Via Crooks and Liars, here’s comedian Frank Caliendo on George W. Bush. It’s not deep, just funny.

11:52:02 PM  #  
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Another pioneer of the civil rights movement is gone. Rest in peace, Coretta Scott King:

Coretta Scott King, who with grace and determination kept her husband's legacy alive and emerged as one of America's most influential voices for social change and human rights, died yesterday at an alternative medical clinic in Mexico. She was 78.

11:10:38 PM  #  
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I don’t often agree with George W. Bush, but this time he’s absolutely right:

The only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership.

To call the Bush Administration’s record of leadership “dismal” would be to flatter. We need better.

Impeach Bush! He’s asking for it!

11:05:51 PM  #  
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In George W. Bush’s America, on the night of the State of the Union address, only the president gets to exercise freedom of speech:

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush’s State of the Union address.

“She was asked to cover it up. She did not,” said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman, adding that Sheehan was arrested for unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor.

The charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail, Schneider said.

10:56:37 PM  #  
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We all know that George W. Bush said FEMA Director Michael Brown did a “heckuva job” after Hurricane Katrina. An Interior Department report gives us a glimpse of what a heckuva job looks like:

Hundreds of federal search-and-rescue workers and large numbers of boats, aircraft and bulldozers were offered to FEMA in the hours immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, but the aid proposals were either ignored or not effectively used, newly released documents show.

The Interior Department, which made the offers, also proposed dispatching as many as 400 of its law enforcement officers to provide security in Gulf Coast cities ravaged by flooding and looting. But nearly a month would pass before the Federal Emergency Management Agency put the officers to work, according to an Interior document obtained by The Washington Post.

…

Acting in the “immediate aftermath” of the hurricane, Interior officials provided FEMA with a comprehensive list of assets that were “immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance,” according to the memo, dated Nov. 7, 2005. Those assets included more than 300 boats, 11 aircraft, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 dump trucks and other vehicles for clearing debris, as well as Interior-owned campgrounds and other land that could be used as staging areas or emergency shelters.

Also offered were rescue crews from the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, teams specially trained for urban search-and-rescue missions using flat-bottom boats.

“Clearly these assets and skills were precisely relevant to the post-Katrina environment,” the memo said. Yet, the rescue teams and boats were not considered in the federal government’s planning for hurricane disasters, the memo states.

There’s a rule called Hanlon’s Razor, which says, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” But I don’t think the Bush Administration response to Katrina — or in many other cases where they’ve fumbled aid for non-wealthy Americans — can be adequately explained by stupidity. Incompetence, once again, is a cover story.

The Washington Post has a follow-up on Bush’s promises to “do what it takes” in the Gulf Coast after Katrina.

1:51:36 AM  #  
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Twenty years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. The entire crew was killed: Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnick, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe.

Former astronaut John Glenn, a U.S. Senator at the time, said what we were all thinking: that we always knew a day like this would come, but we always hoped it would not be this day.

This is a sad time of year for NASA. Yesterday, January 27, was the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Next Wednesday, February 1, is the third anniversary of the breakup on re-entry of shuttle Columbia, which killed Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon.

Our astronauts are truly the brightest and the best this country has to offer. The things that NASA tries to do are fundamentally difficult, and fundamentally risky. The astronauts are ready to face great risk in order to achieve great things, but they have no intention of throwing their lives away carelessly, and we must never expect them to do so.

Let’s remember the dead astronauts, and honor their memory in the only way that matters: by carrying on their important work with the utmost care for the lives of the living astronauts.

We always know that days like those will come. When the next tragedy comes, as it surely will, let it never be because we valued the lives of our best people too lightly.

Update: Via Slashdot, MSNBC has an eight-part article about the Challenger disaster, written by correspondent Jay Barbree.

10:49:37 PM  #  
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Cartoonist Ruben Bolling is funny, but not in the same way as Ann Coulter.

He says, “You’ll be surprised to find out how helpful it is to have N.S.A. agents eavesdrop on your conversations,” he brings us Dick Cheney’s Philosophical Thought Experiment Legislation, and he compares Presidents Goofus and Gallant.

Unless you are a paid subscriber at Salon.com, you will need to click for a “site pass,” which requires you to watch an ad to gain full access to Salon content for one day.

9:43:53 PM  #  
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What a kidder that Ann Coulter is:

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, speaking at a traditionally black college, joked that Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned.

Coulter had told the Philander Smith College audience Thursday that more conservative justices were needed on the Supreme Court to change the current law on abortion.

Stevens is one of the court’s most liberal members.

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee,” Coulter said. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”

Ann Coulter is a laugh riot. I’ll bet she cracks ’em up at airports, the White House and the Capitol building when she jokes about carrying a bomb, too. Man, that stuff never gets old. Any old liberal fuddy-duddy who doesn’t find Ann’s death threats funny just doesn’t have a sense of humor, and should probably be taken out and shot.

Just kidding. Heh.

8:59:27 PM  #  
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A little dash of democracy will fix up everything, George W. Bush told us. Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne says it’s not that simple:

In two elections this week, voters tossed incumbents out of power. One election made barely a ripple internationally. The other broke like a tsunami over the entire world. The response to each vote should teach us the danger of pretending that elections alone can make democracy happen.

In Canada’s quiet election, Stephen Harper ended more than a decade of Liberal Party rule.…

In the elections for the Palestinian Authority, the voters also rose up against the incumbents. But in the process, they gave a majority to Hamas, a party that has embraced terrorism and would obliterate Israel.

…

From this tale of two elections, it’s possible to take the wrong lesson, which would be to walk away from America’s long if inconsistent quest to promote free elections and human rights. You don’t have to agree with Bush’s decisions to believe that an important goal of American foreign policy should be to expand the number of nations that live under democratic rule.

But since the invasion of Iraq, administration spokesmen and supporters have offered a utopian and decidedly unconservative view of how American power could be used to change the world — and quickly.

…

The polls suggest that Hamas did not win because a majority of Palestinians bought into its terrorist program. Hamas won, precisely as Bush said, because voters were so unhappy with the status quo. But shouldn’t Washington ask itself why it didn’t take more dramatic steps, over a much longer period, to change the Palestinian status quo? Taking action in Iraq was not going to do the job.

A working democracy north of our border requires a degree of hope for the future now lacking among Palestinians. The Bush administration once thought it could take a holiday from complexity and remake the world through a few bold strokes. But democratization is hard, complicated and frustrating. It requires the patient building of institutions and attention to detail. There are no short cuts. You wonder if the president will come to terms with the flaws in his own status quo.

Hamas’ victory isn’t good news. But this was the first chance at a real election in a long time for the Palestinians. I like to hope that self-government, all by itself, can help give people a sense of civic responsibility. It doesn’t happen in a single election. It grows slowly, as hope grows that voters can influence their own destiny.

Hope I’m right.

3:56:37 AM  #  
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Via John Moltz, Digby comments on John Kerry’s announced plan to filibuster the Alito nomination, and on the reaction from many Democratic bloggers:

If we carp when our elected politicans take risks just as we carp when they don’t take risks, they have no motivation to listen to us at all.

Kerry and Kennedy stepped up today. They aren’t going down without a fight. This is worth doing and if we lose it, we should reward them and those who stood with them with our gratitude and support not another round of complaints about how they are a bunch of losers.

We have to fight to protect this country and the Constitution from the monarchists, even if we might get beat.

12:13:27 AM  #  
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The U.S. Secretary of the Interior is supposed to protect the nation’s natural resources. But James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, opposed virtually every effort at environmental protection. This is what he told the House Interior Committee in 1981:

That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have: to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns; whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.

His reassurances were lip service. However you might characterize Watt’s failure to protect our environment and natural resources, it wasn’t incompetence. Watt was a conscientious proponent of extraction, and an enemy of conservation. The environment was something to exploit, to bleed dry, never something to preserve and protect. He never had any interest or intention to defend our natural resources.

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson makes some good points when he writes about Bush the Incompetent:

Incompetence is not one of the seven deadly sins, and it’s hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president’s defining attribute. Historians, looking back at the hash that his administration has made of his war in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and his Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things — particularly when most of them were the president’s own initiatives.

In numbing profusion, the newspapers are filled with litanies of screw-ups.…

It’s the president’s prescription drug plan (Medicare Part D), though, that is his most mind-boggling failure. As was not the case in Iraq or with Katrina, it hasn’t had to overcome the opposition of man or nature. Pharmacists are not resisting the program; seniors are not planting car bombs to impede it (not yet, anyway). But in what must be an unforeseen development, people are trying to get their medications covered under the program. Apparently, this is a contingency for which the administration was not prepared, as it has been singularly unable to get its own program up and running.

Initially, Part D’s biggest glitch seemed to be the difficulty that seniors encountered in selecting a plan. But since Part D took effect on Jan. 1, the most acute problem has been the plan’s failure to cover the 6.2 million low-income seniors whose medications had been covered by Medicaid. On New Year’s Day, the new law shifted these people’s coverage to private insurers. And all hell broke loose.

…

No such problems attended the creation of Medicare itself in the mid-1960s. Then, a governmental agency simply assumed responsibility for seniors’ doctor and hospital visits. But, financially beholden to both the drug and insurance industries, the Bush administration and the Repsublican Congress mandated that millions of Americans have their coverage shifted to these most byzantine of bureaucracies.

This is, remember, the president’s signature domestic initiative, just as the Iraq war is his signature foreign initiative.

How could a president get these things so wrong? Incompetence may describe this presidency, but it doesn’t explain it. For that, historians may need to turn to the seven deadly sins: to greed, in understanding why Bush entrusted his new drug entitlement to a financial mainstay of modern Republicanism. To sloth, in understanding why Incurious George has repeatedly ignored the work of experts whose advice runs counter to his desires.

I think Meyerson is mistaken in attributing the Bush Administration’s many failures to incompetence. There’s plenty of that, too, I suppose. But over and over again, I find myself thinking, when the Administration drops the ball on helping people in need, that they never had any interest or intention to succeed. They are governed by a malign will that’s partly disguised by Bush’s stumbling “aw, shucks” public persona. Incompetence is a cover story.

“Bush the Incompetent?” That’s letting this Administration off too easy.

11:29:43 PM  #  
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So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address

Where, in our current dark hour, is leadership of frankness and vigor?

Conservatives didn’t have a very good opinion of Franklin Roosevelt back in 1933. They called him a “traitor to his class”. They’re still trying to dismantle the New Deal. And, as cartoonist Tom Tomorrow shows, they embrace fear.

The only thing they have to fear is the end of nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.

3:46:44 PM  #  
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On January 20^th last year, George W. Bush put his left hand on a Bible, raised his right hand, and, repeating after Chief Justice Rehnquist, spoke the following words:

I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.

We know now that he didn’t mean it. By that time, he had already decided that Constitutional guarantees like search warrants and due process of law are outdated and meaningless in our present time of peril.

The presidential oath of office is specified in the obsolete Constitution itself, so Bush probably didn’t feel much of a twinge of conscience in just mouthing the words last January.

The Constitution was written quite a long time ago — more than two hundred years ago, in fact. As we’ve all learned from listening to countless memoirists, the past was a more innocent time. Two-hundred-plus years ago must have been a really, really innocent time. There’s no way the framers of the Constitution could have foreseen that a day would come when this country would confront bad people who want to hurt us. Bills of Rights, limited powers, judicial review, check and balances all may have made sense in the halcyon agrarian world of the Founders, but times have changed, and we understand the world so much better these days than the simple folk who wrote the Constitution ever could have. They never met Osama bin Laden, so they gave us a president, not a king. George W. Bush is fixing that, now, just as fast as he can.

Still, I can’t help wishing that the framers of the Constitution had been men with vision and foresight. I can’t help wishing they had understood the dynamics of power as well as — heck, even better than — we do now. I can’t help wishing they had written a Constitution that could stand the test of time — a Constitution that could withstand even the death of 3,000 civilians in a vile sneak attack by a murderous enemy. I even wish — do I dare even think it? — that they had given us a Constitution that could withstand a rotten power-grubbing president who wanted to be a king.

11:57:44 PM  #  
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Cartoonist Mark Fiore says: Say goodbye to the good ol’ U.S. of A., and say hello to Greater Georgelandia.
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L. Paul Bremer, formerly head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, was on The Daily Show last night:

Bremer: As you know, I did support the war. I supported the war because I’ve been involved in the fight on terrorism for twenty-five years now, and I was concerned that the new terrorists, the guys who showed their face here on 9/11, would get their hands on really bad stuff: nuclear, chemical or biological. And I think we need to be very concerned about that. I think that is the preeminent threat to American security.

Jon Stewart: I definitely think we’re still going on that problem. I feel that it would be nice, for once, if the debate we have in this country about our actions is the actual debate that’s going on, and not the one that was invented by the marketing guys.

10:16:40 PM  #  
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The Supreme Court disappointed the Bush Administration yesterday when it upheld an Oregon right-to-die law:

The Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s law on physician-assisted suicide yesterday, ruling that the Justice Department may not punish doctors who help terminally ill patients end their lives.

By a vote of 6 to 3, the court ruled that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft exceeded his legal authority in 2001 when he threatened to prohibit doctors from prescribing federally controlled drugs if they authorized lethal doses of the medications under the Oregon Death With Dignity Act.

The ruling struck down one of the administration’s signature policies regarding what President Bush calls the “culture of life” and lifts the last legal cloud over the state’s law, which is unique in the nation. It also frees other states to follow in Oregon’s footsteps, unless Congress acts to the contrary.

If Administration officials seem oddly unconcerned about the negative ruling, perhaps they intend to appeal the case to President Bush himself, whose very word is the only law.

10:04:35 PM  #  
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Today is Benjamin Franklin’s birthday.

Franklin was one of the founding fathers of the United States. He sat on the Continental Congress that approved the Declaration of Independence. He was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution. He made a fortune as a businessman, and became one of the greatest scientists of his day. He was a prolific inventor, a successful diplomat, an early abolitionist, a philanthropist and a public-spirited citizen who formed the first public library and the first fire department in America — and we’re scarcely scratching the surface.

If he were still alive, he would be 300 years old today.

I don’t think he would have thought much of George W. Bush’s contention that the president can pick and choose the laws he will obey in time of war. I don’t think he would have kept quiet about it, either. You can bet that Karl Rove and company would work day and night to “Swift Boat” Ben Franklin.

He was born in Boston on Jan. 17, 1706, the 10th son of a soap- and candle-maker. Starting at age 12, he worked five years as an apprentice at his brother James’s newspaper, the New England Courant, establishing himself as a prankster and satirist, and, not for the last time, as “a little obnoxious to the governing party.”

…

Franklin’s greatest public triumph was probably as a diplomat, persuading France to aid the colonies in their fight against the British. But he needed no revolution to be a revolutionary, for he changed the world by living in it. “The things which hurt, instruct,” he observed.

Middle-aged eyesight led him to design a single, all-purpose set of glasses -- bifocals. A struggle to raise money for a public hospital led to a plan by which private contributions would be equaled by government funds, the “matching grant” formula in use to this day.

…

“His demonstration that lightning was not supernatural had huge impact,” says Dudley Herschbach, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. “Since lightning had long been considered a prerogative of the Almighty, Franklin was attacked for presumption, vigorously but in vain.”

Pat Robertson and the Intelligent Design crowd would feel right at home attacking Ben Franklin.

Herschbach, a Harvard University professor who has lectured frequently on Franklin, says: “Franklin’s scientific curiosity extended far beyond his adventures with electricity. He made important discoveries and observations concerning the motion of storms, heat conduction, the path of the Gulf Stream, bioluminescence, the spreading of oil films, and also advanced prescient ideas about conservation of matter and the wave nature of light.”

I wonder how Franklin would respond to the Bush Administration’s steady dismissal of global warming? If he dared to say a critical word, we can be sure they would dismiss him as a dangerous crank.

Franklin now seems the safest of the founders to celebrate, but when he died, in 1790, he was mistrusted by many in power as a Francophile synonymous with the excesses of the French Revolution. The Senate rejected a proposal to wear badges of mourning in his honor. A year passed before an official eulogy was delivered…

And I thought Americans hated France only because they were right about Iraq when George W. Bush was wrong.

Nasty characters in politics are nothing new. You can bet that if Ben Franklin were targeted by a Pat Robertson or a Karl Rove, he would know how to fight back.

We don’t get many leaders like that nowadays.

Happy birthday, Ben.

8:41:59 PM  #  
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Last night the History Channel ran a long show on Abraham Lincoln, and these comments by Matthew Pinsker, author of Lincoln’s Sanctuary, sort of leaped out at me:

He gains a measure of empathy for people who lose loved ones. You know, this is a president who sends young boys to die in a war, and understands what that means to a family: death and tragedy. And it makes him a far more sympathetic figure as a leader, because I think the general public, through a variety of images and stories and decisions he made, realized that he was a kind of empathetic figure, in a way that they were not used to in the White House. And so it separates him from other people. It’s why he gained this image as Father Abraham.

He’s riding out the the Soldiers’ Home one afternoon in the summer of ’62, and he comes across a train of ambulance wagons that are carrying back bodies of wounded soldiers from the Peninsula Campaign, which was one of the pivotal turning points in the history of the war. And it was a brutal campaign with terrible loss of life and devastation to the Union forces.

Now, the president eagerly went up to them and was anxious to converse with them about the real conditions of affairs. That he reached out to them, risking whatever criticism or complaints they would have, in order to make contact, to talk to them. And some people who aren’t as empathetic don’t want to be exposed to angry widows or disgruntled wounded soldiers or others. Lincoln’s the opposite. And for me that defines his greatness.

Mediocre presidents hide from bad news. Great presidents reach out for it.

Personally, I think Pinsker gives George W. Bush way too much credit, calling him “mediocre.” Mediocrity is beyond this president’s reach.

1:39:43 PM  #  
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If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.

—Frederick Douglass

I wonder, sometimes, whether we’re doing the right thing in the way we honor civil rights pioneers like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks.

There’s scarcely a politician in the country today who has anything but warm words of praise for King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Which is strange. During King’s lifetime, there were armies of politicians resisting the civil rights movement every single step of the way.

Rosa Parks came to public attention by being arrested. She was hauled to jail; mug shots and fingerprints were taken. Martin Luther King was arrested many times. He was vilified in language that makes my face feel hot even today.

His non-violent movement was met with dogs and clubs, tear gas, firehoses, guns and bombs. But today, politicians of almost every political stripe stepped up to podiums across the nation with smiles and glowing words about the civil rights movement.

Have we really changed so much since the 1960s? I doubt it.

Tomorrow, many of those smiling politicians will go back to work tying the law in knots to find ways to disenfranchise black voters. It won’t be on account of race—oh, no—they’ll have to find some dodge to explain it. They will approve tax breaks carefully calibrated to benefit millionaires, and then plead poverty to make cuts in programs for poor people.

I wonder whether we’ve made a mistake making Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks icons of the civil rights movement. I don’t think they ever intended to be put on pedestals and serenely admired as heroes of a glorious past. I don’t think they ever intended their struggle for social justice to be turned into an historical relic.

Some of the old injustices are gone, thank goodness, but there’s plenty of injustice left. To honor the memory of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, we need to carry on the work. We need to press the fight against injustice wherever we find it.

How can we tell whether we’re doing it right? There will be an army of politicians resisting every single step of the way.

11:49:31 PM  #  
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Last June, Apple Computer announced that future versions of their Macintosh computers would be based on CPU chips from monopolist Intel. At the time, I said this:

In the past year or so, Macintosh sales seemed to be inching up. Now, sales of existing Macs are going to crater. The new machines won’t ship until about the time that Microsoft’s continually-postponed Longhorn operating system does. The first Macintels will ship in about a year. The entire line won’t be converted for two and a half years. During that time, nobody will want to buy machines that Apple has already abandoned.

Apparently I was wrong:

Mr. Jobs also revealed that Apple’s revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 jumped 63 percent, to $5.7 billion. The figure easily beat Wall Street’s expectations, as sales of the iPod portable music player more than tripled compared with the holiday quarter in 2004. Revenue for that quarter was $3.5 billion.

Mr. Jobs said the company sold 14 million iPods during the holiday quarter, up from 4.5 million during the 2004 holiday season. Perhaps more surprising was the news that Apple sold 1.25 million Macintosh computers in the quarter, up from 1.05 million in 2004, despite the worries of some analysts that consumers would delay their purchases. Sales at Apple’s retail stores rose to about $1 billion, Mr. Jobs said.

This week, Apple introduced their first Intel-based Macs, almost six months before the predictions made last year. They said that the transition would be completed by the end of this year, about a year before last year’s predictions.

Unlike the prototype machines Apple supplied to software developers last June, the new Macs won’t run any currently shipping version of Microsoft Windows, so visions of running Windows and Macintosh software on the same machine are on hold. Longhorn, the forthcoming version of Windows, has been renamed Vista. It’s expected by the end of this year, and may be able to run on the new machines.

I still don’t want one of the new machines. Intel has built DRM capabilities into many of their chips, and I’m still concerned that Apple made the switch to take advantage of those capabilities.

The point of the microcomputer revolution that started in the 1970s was that ordinary people could have complete control of computer power that had previously been available only to governments and big corporations. Once that revolution was well entrenched, Microsoft and other software vendors started trying to take that control back, with things like product activation, active updates and “digital rights management” (DRM) everywhere. Apple has always been an oasis from these anti-customer efforts. However, one apparent reason for Apple’s move to Intel now is that Intel is building DRM capabilities into their CPUs, helping ensure that, although you may have paid for the computer, someone else will control what you can do with it.

I believe it may be a year or two before we know whether Apple intends to limit users’ control over their own computers. Hard as it is to believe, I’ve been wrong before. I’d be delighted to be proved wrong once more.

6:09:03 PM  #  
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This case is playing out in the Ohio Supreme Court, right here in Columbus, Ohio:

Joy and Carl Gamble say they just want to retire peacefully in the dream home where they’ve lived for more than 35 years. But the Cincinnati suburb of Norwood has other plans for the property.

Using its power of eminent domain, the city wants to take a neighborhood that it considers to be deteriorating and boost its fortunes by allowing a $125 million development of offices and shops.

…

Joy Gamble speaks bitterly about the couple’s ordeal and what it meant to see their home of 35 years, purchased after years of savings, in danger of demolition.

“When the municipalities and the people that have lots of money decide they want what you have, you don’t own it,” Gamble said. “You bought it, you paid for it, you kept the taxes up, you kept the appearance up, but it wasn’t yours.”

8:25:33 PM  #  
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It might be hard to believe, but blogger Hetty Litjens seems to have a considerably harsher opinion of the Bush Administration than I do. I’ve often seen a headline from Hetty’s blog and thought, “Woo hoo! Tell it!” Then I read the blog entry itself and think, “Uh, I’m not really sure I want to link to that.”

This entry, too, comes on pretty strong. But I think it makes a point about the very nature of civilization. I have taken the liberty of reformatting the excerpts below:

When Christianity took over from the belligerent and greedy Roman empire, it did so on the basis of new ideals and tenets. These were essentially Pax et Justitia, Peace and Justice, as exposed by St. Augustine. Peace can only be based on justice. These ideals met with general acceptance and resulted in the success of the Christian church. When things went wrong in the Church it was because it became entangled in power and wealth.

“Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?”

“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?”

—De Civitate Dei (The City of God), Book IV, Chapter IV.

…

St. Augustine changed the course of history by giving a new alternative to the reign of war, his new tenets were Peace and Justice. These were the guiding principles of our Christian civilization for hundreds of years. George W. Bush is wiping out not only the American Constitution, but also the attainments of thousands of years of civilization.

8:04:11 PM  #  
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Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow sees where the above the law presidency is heading:

Why do liberals have to act like Chicken Little every time the president exercises his constitutional authority to rob banks?

Please note that in the real world, the arresting officer would be charged with treason.

11:32:28 PM  #  
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The Senate Judiciary Committee held the first day of confirmation hearings today for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. I suspect Alito caused a bit of a panic at the White House and among Republican lawmakers when he said this:

And there is nothing that is more important for our republic than the rule of law. No person in this country, no matter how high or powerful, is above the law, and no person in this country is beneath the law.

Panicky Republicans consoled themselves by looking at Alito’s record and realizing he was just kidding.

11:06:52 PM  #  
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New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

[W]hen a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts “our citizens at risk” by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn’t seen “Sleeper Cell” because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.

That the White House’s over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney’s disingenuousness. In last week’s oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, “The match is about to begin,” and, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president’s excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn’t rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.

…

The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is … to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures.

…

The louder the reports of failures on this president’s watch, the louder he tries to drown them out by boasting that he has done everything “within the law” to keep America safe and by implying that his critics are unpatriotic, if not outright treasonous. Mr. Bush certainly has good reason to pump up the volume now. In early December the former 9/11 commissioners gave the federal government a report card riddled with D’s and F’s on terrorism preparedness.

The front line of defense against terrorism is supposed to be the three-year-old, $40-billion-a-year Homeland Security Department, but news of its ineptitude, cronyism and no-bid contracts has only grown since Katrina. The Washington Post reported that one Transportation Security Administration contract worth up to $463 million had gone to a brand-new company that (coincidentally, we’re told) contributed $122,000 to a powerful Republican congressman, Harold Rogers of Kentucky. An independent audit by the department’s own inspector general, largely unnoticed during Christmas week, found everything from FEMA to border control in some form of disarray.

Yet even as this damning report was released, the president forced cronies into top jobs in immigration enforcement and state and local preparedness with recess appointments that bypassed Congressional approval.…

THE warrantless eavesdropping is more of the same incompetence. Like our physical abuse of detainees and our denial of their access to due process, this flouting of the law may yet do as much damage to fighting the war on terrorism as it does to civil liberties. As the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus wrote in The Huffington Post, every defense lawyer representing a terrorism suspect charged in the four years since Mr. Bush’s N.S.A. decree can challenge the legality of the prosecution’s evidence. “The entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill,” Mr. Garbus explains, as the government refuses to give the courts information on national security grounds, inviting the dismissal of entire cases, and judges “up and down the appellate ladder” issue conflicting rulings.

Far from “bringing justice to our enemies,” as Mr. Bush is fond of saying, he may once again be helping them escape the way he did at Tora Bora.

5:58:15 PM  #  
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In T. H. White’s novel, The Once and Future King, the wizard Merlyn lives backwards in time. In the twelfth century, when he advises the young King Arthur and his foster brother Kay, he is an old man who remembers the twentieth century, when he was young. From the book:

Kay looked up, with his tongue between his teeth, and remarked:

“By the way. You remember that argument we were having about aggression? Well, I have thought of a good reason for starting a war.”

Merlyn froze.

“I would like to hear it.”

“A good reason for starting a war is simply to have a good reason! For instance, there might be a king who had discovered a new way of life for human beings — you know, something which would be good for them. It might even be the only way of saving them from destruction. Well, if the human beings were too wicked or too stupid to accept his way, he might have to force it on them, in their own interests, by the sword.”

The magician clenched his fists, twisted his gown into screws, and began to shake all over.

“Very interesting,” he said in a trembling voice. “Very interesting. There was just such a man when I was young — an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm trooper, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.”

I know we could never get George W. Bush to read a big thick book like this. But I wish we could get some studio to do a faithful animated version of the whole book and put it on a DVD for him to watch sometime when he doesn’t feel like working.

3:19:03 PM  #  
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Senator Edward M. Kennedy on Alito’s credibility problem:

Every Supreme Court nominee bears a heavy burden to demonstrate that he or she is committed to the constitutional principles that have been vital in advancing fairness, decency and equal opportunity in our society. As Judge Samuel Alito approaches his confirmation hearings next week, the more we learn about him, the more questions we have about the credibility of his assurances to us.

…

Alito was 35 when he applied for an important political position with Attorney General Ed Meese during the Reagan administration. Alito sought to demonstrate his “philosophical commitment” to Meese’s legal outlook.…

The views expressed there raise serious concerns about his ability to interpret the Constitution with a fair and open mind. When this embarrassing document came to light, he faced a difficult decision on whether to defend his 1985 views or walk away from them. When I and others met him a short time later, he appeared to be renouncing them — “I was just a 35-year-old seeking a job,” he told me. But now he’s seeking another, far more important job. Is he saying that he did not really mean what he said then?

…

In 1990, during the confirmation process on his nomination to the 3rd Circuit, Alito disclosed that his largest investment was in Vanguard mutual funds. To avoid possible conflicts of interest, he promised us that he would recuse himself from any case involving “the Vanguard companies.” Vanguard continues to be on his recusal list, and his investments in Vanguard funds have risen from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, in 2002 he failed to recuse himself when assigned to sit on a case in which three Vanguard companies were named parties and listed prominently on every brief and on his own pro-Vanguard opinion in the case.

…

Alito’s words and record must credibly demonstrate that he understands and supports the role of the Supreme Court in upholding the progress we’ve made in guaranteeing that all Americans have an equal chance to take their rightful place in the nation’s future. “Credibility” has rarely been an issue for Supreme Court nominees, but it is clearly a major issue for Alito.

2:44:04 PM  #  
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Last night, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had a thought about Pat Robertson’s pronouncements:

When somebody swears in a particular way, we’ve all heard somebody else respond in those situations, “Do not use the name of the Lord in vain.”

I was told by a biblical student that that admonition has been completely misunderstood — that when the Bible says, “Do not use the name of thy Lord God in vain,” it really means, “Don’t be so presumptuous as to claim God told you and only you what He thinks of something.” … Is that not sort of a description of what Pat Robertson’s doing here?

1:00:36 PM  #  
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Hugh Thompson Jr. died today. We are all poorer for the loss.

In 1998, he received the Soldier’s Medal, the army’s highest award for heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy.

But in 1968, he was shunned. His patriotism was questioned. He received death threats. Thompson, a military helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, had protected unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai from a massacre by American soldiers.

Tempers ran high in those days, just like today. Plenty of American hot-heads called Lt. William Calley, who led the massacre, an American hero, and vilified Thompson and the other men who stopped it. Calley was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison, but Richard Nixon commuted his sentence.

From BBC News:

Mr Thompson and his crew came upon US troops killing civilians at the village of My Lai on 16 March 1968.

He put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if they attacked the civilians.

“There was no way I could turn my back on them,” he later said of the victims.

Mr Thompson, a warrant officer at the time, called in support from other US helicopters, and together they airlifted at least nine Vietnamese civilians — including a wounded boy — to safety.

He returned to headquarters, angrily telling his commanders what he had seen. They ordered soldiers in the area to stop shooting.

But Mr Thompson was shunned for years by fellow soldiers, received death threats, and was once told by a congressman that he was the only American who should be punished over My Lai.

…

Mr Thompson died of cancer. He had been ill for some time and was removed from life support earlier in the week.

Even Fox News, whose commentators are quick to question the patriotism of anyone who stands up against the Bush Administration, today called Hugh Thompson Jr. a hero.

The wheel of history turns. Time sifts right and wrong.

Hugh Thompson Jr. was a hero. I hope there will always be Americans like him.

9:26:47 PM  #  
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My guess is that Pat Robertson just can’t endure the idea that people aren’t talking about him. He craves that hit of publicity, and he doesn’t care whether it’s good publicity or bad. But he has to say ever more outrageous things:

Pat Robertson suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke was the result of Sharon’s policy, which he claimed is “dividing God’s land.” … Robertson called the 1995 assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “the same thing.”

Update: The company Robertson is keeping these days! From the Washington Post:

The television evangelist Pat Robertson and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not agree on much, but both suggested yesterday that the severe illness of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was deserved. Both men’s comments were immediately condemned by religious leaders.

11:08:23 PM  #  
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Crooks and Liars has posted a video clip that shows me I should be watching David Letterman. Interviewing Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Letterman said (my transcript, from the clip):

Letterman: I’m not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feeling about sixty percent of what you say is crap. But I don’t know that for a fact.

Bandleader Paul Shaffer: Sixty?

Letterman: You say sixty percent, Paul?

Shaffer: Sixty percent?

Letterman: Sixty percent. That’s just a — I’m just spitballing here.

2:23:36 PM  #  
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Think Progress says the Bush Administration has neglected coal mining safety:

Phil Smith, the communications director for the United Mine Workers of America, said that while citations have been issued, the fines assessed for safety violations are too small to force large corporations to make improvements. “The problem with the current laws is enforcement.” According to an AFL-CIO analysis, the Bush administration cut 170 positions from federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and has not proposed a single new mine-safety standard or rule during its tenure.

And there’s a reason for that. The Washington Post reported that West Virginia coal firms raised $275,000 for Bush.

I wonder whether the Administration will be donating that money to charity now, like some other politically embarrassing contributions.

2:02:34 PM  #  
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I’m grateful that twelve of the thirteen miners trapped by a coal mine explosion have been found alive. Prospects had looked very bleak.

(It is not yet known just when George W. Bush will stage his photo op with the rescued miners to try to cash in on their rescue.)

Update: Apparently the early reports were wrong. At this point, only one of the thirteen miners is alive. He is hospitalized in critical condition. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the miners lost in this disaster.

1:46:57 AM  #  
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Back in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, but he starved his anti-poverty programs to fund the war in Vietnam.

Today, the Bush Administration and Republicans in Congress are fighting an undeclared war on the poor. They’re winning.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes about the latest battle in that war:

If Congress were merely useless, the country would be better off. But it’s worse than useless. In the iron grip of a Republican Party that is almost slavishly devoted to the Bush administration, it’s downright destructive, especially to the interests of poor and working people.

Consider the budget that will soon be sent to the president for his signature. Members of the House and Senate have agreed on legislation that achieves something approaching $40 billion in savings over five years primarily by hammering the sick, the poor, the elderly and college students and their families.

This is the same Congress that genuflects each time the president asks for yet another gift-wrapped tax cut for the wealthiest among us. The textbooks tell us that the U.S. is a representative democracy, but only the upper strata are truly represented.

…

“The Congressional Budget Office,” wrote Kevin Freking of The Associated Press, “has concluded that [increases in Medicare premiums and co-payments] would lead many poor people to forgo health care or not to enroll in Medicaid at all - contributing to some of the $4.8 billion in Medicaid savings envisioned over the next five years.”

(I listened the other day to a story about a woman who had repeatedly postponed a visit to the doctor because she was broke and had no health insurance. It turned out she had breast cancer. By the time it was diagnosed, the cancer had already spread through much of her body. The prognosis for this woman is not good, and it should not be the policy of the United States government to encourage this kind of situation.)

…

This is ugly stuff: mean-spirited legislators hacking like wild men with machetes at the already ragged safety net. Poor children, the very sick and the disabled are among those most likely to tumble into the abyss.

…

Because of some minor, last-minute changes that have to be dealt with, the House will have one more crack at this bill before it goes to the president. It would be an opportunity for some Republican “moderates,” who should be appalled at what is happening, to step up and be heard.

Don’t hold your breath.

11:37:40 PM  #  
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On the Memorial Day weekend of 1974, I took a 12-hour ride on a Greyhound bus to Washington, D.C. It was the first time I’d traveled outside Ohio. I stayed at a cheap hotel and did as many touristy things as I could cram into a long holiday weekend.

I brought back fake parchment facsimiles of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence, and I hung them on the wall in my apartment. When a visitor asked where I’d got them, I said I’d taken the White House tour, and someone had thrust the papers at me from behind a door and whispered tensely, “Psst! Buddy! Get rid of these for me!”

Richard Nixon was president then, and everybody got the joke, even if they didn’t laugh. It’s been more than thirty years since I’ve told that joke, but I think it’s time to trot it out again.

From Daily Kos:

Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s secretary during the Iran Contra Scandal, said in her testimony during the Congressional investigation of Iran Contra:

[T]here were “times when you have to go above the written law.”

And defenders of President Bush’s disregard of FISA have adopted this Fawn Hall defense. Of course, Vice President Dick Cheney does not put it exactly that way. Instead he argues that the President is above the law…

…

Cheney suggested that Democrats who push to reduce the powers of the presidency in the wake of the disclosure of the eavesdropping program would pay a political price. “Either we’re serious about fighting the war on terror or we’re not,” he said. “Either we believe that there are individuals out there doing everything they can to try to launch more attacks, try to get ever deadlier weapons to use against us or we don’t. The president and I believe very deeply that there is a hell of a threat.”

Well, Mr. Vice President, either we are serious about following the Constitution and the law or we are not. Either we believe the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and no person is above the law, or we don’t. I believe the Bush Administration is a hell of a threat to the rule of law and the Constitution. And I don’t care if there is a political price for saying so.

…

Privately, administration officials have said for months that they see the anti-terrorism fight as a decades-long struggle similar to the Cold War that dominated the second half of the 20th century.

So the question the Media needs to ask is ‘is the Constitution now indefinitely suspended?’ And when did we decide to do that?

5:05:10 PM  #  
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From The Once and Future King:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

2:32:35 AM  #  
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