Still Here

I'm still alive, and posting will resume shortly. I plead outrage burnout, a bad chest cold, and an overwhelming lethargy.

I am 44 years old today, and I just attended my 25th anniversary High School reunion. I will have thoughts on each of these momentous events to share with you.

The political stuff will be muted, now. I am still doing my reading, but it will take a while to recharge. You will just have to suffer my maunderings on other subjects for a while.

At the same time, I am posting new material to my Navy website, www.qmss.com. That will take priority until I can generate some new content to keep it from getting stale.

And now I'm tired and I'm going to bed. I'm getting old, after all.

The United States: A Beacon Of Democracy

Setting the example. From Dan Froomkin:

Nick Wadhams writes for the Associated Press: "Several governments around the world have tried to rebut criticism of how they handle detainees by claiming they are only following the U.S. example in fighting terrorism, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture said Monday.

"Manfred Nowak said that when he criticizes governments for their questionable treatment of detainees, they respond by telling him that if the United States does something, it must be all right."

To Bolivian And Back Again

...So I'm back. Been busy at work and home, and too tired to write. My promised "next post" was foiled by none other than Paul Krugman, who wrote on that same subject: that voting in this election and next should be on party lines, regardless of the individual. Any Republican elected to office is going to enable the Bush Administration, and we can't afford that.

Here in Connecticut I had a certain regard for both Chris Shays and Nancy Johnson. Whenever I heard of Shays, he was speaking sense against some Republican position; and I had heard nothing against Johnson (neither of whom represent my district). Now, however, not only do I think they should be kicked out just for being Republican, they have been showing their true colors; Johnson's ads have been truly misleading and mendacious, and Shays is allowing his mouth to override his brain.

The polls here show Lieberman in the lead over Lamont; wherever you see a cluster of GOP yard signs, there is sure to be a "I'm Sticking With Joe" sign among them. He is the pet of the right wing, and we can only hope Lamont comes through. My own yard boasts two Lamont signs, a Courtney for Congress sign (US 2nd District) and a "Had Enough? Vote Democratic" sign.

The Big Picture

I used to get irritated with actors or sports figures who supported a particular charity, typically a disease with which they were afflicted: Christopher Reeves and spinal injuries, Michael J. Fox and Parkinson's. But eventually I understood: there are so many causes, from drought and starvation in Africa to Muscular Dystrophy-- no on can possibly cover all of them, or even keep in a persistent state of agitation at the tribulations in the world. Narrowing your focus to a particular problem and trusting others to pick up their share is rational and legitimate.

So, too, with political discourse. There are so many issues that can get your blood pressure up that it becomes necessary to limit yourself to a few choice ones at most and let the rest take care of themselves.

Some topics of particular interest to me:

• The recent bill authorizing torture and unlimited detention without legal recourse, even of American citizens
  
• The war in Iraq, which comes with several subheads: the continuing incompetence in the overall policy (if any), the lies that led to the invasion itself, the corruption endemic in the letting and execution of contracts, the stubborn refusal to acknowledge facts when they conflict with political desires, and so on ad nauseum.
  
• Lack of oversight by Congress and the usurpation of power by the Executive Branch
  
• Rampant corruption in Congress and the inordinate power wielded by lobbyists
  

Those are the biggies off the top of my head. Others that come to mind that are useful for beating up Republicans on, and are in and of themselves important, but don't threaten the republic (in no particular order):

• The Republican leadership's handling of the Foley issue, ignoring a problem for political reasons and then covering it up when exposed (sorry)
  
• The economy: driving every decision to the benefit of Big Business
  
• Tax policy: the enrichment of the already rich on the backs of the middle and lower classes
  
• Environmental policy: the watering-down of the Clean Air Act, the opening of national forests to lumbering, the relaxing of regulations all around, and on and on
  
• Energy policy: the focus on drilling for more oil rather than on increasing fuel economy standards or renewable resources
  

There are many more, and my one-line summaries don't do justice, of course, to the complexities of each, but I'm running out of my lunch hour here. The real focus should be on defeating the Republicans in November. More on that later.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying...

How many people are going to use that line? Lots, I'll bet. It's appropriate. That North Korea felt that now was the time to test a nuclear device says a lot about the opinion held by them of the United States. President Bush has his trifecta-- he has managed to take his "Axis of Evil" and make our situation with each worse. Forget Teddy Roosevelt: Bush has his own policy: "Speak loudly, but carry a limp dick." And there's no chance of scoring any Viagra until January, 2009.

Here's David Wallechinsky in The Huffington Post. It's short, so I am copying the whole thing.

In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, President Bush dubbed North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil." When he invaded Iraq fourteen months later and overthrew Saddam Hussein, many Americans thought that this would teach a lesson to the leaders of the other two axis members, Kim Jong-il of North Korea and the ruling mullahs of Iran.

They did learn a lesson...but it wasn't the one the Bush administration intended. The North Koreans and the Iranians looked around the world and saw that countries that had nuclear weapons, like Pakistan and China, were not in danger of being invaded by George Bush, while Saddam Hussein, who didn't have a nuclear weapons program, was in prison and being tried for war crimes. If you were the leaders of North Korea or Iran, what would you do to ensure that your country would not be invaded by the United States? Easy call: you build nuclear weapons, which is exactly what both of them are doing. Nice going, Mister President.

Here's a brief excerpt of what Glenn Greenwald has to say:

Independent of how well or poorly the Clinton administration dealt with North Korea -- and there is room for reasonable debate on that question -- there is no getting around several facts: (a) the North Korean threat has grown substantially during the Bush presidency; (b) the course we have followed for managing that threat has failed on every level; and (c) our ability to credibly threaten any military confrontation is virtually nonexistent.

It may seem to be a sideshow, that there is all this finger-pointing going on: shouldn't we be working on resolving the issues? Well, that would be nice, but a) we should know how we got to this point so that we don't repeat our mistakes, and b) from a political standpoint, you know the right is going to be vigorously pointing the other way (Clinton, anyone?). There has been one party in charge for the last six years, and it ain't been the Democrats, and Bill Clinton hasn't been President.

Here is Eric Alterman, in his new Altercation blog site, with some background, taken from The Book on Bush. He has much of interest; read the whole thing. This is a sample:

Bush had already undermined the extremely sensitive negotiations under way to bring the North Korean regime into the international system. When South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung visited Washington six weeks after Bush took office, Bush humiliated both his guest and his own secretary of state by publicly repudiating the negotiations after both had just publicly endorsed them. (Powell had termed their continuation "a no-brainer.")

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly floats the possibility that the test may have been a dud. Brad Plumer has a post up in which he discusses the situation, with many good links to more information.

And Kevin Drum (again) quotes Glenn Kessler reporting that administration officials have been eagerly anticipating the North Korean's test. Kevin sums up:

Let's recap: The Bush/Cheney administration took a bad situation with Iraq and made it even worse. They've taken a bad situation with Iran and made it even worse (see here, here, and here). They've taken a bad situation with North Korea and made it even worse (see Fred Kaplan here). At every step along the way, they've deliberately taken actions that cut off any possibility of solving our geopolitical problems with anything other than military force.

Once is a singular event. Twice might be a coincidence. But three times? That's a policy. Encouraging these "clarifying events" appears to be the main goal of the Bush administration. This is not the way to make America safer.

The Armed Forces is in no condition to invade Grenada again, much less face North Korea. Air strikes, naval bombardment, cruise missiles, sure; and the response to that will be a massive land attack over the DMZ. South Korea will enjoy that scenario. And what of Japan? I wouldn't be surprised to learn they are cranking up their own nuclear research-- the Israel of the Far East. Who could blame them? Thank our Limp-Dick Diplomacy.

Thank You, Folks. I'm Here All Week

This one is hilarious. Via Atrios, go here to see a Congressman brag about "how the Republican government does so much for the people. His example? Katrina." The audience laughs at him. Priceless!

Habeas Corpus, RIP

From Froomkin, President Bush in one of his rabble-rousing speeches says:

...one senior Democrat, their ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, compared the brave Americans who question the terrorists to the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. I believe this exposes a dangerous mind-set on the part of Democrats in the United States Congress. You can't defend America if you can't tell the difference between brave CIA officers who protect their fellow citizens and brutal dictators who kill their citizens. (Applause.)

"I'm not making any of this up. (Laughter.)"

"Ah, but of course," says Froomkin, "Bush was making it up." Here is a portion of the speech by Senator Patrick Leahy, and you really should go and read the rest of the quote at the link above:

Initially, you are not very worried. After all, this is America. You are innocent, and you have faith in American justice. You know your rights, and you say: I would like to talk to a lawyer. But no lawyer comes. Once again, since you know your rights, you refuse to answer any further questions. Then the interrogators get angry. Then comes solitary confinement, then fierce dogs, then freezing cold that induces hypothermia, then waterboarding, then threats of being sent to a country where you know you will be tortured, then Guantanamo. And then nothing, for years, for decades, for the rest of your life.

That may sound like an experience from some oppressive and authoritarian regime, something that may have happened under the Taliban, something that Saddam Hussein might have ordered or something out of Kafka.

Welcome to your new United States of America.

Pretty Obvious

From The Carpetbagger Report (via Atrios). Go and read the whole thing; as a Republican spokesman, Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) leaves something to be desired:

LAHOOD: It just — it's a program that simply is flawed. It has its flaws. We should fix it. And then if it's a valuable program, perhaps bring it back.

MILES O'BRIEN [CNN]: Well, that's kind of a sorry state of affairs. In essence, what you're saying is that members of Congress can't be trusted to be around young people.

LAHOOD: Well, that's pretty obvious.

I really have nothing to add to The Carpetbagger but, "Heh. Indeed."

They Knew, After All

Update to my previous post: George Tenet told select members of the 9/11 Commission about the July 10, 2001 meeting. They chose not to pass that to the whole commission, nor to put it in the final report.

But wait-- there's more! Seems that the original presentation was given not only to Rice, but to Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft as well:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.


The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don't remember the warning...

Former CIA Director George Tenet gave the independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission the same briefing on Jan. 28, 2004, but the commission made no mention of the warning in its 428-page final report. According to three former senior intelligence officials, Tenet testified to commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste and to Philip Zelikow, the panel's executive director and the principal author of its report, who's now Rice's top adviser.

hat tip Josh Marshall

She's Not Called A Secretary For Nothin'

This is a bit from the 9/11 Commission's questioning of Condoleezza Rice. It was quoted by Greg Mitchell in this piece about the July 10, 2001 meeting Condi didn't mention.

It tells you all you need to know about your Secretary of State: she's perfectly willing to act, as soon as someone tells her to. Hello? Condi? You're at the top of the chain of command-- you're supposed to initiate these things! If the whole administration works this way, it would explain a lot: one decisive man (*cough* Cheney *cough*) could run the show. (emphasis mine)

ROEMER: So, Dr. Rice, let's say that the FBI is the key here. You say that the FBI was tasked with trying to find out what the domestic threat was. We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 Commission. We've gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody -- nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices.

We have talked to the director at the time of the FBI during this threat period, Mr. Pickard. He says he did not tell the field offices to do this.

And we have talked to the special agents in charge. They don't have any recollection of receiving a notice of threat.
Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al Qaeda in the country, and still, the FBI doesn't do anything.

Isn't that some of the responsibility of the national security advisor?

RICE: The responsibility for the FBI to do what it was asked was the FBI's responsibility. Now, I...

ROEMER: You don't think there's any responsibility back to the advisor to the president...

RICE: I believe that the responsibility -- again, the crisis management here was done by the CSG. They tasked these things. If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something or that Andy Card needed to do something, I would have been expected to be asked to do it. We were not asked to do it. In fact, as I've...

ROEMER: But don't you ask somebody to do it? You're not asking somebody to do it. Why wouldn't you initiate that?

RICE: Mr. Roemer, I was responding to the threat spike and to where the information was. The information was about what might happen in the Persian Gulf, what might happen in Israel, what might happen in North Africa. We responded to that, and we responded vigorously.

(updated to correct spelling errors)

Republican Page Scandal:Gay=Predator

I have nothing to add to the multiple commenters on this from the blogs to the right of this page; the initial revelation is bad enough, but what makes it really significant (from a national point of view) is the appalling initial concealment of the activity, and the subsequent cover-up.

This, however, via Glenn Greenwald, is pretty pathetic:

After reviewing the fact that Hastert was told months ago about the e-mails sent by Foley to the 16-year-old page (a fact which Hastert first categorically denied and -- after Reps. Reynolds and Boehner both said they told Hastert -- he now claims not to recall), Hinderaker offers this defense of Hastert:

I've never been Speaker of the House, but I can imagine that such a conversation would not be among the most significant Hastert has had in the last year, and would not necessarily make a deep impression. Foley was, I take it, generally assumed to be gay.

Hinderaker then devotes two paragraphs to discussing the cases of Gerry Studds and Barney Frank -- two other gay Congressmen involved in sex scandals (with individuals of legal age) -- and Hinderaker then says:

So I'm not particularly surprised that Foley wrote some "over-friendly"--I'm sure I would find them creepy--emails to one or more underage pages.

So as best I can tell, this is Hinderaker's defense: Hastert knew that Foley was gay, so it would hardly have been a surprise to Hastert to learn that Foley was harassing underage pages. Hastert is a very busy and important man and something as unsurprising as the fact that the homosexual Foley was a sexual predator pursuing underage pages would hardly have been news to Hastert and certainly isn't anything that should have prompted his attention. A gay Congressman pursues minors, the sun comes up in the morning. That's just the way the world works. Why would Hastert take notice?

So, as far as Hindraker (of the Powerline blog) is concerned, a man lusting after young boys is standard operating procedure for a gay person, and nothing to be surprised at. Pedophile == gay, and vice-versa, case closed.

I just don't know what to say; draw your own conclusions and let me hear them in comments.

AFK

I have been away for a bit, having a personal life. I have accumulated a whole backlog of links and opinions, but they essentially boil down to this:

Congress is about to legalize torture, and the indefinite detention (without recourse to lawyers, or judges, or anything) of anyone the administration decides is an enemy combatant, with that term expanded to include, well, anyone. Including American citizens on U.S. soil.

The only reason they are letting the illegal wiretapping remain illegal is because they can't get their act together in time to pass a bill exculpating Bush and his minions for their crimes.

The march to Iran continues.

And so, to quote Vonnegut, it goes.

And I just dropped $400 replacing the ignition switch on my 11-year-old Honda minivan. We don't even have a heavy keyring; it just went. Which actually isn't bad when you spread that and the other minor repairs over 11 years, I guess.

Go read Digby, all of it. It'll do ya good.

Get Ready! Get Ready!The W-o-o-o-r-l-l-l-d Is Coming To An End!

Ten points if you can name that source.

This is via Billmon:

The End of Eden
James Lovelock Says This Time We've Pushed the Earth Too Far
[...]
He measured atmospheric gases and ocean temperatures, and examined forests tropical and arboreal (last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming). He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive-feedback loops -- from air to water, everything is getting warmer at once. The nature of Earth's biosphere is that, under pressure from industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more.

Then, he says, it adjusts. Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.

"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover."
[...]

Plan B

Kevin Drum reports:

The Biting Beaver tells a harrowing story of trying to obtain emergency contraception in rural Ohio. First her doctor told her to call the ER, then a parade of nurses hemmed and hawed over the phone, until finally a fourth nurse told her what was going on...

I am currently suffering from outrage overload, and so I am refusing to make any comment on anything less than a nuclear first strike against a non-threatening, non-nuclear country, or perhaps the end of the world, the subject of my next post.

The March To Iran

Serious people think the administration is building up to attacking Iran, in a replay of the buildup to Iraq. How dumb does Cheney, Rove, et al., think we are? Pretty dumb: they are following the same gameplan. But who's to say they are wrong? This is not getting the attention it deserves. Especially since, with the armed forces mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, the administration is ready and more than willing to let the nuclear genie out of the bottle.

Froomkin picks up the following:

Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott write for McClatchy Newspapers:
"In an echo of the intelligence wars that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a high-stakes struggle is brewing within the Bush administration and in Congress over Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program and involvement in terrorism. . . .

"Some officials at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department said they're concerned that the offices of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney may be receiving a stream of questionable information that originates with Iranian exiles, including a discredited arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who played a role in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal. . . .

"Officials at all three agencies said they suspect that the dubious information may include claims that Iran directed Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, to kidnap two Israeli soldiers in July; that Iran's nuclear program is moving faster than generally believed; and that the Iranian people are eager to join foreign efforts to overthrow their theocratic rulers."

Voted For Bush? Okay, You're In.

Billmon comments on the WaPo article from over the weekend: despite everyone knowing the CPA was messed up, only now are the details being confirmed:

The RNC Branch Office on the Tigris

As long-time readers of Whiskey Bar may recall, that was my pet nickname for the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA -- the unloved, unwanted, unmourned and completely unsuccessful agency assigned the job of running Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

My own personal favorite fuck up was when the CPA couldn't even get its own name right on its own web site, and thus informed the world that it was the Coalition Provincial Authority -- no doubt to demonstrate its intention to turn Iraq into the Canada of the Middle East. But that was an example of ruthless Prussian efficiency compared to the CPA's performance of its other responsibilities, such as fixing the power grid, getting the oil flowing, rebuilding the health care system, etc. etc. etc. Aside from the Pentagon, no single entity did more to give us the Iraq we know today. And they'd better hope God has mercy on their souls. I know I wouldn't.

The reasons for the CPA's FEMA-like failures were both polymorphous and perverse, but the biggest problem (not counting the complete lack of pre-war planning, the petty bureacratic squabbles between Defense and State, the utter cluelessness of Doug Feith and Donald Rumsfeld, and the sheer absurdity of trying to govern Iraq with a few thousand Americans, most of whom didn't speak Arabic and couldn't have found Baghdad on a map before they arrived -- and in some cases even after they did) was the Cheney Administration's deliberate decision to fill the CPA's ranks almost entirely with GOP party workers, campaign donors, hack politicians, think tank interns and assorted relatives of neocon VIPs, like Michael Ledeen's daughter. Thus the nickname...

Read the whole thing.

K-k-k-katie, You're My Lady

From Atrios, comes this pointer to a Media Matters article on the new CBS Evening News feature, "Free Speech."

Seems that after over a week, they have had several right-wingers, including Rush Limbaugh (!), to present their take on things, but no left or progressive speakers. Who would have guessed? That's your liberal media at work.

Gerson is the third Republican or conservative to be featured in the "Free Speech" segment since it debuted on CBS on September 5 -- he followed nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In that time, not one progressive media figure or Democrat has been featured.

Gerson, who left the White House in June, was recently hired by The Washington Post as an op-ed columnist.

I read that on her first night (I don't watch it myself), Katie said that she was going to help temper the discourse, and on hand to help her? Good ol' Rush, who single-handedly manages to inflame that same discourse. There's a reason I don't watch.

Mike Luckovich Cartoon: Where's Osama?

Rather than run some risk of copyright infringment, I'll just link to it-- have a look!

We've Heard This One Already

We've been through this all before; are we going to sit and let the administration blow smoke up our bums again?

The following is from an interview with Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

It's very reminiscent of the coordinated campaign that we saw before the Iraq war. You have cabinet officials, the president, and the vice president giving major speeches on the subject. They're labeling Iran the central or main threat. They try to link Iran to the war on terror, even to 9/11 itself, by talking about Iran as the central banker for terrorism, or the main state sponsor for terrorism. Officials have leaked information to the press just in the last couple of weeks that claims that the Iranian nuclear program is further advanced than it really is.

And there seems to be a concerted effort to convey this threat as imminent, without using that word, and that action will soon have to be taken. And, finally, you hear a drumbeat from both the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby arguing for military action on Iran. None of this is conclusive in and of itself, but together they really present a very ominous picture. And it is now my working hypothesis that at least some members of the administration, including the vice president of the United States, have made up their mind that the preferred option is to strike Iran and that a military strike will destabilize the regime and contribute to their longtime goal of overthrowing the government of Iran...


I believe a military strike would consolidate the hold of the Islamic government, not loosen it. If you want to keep President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad in power for the next five years, launch a strike on an Iranian facility. There is no doubt in my mind that the Iranian people would rally around the government and would become convinced that what the government has been telling them is true, that the main threat to the Iranian people comes from the United States or the U.S.-Israeli alliance. I can't think of any more counterproductive move if you have the goal of enabling the Iranian people to choose their own government, than to launch a military strike against Iran now.

Link courtesy Tristero at Hullabaloo

Popeye Moment

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has had all she can stands, she can't stands no more:

"In light of the rantings that went on for 30 minutes by two colleagues from the other side, I'd like to state for the record that America is not tired of fighting terrorism; America is tired of the wrongheaded and boneheaded leadership of the Republican party that has sent six and a half billion a month to Iraq while the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. That led this country to attack Saddam Hussein, when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. Who captured a man who did not attack the country and let loose a man that did. Americans are tired of boneheaded Republican leadership that alienates our allies when we need them the most. Americans are most certainly tired of leadership that despite documenting mistake after mistake after mistake, even of their own party admitting mistakes, never admit they do anything wrong. That's the kind of leadership Americans are tired of."

She concluded,

"I'm not going to sit here as a Democrat and let the Republican leadership come to the floor and talk about Democrats not making us safe. They're the ones in charge and Osama bin Laden is still at loose."

Let's hope a few more Democrats eat their spinach.

h/t Atrios

Military Tribunals

Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings writes:

I have now read the new draft of the Graham/Warner bill on military commissions... It's very bad...

Our country ought to stand for certain values, including freedom, fairness, and the rule of law. But we do not stand for these values if we allow this bill to be passed in its current form. We do not stand for freedom if we allow our government to toss people in prison without any recourse at all. We do not stand for fairness if we do not allow them the chance to show that they are innocent, or require that the innocent be set free. And we do not stand for the rule of law if we allow our government to strip people of the right to argue that they have committed no act of aggression against us, and thus should not be imprisoned.

Welsh Sheep Poo Paper

Try making some yourself (sheep poo not included)!

Sheep Poo Paper

About That Dream...

Perhaps the dream post seemed pointless. Perhaps it was. But at least if I use the phrase "Banana Chorus" again, you'll know what I was talking about.

And the dream made sense at the time...

Wookie In Waiting

From Talking Points Memo:

Bush's beard? Middle school teacher Gary Weddle pledged he wouldn't shave his beard until bin Laden was captured. Click here to see his very long beard.
-- Josh Marshall

No comment to add.

Music To Soothe The Savage Breast

Two songs to promote. The first I think is by Harry Shearer, and dates from the first Bush-Kerry "Hard Work" debate. It is a version of the classic jazz piece. I don't recall where I got it from, so I'll just make it available from my server.

The second is recent; a song recorded by Rickie Lee Jones, "Have You Had Enough?". A nifty, jazzy campaign song.

I Had A Dream

I had a very strange dream last night, a result no doubt of watching some video of the 9/11 attacks. I didn't have live access to a TV at the time, and don't watch a lot of news, and so missed a lot of the video coverage at the time; it was pretty affecting.

The dream culminated with a large "office" filled with monkeys, all working on a difficult problem. One monkey said, "Banana," and by the end there was an orgiastic frenzy of monkeys all leaping around screaming "Banana! Banana!"

I'm afraid I won't be able to see President Bush speaking again without imagining him saying, "banana", and the Banana Chorus backing him up.

Vote Republican: Or Die!

I saw a TV ad by Nancy Johnson, a congressman (R-CT) running for re-election. It featured a woman who had lost a loved one in the WTC on 9/11. The camera panned from her mournful face across her end table, decorated with a framed picture and a model (!) of the Twin Towers. I thought it was pretty bad, blatantly using this woman's grief for political ends. Then I saw this:

Yep, it's come to this: If you don't vote for the pro-war candidate in your district, you will die. That's literally the message in a new ad that a conservative think tank, The Center For Security Policy, has now released in time for the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11. The ad shows images of the burning Twin Towers and Americans held hostage and concludes by flashing on the screen: "Vote as if your life depends on it. Because it does."

Check it out-- you can see the ad at the above link. It is running, among other places, in Upstate NY.

h/t Atrios (also for the title!)

From Gulag To Gitmo

I've been catching up a bit. Dan Froomkin writes a daily column for the Washington Post online, blogrolled at the right under "White House Briefing." He pulls and comments on various articles and media concerning the White House (duh!) and Administration. Here's a bit concerning President Bush's speech Wednesday, September 6, 2006, when he disclosed (acknowledged) the existence of those "secret" overseas prisons:

A skeptical view on what Bush said yesterday suggests that under the cover of some impressive-sounding but fragmentary and in some cases dubious disclosures, the president was actually making some very controversial demands.

He was, in fact, calling for the CIA to continue to be allowed to use interrogation tactics that many people would reasonably consider torture; he was demanding retroactive legal immunity for American interrogators who used tactics that many people would reasonably consider torture; he was calling for the unprecedented admission of coerced evidence in an American legal proceeding; and after all those years of refusing to give Congress any role in this matter, he was insisting that they take action in a matter of days.

What has become of us, as many have said before me, when we are actually debating the proper use of torture! Shouldn't that be a rather brief debate? What about holding prisoners without any of the basic rights we take for granted? What about ignoring the Geneva Convention? Who could have imagined any such discussion just a few years ago?

Communicate

The previous post is one of those things that slip under the radar of most people. You know, and I know, that everything the Bush administration does is subsumed by the political imperative; nothing bad must ever be admitted. President Bush is one of, if not the Worst President Ever (a blog commonplace, abbreviated WPE). His is not just a case of maladministration, but of active and intentional transformation of the government to suit his agenda.

How to communicate this to the mass of Americans not obsessively following politics as we do (I'm making an assumption, here)? Get out and talk about it: at the water-cooler, at get-togethers; make it part of the common conversation. Griping amongst ourselves is not going to do it.

My neighbor is my gauge; she is a stay-at-home mother going to school (off-and-on) to become a nurse. She doesn't follow current events. It's hard to speak of elections to her; she votes as her husband tells her to. If I can get through to her in a casual way, without haranguing her or turning her off to the whole idea, then I feel that progress is being made: perhaps her new-found attitude will percolate out to friends and relatives. And so on, and so on...

Creative bookkeeping, bodycount edition

(as opposed to "bodycount addition")
Gee, things are looking up in Baghdad, aren't they? Violence is waaaay down:

This article via Atrios of Eschaton

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Johnson declined to provide an actual number for the U.S. tally of August deaths or for July, when the Baghdad city morgue counted a record 1,855 violent deaths.

Violent deaths for August, a morgue official told McClatchy Newspapers on Friday, totaled 1,526, a 17.7 percent decline from July and about the same as died violently in June...

My First Post

Welcome to my blog. Why not, everyone else has one. I do a lot of online reading, and end up sending links and comments to a small circle of friends. I'm sure they appreciate that I have ample time to do so while they are hard at work (who wouldn't?), but perhaps it would be better to just post my links here instead.

Don't expect too much in the way of original thought; by the time I catch up to this stuff others have said it better, and I'll just link to them.

I will, however, add such trivial thoughts as cross my mind on occasion, to relieve the monotony.

Enjoy!