Judge the Daughter Not For the Father

JENNA, BARBARA AND DAD

The children of presidents should not be blamed for their fathers’ failures, or for that matter praised for their achievements.

Which brings us to Jenna Bush, twin daughter of President George and First Lady Barbara Bush, who at age 25 is shedding her (probably unfair) tabloid image as a party girl and dingbat and is promoting her new book for young adults, Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope.

The book is a true account of the struggles and triumphs of a Latin American teenager born HIV-positive and puts Jenna, a third-grade teacher at a Washington, D.C., charter school, squarely in the spotlight she has sought to avoid.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, Jenna addresses living in a media bubble. Not surprisingly, she is circumspect about her father and the issues of the day, although it is obvious she does not necessarily agree with her father on some things -- or at least interviewer Bob Thompson wants you to think so.

She says of Iraq:

"Nobody wants war. I definitely, and my father definitely doesn't want war. But it's a horribly complicated situation. But I can say it's devastating. . . . I think everybody can agree on that."

When asked about the criticism her father has faced over the war, she adds:

“Obviously this breaks my heart.”

Having noted that neither Jenna nor sister Barbara should be judged for the actions of their father, Jenna has now stepped onto the media stage of her own volition – in this instance to sell a book on a global issue about which she may be more committed than that father – and in doing so has become fair game for scrutiny.

And you'd better believe she'll get a load of it.

Month 54 Of the War By the Numbers

ANOTHER WOMAN SOLDIER IS LAID TO REST

When we look back on September 2007, it will be remembered as a month during which a modest downtrend in casualties to a 14-month low continued and George Bush lowered his thick head and plowed once again into the brick wall that is the Iraq war.

But that's not where we're going to focus this roundup. Instead, we will note that the U.S. is closing in on another bloody milestone: The deaths of 100 woman soldiers in Iraq.

The total currently stands at 84, including the deaths of these Army personnel in recent weeks:

Captain and medical doctor Roselle M. Hoffmaster, 32, of Cleveland. (Accident.)

Specialist Marisol Heredia, 19, of El Monte, California. (Non combat-related.)

Specialist Kamisha Block, 20, of Vidor, Texas. (Friendly fire.)

Staff Sergeant Alicia A. Burnett, 28, of Mashpee, Masachusetts. (Vehicle accident.)

Sergeant Princess "Noodle" Samuels, 22, of suburban Baltimore. (Killed with Walker in mortar attack.)

Specialist Zandra Walker, 28, of Greenville, South Carolina. (Killed with Samuels in mortar attack.)

Private First Class Lavena Johnson, 19 of Flourissant, Missouri. (Army claims self-inflicted wound; cause of death is disputed by family.)

Captain and nurse Maria Ortiz, 40, of Pennsauken, New Jersey (Mortar attack in Green Zone.)

At first glance, most of these deaths were non combat-related, but that is misleading.

War kills in myriad ways, and you can have a scalpel in your hand and not a grenade when your number comes up. As it is, two thirds of the U.S. women killed in Iraq this year died because of hostile causes.

* * * * *

Herewith our monthly numbers roundup, or what's left of it because U.S. and Iraq officials have been withholding a number of statistics. (Current 2007 totals are in orange; previous totals are in black.):

SEPTEMBER 2007 ROUNDUP

803 (1,548) Iraqis killed (*)
66 (81) -- U.S. troops killed

TWO-MONTH (August-September) ROUNDUP

2,477 (July-August: 3,238) Iraqis killed (*)
147 (July-August: 169) -- U.S. troops killed

U.S. WAR-TO-DATE ROUNDUP
3,807 (3,735) -- Total killed

COST
$455,893,000,000 ($447,471,000,000)

(*) Includes Iraqi Army personnel, security forces, national police and civilians. Sources: National Priorities Project, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, Defense Manpower Data Center.

Burma: This Revolution Will Be Televised

I've never been to Burma and the nearest I got was Thailand. So I can't tell stories about how my driver snuck me into clandestine late night anti-government meetings in Yangoon because I'd be lying.

This, I suppose, is a rather half-arsed way of saying that I've felt a combination of pessimism and impotence over the violent crackdown against peaceful pro-democracy protests by monks and civilians in the South Asian backwater now officially known as Myanmar.

Pessimism because I don't believe any amount of outside pressure for increasing sanctions, let alone imprecations by that humanitarian lightweight, George Bush, will sway Burma's thuggish military junta in the near future, and impotence because I feel like there is damned little that I can do.

China, chief trading partner and supplier of arms to Burma's generals, and Russia, the second of its three main trading partners, have no interest in joining calls to turn the screws. This is because both countries mirror Burma in troubling respects.

India, the third big trading partner, could fill the void left by America's diminished world standing, but will not. India comes in for special scorn because it presumes to be an emerging world power but behaves like the self-absorbed backwater that it was not too many years ago when push comes to shove.

That so noted, there is an aspect of the story that bloggers do have a role in: Foreign news media is barred from Burma, so supporting its citizen journalists in defying the junta by using the Internet and cellphone cameras to tell the world what's really going on is important, as is being mindful that their involvement can carry the heavy price of arrest and years in imprisonment if they're caught.

The thirst for democracy in Burma is unquenchable, and sooner or later -- probably much later -- the junta will fall and there will be free elections.

It is a small consolation, but nevertheless important, that this revolution will be televised.

Meanwhile, check out Burma NewsLadder, an aggregator of current stories.

The Phillies: In First At Last

More here.

The Mets: In Second At Last

You can probably put all of the people who actually make a living being poets these days in a broom closet with room left over for the brooms, and improbably one of those poets is Frank Messina.

I've known Frank for years and have watched the upward arc of his career with a combination of awe and bemusement and, I suppose, a little envy.

Frank is the progenitor of "Spoken Motion," a band and concept that melds lyrical content with jazz and experimental rock music. He has received the prestigious Woolrich Prize and Playboy magazine called him "one of the most widely recognized young poets living in America today."

But now Frank has outdone himself in going where not even Walt Whitman or Ezra Pound trod:

He has been designated the official poet of the New York Mets, which probably inevitably kismetically landed him on the front page of today's New York Times.

While Frank is one talented dude, the reason for his star turn in the Times is pretty simple: After occupying first place since early may, his beloved Mets are tanking and have fallen a game behind my beloved Philadelphia Phillies in the National League East with only two games to play.

The article includes Frank's latest poem, "Victory's Door:"

Do you know what it’s like

To be chased by the Ghost of Failure

While staring through Victory’s door?

Of course you do, you’re a Mets fan.

Sigh. More here on Frank.

Photograph by Jacob Silberberg for The New York Times

The Boss: 'This Is a Song About Things That Shouldn't Happen Here Happening Here'

Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band have been making the rounds as they prepared to embark on a world tour last night in support of “Magic,” their new album.

Springsteen opened several rehearsals (see photo) to the public earlier in the week, gave a wide-ranging interview to The New York Times and appeared yesterday morning on the Today show.

Now I am fortunate enough to have seen The Boss starting way back in 1973 in small club appearances and a goodly number of times over the years until I soured on big venues. My affection for him is unbounded because of his songwriting, nonpareil heartland rock, affection for New Jersey and fearless defense of progressive politics.

Here is his intro to one of the two songs he played on the Today show:

"This is a song called “Livin' In the Future.” But it's really about what's happening now. Right now. It's kind of about how the things we love about America, cheeseburgers, French fries, the Yankees battlin' Boston . . . the Bill of Rights [holds up microphone, urging crowd to cheer] . . . V-twin motorcycles . . . Tim Russert's haircut, trans-fats and the Jersey Shore . . . We love those things the way womenfolk love Matt Lauer.

"But over the past six years we've had to add to the American picture: rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus, the neglect of that great city New Orleans and its people, an attack on the Constitution. And the loss of our best men and women in a tragic war.

"This is a song about things that shouldn't happen here happening here."

Hey, I even know the fotog: Mel Evans of The Associated Press

Cartoon du Jour

Jeff Danziger/The New York Times Syndicate

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

He may have massive crushes on the disreputable Judy Miller and the reprehensible Ann Coulter, but, for the most part, Chris Matthews and his balls of steel are scared shitless of powerful women, what with their feminism and sisterhood lunches, their unwillingness to play along with his chauvinism.

After the Democratic debate at Dartmouth on Wednesday, Matthews asked Chris Dodd whether he finds it "difficult to debate a woman". A stupid and blatantly sexist question, to be sure. One wonders why he didn't also ask the senator whether he finds it difficult to bring a woman to orgasm, whether he finds it difficult to deal with a woman's menstrual cycle, whether he finds it difficult not to smack a woman's ass when he finds one to his liking.

For Matthews, what this question really amounted to was this: Do you find it difficult to treat a woman with respect, to take a woman seriously, to consider her an equal. You know, because feminism has really fucked things up. The women of Matthews' perfect world ought presumably to be on their hands and knees scrubbing the bathroom floor, or whatever else Matthew would have them doing in that position, Miller and Coulter included.

-- MICHAEL J.W. STICKINGS

The Senate's adoption of the Lieberman/Kyl amendment designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard a "terrorist group" isn't merely embarrassing, it's counterproductive. Designating the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group -- which in contemporary American terms means they're a target -- makes it all the more important for Iran to keep us tied up and weakened in Iraq. The more we telegraph that we'd like to devote forces to regime change or strikes in Tehran, the stronger Iran's incentive to keep Iraq an unstable morass trapping ever-greater numbers of American troops who can't be easily diverted from a chaotic mission and are geographically vulnerable to Iranian counter-attack.

-- EZRA KLEIN

The bed-wetters aren't people who criticize the Iranian government. The bed-wetters are the hysterics who seem to think that the basic acts of diplomacy are a clear and present danger to the United States. Meanwhile, despite Just's best efforts to portray the recent outburst of Ahmedenijad-related hysteria as driven by human rights concerns, the freak-out movement wasn't driven by human rights groups, it was driven by the warmongering elements of the press -- The New York Sun and The New York Post plus the magazines and radio and television shows. The Human Rights Watch Iran Page dominated by actual human rights issues in Iran, not by random screechings about Ahmadenijad's sightseeing schedule.

-- MATTHEW YGLESIAS

The profoundly depressing fact is how little has changed in the Village over the past several years. I'm not simply referring to rather disappointing results of Democratic control of Congress, though that too is of course an issue, but rather the sentiments and conventional wisdom of the political media industrial complex. It shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose, that this static mob would be slow to change and slower still to acknowledge any failures of their own.

-- ATRIOS

The only explanation is that S-CHIP serves as a Trojan horse for nationalized health insurance. It's a particularly cynical method of forcing out private insurers by pushing government-controlled coverage onto children. It deserves a presidential veto, despite the inevitable demonization it will produce.

The Republicans have an alternative that uses tax incentives to level the playing field between those who get tax-sheltered employer-based insurance and those who have to pay for it directly. That approach may not be perfect, but it keeps entitlements from expanding when they should be contracting, and it provides assistance to the middle class without making the poor pay for it. That has to make more sense than this S-CHIP expansion.

-- ED MORRISSEY

Nuclear Power: Ready For Its Second Act

THERE ARE NO SECOND ACTS IN AMERICAN LIVES.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Something happened this week in the American power industry that has not occurred in at least 30 years: Applications were filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build new nuclear reactors.

The last application was made in 1977, two years before the infamous partial meltdown at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (One report says it was 1973.)

Nuclear power went into eclipse in the U.S. not because it was an unsafe technology, although it did have its issues, but because the knuckleheads who ran TMI and other nuclear plants made a compelling case that the did not take public safety seriously enough and were not to be trusted.

The myriad safety problems hidden by the nuclear power industry came crashing home in admittedly exaggerated form in 1979 in The China Syndrome. The hit movie, revelations that TMI's owners had done a fair share of covering up and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 further cemented public mistrust, and that more than any other reason is why no nuke plants have been built in the U.S. since forever.

But now a new generation of nuclear plants will be coming on line. This primarily is because new designs make them inherently safer and the 2005 Energy Policy Act considerably streamlines the licensing and regulatory processes and provides substantial tax credits to utility companies.

Ironically, there is a second reason as well:

Global warming.

This bring us to the Supreme Court's smackdown of the Environmental Protection Agency back in April.

A divided court, ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, found that the EPA could not claim that it lacked the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.

In a further irony, nuclear power -- which in theory creates no pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions -- is the biggest beneficiary of the ruling because wind power, solar power and other renewable technologies favored by Greens remain too limited technologically and economically to make much of an impact in an American energy economy addicted to fossil fuels.

The applications filed this week with the NRC are for two huge 1,350-megawatt advanced boiling water reactors that would join two existing NRG Energy reactors at the South Texas nuclear power plant in Bay City, Texas, near Houston. The price tag: $6 - $7 billion.

France and Japan have leaped ahead of the once dominant U.S. in nuclear technology in the last quarter century and the reactor vessel heads for the Texas reactors will be manufactured by Japan Steel Works, the only forge in the world now capable of casting the huge structures.

One lingering question is whether anti-nuclear organizations like Greenpeace, Public Citizen and the Natural Resources Defense Council will be able to mount a last-ditch campaign against the revival.

William Tucker writes in The American Spectator that:

"While continuing to play brazenly on public fears (NRDC's latest position paper has the word "Radioactive" emblazoned across the top), environmental groups have also become more circumspect in their arguments. Rather than conjuring up 'silent bombs' and nuclear holocausts, they now make the following arguments:

"Nuclear is too expensive. Investors will never go for it.

"The money would be much better invested in conservation and solar energy.

"Nuclear power is not carbon-free. The mining, processing and transportation of uranium consume vast amounts of energy supplied by fossil fuels."

The NRC says it expects U.S. companies to file applications for about 30 new combined construction and operating licenses in coming months.

I was downwind from Three Mile Island and was not a happy camper. But times have changed and I'm looking forward to nuclear power's belated second act.

More here.

White House & Pentagon: Light Years Apart

As I noted earlier this month, George Bush has broken the United States Army because of his reckless and never ending adventure in Iraq, and it's not going to be fixed anytime soon.

General George C. Casey confirmed that this week in an extraordinary appearance before Congress. It was extraordinary because the new Army chief of staff wasn't called up to Capitol Hill because of political grandstanding but because he requested a public hearing.

Casey, in his first appearance as CoC, told the House Armed Services Committee that the Army is:

"Out of balance . . . The current demand for our forces exceeds the sustainable supply. We are consumed with meeting the demands of the current fight and are unable to provide ready forces as rapidly as necessary for other potential contingencies."

It was Casey, of course, who was relieved of his position as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq because of his tepid support for the then-proposed surge strategy now being carried out by his successor, General David Petraeus, and proving so successful that only 56 people were killed and 103 wounded in car bomb attacks in Baghdad on Wednesday.

In their appearance before lawmakers, Casey and Army Secretary Peter Geren essentially drove a stake through the heart of the president's contention in his prime-time speech on September 13 that a possible drawdown of some 30,000 soldiers -- or roughly five combat brigades -- by next summer would be a result of all of the progress being made in Iraq.

What Bush didn’t say was that a drawdown of that magnitude would merely return in-country troop levels to what they were before the surge and that there is no alternative to such a drawdown.

This is because the 15-month tours of duty for these brigades will begin to expire next April, there are no units to replace them, and Geren and Casey and other service chiefs refuse to extend duty tours any further.

While the Casey-Geren appearance was not exactly subordination, it was a revealing indication that the White House and Pentagon may still be only a few miles apart physically, but they're light years apart in realistically assessing the state of the military and what the Forever War has done to it.

More here.

Photograph by Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Cartoon du Jour on the War

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Update: Remembering Omar & Yance

Having blown right past their initial $2,000 goal, organizers of a memorial fund in memory of Sergeants Omar Mora and Yance T. Gray have now set their sights on raising $10,000.

Kiko's House is one of at least 15 blogs supporting the endeavor, which was started by five blogs from across the political spectrum.

Mora and Gray were among the seven GIs stationed in Iraq who wrote a controversial New York Times op-ed piece questioning the war. They died on September 10 when a cargo truck overturned in western Baghdad just as General David Petraeus was about to report to Congress on progress of the surge.

A third author, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, was shot in the head while the article was being written and is being treated for severe brain trauma at a military hospital in the U.S.

The op-ed was titled The War As We Saw It and expressed skepticism about U.S. gains in Iraq because, the men wrote, Americans long ago wore out their welcome and any possibility that they can win through counterinsurgency warfare is far-fetched.

Party of Lincoln, Lincoln, Bo, Bincoln . . .

. . . Banana, Fanna, Foe, Fincoln. Feem Fie, Moe, Minlcon.
More here, Dear.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

DISTANCE II (Concord, Massachusetts)
By Koichiro Kurita

Baseball Playoffs & Spitting Out the Bit

I'm going to be fricking unsufferable over the next three days because my Philadelphia Phillies -- tied for first place in the National League East -- are thisclose to winning the division crown or NL Wild Card.

I would prefer the former but would take the latter.

That's what happens when you're a long suffering fan of the team that has lost the most games in Major League Baseball history and secretly fear that the Phillies will find another way to blow it between tonight and Sunday.

I reprised the Phil's legendary 1964 pennant drive collapse the other day, but according to baseball wonk Nate Silver, the all-time greatest collapse belongs to the 1995 California Angels.

He puts the '64 Phils are well down the list at number 10.

More here.

Meanwhile, there are more bizarre end-of-season permutations looming on the horizon than ever, including what would happen if the Phils, New York Mets, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres all end with identical records.

More here on that.

Disorders From Around Yon Blogosphere

A controversial ad campaign featuring a 68-pound anorexic woman has been launched in Italy to coincide with Milan Fashion Week.

The ads, which are aimed at raising awareness about eating disorders, feature Isabelle Caro, a 27-year-old French woman.

Caro, who has battled the disease for 15 years, shows her exposed breasts and frail, naked body. Another image shows Caro's buttocks and the outline of her protruding rib cage.

The images, which have been placed in newspapers and on billboards, are being used to advertise Flash & Partners' clothing brand Nolita.

The issue was brought to the forefront after the starvation-related deaths of South American models Ana Carolina Reston, 21, and sisters Louisel and Eliana Ramos.

Last year, super-skinny models were banned from Madrid Fashion Week. The ban covers girls with a body mass index of below 18 -- 18.5 to 25 is considered to be "normal."

In Milan, models must now carry medical certificates to prove they are healthy.

-- CTV

The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with the HIV virus deliberately.

Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected "in order to finish quickly the African people".

. . . "Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose," he alleged, refusing to name the countries.

"They want to finish with the African people. This is the programme. They want to colonise until up to now. If we are not careful we will finish in one century's time."

-- BBC

A fascinating thing happens when you're male and you hit your 30s and you're still single.

It's almost like God says "I know you have to deal with man boobs, hairs growing out of your nose and young punks wearing their sister's cardigan pushing in at bar - I'll throw you a bone."

So, instead of being the hunter in the dating game, you become the hunted; females your age transform from creatures to be pursued, wooed and cajoled into the bedroom to stalking, winking, white-wine drinking wild-women who are up for anything with an eligible bloke.

Mother nature is particularly unfair to her daughters and it's about age 32 that many women realise life's grand game of musical chairs is cruelly weighted towards guys and there's not many seats left to sit on.

It is at this moment that 'The Flip' occurs and the balance of power in the dating world shifts irrevocably in the man's favour.

-- SAM de BRITO

There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.

Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. . . . In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.

. . . Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

-- DAVID LEONHARDT

[Sophie] Currier already has received special accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act for dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, including permission to take the test over two days instead of one. The [National Board of Medical Examiners] also offered her a separate testing room where she can express milk during the test or during break time, and the option to leave the test center to breast-feed during break times.

-- DENISE LAVOIE

Men could reduce their risk of developing prostate cancer through regular masturbation, researchers suggest.

They say cancer-causing chemicals could build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly.

And they say sexual intercourse may not have the same protective effect because of the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, which could increase men's cancer risk.

-- BBC

$934,892,570 and Counting

That's the amount that you and I have spent since 2004 to create a public-relations disaster in Iraq that threatens to eclipse the Abu Ghraib scandal.

That disaster is run-amok Blackwater USA contractors, some of whom happen to be outright mercenaries, who have transformed duties guarding diplomats and senior U.S. civilians, escorting convoys, protecting military bases and conducting security overflights into a series of bloody embarrassments that have further exacerbated tensions between occupiers and occupied at a time when the White House claims that real progress is being made in the Forever War.

The State Department, which spent the lion's share of that nearly $1 billion, and the Pentagon had turned a blind eye and deaf earto incidents involving Blackwater until bodyguards accompanying a speeding State Department convoy in Baghdad on September 16 iced at least 11 Iraqis (see photo of aftermath) in an apparently unprovoked attack.

Now that State has been forced to acknowledge the . . . er, problems, it is going through the motions of investigating Blackwater on the one hand while trying to keep Congress from investigating Blackwater on the other, a familiar tactic of the secrecy obsessed Bush administration.

With Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a right-wing Born Again Christian with close ties to the White House and Pentagon scheduled to testify before Representative Henry Waxman's House Government Affairs Subcommittee next week, State has informed the California Democrat that no one from Blackwater will be permitted to talk without White House approval. That, of course, is shorthand for "drop dead."

Waxman calls the move "extraordinary" and "unusual." I call it business as usual.

As for State officials themselves, Condi Rice is not even allowing them to testifying unless it's behind closed doors. Ditto on business as usual.

Blackwater's lucrative contracts and convenient immunity from Iraqi and U.S. laws are a consequence of the administration's radical vision of outsourcing all kinds government work, up to and including waging war. Much of what Blackwater does was once the domain of Military Police units. (Think about all those M*A*S*H episodes when Hawkeye and Trapper were pounced on by MPs.)

After considerable chest thumping, the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has backed away from calls for Blackwater to exit Iraq post haste. The reason is (choose one): U.S. forces would have to be drawn from important surge-related duties or Iraqi security forces would have to cover and they're not prepared to do so.

The Washington Post quotes one of those ubiquitous unnamed officials who populate so many stories about the war these days as saying there is considerable acrimony between State and the Pentagon over the unfolding scandal. He adds:

"This is a nightmare. We had guys who saw the aftermath (of the September 16 incident) and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we're trying to have an impact for the long term. . . .

"This is a big mess that I don't think anyone has their hands around yet. It's not necessarily a bad thing these guys are being held accountable. Iraqis hate them, the troops don't particularly care for them, and they tend to have a know-it-all attitude, which means they rarely listen to anyone -- even the folks that patrol the ground on a daily basis."

The mess got a little bigger today when The New York Times reported that Blackwater has a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later, which is not all that surprising when your job is to protect diplomats and not being school crossing guards.

But, the Times said, Blackwater's associates (most are independent contractors, not employees) have been involved in twice as many violent incidents than DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other U.S.-based security firms that have been contracted by State.

The Times quoted another unnamed official as saying:

"You can find any number of people, particularly in uniform, who will tell you that they do see Blackwater as a company that promotes a much more aggressive response to things than other main contractors do."

By the way, the Pentagon and Iraqi governments also are investigating Blackwater, but like the Abu Ghraib probes, don't expect them to amount to a hill of beans. Like the U.S. itself, Blackwater is above the law and in its messianic zeal answerable to no one, apparently not even The Big Guy.

Photo: Ali Yussef/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Cartoon du Jour on the War

Ben Sargent/Universal Press Syndicate

Anthony K. Bento: An Untamed Spirit

Did you know Tony Bento? Probably not unless you went to Clairemont High School in San Diego or knew him from the old neighborhood.

At age 23, Army Corporal Anthony K. Bento was a seasoned and respected combat veteran who had accepted more responsibility early in life than most people accept much later -- if ever.

Bento was supposed to be reunited two months ago with his wife, Colleen, infant son Anthony and parents, Anthony and Penny Bento.

But his combat tour was extended by 90 days – a sadly regular occurrence as the Iraq war slouches into its fifth year -- and his stateside rotation date had been pushed back to late October.

Then on Monday the man whom Colleen Bento described as having "an untamed spirit that not even the Army or war could break" and his commanding officer called a selfless warrior who always made sure that his gunner's backside was covered, was killed by small-arms fire from insurgents in the north-central Iraqi city of Beiji.

Some 3,801 Americans have now died in Iraq.

Four days before his death, Colleen Bento wrote her beloved husband:

"I got your text messages this morning and you are soooo sweet! I love you so, so, so, so much! Only a few weeks left until I get to see you and give you kisses and move into our house and buy furniture. I'm so excited I can't stand it! Stay Safe."

More here.

Nancy Pelosi Is an Idiot

Politicians are guilty until proven innocent.

-- ME

Given this adage, which has held me in good stead since forever, I can't recall a politician with whom I've felt completely comfortable. Joe Biden, the Democratic senator from Delaware, comes closest, but that's because we went to the same school together. Then there is Nancy Pelosi, with whom I would seem to share many left-of-center values if not her retro Nancy Reagan fashion sense.

But Pelosi (insert Sexist Reference Alert here) always seemed to me to be a condescending bobble-brained harpie, something that she has more than confirmed since becoming House majority leader in January.

So idiotic is Pelosi that I tend to ignore what she has to say. But when she alit in The Situation Room the other day to tell CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she deserves credit for "changing the debate" on the Iraq war and she and her Democratic colleagues were holding President Bush accountable, I was so dumbfounded that I had to confirm the references.

Why dumbfounded? Because of the reality that on Pelosi's watch 30,000 additional troops have been sent to Iraq and she and her fellow Democrats have pretty much given the president a blank check to dump the whole mess on his successor.

To make matters worse, Pelosi whined about how misunderstood and unappreciated she is.

Make that idiotic and delusional.

Click here for more and here for a video.

'Stunning' Is Not the World For It

More here.

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Elementary chaos theory predicts that robots will inevitably rise against their masters. So why this?

Here's the UXV Combatant, a new class of warship being developed by BAE Systems to fight in the drone wars. BAE believes that the future battlefield will be full of intelligent robots fighting against each other, probably until they realize they can join together to eliminate all humans from Earth. The ship looks and specs, expected to enter service past 2020, look terrifying.

-- ROBERT FARLEY

[Laura Bush] said she was moved by a tiny picture she saw of Aung San Suu Kyi - the Burmese pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace prize laureate - who came to the gate of her home, where she is under house arrest to greet monks who were allowed to pass by there earlier this week. Mrs. Bush spoke of Aung San Suu Kyi's long years under house arrest, noting her husband died in Britain, while she was confined to her home in Rangoon. . . .

"There is hope - absolutely, there is hope for Burma," Mrs. Bush said. "And, I think that is one of the feelings we all get as we look at these images - this very cautious hope that, this time, the people have turned a page." Mrs. Bush said the Burmese have told the world they can no longer tolerate oppression, and the nation must move on.

-- PAULA WOLFSON

Can a Republican win the '08 presidential nomination by assailing his own party?

Mitt Romney apparently seems willing to take that gamble. And it would appear to be a risky tactic.

Despite the fact that the Republican "brand" is at low ebb nationally, and despite the fact that the lame-duck Republican president has been written off as an irredeemable failure by roughly 70 percent of the American public, GOP loyalists would prefer not to dwell on their past errors, or question their leader's wisdom; rather, they'd prefer that their '08 candidates simply serve up heapings of red meat about defeat-o-crat Democrats and the perceived evils of Hillary.

But Romney, perhaps with an eye on the Bush-weary independent voters who will ultimately swing the general elections, is now taking a different route. In a new national TV ad, in a weekend speech, and in a widely-circulated "open letter" to fellow Republicans, he has decided (at least for now) to position himself as the "outsider" and "reformer" who will clean up the failed Washington Republican establishment. And the riskiest aspect of this move is his subliminal skewering of the Decider himself.

-- DICK POLMAN

It would be hard to find a more worthless administration tool than Diane Feinstein. From gutting FISA to funding the war without restrictions, this so-called Democrat cries "how high?" anytime Bu$hCo says jump. She voted to extend the Patriot Act without the critical safeguards that real Democrats wanted. She voted for what amounts to a declaration of war on Iran. She was instrumental in sending a corporate shill to the Senate floor for a US 5th Circuit confirmation vote. She condemns the free speech rights of MoveOn.org and our troops to endless combat without relief.

Even a Republican apparatchik, appointed by the governator, would be better than a woman who at every turn demonstrates contempt for her constituents. At least then there would be no expectation of true representation.

So . . . Senator Feinstein . . . could you please just retire. You're an embarrassment -- a liability for your state and your party.

-- KVATCH

It was beef and almonds. The whole time we were fussing about the Chinese government’s failure to impose strict standards on production of toys and Mattel was recalling toys because of lead paint and other manufacturing deficiencies, (some of which Mattel now acknowledges were design flaws) the Commission of the European Communities was quietly taking action against the United States because of almonds, and the South Koreans were banning some U.S. cows.

Although the almonds were, like some of the parts of the recalled toys, small enough to be swallowed by infants with the result that they might choke, they were not recalled because of their size. Nor were they coated with lead paint like the toys produced in China. Indeed, the almonds have not been recalled. They are still being sold in grocery stores all over the United States and will continue to be sold in those places for the foreseeable future.

The trouble with almonds, as far as the Commission is concerned is the aflatoxin levels in their production and processing and the fact that there are inadequate controls in the United States to insure that the almonds that reach Europe meet Community standards. It was a bit of an embarrassment but then, much of what we do is. Not properly processing almonds is a much smaller problem than many of the others confronting the administration.

-- CHRISTOPHER R. BRAUCHLI

It Takes Lotsa Chefs to Cook These Books

Shocking at it may seem, the civilian casualty figures that General David Petraeus used in his Iraq war progress report dog-and-pony show earlier this month differ from the generally higher numbers less partisan body counters use. But what's really interesting in a grotesque sort of way is that the general's numbers also differ significantly from the Pentagon's official numbers, which are higher in some cases and lower in others.

Now before we impugn this whole crowd for having nefarious motives, of which there no doubt are some, let's note that compiling wartime statistics always is tough and is all the more so in Iraq because of the prevalence of sectarian killings. Which begs the question: Just what is a sectarian killing?

The answer, it would seem, is elastic.

Writing in the WaPo, Karen DeYoung offers this sobering example:

"On Sept. 1, the bullet-riddled bodies of four Iraqi men were found on a Baghdad street. Two days later, a single dead man, with one bullet in his head, was found on a different street. According to the U.S. military in Iraq, the solitary man was a victim of sectarian violence. The first four were not.

"Such determinations are the building blocks for what the Bush administration has declared a downward trend in sectarian deaths and a sign that its war strategy is working. They are made by a specialized team of soldiers who spend their nights at computer terminals, sifting through data on the day’s civilian victims for clues to the motivations of killers."

Then there is the range of available statistics.

To cite but one example, Petraeus cherrypicked civilian deaths only for his presentations, while Dan Macomber, a chief warrant officer who is in charge of the Multi-National Force's sectarianism database, counts both civilians killed and wounded, which surely provides a more comprehensive picture.

But this, according to DeYoung, is where it gets interesting:

"In recent months, most of the military's indicators have pointed in a favorable direction. As with all statistics, however, their meaning depends on how they are gathered and analyzed. 'Everybody has their own way of doing it,' Macomber said of his sectarian analyses. 'If you and I . . . pulled from the same database, and I pulled one day and you pulled the next, we would have totally different numbers.'

"Apparent contradictions are relatively easy to find in the flood of bar charts and trend lines the military produces. Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by . . . Petraeus, [whose] numbers were higher than the Pentagon's for the months preceding this year's increase of U.S. troops to Iraq, and lower since U.S. operations escalated this summer."

Ilan Goldenberg is less circumspect, asserting at Democracy Arsenal that a major difference between Petraeus' numbers and the Pentagon numbers is that the general has taken what he asserts is the best available U.S. casualty data and blended it with Iraqi data that is notoriously unreliable.

DeYoung does not say that the numbers are being cooked, but does note that:

"The U.S. intelligence community considers more than numbers in making its war assessments. 'What the Iraqis perceive' about their country and their daily lives 'may be more important than what the numbers are,' said a senior intelligence official . . . Even so, he said, intelligence officials found contradictions in the available statistics as they wrote last month's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, whose conclusions were somewhat less optimistic than the military's. . . .

"While both Petraeus and the recent Pentagon report emphasized improved statistics over the past three months, the intelligence community generally declines to declare trends based on data measured in periods shorter than six months to a year. Several senior intelligence officials said last week that most numerical indicators appear to be moving in a uniformly positive direction in the nearly two months since the intelligence estimate's data cutoff -- although they said it is too early to determine definitive trends."

Alas, it will be something of a miracle if the men and women under Petraeus's command can keep that "uniformly positive direction."

An inept and corrupt Baghdad government that has failed to meet every benchmark of consequence set by the White House got a go-free card from President Bush in his prime-time speech following the appearances by Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on Capitol Hill.

The president's open-ended extension of the surge sends a clear message to the Al-Maliki regime that the pressure to work toward national reconciliation -- which is necessary if modest military gains are to be sustained -- is off because its American helpmates, who are busily arming both sides in the civil war, won't not be leaving anytime soon.

Then there is the feckless Al-Maliki himself, who actually had the temerity to claim earlier this week that his government had prevented a civil war that in point of fact has been raging for a year and a half.

I guess Shiites and Sunnis will just have to reconcile on their own. If they aren't killed trying as were representives of both sects in a bombing in Baquba yesterday.

Photograph by Reuters

Remembering Omar Mora & Yance Gray

In a terrific instance of comity across the political spectrum, five blogs have joined together to set up up a memorial fund in the names of Sergeants Omar Mora and Yance T. Gray.

The men were among the seven GIs in Iraq who wrote a controversial New York Times op-ed piece questioning the war. They died on September 10 when a cargo truck overturned in western Baghdad just as General David Petraeus was about to report to Congress on progress of the surge.

A third author, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, was shot in the head while the article was being written and is being treated for severe brain trauma at a military hospital in the U.S.

The op-ed was titled The War As We Saw It and expressed skepticism about U.S. gains in Iraq because, the men wrote, Americans long ago wore out their welcome and any possibility that they can win through counterinsurgency warfare is far-fetched.

Mora, a resident of Texas City, Texas, was a native of Ecuador and had just become a U.S. citizen. Gray lived in Ismay, Montana.

Kyle Moore explains the memorial fund and motivation for it in a post at Comments From Left Field. The other participating blogs are The Newshoggers, a Kiko's House fave, and The Agonist, Bastard Logic and Conservative Thinking.

Cartoon du Jour on the War

Ben Sargent/Universal Press Syndicate

RIP Razz

Razz, a goregous black labrador, had a resume that many people would envy.

He was a veteran of the 2002 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and the 2006 Commonwealth Games, both in Australia, among other major events.

The former customs dog then went on to greater things as an explosive-detection dog with Australian troops in Afghanistan.

When a vehicle with three diggers in it was hit by a roadside bomb in Oruzgan Province last week, Razz was sent in.

Razz and his handler encountered a second bomb. He was killed and his handler suffered minor injuries.

He was the second Aussie explosive-detection dog killed in Afghanistan this month.

More here.

Who's Sicker? Dubya or America's Kids?

I have a hard time believing much of what President Bush says because so much of it is misleading or downright false, but his claim that the House of Representatives is playing politics by passing a $35 billion expansion of a popular children’s health-insurance program may be a new low in the annals of compassionate conservatism.

The vote last night was 265 to 159 with 45 politics-playing Republicans joining Democrats by a broad but not veto-proof margin. (That would take 290 votes.) Meanwhile, the Senate takes up the bill later this week and is expected to send it on to the president with a veto-proof majority.

The compromise package would expand the $5 billion-a-year S-CHIP children's health insurance program by an average of $7 billion a year over the next five years for total funding of $60 billion for the period. That would be enough to boost the program's enrollment to 10 million, up from 6.6 million, which would reduce the ranks of America's 9 million uninsured children.

There are a number of ways to put these billions into perspective, but try this one on for size: The money that would be earmarked for kids is a tiny fraction of what is spent in a few weeks in Iraq.

So the president's assertion that expanding the health-insurance program would be too expensive is silly, as is his claim that it would be a form of (gasp!) national health insurance.

At this late date, the president's legacy is in tatters and the only question of substance is whether he will be ajudged the worst president or merely one of the worst. So one more veto of legislation that a majority of Americans favor really won't matter. Unless you happen to be a child without health insurance.

More here on the bill.

Dems Finally Do Something That Counts

Bowing to pressure from Democrats and human rights groups, the White House has withdrawn the nomination of John Rizzo to be the CIA's top attorney after months of controversy over his role in the agency's interrogation policy.

Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, had drawn fire because of his support for Bush administration legal doctrines permitting so-called "enhanced interrogation" of terrorism detainees in CIA custody.

A senior official said Rizzo told President Bush he had decided to withdraw after concluding that the nomination would not succeed and that drawing out the process would not be helpful.

Rizzo remains a senior attorney at the CIA.

More here.

'The Eastern World It's Exploding . . . '

Forty-seven years ago this week, "Eve of Destruction" was the number one single on the Billboard Hot 100. It was a song for the times then. And now?

THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION
By BARRY McGUIRE

The eastern world, it is exploding
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’
You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’

But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Don’t you understand what I’m tryin’ to say
Can’t you feel the fears I’m feelin’ today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save, with the world in a grave
[Take a look around ya boy, it's bound to scare ya boy]

And you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Yeah, my blood’s so mad feels like coagulatin’
I’m sitting here just contemplatin’
I can’t twist the truth, it knows no regulation.
Handful of senators don’t pass legislation
And marches alone can’t bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin’
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’

And you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama
You may leave here for 4 days in space
But when you return, it’s the same old place
The poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead, but don’t leave a trace

Hate your next-door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace
And… tell me over and over and over and over again, my friend
You don’t believe
We’re on the eve
Of destruction
Mm, no no, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

This Is One Pissed Off White Chick

Why is Adrianne Curry, America’s Next Top Model winner and spokesbabe, boycotting Black History Month and the BET cable television network?

Click here to find out why.

Hat tip to Jill at Feministe

Scary Beautiful Photograph du Jour

Indian security officers patrol Lake Dal in Kashmir.
By Chris Hondros

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Representative Anthony Weiner is right to keep tilting at the Statue of Liberty — or at least at Washington’s insistence that the statue’s top be closed to the people it is meant to inspire.

Generations of tourists had climbed the 162 steps to Liberty’s crown until the site was closed after the Sept. 11 attacks. The statue was partly reopened three years ago, with visitors ushered through explosives detecting “puffer” machines and other security, and then allowed only up to the statue’s hem. A glass ceiling was installed where the stairs were shut off.

Standing underneath it, visitors can gaze upward into the void, a tremendously unsatisfying experience, especially for those who remember the exhilaration of the climb and the panoramic views of water, city and, yes, freedom.

National Park Service officials, testifying before the House this week, said concerns over terror now have given way to worries that the top of the 121-year-old structure is a potential fire trap. And they warned the narrow staircases were never meant to handle hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. They plan to keep the tourists at Liberty’s hem. That’s unacceptable.

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES

Iraq’s refugees tell heartbreaking accounts of suffering, displacement, and shattered dreams, but these refugees represent more than mere human interest stories. Collectively, the outpouring of millions of Iraqi refugees into a very small number of neighboring countries poses a dramatic security threat to the Middle East, and there is no sign that threat is going away.

-- JON ALTERMAN

When no one was looking, someone cut a hole out of the Democrats' much-hyped ethics bill. A watchdog group which caught it suspects the Democrats of undermining their own effort to clean up Capitol Hill.

-- JUSTIN ROOD

It is mere months after Democrats won the election on a promise to defend America's middle class. The nation demands action to address burgeoning health care and environmental crises. But somehow, the first significant initiative the newly empowered Democratic Party is likely to pass into law is a lobbyist-written trade pact to help Big Business ship jobs overseas.

Quick: Am I talking about the early 1990s or the present day?

Both.

Back in 1992, candidate Bill Clinton chastised the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at events with blue-collar workers. A year later, President Clinton joined with Republican and Democratic legislators to ram NAFTA through Congress "over the dead bodies" of those same workers, as the chairman of American Express gushed at the time.

We all remember what followed. Factories were boarded up, thousands lost jobs, wages stagnated, income inequality exploded, 19 million Mexicans were thrown into poverty, and "the dead bodies" didn't come out to vote during the next election, helping the GOP evict Democrats from Congress in 1994.

-- DAVID SIROTA

In the sad-but-probably-true department comes a Politico story about how GQ killed a piece about in-fighting in Hillary’s campaign for cover-story access to the former President.

-- ROBERT STEIN

Alan Greenspan says there's nothing he could have done about the housing bubble. Monetary levers are too crude to do any good, and the least worst option is to let the bubble collapse on its own and then pick up the pieces afterward.

Maybe so. But that still doesn't explain why Greenspan cheered on the bubble back in 2004.

-- KEVIN DRUM

One of the stranger efforts of the political right over the last decade has been the effort to paint Rachel Carson as a mass murderer, on the basis of bogus claims conflating the US ban on non-public health uses of DDT with a non-existent ban on the use of DDT for indoor spraying against malarial mosquitoes. Starting from the lunatic fringe of the LaRouche movement and promoted primarily by current and retired hacks for the tobacco industry, this claim has become received wisdom throughout the US Republican party and its offshoots, and has deceived quite a few people, including writers for the NY Times.

-- JOHN QUIGGAN

Maybe the DEA should be in charge of the war on terror. Operation Raw Deal has been successful in arresting 120 people and closing 56 labs worldwide for illegal steroid production. Isn't that interesting? The world can't get together with a comprehensive plan to capture or prevent terrorists, but they can get together to stop steroid drug use. Priorities, priorities.

-- DEB

Here we are, at least in this part of the world, at the beginning of a new academic year. Teachers everywhere are facing the prospect of groups of sullen silent students, or groups composed of the cowed majority plus one ignorant loudmouth who you can’t shut up. And then there’s the group which works absolutely fine but when those ten file out, and another ten sit down, and you do exactly the same thing but nothing happens, long silences, etc. And then there’s the temptation to overcompensate and turn those seminar groups into a mini-lecture where you do all the talking.

-- CHRIS BERTRAM

So Mary Winkler, the woman who shot her husband, Matthew in the back has been granted supervised visits with her children by a judge.

Not only will this murderess get supervised visits with the kids, but now her enabling community has provided her with some goodies, just to show their support!

-- DR. HELEN

Ever since the nineteen-fifties, American universities and the idea of intellectual freedom have been under attack from two kinds of anti-intellectualism. On the right, the McCarthy era created a blueprint for landing devastating political blows by ridiculing the patriotism, the manliness, and the common sense of those inherently comical figures known as liberal professors. On the left, beginning in 1964 with, ironically, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the campus became a political battleground where large numbers of students decided that only certain ideas—ones they liked—deserved a hearing, and that the group identity and political bona fides of a speaker mattered more than the quality of his argument.

This history evolved into new forms but never died. It helped create the New Left, the New Right, multiculturalism, political correctness, and the conservative media empire. The events at Columbia University surrounding the appearance of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad . . . put it on full display.

-- GEORGE PACKER

New Jersey: A Garden State of Mind

It took years for New Jersey to wrestle the unofficial Most Corrupt State title from Louisiana and public officials there are determined not to relinquish the crown.

Just the other day, in yet another round of government corruption-related arrests yet another passel of mayors and other public officials from three counties were caught accepting payoffs from undercover agents in yet another sting operation.

Given that voters associate corruption more with Democrats, a reasonable person would think that Republicans could take advantage of that fact.

Wrong.

A new Quinnipiac University poll finds that even through 88 percent of voters consider corruption a serious problem and predominately a Democratic problem, 54 percent of them say they're not likely to vote for Republicans in the November election when all 120 state legislative seats are being contested.

Democrats currently control the state Senate 22-18 and the General Assembly 50-30, as well as the statehouse. Both U.S. senators and 7 of 13 congressmen also are Democrats.

There are a number of explanations for the disconnect revealed by the poll, but I’m going with these:

* New Jersey is, in a word, weird, and suffers from an identity crisis that explains some of the weirdness.

Say "Iowa" and you think of cornfields. Say "Texas" and you think of the Alamo. Say "Florida" and you think of Disney World. But say "New Jersey" and you think of . . . Smelly oil refineries? Toll roads? The 1932 Lindberg kidnapping? Tony Soprano?

* While everyone talks about corruption being a problem, no one does anything about it.

This may stem in part from the probability that just about everyone, especially in the northern part of the state, has a neighbor or knows someone who has been caught up in a corruption probe. It's simply part of the social fabric and a consequence of New Jersey's notorious "pay to play" political ethic.

* New Jersey is unusual in that most power resides at the top and bottom of the political infrastructure.

New Jersey's governor is arguably the most powerful of any of the 50 and local commissions and boards wield a tremendous amount of power.

* New Jersey may be the most liberal state, a tide which tends to raise Republican boats.

Indeed, many Republican officeholders are well out of the national GOP mainstream. The party's sole gubernatorial success in the last 17 years was the election of Christie Todd Whitman, a staunch moderate, in 1993. Only four of the 11 elected governors since World War II have been Republicans.

Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said the poll shows corruption probably won't be decisive in this year's legislative elections, but could pose problems for incumbents in close races.

Meanwhile, the poll found voters approve of U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie, a Republican who has spearheaded many of the corruption investigations, by a 40 percent to 14 percent margin.

But Richards noted that:

"Christie gets good marks from voters for his corruption fighter role in New Jersey, but that does not seem to translate into political power."

Only in New Jersey, folks. Only in New Jersey.

Ahmadinejad Takes a Victory Lap . . .

Given the kerfuffles over whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be allowed to visit Ground Zero and questions over whether there is something strange in the drinking water at Columbia University, it has been easy to overlook that as the Iranian president makes his annual sojourn to the U.S. and the U.N., he arguably has played the fools in the White House . . . for fools.

Put aside for a moment that Ahmadinejad is a bully of the first water and a Holocaust-denying loony tune who has some very real problems back home, as well as the fact that he learned to his dismay when he did finally speak at Columbia that freedom of speech is a two-way street. (Ha!)

Because there is ample evidence that the U.S. may be the only thing propping him up.

No bout adoubt it, Ahmadinejad is winning the public-relations war against a strident Bush administration, which when not off message is sending mixed signals to Tehran, the Middle East and the world at large.

Now glom onto what Peter Galbraith has to say in the New York Review of Books on the U.S.'s train wreck of an Iran policy:

"The scale of the American miscalculation is striking. Before the Iraq war began, its neoconservative architects argued that conferring power on Iraq's Shiites would serve to undermine Iran because Iraq's Shiites, controlling the faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be 'an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western.' Further, they argued, Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and the Iranian Shiites Persian. It was a theory that, unfortunately, had no connection to reality."

While we’re piling on, there is this from Barnett Rubin at Global Affairs:

"The Bush-Cheney administration has surrendered much of Afghanistan to the Taliban and much of Pakistan to al-Qaida. They have turned most of Iraq over to Iran, creating the very danger over which they now threaten another disastrous war; they have strained the U.S. Armed Forces to the point of exhaustion, turned the Defense Department over to private contractors, the Justice Department over to the Republican National Committee, and the national debt over to foreign creditors, while leading a party whose single most basic belief is supposed to be that individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions.

"And they dare to lecture us on national security?"

Indeed, there is nothing that the White House has said and done -- from deliberately leaking news of inner sanctum deliberations over whether to launch air strikes against Iran to its refusal to engage in dialogue with it except in the rarest of circumstances -- that has cowed, let alone deterred Ahmadinejad.

In short, the U.S.'s effort to portray Ahmadinejad as "an enemy head of state," as Juan Cole puts it, has . . . er, bombed.

Photograph by Vahid Salemi/The Associated Press

. . . and Also Takes a Very Big Hit

One of the more puzzling traits of the right wing, which waves Old Glory at every opportunity and professes to have a deep and abiding love for America, is how little faith it actually has in the pillars of the American legal and political system when push comes to shove.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the right wing has slavishly supported the Bush's administration's efforts to suspend habeas corpus, secretly spy on the citizenry, ignore international treaties and promote the use of torture, to name but a few of the pillar-busting laws and policies that the White House has shoved down our throats with the help of a compliant Congress. This even though the legal system the Founding Fathers . . . er, founded has withstood over 200 years of war, depression and pestilence just fine, thank you.

This bring us to another piece of Founding Father handiwork -- freedom of speech -- and the howls of protest from the right wing (as well as a bunch of other folks) when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at Columbia University.

Despite calls for his head, university President Lee Bollinger turned out to not be "a craven boot-licker of tyrants," as one conservative blogger put it, but an exemplar of the notion that freedom of speech is a two-way street.

That conservative blogger is Gerard Van der Leun, who in an apologia at his American Digest, writes that the reality of the appearance of "the dwarf Hitler" at Columbia was very different than he had anticipated.

What Gerard said is worth excerpting at length:

"[Ahmadinejad] was forced to listen to Bolllnger's carefully phrased, utterly devastating catalogue of his evil acts. This is something you can bet he has never had to endure before. To him, it was deeply and personally insulting. The only way it could have gotten worse would have been if Bollinger walked across the stage and spit fully into his face.

"Long, long after all the too and fro about Columbia and Bollinger fade, the clip of the dwarf proclaiming 'We have no homosexuals in Iran' will endure and will be used to revile and denigrate this corrupt and disgusting regime. It may well, over time, cause many people, gay or straight, to reconsider a knee-jerk support for Iran simply because it opposes George Bush and the United States. It will be invaluable. It already is enshrined in the Pantheon of Lies and it will only grow in stature there. It is a major propaganda victory.

"None of this could have happened if Bollinger and Columbia had not exercised their right to invite whom they wish to speak on campus. Spare me the plaints about who they do and do not invite and who they disinvite. That is not relevant to this issue. What they did in the past and what they may do in the future does not in any way diminish the effectiveness of what happened today. Spare me to the lame excuse that Bollinger only did it because of "the criticism." You have no means of knowing that other than inside your own imagination. And even if it were the case . . .So What?

"Today, to be brief, freedom of speech worked as it should work. It revealed the truth."

Cartoon by Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Blackwater: Killing Without Consequence

ALL IS FORGIVEN, LADS

Horror stories involving Blackwater USA in Iraq are stacking up like bodies in the Baghdad central morgue, and the bottom line is always the same:

Employees of the North Carolina-based security company can kill without consequence.

I wrote back to back to back to back posts last week on Blackwater only to see the story whimper to an end with a resumption of activities by the company a few days after its bodyguards blasted at least eight Iraqis to Kingdom Come apparently without provocation.

I am so Blackwatered out that the mere mention of the name threatens to give me heart palpitations, but then I read this dispatch from Michael Hirsch at Newsweek:

"Take the case of the Blackwater guard who got drunk at a Green Zone party last Christmas Eve and reportedly boasted to his friends that he was going to kill someone. According to both Iraqi and U.S. officials, he stumbled out and headed provocatively over to the 'Little Venice' section, a lovely area of canals where Iraqi officials live. He had an argument with an Iraqi guard, then shot him once in the chest and three times in the back. The next day Blackwater put him on a private plane out of the country . . . "

Oh, by the by, the Iraqi government says it has a videotape of the shooting incident that triggered last week's kerfuffle. But it but has dialed back the rhetoric because . . . well, because a security vacuum would result if Blackwater were forced out, that would mean troops would have to be pulled from the surge to babysit diplomats, which would mean . . .

Did Secretary of Secretary of State Rice or Prime Minister Al-Maliki bring up Blackwater when they crossed paths this weekend at the U.N.? Nah, they avoided each other like the plague.

The White House has been infamous for not talking to its enemies, but now it's even avoiding its friends.

Hat tips to Sarabeth at 1115 and Avedon Carol at The Sideshow

Make No Mistake: This Is a Crime

For the fourth year in a row, marijuana arrests in the U.S. set an all-time record in 2006, according to the just-released FBI Uniform Crime Reports.

Arrests totaled 829,627, an increase from 786,545 in 2005. Similar to previous years, 738,916 or 89 percent were for possession, not sale or manufacture, and marijuana possession arrests again exceeded arrests for all violent crimes combined.

More here.

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Who's to blame for the Republican implosion? More here.

In the years since I first met him in 1974, I have learned that it's wise to take Newt Gingrich seriously. He has many character flaws, and his language is often exaggerated and imprudent. But if there is any politician of the current generation who has earned the label "visionary," it is probably the Georgia Republican and former speaker of the House.

-- DAVID BRODER

[H]onestly, on the facts, nobody's better suited than Newt to both hark back to high times for the GOP and break decisively with Bush ... his other shortcomings notwithstanding. I for one hope Newt runs.

-- JAMES POULOS

The single most important issue of the presidential elections next year: Who is going to bring me the the biggest pile of dead terrorist carcasses over the next four years?

Among the sensible people who agree with me on that, many will argue there is no close-second; this is a far-and-away thing. I respectfully admonish them to reconsider, because the second-most-important issue is very important indeed, and it is breathing hotly on the neck of the first.

Coming in at a close second, and I do mean a close one, is a big package of interrelated sub-issues all knotted together. They have to do with the people who are actually proud to call themselves “liberals,” not in the classic sense, but in the post-modern sense. Can we be fooled into thinking they are really champions of our freedoms, when they’re forcing us to think that, and coercing us into silence on any other viewpoint? Are we really so dense that we fail to see, or we can be distracted from seeing, the irony in that simple contradiction? Are liberals crazy, or just stupid? Do we really have to let them vote even when they so obviously lack the level of maturity one would be expected to achieve by age eighteen?

-- MORGAN FREEBERG

The G.O.P. needs at least one minority group in its ranks if it's going to be a viable political party in the 21st century. As the former vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp asked rhetorically last week, "What are we going to do — meet in a country club in the suburbs one day?"

-- FRANK RICH

I don't mean to be rude, but what the hell is going on? No impeachment proceedings, despite the Kucinich Impeachment Articles languishing in the House? A refusal to make the Republican Senators filibuster the Webb amendment that would have required a mandatory year’s rest between deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan (which wasn’t even an antiwar bill, but one crafted specifically to support the troops)? Twenty two Democratic Senators voting to condemn Moveon.org for exercising their right to free speech? No strategy for ending this war other than a vain hope to “peel away” a few “moderate” Republicans? Mealy mouthed explanations for why nothing gets done?

-- STEVEN D.

Nothing in modern politics seems to defy the laws of physics more than the Rudolph Giuliani campaign for the Republican nomination. Watching a thrice-married serial adulterer who supports abortion rights and gay rights and knows less most policy matters than your average rhododendron try to win over Dobson and Tancredo’s loyal minions has the roughly the same feel as watching the test car approach the striped wall in super-slow motion.

-- TIM F.

In the Republican primary, ideology and partisan affiliation are major dividing lines that alter the dynamics of the race. Giuliani and Thompson are basically tied among Republican primary voters who describe themselves as strong Republicans, as well as among conservative leaning Republicans. McCain and Giuliani are close among independents who vote in the Republican primary. Additionally, the Thompson gender gap (widely reported) is worth keeping an eye on. In this omnibus survey, it is slightly larger than the Clinton gender gap, and in a recent ARG poll it was up to 30 points. It is bouncing around a lot, but I think Thompson will probably be in trouble in the general election if he can't even convince Republican women to vote for him.

-- BRKLYNGRL

For all that some Christian Republicans claim Christ as one of their own, it's far more likely that he would vote Libertarian. Treat people with fairness and love; otherwise leave them alone.

-- LARS PEARSON

If smirking self-confidence were money in the bank, they would both be billionaires, the frat boy who got hold of a country and won’t let go and the football star who got away with murder and thinks felonies are his birthright.

George W. Bush and O.J. Simpson keep doing what they do, despite all the warning signs to slow down and consider the consequences. Why?

Because their grotesque sense of entitlement assures them they can get away with anything, and so far they have.

Bush will leave the White House as the worst president in history while O. J. could end up in prison, but that won’t wipe the "What, me worry?" smiles off their faces.

-- ROBERT STEIN

New Yorker illustration by Finn Graff

Alan Greenspan's Shocking Confession & The Myth of the Free-Market Economy

I think I got a B in Econ 101. I got an A, however, in keeping taxes low and being fiscally responsible with the people’s money.

-- GEORGE BUSH

The conservative business press is exalting over how Alan Greenspan took down Jon Stewart when the former Federal Reserve chairman and economic guru appeared on the Daily Show the other day.

Indeed, the usually inscrutable Greenspan was downright irrationally exuberant and got off some good ones. This included a barbed suggestion that Stewart reread The Age of Turbulence, his new book on the global economy, so he can better fathom why the nannies who babysit America's so-called free market economy like Greenspan did for 19 years always know best, as well as why investing in the stock market is preferable to the once hallowed but apparently passé concept of working hard and putting one's money in a bank, or even under a mattress.

But lost in the self-congratulation was an exchange that revealed Mr. Central Banker and his fellow nannies to be acolytes in the One True Church of Capitalism. This means serving Wall Street trumps the needs of Main Street, and as a consequence lot of good people are being driven to wrack and ruin:

Stewart: Many people are free-market capitalists, and they always talk about free-market capitalism, and that is our economic theory. So why do we have a Fed? Is the free market – wouldn’t the market take care of interest rates and all that? Why do we have someone adjusting the rates if we are a free-market society?

Greenspan: You’re raising a very fundamental question. . . . You didn’t need a central bank when we were on the gold standard, which was back in the nineteenth century. And all of the automatic things occurred because people would buy and sell gold, and the market would do what the Fed does now. But most everybody in the world by the 1930s decided that the gold standard was strangling the economy. And universally this gold standard was abandoned. But you need somebody to determine – or some mechanism – how much money is out there, because remember, the amount of money relates to the amount of inflation in the economy. . . . In any event the more money you have, relative to the amount of goods, the more inflation you have, and that’s not good. So . . .

Stewart: So we're not a free market then.

Greenspan: No. No.

Stewart: There's a visible – there’s a benevolent hand that touches us.

Greenspan: Absolutely. You're quite correct. To the extent that there is a central bank governing the amount of money in the system, that is not a free market. Most people call it regulation.

Yet again Stewart proves himself to be perhaps the best source of news and analysis on the boob tube (video here) in getting the congenitally circumspect Greenspan to blurt out the obvious: A truly free market would be based on a value standard like the gold standard that cannot easily be manipulated for political or personal purposes.

The stark reality is that the economy is free market in name only.

Greenspan -- whom I have knighted Sir Alan because he is so noble and all knowing -- certainly never intended publication of The Age of Turbulence to coincide with the scariest rumbling and farting in the U.S. economy in ages, including a weakened dollar, that are legacies of his stewardship.

His tacit admission about what the benevolent hand -- those nannies -- are really up to is the most dramatic evidence to date about why the stock market is soaring to new heights while millions of Americans are fighting for their economic lives.

* * * * *

Many people must have wondered what the hell the ebullient talking heads on MSNBC and other news shows were babbling about when the Dow Jones Industrial Average blew past the 13,000 mark in April. I know that I did.

This is because many of us are making do with less, sometimes a lot less. Home foreclosures and bankruptcies are soaring, health-care and education costs are going through the roof, and once sacrosanct pension plans are collapsing.

There is virtually no discussion about the lousy state of what I call the kitchen table economy, which despite George Bush's upbeat assessment at the top of this post has relentlessly headed south over the last six-plus years of an administration that has cosseted the rich, ignored the poor and robbed the middle class.

You know, compassionate conservatism.

One pair of statistics speaks volumes about the disconnect:

The median hourly wage has risen a little less than 10 percent in the last 25 years while productivity has grown by more than 70 percent. And the less you make -- if you haven't been downsized or laid off -- the bigger the disparity is.

This makes living the American dream – owning a home, sending the kids to college and having decent health-care insurance – substantially more difficult than it was a generation ago. For the first time since forever, a majority of Americans don’t believe the next generation will be better off than they are.

But don’t expect Sir Alan to bring any of that that up.

As Barack Obama put it in a speech to Wall Street executives at Nasdaq headquarters:

"Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it."

Then there is Wall Street's determined refusal to come to grips with the subprime mortgage diaster. This is a result of a combination of factor, not the least of which is that a lot of people were not prepared for the responsibilities that come with home ownership. But the biggest factor is the outrageously high number of loans that were made to buyers with poor credit, a goodly number by predatory lenders whom Sir Alan did nothing to try to rein in during his tenure at the Fed.

About $450 billion of the subprime mortgages written last year are being paid down by homeowners, with as many as 15 percent expected to throw in the towel in bankruptcies or foreclosures. Meanwhile, the losses sitting in loan pools are staggering.

But don’t expect Sir Alan to bring that up, either.

For the record, his successor at the Fed is up to the same mischief. Ben Bernanke got rave reviews when President Bush nominated him, but he too is in the thrall of Wall Street -- would you expect anything else? -- and evinces little empathy for the plight of Main Steet.

While acknowledging that homeowners facing foreclosure are a problem, Bernnake has spoken out most forcefully about his concern that that the economy could be harmed if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac take on too much risk in helping those homeowners and then there is a calamity (a terror attack or natural disaster come to my mind) that would require a federal bailout.

Bernanke gets a big wet smooch for last week's half point interest rate cut, which was designed to keep the economy from further slowing down.

But he has not taken a stand on the biggest problem.

That is excessive risk-taking on his beloved Wall Street, including high-risk loans and excessively secretive and underregulated hedge funds and private equity firms. Which is what got the U.S. economy in such a mess to begin with.

Like Sir Alan before him, Bernanke is another unquestioning lock-step follower of the Conventional Economic Wisdom when millions of Americans whose finances are hemorhaging are desperate for a leader.

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

It Was 50 Years Ago Today . . .

. . . that federal troops escorted nine black students into an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and struggles over race and segregation in America are still far from resolved.

More here.

Television Review: Ken Burns' 'The War'

"There’s no such thing as a good war, only necessary wars and just wars," says former Marine Corps torpedo bomber pilot Sam Hynes in the opening minutes of The War, the magisterial Ken Burns documentary that premiered on most PBS stations last night and continues in seven parts and some 14½ hours in all through early next month.

In fact, the first episode is called "A Necessary War" and would seem to be a backhanded reference to Iraq. But Hynes was speaking of Japanese atrocities in the Pacific and Burns says the interview was shot before the 2003 invasion and toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Therein lies a central lesson of Burns' latest mega-documentary, which while not his best is probably the most nuanced treatment of a war that has been written, talked and filmed about endlessly in this era of countless History Channel programs, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, a time when World War II veterans are dying at the rate of more than 1,000 a day.

As Burns puts it in debunking the notion that The War was produced because of Iraq, let alone Vietnam:

"When people complain in later episodes about not getting the right equipment -- which is endemic to all wars -- or generals making the wrong decisions, or politicians thinking about the upcoming elections, these are universal realities of war that just happen to be there accidentally. But we're not unmindful that they will engage people with questions about the current situation. That's the only reason why you do history. You're not going to change what happened on June 6, 1944, but you're going to ask questions that are going to help us on Sept. 11, 2007."

The War contains substantial never-before-seen film footage, some of it suppressed by the U.S. government at the time, and I sometimes had to remind myself that this was not Hollywood special-effects wizardry, but the real thing. Yet although some of the clips are shockingly graphic and the blood flows in torrents, there is a familiarity to The War because the seminal events are so familiar, as is Burns' narrator voice-over, talking-heads technique pioneered in The Civil War, his groundbreaking 1990 documentary and masterpiece.

Burns uses four American towns – Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California – to frame The War, moving back and forth between homefront and front-line experiences, and it is the moving testimony of the men who made it back home that will stay with you.

Quentine Aanenson, a pilot from Laverne, wrote to his sweetheart:

"I live in a world of death."

Hynes on being a bored young man in a small town one day and in combat the next:

"And then suddenly you could be a pilot or a submariner or an artilleryman or any damn thing, but it was something exciting and it was something adult. It has nothing to do with patriotism. It has nothing to do, really, with who the enemy is. It's the opportunity to be somebody more exciting than the kid you are."

Ray Leopold of Waterbury of the day his unit liberated a Nazi concentration camp:

"I think the horror is still with me. I think there's no apology that can ever atone for what I saw."

U.S. Senator and former infantryman Daniel Inouye on shooting a German:

"You would think that at that moment, after killing a human being, you would feel a little remorseful. I felt pleasure. And the men applauded. 'You were terrific, Dan.' "

Burns and co-director Lynn Novick return frequently to the irony that while the U.S. was battling fascism abroad it was upholding racial injustice at home. Although this is a major theme in The War, Burns caught heat from Hispanics and Native Americans that their contributions had been ignored and added substantial footage about them in mini-documentaries that PBS stations are showing in conjunction with the main event.

While it is damning with faint praise, it may be the familiarity of the Burns format that is The War's only real detraction. The documentary is, in a sense, a prisoner of its format, which can occasionally have a kind of numbing predictability since we all know who the winners and losers were.

No matter. In the end, The War is a huge achievement and a rare television event – something that families can and should watch together. I hope that you and your loved ones, especially school-age kids who can be prepared for the graphic scenes and occasional obscenity, are able to do so.

And while Ken Burns has taken pains to explain in interviews that The War was not produced with Iraq in mind, comparisons are unavoidable.

While not diminishing the valor of the men and women fighting in Iraq, it makes George Bush even smaller and more petty for a folly that could not be more different than World War II, which make his mangled historical comparisons between the two so obscene.

* * * * *

Click here for more on The War.

Episode 2, "When Things Get Tough," airs at tonight; Episode 3, "A Deadly Calling," tomorrow night; Episode 4, "Pride of Our Nation," Wednesday night; Episode 5, "FUBAR," on September 30; Episode 6, "The Ghost Front," on October 1; and Episode 7, "A World Without War," on October 2.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

I had a dream about the Escalante Grand Staircase region of Utah last night. It is, rock for rock and boulder for boulder, about the most beautiful place I've been in the good old U.S. of A. So it figures that others want to spoil it.

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

The Internet is truly a seductive place. It is the 18-year-old blond hard body with legs that don’t quit, swishing through a lunchtime crowd of 40-something paunched, balding, married men wishing they didn’t have two kids, a wife with a headache every night, and a mortgage to rival the national debt. With a flick of her hip, the seductress will whisk them all away to some place where they don’t have to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home from work or take the kid to soccer practice. Instead, our middle-aged Lotharios imagine themselves… (Insert current fantasy here.)

The Internet does that, of course. It seduces our senses, placing us smack in the middle of history, a “This is London,” Murrowesque reality on steroids where we can change the scenery simply by clicking the mouse. To those of us who grew up in a world where the grainy, black and white images of far away places were broadcast on one of only three television networks, it truly is magic – something those who have lived with the sorcery for most of their lives will never understand.

-- RICK MORAN

"I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage," said Sana Klaric, 27, who found out that the anonymous stranger she was chatting up on the Internet was her husband. They're now divorcing.

-- THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

PROBLEM: My device will not turn on.

SOLUTION: Try restarting the device.

PROBLEM: Was I not clear? The device will not start.

SOLUTION: The battery may be dead. Replace only with battery number 3BX-1267, available for $29.95 from your authorized equipment dealer. Use of any other battery may result in damage to your equipment and will void warranty.

PROBLEM: I have replaced the battery, and the device still does not work.

SOLUTION: Try holding down the CTRL, DEL, OPTION, RE-SEND and ESC keys simultaneously while pressing the ON button. If this doesn't work, use a fine-pointed pencil to press the RESET button, which is located in a tiny hole on the back of the device.

PROBLEM: My pencil point broke off in the RESET hole. The button appears to be jammed.

SOLUTION: You have just voided the warranty. Try using a paper clip.

PROBLEM: Still no luck.

SOLUTION: The problem may be a faulty fuse. The fuse is located inside the device housing adjacent to the battery compartment. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN THE HOUSING. This can result in electric shock and will void warranty. Take device to an authorized dealer for fuse replacement.

PROBLEM: There is no authorized dealer within reasonable driving distance of my residence.

SOLUTION: Pack device in the carton it came in and mail or courier express to our factory maintenance facility, Box 2387-H, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Allow eight weeks for fuse replacement and return. Include return shipping charges in Malaysian currency.

-- CHET RAYMO

Two Arab-Americans have been hired to post on blogs and Internet forums in an effort to improve America’s image.

-- NEIL MacFARQHUAR

For quite a while, conservatives have embraced an annoying strategy -- trawl through liberal comments sections in the hopes of finding intemperate remarks. The right then takes these comments to "prove" that the left is made up of unhinged radicals.

The practice has always been rather self-defeating. In fact, about a year ago, Kevin Drum came up with a sensible maxim: "If you're forced to rely on random blog commenters to make a point about the prevalence of some form or another of disagreeable behavior, you've pretty much made exactly the opposite point." Eventually, the practice was even given a name: "Nutpicking."

Unfortunately, the practice seems to have spread. Instead of far-right blogs trolling through liberal comment sections for fodder, now Republican candidates for public office are doing it.

-- STEVE BENEN

I got up this morning and noticed that my site pages were moving a little slow. Usually this means extra traffic. So I checked my site meter only to find that I had already had more hits before 9:00 o-clock in the morning than I do in an entire day. A further check revealed that all these hits were coming from a site called Instapundit. It seems that my man Glenn Reynolds will just post a link on his site, and his disciples will all drill on that site and basically do a bum rush on the site that Reynolds is linking. I think they call it an "Instalanche" or some shit. Which according to Wkipedia is a portmanteau for Instapundit avalanche. And quite a few of them were in the fields today. Just call Glenn Reynolds the Jimmy Buffet of the blogosphere, and call these people, "Parrot Heads". Or, as they call him, the "Godfather". Now black folks, if that's not some blasphemy for your ass I don't know what is. We all know the real Godfather's name is James and not Glenn.

But seriously, I thought it was all kind of ironic, since Reynolds (along with house Negro Lashawn Barber) was the person that pushed me over the edge to start a blog. I caught him on CSPAN one morning while I was having breakfast, and he was going on about how easy it was to start a blog, and how essential it was to share your thoughts, if you were a person with strong opinions. He was a person who also happens to be a member of my profession, which gave him a certain amount of credibility from where I sat. So a blogging I went, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now with all due respect to Mr. Reynolds, and his Instalanche people, ( I wonder what they call themselves. I mean doesn't every group have a name? Think Kossacks for example) I think it would be nice if they maybe read some of the shit on the blog that they bum rush before they start making stupid ass comments about the host and the blog itself.

-- FIELD NEGRO

John Coltrane: An Appreciation

As a very grown-up 18 year old (or so I thought), I traveled to New York City alone for the first time during my senior year in high school. Some 40 years later, I vaguely recall getting off a Trailways bus at the Port Authority Terminal and walking out into the teaming throngs on 42nd Street. I lunched on a freshly sliced roast beef sandwich at an Irish pub near Madison Square Garden and washed it down with my inaugural English ale. I dropped some pocket change in the open guitar case of the first street musician I'd ever encountered. I took the subway uptown to Columbia University, where I (futilely) hoped to attend college, walked across the campus green to Low Memorial Library and later window shopped along Broadway.

But what I most clearly remember was gazing in the window of a hole-in-the-wall record store a few doors from the West End restaurant and seeing John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" album staring back at me. I went inside and asked to see a copy.

This rookie didn't know Coltrane from Colbert (as in Claudette, not Steve), but I was taken by the image of an intense looking black man blowing a horn on the dust jacket. I figured that if the title track was a cover of the Rodgers and Hammerstein waltz from "The Sound of Music" and the flip side included George Gershwin's "Summertime," which I knew from "Porgy and Bess," then these were good enough reasons to pay four or five bucks (I don't remember exactly how much) to plunge into the great musical unknown.

Besides which, buying my first modern jazz album seemed like a very sophisticated thing to do for a young man on his own for the first time in the big city. I was cool.

* * * * *

We celebrate what would have been John Coltrane's 81st birthday today with the annual outpouring of tributes and remembrances. This is mine:

I had listened to classical music that moved me in emotional and intellectual ways I hardly understood, stuff like Beethoven's "Pastoral" and Dvorak's "From the New World," both part of a boxed set purchased at an old A&P supermarket with money from my newspaper route.

While I had a budding affinity for jazz, it ran toward the Great American Songbook singers, notably Ella Fitzgerald, and bandleaders like Dave Brubeck and Benny Goodman. I enjoyed their music, but these comparatively square bears didn't move me. When I returned home from New York and put "My Favorite Things" on the turntable of my dinky RCA hi fi, I was moved.

I didn't know that Coltrane was playing in a style called "sheets of sound," let alone that he was grasping something called a soprano saxophone in his massive hands in the dust jacket photo, an all but obsolete instrument that he had taken up because it was less painful for his diseased gums to play than his old standby and meal ticket, the tenor sax.

All I knew was that I was moved.

This white boy from suburbia had arrived at a lush musical oasis amidst a mid-1960s landscape dominated by the Beatles, Motown and the last gasps of California surfer music. There would be no turning back.

* * * * *

John Coltrane was born and raised in rural North Carolina when Jim Crow laws were still on the books. He is said to have begun playing the clarinet after the deaths of his father and two other members of his close-knit family.

He moved to Philadelphia in 1943 and was drafted into the Navy two years later, where he became interested in jazz and switched to alto sax. Charlie Parker was an early idol and he styled his playing after the bebop legend.

Coltrane’s first big break was with Dizzy Gillespie's big band in 1949, and after the band broke up he switched to tenor sax, which he played with bands led by Earl Bostic, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vincent and Johnny Hodges, among others.

In 1955, he got a call from trumpeter Miles Davis, whose career was on the rebound after years of being addicted to heroin. Despite the growth of his musical abilities, Coltrane soon became strung out himself, but received widespread notice in Miles’ so-called First Great Quintet for his harsh but free flowing playing.

Coltrane succeeded in kicking heroin in 1957 with help from pianist Thelonious Monk. He also experienced a spiritual epiphany, embracing Sufism and later other religions. He also began studying the violin and harp and Indian music, which in turn led him to what today is loosely called world music. He recorded his first solo albums and rejoined Miles in 1958, bringing to the now sextet that compressed “sheets of sound” style that characterized the middle phase of his too short career.

The year 1960 marked the beginning of Coltrane’s most prolific period and the formation of his so-called Classic Quartet with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Steve Davis (later replaced by Jimmy Garrison) and drummer Elvin Jones. He recorded the seminal “Giant Steps,” the title track of which includes perhaps the most complex cord progressions he ever laid down, and then “My Favorite Things.”

Coltrane moved on stylistically, expanding his improvisations but leaving behind some of his fans and critics. In 1964, the Classic Quartet produced its most famous album, the deeply spiritual “A Love Supreme.”

In 1965, Coltrane moved into the final and phase of his career, embracing the avant-garde jazz influenced by Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, and formed a second quartet that featured young and up and coming artists like Archie Shepp.

Some people claim that Coltrane began using LSD about this time, and there is indeed an acid-like transcendence to his music he played, much of it with new wife Alice (who died in January) on piano and Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax.

Coltrane succumbed to liver cancer at age 40 in 1967.

* * * * *

I never saw Coltrane play. Probably the closest I ever got to him was when I took my draft board physical a few blocks from the three-story brick row house on North 33rd Street in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of Philadelphia that he bought for $5,400 in 1952 and practiced and lived in until his death.

I have seen McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, two of his three collaborators on "My Favorite Things," many times, and one of the highlights of the 35 or so years of live jazz that I've absorbed was hearing Tyner channel Coltrane in an all-Trane show which happened to fall on my birthday a few years back.

Then there's that ebony soprano sax in the dust jacket photo.

Although Coltrane is best remembered for his extraordinary tenor work, if you put an Indonesian gamelan to my head and threatened to beat it until you broke my eardrums if I didn't name my favorite artist and instrument, I would shout "Uncle! John Coltrane! Uncle! Soprano sax!"

And my favorite album?

"My Favorite Things."

Of course.

* * * * *

This is another in a series of musician appreciations. Previous appreciations include those on Jerry Garcia and Bob Marley.

" . . . "

More here.

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! . . .

. . . Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

Correspondent Patrick Graham does note that the U.S. has reached out to Saddam Hussein's former henchmen, but that certainly does not make him "the new Saddam" as hyped on the cover of the new Maclean's magazine.

That so noted, Graham's commentary is most excellent for its perspective, depth and balance. Some excerpts:

Certainly the notion of there being any cohesive central power in Iraq is a myth. Whatever is running the country, it’s not a government. Iraq’s body politic has some kind of autoimmune deficiency syndrome in which the antibodies designed to defend it have turned on its own organs. It’s a perfect environment for opportunistic parasites, in this case Iraq’s neighbours. So it seems almost unfair to criticize Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s failure to govern, as if somehow he was in charge of anything that could be called a state.

In many ways, this is Saddam’s fault. Like most tyrants, he turned the Iraqi government into a series of fiefdoms loyal only to him. That’s why it was called a regime. But today, it’s really a set of regimes.

* * * * *

Revenge is deeply woven into the foundations of this war, and not just on the Iraqi side. I remember looking inside the lead Humvee coming into downtown Baghdad on the day the Americans took the city on April 2003. Inside was an "I Love NY" sticker. How much of the American motivation for the war was payback for 9/11 is a question that can be asked every time Bush is quoted, as he was recently in Australia, saying "we’re kicking ass." Misplaced payback, perhaps, but revenge is rarely rational.

* * * * *

The real question is, what are Iran's objectives in Iraq, and how will Iraqis react? If Iran wants economic, political and military domination, the problems are long-term. If Iran is in Iraq to fight a proxy war against the United States, then presumably it will leave when the U.S. does. In general, I have found Iraqis to be extremely suspicious of the Iranian government and its involvement in their country—not just the Sunnis, but the Shias and Kurds as well. But then again, even Iranians are suspicious of their own government.

Iran has a number of interests in Iraq that go beyond security. The most obvious is religious—Iraq contains some of the holiest sites of Shia Islam that have been cut off from Iranian pilgrims for decades. The other is economic. With a population of over 65 million people, Iran views itself as a regional superpower and expects the financial rewards that come from that position. And like any other superpower, it creates economic problems for its neighbours. When I was in Baghdad in August, people complained that Iraqi farm produce was being driven off of the market by Iran, which is dumping its fruit and vegetables in Iraq. This is a disaster for Iraqi agriculture, one of the few areas of employment in the country.

* * * * *

America's other main enemy is al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda what a cheap watch is to a Swiss timepiece—effective, easily reproduced, and disposable. Al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before the invasion, but today it, along with Iran, are the two strongest arguments the U.S. makes for "staying the course." Al-Qaeda in Iraq is essentially a religious criminal gang that kills anyone who threatens its power or differs from its Salafist views on establishing a perverse form of an Islamic state. . . .

The American role in the promotion of the terrorist organization is not some mad conspiracy theory, but a well-documented attempt by the U.S. government to demonize the insurgency and make it appear to be the central front in the war on terror. This was as great a mistake as disbanding the Iraqi army, which the U.S. did in May 2003, or perhaps even greater, since it led to the sectarian downward spiral that has destroyed the country.

* * * * *

[R]ather than come up with an intelligent counter-insurgency policy, reach out to traditional tribal social structures and try to understand why American soldiers were getting killed, U.S. military leaders did what Americans have gotten very good at doing in the last few years. They made up a story, which they repeated on the news for U.S. domestic consumption—and then started to believe themselves.

* * * * *

An enduring myth about Iraq is that it can be split into "nation" states based on ethnicity or sectarian differences, with a Shia south, a Sunni middle and a Kurdish north. But Arab Iraqis are far more nationalistic than you would guess from all the discussions of "ethno-sectarian" differences. Indeed, many Iraqis are astonished by the sudden emergence of Sunni and Shia divisions. As one Iraqi American said to me: "We never used to talk about it, but the other day a stripper asked me if I was Sunni or Shia." And that was in California.

It’s true that many Kurds are keen on partitioning Iraq, but they are also keen on taking chunks of Iran, Syria and Turkey to make a Kurdish homeland. And at least some members of one Shia party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, promote a very decentralized federalism. But, for the most part, the vast majority of Arab Iraqis see Iraq as a strongly unified state. Shias and Sunnis may be chauvinists, violently so in some cases, but that doesn’t mean they don't see Iraq as a nation.

* * * * *

The discussion in Washington and New York has always drowned out the reality of Iraq. One of the terrifying aspects of the war is the monumental failure of analysis and action on the part of America’s political, military, journalistic and even business elites.

That problem may be systemic—the result of a "fact-based" America confronting a society it did not understand and simply making up an alternate reality, guns ablaze. So far, the Republicans have done an impressive job at failing in Iraq. Soon it may be the Democrats’ turn to fail, albeit in a different way. It’s a shame because Iraqi political parties are perfectly capable of doing that on their own. Indeed, they seem to be going out of their way to compete with the Americans on that score.

Take Me Out to the Bawl Game

With yet another Philadelphia Phillies win last night -- their ninth in 10 games -- the last week of the National League season is shaping up to be a wild ride.

This is because the Phillies, whom I have given up for dead several times in recent months, now have as good a chance to edge out the New York Mets for the National League East title as getting past the San Diego Padres for the NL wild-card berth.

The Phillies are 1 1/2 games behind the Mets with eight games to play in the NL East and 1 1/2 games behind the Padres. Hard to say which team has the tougher remaining schedule, but I would have to say the Pads.

The Phillies play two more against the Nationals in D.C. and then go home for three against the Atlanta Braves and a final three against the Nats, while the Mets play two more against the Marlins in Florida and then go home for three against the Nats and four (one a makeup game) against the Marlins. The Padres play two more against the Colorado Rockies at home and then go on the road for three in San Francisco against the hapless Giants and what is shaping up to be a decisive final four against the hard charging Brewers in Milwaukee.

I knew that the screw had turned for the Mets when The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined "Met's Fans Brace, Wincing, for a Familiar Old Feeling: A New York City Flameout."

I'm dating myself here, but this in turn brought to mind the reason that I am bald. I'll let my Philly blogging buddy Will Bunch at Attytood take it from here:

"It was on a different Sept. 21, in 1964, that then-rookie journeyman-turned-legend named Chico Ruiz inexplicably but successfully stole home for the Cincinnati Reds in a scoreless game at Connie Mack Stadium, with two outs and one of the best hitters in baseball, Frank Robinson, at the plate (see photo).

"The Phillies were up by 6 1/2 games with just 12 to play, clearly on their way to their first World Series in 14 years. But they lost that night, 1-0, because of the Ruiz steal -- triggering an astounding 10-game losing streak that not only cost the 1964 Phillies that pennant but is still recalled, nearly two generations later, as the greatest collapse in the history of American professional sports. We're honored here . . . really."

FYI, the Phillies would not get another shot at the World Series until 1980, which they won.

More here.

A Looning Sign of the U.S. Financial Crisis

Boosted by high commodity prices and a weakening U.S. dollar, the Canadian loonie reached parity with the greenback Thursday for the first time in nearly 31 years.

Reports Michael J.W. Stickings at The Reaction:

"[This promises] to boost the energy and import sectors and give consumers cheaper vacations but spelling more trouble for Canada's industrial heartland.

"The loonie, which has been gaining on its American counterpart since bottoming out below 62 cents in early 2002, has recently been on a spectacular run, up from 95 cents at the start of September and from under 90 cents last spring.

" . . . The last time the dollar was at par with the greenback was Nov. 25, 1976, when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister and René Lévesque had just become premier of Quebec. That high point for the currency signaled the beginning of a long slide for the loonie, as national unity concerns and mounting worries about Canada's worsening government finances over the next decade or so scared away foreign buyers of the currency."

More here. And here on the dollar falling to a new low against the Euro.

When Emigration Is An Option

Every once in a while when things get really sucky in the Old U.S. of A., the DF&C and I discuss emigrating to Australia, where she was born and has family and friends.

Maybe someday we will.

Meanwhile, over on the Left Coast, Kvatch conducted an interesting if modest poll at Blognonymous that plumbs the depths of the question of whether to pack it in and move off shore.

Click here for the gory details.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

A LITTLE TO THE LEFT
By Jill Greenberg

A Transvestite's Dream Come True

The DF&C's mum was a beautiful woman who stood 6-foot-1 and even taller when wearing one of her many pairs of elegant high heels.

After her passing, friend Frank suggested that the DF&C sell her mum's shoes on eBay.

"Why would anyone want a bunch of large-size shoes," she asked.

"Transvesties," Frank replied, and boy was he ever right.

Before you could say Julie Newmar, some guy in Kansas City had bought out the entire shoe closet for a pretty fair price.

Which brings us to a transvestite's dream come true -- a genuine if slightly used Barbra Streisand bra, which is being sold on eBay.

Details here.

Hat tip to Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

TIGHT SEATS. LOUSY FOOD. BUT THE MOVIE ROCKED!

Improving the pleasure of flying by eliminating free bad food has been accompanied by (a) ever shrinking space between seats thus enabling passengers to more easily become acquainted not only with those next to them but those in front and behind them and (b) unpredictable arrival and departure times thus introducing a bit of mystery to what were formerly mundane voyages. And these improvements affect only the pleasure of the on-board experience. The pre-flight experience has also been enhanced, but blame for that lies at the feet of would-be terrorists and not with the airlines. Aware of the diminished pleasure experienced by passengers the airlines have done one thing to help passengers take their minds off their physical woes. They have enhanced in-flight movies.

Before recent innovations films shown on overhead screens were relatively innocuous and if not of PG quality, carefully edited to eliminate graphic shots of sex and violence thus making them suitable for viewing by all passengers irrespective of age. That has now been changed and, surprisingly, not everyone is happy even though given enough violence and sex many lose their appetites and don’t notice the absence of food service while others forget that they are uncomfortable.

According to kidsafefilms.org, a recent U.S. Airways flight showed a film on an overhead screen and within the first 5 minutes there was a drive-by shooting, a child crushed to death by a car and children swapping guns. In August some airlines included a scene from “Fracture” in which the husband shoots his wife in the face. Exercising discretion the shot face was not shown. What was shown was the victim’s head with blood oozing out.

-- CHRISTOPHER R. BRAUCHLI

A judge ruled that the new Planned Parenthood clinic in Aurora, Illinois, won't be allowed to open. The court sided with the city attorney, who argued PP violated land use and permit regulations -- and that this supposedly isn't about abortion. (Yeah, right.) PP lawyers responded, "We wouldn't be here if this was a foot care clinic."

-- ANN FRIEDMAN

Earlier this month, we discovered all we needed to know about wide stances and tap dances from Republican Senator Larry Craig, and the GOP got wind burns in their race to throw him under the bus. Now we have a different kind of tap haunting another Republican Senator, and this one relates much more closely to the people's business than a flirtation in a Minneapolis airport salle de bain. Ted Stevens found out that the FBI has tapped his conversations with an Alaskan oil executive already in hot water in another corruption case.

-- ED MORRISSEY

We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey eminences Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.

Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave.

-- DIGBY

Rudy Giuliani, in full pander mode while addressing the National Rifle Association today, demonstrated the art of the acrobatic flip-flop, as he sought to show that he is gung ho for gun rights after having been against 'em.

Rudy today: "People commit crimes, not guns."

Rudy in a PBS interview on May 31, 1995: "It's the person who uses the gun that is the source of the real problem. The gun is also the source of a very big problem."

Rudy doesn't really expect the NRA's endorsement; he is merely hoping that the group will be sufficiently mollified to leave him alone during the Republican primary season. But the NRA never forgets an insult; nor will it necessarily embrace a panderer who has already recalibrated his beliefs in the name of ambition.

-- DICK POLMAN

Well, my friends, we beat you yesterday. We'll beat you today . . . And we'll beat you tomorrow!

-- JOHN McCAIN

[Hillary Clinton] has combined the party’s most popular brand name with a muscular, disciplined campaign to take a commanding position almost everywhere. She’s opened double-digit leads over her nearest rivals in national polls, as well as in early voting states such as New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and California. If she runs the tables there, the nomination almost certainly will be hers.

-- STEVEN THOMMA

On Sept. 6, something important happened in northern Syria. Problem is, no one knows exactly what. Except for those few who were involved, and they're not saying.

We do know that Israel carried out an airstrike. How do we know it was important? Because in Israel, where leaking is an art form, even the best-informed don't have a clue. They tell me they have never seen a better-kept secret.

Which suggests that whatever happened near Dayr az Zawr was no accidental intrusion into Syrian airspace, no dry run for an attack on Iran, no strike on some conventional target such as an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base or a weapons shipment on its way to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Circumstantial evidence points to this being an attack on some nuclear facility provided by North Korea.

-- CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Iraq: The U.S. Bites Itself In the Ass Again

(UPDATE: CNN reports that Blackwater employees will return to work in Iraq on Saturday. End of kerfuffle.)

The intrinsic half-assedness of virtually everything associated with the planning and execution of the Iraq war is on full display in the raging controversy over Blackwater USA.

Let me hasten to say that the military, despite sometimes crossed and changing signals from the White House and Pentagon, has comported itself with the utmost professionalism. But the latest consequence of the Bush administration’s make-it-up-as-we-go-along approach to war is that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has indefinitely barred diplomats and other civilian government employees from traveling by land vehicle outside the heavily protected Green Zone. Also barred are CIA agents who are trained to kill with a ballpoint pen but apparently can't take a wee-wee without some Blackwater goon holding their . . . oh, never mind.

This is the Green Zone that somehow keeps coming under attack from insurgent fire despite the much-vaunted successes of the surge. The area outside the Green Zone is where there are myriad infrastructure repair and improvement projects that investigations show somehow have been shoddily built and are rife with corruption, sometimes somehow because of the shady dealings of the politically-connected winners of no-bid contracts like Haliburton and Bechtel.

Blackwater, of course, is the North Carolina-based security company that somehow is a law unto itself. It is lead by a right-wing Christianist Republican fatcat donor whose spokespersons describe its work in Iraq in messianic terms and is nominally supervised by the State Department, which trots out fall guys when bad things somehow happen because of Blackwater's trigger-happy mercenaries.

These "somehows" are, of course, because of the make-it-up approach, which is a consequence of the larger reality that politics always have trumped policy in the Bush administration.

Which is to say the absence of the methodical planning that takes into consideration the military, cultural and legal aspects of an invasion and occupation that has been AWOL from Day One and remains so despite four-plus years into the war despite the myriad unpleasant consequences of being half assed.

These unpleasant consequences can take on a kind of circular, bite-your-self-in-the-ass dynamic.

A terrific example is the incident last weekend in which Blackwater bodyguards killed at least eight Iraqis. The Iraqi government has concluded that they did so without provocation and is calling for Iraqi companies to replace the dozens of foreign security companies and that a law that has given the companies immunity be scrapped. Meanwhile, a U.S. investigation continues.

And so at a time when the focus of the American effort is reaching out to tribes outside of Baghdad and local leaders in the capital, diplomats and other officials sit in front of their computers in the Green Zone playing solitaire because no one from the Oval Office on down took seriously the implications of letting loose a bunch of trigger-happy U.S. mercenaries on the Iraqi people.

And at a time when there are reports of how safer everyone is in Iraq, these rosy pronouncements are drowned out by news stories about those trigger-happy U.S. mercenaries and how the rift between the occupiers and occupied in reality grows ever wider.

Oh, what a lovely war!

Oh, Those Wild & Crazy Blackwater Guys

Did Blackwater USA operatives help a former Iraqi cabinet minister being held on embezzlement charges escape from a Green Zone jail?

In the wake of the shooting deaths of at least eight Iraqis by Blackwater bodyguards last weekend, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claimed that the North Carolina-based security company has been involved in at least seven serious incidents, some of which resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians.

Al-Maliki didn’t detail the incidents, but Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed al Askari tells McClatchy Newspapers that one of the incidents was former Iraqi Electricity Minister Ahyam al Samarrai's escape from a Green Zone jail in December.

Samarrai (photo) had been awaiting sentencing on charges that he had embezzled $2.5 billion that was intended to rebuild Iraq's decrepit electricity grid.

Meanwhile, Erik Prince, the former Navy SEAL who heads Blackwater, has been called on the carpet by Representative Henry "Mr. Investigation" Waxman, who has been told to appear before the House Government Reform Committee next week to talk about Blackwater's activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cartoon du Jour on the War

Tony Auth/Philadelphia Daily News

Politix Trumps Humane, Inane Trumps All

He who travels far will often see things Far removed from what he believed was Truth.
When he talks about it in the fields at home,
He is often accused of lying,
For the obdurate people will not believe
What they do not see and distinctly feel.

-- HERMAN HESSE

There is something that is at the same time political and inhumane about Senate Republicans this week rejecting a bipartisan proposal to lengthen the home leaves of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a political level, these senators were only doing the expedient thing in blocking a measure that war opponents viewed as one of the best chances to force President Bush to accelerate the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

This is because extending home leaves – even with an exemption for troopers who volunteer to return to duty early by Democratic Senator James Webb of Virginia, himself a Vietnam combat veteran – might have painted the president into an even tighter corner.

The 15-month tours of duty for the "surge" combat brigades will begin to expire next April, there are no units to replace them, the Army secretary and service chiefs refuse to extend duty tours any further, and even the president knows that he cannot mobilize the Reserves.

But on a human level – something that most politicians of all stripes merely pay lip service to – the vote was a stinging slap in the face of an exhausted and, I daresay, a demoralized fighting force.

As it was, the Senate was merely taking valuable time from its important debate over the MoveOn.Org ad on General Petraeus, which of course was as supercilious as the ad itself, and it came down to Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia, a Navy veteran and former secretary of the Navy, to best elucidate the inherent conflict between the political and the humane.

Warner told Webb that:

"I agree with the principles that you've laid down in your amendment, but I regret to say that I've been convinced by those in the professional uniform that they cannot do it."

And with that the vote to end debate failed at 56 votes, four fewer than needed to undercut a threatened Republican filibuster.

But when all was said and done, inane trumped all as 72 senators voted to condemn the MoveOn ad, 16 more than could muster the courage to support extending home leaves.

Why Are You So Freaked Out?

These women are 9/11 widows. They're not afraid of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who says he wants to lay wreath at Ground Zero when he comes to New York to address the U.N., even though it was Iran that attacked the U.S. on 9/11.

So why are so many Americans freaked out by the possibility that some good may actually come of such a gesture?

Why are you so freaked out?

'Last Gasp of the Circulation Mentality'

If my experience was typical, and I believe it was, TimesSelect was doomed from the start.

I just didn't miss reading the Times' op-ed columnists who were hidden behind the TimesSelect paywall enough to pony up the dough to be able to read them every day. Besides which, I usually still buy the dead tree edition of the Sunday Times. And while it was nice to be able to again catch up with the dingbattery of Mo Dowd and David Brooks when the paywall came down earlier this week, I didn't feel like a kid on Christmas morning or anything.

Jeff Jarvis got it exactly right when he said at Buzz Machine that:

"It was a cynical act doomed from the start. With it goes any hope of charging for content online. Content is now and forever free.

"No one with sufficient experience ever thought that TimesSelect made good business sense. Oh, they talked a good game: It was another revenue stream to balance dependence on advertising, said the spin, . . . It was a tribute to the great value of the Times brand and its unique content ,. . . It was an opportunity to create added value worth added revenue. . . . It was a way to give print subscribers new benefits. Yada-yada-ka-ching.

"Bull. TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media, the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation."

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

SAND COVE (Outer Banks, North Carolina)
By Koichira Kurita

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

What better way for the GOP to burnish its image as the country club party than to have all its top presidential candidates blow off a long-scheduled, nationally-televised forum on minority issues, a Sept. 27 debate hosted by a prominent black commentator at an historically black college?

Republicans frequently complain that they are unfairly maligned as being insensitive to people of color; indeed, one of the more noteworthy pillars of the long-range Bush-Rove political game plan was to convince black and Hispanic voters that the GOP was a safe haven. Karl Rove's chief political emissary, the now-departed GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, spent much of his time ricocheting around the nation, trying to court non-caucasians. Just 16 months ago, President Bush said he considered it "a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community," and signaled that GOP should forge those ties again.

But today it's hard to see how that message can have any resonance, now that four '08 Republican contenders - Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and John McCain - have opted to stiff Tavis Smiley, the TV/radio host who is sponsoring next Tuesday's minority issues forum at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Newt Gingrich has called this decision "an enormous error," and no wonder: If the GOP has any hopes of being seen as open to diversity, its cause will hardly be helped next Thursday, when the TV cameras zero in on the four empty lecterns.

One of the biggest frauds in this episode is the excuse being floated by the four boycotting candidates, the old chestnut about "scheduling conflicts." This forum has been on the calendar since it was officially announced back on February 8. And "scheduling conflicts" were also invoked this year by major GOP candidates when they were approached by the NAACP, the Urban League, Univision, and the National Association of Latino and Elected Officials.

-- DICK POLMAN

Over the last seven years, the racial situation has deteriorated even more. No child left behind, has left enough children behind that they could start a new country. The dumbing down of America is having serious consequences, not the least of which is an increase in racism. The elephant in the room is now breaking things in an effort to make itself known.

-- DEB

In another group no-show, only Senator John McCain accepted an invitation to a TV debate on Univision, the major Hispanic network. One transparent factor in the selective shyness is that, except for Senator McCain, the major candidates have been avoiding nuanced approaches on the heated immigration issue. Simplistic speeches may play well on the stump, but they’re a shame to the party and nation. Next week’s Morgan State debate would be just the platform to put aside electoral pandering for larger principle on issues important to all Americans.

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES

CNN's “Political Ticker” blog reports that the Rev. Jesse Jackson has accused Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama of "acting White" by not taking a more vocal stand on the Jena Six case. It's worth noting that Jackson says that he "does not recall" making such a statement, but I see no real reason to doubt the newspaper coverage. . . .

Generally, the phrase "acting White" has entered the public eye as a referent to Black youth seeking to tar their peers who excel academically. This, of course, is a bad thing, for it implies that authentic Blackness stands in opposition to intellectual pursuits. Thus, it is detrimental the construction of a positive, flourishing Black identity.

But Jackson's claim, as reported, is different. He's not arguing that Obama is "acting White" because he's too erudite. He's saying Obama is "acting White" because he's showing insufficient concern for social and racial justice.

-- DAVID SCHRAUB

The "Awakening" model is spreading elsewhere in the country, which is good, but something else will need to happen in Baghdad . . .

[T]he Mahdi Army will be tougher to beat than Al Qaeda because they are less extreme and less likely to be rejected by the society as a whole. So while the Anbar model is exportable to an extent - it is being exported to Diyala Province, Salah a Din Province, and even to some places in the South - winning everywhere in Iraq (if it's even possible, and I really don't know if it is) will require something more. The success in Anbar Province is real, but it would be a mistake to assume that solution can be applied to the entire country. It probably can't. I wouldn't say reconciliation between Sunnia and Shias is impossible, but if it is possible it won't be because of what happened in Anbar.

-- MICHAEL TOTTEN

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

"This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar," said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas.

-- HARIS ANWAR

The little man in the over-sized leisure suit has Presidential candidates all atwitter with his planned visit to Ground Zero while he’s in New York to attend UN meetings.

Not since Saddam Hussein conned us with his coyness about WMD and fired off rifles for the TV cameras on a balcony in Baghdad has a loony Mideast head of state provoked so much Sturm and Drang over so little.

By eliciting outrage, the Iranian President succeeds in getting the international attention he so clearly craves. When disdain and disregard would be so much more appropriate and effective in dealing with a punk whose aim is to be taken seriously on the international stage.

-- ROBERT STEIN

Google is road-testing a major initiative capable of hijacking a good deal of the web traffic the mainstream media ordinarily would get during the 2008 election in the United States.

-- ALAN MUTTER

Image: "The Minstrel Show" by Thomas Hart Benton

What's the Frequency, George?

While the legendary Walter Cronkite is tacking quietly into the sunset aboard his sailboat, Dan Rather, his controversial successor at CBS News, is determined to settle old scores.

And while my initial thought when I first heard that Rather had filed a $70 million damage suit against his old bosses was that he should have signed on as Uncle Walter’s first mate, I've reconsidered.

Yes, the lawsuit is a world-class case of sour grapes, but it could serve a significantly more important purpose.

It contends that CBS ruined Rather's reputation by making him the scapegoat on one of the strangest investigative stories in memory -- A September 2004 report that correctly said that President Bush's cushy Vietnam-era military service with the Texas Air National Guard was a result of high-level string pulling, but was based, in large part, on a forged document.

While aspects of the reporting were indeed faulty, the president's rich-boy party hearty lifestyle while Americans were dying by the thousands in Vietnam is no secret. The reaction to the story by the Republican right wing was ferocious, and is a cardinal example of how the mainstream media has been repeatedly cowed by the Rove Blowback Machine, which in this instance further greased the skids for Bush's re-election and neutralized one of the MSM's more outspoken figures.

That chapter in the president's life demands to be aired out for both the historic record and to put his failings in a more comprehensive context, just as allegations that Bill Clinton as Arkansas governor had a habit of wagging his wand at the women he chased needed to be aired out.

The 32-page complaint, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, charges that CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves, former CBS News President Andrew Heyward and Sumner Redstone, chairman of former CBS parent Viacom, caved into the Bush administration by publicly discrediting the "60 Minutes II" segment.

Rather, 75, who anchored the "CBS Evening News" for nearly a quarter century, narrated the piece and was forced to step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" in March 2005.

The New York Times says that the portrait of Rather that emerges from the lawsuit bears little resemblance to his carefully cultivated image as a hard-charging newsman:

"By his own rendering, Mr. Rather was little more than a narrator of the disputed broadcast. . . .

"Instead of directly vetting the script he would read for the (Air National) Guard segment, Mr. Rather says, he acceded to pressure from Mr. Heyward to focus instead on his reporting from Florida on Hurricane Frances, and on Bill Clinton’s heart surgery.

"Mr. Rather says in the filing that he allowed himself to be reduced to little more than a patsy in the furor that followed, after CBS concluded that the report had been based on documents that could not be authenticated. Under pressure, Mr. Rather says, he delivered a public apology . . . witten not by him but by a CBS corporate publicist — ‘despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.' "

The suit also claims CBS stacked the deck against him by commissioning a two-man independent review panel whose "conclusions were preordained to find fault with the broadcast and those persons responsible for it."

Rather's suit accuses panelist Richard Thornburgh, U.S. attorney general under President Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, of bias. Which I believe is correct. It said Thornburgh had been the subject of the newsman's critical reporting. Ditto.

The suit charges that:

"The appointment of a man with Mr. Thornburgh's background reflected CBS' desire to appoint a panel that would placate the Bush administration, while neatly laying the ‘blame' for the story on certain employees."

Thornburgh ain’t talking, but CBS – whose ratings are flagging badly and certainly doesn’t need the bad publicity -- fired back at its former star, saying:

"These complaints are old news, and this lawsuit is without merit."

Rather, who was making $6 million a year at CBS, is seeking $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

By network standards, Rather’s career was a bit odd, and in contrast to the dead serious Cronkite, he would lapse into folksy Ratherisms such as an Election Night statement that "The presidential race is swinging like Count Basie."

In a petulant footnote in the lawsuit, Rather claims that despite his notable assignments reporting on the JFK assassination and wars from Vietnam to Iraq, CBS didn’t give him any facetime on his last "60 Minutes" assignment – covering Hurricane Katrina.

Rather has a precedent of a sort: Blabmeister Don Imus settled with CBS Radio over his $120 million breach-of-contract lawsuit four months after he made a sexist and racist remark about the Rutgers women's basketball team.

More here.

A Gift For the Man Who Has Everything

For sale: A slightly used relic of the Cold War -- a completely outfitted Titan ICBM complex.

Price: $1.5 million.

Details: The complex is located in central Washington state between Moses Lake and Ritzville and is a convenient 10 minutes from Interstate 90 and only one and a half hours from Spokane.

It includes 57 acres and 16 underground buildings, including a 160-foot-tall missile silo, two antenna silos and control dome and power dome buildings.

Missiles not included.

Terms: $300,000 down with the balance at 7 percent interest due in three years.

More here.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

APE
By Jill Greenberg

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Middle class America: That’s the country I grew up in. It was a society without extremes of wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared prosperity, partly because strong unions, a high minimum wage, and a progressive tax system helped limit inequality. It was also a society in which political bipartisanship meant something: in spite of all the turmoil of Vietnam and the civil rights movement, in spite of the sinister machinations of Nixon and his henchmen, it was an era in which Democrats and Republicans agreed on basic values and could cooperate across party lines.

The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.

-- PAUL KRUGMAN

So Mr. Ahmedinejad, the President of Iran, requested that he be allowed to visit ground zero next week when he is in New York City to address the United Nations. His request was denied. The Police Commissioner made a boo-boo and announced that the request was under review. Then everyone and their mother raced to say that the request had been denied, like, forever ago . . . and that it was a really bad idea anyway.

-- BOOMAN

Newspapers like to play gotcha games with presidential candidates and their stump speeches. Most of the time, the fact-checking sessions focus on number-juggling on tax proposals and spending policy, and they find plenty of daylight between claims and reality. However, when the Washington Post attempts to fact-check Fred Thompson on historical references, they reveal more of their bias than of Fred's. They try to take apart Fred's claim that Americans "have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world", and manage to completely miss the point.

-- ED MORRISSEY

Three hundred twenty-three students have died in documented school shootings over the past 15 years, making it by far the largest cause of violent deaths in school.

It outranks the documented 111 combined deaths by strangulation, stabbing and slashing, hanging, beating and kicking, heart attacks, a half dozen deaths from unknown causes and two persons who jumped to their deaths, according to data from the National School Safety Center.

-- RICHARD ESPOSITO

The state of Minnesota has chosen its prime contractor for the replacement of the collapsed St. Anthony Bridge, and Minnesotans may feel relieved that the state didn't choose the lowest bidder. Instead, they selected the firm with the highest bid and the longest predicted time to completion, but included plenty of incentives for faster work.

-- ED MORRISSEY

I was in L.A. recently with a group of friends, devouring pommes frites and red wine, when someone blurted out, "You know, Suzanne had this horrible reaction when she had her anus bleached and had to go to the emergency room." Yes, I know, I'm speechless, too (mostly because my mother-in-law will read this). I assumed this ritual was for dealing with a parasite. But no, Suzanne was given the treatment as a gift from the movie star who employed her.

Apparently, plenty of women want to go past the now-ordinary breast enhancement and pubic electrolysis to a place few have heretofore dared to go in the name of beauty. Much to my ignorance, bleaching one's anus (I guess to bring it back to its budlike, puckish pink) has become an obsession far beyond the young jet set and the detail-oriented gay community. These days, anal-bleaching creams can be purchased as easily as cough drops. Let's see . . . next Mother's Day, should I go with the balloon bouquet or a gift certificate for total rectal beauty?

-- GERARD VEN DER LEUN

How many Lives Does O.J. Have Left?

It is said that cats have nine lives. The question of the moment is how many O.J. Simpson has.

By my reckoning, The Juice has squandered four lives so far:

Lives One and Two got used up when he skated following the so-called Trial of the Century for the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman.

Life Three concluded with a $33.5 million wrongful death civil judgment against him, little of which he has paid.

And he left behind Life Four when he walked out of a Las Vegas courtroom this afternoon after posting $125,000 bail in connection with the armed robbery of two sports memorabilia collectors at a casino-hotel last week.

The Heisman Trophy winner and former ad pitchman and B-movie actor stood in court in a blue jail uniform and handcuffs. He furrowed his brow as the judge read the list of charges against him.

Simpson answered quietly in a hoarse voice and nodded as Justice of the Peace Joe Bonaventure Jr. delineated the restrictions for his release. He did not enter a plea but his attorney, Yale Galanter, said he would plead not guilty.

Galanter said after the hearing that the $125,000 bond was reasonable and had already been arranged.

The latest incident involving Simpson, who has had comparatively minor brushes with the law in Florida since he moved there after the double-murder trial, quickly became a media circus.

Among the talking heads were Marcia Clark, who is reporting for Entertainment Tonight.

Clark prosecuted Simpson for the 1994 murders and with help from a key homicide detective who perjured himself and was outted as a racist, among other factors, turned what many legal observers saw as an open-and-shut case of guilt into a victory for Simpson and his "Dream Team" of defense lawyers, who included two legends of the American defense bar — Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey.

Simpson, who looks every bit his 60 years, was arrested Sunday after a collector reported a group of armed men had charged into his hotel room at the Palace Station Casino-Hotel last Thursday and took several items that Simpson claimed belonged to him.

He was charged with kidnapping, robbery with use of a deadly weapon, burglary while in possession of a deadly weapon, coercion with use of a deadly weapon, assault with a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit kidnapping, conspiracy to commit robbery and conspiracy to commit a crime.

Said Galanter:

"These are very serious charges. He is taking it very seriously."

Given Simpson’s history, that remains to be seen.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Tom Riccio, the man who arranged the meeting between Simpson and the two collectors, has an extensive criminal history from the 1980s and ’90s, including grand larceny in Florida, possession of stolen goods in Connecticut and receiving stolen property in California.

Riccio claims that he has been promised some form of immunity by prosecutors.

The memorabilia taken from the hotel room included football game balls signed by Simpson, Joe Montana lithographs, baseballs autographed by Pete Rose and Duke Snider and framed awards and plaques, together valued at upwards of $100,000.

Police say four other men were with Simpson, although he is considered to be the ringleader. Two have been arrested and two are at large.

Kim Goldman, sister of Ron Goldman, told NBC earlier today that she felt some satisfaction from Simpson’s arrest:

"I’m not going to lie to you, I do feel a little bit of elation to see him in handcuffs,” she said. “I hope that in some way the pressure that we put on him for the last 13 years drove him to this."

More here.

Kicking The Can Down the Road to 2009

Am I the only person who didn't realize until after President Bush’s speech last week on Iraq that he all but came out and said what we have known for some time -- that it would be up to his successor to end the war?

You too, eh?

In retrospect, this was far and away the most important aspect of a speech that has been dissected to a fairthewell but an aspect that was ignored by a mainstream media that seems only marginally capable to sussing out the big picture.

There are three different groups of Americans when it comes to the war these days, and polling after Progress Report Week showed that virtually no one's mind was changed:

* The vast majority who just want the war to go away and are literally and figuratively shopping at the mall where, poor dears, they may inconveniently catch a glimpse of a bloody street scene from Iraq on the TVs in the window of an electronics store.

These are the people that the White House is really counting on.

* The small but vocal minority for whom the war started in January with the advent of the surge strategy. The nearly four years between the fall of Saddam Hussein are a blur, don’t count, or both -- and the limited successes of recent weeks are all they need to get behind “Return to Success,” the Orwellian name of the administration’s latest slogan for Bush's Forever War.

These are the people that the White House is counting on to push back against the third group.

* This is the also small but vocal minority whose memories are not so short. We have not forgotten the insurgency, the collapse of the Provisional Coalition Authority, the first battle of Falluja, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the onset of a civil war and the emergence of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a result of a failed occupation.

As Frank Rich put it in a New York Times column (that is no longer lurking behind the now defunct TimesSelect firewall):

"Mr. Bush confident that he got away with repacking the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan . . . is counting on the public’s continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality. We can’t afford to punt until Inauguration Day in a war that each day drains America of resources and will. Our national security can’t be held hostage indefinitely to a president’s narcissistic need to compound h