factesque

2005-07-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

Clever Headline.

See where we're going with this? If he's got critics on both sides, he *must* be a centrist!
Bush Rips Gonzales Critics on Both Sides - Yahoo! News

2005-06-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

Emphasis Mine

Give. Me. A break.
Bush Declares Sacrifice in Iraq to Be 'Worth It' - New York Times: "After some initial reluctance, all three major networks broadcast the speech, which the White House scheduled to mark the first anniversary of the end of the formal occupation of Iraq, and the official transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi government that has struggled to exercise its authority. Network officials said they were hesitant to broadcast the speech in part because of Mr. Bush's decision to hold it here, in front of soldiers selected by their commanders, a setting that could give the appearance of a rally."

2005-06-28T15:54:00.000-07:00

Prescience

I love how this story was written and filed about 2.5 hours before the speech (which, as I write this, is still 1 hour away from happening).
But it does illustrate how all one needs to write these is an advance copy of the President's speech.

Bush: Bloodshed in Iraq Is 'Worth It' - Yahoo! News: "In an evening address at an Army base that has 9,300 troops in Iraq, Bush was acknowledging the toll of the 27-month-old war. At the same time, he aimed to persuade skeptical Americans that his strategy for victory needed only time - not any changes - to be successful."

2005-06-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

dotcom nostalgia

i used to work at suck. that's not actually true, i guess - i was the 'marketing manager' for several years, but i had other responsibilities and there really wasn't much in the way of marketing $$ for the site. i think i'm the only ex-staffer not quoted in this piece but it doesn't much bug me. what does bug me, though, is the huge wave of nostalgia for the 90s i'm getting from this article. i'd say you should read the whole thing but most people probably won't.

keepgoing.org :: The Big Fish: "�At HotWired, there were people there at all times of night,� says Ed Anuff, Joey�s brother. �If you had nothing to do at 11 p.m., you could just go pound on the door and somebody would let you in. People were working on their various projects, whether they were their official jobs or whatever else they were doing online. I guess part of it was that people would hang out there because of the high bandwidth and so on. If they were surfing the web, it was easier to do there in the office.� Ed was working at a consulting job just up the street, and whenever he got bored or needed a break, Joey and Steadman were sure to be at the office. Though the two shared a loft apartment nearby, they were basically living at HotWired, sleeping in a pair of bunkbeds Steadman had installed and using a shower one floor up. �I just wasn�t getting home because I was working so late, and I ended up sleeping at the office, most of the time,� Steadman would later write. �Why fight it?�"

2005-06-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

Emphasis Mine

If only this was funny...

Liberals, Conservatives and Aid - New York Times: "The Bush administration has nearly doubled foreign aid (to Africa -i), but it will not spend the amounts Sachs wants. The Bush folks, at least when it comes to Africa policy, have learned from centuries of conservative teaching - from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek - to be skeptical of Sachsian grand plans. Conservatives emphasize that it is a fatal conceit to think we can understand complex societies, or rescue them from above with technocratic planning."

2005-06-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

So, He's in Saudi Arabia?

Goss Claims He Has Idea Where Bin Laden Is: "The director of the CIA says he has an 'excellent idea' where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but that the United States' respect for sovereign nations makes it more difficult to capture the al-Qaida chief.
In an interview with Time for the magazine's June 27 issue, Porter Goss was asked about the progress of the hunt for bin Laden.
'When you go to the question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play,' Goss said. 'We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways.'"

2005-06-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

He Has a Plan?

He does? Where is it?

Bush's Support on Major Issues Tumbles in Poll - New York Times: "Americans also recognized that Mr. Bush has a Social Security plan and the Democrats in Congress do not. A majority said they would like to see the Democrats offer a plan and not simply oppose Mr. Bush's.
But most said they did not think Mr. Bush's plan for private accounts would do anything for the system's long-term solvency."

2005-06-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

Finally, I Agree With Hitchens on Something!

I've been complaining about airline screening forever to whomever's unfortunate to hear me. I, too, think the current screening process is largely useless. My favorite example is the removal of one's shoes to have them screened for explosives: how would this have been different if the 'shoe bomber' had secreted alleged explosives in his underwear, for example?

(As an aside, I've noticed that the allegedly 'random' screening process has always selected me for screening since 9/11. On my last pass through Las Vegas, my boarding pass had 'SSSS' on it; I asked a helpful airline employee what it meant. She told me that it meant I was subject to the highest level of scrutiny and screening. Why? I'm a white male in my 30s with no criminal record. I'm not religious, don't belong to any wildly righty/lefty political parties (I vote almost exclusively Dem), and I've only been out of the US a handful of times, and only to continental Europe (UK, Germany). Although I should add that I went to a wildly liberal university and have, at times, marched in rallies against things like the war on Iraq. Would that qualify me? I'll probably never know, and it may not even be important. But it strikes me as strange that I'm always selected. I've never had a cavity search, though, so I'm still counting myself very lucky.)

The important items, though, are what Hitchens outlines in his piece: we've got a bunch of patently absurd processes for screening passengers that seem designed to make us feel safer while a) doing little to make us actually safer and b) increasing the time it takes to get from curb to gate to a ridiculous extent.

I do think that the metal detector, X-Ray scanners for baggage, chemical detection machines, and (to some extent) physical searches (i.e. frisking) are useful. But the shoe thing? Useless. Confiscating nail clippers, knitting needles, and lighters? Probably the same.

Read the whole thing.

Terminal Futility - Routine airport security won't thwart jihadists, but it does inconvenience and endanger the rest of us. By ChristopherHitchens: "Flying from London to Washington the other day, I was told that I was no longer required to take my computer out of its case. Apparently, there are scanners that can see though soft cases as well as through the hardened lid of a laptop (and apparently the United States hasn't managed to invest in any of these scanners for its domestic airports). On the other hand, I was asked if I had packed my own bags and if they had been under my control at all times. This exceptionally stupid pair of questions, to which a terrorist would have to answer 'yes' by definition, is now deemed too stupid for U.S. domestic purposes and stupid enough only for international travel. This makes as much sense as diverting a full plane that carries a notorious Islamist crooner, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, from one airport to another.

Routines and 'zero tolerance' exercises will never thwart determined jihadists who are inventive and who are willing to sacrifice their lives. That requires inventiveness and initiative. But airport officials are not allowed to use their initiative. People who have had their names confused with wanted or suspect people, and who have spent hours proving that they are who they say they are, are nonetheless compelled to go through the whole process every time, often with officials who have seen them before and cleared them before, because the system that never seems to catch anyone can never seem to let go of anyone, either"

2005-06-07T13:29:00.000-07:00

There's such a nice symmetry to it

E-Mails Detail Air Force Push for Boeing Deal: "Druyun improperly used her influence to increase the price paid for the tankers and also made incorrect statements to others in the administration, the report states. When Air Force cost analysts told her that leasing would cost $2 billion more than buying the planes, she told the head of the Air Force Materiel Command that 'she no longer needed the financial management team . . . on the project.'
The Air Force has long maintained that any defects in the lease proposal were attributable solely to Druyun, who is serving a nine-month sentence in federal prison for illegally negotiating a lucrative job with Boeing as she supervised the lease negotiations. "

2005-06-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

Farcical

Hilarious. Is it possible, perhaps, that Chalabi's 'problems' are related to his campaign of misinformation designed at convincing folks other than the neocons to invade Iraq? A campaign financed, we may remember, with his over-$200K-monthly stipend paid for by the US government throughout the past few years?

And that last quip, genius: no, it's not that people in the administration now have doubts about him based on things he said, it's that their doubts have evaporated because they no longer trust the mean stuff said *about* him.

Unbelievable.

Newsday.com: Chalabi's reason to grin: "Perle said Chalabi's problems with the United States are the result of a campaign of vilification and misinformation waged against him by the CIA, which he said had a longstanding grudge over a failed CIA coup that Chalabi had warned it about. Now the tide is changing, Perle said. Charges that Chalabi passed information to Iran are still being investigated by the FBI, sources said.

'I think some people [in the administration] who accepted what was being said about him now have very serious doubts about that,' Perle said."

2005-06-03T10:39:00.000-07:00

Good To Keep In Mind
Guardian - Bush's war comes home: "Unlike the House, the Senate was constructed by the constitutional framers as an unrepresentative body, with each state, regardless of population, allotted two senators. Currently, the Republicans have 55 senators who represent only 45% of the country. The Senate creates its own rules, and the filibuster can only be stopped by a super-majority of 60 votes. Historically, it was used by southern senators to block civil rights legislation. In the first two years of the Clinton presidency, the Republicans deployed 48 filibusters, more than in the entire previous history of the Senate, to make the new Democratic chief executive appear feckless. The strategy was instrumental in the Republican capture of the Congress in 1994. By depriving the Democrats of the filibuster, Bush intended to transform the Senate into his rubber stamp. "

2005-06-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

But There's Oil in Sudan, Too!

Really, there is. Although the president of Sudan has not, to our knowledge, tried to kill President Bush's father.

Bush Maintains Opposition to Doubling Aid for Africa - New York Times: "If the word 'genocide' was on Mr. Bush's mind, it may be because he had dinner on Tuesday at Mr. Powell's home in Virginia. But Mr. Mbeki sat in silence when Mr. Bush used the term, refusing to declare that the Sudanese government was responsible for the killings in the region.

'It might be fine for some in the United States to make all kinds of statements,' he said later. 'If you denounce Sudan as genocidal, what next? Don't you have to arrest the president? The solution doesn't lie in making radical solutions - not for us in Africa.'"

2005-06-01T12:29:00.000-07:00

Mission Accomplished

Interesting that Cheney finally gives the nod to a long-term US military presence in Iraq, post-2009. The writing here is confusing, though: if the insurgency is in its 'last throes,' doesn't 2009 sound like a long way off?

CNN.com - Iraq insurgency in 'last throes,' Cheney says - May 31, 2005: "The insurgency in Iraq is 'in the last throes,' Vice President Dick Cheney says, and he predicts that the fighting will end before the Bush administration leaves office.
In a wide-ranging interview Monday on CNN's 'Larry King Live,' Cheney cited the recent push by Iraqi forces to crack down on insurgent activity in Baghdad and reports that the most-wanted terrorist leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been wounded.
The vice president said he expected the war would end during President Bush's second term, which ends in 2009.
'I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time,' Cheney said. 'The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.'"

2005-05-31T17:03:00.000-07:00

Praise Be
Why I'm joining the GOP / Leaving the left for fun and profit: "My decision to become a Republican didn't come easily. For years I clung to the idea that the foundation of a democratic society was our implied social contract, each of us committing some level of personal sacrifice to the common good of all.
...
Let Democrats continue promising the 'greatest good for the greatest number.' Republicans clearly have my number -- No. 1.
I'm sure a lot of my friends reading this will ask me, 'How can you sleep?' My answer will be, 'Who's got time? I'm busy earning money.' While they're bellyaching about rising deficits, the outsourcing of jobs and casualties in Iraq, I'll be marveling at the march of freedom in the Middle East, upticks in the GDP and the president's plan to link Social Security to the magic of the marketplace"

2005-05-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

There Is No Bubble, Part XI

Appraisers say they're pressured to inflate their estimates. - May. 23, 2005: "on Tuesday, the Appraisal Institute will tell Congress that its members are under increasing pressure from lenders, mortgage bankers and real estate agents to 'hit their number' when appraising property.

Rather than come up with an independent estimate of a home's value, appraisers -- who are typically independent contractors -- say they are being told to base their estimate on a predetermined value.

Alan Zielinski, owner of FAST Appraisals in Lake Barrington, Ill., said he's surprised if he doesn't get a call questioning his estimate.

"All [lenders and brokers] want to do is hit the number because if they don't hit the number the deal doesn't go through and if the deal doesn't go through they don't get the commission," said Zielinski.
"

2005-05-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

Keillor

A good point. Would that it were true.

Confessions of a Listener: "I enjoy, in small doses, the over-the-top right-wingers who have leaked into AM radio on all sides in the past twenty years. They are evil, lying, cynical bastards who are out to destroy the country I love and turn it into a banana republic, but hey, nobody's perfect. And now that their man is re-elected and they have nice majorities in the House and Senate, they are hunters in search of diminishing prey. There just aren't many of us liberals worth banging away at, but God bless them, they keep on coming. Just the other day, I heard one foaming and raging about the right to life and about liberals preying on the helpless--I realized he was talking about Terri Schiavo--and then he launched into the judiciary and how they had stood by and done nothing. He held their feet to the fire for a while and then he tore into George McGovern for about five minutes. George McGovern is a kindly, grandfatherly man who lives in Mitchell, South Dakota, and winters in Florida and every year attends his World War II bomber squadron reunion. He ran for President in 1972. His connection to the Florida case is tenuous at best. When you go ballistic over 1972, you are truly desperate to fill time"

2005-05-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

After Two Years

Surprised to find out that this is the case, more than two years since major combat operations blah blah blah.

Transcript for April 17 - Meet the Press, online at MSNBC - MSNBC.com: "
MR. RUSSERT: How do you move around the city?

MR. FILKINS: You just try to do the best you can, you know. The--you go...

MR. RUSSERT: With guards?

MR. FILKINS: Usually with guards. I mean, you know, none of that's desirable. You want to be--as a reporter, you want to be as unintrusive as possible. You want to put people at ease. And--but that's not really possible anymore. So you can--things have gotten a little better. I mean, Baghdad is not as tense and as angry as it was even six months ago. But doing something like getting out of your car and walking around a neighborhood and just talking to people on the street, you can't really go that anymore. I mean you can do it for 20 minutes, you know, 25 minutes, and then get in your car and get out, because if you linger too long, you're putting yourself in danger."

Also: ~$6,000 a mile? Crazy.

"MR. RUSSERT: There is a road, a highway from the airport to downtown Baghdad that's called the Road of Death by many. I understand there's a taxi service on that road to take someone from downtown to the airport.

MR. FILKINS: Yeah. There's actually a company in Baghdad that does nothing except offer rides to the airport and back. They've got an armored cars and some guards. And they charge $35,000 for...

MR. RUSSERT: Thirty-five thousand dollars?

MR. FILKINS: ...for a ride to the airport. And I think you know, if you miss your plane and you have to come back, it's another $35,000. But...

MR. RUSSERT: How long--is it six miles?

MR. FILKINS: I think it's about six miles, yeah. It's not a happy six miles. So, you know, they earn their money."

2005-05-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

That's the Smell of Freedom Cookin' Up

It's the H2 of burgers! Oh, and make sure to order a side of Freedom Fries.

Pa. Eatery Offers New 15-Pound Burger: "The burger war is growing. Literally. Denny's Beer Barrel Pub, which lost its crown as the home of the world's biggest burger earlier this year, is now offering a new burger that weighs a whopping 15 pounds.
Dubbed the Beer Barrel Belly Buster, the burger comes with 10.5 pounds of ground beef, 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, a cup-and-a-half each of mayonnaise, relish, ketchup, mustard and banana peppers, and a bun."

2005-04-29T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Opposite of Schadenfreude

Unbelievable.

USATODAY.com - Ahmad Chalabi gains key spot in Iraq's new government: "Thwarted in his bid to be Iraq's leader, one-time Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi has nevertheless captured a key position in the new government, a deputy prime minister's spot and temporary control of the lucrative oil ministry.

With his nephew also installed as finance minister, Chalabi and his family appear to have a firm grip on the country's purse strings. "

2005-04-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

Bush Delays Judgement

What's the difference? He may have done something illegal, but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong.

Bush Takes Risk With Show of Support for DeLay: "'He does not think DeLay has done anything wrong,' said Charlie Black, a GOP lobbyist with close ties to the White House. 'It's Bush's natural instinct to stand with him. There could be a risk, but it's the kind of risk [Bush] takes all the time.'
Bush might also feel boxed in and left with little choice but to help DeLay, who has won the devotion of social conservatives, several Republicans said.
Bush has no connection to the issues surrounding DeLay's controversies, but one of the lobbyists whose credit card was charged for part of DeLay's trip was a major fundraiser for the president's reelection. Jack Abramoff raised more than $100,000 for Bush in 2004 and had close ties to his Interior Department. In addition, investigators are looking into a $4 million payment that Abramoff made to lobbyist Ralph Reed, a key player in the president's reelection operation who raised more than $300,000 for Bush's two presidential campaigns. Two people close to Bush said the entire party will suffer if the controversy spreads and become a major issue with the public."

2005-04-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

We'll Just Ignore This Inconvenient Statistic

WoT generating more T?

U.S. Figures Show Sharp Global Rise In Terrorism: "The number of serious international terrorist incidents more than tripled last year, according to U.S. government figures, a sharp upswing in deadly attacks that the State Department has decided not to make public in its annual report on terrorism due to Congress this week.
Overall, the number of what the U.S. government considers 'significant' attacks grew to about 655 last year, up from the record of around 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides who were briefed on statistics covering incidents including the bloody school seizure in Russia and violence related to the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir
...
Terrorist incidents in Iraq also dramatically increased, from 22 attacks to 198, or nine times the previous year's total -- a sensitive subset of the tally, given the Bush administration's assertion that the situation there had stabilized significantly after the U.S. handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government last summer.

The State Department announced last week that it was breaking with tradition in withholding the statistics on terrorist attacks from its congressionally mandated annual report. Critics said the move was designed to shield the government from questions about the success of its effort to combat terrorism by eliminating what amounted to the only year-to-year benchmark of progress."

2005-04-15T15:41:00.000-07:00

Why Tax Cuts Must Be Made Permanent.

WaPo: Bush Pays $207,307 in Taxes

President Bush reported adjusted gross income of $784,219 for last year, on which he paid $207,307 in federal taxes -- about $20,000 less than the previous year, according to the president's return released Friday by the White House.

Wait, there's more!

The White House also released the 2004 tax return filed by Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne.

The report shows the Cheneys owe federal taxes for 2004 of $393,518 on adjusted gross income of $1.7 million.

Throughout last year, the Cheneys paid $290,855 in taxes through withholding and estimated tax payments. When they filed their return on Friday, they paid the remaining $102,663.

The Cheneys' income included the vice president's $203,000 government salary and $194,852 in deferred compensation from Halliburton Co., the Dallas-based energy services firm he headed until Aug. 16, 2000.

2005-04-15T14:56:00.000-07:00

Eric Rudolph is a strange guy.

...but then you probably already knew that. In a brief search today to see if this anti-abortion warrior had kids of his own (I can't tell for sure, but it seems the answer is 'no'), I came across this interesting piece in the Southern Poverty Law Center's report. It's equal parts creepy Nazi/racist/mercenary stories like you'd expect, but with an amusing topnote of, well...ganja.

IR: Did you know Eric well? What was it like to be with him?

RUDOLPH: Oh God, yes. Eric stayed in my home [in Nashville, where Eric frequently visited in the early 1990s] a lot. He would sleep all day, then stay up all night and eat pizza and smoke pot and watch movies by Cheech and Chong.

I mean, what do I not know about the guy? If you were to walk into my house, you'd see him hanging out with his brothers, talking about an issue they were discussing on TV with a joint hanging out of his mouth. They'd say, "Hey dude, let's eat a pizza." It was like [the movie] "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."
...
IR: What exactly was Eric's involvement with marijuana?

RUDOLPH: At one point, he was probably making $60,000 a year selling pot. What happened was once Pat moved out, she agreed to sell the house in the mountains [in Topton] to Dan and Eric.

Eric built a garage that went up under the house and there was a secret little room for hydroponics [a method of growing plants in nutrient solutions that allows indoor cultivation without sunlight].

But he had already been growing pot out on Army Corps of Engineers land behind the house. He kept it buried out in the yard. It was surreal.

IR: How did he conduct his business?

RUDOLPH: He always got top dollar for everything. He would have people pay up to $80 for a quarter-ounce of his product [more than twice typical marijuana street prices]. I know he put that money away.

I mean he would go on little shopping sprees and get what he wanted. He spent his money on stuff he thought he needed for his protection, like two pits that he bought to guard his house and a 9mm pistol.

But Eric was pretty tight. He set his prices on his pot and that was about it — no discounts. Most of that money went to pay for the house.

Rudolph claims he was not a "big time" dealer.

2005-04-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

Bubblicious, Redux

Homeowners find much to appreciate / Despite rising interest rates, sales and prices in the Bay Area rocket to new highs. How high? The annual increase in the median home price now tops the region's typical household income.: "Forget the stock market or working for a living. Homeowners in the Bay Area made more money last year simply occupying their lofts, townhomes and suburban tract houses.
At least on paper.
The numbers say it all: Between February and March, the median price for a single-family house jumped $36,000, or 6.3 percent. Over the last 12 months, it soared $106,000, or 21 percent, hitting $605,000 in March.
That appreciation far exceeded the $74,124 the typical Bay Area household earned last year, according to Economy.com. And it certainly outpaced the stock market, which is down 4 percent in the last 12 months. If you'd bought a 10-year government bond on March 31, 2004, you would have received about 3.9 percent in interest in the last year. "

Ah, but here's the warning sign. Anyone remember the dotcom boom of the late 90s? People were saying the same thing about stock prices:

Rod Gabriel feels he made the right choice to buy, despite sky-high prices. Gabriel, 35, bought a two-bedroom home in East Oakland 15 months ago for $315,000. In January, it was appraised at $410,000.

"You pay the bills and (the value) goes up. It almost seems too good to be true," said Gabriel, noting that the $95,000 in appreciation surpasses his income as a marketing writer for a San Francisco bank.

2005-04-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

Familiar

The New York Times > Washington > DeLay Defends Effort to Rein In the Courts: "Yet Republicans continued to debate and comment on Mr. DeLay. President Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan, said, 'We support his efforts, along with the efforts of other congressional leaders, to move forward on the agenda that the American people want us to enact.' Asked if the majority leader and the president were friends, Mr. McClellan replied that the president does consider Mr. DeLay a friend, but suggested he's more a business associate than a social pal. 'I think there are different levels of friendship with anybody.'"

The Nation, Jan 15 2002

"On Friday, Bush attempted to distance himself from the Enron scandal by stating that CEO Lay "was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994," obscuring the fact that Lay gave Bush three times as much money as he did the Democratic gubernatorial incumbent whom Bush was trying to unseat. Bush added that he really did not get to "know" Lay--the man he nicknamed "Kenny Boy"--until after he won the governor's race. I can't speak to the varying levels of intimacy of their relationship, but Bush had considerable contact with Lay two years earlier when the Enron leader served as the chair of the host committee for the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, where Bush the senior was nominated for his second term as president."

2005-04-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

No Surprises
CNN.com - Bush bares soul with 'iPod One' - Apr 12, 2005: "The playlist does reveal a rather narrow range of babyboomer tunes. Writing in the London Times, Caitlin Moran noted: 'No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles.'"

Also interesting: the iPod holds 10,000 songs, but there are only 250 on Bush's iPod. Kinda makes you think about what kind of metaphor that might inspire.

2005-04-08T18:21:00.000-07:00

Imagine They're All Naked

Jeff Gannon did a thuddingly awful job today on the National Press Club panel on bloggers v journalists, but I doubt that'd be surprising to anyone. But who can blame him, really? An old saw of getting comfortable about public speaking is to imagine one's audience is naked; Gannon, though, started with the knowledge that much of today's audience had already seen him naked in perhaps compromising situations.

See highlights at Crooks & Liars.

2005-04-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

Up and Down

Yahoo! News - Jobless Claims Post Biggest Dip in 2 Months: "The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits dropped by 19,000 last week, the largest decline in two months, the government reported Thursday.

The Labor Department said the decline pushed the level of unemployment benefits down to 334,000 after claims had unexpectedly jumped by 23,000 the week before. "

So, the biggest drop in two months...came on the heels of a huge jump the previous week? This is hopeful news?

Strangely, this little tidbit was held back til the end of the story, two paragraphs from the bottom:

While the labor market has been improving in recent months following an extended period of weak job growth, the government reported last week that employers added just 110,000 people to payrolls in March, the poorest showing in eight months and only about half of what economists had been expecting.

2005-04-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

Drop in the Barrel

I won't complain one bit if daylight savings is extended. I've always disliked the time switch in fall, mostly because I don't care how light it is outside at 6am since I'm asleep. At 5pm, though, it would be nice to not have to ride my bike home in the dark. Not many people I know share this view, and I know it's bratty and selfish. So be it.

But what caught my eye here was the estimated oil savings: 10,000 barrels a day!
Which is....doing the math.... .05% (i.e. half of one percent). Pretty insignificant.

Yahoo News/AP: Congress May Extend Daylight Savings Time
Lawmakers crafting energy legislation approved an amendment Wednesday to extend daylight-saving time by two months, having it start on the last Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday in November
...
"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said Markey, who cited Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day.

The country uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day.

2005-04-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

Why I Love Fafblog

Have I mentioned that I think Fafblog is sort of a modern version of Walt Kelly's Pogo?

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.: "America's intelligence agencies made thorough and grievous errors in their assessments of Iraq's weapons capabilites. For example, in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the line 'Saddam Hussein is made entirely of poison and can launch fifty fusion warheads from his perpetually-flared nostrils' should properly have read 'No nukes here, nothing to see, all done now.' The commission has concluded these were wholly the result of clerical error, most likely a typo or a severe paper jam."

2005-04-06T17:27:00.000-07:00

Just Wondering

How having more accurate intelligence would have changed Condi's position on invading Iraq. My guess is: not at all.

Guardian Unlimited | Rice Warns of Nuclear Weapons Threats: "As President Bush's national security adviser, she relied on flawed intelligence about Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction to help make the administration's case for an invasion two years ago. She succeeded Colin Powell as America's top diplomat in January.
``We have very good intelligence analysts who were doing their best, but obviously the president's intelligence has to be better than what we got on Iraq,'' she said Tuesday. "

2005-03-30T15:12:00.000-08:00

I'm Spinning As Fast As I Can

Yes, they're getting a lot of legislation through. It's called having a majority in both Houses & control of the WH and the SCotUS. Social Security is more dear to most Americans than the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, so Grover's talking about two different things. One's a loser for the Republicans, even after 3 months of concerted on-message scareblather. One's a winner that, ten years from now, will provide a smidgeon of additional oil to our gaping maws. So Norquist declares victory and tries to twist the knife, while trying to pretend that slowly drowning SS to death while borrowing trillions of dollars and putting future generations' retirement in the hands of Wall Street is 'progressive.'

Changing the Grand Ole Party into the Grand Rove Party: "Yet as ugly as the Social Security debate has been for Bush and the GOP, it has served, perhaps intentionally, one salutary purpose: distracting Democrats while Republicans legislate, with ungodly brio, the rest of their agenda. Class-action reform, the bankruptcy bill, drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness: Republicans are teeing up pet legislation and knocking it down the fairway like Tiger Woods with a brisk wind at his back. "Without Social Security," Grover Norquist, a Rove confidant and head of Americans for Tax Reform, told me, "this other stuff would've been the front line of battle. Instead, Democrats are holding us up on Social Security, while we get everything else we want done."

Like Moore, Norquist concedes that Social Security reform (at least any version featuring private accounts) is unlikely to be passed this year. But this, he contends, would hardly be catastrophic for Republicans, and he has a point. "On Social Security, we're playing on our field, Norquist says. "What would a Democratic win be? The status quo! Not exactly exciting for the party of progressivism."

2005-03-22T13:01:00.000-08:00

Bubblicious

In the past week, two separate friends have bought residences in the Bay Area. One, a 'power couple' who make a combined $300k a year, bought a loft after looking for about six weeks (and being outbid on a handful of other places). They paid $800,000. This stellar price was a mere $100,000 over what the listed asking price was.

The building, a new one, is situated in the SOMA neighborhood, a rapidly gentrifying area that until the 1990s was largely the home of auto repair places and gay bars. Now, though, pastel-colored steel-and-stucco luxury lofts have sprouted up from the former parking lots and warehouses. I don't envy their location at all; the building is located at the end of a busy freeway off-ramp, & is across the street from a loud bar (The Stud, in case you're playing along at home) and a parking lot for enormous tour buses. On the same block, it is wedged inbetween a gas station and a homeless shelter.

Friend 2, a software engineer with a 6figure salary, just bought a place in Berkeley. A cute little 2br with 4,500 square feet. He tells me that they paid $640,000, which I should note is also $100,000 more than the asking price of $540k. Strategically, they were able to get the agent to accept their bid before a bidding war began.

I don't know much about economics and housing bubbles, but the median price of a home in SF continues to grow at 10-20% a year, far faster than the wages are growing post-recession. In 2000, right when the dot-conomy cratered, I may have been able to afford a home, but not anymore.

But both of my pals were annoyed at being foiled in their earlier efforts by people who outbid them, which makes me think of some weird food-chain analogy: if a couple making $300k a year, who are overbidding the asking price by nearly six figures...if they are feeling grumpy and stung, how am I to feel? Empty, I think.

2005-03-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

The Fame, it Beckons

Ran across ex-coworker and 90s pal Ana Marie 'Wonkette' Cox on Tina Brown's Topic A show sunday afternoon at a time when, having just returned from a 48-mile bike ride, i was well-suited for zoning out and absorbing the tepid talk about Michael Jackson and other pressing issues of the day. AMC is becoming much more visible, I thought to myself. Tina is definitely a fan, and Ana, now accustomed to being on tv, acquits herself well. much better than the quiet self she assumed on the blab-fest Charlie Rose segment featuring her, Instapundit, and Andy 'the bear' Sullivan or her early appearances on Scarborough Country.

The editor’s desk was faced with a conundrum: talk about Michael Jackson, ignore Michael Jackson, or talk about not talking about Michael Jackson. Tina chose the third way: “On Thursday, fifty people were blown up in Iraq,” but we were looking at MJ’s PJs. Apparently Thursday’s media spree — and her column on the trial — was not enough for Tina. She asked, seemingly powerless, “can we say enough is enough?” Luckily, Wonkette Ana Marie Cox was there — cough, no conflict of interest here — to provide perspective: “Perhaps we can… I like how you set this segment up,” yet “I know that we have to keep talking about it for another ten minutes.” Tina turned defensive, “Until the pajamas, I had in fact checked-out… I felt there was no suspense in the trial,” at which point Cox pulled out the third-person: “She was drawn back in because she had a column to write.”

Last week, a co-worker brought the current issue of Lucky ('the magazine about shopping!') in, just to show me the 7page spread on Ana's fashion.

Then today i'm reading Tony Pierce's blog, a blog i rarely read, and he's effusing over someone else's camera phone photo of said-same AMC outside an Austin bar (big blog conv at SXSW this year); she, clad in poncho, is dialing her phone. Apparent irony: in a town full of bars, 30something AMC is denied entry to a party celebrating her, for....wait for it.....neglecting to bring a drivers' license.

Earlier today, reading about Malcolm Gladwell's appearance on the panel - she is namechecked after him, and I wondered how they could really be equated, fame-wise. This feels like a leap, to me; Ana's done a lot of great, funny, insightful stuff, but she's no Malcolm Gladwell. (for one thing, i can't think of a single joke he's done involving anal sex.)

http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/11140123.htm
"Along with best-selling writer Malcolm Gladwell, who spoke about blogs in his keynote address, the biggest star at the conference was Ana Marie Cox, better known by her blogging handle of Wonkette."

So now I'm finally making a projection: it will only be a short time before i'm seeing Ana's smile and creamy complexion on billboards and the sides of buses. cable news shows will feature her each night. Shortly after that, she will sell a thinly-veiled fictional/autobio script detailing her few short years here in San Francisco, and in the movie Ethan Hawke will have a bit-part playing me, which will probably take place in a bar, and will irk me to no end. She got out, bless her soul.

2005-03-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

Mission Accomplished

So, couple this with op-ed pieces like Brooksie's ode to Paul Wolfowitz, and it's obvious we're still moving the goalposts. But they're also getting wider; while once the righties were fine with claiming that the mythical Joe Iraqi was better off than they were in Jan 2003, after a whole two weeks of protests in Lebanon we're supposed to believe that this is the Berlin Wall moment of the WoT. Is it? And here there are repeated jumps in analogy: it's like Reagan and the Berlin Wall! It's like if we'd stopped Hitler before he really got his game on in WWII!

So we'll see. Whether there's any objective argument to be made that our war on Iraq will lead to any narrow or wide 'democratization' in the Middle East (and perhaps there may be), Bush will automatically, immediately take credit for it all (remember the 'political capital'?). And he'll blame Clinton. And anything bad that happens will be written off to the Rumsfeldian unknown-unknowns and a few bad apples (this extends from the 'dead-enders' to US troops that misbehave and is utterly mutable).

Tacitus: The Dawn

If WMD was the official justification for the Iraq war, then the unofficial justification was surely the neoconservative vision of a democratized Middle East, birthed by the example of a free Iraq in its midst. It has become commonplace for the lazy left to assert that this or that vision or tendency is the work of "the neocons"; but the abuse of the term does not mean they do not exist. For the original neocons were indeed the best of the American left: men and women whose moral vision informed their ideology to a true love of liberty, and a belief in the state's role in promoting it. One may well hope that future generations may see the neoconservative projects of the past quarter-century -- eradicating the Soviet Union; democratizing the Muslim world -- as triumphs of the better nature of the humane left. More likely those generations will see the left's rejection of that better nature as symptomatic of its moral degeneracy.
For herein lies the paradox for those who denounce war in the false belief that peace and justice are synonymous: that neocon vision is working. The specific events we now see in motion have been recounted well enough elsewhere, but a brief survey will suffice. What has happened since America oversaw the first free elections in Iraq in a half-century? In Saudi Arabia, local elections have been held, and local Shi'a are asserting their public identity for the first time in generations. In Egypt, the local autocrat has felt compelled to allow, at least in theory, competetive elections for the first time since the British presence. In Lebanon, "people power" of the sort once seen in Manila and Kiev has compelled the beginnings of a Syrian withdrawal -- and the fiercely anti-American Druze potentate Walid Jumblatt has directly credited the American occupation of Iraq with enabling it. In Syria itself, the rumblings of popular opposition are seen now as they have not been since Hama rose in revolt a quarter-century past. It is a long time coming before we can say that freedom is sweeping the region; and it is a long time coming before the definitive strategic lessons of Iraq are known. But it is enough to be able to say now that this war has set events in motion: good events, and hopeful events in this erstwhile squalid, dusty environ of tyranny.

2005-03-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

RIP HST

Rocky Mountain News: Local: "A gravelly voiced Johnson read a Thompson passage about electricity - a lazy, actually neutral force - that could turn quickly and punch someone in the gut with one wrong move. Just like when Johnson asked Thompson "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Thompson slapped him across the face. "

2005-03-04T12:20:00.000-08:00

Sad.

Report: Freed Journalist Injured by U.S.: "A freed Italian hostage was injured and an Italian secret service agent killed Friday after a U.S. armored vehicle fired on a car in which they were riding in Iraq, two Italian news agencies reported.
...
The editor of Il Manifesto, Gabriele Polo, said the secret service agent was killed when he threw himself over the freed hostage to protect her from fire, according to Apcom. He also said Sgrena was in the hospital but was not seriously injured.
...
Sgrena, 56, was abducted Feb. 4 by gunmen who blocked her car outside Baghdad University. Last month, she was shown in a video pleading for her life and demanding that all foreign troops — including Italian forces — leave Iraq."

2005-02-22T19:07:00.000-08:00

Bye bye, brave Freedom Fries

Diplomacy in action!

NYT: Diplomacy, Served With French Fries

'The friendliest gesture during the dinner given by President Bush here was not political or personal, but culinary. After the lobster risotto with truffle sauce and alongside the filet of beef with bordelaise sauce was a side dish of potatoes. Mr. Bush announced that they were "French fries," one participant said. No longer would thin slices of potatoes cooked in oil be "freedom fries."'

2005-02-21T23:29:00.000-08:00

I'm Giving You One More Chance

How generous.The only way I can read this is: "You disagreed on the need for war, but that's long-gone. Now, you should focus on helping me mop up the mess of my war, which you opposed." In what way could this constitute a high-minded call for help? It's much more if "I was right, you were wrong. Now put all bickering aside and help out." With very little of "We need your help." Atypical, right? Right.

SFGate: Bush Seeks More NATO Support on Iraq

President Bush is pressing his agenda for a refurbished trans-Atlantic alliance at back-to-back summits with NATO and the European Union. He's looking for a commitment on more training aid for postwar Iraq and is expected to argue his case for increasing pressure on Iran to end its nuclear ambitions.

NATO's 26 members are expected to announce they all will participate in a modest program to train Iraq's military.

Despite differences over the war, "all nations now have an interest in the success of a free and democratic Iraq," Bush said ahead of Tuesday's sessions.

2005-02-19T20:25:00.000-08:00

Hang On To Your Ego

Looks like it's worked pretty well so far!

NYTimes: In Secretly Taped Conversations, Glimpses of the Future President
Mr. Bush also regularly gripes about the barbs of the press and his rivals. And he is cocky at times. "It's me versus the world," he told Mr. Wead. "The good news is, the world is on my side. Or more than half of it."
...
Mr. Bush knew that his own religious faith could be an asset with conservative Christian voters, and his personal devotion was often evident in the taped conversations. When Mr. Wead warned him that "power corrupts," for example, Mr. Bush told him not to worry: "I have got a great wife. And I read the Bible daily. The Bible is pretty good about keeping your ego in check."

2005-02-18T16:39:00.000-08:00

You'll Defend Anything!

I loved this little nugget from the Hardball segment on "Jeff Gannon" last night (bolded below); if Matthews wasn't just kidding, would it be funny or sad? Aren't the talking heads on talk/news shows there to do exactly that, to vigorously attack or defend anything? It's painful to watch, but we keep doing it. And so do they.

MSNBC - 'Harball with Chris Matthews' for Feb. 17:

"MATTHEWS: Sure. Well, teeing up all those softball questions for McClellan. And I don't know. We couldn't get anybody from HotMilitaryStud.com, so we got Pat Buchanan here.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: I am going to ask you, what is this connection?
PAT BUCHANAN, NBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, I had to moonlight as well in the early years, Chris.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: I was a Capitol Cop, but I wasn't Dirk Diggler. This guy is, what is the story here? You're here, you'll defend anything, right?
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: Well, I was prepared to defend, but, as a matter of fact, I think the White House handled itself fairly well.
I had assumed he had a White House pass. When you get a White House pass...
MATTHEWS: Under a different name.
BUCHANAN: Well, no, here's the thing.
With a White House pass, here's what you get it for. They give White House passes on a priority list. The ones that go to the briefing every single day, got to have them, because you don't want to be calling in every day. And eventually they will run down and they get them. Then The New York Times and other bureaus, they get a set number. I remember NPR had four or five. And they called for one for Daniel Schorr when he went there. We said no. We're not going to give you another. You can...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Did you have any ringers in the Nixon White House or Reagan White House, anybody you planted in the White House press room?
(CROSSTALK)
BUCHANAN: There were people, reporters and columnists and others, who were deeply devoted to Nixon, who, and they're people who we would go to and say, look, the president has got something to say on this issue.
MATTHEWS: Sure, "

2005-02-18T14:45:00.000-08:00

Not Exactly the Other Shoe Bomb Dropping

Protester Throws Shoe at Richard Perle: "Howard Dean, the newly minted leader of the Democratic Party, and former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle made clear their opposing views on the war in Iraq during a debate marred by a protester who tossed a shoe at Perle.
Perle had just started his comments Thursday when a protester threw a shoe at him before being dragged away, screaming, 'Liar! Liar!'"
...
Perle said the war in Iraq was justified based on the intelligence available at the time. "Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable to others," he said.
...
Perle was forced by one of the questioners to recast a comment he made on Sept. 22, 2003, in which he predicted that within one year, there would be "a grand square in Baghdad named for President Bush."

"I'd be a fool not to recognize that it did not happen on the schedule I had in mind," Perle said, adding that he did not deny that the administration had made mistakes in Iraq.

But, Perle added, "I will be surprised, yet again, if we do not see a square in Baghdad named after this president." He did not specify a time."

Maybe he should call Chalabi?

2005-02-16T17:36:00.000-08:00

In Which the Headline and the Story Utterly Disagree

The New York Times > AP > National > Bush May Raise Payroll Tax Cap to Pay for Social Security: "President Bush is not ruling out raising taxes on people who earn more than $90,000 as a way to help fix Social Security's finances.Asked directly, Bush said he would not bar raising the $90,000 cap, although he does not want to see the payroll tax rate go up.
....
``The one thing I'm not open-minded about is raising the payroll tax rate. And all the other issues go on the table,'' Bush said in the interview, according to an account in Wednesday's New Haven (Conn.) Register.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said raising the cap on Social Security taxes is just one option among many being advocated.
``Just because he said it was an option doesn't mean he embraced it,'' Duffy added."

2005-02-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

Who's Next?

Perhaps we'll invade Iran and Syria at the same time? It'd be the ultimate in freedom-spreading.

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Rice Sees Tensions With Syria Growing After Assassination: "WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signaled today that the recall of the United States ambassador to Syria might be just the start of a long, deep chill between Washington and Damascus.
The assassination of the former prime minister of Lebanon, a deed that the Bush administration has linked to Syria at least indirectly, was the latest incident in a rocky relationship between the United States and Syria, Ms. Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
...
There has been no word on whether Syria will recall its ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha. "

2005-02-11T15:04:00.000-08:00

Honk if you hate queers!

Ah, Virginia! This AND the anti-thong legislation in the same week? I think I may have to consider moving into your welcoming arms.

TimesDispatch.com | No harmony on marriage plates: "With only a week left to act on all legislation introduced by their respective members, the House and Senate yesterday argued over matters ranging from "traditional marriage" license plates to state budget procedures.
The House of Delegates squabbled before tentatively endorsing the special state plates that would include the capital-letter words 'TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE,' as well as a symbol, two interlocked golden wedding bands over a red heart."

2005-02-09T22:36:00.000-08:00

Or, well, uh, I used to report news. Until recently, I mean.

James Guckert or "Jeff Gannon" stops "reporting" his stories from the WH. Terribly sad. Listen to the whole thing. Y'know, he would've kept reporting under his 'real' name until he realized that people were angry at him and had ferreted out his pseudonym, and allegedly started offering 'death threats' etc. Which validated his raison d'astroturf! 700k people received his 'indie' perspective, daily!'! Poor guy! Out of fear for his life he wisely declines to disclose his actual identity. Out of a desire to not-fluff his journalism, I mean.

Why use a pseudonym?
Gannon: "I'm not even going to acknowledge that it's controversial...well, there're many people in this business who do that....there are reasons to do such a thing..."
Q: "So, i'm asking yours..."
Gannon: "Well i'm not even going to acknowledge...these are reasons that someone would do it and it's not reasons to hide anything, it would probably be a commercial consideration...it has it doesn't have great commercial appeal, and if it could be more (*that way*) then so much more the better."

Vanity and disingenuity, all in the same package.

Conservative Reporter Resigns Amid Controversy (Requires RealMedia plugin)

All Things Considered, February 9, 2005 · A reporter for the conservative news site TalonNews.com resigns. The reporter, who went by the pseudonym Jeff Gannon, drew critical attention at President Bush's Jan. 26 press conference when he referred in question to Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality" on the issue of retooling Social Security.

Liberal bloggers have disclosed that Gannon, who has little previous journalism experience, was easily granted a coveted White House press pass -- even though he did not work for a traditional or established news organization. He also routinely asked "softball" questions at press conferences. There are also allegations that Gannon is linked to Web sites with homoerotic themes.

Gannon spoke with NPR's David Folkenflik the day before he resigned. He says he is open about his conservative point of view, but that he is just as valid a journalist as other reporters in the White House press corps.

2005-02-04T11:44:00.000-08:00

Yeah, somehow I doubt it.

But we'll see.

U.S. 'in for a shock' / In early election results, Shiite cleric's alliance trouncing Washington's favorite: "Baghdad -- Partial results from Sunday's election suggest that U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's coalition is being roundly defeated by a list with the backing of Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani, diminishing Allawi's chances of retaining his post in the next government. "

2005-01-31T20:42:00.000-08:00

It's not the new Germany

Atrios:
What I do think is important - and it's time for the press to start asking - is just how permanent our designs on Iraq are? Why are we building the Biggest Baddest Embassy Ever and a bunch of permanent military bases? The elephant in the living room is of course the high probability that even if things work out wonderfully, and the security situation improves, the Bushies still intend to maintain a significant permanent presence in Iraq. Is that true? I don't know. But it's time for somebody to start asking.

I think it's noteworthy that Bush is willing to set and keep utterly arbitrary, artificial deadlines (Saddam's surrender, '04 transfer of power, '05 elections), but refuses to ever talk in even vague terms about when US troops might be pulled out of Iraq. Hey, we're staying as long as 'they' want us there...you know, 'they': the exile the CIA funded and who we installed as president who'll probably 'win' the election? i.e. maybe we'll stay forever. Let's see when talk of our alleged 14 'permanent' bases finally hits the nightly news.

2005-01-19T11:41:00.000-08:00

Shorter Gonzales

We believe the Geneva Convention. But combatants in Iraq don't meet the definition of the GC, so we don't have to treat them accordingly. Not that we'd ever torture anyone! Besides, what we're doing isn't defined as torture. And those doing the tor....errr, humane interrogation arent' members of the military, and are so also not bound by the GC or rules against torture. Which, I repeat, we would never do.

The New York Times > Washington > Gonzales Says '02 Policy on Detainees Doesn't Bind C.I.A.: "Officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and other nonmilitary personnel fall outside the bounds of a 2002 directive issued by President Bush that pledged the humane treatment of prisoners in American custody, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, said in documents released on Tuesday.
...
At the same time, however, the president has a clear policy opposing torture, and "the C.I.A. and other nonmilitary personnel are fully bound" by it, Mr. Gonzales said.
...
"But it's notable," Mr. Lederman added, "that Gonzales is not willing to tell the senators or anyone else just what techniques the C.I.A. has actually been authorized to use."

Indeed, Mr. Gonzales declined to say in his written responses to the committee what interrogation tactics would constitute torture in his view or which ones should be banned.

That question, he indicated, is again under review by the administration. But if the administration "were to begin ruling out speculated interrogation practices" in public, he wrote, "we would fairly rapidly provide Al Qaeda with a road map concerning the interrogation that captured terrorists can expect to face and would enable Al Qaeda to improve its counter-interrogation training to match it." "

More here, from Andrew Sullivan (yes, I know).

2005-01-16T21:51:00.000-08:00

Entitle-itis

I have to write something longer and better-thought-out on this, but why is it that Bush, whose family has been rich for at least two generations and who would be rich even if he'd never left the house or gone to school or gotten sweetheart treatment from schools like Yale and rich investors through the entirety of his largely-irresponsible adult life...why is it that he believes so much in his 'ownership' or 'shareholder' society? If he'd been some big rags-to-riches story I could understand it, but he's not. I think he's just using this rhetoric to make it sound like he's expanding opportunities for lower-income people while he's ensuring that the really-rich (his class of people) can coast without paying the 'death tax' or the dividend tax or higher tax rates or ever have to support the less-priveleged. And that's what's morally reprehensible about the 'take your chances' facet of the 'ownership' society.

The article/quotes below don't really address this in any detail, but they provide some useful context.

SFGate: Bush Legacy Likely to Last Generations
"Bush has an opportunity over the next four years to create a conservative New Deal, to be one of the most influential presidents in the last 50 years,'' said Stephen Moore, president of the Free Enterprise Fund, a conservative group that promotes free-market solutions.

"He has the opportunity to move the economy away from the idea of an entitlement society, which we had during (presidents) Roosevelt and Johnson ... toward a genuine shareholder society,'' Moore said, bringing "the Reagan revolution to its fruition.'

2005-01-15T11:00:00.000-08:00

Watch What You Do

ABC: 20/20: Bush will watch what he says in second term
"I watch what I say. … I said some things in the first term that were probably a little blunt. 'Bring it on' was a little blunt. I was really speaking to our troops, but it came out and had a different connotation, different meanings for others," he told Walters.

Bush used the phrase in July 2003 to say U.S. troops would not be scared off by Iraqi insurgents' attacks. During the presidential election campaign, his rival, Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, used the line to criticize administration policy. "If the White House wants to make this election about national security, I have three words they understand: 'Bring, it, on!' "

More recently, guerrillas in Iraq have used the president's words in a propaganda video narrated in English, according to the Reuters news agency. The narrator of the video says, "George W. Bush, you have asked us to 'bring it on.' And so help me, [we will ] like you never expected. Do you have another challenge?" The video then shows explosions around a U.S. military vehicle.

'We Will Stay on the Hunt'

Bush told Walters that the first lady criticized him for pledging after Sept. 11 to get al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."

"I'll be more disciplined in how I say things," the president, adding, "I have to be cautious about conveying thoughts in a way that doesn't send wrong impressions about our country."

Bush repeated that his administration will continue to make the war on terror a priority and continue its pursuit of bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

I'm as to what 'bring it on' was supposed to say to our troops. And really, what about 'dead or alive'? It's not what he said, it's that he hasn't found bin Laden in either condition over 3 years later.

2005-01-11T12:38:00.000-08:00

Dept. of Ridiculous Analogies, Redux

Prisoners are like cheerleaders! Or prisoners! Or toddlers.

Reuters: "A lawyer for Charles Graner, accused ringleader in the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, on Monday compared piling naked prisoners into pyramids to cheerleader shows and said leashing inmates was also acceptable prisoner control.
'Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?' Guy Womack, Graner's attorney, said in opening arguments to the 10-member U.S. military jury at the reservist sergeant's court-martial.
Graner and Pvt. Lynndie England, with whom he fathered a child and who is also facing a court-martial, became the faces of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal after they appeared in photographs that showed degraded, naked prisoners.
The prosecution showed some of those pictures in their opening argument, including several of naked Iraqi men piled on each other and another of England holding a crawling naked Iraqi man on a leash.
Womack said using a tether was a valid method of controlling detainees, especially those who might be soiled with feces.
'You're keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections,' he said. 'In Texas we'd lasso them and drag them out of there.' He compared the leash to parents who place tethers on their toddlers while walking in shopping malls."

2005-01-06T17:12:00.000-08:00

More Matt on 'Desperation'

Just updating the post below....Click the Prospect link for more deja vu all over again.

TAPPED: January 2005 Archives: "The recent acts of terrorism, such as the bombing of the U.N. headquarters and the mosque in Najaf, show a couple of things. First, that Iraq is still a dangerous place. They also show, I think, the desperation -- the desperation of the adversaries that we face. We're actively engaged in rooting out this threat with more and more Iraqis coming forward with information and a willingness to help us.
-- Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, September 9, 2003. "

2005-01-06T15:41:00.000-08:00

Urgh.

And maybe they're confident because they already know the outcome? CIA-fave crony or on-the-take strongman 'democratically' wins the election, despite a huge list of problems and irregularities that make the first Ukrainian elections look honest in comparison.

You should really click on the link and read the whole post.

Baghdad Burning: "Can you just imagine what our history books are going to look like 20 years from now?

'The first democratic elections were held in Iraq on January 29, 2005 under the ever-watchful collective eye of the occupation forces, headed by the United States of America. Troops in tanks watched as swarms of warm, fuzzy Iraqis headed for the ballot boxes to select one of the American-approved candidates...'

It won't look good.

There are several problems. The first is the fact that, technically, we don't know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don't know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren't making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated.

Another problem is the selling of ballots. We're getting our ballots through the people who give out the food rations in the varying areas. The whole family is registered with this person(s) and the ages of the varying family members are known. Many, many, many people are not going to vote. Some of those people are selling their voting cards for up to $400. The word on the street is that these ballots are being bought by people coming in from Iran. They will purchase the ballots, make false IDs (which is ridiculously easy these days) and vote for SCIRI or Daawa candidates. Sunnis are receiving their ballots although they don't intend to vote, just so that they won't be sold.

Yet another issue is the fact that on all the voting cards, the gender of the voter, regardless of sex, is labeled 'male'. Now, call me insane, but I found this slightly disturbing. Why was that done? Was it some sort of a mistake? Why is the sex on the card anyway? What difference does it make? There are some theories about this. Some are saying that many of the more religiously inclined families womenfolk voting so it might be permissible for the head of the family to take the women's ID and her ballot and do the voting for her. Another theory is that this 'mistake' will make things easier for people making fake IDs to vote in place of females.

All of this has given the coming elections a sort of sinister cloak. There is too much mystery involved and too little transparency. It is more than a little bit worrisome.

American politicians seem to be very confident that Iraq is going to come out of these elections with a secular government. How is that going to happen when many Shia Iraqis are being driven to vote with various fatwas from Sistani and gang? Sistani and some others of Iranian inclination came out with fatwas claiming that non-voters will burn in the hottest fires of the underworld for an eternity if they don't vote (I'm wondering- was this a fatwa borrowed from right-wing Bushies during the American elections?). So someone fuelled with a scorching fatwa like that one- how will they vote? Secular? Yeah, right."

2005-01-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

More Gonzo

Geez, and I thought I was a cynical jerk.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: We Are All Torturers Now: "On the other hand, perhaps it is fitting that Mr. Gonzales be confirmed. The system of torture has, after all, survived its disclosure. We have entered a new era; the traditional story line in which scandal leads to investigation and investigation leads to punishment has been supplanted by something else. Wrongdoing is still exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents, and then we listen to the president's spokesman 'reiterate,' as he did last week, 'the president's determination that the United States never engage in torture.' And there the story ends. "

2005-01-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

Why Don't I Believe Him?

Sure, he owes his whole political career to GW Bush, but...

The New York Times > AP > National > Justice Nominee Draws Scorching Criticism From Senate Democrats: "``I will no longer represent only the White House. I will represent the United States of America and its people. I understand the difference between the two roles,'' President Bush's counsel told the Senate Judiciary Committee."

2005-01-04T23:50:00.000-08:00

Before the Elections

SFGate:Gunmen slay governor of Baghdad region; 5 Americans killed in separate attacks

Insurgents assassinated the highest-ranking Iraqi official in eight months Tuesday, gunning down the governor of Baghdad province and six of his bodyguards, and a suicide truck bomber killed 10 people at an Interior Ministry commando headquarters, the latest in a string of violence ahead of Jan. 30 elections.
...
"It once again shows that there are these murderers and terrorists, former regime elements in Iraq, who don't want to see elections. They don't want the people of Iraq to chose new leaders. They want to go back to the past. They want to go back to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein's regime and that's not going to happen," Powell said.

Yes, the reprehensible killing is definitely (and by this I mean 'by definition') occuring ahead of the 1/30 elections. But does anyone think that this horrific rate of killing will abate after the elections? If so, I haven't heard it expressed anywhere. Framing it as specific to the elections is ridiculous - it's not as if postponing the elections or sticking to the January date would really change anything. And yet we keep buying this line in all sorts of stories.

Big Media Matt has more on this overused meme.

Reacting to today's assassination of the governor of Baghdad province, Secretary of State Colin Powell blamed those who "want to go back to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein's regime." That's part of a recent shift in rhetorical emphasis coming from the administration lately. In the early days of the insurgency, the Baath angle was played up a lot and one heard much talk of "dead-enders," "former regime elements," etc., and how capturing Saddam Hussein would do a great deal of good. Then Saddam was captured, it didn't do much good, and the rhetoric shifted to an emphasis on the idea that foreign jihadists were at the core of the insurgency and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the key to beating the insurgents.

Over the past month, the administration seems to have largely shifted back in the other direction, as in Powell's statement today, or this assessment of the insurgency (via Spencer Ackerman) from Iraq's intelligence chief.

2005-01-04T23:09:00.000-08:00

Omission is the better part of valor

Ever wonder how one could write a defense of Alberto Gonzales's legal positions on torture, the WoT, enemy combatants, and the Geneva Convention without once mentioning Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay? Well, look no further. And it's in the Moonie Times but it's not from someone on the fringes of opinion.

Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Property Rights. He served previously as Texas Attorney General and state supreme court justice.

Update: The National Review's getting in on the game, too! So is there some sort of talking point circulating encouraging journos to write positive things about Gonzales without mentioning the two biggest torture-ariums he's associated with?

2005-01-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

Not to Put Too Fine A Point on It

Holbrooke makes his point and then swiftly un-makes it. Is it the appearance of coercion or the actual evidence of it that's a problem?

BTW, thinking back to Colin Powell's slam-dunk WMD presentation to the UN, whose behavior seems more in need of correction? Powell's over the top argument for war, or the UN's generally chilly reception to same?

NYT: Secret meeting to 'rescue' U.N.
At the gathering, Secretary General Kofi Annan listened quietly to three and a half hours of bluntly worded counsel from a group united in its personal regard for him and support for the United Nations. The group's concern was that lapses in his leadership during the past two years had eclipsed the accomplishments of his first four-year term in office and were threatening to undermine the two years remaining in his final term.
...
"The intention was to keep it confidential," Mr. Holbrooke said. "No one wanted to give the impression of a group of outsiders, all of them Americans, dictating what to do to a secretary general."

He described the group as people "who care deeply about the U.N. and believe that the U.N. cannot succeed if it is in open dispute and constant friction with its founding nation, its host nation and its largest contributor nation."

"The U.N., without the U.S. behind it, is a failed institution," he said.

2004-12-20T17:24:00.000-08:00

"Literally"

Not worth much comment here, but I'm grabbing this because it's another example of one of Andrew's long-held pet peeves, one he identified to me years before David Cross would sling it liberally across his live routine.

To wit: you either believe that the US Military is "literally" GW Bush's "gun," or it's not actually literal at all. Or perhaps the reporter has seen Bush personally wield some firearms of his own that others had tried to dissuade Bush from. Maybe he's thinking of the pistol of Saddam's that Bush keeps on display in the WH?

Update: Bush is Commander in Chief, so the troops/"guns" *are* his to commit at discretion. But making a line between that and "his guns" only perpetuates the suture-ific idea of Bush fighting the war himself, one that perhaps begins with his triumphant carrier landing last year and (sadly) pushes on through his supremely arrogant, childish "bring 'em on" taunt.

TIME Person of the Year 2004: George W. Bush: "For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his ten-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years, George W. Bush is TIME's 2004 Person of the Year"

2004-12-17T13:21:00.000-08:00

Again With the How Great James Wolcott Is
James Wolcott: Bernie, We Hardly Knew Ye: "Weeks ago, I found myself in the green room of a cable show with Ed Koch, Bernard Kerik, and Joe Trippi. I had been looking forward to meeting Trippi, but when I stepped into the room and saw these two other slabs of supreme self-assurance taking up real estate, I figured this wasn't the time for chitchat....Upcoming were the Olympics, and Koch asked Kerik if he thought there might be terrorist trouble. Kerik intoned that the security in Athens, in Greece generally, was very porous, and let the subject drop with a combination of ominous understatement and quiet authority that made me suspect I was in the presence of a champion b-s'er.

Kerik exuded too much quiet authority and dramatic effect, trying a shade too hard to convey that he knew things he couldn't speak of and was working from the deep inside, privy to secrets that he carried locked inside the bank vault of his barrel chest. I could see how this tough-guy shtick--which obviously wasn't entirely shtick, but a tough streak that had been refined into an urban lawman persona--would impress fake swaggarts like, well, George Bush, who likes to play dress-up as a range hand and fighter pilot to show what a Hungry man entree he is. "

2004-12-16T13:47:00.000-08:00

Ye Olde Revolving Door

You can only roll your eyes so many times in one day. Trust me.

The New York Times > Washington > House's Author of Drug Benefit Joins Lobbyists: "Representative Billy Tauzin, a principal author of the new Medicare drug law, will become president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the chief lobby for brand-name drug companies, the trade group announced Wednesday.
...
Drug makers said that the job was not a reward for Mr. Tauzin's work on the Medicare bill, which followed the industry's specifications in many respects. The law was signed by President Bush on Dec. 8, 2003, a few weeks before a lawyer for Mr. Tauzin began talks with the drug trade group.
...
Mr. Tauzin (pronounced TOE-zan) and Mr. White refused to discuss Mr. Tauzin's new salary, except to say it was comparable to the pay at other large trade associations. People at other trade groups said they believed that Mr. Tauzin would receive $2 million a year or more.
Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said: 'As a member of Congress, Billy negotiated a large payout to the pharmaceutical industry by the federal government. He's now about to receive one of the largest salaries ever paid to any advocate by an industry.'
Mr. Tauzin wrote large parts of the new Medicare law as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee and as a member of the conference committee that hashed out differences between the House and the Senate in four months of intense negotiations last year.
The law steers clear of price controls and price regulation, which are anathema to drug companies. The law forbids the government to negotiate with drug manufacturers to secure lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries. "

2004-12-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

(Another) Missile Defense Launch Fails

Follow the discussion thread on DailyKos.

An attempt to launch an interceptor missile as part of the U.S. missile defence shield failed early Wednesday in the first test of the system in nearly two years.

The Missile Defense Agency said the ground-based interceptor automatically shutdown "due to an unknown anomaly" shortly before it was to be launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean [...]

The missile defence shield was meant to be in operation by the end of 2004.

In earlier tests, missile interceptors had a record of five-for-eight in hitting target missiles.

Kos:Note, that five out of eight record was achieved only because the target missile did not have 1) decoys (which are employed by intercontinental ballistic missiles, and 2) the targets had a homing beacon on them.

Wednesday's test had been put of several times because of bad weather, and a malfunction of a recovery vessel not directly related to the equipment being tested, The Associated Press reported.

Don't any of these people remember Real Genius?

REAL GENIUS (1985) is considered by many fans to be their favorite Val Kilmer movie. This movie which tells the story of the legendary whiz kid, Chris Knight, and the neophyte genius, Mitch Taylor, whom Chris takes under his wing while foiling the military's development of a Star Wars-like death weapon, offers something for nearly everyone.
...
In REAL GENIUS, the U.S. military has hired a university physics professor, Jerry Hathaway (William Atherton), in order to use his resources (the lab and the students) to help them develop the latest 'smart' weapon, so as to enable a Star Wars-like defense of the USA. Actually, they want to develop "a peacetime weapon that will upgrade the art of terrorism.
...
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan first proposed what he called the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.) S.D.I. was born out of the convergence of political crisis and scientific hubris. In the first two years of the Reagan administration, the U.S. redefined its relationship with the Soviet Union and, in the process, produced not only a heightened level of hostility between the two superpowers, but also, a complete stalemate in the slow progress of arms control negotiations that had then been in progress for over a decade. Most of the leading military and foreign policy figures in the administration's early years preferred a confrontational escalation of the arms race, which they believed the USA would win. However, the recession of 1982, along with the emergence of the nuclear freeze movement in Europe and America, and its rapid transformation into a major political force threatened the U.S. agenda. (The nuclear freeze movement in the U.S. became a particular rallying cry for college students, including the Juilliard student, Val Kilmer, whose play "How It All Began" has to be viewed as a seminal piece of work for this time period).

Fearful that budgetary constraints and popular fears would derail the administration's military and foreign policy, a number of Reagan aides began to take an interest in what until then had been a relatively obscure proposal from a small group of important, if somewhat erratic, scientists and university professors. It was a plan for developing a laser-guided, space-based defense against ballistic missiles, and its principal scientific sponsor was Edward Teller, a distinguished physicist, who was also known as a hyperbolic enthusiast for visionary schemes that existed largely in his own imagination. (REAL GENIUS' Professor Hathaway is a dumbed-down Teller). Teller and those who shared his vision talked ecstatically about the new technologies that they claimed were already available to create such a system, and they persuaded many within the administration to go along with the wishful and entirely erroneous idea that effective deployment was within easy reach...unfortunately for them, they had no Chris Knight! Teller's ideas were a godsend to the policymakers and they promoted them fervently. Reagan always presented S.D.I. as an impenetrable barrier that would protect the American people (even though, very early in the research process, almost every scientist understood that at best it would be able to protect only American land-based missiles, not the population). Today, in the year 2000, Ronald Reagan's missile shield project is still alive, though it shows no sign of consciousness. As Chris Knight might say, "would you classify this as a design problem or a launch problem?!"

2004-12-14T12:12:00.000-08:00

Yes, but did he ever use the exact phrase "imminent threat"?

Yahoo! News - Bush Says Social Security Faces 'Looming Danger': "President Bush (news - web sites) said on Saturday Social Security (news - web sites) must be overhauled to avoid a 'looming danger' of insolvency, as he launched a public push for his proposal to add private accounts to the program"

2004-12-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

Upisdownism

Taking on a $2 trillion (*trillion!!*) hit, on or off the books, should never, ever, be referred to as a 'savings.' With the new 'mandate,' I guess lying with impunity has gone a step further into the realm of unreality.

The New York Times > Washington > Bush Says He Won't Raise Taxes for Social Security Overhaul: "If the government was to let people divert part of their payroll taxes to private accounts, the budget deficit would be more than $100 billion a year higher than otherwise and the surpluses in the Social Security trust fund expected over the next 13 years would disappear.
With that in mind, administration officials and Republicans in Congress hint that they are looking at ways to exclude the expected transition costs from the official deficit numbers.
'I wouldn't view anything as a cost,' Mr. McClellan, the president's spokesman, said. 'I would view them as savings.'
Meanwhile, some Republicans who support private savings accounts say it might well be better to raise taxes than to add $2 trillion to the federal debt."

2004-12-06T20:51:00.000-08:00

Hoo Boy

And this is the Pentagon's report on the War on Terror. Sobering.

Sunday Herald: Pentagon report reveals catalogue of failure

“Thus the US has strongly taken sides in a desperate struggle … US policies and actions are increasingly seen by the overwhelming majority of Muslims as a threat to the survival of Islam itself … Americans have inserted themselves into this intra-Islamic struggle in ways that have made us an enemy to most Muslims.

“There is no yearning-to- be-liberated-by-the-US groundswell among Muslim societies … The perception of intimate US support of tyr-annies in the Muslim world is perhaps the critical vulnerability in American strategy. It strongly undercuts our message, while strongly promoting that of the enemy.”

The report says that, in terms of the “information war”, “at this moment it is the enemy that has the advantage”. The US propaganda drive has to focus on “separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical- militant Islamist-Jihadist”.

According to the report, “the official take on the target audience [the Muslim world] has been gloriously simple” and divided the Middle East into “good” and “bad Muslims”.

“Americans are convinced that the US is a benevolent ‘superpower’ that elevates values emphasising freedom … deep down we assume that everyone should naturally support our policies. Yet the world of Islam – by overwhelming majorities at this time – sees things differently. Muslims see American policies as inimical to their values, American rhetoric about freedom and democracy as hypocritical and American actions as deeply threatening.

“In two years the jihadi message – that strongly attacks American values – is being accepted by more moderate and non-violent Muslims. This in turn implies that negative opinion of the US has not yet bottomed out

2004-12-03T15:46:00.000-08:00

Return of the Son of the Tortured Analogy

In other news, humans are not analogous to automobiles. Though it's interesting that our pro-SUV administration would try to make such a connection.

Theoretically, Tax Reform Should Fly (washingtonpost.com): "If you want to understand why the Bush administration is pondering eliminating the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, consider this year's Economic Report of the President. There, White House economists assert that the deduction unfairly subsidizes employees of some companies while encouraging overly generous health policies that focus on routine medical care.
'If automobile insurance were structured like the typical health policy, it would cover annual maintenance, tire replacement, and possibly even car washes,' said the report, concluding that 'health insurance markets can be improved . . . [to] focus on large expenditures that are truly the result of unforeseen circumstance' and 'to provide a more standardized tax treatment of all health care markets.'
...
Critics say the White House's theoretical arguments may fly in the face of empirical evidence. They argue that health care, for instance, is fundamentally different from auto care: If insurance does not motivate to get routine checkups, the ultimate cost to the health care system of treating late-stage cancer is far higher then replacing a transmission. And while the business deduction for health insurance costs may violate some standard textbook tenets, said Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago, consider the alternatives. "

2004-12-03T13:29:00.000-08:00

Cashing in Some Chips

Fred Kaplan's got some intriguing background on our new head of Homeland Security. The basic thrust of which is that Kerik may not be qualified for the job, which he probably got as a result of Giuliani's pushing for it. Hardly encouraging stuff.

...Kerik was no longer in office when the NYPD started mounting its intensive effort toward preventing and fighting terrorism. That campaign was jump-started by Raymond Kelly, the commissioner named by Giuliani's successor, Mike Bloomberg. If President Bush had wanted to hire a city cop with broad and deep experience at homeland security, Kelly would have been his man—but, alas, Kelly has worked for too many Democrats. He was police commissioner in David Dinkins' final year as mayor (when, most people forget, crime started to creep down). He was undersecretary of treasury, in charge of border security, under President Clinton. In his first two days on the job under Bloomberg, he set up a counterterrorism division; hired David Cohen, a 35-year CIA veteran, to run the shop; and lavished the operation with piles of department money.

The second question—Kerik's time in Baghdad—is a more mysterious matter, but from what's known about it, still more dismaying. In mid-May 2003, the Defense Department gave Kerik a $140,000-a-year contract to go train the new Iraqi police force. He told reporters, "I will be there at least six months—until the job is done." He came back to New York in early September, a little more than three months later, just as the insurgency began to grow, saying, "Everything that had to be done that I could possibly do, it was done."

Whatever Kerik did, it wasn't much. The Iraqi police forces were—and still are—notoriously ill-trained and ill-equipped for the gigantic challenges they face. It's not clear why Kerik left earlier than scheduled. By all accounts, he was a wash-out. One Pentagon official who was in Baghdad at the time calls Kerik's tenure "notably unspectacular." His tenure did produce some grist for scandal. Members of Iraq's interim governing council expressed loud dismay that Kerik spent $1.2 billion to train 35,000 Iraqi police in Jordan. More annoying still was his decision to buy from Jordan 20,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 50,000 revolvers, and 10 million rounds of ammunition, when he could have rounded up all those weapons far more cheaply—if not for free—from the disbanded Iraqi army.

2004-12-02T19:16:00.000-08:00

Let's Not Call it Favoritism

NY Times :Bush Apppoints Kerik as new Homeland Security Czar
Republicans with ties to the White House said they also expected Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, to announce his resignation within days, most likely to be replaced by Mark McClellan, the administrator of the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Instead, let's call it nepotism. McClellan is the brother of that other famous White House McClellan, Scott. He's Bush's Press Secretary.

2004-12-02T17:22:00.000-08:00

Putting the Tape in the VCR

Hrm, this is a pretty good analogy for Bush's insistence in 'staying on message' (a euphemism for repeating a few broad generalities ad nauseaum), but I think it could get better. "Pressing play"? "Broken record"? I dunno. But it's out there for the taking, somewhere.

washingtonpost.com: Next Question: "Bush has held 16 solo news conferences, compared to 43 for Bill Clinton, 84 for George H.W. Bush and 26 for Ronald Reagan at this point in their presidencies, according to research by Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University.
These sessions are a contest between Bush's desire to repeat his previously articulated views ('sticking a tape in the VCR,' as one frequent Bush questioner puts it), and the reporters' quest to elicit something that will contribute to democracy, not to mention getting them on television or the front page."

2004-11-24T22:58:00.000-08:00

Valor

Read the whole thing. A really amazing, touching report on the Marine Bravo Company (1st batallion, 8th Marines) and their fight for Fallujah. Stories like this are few and far between, and really bring home the scenes on the ground and the bravery of our troops...along with the gore, confusion, sacrifice, and artifice of urban warfare. The cited passage is only one small fragment of this insightful piece. For or against the war, I can't overemphasize that you should read the entire article by Dexter Filkins of the NYT.

In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War

ALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 18 - Eight days after the Americans entered the city on foot, a pair of marines wound their way up the darkened innards of a minaret, shot through with holes by an American tank.

As the marines inched upward, a burst of gunfire rang down, fired by an insurgent hiding in the top of the tower. The bullets hit the first marine in the face, his blood spattering the marine behind him. The marine in the rear tumbled backward down the stairwell, while Lance Cpl. William Miller, age 22, lay in silence halfway up, mortally wounded.

"Miller!" the marines called from below. "Miller!"

With that, the marines' near mystical commandment against leaving a comrade behind seized the group. One after another, the young marines dashed into the minaret, into darkness and into gunfire, and wound their way up the stairs.

After four attempts, Corporal Miller's lifeless body emerged from the tower, his comrades choking and covered with dust. With more insurgents closing in, the marines ran through volleys of machine-gun fire back to their base.

2004-11-24T14:57:00.000-08:00

Somebody Tell Melissa Etheridge!

BothSides Magazine: "Proponents of the homosexual lifestyle argue that as race is merely a byproduct of inherited genes, so is homosexuality. The weakness of this position is that people of color reproduce and pass on the DNA that makes the skin brown; however, homosexuals cannot reproduce. If homosexuality is a genetic trait and homosexuals were true to their orientation, the trait would have virtually disappeared over the ages. Nature does not perpetuate homosexuality."

2004-11-23T14:27:00.000-08:00

Moral Swampland

Uh-huh.

The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising > Many Who Voted for 'Values' Still Like Their Television Sin: "Desperate Housewives' on ABC is the big new hit of the television season, ranked second over all in the country, behind only 'C.S.I.' on CBS. This satire of suburbia and modern relationships features, among other morally challenged characters, a married woman in her 30's having an affair with a high-school-age gardener, and has prompted several advertisers, including Lowe's, to pull their advertisements.

In the greater Atlanta market, reaching more than two million households, 'Desperate Housewives' is the top-rated show. Nearly 58 percent of the voters in those counties voted for President Bush.

And in the Salt Lake City market, which takes in the whole state of Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming, 'Desperate Housewives' is fourth, after two editions of 'C.S.I.' and NBC's 'E.R.'; Mr. Bush rolled up 72.6 percent of the vote there.

'We say one thing and do another,' said Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment. 'People compartmentalize about their lives and their entertainment choices.' "

2004-11-22T14:30:00.000-08:00

From the Inept Analogy Dept.

Because people climbing on H3s is the same thing as people in H3s running over people? Tortured.

Hummer foes take message to auto show / Protesters see link between war, Americans driving gas guzzlers:

Attitudes toward the protesters became somewhat less supportive when about 10 demonstrators entered the Moscone Center and marched through the exhibition chanting "Driving a Hummer Is Driving Us to War," as they climbed aboard a prototype of a 2006 H3 Hummer. The vehicle was parked on a platform intended to be off limits to the public.

"'I think they're a bunch of morons,' said Mike Silva of Riverbank (Stanislaus County) as he watched the Code Pink protesters celebrate the news. 'It's cool if you want to protest outside, but coming in here and bothering people who just want to enjoy the show is crossing the line. It's not like I went and drove a big truck over them.' "

2004-11-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

Insurgency to Blame for Rapid Deterioration of Iraqi Children's Health?
That's certainly one way to think about it. I think it's only a facet. If there'd been better post-war planning and solid thinking about how to deal with a guerilla insurgency, this wouldn't be such a huge problem.

Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos (washingtonpost.com)

BAGHDAD -- Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.
...
Violence has also driven away international aid agencies that brought expertise to Iraq following the U.S. invasion.

Since a truck bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed more than 20 people last year, U.N. programs for Iraq have operated from neighboring Jordan. Doctors Without Borders, a group known for its high tolerance for risk and one of several that helped revive Iraq's Health Ministry in the weeks after the invasion, evacuated this fall.

2004-11-16T13:14:00.000-08:00

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That....

Geez, I wish Wolcott would post as often as Atrios does.

James Wolcott: Rice and No Beans: "I can exclusively report what finally drove Powell over the brink. Yes, he was bummed by years of being backstabbed by the neocon hawks, most of whom spent Vietnam masturbating in their dorm rooms. But the last straw was seeing and hearing Thomas Friedman on Tim Russert's CNBC weekend show, channeling Bush's voice to advocate that Powell devote himself exclusively to negotiating a peace deal between the Palestinians and Israelis--that he be dispatched to the Middle East deal and not to be allowed to return home until he had one, even if it took a year. "

2004-11-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Confuse-atron

Love the "who's on first?" discussion here. He'd never intended to stay and would've stayed if asked but he wasn't so he left. Although, uh, not being asked to stay is also sort of the same thing as being asked to leave, right?

CNN.com - Colin Powell submits resignation - Nov 15, 2004:
...
"Bush accepted the resignation Friday, Powell said, adding, 'It has always been my intention that I would serve one term.'

But a senior State Department official characterized Powell's departure this way: 'He was not asked to stay.'

For months Powell said he served at the pleasure of the president, suggesting he might stay if asked. 'That didn't happen,' the senior official said. But the official also said Powell 'never asked to stay and was never asked to leave.'"

2004-11-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

Theatrical Micromilitarism: Say It 3 Times Fast

Wolcott's such a deft, barbed writer. Glad his blog is updated so regularly.

James Wolcott: On Borrowed Time: "The US assault on Fallujah is a prime example of what Todd calls 'theatrical micromilitarism.' I mean, calling it 'Operation Phantom Fury'--it's a sick joke. What's 'phantom' about it? For months the US has been touting this incursion and publicly built up forces outside the city for weeks, giving the enemy plenty of time to rig explosives and/or skip town. Billing it as a 'decisive battle'--another fraud. Guerrilla warfare operates on an entirely different set of rules; as has been oft pointed out, America won every major battle during Vietnam and still lost. What's unfolding is not a decisive moment but a ghastly production that trains hellfire on a symbolic target and 'plays well' to American citizens as a flex of muscle, as witness the NY Post cover today of an American soldier with a cigarette dangling from his mouth with the headline 'Marlboro Men Kick Butt.' Civilian casualties, the destruction of homes and livelihoods, the absence of any significant capture of insurgent ringleaders, these are secondary to getting good action footage over which benedictions can be said. "

2004-11-10T14:31:00.000-08:00

The full text of OBL's recent tape

2004-11-09T15:45:00.000-08:00

Now That We Are All Safe, He May Go

Astounding. How could one take this out of context, I'm wondering?

MSNBC - Ashcroft, Evans resign from Bush's Cabinet: "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved," Ashcroft wrote in a five-page handwritten letter to Bush, adding that he believed that the Justice Department "would be well served by new leadership and fresh inspiration" and that "my energies and talents should be directed toward other challenging horizons."

2004-11-09T11:56:00.000-08:00

Omitting the Inconvenient Points

David Frum's Diary on National Review Online: "For days before the U.S. election, Marines and Iraqi troops massed around the city of Fallujah. As the voters arrived at the booths, they knew that their ballots would determine the whole future course of the war in Iraq. With everything at stake, they cast those ballots for George Bush.

Now the battle has begun. What is to come we cannot know. But we can know this: Fully aware of the stakes, American voters massively rejected the candidate who promised to put an end to battles like Fallujah--and massively voted in the candidate who pledged to do whatever was necessary to win these battles. "

Nowhere in this article does Frum note that the Fallujah battle was held back until after the election. Was that just to see whether voters wanted it to happen or not? I think not.

2004-11-09T11:21:00.000-08:00

Fake Confusion

One of the things I find most interesting about David Brooks is his reliance on a seemingly earnest befuddlement to make his points. He'll say that he's confused about something that he's not actually confused about at all, and then slyly slip in what his conclusion at the outset was and pretend like he just got there.

In the article below, he bemoans how out of touch us liberal folks are with the 'exurbs' and those who live there. These are people like the Bay Area's 'supercommuter,' people who buy a new home in a not-quite-finished outer suburb, say in Tracy, and spend 2 hours a day driving to jobs in places like San Francisco. There are a lot of reasons to do this, but the only one that makes sense to me is that the housing is relatively cheap.

So Brooks is bemoaning the fact that his book was ABOUT these people but that, for a variety of reasons, he couldn't do readings or promotional appearances in these exurban environments because 'civic life as yet is so spare.' In the next graf, he goes to talk about a reading in Berkeley (probably at Cody's), and how surprised he is to hear that the employees at the store are unfamiliar with Rick Warren's popular "Purpose-Driven Life," which is all about how Jesus has a plan for us and is apparently a hit in the exurbs, in the big-box stores.

Isn't there something ironic about this? Brooks, complaining that at stores he could do readings that none of the folks he was writing about were there? Maybe he should do an all WalMart tour next time. It doesn't take Karl Rove to figure that one out, right? In Berkeley, people who aren't like the people Brooks is writing about want to listen to him speak. Out in the exurbs, they are more interested in reading about how Jesus has a big plan for them. How can Brooks miss this?

I haven't read any of Brooks's books, but I think he's dancing around the point when he says that the exurbs/suburbs have 'spare' or spartan culture. My parents live in the suburbs down on the peninsula near SF and 'spartan' is the biggest euphemism for the culture down there. 'Bland to nonexistent' would be a better word, and their suburb has been there for 30 years. It's a mass of pavement and minimalls, where you absolutely have to drive nearly everywhere, and it sucks.

(Aside: 'exurb' is such a great word. Does it mean 'extended suburb,' or does it mean 'ex-urban residents'?)

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Take a Ride to Exurbia: "I couldn't figure out how to tell the people in exurbia that I had written a book about them. Here I was writing about places like Loudoun County, Va., and Polk County, Fla., but my book tour took me to places like downtown Philadelphia, downtown Seattle and the Upper West Side. The places I was writing about are so new, and civic life is as yet so spare, there are few lecture series or big libraries to host author talks. The normal publishing infrastructure is missing."

2004-11-04T13:39:00.000-08:00

Fundy-Mental

Friedman says it better than I could.

The New York Times > Opinion > Friedman: Two Nations Under God:

"My problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad. I respect that moral energy, but wish that Democrats could find a way to tap it for different ends.

'The Democrats have ceded to Republicans a monopoly on the moral and spiritual sources of American politics,' noted the Harvard University political theorist Michael J. Sandel. 'They will not recover as a party until they again have candidates who can speak to those moral and spiritual yearnings - but turn them to progressive purposes in domestic policy and foreign affairs.'"

2004-11-04T13:20:00.000-08:00

3% Ain't a Mandate

But don't bother trying to tell Bush that. In the last four years he's governed as if he had a mandate, pushing hard-right causes through into reality and making few compromises. Clearly taking his 3% popular vote win as a "mandate," he's running on to other items he couldn't have achieved when fearing re-election. It's gonna be a pretty rough four years for Dems and progressives.

As mydd.com notes,
This is the largest number of people who have ever voted AGAINST a president

At 80% approval after 9-11 and guaranteed a landslide election by prognosticators 2 years ago, only half the country supports him

via SFGate: Bush Sketches 2nd Term Agenda

Bush fielded questions after securing re-election in a campaign framed by the war in Iraq and economic issues at home. Nearly complete returns gave him 51 percent of the popular vote -- a contrast to 2000, when he lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.
...
"I earned capital in the campaign and now I intend to spend it," Bush said. "And I'm going to spend it for what I told the people I would spend it on."
...
"I will reach out to every one who shares our goals."
...
"In a victory speech late Wednesday, Bush said reaching his goals 'will require the broad support of Americans.' He asked Kerry's disappointed supporters to back him -- even though many of his proposals are anathema to those who opposed his re-election. "

2004-11-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

Exactly

Wonkette: "Wonkette Answers: Where and How To Drink #
6:05 p.m.
"This is my first election in Washington. What to do? I went to Local 16 last weekend, and when I realized you weren't there, it was super-lame! Should I go to ESPNZone to ride out the night, or maybe hit the Pharmacy Bar to avoid it?'

Local 16 is a fine institution and I will not have you slander it. Except when it's taken over by the Princeton Young Alumni Association, in which case, don't just slander it, but go throw lukewarm Jell-o on the patrons. It would be a bad place to hit tonight, as there are no TVs. We say go for broke or don't go at all: Either crash the DNC party at the Capitol Hilton (go with a large enough entourage and people will just assume you're Terry McAuliffe). Or don't go at all. We, in fact, prefer the DIY approach: Getting blitzed on bourbon while watching Chris Matthews try to hold it together."

2004-11-01T17:23:00.000-08:00

What Part of "Yes" Do You Not Understand??

I'm not saying Greenhouse isn't wrong here or that it's not possible that Halliburton wasn't absolutely the best corp to do the job. But doesn't something seem really fishy here? Read the whole article.

Yahoo! News - Halliburton Contracts Bypassed Objections:

"In fall 2002, a group of top Pentagon (news - web sites) civilian officials began meeting to plan how best to prevent the destruction of oil wells and infrastructure in the days after an invasion.

They decided to give Halliburton a job worth $1.9 million as part of an existing contract to draw up a plan to protect the oil infrastructure. An Army lawyer at the time objected to the decision, saying it was outside the scope of the contract.

The lawyer was overruled by a higher-up in the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel. But the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, later determined the lawyer was correct, according to testimony given before Congress.
Once Halliburton had drawn up the plan, the Army Corps decided in March 2003 to award Halliburton the contract to carry it out. Greenhouse objected, saying it was against usual contracting procedures to award a job to the company that had drawn up plans for it, Kohn said.

Greenhouse also objected to the presence of KBR officials at meetings where Army Corps officials were discussing the award of the contract, according to the documents. Later, she objected when the government proposed making the 'sole-source' contract awarded without bidding for five years instead of a more limited period. "

2004-11-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

Perish the Thought

LA Times: After 4 Years, Bush Is No Closer to Building a GOP Majority

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a leading conservative political action committee, said that "if Bush wins, I actually think he'll be more conservative than he was in his first term, because he doesn't have to face the voters again."

If true...it's sort of ludicrous to contemplate what this could entail. I mean sure, martial law, yeah, but...

2004-10-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

From http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/30/binladen.tape/index.html

An ironic attempt at censorship from the government, who would rather we believed what they tell us about Al Qaeda than what Al Qaeda is saying themselves:

The length of the tape received by the U.S. government is 18 minutes. Bin Laden spoke for 14 minutes and 39 seconds. U.S. officials would not comment on what else is on the tape.

The official said that once the embassy received the video, the U.S. ambassador to Qatar asked the government to use its influence with the management of Al-Jazeera to convince the network not to broadcast the tape.

"We are disappointed that the tape was aired," the official said.

...

The United States regularly complains to the Qatari government about Al-Jazeera's coverage and has often asked the government to use its influence to rein in the network.

Oh, sainted irony; now that we have 'liberated' Iraq... Need I say more? Okay I will. Can you imagine the outrage if Qatar came to us requesting that CNN not air certain types of content?

FREEDOM, BITCHES! TASTE THE FREEDOM!

2004-10-29T15:26:00.000-07:00

Bin Laden Taking Cues From David Cross?

This videotape sounds utterly ludicrous. But what else could we expect from a nutcase like OBL?
CNN.com - Bin Laden: U.S. security depends on policy - Oct 29, 2004

He underscored it was U.S. foreign policy that led to the attacks, saying, "Bush has told you that we do not like freedom. Then, why didn't we hit Sweden?"

Cross, from his album It's Not Funny.

"If the terrorists hated freedom, then the Netherlands would be fucking dust, ya' know? As would Denmark, and Sweden, and Switzerland, and New Zealand, and Canada, and every other country that's truly freer than we are. I don't think Osama Bin Laden sent those planes in to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel and our ties with the Saudi family and all our military bases on the holy land in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT HE FUCKING SAID."

2004-10-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

Who's Jawbonin' Who?

from CBS:
Mr. Bush was critical of Al Gore in the 2000 campaign for being part of “the administration that's been in charge” while the “price of gasoline has gone steadily upward.” In December 1999, in the first Republican primary debate, Mr. Bush said President Clinton “must jawbone OPEC members to lower prices.”

As gas topped a record level of $50 a barrel this week, Mr. Bush has shown no propensity to personally pressure, or “jawbone,” Mideast oil producers to increase output.

A spokesman for the president reportedly said in March that Mr. Bush will not personally lobby oil cartel leaders to change their minds.

(Reuters)OPEC to U.S. - Use Emergency Oil Reserves

Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the president of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, said on Wednesday he had approached Washington to suggest the move to force prices down from $55 a barrel.

"We had communication with them. I asked them to use their reserves," Purnomo, Indonesia's oil minister, told reporters in Jakarta. He did not say what Washington's response was.

In Washington, a White House spokesman said the Bush administration would not use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to influence market prices.

Still no word on whether they'll continue to use it as a lever to promote drilling in the ANWR, as President Bush did in one of the three debates.

2004-10-26T16:38:00.000-07:00

Desperation Made A Fool Out Of Me

Egads. So "activists judges" and legislatures should go ahead with civil unions, but should leave marriage alone? Bush himself wouldn't have supported civil unions during his gubernatorial term, and has barely said anything publicly affirming civil unions til a week before the 2004 election? Pitiful. It's not like the righty base won't vote for him because of this (even if they believe he believes it), but this is a good example of Bush trying to have two (nearly opposite) sides of an issue.
Compassionate conservatism, huh? Let's see if he puts his money where his mouth is a la his support of the FMA.

Bush Says His Party Is Wrong to Oppose Gay Civil Unions

President Bush said in an interview this past weekend that he disagreed with the Republican Party platform opposing civil unions of same-sex couples and that the matter should be left up to the states.

Mr. Bush has previously said that states should be permitted to allow same-sex unions, even though White House officials have said he would not have endorsed such unions as governor of Texas. But Mr. Bush has never before made a point of so publicly disagreeing with his party's official position on the issue.

In an interview on Sunday with Charles Gibson, an anchor of "Good Morning America" on ABC, Mr. Bush said, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so."

2004-10-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

Recount Redux

A snipped of the New Yorker's endorsement of Kerry set me a-wonderin', what with the election looking pretty close so far: what if there's a Florida-2000 situation with recounts during this election? I know it's statistically really unlikely, but...what would happen if the 2004 vote were again decided by the Supreme Court in Bush's favor?

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town: "Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v. Gore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and state law and in the Constitution itself. By ignoring them - by cutting off the process and installing Bush by fiat - the Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism."

Update: A really interesting WaPo article on why the SC needn't have been involved in decided in the 2000 election at all.

Bush v. Gore was a mistake -- one the people will over time forgive. If the court should make the same mistake again, forgiveness may be more elusive. It would be disastrous for our system if recourse to the Supreme Court became a feature of every presidential race; the already-politicized confirmation process for nominees to the court would become a guaranteed blood bath every time.
...
On Dec. 9, 2000, the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount. In his opinion that day, Justice Antonin Scalia explained that allowing the recount to proceed would harm Bush "by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." Political legitimacy, however, is not a gift the court can bestow. At stake this year is the court's own legitimacy; a wrong decision may tumble it from its high seat, into a place where it will be regarded as neither infallible nor final.

2004-10-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

I Don't Really Think About Him Much....Until Right Before the Election

washingtonpost.com: Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide:

"Two months ago, a team of soldiers from a highly classified special operations squadron arrived in the southeastern mountains of Afghanistan, along the Pakistani border. They were back to hunt bin Laden, many of them after a two-year gap.
'We finally settled in at our 'permanent' location 8 days ago after moving twice in three weeks,' one team member wrote to a friend. 'New territory, right at the border, up in the mountains. Interesting place. We need to start from scratch, nothing operational in place. Guess we'll spend our whole time developing a basic structure for our ops.'
At the peak of the hunt for bin Laden and his lieutenants, in early 2002, about 150 commandos operated along Afghanistan's borders with Pakistan and Iran in a top-secret team known as Task Force 5. The task force included a few CIA paramilitaries, but most of its personnel came from military 'special mission units,' or SMUs, whose existence is not officially acknowledged. One is the Army squadron once known as Delta Force. The other -- specializing in human and technical intelligence operations -- has not been described before in public. Its capabilities include close-in electronic surveillance and, uniquely in the U.S. military, the conduct of 'low-level source operations' -- recruiting and managing spies.
These elite forces, along with the battlefield intelligence technology of Predator and Global Hawk drone aircraft, were the scarcest tools of the hunt for jihadists along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. With Bush's shift of focus to Iraq, the special mission units called most of their troops home to prepare for a new set of high-value targets in Baghdad."

2004-10-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

Tortured Logic

on CNN.
Putin's logic is more than a little weird here. War on Iraq was a bad idea, but we can't let terrorist attacks there (terrorists, it should be noted, who were *created by said war!*) keep us from re-electing Bush. Oh, and instead of the war in Iraq inspiring more terrorists, it's actually not re-electing Bush that would create more terrorists? I don't get it. Maybe I should look into his soul?

Russian President Vladimir Putin says terrorist attacks in Iraq are aimed at preventing the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush and that a Bush defeat "could lead to the spread of terrorism to other parts of the world."

And yet:

President Putin made it clear Russia remained opposed to the war in Iraq.
"Today, our views on that differ from the views of President Bush," he said.

2004-10-18T13:48:00.000-07:00

Up is Down, Redux

Quick, what's the opposite of 'reality'? Hint: it's not 'faith'

Clip from Ron Suskind's excellent NYT piece on Bush's faith-based presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

2004-10-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

Swiss Meatballs and the Swedish Army Knife

(Al Gore-like) sigh. Suskind on Bush's faith in the NYT.

One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''

2004-10-14T13:22:00.000-07:00

Arm in the Cookie Jar

WaPo story on the Kuwait/Carlyle/Baker/Albright 'debt relief' proposal.

If Carlyle had been hired by the consortium to manage Kuwaiti reparations funds, the firm would have made sure Baker would not have benefited from the business, (Carlyle spokesman Craig) Ullman said. "If it had happened -- and I say if, because it never did happen -- we have the controls required to make sure Baker was in total compliance with his agreement" with the U.S. government in his role as Bush's Iraqi debt envoy, he said.
...
Jamie Smith, spokeswoman for the Albright Group LLC, said the consortium has, as of yesterday, stopped pursuing business with Kuwait. "The proposal is clearly dead," she said.

Good stuff in the Klein piece about how Carlyle wasn't agitating for this plan (confirmed by the WaPo piece), but they sure wouldn't have minded if the plan had been adopted. And, y'know, no impropriety. But now the potential deal's dead because Naomi Klein wrote about it - even though no one did anything untoward or illegal, of course. Sort of seems to me like the carrot (this plan) and the stick (campaigning for debt forgiveness) are pretty obvious, here. But this is the New America, where no one should be shocked by something as blatant as this. After all, these important folks were just trying to help those poor, rich Kuwaitis.

Klein's piece in the Nation is here.

2004-10-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

Who's The Not-So Nimble One?

David Frum on the third debate:
One thing I’ve learned from these debates: John Kerry is poised and well-spoken – but he’s not very mentally nimble. Over three debates, the president made a number of mistakes, some of them potentially very damaging. Yet Kerry almost never pounced on them, and when he did do so, his remarks were very obviously prefabricated.

This is a curious thing to say. If anything, Bush's less-than-stellar performance in each of the three debates (though he was much better in the 2nd and 3rd) showcased his lack of mental nimbleness. Yes, both candidates often gave 'prefabricated' answers to expected questions. And both candidates sometimes failed to swing for the fences when their opponent offered up an easy pitch.

Speaking of the easy pitch, here's Frum's assessment of Bush's performance.

The president was...OK. He knew his numbers, and made his points vigorously, often eloquently. He hit especially effectively on questions about affirmative action, taxes, and religion. But the president’s gorge continues to rise whenever Sen. Kerry spoke. For fear of scowling, he would pull his head back and freeze his face in a state of suspended animation, blinking rapidly. When he spoke, he over-relaxed and he often smiled at awkward and unexpected moments.

2004-10-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

DPT

I'll wait a bit longer before posting my essay about why the SF DPT is so blatantly ridiculous. Consider yourself lucky. But this is a good summation of my feelings.

"Most big cities use parking tickets as a method of generating revenue, not for creating an environment of safety for drivers and pedestrians, the reason why parking tickets were invented," Bolofsky said.

SF Chron: Internet company contests parking tickets for individuals, corporations.

2004-10-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

Debate Exposes Doubt. Or Not.

It's strange that Bush can't even think of any mistakes he's made. I mean sure, he's alluding to Clarke, O'Neill, & Shinseki when talking about appointing people as a mistake - because later they didn't agree with him on the budget, terror intel, or the war in Iraq. (Let's leave Bremer aside for the moment, though his editorial in the NYT today was a push for Bush.) And then there's the malapropism: "I did the right decision." Okay, leave it aside.

Bush is smart to tie Iraq and Afghanistan together, but he's wrong to do so. Can't say that's a mistake. It's a faith-based initiative. But would Bush ever admit any mistake, ever? About his failed businesses? About burned BBQ? I think not. He woke up on third base and though he hit a triple. And he's stuck with that ever since.

Was Kerry awkward in places? Yes. He did a terrible job of explaining Bush's $84 timber tax claim, and that's not the only example.

Debate Transcript via MSNBC.

RABEL: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.

BUSH: I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you never heard of, and some of them big.

And in a war, there's a lot of -- there's a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have made that decision. And I'll take responsibility for them. I'm human.

But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I'll stand by those decisions, because I think they're right.

That's really what you're -- when they ask about the mistakes, that's what they're talking about. They're trying to say, Did you make a mistake going into Iraq? And the answer is, Absolutely not. It was the right decision.

The Duelfer report confirmed that decision today, because what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so he could reconstitute a weapons program. And the biggest threat facing America is terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

We knew he hated us. We knew he'd been -- invaded other countries. We knew he tortured his own people.

On the tax cut, it's a big decision. I did the right decision. Our recession was one of the shallowest in modern history.

Now, you asked what mistakes. I made some mistakes in appointing people, but I'm not going to name them. I don't want to hurt their feelings on national TV.