JUSIPER
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Hiatus
JUSIPER will be on a hiatus beginning Wednesday as we enter internetless terrain. We hope to be back in mid-March.
1:01 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Could Bush sink Blair?
It doesn't seem so, but it's not absolutely impossible, either.
With the expected date of the general election only 72 days away the poll results will alarm Labour election strategists who fear Conservatives could use the intensive "phoney war" campaigning to close the gap between the parties. [...]
The ICM poll also shows that Gordon Brown has replaced Tony Blair as Labour's biggest electoral asset with the chancellor enjoying the same kind of cross-party respect that the prime minister had before his 1997 and 2001 general election victories.
The survey shows that Mr Blair's political appeal is confined to Labour's core voters who still see him as likeable and caring. But among the wider electorate the prime minister is regarded as arrogant, out of touch and untrustworthy and it appears that his hopes of rekindling his "marriage" with voters generally may prove shortlived.
While Mr Brown gets positive ratings from Liberal Democrat and Conservative voters they now see Mr Blair as a positive liability.
4:54 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Perfect question for a statistics course
"How biased is this poll on Larry Summers?"
2:33 PM | Post or Read Comments (1)
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Putting the fear of God in kids today
Microsoft is on to leetspeak.
2:02 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, February 21, 2005
Factoid of the day
The average American consumes 80 pounds of chicken (an increase) and 67.5 pounds of beef (a decrease) every year.
3:07 PM | Post or Read Comments (1)
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Sunday, February 20, 2005
Wead
Doug Wead is probably better known as the guy who "secretly" taped his conversations with then Governor George W. Bush .
Here's the transcript of a fascinating Frontline interview with him on the Bushes and evangelicals from November, 2003.
4:12 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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No way Rove didn't know
A lot of folks at the top of food chain knew about Gannon; that is why they are not condemning him; in the meantime, he is still protecting them. Perhaps Plamegate prosecutor Peter Fitzgerald can force some truthtelling. But in the meantime, here's more evidence that he was doing some pretty important dirty work for the GOP:
Gannon bragged about passing a scoop on who obtained the troubled Bush National Guard memos to Fox News’ Sean Hannity on the conservative forum Free Republic.
“Mary Mapes is DEFINITELY [sic] behind the story,” Gannon wrote in Free Republic on Sept. 10, 2004. “This is who I told Sean Hannity got the documents. She also obtained the Abu Ghraib photos.”
“I got the scoop and passed it to Hannity,” Gannon added. “Look for my detailed story on Monday at Talon News. There is much more to this story. Mary Mapes is just the beginning.”
That story–that CBS producer Mary Mapes was the source of the troubled Bush Guard documents–shredded the credibility of anchor Dan Rather and killed any chance the facts that Bush had failed to adequately perform his duties as a member of the Texas Air National Guard would be taken seriously. [...]
Salon’s Joe Conason also noted Friday that Gannon worked directly with paid bloggers who sought to sink former Sen. Tom Daschle’s (D-SD) campaign.
“Working with two local South Dakota bloggers, both of whom later turned out to be secretly paid operatives of the Thune campaign, he targeted Daschle and discredited mainstream journalists,” Conanson writes. “Among Gannon’s direct hits was an embarrassing story that revealed that the three-term senator and his lobbyist wife, Linda, had applied for a ‘homestead exemption’ on their costly Washington, D.C., residence, claiming it as their primary residence.” [...]
On April 29, 2004, Gannon asked White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan asking if the president shared an opinion that “the work of the 9/11 Commission won’t be complete until and unless Jamie Gorelick testifies before the commission on her role in building the wall between intelligence and law enforcement.”
Just hours later, Gannon bragged on Free Republic about putting the mainstream press on the trail.
3:53 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saturday, February 19, 2005
The budget messiah
Guess what, David Brooks: there already was a "millionaire rising out of the country... [leading] a movement of people who are worried about federal deficits...and who are disgusted by a legislative process that sometimes suggests that the government has lost all capacity for self-control." His name was John Kerry. I take it you didn't vote for him.
9:29 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Estrich v Kinsley
Painfully vicious, both part one and part two.
9:18 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Ecstacy for soldiers
Via TalkLeft. Sad and somewhat bizarre, but hopeful.
6:43 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Bill and W
From today's New York Times piece on the growing friendship between Bush 41 and Clinton:
[W's friend Roland] Betts... added in a brief interview this week that in his view the current president and Mr. Clinton were charismatic people and that they 'saw a little bit of themselves in each other, and they liked it.'
Of Gore, Bradley, McCain and Bush, the candidate most like Clinton was Bush, even though he sought to portray himself as the opposite--particularly to the GOP base. Now that W is in his second term he evidently feels comfortable admitting it.
1:46 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Friday, February 18, 2005
More truthtelling from Krugman
Greenspan is a "partisan hack" for sure, but what does that say about Andrea Mitchell and her nearly permanent conflicts of interest?
4:57 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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A real gun rights group
Gun Owners of America took a stand for civil liberties and second amendment rights against the Bush Administration's national ID bill.
During the Clinton years, the GOP talked a lot about civil liberties (not for unpopular political expression but for the violent and racist militia activities by the party base). Although the bill received limited attention, it represented an enormous opportunity for Democrats to back gun owners on an issue that much of the party base is sympathic to.
Rep. Ron Paul got it right. H.R. 418 is not about immigration control as much as it is about citizen control.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 261-161 to send H.R. 418, the so-called "REAL ID Act of 2005," over to the Senate. The bill federalizes the issuance of drivers' licenses, an activity which until recently has always been a state function. Because no American will be able to fly, take a train or buy a gun from a dealer without a driver's license that meets the federal standards in the bill, H.R. 418 has effectively created a National ID card.
The bill's future in the Senate is uncertain at this time, although Rep. Paul's office has told Gun Owners of America that House leaders are contemplating whether to attach H.R. 418 as an amendment to the tsunami relief bill.
Lambasting the bill on the floor of the House last week, Rep. Paul noted that the legislation gives authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to expand the required information that goes into drivers’ licenses, including "such biometric information as retina scans, fingerprints, DNA information, and even Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) radio tracking technology."
Should this happen, it would mean that the federal government "would know where Americans are at all times of the day and night," Paul said.
Moreover, H.R. 418 requires the U.S. government to share our personal information with Canada and Mexico. Paul was flabbergasted. "There are no limits on what happens to the database of sensitive information on Americans once it leaves the United States for Canada and Mexico -- or perhaps other countries," he said. Paul wondered if crooked Mexican officials would soon be able to sell thousands of identity files, including our Social Security numbers, to alien criminals.
Rep. Paul also informed his House colleagues about the dangers this bill poses to gun owners, noting that H.R. 418 contains no prohibitions against including "a person's appearance on a registry of firearms owners" in the National ID card.
"H.R. 418 does what legislation restricting firearm ownership does," Paul said. "It punishes law-abiding citizens. Criminals will ignore it.
"H.R. 418 offers us a false sense of greater security at the cost of taking a gigantic step toward making America a police state."
Paul is a libertarian. He was one of only eight Republicans to buck his party. Alongside a majority of Democrats, he voted against the bill.
The new, allegedly gun-lovin' DNC chairman should take this opportunity to reframe the party's image on an issue that has turned into a political albatross. The protection of civil liberties should be a point of agreement among Democrats and gun owners that that party can exploit to its advantage.
1:52 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Canada on the verge
A poll last weekend showed that 59% of Canadians were comfortable with gay marriage. Prime Minister Paul Martin, the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP are expected to make marriage equality within days. Expect a political earthquake closer to home.
1:30 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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"Chickens coming home to roost...
"...never made me sad. It only made me glad," said Malcolm X infamously once in a reply to a question following one of his speeches. Sounds like a former Harvard professor Cornel West had something similar to say today about his former boss.
12:58 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Song of the day
"Fisherman's Blues," the title track from the Waterboys' watershed album.
12:47 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Specter has Hodgkin's
Will the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition express their sadness at the news in somber press releases tomorrow? It would be dishonest, I should think, to lie about something they prayed for.
11:43 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Song of the day
"Aisha" made Algerian raï master Khaled a superstar across Europe.
11:30 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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GOP thieves start young
Poor kid, he only stole $25,000. And that too, from young thugs like himself. If he had stolen several dozen billion from the poor, he could have been on the ticket.
8:19 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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John Aravosis on fire
From his response to the Hotline's criticismof the investigation into James "Jeff Gannon" Guckert:
"More blah blah blah about Jeff Gannon's private life being offlimits. Let's all say it again, loud and clear. Jeff's previous job, and apparently current job since the Web sites are still live, is not his private life any more than outing Hotline reporters as, well, Hotline reporters is their private life. Whether they like or not, whether I like it or not, running a prostitution service goes against every family value that this administration and Guckert supposedly stand for.
Where was the high-and-mighty Hotline when George Bush, with the help of buddies like Guckert, tried to write me and 20 million of my friends out of the Constitution last year? Where was Accuracy in Media, the conservative bloggers, and everyone else who is defending Guckert's 'private life' when my private life was going to singled out and savaged in our nation's most sacred document simply to get a few votes?
You've got a lot of nerve, Hotline. The entire GOP and its mainstream media sympathizers have a lot of nerve. We're talking about a hooker getting special access to the White House, the president, and intelligence information, and somehow everyone has suddenly discovered a conscience about homosexuals and hookers. Oh how I wish that conscience were real. But it's not. Bash a fag, bash a whore, and the GOP eats it all up. They throw us to their hateful, bigoted religious right buddies for votes with glee, while Mary Cheney cowers in the corner and Ken Mehlman runs for the shelter of the off-the-record quote.
Well newsflash Washington. The GOP is the one that rose gay-bashing and gay-baiting and sex-baiting to an art, and JeffJimGuckertGannon willingly joined the family values parade in print and in passion. They're trying to ban condoms, pornography, AIDS education. They take children away from gays, and want to make our very lives a crime. GOP Senators compare us to kleptomaniacs, alcoholics, and man-dog sex. And they can't even handle a bronze breast on a statue.
And we're the ones picking a fight over sex.
Spare me your sanctimonious bullshit now that those of us in the gay community and on the left have finally - finally - started to fight fire with fire by simply holding you to the very standards you legislate over us. We are simply giving the GOP the sex-less utopia it's always wanted. How does it feel?
Oh, gee, the Hotline warns, this might establish a precedent. Really? You mean the GOP might respond by using our sex lives against us as a weapon to destroy us and curry votes with bigots?
I don't like this battle, I don't enjoy this battle. I hate this battle. But the battle began years ago, and until now, we sat back and watched and waited and hoped it would go away. Well it's not going away. We have a choice. We can sit back and watch the GOP sex police destroy us. Or we can fight back. And I can think of nothing more poetic, nothing more just, than fighting back by simply holding them to their own standards.
6:58 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Bill Frist
According to The Note, he will be attending the annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner in New Hampshire on March 4. One kind of wonders what the Democratic equivalent would be. Buchanan-Johnson? Douglas-Clinton? Taney-Marshall?
6:43 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Condi in 2008?
Jerome at MyDD reports that the rightwing blogosphere has settled on her as their ideal candidate for 2008. There is no sign, however, that she wants the nomination.
Jerome also links to a Dick Morris interview , in which the mendacious triangulator agrees that neither Giuliani nor McCain could win the nomination. Even more interestingly, he says that Allen, Frist and the other dwarves couldn't beat Hillary (maybe he's already working for her)--and that only Condy could.
1:42 PM | Post or Read Comments (1)
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Pennsylvania Q Poll: Santorum very popular
There's only one problem: State Auditor Bob Casey is even more popular. And he has lower negatives than Man on Dog. Result? Casey leads Santorum 46-41 among all voters; his margin among independent voters, incidentally, is 49-32.
12:55 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Idiot of the day
Liz Sidoti of AP for her article on Kerry's military proposals, which begins with this paragraph:
Former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who lost decisively to President Bush in an election focused on national security, said Tuesday the country would be "far better off" with his proposals for Iraq and the military.
Decisively? The closest election in a quarter century? An election that wasn't decided for days? An electoral vote decided by just one state?
Liz Sidoti, we don't know if you are brainwashed, an ideologue, or just plain dumb. But we do know that you are JUSIPER's Idiot of the Day.
2:05 AM | Post or Read Comments (2)
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"Let me go back to Harvard"
"...before I lose what little credibility I have left." It may be too late, Greg Mankiw.
1:13 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Hitting the third rail
Bush now wants to cut the rate of growth of retirement benefits. This is the kind of news story that will have congressional Republicans hitting the panic button.
President Bush said on Tuesday that limiting the growth of future retirement benefits for Americans would be an ``adjustment to reality.''
Bush said in an interview with local newspapers that he was not expressing a preference for one idea that would link benefit growth to increases in prices rather than wages. That idea, backed by some White House officials, would effectively slow the growth of the benefits.
``Benefit cuts is an interesting word,'' Bush was quoted as saying in the Quad-City Times, a Davenport, Iowa newspaper.
``Benefits are scheduled to grow at a certain rate, and one of the suggestions, for example ... was they grow ...they grow, but not at a rate as fast as projected. You can call it anything you want. I would call it an adjustment to reality,'' he said.
Bush emphasized that curbing benefit growth was one of many ideas others have proposed.
``I don't want you to walk away thinking that I am picking one part of the solution mix or not. I'm not,'' he said.
1:05 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Song of the day
"Love Changes" by Climie Fisher, a top 10 hit in the summer of 1988. The British duo had quite a songwriting history; this single, however, they performed on their own. And it was as buoyant a single as any that decade.
11:25 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Is Bloomberg toast?
After the last two weeks, I have a feeling that he now might be, despite his recent rise in the polls; and all the more so if his opponent is Fernando Ferrer.
But within the gay community, the fight for civil marriage rights has mobilized activists in a way not seen for a long time. The closer gay and lesbian couples get to achieving full equality under the law, the more important same-sex marriage becomes—and the more impatient they grow with elected officials who compromise.
Some gay rights activists don't see the mayor's handling of the issue as an actual deal breaker—at least, not yet. Privately, they acknowledge that the fight had to move to the state's highest court regardless of the city's decision. And they recognize a silver lining in the appeal: Municipal lawyers have asked the Court of Appeals to hear the case directly, rather than have it wend through a slow-moving judicial system. The city may have shaved years from the date when same-sex marriages become legal in this state.
Others, though, have already given up on Bloomberg. Bob Zuckerman, a board member of the Stonewall Democrats of New York, is convinced that the mayor has lost the overwhelming majority of the gay vote. "Many in the community thought that the mayor was doing a good job overall—but not now."
It hasn't helped that Bloomberg had riled gay voters before. There was the Equal Benefits bill, for one, which would have required contractors doing $100,000 worth of business in the city to offer domestic partnership benefits to gay employees. When the council passed it last year, Bloomberg vetoed it. When the council overrode his veto, he sued. He followed a similar pattern with the Dignity for All Students Act, an anti-bullying bill that would have benefited gay kids. Bloomberg's handling of the gay marriage ruling, activists say, further exposes the mayor as a hypocrite.
Conservatives, likewise, say the mayor's handling of the ruling by itself may not be all that damaging. But coupled with his other stances—he's pro-choice, pro-gun control, anti-death penalty—his latest action seems another example of an inability to stand for core Republican values. Oddo, the Republican councilmember, says he doubts that people in his "mostly family-oriented" Staten Island district "stood up and were out of their gourds" because of Bloomberg's statement. "But when you put it alongside his other positions, it's problematic."
Bloomberg has no base. He won last time not just because of all the money he blew but because of Rudy's endorsement during a time of trauma, and, most importantly, because of his horrendous opponent. Mark Green was arrogant; he refused to build bridges within the Democratic Party, particularly among Hispanic leaders, with the result that (with this same Ferrer's tacit support--something I hope he will be called on to explain), enough Hispanic voters abandoned Green for Bloomberg to be elected.
While the city's democrats have often found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, I don't know that they will again, particularly if they coalesce around supporter Freddy Ferrer, who calls his support for gay marriage "unequivocal."
As the New York Times points out, there are risks for Ferrer as well, with "one Bronx-based evangelical leader ... [saying], "We're closing our churches down for him even to visit."
That would suggest that Bloomberg opposition to gay marriage could end up being a wash. But here's the thing. Bloomberg does believe in gay marriage. He doesn't need the job. And he's not a Bush. I suspect he would rather lose than try to win religious black, white and Hispanic voters by making a policy shift that he was personally opposed to on this issue (that said, Bloomberg has of late succeeded in some of his attempts to build bridges with the city's African-American ministers).
Assuming I am right, Bloomberg deserves enormous credit for his decency, but maybe just as much scorn for his stupidity. He could have made history, and possibly won re-election, as the Republican mayor who turned his back on a detested and troglodytic national party by issuing gay marriage licenses. After all, could any Democrat have run to his right on the issue without losing the party's primary?
If Ferrer becomes mayor on the strength of Manhattan liberals, he may have to invite Bloomberg to Gracie Mansion next year to thank him personally for this month's idiocy.
5:14 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, February 14, 2005
Song of the day
"Just Like This Train" by Joni Mitchell, from 1974's great Court and Spark.
9:28 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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I think it's fair to say
That AMERICAblog has put itself on the map permanently with this one. Lurid details aside, and there are way, way, way too many, it's best to remember the essentials, which are at the end of this investigative piece:
So in the end, why does this matter? Why does it matter that Jeff Gannon may have been a gay hooker named James Guckert with a $20,000 defaulted court judgment against him? So he somehow got a job lobbing softball questions to the White House. Big deal. If he was already a prostitute, why not be one in the White House briefing room as well?
This is the Conservative Republican Bush White House we're talking about. It's looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a 'daily basis.' They reportedly made a decision to give him - one of only six - access to documents, or information in those documents, that exposed a clandestine CIA operative. Say what you will about Monika Lewinsky - a tasteless episode, 'inappropriate,' whatever. Monika wasn't a gay prostitute running around the West Wing. What kind of leadership would let prostitutes roam the halls of the West Wing? What kind of war-time leadership can't find the same information that took bloggers only days to find?
None of this is by accident.
Someone had to make a decision to let all this happen. Who? Someone committed a crime in exposing Valerie Plame and now it appears a gay hooker may be right in the middle of all of it? Who?
Ultimately, it is the hypocrisy that is such a challenge to grasp in this story. This is the same White House that ran for office on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. While they are surrounded by gay hookers? While they use a gay hooker to write articles for their gay hating political base? While they use a gay hooker to destroy a political enemy? Not to mention the hypocrisy of a 'reporter' who chooses to publish article after article defending the ant-gay religious-right point of view on gay civil rights issue.
Who in the White House is at the center of all of this? Who allowed this to go on in the People's House? Who committed the crime of exposing Valerie Plame? Jeff Gannon has the answers to these questions, and boy we know he loves to talk.
Let him talk to Patrick Fitzgerald.
More on the state of the Plame investigation here.
4:10 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Hillary
Three fine quotes among so many in a terrific piece from New York magazine on the prospect of Hillary Clinton's candidacy for president:
“I don’t have the slightest clue who Hillary really is,” says Charlie Rangel, the Harlem congressman who first encouraged Hillary to run for the Senate in 1999. “I don’t think you ever find out who the real person is. All I see is a gal who knew she was as good as anyone else, and she saw this guy she could make something of, so she forfeited Illinois and went to Arkansas. That’s a hell of a move to make for a redneck, which is all he was.”
He thinks. “I’ve found that the human mind is so fragile, you can believe what you’re doing is right if other people want you to do it,” he adds. “If I was going to confession, and I had to talk about what adjustments I’ve made in public life, I don’t know what I’d say. I don’t remember contradicting myself, though I assume hundreds of reporters would say otherwise. Life’s a changing thing.” [...]
“And she’s a lot of fun,” adds [Republican Senator Lindsey] Graham. “That’s the thing that shocked me. We’ve traveled a lot. I mean, we went, let’s see . . . we went to Norway and Iceland and to the Arctic Circle. Estonia—”
Wait. She’s fun?
“A lot of fun! She’s got a great sense of humor.” Can he give an example?
He gives me a cross look. “Hey, you’re either funny or you’re not, okay? And she’s funny.”
I ask what he thinks of Hillary as a presidential contender in ’08.
“Some people would work morning, noon, and night to beat her,” he says. “And some people would sell their firstborn for her to win. But I think there’s also a sizable part in the middle that’d sit and listen to what she has to say. People are fair. I think she could win every state John Kerry won. And she’d probably be a better candidate in the swing states.” [...]
What if Hillary found her own wedge issue, her own Sister Souljah? I ask [Former Senator from Louisiana and Democrat John] Breaux. Would it work?
“It has to happen.”
But would it work? What does your gut tell you?
“It can work,” he says. “But it’s a helluva challenge.”
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the other politician with the name of Clinton couldn’t triangulate?
“That’s the challenge she has,” he repeats for the third time, clearly straining under his own ambivalence—Breaux’s very close to both Clintons, but he’s also a moderate, and he’s a blunt-spoken guy. It’s what made him so popular both in his state and among his colleagues. He gives me a pained, sheepish look. “I’m being nice. But it’s true.” He struggles for the right way to frame it. “Hillary’s the most exciting thing we have,” he says. “The question is whether that excitement can transform people who have a built-in opposition to her. The question is whether it’s enough.”
12:30 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Goes with those red state divorce statistics
I haven't seen any numbers to back this up, but it comes from a Reuters piece on the Berlin Film Festival:
[Documentary director] Barbato said American conservatives tended to speak more about ``moral values'' and against pornography in public, but demand and sales of porn was highest in conservative states."
I saw no numbers to back this up, but I sure would like to see them.
12:09 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Bankruptcy bill returns
We've written about it in the past, so there's not too much to add. The GOP has revived the revolting legislation, and a few courageous senators like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer will do what they can to kill it. The only reason it didn't become law years ago was Schumer's poision pill amendment denying safe-haven privileges to anti-abortion protestors.
It is not at all shocking that Republicans would want to deny a second chance a family whose child's illness sent them to poorhouse. It is far more shocking that without the Schumer amendment, the bill would pass the Senate with Democratic support.
12:22 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sunday, February 13, 2005
Friedman: "The president's priorities are totally nuts"
A fine piece, though you'd think he might have seen some of this coming two years ago.
The Journal quoted Ali Ansari, an Iran specialist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, as saying that for 10 years analysts had been writing about Iran's need for economic reform. "In actual fact, the scenario is worse now," said Mr. Ansari. "They have all this money with the high oil price, and they don't need to do anything about reforming the economy." Indeed, The Journal added, the conservative mullahs are feeling even more emboldened to argue that with high oil prices, Iran doesn't need Western investment capital and should feel "free to pursue its nuclear power program without interference."
This is a perfect example of the Bush energy policy at work, and the Bush energy policy is: "No Mullah Left Behind."
By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that?
9:53 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Our man in Baghdad
Good Lord:
One Iraqi who may hold the key to Mr. Chalabi's future is Moktada al-Sadr, the young cleric who led a series of armed uprisings against the American military last year. According to aides for both men, Mr. Sadr has promised to back Mr. Chalabi in his bid to become prime minister. Despite his outlaw status - he is under indictment for murder and has been in hiding for months - Mr. Sadr fielded several candidates in the election. Together, his allies appear likely to emerge as the largest single block inside the Shiite alliance, with as many as 21 seats.
Mr. Sadr's backing would give Mr. Chalabi a substantial boost toward his goal. Without it, Mr. Chalabi's chances seem slim.
Mr. Sadr, known for his virulently anti-American views and Islamist leanings, seems an unlikely ally of Mr. Chalabi, a pro-Western moderate who supports the continued presence of American forces in Iraq. But in an interview last week in Najaf, Mr. Sadr's chief aide said that Mr. Sadr had decided to back Mr. Chalabi. The aide, Ali Smesim, said the other candidates were pursuing their narrow agendas.
9:48 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Album of the day
The Grammies are tonight 8 and most likely not worth watching (although you never know; there were a few pleasant surprises last year). So let's honor the artist who won the award for Best R&B Performance, Female the very first time it was given out in 1968 and would win it the next seven years in a row. She would win it thrice in the 1980's as well.
For today, we limit ourselves to the year 1973, the first time the award went to an album. Best known for the self-penned hits, "Rock Steady" and "Day Dreaming," Aretha Franklin's Young Gifted and Black is a masterpiece from the first few notes of of "Oh Me Oh My" to the memorable and often definitive covers of Elton John, Nina Simone the Beatles and the Delfonics. Accompanying herself on piano and at the peak of her form, she once again put the world on notice that she was as capable of a great album as Ray Charles or Bob Dylan. It's one of her four of five greatest collections.
5:23 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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The new enemy: Clint Eastwood
Frank Rich on the religious right's latest target:
Hence, the campaign against Clint Eastwood, a former Republican officeholder (Mayor of Carmel, Calif., in the late 1980's), Nixon appointee to the National Council of the Arts and action hero whose breakthrough role in the Vietnam era was as a vigilante cop, Dirty Harry, whom Pauline Kael famously called "fascist." There hasn't been a Hollywood subversive this preposterous since the then 10-year-old Shirley Temple's name surfaced at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1938.
No matter. Rush Limbaugh used his radio megaphone to inveigh against the "liberal propaganda" of "Million Dollar Baby," in which Mr. Eastwood plays a crusty old fight trainer who takes on a fledgling "girl" boxer (Hilary Swank) desperate to be a champ. Mr. Limbaugh charged that the film was a subversively encoded endorsement of euthanasia, and the usual gang of ayotallahs chimed in. Michael Medved, the conservative radio host, has said that "hate is not too strong a word" to characterize his opinion of "Million Dollar Baby." Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a longtime ally of the Christian right, went on MSNBC to accuse Mr. Eastwood of a cultural crime comparable to Bill Clinton having "brought the term 'oral sex' to America's dinner tables."
"What do you have to give these people to make them happy?" Mr. Eastwood asked when I phoned to get his reaction to his new status as a radical leftist. He is baffled that those "who expound from the right on American values" could reject a movie about a heroine who is "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what" to realize her dream. "That all sounds like Americana to me, like something out of Wendell Willkie," he says. "And the villains in the movie include people who are participating in welfare fraud."
"I never thought about the political side of this when making the film," Mr. Eastwood says. He is both bemused and concerned that a movie with no political agenda should be construed by some as a polemic and arouse such partisan rage. "Maybe I'm getting to the age when I'm starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now," he adds. "You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the right and the left." His own politics defy neat categorization. He's supported Democrats (including Gray Davis in the pre-Schwarzenegger era) as well as Republicans, professes the libertarian creed of "less government" and "was never a big enthusiast for going to Iraq but never spoke against it once the troops were there." In other words, he's in the same middle as most Americans. "I vote for what I like," he says. "I'm not a loyalist to any party. I'm only a loyalist to the country." That's no longer good enough, apparently, for those who feel an election victory has empowered them to enforce a strict doctrine of political and spiritual correctness.
3:35 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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File under "Worth going to war for"
Juan Cole on Allawi's attempts to stop Sistani from getting the two-thirds majority required to pick a President.
The US now hopes to use the Kurds to blunt the push for Islamic law from the UIA. This is the significance of Allawi's visit to Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and his support for Talabani as president. The Kurds and Allawi together control nearly 40 percent of seats in parliament. They can be outvoted on many issues, but they can't be ignored. Allawi is trying to ensure that Talabani's position is unassailable and to pressure the UIA to give up its own candidates for president, so as to bloc any rush to Islamic law.
Ironically, Talabani is extremely close to Tehran and has been a client of the Iranians for many years. His alliance with the UIA will ensure warm relations between the new Iraq and Iran. The US, in pushing for Talabani for Iraqi domestic reasons, is creating a Baghdad-Tehran axis in regional politics.
3:31 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saturday, February 12, 2005
Should have stuck to butter
From Sunday's New York Times:
"Balancing health with taste has long been a challenge for food manufacturers. In the 1980's, on scientists' advice, the industry replaced saturated fats like coconut oil and butter with oil containing trans fat. Now nutritionists have changed their edict.
'There was a lot of resistance from the scientific community because a lot of people had made their careers telling people to eat margarine instead of butter,' said Walter Willett, chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of a handful of medical researchers who have led the fight against trans fat. 'When I was a physician in the 1980's, that's what I was telling people to do and unfortunately we were often sending them to their graves prematurely.'
He and other researchers say that cells rely on natural fatty acids to function. Trans fat is artificial, and acts in the body like grains of sand do in the workings of a clock.
The strongest argument against trans fat is its role in heart disease. Like lard, beef fat or butter, trans fat increases low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol. But it also decreases HDL, the good cholesterol that helps clean arteries, several studies have shown."
10:02 PM | Post or Read Comments (1)
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Song of the day
Today we give it to three renditions of "A Song for You." The first is Aretha's version from her 1973 classic album, Let Me in your Life. The second is Gladys Knight's gorgeous rendition on Oprah's 40th birthday episode (Aretha, bless her or curse her, chose to lipsync her latest hit, "A Deeper Love" from the Sister Act 2 soundtrack for said occasion). And the last is the trio of Ray Charles, Leon Russell, and Willie Nelson on the latter's 70th birthday (available on Live and Kickin',); Ray's performance left Willie in tears.
7:10 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wasn't this what they voted for?
People 60 and move supported Bush over Kerry by 8 points in 2004, according to the national exit poll. However, they now disapprove of his performance by about 42-57, a 15 point disadvantage, largely over his plans for Social Security.
Will Bush's new unpopularity embolden Democrats to sink the rest of his domestic agenda? We'll see.
Bush has decided to expend the political capital he claimed to have earned on a proposal that is dead on arrival but will win Democrats the 2008 election. Angry seniors don't have to wait that long, since midterm elections are coming just two years from now. One wonders whether Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson and Bill Nelson will be sending Bush chocolates on Valentine's Day. Watch out Jim Talent, Jon Kyl and Conrad Burns. And watch out Rick Santorum; nothing would derail your plans for 2008 like losing your Senate re-election campaign over Social Security.
3:35 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Add George Pataki
To the list of Republicans who screw the poor and minorities but are still not quite hateful enough to satisfy good Christians. If he were smart, he'd plan on a graceful exit from politics in 2006 rather than run against Spitzer for a fourth term. But if we're lucky, he'll run against Giuliani for the presidential nomination. They'll both lose, but Pataki will lose worse.
3:24 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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The latest on the draft
It wasn't just campaign rhetoric. Bush's misadventure in Iraq means we are presently unable to spare forces for an actual security threat. The armed forces know it, and so does Rumsfeld. And plans are farther along than you might think. And with a few new wrinkles too. Looks like the draft age this time could be 18 to 34, and for both sexes.
There is a lot to think about here, but here is one section:
According to an internal Selective Service memo made public under the Freedom of Information Act, the agency's acting director met with two of Rumsfeld's undersecretaries in February 2003 precisely to debate, discuss and ponder a return to the draft. The memo duly notes the administration's aversion to a draft but adds, "Defense manpower officials concede there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain special skills, such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network engineers, etc." The potentially prohibitive cost of "attracting and retaining such personnel for military service," the memo adds, has led "some officials to conclude that, while a conventional draft may never be needed, a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis." This new draft, it suggests, could be invoked to meet the needs of both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.
The memo then proposes, in detail, that the Selective Service be "re-engineered" to cover all Americans -- "men and (for the first time) women" -- ages eighteen to thirty-four. In addition to name, date of birth and Social Security number, young adults would have to provide the agency with details of their specialized skills on an ongoing basis until they passed out of draft jeopardy at age thirty-five. Testifying before Congress two weeks after the meeting, acting director of Selective Service Lewis Brodsky acknowledged that "consultations with senior Defense manpower officials" have spurred the agency to shift its preparations away from a full-scale, Vietnam-style draft of untrained men "to a draft of smaller numbers of critical-skills personnel."
Richard Flahavan, spokesman for Selective Service, tells Rolling Stone that preparing for a skills-based draft is "in fact what we have been doing." For starters, the agency has updated a plan to draft nurses and doctors. But that's not all. "Our thinking was that if we could run a health-care draft in the future," Flahavan says, "then with some very slight tinkering we could change that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short." In other words, if Uncle Sam decides he needs people with your skills, Selective Service has the means to draft you -- and quick.
But experts on military manpower say the focus on drafting personnel with special skills misses the larger point. The Army needs more soldiers, not just more doctors and linguists. "What you've got now is a real shortage of grunts -- guys who can actually carry bayonets," says McPeak. A wholesale draft may be necessary, he adds, "to deal with the situation we've got ourselves into. We've got to have a bigger Army.
And here is another:
Even military recruiters agree that the only way to persuade average Americans to make long-term sacrifices in war is for the children of the elite to put their lives on the line. In a recent meeting with military recruiters, [military sociology professor] Moskos discussed the crisis in enlistment. "I asked them would they prefer to have their advertising budget tripled or have Jenna Bush join the Army," he says. "They unanimously chose the Jenna option."
One of the few politicians willing to openly advocate a return to the draft is Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, who argues that the current system places an immoral burden on America's underprivileged. "It shouldn't be just the poor and the working poor who find their way into harm's way," he says. In the days leading up to the Iraq war, Rangel introduced a bill to reinstate the draft -- with absolutely no deferments. "If the kids and grandkids of the president and the Cabinet and the Pentagon were vulnerable to going to Iraq, we never would have gone -- no question in my mind," he says. "The closer this thing comes home to Americans, the quicker we'll be out of Iraq."
But instead of exploring how to share the burden more fairly, the military is cooking up new ways to take advantage of the economically disadvantaged. Rangel says military recruiters have confided in him that they're targeting inner cities and rural areas with high unemployment. In December, the National Guard nearly doubled its enlistment bonus to $10,000, and the Army is trying to attract urban youth with a marketing campaign called "Taking It to the Streets," which features a pimped-out yellow Hummer and a basketball exhibition replete with free throwback jerseys. President Bush has also signed an executive order allowing legal immigrants to apply for citizenship immediately -- rather than wait five years -- if they volunteer for active duty.
"It's so completely unethical and immoral to induce people that have limited education and limited job ability to have to put themselves in harm's way for ten, twenty or thirty thousand dollars," Rangel says. "Just how broke do you have to be to take advantage of these incentives?" Seducing soldiers with cold cash also unnerves military commanders. "We must consider the point at which we confuse 'volunteer to become an American soldier' with 'mercenary,' " Lt. Gen. James Helmly, the commander of the Army Reserve, wrote in a memo to senior Army leadership in December.
1:52 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Consequences
Via TalkLeft: Bruce Ackerman on the radical right's agenda for the Supreme Court, how Bush might try to fulfill it, and what Senate Democrats need to do to stop it.
12:55 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Friday, February 11, 2005
Won't put it into my own words
Public Theologian says it better.
There are hundreds of biblical passages which speak about the demand for people of faith to care for the poor, while there are only about six that speak of same sex behavior. Yet in November our country put back in office a President and a Congress that repeatedly sided against the interests of the poor, while fixating instead on homosexuality. One would think that Bible-reading Protestants and Catholics would have placed some emphasis on taking care of the poor and against the ever-encroaching power of the wealthy, given that Jesus and the prophets and the Torah are adamant that the poor are to be given priority, but sadly that was not what happened. And now we see what the new administration means for the rich and the poor, and if you are concerned about biblical ethics and priorities, it is not a pretty picture. Latter-day prophet Paul Krugman, having been called to duty because the religious leaders of the day are all down at the Rose Garden having a photo-op with the President, gives us the lowdown in today's NY Times.
How can a bunch of people who rail on and on about how this nation was founded on the Christian faith vote for someone whose budget would slash food stamp recipients while at the same time cutting taxes for millionaires---again?
FYI, this is Public Theologian's statement of purpose. So