The Weekly Wash (Premier)

I have an acquaintance, who shall remain nameless until permission to reveal is granted, who sends me weekly week-end op-ed roundups he/she calls the "wash". I intend to make it part of this blog, beginning today. It is usually comprised of New York Times columnists, which is the case today. Note these opinions do not always reflect my own (especially Mr. F):



July 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Left Behind Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I’d like to say that there’s a real dialogue taking place about the state of the U.S. economy, but the discussion leaves a lot to be desired. In general, the conversation sounds like this:
Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.”
Informed economist: “But it’s not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well.”
Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.”
To a large extent, this dialogue of the deaf reflects Upton Sinclair’s principle: it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But there’s also an element of genuine incredulity. Many observers, even if they acknowledge the growing concentration of income in the hands of the few, find it hard to believe that this concentration could be proceeding so rapidly as to deny most Americans any gains from economic growth.
Yet newly available data show that that’s exactly what happened in 2004.
Why talk about 2004, rather than more recent experience? Unfortunately, data on the distribution of income arrive with a substantial lag; the full story of what happened in 2004 has only just become available, and we won’t be able to tell the full story of what’s happening right now until the last year of the Bush administration. But it’s reasonably clear that what’s happening now is the same as what happened then: growth in the economy as a whole is mainly benefiting a small elite, while bypassing most families.
Here’s what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?
The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.
There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn’t just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.
The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There’s a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better — like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.
In short, it’s a great economy if you’re a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
Can anything be done to spread the benefits of a growing economy more widely? Of course. A good start would be to increase the minimum wage, which in real terms is at its lowest level in half a century.
But don’t expect this administration or this Congress to do anything to limit the growing concentration of income. Sometimes I even feel sorry for these people and their apologists, who are prevented from acknowledging that inequality is a problem by both their political philosophy and their dependence on financial support from the wealthy. That leaves them no choice but to keep insisting that ordinary Americans — who have, in fact, been bypassed by economic growth — just don’t understand how well they’re doing.

July 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Kidnapping of Democracy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
When you watch the violence unfolding in the Middle East today it is easy to feel that you’ve been to this movie before and that you know how it ends — badly. But we actually have not seen this movie before. Something new is unfolding, and we’d better understand it.
What we are seeing in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon is an effort by Islamist parties to use elections to pursue their long-term aim of Islamizing the Arab-Muslim world. This is not a conflict about Palestinian or Lebanese prisoners in Israel. This is a power struggle within Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq over who will call the shots in their newly elected “democratic’’ governments and whether they will be real democracies.
The tiny militant wing of Hamas today is pulling all the strings of Palestinian politics, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah Shiite Islamic party is doing the same in Lebanon, even though it is a small minority in the cabinet, and so, too, are the Iranian-backed Shiite parties and militias in Iraq. They are not only showing who is boss inside each new democracy, but they are also competing with one another for regional influence.
As a result, the post-9/11 democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world is being hijacked. Yes, basically free and fair elections were held in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Iraq. Yes, millions turned out to vote because the people of the Arab-Muslim world really do want to shape their own futures.
But the roots of democracy are so shallow in these places and the moderate majorities so weak and intimidated that we are getting the worst of all worlds. We are getting Islamist parties who are elected to power, but who insist on maintaining their own private militias and refuse to assume all the responsibilities of a sovereign government. They refuse to let their governments have control over all weapons. They refuse to be accountable to international law (the Lebanese-Israeli border was ratified by the U.N.), and they refuse to submit to the principle that one party in the cabinet cannot drag a whole country into war.
“Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinians all held democratic elections,’’ said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, “and the Western expectation was that these elections would produce legitimate governments that had the power to control violence and would assume the burden of responsibility of governing. ... But what happened in all three places is that we [produced] governments which are sovereign only on paper, but not over a territory.’’
Then why do parties like Hamas and Hezbollah get elected? Often because they effectively run against the corruption of the old secular state-controlled parties, noted Mr. Ezrahi. But once these Islamists are in office they revert to serving their own factional interests, not those of the broad community.
Boutros Harb, a Christian Lebanese parliamentarian, said: “We must decide who has the right to make decisions on war and peace in Lebanon. Is that right reserved for the Lebanese people and its legal institutions, or is the choice in the hands of a small minority of Lebanese people?”
Ditto in the fledgling democracies of Palestine and Iraq. When cabinet ministers can maintain their own militias and act outside of state authority, said Mr. Ezrahi, you’re left with a “meaningless exercise’’ in democracy/state building.
Why don’t the silent majorities punish these elected Islamist parties for working against the real interests of their people? Because those who speak against Hamas or Hezbollah are either delegitimized as “American lackeys’’ or just murdered, like Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.
The world needs to understand what is going on here: the little flowers of democracy that were planted in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories are being crushed by the boots of Syrian-backed Islamist militias who are desperate to keep real democracy from taking hold in this region and Iranian-backed Islamist militias desperate to keep modernism from taking hold.
It may be the skeptics are right: maybe democracy, while it is the most powerful form of legitimate government, simply can’t be implemented everywhere. It certainly is never going to work in the Arab-Muslim world if the U.S. and Britain are alone in pushing it in Iraq, if Europe dithers on the fence, if the moderate Arabs cannot come together and make a fist, and if Islamist parties are allowed to sit in governments and be treated with respect — while maintaining private armies.
The whole democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world is at stake here, and right now it’s going up in smoke.
And another view. I still believe that Iz has gone too far, but it has become clear to me that I do not have a firm understanding of all the factions and forces at work in the Middle East.

July 14, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Israel’s Invasion, Syria’s War
By MICHAEL YOUNG
Beirut, Lebanon
ISRAEL’S incursion into Lebanon after the kidnapping on Wednesday of two Israeli soldiers by the militant group Hezbollah is far more than another flare-up on a tense border. It must also be seen as a spinoff of a general counterattack against American and Israeli power in the region by Iran and Syria, operating through sub-state actors like Hezbollah and the Palestinian organization Hamas.
If America and its Security Council partners are smart, however, they may be able to use this crisis to further their security goals in the Middle East, and to help Lebanon climb out of its political morass.
This is not to say that the cycle of attack and retaliation between Hezbollah and Israel is merely a proxy war. The two sides have long engaged in a conflict in southern Lebanon — albeit, since Israel’s pullout in 2000, one mostly limited to a disputed territory known as the Shebaa Farms and contained by unwritten rules. This week, however, Hezbollah transgressed three political lines.
The first was its expansion of military operations outside the Shebaa area. While Hezbollah has done this before — even killing some Israeli troops — the latest operation was certain to be intolerable to an Israeli government already dealing with the kidnapping of another soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, by Hamas in Gaza.
A second line that Hezbollah crossed was its evident coordination of strategy with Hamas; this went well beyond its stated aim of simply defending Lebanon and left Israel feeling it was fighting a war on two fronts.
The third line crossed was domestic. By unilaterally taking Lebanon into a conflict with Israel, Hezbollah sought to stage a coup d’état against the anti-Syrian parliamentary and government majority, which opposes the militant group’s adventurism.
Hezbollah holds seats in the 128-member Parliament but has an uneasy relationship with the majority, which has been on the defensive as Syria has tried to reassert control over Lebanon after its military withdrawal last year. Hezbollah hoped to humiliate the anti-Syrian politicians by forcing them to endorse the kidnappings and showing how little control the government has over the party.
Israel wants Lebanon to pay an onerous price for its ambiguity on Hezbollah: it has imposed an air and sea blockade and is launching air attacks well into Lebanon, including several on the Beirut airport. Pointedly, however, Israel has failed to mention the regional facet of the crisis. Israeli officials have left Syria out of their condemnations, in jarring contrast to the Bush administration’s statements that have rightly highlighted Iranian and Syrian responsibility for Hezbollah’s behavior.
Iran, of course, has long bankrolled Hezbollah, and the Israeli government said yesterday it feared the two kidnapped soldiers were being taken to Tehran. But Syria is the nexus of regional instability, giving shelter to several of the most intransigent Palestinian militants, transferring arms to Hezbollah, and undermining Lebanon’s frail sovereignty.
Israel can brutalize Lebanon all it wants, but unless something is done to stop Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, from exporting instability to buttress his despotic regime, little will change.
Once the Israelis end their offensive, Hezbollah will regroup and continue to hold Lebanon hostage through its militia, arguably the most effective force in the country. Hamas leaders in Damascus will continue derailing any negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. And Syria will continue to eat away at Lebanese independence, reversing the gains of last year when hundreds of thousands of Lebanese marched against Syrian hegemony.
It would be far smarter for Israel, and America, to profit from Hezbollah’s having perhaps overplayed its hand. The popular mood here is one of extreme anger that the group has provoked a conflict Lebanon cannot win. The summer tourism season, a rare source of revenue for a country on the financial ropes, has been ruined. Even Hezbollah’s core supporters, the Shiite Muslims in the south, cannot be happy at seeing their towns and villages turned again into a killing field.
What to do? While the United Nations has been ineffective in its efforts toward Middle East peace, it may be the right body to intervene here, if only because it has the cudgel of Security Council Resolution 1559, which was approved in 2004 and, among other things, calls for Hezbollah’s disarmament.
The five permanent Security Council members, perhaps at this weekend’s Group of 8 meeting, should consider a larger initiative based on the resolution that would include: a proposal for the gradual collection of Hezbollah’s weapons; written guarantees by Israel that it will respect Lebanese sovereignty and pull its forces out of the contested Lebanese land in the Shebaa Farms; and the release of prisoners on both sides. Such a deal could find support among Lebanon’s anti-Syrian politicians, would substantially narrow Hezbollah’s ability to justify retaining its arms, and also send a signal to Syria and particularly Iran that the region is not theirs for the taking.
One important thing: No Lebanese government could legitimately help to advance such a plan if Israel were to try to, as its army chief of staff put it this week, “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years.” Israel must cease its attacks and let diplomacy take over.
Michael Young is the opinion editor of The Daily Star in Lebanon and a contributing editor at Reason magazine.
A reasonable voice:
To the Editor:
Israel’s bombings of Gaza and Lebanon are an irrational and disproportionate reaction to the capture of three Israeli soldiers and the killing of three others.
So far, more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza and nearly as many Lebanese have been killed, hundreds have been wounded, and the bombing of critical infrastructure will surely kill far more.
This incredibly disproportionate use of force demonstrates a macabre equation where each Israeli life appears to be worth the lives of dozens of innocent Palestinians and Lebanese.
By threatening to “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years,” Israel appears willing to punish millions of Lebanese for the actions of a few militants.
The time has come to end United States support for the oppressive, out-of-control government of Israel.
Eric Ettlinger
Berkeley, Calif., July 13, 2006

Losing Their Way

Its got to be tough being a mainstream, reasonable, rational Republican these days.

The party which embraced fiscal restraint is now spending like a drunken sailor, charging it to our kids' and grandkids' (and so on) credit cards. And by selling this historic debt to foreign governments, some of whom are a looming threat, they're compromising national security to a far greater degree than a group of al-Qaida operatives. Even worse, this deficit spending is not being used for investments in our future, such as infrastructure improvements, education, or health care. It's instead being pissed away to bloated defense contractors and other DOD waste that is well beyond most citizens' imagination. We spend more in sheer dollars for "defense" than the rest of the world combined, and it's increasing every year. This is on the back of ever shrinking expenditures on education and social safety net programs such as Medicare.

The party that self-identifies with morals, principles and values is now mired in scandal, hypocrisy, corruption and a cynical regard for the law. And since we have the fox guarding the henhouse, there's not likely to be any serious oversight in the near future.

The party which used to be for smaller government, state's rights and a reduction of federal intrusion into individuals' lives has now built the largest government infrastructure in the nation's history (per capita spending). It is in the process of building huge bureaucratic organizations spying on ordinary citizens to an extent that even George Orwell could not have imagined, away from the prying eyes of a bipartisan congress and pesky federal judges ensuring virtually no meaningful oversight. They govern with a fascist flair, creating knee-jerk policies which will do little to stop well funded al-Qaida operatives, but will continue to shrivel the rights of law-abiding Americans. State's rights? Can you say Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage?

The party of bold, forward thinking ideas has now degenerated into a three-word culture, winning elections solely by sliming their opponent with misleading information and outright lies. "Stay the course", "cut and run", "tax and spend", "war on terror", "September the 11th" and many other phrases that play well on Fox "News" do not describe sound, intelligent public policy.

Lastly, the party which claims to be the gatekeepers for our security has accomplished just the opposite due to the unprovoked invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab country and our "my way or the highway" attitude toward the rest of the world on this and other issues, according to many ex-generals and other non-partisan security experts. And just as important as what they are doing is what they are not doing, the behind the scenes blocking & tackling like tightening cargo port security.

To the group I identify in the opening? It's no longer enough to say "this is not my Republican party", hold your nose and pull the "R" lever hoping you might actually get to pay a couple of bucks less tax someday or because you believe that bigger international problems just require bigger bombs (that's the naive notion, not the other way around). This is not just a couple of bad apples in the West Wing, this is Senate leadership, this is House leadership and it is increasingly State leadership. This is your party in the 21st century, denial is futile.

This is not the party of Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, or even George the first for that matter. And it's not going away soon. This is your party, that's the name on the door, and you're enabling it to thrive and grow. Before you vote this fall, I'd ask you to read two of the most poignant and learned speeches of the 20th century and decide if the current bunch really represents you: Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1953 "Chance for Peace" speech and his 1960 "Military Industrial Complex" speech. He was a real Republican, and a true American.

The Color Purple

I brought this up in a blog last year, but think it bears repeat scrutiny. Look at the map to the left (taken from the RNC web site) and what do you see (besides a greatly exaggerated depiction of red dominance)?

With few exceptions, all the major population centers in the US are blue, or dominated by progressive voters. The vast majority of lightly populated rural areas are dominated by regressive voters.

Why?

My theory?

Major population centers tend to have much greater access to social, cultural, and political diversity through the arts, lectures, media and educational institutions thereby exposing the population to greater thought diversity (not to mention real life outside of these United States). This results in more nuanced and considered opinions. And I also believe these areas are more exposed to the effects of poverty, as well as the work of charitable organizations.

Your thoughts (besides calling me an elitist)?

New NEW To The Page

Check out the "Cost of the War" counter at the bottom of the left sidebar (after "About Me"). I plan to leave it there for awhile, so if you ever want to remind your rightie friends how much moolah we're pissin' away on a daily basis there (not to mention the human life) feel free to come back and check it out as often as you like!

UPDATE: New, improved! Now with W time-left-in-office countdown clock!!

Vegas East

Castro Convertible

Who was the first to conquer space?
It's incontrovertible!
That the first to conquer living space
Was the Castro Convertible.
Who conquers space with fine design?
And saves you money all the time?
Who's tops in the convertible line?
Castro Convertible!!

Colbert Fever

You know you have a real story when folks are still talking about an event a week and a half after it happened. In modern times we discuss today what the entertainment media told us to talk about last night or this morning, then tomorrow dutifully change to the assigned topic du jour, yesterday's news a faded memory.

So now a week and a half we still have the pundits parsing the now famous Steven Colbert speech at the annual White House Correspondents dinner in D.C. One of the initial reactions right after the event was the predictable righteous indignation of the regressive talkers as they tried to kill that story early on. Shameful, disrespectful, not funny, and on and on went the critics. Excuse me?????!! Not funny???!! Or maybe did most of it go over your head?

But then stodgy, buttoned-down CSPAN awakens to find they actually have a hit on their hands!

And so Mr. Colbert has gone from emerging sidekick to the toast of the town. Well, toast of half of the town (or is it 69% now?).

The No Fact Zone

Not sure what the AP was thinking when they invited Stephen Colbert to be the keynote speaker at the White House Correspondents annual dinner last Saturday. As Jon Stewart put it, "Apparently he [Colbert] was under the impression that they'd hired him to do what he does every night on television". Colbert has come of age, the speech was nothing short of brilliant. He thoroughly spanked the DC press crowd, plus W, did it to their faces and on their turf. Enjoy (Update: As of 5/8/06 CSPAN has forced YouTube and ifilm to take down the Colbert speech. Here's the version the GOOGLE cut the exclusive deal for):
Colbert WHCD Speech
The Story
Jon Stewart's Thoughts

Ooo-ooo That Smell!

Um, can I please take a look at that Kyoto thingy again? Um, uh, I may have ovelooked something.......

Just Say No!

Reuters reports that John Kerry is deciding whether or not to run for president in '08. Senator Kerry, ponder no more! You are a wonderful statesman, and a dedicated public servant. And you'd probably make a very good president. But you blow as a candidate. Don't subject us to that, or another humiliating defeat again.

Tweak!

It would be amusing if it was not so sad. The guy whose only other job before the current one was as the governor of a state. And now he's trying to effectively deal with rabble like this. God help us every one.

BTW, is this a bad wig or a bad comb-over??

Flotsam and Jetsam

We have a mixed bag today. Among the gems:

• W pretending to "shake things up"
• Scotty Mac is tired of lying
• "Ahm the desahder!" (dejavu from the Iraq invasion runup)

I originally had 5 items, but decided one might be offensive to our female readers and the other was immature: letting a rabid regressive lure me into his lair of anger and hate (in other words, "their" comfort zone). Enjoy!

"I think we need a fresh start..."

There seems to be no end to the supply of retired military generals lining up for their turn at the microphone to lambaste Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's performance leading the Pentagon, and the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Just as the buzz on the airwaves and blogosphere was reaching a fevered pitch this afternoon over yesterday's Washington Post article quoting Maj. General John Batiste as saying (among other things) "I think we need a fresh start", CNN reports that Maj. General Charles Swannak has told them that "I really believe that we need a new secretary of defense because Secretary Rumsfeld carries too much baggage" in this interview today.

To my knowledge this is way beyond unprecedented. This makes 6 or 7 retired military commanders who have made highly critical public statements about how Rumsfeld has prosecuted this war, (and in some cases have questioned the war itself) and have called for the removal of him and those he surrounds himself with. And the fact that this man has claimed to have twice submitted his resignation to W, and was twice turned down, if true, implicates the president in this mismanagement as well.

Remarkably, of the three military leaders who have spoken out in Rumsfeld's defense over the last year or so, two still reported to him at the time they did so. And essentially all they say is that he works hard, is smart & efficient, and knows a lot of stuff. Sounds like the perfect sole qualifications for a guy leading a $500B+ (annual) military operation. They do not speak to the charges of poor judgement, not listening to the guys who know how this business works, and unhealthy cronyism.

I can't even in my wildest imagination think of how the wing nuts on the right are going to spin this.

UPDATES: New York Times weighs in, and, another day, another general

Planning Armageddon

Question: What's more dangerous than a deranged, deceitful leader that is up for re-election? Answer: A deranged, deceitful leader that isn't.

In a new story in the New Yorker, an investigative journalist with a near impeccable track record dealing in truth tells us that the smash & pillage crowd currently in the West Wing are seriously planning a military attack on Iran, allegedly to try and terminate their nuclear weapons program. The real kicker? According to Seymour Hersh (who brought us, among other things, the first news of the Abu Graib parties) part of the plan involves the use of tactical nuclear (or "nucular" as they'd say) weapons against Iran to accomplish this.

Unlike the invasion/occupation "freedom's on the march" style operation a la Iraq (how's that one going again?), this would involve clandestine special forces and airstrikes only. I realize this crowd acts solely on single-minded, blind ideology and does not learn anything beyond political lessons. But I hope and pray that there will be enough representatives in congress who recognize that this action will only make the US and the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place for us all and will muster the mettle to stop it.

Here's another view from the Washington Post.

Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead (or "Tommy, We Hardly Knew Ya!")

Or is he? Is he more dangerous (& wealthier!) in private life without those pesky ethical roadblocks and whatnot?
He obviously expects to be caught up in his little sleeze web eventually, what with the plea bargains and all. Amazing how quickly the regressives got snared in their absolute power corruption. And the "national security" lemmings would probably vote for them all over again.

Weighing General Opinion

In yet another sobering interview, former CentCom commander General Anthony Zinni offered his assessment of the Iraq invasion and occupation again, this time on yesterday's Meet the Press (click on page 5 and scroll down to get to the Zinni transcript, McCain the chameleon is first). It wasn't pretty. A sample:

MR. RUSSERT: I want to bring you back to a book you co-wrote with Tom Clancy called “Battle Ready." And you wrote this: “In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption.” That’s very serious.
GEN. ZINNI: Yes.

And:

"I saw the—what this town is known for: spin, cherry-picking facts, using metaphors to evoke certain emotional responses, or, or shading the, the context. We, we know the mushroom clouds and, and the other things that were all described that the media’s covered well. I saw on the ground, though, a sort of walking away from 10 years worth of planning."

I'm sure the rightie airwaves are buzzing today with talk from claims of "the liberal media", to allegations about Zinni preferring woman's underwear, to "al Qaeda must be smiling with this support". Discredit both messengers, but never, ever have an intelligent, civil discussion about the subject.

But I challenge any regressive (or anyone who "supports" the war) to consider the following: General Zinni is at least the 4th or 5th retired high-ranking American general to publicly criticize the Iraq war for either it's wisdom, execution, or both. These are the guys who understand fully both the political and practical aspects of war. I am unaware of any similar individual who has spoken out publicly in support of the invasion and its execution.

I would also challenge you to read the interview in it's entirety (and the 60 Minutes one cited below) with an open mind. At that point try to make a cogent argument about the flaws in these leaders' positions. And let's forget red herrings, like he's trying to sell a book, it's the liberal media, etc., etc. The only constructive, factual, areas we should concern ourselves with in refuting this piece are the following:

1. Has MSNBC somehow edited his comments so as to have presented them out of context or contrary to his intentions?
2. Is General Zinni qualified to make such assessments?
3. Are these just the personal opinions of 4 or 5 disgruntled former generals, and do not reflect the real situation?

Given the above (as well as this transcript from a 60 Minutes piece 2 years ago), if you can make a sound, rational, logical counterargument based upon provable fact, then I'm all ears.....

Note: One could plausibly argue that W was honestly misled by his advisors. I don't buy that, but think its a valid supposition. However, one can't argue that the war has been botched, and that the guy solely responsible for its success or failure, Donald Rumsfeld, still has his job. And that failure rests squarely on one man's shoulders.

WATCH IT HERE

I'm So Sorry!

I've been neglectful of late about my posts, many distractions. There's lots going on, and will post one or more of the ideas I've been developing tomorrow (let me know if you have one or two ideas). In the meantime, look at some of the crazy things going on. Or, the archives, plus my favorite past month of postings.

Thanks for your visit, and, as always, I am grateful to get your comments below.

Straight Talk from the RNC

I'm sure Democratic Senator Russ Feingold knew just what was coming down the tracks following his March 13th introduction on the senate floor of a resolution to censure George Bush for his illegal domestic spying program. Now I don't know what the senator's motivation was for this move, whether it's purely political, idealistic, practical, or some combination of those. But I'll take him at his word that he is doing the citizens' work; he seems to be a good guy. On the surface it seems like a sane though largely symbolic attempt at accountability.

And yes, the backlash was predictable: Frist feigning monstrous shock & surprise, (as though Feingold had suggested a firing squad), angry talking heads like the O'Reillys of the world painting the good senator as a gay/lesbian terrorist communist alien. Then the Prince of Darkness, Dick, mumbling something about al Qaeda being the enemy, not W.

The most amusing, however, is a radio ad released yesterday to stations in the senator's state of Wisconsin by the RNC. One thing this crowd does consistently: just when you think they can't demonstrate greater chutzpah and hauteur, they prove you wrong. The ad frames Senator Feingold as wanting to "publicly reprimand President Bush for pursuing suspected members of al Qaeda". The new euphemism for illegal wiretaps is the "Terrorist Surveillance Program". And it lists a hopelessly unverifiable number of thwarted terrorist plots as a result of Mr. Bush's programs. Of course, there's also no way to measure whether or not we could been just as effective without these programs. It admonishes the good senator for being "more interested in censuring the president than protecting our freedoms" (protecting real freedoms is exactly what he's trying to do!!!). One thought concludes "Is this how Democrats plan to win the War on Terror?". Well, no, they probably think getting bogged down in a country for 3+ years with no end in sight is the most effective way to go.

Its no wonder some Americans don't consider the real facts and reach reasonable conclusions prior to entering the ballot box with this misleading tripe suffocating them every day.

Who Cares?

It would be amusing if it were not so sad. I'm talking of course not about the ongoing Iraqi occupation, or the illegal domestic spying, or even Dick Cheney shooting friends in the face. I'm talking about the use of banned steroids in sports; not the seeming increase in their use (or their reporting), but rather the fact that we seem to care. We have serious talking head analysis about it, testimony under oath in congress, and serious water cooler banter about whether or not so and so deserves his record or to be inducted into this or that hall of fame.

I could not care less.

If they want to do the drugs, let them. Let them take as much as they want! These are games they are playing folks, games! They are not issues that seriously impact everyday people's lives (unless they're losing wagers on certain games!). How about congress and the talking heads focusing on things that can improve the lives of struggling workers, like maybe fixing health care? Let the games crowd worry about themselves.

Serious Brass

I swore I was going to leave the guy alone for awhile, what with his low poll numbers and having to take a few on the chin for the team in an election year and all (though I pessimistically suspect that if there was a presidential election today the same group of wackos and lemmings would sweep him back into the Oval Office). But W (or "Commander Cuckoo Bananas" as Homer Simpson referred to him) rose to yet another new height of chutzpah and hypocrisy today in a speech to the National Newspaper Association in DC. With a perfectly straight faced he expressed a profound concern about the message sent to the Arab Middle East by broad US opposition to the Dubai ports deal. This, from the guy more disliked globally than any president of the last 100 years. This, from the guy who presided over:

• The unprovoked invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab nation, causing the deaths of over 100,000 innocent civilians
• The imprisonment of over 1,000 Arabs (and others) without due process, representation, or any glimmer of hope of justice (until the Supreme Court shot him down in 2004, at least for Gitmo)
• The systematic abuse and torture of hundreds of Arab prisoners, including sexual and religious humiliation and insults
• The rendition of at least dozens of Arabs to repressive regimes for "questioning"

Yeah, this guy's a freakin' hero in that part of the world, and the pile-on over the ports deal is going to jeopardize all his good work. Wonder how he'd feel about visiting Iraq protected by a security force owned and operated by the Dubai government.
WaPo