Hysteria on the right

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

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

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

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

Alleged terror financing case falls flat

The Bush Justice Departments big terror financing case just collapsed.

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

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

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

Bush destroying conservatism

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

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

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

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

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

What a mess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And more here:

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

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

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

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, about three-quarters of the generators were no longer functioning.

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

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

Beginning To Wonder

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

Pelosi unfairly attacked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poisoned discourse, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

13 votes short

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

Rats and sinking ships

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

Here is the latest list of retirements:

Republicans

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

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

Democrats

Senate
None leaving

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

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

Military duress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No joy in Muddville

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

A nightmare with no end

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

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

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

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

Al Gore: Nobel Laureate

Congratulations to the man who should be president.

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

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

Give ‘em hell, President Carter!

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

Carter: Cheney is a disaster for our country.

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

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

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

SCHIP defended

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

More on the Rock Hall of Fame

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

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

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

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

Oops, They did it again

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

Pow Mike!

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

Impeach Judge Sharon Keller

This is just sickening.

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

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

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

Another Udall in the Senate

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

Business rejecting Republican brand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans are doomed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is Sheldon Adelson?

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

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

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

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

Cornyn’s dishonest op-ed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senate veto-proof’s SCHIP

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

Republicans are broke

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

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

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

Where the money goes

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m glad we got that all straightened out.

Economic consequences of anti-immigrant hysteria

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

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

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!