King Canute, George W. Bush and the oil crisis

Over at the Oil Drum there is a great piece on the lack of leadership when it comes to energy, Leadership can help.

On Thursday night the President began his press conference by talking about an immediate concern of the American people, the steady increase in the price of gas. He confessed to being able to do almost nothing about it, and, most of his questions, and the resulting comments in Friday’s press, dealt with the other major issue, Social Security.

There is an interesting juxtaposition between what he said, Friday, about Social Security,"it is a President's job to address the problem" and what he said about energy "there is nothing I can do." If one goes back to President Carter, one finds clear evidence against the latter position. By a variety of means, albeit only some of which he should be given credit for, oil consumption decreased by almost 13% between 1973 and 1983.

Carter took a leadership position and people conserved. There was not a single mention of conservation in Bush's "press conference". That's a lack of leadership. As the crisis approached the administration has resisted all attempts to improve the gas mileage in automobiles. The current crisis may mark the end of General Motors and Ford who have been on the front line to battle increased mileage standards.

George W. Bush as King Canute

The energy problems of this country are not for our children to be worried about, they are here today and will not get better. Along that line I am re-reading the SAIC report on Peak Oil from which most of these numbers are taken. (And SAIC is not your typical “liberal think tank”). Much has been made of the analogy of the coming energy crisis to that of an approaching tsunami. I am not yet convinced that it is going to be that bad, at least in the short term. What I am more reminded of is the story of King Canute.

Who, you ask? Well historical memory is the curse of an English heritage. King Canute was an English King, who wanted to prove the limits of regal power. And thus he had his throne carried down to the shore, and set down at low tide. As the tide came in, he imperiously ordered it to retreat. Of course it did not, and a hasty court retreat was required. It is a lesson our present day rulers need to remember. You cannot legislate natural realities. If we are running out of oil, pretending it does not exist, or that foreign suppliers can magically create an infinite resource, is going against a natural reality that will not respond to political importuning. Further, pretending that the issue will disappear in a couple of years, as currently projected projects release additional oil, is a selective reading of the facts that will have disastrous consequences.

There is a great quote in the comments section of the above post.

"Reality is that which, when you refuse to believe in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K Dick

But I forgot, this is an administration that refuses to believe in reality.

The filibuster....Good for Iraq but bad for the US?

Apparently Sen. Isakson (R-GA) thinks so.

Senator Isakson on the floor of the United States Senate extolling the virtues of the filibuster to protect the rights of the minority from being overrun by the majority.

"Don't you fear that the Shi'ites inevitably being in the majority, that you will be overrun? And he says, 'oh no, we have a secret weapon.' Mr. President, this is a Kurdish leader, in the middle of Iraq in the 21st century who said he had a secret weapon. And when asked what it was, he said one word, 'filibuster'" [...]

"It is one of their minority leaders, proudly stating one of the pillars and principles of our government, as the way they would ensure that the majority never overran the minority."

The hypocritical Republican bastards.

Search Engine Hits of the week

Some of the best for the week.

• Google: "justice kennedy" flipper


• Google: Bolton UN Shaw


• Yahoo: RATZINGER as a nazi pictures


• Yahoo: stupid vespa


• Google: ron beasley army quartermaster retired


• Google: what time did middle earth take place

Now here is someone who knew what they wanted:

• Google: Essay format (multiple paragraphs, introduction body conclusion, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson and which of these presidents was most influential.


• Yahoo: joseph ratzinger nazi


• AskJeeves: A picture of an Earth Journal


• Google: vespa journal


• Yahoo: Tom Delay bus democrats


• Google: middle earth spirituality


• Google: what are we fighting for AND country joe


• Yahoo: why are Kurds being abused?


• Google: In the epic of Antar what qualifies Antar as an epic hero


• Google: Cheney "spreading democracy"


• Google: Earth Plane Analogy Dismantle


• Google: battle for middle earth exception violation

I wonder if this was a typo.

• AskJeeves: witches in the media 2005


• Google: crusade propaganda pictures


• Google: "loyal minority"chinese america world war II propaganda

Vietnam re-hash

Dean Esmay has a post over on Dean's World re-hashing the Vietnam war. That's good. When discussing the Vietnam war we see the same lame reasoning, ignorance and name calling we saw during Vietnam that we are seeing now when the Iraq debacle is discussed. The names are different, communist VS al Queda supporter but the argument is the same.
The Vietnamese started the Vietnam war, not because they wanted to be communists but because they wanted to rid themselves of western (French) imperialistic rule. They hated the west and really didn't differentiate between the French or Americans. The communist Chinese and Russians came to their aide and that's when it became a battle of political philosophies. To the west it was never a war about freedom for the Vietnamese but a war to protect the economic interests of the west. That probably included the vast economic interests of the Roman Catholic Church in South East Asia. Outside of the major cities in the south the vast majority of the population supported the insurgency. If you were an American Soldier the kid you befriended during the day would shoot you in the back at night. The only way we could have "won" the war in Vietnam was to defoliate the entire country and kill nearly everyone. One has to wonder if that's what people like Dean, who criticize the politicians for holding back the military, advocate. There are those who think that the United States has God given imperialistic rights to dominate the world and it's resources. Like imperialistic communism was an evil religion to the Soviet Union imperialistic capitalism is a religion to the west. Any who oppose this religion of capitalism are branded communist and un American.

We see the same pattern in Iraq and the middle east. In the 1920's Europe and the United States recognized the importance of middle east oil. All foreign policy in the region since then has centered around imperialistic control of that resource. Un-natural national boundaries have been established and despots have been supported to insure that the oil will flow from there to here. We are once again bogged down in a war where the majority of the population hate us. Polls in Iraq indicated that many, if not a majority, risked going to the voting both because it was seen as a way to get the Americans out. If a majority of the Iraqis don't support the insurgents they do support their stated goal, to drive the Americans out. Once again we are involved in a conflict we can't win and those who oppose it are being labeled "Un-American". Deja Vu all over again. The supporters of the Vietnam war were dead wrong and the supporters of the quagmire in the desert are just as wrong.

Update
Dean Esmay has responded to the above:

Most of what you said about why we went to Vietnam is nonsense but, more importantly, what you said about my position has nothing to do with what my actual position is. Just to be clear.

I find this to be fairly typical for the folks who bash America and constantly accuse us of doing things for selfish, evil, imperialist reasons though: they constantly distort the position of those who disagree with them, creating straw men like that.

It's too bad people do that, but what can you do? Closed-minded reactionaries are to be found in all parts of the political world I guess.

You decide.

Dead or alive

This is not yet confirmed in any substantial way, but... an Al Queda web site is claiming that Osama bin Forgotten is dead.

A Web site claiming close ties to Al-Qaida has announced that the leader of the international terror network, Osama bin Laden, is dead, the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al Awsat reported Friday.

The claim has not been confirmed.

"We have now found out this urgent news item, whereby the Al-Qaida organization has announced the death of bin Laden," read Thursday's message on the Web site, Manbar Ahal A-Suna V'al Jama'a.

Also uncofirmed are rumors that he died of boredom while waiting for Bush to finally find him.

So, if bin Laden dies of old age / natural causes, after a career of blowing up Americans and thumbing his nose at Bush's non-efforts to track him down... did he win?

He's got to be kidding!!!!!

Bill in DC sends us this gem.
Believe It Or Not:

DISGRACED former White House reporter/male escort Jeff Gannon can't believe no one has invited him to tomorrow's White House Correspondents Dinner. "It seems to me to be odd to exclude the one person who has brought more attention to the White House press corps than anyone else in years," Gannon tells PAGE SIX's Jared Paul Stern. "Probably many who would want to extend such an invitation already assume I will be in attendance." Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, quit his job with the conservative Talon News earlier this year after his fake name, lack of journalistic qualifications and male escort connections came to light. The dinner usually features several stars and sensational guests such as Paula Jones to liven things up. The sub-par star lineup this year includes Robert Duvall, Burt Reynolds, Randy Quaid, Ron Silver, Patricia Heaton and Anne Hathaway.

I'll have to read the Post gossip column more often.

Mommy the Kool-Aide tastes funny

In an attempt to breath some life into his moribund presidency George W. Bush took a gamble on Thursday. Michael Tackett of the Chicago Tribune said it best.

President Bush on Thursday used a format he does not like to discuss issues he cannot resolve in hopes that he can sell the American people on policies most say they don't want.

Most seem to think he failed. It appears that more and more people are giving up Karl Rove's brand of Kool-Aide.

There have been events throughout history that changed the course of history even though many of them at the time seemed insignificant. I suggested a few weeks ago that the death of Terri Schiavo's earthly shell may have been one of those events. It was a wake up call to the American people. It was an event that demonstrated what they had actually voted for. It was a time they stopped drinking the Kool-Aide.

Calculator Free Zone....Or????

Brad DeLong on the Bush Social Security Plan: Did nobody inside the White House bother to run the numbers?

If you are 45 and if Bush's plan were available today...

Follow George W. Bush's advice, divert $1,000 into your private account, invest it in TIPS, and at the 1.85% per year interest rate you will indeed by able to collect an extra amount worth $10.11 a month in today's dollars when you retire at 65...

But the clawback would reduce your normal Social Security benefit by $14.16 a month. You're $4.05 a month behind.

They probably did but think your just too dumb to notice.

Iraq...Still a ticking bomb

The violence and anarchy continue in Iraq and so does the religious and ethnic hate and distrust. The elections have done nothing to improve the situation. The new, and incomplete, Iraqi cabinet is hostage to post invasion conditions and as a result unlikely to be a stabilizing force.

After fasting - or watching non-stop squabbling - for almost three months since the January 30 elections, Iraqis finally got their onion: a new cabinet no one likes (except the Kurds). Shi'ite Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari didn't get what he wanted. No wonder: the Washington/Green Zone is wary of him. The Sunnis are threatening to walk out of the government altogether. Approved by 180 parliamentarians against five, with a significant 90 absences, this is not even a full cabinet: Jaafari was unable t o appoint permanent ministers to the Oil, Defense, Electricity, Industry and Human Rights ministries. All posts are meant to be filled by May 7.

The slime floats to the top

But for the moment, even more alarmingly, the acting minister is none other than the unsinkable convicted fraudster, former Pentagon darling and purported Iranian agent Ahmad Chalabi. "For the moment" could last a lifetime: Chalabi - who has been oiling his connections with leading Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for a long time - will undoubtedly waste no time filling the Oil Ministry with his Iraqi National Congress cronies. Not a few in Baghdad firmly believe that the Green Zone may have had a perverse hand on his appointment.

Planting the seeds of civil war

To say that Sunnis are angry would be an understatement. Powerful Sunni tribal Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer, one of the vice presidents, is threatening that all Sunnis may withdraw from the government - because this cabinet lineup is not what they had agreed to with Jaafari. No wonder: Sunnis wanted to finish off once and for all with de-Ba'athification, and insisted on a very firm Arab nationalist government.

Shi'ites from religious parties would never agree to these demands. Some Sunnis have already pulled out, such as the Front of Sunni Arab Blocs, which includes the Front of National Blocs and the National Dialogue Council. The Sunnis wanted seven ministries, especially Defense (they will probably get it; Jaafari is the acting minister). An alert Sistani was wise enough to have pressed for 10 ministries for the Sunnis.

The political situation in Iraq is not unlike the power struggle in the Republican party; an attempt to please both the theocrats and the secular feudalists. The wild card in Iraq has always been the Kurds.

One fears for Jaafari: he still has an uphill negotiation battle ahead. Some powerful Sunni tribal sheikhs and religious leaders have been fiercely denouncing "an occupation of Kurds and Shi'ites". Only a month ago, Sheikh Abu D'ham was saying that "the Kurds are asking for Kirkuk. Later on they will start asking for Baghdad. It was Saddam Hussein who gave the Kurds too much, more than they deserved."

Kurds may have received too much once again. They keep Hoshyar Zebari as foreign minister, an affable, American-approved Iraqi face to the world, and they have important positions in ministries such as as Planning and Development Cooperation (Barham Salih), Communications (Jwan Maasoum, a woman), Labor and Social Affairs (Idris Hadi) and Water Resources (Abdul Latif Rashi). Shi'ites predictably got several important ministries: Interior (Baqir Jabbur), Finance (Ali Allawi), Agriculture (Ali al-Bahadli), Justice (Abdul Hussein Shandal) and Transport (Salam al-Malik). A welcome development is that the Science and Technology Ministry is attributed to Bassima Boutros, a Christian woman.

Civil war is inevitable

It is not difficult to believe that Sunni Arab public opinion has not by any measure started to believe in the political process. It's true that many powerful Sunni Arabs, at least for the moment, are making a distinction between terror and resistance. But the moment the majority of Sunni Arab public opinion equates illegal occupation to the Shi'ites, Kurds and the political process, civil war is inevitable. There's nothing this hostage cabinet can do about it. We're not there yet, but it's getting closer by the minute.

What's that ticking sound I hear in Iraq?

In love with costly conquest

I scanned the virtual newspapers this morning and found a lot of hot air about Bush's gamble to save his agenda; most thought he probably lost. Nothing worthy of filling virtual white space here at Middle Earth Journal. I did find this piece in the LA Times by Robert Scheer comparing the American Empire of George W. Bush to the Roman Empire, Fiddling While Crucial Programs Starve, that was worth a second look. He takes a look at the casualties of the Iraq war here in the United States.

The Promise

Of course, back in 2003, conquering Iraq looked like a great package deal, what with all that oil — second only to Saudi Arabia — and the manufactured photo ops of cheering Iraqis. So what if those pesky weapons of mass destruction weren't really there? So what if no solid links to Al Qaeda are ever found? This was a win-win, as the corporate guys like to say: Not only would we be able to conduct this operation for next to nothing, we would be welcomed with flowers.

The Reality

With approval of the latest spending bill, taxpayers will have been forced to cough up more than $300 billion for the war to date — above and beyond the annual $400-billion Pentagon budget — and tens of billions for a bungled reconstruction. Even if the United States can lower its troop commitment to 40,000 troops in Iraq by 2010, as some Pentagon strategists optimistically anticipate, the war could still end up costing U.S. taxpayers up to $646 billion by 2015, according to Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. If insurgency, corruption and incompetence continue to plague the U.S. occupation as they have steadily for the last two years, however, the number could surge to a trillion dollars or more.

The Impact

The emergency funding that the Senate passed 99 to 0 last week gives the military roughly $80 billion and pays for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan only through September. That is twice what President Bush insists he needs to cut from the federal support for Medicaid over the next decade.

Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its Medicaid program entirely within the next three years because of a lack of funds. As the Los Angeles Times reported, that will save the state $5 billion, but at the cost of ending healthcare for the more than 1 million Missourians enrolled in the program. That sum is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for reconstruction efforts in Iraq, without much to show for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality of life.

Bush's war is not only a war on the most vulnerable in Iraq but a war on the most vulnerable here at home as well.

When in Rome

Welcome to late-era Rome, where mindless militaristic expansion is considered patriotic and where demagogues who recklessly waste taxes and young lives in empire-building are deemed valorous. Wolfowitz, for example, has been rewarded for his ignorance and arrogance with the top job at the World Bank.

It is not too late, however, for us to wake up and recall that, in the end, once militarism trumped republicanism, the glory that was Rome proved to be a hollow boast.

I think we can see what the "legacy" of George W. Bush will be; think Nero.

Amphibian Week

It's not a good week to be a toad in Germany or a frog in South America. However, things are looking up. The frog caper was solved by the police, and now the exploding toad mystery in Germany seems to be explained as well. The problem?

Blame the crows.

Toads have been exploding by the hundred in Germany because they are being attacked by crows, a veterinary surgeon revealed. A veterinary surgeon, Frank Mutschmann, who has examined the remains of the toads, said they had been pierced with a single peck by crows trying to eat their livers. This in turn caused the toads to explode.

"The toads swell up as a form of self-defence. But when their livers are taken away and their stomachs are punctured, their blood vessels explode, their lungs collapse and the other organs come out," Mutschmann said.

"Crows are intelligent animals. They learn very quickly how to eat the toads' livers," he said, adding that between three and five crows could kill around 100 toads.

So many toads have died in a lake in the Altona district of Hamburg that it has been dubbed "the pond of death."

I had been expecting some form of human pollution, chemicals, or possibly even a fungus or other parasite imported from far away. I definitely didn't see the crow angle coming. I realize they are smart birds, but if these toads and crows have been living in the same area for thousands or millions of years, the crows only just now figured this out? Doesn't that strike you as odd?

(The preceding post was, I admit, entirely non-political in nature. This is mostly because last night's presidential press conference has burned me out on politics for a little while.)

Press Conference

Yes I watched it!!!!I was surprised, the questions were not bad. The real surprise I think was David Gregory from FOX news who forced Bush to distance himself from the "Justice Sunday" wingnuts and by association Mullah Frist. No surprises in the answers. As usual, You can put the monkey in a suit but he's still a monkey.

Nothing accomplished, nothing news worthy, didn't change any minds.

The Politics of the approaching energy crisis

In keeping with today's downbeat assessment of things I direct you over to The Oil Drum for a look at the Coming Politics of Peak Oil.

Because, in a petroleum-starved depression-laden economy, people will look to government for assistance, and be willing to give up freedoms and rights for security and food. The poor and even middle class of our country will not have the wherewithal to care about giving up liberties and rights as much as they will be worrying about jobs, food, and energy.

That means people will be willing to tolerate larger government, more redistribution of income, and concomitantly higher taxes. But to what end?

One of the things that most concerns me when I think this through is a drastic change to democracy as we know it.

That's right, liberties and rights will seem less important when you don't have a job and you are hungry. Think about that in relation to what we have already seen the last few years. We have a cabal in power who's only concern is more power. They have already used the 911 inspired fear to consolidate that power and they will soon have another tool at their disposal.

Time Line

A brief timeline of the end of freedom and democracy in the United States.

• 1982:Moon establishes Washington Times


• 1985:General Electric Buys RCA (NBC)


• 1995:Westinghouse Buys CBS


• 1996:Walt Disney Corporation buys Capital Cities/ABC


• 1996:Time Warner buys Turner Broadcasting (CNN)


• 1996:Ruppert Murdoch starts the Fox News Channel


• 2000:CBS(Westinghouse) purchased by Viacom

Can they do that?

Josh Marshall tells us that The Senate Majority Leader, Mullah Frist, with 51 votes can do about anything he wants.

The simple fact is that there is no outside authority that does or can pass judgment on how 51 senators choose to interpret the rules or how Dick Cheney chooses to interpret the constitution. So, I stick to my assertion that so long as they are not bound by a good faith interpretation of the rules or the constitution, 51 senators and/or a vice president of their own party, pretty much can do anything they want. When you push past the soft tissue of law, almost anything becomes possible.

After a brief attack of optimism I find myself returning to the ranks of those who think Democracy may be finished for good in this United States; or at least for a long while. The christo-fascists will get their judges and that will be the end of that. I hope all you morons that voted for Bush and the Republicans in November like the theocracy you put in place.

Made for television

The serial liar in chief is holding a prime time "press conference" tonight. Will any real journalists show up? Not likely. Just another scripted event I would guess.

The Economy

How is the economy doing? Who's benefiting form the "Boom". The Reuters Business Headlines tell the story this morning.

• Economy Grows at Softest Pace in 2 years
  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy grew at its softest pace in two years during the first quarter this year, slowing to a 3.1 percent annual rate of expansion as consumers and businesses curbed spending in the face of rising prices, the Commerce Department said on Thursday


• US Jobless Claims Rise to 320,000
  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The ranks of Americans queuing up to claim jobless benefits for the first time grew by 21,000 last week as expected, government data showed on Thursday, while continued claims declined to the lowest level in four years.


• Exxon Mobile Profit Soars
  NEW YORK (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE:XOM - news), the world's largest public oil company, on Thursday said quarterly profit jumped 44 percent on rising oil prices, but the results fell short of Wall Street expectations.

Overheard

And then I was sad.

I ran into a pair of men having coffee near my office today and overheard the tail end of a conversation which just started my day off badly. Out of context, this was the portion I caught.

First man: "I was kind of joking, but I said, so you're saving yourself for marriage I take it?"
Second man: "Yeah? What'd she say to that?"
First man: "Just being a smartass, I guess, she says, unless they changed the law and nobody told me, they still don't let lesbians get married in New York. So I told her they sure do let lesbians get married. And she says, no, that's still being fought in the courts. So I tell her, no, lesbians can get married right now. You just need to straighten up from all this nonsense and marry a man like you're supposed to. How long do you think your mother is going to wait to have grandchildren?"

From the follow on comments, I found out that this guy was talking about a conversation with his daughter. I don't know the family, but from his age (about the same as mine) the daughter is almost undoubtedly an adult. And this guy grew up in the sixties and seventies! The summer of love and all that.

I live in a supposedly reliably blue state. These people work with me in the same industry. They are allegedly educated men with advanced degrees working in the IT industry. This isn't just happening in the deep South at evangelical bible thumper meetings.

They're everywhere.

Bolton and Hubris

Elisabeth Bumiller has an..., well, an Elisabeth Bumiller piece on the Bolton fight in the New York Times. Now there is no reason to think that she is not just writing what the Bush administration wants her to but it's worth a read anyway.

The White House is intensifying its campaign to rescue the nomination of John R. Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, administration officials said on Tuesday, as Republicans close to the West Wing acknowledged that a rejection of Mr. Bolton would be politically damaging for President Bush.

The White House continues to defend him.........................

But Republicans close to the administration also said that a powerful motive for the White House was simply showing strength and an unwillingness to back down, particularly after Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state who often warred with the hawks, expressed private doubts to Republican senators last week about Mr. Bolton.

"It would mean that Colin Powell had influence to block someone," said a Republican close to the White House. "It's a troubling sign if the president can't get him confirmed."

The Bolton nomination and fight is as like the battle over judiciary nominations. "We will get our way because we have the power"! aka hubris. A defeat on Bolton would indicate that the administration is not "all powerful" and would have an affect on everything the administration wants to do in the second term.

The next few weeks will determine who's in charge, Bush and Cheney or the Republicans who are thinking about what's best for the party. I suspect that the idea of a neutered Bush is not something that would bother many in the Republican party. It was interesting that the day after Bush embraced DeLay the Republicans agreed to reverse the rules that had been put in place to protect him.

Whatever happened to Ashleigh Banfield??

Eric Alterman was on Air America's Majority Report last night. Basically he said that a media outlet with a "business model" cannot have journalism. Juan Cole made a similar point the other day. To make his point Professor Cole uses the case of MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield. You may have noticed that Ms Banfield disappeared a few months after the start of the Iraq war. The reason she disappeared was because she said some things that were too much for The War profiteering owner of MSNBC, General Electric, to take. Cole quotes something she said in a speech Banfield gave at Kansas State University on April 24, 2003 that led to her banishment where she states that reporters became cheerleaders for the war rather than journalists.

I think we all were very excited about the beginnings of this conflict in terms of what we could see for the first time on television. The embedded process, which I'll get into a little bit more in a few moments, was something that we've never experienced before, neither as reporters nor as viewers. The kinds of pictures that we were able to see from the front lines in real time on a video phone, and sometimes by a real satellite link-up, was something we'd never seen before and were witness to for the first time.
[......]
That said, what didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.

I can't tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you've got to be on both sides. You've got to be a unilateral, someone who's able to cover from outside of both front lines, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to cover a war, which is the way most of us covered Afghanistan. There were no front lines, they were all over the place. They were caves, they were mountains, they were cobbled, they were everything. But we really don't know from this latest adventure from the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should never do it again. The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.

So Banfield was fired for stating the obvious. The government did learn one thing from Vietnam, let the American people only see a sanitized version of the war, the puff of smoke from the barrel of the motor, not the blood and guts on the other end. With the corporate take over of the media, journalism has died, disappeared just like Ashleigh Banfield. George W. Bush sits in the White House today not because of "moral values" but because of a media that cannot or will not investigate and report the truth. The truth takes a backseat to the business model and that business model includes not alienating those in power.

Another House Republican Reversal

GOP to Reverse Ethics Rule Blocking New DeLay Probe

House Republican leaders, acknowledging that ethics disputes are taking a heavy toll on the party's image, decided yesterday to rescind a controversial rule change that led to the three-month shutdown of the ethics committee, according to officials who participated in the talks.

Republicans touched off a political uproar in January by changing a rule that had required the ethics committee to continue considering a complaint against a House member if there was a deadlock between the committee's five Republicans and five Democrats. The January change reversed this, calling for automatic dismissal of an ethics complaint when a deadlock occurs.

This has to be bad news for DeLay. Four months ago the house Republicans reversed a decision that would have allowed a House member to retain their leadership position if indicted. The latest reversal indicates that the House Republicans recognize they were losing the public relations war. This can also be seen as an attempt by Republicans to distance themselves from the lunatic fringe of the religious right who continue to defend Mr DeLay.

Private accounts are not coming off the table

"Congressman, I am the president. And private accounts are not coming off the table even if it's the last day I spend in the presidency."

With the above statement to Representative Charles B. Rangel, George W. Bush made it clear to the world that he had no intention of fixing Social Security only in destroying it. This is the back drop as The Senate Finance Committee began the first day of it's full-scale debate on reform.

The Senate Finance Committee's first full-scale debate on Social Security raised new doubt Tuesday about whether a majority of the committee would vote for President Bush's proposal for individual investment accounts.

All the Democrats on the panel who spoke said they were resolutely opposed to the president's plan. And the reservations of Republicans were more ominous for the White House.

As a last resort, some administration officials have said, they might be able to keep their plan alive by pushing a private accounts bill through the Finance Committee on a party-line vote rather than in a bipartisan manner. But at the hearing, one Republican, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, said she did not want to tamper with "the foundation for our seniors," and another, Senator Craig Thomas of Wyoming, expressed concern over the amount of borrowing that proposals like the president's would require.

The purpose of the hearing was to allow the committee to begin addressing the solvency issue, something Bush has yet to do.

In an interview on CNN after the Finance Committee hearing, Mr. Grassley suggested a realization that a majority on the panel might not vote for private accounts. If that proves to be the case, he said, he would still like to move ahead with a bill dealing with solvency in the system and send that to the Senate.

Democrats, however, said they would try to block any Social Security bill unless Mr. Bush personally promised that investment accounts would not become part of the legislation at a later stage.

Administration hubris is now threatening the party on two fronts, Social Security and judicial appointments. As the popularity of "Private Accounts" continues to fall the administration and Senator Grassley do not have the votes in the Senate. It would also appear the administration and Senator Frist do not have the votes to end the filibuster on judicial appointments. The reason is politicians must pay attention to public opinion to survive and the public is not on the Rebublican's side.

More on the inept Senator Frist

The Moose agrees with my post below on the pandering Mr. Frist.

Maybe, he should stick to heart surgery. It's easier.

Feeling Safer Yet?

World terror attacks tripled in 2004 by U.S. count

The U.S. count of major world terrorist attacks more than tripled in 2004, a rise that may revive debate on whether the Bush administration is winning the war on terrorism, congressional aides said on Tuesday.

The number of "significant" international terrorist attacks rose to about 650 last year from about 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides briefed on the numbers by U.S. State Department and intelligence officials on Monday.

I wonder why?

The State Department last week unleashed a new debate about the numbers by saying it would no longer release them in its annual terrorism report but that the newly created National Counterterrorism Center that compiles the data would do so.
[.......]
Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday asking her to release the data.

"The large increases in terrorist attacks reported in 2004 may undermine administration claims of success in the war on terror, but political inconvenience has never been a legitimate basis for withholding facts from the American people," Waxman said in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.

Do you feel safer yet? Sure doesn't look like we are winning Bush's war on terror does it?

I'll have Ketchup on my crow

Well for the second time today I'll admit I over reacted to the "nuclear option" compromise issue. Steve Soto reports and does a really good analysis on the story that Frist has rejected the Democrat's compromise.

And with the public overwhelmingly against the GOP plans to pander the Christo-fascists and prohibit judicial filibusters, Harry Reid has set it up pretty well: he offered through Joe Biden a reasonable, and possibly too accommodating deal to avoid the upcoming train wreck for Frist. Rove did as expected and said that all nominees deserve votes, even though his party denied over 40 Clinton nominees votes. Frist then backed away and said there will be no deals so that the American Taliban doesn't get angry with Frist.

And now Reid can say "don't say I didn't warn you." I hope Mullah Frist is satisfied at watching his tenure as Majority Leader result in losses for his caucus next year. Right off the bat, Ricky Santorum is toast, and I can think of a few others.

I will certainly have a little more respect for Senator Reid is the future and I am certainly glad it was Reid and not Daschle running the show. This has turned out well for the Democrats. It's placed a number of Republicans in a position where they must side with the American Taliban or side with the majority of voters. A lose-lose situation for them. Couldn't happen to better bunch of guys.

I still stand by my lowly opinion of David Broder's commentary however.

Making Trent Lott look adept and competent.....

.......That's Bill Frist's claim to fame according to The Carpetbagger Report.

By agreeing to participate in an event that exploited faith for partisan ends and condemned his rivals as anti-religion bigots, Frist was roundly criticized by Dems, Republicans, newspaper editorial boards, and the religious community.

So Frist thought he’d be clever and strike a reasonable, moderate tone at the event, preemptively dealing with the criticism that came with the appearance. The right would be receptive to his showing face and committing himself to the nuclear option, while everyone else would be impressed by his rhetoric about an "independent" judiciary and his opposition to "retaliation" against judges.

Except it really hasn’t worked out that way for him. The left is still outraged by First’s role in the extremists’ event and now the right is livid that Frist was distancing himself from Tom DeLay’s hatred for the federal judiciary.

This follows Frist's involvement in the Terri Schiavo debacle which 80 percent of the American people opposed and he was unable to deliver the goods to the radical lunatics. Perhaps it's time for Mr. Frist to consider a return to the medical profession.

And I thought I hated Micorsoft before......

....but this is too much. My computer feels dirty!

No Compromise--Revisitied

Starting with my post on David Broder's lame commentary on Sunday, I have been very critical of any compromise on the nuclear option and the Democratic lawmakers in general; here, here and here. I still think that Broder's column was really lame, but after comments from my friend Bill, a post by Mary at The Left Coaster and by TCF over at The Big Brass Blog I am willing to admit I may have had too little faith in the Democratic leadership.

I don't think my lack of faith is totally unjustified after the last 6 to 8 years but I can see some advantage to making an attempt to negotiate. I believe, however, that it should be done with extreme care. I think the Fristians are backed into a corner on this one. Don't give away too much. The ideal compromise would be one that sounded reasonable was unacceptable or have a large political downside for Frist and company. I still believe that no compromise is a winner but attempted compromise could have some advantages.

Self-fulfilling prophecies

We noted yesterday that many Americans were becoming concerned about the influence of the radical Christian Right and that two thirds opposed the "nuclear option". The Liberal Anti-war Avenger makes an interesting point:

The extremist religious right is on the path towards learning about "self-fulfilling prophecies." If they feel the sting of imaginary persecution from the secular world as Christians now, imagine the pain they'll feel once their lunatic behavior creates a genuine backlash against them.

Is this what they want? Do they care so little about the rights, wants and needs of their non-extremist neighbors and so much about having judges like Pickering on federal benches that they are willing to abandon the very Christian ideals they claim to seek to uphold in order to get their way? Lying, cheating and discriminating was not the way of Christ.

Although I'm not religious I can't say that I have been anti-religious until recently. We have talked about the fact that the Terri Schiavo case was a political miscalculation on the part of Frist, DeLay and the Republicans with 80 percent of Americans opposing federal intervention. This may have been the turning point for the radical lunatic fringe of the evangelical movement. While some on the left may have been apprehensive about the influence of the religious right in politics a majority are now worried about the influence of the most radical, the American Taliban. We may be indeed be seeing a self fulfilling prophecy in the works and Mr. Frist, Mr. DeLay and the Republicans may pay the price.

We didn't do it

Of course not. We never do it. It's always somebody else's fault, or "an unfortunate accident."

Soldiers not at fault in Italian's death

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A U.S. military investigation has cleared American troops of any wrongdoing in the shooting death last month of an Italian security agent in Baghdad, according to a senior Pentagon official.

The agent's death strained relations between the United States and Italy, two stalwart allies in the Iraq war.

The U.S. soldiers involved will face no disciplinary actions, the Pentagon official said Monday.

You may remember that Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was also in the car, having just been released from a month of captivity by kidnappers. Her version of the story (and that of others in the car) has always been slightly different than the official US position. Her reaction seems to indicate that her opinion hasn't changed.

<>

Sgrena reacted strongly to the reported findings of the U.S. military investigation. "It is worse that I thought," she said. "Now they're saying it is not their fault."

Remember... no matter what happens, aside from blaming a few low ranking "bad apples", nothing we ever do in Iraq is our fault. It's those ingrates that we "liberated" and our so called allies from "Old Europe" who are the root of all evil.

Juan Cole on the "MSM" and Blogging

No copy and paste, you gotta read the whole thing.
Thank you Professor Cole.

No Compromise Part 2A

As a follow up to No Compromise Part 1 and Part 2 I give you an interesting statistic from the most recent Washington Post poll.

36. Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush's judicail nominees?

Support: 26%

Oppose: 66%

I repeat;
No Compromise

It might be love.......................

................but really bad politics. Head over to The Left Coaster and check it out.

No Compromise Part 2

This morning I stated that in my opinion the Democrats in no way should compromise with the Republicans on the "nuclear option". My dear friend Bill in DC does not agree.

I think there are big risks for the Democrats in forcing the issue. I don't think it's at all clear that they will benefit. And perhaps having made an effort at compromise beforehand will bolster their case for shutting down the Senate, which may not be at all popular, in the event the Republicans are able to eliminate the filibuster. And who knows? Biden may be offering a compromise in the knowledge that it won't be accepted, so that the Democrats can later say they tried to compromise. Also, maybe the nuclear option should be kept in reserve for Supreme Court appointments. I guess I'm just not willing at this point to second-guess Democratic senators, who are in a much better position than I to assess the strategic considerations. At any rate, I wouldn't necessarily excoriate them for trying to come up with a compromise. After all, the Democrats are in the minority and have to play the few cards they still hold much more carefully than the Republicans.

I remain convinced that compromise is just as risky if not even riskier than no compromise.
You can't trust Senator Frist
In order to reach a compromise you must trust that the other party will fulfill their part of the bargain. The theocrats in the Senate, including Bill Frist have shown a pattern of lies and deception. Recently Senator Frist has lied about the historic use of the filibuster and the origin of the term "nuclear option". The Bill Frist Republicans would feel no obligation to hold up their end of any "compromise".
The nuclear option and the Religious right
There is a growing distrust and even fear of the extreme Radical Christian Right. The battle over the filibuster has become associated with this Radical Christian fringe. Polls show that a majority of Americans oppose removing the filibuster for judicial appointments.
Moral support for rational Republican Senators
I suspect that there are more Republicans than we might think who are uneasy about the nuclear option. Even a wingnut like Rick Santorum realizes it could hurt him in next years election. The Republicans have shown during the John Bolton hearings that they are willing to leave the reservation when the Democratic minority stands united and firm.

A compromise is not without risks but I can't see any rewards. The no compromise stand may carry some risks but the rewards could be great.

NO COMPROMISE

South of the border

We have discussed the ticking time bomb just south of the border both here and at Running Scared. To summarize the situation the people of Mexico are not happen with the free market (feudalist) economy of President Vicente Fox. With elections approaching Mexico Cities Mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an opponent of "free trade" appears to be the favorite. The existing powers that be in Mexico have disqualified Mr Obrador as a candidate. This has resulted in a very real possibility of major civil unrest if not all out civil war on our southern border.

It appears that this situation has finally gotten the attention of the MSM. Bill in DC sent us this article in the New York Times on a march by hundreds of thousands of Obrado supporters in Mexico City.

[M]EXICO CITY, April 24 - A capital typically clogged with traffic was thronged Sunday by hundreds of thousands of people who marched into the main plaza to protest a government effort against Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador that threatens to force him out of next year's presidential elections.

The police estimated that more than one million people participated in the march. Aides to the mayor estimated that there were 750,000 people. Several political observers described it as the biggest in the country's recent history.

After two weeks of heated political discourse and confusing legal maneuvers, the march was not the first to denounce the government's campaign against the mayor. But it was a dramatic illustration of seemingly growing support for Mr. López Obrador and disappointment in President Vicente Fox.
[.......]
Under most interpretations of Mexican law, Mr. López Obrador, of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, cannot run for office or be put on the ballot until after a trial, which could take more than a year.

The situation has plunged Mr. Fox's party and his cabinet into open conflict.

On Saturday The Washington Post ran a commentary by someone in Mexico, Rossana Fuentes Berain, managing editor of Foreign Affairs en Español and a professor at the Mexico Institute of Technology, In Mexico, Fears Of a Populist President.

MEXICO CITY -- The Mexican Congress voted recently to strip this city's mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of his immunity from prosecution for an allegedly illegal act by his administration -- thus endangering his expected run for president. But of course, this is not the end of the story. Lopez Obrador may well garner enough support for his cause to get on the ticket, raising this question: Is this populist mayor someone to be feared? Is he another Hugo Chavez, who will create turmoil in domestic and foreign affairs while pursuing an agenda of radical change?

Not likely, I would say. Mexico is not Venezuela. State and federal institutions are strong. We also have a more diversified economy and a private sector less dependent on governmental actions. So, even if he is not defeated at the polls, which he very well could be, we in Mexico would do better to learn to live with him than to risk derailing our young democratic process.

It's clear that no politician should be above the law. But the misdemeanor with which Lopez Obrador is being charged (the building of a road in violation of a court order) should not be allowed to trigger a political crisis that could undermine hard-won economic stability.

Although Ms Berain is cold toward Lopez Obrador she recognizes that his disqualification could and probably would result in a massive disruption of Mexico's society and economy.

Lopez Obrador, should he win, is unlikely to join Chavez and Fidel Castro in a sort of Latin American axis of evil. That is so not only for the institutional reasons mentioned above but because of important economic considerations, the most important being the fact that monetary policy in Mexico is set by an autonomous Central Bank whose head, Guillermo Ortiz, cannot be removed.

As for Lopez Obrador's comments about restructuring Mexico's debt (comments that understandably frighten the markets, given the recent Argentine experience), his economic advisers are adamant in maintaining that this would have to do with renegotiating terms rather than with seeking debt reduction.

And her advice for the Bush administration:

And what should the United States do in this situation? Nothing. At least nothing but sit tight and be patient. I know that's hardly within the nature of an activist country, but it's exactly what Washington needs to do.

Something the Bush administration is not very good at.

Oblivious

Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate interests and the religious right - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns.

This is the money quote from today's column by Paul Krugman. While sometimes out on a ledge, Krugman has been on a roll recently in analyzing exactly why the GOP is out of touch with mainstream American interests and suffers from falling popularity ratings which make Michael Jackson look like a national favorite.

Krugman continues:

Since November's election, the victors have managed to be on the wrong side of public opinion on one issue after another: the economy, Social Security privatization, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay. By large margins, Americans say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Mr. Bush is the least popular second-term president on record.

Is the administration's obliviousness to the public's economic anxiety just partisanship? I don't think so: President Bush and other Republican leaders honestly think that we're living in the best of times. After all, everyone they talk to says so.

That's pretty much the crux of the matter. If you live in an echo chamber, and you surround yourself exlucsively with soothing voices which will say what you want to hear, why wouldn't you think that things are going fabulously. It's days like this which give me hope for the '06 mid-terms. Some people may be in for an extremely rude awakening.

No Compromise

I discussed David Broder's horrible commentary advocating compromise to avoid the "nuclear option"here yesterday. Josh Marshall was equally upset. This morning Joe Gandelman has an excellent post, Republicans May Have Votes To Nuke Filibuster, discussing the issue. Joe reports that Senator Joe Biden is once again having major problems with his spine.

Biden, appearing on ABC's "This Week," said, "I think we should compromise and say to them that we're willing to - of the seven judges - we'll let a number of them go through, the two most extreme not go through and put off this vote" to end the filibuster.

The Democrats can't expect enough Republican defections to defeat the "nuclear option" if people like Biden are going to listen to the nonsense of David Broder. Bill Frist and the rest of the theocratic radicals that have hi-jacked the Republican party don't compromise. To them a compromise is we win--you lose. If there are Democratic lawmakers who still can't see this they are unfit for office. While there are risks in forcing Frist's hand there are NO benefits for not doing it. In my professional life as an engineer I was involved in cost/benefit analysis. This is a no brainer--NO COMPROMISE!!!!.


Note
Go check out all of Joe Gandelman's excellent post on this.

Update
See No Compromise Part 2 above.

Justice Sunday

Progressive United Church of Christ Seminarian, Chuck Currie has a good rundown of "Justice Sunday" and thoughts from those Americans of faith who opposed it.
Justice Sunday Event Concludes After Advocating For Radical Judges With Records Opposing Civil Rights


The Green Knight has a nice bumper sticker you might want for the car you can't afford to drive anymore to commemorate the occasion.

Recommended Book (For Guys Only)

No it's not porn, in fact there is not a mention of women in the entire 600 plus pages.

The book is a recent translation of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island. If you want an escape from politics and 21st century world events I recommend it. Pure mindless escape, no hidden messages or agenda, just a real good way to get away from it all.

Iraq....The Saga Continues

As the saga of Tom Delay and John Bolton continue to undercut the Bush legacy he is not getting any help in Iraq. The Washington Post today has a rundown on activity in Iraq over the last couple of days that has resulted in many Iraqi deaths and at least one American death. I'm not going to go into the details here, you can go right to the source.

The post had an even more disturbing report yesterday by Ellen Knickmeyer, Insurgent Violence Escalates In Iraq. She reports that not only is insurgent violence increasing but the Iraqi Security Forces and police that the administration likes to tell us about are afraid to leave their stations.

Violence is escalating sharply in Iraq after a period of relative calm that followed the January elections. Bombings, ambushes and kidnappings targeting Iraqis and foreigners, both troops and civilians, have surged this month while the new Iraqi government is caught up in power struggles over cabinet positions.

Many attacks have gone unchallenged by Iraqi forces in large areas of the country dominated by insurgents, according to the U.S. military, Iraqi officials and civilians and visits by Washington Post correspondents. Hundreds of Iraqis and foreigners have either been killed or wounded in the last week.

You don't want to go there

This week, at a checkpoint bunker in Tarmiya where insurgents downed a helicopter, a teenager in sunglasses clutching an AK-47 marked the limits of the Iraqi army's authority. "I wouldn't advise going there," the young Shiite Muslim recruit said, referring to Tarmiya, a Tigris River town a few hundred yards up the road that is dominated by Sunni Muslim landowners who were loyal to Saddam Hussein. "Those are some bad people there."

No government no security

Meanwhile, the Iraqi leadership remains in limbo.

The attacks, coming as officials continued to haggle over government posts, have eroded some of the hope that followed the elections. Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular leaders, most of whom are building the first democratically elected Iraqi government of their adult lives, have let power struggles fill nearly one-third of their government's planned 11-month run.

At best, deal-making on some key posts appears stuck where it was two weeks ago, when Ibrahim Jafari, a formerly exiled Shiite leader, accepted the prime minister's job and the task of forming a promised national-unity government.
[.......]
"The government is useless! I have stopped depending on it," Ali Hali, a 29-year-old Shiite, cried last week.

So much for Iraqization

Meanwhile, officials describe setbacks in the security situation in the Sunni Muslim city of Husaybah on the Syrian border, near the area where fighters tied to al Qaeda had staged the second of two well-planned attacks on a U.S. military installation this month. An Iraqi army unit that had once grown to 400 members has dwindled to a few dozen guardsmen "holed up'' inside a phosphate plant outside of Husaybah for their protection, a Marine commander said.

Maj. John Reed, executive officer for the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which has a company in Husaybah, said the Iraqi guardsmen retreated to the phosphate plant compound with their families after insurgents attacked and killed scores of people in recent months.

"They will claim that they've got hundreds ready to come back and fight," said Reed, whose company seldom patrols inside Husaybah. "Well, there are no more than 30 of them on duty on any given day, and they are completely ineffective."

At Tarmiya, along the heavily Sunni-populated banks of the Tigris, Shiite recruits sent by the government usually stay well out of town unless accompanying U.S. patrols, a correspondent for The Post observed. Police officers man a station inside Tarmiya, but they are Sunnis from the same tribes as the townspeople. Even they are seldom seen.

In city after city and town after town, security forces who had signed up to secure Iraq and replace U.S. forces appear to have abandoned posts or taken refuge inside them for fear of attacks.

A way to commit suicide

''We joined the police, and after this, the job became a way of committing suicide,'' said Jasim Khadar Harki, a 28-year-old policeman in Mosul, where residents say patrols are dropping off noticeably, often appearing only in response to attacks.

The worst that any of us could have predicted or imagined seems to be coming true in Iraq. It is probably even worse because journalists are unable to travel in most of the country.

John Bolton...the saga continues

A good catch by Norwegianity.

A good run down on the Bolton nomination can be found in Bolton Finds U.N. Nomination in Jeopardy buy Anne Geran. The general consensus is the Bolton nomination is in big trouble.

• "This nomination is not doomed, but it's on life support and the plug may well be pulled any day," said Allan J. Lichtman, a political history professor at American University.


• "My sense is that he's going down," said Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress and the presidency at the Brookings Institution in Washington. It is not clear, Mann said, whether Bolton would jump or be pushed by the White House.

From what I've heard about Bolton he won't jump unless Karl Rove has a gun in his back. While we will see the administration continue to support Bolton for another week or two behind the scenes I would imagine they are opening the window and loading the gun.

To salvage the nomination, the White House probably will have to offer some "exculpatory information" to counter the daily trickle of new allegations about Bolton's record, Lichtman said. In the end, however, he said it may depend on how badly the White House wants Bolton's confirmation.

"If the White House wants to spend enough political chips they could save it," Lichtman said.

The administration's pile of "political chips" is getting a bit low and I would be very surprised if they would be willing to put many on the table to save the Bolton nomination.

Update
I have more over at Running Scared.

Tom DeLay...The saga continues

Over at Dean's World, Joe Gandelman has a piece on some more digging by the Washington Post on the Bugman's paid vacations. It would appear that the charges for his junket to play golf in England were put on lobbyist's credit cards, a direct violation of House rules.
While it's good that all of this dirt is piled on Mr. DeLay perhaps this is not the issue that is going to really resonate in the voters minds. A recent poll is DeLay's Sugerland district indicated that his support there had dropped to under 40%. What did the voters in his district most object to? The fact that he had paid is wife and daughter a half of a million dollars, not that lobbyists had been funding his vacations. DeLay attempted to divert attention from his ethical problems by jumping on the Terri Schiavo case. This totally backfired as we can see in the polls where 80% of Americans were opposed to congressional intervention, including over 50% who consider themselves evangelical Christians. A vast majority of Americans, including many evangelicals are shocked and dismayed by the attack on the judiciary by DeLay, Frist and the snake handlers of the radical Christian right. As Chuck Currie reported yesterday, 17 Baptist ministers in Louisville, Kentucky urged the Highview Baptist Church to cancel "Justice Sunday".
There is an editorial in the Portland Oregonian this morning which discusses the feelings of the old time Libertarian base of the Republican party:

I n the past few months, American conservatism has swerved toward a power-hungry self-righteousness that scares many Republicans. One of the fearful is John Danforth.

The former senator wrote that "Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians." The policy of the party, he warned, seemed to be "the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law."

Danforth -- a Missouri Republican, hero to pro-lifers, patron of Clarence Thomas, ordained priest and tireless conservative -- makes an unlikely Jeremiah. But he speaks for many citizens who worry that something has gone badly awry since George Bush's inauguration.

There is more and I suggest you go read the entire thing.

While DeLay's ethical lapses are important his anti-judiciary theocratic ranting is what will really turn the majority against him and the rest of the extremists who have hi-jacked the government. People expect their politicians to be corrupt but the don't expect their politicians to undermine the constitution.

Days of wine and shackles

Do any of you remember when Khaled el-Masri told the New York Times, in January, that he had been picked up by American intelligence officers and sent to an Afghan prison for five months? He said he'd been shackled, beaten, photographed nude, and injected with drugs during questioning, and then suddenly dumped out of a truck in Albania to make his way home to Germany. The CIA had no comment on it at the time, and the White House administration was not talking. Right wing blogs went crazy saying that he was probably a terrorist, a liar, a Democratic plant and who knows what else. Guess what?

Rice ordered release of German sent to Afghan prison in error.

A German citizen detained for five months in an Afghan prison was released in May 2004 on direct orders from Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, after she learned the man had been mistakenly identified as a terror suspect, government officials said Friday.

Within several months they concluded he was the victim of mistaken identity, the officials said. His name was similar to a Qaeda suspect on an international watch list of possible terrorist operatives, they said.

By then, Mr. Masri, 41, a car salesman who lives in Ulm, Germany, had been flown on a C.I.A.-chartered plane to the prison under a secret American program of transferring terror suspects from country to country for interrogation, officials said. At the prison in Kabul, Mr. Masri said, he was shackled, beaten, photographed nude and injected with drugs by interrogators who pressed him to reveal ties to Al Qaeda.

For reasons that are unclear, he remained for months at a prison known locally as the "Salt Pit." The case reached Ms. Rice in May 2004, officials said, and twice, over several weeks, she ordered him immediately freed. He was released in Albania on May 29, 2004.

Lies, lies, and damned lies. So the White House didn't know anything about it, huh? Would have looked bad during the election, so it was shoved under the carpet and this guy was given a bus pass. "Oh, sorry about the electrodes on the testicles there, old buddy. You know how it goes. See ya. And remember... Freedom is on the march!"

Like Atrios said, it sure makes you Proud to be an American, eh?

Who is David Broder channeling?

What can I say? David Broder is so full of it. Why you ask?

A Judicious Compromise

Democrats Should Take the First Step to End the Filibuster Fracas

This is the sort of horse crap I would expect from the poisonous cyber pen of Robert Novak or Fred Barnes..

Let's start with this:

Here is what should happen: The Democratic Senate leadership should agree voluntarily to set aside the continued threat of filibustering the seven Bush appointees to the federal appeals courts who were blocked in the last Congress and whose names have been resubmitted. In return, they should get a renewed promise from the president that he will not bypass the Senate by offering any more recess appointments to the bench and a pledge from Republican Senate leaders to consider each such nominee individually, carefully and with a guarantee of extensive debate in coming months.

" This is so absurd I'm at a loss for words. "A renewed promise from the president"? Where has this guy been. This is a President and an administration that has never seen a truth they had to tell or a promise they had to keep. And this one; "a pledge from Republican Senate leaders", when the Senate majority leader has become a snake handler for the Radical Christian lunatic fringe.
And then there is this, also worthy of Bob Novak or Fred Barnes:

Voters placed Republicans in control of the White House and the Senate, and while the opposition still has a constitutional role to play, at the end of the day that function has to be more than talking important matters to death.

May I remind you David that the Democratic members of the Senate, although fewer in number, actually represent more Americans.
Then there is this little piece of wisdom you would expect to hear from one of the mindless talking heads on FOX news:

"The balance of power in the Senate is not in a right-wing cabal; it is in the moderate center".

Once again I can only assume that Mr. Broder has been transported to some alternate reality. He rambles on about the danger of "road blocks" and such but I just can't bear to go on. The only question is who is David Broder channeling, Bob Novak or Fred Barnes?

This is my weapon, this is my gun...

Head over to Random Fate to see what it's all about.

Second Term Quagmire

"I've earned capital in this election and I'm going to spend it for what I told the people I'd spend it on: Social Security, tax reform, moving the economy forward, education and winning the war on terrorism," Bush told reporters two days after he won re-election.

Troubles mount in White House, Bush agenda bogged down

Three months into his second term, however, Bush's bold agenda is bogged down by public skepticism about some of his proposals, growing resistance from Democrats, dissension within his party's ranks and what some analysts consider second-term hubris.


With gas prices near record highs and stock markets jittery, Bush's drive for privatized Social Security accounts has been met by deep public skepticism. His judicial nominees are stalled, his choice for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is stuck in committee, and his job-approval rating recently dropped to 45 percent, the lowest of his presidency and well below that of other recent second-term presidents.


Recent surveys have found a disconnect between most Americans' mainly economic priorities and the White House's and the Republican Congress' preoccupation with issues ranging from Terri Schiavo to plans to kill the filibuster.

Over at Make Them Accountable Carolyn Kay thinks Bush's problems are at least partially the result of the Democrats showing some backbone.

It’s at least possible that part of the reason for Bush’s slide in the polls is the Democrats’ resistance to him. Surely a lot of people believed that when the Democrats didn't fight Bush, there must have been nothing wrong with what he was doing.

I think it is largely because of the administration's own mis-steps, Karl may have lost his Midas touch. It is now obvious the Social Security initiative was a mistake. The fact that the stock market decided to go south in the middle of it didn't help. The attempted intervention in the Terri Schiavo case was another major error on Rove's part. Let's be honest, the Democrats really didn't find their backbone until the administration became stuck in the quagmire of hubris. Even now the Democrat's backbone seems a little weak. Liberal Oasis reports there are rumors that Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid was trying to cut a deal with the GOP, where he’d end the filibuster on some of the controversial judges in exchange for scrapping the nuclear option. There have been persistent rumors of Democratic Senators talking compromise on Social Security. We have the Republicans on the run, this is not the time for compromise on anything.

The weeks strangest Search Engine Hits

I know you've been waiting so here they are:

• Google: professor accused "st. thomas" faletta


• Google: john r. bolton molestor


• Yahoo: pictures of ugly republican women


• Yahoo: a factor statistic about recess in middle school


• Google: "in 2006" "falling dollar" screwed economy collapse


• AskJeeves: Bush say earth is flat


• Google: ludifer heaven battle


• Yahoo: iron filings paint


• Google: earth day country joe and the fish


• Google: juan cole unitarian


• Yahoo: ann coulter pictures legs

Note
These are copy and pastes from Extreme Tracking, words and spelling are exactly as entered.

Are you feeling dumber?

Overload
'Info-mania' dents IQ more than marijuana

The relentless influx of emails, cellphone calls and instant messages received by modern workers can reduce their IQ by more than smoking marijuana, suggests UK research.

So much information--so little time. Is it time for a smoke break yet?

Update
The Green Night has a test you can take. Is it time for a smoke break yet?

Progressives continued, Parts 7 and 8

Over at Running Scared the week long discussion continues with Part 7 and Part 8. The entire chain can be found here. Please use the comments section to chime in. This is an important topic and the more ideas the better.

Blessings

hubris - excess pride or arrogance, usually leading to ruin (a serious flaw in Greek heroes); excess of pride which shows disrespect for gods and man.

Hijacking Christianity . . .

The statement by one of the sponsors of tomorrow's event, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, is an example of the Holy War that is being launched by the right. In one of the most outrageous smears to be uttered by a so-called religious leader, Perkins said that "activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups . . . have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms." That is an unmitigated lie that should not be allowed to stand.

. . . Smearing Christian Judges

People calling themselves Christians are gathering once again for a crusade against what they consider to be the secular humanist subversion of Christian values. This time the object of their wrath is the judiciary. In the wake of the fanatical and fruitless assaults against the judicial system for letting Terri Schiavo die, the Family Research Council will convene tomorrow what it calls "Justice Sunday," a live simulcast to pit Christian values against "our out-of-control courts."

While we should be outraged by Sunday's "Justice Sunday" and continue to say so we should also see it as a blessing. Like the Terri Schiavo debacle it is an opportunity for the American people to see what the Senate majority leader Bill Frist and the House majority leader Tom DeLay really represent. We should be happy to see that many more people of faith will be protesting the event than participating in it.

Update
Chuck Currie reports that Louisville Baptist Leaders Tell Highview Baptist Church: Cancel “Justice Sunday”

17 Baptist ministers in Louisville, Kentucky held a press conference on Friday urging Highview Baptist Church to cancel "Justice Sunday." The event – being held this weekend at Highview – is sponsored by conservative evangelical Christian groups and Republican Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist with a stated intention of painting democrats and those who oppose the president’s judicial nominees as "people against faith."

Another sign that this gathering does not even represent the majority of "Evangelical Christians".

Always on Friday: Abu Ghraib Officers Cleared

When Rachel Maddow signed off for the last time from her Air America show a few weeks ago, she left listeners with a few pieces of advice. One of these which really stuck in my mind was to always be sure to monitor the news on Friday evenings. The really interesting material seems to always come out then, (at least in terms of things the administration doesn't want you looking at too closely) because fewer people watch the news on Friday night or read the papers on Saturday morning.

Yesterday was no exception. Last night, both CNN and the Guardian released the news that the Army has cleared all of the top level officers involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandals had been mysteriously cleared of all charges and responsibility.

The Army has cleared four top officers -- including the three-star general who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq -- of allegations of wrongdoing in connection with prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, officials said Friday.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who became the senior commander in Iraq in June 2003, two months after the fall of Baghdad, had been faulted in earlier investigations for leadership lapses that may have contributed to prisoner abuse.

He is the highest-ranking officer to face official allegations of leadership failures in Iraq, but he has not been accused of criminal violations.

After assessing the allegations against Sanchez and taking sworn statements from 37 people involved in Iraq, the Army's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Green, concluded the allegations were unsubstantiated, said the officials who were familiar with the details of Green's probe.

Green reached the same conclusion in the cases of two generals and a colonel who worked for Sanchez.

Isn't it amazing that, even after the revelation of the Gonzales torture memos and numerous position papers from the Bush administration about how these prisoners didn't fall under the Geneva Conventions, there was nobody responsible except for a few low ranking soldiers in the field. They were just the "bad apples" that we hear so much about, I suppose.

Michael Froomkin lays it on the line.

So the official line remains: just a few (dozen, hundred) widely dispersed low-ranking bad apples in several locations who were encouraged by email from Washington to do the same things. None of whom ranked above sergeant, except maybe one female scapegoat reservist general, who says her orders came from … Sanchez.

TalkLeft offers an interesting comparison between this report and one released over the winter. The predictions had been made long ago, and now they've come true. Nobody involved in this fiasco at a high level will ever be held accountable. If they were, they would likely start pointing fingers further upward. So some of those "Our Troops" which the right wings loves to embrace are sent off to the slammer as scapegoats.

Oregon Coast

I'm located on the west coast but two thirds of the readers of Middle Earth Journal are located in the Eastern or Central time zone. Well here is what I have about 45 minutes away.(click on picture for larger image)


Oregon Coast

On Thomas Friedman

I have thought for some time that Thomas Friedman was little more than an ego about ready to explode, a pompous bomb with a short fuse. Teresa Nielsen Hayden would seem to agree.

Most bad art is simply dull. Some inspires livelier reactions; for example, the poetry of Julia Moore and William T. McGonagall, Amanda McKittrick Ros’s novels, Florence Foster Jenkins’ recordings, Edward D. Wood Jr.’s movies, and old Petley Studios postcards.

Whatever else you say about Thomas Friedman—and there’s a great deal more you could say—it’s becoming apparent that he’s one of those rare enlivening bad artists. The man’s no H. C. Turk, but he does meet the minimum requirement, which is that contemplating his work can make your brain seize up and throw a tooth.

She then links us to some wonderful comments from the academics at Crooked Timber including Kieran Healy.

It takes a long, long apprenticeship laboring the Augean stables of Globollocks to write a sentence like this:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

Amazing. Tom Friedman is a God. No, not a God so much as a moustachioed force of nature, pumped up on the steroids of globalization, a canary in the coalmine of an interconnected era whose tentacles are spreading over the face of a New Economy savannah where old lions are left standing at their waterholes, unaware that the young Turks—and Indians—have both hands on the wheel of fortune favors the brave face the music to their ears to the, uh, ground.

There is more, go check it out.

The American Taliban's attack on the judiciary continued

I was going to do a post on the latest outrage from the Radical Christian wingnuts, their continued attacks on the judiciary, but Joe Gandelman did it for me. Head over there and check it out. Of course Mullahs DeLay and Frist are involved.

John Bolton and the war against reality

David Sarasohn of my local paper, The Oregonian, has an excellent commentary this morning on the Bolton nomination, Pounding on reality -- and on the U.N. Bolton is the perfect soldier in the administration's war against unpleasant facts that are contrary to the neocons visions of reality.

It wasn't, apparently, accounts of Bolton's repeatedly attacking and threatening officials who disagreed with him, and frequently being wrong, that moved Voinovich and now two other GOP members of the Foreign Relations Committee. It was that ultimate image of Bolton's pounding on the door of the Moscow hotel room, possibly insisting that he was room service bringing borscht.

That moment may have been what undid Bolton, but it was also the moment that summed up both Bolton's record in international dealings and the attitudes of the administration he was being sent to represent:

When confronting reality, pound on it until it goes away.

Bolton has been the poster -- not to say pounder -- boy for this strategy. Insisting that Cuba had bioweapons, he denounced State Department experts who annoyingly kept saying there was no evidence it was true. The way to deal with the disagreement, he suggested, was to fire the experts.

The fact that the experts were right, it seemed, was not the point.

Dick Cheney's warrior:

If your intelligence sources don't say what you want, pound on them.

You can see why Bolton is a favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney, who reportedly insisted on Bolton's being the nominee for U.N. ambassador. Bolton represents the Bush administration policy of rejecting any information that doesn't fit what it already wanted to think.

That meant, of course, rejecting all evidence, from inside or outside the U.S. government, that suggested maybe there weren't imminently threatening weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It meant setting up a separate intelligence office in the Pentagon when the established intelligence offices weren't giving the Bush administration the answers it wanted.

John Bolton represents the Bush/Cheney administration, the ultimate neocon ideologue.

As a Bush administration official told writer Ron Suskind, for Suskind's book on former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

You can see why Bolton's record, even if it unnerves some senators, fits neatly into the administration's pattern. When you have a problem with reality, just pound on it, and on the people trying to tell you about it.

In a related story Steve Soto reports that Colin Powell is talking to Republican Senators in an attempt to kill the Bolton nomination.

Update
Also Also has a post on a headline change from AP. Go check it out.