Voter fraud snipe hunt

"Everytime someone says, 'Show me the fraud,' there isn't any," said Coleman.

Get mad. Again.

Heard this morning on Air America:

Brad on the Stephanie Miller Show This Morning, Discussing the Sibel Edmonds Case... - 11/23/07

More background:

What The Heck is the Sibel Edmonds Case Anyway? And Why Should You Care About It? - 11/20/07

EXCLUSIVE: Daniel Ellsberg Says Sibel Edmonds Case 'Far More Explosive Than Pentagon Papers' - 11/19/07

EXCLUSIVE: FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Will Now Tell All - and Face Charges if Necessary - to Any Major Television Network That Will Let Her - 10/29/07

EXCLUSIVE: FBI WHISTLEBLOWER SIBEL EDMONDS IS READY TO TALK! - 3/3/06

Vanity Fair, An Inconvenient Patriot - 8/15/05

Polterzeitgeist

This piece first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on November 11, 2007.

Flipping through channels last week, I caught the tail end of the 1982 movie, “Poltergeist.” It’s still unnerving decades later. Childhood terrors come to life: monsters in the closet, outside the window, under the bed. In one scene, JoBeth Williams runs to her screaming children, but in helpless slow motion as their bedroom door recedes impossibly before her.

Watching the rerun of the Bush administration’s war-starting strategy — this time featuring Iran — feels like those slow-motion nightmares.

We charge Iran with interfering in Iraq. They’ve supported fellow Shiites there since the days when the United States supplied Saddam Hussein with chemicals, but no matter.

We charge Iran with smuggling weapons across their border with Iraq. The U.S. smuggled Stinger missiles to mujahideen halfway around the world in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, but no matter.

Determined hawks

One influential hawk among many, National Review’s Michael Ledeen, insists a state of war with Iran has existed since 1979. Ledeen helped the Reagan administration transfer weapons to the Iran he repeatedly claims we were at war with, but no matter.

In “The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know” in the recent Esquire, two former Bush State Department Middle East policy experts outline their post-Sept. 11, 2001, discussions with Iranian diplomats. “Iran was ready to cooperate unconditionally,” Esquire reports. The Bush administration was not — is not — interested in diplomacy, but no matter.

The executive branch players reprise roles they made famous, pre-Iraq. President Bush warns of “nuclear holocaust.” Vice President Cheney threatens Iran with “serious consequences.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accuses Iran of “lying” to inspectors about its nuclear programs.

It doesn’t take a quarterback to see that the administration is running the same play again. Against Iran and against us.

Trumping up a case

They’ve been wrong about everything from weapons of mass destruction to Iraqi “dead-enders” to de-Baathification, Hurricane Katrina and Harriet Miers, but no matter. Regimes must be changed. Wars must be started. Reasons will be found.

In February, a story in London’s Telegraph newspaper reported that more than 100 .50-caliber Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifles had been captured during American raids in Iraq. The weapons shipped to Iran in 2005 were now in use against U.S. troops, claimed the Telegraph’s anonymous source.

These formidable-looking Austrian weapons can take off a man’s head at a mile. Austrian native Arnold Schwarzenegger might wield one in the movies. What a jim-dandy backdrop for a press conference 100 would make, a picture worth a thousand words.

But no photos of the captured weapons appeared in any newspapers — only shots from Steyr’s online catalog. Skeptics asked if the serial numbers matched the weapons shipped to Iran, and the tale of the unseen rifles died overnight.

“Explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs) star in this year’s sequel too. Military briefers told reporters that the armor-piercing roadside bombs require machining too sophisticated for Iraqis. They had been manufactured in Iran.

“We have no evidence that this has ever been done in Iraq,” a senior U.S. military official told the New York Times in February.

Days later, a Los Angeles Times op-ed article cited a November 2006 raid on a Baghdad machine shop producing EFP components. Earlier reports of Iraqi EFP factories surfaced, and more questions. Military spokesmen backed away from earlier claims, prompting suggestions that the allegations against Iran had been manufactured. Bush called those suggestions “preposterous.”

Congress can stop this

These anecdotes don’t disprove Iranian weapons are reaching Iraq. Some indeed may. But these examples cast a cloud over tales — especially regarding Iranian nuclear programs — used to justify a disastrous new “preemptive” war by the same people who produced the last one.

Congress has the power to stop it. But despite receiving the voters’ mandate last November — to exercise its duty to flex its own constitutional war and oversight powers — Congress shies like an abused child who fears slaps and name-calling for doing so.

Hoping to wait out a reckless and power-hungry White House until November 2008 is itself reckless, as it is unconscionable.

Presidential spokesmen and candidates warn that a nuclear-armed Iran will destabilize the region. But that mission is already accomplished. Another American pre-emptive war will destabilize it further, and quicker.

Like a slow-motion nightmare, we watch it unfolding just as it did in 2002 and 2003. We scream warnings, but our leaders do not hear us.

Water Woes

Uptown Ruler takes note of the Southeast's water woes, highlighted in Orme, TN. (Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

The Associated Press reports “As twilight falls over this Tennessee town, Mayor Tony Reames drives up a dusty dirt road to the community’s towering water tank and begins his nightly ritual in front of a rusty metal valve.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank’s meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town’s 145 residents.

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

The mayor wonders what the 4.5 million people in Atlanta will do. I had my own perspective on the problem:

As Dreyfuss once said, “Well, this is not a boat accident! And it wasn’t any propeller; and it wasn’t any coral reef; and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper!” But for Atlanta, anyway, it wasn’t a shark or the drought either. It was overdevelopment.

The drought just precipitated the crisis that’s been a long time coming. Atlanta’s been sucking hard on the Flint River Aquifer for years without regard to what sprawl was doing to the water supply.

“Heavens, we can’t tell developers no. That would interfere with their personal freedom and right to put their land to its ‘highest and best use’.”

In 1998, I put in a wastewater neutralization system for a lens coating operation in an office park in Alfalfa-retta, north of Atlanta. I asked what the small out-building was at the edge of the parking lot. The Culligan rep told me it was a well house (in an upscale office park!).

He knew clients (including hospitals) drilling wells all over Atlanta because the Metropolitan Sewer District wouldn’t let people use all the water they wanted (both because of the MSD infrastructure capacity and water source limits, I think). So they were drilling their own wells to get unmetered water.

I was on the edge of another client’s lawsuit in Duluth Buford, GA, in 1999 when the county Fulton reneged on its water contract to supply the water needed for a new, water-heavy manufacturing operation we helped design.

The drought is just the straw that’s broken the camel’s back. The Flint River Aquifer has been under strain for a decade as Atlanta keeps growing, the developers keep developing, and the water supply keeps shrinking.

It was only a matter of time before the taps started running dry. Nobody listens. Nobody cares. Anyone who raises the alarm is an anti-business kook.

For years, I’ve wondered when we’d start seeing bumper stickers that said, “Suppose they gave a subdivision and nobody came?”

Maybe soon, now.

Then from today's LA Times:

But experts say the Southeast’s struggles over water resources are far from over.

“What was not on the table, and what has got to be on the table, is Atlanta’s unrestricted growth and cavalier attitude to water use,” said Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a watchdog group.

[. . .]

“Atlanta is a greedy, poorly designed behemoth of a city incapable of hearing the word ‘no’ and dealing with it,” said a recent editorial in the Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times.

The editorial said Atlanta’s “politicians can’t bring themselves to tell their greedy constituents complaining about the low flows in their toilets this week that perhaps if they didn’t have six bathrooms, it might ease the situation a bit.”

There is sowing, and then there is reaping.

Sandbox Rules

Dave Neiwert of Orcinus began a series this week, "The Politics of the Personal," over at Campaign for America's Future. Part 1 describes his journey from growing up in Idaho in a Republican working class family, to rejecting that ideology. But there's enough caution to go around for all:

A basic realization took shape, perhaps typical of the age, but it has persisted: even though I had always believed (and still do to some extent) upper-class and urban liberals are prone to indulging a paper-thin compassion that more resembles a parlor game rationalized with a tortuous intellectualism, it was also clear that conservatives, conversely, were fond of wrapping themselves in my old-fashioned, working-class values (along with the American flag, of course) even as they systematically undermined the ability of ordinary, working-class people to make a decent living and obtain equal opportunity.

[. . .]

I simultaneously came to almost instinctively mistrust ideologues of all stripes because it seems that to them, ideas are more important than people. This observation arose first out of personal experience, since ideologues are often likely to reject friendships with those who don't think like them or fit their ideologies. I might be able to maintain a relationship with an ideologue (right or left) for awhile, but inevitably, they would reject me because I didn't fit the pure mold they had in mind. People who disagree with them or challenge them assault their egos and are placed out of their personal realms. This dynamic – valuing ideas above people -- played out on the larger stage as well; indeed, it’s virtually a guarantee that when ideologues act out their ideologies, in both national politics and everyday interpersonal dealings, ordinary people in real life are harmed.

You see it at both ends of the ideological spectrum, as I've written myself after encountering liberal activists who wouldn't give pro-life Democrats the time of day:

It has been obvious to me for some time that the further right and the further left one goes in the political spectrum, the more alike conservatives and liberals become. They don't think the same things, but they begin thinking the same way: rigid, dogmatic and intolerant. They just don't see themselves that way: "You must mean those people."

Dave, who has followed the "eliminationist" trend in America for some time, also wanders, as I have, into exploring the mindset(s) behind the American Right. Dave, Digby and others have been puzzling over the coverage of Hillary Clinton's appearance at Wellesley -- for playing the "gender card" -- by the boys' club that unashamedly gushes over their favorite candidates' manliness. As Digby puts it:

Indeed, the entire Republican campaign strategy can be said to be one big gender card --- the only people they believe matter in this country are delicate, insecure creatures who are so sensitive that they have to be pampered and pandered to like a bunch of overfed princes who like to play cowboy and don't want to share their favorite binky.

Even more fascinating is Orcinus' Sara Robinson's take on fundamentalist/Right Wing Authoritarian ideology that traps people "somewhere around the age of five or six":

They also have to give up on adult-level emotional functioning (which, as I mentioned, may be welcomed as something of a relief after adult life has blown up under you a few times). Authoritarian followers crave someone who will keep things ordered and safe, someone who will provide and protect and set firm rules and boundaries; someone all-powerful and all-knowing who can teach you right from wrong and keep the harsh parts of the world at bay. Someone, in short, who looks like Daddy looked when you were about five years old.

RWAs would far rather curl up in Daddy's lap -- even if it means abandoning reason and taking the occasional spanking -- than try to deal with the world by themselves, on adult terms. This is also why RWA family and community relationships (as Lakoff has explained) are necessarily hierarchical. These people still need parents around, because they don't feel emotionally safe without the presence of a strong authority figure. Egalitarian relationships terrify them, because there's nobody in charge to make the rules and set the boundaries that keep people from hurting each other. And that's damned scary, because (as masters of projection) they're quite sure that everybody else in the whole world is also still five years old and playing by sandbox rules. Without a playground supervisor in charge, they know for sure that somebody will get hurt.

It takes us full-circle to the Bush joke that went around the Net awhile back. As Digby put it:

Avedon Carol snares a great quote that finally cleared something up for me: why does Bush always sound like he's talking to five year olds?

"He speaks to the audience as if they're idiots. I think the reason he does that is because that's the way these issues were explained to him." - Graydon Carter

All well and good. Now, what do we do with this information that will help us set this country right again? How do we elect leaders who will lift us out of the sandbox in Iraq and the political sandbox Washington has become?

Why are we not surprised?

From this morning's WaPo:

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

Regarding the president's nominee for AG, Mr. Mukasey, today's NYT editorial weighs in:

Mr. Gonzales resigned after his extraordinary incompetence became too much for even loyal Republicans. Now Mr. Bush wants the Senate to confirm Michael Mukasey, a well-respected trial judge in New York who has stunned us during the confirmation process by saying he believes the president has the power to negate laws and by not committing himself to enforcing Congressional subpoenas. He also has suggested that he will not uphold standards of decency during wartime recognized by the civilized world for generations.

After a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Mr. Mukasey refused to detail his views on torture, he submitted written answers to senators’ questions that were worse than his testimony. They suggest that he, like Mr. Gonzales, would enable Mr. Bush’s lawless behavior and his imperial attitude toward Congress and the courts.

Just another day at the Ministry of Truth.

Blogging still slow

My other political project continues to consume much time.

Op-ed: Coming soon in the funny papers.

The Propagandists Next Door

The right-wing Pass-It-On e-mails that come to me (via friends and relatives who know I collect it) was were a source of amusement for years. But what with the machinations of this administration and its lackeys - and a pending attack on Iran - I've come to see them in a darker light.

Folks, you're not just forwarding e-mail from friends. You're being used as propagandists by propagandandists.

An old one from 2002 came around again last week, already debunked by Snopes.com. Among the lies it traffics in are:

Oliver North warned an unfriendly Senate inquisitor about Osama bin Laden during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings. "Quotes" are included.

North's inquisitor was Al Gore.

9/11 mastermind, Mohammad Atta, in prison in Israel for a bus bombing conviction, was released from prison in 1993 at the behest of the Clinton administration. This "fact" was reported in the U.S. press immediately after 9/11, but subsequently censored.

Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia.

Okay, that last bit wasn't really in there. But as is customary, the spam urges readers to pass it on (to everyone in your e-mail list).

All lies, of course. It was Abu Nidal, not Osama bin Laden. Gore wasn't on that panel. It wasn't that Mohammed Atta - different guy, same name. Ollie North even disclaimed the e-mail on his own site. Newspapers did report the Atta story after 9/11, but stopped after the Boston Globe discovered the error.

The disquieting thing is, these things continue to crop up - along with new ones - and fan out like a chain reaction. And they fly comfortably below the radar, day after day, passed from e-mail list to e-mail list. The mail I got had 75 e-mail addresses on it.

What makes Pass-It-On mail such an efficient conduit for spreading propaganda is that it arrives from a friend, colleague or relative - sources less impeachable, and much less likely to be challenged than the Mainstream Media. A 30-sec Google search would reveal the mail to be false, less time than it takes to attach dozens of your friends' addresses to the forward. Yet few bother. It reinforces existing prejudices. It came from a friend. Why inquire further?

What especially strikes me about this one is, it's not just one falsehood that slipped through the cracks, but many. The newspapers got the Atta story wrong. Okay. But Oliver North (Iran-Contra transcripts are readily available)? Al Gore?

As with other mailings in my collection, somebody went to a lot of trouble to assemble and distribute these lies with World Trade Center graphics and extra-large, extra-bold red, white and blue formatting - not uncommon for Pass-It-Ons. Given what we've seen from the administration and its supporters, it's not a stretch to assume that the authors already knew these things were lies ... and didn't care so long as they furthered the cause and poisoned the well of public discourse.

Such tactics filter from the top down. We shouldn't be surprised.

With evidence that the recent right-wing blogger smear campaign against twelve year-old SCHIP recipient, Graeme Frost, was orchestrated out of Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's office, one wonders if the persistent Pass-It-On spam has similar parentage, though perhaps not regularly originating in the Senate.

These things do their jobs discretely, quietly poisoning minds, breeding mistrust of the unpatriotic Others, laying a foundation of support - almost subliminal - for secret prisons, military tribunals, indefinite detention, kidnapping, torture of prisoners, and the next preemptive war.

As a child reared during the Cold War, I was cautioned what would happen to freedom-loving "trouble-makers" if the Communists ever took over: surveillance, imprisonment, show trials, friends and relatives informing on each other, secrecy and ubiquitous propaganda.

They just never anticipated talk radio and the Internet.

The Greatest Hits Party

At recent and not-so-recent Democrat events I've attended, invariably someone gets up to remind us what Democrats are all about. To cheers and applause they reel off a list of 40-to-70-year-old programs and policies of which Democrats are justly proud. Only it begins to have the air of a late-night K-tel commercial: Democrats' Greatest Hits - All your favorites from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.

Makes me want to put on some plaid golf pants, a white patent-leather belt, and dance the Shag with Mrs. Blue.

Folks, you'd better get off your widening rear ends and create some new hits if you want to remain relevant in the 21st century. This democracy may not survive your biding your time until the end of Bush's term.

Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions:

Restore habeas corpus.

Insist the Executive branch obey the law or impeach the blackguards.

Cut off the Boy King's war-waging allowance -- give him a G.I. Joe and send him to his room.

Demand an Attorney General who's not another presidential toady.

Need more ideas? You know where to find me.

Eliminationists United

This is a few days old, but worth reading in full.

Ezra Klein renders a diagnosis of the latest Malkin/wingnut crusade -- against 12-year-old Graeme Frost -- into plain English:

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.

The shrieking, atavistic ritual of personal destruction the right roars into every few weeks is something different than politics. It is beyond politics. It was done to Scott Beauchamp, a soldier serving in Iraq. It was done to college students from the University of California, at Santa Cruz. Currently, it is being done to a child and his family. And think of those targets: College students, soldiers, children. It can be done to absolutely anyone.

This is not politics. This is, in symbolism and emotion, a violent group ritual. It is savages tearing at the body of a captured enemy. It is the group reminding itself that the Other is always disingenuous, always evil, always lying, always pitiful and pathetic and grotesque.

To punctuate the point, Klein cites a recent account by Jim Henley of road rage, threats and a near assault provoked by simply ... well, let him explain it:

I yell back when he stops for air, “What is your FUCKING problem? What did I do to you?”

He leans out to point at my car bumper. Which is entirely unadorned except for a Kerry-Edwards sticker from 2004.

“YOU FAGGOT YOU VOTED FOR THAT WAR CRIMINAL. I’M GOING TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU.” Guy is turning a shade of purple. I don’t think he’s just putting on a show. He actually sped up, nearly rammed with his car at high speed and is now seriously contemplating attacking me over a bumper sticker.

Liberal protesters may camp out in front of Nancy Pelosi's house, but that's about it. Malkin's mob falls into this disturbing brand of conservatism, the kind of insecure, easily threatened people who beat up guys with long hair in the 60s before wearing theirs long in the 70s.

There are plenty of sane people on the right, to be sure -- some of my relatives among them -- but for too many twisted individuals conservatism isn't a political philosophy, it's a personality disorder.

Dave Neiwert has the last say:

It's important to make an issue of eliminationist talk precisely because it is so poisonous to the national discourse. For starters, its innate divisiveness belies its practitioners' demands for "national unity." Moreover, its targets are in a lose-lose position: if they attempt to continue to practice the old-fashioned politics of traditional civility out of principle, they are doomed to be bulldozered; but if they stand up and fight back, they're accused of being uncivil. (It's funny how bullies act all wounded and picked on when somebody punches back.)

This is easily the ugliest facet of a conservative movement that doesn't have many attractive ones to begin with, and the more the general public sees it in all its mouth-foaming glory, the less they want anything to do with them. With polls a month ago showing something like 86 percent support for SCHIP, nasty attacks on 12-year-olds seem unlikely to change the public's mind. (A more recent Rasmussen poll showed 57 percent disapproved of President Bush's veto of the SCHIP bill.) More important, there's a growing consensus that, like the centrists at Poliblogger, we are "sick to death of these people and their views of both politics and public discourse."

Yet at the same time, eliminationist rhetoric creates a vicious upward spiral that inevitably expresses itself in violence: When its practitioners face the inevitable retaliation, their response always is to ratchet it up another notch, until the back-and-forth gets so ugly that hardly anyone can tell who is worse. This is not discourse; it's a recipe for the destruction of our democratic institutions.

[h/t Dave Neiwert/TomPaine.com]

A little history lesson

from "Last of the Mohicans," on cable tonight:

I believe if they set aside their law as and when they wish, their law no longer has rightful authority over us. All they have over us is tyranny, then. -- Jack, a militiaman

Wake up on the wrong side of the bed?

Every day for the last several decades?

Rick Perlstein (citing James Fallows)observes that Al Gore isn't the first Nobel winner to give conservatives a hissy fit.

For conservatives, everything is political war. Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, reflecting the entire world's consensus that man-made climate change is a crisis? For conservatives, that means: time to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize itself as a pathetic racket—or, as National Review's Steven F. Hayward puts it, "a once-prestigious award," now suffering its "final debasement."

It raises an interesting question. When did conservatives first begin questioning the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize? Steve Benen and James Fallows point out that would be 1964, when the Prize was won by Dr. Martin Luther King.

[. . .]

As I wrote in an essay last January (subscription only; email me at rperlstein@ourfuture.org and I'll email you a copy), conservatives "hated King's doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism." Prominent conservatives even went so far as to blame him for his own death—for didn't the doctrine of "civil disobedience" mean you got to choose the laws you followed? Strom Thurmond: "[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case." Ronald Reagan: this was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break." Civil rights? That was just a front. A have here in front of me a slim 1965 pamphlet c0-authored by Lee Edwards, a present-day fellow at the Heritage Foundation, entitled Behind the Civil Rights Mask, whose cover features King's face as a mask, hiding their true goal: "revolution."

And they go after children the same way.

Separate and unequal

Glenn Greenwald opines today on the naked corruption on display in the Telecom Immunity law winding through Congress with bipartisan support. It's designed to exempt telecoms from lawsuits spawned by violations of communications laws, committed at the behest of the NSA for the White House's domestic surveillance program.

. . . these corporations are using their vast resources to give money to key lawmakers and pay huge lobbying fees to politically
well-connected former government officials to pressure the Congress to write a new law that has no purpose other than to declare that they are immune from accountability for their lawbreaking. They're conniving, literally, to be specially exempted from the rule of law.

[. . .]

By definition, our Beltway establishment does not believe in the rule of law -- at least not for them. They are creating a completely segregated, two-track system where high Beltway officials and their corporate enablers arrogate unto themselves the power to decide when they can break the law. They are thus literally exempt from our laws, even our criminal laws, while increasingly harsh, merciless, and inflexible punishments are doled out for the poorest and least connected criminals -- who receive no consideration of any kind, let alone presidential commutations or special laws written for them by Congress retroactively rendering legal their patently criminal behavior.

The Telecom Immunity law that Congress seems well on its way to enacting is one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence yet not only that our Royal Beltway Court is corrupt and decayed at its core. It also proves that they no longer care who knows it.

This weekend, the WaPo reported allegations by former Qwest Communications CEO, Joseph P. Nacchio, that "the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal."

Per Nacchio's lawyer:

"Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request," Stern said. "When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

Granted, Nacchio is appealing convictions for insider trading, and the substance of his allegations could be suspect, but company records of the alleged Feb. 27, 2001 meeting with the NSA could easily confirm whether the NSA was working on a domestic surveillance program six months before September 11, 2001.

What will Fox News say?

Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

First Jimmy Carter, now Al Gore. Clearly, the Nobel committee is weak on defense and hates America. They don't even have a Nobel Belligerence Prize do they?

Those socialists are as crazy as Gore is.

More from the Times

Today's editorial:

Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters?

Uh, "B"?

And worse. These "leaders" are giving license for their followers to behave likewise.

“Surprise, surprise, surprise."

"That ain’t my finger, neither.”

From this morning's New York Times:

Tens of thousands of Medicare recipients have been victims of deceptive sales tactics and had claims improperly denied by private insurers that run the system’s huge new drug benefit program and offer other private insurance options encouraged by the Bush administration, a review of scores of federal audits has found.

The Road to Damascus

experience -- circa 1st century A.D. -- is what America needs: scales falling from eyes. Courtesy of Glenn Greenwald, evidence that that's happening from John Cole at Balloon Juice:

Seriously- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny state, big spending, torture, execution on demand, complete paranoia regarding the media, control over your body, denial of evolution and outright rejection of science, AND ZOMG THEY ARE GONNA MAKE US WEAR BURKHAS, all the while demanding that in order to be a good American I have to spend most of every damned day condemning half my fellow Americans as terrorist appeasers.

And that isn’t even getting into the COMPLETE and TOTAL corruption of our political processes at every level.

Follow the link above and this one. I was only vaguely aware of the Siegelman case in Alabama. The article in Time should change that for a lot of people.

Round-a-view with destiny

Slate's Fred Kaplan uses a recently released transcript of a pre-Iraq invasion conversation between President Bush and Spain's then-Prime Minister José María Aznar to give advise on picking the next president. The critical exchange is:

AZNAR: The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.

BUSH: I'm an optimist because I believe that I'm right. I'm a person at peace with myself. It was our turn to face a serious threat to peace.

Here, in three sentences, is the first lesson on how to assess the current crop of presidential candidates: Don't pick anyone who utters, or seems capable of believing, those three sentences.

"Beware the politician who sees his life as an appointment with destiny," Kaplan writes. "Ditto a president who thinks it's his 'turn' to do anything, much less to go to war and save civilization."

Amen to that.

Holding up a mirror, Pt. 2

Rick Perlstein and I seem to be on the same page. He shows how far we've come. We once welcomed the leader of the USSR with salutes and state dinners -- back when the US of A's "manliness" wasn't so easily threatened.

I'm working on an op-ed on a very similar topic: the over-the-top reaction to dissenting voices and the hair-trigger on the use of force. This atmosphere is coming from the top down. Can you tell?

A cascade of recent events showed how far things have deteriorated. At the recent B-52s concert at the Biltmore House, security guards manhandled some concert-goers in front of the stage. A prankster creating a scene at an appearance by John Kerry was dragged to the ground and tasered by campus police, as he yelled, “Don’t tase me, bro!” When another protestor (a woman) began yelling at an NRA event (according to Roll Call), members of the crowd began chanting, “Tase her! Tase her!”

And a flake like Ahmadinejad? Nuke him before he calls us names again.

But it's hi-ho, hi-ho time, so Perlstein speaks. You listen:

Bed-wetter Nation

Here's a big question that I want to start addressing in upcoming posts: what is conservative rule doing to our nation's soul? How is it rewiring our hearts and minds? What kind of damage are they doing to the American character? And can we ever recover?

[. . .]

But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.

Holding up a mirror

Reading Slate this morning, it seems this guy has a future in our office of faith-based initiatives:

Most of the papers front Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University, where he was met by protesters and an audience that was anything but friendly. Having faced lots of criticism for even inviting Ahmadinejad, Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, gave Ahmadinejad a strongly worded introduction where he said, "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." He went on to criticize several of Ahmadinejad's views, "You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated." The Iranian smiled during the introduction but then called it "an insult to the knowledge of the audience here." Ahmadinejad then "offered evidence of why he is widely admired in the developing world" as he criticized the Western world, and especially the United States, says the NYT. Everyone notes the biggest laugh of the day came when Ahmadinejad said that "in Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country."

Like others we could mention, Ahmadinejad too is not stuck in the reality-based community.