JUSIPER
Monday, November 22, 2004
Guess what decided Ohio
Make no mistake about it--the real story out of Ohio is that the urban vote was suppressed by a deliberate strategy to increase the costs of democratic participation to the point where withdrawal from the process became the only option. There is now mounting evidence that the long lines kept people from the polls.
The fact that the electoral vote, and hence the presidency of this nation was decided in this way will be of little concern to most Republicans; as we have written many times, since 2000 it has become patently obvious that most of them do not really believe that a nonwhite person's vote should count as much as their own, if at all.
But if democracy is the defining trait of our nation, such beliefs are not only racist but unamerican.
It's a shame that Bush rode these beliefs to the pinnacle of power not once but twice, to complete silence from the media or members of so called "faith" communities.
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Saturday, November 20, 2004
Usury
Sadly for Gurley men like Ken Mehlman, it doesn't just not compare to sodomy on the GOP's list of mortal sins. Quite the opposite-- usury is their core principle.
So don't expect anything to be said about this in Washington (or most American churches) during the next four years.
6:18 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Friday, November 19, 2004
Religious right: Time to stop spreading Santorum
Yes, Senator Man on Dog is now too far left for the theocrats who want to rewrite the Constitution.
But if Pennsylvania Republicans ultimately dump him in a fit of vengeance over the Toomey and Specter fiacos, I will be the first to thank Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney.
"Anything can happen in two months," said the Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, who led a protest against Specter earlier this week on Capitol Hill. "Let's face the political realities, but I don't think it's both morally or strategically wise to throw in the towel this early."
Mahoney told Human Events his Christian Defense Coalition was still planning to hold a nationwide protest against Specter on December 9. On that day, constituents are encouraged to visit their senators' home-state offices to voice their concerns about Specter.
Mahoney said his December 9 protest would be designed to raise doubts with senators about Specter. He also said it's an opportunity to assert the power of pro-lifers, who Mahoney said Republicans are taking for granted.
"The pro-family, pro-life voting bloc is almost being viewed by the Republican Party as African Americans are viewed by the Democratic Party," Mahoney said. "Specter getting to the Judiciary, although it's very disturbing, I think is dwarfed by a larger problem. The Republican leadership truly does not respect nor understand our constituency."
Chief among Mahoney's targets is Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. As the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, Mahoney said Santorum should be prepared to face a tough fight when he faces re-election in 2006.
Santorum's support for Specter in this year's Pennsylvania primary angered conservatives, who preferred Rep. Pat Toomey. Toomey lost by a mere 17,000 votes of the more than 1 million that were cast.
Despite Santorum's friendship with Specter, he has stopped short of supporting his bid to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee. At a Wednesday press conference, Santorum said, "I think it would be presumptuous of me to direct the committee as to who they should appoint as their chairman."
Even if Santorum were to oppose Specter by voting against him when it reaches the Senate Republican Conference, Mahoney said it wouldn't have much of an impact with the pro-life community.
"We're going to use Senator Santorum as a template," Mahoney said. "Because of what he has done with Specter -- putting party over principle -- we are going to work to see that he's not re-elected in 2006."
Mahoney's early alternatives include Toomey, whose campaign manager didn't return a call to Human Events, and newly elected Pennsylvania Treasurer Bob Casey Jr., who received more than 3.3-million votes on November 2, the most ever for a candidate in Pennsylvania.
Casey, incidentally, is the son and namesake of the popular former governor, and a pro-life Democrat.
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Bush's legacy to global security
Iran is on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons.
Raising doubts about its commitment to dispel international distrust, Iran is producing significant quantities of a gas that can be used to make nuclear arms just days before it must stop all work related to uranium enrichment, diplomats said Friday.
Iran recently started producing uranium hexafluoride at its gas-processing facilities in the central city of Isfahan, the diplomats told The Associated Press.
When introduced into centrifuges and spun, the substance can be enriched to varying degrees. Low-grade enriched uranium is used in nuclear power plants. Highly enriched uranium forms the core of nuclear warheads.
While Iran says it is only interested in enrichment to generate power, the United States and its allies accuse Tehran of wanting the technology to make weapons-grade uranium.
In the latest accusation, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday he had seen intelligence to confirm claims by an Iranian dissident group that Tehran was secretly running a program intended to produce nuclear weapons by next year.
[...] Asked about quantities being processed at Isfahan, one of the diplomats said, ``It's not little,'' but he declined to elaborate.
But another diplomat familiar with the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the U.N. nuclear watchdog -- said the Iranians apparently were in the process of converting 22 tons of uranium into gas, either as a precursor to uranium hexafluoride or as the finished product.
Iran has huge reserves of raw uranium and has announced plans to extract more than 40 tons a year.
That amount, if converted to uranium hexafluoride and repeatedly spun in centrifuges, could theoretically yield more than 200 pounds of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium, enough for about five crude nuclear weapons.
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What defines a Republican
Ken Mehlman offers up his campaign post-mortem:
After two years of polling, market testing and up-close demographic scrutiny of American voters, the manager of President Bush's re-election campaign, Ken Mehlman, offered another way Thursday to view the divide between the American electorate.
'If you drive a Volvo and you do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat,' Mr. Mehlman told an assembly of the nation's Republican governors here. 'If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for George Bush.'
If on the other hand, you want to enjoy some out-of-wedlock, good old fashioned American sodomy in that BMW while working for people who hate you, you're incoming RNC head Ken Mehlman.
Update: And, it now appears, you might also be RNC field director (and this is really his name) Dan Gurley.
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Thursday, November 18, 2004
Hearts and minds
Even a neocon would have expected that the likes of Riverbend, a liberal, modern, young, and obviously intelligent English-speaking Iraqi woman, would have had some sympathy for the prospect of democratizing her nation. And she does. But we lost her long ago.
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An emasculated Specter gets his chairmanship
But it remains to be seen whether he will wield his new powers.
8:36 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Coup de grace
A fitting end for a year in which mediocrity was rewarded at every level: Robin Williams will receive the Cecil B. Demille Award at the Golden Globes this year.
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Schaller: Nancy's wedgie
The GOP doesn't really want to ban abortion, since it knows that the party gains more votes through continued legality than it would through prohibition.
But what if Nancy Pelosi was able to force a House vote on it? What would happen then?
4:31 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Frank Rich
Bush's victims: 100,000 Iraqis and freedom of the press.
3:15 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Questioning Ohio: a must read
From this week's Boston Phoenix, a major piece by David Bernstein:
For Americans, it’s bad enough that the 2000 election was such a fiasco that our government felt compelled to bring in international election monitors from Vienna, as though we were some Third World banana republic rather than the world’s oldest democracy. Worse, the monitoring group — the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) — left unimpressed.
The OSCE won’t issue a final report for another six weeks, but its preliminary findings are a litany of "questions of possible conflict of interest," "widespread ... allegations of electoral fraud and voter suppression," "significant delays ... [that] may restrict the right to vote," "considerable confusion ... regarding the use of provisional ballots," "occasional faults and breakdowns of DRE [direct-recording equipment] machines," "concerns ... regarding the secrecy of the vote." Not only that, but "it was not clear that poll workers had generally received sufficient training to perform their functions." [...]
[A] Phoenix analysis suggests that more Ohioans may have tried to vote for Kerry than for Bush, and couldn’t — in which case by rights W. should be packing his bags and shredding his files, rather than plotting his second-term agenda.[...]
BUSH HAS, at the moment, won Ohio by 136,483 votes, but a number of considerations throw that lead into serious doubt. For one thing, that number will likely diminish when the state’s approximately 155,000 provisional ballots are processed. Most of those who had to use provisional ballots probably were first-time voters whose names had not made it onto their precinct lists, observers say, and first-timers went 54-46 for Kerry in Ohio, according to exit polls.
Another 92,672 votes were discarded, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, mostly due to now-familiar problems with punch-card ballots. Those punch-card machines are — surprise, surprise — predominantly used in urban areas that tend to vote Democratic. In Cuyahoga County — two-to-one Kerry country — a voter reported misaligned holes and out-of-order pages on the punch ballots to Election Protection, a nonpartisan coalition of organizations led by People for the American Way Foundation, which was monitoring elections in select states, including Ohio.
[...] MANY OF THOSE who did get to the polls had to wait ages to get to a booth. There were reports of waiting times of two-and-a-half-hours in Cleveland, five in Columbus, and six in the college town of Gambier.
This was all officially blamed on extraordinarily high turnout, but many disagree. After all, turnout was actually lower than predicted by the Secretary of State’s office, and the increase from 2000 worked out to just 64 additional voters per Ohio precinct. "Everybody saw it coming — the huge lines, the huge voter turnout," says Britton. "We’re very concerned that county officials did not adequately prepare."
"It was poor planning, and I think you lay that on the head of the governor and secretary of state," Trevas says.
But Republican governor Bob Taft and Blackwell did prepare: they reduced the number of polling places, ensuring long lines. [...]
Almost certainly, long lines disproportionately disenfranchise poorer, working-class voters, who tend to live in high-density city precincts, and have less flexibility in their schedules. "We heard of folks who were told by their bosses they have to get back to work instead of stay and vote," says Britton. [...]
Here's the rub: a Phoenix analysis shows that the precinct reductions disproportionately hurt Ohio’s Democratic turnout.
Of Ohio’s 88 counties, 20 suffered a significant reduction — shutting at least 20 percent (or at least 30) of their precincts. Most of those counties have Republicans serving as Board of Elections director, including the four biggest: Cuyahoga, Montgomery, Summit, and Lucas.
Those 20 counties went heavily to Gore in 2000, 53 to 42 percent. The other 68 counties, which underwent little-to-no precinct consolidation, went exactly the opposite way in 2000: 53 to 42 percent to Bush.
In the 68 counties that kept their precinct count at or near 2000 levels, Kerry benefited more than Bush from the high turnout, getting 24 percent more votes than Gore did in 2000, while Bush increased his vote total by only 17 percent.
But in the 20 squeezed counties, the opposite happened. Bush increased his vote total by 22 percent, and Kerry won just 19 percent more than Gore in 2000.
If the reduced number of precincts in those counties accounts for the difference, it cost Kerry about 45,000 votes. And who knows what might have happened had the state increased polling places in anticipation of the high turnout it knew was coming? And if the state had encouraged voting rather than threatened to challenge credentials? And if there had been no dirty tricks and intimidation? And if all had received their absentee ballots?
Would we be preparing for a Kerry presidency? We’ll probably never know.
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America's failed newsmedia
Raison d'etre for the blogopshere, but as infuriating as ever.
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"For Christ and for liberty"
"Mr. Farris, even though I'm ordinarily very busy promoting a hate amendment and not reading the newspaper, I couldn't help but notice that you are one hot man."
[Mike] Farris [president of the insane Patrick Henry College and father of ten] joined four other nationally known Christian leaders to discuss the details of the historic Act: Dr. James Dobson, founder and chairman of the board of Focus on the Family; Don Hodel, president of Focus on the Family and husband of PHC trustee Barbara Hodel; Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council; and Chuck Colson, [ex-con and] founder of Prison Fellowship.
Farris recalls the friendly comments the President made to each of the attendees as the meeting began, "When he first saw me, he asked if I'd been pumping iron. I have lost ten pounds since he saw me in June … maybe it was because I was wearing cowboy boots and looked taller. Whatever the reason, I was surprised by the detail of his memory." The room was set up for an intimate meeting, two chairs and two couches for the five invitees and the President. The exception was the additional seats for the White House staff and press corps who circled the President and his five guests. President Bush was sitting between Farris and Colson.
"We thanked him for taking a right stand on human rights," Farris said. "And abortion is a human rights issue." The five also commented on the negative press that the President and the partial-birth abortion issue had been receiving. Bush replied that he didn't read or watch the news. The reason, he said, was because he sees his job as one that gives hope to the country, and he wants to keep an optimistic view of life. A reporter countered Bush's comment by asking the President how he would know what people were thinking if he wasn't reading the news. Bush responded by commenting that people don't think what they think because of what was being written in the papers. "It was an interesting exchange," Farris said.
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Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Emerging movement?
As I wrote a week ago, all it takes is for one smart politician to capitalize on this.
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Florida fraud
Black Box Voting's valiant efforts to discover the truth about Jeb's corrupt Florida election.
Still more fraud here.
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Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Novak: Powell was fired
Not for cowardice but disloyalty.
Rather, there was a sense, in an administration that puts a high premium on teamwork and loyalty, that Powell was really not a team player. Critical insiders often compared Powell unfavorably with James Baker, the elder George Bush's secretary of state. While Baker was seen as the president's representative to the State Department, Powell was the State Department's representative to the president. That is, Powell was criticized for coddling career Foreign Service officers.
Accordingly, there was no weeping among Bush's political aides about Powell's imminent departure. Ironically, the most politically popular member of the Bush Cabinet is perhaps the least popular with the conservative Republican base.
In contrast, Powell will be missed in foreign ministries around the world, where Rice is distrusted precisely because she is so close to President Bush. However, his loss will not have much impact on the success or failure of U.S. foreign policy. The presence of Powell at State did not alleviate the Bush administration's global unpopularity.
Sources close to Powell say he might have been persuaded to stay around for another six months, if only to try to make progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace. In fact, that issue is really in the hands of President Bush. Only he, not any secretary of state, can force the elusive agreement needed to create a peaceful Palestinian state.
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Nothing short of full immersion
Via Josh Marshall, some tips for Arlen Specter.
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Songs for soaring eagles
Both Ashcroft and Bacon feel that their ministry is important in demonstrating that "government and God"--Christianity and politics--are compatible.
Music, Christianity and politics, however, may not be.
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Monday, November 15, 2004
Now that's faith based initiative!
Linda Schrenko, good Christian and GOP hero, makes a detour to the big house on her way to the pearly gates.
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Chicken soup for progressives
There is much truth here. Take a look.
1:26 AM | Post or Read Comments (1)
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Sunday, November 14, 2004
And just to make sure we lose the war on terror
We'll make sure we have a CIA which agrees with us before beginning analysis. Scary beyond belief:
The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.
'The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House,' said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. 'Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda.'
One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.
But the former senior CIA official said that the White House 'doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out.' He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division who retired after a spat with then-CIA Director George Tenet.
Another recently retired top CIA official said he was unsure Kappes had 'officially resigned, but I do know he was unhappy.'
[...] Tensions between the White House and the CIA have been the talk of the town for at least a year, especially as leaks about the mishandling of the Iraq war have dominated front pages.
Some of the most damaging leaks came from Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, who wrote a book anonymously called "Imperial Hubris" that criticized what he said was the administration's lack of resolve in tracking down the al-Qaida chieftain and the reallocation of intelligence and military manpower from the war on terrorism to the war in Iraq. Scheuer announced Thursday that he was resigning from the agency.
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Going beyond red and blue
Another must read by Robert David Sullivan based on his "ten regions" map.
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Friday, November 12, 2004
Bush guarantees to kill off remains of Spain's Popular Party
From Spain's ABC:
The President of the United States of America, George Bush, received... Spain's former chief executive José María Aznar in the Oval Office in a private audience that lasted 40 minutes.
Aznar thus becomes the first European head of state---in his case, ex--- to be able to personally congratulate Bush for his victory in the presidential elections, while the current Spanish president, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, continues to wait for the White House to respond to last's week's phone call....
Bush's ties to Aznar sank his party in the last Spanish elections. It is safe to assume that four more years will guarantee the rise of anti-American leaders across Western Europe rending the transatlantic alliance even further; democratic elections could hardly result in anything else.
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And computer "glitch"
This time in Indiana. How many of them were there in Ohio? Or in the I-4 corridor? And will we find out before 2040?
7:02 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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This will surprise no one
More than a thousand words in this picture.
5:01 PM | Post or Read Comments (3)
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Thursday, November 11, 2004
Investigate the vote
Sign on. "Congress must investigate the integrity of the voting process in the 2004 election."
4:42 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Two paragraphs that say it all
These are the kinds of people who vote for George W. Bush.
Organizers say they are deeply troubled that the lives and families of gay people were portrayed as a threat to society in the state campaigns for a gay marriage ban. Hyde fears that passage of the measures now means it's possible for openly gay people in some communities to be physically hurt by those who fear or hate them.
Roey Thorpe, executive director of Basic Rights Oregon, shared a personal story that she believes illustrates the prejudice that a gay person cannot love as truly or as deeply as a heterosexual.
The Portland, Oregon, woman said an employee who was grieving over the death of her husband asked Thorpe, "Do your people feel sad when your person dies?"
"It tells it all," Thorpe said. "I said, 'you saw me as a little less human and for me to realize it breaks my heart.' "
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Wednesday, November 10, 2004
2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes
And you can use them for four more years.
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Dark horses
I didn't count Larry Thompson being in the running, but again, expect him to do Rove's bidding--he will be no less controversial than Ashcroft.
If Alberto Gonzales is named, all that really means is that he's out of the running for the Supreme Court, portending unexpectedly bizarre court appointments down the road.
1:01 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Let the GOP's 2008 civil war begin
The first shot has been fired, although you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know which side will win what promises to be a bloody battle:
Gov. Pataki's top political adviser has trashed President Bush, attacked the "Christian right," and said Bush's re-election means Pataki can't become president in 2008.
The shocking comments by Arthur Finkelstein appeared in the Israeli daily newspaper Maariv, which also quoted the nationally known GOP consultant as saying that in the presidential election, "the Republican Party became the Christian right, the most radical in modern history ever."
Finkelstein, the one-time political guru to former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, is also described by Maariv writer Boaz Gaon as "hating" Bush.
In the story, which ran last Friday, Finkelstein accused Bush of trying to "dictate to America how to live and what to believe in."
Finkelstein, who has helped run several Israeli elections, is also described as claiming Bush is more interested in banning abortion than he is in winning the war in Iraq.
And Finkelstein, who told a Boston newspaper several years ago that he is homosexual, described Bush's campaign strategy as being more interested in banning gay marriages than in improving the American economy.
Finkelstein, who is credited with orchestrating Pataki's stunning upset victory over then-Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1994, told the newspaper Bush's victory is bad news for Pataki, a social liberal who supports abortion and gay rights, because it means the "Christian right" is in charge of the GOP.
Asked if Pataki could run for president in 2008, Finkelstein responded:
"Bush's victory not only establishes the power of the American Christian right in this candidacy, but in fact established its power to elect the next Republican president."
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Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Verbatim transcript
Of Bush's "victory" speech published at long last.
11:12 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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AG Hutchinson?
Excerpts from a piece I was working on in September, 2003:
Meet your new Attorney General!
John Ashcroft, it turns out, may not be Attorney General from 2005 to 2009 no matter who is elected President. So implies Robert Novak in last Sunday’s roundup.... We can be certain that a new AG under a President Braun or a President Dean would try to find creative and intelligent way to reconcile the demands of anti-terrorism efforts with the protection of civil liberties. Who, on the other hand, would George Bush pick to erode our constitutional rights further if elected or re-selected?
The answer: Asa Hutchinson, former House impeachment manager and now Homeland Security Undersecretary for drugs.
It turns out that Asa and John Ashcroft have a lot in common. One of them is their love for that old racist bastion, Bob Jones University, which “stands without apology for the old-time religion and the absolute authority of the Bible.” Catholics remember Bob Jones for this quote upon a Pope’s death in 1978: "Pope Paul VI, archpriest of Satan, a deceiver and an anti-Christ, has, like Judas, gone to his own place."
Hutchinson and his brother Tim, whose adultery and remarriage resulted in his 2002 eviction from the Arkansas Senate, weren’t just friendly visitors to South Carolina’s pride and joy. No, they are proud graduates of BJU.
This position was always the payoff for evangelical support, so I never believed the media reports suggesting Rudy Giuliani was considered seriously for Attorney General. I would be very surprised if Bush replaced Ashcroft with someone less reactionary after the last election, particularly if Jeb is interested in taking over come 2008. More about that last prospect later.
7:45 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Readers in the nascent secessionist movement
Are sending around links to those red state welfare tables, which we'll be hearing about repeatedly over the next few years.
The increasing wealth of diverse, creative metropolitan centers in the coasts, coupled with unchecked radicalism from the federal government is precisely what's necessary for secessionism to go from a weak fringe movement to a legitimate political one. If this sounds crazy to you, think of the Northern League in Italy, which is not even two decades old but came to prominence on the strength of economic arguments alone:
The League found their first, small success by winning a seat on the town council of Varese with 13,000 votes. The next year, [leader Umberto] Bossi purged the inner circle of members and disposed of those who did not agree with his vision of what direction the League should take. These changes made the League more efficient and successful. In the 1987 national elections, the vote for the League rose to 200,000, or 3 percent of the electorate. Bossi was elected to the Senate and Giuseppe Leoni, a founding member, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies.
This success brought media attention, much of it negative. The league was viewed as a simple-minded protest movement that was succeeding only because it criticized the government at a time when the public was becoming wary of the corruption of the traditional parties. Despite this analysis, claims Gilbert (52), the League was tapping into legitimate complaints. The north was supporting the south with welfare, and much of the public money being spent on programs to improve the economic and social plight of the south was not working. Also, the political system of Italy was extremely corrupt, and the League offered an alternative.
[...]Now that his League had run into some success, Bossi decided to expand his ideology to include the goal of dividing Italy into three republics: north, center, and south. Bossi was influenced and encouraged by Gianfranco Miglio, a political philosopher at Cattolica University in Milan. Miglio contended that the cultural gap between north and south was too wide for Italy to remain a unified nation. He believed that the era of the nation state was nearing an end and that the next step in the development of national entities was the "macro-region".
The situation between the American Red and Blue is rather different, of course. Blues are unaware of their relative wealth, however much they may be aware of their cultural differences. But there is a lot of dry wood out there. All that's missing is the match provided by a charismatic leader who can announce the disparity, explain it, and link it to blue staters' strong distaste for fundamentalism.
If blue states discover the degree of their economic advantage, and the advantages of a red state free tax system (lower taxes for more services), there could be trouble. The radicalism of the Bush administration could prove dangerous indeed for the future of the Republic.
UPDATE: It could even be a Slovakia-Czech Republic style peaceful transition. Reds, in search of a "whiter" and "Christian" America are already agitating for their own blue state-free nation.
3:49 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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New Bible!
And why not, since nearly all forms of American born Christianity are at odds with its worldwide counterparts. For faith without works, indeed, is the Republican way.
3:26 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Quote of the day
From one maddrailin on dailykos.com, about how Democrats are busy throwing their last standardbearer through to the wolves:
It's kinda funny how people rag about Kerry getting the nomination because he was the "most electable" and then go on to point out why their 2008 choice would be the "most electable."
3:13 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sorry Everybody
Eighty-seven pages of apologies to the sentient world.
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Monday, November 08, 2004
Bye bye, Rupert?
Some of the best media related news this decade: word of a possible hostile takeover of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. by Liberty Media; it is worth pointing out, however, that realities on the ground are far more complex than they appear to be.
While I don't know much about his political leanings, this quote from an interview with Ken Auletta suggests John Malone is no Murdoch-lover:
What you really are afraid of is that you're competing against somebody who is rich and irrational. I mean, it used to be a given, a saying in the industry: Don't ever bid against Rupert Murdoch for anything Rupert wants, because if you win you lose. You will have paid way too much.
10:00 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Bush/Rove ready to kick fundies to the curb
"We got your vote, and thanks. Now we've got a tax cut to pass." Bush will give fundamentalists their vote on gay marriage in the Senate, but only because he knows it will lose. Rove admitted as much this weekend:
MR. RUSSERT: Towards the end of the campaign, the president reaffirmed his opposition to gay marriage, but said he was open to civil unions. Would he support federal legislation to honor and respect civil unions with gay couples?
MR. ROVE: Well, my understanding is is that he was referring to civil relationships defined at a state level. He clearly believes that states have the right to define such things as the right to visitation in the hospital or inheritance rights or benefit rights. Those ought to be up to states. But he does believe very fervently that 5,000 years of human history should not be overthrown by the acts of a few liberal judges or by the acts of a few local elected officials. Marriage is and should be defined as being between one man and one woman.
MR. RUSSERT: But no federal law for civil unions?
MR. ROVE: He believes that the definition of relationships ought to be left up to the states and that proper protections can be put in place for the right to visit in the hospital or the right to inherit or other legal contractual questions like that.
4:01 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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No mandate
Hertzberg in this week's New Yorker:
In Thursday’s Times, a front-page news analysis argued that “it is impossible to read President Bush’s reëlection with larger Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as anything other than the clearest confirmation yet that this is a center-right country—divided yes, but with an undisputed majority united behind his leadership.” That is certainly true in institutional terms. But it is not true in terms of people, of actual human beings. Though the Republicans won nineteen of the thirty-four Senate seats that were up for grabs last Tuesday, for a gain of four, the number of voters who cast their ballots for Republican Senate candidates was 37.9 million, while 41.3 million voted for Democrats—almost exactly Bush’s popular-vote margin over Kerry. When the new Congress convenes in January, its fifty-five Republicans will be there on account of the votes of 57.6 million people, while the forty-four Democrats and one independent will be there on account of the votes of 59.6 million people. As for the House, it is much harder to aggregate vote totals meaningfully, because so many seats are uncontested. But the Republicans’ gain of four seats was due entirely to Tom DeLay’s precedent-breaking re-gerrymandering of the Texas district lines.
The red-blue split has not changed since 2000. This is not a center-right country. It is a center-right country and a center-left country, but the center has not held. The winner-take-all aspects of our system have converged into a perfect storm that has given virtually all the political power to the right; conservative Republicans will now control the Presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate so firmly that the Supreme Court, which is also in conservative hands, has abruptly become the most moderate of the four centers of federal power. The system of checks and balances has broken down, but the country remains divided—right down the nonexistent, powerless middle.
3:34 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sunday, November 07, 2004
"Keep lots of Coke cans in my private chambers"
Bush is ready to name a Chief Justice, a man Arlen Specter has already proven his love for.
8:43 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Foul play?
And will the media investigate or is Scott Petersen more important?
12:14 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saturday, November 06, 2004
New Senate minority leader
Word is it's Harry Reid. Fine, but there are alternatives.
5:45 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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One nation
Not likely under Bush, if this is any indication.
1:32 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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The Right goes after Specter
Proving that even diehard Republicans who shamefully voted for Clarence Thomas are now too liberal for the Republican Party.
1:00 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Bush beats Dr. Octopus
Missed in the buildup to the election:
The American president was awarded the dubious honour of Movie Villain of the Year for his part in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 by 10,000 film fans polled by Total Film magazine.
Mr Bush beat stiff competition from Spider-Man 2's Doctor Octopus, played by Alfred Molina, and from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's wannabe lumberjack, Leatherface. Even Gollum from The Lord of the Rings and Kill Bill assassin Elle Driver, played by Daryl Hannah, proved no match for the White House's current tenant.
Total Film editor Matt Mueller said Mr Bush was "absolutely terrifying" in Fahrenheit 9/11.
12:41 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Friday, November 05, 2004
And this is from our closest ally
Imagine what other nations are thinking.
8:30 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Thursday, November 04, 2004