John Edwards: DAMN, he's good.



And the wingnuts are going to make mincemeat out of him. Edwards has a couple of problems. First of all, he's almost TOO polished -- too pretty, too youthful, too -- dare I say it? -- slick. Second of all, when he flashes that toothy smiles, he looks disconcertingly like Jimmy Carter. That's also going to be a problem. But this is a really good speech. He's studied his Al Sharpton very carefully, and I mean that as a compliment. The speech is based on two themes: "It doesn't have to be that way", and "Will you stand up?". Then it's structured around these themes: illustration --> theme --> illustration --> theme --> illustration --> theme. It's not quite call-and response, but it's awfully close, and it WILL play in the south. It also expertly demonstrates how Democratic values line up with real families -- something that Democrats have let get away from them in recent years. Right now Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but if Edwards plays like this everywhere he goes, he may very well be the stealth weapon of this campaign. His web site is already fabulous, and he's just brought on two of the best damn bloggers in the business in Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen (a.k.a. ShakesSis).

Edwards' biggest liability is his lack of experience, particularly in regard to military affairs, which is going to hurt him with white males who may not support the Iraq war but realize that some pretty fancy dancing is going to be required to repair our reputation in the world. Barring unforeseen circumstances, 2008 is going to be about Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, and health care. And unless Edwards can do some convincing on the first four, his potential strengths on number five won't do him much good.

But speaking of Iraq, let's now look at Hillary Clinton's speech. I had to snag this one from YouTube because Hillary, who desperately needs some help with her web site, because there's no embed code to take the video right from her site, and she has absolutely no position papers posted.



It bugs me that the words "I'm Hillary Clinton and I'm running for president" don't give me thrills. I should be excited about this candidacy. God knows Clinton is smart enough and savvy enough, but unlike John Edwards, she refuses to say the three little words that so many of us want to hear: "I" "Was" "Wrong". And that is just too much like the person who currently occupies the White House. Hillary is trying to undergo a metamorphosis into an antiwar candidate by saying she's always been critical -- which she hasn't. She has never repudiated her vote. She has never admitted that in October 2002 she, like so many others, was afraid to listen to people like Scott Ritter and the Duelfer Report and the sources that the half-million of us who marched in New York City had read so that we knew that the Bush Administration was a) planning to go to war come hell or high water, and b) that this war was being entered into under false pretenses.

In this speech, Hillary says that if she'd been president in October 2002, she would not have started this war. Then why did she give this president, this dimwit, this numbskull who sat in an elementary school classroom for seven minutes while people in the World Trade Center jumped over 100 floors to their deaths, authorization to go to war? How can she say she never dreamed he'd actually do it?

She certainly LOOKS presidential here, as if Meryl Streep is going to play her in the movie. But when she tries to rouse the crowd, she sounds shrill. Perhaps this is going to be the burden of any female presidential candidate, but she could do with some vocal coaching to be able to project to the crowd without sounding so much like a scold. But the scolding tone aside, there's nothing in this speech that makes you jump to your feet and scream "Yes!"

With Hillary, it's all going to come down to Iraq. I don't care how smart she is, I don't care how good a president I think she might be -- and I think that if she banished the DLC from her life, she might have a better shot of being a good one instead of being just another corporatist in a different costume. Unless I hear those three little words, she isn't getting my vote.

As for Barack Obama, you'll have to go to C-SPAN and click on "Democratic Nat'l Cmte Annual Winter Meeting" to see his speech (it starts about 57 minutes in, and RealPlayer is required), because it's not on his web site (bad move, guys), and the speech in its entirety isn't even on YouTube.

I really like the way Obama talks about how right-wing talk radio and the 24-hour news cycle create an environment in which politics is like a reality TV show, and how it has poisoned the political environment. I like that he alludes to the Democrats' fear of taking a stand. This is clearly a dig at Hillary Clinton, but he's also correct -- Too many politicians are so terrified of the Washington punditocracy that has had its lips attached to George W. Bush's codpiece for the last four years that they don't dare levy criticism of this president's policies.

I also likes that he talks about energy dependency and how some sacrifice here at home is going to be required. This may be a deal-killer for him, because while the Administration talks about sacrifice, the current president regards news coverage of Iraq as enough sacrifice for Americans to make. But I think enough Americans outside of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade are willing now to listen to realistic plans on how we can change how we live to eliminate the need to go to war with every country in the Middle East in order to get oil. Whether too many Americans regard Middle Eastern oil as "our oil under their sand" remains to be seen. My guess is that it's fewer than there were four years ago.

I also like that he talks about hope, stealing Bill Clinton's theme right out from under Clinton's wife's nose. But what is "hope"? Hope is also manifested by "It will work because it has to" -- and it's not enough. Not this campaign. This isn't the best speech I've seen from Obama. It's long on symbols and short on specifics. Yes, he's charismatic, and I think far kindlier of him after his development of a plan for dealing with Iraq. But overall I'm still getting a not-quite-ready vibe from him.

It's early yet, and we'll see how it all shakes out. Jeff Feldman at Frameshop has been liveblogging the entire meeting, and if you want to feel like you're in the room, go over to Frameshop and pay him a visit.

Overall, it's nice to see the candidates give Howard Dean credit for the victories in November. Whether it's because it's because HoDee is providing the shrimp, or a smackdown of those media hogs Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer, I don't know. But it was classy, and Dean deserves the accolades.

I'm not going to spend time and effort on Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Joe Biden, because I don't think any of them has a shot at the nomination, especially Biden. And I can't imagine why they're doing this, except that when you're done, you get to keep any money you've raised, and all three can use that money for future campaigns.

This is going to be an interesting campaign. Obama is very much the fresh face in this race, much the way Howard Dean was in 2003. But Obama still feels like a symbol rather than a real candidate. I expect that to change as he begins to develop position papers, and I hope that he will be able to get someone to do something about his web site, because right now John Edwards has the best mix of substance and community on his site that I've seen since, well, Howard Dean. Hillary seems to be sucking up the Big Boy money, which as far as I'm concerned, dilutes her rhetoric about being a candidate of the people.

It's odd to see John Edwards, a white southern male, be emerging as the netroots candidate this year. I'm sure that much ink will be spilled about how the so-called liberal netroots aren't as liberal as they like to believe. We shouldn't let the Chris Matthewses of the world define the blogosphere that way. It's BECAUSE we aren't engaging in identity politics that we DO have concerns about Obama's tendency towards conciliation with the religious right and his coziness with Joe Lieberman. It's BECAUSE we aren't engaging in identity politics that we are wary of Hillary Clinton's corporatist tendencies. We aren't going to support a woman just because she's a woman, and we aren't going to support a black man just because he's black. We simply want to nominate, and elect, the best candidate possible.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards

Senator Obama, take note:

For the third consecutive year, the number of Americans calling for less religious influence in public life exceeded the number of Americans who want more, according to a new Gallup poll.

Most Americans, however, remain "generally satisfied" with organized religion's role in the U.S., the survey round.

Nearly 40 percent of Americans say religion's level of influence "in the nation" should not change, 32 percent would like it to have less influence and 27 percent would like it to have more, according to the survey. Weekly churchgoers are much more likely to agree that religion should have greater influence on government and politics than those who go to church less frequently, the survey found.

Opinions also tended to shift depending on political affiliation.

Some 41 percent of Democrats believed religion should have less impact, while 43 percent of Republicans felt it should have more.

During President Bush's first term, 2001 through 2004, more Americans believed the role of religion should increase than wanted its influence to fade. But by 2003, the numbers began to shift, and by 2005 a greater number of Americans believed religion should have less influence on public life.

The number of Americans who think religion should have less impact has increased 10 percentage points since 2001, according to Gallup.

Perhaps that's because we've seen what happens when religion has more impact on public life. It's not mainstream Christians or Buddhists or reform Jews or mainstream Muslims who want to shove religion down the throats of every living American, it's fundamentalist Christians, the most vociferous of whom are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. Now that Americans have had a taste of what a so-called "Christian Nation" might look like, they want no part of it.

Labels: Christianity, religion

Meliina of RIPCoco sent me this today:

update For the past three months, an employee at Gawker Media has posted copyright videos sandwiched between ads for Gawker-owned properties such as Valleywag and Gizmodo.

Nick Denton, the owner and founder of Gawker Media, acknowledged Friday that the Gawker employee, who goes by the YouTube username Belowtheradar, is the company's "video guy."

At least 50 videos were uploaded by the Gawker employee since October from such shows as ABC's Good Morning America and Inside Edition and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360.


On Thursday, the poster did not return an e-mail from CNET News.com, and representatives from Gawker, including owner Nick Denton, did not immediately return e-mails and phone calls. But on Friday morning, after this story appeared, Denton did confirm that Belowtheradar is associated with Gawker.

"He's our video guy," Denton wrote in a terse e-mail.

Most of the copyright holders, which range from Viacom-owned Comedy Central to NBC to even Apple, were contacted by CNET News.com on Thursday and most said they would need time to evaluate the YouTube clips and the ads in them before commenting. Two content owners, however, said that they never gave permission for their videos to be used in such a way.

"I can tell you emphatically that this video was used without our authorization," said Audrey Pass, spokeswoman for WNYW Channel 5, the Fox affiliate in New York. A clip from a Fox 5 news report was among those posted by Belowtheradar in December. "We have plans to pursue this matter further."

So now we know the reason why WNBC plied us with shrimp the other night, and why they focused so heavily on gossip blogs -- like GAwker. "Work with bloggers" my ass. It's more like "know your enemy."

Fatted calf indeed.

At least not as long as we have Stephen Hadley to kick around. Remember when you were in junior high school, and you hadn't read the assigned book, and you sat down with the dictionary instead and came up with six pages of babble, most of it consisting of saying the same thing over and over again using different wording, and you hoped it would sound impressive enough to fool the teacher?

I give you: "The WTF of Stephen Hadley, Assistant to the President For National Security Affairs", from yesterday's press conference:

...while the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate, which is an effort to bring together all the elements of the intelligence community and come out with a consolidated set of judgments about the situation in Iraq -- this is a new document, the result of the conclusion of that review, but it's not new intelligence. That is to say, the substance of the document is intelligence that we have been provided by the intelligence community for several months, and it is this intelligence and the picture it paints that caused the President to conclude and then develop a new strategy or new approach to Iraq.

in developing that new strategy or new approach, the intelligence community was a participant, and this intelligence, of course, inputted into that process to help us identify, then, and develop the policy that we did. Put another way, the intelligence assessment that is reflected in this NIE is not at war with this new approach or new strategy the President has developed, but I would say, explains why the President concluded that a new approach, a new strategy was required; explains a number of the elements of that strategy, and generally supports it. That is to say that the policy is designed to deal with the challenges that are reflected in this intelligence.

We agree that it is hard. We think that's accurate. We would emphasize the "hard pressed," because we will be pressing them hard, and the Iraqi people will be pressing the government hard, because in the end of the day, we all understand that reconciliation is a key to long-term security and success.

If you go to page three, it talks at the bottom of the page, it talks about a number of identifiable security and political -- what they call political triggering events, things that if they occurred, would severely convulse the Iraqi security environment, and result into a range of bad effects. And the point I would make here -- and they talk about mass sectarian killings, assassination of major religious or political leader, defection of the Sunnis from the government. The point here is, and what the President concluded from this is that the status quo is not stable.

Uh....figure that out all by yourself, Einstein?

Then there's this jaw-droppingly obtuse exchange:

Q Mr. Hadley, the report also says, the term "civil war" accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict. Is the President ready to embrace that term, as well?

MR. HADLEY: One of the things that is helpful -- and this is on page two -- is a statement that the intelligence community judges that the term "civil war" does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq. And we think that is right. And one of the things that's good about the NIE is it describes the complexity. Iraq right now is a number of different conflicts, and it talks in that paragraph about Shia-on-Shia violence, al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, criminally motivated violence. I would add one more, and I don't think the analysts would object, and that is efforts by al Qaeda not just to attack coalition forces, but to attack Shia civilians in order to provoke them to attack Sunnis and to encourage the sectarian violence that we've seen.

So I think the thing I would say is, we would agree with the description in that paragraph of the realities on the ground. Now, you get to the issue of labels. Labels are difficult. And of course, everyone is looking at the label of "civil war." Let me read to you what Iraqis say. As we've talked about before, Iraqis do not describe it as a civil war. And it's very interesting -- in a recent interview, the Iraqi Prime Minister* [sic], Abd al Madhi, had the following statement, which I thought was an interesting, different perspective on this issue. He said first, "I don't think we are in a civil war. We are in a war on civilians. That's what Abu Musab al Zarqawi was trying to do. That's what the insurgents are trying to do. Otherwise, what is the meaning of a car bomb in a university or market? You're against a society, against civilians. Or when Sunni militias attack, some Shia militias attack in retaliation. They are not attacking as one army against another, but they are attacking civilians from the other community. That's why I say," and this is Abd al Madhi's comment, "we are in a war against civilians, not a civil war."

And finally he says, "Secondly, the government is still powerful, still feared by the population. Whenever it issues a curfew it is respected all over Iraq. No country in a civil war respects the decision of a government. We have to go and decrease the sectarian violence; we have to go and protect people from car bombs and from insurgent acts that target civilians and institutions."

So what I would say -- let me just say, the description in the NIE of the situation on the ground and the variety of these challenges is real. And we agree with that. The issue of the level -- the issue of the label is one we're going to go back and forth on. What the President's job is, in view of that situation on the ground, to develop a policy and a strategy that has the prospect of success. That's what the policy challenge is, and that's what we think we've done.

Q Does it mean that the President does accept that civil war accurately describes key elements -- does he accept that?

MR. HADLEY: I think what the President does is he accepts the description of the key elements -- that is that there's a hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements. The facts are not in dispute, and they are what drove the policy. And the policy seeks to try and respond to those facts and come up with a strategy that will succeed. That's what our task is and that's what we've done.

Later on, ABC News' Martha Raddatz refuses to let the topic of civil war go, and Hadley really goes off into Rumsfeldian nonsense:

Q Mr. Hadley, I want to go back to the term "civil war." The administration has really gone out of its way not to use that term, "civil war," in the same way that Don Rumsfeld wouldn't call it a "guerilla war" when it was, or an "insurgency" when it was. Why do you go out of your way not to use that word? The President goes out of his way, as well. You say labels are difficult, but is it not important -- certainly any military strategist will tell you it's important to know what kind of fight you're in. Can you call it a civil war, and why haven't you?

MR. HADLEY: We know what kind of fight we're in. We know the facts. That is described well in this NIE, and we have a strategy to deal with those facts and to try to succeed.

Q Is it a civil war?

MR. HADLEY: I will tell you what this NIE says.

Q I want to know why you avoid using that term.

MR. HADLEY: Because it's not an adequate description of the situation we find ourselves, as the intelligence community says. Intelligence judges "the term civil war does not adequately capture the complexities of the conflict in Iraq." And what we're doing is saying, if you're going to run policy, and if you're going to explain it to the American people, we need to get across the complexities of the situation we face in Iraq, and what is our strategy to deal with that. And simple labels don't do that. We're going to try and force everybody to get into the facts.

In other words, what's going on is WORSE than civil war.

And in case you thought they had a plan for what happens if the escalation of the war doesn't work; in case you thought "It will work because it has to" was the Crawford Caligula kidding around again, guess again:

Q The President asked for patience to see that his plan will work. The NIE says that unless there's measurable progress in 12 to 18 months, then the security situation could deteriorate. Is that the same time frame that you all are looking at to see if this plan is going to work?

MR. HADLEY: Well, we'd obviously like the plan to work sooner, because the sooner we get the violence down, the sooner the Iraqis can move forward more effectively on the reconciliation, the sooner we can proceed in training the Iraqi security forces. So we would like it to occur as soon as we can. Nonetheless, as you've heard from General Petraeus and from General Casey in their testimony, we've got to be patient, it's going to take some time.

Q But are you not going to reassess the new strategy in 12 to 18 months?

MR. HADLEY: No, no, we're -- one of the advantages about the benchmarks that we have talked about and the President talked about is they are gauges for whether that strategy is succeeding, both narrowly, in terms of the Baghdad security plan, but also more broadly, because, as you know, some of those benchmarks involve the reconciliation effort. So we are going to try and monitor the progress and our response is going to be, if we don't see progress, we're going to be talking to the Iraqis and emphasize the importance that we, and they take the steps that they need to do.

So we're going to be monitoring this along the way. The Congress has made clear that they will be monitoring the situation as we go.

So there you have it, folks: There will be no reassessment of this strategy. Oh, they'll talk to the al-Maliki government, assuming it survives that long, and chastise it soundly. But the REAL strategy is going to be to use the lives of another 20,000 to 40,000 American soldiers to allow Bush to run out the clock -- and then blame Congress.

It truly is appalling the way the Scooter Libby trial has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media, outside of Keith Olbermann. It's interesting that for all the MSM talk of "blogger ethics" and the perpetuation of "Old Media"'s notion that "bloggers don't have any journalistic standards", it's been Firedoglake that has provided the best and most comprehensive coverage of the trial.

I'm sure much of the mainstream media is embarrassed at this display of how they allowed themselves, in their hunger to get invited to the right DC cocktail parties and to have access to this most secretive of administrations, to be played like violins by the Bush Administration to do its bidding. Journalistic standards indeed.

This op-ed by David Ignatius in WaPo dares to use the c-word -- "coverup" -- to describe what happened in the summer of 2003. It was a coverup that failed, but a coverup just the same:

Why was the White House so nervous in the summer of 2003 about the CIA's reporting on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb? That's the big question that runs through the many little details that have emerged in the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The trial record suggests a simple answer: The White House was worried that the CIA would reveal that it had been pressured in 2002 and early 2003 to support administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that in the Niger case, the CIA had tried hard to resist this pressure. The machinations of Cheney, Libby and others were an attempt to weave an alternative narrative that blamed the CIA.

The truth began to emerge on July 11, 2003, when CIA Director George Tenet issued a public statement disclosing that the agency had tried to warn the White House off the Niger allegations. In that sense, the Libby trial is about a cover-up that failed.

[snip]

The record begins with a Feb. 13, 2002, memo from a CIA briefer who had been "tasked" by Cheney on the uranium issue: "The VP was shown an assessment (he thought from DIA) that Iraq is purchasing uranium from Africa. He would like our assessment of that transaction and its implications for Iraq's nuclear program." The CIA briefer responded the next day with a comment that should have aroused skepticism on whether Iraq needed to buy any more uranium: Iraq already had 550 tons of "yellowcake" ore -- 200 tons of it from Niger. But the CIA, eager to please, asked Wilson a few days later to go to Niger to investigate the claim.

A glimpse of the pressure coming from the vice president's office emerges from a memo from CIA briefer Craig R. Schmall, after he was interviewed in January 2004 by FBI agents investigating the leak of Plame's covert identity: "I mentioned also to the agents that Libby was in charge within the administration (or at least the White House side) for producing papers arguing the case for Iraqi WMD and ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, which explains Libby's and the Vice President's interest in the Iraq/Niger/Uranium case."

CIA and State Department documents show that analysts at both agencies became increasingly skeptical about the Niger allegation and tried to warn the White House. A memo from Schmall to Eric Edelman, then Cheney's national security adviser, recalled: "CIA on several occasions has cautioned . . . that available information on this issue was fragmentary and unconfirmed." A memo from Carl W. Ford Jr., then head of the State Department's intelligence bureau, noted that his analysts had found the Niger claims "highly dubious."

The Niger issue wasn't included in Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous U.N. speech on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, according to Ford, "due to CIA concerns raised during the coordination regarding the veracity of the information on the alleged Iraq-Niger agreement." But despite CIA warnings, Bush referred to uranium purchases from Africa in his January 2003 State of the Union address, attributing it to British sources.

So we begin to understand why the White House was worried about the CIA in the summer of 2003: It feared the agency would breach the wall of silence about the claims regarding weapons of mass destruction. Robert Grenier, a CIA official who was the agency's Iraq mission manager, told colleagues that he remembered "a series of insistent phone calls" that month from Libby, who wanted the CIA to tell reporters that "other community elements such as State and DOD" had encouraged Wilson's Niger trip, not just Cheney.

The bottom line? Grenier was asked in court last week to explain the White House's 2003 machinations. Here's what he said: "I think they were trying to avoid blame for not providing [the truth] about whether or not Iraq had attempted to buy uranium." Let me say it again: This trial is about a cover-up that failed.

If the Bush Administration's actions in regard to the lead-up to the Iraq War don't constitute crimes and misdemeanors, I don't know what does.

This post isn't dedicated to any particular idiot, just idiots in general, on this Friday before the Super Bowl.

Sales rush shows we want our big TV for the big game

On Super Bowl Sunday, hundreds of North Jersey residents will sit down with their beverages, chips and dip and watch the big game on their latest and proudest possession – a big screen, high-definition television.

And local retailers are expecting to sell hundreds more of the sets today, Saturday and Sunday.

"People are just going nuts," said Tom Galanis, vice president of operations for Sixth Avenue Electronics, which has nine New Jersey stores, including two in Paramus. "They want a big screen, high definition, and they want it flat and they want it yesterday."

Personal savings rate drops to lowest in 74 years

Americans once again spent everything they made and then some last year, pushing the personal savings rate to the lowest level since the Great Depression.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the savings rate for all of 2006 was a negative 1 percent, meaning that not only did people spend all the money they earned, but they also dipped into savings or increased borrowing to finance purchases. The 2006 figure was lower than a negative 0.4 percent in 2005, and was the poorest showing since a negative 1.5 percent savings rate in 1933 during the Depression.

Party like it's 1929 -- that's the American way.

As John McCain continues to falter, and people start to remember just what Rudy Giuliani is, here's something to think about in anticipation of a possible Jeb Bush presidential run in 2008: Electing Bushes as president is like playing a really bad record over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over....

Cue the wingnuts squawking about how this is crap when the temperature in New York is in the teens next week:

International scientists and officials hailed a report Friday saying that global warming is ''very likely'' caused by man, and that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level ''would continue for centuries'' no matter how much humans control their pollution.

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, called it a ''very impressive document that goes several steps beyond previous research.''

A top U.S. government scientist, Susan Solomon, said ''there can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities.''

The 21-page summary of the panel's findings released Friday represents the most authoritative science on global warming. The panel comprises hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

The scientists said the changes are ''very likely'' caused by human activity, a phrase that translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame.

The report said no matter how much civilization slows or reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and sea level rise will continue on for centuries.

''This is just not something you can stop. We're just going to have to live with it,'' co-author Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., told The Associated Press in an interview. ''We're creating a different planet. If you were to come up back in 100 years time, we'll have a different climate.''

Sharon Hays, associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, welcomed the strong language of the report.

''It's a significant report. It will be valuable to policy makers,'' she told The Associated Press in an interview in Paris.

Hays stopped short of saying whether or how the report could bring about change in President Bush's policy about greenhouse gas emissions.

The panel predicted temperature rises of 2-11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. That was a wider range than in the 2001 report.

However, the panel also said its best estimate was for temperature rises of 3.2-7.1 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2001, all the panel gave was a range of 2.5-10.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

On sea levels, the report projects rises of 7-23 inches by the end of the century. An additional 3.9-7.8 inches are possible if recent, surprising melting of polar ice sheets continues.

Trenberth said scientists do worry that world leaders will take the message in the wrong way and throw up their hands. Instead, the scientists urged leaders to reduce emissions and also adapt to a warmer world with wilder weather.

How likely do you think that is to happen? If the tipping point has already been reched, we might as well party like it's 2099, right?

I'm not sure how a response of "It's a significant report. It will be valuable to policy makers" is "welcoming", but this allows the Times to give the impression that this Administration is concerned with global warming.

The problem is that global warming creates more than "a warmer world with wilder weather." This gives the impression that we're looking at lower heating bills with more thunderstorms. Those pictures of cute polar bear cubs? Forget about 'em. They'll all be gone. That nice Caribbean vacation you take every year? Forget about it. All those islands will be under water. Your beach house? Gone. Coral reefs and the fish that feed around them? Extinct. Malaria? Widespread. Category 5 hurricanes? Commonplace. Homeowner's insurance costs? Skyrocketing. For everyone.

Perhaps it's true that it's too late to stop it now. But does that mean we should continue to guzzle fossil fuels at the same rate? I don't have children, so perhaps I don't need to care. But when you think about a world with widespread food and water shortages as a result of global warming, a world in which the struggle for food is worldwide, among nations many of which have thermonuclear weapons, I wonder what the children and grandchildren of the parents who insist on driving a half-mile to the 7-11 in a Ford Excursion are going to think of them.

But that the report indicates that there are limits to what we can do to prevent global warming's effects, that isn't stopping the Usual Suspects from trying mightily to debunk the report in the only way they know how -- not by scientific methodologies, but through bribes:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.
The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

"The IPCC process is probably the most thorough and open review undertaken in any discipline. This undermines the confidence of the public in the scientific community and the ability of governments to take on sound scientific advice," he said.

Remember Lee Raymond?



He's already received his $400 million parachute. But he still won't be satisfied unless Exxon is able to post record profits in perpetuity -- even if it means the extinction of thousands of species and the drowning of entire island nations of people.

Labels: global warming

Remember that scene in Animal House where Otter throws his arm around Flounder, the latter despondent at his brother's trashed car, and says, "You fucked up! You trusted us!"

Well, those who supported Bush's so-called "surge" of 20,000 troops ought to be feeling a tad floundery themselves today, because -- surprise! It's not going to be 20,000 troops, it's going to be closer to 50,000, and it's not going to cost $5.6 billion, it's going to cost "$9 billion to $13 billion for a four-month deployment and from $20 billion to $27 billion for a 12-month deployment."

You and I have "gold-plated health insurance". But when it comes to trying to salvage some kind of legacy for this lifelong screw-up, it's spare no expense.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq, surge

It's almost enough to turn you into a vegetarian, because now I think I understand how the cows feel when they're being fattened up for the slaughter.

Last night I had the rather dubious honor of attending the WNBC Bloggers Summit, held at the WNBC Studios at Rockefeller Center, accompanied by Tata, DBK, Mary Ann, ModFab, and Melina.

While the invitation talked about refreshments being served, I, being a person of not preposterous girth, but of some girth, tend to use the Scarlett O'Hara tactic of eating something before going in, so that I can pick daintily at a cookie, fan myself, and chuckle "Oh, fiddle-dee-dee" at whomever I'm talking with at the moment. However, most of the crowd immediately succumbed to the Inexorable and Irresistable Power of Free Food, causing a chow line to snake out the door of Studio 6B, from whence Today in New York, the local morning news show and gabfest, is Actually!!! Broadcast!!! Now, given how mainstream media feels about bloggers, and given that we had actually volunteered the enter the Belly of the General Electric Beast, the whole affair had a distinct "fatten them up till they're good and groggy, then slaughter them" air.

At that point, decisions must be made: Do you want to die WITH having eaten the brownie, or WITHOUT it. I, of course, chose the former, and as one would expect from being in such an ersatz environment, it looked far better than it tasted. Of course, that was the precise moment when a size 00 who looked to be about fourteen years old came over to our little middle-aged group and introduced herself as Erin, the "Interactive Content Specialist", who had not only sent the invitations, but encouraged bloggers to pass it on to their friends, essentially inviting the select few she had contacted directly to get others to crash her party.

It's pretty clear why Erin was selected to spearhead Capital N New Capital M Media development at NBC. She's young, friendly, attractive but not intimidatingly so, and because she talks in scallops like a Valley girl circa 1987, with the annoying habit of liberally peppering her speech with the word "really" (which she pronounces "rilly"), you can see that the suits decided, "Let's let Erin spearhead this. She's young and she must know all about blogs -- you know, that MyFacebook thing all the kids are using." I would love to know what was going through Erin's mind when the average of the crowd that showed up appeared to be somewhere around 38, with at least a third of the room being old enough to have conceived her ourselves.

Before enough of the shrimp could be consumed to prevent the night staff from having a treat, shrimp that they kept reminding the bloggers in attendance they had provided, we were given the special treat of being herded across the hall to Studio 6A, which is WHERE CONAN O'BRIEN'S SHOW IS ACTUALLY TAPED!!!! I guess we're supposed to be impressed with this, but while I like Conan, and believe he is Marc Maron's perfect foil, his studio, like the celebrities who plop their fannies in the ugly 1960's-looking furniture therein, is far smaller and less impressive than one would think. Of course Melina and I, the Morning Seditionists that we are, immediately turned to each other, and said "Look! It's Marc's chair!

Then we found out why we were there: It's because television news is scared shitless of bloggers, and local television news is pooping in its collective pants with terror, because the informal network that is blogtopia is able to get a story and disseminate it far more quickly than they can. They understand that the future is delivery of content online, and they also understand that right now we do it better than thay do. So, having spent what must be a boatload of cash to lure the Cute But Not As Pretty As Either Naveen Andrews Or Sendhil Ramamurthy Sree Sreenivasan from WABC, the suits at GE decided to make him the the public face their push to embrace new media.

So far, so good, right? But now we get to the pitch, and it's a pitch that Mary Ann, ModFab and I have heard over and over again during our experience with writing movie reviews online: You give us your content, and we give you "credit." That it took them a half-hour of business babble to reach this point, and that this pitch followed an opening statement that WNBC's site doesn't get much traffic, merely illustrates the problem.

It was perfectly clear that the suits in the executive suites at NBC have read enough in their business magazines and newspapers, and seen enough of the impact of internet content delivery in their bottom line, to know that Houston, they have a problem. And while their pathetic, if well-meaning attempt to "reach out to bloggers" indicates a commendable willingness to work with bloggers, rather than simply regard us as pajama-clad losers living in our parents' basements, they are still very much tied to their one-way "push" model of content delivery. The suits still not only believe that simply bringing in "blogger content" wills somehow make their own online endeavors magically work, they also believe that "credit" from a conventional news web site that they have already admitted few people visit is hardly an inducement. Needless to say, "cash for content", at which point a few people in the room other than the twentysomething goths and other assorted late adolescents sprinkled around the room might pay attention, was never mentioned.

The WNBC executives who held this affair still don't get it. The event was taped for the 11:00 news last night, and they made damn sure that the only so-called bloggers that received face time were those associated with larger sites, such as Gothamist, Media Bistro, Best Week Ever, and Gawker. Occasionally a smaller player received the microphone, but since these people tended to ask the really tough questions rather than hold forth on how fabulous new media is, they didn't receive the face time of the Big Boys and Girls of Gossip Blogging. The only arguably political blogger interviewed with face time was with the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal, which shows you that despite all the talk of New Media at WNBC, General Electric is still calling the shots.

As I looked around the room, I saw a sea of largely over-35 faces, most of them looking at each other and rolling their eyes. One intrepid soul managed to note that the problem with local news is that it only seems to cover fires and murders. The WNBC news program director noticed the lack of enthusiasm that met his shiny new bauble of Being Given Credit By "Real" News, and finally blurted out in sheer frustration after the crowd a) was not impressed with the fact that the 80-year-old Gabe Pressman's Sunday interview show is now streamed live over the web; and b) noted that we don't watch the network news because we're watching The Daily Show, "How many of you think we should just eliminate television news?" My response, echoed by most of the room, was "Keep Olbermann and get rid of the rest of it."

Throughout this whole ordeal, which ran nearly an hour overtime and from which one was not permitted to exit early, our little crew sat near the back of the room, snickering and snarking and waiting to be given detention. One woman from a small newspaper noted that she would have rather listened to what we were saying. But being able to meet up with online friends, combined with an interesting and useful conversation about political blogging with Jeff Feldman of Frameshop on the subway afterwards, made shlepping into the city on a worknight worthwhile.

But if the executives at WNBC really wants to know how blogs have become so influential and how they can move towards an embrace of new media, perhaps they might try actually reading some.

UPDATE: Don't take my word for it, read the recaps of the evening from my partners in snark, who quite frankly, are far more entertaining than I am on the subject:

ModFab: 10 Things I Learned At The New York Bloggers Summit

Melina: Welcome to the Blogerrati...I Will Be Your Hostess: Conan's Studio, Marc's Chair, Jumbo Shrimp, and then..Mind Meld! The Long Version...;-)

Tata: I Am the Passenger

Labels: blogging, WNBC. Blogger Summit

Alas, she can. Molly Ivins died far too soon today at the age of sixty-two.

I'm not sure if we could have made it through the last six years without Molly Ivins' passion and humor. For all that she, as a Texan, knew long before most Americans what they were getting when they allowed George W. Bush to assume the presidency, she never succumbed to despair, instead deciding to fight the Bush junta with her best weapon -- humor.

There really isn't anything I can say that can illustrate what we lost today, so I'll just let Molly Ivins speak for herself one last time:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

If we won't do it for ourselves, and we won't do it for the generations to come, then for God's sake let's do it for Molly. It's the least we can do after all she did for us.

Labels: Molly Ivins

OK, grab your popcorn, because this ought to be good:

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, one of the most prominent Democrats in the 2008 presidential field, proposed for the first time setting a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq, as part of a broader plan aimed at bolstering the freshman senator's foreign policy credentials.

Obama's legislation, offered on the Senate floor last night, would remove all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008. The date falls within the parameters offered by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended the removal of combat troops by the first quarter of next year.

The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close," Obama said in his speech. "It is time for us to fundamentally change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back."


The Obama plan, called the Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007, would begin a troop withdrawal no later than May 1, 2007, but it includes several caveats that could forestall a clean break:

It would leave a limited number of troops in place to conduct counterterrorism activities and train Iraqi forces. And the withdrawal could be temporarily suspended if the Iraqi government meets a series of benchmarks laid out by the Bush administration. That list includes a reduction in sectarian violence; the equitable distribution of oil revenue; government reforms; and democratic, Iraqi-driven reconstruction and economic development efforts. Obama's proposal also would reverse Bush's troop-increase plan....Obama described his proposal as a mainstream package of well-vetted ideas, consistent with the Iraq Study Group's recommendations and "with what the American people demanded in the November election," when they voted Republicans out of power in both the House and the Senate.

The details of the Obama plan are here. Good for Obama for doing this. My beef with him has been his excessive caution and unwillingness to take a stand on anything. While this plan still allows far too many American soldiers to die for this failed war between now and 2008, it at least describes concrete steps for extricating the U.S. from this disastrous civil war, and reminds the Crawford Caligula just who is in charge of the pursestrings. Nice. The one giant gaping hole in the plan as put forth in Obama's web site is what the consequences might be for Iraq FAILING to meet the benchmarks. As yet, no one seems willing to address that possibility. The absence of such consequences here has echoes of the same delusion that Bush has: "It will work because it has to."

In contrast, Hillary Clinton not only does not have any position papers on Iraq (or anything else for that matter) on her campaign wab site, but so far her position on Iraq is "Hey, George, clean it up before you leave." This demonstrates that she still doesn't get what she's dealing with in this Administration. She voted for this war and has still not expressed regret for that vote, claiming that "if we knew then what we know now there never would have been a vote. I never would have voted to give this president that authority."

Sorry, Hill, but that just won't wash. I knew that Bush was determined to go to war. So did a half-million people who marched in New York City in February 2002 and millions more nationwide. If I, a mere citizen knew what you were dealing with in 2002, why didn't you?

This is a Big Bold Move for Obama, perhaps the first of his Senate career. It dares Hillary Clinton to take a stand, and positions Obama in stark contrast to John McCain (who may not be the one to watch at this point).

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out on both sides of the aisle.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq, Obama

...at least not in the military victory sense.

The Iraq war has been a bonanza for military contractors. From Halliburton and its many subsidiaries to Dyncorp to Bechtel, some of the most heinous corporations in the United States have turned Iraq into a cash cow, using OUR money -- money that could have been spent on education, infrastructure, research into alternative fuels, medical research, providing universal health insurance, or perhaps even fighting the REAL battle against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Instead, proving on an even more massive scale what I said back in 1988 when I posited that the Bush family regards the entire country as a private fiefdom for itself and its friends, the Bush/Cheney administration has bankrupted the country for generations to come shoveling cash into the pockets of these corporations.

And this is what we got for our so-called "investment":

The U.S. government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.

The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion and left the region near civil war.

"The security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, hindering progress in all reconstruction sectors and threatening the overall reconstruction effort," according to the 579-page report, which was being released Wednesday.

Calling Iraq's sectarian violence the greatest challenge, Bowen said in a telephone interview that billions in U.S. aid spent on strengthening security has had limited effect. Reconstruction now will fall largely on Iraqis to manage — and they're nowhere ready for the task.

The audit comes as President Bush is pressing Congress to approve $1.2 billion in new reconstruction aid as part of his broader plan to stabilize Iraq by sending 21,500 more U.S. troops to Baghdad and Anbar province.

[snip]

According to the report, the State Department paid $43.8 million to contractor DynCorp International for the residential camp for police training personnel outside of Baghdad's Adnan Palace grounds that has stood empty for months. About $4.2 million of the money was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool, all ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior but never authorized by the U.S.

U.S. officials spent another $36.4 million for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that can't be accounted for. DynCorp also may have prematurely billed $18 million in other potentially unjustified costs, the report said.

Bowen, whose office was nearly eliminated last month by administration-friendly Republicans in Congress, called spending waste in Iraq a continuing problem. Corruption is high among Iraqi officials, while U.S. contract management remains somewhat weak.

With America's $21 billion rebuilding effort largely finished, it will be up to the international community and the Iraqis to step up its dollars to sustain reconstruction, Bowen said in the interview. "That will be a long-term and very expensive process," he said.

According to the report:

_Major U.S. contractors in Iraq, including Bechtel National and Kellogg, Brown and Root Services Inc., said they devoted an average 12.5 percent of their total expenses for security.

_Bowen's office opened 27 new criminal probes in the last quarter, bringing the total number of active cases to 78. Twenty-three are awaiting prosecutorial action by the Justice Department, most of them centering on charges of bribery and kickbacks.

Meanwhile, John McCain, who has completely lost his mind and thinks he's back in 1972 and he is the only person standing between victory and loss in Vietnam, along with Joe Lieberman, who seems to think that nuclear war in the Middle East somehow benefits Israel, and Lindsey Graham, are committed to propping up this failed presidency by continuing to fund this war in perpetuity, no matter how many American kids have to die to do it.

And what of those American kids? Remember the opening scene in Three Kings, in which Mark Wahlberg says, "Are we shooting people, or what?" That was fiction. This is the real-life mirror image of that scene:

"Who the hell is shooting at us?" a US soldier yelled last week. His platoon was in a strife-torn part of Baghdad, teamed with an Iraqi Army unit. Gunfire was coming from all directions. "Who's shooting at us? Do we know who they are?"

Those of you who were alive during the Vietnam era just felt a chill, didn't you? Because we have all been here before. The ghosts of Vietnam hover over this war like the crazy aunt in the attic about whom no one wants to talk. Vietnam wasn't lost due to a lack of will; it was lost because we had no business being there in the first place. Putting the generations to come into debt to China in perpetuity to pay for another escalation of another senseless war will not change history in Vietnam, nor will it prevent a similar outcome in Iraq. It will, however, make a whole lot of Bush/Cheney contributors, as well as the Vice President himself, even wealthier than they are now.

Labels: Bechtel, Cheney, Dyncorp, George W. Bush, Halliburton, Iraq

Now this is completely surreal.

Part I:


Part II:



Here's what I want to know: How the hell does the richest man in the world still look like a college student? And what is he going to do to Comedy Central as punishment for using Macromedia Flash for its videos?

Labels: Bill Gates, Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Windows Vista

Or as Pam calls him, "Humpy McTool".

This ought to derail the so-called "Straight Talk Express" for good:



Live by the flip-flop, die by the flip-flop.

(And what the hell is wrong with his cheek, anyway? He looks like he's got acorns stowed in there.)

Labels: John McCain, Straight Talk Express

Now he is the decider on all things regulatory:

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

Got that? Every federal agency has to have a Bush crony overseeing how regulations are enforced.

This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats.

The White House said the executive order was not meant to rein in any one agency. But business executives and consumer advocates said the administration was particularly concerned about rules and guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

In an interview on Monday, Jeffrey A. Rosen, general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said, “This is a classic good-government measure that will make federal agencies more open and accountable.”

Amazing that a human being can say that with a straight face, isn't it?

Business groups welcomed the executive order, saying it had the potential to reduce what they saw as the burden of federal regulations. This burden is of great concern to many groups, including small businesses, that have given strong political and financial backing to Mr. Bush.

Say this about George W. Bush: If you give him money, he takes good care of you. Sort of like a protection racket.

Typically, agencies issue regulations under authority granted to them in laws enacted by Congress. In many cases, the statute does not say precisely what agencies should do, giving them considerable latitude in interpreting the law and developing regulations.

The directive issued by Mr. Bush says that, in deciding whether to issue regulations, federal agencies must identify “the specific market failure” or problem that justifies government intervention.

Besides placing political appointees in charge of rule making, Mr. Bush said agencies must give the White House an opportunity to review “any significant guidance documents” before they are issued.

The Office of Management and Budget already has an elaborate process for the review of proposed rules. But in recent years, many agencies have circumvented this process by issuing guidance documents, which explain how they will enforce federal laws and contractual requirements.

Peter L. Strauss, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the executive order “achieves a major increase in White House control over domestic government.”

“Having lost control of Congress,” Mr. Strauss said, “the president is doing what he can to increase his control of the executive branch.”

Bush has thrown down the gauntlet to Congress. This is "Go ahead...make my day" politics. The craven, small-minded weasels who still support George W. Bush may applaud this as a big, swinging dick tactic of macho administration by a guy who won't let himself be pushed around by those wimpy Democrats, but they should be very careful putting that much authority in the executive branch -- unless they are pretty damn sure that the current dick-waver plans to stay in office forever. That every decision like this makes such a scenario more plausible must delight them to no end.

Yeah, I know, there are PEOPLE being killed every day, and in the larger sphere of things, this is pretty damned insignificant. But for some strange reason, I felt kicked in the gut when I read this:

Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was euthanized Monday after complications from his gruesome breakdown at last year's Preakness, ending an eight-month ordeal that prompted an outpouring of support across the country.

"We just reached a point where it was going to be difficult for him to go on without pain," co-owner Roy Jackson said. "It was the right decision, it was the right thing to do. We said all along if there was a situation where it would become more difficult for him then it would be time."

A series of ailments, including laminitis in the left rear hoof and a recent abscess in the right rear hoof, proved too much for the gallant colt.

Barbaro battled in his ICU stall for eight months. The 4-year-old colt underwent several procedures and was fitted with fiberglass casts. He spent time in a sling to ease pressure on his legs, had pins inserted and was fitted at the end with an external brace. These were all extraordinary measures for a horse with such injuries.

He suffered a significant setback over the weekend, and surgery was required to insert two steel pins in a bone — one of three shattered in the Preakness but now healthy — to eliminate all weight bearing on the ailing right rear foot.

The procedure Saturday was a risky one, because it transferred more weight to the leg while the foot rests on the ground bearing no weight.

The leg was on the mend until the abscess began causing discomfort last week. Until then, the major concern was Barbaro's left rear leg, which developed laminitis in July, and 80 percent of the hoof was removed.

Richardson said Monday morning that Barbaro did not have a good night.

I don't even LIKE horses.

I guess it's because those of us who have had pets have at one time or another had to endure that terrible dilemma of judging when the animal we love has been through enough. And when someone else goes through that, it brings back all the pain we've had in our lives making similar decisions. The loss of a beloved pet or animal companion of any kind, whether through death or another reason, is sharper than those who are not animal people can understand. The pain of this couple making the correct, if painful choice to return a cat they had adopted to its desperate original owner is palpable.

I'm still not sure why Barbaro became the mascot of a nation. Perhaps we wanted to believe in a happy ending because it meant we didn't have to confront the sick waste and Darwinian brutality of horse racing. Perhaps it was because he seemed to WANT to fight back and be the one horse that makes it. Whatever the reason, an entire nation affixed its own emotional baggage to this one horse, and when he was unable to come through for us, it feels like a personal loss.

Labels: Barbaro, horse racing, pets

Because sometimes we need a break from the horror that is life in Bush's America.

I've blogged periodically this winter on figure skating, particularly over New Year's weekend when not much else is happening. It's not that I follow skating that much anymore; other interests have supplanted it. But every now and then I see something that reminds me why I enjoyed watching skating.

Enter Evan Lysacek, like manna from skating heaven.

He's cute, he's straight, he's tall, and hoo-boy, can this young man skate. Forget the quad toe-triple toe combination to open the program. Forget the triple axel-triple toe combination. Forget the jumps. Look at the SPINS. Anyone who's taken martial arts training will tell you how difficult that sit spin position is:



Yes, his choreography leaves something to be desired; it has far too much Brian Orser-style flailing his arms around. And yes, sometimes it seems that if one more skater uses music from Carmen, we're going to put our heads in the oven. But for a kid coming off a hip injury just over a month ago to skate a program like this is nothing short of amazing.

But you'd better watch him now, because at 6'1", you have to wonder what kind of toll these jumps are going to take on his hips and legs. Tim Goebel, the last American "quad rat", had to retire at age 26 after landing 76 quad jumps in his career. And he was only 5'7".

That she's correct about what she said doesn't change the fact that it sounds appallingly opportunistic:

Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that President Bush should withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq before he leaves office, asserting it would be "the height of irresponsibility" to pass the war along to the next commander in chief.

"This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy," the Democratic senator from New York said her in initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.

"We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office" in January 2009, the former first lady said.

The White House condemned Clinton's comments as a partisan attack that undermines U.S. soldiers

Let's ignore the whiny-ass titty baby kvetching of an administration that has claimed that every criticism of anything it does "emboldens the enemy." Let's look instead at what Hillary is saying. She's absolutely right, of course, that the Bush strategy of running out the clock and continuing the Crawford Caligula's pattern of screwing up everything he touches and then leaving the mess for someone else to clean up is appalling. However, if she thinks that demanding a timetable for withdrawal by the end of the current administration somehow negates her vote for the war, she'd better guess again, as far as I'm concerned. Let's not be blinded by this and think that this is a change in her "invading Iraq was the right thing to do, it was just planned and executed badly" viewpoint. Do not be fooled. She is still a war hawk, and these times demand more courage than the kind of triangulation that may have worked well enough during the 1990's indicates.

The situation can change radically by November 2008, but right now she is well-positioned to take the Democratic nomination, whether a majority of Americans would vote for her in a general election or not. And this is NOT what I want to hear from the party's likely nominee.

John Aravosis disagrees:

My initial reaction is: smart move. The overwhelming majority of Americans have had it with this war. They want us out - just not yet. Yes, it's a contradiction, I get it, but they don't, and it's where they are. People want the war over "soon." And Hillary just gave the public a timeline that meets what their gut is telling them.

It also puts Bush on notice that the clock is ticking. He no longer gets to pull the old "this war will have to be settled by the next president." Hillary's message for the next two years is going to be "are we there yet?" And it's a smart message for the Democrats as well. It permits them to keep running against Bush even as the elections approach for the post-Bush.

The only danger with this strategy is were it morphed into a "Bush has two more years to fix things, so let's just escalate and see what happens." No one is for that, and that's not what Hillary is saying, in any case. She's saying that even she, Democrat who has often been a pain in the butt (to us) as it concerns her views on the war, has a limit.

Here's the problem with Hillary's so-called "timetable": It essentially asks for the war to be ended in time for her to presumably take office -- but does not take into account a temporary escalation and the lives of the thousands more American soldiers that will be lost while we wait for Bush to clean up the mess. Whom does waiting benefit, other than the next president? It certainly doesn't benefit the American people, who are going to pay for another year and a half of war profiteering on the part of Bush and Cheney's friends and cronies. It doesn't benefit the troops who will be at risk for loss of life or limb for another year and a half. And it doesn't seem to benefit the so-called Iraqi military, who somehow miraculously, after foundering for four years, got its act together at least for a day right when George W. Bush needed them to most.

Hillary Clinton's call for an end to our presence in Iraq not now, but before SHE can take office, is exactly the kind of policy position, driven not by the pulse of the American people who marched on Washington on Saturday and the many others who weren't there but were in solidarity, but by the Washington consultant corps -- the Bob Shrums and Al Froms and craven "centrist" Democrats like Chuck "Let's try to do it halfway" Schumer, that is the LAST thing we need. The next president is going to have to have one hell of a mess to deal with -- and this sort of blithe willingness to sacrifice more Americans in a lost cause is disturbing on a potential nominee who is supposed to represent an alternative.

Labels: Chuck Schumer, Election, Hillary Clinton, Iraq

According to the Scotland Sunday Herald, the Crawford Caligula will try to make himself better about his penis size one more time by launching an attack on Iran before the end of April:

PRESIDENT BUSH is preparing to attack Iran's nuclear facilities before the end of April and the US Air Force's new bases in Bulgaria and Romania would be used as back-up in the onslaught, according to an official report from Sofia.

"American forces could be using their two USAF bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania's Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April," the Bulgarian news agency Novinite said.

The American build-up along the BlackSea, coupled with the recent positioning of two US aircraft carrier battle groups off the Straits of Hormuz, appears to indicate president Bush has run out of patience with Tehran's nuclear misrepresentation and non-compliance with the UN Security Council's resolution. President Ahmeninejad of Iran has further ratcheted up tension in the region by putting on show his newly purchased state of the art Russian TOR-Ml anti-missile defence system.

Whether the Bulgarian news report is a tactical feint or a strategic event is hard to gauge at this stage. But, in conjunction with the beefing up of America's Italian bases and the acquisition of anti-missile defence bases in the Czech Republic and Poland,the Balkan developments seem toindicate a newphase in Bush's global war on terror.

Sofia's news of advanced war preparations along the BlackSea is backed up by some chilling details. One is the setting up of new refuelling places for US Stealth bombers, which would spearhead an attack on Iran. "The USAF's positioning of vital refuelling facilities for its B-2 bombers in unusual places, including Bulgaria, falls within the perspective of such an attack." Novinite named colonel Sam Gardiner, "a US secret service officer stationed in Bulgaria", as the source of this revelation.

Curiously,the report noted that although Tony Blair, Bush's main ally in the global war on terror, would be leaving office, the president had opted to press on with his attack on Iran in April.

Before the end of March,3000 US military personnel are scheduled to arrive "on a rotating basis" at America's Bulgarian bases. Under the US-Bulgarian military co-operation accord, signed in April,2006,anairbaseatBezmer, a second airfield at Graf Ignitievo and a shooting range at Novo Selo were leased to America. Significantly,lastyear's bases negotiations had at one point run into difficulties due to Sofia's demand "for advance warning if Washington intends to use Bulgarian soil for attacks against other nations, particularly Iran".

Romania, the other Black Sea host to the US military, is enjoying a dollar bonanza as its Mihail Kogalniceanu base at Constanta is being transformed into an American "place d'arme". It is also vital to the Iran scenario.

Last week,the Bucharest daily Evenimentual Zilei revealed the USAF is to site several flights of F-l5, F-l6 and Al0 aircraft at the Kogalniceanu base. Admiral Gheorghe Marin, Romania's chief of staff, confirmed "up to 2000 American military personnelwillbe temporarily stationed in Romania".

In Central Europe, theCzech Republic and Poland have also found themselves in the Pentagon's strategic focus. Last week, Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister, and the country's national security council agreed to the siting of a US anti-missile radar defence system at Nepolisy. Poland has also agreed to having a US anti-missile missilebase and interceptor aircraft stationed in the country.

Russia, however, does not see the chain of new US bases on its doorstep as a "defensive ring". Russia's defence chief has branded the planned US anti-missile missile sites on Czech and Polish soil as "an open threat to Russia".

If this report is true, then it's time for Congress to step up to the plate and once and for all yank funding from any of this president's war efforts, because he is a certified madman the likes of which we haven't seen since Nikita Krushchev banged on the table at the UN and said "We will bury you." Are they so craven about their political futures that they're willing to risk global thermonuclear war? Do they realize that if we have global thermonuclear war, there will be no political future about which to be worried?

Because I've been thinking I might quite possibly do that.

But here are some things you need to know about Chuck Hagel's record before deciding:

Chuck Hagel on Abortion

• Voted NO on $100M to reduce teen pregnancy by education & contraceptives. (Mar 2005)
  
• Voted YES on criminal penalty for harming unborn fetus during other crime. (Mar 2004)
  
• Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life. (Mar 2003)
  
• Voted YES on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions. (Jun 2000)
  
• Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions. (Oct 1999)
  
• Voted YES on banning human cloning. (Feb 1998)
  
• Rated 0% by NARAL, indicating a pro-life voting record. (Dec 2003)
  

I don't have a problem with banning human cloning, but the rest of it is troublesome.

Chuck Hagel on Civil Rights

• Voted YES on recommending Constitutional ban on flag desecration. (Jun 2006)
  
• Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. (Jun 2002)
  
• Voted YES on loosening restrictions on cell phone wiretapping. (Oct 2001)
  
• Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000)
  
• Voted NO on setting aside 10% of highway funds for minorities & women. (Mar 1998)
  
• Voted YES on ending special funding for minority & women-owned business. (Oct 1997)
  
• Supports anti-flag desecration amendment. (Mar 2001)
  
• Rated 60% by the ACLU, indicating a mixed civil rights voting record. (Dec 2002)
  

This is not a great record.

Chuck Hagel on Corporations

• Voted NO on repealing tax subsidy for companies which move US jobs offshore. (Mar 2005)
  
• Voted YES on reforming bankruptcy to include means-testing & restrictions. (Mar 2005)
  
• Voted YES on restricting rules on personal bankruptcy. (Jul 2001)
  
• Rated 87% by the US COC, indicating a pro-business voting record. (Dec 2003)
  

It isn't just pro-business, it's anti-worker and anti-consumer. Hagel is clearly in the pocket of the corporations.

Chuck Hagel on Education

• Voted NO on $52M for "21st century community learning centers". (Oct 2005)
  
• Voted NO on $5B for grants to local educational agencies. (Oct 2005)
  
• Voted NO on shifting $11B from corporate tax loopholes to education. (Mar 2005)
  
• Voted NO on funding smaller classes instead of private tutors. (May 2001)
  
• Voted NO on funding student testing instead of private tutors. (May 2001)
  
• Voted NO on spending $448B of tax cut on education & debt reduction. (Apr 2001)
  
• Voted YES on Educational Savings Accounts. (Mar 2000)
  
• Voted YES on allowing more flexibility in federal school rules. (Mar 1999)
  
• Voted YES on education savings accounts. (Jun 1998)
  
• Voted YES on school vouchers in DC. (Sep 1997)
  
• Rated 36% by the NEA, indicating a mixed record on public education. (Dec 2003)
  

Again -- not great. It sounds like he's not interested in funding public education at the federal level.

Chuck Hagel on Energy & Oil/Environment

• Voted NO on disallowing an oil leasing program in Alaska's AMWR. (Nov 2005)
  
• Voted NO on $3.1B for emergency oil assistance for hurricane-hit areas. (Oct 2005)
  
• Voted NO on reducing oil usage by 40% by 2025 (instead of 5%). (Jun 2005)
  
• Voted NO on banning drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Mar 2005)
  
• Voted YES on Bush Administration Energy Policy. (Jul 2003)
  
• Voted NO on targeting 100,000 hydrogen-powered vehicles by 2010. (Jun 2003)
  
• Voted NO on removing consideration of drilling ANWR from budget bill. (Mar 2003)
  
• Voted YES on drilling ANWR on national security grounds. (Apr 2002)
  
• Voted YES on terminating CAFE standards within 15 months. (Mar 2002)
  
• Voted YES on preserving budget for ANWR oil drilling. (Apr 2000)
  
• Voted NO on ending discussion of CAFE fuel efficiency standards. (Sep 1999)
  
• Voted NO on defunding renewable and solar energy. (Jun 1999)
  
• Voted YES on approving a nuclear waste repository. (Apr 1997)
  
• Voted NO on including oil & gas smokestacks in mercury regulations. (Sep 2005)
  
• Voted YES on confirming Gale Norton as Secretary of Interior. (Jan 2001)
  
• Voted YES on more funding for forest roads and fish habitat. (Sep 1999)
  
• Voted YES on transportation demo projects. (Mar 1998)
  
• Voted NO on reducing funds for road-building in National Forests. (Sep 1997)
  
• Rated 0% by the LCV, indicating anti-environment votes. (Dec 2003)
  

This is a TERRIBLE record on issues related to global warming and the environment, as well as indicating a very friendly-to-the-energy-industry pattern -- something that we don't know if it has changed as a result of his growing opposition to the Iraq war.

Chuck Hagel on Government Reform

• Voted YES on allowing some lobbyist gifts to Congress. (Mar 2006)
  
• Voted NO on establishing the Senate Office of Public Integrity. (Mar 2006)
  
• Voted NO on banning "soft money" contributions and restricting issue ads. (Mar 2002)
  
• Voted YES on require photo ID (not just signature) for voter registration. (Feb 2002)
  
• Voted NO on banning campaign donations from unions & corporations. (Apr 2001)
  
• Voted NO on funding for National Endowment for the Arts. (Aug 1999)
  
• Voted NO on favoring 1997 McCain-Feingold overhaul of campaign finance. (Oct 1997)
  

Again -- awful on government-for-sale and government corruption issues. Let us also not forget Hagel's connection to ES&S -- the manufacturer of the voting machines used in Nebraska in both elections he won:

Chuck Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska in 1996. Electronic voting machines owned by Election Systems & Software (ES&S) reported that he had won both the primaries and the general election in unprecedented victories. His 1996 victory was considered one of the biggest upsets of that election. He was the first Republican to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign in 24 years and won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican.

Six years later Hagel ran again against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. He was re-elected to his second term with 83% of the vote: the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska. Again, the votes were counted by ES&S, now the largest voting machine company in America.

While these victories could be dismissed simply as a Republican upset, a January 2003 article in the independent Washington paper The Hill revealed interesting details about Hagel's business investments and casts a different light on his election successes. Chuck Hagel was CEO of ES&S (then AIS) until 1995 and he is still a major stockholder of the parent company of ES&S, McCarthy & Company. Hagel resigned as CEO of ES&S to run for the Senate and resigned as president of the parent company McCarthy & Company following his election (where he remains a major investor).

Today, the McCarthy Group is run by Michael McCarthy, who happens to be Chuck Hagel's treasurer. Hagel's financials still list the McCarthy Group as an asset, with his investment valued at $1-$5 million. Campaign finance reports show that Michael McCarthy also served as treasurer for Hagel until December of 2002.

But there's more:

Chuck Hagel on Health Care

• Voted YES on limiting medical liability lawsuits to $250,000. (May 2006)
  
• Voted NO on expanding enrollment period for Medicare Part D. (Feb 2006)
  
• Voted NO on increasing Medicaid rebate for producing generics. (Nov 2005)
  
• Voted NO on negotiating bulk purchases for Medicare prescription drug. (Mar 2005)
  
• Voted YES on $40 billion per year for limited Medicare prescription drug benefit. (Jun 2003)
  
• Voted NO on allowing reimportation of Rx drugs from Canada. (Jul 2002)
  
• Voted NO on allowing patients to sue HMOs & collect punitive damages. (Jun 2001)
  
• Voted YES on funding GOP version of Medicare prescription drug benefit. (Apr 2001)
  
• Voted NO on including prescription drugs under Medicare. (Jun 2000)
  
• Voted YES on limiting self-employment health deduction. (Jul 1999)
  
• Voted NO on increasing tobacco restrictions. (Jun 1998)
  
• Voted YES on Medicare means-testing. (Jun 1997)
  
• Invest funds to alleviate the nursing shortage. (Apr 2001)
  
• Rated 12% by APHA, indicating a anti-public health voting record. (Dec 2003)
  

More here.

As appealing as Chuck Hagel is looking right now because of his principled stand against escalating the Iraq war, let's not forget, before we fall in love, that this is a very right-wing guy on everything else. I'm not saying don't consider voting for him, just know what you're getting when you do.

Labels: 2008, Chuck Hagel

Funny how the conservatives scream "No more dynasties!" when it comes to a Hillary Clinton presidency, but already they've forgotten what a botch job the Crawford Caligula has made of this country -- and they're cheering his brother as the new Bush standard bearer:

At a time when the conservative movement is looking bereft, humbled by midterm-election defeats and hungering for a presidential candidate to rally around, Jeb Bush delivered yesterday in Washington a resounding endorsement of conservative principles, bringing his audience repeatedly to its feet.

In his lunchtime remarks to the Conservative Summit, Bush struck every conservative chord, blaming Republicans' defeat in November on the party's abandonment of tenets including limited government and fiscal restraint.

"Don't take offense personally if I get mad at Congress," the Republican former Florida governor began. "It's important for us to realize we lost, and there are significant reasons that happened, but it isn't because conservatives were rejected. But it's because we rejected the conservative philosophy in this country."

He added, "If the promise of pork and more programs is the way Republicans think they'll regain the majority, then they've got a problem."

Bush's speech prompted three standing ovations from the audience of hundreds at the National Review Institute's conference at the JW Marriott Hotel, reflecting the widespread concern among conservatives that exorbitant government spending led to the loss of majorities in the House and Senate and concern about whether Republicans would again embrace the traditional principles.

To Ed Gillespie, a prominent lobbyist and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Bush's two terms in Tallahassee -- where he developed a reputation as a tax-cutter and staunch spending hawk -- exemplified conservative politics at its best, and what makes for a compelling presidential candidate.

"For those who are worried if you can put forward a vigorous conservative policy agenda in a state like Florida and still get elected and still be popular: Our keynote speaker left office with approval ratings above 60 percent," Gillespie said.

"If he were former two-term governor Jeb Smith, he might be in Des Moines today," Gillespie said, alluding to presidential hopefuls' campaigning.

Bush says he will not run for president in 2008, however, and conservatives continue to look for a candidate to excite their interest.

"So far there's definitely a lukewarm feeling about the field, but it's still early, and conservatives want to see how these guys run. And it's still possible that one or the other of the candidates will really inspire conservatives," said Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review.

Sounds like the folks at National Review really, really, really want Jebbie to run in 2008 -- as if we hadn't had enough of the Bush family.

The king is dead. Long live the king.

Labels: 2008, conservatives, Jeb Bush

And January isn't even over yet. But the award goes to The Poor Man, for the 2006 Kippie Awards for Wingnuttery.

It Has Unraveled So Quickly

A PAINFUL measure of just how much Iraq has changed in the four years since I started coming here is contained in my cellphone. Many numbers in the address book are for Iraqis who have either fled the country or been killed. One of the first Sunni politicians: gunned down. A Shiite baker: missing. A Sunni family: moved to Syria.

I first came to Iraq in April 2003, at the end of the looting several weeks after the American invasion. In all, I have spent 22 months here, time enough for the place, its people and their ever-evolving tragedy to fix itself firmly in my heart.

Now, as I am leaving Iraq, a new American plan is unfolding in the capital. It feels as if we have come back to the beginning. Boots are on the ground again. Boxy Humvees move in the streets. Baghdad fell in 2003 and we are still trying to pick it back up. But Iraq is a different country now.

The moderates are mostly gone. My phone includes at least a dozen entries for middle-class families who have given up and moved away. They were supposed to build democracy here. Instead they work odd jobs in Syria and Jordan. Even the moderate political leaders have left. I have three numbers for Adnan Pachachi, the distinguished Iraqi statesman; none have Iraqi country codes.

Neighborhoods I used to visit a year ago with my armed guards and my black abaya are off limits. Most were Sunni and had been merely dangerous. Now they are dead. A neighborhood that used to be Baghdad’s Upper East Side has the dilapidated, broken feel of a city just hit by a hurricane.

The Iraqi government and the political process, which seemed to have great promise a year ago, have soured. Deeply damaged from years of abuse under Saddam Hussein, the Shiites who run the government have themselves turned into abusers.
Never having covered a civil war before, I learned about it together with my Iraqi friends. It is a bit like watching a slow-motion train wreck. Broken bodies fly past. Faces freeze in one’s memory in the moments before impact. Passengers grab handles and doorframes that simply tear off or uselessly collapse.

I learned how much violence changes people, and how trust is chipped away, leaving society a thin layer of moth-eaten fabric that tears easily. It has unraveled so quickly. A year ago, my interviews were peppered with phrases like “Iraqis are all brothers.” The subjects would get angry when you asked their sect. Now some of them introduce themselves that way.

Before deciding to resolve his Oedipal issues by invading Iraq, George W. Bush had no idea what the difference between Shia and Sunni were. When he lumped them together in his State of the Union address last week, he showed that he still doesn't. He can throw all the soldiers he wants at this, it will never, ever resolve the underlying problem.

Before the 2000 election, there was a parody cover by Bruce McCall of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s magazine George. Instead of it being a political/culture magazine, this cover represented a magazine by and about George W. Bush. The headline at the top, directly above the title, was "Iran, Iraq -- would you guys make up your mind already?"

McCall couldn't have known how prescient he was.