At Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, he says there's sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to stand for hours on end - what he terms minute cells 1.8m by 2.4m then quotes officials saying it's 'not quite torture but as close as you can get.’

He said: "The purpose of holding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was and is to put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts, and at the mercy of victors.

"The procedural rules do not prohibit the use of force to coerce prisoners to confess."

Lord Justice Steyn says there's no justice -- Presidential order denies US courts hearing complaints of torture - or that prisoners might be non-combatants -- or foot soldiers who know nothing of al Qaeda.

"The blanket presidential order deprives them all of any rights whatsoever. As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice."

The question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay complies with the minimum international standards for the conduct of fair trials. The answer can be given quite shortly: It is a resounding No."

Just how sleazy was that "15 minute vote that became a 2 hours and 51 minutes vote" arm-twist-a-thon to pass the Medicare bill in the House? Bob Novak (of all people), explains:

During 14 years in the Michigan Legislature and 11 years in Congress, Rep. Nick Smith had never experienced anything like it. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, in the wee hours last Saturday morning, pressed him to vote for the Medicare bill. But Smith refused. Then things got personal.

Smith, self term-limited, is leaving Congress. His lawyer son Brad is one of five Republicans seeking to replace him from a GOP district in Michigan's southern tier. On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat.

The bill providing prescription drug benefits under Medicare would have been easily defeated by Republicans save for the most efficient party whip operation in congressional history. Although President Bush had to be awakened to collect the last two votes, Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Majority Whip Roy Blunt made it that close. ''DeLay the Hammer'' on Saturday morning was hammering fellow conservatives.

Last Friday night, Rep. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania hosted a dinner at the Hunan restaurant on Capitol Hill for 30 Republicans opposed to the bill. They agreed on a scaled-down plan devised by Toomey and Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. It would cover only seniors without private prescription drug insurance, while retaining the bill's authorization of private health savings accounts. First, they had to defeat their president and their congressional leadership.

They almost did. There were only 210 yes votes after an hour (long past the usual time for House roll calls), against 224 no's. A weary George W. Bush, just returned from Europe, was awakened at 4 a.m. to make personal calls to House members.

Republicans voting against the bill were told they were endangering their political futures. Major contributors warned Rep. Jim DeMint they would cut off funding for his Senate race in South Carolina. A Missouri state legislator called Rep. Todd Akin to threaten a primary challenge against him.

Intense pressure, including a call from the president, was put on freshman Rep. Tom Feeney. As speaker of the Florida House, he was a stalwart for Bush in his state's 2000 vote recount. He is the Class of 2002's contact with the House leadership, marking him as a future party leader. But now, in those early morning hours, Feeney was told a ''no'' vote would delay his ascent into leadership by three years -- maybe more.

Feeney held firm against the bill. So did DeMint and Akin. And so did Nick Smith. A steadfast party regular, he has pioneered private Social Security accounts. But he could not swallow the unfunded liabilities in this Medicare bill. The 69-year-old former dairy farmer this week was still reeling from the threat to his son. ''It was absolutely too personal,'' he told me. Over the telephone from Michigan on Saturday, Brad Smith urged his father to vote his conscience.

However, the leadership was picking off Republican dissenters, including eight of 13 House members who signed a Sept. 17 letter authored by Toomey pledging to support only a Medicare bill very different from the measure on the floor Saturday. That raised the Republican total to 216, still two votes short.

The president took to the phone, but at least two Republicans turned him down. Finally, Bush talked Reps. Trent Franks of Arizona (a ninth defector from the Toomey letter) and Butch Otter of Idaho -- into voting ''yes.'' They were warned that if this measure failed, the much more liberal Democratic bill would be brought up and passed.

UPDATE:  Timothy "Chatterbox" Noah over at Slate follows up:

Marc Miller, a Washington attorney who advises clients on ethics issues, told Chatterbox that what Novak described not only looked like "a slam-dunk violation of the bribery law" but probably also included "a smorgasbord of other criminal violations." Rep. Smith, Miller said, "should really be sharing the specifics with the Justice Department."

So, Congressman. Enough with the guessing games. Who tried to bribe you?

FURTHER UPDATE December 3, 2003:  Josh Marshall has a copy of the letter that DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe sent today to Attorney General Ashcroft demanding that he investigate this matter. It will be interesting to see how Ashcroft manages to ignore this. Offering a Congressman a $100,000 bribe on the House floor to switch his vote sure seems illegal, and perhaps is even more morally reprehensible than a terminally ill person smoking a joint to deal with his/her pain -- the kind of thing that Ashcroft usually gets worked up about.

what's really remarkable is that Steyn can crank out 2,000 words about toppling five separate regimes without once acknowledging that the war in Iraq has taught us any lessons. Like, say, that getting rid of a regime is relatively easy compared to installing a new one and that the Bush administration hasn't demonstrated singular competence in this area.

You'd hardly think that even an über-hawk like Steyn would have the chutzpah to ignore this, but he does. We should "accidentally" bomb Syrian targets, we should promote revolution in Iran, we should encourage the House of Saud to tear itself apart, and we should do some unspecified things in Sudan and North Korea — unspecified but presumably nasty. And we should do all of this right now — and without even a nod to what happens after these regimes are toppled or whether we have any chance of controlling post-toppling events.

It's breathtaking. It's almost like the real world doesn't even exist for these guys.

Lest you think Steyn is just some isolated lunatic, recall what Wesley Clark says about the neocons' plans to remake the world:

I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. . . . He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision.

"Bush/Cheney '04:  Four More Wars!" is more than a silly bumper sticker. These guys are nuts.

the news media are hurting our chances. They are dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed, the wounded . . . . Fair enough. But it is not balancing this bad news with "the rest of the story," the progress made daily, the good news. The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy.

U.S. senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Reed spent about 10 hours in Baghdad on Friday and planned another day in Iraq on Saturday after overnighting out of the country.

UPDATE:  DHinMI over at Daily Kos points to this article showing that the Bushies started planning his trip only after learning that Hillary was going:

[Condoleezza Rice] also acknowledged that the missile attack earlier this month on a German DHL cargo plane had almost caused the White House to scrap Bush's visit, which was planned for weeks starting in mid-October.

. . . .

Bush's visit overshadowed a similar one a day later by Senator Hillary Clinton. A source familiar with the planning of her visit said the administration was informed in late September that she would go.

DH in MI's conclusion:

So now it looks like the reason Bush went to Iraq might have been because he was afraid he would be shown up by Hillary Clinton. And even then he would only skulk in and out after dark. He's a craven coward.

Ditto.

Clinton was able to make a day-time trip to Kosovo after that war -- his enthusiastic reception by both troops and locals showing the success of that intervention.

Bush -- he has to visit the country like a thief in the night. Essentially, this trip was an announcement that Iraq is in such bad shape that the military could not protect the life of the President without such deceit.

And PG at En Banc points out that Dubya is way more interested in generating Kodak moments than in doing anything meaningful for the troops:

Increasing veterans' benefits, or getting the international cooperation to replace some U.S. troops with other troops, or actually having Iraq calm down enough that our people aren't dying on a near-daily basis -- those would be worth putting in campaign ads, because they show that this president is a good president, a good leader and policymaker.

This trip reminded us of the kind of person Bush is. And while you can't totally separate the man from the position, I do not see how going to visit the troops for a couple of hours is a sign of Bush's fitness for the presidency. They show that he's a man who will take personal risks to give a great memory.

. . . .

This particular event, on the other hand, can only be used to rebut an argument that Bush is incapable of making the symbolic gestures that show he cares. In the last week, as the criticism of his failure to attend any memorial services for soldiers killed in Iraq has intensified, he has shown that he can make the symbolic gestures. He's met with families of KIAs, and now honored the living troops as well. So this should quash most negative commentary about whether the president can do the symbolism. Obviously, he can.

But I'm still waiting to see the real thing.

Flanked by the two most recognizable U.S. military figures of the recent past — retired generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf — the Republican presidential nominee told a cheering crowd made up largely of veterans and their families that he would create an American military with “good morale, good spirits, well-paid and well-housed.”

“It's time for new leadership in Washington, D.C., that will rebuild the morale of the United States military,” Mr. Bush said at a half-hour rally of supporters in the student union of Wright State University. "

"The GOP nominee said that one of the problems with the Clinton administration's stewardship of the military is that it has overextended the armed forces, sending American troops all over the world “with no clear mission.”

“The mission of the U.S. military is to be ready to win and fight wars, and, in that way, prevent war from happening in the first place,” Mr. Bush said. “The job of the military is not to solve all the difficult diplomatic problems in the world.” 

Mr. Bush promised to work for better housing and better pay for military personnel, to stem the tide of military officers and enlisted men walking away from the armed services instead of re-enlisting.

Their numbers have more than doubled in a decade, to nearly 30 million. Organized as a religious denomination, they would trail only Catholics and Baptists in members.

They are the "nones," named for their response to a question in public opinion polls: "What is your religion, if any?"

Some nones are atheists, others agnostics, still others self-styled dabblers in a variety of faiths and philosophies. Despite their discomfort with organized religion, many consider themselves quite spiritual.

 

. . . .

Whatever the reason, nones grew from 8 percent of the U.S. population in 1990 to more than 14 percent in 2001.

That's the conclusion of religion experts who compared results of the National Survey of Religious Identification, conducted in 1990, and the American Religious Identification Survey, which in 2001 sought to update the earlier poll.

"That makes nones the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, if you think about them as a religious group," said Patricia O'Connell Killen, a professor of religious history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. "We're just coming to grips with the reality that this group even exists."

[A]s my oldest friends can tell you, the truth is that I used to be fairly conservative myself. I come from a working-class family -- my mother's side of the family was in road construction, and my dad's was mostly a farming family, though his father actually was an auto mechanic.

Working-class values, and my belief in blue-collar virtues -- like integrity, decency, hard work, honesty, common sense, and fair play -- all were quite deeply ingrained. When I was younger, I really believed that conservatism best embodied those values.

. . . .

Conservatism, especially in the past 20 years, has come less to represent those old-fashioned values, and instead has become a watchword for rampant, unfettered corporatism. Republicans in Idaho particularly were fond of gutting my state's heritage -- letting "free enterprise" pollute our streams, wipe out fish runs and wildlife habitat, destroy the forests in which I used to hunt and fish -- while proclaiming they were doing so in the name of "liberty." They weren't the party of the little people, despite their pose, which so many people I knew bought into. They were the party of the fat cats who bellied up to the public trough, trashed our lands, and walked away fatter and fancy free.

In the end I realized that, when it came to everyone from personal friends to politicians, ideology mattered a great deal less than the person. The proof, in what is now my entrenched view, lies both in the personal integrity they exhibit and in the kinds of policies they promote. It came to matter less and less to me whether a person was Republican or Democrat; what counted, in a politician especially, was how straightforward and honest they were in dealing with the public, how well they balanced the needs of everyone with the rights of the individual, and most of all, how well they made better the lives of ordinary people.

Moreover, I came distinctly to distrust ideologues -- because, I realized, ideas are more important to them than people. This observation arose first out of personal experience, because most ideologues are likely to reject friendships with those who don't think like them or fit their ideologies. I might be able to maintain a friendship with an ideologue (right or left) for awhile, but inevitably, they would reject me because I didn't fit the mold they wanted to make. Eventually this insight translated to my view of politicians and public figures as well. It has been for some time clear to me that hardened right-wing and left-wing partisans alike place their abstractions well above what happens to ordinary citizens in real life.

. . . .

One of the important things I learned as a cops-and-courts reporter lo these many years ago was something about crime victims: That they often make themselves vulnerable to violent crimes because they are not prepared to deal with people who are sociopathic, or who exhibit antisocial or narcissistic personality disorders, or in some cases outright psychoses. That they project their own normalcy onto these other people -- they really cannot believe that someone else would act in a way substantially different from their own decent, sane base of operations.

In a way, I think this is a large part of what is happening to our national body politic: People in key positions of media and conservative ideological prominence (Coulter, Limbaugh, even Bill O'Reilly) exhibit multiple symptoms of being pathological sociopaths, either antisocial or narcissistic, or a combination of both. And not only their fellow participants in the conservative movement, but mainstream centrists and even liberals are unable to figure out that there is something seriously wrong with these people because they are projecting their own normalcy onto them. They cannot perceive because they cannot believe -- that, above all, these people are not operating within a framework guided by the boundaries of basic decency that restrain most of us.

They are political muggers out of control -- and as their rhetoric encourages both the figurative and physical elimination of liberals, they become ever more likely to actually tread into regions of real violence.

This is why all the talk about liberal incivility is such a joke. For the past decade liberals have been increasingly subjected to a brand of conservative ridicule that has explicitly blamed them for every one of society's ills, and it has come relentlessly and from every quarter of the increasingly politically dominant conservative sphere. Now that rhetoric is reaching a violent pitch -- and if Oklahoma City should have taught us anything, it was the consequences of spreading this kind of hate. Much as conservatives like to argue that liberals are guilty of the same thing, there really is no parallel to this on the left, at least not since the early 1970s.

But you know, if only one person hangs a sign on a freeway overpass, people may just figure he's nuts and not pay any attention to him. And if two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots, and they won't pay attention to them either. But if three people do it -- three, can you imagine, three people walking up on freeway overpasses and hanging up signs and walking away? They may think it's an organization. And can you imagine 50 people a day -- I said 50 people a day -- putting up signs on freeway overpasses and then walking away? Why, they may think it's a movement. And that's just what it is: a freeway overpass anti-massacre movement.* And as Freeway Blogger points out, anybody can join.

* With apologies to Arlo Guthrie.

U.S. officials can’t seem to decide whether the war in Iraq is helping or hurting the overall war on terror. It has long been a dream of many in the Bush administration, especially the neoconservatives in the Pentagon centered on Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, that a democratized Iraq will be both a beacon and a base in the fight against radical Islam. But some senior officials worry, though usually not out loud, that the war could backfire. A leaked memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointedly asked whether Islamic religious schools, fueled by anti-Western rage, are creating terrorists faster than American soldiers can kill or capture them.

Although the administration likes to say that the war in Iraq and the war on terror are inseparable, the former has almost certainly diverted resources from the latter. Arabic translators, always in short supply, are in demand to interrogate Iraqi prisoners and help American soldiers talk to the locals. Meanwhile, in Washington, transcripts of electronic intercepts of possible terrorist conversations pile up, unread and untranslated for weeks. Similarly, many Special Operations soldiers who had been chasing through the mountains of Afghanistan looking for bin Laden and his followers were shifted over to Iraq to spend months fruitlessly searching for weapons of mass destruction.

Administration officials insist that they have not been robbing Peter to pay Paul in the war on terror. Much of what the CIA knows about Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists comes from other intelligence services. The Egyptians or Jordanians are much more likely to get inside an Islamic terror network than the Americans. Countries that don’t always observe democratic niceties sometimes have more effective interrogation methods (the Egyptians have been known to closely question a suspect’s family members). The CIA has a pipeline, lubricated by large amounts of cash, to the secret police in various Middle Eastern countries.

Still, the war in Iraq has not helped foster these special relationships. The security services of Middle Eastern despots are not enthusiastic about promises of democratic change coming from Bush, who made clear in his speech last week in England that America would push even its allies to become more democratic. After 9/11, Syrian intelligence began working with the CIA against a common enemy, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which wanted to both overthrow the Assad regime and help Al Qaeda attack the United States. But, intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK, the neocons in the Pentagon have been undermining that relationship by accusing (without much proof) the Syrians of encouraging jihadists to cross into Iraq and of hiding Saddam’s WMD inside Syria.

So far, Turkey has been America’s most constant public ally among Muslim nations in the Middle East. Turkey is a bridge to the West, with strong economic and military ties to Europe and the United States. It has long been the most secular of Islamic countries and the friendliest toward Israel. All of which marks Turkey as a target for extremists. Last week a Qaeda Web site challenged Turkey to leave behind the "Crusaders" and rejoin Islam.

The responsibility for the suicide bombings was claimed by a Turkish radical fringe group called the Islamic Eastern Raiders’ Front (IBDA-C). Driven underground by Turkey’s violent repression of Islamic fanaticism in the ’90s, some Turkish extremists showed up in Qaeda terrorist-training camps in Afghanistan or joined the jihad in Chechnya or Bosnia. Just before they self-immolated, two of the Istanbul bombers had flown to Dubai, a crossroads in the Gulf sometimes used by terrorist planners, including the ones who staged 9/11. Did the Turks receive money, weapons and instruction from some higher authority? Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s brainy number two, has written that jihadists should go after softer, smaller targets if the big ones are too hard to hit. Al-Zawahiri has also counseled patience. True holy warriors measure time by the century.

Melanie draws attention to that last sentence. This is a long-term battle. To me that suggests that we should be putting more effort into winning hearts and minds in the Islamic world instead of trying to kill everyone who doesn't like us. That policy sure hasn't worked for Israel, from whom we're now taking lessons. And it sure isn't working for us in Iraq.

The events of 9/11 were a new and dangerous form of terrorism — "terrorism not meant to stimulate political concessions but to destroy our way of life," notes John Chipman, head of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. We had to react, but we must stop overreacting. Terrorists win when they prevent us from enjoying and spreading our values. We defeat them not just by how we react, but by how we don't react.

No one else who filed late would be cut any slack whatsoever, and there is no reason Bush should be. Rules are rules. This incident demonstrates once again both the Bushies' utter incompetence (in scheduling the convention without realizing the problem) and their incredible arrogance (in demanding that the states change their laws to accommodate them, rather than rescheduling the convention to make it legal). It also demonstrates what wusses the Democrats are. If the Democrats had scheduled their convention too late to get their candidate on the ballot, do you think all the Republican legislators would have been bending over backwards to change their laws? Not likely.

Clinton got beaten for Governor after a vicious negative campaign that he tried to rise above. He attributes his comeback to a new philosophy about negative ads, "when someone hits you on the head with a hammer, you take a meat cleaver and chop their hand off." We have to stop whining about how Bush is being mean and start chopping his hand off.

Copyright 1991 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian (London)

March 28, 1991

LENGTH: 1101 words

HEADLINE: US fights shy of joining in Iraq civil war: Despite the scenes of horror, the appeals from the Kurdish and Shi'ite rebels will still fall on deaf ears

'No one can read about what's going on there without feeling a great sense of sympathy for what's going on. But that doesn't mean it is in our power to straighten it out. It's a mess that, to be a little harsh about it, is to some extent of their creation, and they are going to have to come up with a solution', the Under-secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, said yesterday.

The simple fact is that a guerilla war is being fought in Iraq, that the US was misled via an utterly ridiculous ideology and a lack of hard facts into the conflict; that US ignorance of the situation before, during and after our arrival on the scene was and is boundless; and that the US is bogged down in Iraq for as long as anyone can foresee with a steady number of casualties reminding us everday of the quagmire, the avoidable quagmire, that the US government perpetrated both on Iraq, and on its own people.

Just like Vietnam.

The first question I asked was the one that scores of our decent, hard-working readers asked me at the Beachcomber bar in Torbay Sands caravan site last summer: Is the world a safer place after the Iraq War?

GEORGE W BUSH: You joking buddy? Twenty-three dead in Istanbul, five Black Hawks down in four weeks, 30 attacks a day on coalition forces in Iraq, Israel mired deeper in bloodshed, London brought to a standstill for fear of an al-Qaeda attack, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden still at large. A safer place? You kidding. Why do you think ah'm asking the Queen to gimme iron curtains in my bedroom?

BRIAN READE: Iraq is turning into your new Vietnam, just as we predicted, isn't it?

GWB: You betcha. You were bang on the money. Listen up, more US troops have been killed during this war than in the first three years of Nam.

And that's from our own Defence Department. So far we've had 417 killed in the past seven months, which is more than died in Nam between 1962 and 1964. Ah'm in deep doo-doo.

BR: If, as expected, you pull out of Iraq to win re-election, does that mean that the 52 Britons killed over there died in vain?

GWB: That's one way of looking at it, ah s'pose. They died to give Iraq a secure future but a far more important future is at stake. Mine. And Donnie Rumsfeld's and Condoleezza's.

Us Republicans can't have body bags flying home in the run-up to next year's election. So we're outta there. But they didn't die totally in vain. They made a lot of Party donors very rich.

BR: Are you referring to the fact that you have made Iraq a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, causing massive unemployment as you sold off the public sector?

GWB: Sure. On September 19, we enacted the now infamous Order 39. It announced that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised; decreed that foreign firms (mainly ours) can retain 100 per cent ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move 100 per cent of profits out of Iraq.

BR: Is it true the beneficiaries of the $8 billion rebuilding contracts so far awarded are virtually all American firms and overwhelmingly donors to your re-election campaign?

GWB: You've got it buddy. Washington's Center for Public Integrity said 70 firms who were handed contracts gave more than half a million dollars to my 2000 campaign. Most of the 10 largest contracts went to companies that employed former high-ranking government officials, or executives with close ties to members of Congress.

A $2 billion contract went to oil firm Halliburton, which used to be run by my big pal and Vice President Dick Cheney.

BR: Amazingly, the contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the White House without any competitive bids. Is that usual?

GWB: Since 9/11 we live in unusual times mah friend. I will never forget the smell at Ground Zero in the days that followed...

BR: Meaning?

GWB: Hell, I dunno but it's what I always say when I get a tricky question. What was it again? Oh yeah, giving all the contracts to my backers? It's called rewarding friendship.

That's why I'm coming to Britain, because Tony Blair has been a great friend to me over this war thing.

BR: When exactly did Blair commit himself to your war? After all diplomatic channels had been exhausted?

GWB: Diplo-what? I don't understand. I won Tony over by making Congress give him a standing ovation after 9/11. I could see in his eyes he got drunk on the same power as me.

Then in April 2002, when he stayed in my Texan ranch, he told me the Brits would follow us to war whatever happened. All that UN resolution stuff was just bulls**t.

BR: Do you and Tony pray together?

GWB: Yep. Whenever we see our opinion poll ratings.

BR: Did you know there was no hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction?

GWB: Like I give a s***.

BR: Or that Saddam Hussein had no link to Osama bin Laden?

GWB: Whatever.

BR: Your family has links though, hasn't it? You've done business with them for 25 years, haven't you?

GWB: As my good friend Michael Moore says, the bin Ladens have extensive dealings with our friends. Friends such as Citigroup, General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and the Fremont Group.

The bin Ladens have donated $2 million to my alma mater, Harvard. They own property in Texas, Florida and Massachusetts. In short, they have their hands deep in our pants.

BR: You knew Iraq would descend into chaos but went ahead regardless, didn't you?

GWB: Sure. Yonks ago, the US State Department issued a report called The Future Of Iraq after consulting with 200 experts which forecast everything from the looting to the overt hostility against us. But we ignored it 'cos, hey, whadda they know?

BR: You famously said when you gave the order to go to war: "I feel good." Do you still today?

GWB: Six months after the war the country is still without a regular power supply. Sabotage has destroyed about 700 transmission centres. The whole reconstruction effort is foundering under allegations of favouritism and corruption.

Congress has gone ape over my demand for another $87 billion and more than half of Americans say they can't rely on me in a crisis.

Now I have to come to Britain to send back pictures of me looking like a world statesman when most of you Limeys hate mah guts and thousands are gonna tell me so. Would you feel good?

BR: What will you be giving Britain as a reward for our help in the war? Will you drop steel tariffs, release our citizens in Guantanamo Bay, adhere to the Kyoto Treaty?

GWB: Erm, kinda nope.

BR: You don't really give a monkeys about the rest of the world, do you?

GWB: The rest of the world just outside Texas, yep. Because I need it to vote for me. The world outside America? Uh-un.

BR: Do you have plans to liberate any other country run by a despotic regime?

GWB: Let me tell you this. If people are getting slaughtered and tortured by fanatics running nations where only cabbages or rice grow, they've got nothing to worry about.

But if there's oil there, we will unleash all of our awesome might to liberate it. And that's a promise folks.

Everything Mr. Bush did in London reinforced the idea that this was a trip made not so much to thank the British people for their friendship, but to send a message to the voters back home that he was at ease as a world leader.

The White House spared Mr. Bush from having to endure a session with the rowdy Parliament and flew him by helicopter over the protesting rabble, who think a bullying Bush administration dragged Britain into the war under false pretenses. (Scotland Yard even wanted to keep the president in a "mobile-free bubble" that would block cellphone calls in his vicinity, but the phone companies refused, calling it "Bush hysteria.")

The White House packaged the visit for the viewers at home.

How else to explain the same Bush advance geniuses who brought us the "Mission Accomplished" banner putting up a blue PowerPoint-ish backdrop for the president's speech at Whitehall Palace that stuttered, "United Kingdom," "United Kingdom," "United Kingdom."

The people in the United Kingdom already knew he was in the United Kingdom. And the kingdom isn't very united at the moment.

Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, captured the spirit of the moment when he told NPR that the Republican National Committee should foot the bill for Mr. Bush's extraordinary security, the largest police operation ever in Great Britain. All this, he harrumphed, "just so George Bush can use a few clips of him and the queen in his campaign advertisements for re-election next year."

There was a dispiriting contrast between G.W.B. shutting out the world and avoiding the British public, and the black-and-white clips this week of J.F.K. reaching out to the world and being adored by Berliners.

There was also a dispiriting contrast between the Bush administration, hiding the returning coffins of U.S. soldiers and avoiding their funerals, and the moving pictures of the Italian politicians and people, honoring their dead with public ceremonies and a week of mourning.

The bubble in London is just an extension of the bubble the Bush team lives in at home. It superimposes its reality on the evidence for war, the ease of the occupation, the strength of the insurgency and the continuing threat from Saddam and Osama.

Isolationism has been a foreign policy before. But for this administration, it seems to be a way of life.

THE PRESIDENT:  I'm looking forward to -- it's a huge honor to be invited by Her Majesty to stay in Buckingham Palace. It's hard to imagine me even considering staying in Buckingham Palace when I was living in Midland, Texas. It's just one of those things. And Buckingham Palace has got a tremendous mystique to it, and so Laura and I are really looking forward to coming.

This bill is very plainly nothing but an enormous piece of corporate welfare, with tax giveaways and unneeded incentives for practically every energy-related lobbying group around but practically no actual energy policy. It's just one big pork fest, and the folks who came up with it barely even did us the courtesy of trying to hide it. There's nothing in this bill that deserves any serious analysis.

Is the free market in coal and oil really so broken down that America's energy industry needs $100 billion worth of tax breaks in order to bother coming in to work every morning? And are Senate Democrats really so craven that they're going to allow themselves to be bribed into supporting this monstrosity by the pittance of a few billion dollars in ethanol subsidies? I hope the answer to both questions is no.

With today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Bush Administration’s response to 9/11, the question remains: Does the President have the power unilaterally to strip away the constitutional rights of a U.S. citizen? Jose Padilla, a US citizen designated an “enemy combatant” by the President, has been detained on a naval brig in South Carolina for the last 15 months. Padilla, who has not been charged with any crime, has not been permitted to communicate with an attorney (or anyone else). A federal appeals court yesterday, during oral arguments regarding the circumstances of Padilla’s detention, was sharply critical of the President’s actions. Judge Barron D. Parker (nominated to the federal appeals court by President Bush): “Were we to construe the Constitution as permitting this kind of power in the executive…we would be effecting a sea change in the constitutional life of this country and making changes that would be unprecedented in civilized society.” Judge Rosemary S. Pooler: “As terrible as 9/11 was, it didn’t repeal the Constitution.” Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement argued that Padilla’s detention was permissible because the President has a “reservoir of authority to respond when the battlefield is in the United States.” But Jenny Martinez, an attorney who argued on Padilla’s behalf explained the problem with government’s position: “Under their theory, they can do this to any American. They can pick up any person off the street and, so long as the president turns in a piece of paper that says that that person is associated with al-Qaida, that person has no rights and the courts are powerless to intervene… that has never been the law in this country and it cannot be the law.” Yassir Hamdi, a U.S. citizen, has also been designated an enemy combatant and as been held incommunicado in South Carolina for more than two years. (For more about enemy combatants and other civil liberties issues see the American Progress report: Strengthening American By Defending Our Liberties)

 The states - and the exports to be targeted - are:

· Florida and its citrus products. The state was the scene of the "hanging chad" saga in the 2000 presidential election, after Mr Bush and Al Gore virtually tied there;
· Wisconsin and its apples and paper. Mr Gore won this state by a tiny margin;
· Tennessee and its chemicals. Mr Bush scored a narrow victory in Mr Gore's home state;
· Iowa and its agricultural equipment. This state will play a key role when the nominations battle starts in January.

Mr Byers also calls for tariffs to be imposed on exports of textiles, which would hit states across the American south.

Other commentators have remarked that the tariffs, which President Free Trade imposed for political advantage, have actually been a political disaster for Bush. Although they may have helped him in steel-producing states, they have hurt him badly in steel-consuming states, which have had to pay higher steel prices as a result of the tariffs. Kos says the "steel tariffs may very well be Karl Rove's biggest misstep of the presidency."

If that news wasn't wild enough, there's this:

George Bush's administration has called on US companies in Britain to relocate jobs to America in an astonishing move that could trigger a major trade war.

US-based multinationals have been told they will receive compensation from American trade authorities if they cancel contracts in Britain and take jobs home, according to CBI director-general Digby Jones.

Speaking at the CBI's annual conference in Birmingham, Jones said: 'Three chief executives of American companies investing in Britain have told me to my face that they have been told to close down, bring their stuff home and make it in the US.'

He said the companies were major employers in defence or manufacturing.

Jones continued: 'Whether flouting international law with their steel tariffs or telling their companies to come home, this bullying affects Britain and British jobs.

'We are America's biggest trading partner, but if this escalates into an international trade war it hits us worst because we are such a big player in the world market.'

Unilever chairman Niall FitzGerald said: 'There is a mid-Atlantic trade storm whipping up. There will be retaliation and then retaliation to that retaliation, which could lead us to a 1930s decline.'

Economist Brad DeLong says:

I do not believe this. I cannot believe this. Incompetent, short-sighted, ungrateful, and mendacious as we all know the George W. Bush administration to be, even they wouldn't do something as stupid and counterproductive as this.

Would they?

Such comments are grossly unfair to the Sun. True, its Page 3 is devoted daily to photographs of women and their breasts. True, it this week named "classy Krystle, the beautiful brunette babe" as this year's "Page 3 Idol" and amply displayed evidence of what it called her "vital statistics of 32C-24-33."

But the Sun is so much more than breasts. It is also reporting this week on a woman who is "made of two women" and "is NOT the biological mother of two of the children she conceived and had naturally." Other news items highlighted on the Sun's Web site: "Man begins 12-day sausage, bean and chip bath to promote Brit food," "German saboteurs plotted to bomb Palace with peas in WW2, files reveal," and "Sobbing islanders say sorry to the ancestor of minister eaten by natives."

Bush, meanwhile, has given no solo interviews this year to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time or Newsweek. And he hasn't given an exclusive interview in his entire presidency to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and dozens of other major publications.

So why give an interview to this sleazy tabloid, of all newspapers? Why, because it's owned by Rupert Murdoch (Mr. Fox News), of course. Duh.

McGovern thinks that what the Bush White House has done is far worse than the false premise that dragged the United States into the Vietnam War -- a reported second attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin which later turned out not to have taken place.

" 'The Gulf of Tonkin was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and Lyndon Johnson seized on that. That's very different from the very calculated, 18-month, orchestrated, incredibly cynical campaign of lies that we've seen to justify a war. This is an order of magnitude different. It's so blatant."

"Mr. McGovern accuses Mr. Bush of an extraordinary act of chutzpah -- taking advantage of his authority as President of the United States ... 'Now we know that no other President of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything.'

The whole Demagogue piece is here.

As a married (straight) person, I have always been mystified by the argument that banning gay marriage was necessary in order to "defend" (straight) marriage. Chief Justice Marshall of the Massachusetts SJC responds to that argument.

Here, the plaintiffs seek only to be married, not to undermine the institution of civil marriage. They do not want marriage abolished. They do not attack the binary nature of marriage, the consanguinity provisions, or any of the other gate-keeping provisions of the marriage licensing law. Recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of the same sex will not diminish the validity or dignity of opposite-sex marriage, any more than recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of a different race devalues the marriage of a person who marries someone of her own race. If anything, extending civil marriage to same-sex couples reinforces the importance of marriage to individuals and communities. That same-sex couples are willing to embrace marriage's solemn obligations of exclusivity, mutual support, and commitment to one another is a testament to the enduring place of marriage in our laws and in the human spirit.

The part I put in bold really captures the problem I've had with the "defense of marriage" rhetoric (Bill "I signed the Defense of Marriage Act" Clinton, are you listening?). My marriage to my wife somehow means less because some other guy is married to some other person who isn't like my wife (maybe in skin color, maybe in religion, maybe in sex)? And before you rail about how (most denominations of) Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other faiths define marriage as between people of opposite sexes, remember it wasn't so long ago that many religious traditions in this country taught that mixed-race marriages were immoral, and cited passages from the Bible to prove it.

In short, if you don't like gay marriages, don't have one.

Update: Oh, and notice the reference to not undermining "the institution of civil marriage." The court's not saying the Catholic Church has to perform marriages between persons of the same sex, or that any individual has to regard a gay couple as married in the eyes of God, or that any religious congregation has to treat gay couples the same way they treat straight married couples. The question is whether the government can discriminate against gays.

Paul Krugman's latest New York Times column:

You're selling your house, and your real estate agent claims that he's representing your interests. But he sells the property at less than fair value to a friend, who resells it at a substantial profit, on which the agent receives a kickback. You complain to the county attorney. But he gets big campaign contributions from the agent, so he pays no attention.

That, in essence, is the story of the growing mutual fund scandal. On any given day, the losses to each individual investor were small — which is why the scandal took so long to become visible. But if you steal a little bit of money every day from 95 million investors, the sums add up. Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, calls the mutual fund story "the worst scandal we've seen in 50 years" — and no, he's not excluding Enron and WorldCom. Meanwhile, federal regulators, having allowed the scandal to fester, are doing their best to let the villains get off lightly.

. . .

Oh, and about that corrupt county attorney: last year it seemed, for a while, that corporate scandals — and the obvious efforts by the administration and some members of Congress to head off any close scrutiny of executive evildoers — would become a major political issue. But the threat was deftly parried: a few perp walks created the appearance of reform, a new S.E.C. chairman replaced the lamentable Harvey Pitt, and then we were in effect told to stop worrying about corporate malfeasance and focus on the imminent threat from Saddam's W.M.D.

Now history is repeating itself. The S.E.C. ignored warnings about mutual fund abuses, and had to be forced into action by Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general. Having finally brought a fraud suit against Putnam Investments, the S.E.C. was in a position to set a standard for future prosecutions; sure enough, it quickly settled on terms that amount to a gentle slap on the wrist. William Galvin, secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts — who is investigating Putnam, which is based in Boston — summed it up: "They're not interested in exposing wrongdoing; they're interested in giving comfort to the industry."

I wonder what they'll use to distract us this time?

Solid Republican victories in the Kentucky and Mississippi governors' races, coupled with Howard Dean's clumsy overture to Confederate flag-waving Southerners, have raised anew the question of whether Democratic presidential candidates can compete in the South.They can't.

And precisely because they can't, they should stop trying. Moving forward, the Democrats would be better served by simply conceding the South and redirecting their already scarce resources to more promising states where they're making gains, especially those in the Southwest.

I can imagine the laughter of party strategists -- and the ire of Southern Democratic officials -- who subscribe to the prevailing wisdom that presidential elections are decided in the South. Indeed, pundits love to shout into the echo chamber that the last three Democratic presidents have come from the South.

This thinking is not only superficial and retrospective, but it could trigger a partisan realignment that would relegate the Democrats to minority status for a generation. Trying to recapture the South is a futile, counterproductive exercise for Democrats because the South is no longer the swing region. It has swung: Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy" of 1968 has reached full fruition.

It might sound nuts, but Schaller makes a pretty strong case -- at least if Dean is the nominee. If Clark or Edwards is the nominee, I don't buy it.

It is easy to think the presidential race has reached a tipping point. One week, assured by his supporters that they will raise all the money he needs, Howard Dean skips out of the restrictive federal matching-funds system. The next, he formally accepts the endorsements of the two most politically powerful unions in the country: the Service Employees International Union (seiu) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. And soon, according to an aide, his campaign will unveil a group of foreign policy luminaries who had been advising several candidates but have recently decided to back only Dean. The Dean campaign seems to be shedding the last vestiges of insurgency, aiming to build a sense of inevitability and end the race early with decisive victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, like Al Gore in 2000.

But, for all of his newfound respectability, the buzz from numerous Washington Democrats in the wake of Dean's extraordinary two weeks has been a hardening of opposition rather than a cascade of previously reluctant supporters endorsing the governor. "My sense is that this isn't tipping anyone towards Dean," says a top Beltway Democrat with ties to the Dean campaign. "The overwhelming majority here in Washington are more worried." Instead of consolidating support within the party establishment, Dean is polarizing it.

Kos has a piece (with the same title as this post) here discussing this article and linking to it (TNR provided Daily Kos a free link to the article, which normally requires a paid subscription). Check it out. As Kos says, the danger is that if Dean gets the nomination the establishment might sabotage him in order to save itself. One sure as hell hopes that the powers that be realize that getting rid of Dubya is of overriding importance.

The fact of the matter is we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. We don’t get to choose, and shouldn’t be able to choose and say, ‘You get to live free, but you don’t.’ And I think that means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It’s really no one else’s business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard.

The next step, then, of course, is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some kind of official sanction, if you will, of the relationship, or if these relationships should be treated the same way a conventional marriage is. That’s a tougher problem. That’s not a slam dunk.

I think the fact of the matter, of course, is that matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area.

I try to be open-minded about it as much as I can, and tolerant of those relationships... I also wrestle with the extent to which there ought to be legal sanction of those relationships. I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into.

Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. There will be only two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitching by the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

Faced with growing public uneasiness over Iraq, Republican Party officials intend to change the terms of the political debate heading into next year's election by focusing on the "doctrine of preemption," portraying President Bush as a visionary acting to prevent future terrorist attacks on US soil despite the costs and casualties involved overseas.

 

The strategy will involve the dismissal of Democrats as the party of "protests, pessimism and political hate speech," Ed Gillespie, Republican National Committee chairman, wrote in a recent memo to party officials -- a move designed to shift attention toward Bush's broader foreign policy objectives rather than the accounts of bloodshed. Republicans hope to convince voters that Democrats are too indecisive and faint-hearted -- and perhaps unpatriotic -- to protect US interests, arguing that inaction during the Clinton years led to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"The president's critics are adopting a policy that will make us more vulnerable in a dangerous world," Gillespie wrote. "Specifically, they now reject the policy of pre-emptive self-defense and would return us to a policy of reacting to terrorism in its aftermath."

Inviting a fierce foreign policy debate in the months to come, Gillespie continued: "The bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, Khobar Towers, our embassies in East Africa, and the USS Cole were treated as criminal matters instead of the terrorist acts they were. After Sept. 11, President Bush made clear that we will no longer simply respond to terrorist acts, but will confront gathering threats before they become certain tragedies."

Republican strategists maintain that this tack is consistent with Bush's style: direct, sweeping, and bold to the point of brazenness.

Is this for real? The Rethuglicans are going to urge Bush's re-selection based on his "Bush doctrine" of preemptive war? Surely this will blow up in Dubya's face when the Dems (1) point out the Bushies' myriad statements about the gobs of WMD's that required us to go to war; (2) point out that we never found any of said WMD's; (3) point out that Bush admits that there's no connection between Saddam and 9/11 (even though he keeps invoking 9/11 as somehow justifying the war); (4) show commercials juxtaposing footage of Operation Flight Suit/Mission Accomplished and Bush's "Bring 'em on" dare with footage of buildings blown up, flag-draped coffins, and statistics on killed and wounded soldiers since those events? Or are the American people dumber than I think?

Given Clark's late entry into the race, he needs money, organization, and ground troops. All three could've been provided by AFSCME. Not only did Clark lose the union, but he handed it over to his chief rival.

It will be very difficult for anyone to stop Dean from winning the nomination at this point. Gephardt, already behind, is further wounded, Clark and Kerry's organizations are in disarray, Edwards has gone nowhere, and Lieberman's poll numbers are falling like a lead balloon. The nomination is Dean's to lose.

George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project:  defeating President Bush.

"It is the central focus of my life," Soros said, his blue eyes settled on an unseen target. The 2004 presidential race, he said in an interview, is "a matter of life and death."

Soros, who has financed efforts to promote open societies in more than 50 countries around the world, is bringing the fight home, he said. On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5 million to MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, bringing to $15.5 million the total of his personal contributions to oust Bush.

Overnight, Soros, 74, has become the major financial player of the left. He has elicited cries of foul play from the right. And with a tight nod, he pledged: "If necessary, I would give more money."

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said. Then he smiled: "And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

. . .

Neoconservatives, Soros said, are exploiting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a preexisting agenda of preemptive war and world dominion. "Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God," Soros said. "He's leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence."

. . .

Asked whether he would trade his $7 billion fortune to unseat Bush, Soros opened his mouth. Then he closed it. The proposal hung in the air: Would he become poor to beat Bush?

He said, "If someone guaranteed it."

This is incredibly good news. With Dean declining public financing (and thus not limited in the amount he can spend), and Soros willing to donate tens of millions of dollars to organizations fighting against Bush, the Democrats should be able to compete against Bush's anticipated $200 million war chest.

The record is unmistakable: George W. Bush's presidency has been an unmitigated disaster from nearly the day he took office, and it has compounded exponentially with every week the man occupies it. Even if he is defeated in 2004, Americans will be paying the price for his spectacularly misbegotten ascension to the nation's highest office at one of the most critical junctures in history for years, perhaps even generations, to come. Which makes the thought of him winning election for the first time, thereby handing him another four years in which to deepen the problems beyond the point of recovery, even more chilling.

Al Gore gave an outstanding speech yesterday in New York criticizing the Bush administration's subversion of civil rights in the name of the "War on Terror." An excerpt:

I want to challenge the Bush Administration’s implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists.

Because it is simply not true.

In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.

In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.

In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.

In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.

In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening not strengthening America.

In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the Courts, the press and the people.

Indeed, this Administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. A government of and for the people is supposed to be generally open to public scrutiny by the people – while the private information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from government intrusion.

But instead, this Administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about American citizens. Under the rubric of protecting national security, they have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep it secret. Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism.

Go read or hear the whole speech.

Of course the World Trade Center bombings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.

Countries which I like seem to never suffer such tragedies, while countries which, for one reason or another, I dislike, suffer them all the time. The one common factor which seems to explain this has to do with my political views, and it suggests that my political views should be implemented as a matter of urgency, even though they are, as a matter of fact, not implemented in the countries which I like.

Of course the World Trade Center attacks are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. But we must also not lose sight of the fact that I am right on every significant moral and political issue, and everybody ought to agree with me. Please, I ask you as fellow human beings, vote for the political party which I support, and ask your legislators to support policies endorsed by me, as a matter of urgency.

It would be a fitting memorial.

Not very relatedly, Atrios points out an excellent, funny piece by Philosoraptor responding to an essay by one Kim du Toit, a right-wing gun-loving guy who laments the alleged "Pussification of the Western Male." Philosoraptor's piece is long but very entertaining. Don't miss it.

UPDATE:  "Sadly, No" has responded in kind to du Toit with "The Dickification of the Western Female."

But you know, if only one person hangs a sign on a freeway overpass, people may just figure he's nuts and not pay any attention to him. And if two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots, and they won't pay attention to them either. But if three people do it -- three, can you imagine, three people walking up on freeway overpasses and hanging up signs and walking away? They may think it's an organization. And can you imagine 50 people a day -- I said 50 people a day -- putting up signs on freeway overpasses and then walking away? Why, they may think it's a movement. And that's just what it is: a freeway overpass anti-massacre movement.* And as Freeway Blogger points out, anybody can join.

 

* With apologies to Arlo Guthrie.

The intellectual qualities Bush lacks—historical knowledge, interest in the details of policy, and substantive (as opposed to political) judgment—might well have prevented the quagmire we're facing in Iraq right now. A more engaged president—one who understood, for instance, the difference between the Sunnis and the Shiites—surely would have asked about Plan B.

The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

. . .

The director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, sent an e-mail titled "congressional questions" to majority and minority staff on the House and Senate Appropriations panels. Expressing "the need to add a bit of structure to the Q&A process," he wrote: "Given the increase in the number and types of requests we are beginning to receive from the House and Senate, and in deference to the various committee chairmen and our desire to better coordinate these requests, I am asking that all requests for information and materials be coordinated through the committee chairmen and be put in writing from the committee."

He said this would limit "duplicate requests" and help answer questions "in a timely fashion."

It would also do another thing: prevent Democrats from getting questions answered without the blessing of the GOP committee chairmen.

"It's saying we're not going to allow the opposition party to ask questions about the way we use tax money," said R. Scott Lilly, Democratic staff director for the House committee. "As far as I know, this is without modern precedent."

Norman Ornstein, a congressional specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed. "I have not heard of anything like that happening before," he said. "This is obviously an excuse to avoid providing information about some of the things the Democrats are asking for."

Josh Marshall's comment on this travesty:  "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And if you're already pretty corrupt when you get the power ... well, then things can really get bad pretty quick, as we're seeing."

Amazing but true, the far-right media machine has successfully held CBS entertainment to a higher standard of truth regarding the docudrama, “The Reagans” than the news media manages to hold the Bush administration regarding the war in Iraq.

I was listening to NPR this morning, and they were talking about the Leviathan energy bill oozing its way through congress. Apparently one of the main sticking points right now is the single direct-to-consumer subsidy - a tax break on hybrid vehicles. It's in the Senate version and not the House. Predictably, the oil industry and automobile manufacturers that don't produce hybrid vehicles are against it.

So, apparently, a compromise is in the works -- to provide a tax break for hybrid vehicles that only improve fuel efficiency a little bit. Those which get too many miles per gallon won't have a tax break.

In otherwise, the "compromise" would encourage hybrid manufacturers to produce hybrids which get shittier fuel efficiency.

You can't make this stuff up.

Of course, what do you expect from a Congress that gives you a much larger tax deduction (about $38,000 on a $55,000 purchase if you're in the highest tax bracket) for buying a Hummer or other gargantuan SUV?  As you would expect, a Hummer is one of the least fuel-efficient consumer vehicles on Earth, at about 10 m.p.g. We wouldn't want to do anything to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, heaven forbid.

Those pinkos at Business Week report that a lot of people at Harvard Business School say that Dubya's handling of Iraq and the economy show that he didn't learn much there:

It's a conversation heard more and more around the halls of Harvard Business School these days: One of President George W. Bush's unique qualifications for office was his Harvard MBA. Yet the mess in postwar Iraq has revealed a lack of the careful planning that Harvard teaches its elite clientele.

And a related problem -- the ballooning federal budget deficit -- hints at much less financial discipline than B-school alums are supposed to have. "Because George is a graduate of the school, there's lots of casual discussion about what he learned, or didn't learn, while he was here," says David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor of international business administration.

"The first thing we teach in a negotiations class is to look for win-win...try to find ways where everyone comes out ahead," says Justin Wolfers, a professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In Bush's pre-war dealings with the U.N., "there was no evidence of creative negotiation," Wolfers adds.

Whatever path the President chooses, he should realize that when things go wrong it's often time to try a new approach, adds Barry Nalebuff, professor of economics at the Yale School of Management. Nalebuff adds that one source of Bush's difficulties is "an inability to change his strategy in light of differing circumstances."

U.S. forces are losing the intelligence battle in Iraq to an increasingly organized guerrilla force that uses stealth, spies and surprise to inflict punishing casualties.

U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say that after six months of intensifying guerrilla warfare, Iraqi insurgents know more about the U.S. and allied forces — their style of operations, convoy routes and vulnerable targets — than the coalition forces know about them. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has had trouble simply identifying the enemy and figuring out how many are Iraqis and how many are foreign fighters.

With local knowledge and the element of surprise on their side, the guerrillas are exploiting their intelligence edge to overcome the coalition's overwhelming military superiority. Insurgents routinely use inexpensive explosives to destroy multimillion-dollar assets, including tanks and helicopters. Using surveillance and inside information, the guerrillas have assassinated many Iraqis helping the coalition, gunned down a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, killed the top United Nations official in Iraq and blasted the heavily guarded hotel in Baghdad where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.

Go read the rest here.

Iraq is simply a horrific disaster. Even center-right columnist David Broder, the dean of the Washington press corps, is asking, "Is Iraq becoming Vietnam?" Attacks on American forces have roughly tripled since July, and have gotten more and more deadly. It is pure wishful thinking at this point to believe that this war will end happily for the United States. And the end result will probably be far worse for our interests than Viet Nam. We are likely to end up with a Muslim theocracy in Iraq that bitterly hates the United States and is far, far more dangerous to us than Saddam Hussein ever was. And to "achieve" that result we will have killed thousands of Iraqis, killed hundreds of our people, maimed thousands more, and destroyed our economy.

Outside the Christian right, . . . clarity over Terri's fate - or indeed the best recourse for any person condemned to live for years with virtually no brain function - is generally difficult to obtain.

But, given the vehemence with which he has been fighting to prolong Terri's life, it is a little surprising to learn that Robert [Schindler, Terri's father] decided to turn off the life-support system for his mother. She was 79 at the time, and had been ill with pneumonia for a week, when her kidneys gave out. "I can remember like yesterday the doctors said she had a good life. I asked, 'If you put her on a ventilator does she have a chance of surviving, of coming out of this thing?'" Robert says. "I was very angry with God because I didn't want to make those decisions."

When some people "kill," it's apparently because God told them to -- and it's out of love.

When others do it, they are stripped of their legal rights, and damned to hell. And certain people -- but, it would appear, only members of the Christian Right -- are sometimes on the side of good, and sometimes on the side of evil. It also would appear that they get to choose which is which -- both for themselves, and for everyone else.

And according to them, that's just fine.

Paul Krugman says in his latest column that the Bush administration is engaging in magical thinking on both the budget deficit and Iraq:

Academic economists often cite Stein's Law, a principle enunciated by the late Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Nixon administration. The law comes with various wordings; my favorite is: "Things that can't go on forever, don't." Believe it or not, that's a useful reminder.

For we're now led by men who think that macho posturing makes Stein's Law go away. On issues ranging from budgets to foreign policy, they insist that we can sustain the unsustainable. And when challenged to explain how, they engage in magical thinking.

. . .

Just as the federal government is in no immediate danger of running out of money, our forces in Iraq are in no danger of outright defeat. But in both cases, current policies appear to be unsustainable: we can't go on like this indefinitely. And things that can't go on forever, don't.

Go read the whole column here.

Years ago, I was asked to write a speech for President Nixon.

I didn't do that, but I wish President Bush would ask me to write a speech for him now.

Here's what I'd write if he asked me to - which is unlikely:

My fellow Americans - (the word "fellow" includes women in political speeches):

My fellow Americans. One of the reasons we invaded Iraq was because I suggested Saddam Hussein had something to do with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. No evidence that's so, I wish I hadn't said it.

I said we were going to get Saddam Hussein. To be honest, we don't know whether we got him or not. Probably not.

I said we'd get Osama bin Laden and wipe out al Qaeda. We haven't been able to do that, either. I'm as disappointed as you are.

I probably shouldn't have said Iraq had nuclear weapons. Our guys and the U.N. have looked under every bed in Iraq and can't find one.

In one speech, I told you Saddam Hussein tried to buy the makings of nuclear bombs from Africa. That was a mistake and I wish I hadn't said that. I get bad information sometimes just like you do.

On May 1, I declared major combat was over and gave you the impression the war was over. I shouldn't have declared that. Since then, 215 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. As the person who sent them there, how terrible do you think that makes me feel?

I promised to leave no child behind when it comes to education. Then I asked for an additional $87 billion for Iraq. It has to come from somewhere. I hope the kids aren't going to have to pay for it - now in school or later when they're your age.

When I landed on the deck of the carrier, I wish they hadn't put up the sign saying MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. It isn't accomplished.

Maybe it should have been MISSION IMPOSSIBLE.

I've made some mistakes and I regret it. Let me just read you excerpts from something my father wrote five years ago in his book, "A World Transformed":

I firmly believed we should not march into Baghdad ...To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant, into a latter-day Arab hero.

This is my father writing this.

...assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war.

We should all take our father's advice.

That's the speech I'd write for President Bush. No charge.

(Thanks to randomtask at Daily Kos.)

TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) . . . I want to be sure that I understood you correctly. You're saying the, the top cost for the US taxpayer will be $1.7 billion. No more than that?

ANDREW NATSIOS
For the reconstruction. And then there's 700 million in the supplemental budget for humanitarian relief, which we don't competitively bid 'cause it's charities that get that money.

TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) I understand. But as far as reconstruction goes, the American taxpayer will not be hit for more than $1.7 billion no matter how long the process takes?

ANDREW NATSIOS
That is our plan and that is our intention. And these figures, outlandish figures I've seen, I have to say, there's a little bit of hoopla involved in this.

Calpundit reports that for some strange reason this transcript apparently is no longer on the USAID's website. Surprise, surprise. He got it from the Google cache. Thank heaven for Google.

Q: Did the Clinton administration miss the seriousness of the terrorist threat?

A: Our problem was actually the opposite. We couldn't get anybody to believe how serious it was. President Clinton talked about it all the time — in State of the Union addresses and in various public statements and in all meetings with the Cabinet. We tripled the [anti-terrorism] budget of the FBI and increased the budget of the CIA and set up an Osama bin Laden office that kept getting larger and larger. My worst day as secretary was [in August 1998] when the embassies were blown up in Kenya and Tanzania. We did link that to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and we launched 79 cruise missiles against Afghanistan and the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan [which was believed to have been producing chemical weapons]. President Clinton put out executive orders to use lethal force against Osama bin Laden. We were criticized at the time for overreacting. I try very hard to stay out of the "was 9/11our fault, was 9/11 their fault" debate, because I find it useless. But when we did transition briefings, the Bush administration was not interested in what we were telling them about terrorism. They were quite surprised when they saw how much time we spent on it. They really did not believe that they'd have to spend as much time.

U.S. helicopter shot down in Iraq              
Sunday, November 2, 2003 Posted: 1245 GMT ( 8:45 PM HKT)

In other news, Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz spoke at Georgetown University on Friday and and took questions (hat tip Juan Cole.)

And it seems to me a time to have supported the United States and to push the United States harder was in 1991 when Saddam Hussein was slaughtering those innocents so viciously.

(The remaining commentary is mine.) Strange that Wolfowitz seems not to comprehend that one can love one's country and yet criticize its actions. Rp at Daily Kos noted that an apt description of Wolfowitz's rhetorical tactics was provided by Senator Robert Byrd in his October 17, 2003 remarks on the Senate floor:

I shall close my remarks with a horror story, in the form of a quote from the book Nuremberg Diaries, written by G.M. Gilbert, in which the author interviews Hermann Goering.

"We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

". . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

So, self-described stalker Donald Luskin has his lawyer threaten to sue Atrios (and not incidentally out him) because Atrios also used the word "stalker" in his blog post about Luskin's article “Face To Face With Evil” --- in which Luskin describes his stalking of Paul Krugman.

Irony may be dead, but Luskin et al are energetically committing necrophilia on the corpse. Oy.

Apparently, Donald Luskin (who in my opinion, is showing some signs of serious mental illness) believes that it is acceptable for him to call Paul Krugman "evil" but it is not acceptable for Atrios to call Luskin a "stalker,"a phrase Luskin used to describe himself. Oh, and let's not forget that Don was very offended, hurt and upset by the anonymous creepy people who said mean things about him in Atrios' comments section. It's just too much!

When, exactly, did the right wing become such a bunch of lame-assed pussies, anyway? These are the big, bad motherfuckers who are going to run the world? If this is any indication of how they take a punch, Jenna Bush had better get used to wearing a burka, because Osama bin Laden is going to be sitting in the White House within the next decade.

The whining, the crying, the wringing of the hands about "political hate speech," the law suits over hurt feelings, running away from interviews with a 5'2" woman because she was "aggressive," snivelling about "leftist homophobia" for making fun of the simpering drooling over Bush's "masculinity" --- it's all so pathetic.

We've got nothing to worry about folks. Limbaugh's in rehab because he couldn't take the pain and had to hide his illegal "little blue babies" under the bed so his meanie of a wife wouldn't get all mad at him, Bennett spent years furtively cowering behind the "Beverly Hillbillies" video poker machine at the Mirage so that nobody would recognize him, Coulter's having little temper tantrums on national TV because she's not being "treated fairly," and Junior travels with his own special pillow and can't even give up his favowit, widdle butterscotch candies for longer than an hour and a half.

All codpiece, no filling.

As someone who served with President Reagan, and in the interest of historical accuracy, please allow me to share with you some of my recollections of the Reagan years that I hope will make it into the final cut of the mini-series: $640 Pentagon toilets seats; ketchup as a vegetable; union busting; firing striking air traffic controllers; Iran-Contra; selling arms to terrorist nations; trading arms for hostages; retreating from terrorists in Beirut; lying to Congress; financing an illegal war in Nicaragua; visiting Bitburg cemetery; a cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein; shredding documents; Ed Meese; Fawn Hall; Oliver North; James Watt; apartheid apologia; the savings and loan scandal; voodoo economics; record budget deficits; double digit unemployment; farm bankruptcies; trade deficits; astrologers in the White House; Star Wars; and influence peddling.

I hope you find these facts useful in accurately depicting President Reagan's time in office.

UPDATE 11/3/03 9:25 P.M.:  It gets worse. Reuters reports that the director of the miniseries has resigned in protest over last-minute changes demanded by CBS executives, and that CBS is now considering canceling or postponing the show. Jesus Christ. What a disgrace our media is. As Josh Marshall says, "Wake me up when we're back in America."

In the thick of the war with Iraq, President Bush used to pop out of meetings to catch the Iraqi information minister slipcovering grim reality with willful, idiotic optimism.

"He's my man," Mr. Bush laughingly told Tom Brokaw about the entertaining contortions of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, a k a "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob," who assured reporters, even as American tanks rumbled in, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and, "We are winning this war, and we will win the war. . . . This is for sure."

Now Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob.

Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," he said.

In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

Paul Krugman looks at the recent 7.2% rise in GDP, and isn't that impressed.  An excerpt:

The big question, of course, is jobs. Despite all that growth in the third quarter, the number of jobs actually fell. And new claims for unemployment insurance, a leading indicator for the job market, still show no sign of a hiring boom. (By the way, for the last month there's been a peculiar pattern: each week, headlines declare that new claims fell from the previous week; a week later, the past week's number is revised upward, and the apparent decline disappears.)

And unless we start to see serious job growth - by which I mean increases in payroll employment of more than 200,000 a month - consumer spending will eventually slide, and bring growth down with it.

Still, it's possible that we really have reached a turning point. If so, does it validate the Bush economic program? Well, no.

Stimulating the economy in the short run is supposed to be easy, as long as you don't worry about how much debt you run up in the process. As William Gale of the Brookings Institution puts it, "Almost any tax cut or spending increase would succeed in boosting a sluggish economy if the Federal Reserve Board follows an accommodative monetary policy. . . . The key question is, therefore, not whether the proposals provide any short-term stimulus, but whether they are the most effective way to provide stimulus." Mr. Gale doesn't think the Bush tax cuts meet that criterion, and neither do I.

To put it more bluntly: it would be quite a trick to run the biggest budget deficit in the history of the planet, and still end a presidential term with fewer jobs than when you started. And despite yesterday's good news, that's a trick President Bush still seems likely to pull off.