Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come on, man.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The words do not have to be perfect.

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Not all heroes wear capes.

I was promised a recession.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Please don’t feed the bears.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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Archives for September 2006

Groundhog Day

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I can’t be the only person who, when turning on the news, feels like it is Groundhog Day. Take a look at what has been going over the newswires in the last few days:

1.) Bush and some crazy Middle Eastern dictator are having verbal spats, scaring the shit out of anyone with a brain and arousing Michael Ledeen and a few people excited about the ‘Rapture.’
2.) Radical Clerics in the Middle East are fomenting violence and having their followers burn churches because someone suggested (or may have seemed to suggest) that Islam is a violent religion.
3.) The Dixie Chicks have pissed someone off.
4.) Bill Maher is arguing with a network about what he can and can not say.
5.) We are STILL debating whether torture is bad.
6.) Iraq is a bloody mess, and there will be no troop cuts this year.
7.) The Pirates suck.
8.) Lobbyists for corporations are still having their way with the taxpayer, courtesy of a corrupt legislative process and crooked pols.
9.) We are still flying the space shuttle (the NASA equivalent of the Corvair), and lo and behold- we are worried that shit is falling off or hitting it midflight and we might kill some more scientists.

I feel like Bill Murray- except I just get fat when I gorge on pastries and I don’t get to hit on Andie McDowell every day.

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Your Civil War Checklist

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Step 3: Citizens form competing governments. From an NPR story this morning:

Saddam Hussein’s trial in Baghdad was disrupted when a witness wore a lapel pin with the image of the Kurdish, rather than the Iraqi flag. The flag issue has taken on greater importance in Iraq since Sept. 1. That’s when Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s Kurdish region, banned the flying of the Iraqi flag at government buildings.

No transcript yet, so listen to the whole thing. It is perfectly understandable that the Kurds would resist hanging a flag which features Saddam’s personal handwriting. However the flag issue represents something much more significant. Since 1991 Iraqi Kurdistan has developed into practically its own country with a shadow government and passport checks at the border with Iraq proper. The Kurds plan a referendum next year in Kirkuk over its allegiance to Iraq or Kurdistan, but have promised to begin oil exploration beforehand as if the referendum has already been decided. These displays of separatism will become increasingly intolerable for the Iraqi central government. Even more than the Shiite-Sunni problem Kurdish resitveness may spark the first major act in the potential breakup of the Iraqi state.

However, whatever problems Kurdistan has right now the mess in the Sunni-Shiite regions, and particularly in Sarajevo Baghdad, make Kurdistan look like a Swedish day spa. Steve Benen summarizes the latest. If Iraq has any good news at the moment it is keeping a very low profile.

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Worst. Majority. Leader. Ever.

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Bill Frist only hates filibusters some of the time.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist signaled yesterday that he and other White House allies will filibuster a bill dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of detainees if they cannot persuade a rival group of Republicans to rewrite key provisions opposed by President Bush.

Frist’s chief of staff, Eric M. Ueland, called the dissidents’ bill “dead.”

[…] The sharp rhetoric of last week was replaced yesterday by softer language from both the Bush administration and the three Republican senators leading the opposition to its proposals: Warner, John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).

But Frist struck a more jarring tone, telling reporters that the trio’s bill is unacceptable despite its majority support.

[…] The disagreement centers on the Geneva Conventions, which say wartime detainees must be “treated humanely.” Bush backs language saying the United States complies so long as CIA interrogators abide by a 2005 law barring “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of captives. Warner and his allies say they are concerned that Bush’s approach would invite nations to interpret the Geneva Conventions in lax ways that could lead to abusive treatment of captured U.S. troops.

The Warner contingent also opposes Bush’s bid to allow detainees to be convicted on secret evidence they are not allowed to see.

Observers have been biting nails for weeks over whether the McCain-Graham-Warner trio would knockle under to pressure and present some watered-down “compromise” that gives the president ninety-five percent of what he wants. Many observers have speculated that the entire kabuki exercise is designed to produce just that result. As Anonymous Liberal points out in the link this is still a bill written by very conservative Republicans. That the president cannot accept the bill’s meager intrusion on unitary executive rights does not by itself make the legislation good. Rather we should leave our code of conduct exactly where it has stood through the existential crises of the twentieth century, and anybody who has broken the law in mistreating detainees should be prepared to go to jail.

Needless to say the Democrats could not write a better result than the president’s legislation going nowhere and the half-awful “compromise” bill falling to a Republican filibuster threat. Given the state of our Republican leadership, nothing could serve America’s interests more than to put these bills off until the Democrats take one or both houses of Congress. Let Congressional hearings shine some light on the behavior of our government for the last six years and then make legislation based on informed understanding rather than our current state of half-light and demagoguery.

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The Anecdote Trap

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Attorney General Gonzales wants your ISP to keep more personal usage data:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that Congress should require Internet service providers to preserve customer records, asserting that prosecutors need them to fight child pornography.

Testifying to a Senate panel, Gonzales acknowledged the concerns of some company executives who say legislation might be overly intrusive and encroach on customers’ privacy rights. But he said the growing threat of child pornography over the Internet was too great.

“This is a problem that requires federal legislation,” Gonzales told the Senate Banking Committee. “We need information. Information helps us makes cases.”

Notice how the government wants the right to torture so they can torture terrorists (and the terrorist-adjacent). Except, once those unitary executive rules take effect there will be nothing saying that the person held incommunicado, without charges, and maybe beaten with a frayed electrical cord absolutely has to be a terrorist. As long as the president or the president’s designee deems it necessary for security your aunt Martha could find herself strapped to the waterboard. But hey, stuff happens.

So Gonzales wants the right to snoop through your and my internet usage data because… look! Child porn! The chance that the White House will sign legislation with language mandating oversight rules that make sure that these new powers are used exclusively to fight child porn of course hovers somewhere between zero and negative infinity. So let’s strip away the hoopla and spell out what the White House wants here, which is to increase the government’s ability to snoop on you for whatever reason they see fit.

If you think that the problem with America is that we are not yet enough of a surveillance state then great, phone your Congressperson and pass on your support. That also goes for Glenn Reynolds libertarians who have special dispensation to oppose everything that libertarianism used to stand for. If you don’t think highly of government surveillance then try to make your judgment without getting caught up in the smokescreen over child porn. Anecdotes make terrible policy.

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Bush’s Numbers

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Bush’s poll numbers have ‘soared’ to roughly 44%:

Amid falling gas prices and a two-week drive to highlight his administration’s efforts to fight terrorism, President Bush’s approval rating has risen to 44% in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. That’s his highest rating in a year.

The poll also showed likely voters evenly divided between Democratic and Republican candidates for Congress, 48%-48%. Among registered voters, Democrats had a 51%-42% advantage.

The results come seven weeks before closely contested elections for control of Congress. Republicans have struggled to overcome problems, including Bush’s low ratings, continuing violence in Iraq and the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

They also come as terrorism is making headlines: an alleged plot to blow up planes headed from Britain to the USA, the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and weeks of focus by Bush and other top Republicans on terrorism and whether Democrats can protect the country.

The new findings reflect “a consistent, persistent, tenacious effort to make … the Republican Party’s ability to deal with terrorism the No. 1 issue in the campaign,” said political scientist Richard Eichenberg of Tufts University, who has studied presidential job ratings during wartime. He called it “a carbon copy” of the successful 2004 playbook.

A couple quick notes-

1.) A 44% approval rating is not much to cheer about. By comparison, the Clenis™ was roughly in the high 60’s during the impeachment business. Perhaps Bush should start shopping around for some young interns.

2.) The cynic in me thinks the ‘leap’ in his numbers has more to do with a drop in gas prices than anything else.

3.) I think voter apathy with the GOP, to include the widespread disillusionment within the ranks of the former ardent supporters (yours truly included), and the inevitable hard campaigning from the Democrats will make this a bad year for the GOP. Or so I hope. We need some time in the wilderness and we need to get rid of the crazies currently running the show.

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