Is LeftyBlogs blinkered for everyone else?

by folkbum

How am I supposed to know what to think today if it's stuck in last week?

Half Cocked -- Church Cancels Gun Giveaway

Keith R. Schmitz

Get a gun, get saved.

A small bore idea for gettin' the kids into church.

OKLAHOMA CITY, July 14 (UPI) -- An Oklahoma City church called off plans to give away a semiautomatic assault rifle at a weekend gathering of teenagers, the church's pastor said.

Plans called for Windsor Hills Baptist to give away the weapon as a way of encouraging attendance at the gathering but plans changed when one the event's organizers was unable to attend, KOCO 5, Oklahoma City, reported Sunday.

The church's pastor, Bob Ross, said officials anticipated hundreds of teenagers from as far away as Canada would attend.

"We have 21 hours of preaching and teaching throughout the week," Ross told KOCO 5.

The church Web site featured a video showing the shooting competition from last year's conference. A gun was given away last year, but this year organizers decided to highlight the giveaway in promotions for the conference.

Ross told the TV station the church was not "putting a weapon in the hand of somebody that doesn't respect it who are then going to go out and kill."

The gun giveaway has been taken down from the Web site, but Ross said the church will give the gun away next year.

Granted, just because someone has a gun doesn't necessarily mean they are going to use it on others, but this move in connection with a faith-based organization has all the cachet of handing out copies of Grand Theft.

WWJS -- what would Jesus shoot?

Veiled threats lobbed in the border wars

by bert
It's time once again to open up the get-tough-with-illegals mailbag and, looky here, it's an unsigned letter to a nun. Sister Mary was working through the St. Bridget Roman Catholic Church to help families, most Latino, affected by the May raid on about 400 undocumented workers at a kosher packing house in Postville, Iowa.

Here's what, according to Sunday's New York Times , the anonymous man wrote to Sister Mary: "May you rot in hell."

Neat, huh? A fellow hostile to foreign slaughterhouse workers without proper papers is also in favor of damning to hell any nun who tries to feed the children of such workers. What does that tell you about all of those folks from Jessica McBride to Jim Sensenbrenner who want a hard line on immigration?

Before you answer, let's remember that lifting anecdotes from the news about bad people in order to score points in the border wars is already a favorite weapon of many folks.

Until today, they all fought on the side of our gutless nun-damner from Postville.

Alberta Darling: My Staff Will Not Be Outworked

by capper

Last week, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story about the political races that are forming up for this fall's elections.

Without a doubt, one of the biggest races on the local scene is the match up between state Senator Alberta Darling and state Representative Sheldon Wasserman. This is what Greg J. Borowski wrote about the race (emphasis mine):

In the Milwaukee area, the marquee battle pits Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) against Rep. Sheldon Wasserman (D-Milwaukee). In what could become an expensive battle, Democrats hope a win will add to their edge in the Senate.

“There is a huge mood in this country for change,” said Wasserman, who added, “This race will not be bought. It will be earned by someone knocking on doors.”

Wasserman said he has knocked on more than 17,000 doors (17,274 to be exact). Darling said she and her staff have visited 25,000 homes, including 10,000 since spring.

“I will not be outworked,” Darling said, adding: “People are looking for somebody who listens to them, hears them and works for them.”

It would be interesting to know just how many of those 25,000 homes Darling did herself, and if she spent any time with the people that live in those homes. It is also rather tacky to take credit for the work of others, even if they're volunteers for her campaign.

My personal impressions of Darling are not favorable, and she has spoken out of both sides of her mouth on more than one occasion. I remember that in the mid 1990's, she, along with Mia Farrow and a few other Republican Senators, spearheaded getting Milwaukee County's child welfare system privatized. On the morning that she came to speak to the county workers, in which she was going to thank and praise us for our years of devotion, the MSJ ran an article in which she completely smeared the workers, and not the fact that three different auditors found that the state had been shorting the system for years. Since then, the privatization efforts have only made things worse.

Now, more than ten years later, she even admits that she did a lousy job of it.

Cross posted at Cognitive Dissidence.

McCain and the Economy

by folkbum

You know, I've been compiling a list of links concerning John McCain's campaign and his economic and budget proposals. However, nothing sums up, for me, the total substance of the McCain campaign's economic stance than this stark fact:

The McCain camp sent Phil Gramm, the top economic advisor to the campaign, to the Wall Street Journal editorial board to advocate and explain McCain's economic plan. Just hours later, the campaign itself issued a statement that Gramm, the man who advises the campaign and was delegated to go advocate on behalf of the campaign to a friendly editorial board that would promote the campaign, does not speak for the campaign.

In a just world, that would end a candidacy (imagine, for example, if Obama had done it--or, worse, Al Gore). Apparently, though, our liberal media has instead been replaced with the press corps usually covering Bizzaro World, which is why "cut his nuts out" is the new "don't tase me bro."

Remind McCain: He's in Wisconsin Today, so Packers Again

by folkbum

Yesterday John McCain did an interview with a Pittsburgh radio station and told a story about his time as a P.O.W. in Vietnam:

When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the physical pressures that were on me, I named the starting lineup -- defensive line -- of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron-mates.

Wow! The people of Pennsylvania and Steelers fans everywhere will eat that story up. Unless of course they’ve read John McCain’s book, Faith of My Fathers, and wonder how he could forget writing:

Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron.

But hey, let’s cut McCain some slack here...it’s easy to forget details after 40 years.

Iran -- Fighting Us with Photoshop

By Keith R. Schmitz

Seems that all the lather worked up by the Iran missle tests might have been unwarranted. Comments from a Harry Farid in the Scientific American.

Well, at first glance it looks like the second missile from the left and its trail was possibly copied in the original and then pasted in as the second missile from the right in the edited version. But I'm not so sure it's that simple a story. If we look at the trails from these two missiles, for starters, there's a black dot just under the second-from-right missile that's not there on the other one.

Then there's the smoke plumes rising from the ground. If you look at the smoke plumes underneath two rockets on the right, those folds of smoke on the right-hand side of the trail look pretty similar, too, though. But if you look very closely, they are not identical; the pixels don't line up exactly. This distortion could have happened when the JPEG file [a common kind of digital image] was compressed, so it could just be cloned image. Or, it may be that the same kind of missile can make a very similar-looking plume.

Something else to notice here is that in the edited version, the rockets look a little bigger and thicker. This means that they are closer to the camera or the ground. So, it's a possibility that that so-called edited and the original are actually different shots entirely, taken by two people who took the pictures almost at the same time but from slightly different distances from the launch.
It's a good thing there is not the same mental climate we had in 2002/2003 to go off half cocked for sure when the US chugged off to Iraq.

What is interesting is that it seems the Bush administration and Iranian Revolutionary Guard need each other to play to their respective bases:

"There have been several comments about our missiles' tests, especially by the United States, and all of them are wrong," said Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani at the Friday prayer ceremony in Tehran.

Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guards test-fired during the last three days several medium- and long-range missiles, including the Shahab-3 missile which is said to have a range of 2000 kilometres and therefore capable of reaching any part of the territory of Israel.

And we're not drilling offshore now because ... ?

by folkbum

If you learn nothing else today, at least learn this: The oil companies have leases right now which give them permission to drill on about 68 million acres of offshore land:

Unfortunately, President Bush and Sen. John McCain are trying to sell us on the oil companies' old argument that repealing the 27-year old moratorium on drilling in protected areas offshore will lower gas prices. Americans need to put this tired debate to rest. Our security--both here at home and abroad--depends on it.

First, the oil companies in this country now hold 7,000 leases to drill offshore, yet only 20 percent of those leases are producing oil. That is 68 million acres for which they already have the rights to drill. Nearly 80 percent of our offshore oil is already available for leasing--approximately 54 billion barrels total. They could be drilling in these areas, but they are not.

Another startling fact: In the last seven years (you remember how cheap gas was in 2001? Even when you were getting gouged on the afternoon of 9/11/01, you only paid $2.59), "permits for new oil drilling leases increased by 361 percent." If you're doing the math, that's faster than the price of a gallon of gas has increased since 2001.

Having a lot of offshore sites to drill in and handing over more drilling permits hasn't seemed to keep gas prices in check. The next time you hear someone suggest that doing more of the same will get us a different result, remind them that that's the definition of crazy. Which, come to think of it, probably explains why we hear it so much from some people these days ...

THIS storm has my name on it ...

by folkbum

McCain's Huge Blunder on Social Security

Josh Marshall has the goods on McCain's gigantic blunder on Social Security, absolutely humiliating McCain as uninformed and contradictory.

At a campaign event, McCain blasted the set-up of the Social Security system as a "disgrace," and demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of Social Security, in place since the 1930s.

Marshall is devastating. Watch this video; you almost feel sorry for McCain.

What's a Senate to Do?

By Keith Schmitz

With the vote today in the Senate over the FISA bill, Bush is holding the war on terror that he so cherishes as a hostage over telcom immunity. In other words, look the other way when the Bush administration sucks the life out of the 4th amendment.

If this free pass passes today this will be the triumph of telcom cash being poured into many pockets, knowing that they will be let off for a crime they may have committed, but we are not supposed to know what it is.

Every one knows that unless this measure is passed, there will be no way for this country to find out who in the Bush administration ordered possible illegal wire taps. It's like Al Capone running the courts in Chicago.

One shouldn't care which political party is perpetrating a crime, but that a crime could have been perpetrated. Isn't this what the rule of law is all about?

When a Senator raises the right hand, isn't protecting the Constitution supposed to be somewhere in the job description? Just asking.

Being Wrong About Iraq was Right, Being Right About Iraq was Being Unserious

by folkbum

There were many winners and losers after the fight over a taxpayer-funded killing game that children as young as 13 could play was shut down at Milwaukee's Summerfest. Among the biggest losers, I think, are the blowhards who spend half their lives yelling at us liberals to shut up, that we do not have any particular right never to be offended by stuff and the other half of the time complaining about the stuff that offends them. Including, apparently, the victory of such groups as Peace Action Wisconsin and Veterans for Peace over bloodlust and poor judgment.

That fight spun off a number of smaller battles across the Cheddarsphere, with many conservatives vowing never to go to Summerfest again and some even arguing, until corrected, that Summerfest had actually kicked the Army off the Summerfest grounds altogether. Affronts to good taste, rules of grammar, and common sense abounded. But one mini-drama stands out, between Mike Mathias and Rick Esenberg. Esenberg started it, followed by Mathias, and then one more round from each (MM, then RE) so far, with a few others joining in the fun, notably James Wigderson.

The Mathias-Esenberg skirmish is, in fact, a microcosm of a larger debate being played out in the national punditocracy. I think it's worth looking at more deeply, because what Esenberg and the like are doing is offering a grotesque version of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose, with the booby prize being the deaths of more than 4000 American men and women, not to mention countless innocent Iraqi civilians.

To illustrate what's wrong with Esenberg et al., I quote first (via tristero) from George Packer, member of the aforementioned national punditocracy, commenting on fellow pundit Christopher Hitchens's years-late epiphany that waterboarding is torture:

“If waterboarding does not constitute torture,” Hitchens concludes when it’s over, citing Lincoln on slavery, “then there is no such thing as torture.” This is powerful testimony, but another writer would have made it his starting point. The fact that waterboarding is torture forces certain questions on anyone who has supported the war on terror as vehemently as Hitchens and who, in the past, has been far quicker to criticize its critics than its excesses. This is the beginning of an argument with himself—not craven self-denunciation, but a genuine effort to draw out and clarify the hard trade-offs and ideological confusions that the past years have forced on all thinking people.

It seems innocent enough, but that last bit contains the nut of everything that is wrong about otherwise-reasonable people who supported the abortion that is the Iraq War. If you are a "thinking" person who supported the war, you did so only with great reservation, and now that you see what a mess it was, is, and will continue to be (whether you still support it or not), you can can admit faults only with the pain of someone wrestling his greatest inner demons. "Hard trade-offs and ideological confusions" are the hallmarks of all "thinking" people's opinions on the Iraq War.

The flipside, of course, is that if you opposed this war from the start, recognized that it would be bungled and mismanaged, knew that Dick Cheney was lying to you (his mouth was moving, after all), you could not have been a thinking person. Thinking people had to weigh the implications long and hard and make the difficult to decision to support invading Iraq.

In other words, if you were wrong about Iraq, you were right, because clearly you were a serious person and you made difficult sacrifices in deciding to support the war. And if you were right about Iraq all along, you were wrong, because you were too stupid to have been right.

Think I'm doing a disservice to Esenberg? I'm not:

[W]e need to persuade people that, while war is hell, those who serve are doing something that is not only necessary, but that can be done with integrity and in a way that fulfills the human need for accomplishment.

The critics don't believe that. War, to them, is just undifferentiated killing. There is nothing about what we fight for and how we fight that is distinctive. But, in a world where evil exists--where there are Nazi Germanys, Soviet Russias and Al Qaeda--that leads to the charnel house just as certainly as a mindless celebration of conquest.

That's from his shock-and-awe opening salvo. Clearly, Esenberg suggests, anyone who opposes war is unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling. He clarifies in his comments to Mathias's first post: "[P]eace activists did not understand the situation in Iraq," he writes. Esenberg's second post is a longer argument for the idea that people opposing the war just didn't get it (titled, even, "Being serious about Iraq"!), and includes an eerie, likely unknowing paraphrase of Packer:

I don't cite Herman's piece as necessarily establishing that the Iraq war was the right decision. I remember, at the time, being very uncertain about whether it was. But it--along with so many other post war reviews--reminds us that the demonization of Bush reflects, at best, a refusal to face difficult facts and, at worst, a cynical manipulation of a complicated issue.

The issue was "complicated," Esenberg says, and those of us who were thinking people were "very uncertain" about whether invading Iraq was "the right decision." (I would also note that Esenberg dives into non-sequitur: not one word of either of Mathias's posts contains anything like "demonization of Bush"--Mathias's first post doesn't even say the man's name, and his second only notes that Bush ignored both protesters and prominent opponents of going to war.)

Wigderson makes it worse, by asking what peace activists would have done in Iraq if not go to war. Mathias eviscerates him:

James asks: “What would they have done?” And the response is: About what?

Hussein was at the front of no invading army. He was launching no missiles against his neighbors. His support for terrorism seemed limited to sending funds to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The price that has been paid in lives and treasure for such an affront seems wildly disproportionate.

But of course, to the Esenbergs, Packers, and Wigdersons of the world, to do nothing was the unthinking response. To do nothing did not carefully measure out the "complicated" issue or "clarify the hard trade-offs and ideological confusions" of thinking people like them. To do nothing in Iraq, though the right thing, was wrong because there was no thought behind it.

This is simply not true. Saddam Hussein posed no threat to us, but al Qaeda did. That was my reason for opposing the war in Iraq, and I defy anyone to tell me how a) there is no thought behind it or b) it is wrong.

This graph, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, via chart-master Kevin Drum, explains quite neatly why, in fact, I'm right; it's of US casualties in Afghanistan:


Is it any wonder that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spent the whole of the recent NATO summit begging for help in Afghanistan?

***
Esenberg and Packer at least seem to want to live in the same reality as those of us who opposed the war; even though they will not acknowledge that such opposition was possible from anyone with a brain, their protestations over how "very uncertain" they were about the war allows that such opposition was at least a viable option. But there are some dead-enders who remain on another planet entirely, and they were brought out in the last few days by news that 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium was moved from Iraq to Canada. Cheddarsphere ex-pat Sean Hackbarth, for example, veers off to write,

We now know Saddam had 550 tons of the stuff [. . .].That, my friends, is a nuclear weapons program. It’s not a stretch to assume that a dictator who had a history of using WMDs and had tons of material that could be processed into a nuclear or dirty bomb would want more. It’s not a stretch to make a big deal out of this [. . .]. If it weren’t for President Bush’s invasion Saddam might well be on his way processing that 550 tons of yellowcake.

We now know? We've known about this yellowcake since 1981, at least, when Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear program to smithereens (a program never restarted). Heck, given that we were allies with Iraq in 1981, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out we gave him the stuff. We knew about this yellowcake in 1991, when the International Atomic Energy Agency locked it up and threw away the key. We knew about it through 1998 when IAEA inspectors made regular checks on it. We knew about it again in 2002 when the UN inspectors noted that it hadn't been touched. We knew about it in 2003 when US troops found it--still sealed. We've known about it every 18 months or so since then when some mention of it made the news. Now we know? That is a nuclear weapons progam? A different reality.

Perhaps Amy P., commenter on this news at Dad29's alternate-reality paradise, sums up this worldview in support of the war and against anyone suggesting it was a mistake:

No doubt Barack "Uniter" Obama will simply raise the white flag and we'll all find the peace that comes through submission under shari'a law.

There are so many things wrong with that--from the notion that Saddam Hussein, secular dictator, would have subjected us to religious law to the idea that Barack Obama will not defend the country if elected.

It leads me to ask this: Who, pray tell, are the real unthinking, unserious ones? Who are those who refuse to acknowledge reality and instead accept an immature, naïve world view? It is certainly not those of us who opposed the war from day one. It is not those involved in Wisconsin Peace Action or Veterans for Peace who oppose convincing 13-year-olds that going to Iraq will be fun and worthwhile. I think it would behoove the Esenbergs and Packers of the world to note the difference, and save their disdain for those who deserve it.

Thank Your Sir, May I Have Another

by folkbum

Revisiting Rush: Pitiful

by bert

I have been puzzling over the profile of Rush Limbaugh since I read it yesterday morning in the New York Times magazine. The piece by Zev Chafets surprises you at first because you don’t expect the plaudits nor the sympathetic vignettes. Others have called the article a puff piece. Ann Althouse, for example, liked it almost as much as she apparently likes Rush himself.

But I no longer agree that the story is simply hagiography. Now I think that clever bugger writing the article meant it to work like a Trojan Horse: throw a monkey wrench in the right-wing’s mechanical attack on the NYT, and also send concealed ammo to those of us who recognize Rush as harmful.

In his own voice, Chafets will only praise, as when he marvels at Rush's skill on the air. But the author never takes a critical shot in the first person. Instead, in delivering the concealed shots that he does take, Chavets obeys the literary dictum to show, don’t tell.

Take for example John McCain, whom Limbaugh has railed against and ridiculed for years with clearly heartfelt hatred. The article lets Limbaugh try to explain why he is now going to support McCain. Chavets leaves unspoken the reasonable conclusion that Limbaugh is a craven, opportunistic hypocrite with linguini for a spine.

Another sneaky hit is landed when the article also shows us – and here Chafets does a skillful job of packaging this in a way Limbaugh and his dittoheads can not assail – that Limbaugh’s protogé Sean Hannity is owning him during this campaign. Hannity has conceived and nurtured the right-wing talking points that got traction such as the Jeremiah Wright connection. We readers have to see for ourselves that Limbaugh is coasting: fat, happy, and all fire in his belly extinguished.

The author is also clever in presenting parts that I and others see as negative but his fans will instead view as a plus. Anti-intellectualism is a core feature of conservatives, but I see as a defect Limbaugh’s animosity toward education and his failure as even an average student. The article also documents that Rush’s friends include Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, and Clarence Thomas. These are men of contemptible character who have only contributed harm to this country. The article also makes much of his show's ratings. That doesn't show me much about him, though. Baywatch, pork rinds, and Joseph Goebbels were also able to attract a large following.

More than anything, the article intended to plumb Rush’s psyche. What it renders, if you step back and look and even if you don’t begrudge him his wealth, is sad and pathetic.

Limbaugh failed at marriage three times. Without much comment, the article ran a photo of Rush snuggling up to his latest girlfriend Kathryn Rogers. As you can see in the photo above by John Parra/wireimage/Getty Images, she is pretty, blond, and much younger.

Limbaugh showed Chafets around a 24,000-square-foot home he shares with a cat. And then the two went out to dinner where seemingly affectionate waiters buzzed genially around them, we learn later that they anticipated Rush’s four-figure tip.

I might be deluding myself as I balance my wife and children packaged in our crappy little 1,900 square foot home. But against Limbaugh’s cars and jet and houses, I find myself more weighted with blessings. (His cat is probably better than mine; I'll give him that.) I sincerely think the loneliness of this vulnerable human is magnified by Rush’s lust for ostentation.

And I never know whom to pity more in those trophy-wife/fatcat items.

Obama, FISA and the Politics of Puffery

Update: Contact Barack Obama.
Update: See Compromising the Constitution and August 8, 1974 v. July 9, 2008.
***Bush is using the Nixon crimes-inspired FISA to immunize the very executive abuse which FISA was crafted to prevent.***

Barack Obama has taken much heat for his qualified support for the FISA capitulation to be debated and possibly voted on in the U.S. Senate this week.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (1978) was one of numerous post-Watergate reforms intended to check the vast executive power, in this matter of concern the power to wiretap and spy on American citizens under the invoked umbrella of national security.

A president wants to spy on Americans and claim national security rationales (misleadingly like Nixon and Bush), then a president has to answer to the FISA court as a check on the executive power preventing the president from becoming an Orwellian tyrant, dispensing with citizens’ rights at will, FISA mandates.

Bush, like Nixon before him when there was no FISA, is attempting to codify an unconstitutional executive program, violative of (among other liberties) the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and the First Amendment right to engage in free speech, chilled when “(t)he price of lawful public dissent (is) dread of subjection to an unchecked surveillance power” [Landmark Supreme Court decision striking down Nixon’s claims of unlimited power to wiretap Americans under presidential claim of “domestic security;” UNITED STATES v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, 407 U.S. 297 (1972)].

But one of the rare points of light in the new FISA bill (that addresses modern technological methods of communication), it is claimed, is the mandate that a court will be in place to check illegal executive branch monitoring of citizens, and that any monitoring must take place exclusively within the FISA court-approved sphere, effectively negating the power of a Bush-Cheneyesque, out-of-control presidency.

“The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any president or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court,” said Barack Obama in a statement of his support for the bill.

These things you say we have, we already have.

That’s one of the problems of the FISA bill. As Slate and others have pointed out, FISA is already the exclusive legal authority checking executive surveillance on American citizens that are made on national security grounds, and the new FISA bill, ironically, retroactively codifies the most flagrant FISA law-breaking since its inception.

Bush, and his conspirators in the telecommunications industry, have throughout his presidency utterly disregarded FISA and broken this federal statute in presidential acts of lawlessness unrivaled since Nixon.

Bush is using the Nixon-inspired FISA to immunize that which FISA was crafted to prevent. And the Democrats believe opposition to this disgusting act is too politically risky.

As Patrick Radden Keefe explains:

The Democrats' most pathetic bit of self-deluded posturing involves the inclusion of a clause suggesting that the new law represents the "exclusive means" by which 'electronic surveillance and interception of certain communications may be conducted.' According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., this means 'the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president.' But, then, FISA always said that it was the 'exclusive means.' And in 2001, pretty much on a whim, the president set it aside. …

From 2001 to 2007, the NSA engaged in a secret program that was a straightforward violation of America's wiretapping laws. Since the program was revealed, the administration has succeeded in preventing the judiciary from making a definitive declaration that the wiretapping was a crime. Suits against the government get dismissed on state-secrets grounds, because while the program may have been illegal, it was also so highly classified that its legality can never be litigated in open court. And now suits against the telecoms will by dismissed en masse as well. Meanwhile, the new law moves the goal posts, taking illegal things the administration was doing and making them legal. … Whatever Hoyer and Pelosi—and even Obama—say, this amounts to a retroactive blessing of the illegal program, and historically it means that the country will probably be deprived of any rigorous assessment of what precisely the administration did between 2001 and 2007.

The Politics of FISA

The political track for candidate Obama, who undoubtedly despises out-of-control chief executives like Bush and Nixon, is to project a nuanced presidential candidate laboring under the weight of his national security commitments, and then quietly help strike the absurd passages from the House-approved FISA bill under Senate consideration.

President Bush will ultimately veto such an amended FISA if passed, leaving the issue on the backburner as gas pushes five dollars/a gallon and middle America goes further in debt leaving FISA about as relevant and compelling a political story to struggling American families as the movie Jaws II.

The compulsion driving this maneuver, rather than just calling the House FISA bill what it is, is to prevent a harebrained national media (ever desperate to assist John McCain) from creating a campaign narrative (false though it be) of McCain and national security versus Obama and fuzzy Fourth Amendment (whatever the hell that is).

But Obama need not engage in this strategy, though he is not doing so casually. There is a long and distinguished tradition of American Constitutional thought on liberty and security that can inoculate Obama from even the most craven Republican and the most foolish of talking heads.

And Obama can, in essence, plausibly assert that anything Bush and his cronies tell you on anything is wrong. That would be the politically safe and Constitutional thing to do.

We'll see what happens this week.

For a more detailed examination on the unadulterated idiocy of the FISA bill, see Glenn Greenwald at Salon.
- via mal contends -

The Good Done By George W. Bush

by capper

A lot of times, liberals will make uncomplimentary comments and remarks about George W. Bush. The right often dismiss this has Bush Derangement Syndrome*.

Well, this is just to let the right wingers know that we don't think Bush is all bad, just mostly.

Here is a list** of some postive things that Bush has done:

15. Well, he never accidentally shot anyone while hunting!

14. Dramatically raised the bar for future presidents who want to be considered "Worst President Ever."

13. Brought the tourists back to Guantanamo Bay.

12. Demonsterated that alcohol and drug abuse during one's youth has absolutably no effect on one's job performabication later in life.

11. Finally put all those scientists and historians and economists with their fancy book-learnin' in their place.

10. Took the pain out of long commutes by both making gas too damned expensive to afford and eliminating our jobs.

9. Shattered a glass ceiling by giving female soldiers the opportunity to point at POW penises.

8. Gave the rest of the world a chance to catch up with America.

7. He wrested a country from the clutches of a twisted, tyrannical megalomaniac. And Ashcroft will never forgive him for it.

6. Stood devoutly aside as the wrathful Lord exacted His vengeance on the depraved populace of New Orleans, avoiding such heretical modern responses as "humanitarian aid" or "giving a damn."

5. Helped with that whole superiority complex that Americans had going on.

4. Put a serious dent in our nation's brush-clearing problem.

3. Got a really good price for selling America to the oil companies.

2. Caught more al-Qaeda #2s than the Waziristani sewer system.

Number 1 Positive Thing President Bush Has Done...

1. Single-handedly convinced Frank T. Burvis, unemployed Klansman from New Orleans, to vote for a African-American Democrat for president.

*More thoughts on Bush Derangement Disorder can be found here.

**This list was recreated here, after some modifications, from a cross-posting that can be found at Cognitive Dissidence.

Now I'm cooking with gas. Literally.

by folkbum

I have joined the ranks of the Hank Hills. A couple of weekends ago we decided to chuck the old Weber charcoal grill, the one that was almost as much rust and ash-paste as it was animal bits and smoke residue. And we bought one of these babies.

We assembled it over the course of a couple of days and finally fired it up for a meal this evening. It was successful, and tasty. I even remembered to turn off the gas at the cylinder when I was done.

Anyway, mad props to the guys at Menards. When we pulled the firebox out from the bubble-wrap and corrugated, in hour 700-something of assembly, we found that the top had a one-inch diameter chip out of the enamel. We called Menards and that day and they pulled a new part out of an unopened box at the store and traded us. No questions asked, except to see our receipt. Good customer service is always a pleasant surprise.

Happy America Day

by folkbum

I want to see all of your fingers when you come back on Monday.

Once again: School finance is *(&^$)#&&#$ up

by folkbum

(UPDATE: See the Superintendent's full memo to the Board here.)

Quoting just one paragraph:

State aid to MPS has been decreasing in recent years for several reasons, among them declining enrollment. In addition, MPS is losing about $6 million in state aid because the board decided a year ago to not spend to the limit allowed under law, and under the current formula, the more a school district spends, the more state money it gets in succeeding years.

By being responsible to the taxpayers and not jacking up the taxes as far as they could last year, the Milwaukee Public Schools are being punished by the state. I mean, we knew it was going to happen we warned about it last fall. But that doesn't make it any more fair or any more right when it happens.

Also of note, the special-education settlement against MPS, under heavy pressure by the state and the Department of Public Instruction, which essentially requires that MPS do more testing and more diagnosing of expensive students that we don't get paid enough for. Push us to spend more, then cut our funds. Nice.

No, there's no option that will make anyone happy. If I could think of one that would, well, I wouldn't be at at the bottom of the MPS food chain, now would I?

SpongeJohn GardPants and the Mythical Chinese Oil Drillers

by folkbum

(I would not have used xoff's greatest gift to Wisconsin bloggers in my title had this not been an underthesea-related story.)

A month or so ago, Vice President Dick "Dick" Cheney was rambling on about something and let slip a complaint that the Chinese were drilling up OUR OIL right off the coast of Florida with the help of Cuba, those commie bastards. Okay, that's a praphrase. Here's what Cheney really said:

Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech Wednesday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, picked up the refrain. Cheney quoted a column by George Will, who wrote last week that "drilling is under way 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are."

In his speech, Cheney described the Chinese as being "in cooperation with the Cuban government. Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to higher prices means more supply."

That makes for a great story and it backs a significant aspect of the Republican philosophy of drilling our way out of the gas crisis (which John McCain, GOP candidate for president, suggests we both can and can't do). Gas prices are high, Americans are ticked off, and the dirtyhippielibrultreehuggers won't let us have OUR OWN OIL but China is taking it.

I bet you can see the problem coming. That's right--the story was just not true.

[N]o one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba's shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is "akin to urban legend," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.

Cheney's office even did the unthinkable and admitted that Cheney was wrong and that no, China was indeed not drilling for oil off the coast of South Florida. It's also interesting to learn that Mel Martinez is now apparently a dirtyhippielibrultreehugger,

Note the dates on those stories: The first, explaining that the story was false, was posted on June 11. It even got some pretty heavy play on the blogs at the time. So it's not to much of a surprise to learn that John Gard, career politician who lost to first-time candidate Steve Kagen in 2006, would repeat the lie in a June 4 press release (.pdf).


But it doesn't explain why, days after the lie was exposed, Gard was still walking around handing out this flier at county fairs.

Talking Points Memo got ahold of the flier (confidential to 8th CD tipsters: what am I? Chopped liver?), and made some calls. Our old friend Mark Graul dug the hole deeper:

At first, Gard campaign manager Ellen Nowak told us that these flyers had been scrapped. "We didn't print them that way," Nowak said, after the text was read to her over the phone.

Then she made the mistake of referring us to communications director Mark Graul, who confirmed the flyer's existence. But he said it wasn't about China, insisting that the "foreign nations" reference was to India, Brazil and other countries. "We now know that China are not drilling per se," Graul said, "but other foreign countries are."

Sadly, that's not true, either.

Sigh. A couple weeks before TPM had at Graul and co., the Green Bay Press Gazette, on their blog, not in the paper where it belonged, was on the case, with Gard standing by a weaselly version of the urban legend, that China was "exploring to set up" off of the Florida coast. That's not what the flier said, that's not what his campaign said when it announced its energy plan ( the references to China have not even been scrubbed from his website!).

It's a simple thing, John. Just man up and say, as the vice president did, that you were wrong. That you bought into a Republican urban oil myth (like the one about Katrina not causing any oil spills) and that you're sorry. It's not hard.