Monday June 30, 2003
Santorum -> santorum
And you thought that Rick Santorum (PA senator, asshole) couldn't possibly have anything to contribute to sexual culture. How wrong you were! Dan Savage had a contest to name some aspect of sex or a sex act after Rick Santorum.
The winner (Near the end of the article.) I'm not gonna tell you. You have to look.
Now Santorum is "santorum". When you see what the winning result was, your response might just be, "But I already thought he was that!"
Shooting sheep rustlers doesn't win you points; Who is looking for WMDs?; Pumping oil to Kuwait; 130; feeling the strain
Via Atrios, LATimes on Bush lying. US Credibility Under Fire. What's that saying -- "Don't let a creepy Bush lie"? "The U.S. assault on a six-vehicle convoy earlier this month near the Iraqi city of Qaim illustrates the problem. U.S. officials relied on what they first said was sound intelligence indicating that Saddam Hussein and his sons were part of the convoy. Now they concede there's no evidence they were. Instead, the world learned that U.S. troops wiped out a tiny village of Bedouins. U.S. military vehicles then sealed the area to prevent journalists from entering."
Via Brad DeLong: According to Time magazine, Bush didn't know who was in charge of the WMD hunt in Iraq.
Did Saddam have a dog house? Steve Gilliard of The Daily Kos on how to respond to Rightist attacks on the Left about the war.
Hank Brandli, a retired Air Force colonel, Vietnam vet, and satellite imagery expert, thinks we're siphoning oil out of Iraq to Kuwait's refineries. "The most recent photo showed a blazing corridor of light running the length of Kuwait, south to north, all the way to the Iraqi border. The image wasn't there on May 3. 'It's going right up to Iraq's oil fields,' says the retired Air Force colonel from his home in Palm Bay. 'Maybe I'm full of s---. Maybe all they're doing is building a highway to put in McDonald's and sell hamburgers. But why go that way? I think we're in bed with Kuwait. I think we're pumping oil out of Iraq to pay for this war.'" This guy single-handedly saved the Apollo 11 astronauts on their return flight. An interesting read.
130 is the coming temperature in Iraq. Bush Wars blog has a good piece with a survey of reporting on the problem of heat in Iraq. Hot enough for you?
Again at the LATimes: "Between War and Peace, U.S. Soldiers Feel Strain". "'This duty is absolutely ridiculous,' said Sgt. 1st Class Richard Edwards, a 42-year-old from Brooklyn who was on night patrol in the rural area between Baghdad and Fallouja. 'We are combat troops. We are trained in combat. We are not trained in peacekeeping. We should all be home by now It's like we won the Super Bowl but we have to keep on playing.' His partner, Sgt. 1st Class Andre LeGrant from Georgia, said the psychological strain has been immense. 'We fought and fought to survive, and we thought we were going home,' LeGrant said as he guided his Humvee through a warren of rural alleys and along stands of palm and brush — ideal ambush sites, he noted. 'You're not really fighting an enemy anymore. You're more or less fighting terrorism We thought we would go home as heroes after taking Baghdad. Now look at us.'"
Sunday June 29, 2003
Excerpts from Tony Kushner's commencement address at Columbia College:
"life, each individual life and our collective life on the planet is a teleological game, it is not infinite, like Bush's justice, it has an ending, and so the future you put your faith in is not, in fact, limitless; and given the catastrophic failure here and abroad of the Kyoto global warming accords, given our newfound post 9-11 imperialist exuberance, given the sagging of the world's economy and the IMF-directed refusal to see any solutions beyond making poor people suffer even more than they always do in the hopes of reviving a market that only ever revives long enough to make the rich even richer, given the eagerness in Washington to explore new and tinier kinds of nuclear bombs, well, it's sort of optimistic to believe it's a supernova that's going to get us, when it's clear that what's much more likely to get us, if we are got, is our present condition of living in a world run by miscreants while the people of the world have either no access to power or have access but have forgotten how to get it and why it is important to have it.
...
You have presumably made a study of how important it is for the people – the people and not the oil plutocrats, the people and not the fantasists in right-wing think-tanks, the people and not the virulent lockstep gasbags of Sunday morning talk shows and editorial pages and all-Nazi all-the-time radio ranting marathons, the thinking people and not the crazy people, the rich and multivarious multicultural people and not the pale greyish-white cranky grim greedy people, the secular pluralist people and not the theocrats, the metaphorical imaginative expansive generous sensual rational people and not the sexual hysterics, the misogynists, Muslim and Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, the hard-working people and not the people whose only real exertion ever in their whole parasite lives has been the effort if takes to slash a trillion plus dollars in tax revenue and then stuff it in their already overfull pockets – whatever your degree, you have presumably read history and thought about justice and freedom and the relationship between ideas and action ...
201, Hit and run, Clinton on Clark, verbal abuse
201 is the number of dead Americans in Iraq.
The administration's hypocrisy regarding the military isn't lost on The Army Times. "Lip Service" is the name of the piece. "In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately."
From the BBC, news of an 11-year-old run over by an American convoy. "The girl is still crying - her name is Sabrina, she is 13 years old. She is barefoot and wears a ragged dress. She has dark eyes and long, brown hair. She tells me how she saw her 11-year-old brother, Muhannad, had run up to an American military convoy trying to sell something to the soldiers, but was run over as he crossed the road. The Americans did not stop." We didn't stop. Later, talk with a soldier that has arrived at the scene. "'We can't take any chances,' one soldier tells me, sweating profusely. I engage him in conversation. He tells me he is from New York, his name is Al and he is married with three children. 'I've been in the Gulf for five months and I'm tired of all of this' he says. 'We have become a target now. All I want to do is to go back to my family.'"
Bill Clinton thinks that Wesley Clark would make a good presidential candidate. His performance on Meet the Press was impressive. Moreso than any other candidate that I've seen so far.
A clinical psychologist on Bush's verbal abuse. Particularly telling: when he's not talking about himself, he's saying "we". But he doesn't mean "the American people," he means "we, the people who are in power." From George, "Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility."
Friday June 27, 2003
One party, Canadian hate, soft targets, Judith exposed, missles found (they're ours)
Paul Krugman thinks we're soon to be as Mexico once was. "In principle, Mexico's 1917 Constitution established a democratic political system. In practice, until very recently Mexico was a one-party state. While the ruling party employed intimidation and electoral fraud when necessary, mainly it kept control through patronage, cronyism and corruption. All powerful interest groups, including the media, were effectively part of the party's political machine."
Why do the Canadians hate us? Toronto Star: 71% of Canadians now believe it was right for Canada to stay out of the Iraq war, compared to 66% before the war and an even split during. Canada is also trying to get reforms into the UN to check the power of the US and the other major players.
A US contractor in Iraq fears becoming a "soft target" for Iraqi discontent over the American occupation. "Dall... told Reuters several of their vehicles were stoned in recent weeks by angry Iraqis and he feared the 'stones will soon turn to bullets'".
When quacks are in charge, what do you get? A "quackmire", according to the Asia Times. Others, like Atrios, are starting to call it a qWagmire.
It seems that Judith Miller, co-creator (along with Chalabi) of most of the discredited WMD reports in Iraq, is outed by the troops that she travelled with. "Said a senior staff officer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha is a part: "It's impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better." Three weapons specialists were reassigned as the unit changed its approach, according to officers with the task force." From another officer: "'this woman came in with a plan. She was leading them. . . . She ended up almost hijacking the mission.'" The article also has a blast from the past: some of Judith's headlines: "U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs to Germ Arms," "U.S. Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq" and "U.S.-Led Forces Occupy Baghdad Complex Filled With Chemical Agents." Good times.
Jerry Falwell is scared of the homosexual menace unleashed by the Supreme Court's ruling yesterday.
Think you're working longer hours for lower pay? Bush wants to make it official. 8 million could lose overtime pay. "Up to 8 million U.S. workers could lose their right to overtime pay if Bush administration rules are put in place, according to a new study released Thursday. The new proposed rules would dramatically change who qualifies as a salaried worker, and which hourly wage earners are able to collect overtime." I always thought that my work was overvalued. Now you know that yours is, too. If you voted for Bush, you voted for the decimation of the country and, on a more personal level, your paycheck too. No wriggling out of responsibility simply because he was selected by the Supreme Court!
Missles sold to Iraq by the US are found by search teams.
I thought for sure that Strom's longevity was military science gone awry, and that he'd live to be 1000.
Thursday June 26, 2003
Bush balked, rich enriched, secrets unveiled, taxes hiked
Here's a quick rundown of the news. So much, yet so little time...
Watch this! Via This Modern World: At The Memory Hole, A 5:00 minute video of Bush being told about the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. He's told in the first seconds of the video. The rest of the time is him sitting there. And picking up a children's book and following along with the students. The school officials look on admiringly. The volume is low on the video, so you'll need to turn it up on your computer to hear "Very impressive! Thank you all for showing me your reading skills!"
The AP says that Bush was informed, upon entering office, that predator drones had spotted Bin Laden, but he didn't act until after 9/11. Bush Slow to OK Drones in Bin Laden Hunt.
Bush says that God told him to attack Al Quaeda and Saddam, according to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Ha'aretz:
`Road map is a life saver for us,' PM Abbas tells Hamas. That's a "holy fuck" moment if ever I heard one. Let's pause, shall we?
The Washington Post has the story of a judge revealing the transcripts and utter lack of evidence in a "secret evidence" terror case. The victim is thinking of filing a civil suit. "'To think they kept me in jail on this!' he said with tears in his eyes."
On the cover of Salon, in the blurb for Andrew Sullivan's latest column, he admits that he tries to ignore right wing bigots.
The AP says that the White House is refusing to release some budgetary calculations drawn up by the administration's top Medicare accountant. "An earlier analysis suggested that a Republican plan to inject market forces into Medicare could increase premiums for those who stay in traditional programs by as much as 25 percent."
Brad DeLong has excerpts of the Brookings Institute's Bob Gale's opinion on the Bush tax cut.
Bob Herbert talks about when a tax cut is actually a tax hike.
And the NYTimes reports that the very richest have gotten even richer, while their taxes have fallen. "The 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in the year 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. But their tax burden plummeted over the period."
Wednesday June 25, 2003
Regarding the Iraqi scientist who turned over the nuclear equipment hidden in his backyard, here's an important point that you may have missed. From Josh Marshall:
Look closely: What was buried were components for a uranium centrifuge and a sheaf of documents detailing how to construct, or rather reconstruct, a uranium enrichment program. These were from the pre-1991 program. The CNN story says that regime leaders ordered him to hide them in expectation of the day when the inspectors would leave and the nuclear program could be restarted. But the CNN story says the call never came -- even though inspectors did in fact leave the country in 1998 and were absent for almost four years.
Former weapons inspector David Albright told CNN: "In a sense, the program was in hibernation. He was the key to the restart of this centrifuge program, and he never got the order. So in that sense it doesn't show at all that Iraq had a nuclear program. And Obeidi told me that he never worked on a nuclear program after 1991."
Yet a day or two of the administration touting this, and 70% of Americans will believe that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program, with missiles able to carry a payload to the US.
More on the Sgt. Borell story
Thanks to the Toledo reader for a link to more articles on the Sgt. Borell story at the Toledo Blade. Here are a number of links for you to follow:
June 15th: Kaptur to press Rumsfeld on Toledo GI’s ‘reality check’: Iraqi kids’ wounds spark policy debate
June 17th: Photo of Toledo soldiers stirs pride, gratitude
June 17th Editorial: Suffer not the children
June 19th: Kaptur: Pentagon will look into burned Iraqi kids
June 24th: Debate still brewing over U.S. treatment of burned Iraqi children
Tuesday June 24, 2003
Heartless. And damn near criminal.
Some of you may recall a picture that appeared on the front page of many papers a week or so ago. It showed two soldiers bent down, one comforting the other, who was obviously distraught. The caption read (paraphrasing from my memory): "Soldier comforted after witnessing children hurt in an explosives accident." Well, apparently the incident was much worse. Those children were refused aid by American medics:
On a scorching afternoon, while on duty at an Army airfield, Sgt. David J. Borell was approached by an Iraqi who pleaded for help for his three children, burned when they set fire to a bag containing explosive powder left over from war in Iraq.
Borell immediately called for assistance. But the two Army doctors who arrived about an hour later refused to help the children because their injuries were not life-threatening and had not been inflicted by U.S. troops.
Now the two girls and a boy are covered with scabs and the boy cannot use his right leg. And Borell is shattered.
"I have never seen in almost 14 years of Army experience anything that callous," said Borell, who recounted the June 13 incident to The Associated Press.
So, what was that picture about? Was it the soldier being comforted after seeing the children hurt? Here's the real story:
The incident came to light after an AP photographer took a picture of Borell being comforted by a colleague after the doctors refused to care for the children. When Borell's wife, Rachelle Douglas-Borell, saw the photo, she contacted AP with a copy of a letter he sent her describing what happened.
What's the meaning of "revisionist"? Well, when your administration tries to redefine it, you know you're in trouble.
Sunday June 22, 2003
I think that the Bush administration has placed us in an ever-hardening position in Iraq, particularly in regard to the use of a UN-led peacekeeping force.
The problem is that every day the situation seems to be deteriorating. American soldiers are ill-equipped for the role of peacekeeper; this is a fact that is not lost on them. From the Washington Post, "U.S. Troops frustrated with role in Iraq":
Some soldiers complain they are playing roles for which they are ill-prepared. In Baqubah, the domain of the 4th Infantry's 2nd Brigade, combat engineers who specialize in weapons demolition and building bridges have been given a new mission: to drive around in their M113 armored personnel carriers to fight crime.
"I don't know why they're keeping us around here," said Cpl. Anthony Arteaga, 25, of Hammond, La., who is assigned to the 588th Engineer Battalion. "We're not peacekeepers. We're heavy-combat engineers."
The administration has obstinately denied the deployment of a UN force to the region. But as the situation deteriorates, the need for an international presence becomes more acute. And it also makes it more likely that once a UN force is finally deployed, they will be looked upon as "cleanup" -- a group arriving to clean up the mess that the US has made. By refusing UN help from the beginning, Bush may end up diminishing the authority and validity of the American presence.
For this reason, if the UN isn't allowed in soon, they probably won't be allowed in at all, because to do so later will admit failure, and we know how acceptance of responsibility plays out within this administration. It doesn't. Ever. If they admit UN troops, that will be a signal that Iraq is officially off their radar (off their radar like "Afghanistan not even showing up in their budget" off. Done. Over. Were we even there?)
Oh, and the high ranking Iraqi official, recently captured, who claims that Saddam is alive -- I wonder what he's told us about WMDs? I think we'd have heard, don't you?
Saturday June 21, 2003
Again, way too many things to get into detail today. Check out these pieces, if you get the time:
The New Republic has an article on the Bush administration's "misrepresentation" of the evidence of Iraq's WMDs, written by Spencer Ackerman and John Judis.
The Masters of Spin, by Eleanor Clift at MSNBC.com. Consider her the parallel-universe positive version of Kate O'Beirne.
Democrats ask Justice Department to look into Westar donations to GOP at KansasCity.com.
Read about how the Mucuna bean is transforming agriculture in South America. Here's a piece at New Agriculturalist Online, and one at LandLine, Australia's national rural affairs weekly. I had seen a documentary on the mucuna bean while watching 24ore TV, and decided to find out a little more about it (in English).
David Neiwert's blog
If you haven't made David Neiwert's Orcinus a part of your daily blog-browsing regimen, you should do so.
Some of his recent posts:
A brief excerpt from Harper's Magazine ("A Christian's Duty in Time of War", a pamphlet distributed to soldiers in Iraq)
A discussion of "The Family" -- a cadre of theocrats who speak of "The Hitler Concept" and have a scary amount of influence in our government (Congressmen, lobbyists, etc). Read the original exposé at Harper's, and then a followup with its author at Alternet.
David also has a great post on Fascism and Fundamentalism, which ends with this line: "European fascism was a terrible thing. An American fascism, though, could very well devastate the world." Read the whole thing. It's the final installment in his series "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism," which he will be distributing soon in PDF format.
Will we have a "Find Saddam" Easter Egg Hunt next year?
Via Atrios: Has the Defense Dept. hijacked your 4th of July fireworks display? What's Rumsfeld been up to now?
The same flair for micromanaging and knowing what’s best for those in uniform is now being shared with the rest of us, here in Everytown, USA. His staffers have been phoning city officials, including some in Orange County, and strongly urging them to structure Fourth of July celebrations around the war in Iraq.
"I got the impression that they had a list of every city in the nation that had applied for a pyrotechnics permit, and were calling them to persuade them to be part of the program," said one OC city official.
Maybe Rumsfeld’s just looking out for his boys, helping to make sure the troops get the thanks they deserve. But it’s not as if our servicemen aren’t already swamped in bunting, praise and patriotic country songs. Do they really need Washington to orchestrate the public mood for them?
Apparently. The project even has a name: Operation Tribute to Freedom, putatively overseen by Air Force general Richard B. Myer. Check out the website at www.defendamerica.mil/otf/photos/index.html. Therein, it is claimed that Pentagon officials had been "inundated" with requests from communities asking how they could show support for the troops. Another press release remarks on the "spontaneous" displays of support for the military. And there doubtless have been many.
So why, then, does the Department of Defense deem it necessary to cold-call cities to sell them on a military salute?
"It seemed pretty obvious they were just trying to manufacture more public support for their war," said the city official.
Friday June 20, 2003
Oh, and the banana-republic policies now being followed in Washington won't just drive up interest rates; they'll probably generate a full-blown fiscal crisis one of these years. That can't be good for equity prices.
In short, the current surge in stocks looks like another bubble, one that will eventually burst.
Salon.com's Charles Taylor on the Hulk by Ang Lee, and the merciful Salon Day Pass:
Lee has no taste for the low, and he's among the most self-conscious of filmmakers. So in "Crouching Tiger" he opted for refinement and the result was a placid formalism that was beautiful to look at and singularly unexciting...
Want to read the whole article?
Fuck, no!
Thursday June 19, 2003
Ok, lots of stuff, so I'm just gonna post the rundown on each.
From USAToday: A former CIA director accused the administration of "overstretching the facts" on Iraq's WMD program.
From the Washington Post: FCC asked to spurn Murdoch. "News Corp.'s purchase of a controlling interest in the DirecTV home satellite service should be blocked because it will mean higher prices and could lead to collusion between News Corp. and cable companies, DirecTV's biggest competitor said yesterday."
From the NYTimes: Report by the E.P.A. Leaves Out Data on Climate Change. "The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs."
From Salon.com: Bush's 9/11 coverup?". "While the administration of President George W. Bush is aggressively positioning itself as the world leader in the war on terrorism, some families of the Sept. 11 victims say that the facts increasingly contradict that script. The White House long opposed the formation of a blue-ribbon Sept. 11 commission, some say, and even now that panel is underfunded and struggling to build momentum. And, they say, the administration is suppressing a 900-page congressional study, possibly out of fear that the findings will be politically damaging to Bush.
The Boston Globe: Kerry says Bush misled Americans on war. "Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Wednesday that President Bush broke his promise to build an international coalition against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and then waged a war based on questionable intelligence. 'He misled every one of us,' Kerry said. 'That's one reason why I'm running to be president of the United States.'"
Robert Scheer: What did he know and when did he know it?". "What did the president know and when did he know it? The answer to that question forced the resignation of Richard Nixon as he was about to be impeached. Now, with President Bush facing that same question, congressional Republicans have circled the wagons to prevent a public hearing on whether intelligence was distorted by the White House to convince us of the need for war."
Wednesday June 18, 2003
Norquist opens the Republican playbook
Here's an opinion piece you should read. For the Democrats, it lays out very clearly how radical the Republicans have become. For you Republicans out there, it will show you exactly what kind of program you've signed on to. This is by Grover Norquist, and it appeared June 9th in the Washington Post. Exercpts follow:
The strategy of annual tax cuts has united the center-right coalition and avoided the sort of conflict that bedeviled the 1981 tax cut, when K Street pushed to include its favorite industry or corporation-specific tax change at the cost of paring back Reagan's proposed 30 percent cut in marginal tax rates. Businesses were rightly concerned that this would be the last tax cut for some time. Bush's 2001 tax cut received strong business support, even though it was completely aimed at individual taxpayers. Why? Because the best way to "lobby" to be in next year's tax cut is to cheerfully support the president's tax cut this year.
The Bush administration -- wisely -- has not proposed fundamental tax reform in a single piece of legislation. But the president has been taking deliberate steps toward such reform with each tax cut. There are five steps to a single-rate tax, which taxes income one time: Abolish the death tax, abolish the capital gains tax, expand IRAs so that all savings are tax-free, move to full expensing of business investment rather than long depreciation schedules and abolish the alternative minimum tax. Put a single rate on the new tax base and you have Steve Forbes and Dick Armey's flat tax. Each of the Bush tax cuts, past and proposed, moves us toward fundamental tax reform. The step-by-step annual tax cut avoids the problem that faced Bill and Hillary Clinton's too ambitious effort to nationalize health care in one gulp: It is easy to stop oversized reforms.
...
In crafting its agenda for economic reform, the Bush administration has the luxury of being able to think and plan over a full eight years. This is because the 2002 redistricting gave Republicans a lock on the House of Representatives until 2012 and the Founding Fathers gerrymandered the Senate for Republican control. In the 50-50 election that was 2000, Bush carried 30 states and Al Gore 20. Over time, a reasonably competent Republican Party will tend to 60 Republicans in the Senate. This guarantee of united Republican government has allowed the Bush administration to work and think long-term.
One sees this longer time horizon not only in the annual tax cuts that move slowly toward a flat rate income tax, but also in the decades-long move to free trade in the hemisphere and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick's call for zero tariffs on manufactured goods within 10 to 15 years, the focus on transformation in the Defense Department, reforms in personnel management and the Social Security changes that will take a generation to phase in.
The Pentagon used to debate whether we had enough strength to fight two wars at the same time. The Bush administration is demonstrating that it can operate successfully on two fronts, fighting the war on terrorism and at the same time embarking on fundamental economic reform.
David Broder read this and was apparently taken aback. He questioned Norquist about this radical agenda, and Norquist was unrepentent:
The consequence of this -- not spelled out in his essay but clearly in his mind -- is a massive rollback in federal revenue and what he regards as a desirable shrinkage of federal services and benefits. In short, the goal is a system of government wiped clean, on both the revenue and spending side, of almost a century's accumulation of social programs designed to provide a safety net beneath the private economy.
When I asked Norquist what had prompted this exercise in candor, he said that when The Post's editorial page invited him to explain the Bush tax strategy, he saw it as an opportunity to show his fellow conservatives that "we don't have to try to operate under the radar screen. We can be very open about our agenda."
And the White House reaction? "They didn't ask me to do it, but they certainly didn't complain about what I did. I have exchanged several e-mails with Karl Rove since then, and it's never come up," he said.
...
Did you think you were tipping off the opposition? I asked.
"No," he said, "I think the smart guys on the left have known for a long time they are in trouble -- and that we are going to dig out their whole structure of programs and power."
The cat comes out of the bag, right? Now the Dems will mobilize? You would hope so, seeing that the Republicans under-the-covers agenda is now out in the open. But we've known about this for a long time. (Read here and here.)
As I said, if Bush is re-elected, America after his Presidency is going to be a shadow of its former self. And it's not because they're starting down the road to gut Social Security and the entire public safety net, but they're at the same time doing everything they can to keep a complete lock on power.
Imagine John Ashcroft if he stayed in power for 4 or 8 more years. Imagine what a Patriot Act III or IV would be like.
Imagine what kind of conflicts Bush will mire us in. Intentionally. Because every extra dollar that goes to defense is a dollar taken from a public fund like Social Security or education or road building.
And imagine a Supreme Court stacked with Scalia sycophants.
I think there are even a few Republicans out there who are starting to get worried.
Tuesday June 17, 2003
From The Guardian: Spinning out of Control, an article on the Australian reaction to the lies about WMD, with some interesting comment about the American reaction.
Certain aspects of character are assumed to be more or less the same the world over: fear of failure, hope for the future, hatred of injustice. You might have thought that the response to dishonesty would be similarly universal, but if public reaction around the globe to the lying and spin used to promote war in Iraq are anything to go by, it is anything but.
In the US, news that Washington ignored the testimony of its own intelligence agencies has been greeted by the plunging of heads into sand. For conservatives and much of the US mainstream, such matters are best not thought about. The four-square solidarity behind the White House following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks will admit no imperfection on the part of government.
...
In Britain, journalists, politicians and activists have spent weeks trying to dig up evidence that the government made up its intelligence claims relating to Iraq. In Australia, that evidence was on the front page of the country's biggest news weekly a full two weeks before the first cruise missile was launched on Baghdad.
The revelation came with the resignation of Andrew Wilkie, a senior analyst at Australia's top intelligence body, the Office of National Assessment (ONA). A former soldier with an open, affable manner, Wilkie used to sit in his Canberra office reading raw intelligence reports from Australian and international spy agencies, weighing them up and then boiling them down into briefings for the prime minister and cabinet.
...
Wilkie does not mince his words. Claims of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda were "preposterous". "They were clearly concocted. There was no strong intelligence to support it whatsoever," he says.
Evidence about that missing stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was similarly unreliable. "It was clear before the war that some of the evidence on WMD coming out of Britain and America was garbage," he says. "It was being skewed by political information from Iraqis who were trying to encourage a US invasion."
It's weird watching the American public, media, and political class react to this information. It's as if we are trying by force of will to create a different outcome. What exactly is going on in our heads? Is it simply that the press is so sycophantic that they're unwilling to confront the administration? Is it that the American people have been so scared out of their wits that they're unconcerned with petty issues like deliberate deception? Or is it that we simply don't care about what happens to our soldiers and thousands of people in a country halfway around the world?
Monday June 16, 2003
Here are the words of the former White House counterterrorism adviser, Rand Beers. Rand is a career government official. He's a Democrat, but served under three Republican administrations. He replaced Oliver North on Ronald Reagan's office of counterterrorism and counternarcotics. Yet he recently quit his new post as a top White House counterterrorism adviser. Why? Here's what he had to say to the Washington Post:
"The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure," said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent about leaving his National Security Council job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out."
...
"Counterterrorism is like a team sport. The game is deadly. There has to be offense and defense," Beers said. "The Bush administration is primarily offense, and not into teamwork."
In a series of interviews, Beers, 60, critiqued Bush's war on terrorism. He is a man in transition, alternately reluctant about and empowered by his criticism of the government. After 35 years of issuing measured statements from inside intelligence circles, he speaks more like a public servant than a public figure. Much of what he knows is classified and cannot be discussed. Nevertheless, Beers will say that the administration is "underestimating the enemy." It has failed to address the root causes of terror, he said. "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged and generally underfunded."
The focus on Iraq has robbed domestic security of manpower, brainpower and money, he said. The Iraq war created fissures in the United States' counterterrorism alliances, he said, and could breed a new generation of al Qaeda recruits. Many of his government colleagues, he said, thought Iraq was an "ill-conceived and poorly executed strategy."
"I continue to be puzzled by it," said Beers, who did not oppose the war but thought it should have been fought with a broader coalition. "Why was it such a policy priority?" The official rationale was the search for weapons of mass destruction, he said, "although the evidence was pretty qualified, if you listened carefully."
Beers didn't want to discuss the culture of the White House, but he obviously had talked about it with his wife, and here's what she had to say:
"It's a very closed, small, controlled group. This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There's almost a religious kind of certainty. There's no curiosity about opposing points of view. It's very scary. There's kind of a ghost agenda."
Americans need to face the fact that this is an administration blinded by ideology. Yet their ideology doesn't seem to be grounded. It's rather the philosophy simply of "those in power get to make the decisions, and others follow them without question."
Sunday June 15, 2003
From The Observer, Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds:
An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.
The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein.
Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'
...
The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.
Saturday June 14, 2003
Won't be fooled again?
As time goes on, and the WMD hunt looks more and more like a snipe hunt, I think it's time to seriously re-evaluate what we believe about the run-up to the war.
From the beginning, with the Bush administration pushing the idea that Saddam had an active WMD program and was arming his troops for a fight with the US, the Hussein regime had been vociferous in denying the presence of WMDs or a WMD program. Now we see that if it was not completely true, then it became true at a certain point in this process leading up to the war. If Saddam had weapons, they weren't used in the war, and they aren't discoverable now. So the possibility is that either Hussein 1) was telling the truth, and was standing against the US for reasons that we can speculate on, or 2) he was lying and then so thoroughly demolished his weapons program that no trace can be found anywhere.
Quickly, I'll deal with the possibilities. In possibility one, Hussein never had (or disposed of long ago) the weapons of mass destruction. I think this is the more likely of the two scenarios, since our belief in Hussein's stockpiles comes from the Hussein government itself. As evidence of the imminent threat, the only piece of evidence that is cited as proof is Hussein's WMD declaration at the end of the first Gulf War. There doesn't seem to be any other first-hand account of these weapons, at least not from our side. If the weapons were actually ever seen by the inspectors, they would have been dismantled. Seen by our own government, and they would be citing more than Saddam Hussein's word. There doesn't seem to be any intel proving their existence. Is it not possible that he was lying then? That he was exaggerating the size of his WMD stockpile intentionally? But even if he was not lying, there exists the distinct possibility that Hussein surreptitiously dismantled and destroyed evidence of his WMD programs in advance of inspections throughout the 90's. These two possibilities are not even entertained by those who pushed us into war in Iraq. But they have to be considered now, if only because it seems that little to none of our intel on Iraq was legitimate (Remember the terrorist training camp, where WMDs might have been developed? Remember the extensive tunnel system under Baghdad where WMDs would be stored? Remember the overhead shot of the so-called WMD manufacturing facility, with the slides pointing out trucks and missile bodies? If any of that intel had any basis in reality, and even the slightest bit of evidence was available now to corroborate it, we would have heard it by now.) Not only have no weapons been found, but no sites have been found indicating a revived weapons program. And today comes word that a secret Army unit has been scouring Iraq since before the war started, and they've found nothing.
The second possibility is that Hussein dismantled his entire WMD program in the months leading up to the current war. Yet we've not come across anyone who participated in the dismantling that is willing to admit to it. In fact, what we hear from people involved is that the weapons program was dismantled during the 90's and hadn't been revived. We've found no evidence of new facilities, or facilities dismantled. We've found no evidence of weaponized agents, and we've found no new weapons (only older missile bodies - and these were found by the UN inspectors) capable of carrying the payload. No weapons were found in the field, and none were used. If the weapons had been in place or there had even been talk about placing batteries of WMDs in the field, no soldiers who have been captured are admitting to that. I think this is an important point. With the administration in such a desperate position now, they have not even the word of a solitary soldier to cite as evidence. We certainly would have heard; the administration was vocal about much dodgier evidence, after all. Regarding the scientists, the VOA article cited above details the account of an Iraqi scientist (Christian, not Muslim, BTW) who was told to give up VX development in 1991 who was nonetheless counseled by the Hussein regime, in 2003, to not discuss the program. If that account is to be believed, then Hussein's crackdown on scientists wasn't necessarily to cover evidence of an existing program, but at the least included an effort to control release of any information about Iraq's history of WMD. That means that the crackdown is far from being the explicit evidence of an ongoing WMD program.
Here's how I picture the whole scenario now, and thankfully it doesn't rely on trusting Saddam Hussein's word: Hussein's regime had an active weapons program, even after the Gulf War, but the extent of the program was exaggerated. If not exaggerated, the efforts to continue the creation of WMDs was abandoned, in part due to the inspections regime. Because of the "unaccounted for stockpile" of WMDs continuously cited, the assumption from US intelligence agencies was that the Iraqi government still had a weapons program. With the removal of inspectors from the country came the added assumption that the Hussein regime would immediately resume their WMD development. Thus, any intel that came in was examined with these assumptions in mind, leading intelligence officers to conclude, like the DIA report recently, that they think Iraq has a weapons program, but there is no reliable information to prove it. The intelligence community is thus put in the position of classifying as "possible" information to which they have no actual, reliable proof.
Then comes the Bush administration. Unable to deal with the value scale between black and white, the Bush administration was convinced that Baghdad must be swimming in mass destruction munitions. Absent proof, there was nothing to stop them from crafting their own personal doomsday scenario and foisting it on the cowed American population. And the American people don't give a fig about issues such as validity. Determining validity requires that steps between hearing and judging have to be done: weighing of evidence, contextualizing the evidence, determining the gravity of the situation, etc. These steps are beyond the grasp of our population. To put it another way, the American people could have been told that England posed an imminent threat to the US, and we would now be paying for reconstruction of London.
But now we come to the question that causes Rightists to dismiss the scenario I described above: Why would Saddam Hussein obstinately push against the US if he knew that he had no WMDs and it would cause his removal from power?
Trying to come up with a reasonable answer requires that the evaluator make one assumption that I think the Right is unwilling to make: that Saddam Hussein might be a madman, but he's not stupid. And if he started from the assumption that the Bush administration was going to war under any circumstances, the moves that he made from the pre-war tussle in the UN until now have worked in his favor. The pre-war opening game was won decidedly by Hussein. When, before the war even starts, the world considers the US and George Bush a bigger threat to world peace than Hussein, could he have asked for more?
He consulted with Russian ex-military before the war, and if the advisers were worth their weight in salt, the first thing that they said to Hussein was this: "You can not possibly win in a head-to-head confrontation vs. the US military. So don't even try. If you try, you'll be destroyed." Yet that is exactly what happened, no? Yes and no. There was some fighting, and actually some worry from US ex-military during the first few weeks. But by the time we got to Baghdad, entire divisions of Republican Guard had dissolved. And Hussein's son had lifted 1 billion from banks in Baghdad and disappeared (presumably with his father and coterie) into the night.
And now, in "post war" Iraq, we're losing soldiers at the rate of about one per day via guerrilla attacks. Faced with the overwhelming military power of the US, could Hussein have imagined a better situation than this? He's presumably still alive, free, and has enough money to fund an insurrection. Add to that the ill will that the Bush administration engendered, in Iraq and throughout the world, and it's easy to say that in this situation, given the hand dealt him, Saddam seems to have gotten the best result he could have hoped for.
We have the Bush administration's careless planning and foreign policy to thank for that.
So where does that leave them? With a long list of problems:
- World opinion turned against them
- As many as 10,000 civilians in Iraq killed
- Violence against US soldiers in Iraq rising
- Bush's poll numbers plummetting
- A list a mile long of dubious statements and outright false assertions made about Iraq by the administration
- A situation on the ground in Iraq requiring a much larger force than the war proponents like Wolfowitz thought would be necessary
- No reasonable timeframe for pulling out of Iraq
- No WMDs yet
- With the mobile weapons lab fiasco, little regard left for the administration's word regarding their assessements of Iraq's WMD program
- People in the CIA countering the word of Bush administration officials (more in this story from Knight Ridder)
Given what we know about Iraq now, to say that the Bush administration lied to the American public and the world is practically an understatement. Evidence that was presented to the administration as faulty or unreliable or unverifiable became ironclad when needed to make the case to the American people. That there was deception on the part of the administration is now undeniable. Even if WMDs turn up in some form or another, this doesn't obviate the fact that the Bush administration strung together a series of dubious claims and outright falsehoods into a coherent horror story that the American people are still believing. A story of subterranean tunnels, aluminum tubes, mobile weapons labs, divisions armed with WMD munitions, links to terrorist organizations, and a furtive nuclear weapons program. If any of these assertions prove to be true now, it would almost be a relief.
Friday June 13, 2003
Note to self:
Don't try riding a Segway while carrying a tennis racket.
Thursday June 12, 2003
Salon magazine on Bush's attempt to kill Social Security:
A charitable explanation of why Bush is still pushing tax cuts is that it's all he knows how to do: It's his one policy, and by God he's sticking to it. But there's another, perhaps more convincing rationale: the argument that Bush's deep, permanent cuts are in the service of a central conservative political goal, an eternally hobbled federal establishment.
Such a strategy was attempted before -- during the Reagan years, but even then, a huge tax cut was soon followed by several tax increases. Such a course correction seems increasingly unlikely in the current political climate. Bush's policies will prevail long after he's gone. There will be precious little money for social programs, or environmental protection, or homeland security. And if Democrats want any of these things, they'll face a stark choice: They can ask for tax increases and commit political suicide. Or they can give in to what may be Bush's main reelection plank, using the coming baby boomer retirement disaster as an excuse for privatizing Social Security.
Tuesday June 10, 2003
...dishonest salesmanship has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's approach to domestic policy. And it has become increasingly clear that the selling of the war with Iraq was no different.
For example, look at the way the administration rhetorically linked Saddam to Sept. 11. As The Associated Press put it: "The implication from Bush on down was that Saddam supported Osama bin Laden's network. Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks frequently were mentioned in the same sentence, even though officials have no good evidence of such a link." Not only was there no good evidence: according to The New York Times, captured leaders of Al Qaeda explicitly told the C.I.A. that they had not been working with Saddam.
Or look at the affair of the infamous "germ warfare" trailers. I don't know whether those trailers were intended to produce bioweapons or merely to inflate balloons, as the Iraqis claim — a claim supported by a number of outside experts. (According to the newspaper The Observer, Britain sold Iraq a similar system back in 1987.) What is clear is that an initial report concluding that they were weapons labs was, as one analyst told The Times, "a rushed job and looks political." President Bush had no business declaring "we have found the weapons of mass destruction."
...
One last point: the Bush administration's determination to see what it wanted to see led not just to a gross exaggeration of the threat Iraq posed, but to a severe underestimation of the problems of postwar occupation. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that occupying Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers for an extended period, Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark" — and the secretary of the Army may have been fired for backing up the general. Now a force of 150,000 is stretched thin, facing increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks, and a senior officer told The Washington Post that it might be two years before an Iraqi government takes over. The Independent reports that British military chiefs are resisting calls to send more forces, fearing being "sucked into a quagmire."
I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being held accountable for misleading the nation into war.
Looks like some folks at the Department of Fatherland Security might have known exactly what they were doing when they were tracking down the wayward Dems in Texas last month. From Josh Marshall's blog:
Till now we've assumed that the Department of Homeland Security got hoodwinked into getting involved in the manhunt for the Texas Democrats. Apparently that's not so. (Note to Joe Lieberman, Dan Gerstein, et al.: did you guys pick up on this?) One of the things Homeland Security did to help the Texas Republicans was to put out what amounted to an APB, calling various Texas airports to see if they could track down the Democrats in question. When an official at one of the local airports contacted by Homeland Security asked what was up, the Homeland Security official told him it didn't have anything to do with a downed plane or any problem like that. "This is just somebody looking for politicians they can't find," an unidentified official told Marvin Miller, an airport official in Plainview, Texas, according to a Saturday article in the Washington Post.
So much for an innocent misunderstanding. So much for 'homeland security'.
Bush and Rush II
As was pointed out to me yesterday, Bush is now talking about "weapons programs" instead of "weapons of mass destruction". TBogg expands upon this:
While his defenders are still talking about the weapons of mass destruction that they think will be found, President Makes It Up As He Goes Along is now talking about weapons programs. Oh.
Despite a lack of evidence, President Bush insisted Monday that Baghdad had a program to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, seeking to rebut critics who charge his administration doctored evidence to justify an invasion of Iraq.
From "weapons of mass destruction" to "banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons" to "weapons programs."
Why does the room seem to be moving? That's just George over there tugging on the Oriental rug that you're standing on.
Sunday June 08, 2003
As goes Iraq, so goes the USA?
Is Iraq to be the new proving ground for neocon free market philosophy? Quite possibly, seeing as Bechtel is in the mix. Bechtel was the winner when Bolivia privatized their water resources:
Higher rates for water also led to a legal dispute for Bechtel in Bolivia.
Hired to run the water system in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a Bechtel joint venture saw its contract canceled by the government after protests against price increases turned violent. Bechtel says the hikes averaged 35 percent. Some Cochabamba residents complained their bills doubled before the fee increases were revoked.
Bechtel and the Bolivian government are now locked in arbitration proceedings before an international financial panel, with the company seeking compensation for the canceled contract.
That case has raised suspicions among activists about Bechtel's intentions in Iraq.
Some intelligence officers are claiming to have the goods on the Blair administration's hyping of WMDs in the run-up to the Iraq crusade.
Intelligence officers are holding a "smoking gun" which proves that they were subjected to a series of demands by Tony Blair's staff in the run-up to the Iraq war.
The officers are furious about the accusation levelled by the Leader of the Commons, John Reid, that "rogue elements" are at work in the security services. They fear they are being lined up to take the blame for faulty intelligence used to justify the Iraq war.
The intelligence services were so concerned about demands made by Downing Street for evidence to use against Iraq that extensive files have been built up detailing communications with Mr Blair's staff.
Stung by Dr Reid's accusations about misinformation over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, intelligence officials have given veiled warnings about what may emerge in the two official inquiries into the affair.
"A smoking gun may well exist over WMDs, but it may not be to the Government's liking," said one senior source. "Minuted details will show exactly what went on. Because of the frequency and, at times, unusual nature of the demands from Downing Street, people have made sure records were kept. There is a certain amount of self-preservation in this, of course."
Damn Saddam and his clandestine... hydrogen manufacturing
Oh, look! Those mobile WMD laboratories are -- gasp! -- probably mobile hydrogen manufacturing trucks after all! And they might have even been designed for an artillery system sold to the Iraqis by the British, for crissakes!
One of those expressing severe doubts about the alleged mobile germ labs is Professor Harry Smith, who chairs the Royal Society's working party on biological weapons.
He told The Observer 'I am concerned about the canvas sides. Ideally, you would want airtight facilities for making something like anthrax. Not only that, it is a very resistant organism and even if the Iraqis cleaned the equipment, I would still expect to find some trace of it.'
His view is shared by the working group of the Federation of American Scientists and by the CIA, which states: 'Senior Iraqi officials of the al-Kindi Research, Testing, Development, and Engineering facility in Mosul were shown pictures of the mobile production trailers, and they claimed that the trailers were used to chemically produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.'
Artillery balloons are essentially balloons that are sent up into the atmosphere and relay information on wind direction and speed allowing more accurate artillery fire. Crucially, these systems need to be mobile.
The Observer has discovered that not only did the Iraq military have such a system at one time, but that it was actually sold to them by the British. In 1987 Marconi, now known as AMS, sold the Iraqi army an Artillery Meteorological System or Amets for short.
Bush and Rush
A comment made a few days ago by the Resident reminded me of a similar twist of logic by Rush Limbaugh years ago.
Rush was dissembling on the folly of mass transit, and was citing a pollution study that said that buses were responsible for an inordinate amount of pollution in California, moreso than passenger cars. He continued ranting, and then at the very end he let slip this little fact: it was the class of buses *and trucks* that was responsible for the high percentage of pollution.
Bush went through a similar twisting of the truth in Poland recently. Here's a quote, pulled from Jake Tapper's in-depth look into the missing WMD problem:
We found the weapons of mass destruction ... For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, we found them.
Note the similarity? For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices *or* banned weapons, we found them. Unfortunately, for those who say we haven't found the banned weapons, they're... uh... correct. Next question.
What that should show to you is that Bush himself is willing to engage in the same kind of verbal manipulation as the rightwing extremists that flood our airwaves. That he is willing to crassly manipulate world opinion without consideration. Our president is extreme, he is no puppet; he has taken up the cause of the Righists intent on dismantling the country, and his statements are not to be trusted.
Saturday June 07, 2003
Jeffrey Zeldman, once head of the Web Standards Project (and still might be, for all I know), has some interesting things to say about the current state of affairs in browser land. Apparently, there's nothing to be done about Microsoft's intransigence in updating their browser, and we simply have to wait for them to hopefully do the right thing at some later date. In the meantime, since people don't really care about browsers, there's no reason trying to shame Microsoft into compliance; no need to promote working, viable alternatives to IE like Mozilla, Firebird, Opera, Safari. We should be happy with a half-assed product that rules the Internet with the iron fist of monopoly.
Consumers don’t care about browsers. If they did, and if persuasion in this sector was effective, Opera and Netscape would advertise heavily and gain market share. Instead, last week, Netscape’s corporate owners accepted a fraction of Microsoft’s pocket change in return for agreements that will further diminish their own browser’s market share. If companies and their ad agencies cannot interest consumers in the advantages of their browsers, it’s unlikely that a grassroots effort led by few web professionals can.
and this gem:
If you can’t see the good, here it is: “what IE6 is capable of” makes a far better platform for standards-based design than “what Netscape 4 can do,” which was where many of us were trapped the last time the browser space froze.
Fighting the good fight, I see. It's been how long since IE's last significant update to IE? One year? Two years? For those of you who don't recall, here's what the WSP had to say about the Mozilla developers' efforts at the two year point:
Frankly, if we had known you could not deliver a stable, usable, standards-compliant browser in under two years, we would not have asked you to try.
There was a time when I couldn't even think back on that comment without wanting to break something.
Times have changed, and I've changed. No more of this quixotic "good of the people" bullshit. No more hoping for a day when we are free of corporate tyranny. No more pulling for the underdog, questing for fairness and reason. Time for me to hunker down and get the SUV and the unassailable debt and the cartoon family and the unmentionable sexual proclivities and the unquestioning, breathless patriotism. Time for me to start piloting my life by the shimmering light of God and George and Microsoft's best wishes.
I've signed up to be a Microsoft Junior IE Internet Protector (First Class). My badge arrives next week, along with my special ID/credit card that beams a portion of all my transactions directly to Microsoft. Just consider it the price of membership.
Thursday June 05, 2003
The guy who wrote this review of Mozilla Firebird is an "executive editor" at DevX. Guess what he says that Mozilla Firebird is missing? The ability to misrender HTML like IE! And the ability to load insecure ActiveX controls that can deposit viruses on your system!
He says that's the only way to compete with IE in the browser war. No, sorry, wrong. Give this man a lollipop and show him to the door. The only way for Mozilla to compete with IE would be for Microsoft to not be a monopoly, and for the government to give a damn about Microsoft not being a monopoly. Nothing else, apart from a natural catastrophe in Washington state, will affect the current state of affairs.
So, what he suggests is that we take the browser that we love, pollute it and corrupt it even more that we already have to make it compatible with IE's misrendering of the world of HTML. Apparently he wants us to support VBScript, too? Because that would be necessary to be 100% compatible. And virus-ridden.
Any site mis-renderings that you see out there are 99%-sure to be caused by the designer's inability to fire up a browser other than IE/Win before pushing it out on the web. Don't blame Mozilla for the failings of others. Mozilla has been my faithful companion and a more-than-adequate replacement for IE for years. For someone to come out at this time and state that Mozilla has to be IE, security holes, outdated rendering engine, and all, is simply astounding, and he needs to go reassess his priorities.
I agree that the Democrats have to be tougher in order to win the next election. But the DLC has it wrong -- the Dems don't have to be Republican-lite. They don't need to roast the children of the poor over a petroleum fire in order to win the election. Mozilla shouldn't stoop to the lowest common denominator behavior, either. The economic situation is not going to change. Microsoft is going to be dominant for quite some time, and IE isn't going anywhere. The government and AOL saw to that. Mozilla needs to just be the best it can be. It's been there for quite some time. And now it's getting even better.
Wednesday June 04, 2003
Taken Down...
Sorry, folks, the Guardian got it wrong (and so did Die Welt, according to Babelfish's translation). See this post at This Modern World for more.
Tuesday June 03, 2003
Lies and the Lying Liars...
Finally Paul Krugman calls a lie a lie. Let's hope this is the first of many. Too many people have been playing around with "untruth" and "distortion." Maybe the proper terminology can be employed from now on. Be sure to read the entirety of this article. Here are a few select quotes:
Suggestions that the public was manipulated into supporting an Iraq war gain credibility from the fact that misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for this administration, which — to an extent never before seen in U.S. history — systematically and brazenly distorts the facts.
Am I exaggerating? Even as George Bush stunned reporters by declaring that we have "found the weapons of mass destruction," the Republican National Committee declared that the latest tax cut benefits "everyone who pays taxes." That is simply a lie. You've heard about those eight million children denied any tax break by a last-minute switcheroo. In total, 50 million American households — including a majority of those with members over 65 — get nothing; another 20 million receive less than $100 each. And a great majority of those left behind do pay taxes.
...
It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters — a group that includes a large segment of the news media — obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.
...
The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra.
Sunday June 01, 2003
I watched the slugfest between Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken Saturday evening on CSPAN-2, and afterwards I was left with the fervent hope that Al gets on the radio as soon as possible. Because when you hear some simple, reasoned (and humorous) arguments starkly contrasted with the self-aggrandizing, insipid twaddle of Bill O'Reilly, there's simply no contest. Al was hilarious, and skewered Bill mercilessly, and all Bill was able to belch out was "Unbelievable," "Shut up! You've got your 35 minutes, " and "You had your 45 minutes. Well, it felt like 45 minutes."
Molly Ivins was there too, and she was great, but I was surprised that as Bill tried to ally himself with her she didn't do more to shoot him down. Tucker Carlson's bow-out from the event left Bill in the crosshairs between two radical intellects, and he came up unsurprisingly short. Bill's spiel was always more about himself than anything else, and that was painfully obvious while watching him last night. Frankly, he was pathetic, and one hopes that he appears in more venus like this in the future, so that the American people can get a better sense of "the Bill O'Reilly act."
