Impeccable timing

Not foreseeing the disaster on the Gulf Coast — as they famously didn't foresee the consequences of their tax cuts and their war — like the flood waters of the Mississippi Bush and the Republican majority just kept on rolling along: The big question now is whether anyone will decide to rethink the drastic reduction of funding for New Orleans flood control included in the FY 2006 budget (that would begin October 1, 2005).

Ironically, as reported in New Orleans CityBusiness three months ago, the cut means that "a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now."

Guess that's okay, since Katrina was only a Category 3 or 4 at landfall . . .

I just hope those billionaires are enjoying their tax cuts!

A Tale of Two Philosophies

Clinton: I feel your pain.
Bush: I'm a compassionate conservative.

We all know that if Bill Clinton were in office he would have been in Mississippi — TODAY.

Bush, on the other hand, is headed back to Washington (shaving two days off his vacation, where Cindy Sheehan and the Gold Star Mothers are making his life so complicated anyway) to — get this — chair a committee on What to Do.

What is the matter with this man?

I keep having these conversations with strangers in the course of daily business — arguing about the phone bill, fixing satellite TV technical problems, making credit card payments — who, when I suggest somewhat wryly that all these problems will be over when we change administrations, say: "You know THAT's right!" Or, today, "Don't even get me started!"

The common people get it.

Gentle question

Is there any connection between global warming and what's about to happen to New Orleans?

Just curious.

Déja vu all over again?

On Friday, as reported in the New York Times, there was

. . . a huge Hamas march from Jabaliya refugee camp to Beit Lahiya in the bright sun, to celebrate the supposed victory of Hamas in driving Israel out of Gaza. More than 5,000 people, including a number of young children, marched under green Hamas banners that vowed, "We will continue," carried flags that combined the Palestinian and Hamas standards and wore green Hamas baseball caps stating, "There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet."
. . .
On Friday, perhaps 500 [Hamas] men marched with antitank rockets, automatic rifles and submachine guns. The Palestinian Authority has said that militants should not carry guns in the street. Hamas marchers, unusually, did not fire their weapons into the air, even though a van with a loudspeaker played recordings of automatic weapons fire and of explosions that were described as the suicide bombings of martyrs.

New posters showed a Rambo-like masked Hamas fighter stepping on the red-tile roofs of Israeli settlement homes while small, black-clad settlers in side-curls fled in terror.

There were also many women marching, a number of them wearing full covering - swathed in black, including the hands, with slits to see through, and topped by the green Hamas caps. Some carried or led young boys and girls dressed in military uniforms, carrying plastic guns.
. . .
Ayshah Kahlout, 70, a refugee from Ashkelon, sat in the shade watching the men of Hamas march by with their guns. "I feel like ululating," she said. "I'm very happy. This is part of my land." Asked about the little children in uniform, she said, "I wish I could be pregnant again so I could bear more kids to be soldiers."

Marching militants with banners, anti-Jewish posters, uniformed youth brigades, and even a swooning woman wanting to bear children for the Cause. Scary.

Call to arms!

Consider this a call to arms (from today's Houston Chronicle):

Republicans are so concerned about DeLay's race that Vice President Dick Cheney is scheduled to attend a fundraiser for him next month.

Now, Nick Lampson is running against DeLay, and it is the duty of every red-blooded true American to see that he wins!

Revoltin' Bolton

It looks like John Bolton hasn't gained any humility from his "no recommendation" by the Senate committee, but is in fact even worse than we feared. Read Talking Points Memo and follow the links. It's pretty awful.

Optimistic thought: Surviving this administration will prove the strength of America.

Iraq's oil fields

Just wondering: How does the war in Iraq affect the worldwide oil supply (and hence our skyrocketing prices)? According to MarketWatch,

Iraq's oil exports were shut down for a time Monday because of a lack of power in the central and southern part of the country, according to the Associated Press. On Monday afternoon, officials said exports have partially resumed following the blackout, which was blamed on sabotage.
...
The "shutdown of production in Iraq is an ominous sign of just how vulnerable those supplies are to the strained Iraqi infrastructure," said commodities trader Kevin Kerr, who edits the Global Resources Trader investment letter, a service of MarketWatch, the publisher of this report.

"The deliveries of oil to the Ceyhan (Turkey) port have all but stopped due to lack of power and at this rate, there will certainly be an impact on crude supplies," said Kerr. "There really is nobody with spare capacity right now."

Just wondering . . .

Bush's Islamic Republic

I seldom find David Brooks's opinions helpful, but today he cited Peter Galbraith on the matter of Iraq's proposed constitution (Galbraith likes it) in a somewhat optimistic context. Of course, that was written before the latest cancellation by the Iraqi parliament of a vote on it.

While we wait, there's fascinating reading in Galbraith's article, "Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic," published in the New York Review of Books this month. For example,

There is, in fact, no Iraqi insurgency. There is a Sunni Arab insurgency. And it cannot win. Neither the al-Qaeda terrorists nor the former Baathists can win. Even if the US withdrew tomorrow, neither insurgents nor terrorists would be knocking down the gates to Iraq's Presidential Palace in Baghdad.

Roberts's record reviewed

People for the American Way has posted its assessment of the Roberts record, with a "do not approve" recommendation. See what you think. Link

Getting together

Rather than let the media drumbeat about a “divided Democratic Party” define us, the inside-the-beltway types, the elected Democrats, the more visible people — our leaders — instead of watching what they say or carefully saying nothing or even distancing themselves from outside-the-beltway activists, should step up and acknowledge the efforts of liberal bloggers, moveon.org, Cindy Sheehan, and yes, even Michael Moore as vital to our democracy.

Then, while they have our attention, they should go on and describe where they disagree and how and to what extent they plan to work for what the activists want to see happen.

We activists are not unreasonable — we just want to know how our concerns will be addressed.

It’s called finding common ground, and it has to happen.

Hiding behind the numbers

Newscasters and commentators expressed cautious approval this week when Mr. Bush for the first time spoke in public about the actual numbers of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — very specifically enunciating "one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four" in Iraq (make that 1,867 as of this morning), "two hundred and twenty-three" in Afghanistan.

My cynical take on this is that the administration wants us to view Cindy Sheehan's loss from their perspective: Given those numbers, what's one soldier more or less?

The lesson of Cindy Sheehan and the other Gold Star families is that every lost life is painfully personal, and we need to make sure that Mr. Bush and his admirers are never allowed to forget that, in the words of a classic Rose Maddox song,

He was some mother's darlin'
He was some mother's son;
Once he was fair and
Once he was young!
Some mother rocked him,
Her darlin' to sleep . . .

EVANGELICAL FATWA!

From today's New York Times:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson suggested on-air that American operatives assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stop his country from becoming ''a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.''

Read about it here.

Isn't this, like, against the law or something?


UPDATE: Check out this great post by Cenk Uygur, writing for Huffington's blog today. Lots of food for thought.

Democrats in disarray -- again?

As summed up very nicely by Michael Crowley, writing today for Talking Points Memo, the NYTimes and the Washington Post are publishing pieces about Democratic divisions and the DLC is doing its usual nonsense that only serves to confuse and weaken us. Link

What we really need is for Howard Dean & Joe Biden, for starters, to take a show on the road to get the Party, including the “liberal base,” to agree on a clear message that can then be delivered with the discipline we claim to want. If the so-called Washington establishment doesn't deliver the message that those of us outside the Beltway (OTB) want to hear, whose fault is that?

Us OTB Democrats, cavalierly lumped by the media into “the liberal base,” are NOT all calling for immediate pullout, as so many pundits claim to know; many of us want what Dean and Biden want — stated clearly by one of Sheehan’s Gold Star Mom supporters, who said she wants the US to send more troops and do it right, or else get out.

To that end, OTB Democrats and independents should be bombarding Howard Dean, Joe Biden, Russ Feingold (who has NOT recommended immediate pullout despite what some folks think; he has called for a “target date” — not a “date certain” as at least one pundit asserted) and others with like credibility and passion to get on the road and get us all on one message:

SEND MORE TROOPS AND CORRECT OUR STRATEGY. LISTEN TO THE GENERALS, NOT TO RUMSFELD. GET RID OF RUMSFELD, WHO HAS BOTCHED THE WHOLE OPERATION. IF THE ADMINISTRATION INSISTS ON SIMPLY “STAYING THE COURSE” WE ARE ON NOW, THEN YES, WE SHOULD GET OUT.

We got Dean elected to DNC chair by grassroots effort, now let’s help the Democratic Party choose a decent message.

Unintended consquences

Now that the evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza is about to be a done deal, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas is in an interesting pickle. Seems that Jordan and Lebanon want the Palestinians living in those countries to be repatriated to Gaza, now that Israel will no longer be there to impose entry restrictions, and Abbas does not. This is only part of the complicated story reported today in Ha'aretz.

Arabs who fled what was to become Israel during and after the 1948 war went in all directions to bordering Arab states; in most cases those states did not admit them but instead kept them in refugee camps, and the populations of those camps increased exponentially.

While planning and working for an orderly transfer of Gaza from Israel to Palestinian Authority control, Abbas has called for Lebanon and Jordan to grant these refugee populations citizenship status in their respective countries, in order to improve their living conditions, possibilities of employment, etc., and not to plan on relocating them to Gaza.

Since the Israeli settlers occupied about a third of the available land in Gaza, the joyful expectation in Gaza has been that the Palestinian population (over 1.3 million) would now have room to spread out, a vital development in such an overcrowded country. The promise of improvement in quality of life seems just about to be fulfilled.

That dream might vanish were the tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon to be relocated to Gaza.

Yet, ironically, as reported in Ha’aretz,

Any proposal for changing the status of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, which is extremely sensitive about its ethnic structure, or in Jordan, which fears becoming a second Palestinian homeland, is regarded as a threat to the host country's very existence.

Hm.

Is the "I" word relevant yet?

Can impeachment proceedings be brought against more than one person at a time, as RICO proceedings are? (And for that matter, can RICO be applied to an administration?)

Just wondering . . .

Judge Roberts's records

Somehow all his work on affirmative action done for the Reagan White House has disappeared from the Reagan archives, and no one can figure out where those papers might be. Supposedly the last ones to see them were Bush folks, come to take a look at them.

Maybe they should look in the dining room, where Hillary's billing records turned up . . .

One small step for labor . . .

Terrific piece of news for the labor movement today.

The Bushies loved to point to the Democrats in Congress as having voted against Homeland Security -- remember the famous assertion that the Democrats didn't care about America's security? -- because the Dems objected to the bill's provisions for moving employess about at will, leaving union rights behind.

Naturally the Bushies got their way with the Congress they pretty much own, but today's New York Times reports a small bump in Roughshod Road:

In a ruling on Friday night, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of Federal District Court said the rules did not "ensure collective bargaining" as required by the law that created the department. The rules were to take effect on Monday.
. . .
Judge Collyer, who was appointed by President Bush, said the 2002 law gave federal officials "extraordinary authority" to develop a personnel system without regard to many of the constraints normally imposed by Civil Service laws. But, she said, the Bush administration exceeded even the "broad authority" granted by Congress.
. . .
Under such circumstances, she said, "a deal is not a deal, a contract is not a contract, and the process of collective bargaining is a nullity."

And it appears the ruling may ultimately cut a much wider swath across federal agencies, as this was the Administration's model for future assault on long-standing labor rights.

Read the whole article here.

NARAL blew it!

UPDATE: Friday, August 12 - We hear that NARAL has pulled the ad!
_________________________________________

I was appalled by the NARAL attack ad, released this week against John Roberts. It's illogical, extremist and embarrassing.

I am wary, as I've written, but I think we should at least maintain an appearance of waiting to hear evidence before finding guilt, and hold our fire until we see how the hearings proceed. Here's what I wrote to NARAL:

As a long time supporter, I am chagrined at the decision to go on such a strong attack against Roberts before the hearings have even begun. I believe that accusing him of supporting violence against clinics is WAY over the top, and makes it harder for the rest of us to try to convince moderates to our point of view.

Are we having "civil war" yet?

Today's New York Times reports:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 10 - Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city's mayor and installed a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.

Read the whole article here.

O, lovely Irony . . .

Now we learn that the Roberts nomination is threatened by the very Righteous Fury the Administration so often seeks to soothe. Seems that the good Judge Roberts did pro bono (free) work on behalf of the gay rights movement, back in his D.C. law firm days. With his reportedly invaluable help, the matter of Romer v. Evans was settled in favor of the gay community. As reported in today's New York Times :

By a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Colorado Constitution that nullified existing civil rights protections for gay men and lesbians and also barred the passage of new antidiscrimination laws.
. . .

The White House immediately sought to reassure Judge Roberts's conservative backers, telephoning prominent leaders, including Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, but it appeared that not all of them had been convinced.

They're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore

The Brits, who already stunned the world with their rapid and effective police work following the terrorist bombings in London, now take the lead in dealing with the problem. As reported in today's New York Times:

Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday announced new deportation measures against people who foster hatred and advocate violence.
. . .

Clerics who preach hate and Web sites or book shops that sponsor violence would be targeted. Foreign nationals could be deported under the new measures.
. . .

The law would ban receiving training in terrorist techniques in Britain or abroad. A new offense of ''acts preparatory to terrorism'' would outlaw planning an attack and activities such as acquiring bomb-making instructions on the Internet.

There's no doubt that lack of integration into the host society is very much a part of the problem, but the road to resolution is sometimes littered with obstacles. On the other hand, it is necessarily a two-way street, and too often the newly arrived simply prefer not to travel it.

How to clear the way and draw them in is the next challenge for Tony Blair — and, by extension, all of us — and it really can't wait.

Meanwhile, I hope the Dutch and the French are watching. I hope we are watching, too . . .

But damn! He doesn't get to have any fun!

The New York Times today reported that

"Most of the reforms sought by the United States are well on their way to completion," said a senior administration official, speaking anonymously to avoid undercutting the rationale for the Bolton appointment. Another said that because so much had been achieved, there was little concern that Mr. Bolton's combative personality would jeopardize the agenda.

Sorry, Johnny . . .