In the Bush Administration’s notion of economic recovery, the rich get richer and the poor get more numerous:

With the Midwest leading the way, the nation’s poverty rate went up in 2004 for the fourth straight year even as the U.S. economy strengthened, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.

George W. Bush has been president for a little over four and a half years. With four straight years of increasing poverty rates, the Bush record on poverty is remarkably clear.

There is an undeclared War on Poverty.

Via Crooks and Liars: Fred Barnes, a conservative pundit and frequent Bush apologist, has assailed poor people for foolishly living in areas where disasters happen:

Fred Barnes, who supports throwing endless amounts of taxpayers’ money down the rat hole called the Iraq War, says the federal government should stop providing disaster aid to places like New Orleans when they suffer hurricane damage.

Barnes, speaking on “Special Report with Brit Hume” on Monday (August 29), said people who move into such areas should assume the risk themselves rather than expect help from Congress. He noted that earlier in the day he talked to a Republican offical who also noted that as the storm raged, “every half or hour or so, you know, there’s another billion dollars, another billion dollars the federal government’s gong to have to spend.”

This is what terrorists hope for — that fear itself becomes the weapon that kills more than the mortars or the suicide bombs:

At least 600 people have been killed in a stampede of Shia pilgrims in northern Baghdad, Iraqi officials say.

The incident happened on a bridge over the Tigris River as about one million Shias marched to a shrine for an annual religious festival.

Witnesses said panic spread because of rumours that suicide bombers were in the crowd. Many victims were crushed to death or fell in the river and drowned.

They also serve, who only sit and type.

Via Crooks and Liars: finally, some recognition for the brave keyboard kommandos who brave carpal tunnel syndrome and that awful crick you can get in your neck sometimes, and who keep up the drumbeat for George W. Bush’s Iraq Adventure even as the American people turn against it. The Kombat Keyboard Badge:

These awards are restricted to those pundits who advocate the Iraq War, but refuse to serve or have family members serve, when eligible.

Those ineligible include Michael Ledeen, who sent his daughter to work in the CPA in Baghdad, The Bushes, since their children have not taken a clear stand on Iraq, and sadly, Max Boot, who has actually been to Iraq, as has Tom Friedman.

To be eligible, one must have risked nothing to advocate the war, while advocating it [vociferously]

It's not enough, I think, not to have served or sacrificed for this war. The true keyboard kommando attacks the service and belittles the sacrifice of others.

Update: Turns out the phrase “Keyboard Kommando” is not original to me.

From time to time, this list of questions for the moral arbiters of the religious right circulates via email and in blogs. A couple representative questions from the list:

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states that he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

My uncle has a farm. He violates Leviticus 19.19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Leviticus 24.10-16) Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair, as we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Leviticus 20.14)

If you live in South Carolina, you may wish to print out the full list of questions and research the answers. The Los Angeles Times reports that a group called Christian Exodus is strategizing a Christian coup d’etat to take over your state:

… Mario DiMartino was planning more than a weekend getaway. He, his wife and three children were embarking on a pilgrimage to South Carolina.

“I want to migrate and claim the gold of the Lord,” said the 38-year-old oil company executive from Pennsylvania. “I want to replicate the statutes and the mores and the scriptures that the God of the Old Testament espoused to the world.”

DiMartino, who drove here recently to look for a new home, is a member of Christian Exodus, a movement of politically active believers who hope to establish a government based upon Christian principles.

At a time when evangelicals are exerting influence on the national political stage — having helped secure President Bush’s reelection — Christian Exodus believes that people of faith have failed to assert their moral agenda: Abortion is legal. School prayer is banned. There are limits on public displays of the Ten Commandments. Gays and lesbians can marry in Massachusetts.

Christian Exodus activists plan to take control of sheriff’s offices, city councils and school boards. Eventually, they say, they will control South Carolina. They will pass godly legislation, defying Supreme Court rulings on the separation of church and state.

“We’re going to force a constitutional crisis,” said Cory Burnell, 29, an investment advisor who founded the group in November 2003.

“If necessary,” he said, “we will secede from the union.”

If you think these people are kidding, you’re wrong. If you think there’s no need to fight them, you should probably get rid of those cotton-poly blends now.

What a surprise — the Bush-Cheney crime wave has claimed one more victim:

A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.

The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq.

…

Ms. Greenhouse’s lawyer, Michael Kohn, called the action an “obvious reprisal” for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq.

…

Known as a stickler for the rules on competition, Ms. Greenhouse initially received stellar performance ratings, Mr. Kohn said. But her reviews became negative at roughly the time she began objecting to decisions she saw as improperly favoring Kellogg Brown & Root, he said.…

Right, yeah, a buffer. The Family had a lotta buffers.

—Willy Cicci in The Godfather, Part II

On Monday, on his television program The 700 Club, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the democratically-elected president of Venezuela. On Wednesday’s edition of The 700 Club, he denied he’d said “assassination,” and said “I was misinterpreted by the AP, but that happens all the time.” Later on Wednesday, Robertson wrote on his website, “Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement.” Later on the same web page, he makes arguments to justify assassination, and closes by saying “the incredible publicity surrounding my remarks has focused our government’s attention on a growing problem which has been largely ignored.”

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Pat Robertson’s assassination tango wasn’t about Hugo Chavez or Venezuelan oil at all.

Since Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement, Robertson has made a great show of his “prayer offensive” to open three more vacancies on the Supreme Court. Because the Constitution gives Supreme Court justices lifetime tenure, there are only three ways to create a vacancy: death, resignation or impeachment. On The 700 Club, Robertson said, “We ask for miracles on the Supreme Court.”

The 700 Club is seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers. I don’t know how many of them share Robertson’s extremist religious and political views. Right now, I believe Robertson is thinking he only needs one.

In the hard religious right, there are small but significant pockets of support for people who murder doctors and bomb clinics, and a handful of people willing to carry out such crimes. By advocating assassination, and by attempting to justify assassination even as he apologizes for mentioning it, it seems Pat Robertson is trying to get a message to some of those people. If any understand and take up his coded challenge, Robertson’s protected by a lotta buffers.

Media Matters observes that Pat Robertson isn’t the only right-winger dreaming of assassination and murder.

I think they’re a little bit unfair to Bill O’Reilly, though. As creepily detailed as his imagery of decapitating Michael Kinsley is, I don’t think he’s actually advocating murder here, in contrast to the other conservatives cited.

In Iraq, American soldiers are digging through scrap yards to up-armor their military vehicles with improvised “hillbilly armor.”

On the home front, this veteran brought protective equipment of his own to a George W. Bush speech on the topic of Iraq.

Good old American ingenuity.

Some years ago, when Gary Hart was running for president, an astute observer noted that he seemed to be imitating some of John F. Kennedy’s tics and gestures on the stump. I can tell you that Gary Hart was not the only politician of his generation to adopt some of Kennedy’s mannerisms. On The Simpsons, Springfield mayor Diamond Joe Quimby didn’t start out as a caricature of the Kennedys; he started as a caricature of small-time politicians who modeled themselves on JFK.

If you see enough film of him, you can eventually see that much of Kennedy’s speaking style was in imitation of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I suspect Roosevelt borrowed something from Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, or other successful politicians of that era. We all borrow something from the people we admire. The person we become depends, in part, on our choices of from whom we borrow.

When I hear the deep resonant voice of James Earl Jones, I always hear an echo of the great actor Brock Peters, who died today. Peters’ voice could send shivers down my spine. His face could be used in a dictionary to illustrate the word “dignity.”

His most important role was probably Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. Watch it.

Wow. I thought I was being nasty yesterday, poking fun at Pat Robertson’s prayer vigil asking God to remove three Supreme Court justices. I felt a little guilty for being so mean. But now, I’m worried.

The Lord, you see, moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Sometimes that takes a while, and Pat Robertson is not always a patient man. Apparently he is adopting the doctrine that the Lord helps those who help themselves:

Pat Robertson, host of Christian Broadcasting Network’s The 700 Club and founder of the Christian Coalition of America, called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The Bush Administration says it supports democracy around the world. Chavez was democratically elected by the people of Venezuela. But Venezuela has oil, and that changes things.

John Moltz asks, “What does Pat Robertson have to do to get de-mainstreamed?” (Rated ‘R’ for strong language.)

From his HBO program Real Time, here’s Bill Maher on Intelligent Design:

New rule: You don’t have to teach both sides of a debate if one side is a load of crap.

President Bush recently suggested that public schools should teach intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution, because, after all, evolution is “just a theory.” Then the president renewed his vow to drive the terrorists straight over the edge of the earth.

…

There aren’t necessarily two sides to every issue. If there were, the Republicans would have an opposition party. And an opposition party would point out that even though there is a debate in schools and government about this, there is no debate among scientists.

Evolution is supported by the entire scientific community. Intelligent design is supported by guys on line to see The Dukes of Hazzard. And the reason there is no real debate is that intelligent design isn’t real science. It’s the equivalent of saying that the thermos keeps hot things hot and cold things cold because it’s a god.

…

“Babies come from storks” is not a competing school of thought in medical school. We shouldn’t teach both. The media shouldn’t equate both.

During the past week, civil rights leader Coretta Scott King suffered a stroke; gold star mother Cindy Sheehan had to abandon her vigil outside President Bush’s Texas hideaway when her mother suffered a stroke, and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid suffered a stroke.

What’s going on here?

Watch the news carefully over the next few weeks. If Donald Rumsfeld announces a successful Defense Department test of a new vascular disruption ray, or if Senate Republican leader and prominent cardiologist Bill Frist suddenly appears, unkempt and unshaven, after a mysterious week-long disappearance, we may have an important clue.

My own bet is that Pat Robertson will soon address his television audience, saying, “Focus, people! Focus! We’re only asking God to kill Supreme Court justices. For now.”

From a DVD commentary, Simpsons executive producer David Mirkin:

There’s no lack of lack of backbone in Hollywood.

Roger Rosenblatt on the PBS NewsHour:

After the London bombings, experts there and here were asked what one can do to protect oneself — in subways, on buses, in shops — anywhere. The answer the experts gave, uniformly, was vigilance. Keep your eyes open for unattended packages, unsavory people — for the exit doors, in case of the worst.

The implication of such advice is that most people, most of the time, are not vigilant, not even casually observant. And this seems true. One saunters through the day without taking notice of the details of one’s surroundings. Now we are told to notice all we can, as the act of seeing may save our lives.

…

If Americans are to be more vigilant in their self-protection, that includes a watchfulness of one’s government, as well, to see that it does not exercise power that diminishes the freedom of those it protects. A PATRIOT Act that interferes with the free life of libraries takes away an essential kind of sight. An unattended package is no more lethal than an unattended liberty.

Molly Ivins, a few months ago, on the PBS program NOW:

Here are these people — they have all the executive power; they have all the legislative power; they’re getting all the judicial power just as fast as they can — and sitting around whining about people of faith being discriminated against. It’s silly.

…

There are those of us who are Christians who believe that the politics of the right is actually un-Christian. It’s not a hard position to hold.

Come the Revolution (already in progress), Molly Ivins will be burned at the stake for her heretical views.

Jason Spitalnick asks a pointed question about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts:

…if Democrats want to strike a chord with American voters, they’ll need to focus national attention on how John Roberts’s approach to legal questions will impact lives. If John Roberts had been the deciding vote on the Court for the entire twentieth century, what would America look like today?

The question casts light not only on Roberts and what he might do on the Court, but on the ideal world dreamed of by Bush and Company.

Yikes.

Arlo Guthrie on “Alice’s Restaurant”:

Nobody in their right mind would have expected an 18-minute monologue to have shelf life, especially in an era when radio refused to play anything that was over 2 1/2 minutes.

It’s been forty years since the true story told in the song took place. Generations have grown up without hearing it. Rats.

On the plus side, what fun to play it for someone who has never heard it before!

If you want to end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud.

On January 28, 1986, I was working in the lab supply storeroom on the first floor of the Biological Sciences Building at the Ohio State University. A graduate student stuck her head in the door and said, “Did you hear, Mike? The space shuttle exploded!”

That — not the subsequent video replays — is the moment I’ll never erase from my memory.

I asked questions, but she didn’t have many details. What she had heard wasn’t encouraging. I hoped she’d heard wrong.

I imagined a hundred different scenarios. There had been a terrible accident on the launch pad, but everyone had gotten safely away. If the shuttle exploded in orbit, ground controllers would see only a loss of downlink: the radio would go silent, and the constantly-changing numbers on their consoles would stop changing. Then someone would observe that radar was tracking multiple targets. I didn’t want to think of the scenarios where the astronauts didn’t escape.

We’ve been putting people onto rockets since 1961, and every journey begins with a lump in the throat, and a sense of dread that takes the breath away, and makes us whisper “Godspeed.” When do we breathe easy?

Before the Challenger disaster, I think we breathed a sigh of relief when the shuttle cleared the launch tower. The rockets had all lit, and hadn’t exploded. The spacecraft was on its way. Everything was going to be alright.

The night of the Challenger explosion, I saw a high-school class cheer and groan when the shuttle exploded. The sequence of launch events had been explained to them. Most saw the two solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) flying away, and thought it was the planned SRB separation. Others sensed instantly that there was something wrong.

Later, we learned that the Challenger was destroyed by a flaw in one of the SRBs. After the Challenger disaster, we held our sigh of relief until after the SRB separation. I held mine for MECO — Main Engine Cutoff. I suspect the people really in the know didn’t relax even then.

The shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry 17 years and 4 days after the Challenger disaster. Controllers lost their downlink. Radar started tracking multiple targets. Witnesses heard a sonic boom that lasted for thirty seconds or longer. What they heard was actually a sequence of sonic booms — the spacecraft had broken into pieces, and each piece made a separate boom.

Email from my brother living near Los Angeles:

At about 5:02AM Tuesday, August 9th, a double sonic boom rattled Southern California announcing the return of the space shuttle Discovery.

It woke me up. .......... Hoorah!

I saved my sigh of relief until the wheels stopped turning.

Godspeed, Discovery, and welcome home.

MoveOn.org lets you print your own Karl Rove poster:

Al Franken:

I respect everyone else’s religious beliefs. But you know what? I expect them to respect mine.

We are a secular society, and that’s why religion has flourished in this country. That’s why this is such a religious country, why it’s so successful. And we have to maintain that separation.

If you remember the story of Bill O’Reilly’s Peabody awards from Al Franken’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, it will come as no surprise to you that Bill O’Reilly makes stuff up:

Media Matters has repeatedly debunked O’Reilly’s false claims of success regarding a French boycott. On April 27, 2004, he asserted that the boycott had cost France “billions of dollars,” citing the “Paris Business Review” as a source, but Media Matters documented that Census figures actually showed an increase in U.S. imports from France; additionally, there is no evidence of a publication named the “Paris Business Review.”

(Franken’s celebrated BookExpo run-in with O’Reilly is supposedly online here. It appears to be in RealMedia format. I can’t run it myself, because I don’t use RealPlayer.)

Annie Lamott, on the Bolton appointment:

Bush acts more and more like Bam-Bam Rubble, from the Flintstones: 4 years old, out of control—Bam! Bam! Bam! It used to work when we were still in Act II, waiting for the critical mass of lies and betrayal to be reached. But now that we are in Act III, where things are unraveling for the White House—winning CAFTA by two votes? Iraq and Iran’s new alliance?—it’s not going to help them in the long run.

Last night, on PBS’s News Hour, Abraham Sofaer, a State Department official during the Reagan Administration, defended the recess appointment of John Bolton:

He’s been Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, and while he was there, he was the point man on putting together the coalition on Iraq.

And in this administration, when you fail spectacularly, you get a promotion or a medal. Everybody knows that.

You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.

—John Huston as Noah Cross, in Chinatown

A great mystery story is like skinning an onion. You peel back the lies and corruption, and expose… another layer of lies and corruption.

Think Progress cites a Time magazine report about how administration officials learned about Valerie Plame:

If these revelations are true, the least of Rove and Libby’s concerns is perjury. Today’s disclosure adds further evidence that the White House consciously dug out Plame’s identity, used it, and then engaged in a massive cover-up by pinning blame elsewhere. Moreover, it appears far more players were involved in this orchestrated, administration-wide effort than previously believed. The key question, if these revelations are true, is why did these administration officials lie so overtly to the special prosecutor? Knowing hard evidence would come out sooner or later against them (through leaks, emails, etc), the White House officials still chose to lie. What could they possibly be trying to hide? Perhaps this wasn’t just a “third-rate smear.”

PERRspectives has a list of senior officials who appear to be implicated in Rovegate or Plamegate or Traitorgate, or whatever you want to call it:

The mushrooming Karl Rove CIA outing scandal increasingly looks like it will rack up quite a body count within the White House. It was only two years ago that President Bush concluded of the Valerie Plame outing, “I don’t know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official.” Now it is beginning to appear that he will have no credible senior officials left.

In politics and business, we use dramatic language to make our little jobs seem bigger and more exciting. We’re constantly “dodging bullets” and “putting out fires,” and scandals rack up “body counts.”

It will probably be twenty years or more before we know what kind of body count was racked up outside the White House. Governments tend to be very protective of their secrets regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Valerie Plame’s specialty as an undercover CIA operative.

When “senior administration officials” blew her cover for the sake of a good political jab, they also blew the cover of the CIA front company that ostensibly employed her. That blew the cover of an unknown number of other undercover operatives. We haven’t heard their names, but you can be certain that foreign intelligence services, who pay very close attention to matters like this, know who they are. Those foreign intelligence services also tend to keep a close watch on the people in their own WMD programs, so they’ve learned who was talking to undercover CIA operatives.

Now we’re talking body counts.