In the music biz, a popular tune that quickly becomes unpopular because it’s been played to death is said to have “high burn.” Listeners burn out due to overexposure. (The classic example is Debbie Boone’s recording of “You Light Up My Life.” I’m old, okay?)

PERRspectives Blog reports the top 10 Bush sound bites, and the administration may be setting new records for burn rate:

With the Karl Rove PlameGate scandal now in high gear, the Bush White House and the GOP leadership as usual have everyone singing the same tune. Over the last three weeks, their latest smash sound bite hit, “Don’t Prejudge An Ongoing Investigation”, has jumped to the top of the charts

Remember JibJab’s animated parody last year of Woody Guthrie’s classic “This Land is Your Land,” with new lyrics like this?

Bush: You’re a liberal sissy.
Kerry: You’re a right-wing nut-job.

Who could forget? Oh, how we laughed!

Media Matters for America just mentioned a short promotional animation they had done some time ago. I had never seen it before, but it’s chock full of right-wing nut-jobs. Check it out here.

Terrorism has been very, very good to George W. Bush. And it seems there’s an emerging international consensus that George W. Bush has been very, very good for terrorism. From Think Progress:

Three separate intelligence reports – the British intelligence agency, a Saudi intelligence analysis, and an Israeli report – contradict Bush’s view that we have to “defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.” The emerging consensus is that the occupation of Iraq is inspiring people around the world to join the ranks of the terrorists.

Think Progress also takes a nostalgic look back at the Bush administration’s pre-war predictions that post-war reconstruction in Iraq would cost less than $2 billion. Boy, those were the good ol’ days.

Billmon is kinda over the top about right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, calling her Ilse Koch, after the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald. (I mention this to make his article easier to understand if you follow the link.) But he reads that Coulter has reservations about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, and that gives him an idea:

Since the guy is probably going to be confirmed anyway, maybe the Dems should praise him instead of slamming him. Talk about his tolerance and his respect for diversity. Congratulate Bush for picking such a moderate, fair-minded jurist — one who has already testified that Roe v Wade is “settled law.” Tell the world they’re overjoyed the president selected a nominee who can reach across the partisan divide, instead of some extremist skin job with a radical religious agenda. Smother Roberts in some hot, juicy Demo love.

Say that kind of stuff often and loud enough, and it might plant some seeds of doubt in those tiny wing-nut minds: “If the filthy ’rats like him so much, he mus’ be some kinda librul.”

Who knows? If enough of the “base” starts talking like [Ann Coulter], it might even force Roberts and his GOP support team to drop the warm and cuddly spin, and demonstrate just how much of a hardliner the guy really is — thereby stripping some of the radar cloaking off the Stealth nominee. But frantic efforts to polish up Roberts’s ultaright credentials might further feed wing nut paranoia about the guy: “If he’s one of us, how come they gotta keep defendin’ him alla time? And why don’ his forehead slope down like ourn?”

Animated political thriller from Mark Fiore: Double Super-Secret Background.

You will believe a man can lie.

Media Matters lists top Supreme Court myths, falsehoods and distortions, and debunks each of them. The following is only a listing. Go to the site to see how to challenge each of these claims:

Since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement from the Supreme Court on July 1, conservatives have formulated or resurrected numerous false and misleading claims about the high court, which some in the media have all too willingly repeated without challenge. With President Bush’s anticipated nomination announcement later today, some of these claims are sure to resurface, and Media Matters for America will be on the lookout for new “Supreme distortions” that will undoubtedly emerge.

1. Robert Bork was “smeared” when he was nominated for the Supreme Court…
2. Democrats will oppose any nominee President Bush picks…
3. In questioning nominees, Democrats will treat them with disrespect and hostility…
4. Roe v. Wade is not threatened by O’Connor’s retirement…
5. Democrats should follow “Ginsburg precedent” by accepting a Bush nominee despite significant ideological differences…
6. Democrats are divided on whether ideology constitutes an “extraordinary circumstance” under Senate agreement on filibusters…
7. Bush favors conservatives who will strictly interpret the law over judicial activists who legislate from the bench…

There are some things you just can’t get from a book.

Magazines like Life and Look ran huge, beautiful photo spreads when Apollo 8, the first manned journey to the moon, brought back pictures like this.

We’ve all seen these photos. The images are so familiar now that it’s hard to understand that there was a time when they were astonishing and disorienting — a time when it seemed they just might revolutionize earthbound thinking.

I’ve spent many hours gazing at those photos. They show us ourselves, from a new perspective. Yet, I think my understanding falls short. We can’t adequately grasp this view of the world by looking at photographs. To fully understand it, I think, we must see it through a window. We must see it with our own eyes.

Earthbound thinking is tough to revolutionize.

Thirty-six years ago today, human beings first touched down on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility.

Most of the world’s population today were born after the landing. A man on the moon is not a hopeful futuristic idea, but a half-forgotten historical event.

In his autobiography, Last Man on the Moon, astronaut Eugene Cernan writes:

Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time. President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s. Logic dictates that after Mercury and Gemini, we should have proceeded to build the shuttle, then an orbiting space station, and only then sought the Moon. As it was, we accomplished the impossible, then started over again.

Here are lunar panoramas and photographs from the Apollo missions.

Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter:

Like a lot of President Bush’s critics, I supported the Iraq war at first. Because of the evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction laid out by Colin Powell, I agreed that we needed to disarm Saddam Hussein. I even think it’s possible that 25 years from now, historians will conclude that the Iraq war helped accelerate the modernizing of the Middle East, even if it doesn’t fully democratize it.

But if that happens, Bush might not get as much credit as he hopes, and not just because most historians, as Richard Nixon liked to say, are liberals. Bush may look bad because his leadership on Iraq has been a fiasco. He didn’t plan for it: the early decisions that allowed the insurgency to get going were breathtakingly incompetent. He didn’t pay for it: Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war, this one now costing nearly $1 billion a week. And most important of all, he didn’t tell the American people the truth about it: taking a nation to war is the most solemn duty of a president, and he’d better make certain there’s no alternative and no doubt about the evidence.

Why do I mention this now? Because for all of the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, for all the questions raised about the future of investigative journalism and the fate of the most influential aide to an American president since Louis Howe served Franklin D. Roosevelt 70 years ago, this story is fundamentally about how easy it was to get into Iraq and how hard it will be to get out.

We got in because we “cooked” the intelligence, then hyped it. That’s why the “Downing Street Memo” is not a smoking gun but a big “duh.” For two years we’ve known that senior White House officials were determined to, in the words of the British intelligence memo, “fix” the intelligence to suit their policy decisions. When someone crossed them, they would “fix” him, too, as career ambassador Joseph Wilson found when he came back from Africa with a report that threw cold water on the story that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.

…

The bigger question is what this scandal does to the CIA’s ability to develop essential “humint” (human intelligence). Here’s where the Iraq war comes in again. The sooner we beef up our intelligence, the sooner we crack the insurgency and get to bring our troops home. What does it say to the people doing the painstaking work of building those spy networks when the identity of one of their own becomes just another weapon in the partisan wars of Washington? For a smart guy, Karl Rove was awfully stupid.

Carl Bernstein on the Daily Show:

Now, everything has become part of an ideological war, and more energy and thought is going into that ideological war — against the Democrats particularly, but some of it comes back the other way — than into fighting terrorists.

I mean, really, they’re so far off the ball in what the real game is at this point. It is about destroying the other side, and serving the country has become incidental.

Annie Lamott:

It’s a fairly common saying among sober alcoholics that the reason they finally quit drinking was that, by the end, they were getting sicker faster than they could lower their standards.

Annie’s piece recalls a scene that runs through Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, slowly revealed. One character tries to help a wounded comrade and realizes, in an utterly harrowing moment, that things are much worse than they seem. (If you’ve read the book, you will remember the scene.)

[T]here were so many revelations and so much brilliant writing this weekend, that you could’t help but think that this nation is just beginning to notice the [first evidence that things are much worse than they seem.]

Ed Kilgore on the Irresponsibility Era:

Recall George W. Bush’s meta-message during the 2000 campaign: it was time for a “responsibility era” to rein in the excesses introduced by the out-of-control Baby Boomer Bill Clinton. The grown-ups, emblemized by Dick Cheney and other Bush 41 exiles, were ready to give America a mature and accountable government.

That has turned out to be the biggest Bush lie of them all.

With precious few exceptions, this administration has been characterized by a recklessness and irresponsibility that could barely have been matched if the country had been turned over to actual adolescents.

The Swing State Project has a DNC press release about the record of the Republican smear machine. The following is only a summary. Lots more details are at the Swing State Project site. (I couldn’t find this press release on the DNC site.)

THE REPUBLICAN SMEAR MACHINE CONSTANTLY IN MOTION

Republicans follow a tried and true tactic of attacking, smearing, and sliming anyone who might get in their way or threaten their political survival. Their ongoing effort to discredit Joe Wilson and their destruction of his wife’s career is just the latest in a long line of questionable tactics that the Bush Administration, Karl Rove, and Ken Mehlman consistently use to protect themselves and ensure their continued political power.

ARMY CHIEF OF STAFF PUNISHED FOR TROOP LEVEL ASSESSMENT

Shinseki Punished For Honest Assessment Of Troop Levels Needed In Iraq; Retribution Intimidated Commanders…

FORMER COUNTER-TERRORISM CHIEF SMEARED FOR CRITICISMS

Richard Clarke Smeared After Talking About White House Lackadaisical Attitude Towards Al-Qaeda…

TREASURY SECRETARY FIRED FOR OPPOSITION TO TAX CUTS

O’Neill Fired For Expressing Misgivings Over Bush’s Additional Tax Cuts…

ECONOMIC ADVISER FORCED TO RESIGN

Lindsey Forced to Resign After Citing Large Cost of Iraq War. White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey annoyed the White House in September 2002 when he suggested that war with Iraq would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion, an estimate Administration officials insisted was too high…

ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS DIRECTOR FIRED FOR BUDGET CRITICISM…

PARK POLICE CHIEF FIRED FOR CRITICM OF BUSH POLICY…

REPORTER SMEARED FOR REPORTING ON TROOP MORALE

ABC News Reporter Smeared By Bush Administration For Documenting Low Troop Morale…

INS AGENTS DEMOTED FOR POINTING OUT LAX SECURITY…

Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Agents Mark Hall and Robert Linderman were demoted from their positions after they told reporters that United States security at Canadian borders was lax…

Smears, demotions, firings. This administration rewards failure and punishes competence and truth-telling.

In furtherance of a White House smear, Karl Rove leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent, and Bush is “moving the goalposts” so Rove can stay. Josh Marshall wants more specificity:

My first question is whether the rule applies merely to indictment or whether conviction is necessary to trigger dismissal. And as I mentioned on TPM, can a staffer continue to work while their case is taken up on appeal?

Oh, they’ll keep moving the goalposts, as needed. That’s a fundamental part of this administration’s M.O.

Tom Tomorrow poses a simple question for Rove’s defenders:

If everything he did was aboveboard and beyond reproach, why has the administration consistently lied about it for two years?

Richard Clarke, formerly the U.S. government’s top anti-terror expert, talks about the Bush Administration on the Al Franken Show:

What they’re saying is, anybody who wants to ask analytical questions is a Democrat, and is trying to subvert the president, and is unpatriotic, and is a liberal. And probably, gave money to MoveOn.org. That’s what they say. They just won’t discuss, they won’t debate on the facts.

…

You just ask questions, and they smear you.

(Poster swiped (with permission) from the Propaganda Remix Project. Much more at the site.)

This post at Think Progress details how to shoot down Rovegate lies.

Why so many outrageous lies from the right in Rovegate? Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant knows the answer, and explained it on the Al Franken Show:

Modern right wing propaganda, and here I’m using my words carefully, is based on the headline value of assertion as opposed to the lasting value of evidence. And they have learned that they can say anything, and unfortunately, given today’s journalism, it’ll get reported.

From a recent email message:

The root crime here is not the Karl Rove leak story.

The root crime is that a President of the United States lied in an official address to the nation about the necessity of going to war.

I can’t currently imagine a higher crime. Oh,............. except for lying about being unfaithful to your wife.

Josh Marshall on the real cover-up:

The entire Wilson/Plame story and the Rove/White House criminal probe sub-story are just so many threads thrown off a much larger and more consquential ball of yarn: the administration’s use of fraudulent evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program to seal the deal for war on Iraq with the American people.

That’s where the real cover up is. These are just side stories. So why not cut to the chase and have a real investigation to get to the bottom of that?

Tom Tomorrow on attack dog Sean Hannity:

As I sit here on a sweltering July day, listening to Sean Hannity run through all the Republican talking points over and over again--no crime was committed, she wasn’t even a covert op, Joe Wilson is the real villain here, blah blah blah--I am transported back in time a few years…

[T]his is when I first become aware of Hannity as a radio personality, listening to him on WABC that summer in my sweltering loft space. The big story of the summer concerns several New York City police officers, including Justin Volpe, who are accused of sodomizing a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima with a broom handle, and day after day, Hannity defends Volpe and attacks Louima--regularly referring to the latter as “Lyin’ Louima.”

Except as it turns out, Lyin’ Louima is telling the truth and Justin Volpe and the others go to jail.

And Sean Hannity drops the topic like a burning hot potato.

So whenever I hear him ranting on like this, trying to restructure his audience’s perception of reality so that the obviously guilty party is pure as the driven snow, and the obvious victim actually dirty as sin, I think back to the days of Lyin’ Louima, and wonder--why does anyone listen to this moron? Is there anything any of these guys can get so wrong that their audience will even notice?

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow presents The Republican Guide to Successful Supreme Court Nominations. (Rated ‘R’ for strong language.)

Josh Marshall on the Rove methodology:

Now we can see in full view what we’ve seen again and again in recent years, the favored tactic: terror by grand moral inversion, the lie so total and audacious that it almost knocks opponents off their feet.

John Kerry decorated war hero? No, coward and showboat.

We noted yesterday the great article by Josh Green in the Atlantic last year in which Josh chronicled the tactic as Rove practiced it in races he ran down in Alabama in the 1990s. In one state supreme court race his candidate went up against an opponent who’d developed an impeccable reputation on child welfare issues (he was a former family court judge). Once you understand the pattern, the strategy suggests itself. Rove orchestrated a whispering campaign to spread the word that the man was a pedophile. Like I said, audacious.

And so here now. Wilson, a whistleblower administration officials were trying to punish? A whistleblower calling out White House manipulated intelligence during the lead-up to war?

Not at all. Rove was the whistleblower trying to knock down a campaign of disinformation from Joe Wilson. The audacity of it is enough to knock some people off their feet. Like I said, terror by grand moral inversion.

That is precisely the Rove technique.

It’s time for a thorough airing out of Rove’s career — the Swift Boat attacks, the whispering campaigns, including the lies about John McCain in South Carolina, even the “bug” planted in Rove’s office during one early campaign.

Usually, when one of these stories is discussed, people shrug it off. Politics is a nasty business, and sometimes the practitioners get into the gutter. No big surprise.

It is only when you see the entirety of Rove’s career that you really understand just what Rove is. Understanding that, you start to understand something about the people who hire him. That’s not good for Rove, it’s not good for Bush, and it’s not good for the Republicans now promoting the Rove line.

Time for the whole story.

While we await the launch of the Return to Flight mission of space shuttle Discovery, here is a moving essay on the people who fly these ships. On the final flight of the shuttle Columbia:

Perhaps ten minutes before eight am on Saturday morning, Rick Husband and Willie McCool started to pay attention to the data coming from the left wing sensors. It was 30 degrees warmer than normal in the left wheel well. Not much, considering the 2-3000 degrees on the leading edge of their wings and nose, but something to pay attention to. Anomalies are never good. There are no pleasant surprises in the flying business.

By 7:55 things were looking worse – a lot worse. Unbenownst to the crew, telemetry beamed to the ground showed that readings from the heat sensors in the left wing started to rise, and then dropped to zero. They were failing, in a pattern expanding away from the left wheel well. Tire pressures were way high on the left side, and then those sensors failed too.

Sensors fail all the time. But this was different. This was a pattern, and it was spreading. And something was starting to pull the ship to the left.

I don’t know the words he used, but I can hear the tone perfectly in my head, because it’s exactly the same tone I’ve heard dozens of times on cockpit voice recorders. It’s concern. Alarm, even. But it’s cool. Disciplined.

All right, we’ve got a problem here...

It’s a long piece, well worth reading.

At TPMCafe, a retired CIA officer talks about the damage done in exposing Valerie Plame:

Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover — in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport — i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.

A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.

The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O’Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.

The Republicans now want to hide behind the legalism that “no laws were broken”. I don’t know if a man made law was broken but an ethical and moral code was breached. For the first time a group of partisan political operatives publically identified a CIA NOC. They have set a precendent that the next group of political hacks may feel free to violate.

The Bush Administration knows all about the Higher Law. That’s the law they make up as they go along, to suit their convenience.

Yesterday, Al Franken quoted The Note from ABC News:

Whatever else one thinks, these facts are not in dispute:

1. Rove’s attorney has acknowledged that Rove talked about Valerie Plame with Matt Cooper, without mentioning her name, days before the Novak column appeared.
2. Rove (and Rove via McClellan) has repeatedly suggested that he had nothing to do with this story at all.
3. The White House has suggested that any person found to have anything to do with the improper leaking of Wilson’s name to the press would be fired.

From this, Franken arrived at the following conclusion:

So we now know that, according to their own rules, they gotta fire him. They gotta fire him. They got to fire him.

Franken is a very smart guy. I’m surprised that he has somehow missed the fact that these Republicans change the rules at will.

Marshall Wittman says Rove isn’t going anywhere:

Democrats should not get too excited about the presumed crisis confronting Rove. Short of a criminal indictment, Rove is not going anywhere. As I wrote in my blog this morning, for Bush to get rid of Rove, would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen.

…

Rove is the nerve center of today’s Republican Party. The White House is already lowering the bar for punishment in the Plame case. Unless, the prosecutor has the goods on Karl, he stays. The President and the GOP has no choice. Rove is the closest in Washington to the indispensable man.

Many critics of the Bush Administration speculate that Bush is little more than a figurehead, and that Vice President Dick Cheney is really in charge. But it may be Rove who really pulls the strings. Former Bush Administration official John DiIulio has said this administration is all politics, all the time:

“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” says DiIulio. “What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

…

“I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions,” he writes. “There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff.”

Rove, Bush’s political mastermind, exposed a covert CIA operative specializing in WMDs, endangering the lives of the operative and her sources in other countries, and damaging the nation’s intelligence-gathering abilities on WMDs. Rove did this to undercut a critic of Bush war policies. Nevertheless, Rove will be keeping his high-level government job.

If Democratic leaders can’t get the electorate riled about this, they ought to find another line of work.

Bill Moyers is back on PBS!

I hope there will be repeat showings, because I missed it tonight. I don’t intend to miss it again.

Via Backup Brain: While My Ukulele Gently Weeps. The hosting site is called College Humor, but this is no joke.

Are they letting Jeff Gannon back into the White House press briefings again?

QUESTION: Considering the widespread interest and the absolutely frantic Democrat reaction to Karl Rove’s excellent speech to conservatives last month, does the president hope that Karl will give a lot more speeches?

Josh Marshall raises an interesting question:

I’m curious whether today’s fireworks on the Rove/Plame matter will resurrect any more serious interest in the whole underlying issue of who forged those phoney Niger uranium documents or whether there will be more searching scrutiny into that paste-up job that was last year’s Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on Iraq intel.

As I’ve discussed at various points at TPM, the FBI has gone out of its way not to do any serious investigation into where these documents came from. The interviews they conducted in Italy were cursory. And when the man who actually peddled the documents to the Italian journalist was named publicly in several European papers, they still made no attempt to interview him — even when we brought him to the US under his own name, twice.

Dare we hope that we’ll soon see the unraveling of the whole web of Rove and Pals’ lies and dirty tricks?

Last Friday on the NewsHour on PBS, conservative columnist David Brooks tried to offer an innocent explanation for why a highly-placed White House source blew the cover of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame:

I’ve got an alternate story line, which was if somebody asked the people in the White House, why is this guy Wilson who writes for the Nation Magazine working for the Bush administration, and somebody says, oh, I hear his wife works at CIA; she led us to him. And that’s not a crime; that’s totally innocent. I think that’s an alternate explanation of why they mentioned this woman, Valerie Plame.

There’s a problem with this alternate story line. The exposure of Valerie Plame was not a careless offhand remark. White House officials had been “shopping the story” for a while, looking for a reporter to print it. It was no accident.

Today, according to Talking Points Memo, the White House wants to clam up on the case. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said:

This is an ongoing investigation at this point. The President directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, that means we’re not going to be commenting on it while it is ongoing.

But, apparently, someone managed to sneak a spine into the press room. One reporter reacting to a later McClellan evasion:

It’s not an answer. And you were perfectly willing to comment from that podium while the investigation was going on, and try to clear Karl Rove. Why the double standard? Why were you willing to say Karl Rove was not involved when -- and talk at length about it, when the investigation was going on, and now that he’s been caught red-handed, all of a sudden you’ve got a new line?

I’m guessing we’ll soon see new security procedures for the White House press corps. Backbones and guts must be left at the door.

From Media Matters, Rush Limbaugh answers Bush’s call to “tone down the rhetoric”:

I’m tired of these Democrats acting like they won the election. Somebody needs to stand up and say, “When you win the election, you pick the nominees. Until then, shut up! Just shut up! Just go away! Bury yourselves in your rat holes and don’t come out until you win an election. When you win an election, you can put all these socialist wackos, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, all over the court, but until then, SHUT UP! You are really irritating me.”

Gosh… sorry, Rush. We didn’t know.

From Media Matters for America, Fox’s Gibson on “golden opportunity” missed:

The day before the July 7 terrorist attacks on London buses and subways, Fox News host John Gibson stated that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) “missed a golden opportunity” because, if France had been selected to host the 2012 Olympics, terrorists would “blow up Paris, and who cares?” Following the London attacks, Gibson reiterated that the IOC ought to have selected Paris instead of London, because the British should “let somebody else be worried about guys with backpack bombs for a while.”

Brit Hume’s first thought on hearing of the terrorist attacks in London:

During Fox News’ coverage of the July 7 London bombings, Washington managing editor Brit Hume told host Shepard Smith that his “first thought,” when he “heard there had been this attack” and saw the low futures market, was “Hmmm, time to buy.”

Brian Kilmeade and Stuart Varney saw a bright side to the terrorist attacks coming during the G8 summit:

It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.

From Talking Points Memo:

You may well have read it already. But if not I want to call your attention to the statement today of Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London. It ripples with all the unadorned democratic resolution and humanity the moment calls for, with none of the puffery and obfuscation and lies that will drag us all, eventually, into the pit…

I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.

That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith — it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee, that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city.

Tony Blair:

When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated.

When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.

When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm.

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

—Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

I visited England in May 2001, and spent two days in London. The people I met throughout England were some of the nicest people I had ever met, anywhere.

London took me by surprise, at first. Most places I visited had a relaxed small-town feel to them. London was a fast-paced, bustling, big city — one of the great capitals of the world. In the Tube, the London subway, I saw faces and heard voices from all around the world. I’d love to go back.

Hearing today’s news, my thoughts and prayers are with the people of London, and all of England.

In our thoughts and prayers, let’s remember someone else, too. According to this chart, 600 Iraqi civilians were “killed by warfare” in May. The chart doesn’t say how many were the deliberate victims of terrorist tactics like suicide bombs, or how many were “collateral damage” in the war. The chart does observe that the “average number of insurgent attacks per day” in May was 70.

I’m not making a political statement here, or minimizing the horror that happened today in London. We must not become so accustomed to violence and so accepting of daily suffering that today’s scenes from London, little by little, become part of “the new normal.” We need to shed a tear, from time to time, for all such suffering.

After I retired last year, I borrowed and read the first four Harry Potter books. Before I’d finished reading the fourth book, I ordered the fifth from Amazon.com, and waited impatiently until it arrived.

If you dismiss the Harry Potter books as children’s literature, or if you know Harry Potter only from the movies, you’re cheating yourself of something wonderful.

The sixth book is due on July 16. I’ve had my copy on order for some time now. In anticipation, I’ve been re-reading the first five books.

Recently much was made of parallels between the plot of the latest Star Wars movie and political current events. The movie was considered critical of aspects of the Bush Administration. Director George Lucas denied that the movie was about Bush or the War in Iraq:

Lucas said that a long time ago in a galaxy far away, he had read some history and wondered why, after going to the trouble of killing Caesar, the Roman Senate turned things over to his equally power-hungry nephew, Augustus Caesar? Or that after a revolution, France turned next to Napoleon, a dictator?

That’s what fueled the entire Star Wars saga, Lucas said. “It seems to happen the same way every time: There are threats, and a democratic body, the Senate, is not able to function properly.”

So I was interested, when reading Harry Potter books published before George W. Bush became president, to see parallels to current events every bit as strong as those in the latest Star Wars movie.

For example: Dumbledore, a very good wizard, objects to the practice, at a wizard prison called Azkaban, of using dementors as guards. Dementors are cruel magical creatures that torment the souls of anyone in their power. The Minister of Magic dismisses Dumbledore’s objections as “preposterous,” and adds, “Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the dementors are standing guard at Azkaban!”

In the books, there are good wizards and evil ones, who practice Dark Magic. Aurors are wizards specially trained to fight against Dark Magic. Voldemort, the worst of the Dark Wizards, led a reign of terror years before, then he mysteriously lost his powers and vanished. Most people in the magical world still fear even to speak his name. Many good wizards believe Voldemort is still alive, waiting to strike again.

The teenaged student wizards, including Harry, notice a certain mistrust between some of the adult foes of the Dark Side. One of their adult friends is talking about a senior official in the Ministry of Magic whom I’ll call John Smith, to avoid giving away too much of the story:

“He’s a great wizard, John Smith, powerful, magical — and power-hungry. Oh never a Voldemort supporter,” he said, reading the look on Harry’s face. “No, John Smith was always very outspoken against the Dark Side. But then a lot of people who were against the Dark Side… well, you wouldn’t understand… you’re too young….”

The teenagers complain, saying, “Try us, why don’t you?” So their friend takes them back to the peak of Voldemort’s power:

“You don’t know who his supporters are, you don’t know who’s working for him and who isn’t; you know he can control people so that they do terrible things without being able to stop themselves. You’re scared for yourself, and your family, and your friends. Every week, news comes of more deaths, more disappearances, more torturing…”

He continues:

“Well, times like that bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. Smith’s principles might’ve been good in the beginning — I wouldn’t know. He rose quickly through the Ministry, and he started ordering very harsh measures against Voldemort’s supporters. The Aurors were given new powers — powers to kill rather than capture, for instance. [Some suspects were] handed straight to the dementors without trial. Smith fought violence with violence[…] I would say he became as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark Side. He had his supporters, mind you — plenty of people thought he was going about things the right way…”

Gosh, that sounds familiar.

Gosh, what a pal ol’ George W. Bush is:

President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair to expect no favors at this week’s Group of Eight summit of major industrialized countries in return for backing the war in Iraq. Blair, who has made tackling global warming and relieving African poverty the goals of his year-long presidency of the G-8, will host fellow leaders at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland from Wednesday to Friday.

Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen says an emergency contraceptive named Plan B may shed light on what the abortion battle is really about:

Feminist advocates have always suspected that the anti-abortion movement is less motivated by the sanctity of life than by opposition to women’s rights. The fate of Plan B could settle the issue. Emergency contraception is the ultimate middle ground in an issue in which the middle has often seemed to be a black hole. One study has estimated that if Plan B were easily available, it could cut the number of abortions by half.

Yet the American Life League, the far-right wing of the anti-abortion movement, has said the organization is opposed not only to emergency contraception, but to any oral contraceptives or IUDs because they constitute “early abortions.” In Colorado, rape victims aren’t even told about emergency contraception in the ER. The governor, Bill Owens, said that to require hospitals to do so would raise “serious concerns” for Roman Catholics like himself, concerns more important than those of a woman carrying a rapist’s child.

…

If easy access to a pill that has been shown to significantly decrease the number of abortions is not a welcome development, what is the real point of the anti-abortion exercise? Is it to safeguard life, or to safeguard an outdated status quo in which biology was destiny and motherhood was an obligation, not an avocation? America leads the industrialized world in its abortion rate. Perhaps that is because it leads in hypocrisy as well.

In honor of Independence Day, here’s a rerun of an earlier blog entry. I’ve modified it a little, so I guess this is the “director’s cut”:

On July 2, 1776, representatives of 13 British colonies met in Philadelphia as the Second Continental Congress and declared their independence from England.

So why do Americans celebrate Independence Day on the 4^th of July, and not the 2^nd?

On July 4, the Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. They knew that they were taking a large and dangerous step, splitting from the mother country. They felt that they should justify their actions.

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another… a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

We celebrate the 4^th of July because the founders took the time to explain themselves, and in doing so, gave birth not only to a new nation, but a new kind of nation, based not on territory or ethnicity, but on an idea.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed…

Nowadays in Washington, D.C., “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” is considered a sign of weakness. Here’s what President Bush said in an interview in the Washington Post on November 18, 2002:

I’m the commander. See, I don’t need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

Discussion topic: how have our leaders advanced since the days of the country’s birth?

Media Matters for America observes that Fox News’ “Supreme Court Analyst” C. Boyden Gray is founder of a group lobbying for the Bush nominees:

Fox News featured extended commentary by C. Boyden Gray in its initial coverage of the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, identifying Gray as a “Fox Supreme Court Analyst.” But how can Fox News hire as a “Supreme Court analyst” someone who also founded the Committee For Justice — a group committed to ensuring the confirmation of President Bush’s judicial nominees — without disclosing the conflict to its viewers?

Uh… lack of journalistic integrity?

Before George W. Bush’s Iraq speech last Tuesday, I was challenged to a drinking game: every time Bush mentioned 9/11, I should down a shot of tequila.

Children, listen to me: don’t engage in any recreational activity designed to destroy your brain cells. You’ll wind up getting the strangest ideas. Like this:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has argued that the United States is not bound by international law and dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “quaint.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting in one case, said “due process requires nothing more than a good-faith executive determination.”

Republicans in Congress briefly changed their own party rules to let Tom DeLay keep his job as Majority Leader even if he was indicted for a crime. They also tried to change Ethics Committee rules to protect DeLay and other members accused of ethical violations. Republican Senate leader Bill Frist developed a plan to overturn inconvenient Senate rules by dictate of the Vice President. In a newspaper interview, DeLay griped about the very existence of judicial review, the right to privacy, and separation of church and state.

I can’t say they believe in no law whatsoever. They have repeatedly stepped into some of most personal and private activities and decisions of other human beings. But they clearly like to keep themselves beyond the reach of any law.

It reminds me of the famous line of occultist Aleister Crowley: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Uh, have we been wrong all this time about which religion the religious right follows?

See, children? Crazy talk! If you must play drinking games during President Bush’s speeches, try this one: down a shot of tequila every time Bush tells the truth. You’ll be surprised how little brain damage you will suffer.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

The president has no one to blame but himself. The color-coded terror alerts, the repeated John Ashcroft press conferences announcing imminent Armageddon during election season, the endless exploitation of 9/11 have all taken their numbing toll. Fear itself is the emotional card Mr. Bush chose to overplay, and when he plays it now, he is the boy who cried wolf.

In the original story, the boy cries wolf because he thinks it’s funny. In the current version of the story, Bush and Company cry wolf because they think there’s a political profit to be made. The real crime of both is that their lies dull our preparedness by blurring this important truth: there are wolves out there.

Got music playing in iTunes while I work. Up comes “Wichita Lineman,” written by Jimmy Webb and sung by Glen Campbell. Stopped working, in awe.

“And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time”

Damn. That may be the single finest line ever written in any song.

If I didn’t know he doesn’t read, I would almost swear that President Bush has been reading popular books on business leadership. That could explain where he’s picked up the mantra “Do More With Less.” But in the absence of innovative ideas for specific ways to get more results from limited resources, the mantra is really just a nice item to add to a magical wish list.

Jonathan Chait considers why Bush won’t send more troops:

Virtually every independent analyst who does not want to withdraw from Iraq thinks we need more troops in order to win. Republicans at the Weekly Standard have said this. Democrats such as Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware have said this. The troops themselves say this, incessantly. A dearth of boots on the ground results in such predicaments as an inability to patrol the border where enemy fighters are swarming in, or the need to repeatedly fight for the same towns, which we lack the forces to occupy continuously.

But President Bush doesn’t think we need more soldiers. Comically, he also insists that in not sending more troops he is merely obeying the wishes of the “commanders on the ground.”

…

Given that the president obviously wants to win the war, what is his motivation for shortchanging the number of troops? It appears to be a combination of partisanship and genuine ideological fanaticism.

…

Bush’s continued stubbornness probably derives from a refusal to admit a mistake. If we need more troops now, that implies we needed more troops all along, which means that if the war ends badly, Bush must have made a colossal mistake. It’s characteristic of this administration that it would rather reduce the chances of being blamed for a national catastrophe than reduce the chances of the catastrophe happening in the first place.

Oakland, California evicts two businesses to make way for private developers:

Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling approving a Connecticut city’s plan to take private land by eminent domain may seem far away.

But to John Revelli, whose family has operated a tire shop near downtown Oakland for decades, the implications hit home on Friday.

A team of contractors hired by the city of Oakland packed the contents of his small auto shop in a moving van and evicted Revelli from the property his family has owned since 1949.

“I have the perfect location; my customers who work downtown can drop off their cars and walk back here,” said Revelli, 65, pointing at the nearby high- rises. “The city is taking it all away from me to give someone else. It’s not fair.”

The city of Oakland, using eminent domain, seized Revelli Tire and the adjacent property, owner-operated Autohouse, on 20th Street between Telegraph and San Pablo avenues on Friday and evicted the longtime property owners, who have refused to sell to clear the way for a large housing development.

Ah, progress!

Via Numeralist, here’s Baghdad Dick.

I now inform you that you are too far from reality. —Baghdad Bob

Update: A few minutes after posting this entry, I found additional material in the same vein on PERRspectives Blog.

While President Bush’s statements on Iraq have entered the realm of the hallucinatory, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chutzpah and mendacity in the just the last few weeks hasn’t gone unnoticed, either.

Via Hetty Litjens: Feeling betrayed by his party, one Republican has had enough:

I still believe in the vast power of markets to inspire ideas, motivate solutions and eliminate waste. I still believe in international vigilance and a strong defense, because this world will always be home to people who will avidly seek to take or destroy what we have built as a nation. I still believe in the protection of individuals and businesses from the influence and expense of an over-involved government. I still believe in the hand-in-hand concepts of separation of church and state and absolute freedom to worship, in the rights of the states to govern themselves without undo federal interference, and in the host of other things that defined me as a Republican.

My problem is this: I believe in principles and ideals which my party has systematically discarded in the last 10 years.

…

Enough is enough. I quit.

Q: Why do firemen wear heavy-duty suspenders?

A: To hold their pants up. Each fire fighter wears and carries 59 to 130 pounds of gear.

See this New York Times story on the burden of saving lives:

Last week, the [New York City fire department] announced plans to outfit fire-fighters with a new state-of-the-art escape system, including steel hooks, Kevlar ropes and a modified rock-climbing device to slow firefighters’ descent.

The kit weighs about six pounds, including a harness that wraps around the hips and legs, and is worn at all times, since there is no time to put it on in an emergency.

Six more pounds may seem a minor inconvenience for a lifesaving system designed to get firefighters out of a building in under 10 seconds. But the weight will be added to an already cumbersome array of protective clothing and gear that has grown heavier in recent years and is worn in extreme heat. Officials say they will affix the rope device to the harness in a pouch, with the weight balanced, but still may have to issue stronger suspenders for the pants.

Click the link labeled “Specialized firefighting equipment” for photos and more details.

This is bad news:

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court, announced today that she is resigning, setting off what is expected to be a tumultuous fight over confirming her successor.

Justice O’Connor, 75, is widely viewed as the critical swing vote on abortion, affirmative action and other hot-button issues that have divided the court, and her departure is sure to ignite a passionate ideological battle throughout the summer.

There were rumors that O’Connor joined the execrable 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, making George W. Bush president by stopping the counting of actual ballots cast by actual voters, because she wanted to retire, and wanted a Republican president to name her successor.

I don’t know whether those rumors were true. Certainly, she didn’t retire during Bush’s first term. Maybe she felt guilty, seeing that everyone saw right through Bush v. Gore. Maybe she was appalled by the lunatic fringe ideologues Bush was appointing to federal courts.

O’Connor was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and started out as a reliable conservative vote on the Court. With the elevation of William Rehnquist to Chief Justice and the addition of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas to the Court, O’Connor has seemed less ideological, often casting the swing vote in hotly divided cases and providing the voice of sanity and reason. Her departure will be a great loss to sanity and reason, because George W. Bush will choose her replacement.

Another Scalia, another Thomas, another Rehnquist would not bode well for the Court or the country.

One friend likes to remind me that Dwight D. Eisenhower named Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, and was deeply disappointed when Warren turned out to be his own man. Maybe Bush’s nominee will disappoint Bush by being better than planned?

Sadly, I don’t think so. The Republicans have gotten really good at the art of the ideological litmus test. Scalia and Thomas are two examples. They’re the two justices George W. Bush admires most. Bush’s nominee will help shape the Court, the law, and the nation for twenty to thirty years to come. I see dark days ahead.