining feature of our political system has been an intense Republican partisanship.

No Republicans were willing to sign on to Clinton's major policy initiatives. His tax bill passed only when Al Gore cast the deciding vote; every Republican opposed it. And his health care bill was defeated when Democrats joined every Republican in opposing it.

When the Republicans took over in 1994, they began changing rules and procedures in an effort to shut Democrats out of the legislating process. They initiated the K-Street Project, which was an effort to systematically purge all Democratic lobbyists from Washington. They implemented a majority-of-the-majority policy so as to ensure that only bills that a majority of Republicans supported would even be considered. They shut down the government in a budgetary squabble. They investigated everything and subpoenaed everyone imaginable, including the Socks the Cat. And they made a mockery of our constitutional system and paralyzed our country for over a year by insisting on impeaching and trying a popular Democratic president over matters related to a sexual indiscretion.

When President Bush took over, the Republican-controlled Congress grew even more aggressively partisan. Under Karl Rove's direction, Republicans in Congress actually pursued a policy of attempting to minimize bipartisan support for legislation (and thereby keep Democrats from taking any credit). They would tinker with bills that had bipartisan support by adding provocative amendments and provisions until no self-respecting Democrat could support the final product. In the Senate, Republicans went as far as attempting to eliminate the filibuster.

They solidified their majority in the Fall of 2002 by shamelessly politicizing the issue of terrorism just a year after the 9/11 attacks. The goal was to turn terrorism into a Republican (as opposed to bipartisan) issue. And, of course, unlike the previous six years, in the first six years of President Bush's term, the Republican-controlled Congress conducted no oversight at all and issued no subpoenas.

And now that the Republicans are a minority again, they have resorted to partisan obstructionism of an unprecedented scale. Republicans in the Senate are now using procedural tactics to block just about everything, including bills that have already been passed by overwhelming margins:
Remember the Congressional Ethics Reform package, for instance? It passed both houses of Congress by substantial majorities: 96-2 in the Senate, and 396-22 in the House. And yet, strange to say, the Republicans are refusing to let it go to conference, where both houses agree on a uniform final version of the bill to enact.
And the filibuster has gone from being a tool of last resort to a daily occurrence:

Normally, filibusters are used only when one side feels that some bill is exceptionally important. They have always been for special circumstances, not for everyday use. But the Senate Republicans have, essentially, decided that they are going to require not a majority vote, but 60 votes, for everything more important than naming post offices. And that is unprecedented.
Unprecedented but, sadly, not unexpected.

If you're still not convinced, consider all the major pieces of legislation that have been enacted in the last two decades. What do they all have in common? Virtually all of them were Republican initiatives that important Democrats agreed to support: welfare reform, the Bush tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug bill, the Iraq War authorization, the Military Commissions Act, etc. The only real exception was the Clinton tax bill, but that's the exception that proves the rule; that bill passed without a single Republican vote (at least in the Senate).

In other words, for a long time now, bipartisanship has been a one-way street. It only happens when Democrats are willing to go along with an idea that most Republicans support. It almost never happens in reverse. In the Senate right now, Republicans are even blocking the bills that many Republicans themselves support. The goal is to make Congress look as ineffectual as possible. And to accomplish that goal, Republican leaders are blocking everything, for no other reason than to stop anything constructive from occurring.

I think it is key right now for people to realize that Republicans are using obstructionism as a political tool and not a legislative tool. They are not obstructing bills because they think they are bad or harmful. They are obstructing bills because they want to make Democrats look bad by making it so that they can’t accomplish anything. And then President Bush can go out, like he did the other day, and lambaste the Democrats in Congress for not getting things done.
It is incredibly cynical what Republicans are doing today and the only reason they can get away with it is because most people don’t care enough to pay attention and because the media is more interested in celebrity gossip and scandal than they are about matters of state.

I’m afraid the only way to fight this kind of partisanship is to be equally partisan in the voting booth. Sometimes I want to support certain Republicans, and in the past I have, because I think they are good, well-meaning politicians whose positions are not so radically different from my own. But when these same Republicans form a block in the House or Senate that prevents anything from being done for purely partisan reasons, they have gone too far and the only recourse is to throw them out and put in a filibuster-proof Democratic majority.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that is possible considering the state of our democracy today.
A better option, of course, would be for a core of moderate, mainstream conservatives to break away from the radical group leading our nation over the cliff and help the rest of us to steer the country back onto course.

$250,000 per minute

Wow! Now that’s putting it into perspective. We spend more money than I make in five years every single minute that we are in Iraq.

As we debate what to do in Iraq, here are two facts to bear in mind:
First, a poll this spring of Iraqis — who know their country much better than we do — shows that only 21 percent think that the U.S. troop presence improves security in Iraq, while 69 percent think it is making security worse.

Second, the average cost of posting a single U.S. soldier in Iraq has risen to $390,000 per year, according to a new study by the Congressional Research Service. This fiscal year alone, Iraq will cost us $135 billion, which amounts to a bit more than a quarter-million dollars per minute.

We simply can’t want to be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us to be there. That poll of Iraqis, conducted by the BBC and other news organizations, found that only 22 percent of Iraqis support the presence of coalition troops in Iraq, down from 32 percent in 2005.

If Iraqis were pleading with us to stay and quell the violence, maybe we would have a moral responsibility to stay. But when Iraqis are begging us to leave, and saying that we are making things worse, then it’s remarkably presumptuous to overrule their wishes and stay indefinitely because, as President Bush termed it in his speech on Tuesday, “it is necessary work.”

We can’t afford universal health care at home — but we can afford more than $10 billion a month so that American troops can be maimed in a country where they aren’t wanted?

Losing its grip

Jonathan Gurwitz has an interesting column in today’s paper basically warning the GOP that it may be losing its grip on Texas.
I agree with much of what Gurwitz says, even if I don’t agree with his tone. I think it is a good sign that Texas may be veering back to being a two-party state rather than a one-party monolith as it has been for the past decade. I think the signs that Gurwitz sees are pretty clear and I don’t think there is much that mainstream Repubicans like Gurwitz can do to change it as long as the GOP is being led by the authoritarian/fundamentalist wing of the party.
He makes the key point that the growing Latino vote in Texas will knock the GOP back into minority status if they can’t win more than 40 percent of that demographic. But I disagree very strongly with his characterization of Latino voters:

Latinos are natural GOP voters, strong on family, self-reliance and faith. Republican candidates simply need to make them follow their inclinations to the voting booth.

So I guess that makes Democratic voters anti-family and anti-faith. Sheesh!
Or better yet, if Latinos are supposed to be pro-family why would they ever vote for Republicans? The Party of Rudy Guiliani who is currently on his third marriage and estranged from his kids? Or the Party of Fred Thompson who dumped his wife of 30 years to find a trophy wife 25-years his junior?
With the combination of the Republican Party’s anti-immigrant zeal, its continuing pursuit of the disasterous Iraq war and the overall unpopularity of President Bush in general, Republicans will be hard-pressed to win anywhere close to 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2008.

Global warming is threatening baseball!!!

OK, this is the final straw! It’s gone too far now. Our national passtime is being threatened by the global warming crisis, according to the latest report from the New York Times.

...a warming of the local climate could also affect the ash used for bats, some scientists say. As temperatures rise, the ash wood that now makes an ideally dense but flexible bat might turn softer because of a longer growing season.

Softer bats!!! Why didn’t Al Gore warn us about this in his movie? Surely people wouldn’t be sitting still knowing that our ballplayers may soon be forced to use squishy bats in the near future.
Naturally, I blame President Bush and all those people driving Hummers, SUVs and big trucks (bigger than a Dodge Dakota, naturally, which is what I drive).

I just hope that it is not already too late!

GOP Family Values

How does the Republican Party get away with portraying itself as the party of “family values?” I just don’t get it.
Today we learn that Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, who was elected to Congress in 1998 to fill in for the disgraced adulterer and would-be Speaker Bob Livingston, has been caught in his own sex scandal.

Glenn Greenwald gives a good rundown of the whole sordid affair.
This is just another in a long line of Washington sex scandals and by my count Republicans have been the culprits in twice as many of these as Democrats during the past decade.

And yet this myth persists that Republicans are somehow morally superior to Democrats because of their intolerant and often hypocritical stand on “family values.”
Right now the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is Rudy Guiliani who has been divorced twice, is estranged from his kids and had to drop out of the 2000 Senate race against Hillary Clinton when it was revealed that he was having an affair at the time.
And now here comes Fred Thompson, the supposed saviour of the political right, who it turns out divorced his wife of nearly 30 years just as his Hollywood career was taking off in 1985. Thompson then had dalliances with a string of celebrity starlets before getting remarried a few years later to a woman who is a quarter century younger than him.
I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if Republicans weren’t so insistent on presenting themselves as the Holier than Thou party, but somehow this whole charade persists.

McCain down and almost out

John McCain’s presidential campaign has apparently imploded.

Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign took another serious blow Tuesday when two of his top strategists left the effort, prompting a series of rumors that McCain may be considering a withdrawal from the race.
Terry Nelson, McCain's campaign manager, and John Weaver, the senator's longtime chief political strategist, have stepped aside.

It’s all over for him. His brand of maverick conservatism just doesn’t sell in today’s GOP culture of strict fealty to the “conservative” movement. The problem for McCain is that conservatism is no longer the leading ideology of the GOP, rather it is radical right-wing authoritarianism that is driving the party.

Never too late

The New York Times finally came out with an editorial the other day calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
I’d say it is about time! I came to that conclusion three full years ago.
I was opposed to the war from the beginning and questioned the administration’s rationale before they pulled the trigger.

In other news, Colin Powell is desperately trying to restore his tattered image by claiming that he tried to talk Bush out of going to war sometime before he shot his global credibility by making a speech before the U.N. chock full of bogus and trumped-up claims of Iraq’s WMD arsenal.

Seven Wonders

Since all but one of the original Seven Wonders of the World no longer exists, someone came up with the bright idea of selecting seven new wonders of the world. So they had a list of nominees drawn up and then opened up a big, worldwide vote. The final results were just announced the other day and they are mostly impressive with just a few quibbles.

The new Seven Wonders include (in no particular order):

Chichén Itzá pyramid, Mexico

Christ the Redeemer statue, Brazil

The Great Wall of China, China

Machu Picchu, Peru

Petra, Jordan

The Roman Colloseum, Italy

The Taj Mahal, India.

The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was not included in the voting because it already has Seven Wonder status as the sole remaining wonder from the original historic list.
Some famous monuments that just missed making the list include the Statue of Liberty in New York; The Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, and the Acropolis in Greece.

Happy Birthday to me!

Today is the 21st anniversary of my 21st birthday!

GOP losing the money race

The leading Democratic presidential candidates are smoking their Republican counterparts in the quarterly fundraising race.
Barak Obama continues to impress with his fundraising prowess raking in an impressive $31 million last quarter to lead the field. Hillary Clinton wasn’t far behind with an equally impressive $27 million.
Meanwhile, John Edwards has slipped back into second tier status with $9 million followed closely by Bill Richardson with $7 million.

On the Republican side, Rudy Guiliani leads the pack with $17 million, just half as much as Obama and $10 million shy of Hillary. Mitt Romney, the previous leader, has slipped back to second with a meager $14 million and limping along at the back of the pack is John McCain who raised $11 million but reportedly has just $2 million in cash-on-hand.
It looks like McCain has just about run out of gas and Guiliani and Romney are clearly not going to be competitive at this pace so the Republicans only hope now is that Fred Thompson or someone else will jump in at the last minute to rally the troops. But quite frankly, Bush has screwed things up so royally for Republicans this time around that I don’t see that happening.

Quid Pro Quo

Lie and obstruct justice to cover Dick Cheney’s rear and we will make sure that you get off scot free. That was the deal that Scooter Libby had from the beginning.
The fact that Bush is using his presidential powers to cover up the misdeeds of his own administration is a far worse abuse of the privilege than anything President Clinton ever did.
There was a concerted effort directed out of the vice presidents office to try and damage Ambassador Wilson’s credibility by exposing his wife as a CIA agent. Cheney was pulling the levers while Scooter Libby and Karl Rove did the dirty work of blabbing to the media. The fact that Richard Armitage had earlier talked to Bob Woodward about it is inconsequential since Woodward did not publish the information and Libby and Rove were not even aware of what Armitage was doing at the time.
By exposing Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert role with the CIA, the Bush officials damaged an undercover operation that was tracking Iran’s nuclear ambitions at a time when such efforts are most vital to our nation’s security. Clearly, if something like this had gone on under a Democratic administration, every Republican who is defending this garbage would have been howling for blood.
This is the most corrupt and criminal administration since the Nixon Whitehouse only worse because, in addition, Bush is an incompetent doofus compared to the whily but whipsmart Nixon.