A lack of empathy

There was an interesting piece in the NYTimes today on Harry Whittington giving the backstory on his long ties to the Texas Republican Party.
What caught my attention was this graph describing one of Whittington’s ‘passions’ “that do not fit so squarely with his image as a Republican elder” - prison reform.

While serving on the board of the Texas Department of Corrections in the 1980's and after observing the conditions in many state prisons, he once claimed, "Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants." He also led an effort to move mentally retarded inmates out of the general prison population and followed this with outspoken support of a bill to ban execution of retarded prisoners. (Although Gov. Rick Perry vetoed that bill in 2001, the United States Supreme Court later outlawed such executions.)

"A person who is born with a body that becomes an adult and a mind that remains a child needs special protection in our criminal justice system," Mr. Whittington, one of whose four daughters is retarded, wrote in a letter to The Dallas Morning News in 2001.

Is it just me, or is the only time I see conservative Republicans taking a liberal position on something like this is when it affects them personally?

Whittington, who has a daughter who is mentally retarded, is an advocate for changing the way the mentally retarded are treated in our prisons.

Dick Cheney, who has a daughter who is a lesbian, refuses to endorse Bush’s anti-gay marriage agenda. Ditto the late Barry Goldwater.

Nancy Reagan, whose late-husband suffered from Alzheimers, is an outspoken advocate for stem cell research.

And so on, and so on.

Why can’t more people have empathy for others when it does not affect them personally?

Taking blame, finally

Thanks to The Agonist for the graphic.

Dick Cheney finally comes clean.
On the grounds that it’s always better late than never, Cheney can be commended for finally coming forward and taking full responsibility for shooting his hunting partner in the face last Saturday.
However, the lengthy delay in doing so has left a bitter public impression that he was hoping to avoid taking responsibility by having his spokespeople point the finger of blame back at Whittington. That was inexcusable and should never have been tolerated.

No laughing matter

There has been a lot of joking and a lot of ducking and covering over this Cheney shooting incident, but now it appears that it could all become very unfunny very quickly.

The 78-year-old lawyer who Vice President Cheney accidentally shot in a hunting accident suffered a minor heart attack this morning after a piece of birdshot moved and lodged in his heart, doctors said.

Doctors treating Harry Whittington said the Republican lawyer was moved back into the intensive care unit and will need to remain hospitalized for at least a week.

This can’t be good for a 78-year-old to have a lead pellet lodged in his heart. What happens if he dies? Is Cheney still “cleared” because of the non-investigation by the local sheriff’s office which didn’t find out about the accident for several hours afterwards and was not allowed to come out to the ranch and interview Cheney until the next day?

Also, is the vice president’s office paying for this guy’s hospital bills and rehab? Does Cheney have insurance for this kind of thing?

This is so funny, it’s sad.

From The Daily Show:

“Rob Courdry: 'Jon, tonight the Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time-there-were-quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be the 78 year old man. Even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists-he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face.”

Now I’m just waiting for Mr. Whittington, as a loyal Republican, to issue a statement accepting full responsibility for the accident and declaring that he was honored to have been shot in the face by Cheney.

UPDATE

Go here to see more coverage from last night's The Daily Show.

Trigger-happy Cheney

Trigger-happy Cheney nearly blows hunting partner’s head clean-off.

Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old hunting companion of Vice President Dick Cheney, was recovering in stable condition Monday after Cheney accidentally shot him during a weekend quail hunting trip...

I went to high school in a small town not too far from where this all happened. I know that hunting accidents like this are not uncommon. I even knew a kid in my high school class who was killed as a result of a hunting accident in the early 1980s.
What bugs me the most about this whole thing is the way the Vice President’s office has handled the aftermath. First, they didn’t bother to report it for 24 hours (shades of Chappaquiddick),...

The accident was not reported publicly by the vice president's office for nearly 24 hours, and then only after the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported it Sunday.

... and then they left it all to the poor people who own the ranch to handle the torrent of media inquiries.

Katharine Armstrong, daughter of Republican Party stalwart Anne Armstrong, did her best to try and spin the story in a way that is favorable to the vice president, but ultimately I think she just made matters worse by making it appear that Cheney is trying to shirk responsiblity for the accident.

Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," said Armstrong.

Oh, so it’s Whittington’s fault that he got shot. I see.

"The vice president didn't see him," she said. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."

Let me just say that Cheney is damn lucky that he didn’t kill Whittington. We’re not talking about a BB gun here. This was a 28-gauge shotgun which can and does kill people at that distance. And he was damn careless to swing around and fire away without knowing where everybody in his hunting party was. So don’t try and blame Whittington for not jumping up and down and waving his arms. Cheney was the one with his finger on the trigger and he alone was responsible for that weapon when it was discharged.

UPDATE

I think fellow Texan Paul Begala sums things up nicely over at TPMCafe.

For the record

If this is true, Bush deserves to be impeached:

Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Pillar's critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

Bush and company will, of course, deny these allegations and the Republican Congress is not about to investigate them, so I doubt anything will come of it. But if you want to know why Democrats are so angry (along with other people who are paying attention) then here it is in a nutshell.

DINO-MIGHT!!!

Democrats have a couple of interesting primary races this year, not least of which is the rematch between Former Congressman Ciro Rodriguez and current U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar.

Cuellar managed to boot Rodriguez out of his seat last time around thanks largely to Republican redistricting that took away familar San Antonio territory in exchange for a big chunk of Laredo. So the Laredo-based Cuellar was able to best the San Antonio-based Rodriguez in a race that came down to geographics. This time the race will be based on ideology and it will be interesting to see how many Laredo Democrats will stick by their man after he has practically shed his Democratic ties and donned a Republican cloak.

Recently, Ciro has become a regular celebrity over at Eschaton ever since President Bush gave Cuellar that curious face massage just before his SOTU speech. It has helped raise Ciro’s profile and contributed significantly to his campaign coffers.
There is good reason why Cuellar is Bush’s favorite “Democrat” as the folks at Burnt Orange Report detail.

Another interesting race here locally is state Sen. Frank Madla’s hotly contested re-election campaign against State Rep. Carlos Uresti. Like Cuellar, Madla is accused of being a DINO (Democrat in name only) who too often casts his lot with the Republicans. He has been especially hit hard on a vote to reduce funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program or CHIP.

The E-N had a story this morning that is apparently not online in which they note that Ciro is getting a lot of support from trial lawyers while Madla is getting lots of financial support from the traditionally Republican tort-reform groups. As I was driving in to work today I thought it was interesting that I would see clusters of Madla signs grouped together with Cuellar signs. How much you want to bet they are being put out by Republicans?

Look out Elmo

Look whose neck is on the budget chopping block again. Big Bird.

Bush wants to slash $150 million from Public Broadcasting, the sharpest cut yet. He just won’t let up on his ideological crusade to crush quality children’s television programming.

And here is more awful budget news:

In his $2.77 billion budget, Bush asks Congress to sharply cut or eliminate 141 government programs. Almost one-third of the targeted programs are in education, including ones that provide money to support the arts, vocational education, parent resource centers and drug-free schools.

Bush: The Anti-Education president. That will be just part of his legacy, along with the corruption, incompentence and the bloody quagmire in Iraq.

UPDATE

TxBubba of Southpaw notes that while Bush proposes saving $400 million by axing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he is advocating that we spend $670 million for the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the federal agency that supervises all US government non-military propaganda including the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.

Bush’s awful, horrible budget

What a pathetic waste of paper this is. There is no chance that Bush’s sorry excuse for a budget will ever see the light of day. Nevertheless, I think it is important that everyone study the proposed budget to see just how screwed up and misguided our president’s policies really are. The Wall Street Journal has excellent coverage of all the atrocities contained within Bush’s recipe for disaster.

Much of the squeezing would be of programs aimed at low-income Americans - and wouldn't save all that much money in the aggregate.

The budget is cowardly in the way it fails to address entitlement spending; frivolous in the way it handles defense spending; and downright cruel in the way it slashes domestic programs for the poor that will result in little to no savings - Especially when you realize he is more than offsetting any of those savings with requests for even more tax cuts for the wealthy.

But as the WSJ points out, this budget will be DOA when it gets to the Congress.

Welcome Back!

Bill Crawford of All Things Conservative is back from his extended hiatus.

Also, I was delighted to find out today that two groups have opted to advertize on my humble little site. Wow! I’ll be raking in the big bucks in no time! WooHoo!!

Robin Hood

My little boy just loves Robin Hood.
I mean the Disney version, of course. At 2 1/2, I don’t think he’s quite ready for the live action versions of the story. (I have both the Errol Flynn and Kevin Costner versions on DVD) But the one where Robin is a fox, Little John is a bear and Prince John is a lion, that one is right up his alley.

I’m not exactly sure what it is about this movie that has such a hold on his fancy. He used to be all in to Winnie the Pooh, but from the first day I let him watch Robin Hood it has been his favorite. He’ll watch others things, but will request Robin Hood at every opportunity.
At first it seemed to be one of Disney’s lesser efforts with animation that was geared more toward Saturday morning cartoons than for a feature film. But now that I’ve seen the movie about 157 times and counting, I have developed a special appreciation for it.

The movie has a lot of the stock Disney vocal talents for that time including Phil Harris as Little John (he was also the voice of Balu the Bear in “Jungle Book” and Thomas O’Malley in “The Aristocats”); Pat Buttram as the Sheriff of Nottingham (he was Napoleon in “The Aristocats”; Luke in “The Rescuers”; and Chief in “The Fox and the Hound”) and Carole Shelley as Lady Cluck (she was the goose in the pink bonnet in “The Aristocats” and one of the Fates in “Hercules”).
Other notable voice talents include Andy Devine as Friar Tuck (recognizable because he had bit roles in just about every Western movie ever made) and country singer Roger Miller as the Rooster/Alan-a-Dale. Roger Miller also contributed most of the songs for the film.
But for my money, Peter Ustinov steals the show as the voice of Prince John, the vain, scheming, vindictive, cowardly, thumb-sucking lion who has it out for Robin Hood. One of the reasons I can make it through multiple viewings of the film without my head exploding is because he gives such an enjoyable and over-the-top performance.

I’m sure the reason my son likes the film is because it has all these animals running around doing funny and exciting things in a non-threatening way. But the Robin Hood story itself has an appeal that goes much deeper for everyone old enough to understand the political dynamics of the time.
When I was in college, a friend gave me a collectible action figure of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood in recognition of my then developing leftist political beliefs. Robbing the rich to feed the poor is the penultimate statement of leftist economic thought. A forced redistribution of wealth to right the wrongs of the oppressive capitalist overlords. But Robin Hood also has many traits that appeal to conservatives such as his loyalty to the crown and his devotion to his childhood sweetheart Maid Marian. And then there is the fact that the thing he is objecting to the most is the high taxation being imposed by the despicable Prince John.

My son will eventually outgrow his obsession with this particular movie, but hopefully he will retain a certain amount of pleasure in the timeless story that inspired it.

Grapes and watermelons

In the comments to the Bono post, Mark Harden takes exception to the implication in Bono’s speech that the U.S. is not being generous enough with its foreign aid to developing countries.

Here is a website with a lot of good information on that very topic.

What we find out from the site is that the U.S. does indeed lead the world in foreign aid assistance when looking at total dollars given. Here is a list of the developed countries and the amount the dollar amount (in millions) that they donate towards ODA (Official Development Assistance).

United States 19,705
Japan 8,906
France 8,473
United Kingdom 7,883
Germany 7,534
Netherlands 4,204
Sweden 2,722
Canada 2,599
Italy 2,462
Spain 2,437
Norway 2,199
Denmark 2,037
Switzerland 1,545
Belgium 1,463
Australia 1,460
Portugal 1,031
Austria 678
Finland 655
Ireland 607
Greece 465
Luxembourg 236
New Zealand 212

But when you take that same list and look at the donations as a percentage of each country’s Gross National Income (GNI), the U.S. suddenly winds up near the bottom.

Norway 0.87
Denmark 0.85
Luxembourg 0.83
Sweden 0.78
Netherlands 0.73
Portugal 0.63
Belgium 0.41
France 0.41
Switzerland 0.41
Ireland 0.39
United Kingdom 0.36
Finland 0.35
Germany 0.28
Canada 0.27
Australia 0.25
Spain 0.24
Austria 0.23
Greece 0.23
New Zealand 0.23
Japan 0.19
United States 0.17
Italy 0.15

So you could argue the point two ways. Yes, we donate more than any other country. But it is not that much when taken as a percentage of our GNI. It’s like comparing a watermelon with a bunch of grapes.
We could give more, but choose not to. So are we really being all that generous?
Or let’s put it another way, who is more generous? A person who makes $10,000 a year and gives $100 to charity. Or a person who makes $100,000,000 a year and gives $1,000?

P.S.
Mark insists that the U.S. more than makes up for the paucity of its government assistance through private donations, but I have not seen a citation for this yet. He is welcome to add any links he finds in the comments.

What’s wrong with the GOP today

Too many Ralph Reeds ; Not enough John Danforths.

Bully for Bono

Bono shows once again why he was tapped by Time Magazine to be Man of the Year.

Ho-hum

Remember when just one U.S. serviceman killed in Iraq was big news?
Now when we have five soldiers killed in one day it only merits an inside story combined with an update on the Hussein trial.

The SOTU shuffle

I nearly fell asleep last night trying to watch Bush’s State of the Union speech.
While the speech itself was not terribly inspiring, reaction to it has been less muted here in the local blogosphere.

Cernig was distracted by Bush’s Columbo-like eyebrow that “hovered and moved around, halfway up his brow as if it had a life of it's own.

Libertas was annoyed with the president’s overuse of the term “freedom,” which is near and dear to his heart.

“How many times can a guy say the word Freedom in one speech? Saying it ain’t the same as doing it Mr. POTUS...
It is not the Manifest Destiny of the United States to spread Freedom throughout the world by force of arms. It is the United States’ Mission to spread Freedom by example. Given current American imperialist tendencies at home and abroad, I’m not so sanguine as the POTUS about which direction has the momentum when it comes to the so-called March of Freedom.”

Over at the E-N’s new political blog, Strange Bedfellows, Gary Martin takes notice of the oddly intimate embrace of President Bush and his favorite Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar upon the president’s entrance into the House chambers right before his big speech.
But it is Cincinnatus who finds and posts the picture.

My take on the president’s speech is that when times are bad and his poll numbers are low he tends to jettison the red meat typically tossed out for his core constituency of rabid right-wing radicals and instead begins to sound like a moderate Republican or even a Democrat.
Just look at Bush’s energy proposal. Denouncing our addiction to oil? That sounded like it was ripped right out of the pages of Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance.” And not one word about ANWR. Likewise, most of the foreign policy parts of the speech could have been voiced by John Kerry while the health care proposals sounded like they could have come from Hillary Clinton.

But don’t expect anything to come from these proposals. This is an administration that is just treading water, struggling to keep from sinking any further as the Abramoff scandal, the Iraqi quagmire and mounting deficits continue to weigh it down.

As an aside, I thought the arrest of Cindy Sheehan for wearing an anti-war t-shirt to the event was a sad spectacle and a testament to our nation’s current state of paranoia and intolerance. As if to show that the sword cuts both ways, the security folks also bounced Republican Congressman Bill Young’s wife from the gallery for wearing a t-shirt that promoted the war effort. Provided that they sat quietly in the chamber, both women should have been allowed to stay and wear their respective shirts.

A newsie day

Yesterday was one of those days when everything seems to happen at once. It is a nightmare for news editors who must decide which stories to put on the front of the newspaper each day. There were easily five and possibly six national stories deserving of Page 1 treatment yesterday. Let’s review:

President’s State of the Union address
Correta Scott King dies
Samuel Alito confirmed to the Supreme Court
Academy Award nominations announced
Last day for Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve and Feds raise interest rates
Enron trial has opening arguments
The Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran has plans for nukes

That doesn’t leave any room for local stories, and most dailies insist on having at least one local story out front. It was fortunate for them that nothing big happened in Iraq yesterday. So what is a poor news editor to do? I was curious to see what the Express-News would do.

They went with a 5-story front with the SOTU story on top, a King feature anchored in the middle and the Enron and Iran stories running down the sides. They also decided to cram in a local feature story in the upper left column just for good measure. The Academy Award nominees got the top of the page banner teasing the story in the Life section while they also found room to squeeze in a tease below the SOTU story on the Alito confirmation. Greenspan and the Feds were relegated to the Business section with no tease.
All in all not a bad set of choices.

Mistake of the Union

Juan Cole has a list of the Top 10 things Bush won’t tell you in the State of the Union address.

Also, I highly recommend anyone with a sense of humor to check out this spoof of Bush giving the 2006 State of the Union. Be sure and pay attention to the two guys in the background playing VP Cheney and Speaker Hastert. Hilarious.

The (Yawn) Oscar nominees are...

Here is the list of Academy Award nominees. Having not seen any of them, I’m not in a position to judge, but based on my perception of which films I would like to see given the choice I think the field this year is pretty lousy.
Like I said before, I will probably never see Brokeback Mountain, not because of the gay theme, but because I don’t like movies about people cheating on their spouses and breaking up families. It is all too depressing.
Nor do I have any desire to see Crash. I’m curious about Capote because of the excellent reviews Philip Seymour Hoffman has recieved for his performance, but it did not strike me as a best picture contender.
I probably will see Spielberg’s Munich at some point and I want to see Goodnight and Good Luck, which I will cheer on to win the Oscar even though I think Brokeback is going to sweep everything.
Personally, I think 100 years from now people will look back and say this was the year that Peter Jackson directed his version of King Kong, while all the other films will be long forgotten.
Quick! Which film won the Oscar in 1977? You know! The year that Star Wars came out! (At least Star Wars got a Best Picture nod that year).

UPDATE:

Underscoring the importance of Disney’s purchase of Pixar Entertainment is the shutout of Disney’s first attempt at digital animation “Chicken Little” in the animation category. With no Pixar feature out last year, there were no digital films even nominated this year.
The nominees were the hand-drawn "Howl's Moving Castle," and the stop-motion films "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" and "Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

My new truck

I just bought a new truck this weekend. Not this one in particular, but it is a red Dodge Dakota quad cab.