Local Politics

Since low-rent impresario Chicken John is running for mayor of San Francisco, alongside a nudist, a professional clown, and a rather spaced-out homeless cab driver; I thought it would be good fun to attend the only mayoral debate in which the incumbent, Gavin Newsom, planned to participate. This took place last Thursday in the auditorium beneath the City's main library.

I was ten minutes late getting there. On the one hand, this didn't matter since Newsom was about ten minutes late himself, and the first half hour of the show was taken up anyway by a lecture about how San Francisco's new system of ranked-choice voting will work. --On the other hand, being late mattered a lot because the auditorium had already filled beyond standing-room capacity, and spilled into a short line outside. Guards were only letting us in when someone else left.

But I was #12 in line, and there was some movement happening; plus I had a book to read and some time to kill before I had another place to be at 8. So I waited.

I was well-buried in that book when a klieg light kicked in on me, and a thoroughly-groomed man was tipping a microphone into my face while introducing himself from CBS-5 and asking what had brought me to the debate.

Ambush!

Before anybody gets excited about the fact that I have the video clip below, be warned that (a) it's of abysmal quality - I mean, criminally bad. I VHS-taped the 11:00 news off of my little TV, tilting the rabbit ears into the best position I could (because yes, I can only watch TV with the help of rabbit ears); then transcoded it to quicktime for upload. And considering that (b) I am a catastrophic disappointment in the video (if not, indeed, a bit of a fool), I wouldn't even have gone through that trouble had it not seemed like an amusing tech experiment.

Yeah, I blew my big opportunity in front of the camera. I didn't say, "Why, I came to see Chicken John's agenda of art and affordability enunciated in the public square!" I did not say the truth, which was, "I came here to see whether a circus erupts!" Instead, I gave a numbingly dull good-citizen translation of that latter thought:

Anyway, I was finally let into the debate for its last 40 minutes or so. Some funny things were said. The cab driver, who calls himself Grasshopper, kept putting his hands into the "flying birdman" goggles position while other people were answering their questions (as per left, below). When answering questions himself, he just gurbled on in spaced-out tones about how marijuana and sex work should be legalized.


A candidate named H. Brown was giving Newsom a little hell, saying apropos of the new system of neighborhood security cameras, "If we'd had a camera in the mayor's office this past year, Newsom wouldn't even be in office today." --An evident reference to Gavin's affair with a top aide's wife, which is about the only piece of local politics I've actually heard anything about.

The nudist (who was, sadly, not nude) actually sounded level-headed enough. He just kept saying San Francisco should borrow more progressive ideas from major European cities.

Chicken John - at least while I was watching - ignored the questions he was asked about surveillance cameras and earthquake preparedness to hold forth about how the City drums out artists with its high rents, and that Muni buses should be run on coffee grounds. In his summary statement, he jabbed in the very funny line that, "San Francisco is not a city of zombies!" - funny, since there was a zombie flash mob slated to gather outside the library and attack the audience and candidates as they left.

And that's San Francisco politics for you, at least in an off-year like this one.

Before the batteries in my camera died, I was able to take one or two pictures of the zombie flash mob that were as bad as, or worse than, this one:

(If you click on it you'll at least be able to get some detail.)

Update: Jim Lamb has provided me the link to some much better documentation of the zombie attack.

citizenship test

This is a bit of fun. Ten questions from the new version of the US citizenship test.

I got nine out of ten - god knows how I was able to pull from out of the dim reaches of my recollection that there are (spoiler alert) 27 amendments to the Constitution.

But I didn't understand their interpretation of the question, "Name two rights of American citizens," and, silly as it sounds, I missed that one.

In defense of Jenna

It feels more than a little weird setting out to defend Jenna Bush. Just seeing her creeps me out a bit: she looks far too much like her father, although younger, and in drag. Quite like the weird little pop! of the senses you get when you see Lisa Marie Presley.

She's him - I mean, she's her own dad... but yet... she's her?

You know.

Plus, Jenna seems to carry the analogy with her father right into the frat house. She strikes one (okay, me) as a bratty, gum-snapping entitle-ee, chafing at the bit - now that she's earned that B.A. - to go pull down some mid-six-figures for doing little or nothing at a consulting firm; but feeling obliged first to build up some public image by helping a handful of disadvantaged third-world youths and pulling down a six-figure royalty advance for writing having a book ghost-written about it. A rather shoddily ghost-written book at that, by most accounts. But an easy read for the pre-teen set.

I know I said I've come here to defend her. Just not about any of that.

No, I want to defend Ms. Bush against this foolish notion that she's required to go fight in Iraq. And sure, there's one obvious reason she shouldn't: she'd be a target, a danger to her fellow soldiers, etc. The Prince-William thing. But I don't care about that. What I care about is the more basic implication that parents' children should be held to account for their sins. It's such a patently ridiculous idea that you can actually find it espoused in the Old Testament.

Michael Moore loves this line of attack. I always thought it was one of the dumbest bits of Fahrenheit 9-11, him running around Washgington, DC asking Congresspeople if they'd send their children to hunt down those Mesopotamian WMDs. To me that's a softball; you answer, "I am terrifically proud of my wonderful son [daughter] and would support wholly his [her] decision to wear the uniform of his [her] country if he [she] so chose. But his [her] life is his [her] own, and I respect his [her] decision."

Oddly, none of the Congresspeople did that. They just got nervous and squirmed away. The line worked so well for Moore that he took it to the 2004 RNC and pounded Bill O'Reilly with it (~ minute 6:00). "Would you sacrifice your child to eliminate a brutal dictator?" "Er - I'd send myself, but I'm not talking about any children here!"

Anyway. The poor girl (Jenna) doesn't know about this whole complicated thing (Iraq) one way or another. She no doubt believes in the war because to do otherwise would be the beginning of the admission that her father is a moron of world-historical proportions. Further than that, I do not believe she's much thought about the matter. You know - just like 90% of the American public didn't much think about it in the buildup to this Vast Miscarriage in the first place.

("Vast Miscarriage": I like that. I think I'll actually start using it to refer to the Iraq war all the time.)

But none of that's particularly Jenna's fault, and it's not logical to somehow punish George by attempting to send his daughter into the conflagration he's uncorked. Even rhetorically.

As for George himself? He should be turned out for lifetime infantry duty on January 21, 2009. We can give him the rank of Sergeant so that Cheney can serve as Private right beneath him.

No Gore '08

Well, I wish he'd run, since I think everything he's come out supporting in the past six years has been borne out to be stone-cold right: and I'm leery in the extreme about ending up with another round of Clintonian triangulation, which is what we'll get if the presidential race proceeds as it has. Not to mention that Gore '08 would be an elegant piece of poetic justice.

But I think he won't run, and the reason, indirectly enough, is that the Republican candidates suck.

All of them, fearsomely. Which is a crying shame.

See, Democrats are very comfortable right now. They feel like they're going to take the White House next year in a walk; and, to be fair, they will. But what this disastrously results in is a total lack of dissatisfaction with the current crop of Dem candidates. "Hillary? Sounds fine by me, but if there's a problem down the road we've got Barack to fall back on. If he doesn't work out, well hell, Edwards will do in a pinch."

And thus Gore lacks the sort of opening through which one might most energetically catapult. So he will likely have to content himself with a cozy little life of racking up Academy Awards, cash, and - from the sound of it - a Nobel Peace Prize in the morning.

Although I agree with Hitchens about the loss of cachet he will suffer for not running (at least for me personally).

Interrogation Techniques

Not a Christian Nation

This clears it up as nicely as you could ask anybody to.

PS. No posts from me for a spell, I realize. Will compensate for that shortly.

Timid majority

Two very decent, important pieces of legislation were shot down in the Senate this week by a Republican threat of filibuster. They were (a) the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, and (b) Jim Webb's (D-VA) defense-spending amendment mandating that our troops get equal time stateside for every 15-month Iraq/Afghanistan deployment.

Forgive me if I'm getting overly basic here, but the filibuster is a senatorial technique to prevent legislation from coming to a vote (you can't use it in the House of Representatives, because only in the Senate are legislators given unlimited floor time during debate). For any legislation, it takes a 60-Senator "cloture" vote to force debate to an end and actually move to the vote-vote. This gives us the result that if a minority of 40 Senators is gung-ho enough about torpedoing a given measure, it's gone.

But consider: when Strom Thurmond wanted to block the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the fool actually had to stand on the floor of the Senate and speechify away for 24 hours and 18 minutes (with, it is perhaps apocryphally said, an external catheter hidden in his pants). You didn't have to talk about the legislation at hand during a filibuster: you could read out the telephone book or recite baseball statistics if you liked, but you did have to stand there in the pit and keep talking. As we all saw dramatized in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Since then, however, it's become standard operating procedure that filibusters need only be threatened. It's one of those comity things. You say you'd block the vote we want to bring if we brought it? Okay, you win, we won't bring it.

Now, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, could make would-be filibusterers actually filibuster if he wants; but he hasn't been doing that. The question is, of course, why not? The Republicans have embarked on a strategy of obstructionism, and are getting the two-for-one deal of both keeping the Democrats from getting what they want, and also making them look incompetent in the process. Not, it should be said, without reason.

Among the legislation that has succumbed to natural and pseudo-filibustering are amendments to advance stem cell research, a bill that would have reduced the cost of attending college, multiple pieces of legislation designed to facilitate a drawdown of troops from Iraq, and a provision that would have allowed the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate drug prices with drug companies. (Huffington Post)

And next up, Bush is asking for more Iraq money within a month or so. Here's what should finally happen: the Democrats tie the money to specific withdrawal benchmarks - how many troops out, and what dates they're to be out by. Then make the Republicans come in with their cots and catheters and their day-long speeches to make their case to the country as to what "success" means in Iraq, how we can still expect to achieve it after the past 4.5 years of unmitigated catastrophe, and what benefit this nation ever did or still could stand to gain.

Here's what will happen: the Dems will give Bush whatever he wants, while making various noises about how he needs "a new strategy in Iraq."

$20

I don't know when the last time was that I "chipped in" (as they always like to term it) to a MoveOn.org campaign. I know it would have been during the '04 election cycle.

But this idiocy about the "General Betray Us?" ad so peeved me that I chucked them $20 this afternoon. 22 Democrats and Joe Lieberman joined all Senate Republicans in passing a condemnation of MoveOn for questioning the veracity of the esteemed General's (Petreus) rosy surge assessment.

Dear me, how dare they.

As John McCain said in response to the ad, they should be kicked out of the country (and who's "they"? Eli Pariser? Or the 3.2 million Americans who've signed on with the organization? And if the latter - and, for that matter, if the former - to what locale are the offending parties to be kicked?)

...In the past two days, of course, the Senate has scuttled real legislation to preserve Habeas Corpus, and to stanch the indefinite deployment of our troops (more on these parliamentary antics in a subsequent post). But then this thing goes sailing through. $20 is, of course, utterly meaningless; and I can't even quite go so far as to say that it makes me feel any better to have donated it. But I did, doggone it, and there you are.

If you're so inclined as to sign a petition of solidarity with MoveOn's right to have run the ad, it's here.

Ding, dong, TimesSelect is dead

Now I can read Paul Krugman again.

$20 a year I might have paid. The $50 they were asking? Too much.

Petraeus' Report to Congress

(You'll want to click on the cartoon to be able to read it.)

Left-Wing / Right-Wing

I've had a request or two to post the text of these short performance pieces online....


Right-Wing Essay:

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to share with you just a word about the Free-Market Gospel. Competition – repeat it with me, brothers – competition – by which I mean the fear of being eaten alive by coyotes – is the root of everything good in this world. Why, in order not to be eaten alive by coyotes, we see majestic works of art and learning everywhere we turn. Would Mr. Sir Isaac Newton have invented physics if he’d lived some kind of a life of leisure? Would the Big Bopper have created such seminal works of Rock ‘n’ Roll were he not locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Wolfman Jack? Would Michelangelo ever have impressed his masterwork upon the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel if he’d been on some kind of a government contract?

And there we get to the heart of the problem, friends. Government. After all, governments are incompetent by definition – there’s no competition! Indeed, everything every government has ever done is inferior to anything any act of free enterprise has ever accomplished. Period.*

You see, the very existence of a “nanny” government creates a host of perverse motives. For example, programs like welfare and unemployment encourage people not to work – just like Medicare makes them sick and Social Security makes them get old. And consider the police force. Why in the name of all that’s wholesome does the government run a police force? As I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s terribly unfair to poor people. Here they are, these poors out there with barely any property to protect, forced to pay taxes to support cops to protect their property! At least so far as poor people even pay taxes anymore.

No, let people who need the police, pay for the police – that’s what I say! Anybody can see how much better off we’d be if only the laws of this country were enforced by paid cadres of mercenaries in the employ of the wealthy.

And by the way, why in the world is the government running around printing money? Don’t they realize they’re incompetent? Money should be minted by multiple competing private companies, each of which can publish their own paid advertisements on the currency. Whichever company prints the coolest money (holograms, the best movie tie-ins, singing dollar bills, etc.) will tend to win out in the marketplace. Luckily, no one will ever win out, though, because market forces ensure there can never be such a thing as a monopoly.

Aha – I bet you disagree with me about that. And why? Because you’ve been brainwashed by liberals who are always out yelping that the government needs to be performing unnecessary busywork like breaking up monopolies, enforcing laws, and printing money. And it’s nonsense, top to bottom. I can prove to you right now that a monopoly has never existed in the history of human commerce. Observe: if there had ever been a monopoly, some enterprising individual would have created a company whose product was monopoly-breakup. Has there ever been such a company? Not that I’ve heard of. QED.

Therefore, you will now agree with me that all government is useless, counterproductive, marxist, parasitic, perverse, and, in every conceivable regard, bad. This is the entirety of the conservative philosophy, folks, presenting a clean, simple, and “baggage-free” agenda for the health of our nation. Thank you for listening.

P.S. The world is 4000 years old; global warming is a lie; oil companies need billions of tax dollars in annual direct subsidies; the Prince of Peace will throw you in an eternal lake of fire if you ever have oral sex; and the single greatest threat to our nation, besides terrorism and wetbacks, is the creeping menace of any persons who wear Birkenstock™ sandals (aka, “liberals”).

*With these exceptions: governments are excellent at starting wars, enforcing property rights, suppressing social and labor movements, and imprisoning people, particularly for pot-smoking. Oh – and governments are also brilliant at figuring out whom to award contracts to for doing all the things they’re no good at doing.


Left-Wing Essay:

Wake up, sheeple! Are you going to let the multinational corporations, special interests, and the racist, misogynist, corporatist, neo-nazi, Christo-fascist religious extremists continue their hegemonic dictatorship over our economic and private lives – or are you going to stand up and act?

The greed-fueled transnational conspiracy to pollute our air and water; suppress the rights and opportunities for Personages of Color; trample Labor and Wymmyns’ rights; force-feed us the drivel of television game shows, vapid lying news, and The Food Network – that conspiracy came to a head on September the 11th, 2001, when a gang of Saudi patsies was recruited to crash passenger jets into office buildings to distract attention from the explosives George Bush had personally planted in those buildings – and thereby build a fake case for invading Iraq!

Say what you like about its ruthlessness, but what you cannot question is the flawless elegance of their evil plan.

It’s finally time to wake up! They’ve been controlling the world for decades – it’s been going on since they tried to murder Castro!* In fact, in our very own community today, the corpoatocracy is at it again. Our crypto-fascistic District 4 Selectman has systmatically ignored a grassroots effort to promote education in our community. This fall’s proposed municipal bond measure Z will raise funds dedicated to teaching spirit-based holistic wellness – mandating homeopathy and vibration therapy be added to our high schools’ health curriculum, and funding free booths all around town offering herbal-tea colonics.

Spreading wellness awareness in our community is precisely the blow we must strike at the heart of the military-industrial giant! By breaking the spell of corporate brainwashing, and spiritually liberating the public, I assure you that the fundamental reconstruction of our society on a basis of justice and egalitarianism will follow naturally.

Do you realize what’s at stake? This is no time for hesitation or half-measures: have you got the courage, the fortitude, the guts to do what must be done – and sign my petition? Please?

Look, I know you have a lot of groceries you’re trying to load into your car, but it’ll only take a second.

Please? I’m being paid 50¢ for every name I get.

* i.e., when the CIA insinuated a midget assassin into the beard of Fidel Castro [1961]; when the CIA insinuated a humidor into Fidel Castro’s study whose cigars had been replaced by very small midget assassins [1962]; and when the CIA insinuated over 200 million decrepit 1958 Ford sedans into Cuba in the hopes of raising the rate of automobile accidents [ongoing]

Impeachment

Dear Speaker Pelosi,

Last fall, prior to the start of the present congressional term, you publicly declared that the impeachment of President Bush would be "off the table". I am writing because I believe this was a serious mistake - and that a broad-reaching impeachment inquiry should be undertaken immediately by the House Judiciary Committee.

Here are a few of the reasons such an inquiry is needed:

• In December 2005, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration was operating a massive program of warrantless and partly domestic wiretapping in violation of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act. The President publicly admitted the truth of the story, and continued the program without change until the beginning of this year. There is substantial evidence that even now, the administration continues to violate Americans' Fourth Amendment rights on a gross and systematic scale under a modified form of this program - as well as under other programs as yet undisclosed.
  

• The President's broad assertion of executive privilege has included openly flouting congressional subpoenas both for documents and for the testimony of top aides. The President has also appended hundreds of Constitutionally baseless "signing statements" to legislation passed during his tenure in office - many of which declare his open intention to disregard or circumvent these laws as he sees fit. Recent executive orders also suggest the administration's willingness to assume total command, by fiat, over state and local government resources in the event of an emergency, however defined.
  

• The President has asserted extra-legal powers over persons he chooses to name "enemy combatants". In at least one instance, he held an American citizen in prison for years without stating a charge, or allowing any opportunity for judicial redress.

• In violation of international treaties, there is ample evidence that the administration is operating an international network of secret prisons where "ghost detainees" are subjected to treatment that can only reasonably be described as torture.

• Documents like the Downing Street Minutes have suggested the existence of a campaign of deliberate public deception in building the case for war with Iraq.
  

The power of impeachment vested in the House of Representatives is much more than a partisan political tool. It may have been used as such a tool by the Republican-controlled congress in 1998. However, impeachment remains the most basic of the checks and balances which form the essential genius of our system of government. For the Speaker of the House of Representatives to take impeachment "off the table" is as irresponsible as it would be for the President to take the veto power "off the table," or for the Supreme Court to announce it will no longer overturn laws as unconstitutional. To decline even to investigate potentially impeachable offenses - while the Executive branch claims arbitrary new powers for itself - is to allow our system of government to crumble away piece by piece.

Today, quite unlike in 1998, I believe it is to shy away from impeachment which is the partisan political act. Such a decision clearly reflects prioritizing the Democrats' safe standing in the 2008 elections over and above a respect for the integrity of our Constitution, or for the rule of law generally. To allow this President's extra-legal acts to go forward unchallenged, sets a precedent inimical to the future of our way of government.

For these many reasons, I urge you to support the opening of an impeachment inquiry in the House Judiciary Committee.

Sincerely,
Marc Wilson
San Francisco, CA

cc. Representative John Conyers, Chairman, House Judiciary Committee

Gonzo out

Huh? Why now? I must admit - after all that he's sat on his hands for in the past few months - I haven't a clue as to why he would quit this morning; and he gave us no reason at all in his press conference, not even that he wants to spend more time with his family. All I can say is that he clearly wanted to do this while Congress was out of session.

More later, I assume.

***

(2 hours later)
Let me add this. Glenn Greenwald makes an excellent case at Salon that the Democrats should fight tooth and nail to deny the confirmation of a new Attorney General to anyone but a truly independent (read: not Michael Chertoff) candidate. This position - the Attorney General - really holds the keys to the kingdom, if you will. IE, if you get somebody in there who's not beholden to Bush, we may actually start to see (a) some respect for the Constitution in matters like warrantless wiretapping, and (b) some genuine investigations of the administration's malfeasance to date.

However. As suggested over at Talking Points Memo, Bush may seek to throw in a new AG on the quick as a recess appointment while Congress is out of session for August. Indeed, that may be the real reason for Gonzales' timing in quitting.

Cleaning off my desktop

A few weeks back I ran into "The Political Compass", a website/questionnaire which has been making some rounds online. The idea is that to classify people's politics on a spectrum between "left" and "right" is a gross oversimplification - making it impossible to distinguish between (say) such leftists as Stalin and Gandhi. To deepen the picture a little, they posit two dimensions of political belief - social and political - and plot you on a cartesian grid according to how you answer a battery of questions.

Which brings us to the bit about cleaning off my desktop. I've always figured myself well to the left economically, but socially libertarian. According to the questionnaire, I rated thusly:



Like I'd thought. Anyway, now I can delete this image from my desktop.

FYI, this is how the current presidential candidates rate:


I'm not sure how they're deciding to answer their questionnaire on behalf of the candidates, but I'm dinging up comfortably to the left of (and more socially libertarian than) Kucinich.

But that's not the story, of course. The story is that by and large, the Democratic and Republican candidates represent a choice only in what bit of the right-wing-authoritarian quadrant you'd like to inhabit.

You can take the questionnaire yourself here.

Karl Rove: a book report

Odd as it sounds, I've been approached by actual human beings who have asked me to write a book report about Karl Rove. "What does this guy do, exactly?" "Why did he quit?" "Does any of it matter?"

To take the last question first - no, at this point I don't think it really matters. For one thing, it's too late in Bush's term for much of anything to matter. For another, many liberals have a far, far outsized idea of what this guy is able to accomplish. They are in what I call the "Karl Rove controls the weather" camp. So instead of ranting about the fellow, let's just take his actual resume one step at a time.

Rove's Republican partisanship was reportedly cemented when, as a 9-year old Utahian in 1959, he was beaten up by a little girl who supported Kennedy. Rove had been carrying a Nixon button.

He went on to a scholarship in poli sci at the University of Utah. Rove never got a degree, but did begin landing electoral gigs with the Republicans, including in Illinois where at age 19 he used false credentials to steal letterhead from the office of the Democratic candidate for state Treasurer - and went to rock shows and homeless shelters distributing this letterhead with the legend, "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" imprinted thereon. (The Democrat won anyway.)

In 1973 Rove became a candidate for the national chairmanship of the College Republicans, a campaign in which he was mentored by Lee Atwater (of later Willie-Horton-ad fame). Rove became a brief sideshow to the Watergate investigation during this campaign because he was reportedly out teaching the kids "dirty tricks" as campaign techniques - going through your opponents' trash for publicizable dirt, etc. George H.W. Bush, then head of the GOP, was tasked to investigate the matter... with the result that Rove was brought on as the College Republican chair three weeks later with Bush Sr.'s blessing.

This association with the elder Bush brought Rove into his first contact with W. - back in 1973. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow," Karl would later say, obviously still awed - god-knows-how - by the incident.

Anyway, Karl next gravitated to Texas. Here he led a brilliantly-successful 15-year campaign, using direct mail and message-crafting, to turn that Democratic stronghold (think Lyndon Johnson) into a Republican Mordor (think Tom DeLay). My favorite highlight comes in 1986, when Rove is working on the comeback gubernatorial campaign of former Governor William Clements, Jr. Clements is slipping in the polls, and is given to various kinds of blundering public remarks that are setting him further behind. On the morning of a critical televised debate, Rove calls an emergency press conference at his office and says he's discovered that the place has been bugged, implying that the Democrats are responsible. Needless to say, this throws that night's debate coverage into disorder. In the fracas, nobody really notices how Rove goes on to file no charges against anyone. Or that further details of the bugging simply don't add up... like that the batteries inside the surveillance device are estimated to run for about eight hours, and were fresh on the morning of the press conference. Was somebody sneaking into Rove's office and changing the batteries twice a day? Had he caught the bug just hours after it was first planted? Or had he - gasp! - put the thing there himself?

I dunno. But to speculate on this would, I suppose, put me dangerously close to the "Karl Rove controls the weather" camp. So I shall not speculate.

Anyway: Rove goes on to plunk W. into the Texas gubernatorial mansion in 1994 - a state where the governor's duties are nearly as slender as Shrub's resume (it's a weak executive there, and even the legislature only meets four months a year - every other year. Then again, Bush's job experience at that time consisted of running three oil companies into the ground, and using his dad's name to parlay some wealthy friends into helping him buy a baseball team.) On the strength of this executive experience, and his sterling record at offing death-row prisoners, Bush Jr. was duly regarded ready for the oval office. Abu Ghraib, here we come.

And, in a nutshell, that's Rove's background.

--Now, if you can remember back that far, the question was, "What does this guy do, exactly?" Essentially he's held two jobs in the Bush presidency. The first was to get Bush elected; and at that job, say what you like, he at least succeeded. This isn't the place to quibble about how Gore won Florida, or that '04 was closer than the vote should have been for an incumbent who was riding 90% approval a couple years before. Instead bear in mind how the Republicans gained seats in '02 - a remarkable feat for the majority party in an off-year election (of course, they lost big in '06 - but again, let's not get off track).

See, Rove thought like this. Post-Bill-Clinton, he asked, how many people are really swayable in a national election anymore? In the good old days, it used to be around 20%. Now the polls put it at more like 8: not enough to be worth it. So, Rove reasoned, you throw out the time-honored strategy of moving to the center in a national election. Instead you perhaps offer some centrist platitudes ("compassionate conservatism") while working solely to energize your base better than the other guy. I.e., let's talk up abortion, guns, Jesus, terrorism, wedge issues, and tacit charges of treason on the parts of your opponents. It's a hideous way to run a national dialogue, but it's a bang-up way to manage an election in a closely divided country.

Anyway, once Bush was safely in the White House, he gave Rove his second job, the one that put him on the public payroll. This was as Deputy Chief of Staff, where he was charged to craft elements of the administration's public policy and legislative agenda. What does that mean? It means Rove was supposed to use the same demographic savvy he'd brought to bear on the election, to use in shaping a Permanent (or at least Generational) Republican Majority.

I can give you three big examples of the sort of initiative Rove thought would accomplish this. Consider the Medicaid prescription-drug bill, rammed through the House of Representatives in a 5a.m. vote that was held open for three hours while Tom DeLay allegedly bribed and threatened congressmen to change their "nay" votes to "yea". Democracy at work. Anyway, despite the so-called "doughnut-hole" in its coverage, and the fact that the the bill forbids the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for bulk rates (presumably the only advantage of a government drug program in the first place) - despite this, the prescription drug benefit is supposed to make all of our seniors, and soon-to-be-seniors (Baby Boomers), grateful constituents of the Republican party.

In this line of thinking, Republicans show a very crude sort of "Democrat envy", if you will. The New Deal programs (social security, unemployment) and Great Society programs (general assistance, affirmative action) are believed by Republicans to have worked a sort of voodoo over certain segments of the electorate (seniors, minorities, women, the poor) and turned them into Democratic zombies. If we can just give them the right conservative handout - so a Rove reasons - they'll cleave off and become dedicated Republicans for the next 40 years.

Which brings us to his second initiative, social security reform. This of course entailed eliminating the "security" part, and creating an "ownership society" where we all feel like tycoons riding the national economic surge on our $5,000 private-account nest-eggs. We all know that this went over like a lead balloon. So much for making the Gen-Y kids into permanently-grateful Republicans.

Unsurprisingly, the third big initiative was targeted at the fastest-growing population bloc in the U.S.: Latinos. And thus did Rove help W. put together his proposal for "comprehensive immigration reform". By passing this legislative package, the Republican party could hope to endear itself to millions of Mexican immigrants - and their citizen relatives - who would be provided under these new laws both legal employment in the U.S. and an eventual path to citizenship here. Of course, the Republican base happens to consist in fair measure of xenophobes and racists, so this legislative push ended up panning out even worse than social security reform.

--And there you go. Karl Rove is a man who's held two jobs for Bush. The first was to win elections: that one went pretty well. The other was to use targeted policy initiatives to create a permanent Republican majority: that one went all to hell.

So what does it mean that Rove is leaving his job right now? I suppose it means there's a year and a half till the next election. Rove is too radioactive to work for one of the Republican presidential candidates directly - they all need to distance themselves from Bush - but he'll be quietly advising several of them, and surely working on the down-low for the eventual nominee. Plus, it's just time for him to cash in: collect some speaking fees, land some think-tank gigs. And begin pitching in on this $500-million effort called the "George W. Bush Presidential Library", which is actually a P.R. offensive designed to convince future Americans that Bush was not in fact the worst president in United States history.

Good luck, boy genius.

PS. He did out Valerie Plame, and was involved in the US Attorney Purge scandal; and I didn't say anything about his participation in the White House Iraq Group (i.e., how he helped start this war we'll never be able to get out of). Plus he's recently been ignoring a congressional subpoena about the purge scandal.... But it's late and I've gone on more than long enough.

Rove out

Well, of course, Karl Rove announced this morning that he's resigning his post effective at the end of the month. It's been noted around the internet how humorous his choice of timing is to "spend more time with his family" - now that his son is leaving home to start college more or less as we speak.

...I've been asked to write up a little "book report" about Rove - who the hell is he, really?; what's it supposed to mean that he's leaving? - and I will if I can get a moment soon.

All I wanted to say right now, though, was how I miss not being able to read a column about all this from Molly Ivins. She would have had a fine take on the thing. She was a great political writer, a joy to read, a Texan from tip to toe, and she died on the last day of this January last.

So Rove may be out, but it's Molly I'm missing.

Huh.

Sports

I sure hope Barry Bonds breaks this record of Hank Aaron's soon.

Because I am very tired of hearing about it.

This week in warrantless wiretapping news

Last night, 41 House Democrats crossed over to vote with Republicans in passing The Protect America Act of 2007, which previously passed the Senate on 16 Democratic defections. Now, I'm no constitutional scholar, but this would seem to be the first time in our history that there's a law on the books saying Americans can be surveilled without a warrant (maybe the "sneak and peek" provision of the PATRIOT Act? But in that case the government's supposed to tell you within 90 days that they went through your stuff).

Why on Earth did this thing pass? Well, we've been getting a steady "they're about to hit us again" drumbeat for weeks now, ever since Chertoff shared with the public his problems with dyspepsia. Then, at the start of last week... with Congress' August recess looming... Bush popped up from nowhere and began screaming bloody murder about how this bill needs to get rammed through, yesterday. What's with all the last-minute hoo-ha? Didn't we know equally well a month ago, or six months ago, how important this legislation was going to be?

And, naturally, the Democrats (some of them) got suckered into this old chestnut of a hoodwink for fear of being left holding the bag (if you will pardon my mixed metaphors). Because suppose there were an attack this summer, and the "Protect America Act of 2007" had died in Congress. This attack would obviously have been 100% the Democrats' fault. It may as well have been Nancy Pelosi's signature on the receipt for the ammonium nitrate. But, now that the bill has passed, suppose there were an attack this summer anyway. Whose fault will that be?

Don't ask me. But you know as well as I do who wouldn't be taking any responsibility.

***

Anyway, as to what the law says: the National Security Administration, at the discretion of the Attorney General, can track any Americans' international communications - full stop. No warrants, no oversight, no nuttin' (correction: looks like there's a 120-day FISA court review, but that's it). And what does that mean? Because suppose that my domestic-to-domestic phonecall is routed through an offshore exchange - or, for that matter, it's a cellphone call and is therefore bounced off a satellite - does this law say can they monitor that call? Who knows? Who cares? Because you damn well know that if they want to monitor the call they will: and should that become a legal or political liability for them down the road, they'll make up an absurd Rube-Goldberg legal justification for why it was always been their prerogative to do whatever they were doing. We have seen this show before.

Well. Let me repeat for the record something I've said here before: given the threat of nuclear terrorism, a massive domestic surveillance program may really be the very thing we need. But it has to exist within a framework of oversight and restraints. You know, checks and balances - the fundamental genius of our system of government? We don't have any of that in this bill, nor any guarantee of what the information collected by the program will and won't be used for.

Here's what another American law says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That's the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. It seems to conflict a little with the Protect America Act of 2007. So - maybe this thing could get struck down. But we've already seen that it's hard suing the government for secret and anonymous mass wiretapping, since you can't prove damages against a specific person.

But hey, the bill's only good for six months, right? Well, we have seen this show before as well: five and six years ago, with the tax cuts. A bill is eased through on the rationalization that it's temporary; once in place, it becomes the sole pillar on which our fragile economy rests, and must be made permanent at the risk of perpetual famine. Blahbitty blahbitty blah.

All in all, this is a very sad development. Those Republicans can be real mean s.o.b.'s, but it takes a Democrat to really stab you in the back.

(For example, our nation's indefensible and inhuman drug laws, mainly passed by Democrats in the 80s. But that's a story for another day.)

***

PS. In other warrantless wiretapping news, Bush has been using his FBI - as we dwell here beneath the aforementioned shadow of a new terrorist attack - to raid his own guys. The home of Thomas Tamm, a former Department of Justice lawyer, was searched this week for evidence that maybe it was he who leaked the warrantless wiretapping program to the NY Times in the first place. Because that's what ultimately made all this arm-twisting and rigmarole necessary about legalizing the program.

Go sic 'em, W!

Another reason the Democrats will win in '08

To add a quick addendum to the last post: something to think about here is the future of the surge in Iraq. We've been told a number of times now that by extending deployments and shell-gaming our troops around, we can sustain the increased troop levels in Iraq only through April of next year.

After that, we'll have to start pulling back. This occurred previously, when a drawdown was attempted in 2005 by condensing our presence into the larger cities: which led to the escalating violence in 2006, which led to the present surge - and to something else. It led at least in part to the Democrats' win last fall.

The long and short of it is: we don't have the resources - or, rather, we're unwilling to raise taxes and instate a draft to get the resources - to hold off the Great Bloodletting there much longer. (One alternative, per Joe Biden, is to use what resources we've still got, while we've still got them, to push for a three-way partitioning of the country before they do it to themselves much more violently. But Bush isn't going to do that. He's going to wait out the clock and blame the subsequent catastrophe on the Democratic congress and on the next president).

Whatever happens, Iraq - and the Republicans - are very likely to look a lot worse 15 months from now than they do today. So, whether for good or for ill, the White House press corps can start rehearsing the phrase, "Madam President" about now....

Obama v. Clinton

There was a tussle this past week between Barack and Hillary that began during the YouTube debate: Barack said he would extend diplomatic conversation to horrible dictators, and Hill said he was naive for saying so. Or for saying so without caveats of the sort she would insert, or something blah blah blah.

Who cares? (except for the fact that Barack's right - talking to people is not in its own right some kind of reward. That's Thing #432 that has been very very dumb about the Bush Administration.)

Instead, what I wanted to discuss under the header "Obama v. Clinton" is this interesting fact. Their primary fight is the 2008 presidential race.

Because none of the Republicans is going to win. Period. Boom. There you go.

Are you amazed? Wooough.

Observe:

• Giuliani is getting whacked by the NYFD, and has skeletons in his closet like that he ended his thirty-fourth marriage in a press conference (okay, that skeleton is in his foyer). His employees and campaign operatives keep getting busted for cocaine, involvement in prostitution rings, and bedding Judith Regan (of O.J. Simpson's If I Did It fame) in a penthouse overlooking the WTC site. Much, much worse than any of that: Rudy's pro-choice. Worse than that: his 9-11 soft-shoe is gettin' old. He ignored the problem with the firemen's radios for years, and he insisted on putting his command center in WTC7 rather than Brooklyn. Watch the firemen's video.
  
• I don't know how much the Mormonism thing hurts the Mittster with the evangelical lunatics, but it doesn't help. Could Romney win? I dunno. The phrases "Boston brahmin" and "Massachusetts liberal" come to mind. Oh, and "flip-flopper". It would be a truly amusing irony if this guy were the '08 Republican nominee. Is it me, or do you think he looks a little French?
  
• John McCain is so dead in the water that there's no need enumerating the sixteen reasons why that's so. But his breathtakingly Bushlike (read: ignominious) position on Iraq actually matters much less in terms of the Republican base, than his lack of corn-pone nativism (ie, his support of "comprehensive" immigration reform). And - wistfully reminiscent of Giuliani - he's got campaign officials out there doing stuff like getting busted for attempting to pay money to administer fellatio. If only I were making that up....
  
• Fred Thompson is - and I hate to break this to the world, but here goes - a non-starter. He hasn't had to do a day's real campaigning, so all the dissatisfied Republicans of the world have been free to pretend he's whoever they wish he were. (Remember a couple months ago, when Barack Obama was John F. Kennedy warmed over? Barack has held his own since then, but there's no doubt that he's lost some glow by having to actually go out and talk to people). Recent stories also point up Thompson's drooping financials and the fact that, sans staff, his quasi-campaign is being badly managed by his Republican-operative-cum-trophy-wife Jeri (not to be confused with the Jeri-named trophy wife of that other Republican crash-and-burn from Illinois). Add to that the fact that his experience is limited to one senatorial term, some time spent carrying water for Nixon during Watergate, and a decade or two of lobbying (including for a pro-choice concern, Thompson's non-denial denial of it notwithstanding).
  
• Who else is running, again? Ron Paul?

[By the way, an aside about Fred Thompson in general: can we at long, long last put this foolishness to rest wherein everybody in the country gets to enjoy the freedom to hold and express political opinions, except Hollywood actors? This complaint is routinely trotted out on the assumption that outspoken "Hollywood actors" are liberal (which somehow validates the complaint?) - but yet the most activistic (ie, office-seeking) of them are always Republicans. Ronald Reagan, Sonny Bono, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gopher, Cooter, ad nauseam, ad nauseam. I'm wracking my brain right now to think of a Democrat in this vein, and all I can come up with is Al Franken. Who hasn't even won his primary yet. Okay - I guess Michael Moore got himself onto the Flint School Board when he was 18. But as they said in junior high, "big whoop." But back to my original point....]

So the Republicans will lose the 2008 presidential race (I can't wait to check back on 11/5/08 and see how well the prediction holds). A well-publicized poll of week before last tells us that Republican primary voters now favor - ahead of all the candidates currently running, plus Thompson - nobody. Ergo my claim: the Democratic primary, anointing as it will either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, is the 2008 presidential election.

(Hint: it's going to be Hillary. [... with Obama as VP?])

Oh, there are always reasons an upset could occur. Suppose there were a massive terrorist attack: that's a wild card. Would it help Republicans, as the folks who have claimed for decades to be the ones who will keep us safe? Or would it finally prove that this claim has been utter nonsense all along?

And what if - per his appearance on today's "Fox News Sunday" - NEWT GINGRICH jumps into the race? Golly, one can only imagine Hillary Clinton holed up beneath a down comforter, quaking in fear.

Dear me. Newt Gingrich is supposed to save the Republicans from their primary field. I rest my case.

Pets in the News

I'm late posting this one because I left it in the fridge. So pretend this is last week:

Some football guy was caught allegedly running dogfights, so as I'm sure you're aware there was a lot of coverage this past week about that. There was also a story on NPR Saturday I think you would be saddened but compelled by - they follow around an Animal Control officer in Texas as part of a discussion of the nationwide dog and cat overpopulation problem. At present they say 4 to 6 million animals are euthanized annually in the US; however, in some areas, mandatory sterilization laws have been able to halve those rates in just the past couple of years. Also, they say that right now 17% of owned dogs were originally adopted from shelters. If this number could be boosted to something more like 25 or 30%, the dog problem would be solved, cold. So maybe a little education on that point - on not going to the pet shop for an animal when you're looking for one - could make quite a difference.

Privilege and Prerogative

I took this picture of 666 Folsom Street, San Francisco, in 1997, when I worked there.

Later on, the building became notorious for housing, in an entire secure floor cheerfully furnished by your friends at AT&T, a National Security Administration computer network which to this second is robo-analyzing Americans' phone and internet traffic. I don't know which floor we're talking about, but I prefer to assume it's the ninth. Since that's where I worked.

My great regret: that I wasn't able to squeeze the huge sign reading 666 into the photo frame.

Post-Scriptum: A flag flown upside-down is the international signal for distress.


Hey Lauryl,

So Bush's Administration did two pretty amazing things this week. First the better-known one: on Friday afternoon he issued a proclamation stating his Justice Department will not pursue contempt-of-congress charges filed against anybody in his administration he chooses to cover with an executive privilege claim.

To explain what that means. As you know, Harriet Miers (Bush's old lawyer) and Joshua Bolten (his current chief of staff) were subpoenaed to testify before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to explain the White House's role in dismissing 7 US Attorneys for what clearly seemed to be political reasons. (ie, they wouldn't prosecute prominent Democrats on dubious bases in the month or two before the November elections when Repubs like Pete Domenici told them to. So they got fired.)

Neither Miers nor Bolten showed up for their testimony. Because Bush told 'em not to.

Now, Congress can actually go one of two ways in holding these two in contempt. They can go the vanilla route, which means filing charges with the US Attorney in DC (you will note that by definition this will be somebody not fired for Bush-Admin. disloyalty. Ironic, yes?). And this is where Bush weighed in on Friday - he said, go ahead and file your contempt charges with my boy in DC if you want; I'm telling him to blow you off just like I told Miers and Bolten to blow you off.

So in addition to being a shameless breach of the constitutional separation of powers, this also implies a pretty doctrinaire, "unitary-executive" attitude toward the Justice Department, which has traditionally been regarded as maintaining some independence from the office of the President. Rather than being regarded as, you know, a gang of paid lackeys.

But be that as it may, it leaves us with Congress' second recourse, which is to make use of a constitutional provision called inherent contempt. This means they don't need to dither around with the executive branch (Justice Department); they can just send out their sergeant at arms to grab the contemptibles and detain them in Capitol Hill.

This would be quite dramatic. Apparently it hasn't been done since the Postmaster General was so-detained in the '30s.

But I have my doubts that Conyers and Leahy will follow through.

***

Allright, here's the less-known (and potentially more disturbing) thing. Tuesday Bush issued an executive order saying that any "US persons" who "undermin(e) efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq" can have all their assets seized.

What the hell does that mean? Who the hell knows? It could mean just about anything. I posted a picture of a roll of George W. Bush toilet paper last week - does that count? I guess it could, if you wanted it to. Undermining is in the eye of the seizer.

Now pair this with Bush's earlier executive order of May (NSPD 51) - in which he claims broad powers over all aspects and assets of the Federal government in the case of a disaster or emergency - and your head starts to spin. Because these executive orders could be followed out in a way altogether salutary to the American public and exemplificative of a measured response to exigency in a time of war. Or they could be used to annihilate the conventions of American democracy in favor of perpetual despotism.

You know. It's one of those things that could go either way.

Russ Feingold is about to introduce a censure resolution in the Senate (he already tried this once, and it went nowhere). And that's great, but as I was saying week before last, what we unequivocally need is an impeachment here. These sorts of abuses of power cannot be allowed to sediment into precedent. Because if they do, for God's sake - whatever will become of us when another Clinton is in the White House?

I refer to Chelsea, of course. She's a real constitutional hellion.

July 9 - 15, 2007

Hi Lauryl,

Here are some things from the past week you may find entertaining:

Everyone had only glowingly positive things to say about the former First Ladybird, who passed on last Wednesday. I have nothing to add here, except that I wanted to take this opportunity to say, "the former first Ladybird".

***

David Vitter is one of those pro-family blah-blah-blah'ers, who took over the VA Senate seat resigned by another pro-family blah-blah-blah'er, Bob Livingston, back in '98 during the Lewinsky non-issue when Larry Flynt outed his (Livingston's) extramarital affairs. Well, Vitter came public with his own extra-marital affairs last week when Larry Flynt threatened to out them.

But Vitter vehemently denies visiting the prostitutes in New Orleans. It was strictly the D.C. Madam stuff, yessirrie.

Anyway, I don't especially care about his hypocrisy. What I think is funny found interesting is what his wife said to the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2000. She was asked about the stand-by-your-man decisions Hillary had made over the years in her marriage with Bill. And she said:

I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he [Husband Dave] does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me.

This week she announced that she has forgiven him of all his indiscretions.

***

You can now buy square watermelons.

***

I'll try to be quick about this one, since it's sure to have its sequels in the weeks to come. Sara Taylor is a flunky from Karl Rove's office who'd worked there from right out of college (2004ish) until she resigned earlier this year to pursue other opportunities. John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, wanted to know what she knew about the firings of the US Attorneys, and so dragged her in for some questions Wednesday. On the advice of the President, she refused/declined to answer pretty much everything she was asked, beyond name, rank, and serial number. (Although after refusing to answer the same question early on, she did say late in her testimony that she'd not discussed the attorney firings with Bush.) It was awkward, and it didn't look good for the administration.

So when the time came the next day for Harriet Miers to drop by and answer some questions about the same stuff, Bush's solution was to tell her just not to show up at all. His claim here is that (1) executive privilege allows him not to cooperate with Conyers and Leahy, and (2) he's being cooperative. Because as usual, the administration is offering up this nonsense deal about allowing interviews in closed session without transcripts or even note-taking allowed. Which is why the subpoenas were issued in the first place that led to this (lack of) testimony.

Well, great: so now Leahy and Conyers can just place their two interviewees in contempt of congress (which apparently allows them to physically detain Misses Taylor and Miers) and let the courts sort it out, right? But it's not clear whether that's smart. Six years of Bushdom have sufficiently stacked the Federal courts with moon-eyed conservatives that it's quite possible any ruling would be in his favor. Which would help establish precedent for a very broad interpretation of executive privilege and of presidential power generally.

So it's dicey. We'll see where it goes.

***

The no-progress report offered about Iraq Wednesday was roundly debunked by Fred Kaplan at Slate. A good article to look at. Summary: Bush reports genuine progress in Iraq in only 8 of 18 pre-defined areas. You will surely be shocked to learn that he's taken liberties with both facts and logic to help himself to even that middling level of optimism.

***

In Senate debate on Defense spending this last week, Jim Webb (D-VA) proposed an amendment to the appropriations bill which would give troops as much time stateside between deployments as they're required to spend in warzones abroad.

Before joining in a successful Republican effort to filibuster that one, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said about Webb's amendment, "It would be a dangerous precedent to allow troop rotations to be regulated by politicians looking toward the next election."

Well ain't that funny. Isn't that exactly what Webb's amendment was meant to prevent?

P.S. Webb and Graham were both invited onto Meet the Press Sunday, which led to an entertaining, if not illuminating, smackdown.

66% Disapproval Rating

Tied with Nixon at his lowest.

July 2 - 8, 2007

Something I'd wanted to mention last week is "The Angler", the Washington Post's four-part series on Dick Cheney.

Upshot: he is very secretive, and he runs the government.

***

Civil rights, schmivel rights. Late Friday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a challenge the ACLU had mounted to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. The reason the court gave wasn't that they consider the wiretapping program legal, but rather that, since the program is secret, nobody can prove for sure that he or she has been surveilled under it. In other words, the administration can break the law on a massive and ongoing basis - and as long as they don't tell us whose rights are being violated, we can't challenge or stop 'em.

But to the broader point here. I've long thought it's at least possible the administration is right about this program. That is, it's possible that when it comes to the threat of something like nuclear terrorism, the right thing for our society to do may be to seek out plots using broad statistical analysis, say, rather than to cleave unwaveringly to our original legal model: ie, prosecuting crimes with evidence obtained by probable-cause warrant. But once it's put that way, you can see how profound a thing this means - a basic change in our whole paradigm of law enforcement. An asterisk on the cherished principle that we're innocent until proven guilty. Were such a change to be adopted in a democracy, it should first be the subject of a searching public dialogue, culminating in new legislation - new constitutional amendments - defining what kinds of data about its citizens the government might now track, and what rights to privacy we retain. But what you don't, don't, don't allow, is for the executive branch to just up and start running this program on its own recognizance without so much as telling anybody about it first (Bush's fig leaf that he briefed a handful of key congresspeople about it, under conditions of sworn secrecy, notwithstanding). Where are the checks and balances in this system? Where are the guarantees that it will be used strictly to track terrorism and not, say, drug trafficking - or a President's political opponents? Because though Bush surely has America's best interests at heart, the next President may not be quite as glowingly scrupulous.

Put simply, this is as impeachable as impeachable gets. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday that it doesn't carry the merit of so much as a lawsuit.

***

In '06, Iraq was costing us about $8.7 billion a month. Thanks to the surge, that's now up to more like $12. Total expenditures to date are pushing $420 billionish, and by any measure we have clearly spent a fraction of what we ultimately will (VA services for 25,000 wounded soldiers for the next 50 years, anyone?).

To put this cost into perspective, the US GDP was about $13 trillion in 2006. What we've spent to date on Iraq comes to something like a dozen days of our total economic output. Which I guess is pretty darn reasonable, as wars go. Of course, we're not actually paying any of these bills yet, just charging them to the national credit card; and, of course, the total costs of the war should ultimately top well over a trillion bucks.

Never mind that what we're buying with all this money is international political destabilization and decades of future terrorism. Sis boom bah.

***

Distressingly, it turns out that Rumsfeld scotched a 2005 Navy Seal assault at the last minute (they were suited up and on the tarmac) which could have resulted in killing or capturing a number of top Queda leaders in Pakistan, including al-Zawahiri. I guess it's hard to criticize this sort of decision without knowing all of the operational details behind it. But Donald's big concerns at the time were apparently (a) the assault had grown into a large affair, with greater exposure of US troops, and (b) Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wouldn't have been happy about it.

Well, (a) since when did Rumsfeld start caring about the exposure of US troops?, and (b) with friends like Musharraf....

***

Republican lawmakers who've ditched Bush and are now calling for a significant change/drawdown-of-troops in Iraq, mainly in this past week:

1. Dick Lugar (Senator, IN)
2. John Warner (Senator, VA, and ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee)
3. George Voinovich (Senator, OH)
4. Pete Domenici (Senator, NM - currently under investigation for pressuring a US Attorney [David Iglesias] prior to his firing last fall)
5. John Doolittle (Congressman, CA - an Abramoff payee)

Republicans are starting to run scared from their own policy here, and it's probably too late for them to complete a U-turn by November '08. It might all have been different if Bush had paid attention to the Iraq Study Group and not responded to their fairly reasonable recommendations by ignoring them and beginning this surge.

But anyway, we face the prospect again - like last year - that Democrats may win less by their own merits and more by default. Thus setting the stage for a major Republican comeback after.

But I get ahead of myself.

***

And the biggest political story of the week was obviously Bush's pardon Monday of the Scootster. Excuse me: his commutation of the Scootster's prison sentence. Why that difference is supposed to make any difference isn't clear to me. Sure, he's left with a $250,000 fine to pay and two years' probation. Considering that Libby's defense fund has so far raised about $5 million, the quarter-mil isn't so big a deal (yes, he made sure to pay it from his personal funds within two business days, but this goes precisely to the point that it was less than an unbearable hardship). And the judge in the case has been questioning whether you can even serve out a probation when you don't first do jail time....

Tony Snow and others made a howler of a case this week that following all the bad publicity, poor Irving Lewis will now have trouble making a living (before joining Cheney's staff, he was a high-powered lawyer, and ironically represented Mark Rich at the time of Clinton's more-than-dubious pardoning of him back in January '01). But yes, conservative folk hero that the man has now become, I'm sure poor Mr. Scoots will follow in the hard footsteps of (say) Oliver North, and will have a devil of a time landing a corner office at the Heritage Foundation, or seats on corporate boards, or the odd speaking engagement now and then. If he's capable of speaking, that is. One of the interesting things about this whole affair is how over the course of more than three years now, the guy's never given the press so much as a soundbyte. At least not that I've ever heard. "I am innocent." "I will not speak with the press about an ongoing investigation." "I am accused of no underlying crime - and perjury only counts if you're a Democrat lying about fellatio." But no, not a peep. All we've got to go by is that weird prose-poem he sent Judith Miller in prison about aspens turning with the seasons, or whatever.

Oh yes, and the novel he wrote where bears rape caged young women to train them to be prostitutes.

But who am I to criticize a fellow for writing bizarre fiction?

Anyway, I'm afraid this will be the end of the book on the Plame Affair. We've come a long way from the original issue, and it's hard to recall that what happened here involved not just the blowing of the cover of a covert CIA agent, but more importantly of her entire front-company - Brewster Jennings & Associates. Sure, she and her fake company may not have been doing anything very important... you know, investigating Iran's nuclear program or something. But the full damage done is unknown, since Plame was not the only covert agent using this company as a front. (Let us recall that it was the CIA itself that demanded an investigation of this matter in the first place).

The other part of the left-leaning argument about this whole brouhaha - that the Plame exposure was part of the Administration's effort to build a fallacious public case for war with Iraq - does, I admit, have the virtue of being true. But I wonder how much it matters. My vibe has been that the country was quite ready for war with Iraq back in 2003. Towelheads are towelheads, was really about as far as the reasoning went. And with some 40% of the public this is still true - they think to this day that Saddam was behind 9-11. So anyway, I think the Bush folks did overreach in trumping up their case: the fact is that they didn't need to try half as hard as they did. And therefore, anything that went on about outing Valerie Plame in order to retaliate against her whistleblower husband Joe Wilson in order to intimidate future possible critics of the administration... that really is what they call "inside baseball". And to suggest, however indirectly, (as I get the whiff of sometimes from the left) that this thing is an important part of how we ended up in Iraq today, is silly to me. What this is about is the Bush Administration's Mayberry-Machiavellian Stalinistic management of its own human resources.

Nonetheless: blowing the cover of a front company being used to investigate the Iranian nuclear program? To leak this kind of information to the public is, as papa Bush called it, "treason". (Conservatives, please give me an example of something Clinton's administration did that was as egregious.)

And yes, Dick Armitage leaked first, to Bob Woodward (Armtage's source being summary documents about Wilson drawn up at the request of Cheney's office). This is supposed to take the edge off of the scandal since Armitage was Colin Powell's #2 guy, and everyone knows Colin Powell is a birkenstock-wearing flower child. But Armitage did essentially drop the information to Woodward unwittingly, was mortified when the thing went public, and cooperated fully with Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation. Should he still have been punished? Maybe - the details of the Fitzgerald investigation have not been released to the public (a far cry from Ken Starr). Libby, contrariwise, leaked as an act of retaliation and then lied about it.

But anyway, you can see why this story is journalistically finished: it's way too complicated for anybody to bother following. Even my eyes are starting to glaze over.

Bad week: moving.

June 18 - 24, 2007

New Gallup Poll (link): 30% of Republicans say they believe in evolution, next to 61% of Independents and 57% of Democrats. It's ironic, but I guess unsurprising, that the least-evolved human beings - who with their own persons prove evolution best - are incapable of believing it.

Yuk yuk. Let's all laugh ourselves straight back to the Middle Ages.

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Speaking of which, Bush vetoed stem-cell funding again. However, the Democrats are expected to tie it to "must-pass" spending measures later this year. Good. They should send it back to his desk every single week.

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Continuing on the theme of cro-magnon man, I heard some of Sean Hannity's radio show last Tuesday and was amused to hear him beating up on White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. Honor among thieves. Anyway, it seems that the Nativists (conservatives) of our fair country don't like Bush's immigration plan. They don't oppose it for the good reason for opposing it - that by importing 250,000 new workers a year into low-skill positions, we're obviously going to (further) undermine the state of labor in this country. What's the use of, say, a minimum wage if you're going to throw up a shadow labor market where those same jobs are hired out for less? The plan's a baldfaced handout to business interests at the expense of Americans who actually work for a living. You want to help out Mexicans who actually work for a living too? Write some labor standards into your trade agreements.

Dream on, Marc. Anyway - none of that has anything to do with what upsets Sean Hannity. He's upset because he wants the 700-mile wall barricading us from Mexico to be 30 feet taller than Bush does. Or something.

But in all of this there is a ray of light - nobody can stand Bush now. For as you know, he is a U-nighter.

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Dick Cheney is so determined to refuse to obey the law saying that his official records be retained for posterity, that he responded to years of requests to subject those records to examination by the National Archives only by attempting to get the bit of the National Archives that was doing the requesting, eliminated. He stopped providing the records in '03, tried to axe the department the next year, and has been in a continued state of noncompliance since. Henry Waxman revealed the story this week. Cheney's argument is that he doesn't have to follow this law since he's not a part of the Executive Branch: constitutionally, he's also President of the Senate. Which is cute, I admit. It should be borne in mind the next time the budget's drawn up for his office.


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The Iraqi refugee crisis is mounting. Two million Iraqis are displaced; graciously, we've decided to let 7000 move to the U.S. But hell, it's not like we started the mess over there or something.

Heard a very moving story this week on the radio show "The World" about a woman, now living in Jordan, who'd previously worked as a translator with the Americans in Iraq. Her son was kidnapped, and though he was released for a ransom, the woman's husband then left her because he felt she was responsible for the imbroglio. Anyway, there are plenty (thousands or tens of thousands) of cases like this, and America is - here comes a big surprise - not doing right by these folks, who have exposed themselves to the some of the grimmest risks imaginable to support the Americans in Iraq.

And then on the other hand, on the other hand, on the other hand. It's hard to imagine insurgents haven't been infiltrating every institution possible over there. It sure would be ironic now to put one of these moles into the witness protection program, so to speak, and hand'm a first-class ticket to Denver. Which, I am sure, is not likely (I guess). But still, consider this: two million displaced persons in the greater Near East is a lot of movement and a lot of confusion, over a lot of area, over a long time. It can and will provide cover to some terrorist gang someday - probably to gain access to Europe.

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Who knows? Maybe the economy's getting ready to fall apart. But I suppose it always seems like that.

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Onions can kill you.

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Overhyped this week: Michael Bloomberg's run for President, which (he at least claims) isn't even happening; and Hillary's godawful campaign song.

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The Rundown:

Palestinians are too busy fighting one another to remember to blow up Irsaelis.

Iraqi Sunnis are remembering quite handily to blow up the Shi'a. This stimulates the Shi'a to keep up doing that thing they like to do - you know, where they drill holes in Sunnis' heads before dumping the bodies around town? (That's what they mean when they say, "signs of torture", you know).

Afghanistanis have put it at the top of their to-do list to blow up Americans. And Germans and Britons.

And that's what makes the world go round.

--Hey, you know, one good thing about the end of oil, whenever we get there: these folks won't be able to build their bombs anymore. (Or, perhaps, they'll go nuclear.)

Can you build a "green" bomb? Perhaps it's telling that this would be difficult. The sun already is a bomb of sorts, of course, and will devour Earth and its neighbors in 7.5 billion years. Doesn't that make everybody happy enough? Why blow ourselves up prematurely when we have that Big One coming?

Some people are so impatient.

The definition of terrorism

Are right-wingers who perpetrate acts of public violence to affect public policy, terrorists? Or is that term just for Osama bin Laden and... the Earth Liberation Front?

Back on June 4, this came up on "Talk of the Nation". The reason was that a few Earth Liberation Front'ers are facing extended sentences for burning down some buildings. Whether they get the heavier sentences depends on whether the judge chooses to define their acts as terroristic.

The "Talk of the Nation" discussion, focusing as it did on left-wing groups, put me in mind of an old pet peeve. When Eric Rudolph (Atlanta Olympics bombing, attacks on numerous women's reproductive health clinics) was brought to trial in 2005 after hiding in the woods like Rambo for a couple of years, none of the reporting at the time referred to him as a terrorist. When it comes to left-wing extremists, we aren't so peevish. And though the last thing I'm going to do is make excuses for ELF or their burning down of buildings, they've at least sought to avoid hurting people: Rudolph hasn't been quite as circumspect.

And what about the other right-wing lunatics? It's always driven me nuts that in the heat of our search for WMDs in Iraq, back in 2003, we found a large cache of chemical weapons - sodium-cyanide chemical bombs, to be exact - in a storage warehouse in Tyler, Texas. The only catch was that the bombs had been stockpiled not by Islamic extremists, but by a clutch of white supremacists. Ergo, zero news coverage. Was the threat less? Anybody out there remember Timothy McVeigh?

So I emailed a comment to "Talk of the Nation" on a lark; Neil Conan read it on the air. Here's an audio clip (~1:15 minutes).

...I see that Eric Rudolph's wikipedia entry does describe him as a "domestic terrorist", but to be honest, my on-air comment was the first time I have ever heard that word applied to him in the national media.

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Richard Rorty died last week. On the trvial side, this kind of thing's a personal occasion to mourn roads not traveled - namely, that I never went for a Philosophy Ph.D. The debates in which Rorty was involved are, I think, an enviable place in which to live out one's mental life; and his positions in those debates were, I think, enlightened and worthy of admiration. Even if he was a little less hip to science than my own disposition might have it. (Daniel Dennett, who went back and forth with Rorty in this area, jestingly defined "rort" as "rort, n. m. (1) an incorrigible report; hence, rorty, adj. incorrigible.")

There's a promising but incomplete deathbed interview with Rorty in the current Progressive. Worth taking a look at. It opens with a discussion of his place in the western intellectual tradition, including a little farrago of name-drops that might not mean much to you unless you're somebody who almost went for a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Dewey, Gadamer, etc.): but the brunt of this (too-short) conversation is very general-audience-directed, like much of Rorty's writing was in the first place.

I was especially stirred to see Rorty point out this greatest concern he holds for the world's political future. I share it. But it's so fearsome a thought that I don't think a lot of folks ever bring themselves to contemplate it seriously:

The Bush administration has now been repudiated by US public opinion, and the Iraq debacle will make future European governments hesitant about following America’s lead. But I still think that the end of democracy is a likely consequence of nuclear terrorism, and I do not know how to guard against this danger. Sooner or later some terrorist group will repeat 9/11 on a much grander scale. I doubt that democratic institutions will be resilient enough to stand the strain. (ital. mine)

Inaugural Post

For a couple of weeks now I've been collecting my thoughts on how to approach this blog - listing examples to myself of the kinds of news items I might like to summarize, pondering broader political topics on which to hold forth: and etc. All of which I will get to soon enough.

But it seems clear that I should start out by addressing something much more important. Namely, just how much Rudolph Giuliani looks like that Nasonex bee from the television commercials:



(With thanks to Lauryl for first making this observation.)