Iraq I: Abeer Qassim Hamza Is Still Dead

Steven Green is the poster boy-man for much of what is wrong about the Iraq war.

This petulant loner was allowed to enlist in the Army and was fast-tracked to the war zone despite a history of drug, alcohol and emotional problems and a petty criminal record back in Midland, the titular home of the Bush family in Texas oil patch country.

Green had been in Iraq for only a few weeks when he was found to have "homicidal ideations" by Army psychiatrists. Nevertheless, he was sent back into combat before finally snapping on March 12, 2006, when he corralled some buddies and talked up the idea of raping Abeer Qassim Hamza, a pretty 15-year-old who lived with her family near the checkpoint in the so-called Triangle of Death south of Baghdad that Green's unit had been manning without relief for days.

In fact, shadowy Sunni insurgents had driven the men of Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, to near the breaking point. They seldom engaged in face-to-face combat, but there was gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks almost daily and Green's comrades were dying at the rate of at least one a week during this pre-Surge strategy period.

Bravo Company had lost eight men alone and would lose several more in the coming months as a direct result of Green's heinous actions.

After getting liquored up on black market Iraqi whiskey, a violation of war-zone policy, Green and one of his three confederates changed into into Iraqi civilian clothing and made arrangements for a buddy to monitor the radio at the checkpoint so they could go "kill and hurt a lot of Iraqis," as one confederate later told an investigator.

Once at Abeer's house, Green herded her father, mother and Hadil, her 7-year-old sister, into a bedroom. Abeer's brothers, Ahmad and Muhammad, were at school.

Green shot the father several times in the head, the mother several times in the abdomen and the sister several times in the head and shoulder with an AK-47 that the family was legally allowed to keep in the house, proudly announcing to his buddies, "I just killed them, all are dead."

Green then turned on Abeer, whom U.S. officials initially claimed was 20 or 25. As if that justified what happened next.

Abeer's dressing gown and bra were torn from her body and her legs tied. Green and two other soldiers then took turns raping her. By the time they had finished, blood was flowing from her vagina. Green then shot Abeer in the head two or three times, threw a blanket over her torso and set the family's bodies afire in a crude effort to cover up the atrocity.

Back at the checkpoint, Green burned his blood-drenched clothing and swore everyone to secrecy.

* * * * *

Today 22-year-old Steven Green whiles away the days in a federal lockup in Kentucky while lawyers fight over the question of whether he should be tried as a civilian.

Although the cover-up of the rape-murders would not be revealed until June 2006, the behavior of the private first class had become so problematic by May that the Army sent him home on the grounds that he had an "anti-social personality disorder," but nevertheless gave him an honorable discharge.

Green was technically separated, but not retired, from the Army when rape and murder charges were filed against him in July 2006. This would put him beyond the reach of a military court unless higher ups intervened, which they did not.

Iraqi authorities demanded to no effect that Green be returned to Iraq and tried, but the U.S. has been historically protective of servicemen stationed overseas and with few exceptions (none in Iraq), they have been protected against prosecution in local courts.

Green's lawyers, in a motion filed last Friday night, argue that he should have been tried under the military criminal-justice system because the acts occurred while he was enlisted, he told his commanding officer twice about them, and therefore his discharge was thus not valid.

In other words, the Army wanted to wash its hands of the whole sordid mess and should not be allowed to do so.

The defense motion is predicated on the probability that Green would get the death penalty if convicted after a civilian trial now scheduled for April 2009.

Green's confederates and a fourth soldier are serving sentenced after their cases were heard in a military court.

Three men received prison sentences of 110, 100 and 90 years after being found guilty or pleading guilty to participating in the attack. The soldier who covered for them at the checkpoint was sentenced to 27 months after pleading guilty.

Further complicating the case is that Green tried to re-enlist in an effort to be shielded from the civilian court system.

The federal prosecutors assigned to the case counter that the federal death penalty process and methods are constitutional and procedurally sound and assert that the evidence warrants seeking a death sentence.

What that Abeer Qassim Hamza had choices like Steven Green. But alas, she is still dead.

Iraq II: Has The Great Unraveling Begun?

Baghdad demonstrators demand that Shiite prisoners be released

As noted here on February 1, you don't have to be a bloody genius to know that sooner or later the window of opportunity for Iraqi national reconciliation and a lasting reduction in sectarian violence as a result of the military successes of the Surge would begin to close unless there was progress by the Baghdad government.

Well, there has been no progress of consequence despite the wishful thinking of pro-war pundits who endlessly write that the Iraqis are working on This, That or The Other, while the last 72 hours have brought an explosion of violence reminiscent of the Bad Old Days that coincides with the 4,000th American combat death.

There has been no progress because Prime Minister Al-Maliki has no reason to upset his Shiite-dominated applecart knowing that President Bush is committed to maintaining present U.S. troop levels through Election Day and then dumping the whole mess on his successor.

Does this mean that the window of opportunity has closed? No. Not yet.

Does this mean that an unraveling of the success of the Surge is underway. No. It's too soon to tell, but the omens don't look good.

For one thing, the long anticipated re-emergence of the militia loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr is underway with calls for nationwide protests and civil disobedience, which has led to clashes in several cities and at least 50 deaths, and fears that a seven-month-old ceasefire by the militia against American troops is unraveling as they jockey for position ahead of provincial elections in October.

Al-Sadr's extended vacation was credited as a -- if not the -- major reason that the military phase of the Surge has been successful in reducing U.S. and Iraqi casualties, and the timing of his return was exquisite coming as it did on the heels of a Wall Street Journal story writing off the cleric as a force to be reckoned with.

Simultaneously, all heck broke loose in the strategic southern port city of Basra, hard by the porous border with Iran, as Shiite militias clashed with Iraqi troops backed by American or British air support.

The British Army had ceded the city center to armed thugs late last year as part of a cut-and-slink strategy to keep its soldiers from getting killed that was equal parts practical and shameful and bound to backfire.

The fighting has now spread to Baghdad and smaller cities and Al-Maliki has issued an ultimatum: The fighters will be spared if they surrender within 72 hours.

How unfortunate that John McCain is not available to walk through some Iraqi market and tell us how everything is just ducky.

Photograph by The Associated Press

Now That's a Relief!

More here.

The Pot Calls The Kettle Black

Hat tip to The Big Picture

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

SEEDS
By The G8

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Here's where things get dicey for Hillary 2012. If she were seen by a significant portion of Democrats as not having done all she could for Obama in 2008, she'd face massive hostility in 2010 when she started making noises about running again. So she has to be active in helping him, which of course creates a sort of double paradox: she has to work hard for the very outcome that works against her own future interests, knowing that said work is the only thing that will in fact help her future interests! Got it?

. . . But then, there is one more factor, and it is crucial. Even if all the above happens, Clinton will still be in the Senate. And she needs to be a better, more aggressive, more courageous senator than she has been. . . . She could not come back to Democrats in another four years as a warmed-over version of the person who cast that cowardly Iraq vote, still drinking every potion Mark Penn places before her, and expect to be taken seriously.

-- MICHAEL TOMASKY

Milestones are news--the fifth anniversary, the 4000th death--and news shield us, as any drug does, from the pain of reality. We swallow some words and images about Iraq and turn to newer news--about Hillary and Barack, the economy, March Madness, storms and flooding, the HBO miniseries on John Adams.

"People don't actually read newspapers," Marshall McLuhan said half a century ago. "They get into them every morning like a warm bath."

This week we wash away our consciousness of the continuing dying and killing in the Mideast with soothing words from Bush and Cheney in Washington, John McCain in Baghdad and the muffled sounds of impotent anti-war Democrats.

-- ROBERT STEIN

After a week punctuated by Obama's right-stuff response to wrong-way Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Clinton's document dump of today-tea-was-served White House schedules, Democrats are being barraged with new information about the candidates long after most of them have made a binding decision on a nominee. It is akin to being given a subscription to Consumer Reports the day after you bought a new car.

. . . With more than five months to the Denver Convention, the problem for the Democrats remains the crazy-quilt schedule that caused far too many to vote too soon. That is the real buyer's remorse — a front-loaded political calendar that has turned most partisan Democrats into now-irrelevant bystanders just when a real decision is needed.

-- WALTER SHAPIRO

Alex Tabarrok puts forward an explanation for why people who were against the Iraq war (and who predicted a housing crisis) haven’t gotten more of a public hearing.

The answer is media incentives. It wasn’t just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong. The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher. So what does the American public want to hear now? The public wants to hear why they weren’t idiots. And who better to explain to the public why they weren’t idiots than experts who also got it wrong?

-- HENRY

It has been stated with granite implacability that the bailout of the banking and finance industry - already radically taking place, hundreds of billions of public money simply tossed up to the winds without the bat of an eyeball - must of course happen, there simply couldn't be an America without crooks and swindlers laughing as they stole other people’s money. Just as the earth is round, George Bush is a felon, the sky is blue, the San Francisco Giants are not going to the playoffs, so we must bail out the bankers and financiers. . . . I went to the Hillary Hub and the Obama Town Hall this morning and there is nothing, nada, crickets, the sounds of silence, ay curumba zero on the collapse and bailout of Bear Stearns and the $200 billion unsecured revolving fund the Fed set up for the banking industry. Seriously, how is this possible?

-- PARADOX

Of the 28,000 commercial airline flights that take to the skies on an average day in the United States, fewer than 1 percent are protected by on-board, armed federal air marshals, a nationwide CNN investigation has found.

That means that a terrorist or other criminal bent on taking over an aircraft would be confronted by a trained air marshal on as few as 280 daily flights . . .

The investigation found those low numbers even as the Transportation Security Administration in recent months has conducted tests in which it has been able to smuggle guns and bomb-making materials past airport security screeners.

-- CNN

If you were looking for a front man to chair a secretive, anti-Democrat PAC that bears a suspicious resemblance to scandalous pocket-lining schemes formerly run by Linda Chavez and Christopher Gersten, would you pick someone named Gary Kreep? Just asking.

-- CHRISTOPHER ORR

Biblically correct, now that's a mouthful. A book written by many men (Ruth and Esther were tokens used to prove a point but Mary, the mother of Jesus and a major part of a world religion, gets scant mention much less her own book, why is that?) to reflect their point of view and the parts that didn't fit in, were discarded. Now some of the "believers" are conducting museum tours and explaining to the young and impressionable that thousands of years of history never happened. Oh sweet Jeebus, how much dumber is our population going to get? Tyrannosaurus Rex was a vegetarian because Adam and Eve hadn't sinned yet, so there was no death? What planet do these people come from? They most certainly didn't evolve from intelligent humans. That Bible belt is cinched a little too tight and preventing oxygen from circulating through their very little brains. No wonder there are very few "American" doctors in practice, you have to have a science education in order to understand how the body works. Praying doesn't help cure disease.

-- DEB

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Media & Iraq: Shocked, Awed & Cowed

The more things change the more they remain the same, and that certainly is true of the mainstream media's abysmal coverage of the Iraq war.

While there are occasional exceptions, most media outlets continue to swallow the Bush administration's lies, obfuscations and talking points whole, which it has done since the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, and that is why a casual viewer or reader is left with the impression that things are going rather grandly as the war lurches into its sixth year.

After all, U.S. and civilian casualties are down because of the bang-up job that General Petraeus and his troops did in executing the Surge strategy.

What the MSM is not reporting is why, if the Surge has succeeded, are there no plans to begin a drawdown of U.S. troops and why President Bush is arguing that present levels must be maintained for the indefinite future.

The answer is an open secret: The other half of the Surge strategy, a good-faith effort at national reconciliation, was stillborn and any drawdown of consequence could tip a country into chaos that lives a day-by-day existence and in recent days has been showing some serious signs of bloody backsliding.

The mainstream media had plenty of company in its epic rollover. Congress and most Americans also drank the Bush Kool Aid, but the MSM should have known better, which makes the abrogation of its responsibilities all the worse.

The reasons it bailed on the war are twofold:

* A retreat from good old-fashioned reporting. You know, sussing out the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How of every story that used to be drilled into journalists from Day One.

* The consolidation of the MSM into the hands of a few corporations more interested in good profits than good journalism. You know, we can't really go after the Bush administration because that might drive away advertisers and otherwise hurt our bottom line.

* * * * *

The disconnect between what the MSM was saying and what I felt in my gut and knew in my head as a career journalist – the upbeat coverage and the administration's rosy pronouncements versus the far less positive anecdotal reports from the field and insightful blogging by realists like Juan Cole -- grew wider as the first year anniversary of the war passed. And then the second, third and fourth anniversaries even as books arrived on the scene that told a very different story about the run-up to the war and its early days than that being peddled by the MSM.

Worst of all, there continued to be no consensus in the MSM about why there had been a war in the first place. And there were very few reporters beyond the dogged duo of Jonathan Landay and Walter Stroebel, formerly of the former Knight Ridder and now McClatchy Newspapers correspondents, who stepped back far enough to see that the media and public had been sold a bloody bill of goods.

The most infamous retailer in this regard was Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who broke a slew of cardinal rules of journalism, including becoming too close to her sources and ultimately being co-opted by them, inserting herself into the middle of her stories and running roughshod over her editors in repeatedly asserting that there were WMD.

The Times may still be the greatest newspaper on earth, but for me its reputation will forever be tarnished and its credibility forever suspect because of the Miller scandal, which it made much worse because of its own institutional failures.

* * * * *

I was in charge of a big city newspaper's Washington Bureau during President Reagan's second term when, along with my counterparts from other papers, I was summoned to the White House.

Our day began with a briefing by Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and climaxed with a luncheon with the Gipper himself.

As the day wore on, the purpose of the visit became clear: The White House wasn't getting the kind of coverage it wanted from the Washington press corps and was appealing directly to editors like myself to help sell its story.

It is difficult to conceive of the Bush administration feeling the need to roll out the red carpet for my counterparts today. What a difference two decades, a botched war and a cowed media make.

Photograph © James Nachtwey

The Vultures Circle The New York Times

Howell Raines, who was executive editor of The New York Times from 2001-2003, is credited with bringing a healthy dose of advocacy journalism to the Gray Lady but was brought down by the Jason Blair scandal. He warns in his new column in Condé Nast's Portfolio.com that there is no greater threat to American journalism than the possibility that media mogul Rupert Murdoch or some other unwelcome suitor would force its sale.

Money quote:

"He will spend whatever it takes to undermine the Times' standing as America's leading general-interest newspaper. But my real fear is that Murdoch or some other unsuitable purchaser will then buy the Times through a combination of financial and psychological pressures on the strong, but hardly ironclad, Sulzberger family trust that controls the vast majority of the company's voting stock. There is no more important question in American journalism than the future of the Times, and I don't think the newspaper or the journalistic profession is taking Murdoch in particular or the takeover issue in general seriously enough."

It is hard to argue with Raines about the threat, but it is no one's fault but its own that The Times is not the newspaper that it once was -- much improved in some respects but so troubled in many others -- and it should be no more immune to the ongoing shakeout in the newspaper biz than any other publication.

More here.

Illustration by Robin Eley

The Whole Thing Sucks To High Heaven

I wasn't going to blog on the bloody Chinese putdown of the protests in Tibet because I have nothing to add but my sympathy for the Tibetan people, but I backslid here the other day and might as well go whole hog.

The State Department is quite obviously sending a signal to Beijing that it should try to tone things down a few notches because it wouldn't want to sully its most excellent relationship with another repressive regime – the Bush administration -- let alone dampen that old Olympic spirit.

Ah yes, that old Olympic spirit: Professionals masquerading as amateurs while ingesting the latest in performance-enhancing substances in the most crassly commercial sports orgy on the planet.

I thought that President Carter's call for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a well-intentioned joke because the Olympics of yore that I loved as a youngster – the ones with earnest amateurs and nary of Coca-Cola sign to be seen – were already a thing of the past, so a boycott of the Beijing circus would be just as silly even if we had a president who knew what the moral high ground was, let alone occupy it.

My bottom line is that the whole thing sucks to high heaven: The Chinese government sucks. The U.S. government sucks. And the Olympics suck.

Cartoon by Moir/Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

SEARCHING FOR SIGNS OF SPRING
By Michael Woods

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

I could see the self-interest of the officials pushing for war - how war would benefit their political party, their department within the government, enhance their own status at the expense of rivals. Libertarianism made it clear how absurd the idealistic case was. Supposedly, wise, firm and just American guidance would usher Iraq into a new era of liberalism and comity. But none of that was going to work unless real American officials embedded in American political institutions were unusually selfless and astute, with a lofty and omniscient devotion to Iraqi welfare. And, you know, they weren’t going to be that.

-- JIM HENLEY

[Y]ou need to put Iraq in strategic context. The goal wasn't merely to topple Saddam, but to intimidate other "rogue" regimes by creating a credible threat to take them out too. That meant that something like a 350,000 troop, 15-year commitment wouldn't achieve the goals of the policy. It wasn't "incompetent" for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to have rejected those methods; the rejection followed directly from what they were trying to accomplish.

-- MATTHEW YGLESIAS

There are advantages to be gained from taking possession of a country rather than simply befriending its leader. Consider Iraq and Pakistan.

Iraq, as was recently observed in this space, is a possession of George Bush. Though sovereign in theory, Iraq was powerless to contradict Mr. Bush when he said it was all right for Turkey to invade that country. All Iraq could do was have its prime minister, Nouri al Maliki, make a phone call to Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime minister, to let him know of the need to “respect Iraq sovereign authority.” The call preceded the invasion. Being sovereign, however, Iraq could play host to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even though Mr. Bush dislikes him and he is the leader of one of the countries that might be described as the Bush-Cheney axis of hatred.

Pakistan is a country whose leader Mr. Bush has befriended without first invading his country. Although he continues to instruct Pakistan on how it should conduct its affairs, he lacks the clout he has in Iraq. As a result, the country’s citizens and officials have enjoyed thumbing their noses at Mr. Bush, notwithstanding his friendship with its president, Pervez Musharraf. Most recently the nose thumbing by the good citizens and officials pertained to elections and judges in Pakistan.

-- CHRISTOPHER R. BRAUCHLI

The improvement in Iraq amounts to casualty rates that have decreased to the unacceptable levels of 2005, no exit plan for years and a bill accumulating at almost $5,000 per second.

-- NICHOLAS KRISTOFF

Moqtada al-Sadr -- the radical cleric dubbed "The Most Dangerous Man in Iraq" by a Newsweek cover story in December 2006 -- has just unilaterally extended the ceasefire he imposed on his Mahdi Army militia last summer. And on the eve of the Iraq War's fifth anniversary, Sadr also issued a somber but dramatic statement. He not only declared that he had failed to transform Iraq, but also lamented the new debates and divisions within his own movement. Explaining his marginalization, Sadr all but confessed his growing isolation: "One hand cannot clap alone."

What happened? Over the past five years, Sadr has been one of the most persistent and insurmountable challenges for the U.S. Leveraging his family's prestige among the disaffected Shiite underclass, he asserted his power by violently intimidating rival clerics, agitating against the U.S. occupation, and using force to establish de facto control over Baghdad's Sadr City (named after his father, and home to two million Shiites on the east bank of the Tigris) and large swaths of southern Iraq.

-- DAN SENOR and ROMAN MARTINEZ

[T]he security that has been achieved here [in Fallujah] is fragile, the result of harsh tactics recalling the rule of Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown five years ago. Even as they work alongside U.S. forces, [Police Chief] Zobaie's men admit they have beaten and tortured suspects to force confessions and exact revenge.

-- SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN

<>Who knew? President Bush wants to be unpopular.

Not really, of course, but that's what his press secretary said.

Spokeswoman Dana Perino was making the case that it's no surprise that Bush has low poll ratings because he is overseeing an unpopular war. But then her argument went off the tracks.

"Both the president and the vice president have long believed, and it's a part of what has made them the leaders that they are, which is not to chase popularity polls but to hold themselves to a standard that requires people not to like them," she said.

-- THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Photograph by Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

4,000

MORE HERE.

Image by Walter Horvath

Why Hillary Must Come Clean About Bill

Few things are certain in this season of political upheaval on such a seismic scale, but here is one that is: Should Hillary Clinton win the nomination and the election, Bill Clinton will not morph from an alpha male into a passive male on Inauguration Day and will have an outsized, historically unprecedented and unwelcome impact on her presidency.

The former president has played a central role in his wife's quest for the White House. She has depended on him so much that the fortunes of her campaign are inextricably tied to him and how voters perceive Bill Clinton has been as important as how they perceive Hillary Clinton.

It is time for Mrs. Clinton to drop the blather about her independence and explain how a co-presidency is something that the American people should welcome since they will in effect be voting for two people should she survive the primaries and convention.

There are only two historic precedents for what will transpire if Mrs. Clinton is elected: Edith Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt. (Yes, I know that Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer for President Reagan, but that’s different.)

When President Wilson's health failed and a stroke left him partially paralyzed, Edith Wilson became the acting president and took over many of the details and duties of government. She vociferously opposed allowing the vice president to assume the powers of the presidency and the numerous failures that occurred during her husband's incapacitation were her doing.

Eleanor Roosevelt's role during President Roosevelt's 12-plus year tenure was hands on from start to finish and she was a key player in shaping his domestic agenda. While still attending to the more traditional First Lady roles, she was an important connection between Great Depression victims and the government bureaucracy, and later between African-American civil rights leaders and the White House.

Yet neither of these predecessors come close to approximating the possibility that the next president will be married to a former president, as well as the unhappy prospect of two families monopolizing the White House over three decades.

There are concerns that a John McCain administration would be a continuation of the George Bush administration. But no less concerning is that a Hillary Clinton administration would be a continuation of the Bill Clinton administration, a third and possibly fourth term, if you will.

The release last week of thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton's personal records as First Lady confirms that while she did not necessarily help make major policy decisions, she certainly was a co-president to an extent that First Ladies since Eleanor Roosevelt have not come close to replicating.

The full extent of her involvement is difficult to gauge because nearly half of the 11,000 pages of records have been redacted, some no doubt because of third-party privacy concerns but others probably to obscure the role she played in dealing with the administration's multiple controversies. This included the Monica Lewinsky scandal where she not only forgave her husband's humiliating behavior but helped strategize his defense against impeachment proceedings.

Should Hillary Clinton be disqualified because she is married to a former president? Not necessarily. But as it is, she has been extraordinarily obtuse in addressing questions concerning a co-presidency while her husband laughs off such queries.

Yes, these are uncomfortable questions and ones that roil the tender sensibilities of Clinton sycophants. But they must be asked since the course that the U.S. takes if Hillary Clinton is elected is inextricably tied to them. And they must be answered if we are to trust her judgment and her ability to do the job.

* * * * *

There has been criticism, much of it justified, that the mainstream media went too easy on Barack Obama for too long.

But now it is Hillary Clinton who is getting a pass because there is virtually no chance of her winning the nomination unless it is revealed that Obama has a secret family in Idaho, as one pundit put it, or she steals the nomination outright, yet references to this reality are few and far between in news stories.

Let's go to the numbers:

Obama leads 1,406 to 1,249 in The Associated Press pledged delegate count, Clinton leads 250-212 in Politico’s superdelegate count, trails by about 990,000 in the primary popular vote count and is roughly tied in congressional endorsements. Meanwhile, the Florida and Michigan insurrections have mercifully ended.

Most pundits with at least a rudimentary grasp of mathematics believe that Clinton will have to win the 10 remaining primaries with at least 60 percent of the vote, something that she has failed to do in all but three states so far, in order to draw even with Obama in pledged delegates.

About 260 superdelegates remain uncommitted and about 70 have yet to be named, but Clinton's superdelegate lead has been shrinking steadily and if the national polls are to be believed, Obama has gotten a pretty good bounce off of that race-and-religion speech.

If the numbers and circumstances were reversed, can you imagine the pressure on Obama from the Clinton camp to pull out?

Clinton's surrogates maintain that she remains competitive. But that is true only in that neither she nor Obama will have enough delegates to win the nomination outright. Simply and starkly put, Clinton will be unable to win a brokered convention without resorting to dirty dealing.

I am less concerned than the average Democratic bear that a prolonged primary fight favors John McCain, who is getting a free ride as he bumbles through March. More concerning is the shape the Democratic Party will be left in if Clinton resorts to slash-and-burn tactics to wrest the nomination from Obama.

Sptizer: Another Bush Political Prosecution

It took a few days for the truth to out, but there is now no doubt that the outting of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was yet another Bush administration political prosecution.

This does not forgive Spitzer's hypocrisy, but speaks volumes about our Justice Department and Attorney General Mukasey, whose dirty hands are all over this one.

The best accounts to date are in The New York Times and The New Republic, while the New York Daily News focuses on the trigger man.

But I'm willing to bet the ranch that we're only a few news cycles away from the veritable smoking gun -- hard proof that extraordinary resources were arrayed against Spitzer because he was a pain in the Republican and Wall Street ass.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

PUMPKIN HEAD
By Wink

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

It's not just race, gender, identity politics, and mutual verbal annihilation between the campaigns that are making a hash of the Democratic Party's chances in November. This week, with the war in Iraq entering its sixth year, Clinton and Obama both repeated their promises to end it, if not exactly on January 20, 2009 then as soon as possible thereafter. They're outdoing each other in the effort to tell Democratic voters what they want to hear and simultaneously accuse the other candidate of being less than absolutely zealous in wanting to obliterate the past five tragic years from the public's memory.

-- GEORGE PACKER

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.

It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

"It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes," said one leading Democrat.

-- MAUREEN DOWD

The Republican Party has become, in short, a party of empire. The conservative movement is now a movement dedicated to American hegemonic dominion. And, given the lack of debate, both will likely remain that way for some time. These statements are true not only of the major presidential candidates, but of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, most conservative foreign-policy think-tankers, and most high-level GOP operatives involved in policy-making. If the travesty that was our invasion of Iraq has not had the power to change these facts, it is difficult to imagine what set of circumstances could.

-- MICHAEL TOMASKY

Or does anyone else think the Barrack Obama campaign (directly and indirectly) has done more to poison political discourse in this country than anything since the Clinton impeachment or, just maybe, the Watergate scandal? We've got charges of racism against a former President and a former candidate for Vice-President; charges of anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, lying, cheating, sexism, class warfare, liberal guilt, dandyism, and good old fashioned stupidity; claims of opportunism, resume padding, plagiarism, character assassination, incompetence, favoritism, cronyism, fraud, and demagoguery. Hell, there is even the claim that a candidate trashed an elderly relative for political gain.

And that's just among the Democrats.

This "new" tone stinks.

-- THE ICONIC MIDWESTERNER

[W]hat a huge relief it is to learn that Florida will not be conducting a do-over primary. It's akin to getting the news that the lunatic distant cousin in your family will not be coming for Thanksgiving after all. Now we can eat in peace.

-- DICK POLMAN

As Barack Obama stands at the crossroads of race in America and offers himself as an agent of healing, he is a symbol of both the fears and hopes aroused by an ugly word, miscegenation.

When he was born in 1961, his parents' marriage was illegal in 17 states of the Union. It was six years later that the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia statute against racially mixed marriages as unconstitutional and ended anti-miscegenation laws in America.

Such unions have always been denounced by both black and white extremists. Louis Farrakhan, who received last year's Jeremiah Wright A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award as a man "who truly epitomized greatness" from Obama's church, has always opposed intermarriage and called it "unnatural." In doing so, he was echoing the classic sneer of white bigots, "Would you want your sister to marry one?"

-- ROBERT STEIN

Mr. Richardson’s endorsement [of Obama] came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.

-- JAMES CARVILLE

I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

-- INSTAPUNK

Cartoon by Walt Handelsman/Newsday

Happy Easter, Y'All

Hat tip to The Impolitic. Image by Michael Sowa

Sunday Kitty Blogging

As enigmatic as cats can be, they do occasionally let their feelings be known. Here's Kimba hunkering down in a travel bag as I was getting ready to go on the road.

Another Time, Another Firebrand Preacher

Given the flap over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's incendiary sermonizing, it is appropriate to recall Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s landmark speech declaring his opposition to the Vietnam War.

Dr. King was criticized by some civil rights leaders for the speech, which was delivered on April 4, 1967 at a meeting of an antiwar group at Riverside Church in New York City. Why, they asked, was he concerning himself about an issue that seemed to be divorced from the concerns and goals of a civil rights movement that was striving for equality for black Americans?

While King powerfully and eloquently answered their concerns, E.J. Dionne notes in The Washington Post that had today's technology existed then, King's remarks would have been played over and over and he certainly would have been skewered by the right-wing media for being un-American.

Some excerpts:

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

* * * * *

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

* * * * *

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

* * * * *

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

* * * * *

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

* * * * *

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

* * * * *

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.

If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

The Secret Lives of Easter Peeps

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

END OF HEAVEN (South China Sea)
By Josef Hoflehner

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Why do you have sex?

At first blush that may seem like a stupid question, up there with why do you laugh, eat or pinch off a loaf in the morning? I mean derrr, you do it because it feels good, because shooting a hot load is the closest you can get to transcendence while shuffling around this dirt circle.

Think about the question again and try to peer past the mechanics: do you have sex for the act or the intimacy it brings? Is it the physical sensation that attracts you, the emotions it summons or both?

Maybe sex is not about you at all but because it satisfies your partner and fulfills your perceived role as a lover? Perhaps you do one-nighters with randoms for acceptance or for the exact opposite; so you can be rejected, to prove all you're good for is sex and not much else?

It could be you're the religious type and your sex is solely for procreation or, you're "trying for a baby" and copulation has become just that - trying - a chore where you never expected it to be?

From a scientific standpoint, reproduction would seem to be the evolutionary reason for sex, an involuntary instinct; but if this is the case, how come so many of us can override the impulse and never have children? Why then does the huge majority of human intercourse not result in fertilisation?

-- SAM de BRITO

At first, the distinctions seemed clear: One governor broke the law, the other cheated on his wife (and she, apparently, had cheated on him). One offered a short apology, the other answered every question that was asked.

But as New Yorkers tried to make sense of it all, some found themselves questioning their own instinctive sense of right and wrong, of public and private, of how much information is too much information. Was one politician a tragic figure felled by his own hubris, the other just trying to get ahead of the Albany rumor mill? Were the late-night comedians’ jokes funny, or did they sting viewers who were angry and ashamed? Should we even be talking seriously about this stuff, normally fodder for the supermarket tabloids and “The Jerry Springer Show”?

-- JAMES BARRON and LISA W. FODERARO

More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on, and a new study discovers why: Guys are clueless.

More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students.

"Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more," said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

This "lost in translation" phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on, Farris said.

Some might think the results come down to "boys being boys," and so even the slightest female interest sparks sexual fantasy. But the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys - they mistake females' sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.

-- JEANNA BRYNER

Married people the world over are devastated to discover that their partners have been, as the Dutch say, pinching the cat in the dark. French wives were shocked when I suggested that it was their custom to look the other way. (Even French first ladies don’t do this anymore.) Wives from sub-Saharan Africa, a part of the world with the highest levels of male infidelity, told me how they went running down the street after their husbands, begging them to sleep at home.

But American D-Days are even worse because we have such improbably high standards for marriage. If your spouse cheats, you’ve been living a lie. Americans describing their D-Day experiences say that they weren’t just shocked, jealous and profoundly upset, but that their whole view of the world had collapsed. "It robs you of your past," one husband said. "What is real? What is fake?"

We Americans are particularly preoccupied with honesty. We’re the only country that peddles the idea that "It’s not the sex, it’s the lying." (In France, it’s not the lying, it’s the sex.) America is also the only place I found that has a one-strike rule on fidelity: if someone cheats, the marriage is kaput.

-- PAMELA DRUCKERMAN

Passport Breaches: Much Ado About What?

Despite the inherent sleaziness of the Bush administration, the news that two State Department contract employees have been fired for accessing Barack Obama's passport file didn't set off any alarm bells. Then we learned that the files of Hillary Clinton and John McCain had been breached, as well.

Condi Rice apologized to the candidates (and she seems to be doing an inordinate amount of apologizing these days), while the White House had no comment, but there is a quick and easy way to determine whether the Bush administration has an itty-bitty scandal or a full-blown one on their hands:

The State Department should reveal post haste whether the passport files of any presidential candidates who have been slavishly supportive of the Bush administration were subjected to prying eyes, which might begin to answer the question about whether these breaches were politically motivated.

Rice has promised a full (cough, cough) investigation, quite likely of the Blackwater in Iraq variety, but as it is a pretty good circumstantial case is being made that this turn of events may register on the upper end of the Scandal-O-Meter.

Beyond the fact that Obama, Clinton and McCain have not been friends of the White House, consider that:

* Why State did not go public about the breaches and the firings until a reporter started asking questions.

* Is it merely a coincidence that the three Obama breaches followed key events in the primary campaign?

* The fired contract employees are being described as "low level" by State. True? And for whom did they work and what political connections does their employer have?

If all of this has the ring of familiarity, recall that in 1992 a Republican appointee at State accessed Bill Clinton's passport records. The reasons vary: Some people claimed at the time that it was an effort to see if the president-to-be had participated in antiwar demonstrations when he was going to school in England. Others said that it was to see whether he had visited Libya, and still others whether he had renounced his American citizenship.

An independent counsel concluded after a three-year investigation that no higher-ups had known about the breach and it wasn't criminal anyway.

More here.