On July 30, Kerry/Edwards got 54 percent and Bush/Cheney 41 percent, the poll shows.

I have corrected the title of the post accordingly.

In Iraq, the transfer of sovereignty has led to some reduction in American casualties. [link via Atrios]

Let's see. The transfer of "sovereignty" occurred on June 28. Fifty deaths in thirty days in June equals 1.67 deaths per day. Forty-six deaths in the first twenty-one days in July equals 2.19 deaths per day. Woops!

More and more news publications are putting up registration pages. Whenever I encounter such a page, I create an account that you are all welcome to share. It's either:

Login: dailykos
Password: dailykos

or if the login is an email address, then

Login: kos@dailykos.com
Password: dailykos

Many of you have already created accounts at sites all over the place. I have gotten into many a newspaper using those passwords even though I hadn't created the account.

But if you run across a site that doesn't have a "dailykos" account setup, do us all the favor of setting up such an account. It'll make our web surfing efforts much more efficient and enjoyable.

Pass it on.

A question for those who still cling, against all evidence and reason to the myth of the liberal media:
 
Why is it that Billy Carter and Roger Clinton were covered well enough to become household names, and were frequently treated by the SCLM as embarrassments for Presidents Carter and Clinton, yet the wild and crazy (and sexy!) exploits and adventures of Neil Bush go virtually without mention in the national press?
 
For more on Neil, see here, here, and here.
 
Hint: "Because 9/11 changed everything" is not an acceptable answer.

Yesterday, I received a letter from Bush Cheney ’04 Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman asking our campaign for a tape of a recent fund-raising event. Today, I sent the following reply:

July 13, 2004

Ken Mehlman
Campaign Manager
BUSH-CHENEY '04, Inc.
P.O. BOX 10648
Arlington, VA 22210

Dear Ken:

Over the past several months, allies of the President have questioned John Kerry’s patriotism while your staff has criticized his service in Vietnam. Republicans and their allies have gone so far as to launch attacks against his wife and your campaign has run $80 million in negative ads that have been called baseless, misleading and unfair by several independent observers.

Considering that the President has failed to even come close to keeping his promise to change the tone in Washington, we find your outrage over and paparazzi-like obsession with a fund-raising event to be misplaced. The fact is that the nation has a greater interest in seeing several documents made public relating to the President’s performance in office and personal veracity that the White House has steadfastly refused to release. As such, we will not consider your request until the Bush campaign and White House make public the documents/materials listed below:

! Military records: Any copies of the President’s military records that would actually prove he fulfilled the terms of his military service. For that matter, it would be comforting to the American people if the campaign or the White House could produce more than just a single person to verify that the President was in Alabama when said he was there. Many Americans find it odd that only one person out of an entire squadron can recall seeing Mr. Bush.

! Halliburton: All correspondence between the Defense Department and the White House regarding the no-bid contracts that have gone to the Vice-President’s former company. Some material has already been made public. Why not take a campaign issue off the table by making all of these materials public so the voters can see how Halliburton has benefited from Mr. Cheney serving as Vice-President?

! The Cheney Energy Task Force: For an Administration that claims to hate lawsuits, it’s ironic that the Bush White House is taking up the Courts’ time to keep the fact that Ken Lay and Enron wrote its energy policy in secret behind closed doors. Please release the documents so that the country can learn what lobbyists and special interests wrote the White House energy policy.

! Medicare Bill: Please release all White House correspondence between the pharmaceutical industry and the Administration regarding the Medicare Bill, which gave billions to some of the President’s biggest donors. In addition, please provide all written materials that directed the Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress about the actual cost of the bill.

! Prison Abuse Documents: A few weeks ago, the White House released a selected number of documents regarding the White House’s involvement in laying the legal foundation for the interrogation methods that were used in Iraq. Please release the remaining documents.

We also wanted to wish you a happy anniversary. As we are sure you and the attorneys representing the President, Vice-President and other White House officials are aware, today marks one year since Administration sources leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to Bob Novak in an effort to retaliate against a critic of the Administration.

In light of the fact that the Administration began gutting the laws protecting the nation’s forests yesterday, we hope you will accept the paper on which this letter is written as an anniversary gift. (The one year anniversary is known as the "paper anniversary.")

Sincerely,

Mary Beth Cahill

Campaign Manager

Classic.

Last week [Tony Fabrizio of the Republican polling firm Fabrizio McLaughlin & Associates] took a close look at undecided voters in 19 battleground states. The memo (PDF) on this poll is eye-opening. Politics 101 teaches us that undecided voters almost always break for the challenger as the election approaches. If these voters haven't decided to support the guy they know best, the theory goes, there must be a reason they are holding out and will therefore end up supporting the challenger if he or she is an acceptable alternative.

Confirming this theory, Fabrizio found that undecided voters in 2004 are overwhelmingly anti-Bush and pro-Kerry. By almost every criterion they look like Kerry voters, according to the memo:

They are more than twice as likely to see things headed down the wrong track as compared to voters overall. ... They give President Bush a net NEGATIVE image rating. ... They give President Bush a net NEGATIVE job approval rating. ... A solid majority sees the Country as being WORSE OFF than they were 4 years ago. ... They are significantly more pessimistic about the current state of the nation's economy. ... They are significantly more pessimistic about their own current financial condition. ... They are twice as likely to see the number of jobs in their area as DECREASING instead of increasing. ... They are significantly more likely to favor the federal government doing more as opposed to doing less. ... They are more likely to be pro-choice on the issue of abortion. ... They are more likely to have seen or heard advertising critical of President Bush than John Kerry in the past year. ... John Kerry holds a slight net POSITIVE image rating [among the undecided voters].

As the memo notes, "Clearly, if these undecided voters were leaning any harder against the door of the Kerry camp, they would crash right through it." [link via Political Animal] 

At the end of the session, Bush reportedly told the group, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job." [link via BuzzFlash]

God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did . . . .

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There's a higher Father that I appeal to.’"

Beyond not asking his father about going to war, Woodward was startled to learn that the president did not ask key cabinet members either.

"The president, in making the decision to go to war, did not ask his secretary of defense for an overall recommendation, did not ask his secretary of state, Colin Powell, for his recommendation," says Woodward.

So if these accounts are accurate, Bush: 

• appeals to God for advice on matters of state;
• does not consider former President Bush's advice of value;
• did not solicit advice on whether to go to war with Iraq from Secretary of State Powell or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld;
• believes that he receives advice from God, including directions to "strike at al Qaeda" and "strike at Saddam;" 
• acts on that advice; and 
• believes that God speaks through him (remarkably inarticulately, I might add).

Scary stuff.

FIVE STARS   our pet president, July 18, 2004

Reviewer:

Erica F. Verrillo (Williamsburg. MA)

For anybody who wants to know about pets, or goats, or simply wants to avoid the responsibilities of national leadership, My Pet Goat is a "Must Read"!

"A real page-turner! When you pick this one up, you'll wish you never had to put it down!" George W. Bush

 

FIVE STARS   Y'all Are Missin the Point!!, July 17, 2004

Reviewer:

A reader (That ranch with all the brush, Crawford TX)

Everybody is sayin, what's he thinkin while he's settin there in that classroom for all that time? I was thinkin somethin very important. It was the most imporant thoughts I ever did have. When I heard they blowed up all those people, I thought "How terrible! I might be held responsible for my incompetence! How can I make this not my fault? There must be someone I can blame! Since I never make any mistakes that I recall!"
So all these kids are readin about this goat. GOAT! I think! SCAPEgoat!
Whose fault is 9/11? SADDAM, the GOAT!
Whose fault is why we're not invadin right away? DAVID KAY and FRANCE, those GOATS!
When we didn't find none WMDs, whose fault y'all think that was, mine? Nosirree, TENET and the CIA! GOATIE GOAT GOATS!
Iraqis hate us? Dead-ender goats! Abu Ghiraib? A Few Bad Apple goats! Everything else? The Liberal Media goats! Hell, remember when I fell offa my bike? I blamed the DIRT! DIRTY GOAT DIRT!
Know how I released "all" my service records, except for the 3 months that woulda proved I didn't go AWOL? The AP sued to get those, and hey guess what! The microfilm was destroyed, but ONLY for those same 3 months! And there's no paper hard copies of those months either! You got it, THE GOAT ATE 'EM!!!
So stop makin fun of the greatestiest book ever. It gave me an idea I'm gonna use FOREVER!

 

FIVE STARS   If You Don't Like This Book, You Must Hate America!, July 17, 2004

Reviewer:

A reader (Fake Ranch, TX)

Why, it's not like one of them long, boring Sacuritie... Sekeriti... Seekurety... uh, Spy Stuff Memos that always give me a thinkache! It's gots a lotta pictures an real big print! It's great reading for when you're curled up in your hidey-hole, waiting for Mr. Rove to tell you it's safe to come out!

Check out all the reviews yourself, and let Amazon know whether they're helpful to you.

For three days this week the nation was transfixed by the spectacle of the United States Senate, in all its august majesty, doing precisely the opposite of statesmanlike deliberation. Instead, it was debating the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would not only have discriminated against a large group of citizens, but also was doomed to defeat from the get-go. Everyone knew this harebrained notion would never draw the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment, and yet here were all these conservatives lining up to speak for it, wasting day after day with their meandering remarks about culture while more important business went unattended. What explains this folly?

Not simple bigotry, as some pundits declared, or even simple politics. While it is true that the amendment was a classic election-year ploy, it owes its power as much to a peculiar narrative of class hostility as it does to homophobia or ideology. And in this narrative, success comes by losing.

For more than three decades, the Republican Party has relied on the "culture war" to rescue their chances every four years, from Richard Nixon's campaign against the liberal news media to George H. W. Bush's campaign against the liberal flag-burners. In this culture war, the real divide is between "regular people" and an endlessly scheming "liberal elite." This strategy allows them to depict themselves as friends of the common people even as they gut workplace safety rules and lay plans to turn Social Security over to Wall Street. Most important, it has allowed Republicans to speak the language of populism.

The amendment may have failed as law, but as pseudopopulist theater it was a masterpiece. Each important element of the culture-war narrative was there. Consider first its choice of targets: while the Senate's culture warriors denied feeling any hostility to gay people, they made no secret of their disgust with liberal judges, a tiny, arrogant group that believes it knows best in all things and harbors an unfathomable determination to run down American culture and thus made this measure necessary.

. . . .

Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn't have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed — along with front-page coverage

Then again, what culture war offensive isn't doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion.

Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party's all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat — especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated — is the culture warrior's very object.

The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote "no," and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it. [link via Legal Fiction]

[Publius:] I fear I've become too jaded to get outraged anymore, but if I weren't, I would surely be outraged by this. Billmon has an excellent post on the recent schemings of Jeb Bush's Florida machine. As Billmon explains, Florida refined its list of felons who could not vote (in light of the abuses in 2000), but refused to submit copies of that list to the press. CNN sued and eventually obtained the copies of the list, which lo and behold, had a bunch of African-Americans but almost no Latinos. Here's the article that Billmon links to:

The state had tried to keep the list a secret. It fought a lawsuit aimed at opening the records to the public. A series of errors emerged once a Tallahassee judge rejected the state's arguments and released the records on July 1. The error that proved final — and garnered national attention — was that Hispanics were largely overlooked because of glitches ["glitches" would be more appropriate] in how the state records information about race and ethnicity. The list was created by cross-checking voter registration and criminal records. Of the more than 47,000 voters on the potential felon list, Hispanics made up one tenth of 1 percent — this in a state where nearly 1 in 5 residents is Hispanic. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a written statement Saturday saying the exclusion of Hispanics was "unintentional and unforeseen." "We are deeply concerned and disappointed that this has occurred," Hood said. . . . Many Hispanic voters vote Republican.

The Cuban population votes overwhelmingly Republican. And I suspect that's why only 50 — yes, 50 — Latinos were on a list of 47,000 names.

---

[Kevin:] It's really true, isn't it? Sometimes your outrage meter just redlines and then stalls — and then you stare blankly at your computer screen for a while and finally decide to go watch People's Court instead of blogging about anything for a while.

I'm just kidding about that People's Court thing, of course, but I'm glad Legal Fiction prompted me to post about this. I mean, really, think about what happened: we're in Florida, site of the biggest election meltdown in the country's history. An inaccurate list of felons is a big part of the meltdown. The state, headed by the president's brother, promises to do better in 2004. The eyes of the nation are on them. The state produces a new list. But....

It won't show the list to anyone. In fact, it resists showing the list with all the power at its disposal. Finally, when it no longer has any choice due to a lawsuit and a judge's order, it gives up the list. And....

It's wrong again! In a way that just happens to favor Republicans! Again! But it was just a mistake, honest! We are deeply concerned and disappointed! Honest!

Sometimes it's just more than you can stand.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, if you aren't reading Legal Fiction, you should be. Publius is "a law clerk in the South" and writes consistently good, thought provoking stuff. It deserves a place on your bookmark list.

These bastards stole the election for Jeb's big brother in 2000, and they're hell-bent on doing it again.

11. The Democrats have an 8 point advantage in party ID without leaners and a 14 point advantage with leaners. . . . This party ID advantage, if it holds, gives the Democrats a built-in advantage on election day, which the Republicans then have to try to desperately counter by maximizing turnout of their base.

For the likelihood that this strategy will work, see my July 15 post.

Teixeira in the referenced July 15 post noted that in presidential election years, Democratic turnout typically exceeds Republican turnout by 3-4%. Teixera greatly doubts that Republicans can equalize turnout this year, given "recent party ID trends and apparent mobilization levels among Democrats and Democratic organizations." But even if the Republicans somehow did equalize turnout, Bush would then run into the Independent buzzsaw: in the last four Gallup polls, Kerry has beaten Bush by an average of 14% among Independents. Bush could only overcome that if he achieved a Republican turnout about 4% higher as a proportion of voters than Democratic turnout. That would require a high mobilization of Republicans, not at all counterbalanced by Democratic mobilization -- which is "a complete fantasy."

The report will expand on the commission's earlier findings that al Qaeda's contacts with Iran were far more advanced than previously believed, and that the two may have developed a relationship of convenience that included cooperation in attacks such as the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. Time magazine reported that the commission has found that eight to 10 of the Sept. 11 hijackers may have passed through Iran before joining the hijacking plot. (links via Daily Kos)

In Iran we have a country that (a) has clear connections with al-Qaeda and apparently even with 9/11, (b) has a genuine and well advanced WMD program, (c) supports terrorist groups like Hezbollah far more than Iraq ever did, (d) has fought wars against its neighbors, (e) is a medieval theocracy, and (f) is determinedly hostile toward the United States.

Question: that's a much more convincing case than we had against Iraq, so should we invade Iran and attempt to install a democratic government in Tehran? If not, why not? After all, those student protests don't seem to be making much progress.

I vote no. How about getting everyone else on the record?

Nay here. The question at least merited discussion before our war with Iraq, but now our military is already badly overstretched dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor can I imagine that we could get an international coalition to back us at this point, Bush having squandered all the good will that we had after 9/11. Finally, we've certainly seen from Iraq that attempts to install democracy at the barrel of a gun are not well received.

CLEBURNE, Texas (AP) - An obscenity charge has been dropped against a woman who received widespread attention when she was arrested for selling two sex toys to undercover police officers posing as a couple.

A judge dismissed the case against Joanne Webb, Johnson County Attorney Bill Moore said Friday in a statement. He said he asked the judge for the dismissal to prevent wasting county resources but didn't say when the dismissal occurred.

No one answered the phone at Moore's office Saturday morning.

Webb, a former Grade 5 teacher, started selling erotic toys and other adult products last year. The Passion Parties Inc. consultant hosts what she calls Tupperware-type parties for suburban housewives who feel more comfortable buying marital aids in a private home than at an adult bookstore or on the Internet.

Webb was arrested Nov. 13, about a month after the undercover officers approached her at her husband's business in Burleson, about 15 kilometres south of Fort Worth and bought two products. Had she been convicted of violating Texas obscenity law, she could have been sentenced to a year in jail.

. . . . .

Under the state's obscenity code, an obscene device is a simulated sexual organ or an item designed to stimulate the genitals. Adult stores evade the law by posting signs that say: "Sold only as novelties."

Moore said a pending federal lawsuit filed by Sisemore would determine the constitutionality of the obscenity statute Webb was accused of violating.

It's mind-boggling that Texas in the 21st century continues to criminalize the sale of vibrators. The county attorney probably dropped the charges against Ms. Webb so that the county could avoid paying more attorneys' fees on the prosecution, and let the Texas Attorney General spend the state's money trying to defend the statute in the federal lawsuit.

• State-by-state poll projections has Kerry 327, Bush 200, undecided 11
• 2.004k.com has Kerry 292, Bush 246
• Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball has Kerry 274, Bush 264

Hold the doctor up to the light and there are flaws in the glass. We are not quite sure how Iyad Allawi became Iraq's interim Prime Minister and no one knows just how and why he fell out with Saddam Hussein. It is unclear whether his preoccupation with security outweighs a professed love for democracy or what that might mean for Iraq's 25 million people.

His past is murky. His present is ambiguous. Allawi's every response to the Iraq mess is that of a hard man: he threatens martial law; he warns he might shut down sections of the media; he suggests he might delay elections. His Justice Minister is bringing back the death penalty; his Defence Minister warns he'll chop off insurgents' hands and heads.

He was put in - unelected - with a tight constitutional brief to ready Iraq for polls in January. But in his first days in control, Allawi seems to have crafted a loophole to run more freely with inordinate emergency powers that would allow him to take direct command of Iraqi security forces, with the right to impose curfews, seize assets, tap and cut telephones, and crack down on groups in declared "emergency zones".

And already he is wriggling out from under the limited US security blueprint for Iraq, saying that what the country needs is some of the old Saddam institutions of state and what he calls the "clean" from among the old cadres. But he is yet to make clear how much of the old Iraq he wants to salvage, as he presses ahead with plans for a security regime that reminds some Iraqis of where they have been, rather than of the promised land.

He tells people he's a "tough guy". And friends and enemies alike resort to the same page of the thesaurus when they talk about him: "willing to be ruthless," says one; "potential for brutality," says another; "muscular law enforcement comes naturally to him," concludes a third Iraqi voice.

. . . .

Once the Allawi whispers started a few weeks ago, there were signs that the image of the new strongman was already being cultivated. Allawi may have worked out that, to succeed, he too must go down the Saddam road, which, in any event, seems to be his natural inclination.

. . . .

Allawi got to the top from the shadows of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, the first and flailing Washington effort to put an Iraqi face on its occupation.

After being away for 33 years, he kept a low profile for the first year after the fall of Saddam, seeking out the chairmanship of the council's powerful security committee, but reportedly shying away from general meetings of the council.

Despite single-digit popularity among Iraqis, he kept aloof from the Iraqi press. Instead, he is said to have spent much time in Jordan and Britain - and in the US, where he spent a reported $US300,000($415,000) on New York and Washington lobbyists to enhance his image higher up the geopolitical food chain.

. . . .

. . . Allawi is a master of backroom political manoeuvring. He had to climb over the ferocious ambition of his arch rival, Ahmad Chalabi, and the reservations of Brahimi, who vented his frustrations at Allawi's emergence as the winner with his sharp denunciation of the departing US administrator, Paul Bremer, as the "dictator of Baghdad".

The new Prime Minister was in league with Saddam in the late '60s and there is an assumption that he broke with the tyrant when he went to London in 1971. But various reports suggest that he remained on the Baghdad payroll at least until 1975. And the idea that the break was about principle is tempered by suggestions of a row over a sizeable wad of cash.

A senior Jordanian official who met the new Prime Minister "dozens of times" before the US invasion was always worried about an Allawi ascendancy. He explained to the Herald this week: "He made it clear that he was going back to Iraq with vengeance; it was never going to be about a beauty of democracy, so much as a settling of scores.

"Think about it: it is the resistance that will be his downfall, so he thinks if he kills them, he will prevail."

Early this year, a vivid article by one of the Prime Minister's former medical school classmates, Dr Haifa al-Azawi, published in an Arabic newspaper in London, was hardly noticed, despite what it revealed of the Prime Minister's character and qualifications.

Describing Allawi as a "big, husky man", she wrote: "[He] carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorising the medical students." And of his medical degree, she wrote: "[It] was conferred upon him by the Baath party."

The first unvarnished look at Allawi's past since he was named leader of post-Saddam Iraq was by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, in which he quoted an unnamed US intelligence officer on the ties between Allawi and Saddam in the 1960s: "Allawi helped Saddam get to power."

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer who served in the Middle East, elaborated further: "He was a very effective operator and a true believer. Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he's a thug."

Hersh also quoted this assessment of Allawi by another former CIA officer, Vincent Cannistraro. "If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does. He was a paid Mukhabarat [intelligence] agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff."

An unnamed Middle Eastern diplomat spelt it out a bit more for Hersh, claiming that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that ran to ground and killed Baath party dissenters throughout Europe.

In 1978, the brutal world in which Allawi moved came home to him, literally, when he was attacked in his London bed in the middle of the night by a man brandishing an axe. This was the third attempt on his life and he spent a year in hospital, recovering from horrific injuries presumed to have been inflicted at the behest of Saddam.

It was after this attack that Allawi began his long and close associations first with the British intelligence agency MI6 and then with the CIA, which still helps fund his Iraqi National Accord (INA) organisation.

. . . .

Juan Cole, a Middle East historian at the University of Michigan, wrote of a stinging assessment of the Prime Minister's leanings: "He is infatuated with reviving the Baath secret police, bringing back Saddam's domestic spies. Unlike the regular [Iraqi] army, which had dirty and clean elements, all of the secret police are dirty. If they are restored, civil liberties are a dead letter."

It is hardly surprising that they are pacing in Washington. "He's our kind of bully," was one of the first backroom endorsements of the 58-year-old neurologist.

But after only a week of sovereignty, there were also signs of a wind shift on the Potomac: "The last thing we want is for the world to think we're foisting a new strongman on Iraq," a senior US official told reporters on background in Washington last week.

But having punted on Allawi, Washington is stuck. . . .

. . . .

Allawi must secure Iraq. That means breaking the insurgency and the outline of his strategy is there - drive a wedge between the nationalist Iraqis, who US military analysts in Baghdad now concede are the vast majority among as many as 20,000 insurgents, and the small force of foreigners and terrorists who have come to Iraq to take a shot at the Americans.

It's a big gamble.

Allawi is a secular Shiite, but he is courting the largely Sunni Baathists who were disenfranchised by the US-imposed de-Baathification program last year, and at the same time offering dignity to former members of Saddam's huge military disbanded by the US.

He hopes to persuade the Sunnis and the Baathists to lay down their arms because there is something for them in the new Iraq. To this end he is offering an amnesty for those who "don't have blood on their hands". If it works, he might be able to isolate some of the foreigners who, without support from the Iraqi community, would find it tough to soldier on.

. . . .

Allawi reportedly urged the US not to alienate Sunnis with a post-invasion purge, insisting that as few as 90 people needed to be removed. He seems to have been proved right. There is a consensus among observers that de-Baathification and disbanding the military were huge mistakes by the US occupation.

But how much of the old regime he seeks to reinstate and how the Shiite majority will respond is a balancing act that has yet to be performed. Some observers worry that showing through all that Allawi says and does is a belief that perhaps Iraq is not ready for a Western-style democracy.

What comes through in his attitude to the past is a sense of the same ambiguity that allowed so much of the Iraqi elite - the moneyed, the intelligentsia and the officer class - to take their reward under Saddam while seeing little to complain about in the system that Saddam built.

Ghanim Jawad, a human rights campaigner at the Al-Khoei Foundation, a Shiite charitable organisation in London, was not impressed when he looked down the road to Allawi's Baghdad: "I think [Allawi] will succeed in creating not a fully democratic state, but something on the model of Jordan or Egypt."

But if he could get that far on the back of the military, police and internal intelligence complex he wants to build, to what use might he put them once he had a semblance of security?

It sounds like Saddam-Lite in the making; and in it all there's an odour of the Arab authoritarianism that the Bush men say they came to eradicate. [link via You Will Anyway]

An emailed response to questions from the Herald to the US ambassador, John Negroponte, said: "If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed."

For the first time, bloggers will be covering the action, such as it is, on the floors of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

The Old Media that still scribbles in notebooks will confront the New Media of digital pamphleteers. Bloggers are calling it historic.

"The 2004 conventions will be remembered as the conventions of the blog, just as the 1952 Republican convention was the convention of television, and the 1924 conventions were the conventions of the radio," wrote Oxford graduate student Patrick Belton on OxBlog (oxblog.blogspot.com).

Two years ago he started a blog - short for Web log, a journal mixing news and opinion and bristling with attitude. Now Belton is flying from England to pick up a convention pass.

Thirty-five independent bloggers have been issued media credentials for the Democratic convention in Boston, starting July 26. The Republicans say they expect to accredit 10 to 20 bloggers for their New York convention, beginning Aug. 30.

. . . .

With 15,000 credentialed media representatives expected at the conventions, bloggers will be a minuscule minority.

But it's plain to see from how Democrats are courting them that their influence is growing. Ever since Howard Dean raised $7 million over the Internet with help from blogs, bloggers have used their sites for pledge drives.

Philadelphia's anonymous blogger Atrios lists almost $340,000 in pledges for the Democratic Party and individual candidates on his blog, Eschaton (atrios.blogspot.com).

No wonder the convention is hosting a Blogger Breakfast on opening day, and promising excellent cell-phone transmission and plentiful WiFi hot spots. Media giants must rent convention space; bloggers get in for free.

They are being wooed because they are important, said Eric Schnure, the Democrats' official convention blogger.

"Blogs have a large and growing audience, and we have a message we want to share," Schnure said. "To get the message out, you go to where the people are. And more and more people are getting their information from blogs." [link via Pandagon]

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

. . . .

He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway……war crimes."

The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."

Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is "in incredible chaos," he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq.

"The disaffection inside the Pentagon is extremely acute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear."

The Iraqi insurgency, he says, was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information."

He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government.

The war, he says, has escalated to "full-scale, increasingly intense military activity."

Hersh described the folks in charge of US policy as "neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is."

He ripped the supine US press, pledged to bring home all the facts he could, said he was not sure he could deliver all the damning info he suspects about Bush administration responsibility for Abu Ghraib.

Via Holden at Eschaton, here are your viewing options:

You can listen to Hersh's speech at Sadly, No!
(RealMedia 10, 8.3MB.)
 
You can watch streaming video of Hersh's speech here [UPDATE: Hersh is introduced at 1:04:52, and Hersh himself is on beginning at 1:07:48. Hersh will be writing more about Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker, at which point the media will finally have to pay attention -- BeatBushBlog], courtesy of The Poor Man.
(71MB streaming video)
 
I suppose it all depends on your bandwidth.

UPDATE: I finally listened to Hersh's speech. It's horrifying, not just because of his discussion of Abu Ghraib, but because of what he says about what has happened to our country. It is imperative that we remove the Bush regime from power. It is terrifying to think what will happen if Bush continues to hold power. Hersh rightly calls the upcoming election the most important since 1860. Brad DeLong remarks:

Either Sy Hersh has gone completely insane, or the House needs to vote to impeach George W. Bush tonight[.]

I am very confident that Sy Hersh is not insane.

A violent squall sprang up in Blogistan earlier this year over comments made by a wonkish blogger named Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos. He typed something impolitic about four contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, whose charred, mutilated corpses made for a perverse photo-op on the front page of The New York Times, as well as leading the news on CNN. The dead men weren't there on orders, Moulitsas, a military vet, pointed out. They weren't there to rebuild Iraq. "They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them."

Not surprisingly, Moulitsas' rant offended a number of people representing a wide palette of political persuasions. And here's where it gets interesting. With the Internet being the Internet, his comments spread at the speed of data. Worse, they were immediately etched into the ether and permanently archived, unlike, say, cocktail chatter. In response, conservatives organized a boycott; liberal bloggers jumped in, urging Moulitsas to apologize; three sponsors pulled their ads; and the Kerry campaign, allergic to such controversy, announced in the campaign's own Web log that "In light of the unacceptable statement about the death of Americans made by Daily Kos, we have removed the link to this blog from our website."

. . . .

. . . I wonder if the Kerry campaign really thought through its decision to cut links with the Daily Kos. It sets a dangerous precedent. After all, just because you link to a site, does it mean that you stand by its content? Does it imply an implicit endorsement? If that’’s the case, then how can the Kerry campaign justify linking to other sites that post material that is arguably just as off-color as Moulitsas "literally speaking ill of the dead[.]" . . .

. . . [T]he Kerry website links to . . . BeatBushBlog, whose purveyor asked recently: "How many different wars can our 'war president' fuck up? The war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the 'war on drugs,' the 'war on terror'...." I'm sure John Kerry would agree with the sentiments, but I bet he wouldn't endorse the language. (Although Vice President Dick Cheney, who recently told Sen. Patrick J. Leahy to "fuck himself" after Leahy questioned Cheney's Halliburton ties on the Senate floor, might.)

Personally, I applaud such wicked commentary, whether it originates from blogs or websites aligned with Democrats, Republicans, independents or wackos representing a ROYGBIV spectrum of opinions. When it comes to free speech, I'm a verbal libertarian.

But if Kerry and company are going to be consistent (read: not hypocritical), they had better cut links to any site that posts material contrary to Kerry's official views -- and now. [Emphasis added.]

Penenberg must have somehow missed the brouhaha last December over Kerry's remarks in Rolling Stone:

The Massachusetts senator uttered a profanity in an interview in the latest Rolling Stone magazine to express his dismay over Bush's handling of Iraq.

When asked in the interview about the success of rival candidate Howard Dean, whose anti-war message has resounded with supporters, Kerry responded: "When I voted for the war, I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, 'I'm against everything?' Sure. Did I expect George Bush to f——- it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did."

The expletive drew a rebuke from White House, which suggested an apology might be in order.

"That's beneath John Kerry," the president's chief of staff, Andrew Card, said on CNN's Late Edition.

"I'm very disappointed that he would use that kind of language," Card said. "I'm hoping that he's apologizing at least to himself, because that's not the John Kerry that I know."

The Kerry campaign said the Massachusetts senator had no regrets.

"John Kerry saw combat up close, and he doesn't mince words when it comes to politicians who put ideological recklessness ahead of American troops," said spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. "I think the American people would rather Card and the rest of the White House staff spend more time on fixing Bush's flawed policy in Iraq than on Sen. Kerry's language." [Emphasis added.]

First:  Drop dead asshole.

 

Second:  Kerry belongs in front of a firing squad for his treasonous behavior

 

Keep making a fool of yourself.

 

John

Charleston Municipal Court Judge Carol Bloom dismissed the trespassing charges against Jeff and Nicole Rank Thursday morning.

. . . . The Ranks' lawyer, Harvey Peyton, says the charges were dismissed as a matter of jurisdiction. "Municipalities only have the authority to enforce, in their courts, violations of the municipal code. This citation was a general charge of trespass but the city of Charleston does not have an ordinance that prohibits trespass other than on city property or 'the property of another,' and that does not apply to the common grounds of the state house which, of course, is owned by everybody."

. . . .

The Ranks say their plight wasn't restricted to Charleston. They believe it could've happened anywhere. Even though Nicole lost her job with FEMA over the incident, she says it doesn't change her view of the city. . . . .

Confirmed John Kerry supporters, the Ranks say they don't intend to stick around for tonight's rally. They say they're anxious to begin their journey back to Texas. For now both Jeff and Nicole are ready to let the situation drop and have no plans to further it with a lawsuit against the city. [Emphasis added; typo in story corrected; link via Holden at Eschaton]

The Ranks had well-established First Amendment rights to wear clothing expressing their political views without being arrested, and without Mrs. Rank being fired from her job. As I noted in my previous post:

Back in the olden days, before the Bush regime unilaterally repealed the First Amendment, the Supreme Court held in Rankin v. McPherson (1987) that a federal employee had a constitutional right to not be fired for saying, after the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan, "if they go for him again, I hope they get him." The Court held in Cohen v. California (1971), reversing a defendant's conviction for disorderly conduct, that there is a First Amendment right to walk around the corridors of a courthouse wearing a jacket bearing the legend, "Fuck the Draft." In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the Court noted that protection of "seditious libel" -- criticism of the government -- is at the core of the First Amendment.

The Hatch Act, while restricting federal employees' rights to run for political office, also expressly protects their right to political speech:

An employee retains the right to vote as he chooses and to
express his opinion on political subjects and candidates.

The arrest of the Ranks was a blatant violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights. Firing Nicole Rank from her federal job for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt (on Sunday, the Fourth of July, not even a work day) is a flagrant violation of her rights under the First Amendment and the Hatch Act. Why isn't this a major story in every newspaper across the country? Does the media give a damn about the First Amendment rights of anyone besides themselves?

CHICAGO - With four months to go before the election, Illinois Republicans are desperately searching for a U.S. Senate candidate after former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka said he wouldn't run.

The Republican State Central Committee must sift through a stack of would-be candidates to oppose Democrat Barack Obama, a state senator from Chicago who has drawn a national following among party progressives and raised a large war chest.

Republicans confessed Wednesday night they had no surefire strategy for finding a candidate who could raise money and take on Obama.

"It's a pretty difficult situation and I guess it could become a major embarrassment," said Republican state central committee member Robert Winchester.

The state GOP has tried to fill the top of its state ticket since investment banker Jack Ryan dropped out of the race nearly three weeks ago.

Ryan's divorce papers contained embarrassing allegations that he took his wife, "Boston Public" actress Jeri Ryan, to sex clubs before they split up.

The draft Ditka bandwagon started rolling Monday and the NFL Hall of Famer said the idea of running for the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald excited him. By Wednesday night, however, Ditka said that he'd decided against it.

"There was a moment when I said, God, I'd like to take this and run with it, and then I said, you know, put your head on straight and think about what you're getting into," Ditka said outside his restaurant.

Ditka said his volatile temperament could prove a drawback on Capitol Hill.

There are no African-Americans in the Senate. There have been only two since Reconstruction: Edward Brooke (R) of Massachusetts and Carol Moseley-Braun (D) of, yes, Illinois. Now not only is Illinois going to give the nation its third African-American senator, but the Republicans can't even find anyone to be their sacrificial lamb against Barack Obama. And Kerry is going to roll over Bush like a truck here. Why makes Illinoisans so much smarter than the rest of the country?

By the way, Obama will be the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention. Good choice.

KING: Who's your -- who's the main lawyer?

LAY: Mike Ramsey, as far as the activities...

KING: He's criminal...

LAY: ... here in Houston. He's criminal. He's here in Houston. But we have a whole team -- Earl Silbert in Washington, D.C...

KING: You have Earl?

LAY: We have him. And...

KING: Former prosecutor.

LAY: Former U.S. prosecutor for over 20 years. Jim Sharp, former assistant U.S. prosecutor for a long time. We have Carrington, Coleman in Dallas, which has some excellent lawyers on the civil side. So, we have a number of really key advisers here that are involved. [Emphasis added.]

a Washington attorney who also represented Iran-Contra luminary Richard V. Secord.

That may prove convenient since the case will quite possibly involve some of the players from the old days.

Ramares in the Online Journal article revealed some more information about Sharp:

A search, earlier this month, of the Martindale-Hubbell Legal Directory through its Lawyer Locator search engine showed the entries for Sharp and his law firm were totally barebones. (Legal directories are like telephone directories; they publish the information given to them by their listees). Placing Sharp's name and city in the search engine, turned up James E. Sharp of Washington, DC, and the firm Sharp and Associates. According to this entry, Sharp was born in 1940, received his B.S. from the University of Arizona, received his law degree from the University of Oklahoma, and was admitted to the bar in 1965. There were no indications of where Jim Sharp was admitted to the bar. Many attorneys are admitted in multiple jurisdictions. Sharp did not list any awards, publications or memberships in prestigious professional associations. Nor did he list any practice specialties.

The entry states that Sharp is "Rated AV," which is a Martindale-Hubbell legal ability and general ethical standards rating. An AV rating means "a lawyer has reached the height of professional excellence. He or she has usually practiced law for many years, and is recognized for the highest levels of skill and integrity."

The personal entry had no street address, email address, phone or fax number for the firm. One has to search the Lawyer Locator by firm and then all that turns up is the street address, K Street N.W., a street famous as the home of businesses catering to government officials. None of the "Associates" of Sharp & Associates were listed in the firm entry. [Sharp's entry is indeed strikingly uninformative -- compare for example my entry -- BeatBushBlog]

The West Legal Directory, which is where legal columnist John Dean of Findlaw.com got his information, contains the firm's phone and fax number as well as an email address. It also does not list any "Associates" for Sharp and Associates. The practice area WLD lists for James E. Sharp is a rather strange one given the situation that has brought his name to media attention; it's estate planning. That's wills and trusts and setting up college funds for the grandkids. It's not about what to say if you are questioned by a Federal criminal grand jury probing the leak of a CIA covert operative's name. Why turn to an obscure estate planner for advice about a criminal grand jury?

Is James E. Sharp Really an Estate Planner?

Other sources paint Sharp as an excellent trial lawyer, with a white collar crime practice, a private person but one whose accomplishments are well known to older Washington, DC, lawyers. Articles in the New York Times on June 3 by Eric Lichtblau and David E. Sanger and on June 5 by Michael Janofsky, plus a transcript of the June 3 CNN's American Morning with senior legal analyst Jim Toobin, paint the following portrait of Sharp's legal career:

He began practicing law in Navy JAG and also served as assistant US District Attorney for the District of Columbia. In about four decades of law practice, he has represented Richard Nixon friend Bebe Rebozo, Nixon advisor Jeb Stuart McGruder during the Watergate scandal, and Gen. Richard V. Secord during Iran-Contra. Sharp has also numbered former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay and author Clifford Irving among his clients. Maybe that's where the estate planning comes in. Despite the list of well-known Republican clients, his political donations go mostly to Democrats, including the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry.

Janofsky's article quotes attorney Richard Hibey, a friend of Sharp's describing Sharp as " . . . publicity averse. To do the kind of work we do, it's important to stay out of the limelight."

As to what "kind of work [Hibey and Sharp] do," Ramares, after discussing Hibey's work representing the likes of Ferdinand Marcos, Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, and Iran-Contra figure (and former CIA espionage chief) Clair George, quotes University of Illinois Professor of Law Francis Boyle, who "wonders if Sharp has a very special type of law practice":

"There is sort of a CIA bar out there as it were," Boyle says. "That is, lawyers who have worked for the CIA in the past or have been CIA agents, either covertly or overtly or whatever. And oftentimes, they are the ones called upon to engage in legal matters related to the CIA, either when they are defending a CIA agent or when the CIA is somewhat involved.

"It's sort of a very small clique of lawyers there in Washington, D.C. with expertise when it comes to the CIA, covert operations and things of that matter.

"One thing we know about both Presidents Bush is that they are CIA. President Bush, Sr., of course, Director of the CIA . . . As for President Bush, Jr., we do know, it was reported in the New York Times, that Bush Sr. sent him out to work for a CIA front organization for a summer. I think it was up in Alaska. So it does not surprise me that Bush Jr. went to a lawyer, an unknown lawyer, who represented Secord, who again is probably tied into the CIA somewhere.

"And, as you know, this [Valerie Plame] investigation does involve the leaking and public identification of the name of a CIA agent, which is a felony under the United States law. So the CIA is shot through this whole thing and it wouldn't surprise me if Bush got a lawyer who might have ties to the CIA."

So what, if anything, does it mean that Bush and Lay have both hired the mysterious Mr. Sharp? I don't know, but it's intriguing.

UPDATE: Welcome, Talking Points Memo and washingtonpost.com and Eschaton (second-hand) readers! Hope you like the site. Feel free to wander around while you're here.

And I repeat to you -- my own view is, is that if a state -- if people decide to -- what they do in the privacy of their house, consenting adults should be able to do. This is America. It's a free society. But it doesn't mean we have to redefine traditional marriage. [link via Atrios]

• Time, taken July 6-8, 774 likely voters nationwide, MOE ± 3.5%, Kerry 49%, Bush 45%, Other/Unsure 6%
• Zogby, July 6-7, taken 1008 likely voters nationwide, MOE ± 3.1%, Kerry 46%, Bush 44%, Other/Unsure 9%
• CBS News, July 6, 462 registered voters nationwide, MOE ± 5%, Kerry-Edwards 49%, Bush-Cheney 44%, Other 1%, Won't Vote 2%, Don't Know 4% 
• NBC News, taken July 6, 504 registered voters nationwide, ± 5%, Kerry-Edwards 54%, Bush/Cheney 43%, Unsure 3%
• American Research Group, July 1-3, 773 reg. voters, MOE ± 3.5%, Kerry 49%, Bush 45%, Unsure 6%

Then there's:

• Newsweek, July 8-9, 1001 registered voters nationwide, MOE ± 4%, Kerry-Edwards 51%, Bush-Cheney 45%, Other 4%
• Rasmussen today (taken July 9-11, 1500 likely voters nationwide, MOE ± 3%), Kerry 48%, Bush 44%

It's all looking good, except for one scary thing: in the Newsweek poll: substituting Powell for Cheney as Veep gives Bush-Powell 53%, Kerry-Edwards 44%, Other 3%.

One of the commenters at Daily Kos made the excellent suggestion that Kerry demand that Bush replace Cheney. That will make Bush very unlikely to do so, and if he does Kerry can say, "I'm glad you agreed that Cheney had to go." And if he doesn't, Bush is stuck with the Cheney albatross around his neck.

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - The flag-waving, cheering throngs and banners for "Four More Years" were there. But the signs of discord and disapproval with President George W. Bush were also amply evident Friday afternoon outside Lapp’s Electrical Service in Smoketown, where the president spoke. They were there as well along the 18-mile motorcade route to York, with the president surprisingly visible in the front of the bullet-proof, tinted-glass presidential bus.

The president had to see the thumbs-down gestures and John Kerry banners, perhaps even the occasional obscene fingers thrust skyward as his bus passed by them.

Six young men from Lancaster City wearing only thong underwear were arrested along Old Philadelphia Pike when they attempted to recreate the infamous picture of Iraqi prisoners forced into a human pyramid at Abu Ghraib prison.

. . . .

Later, as the motorcade passed through Lancaster, Martin Andrews, 42, of 228 N. Reservoir St., made an obscene gesture and dropped his pants at the president’s convoy, Lancaster police said.

. . . .

Veteran Jake Caldwell, 42, of Lancaster, held up a sign that stated "Stop the war" as he loudly questioned the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"I feel the American public’s been duped," Caldwell said. "I think it’s pretty obvious. If you don’t see that, I think you’re in denial."

Mary Schroeder, 31, held a sign that read "Shame on you" in one hand and her 1-year-old son, Ezra, in the other.

She said Bush should be ashamed of how he won the election in 2000, and of profiting from being president, sending troops to die for no reason and killing people from Iraq needlessly.

"Shame on him for everything," she said. "I think the people need to take a look at how the Bush family is profiting from being the president."

City resident Jon Voynar, 21, said he felt morally obligated to show his disagreement with Bush’s policies.

"We’re representing the other half just to show all of America doesn’t support what’s going on."

Anti-Bush signs seen along the parade route: "Liar," "Thief + Liar + Murder = Bush," "Words of mass deception," "More trees, less Bush," "Impeach Bush," "Outsource Bush," "Words of Mass Deception," "Stop Killing Children" and "Like father, like son —— 1 term only."

Some of the signs on the route, as well as one seen in Penn Square Friday afternoon, contained vulgarities. [link via BuzzFlash]

A young protester wrote an exultant account of what he called, "The Single Greatest Event of My Life":

A friendly Kerry supporter named Mr. Shenk let us use his front yard to display our banners. Now comes the good part. After waiting around for about 45 minutes, the motorcade passed by us again. A few police cars, followed by a van or two, drove by. Then, a Bush/Cheney bus passed, followed by a second one going slower. At the front of this second bus was The W himself, waving cheerily at his supporters on the other side of the highway. Adam, Brendan, and I rose our banner (the More Trees, Less Bush one) and he turned to wave to our side of the road. His smile faded, and he raised his left arm in our direction. And then, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States of America, extended his middle finger.

Read that last sentence again.
I got flipped off by George W. Bush.

A ponytailed man standing next to us confirmed the event, saying, "I do believe the President of the U.S. just gave you boys the finger." We laughed probably for the next half hour, and promptly told everyone we knew. Brendan actually snapped a picture of Bushy in action, but the glare and the tint of the bus windows make it difficult to see him at all. Nonetheless, it was the best possible reaction.

We pissed George W. Bush off. We are true patriots.

Four years after earning the moniker Flori-duh, the state is again risking becoming a late-night talk show one-liner for mismanaging a presidential election.

Once again, there is turmoil over a list of who is eligible to vote, and the voting machines themselves in some of the state's biggest counties are under question: The touch-screen machines touted as a space-age solution to the 1960s-era punch-card dinosaurs are proving to be a colossal headache.

Sensing a mounting public relations disaster less then four months before what could be another squeaker of a presidential election, state officials Saturday yanked the controversial ''felon-purge'' voter list. It was a concession to the critics who barraged the administration with complaints and data showing that the list was riddled with errors -- this despite Gov. Jeb Bush's vow that the state, after the 2000 debacle, would become a model of election reform for the nation.

. . . .

The controversy started to blaze out of Bush's control when The Herald reported that more than 2,100 people remained on the list of potentially ineligible voters despite having won clemency -- the right to vote -- after serving their sentences. Many of them were black -- part of the Democratic base that mobilized against George W. Bush's candidacy in 2000 and nearly cost him the presidential election.

Then the discovery this week that Hispanics -- who in Florida lean Republican -- weren't on the felon purge list sent Bush critics and conspiracy theorists into overdrive, considering that the list was prepared by a Republican administration that went to court to block the public's right to review it.

For Bush critics, it all sounded eerily similar to the events of 2000, in which thousands of blacks complained of being denied the right to vote in the state that delivered the White House to the governor's brother by just 537 votes.

''The actions of the state have been either inept or nefarious,'' said Ralph Neas, president of People For the American Way, which challenged the state's similarly flawed purge list in 2000. [link via Buzzflash]

No one had caught the "no Hispanics excluded" trick before. Presumably they also used this one in 2000? Hispanics are a predominantly Republican voting bloc in Florida because so many of them are Cuban-Americans. Leaving Hispanics off the list results in thousands more votes for Bush -- far more than the 537 votes by which he "won" Florida, and thus the country, in 2000.

After President Bush leaves office in disgrace on January 20, 2005 ("Like father, like son: one term and you're done!"), will he clear brush full-time? Also, does he intend to resume alcohol and/or cocaine abuse? Or has he already done so? (That would explain a lot!)

By the way, is it true that members of the president's administration are known as "Bush Leaguers"? It sure seems appropriate.

I eagerly await your reply.

Submit your questions to the White House today! Or just leave them in comments here if you're afraid you'll get a one-way trip to Gitmo.

HOUSTON, July 8 - Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.

It's odd that this inadvertent microfilm destruction didn't come to light earlier. The New York Times notes:

The loss was announced by the Defense Department's Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review in letters to The New York Times and other news organizations that for nearly half a year have sought Mr. Bush's complete service file under the open-records law.

There was no mention of the loss, for example, when White House officials released hundreds of pages of the President's military records last February in an effort to stem Democratic accusations that he was "AWOL" for a time during his commitment to fly at home in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

Holden at Eschaton points out that on June 25 (as it happens, the same date the Pentagon sent out notices stating that the microfilm had been destroyed), Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post wrote this:

Here's a copy of the lawsuit filed by the Associated Press on Tuesday seeking access to microfilm of all of Bush's military service records.

From the argument: "A significant controversy has arisen in the ongoing campaign over the President's military service during the Vietnam War, and specifically whether he performed his required days of service during a period between May 1972 and May 1973. Allegations have been made that the military personnel file for George W. Bush released to the press earlier this year is not complete. The public has an intense and legitimate interest in knowing the validity of these claims, which may well be answered by reviewing the microfilm copy of the personnel file in the Texas archives."

Associated Press Assistant General Counsel Dave Tomlin told me yesterday that AP reporters began trying to get the documents back in February, but hit roadblock after roadblock.

Tomlin said the AP has been informed that the microfilm in question does indeed exist. Tomlin said that because paper records can vanish and be tampered with, the microfilm "would erase any questions." [Emphasis added.]

US President George W. Bush walks away from a briefing with the media, refusing to answer questions after he was asked about Enron and the reported indictment of former CEO Kenneth Lay, who was a close adviser and fund-raiser for Bush and his father, earning him the presidential nickname of "Kenny Boy." (AFP/Paul J. Richards) [link corrected] [link via BuzzFlash]

UPDATE: Kos also has the picture here.

Late last month, President Bush lost his greatest advantage in his bid for reelection. A poll conducted by ABC News and The Washington Post discovered that challenger John Kerry was running even with the president on the critical question of whom voters trust to handle the war on terrorism. Largely as a result of the deteriorating occupation of Iraq, Bush lost what was, in April, a seemingly prohibitive 21-point advantage on his signature issue. But, even as the president's poll numbers were sliding, his administration was implementing a plan to insure the public's confidence in his hunt for Al Qaeda.

This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided the Pakistanis for providing a "sanctuary" for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing the Afghan border. "The problem has not been solved and needs to be solved, the sooner the better," he said.

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. . . . But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." [link via BuzzFlash]

For Bush, everything is subordinate to his own self-interest. Bush lost interest in bin Laden, who had killed 3,000 Americans, declaring at a press conference just six months after 9/11, "I truly am not that concerned" about bin Laden. Instead, Bush went after Saddam Hussein, who posed no threat to America, but reportedly had "tried to kill my Dad."  Now, with Bush plummeting in the polls and desperate to bamboozle the American public into giving him another four years, capturing bin Laden is suddenly of interest to Bush again. The man is a disgrace.

Now, in the summer of 2004, Larry Flynt has a memoir in the bookstores called "Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth." . . .

. . . .

The first thing in your book that everyone is going to jump on is your claim that young George W. Bush paid for his girlfriend's illegal abortion.

You can't stay with a story this long and not believe in it. In 2000, I got a call from a lawyer in Houston. He told me that his client, "Susan," could prove that George W. Bush arranged for his girlfriend to have an abortion back in the early 1970s. Her boyfriend at the time, "Clyde," was pals with Bush and set up the procedure. We checked up and found that indeed "Clyde" was responsible for keeping Bush out of trouble. Bush had knocked up a girl named "Rayette." We talked to the doctor that performed the abortion. We felt we really had a blockbuster story, but about two months before we were going to break the story, "Susan" disappeared. We finally found her. She was living in a half-million-dollar home in Corpus Christi, Texas. Before that she was living in a small apartment working for $13,000 a year as a cocktail waitress. I'm not saying Bush bought her off, but I'm confident that one or more of his cronies did. The only thing that interested me in this story is -- I'm pro-choice, but to have a guy who is running on a pro-life platform ... and this procedure was committed in 1971, two years before Roe vs. Wade, which would have made it a crime.

I went to two members of the national press (during the 2000 presidential campaign) and said, "Look. I don't have anyone out on the stump. You guys do. At least ask Bush the question." You know what? They refused to. One of them had the nerve to tell me that the election was too close. "We don't want to be the ones to tip it in any direction." I thought, that gives you a really great feeling about the press. [link via Holden at Eschaton]

I wouldn't exactly call Flynt an admirable person. But as far as I can tell he seems to be basically honest -- which distinguishes him from just about the entire Bush regime. He also doesn't like pious hypocrites. During the Clinton impeachment proceedings, he exposed the extramarital affairs of many members of the Republican lynch mob, including as I recall Newt Gingrich, Robert Livingston, Henry Hyde, Bob Barr, Dan Burton, and Helen Chenoweth.

WASHINGTON, July 6 - An internal investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services confirms that the top Medicare official threatened to fire the program's chief actuary if he told Congress that drug benefits would probably cost much more than the White House acknowledged.

A report on the investigation, issued Tuesday, says the administrator of Medicare, Thomas A. Scully, issued the threat to Richard S. Foster while lawmakers were considering huge changes in the program last year. As a result, Mr. Foster's cost estimate did not become known until after the legislation was enacted.

But neither the threat nor the withholding of information violated any criminal law, the report said. It accepted the Justice Department's view that Mr. Scully had "the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress.'' Moreover, it said, the actuary "had no authority to disclose information independently to Congress.''

Mr. Scully, who resigned in December, in part to become a lobbyist for health care companies, had denied threatening Mr. Foster but had acknowledged having told him to withhold the information from Congress.

The report, by Dara Corrigan, the department's acting principal deputy inspector general, said, "Our investigation revealed that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not provide information requested by Congressional members and staff, and that Scully threatened to sanction Foster if he disclosed unauthorized information.''

The report said that if Mr. Scully still worked for the government, he might be subject to disciplinary action for possible violation of the department's standards of ethical conduct.

But Ms. Corrigan discovered "no criminal violations,'' though she sent her findings to the General Accounting Office, a Congressional investigative arm, to determine if Medicare officials had violated an appropriations law that protects the right of federal employees to communicate with Congress. In May, the Congressional Research Service said Mr. Scully's order to Mr. Foster apparently violated that law, which has been on the books in various forms since 1912.

William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the department, said Tuesday that the threat was not illegal because the actuary was supposed to report to the head of the Medicare program, who, Mr. Pierce said, had a right to dismiss him in case of insubordination. "No laws were broken,'' Mr. Pierce said.

. . . .

In recent weeks, Mr. Scully has registered as a lobbyist for major drug companies, including Abbott Laboratories and Aventis; for Caremark Rx, a pharmacy benefit manager; and for the American Chiropractic Association and the American College of Gastroenterology, among other clients. All are affected by the new Medicare law, which Mr. Scully helped write.

. . . .

Mr. Foster had estimated that the Medicare legislation would cost $500 billion to $600 billion over 10 years. The White House told Congress the cost would not exceed $400 billion. [link via Athenae at Eschaton]

Scenario 1: You stick up the corner 7-11 for $100, are caught, convicted, and sent to prison for five to ten years.

Scenario 2: You're the top Medicare official in the federal government. You make your subordinate lie to Congress, on pain of firing if he tells the truth. You thus hoodwink Congress into passing a bill that will cost the taxpayers $100 to 200 billion more than your subordinate told Congress. Then you leave government to make big bucks working for the companies that will make billions thanks to your chicanery and extortion. "No criminal violation."

Screwing the public and personally profiting from it is just business as usual in George W. Bush's America™.

When you hear Republicans disparage Sen. John Edwards's lack of experience, remember the words of Sen. Orrin Hatch, spoken to George W. Bush at a debate on Dec. 6, 1999.

"You've been a great governor," Hatch declared of his rival for the Republican presidential nomination. "My only problem with you, governor, is that you've only had four and going into your fifth year of governorship. . . . Frankly, I really believe that you need more experience before you become president of the United States. That's why I'm thinking of you as a vice presidential candidate." [links via Holden at Eschaton]

Speaking of rude,  imagine this headline after Kerry and Edwards win: "Two Johns Lick Bush and Dick"? (Sorry.)

The defining case in Edwards' legal career wrapped up that same year. In 1993, a five-year-old girl named Valerie Lakey had been playing in a Wake County, N.C., wading pool when she became caught in an uncovered drain so forcefully that the suction pulled out most of her intestines. She survived but for the rest of her life will need to be hooked up to feeding tubes for 12 hours each night. Edwards filed suit on the Lakeys' behalf against Sta-Rite Industries, the Wisconsin corporation that manufactured the drain. Attorneys describe his handling of the case as a virtuoso example of a trial layer bringing a negligent corporation to heel. Sta-Rite offered the Lakeys $100,000 to settle the case. Edwards passed. Before trial, he discovered that 12 other children had suffered similar injuries from Sta-Rite drains. The company raised its offer to $1.25 million. Two weeks into the trial, they upped the figure to $8.5 million. Edwards declined the offer and asked for their insurance policy limit of $22.5 million. The day before the trial resumed from Christmas break, Sta-Rite countered with $17.5 million. Again, Edwards said no. On January 10, 1997, lawyers from across the state packed the courtroom to hear Edwards' closing argument, "the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen," recalls Dayton. Three days later, the jury found Sta-Rite guilty and liable for $25 million in economic damages (by state law, punitive damages could have tripled that amount). The company immediately settled for $25 million, the largest verdict in state history. For their part, Edwards and Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service. [via Atrios]

As Texas Governor, George W. Bush was one of the "tort reform" movement’s biggest proponents. One of Bush’s first acts as governor in 1995 was to meet with representatives of nine Texas Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA) chapters in a salsa factory outside of Austin, after which he declared a legislative "emergency" on "frivolous lawsuits." Over his two terms, Bush signed a series of brutal bills that severely reduced injured consumers' rights to go to court.

However, when it comes to solving problems involving his own family, Bush heads straight to court. In 1999, Bush sued Enterprise Rent-A-Car over a minor fender-bender involving one of his daughters in which no one was hurt. Although his insurance would have covered the repair costs, making a lawsuit unnecessary, Bush sought additional money from Enterprise, which had rented a car to someone with a suspended license. In this case, Bush seemed to understand one of the most important functions of civil lawsuits -- to deter further wrongdoing. The case settled for $2,000 to $2,500.

The Tom Paine piece from which I got the Bush story has lots more amusing accounts of legislators and businesspeople who oppose "frivolous lawsuits" and support "tort reform" unless they or their family members are the plaintiffs. It also has this heartbreaker:

In 1975, Indiana lobbyist Frank Cornelius, whose clients included the Insurance Institute of Indiana, helped secure passage of a $500,000 cap on medical malpractice awards and elimination of all damages for pain and suffering in Indiana. As he wrote in the New York Times on October 7, 1994, he now "rue[s] that accomplishment." Beginning in 1989, Frank Cornelius experienced a series of medical catastrophes that resulted in his wheelchair confinement, respirator-assisted breathing and constant physical pain.

When he turned to the Indiana courts to provide a remedy, to compensate him for his massive injuries and hold the negligent health care providers accountable, the law was no longer there for him. The Indiana legislature had taken his rights away. Though his medical expenses and lost wages amounted to over $5 million, his claims against both the hospital and physical therapist at fault settled for a mere $500,000 -- the limit on damages for a single incident of malpractice.

The question is whether, taking a longer perspective, the economy is performing well. And the answer is no.

If you want a single number that tells the story, it's the percentage of adults who have jobs. When Mr. Bush took office, that number stood at 64.4. By last August it had fallen to 62.2 percent. In June, the number was 62.3. That is, during Mr. Bush's first 30 months, the job situation deteriorated drastically. Last summer it stabilized, and since then it may have improved slightly. But jobs are still very scarce, with little relief in sight.

Bush campaign ads boast that 1.5 million jobs were added in the last 10 months, as if that were a remarkable achievement. It isn't. During the Clinton years, the economy added 236,000 jobs in an average month. Those 1.5 million jobs were barely enough to keep up with a growing working-age population.

In the spring, it seemed as if the pace of job growth was accelerating: in March and April, the economy added almost 700,000 jobs. But that now looks like a blip — a one-time thing, not a break in the trend. May growth was slightly below the Clinton-era average, and June's numbers — only 112,000 new jobs, and a decline in working hours — were pretty poor.

What about overall growth? After two and a half years of slow growth, real G.D.P. surged in the third quarter of 2003, growing at an annual rate of more than 8 percent. But that surge appears to have been another blip. In the first quarter of 2004, growth was down to 3.9 percent, only slightly above the Clinton-era average. Scattered signs of weakness — rising new claims for unemployment insurance, sales warnings at Target and Wal-Mart, falling numbers for new durable goods orders — have led many analysts to suspect that growth slowed further in the second quarter.

And economic growth is passing working Americans by. The average weekly earnings of nonsupervisory workers rose only 1.7 percent over the past year, lagging behind inflation. The president of Aetna, one of the biggest health insurers, recently told investors, "It's fair to say that a lot of the jobs being created may not be the jobs that come with benefits." Where is the growth going? No mystery: after-tax corporate profits as a share of G.D.P. have reached a level not seen since 1929.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Defending the war in Iraq, President Bush said on Independence Day that America is safer because Saddam Hussein is in a prison cell. [Editor’s Note: Bush neglected to note that America would be much safer if he were in a prison cell.]

"Our immediate task in battle fronts like Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere [Editor’s Note: "And elsewhere" –– what wars are you planning next?] is to capture or kill the terrorists ... so we do not have to face them here at home," Bush told a cheering crowd outside the West Virginia Capitol. An enthusiastic audience estimated by state capitol police at 6,500 people waving American flags chanted, "Four more years."

. . . .

Two Bush opponents, taken out of the crowd in restraints by police, said they were told they couldn't be there because they were wearing shirts that said they opposed the president. [emphasis added; via Tena at Eschaton]

So much for that First Amendment silliness. Here in George W. Bush’s America™, you can’t wear a shirt expressing opposition to the president at a public event in front of your state capitol. If you do so, the official guardians of freedom™ come and forcibly remove you.

Independence Day commemorates the anniversary of the date on which the former American colonies declared their independence from England, ruled by the tyrannical King George III. Just four months from now, we can liberate America from the tyrannical rule of this King George. It can't come too soon.

You know the president always brags with me. And what he said to me not long ago was, "Joe, I don't do nuance" --- as if that was a real cool thing, right? I mean literally, that's a quote. When I said to him, "It's a nuanced situation, Mr. President." He said, "I don't do nuance, Mr. Chairman."

This sort of simple-mindedness is how we get Bush dichotomies like "you're either with us or you're against us." In Bush World, Iraq was against us and we had to go to war with it because it had weapons of mass destruction  Saddan Hussein had links to al Qaeda  Bush says that Saddam Hussein "tried to kill my Dad." Either that, or because Saddam wouldn't let weapons inspectors in -- even though that's nonsense.

Saudi Arabia was the home of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers (as opposed to Iraq's zero). Saudi Arabian organizations and individuals are thought to be among the leading financiers of al Qaeda. But Saudi Arabia is "with us" since the Saudis have been friends of the Bushes, and have lined their pockets, for decades.

Pakistan, unlike Iraq, has nuclear weapons, supplied nuclear weapons technology to North Korea and Iran, and is probably harboring Osama bin Laden within its borders. Its madrassas, religious schools run by fundamentalist Wahhabi Muslims, continue to teach children to hate the United States. But Pakistan is "with us" because Bush says so.

Libya, unlike Iraq, sponsored an act of international terrorism that killed Americans -- the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. But Libya is "with us" because Bush says so.

It would be nice to have a president who can see shades of gray.

On the Hillsborough [County] list, in hundreds of cases, names of felons and voters did not match, nor birthdates, nor even gender. Smith added that the ChoicePoint computer program automatically transformed various forms of a single name. In one case, a voter named "Christine" was identified as a felon based on the conviction of a "Christopher" with the same last name.

Another fact noted by Palast might aid the Florida Secretary of State's office in deciding whether I was in fact the similarly-named felon:

Florida is one of the few states to include both party and race on registration files.

"Hmm, this voter's white, so he's probably not the felon. Oh, wait, he's a registered Democrat -- that's him, all right!" There are huge opportunities for abuse, and from what Palast found, the authorities evidently took full advantage of those opportunities. (I know, you're thinking: "Katherine Harris, not fair and balanced? Surely you jest!")

So, could you vote in Florida? Check out the list.

There is also a larger issue. Even if Florida's list was accurate, it is outrageous to exclude felons from voting for life. People who have completed their sentences should be encouraged to become part of mainstream society. Most states thus allow ex-felons to vote. It is cruel and counterproductive to provide that someone busted for, say, possession of marijuana at age 18 is barred from voting for the next 60+ years of his or her life. Disenfranchisement of convicted felons also has a disproportionate racial impact. Blacks are more likely to be convicted of crimes than whites (even when, as is the case with drug crimes, they commit crimes at a similar rate), and the crimes they are convicted of are more likely to be deemed felonies.

George W. Bush has one drunk driving conviction, and Dick Cheney has two (a recidivist!), but they are allowed to vote, and even become President and Vice President of the United States. Dubya refuses to talk about whether he used illicit drugs in his wayward youth, but there's an excellent chance that he committed drug-related felonies (possession of cocaine, anyone?) in his past. And then there's Floridian Rush Limbaugh, who until a few months ago was in favor of throwing the book at anyone busted for drugs. If you're rich and white, you're a lot more likely to avoid a felony conviction than if you're poor and black.

If you're interested in the subject, Right to Vote is one organization working to restore voting rights to former felons, and a Google search for "felony disenfranchisement" provides lots of sources of information.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign's effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.

"I'm appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

"The bottom line is, when a church does it, it's nonpartisan and appropriate. When a campaign does it, it's partisan and inappropriate," he said. "I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors' fur the wrong way."

The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign.

. . . .

One section of the document lists 22 "coalition coordinator" duties and lays out a timeline for various activities targeting religious voters. By July 31, for example, the coordinator is to:

_Send your church directory to your state Bush-Cheney '04 headquarters or give to a BC04 field representative.

_Identify another conservative church in your community who we can organize for Bush.

_Recruit 5 people in your church to help with the voter registration project.

_Talk to your pastor about holding a citizenship Sunday and voter registration drive.

The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the effort "is a shameless attempt to misuse and abuse churches for partisan political ends." Lynn said his organization would be "watching closely to see how this plays out in the pews."

. . . .

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said "efforts aimed at transforming houses of worship into political campaign offices stink to high heaven."

Amen to that.

THE TEXAS EDUCATION "MIRACLE"....George Bush became governor of Texas in 1994 and reforming education was one of his major campaign promises.

So how did he do?

A U.S. Census Bureau study shows that Texas again ranks last in the percentage of high school graduates.

The study released Tuesday shows that 77 percent of Texans age 25 and older had a high school degree in 2003, the same percentage as a decade earlier, when Texas ranked 39th in the country. Meanwhile, graduation rates in other states have improved and a record 85 percent of Americans have high school degrees.

So Bush's programs apparently had no effect at all, while other states showed consistent improvement. The result is that Texas now ranks dead last.

But there's good news for Texans: both George Bush and Rod Paige, the superintendent of the Houston school district and the man most closely associated with the "Texas Miracle," are gone. The bad news is that George Bush is now president of the United States and Rod Paige is his Secretary of Education.

Oops.

(Via Suburban Guerrilla.)

Only in America can a shallow, ignorant man who doesn't like to read, can't put together a sentence, and is governor of a state with one of the worst records on education in the country persuade people that he will be an "Education President."

"In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States…somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power.That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush versus Gore. It put somebody in power," said Guido Calabresi, a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in Manhattan.

"The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy," Judge Calabresi continued, as the allusion drew audible gasps from some in the luncheon crowd Saturday at the annual convention of the American Constitution Society.

"The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in. I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual," the judge said.

Judge Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School, said Mr. Bush has asserted the full prerogatives of his office, despite his lack of a compelling electoral mandate from the public.

"When somebody has come in that way, they sometimes have tried not to exercise much power. In this case, like Mussolini, he has exercised extraordinary power. He has exercised power, claimed power for himself; that has not occurred since Franklin Roosevelt who, after all, was elected big and who did some of the same things with respect to assertions of power in times of crisis that this president is doing," he said.

The 71-year-old judge declared that members of the public should, without regard to their political views, expel Mr. Bush from office in order to cleanse the democratic system.

"That’s got nothing to do with the politics of it.It’s got to do with the structural reassertion of democracy," Judge Calabresi said.

His remarks were met with rousing applause from the hundreds of lawyers and law students in attendance.

Yes, tumultuous applause. The ACS is a liberal group (the liberal version of the Federalist Society). It was startling, but very refreshing, to hear such remarks from a sitting federal judge.

Judges are usually more circumspect in their public remarks, because canons of judicial ethics strictly limit what they can say about politics. Judges also usually do not publicly savage decisions by the Supreme Court. Unsurprisingly, Judge Calabresi apparently got in a spot of trouble after his remarks were reported:

NEW YORK (AP) -- A federal judge offered his "profound regret" Thursday for saying President Bush's rise to power was similar to that of Mussolini and Hitler.

. . . .

"My remarks were extemporaneous and, in hindsight, reasonably could be -- and indeed have been -- understood to do something which I did not intend, that is, take a partisan position," Calabresi wrote in a letter of apology to Chief Judge John Walker.

. . . .

In his letter of apology, Calabresi said he was "deeply sorry" for remarks that were meant as "a rather complicated academic argument about the nature of re-elections after highly contested original elections" -- but that were "too easily taken as partisan."

"That is something which judges should do their best to avoid, and there, I clearly failed," he wrote.

In a letter to the rest of the appeals judges, Walker said Calabresi's "off-the-cuff" comments had been viewed as a call to oppose Bush's re-election. He warned them to refrain from political activity or public endorsements because partisan political comments violate the Code of Judicial Conduct.

The parallel to Mussolini no doubt has personal resonance for Judge Calabresi. The Sun also reported:

Judge Calabresi was born in Milan. His family fled Mussolini in 1939 and settled in America.

 You can see why he prefers democratically elected leaders to appointed despots.

It's tough to pick a suspect out of a lineup, as about 80 Illinois judges found out when they fingered the wrong guy recently.

 

About 100 judges watched a staged crime on video as part of [an Illinois] Supreme Court Committee on Capital Cases training seminar in late May. In the short clip, a dark-haired white male dropped what appeared to be a bomb into a well and ran off.

 

Then Gary L. Wells, a witness identification expert who teaches psychology at Iowa State University, showed a video lineup of six men. More than 30 percent of the judges said suspect No. 3 was the perpetrator; 23 percent said it was suspect No. 1; and another 21 percent said it was No. 4.

 

All of them were wrong: The perpetrator wasn't in the lineup. Wells was using the lesson to show judges how false witness identification can, and does, lead to false convictions. In fact, Wells said, research has shown that witnesses finger the wrong suspect at least 25 percent of the time.

A reasonable doubt is a doubt based upon reason and common sense - the kind of doubt that would make a reasonable person hesitate to act. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt must, therefore, be proof of such a convincing character that a reasonable person would not hesitate to rely and act upon it in the most important of his or her own affairs. 

I believe that ["Fahrenheit 9/11"] will utterly destroy any residual confidence that the American people might have in the credentials of George W. Bush as a decisive war leader.

For a full five minutes, Moore cruelly dwells on Bush's vacuous, tortured face in close-up immediately after he had been told about the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. [I believe that Gen. Rose is mistaken about this detail. Bush had just been told about the second plane striking the WTC. The Pentagon was hit later. -- BeatBushBlog]

The message is clear. Here is no Roosevelt, Churchill or Thatcher, but a deeply inadequate man whose mind is frozen with indecision and fear. It is a look I know well - if he had been a subordinate commander in battle I would have immediately relieved him of his command.

In October 2002 it was finally the case that some in the CIA were willing to buck careerism, recognize the obvious danger of Saddam Hussein, and no longer bury evidence. In February of 2004 it is incompetent alarmists at the CIA who exaggerate the Iraqi threat--and poor naive George W. Bush who believes them. [link via Atrios]

If Hoaglund had any shame, he'd die of embarrassment. Do read this. It's really quite amazing.

Since it opened, "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been a hit in both blue and red America, even at theaters close to military bases. . . .

There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration's use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

And for all its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" performs an essential service. It would be a better movie if it didn't promote a few unproven conspiracy theories, but those theories aren't the reason why millions of people who aren't die-hard Bush-haters are flocking to see it. These people see the film to learn true stories they should have heard elsewhere, but didn't. Mr. Moore may not be considered respectable, but his film is a hit because the respectable media haven't been doing their job.

For example, audiences are shocked by the now-famous seven minutes, when George Bush knew the nation was under attack but continued reading "My Pet Goat" with a group of children. Nobody had told them that the tales of Mr. Bush's decisiveness and bravery on that day were pure fiction.

Or consider the Bush family's ties to the Saudis. The film suggests that Mr. Bush and his good friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the ambassador known to the family as Bandar Bush, have tried to cover up the extent of Saudi involvement in terrorism. This may or may not be true. But what shocks people, I think, is the fact that nobody told them about this side of Mr. Bush's life.

. . . .

Viewers may come away from Mr. Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true. For example, the film talks a lot about Unocal's plans for a pipeline across Afghanistan, which I doubt had much impact on the course of the Afghan war. Someday, when the crisis of American democracy is over, I'll probably find myself berating Mr. Moore, who supported Ralph Nader in 2000, for his simplistic antiglobalization views.

But not now. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a tendentious, flawed movie, but it tells essential truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price.

AUSTIN - When it comes to religion, I've always believed it's more important to walk the walk than to talk the talk. I come from a tradition (Episcopal) that considers it rather in bad taste to wear your religion on your sleeve, presumably from Matthew 6:5-6:

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.

"But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

. . . .

Back in the 1950s, when the late Rep. Bob Eckhardt was still in the Texas Legislature, a bill to cut off all state aid to illegitimate children was under debate. After listening to some of his "Christian" colleagues explain why illegitimate children should be left to starve, Eckhardt rose and said, "I am not so much concerned about the natural bastards as I am about the self-made ones." I consider that one of the most Christian things ever said during legislative debate.

. . . .

To the extent that politics should be based on moral and ethical considerations, of course it has religious foundations. But dragging God into partisan politics is, in my view, a sin.

Is it Christian to cut money for Head Start? Is it Christian to cut poor children off health care? Is it Christian to cut old people off Medicare? Is it Christian to write memos justifying torture? Is it Christian to cut after-school, nutrition and AIDS programs so multimillionaires can have bigger tax cuts?

Historically, the Bible has been used to justify some stupefying crimes, including slavery and genocide. I see no indication that we are any better at divining the Lord's intent now than we ever were.

. . . .

. . . I have seen too many Psalm-singing, Bible-quoting, Holy Joe hypocrites in politics to think that these frauds improve the moral tone of our public life. Getting snookered by some canting humbug is even more depressing than getting snookered by a plain old crook.

Beware those who make a show or a parade of their piety. Keep watching for the ones who walk the walk.

"The bitter differences of the war are over," Bush told a news conference, which was delayed by anti-American protests staged around the lightning U.S.-EU summit in Ireland.

Fenced off from his detractors by 2,000 soldiers and 4,000 police -- a third of the Irish security forces -- Bush holed up in a western Irish castle with European Union leaders.

As Pete M. wrote at The Dark Window, "Those two paragraphs could have come straight out ot the Onion."

After Ireland, Bush moved on to Turkey, where the bitter differences of the war are also over, thank goodness:

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) -- Tens of thousands of Turks chanting anti-Bush slogans demonstrated against the president's visit to their country on Sunday and a NATO summit.

Bush is unpopular in Turkey, where the overwhelming majority of the public opposed the Iraq war.

. . . .

The protest in the Kadikoy district, on the Asian side of Istanbul, attracted more than 40,000 people, mostly members of leftist groups, police said.

"When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars . . . ."

"Bush's believability by and large has been one of his strong suits," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center for the People and the Press. Things began changing in January, Kohut said, when no weapons of mass destruction turned up in Iraq and the president's own weapons inspector cast doubt on whether they'd existed before the invasion. By February, when a Pew poll asked respondents to use a single word to describe the president, "honest" still topped the list - but "liar" turned up close behind for the first time.

New surveys by The New York Times and the Washington Post reveal a perilous plunge in the commander-in-chief's credibility. The Times found that 79 percent of the public thinks Bush either is hiding something about Iraq, or worse, is "mostly lying" about it. The Post asked whether Bush or Kerry is "honest and trustworthy," and the president was judged to be honest by 39 percent. Kerry came in at 52 percent. [link via Daily Kos and Atrios]

This is a very big deal. As Atrios writes, "Bush has lost one of [his] strongest media-manufactured characteristics - his reputation as a 'straight shooter.'" Bush's record is horrific, but a lot of people have liked him anyway because of his "character" -- honest, Christian, a "compassionate conservative," yada, yada, yada. It's hogwash, of course. He's actually an ignorant, self-centered, irresponsible, dry-drunk pathological liar who's so devoid of compassion that he mocks people whose executions he's presiding over. But with people coming to realize that Bush is not only incompetent but a liar, he's in deep trouble.