Dustin Diamond

This has abosolutely nothing to do with politics, but, ohmygod.

Paging Senator Obama

These past few days have presented a stunning array of opportunities for Democrats to define ourselves. With the near passage of Bush's Human Torture Act, which allows the president to order people to be held under water until they've just about drowned, and the word leaking out that Bush has known for at least 5 months that the Iraq war has increased the risk of terrorism but told us all that it hasn't, there's plenty of material.

Now would be a good time for a certain celebrity democrat who loves to talk about how his party needs to be tough on security to step up and, you know, be tough on security. The Media doesn't pay much attention to democrats, but I'm sure the our resident rock star would turn a few heads...

More Like This

This is the kind of ad every democrat should be running. "We need leaders, not followers" - brilliant.

Centrism

I got to thinking about the concept of Centrism recently because Joe Lieberman has been saying Connecticut residents should vote for him because he's a centrist. Something about the notion of centrism has always struck me as phony, and I've been trying to figure out why.

I'm not saying that I don't think people can have "centrist" ideas on certain things - like believing abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape or incest, or that we should have universal health care but not run by the government, etc. I also understand that certain people call themselves centrists because they're just not that interested in politics or because they're turned off by the two parties.

Centrism as an identity, though, strikes me as pretty calculated - as if you see what the extreme positions are on all issues and find a position that's somewhere in the middle. It just seems to me that most normal people don't think that way, and that people like Lieberman who identify themselves as centrists are actually taking a calculated stance, in his case to be accepted by the beautiful people who run Washington these days.

It also amuses me that you rarely hear of centrist republicans - it's always centrist democrats.

Anyway, all of this brings me to a hypothesis that I would love some feedback on: centrism is the acting out of the internal struggle between one's conscience (what he/she really believes is right) and one's desire for power (what needs to be done to break into the republican-dominated power structure).

Discuss...

Podcasts

Since maintstream news is so bad and since it's often difficult to catch the good programs when they're on, I've been listening to some podcasts lately. They're good for on the way to work, running, long walks in the woods, etc, and sometimes you need a break from listening to Kelly Clarkson. A few of my favorited are:

- KCRW Left Right and Center - a good weekly roundup on politics with two of my favorite people - Arian Huffington and Bob Sheer
- Real Time with Bill Mahr - if you don't get HBO, this is a great way to catch this funny and smart show
- Countdown With Keith Olbermann - this is one of the only cable news programs with a progressive bent - he's great
- Meet the Press - I am ambivalent about this one, but this week's interview with Bill Clinton reminds you of how good the US can be
- The Writer's Almanac - This is just about 2 minutes long each day, but it's always relaxing and insightful

The easiest way to get these is to use I-tunes; in the music store, go to podcasts, search for them and then click subscribe. Then, every once and a while, go to the podcast section in I-tunes and click refresh. They will sync when you connect your Ipod.

Let me know if there are any other podcasts that you favor...

Dead or Alive?

How nice for the 3,000+ victims of 9/11 that, unlike them, it looks like Osama Bin Laden might have been lucky enough to pass away in the company of friends.

Remember this?

THE PRESIDENT: They will try to hide, they will try to avoid the United States and our allies - but we're not going to let them. They run to the hills; they find holes to get in. And we will do whatever it takes to smoke them out and get them running, and we'll get them.

Listen, this is a great nation; we're a kind people. None of us could have envisioned the barbaric acts of these terrorists. But they have stirred up the might of the American people, and we're going to get them, no matter what it takes.

Wild Bill

Fox News lured Bill Clinton on under the guise of talking about the $7.3 billion that the Clinton Global Initiative just raised to fight global warming, AIDS and third-world poverty. Only when he got there, Chris Wallace started with this:

WALLACE: When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn't you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President? There's a new book out which I suspect you've read called the Looming Tower. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said "I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops." Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole.

Clinton completely hammered him. A partial transcript is here, although the video will not air until tomorrow. In typical fair and balanced fashion, Fox is promoting the segment on its website under the headline "Crazed Clinton"

Sell Out

Looks like John McCain's desire for the presidency trumps his desire to make sure what happened to him doesn't happen to any other American soldier. I suppose we're supposed to take comfort in this passage, from the "compromise bill" that Saint McCain fought so hard for:

(3)INTERPRETATION BY THE PRESIDENT. (A) As provided by the
Constitution and by this section, the President has the authority for the
United States to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva
Conventions and to promulgatehigher standards and administrative
regulations for violations of treaty obligations which are not grave
breaches of the Geneva Conventions.

I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that means anything goes. How's that for straight talk?

Bush Speaks the Truth

From his interview with Katie Couric:

There – it's – you know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.

More on the Bush Human Torture Act

Just so we all know what all this fighting is about, recall the August 2002 Bush administration memo outlining its torture policy. It argures that for an act to be considered torture it:

must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.

So, under this definition, the following activities would not be considered torture:

- Cutting off fingers, legs, or other appendages
- Pulling off fingernails
- Rape of any kind
- Burning
- Scalping

Freedom is on the march.

An Aside

What if during World War II, we started referring to Moussolini as a Catholo-fascist? Or Hitler as a Christian-o-fascist. I think Catholics and Christians might find that a little offensive, even though they despised those dictators.

This newly minted term Islamofascists is very dangerous. I'd like to think it is not intended as a slur, but knowing these people, I suspect it is deliberate...

God, I'm Good

I hate to say I told you so, but I really did call this one on Bush's upcoming global warming initiative, right down to the following line:

Administration insiders privately refer to the planned volte-face as Mr Bush's 'Nixon goes to China moment,' recalling how the former president amazed the world after years of refusing to deal with its Communist regime.

I am both proud and ashamed of myself...

Progress

I'm sure you've heard about the whole torture debate that is going on. Bush tried to pull off an election-year gambit by putting up a bill that he knew Democrats would oppose so he could claim they were week on terra. Only it seems that the primary opposition is coming from within his own party, allowing democrats the rare pleasure of sitting back and watching the fight.

Lost in the debate, and buried in this story, is the specifics of what Bush is proposing. I find the following pretty astounding:

McCain, a former prisoner of war, did not elaborate on how an agreement can be achieved on whether to allow highly controversial methods by the CIA, such as electric shock, forced nakedness and waterboarding, in which a subject is made to think he is drowning. The Bush administration says those techniques have foiled terror plots. Opponents say they verge on torture.

Bush says that he's just trying to clarify Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, the portion of international law that governs the treatment of prisoners of war. He says it's needlessly vague. It says:

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) Taking of hostages;

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples

Now maybe Dear Leader has a point, maybe this is a little vague. It seems to me, though, that it's sufficiently clear for one to infer that making someone think they're drowning or shooting electric current through them would be pretty much a no-no. And if Bush doesn't think that stripping someone naked is humiliating and degrading, perhaps he would be open to giving his next televised press conference in the altogether.

Not to be overly dramatic, but I find it shocking (no pun intended) that this even has to be discussed - that somebody has to take the time to explain to our president that you can't strip people naked, hold them under water and pump them full of voltage. And leaving aside the irony of this in light of soaring rhetoric about how we liberated the people of Iraq from this kind of treatment, you'd think that people would understand that the best reason not to do this is so that the next time one of our GIs gets captured, he isn't, you know, stripped naked, held under water and pumped full of voltage.

Ann Richards

It was sad to hear of the death of the woman who uttered that famous phrase about Bush senior at the 1988 Democratic National Convention: "poor George, born with a silver foot in his mouth".

But, as an inidcation that there's pretty much no news that can't be tied in some way to the incompetence, dishonesty and deceit of the current Bush administration, it's this incident that both ended Richards' political career and foreshadowed the political atmosphere that we now enjoy:

George W. Bush ousted Ann Richards from the Texas governor's office in 1994 after a whisper campaign focused on a small number of Richards appointees who were lesbians and even suggested that Richards was gay. Bush himself stoked the fire, saying some Richards appointees "had agendas that may have been personal in nature."

Status Check

In his State of the Union Address this year, Bush promised energy independence, uttering the famous phrase "America is addicted to foreign oil." The typical media fluffers gushed about the pure audacity of it all. It's now 8 months later, and I just thought I'd ask: how's it going?

As I wrote back in February, this, like the AIDS in Africa initiative or the Man on Mars, is never going to happen, and it speaks to the cynicism of the press corp that they don't even think that a promise made in the state of the union speech is anything more than a rhetorical flourish, completely unworthy of following up on.

I bring all this up because it appears that he's about to do it again this time promising to eliminate global warming. I am sure we will all gush over the sheer "Nixon in China-ness" of the move, just as much as I'm sure that come next Monday, it will all be forgotten, and once again, the press will allow the President of the United States to make a promise to the American people that he has no intention of keeping.

There He Goes Again

Barack Obama needs to stop talking about how Democrats need to be tougher on security and start actually doing something about it.

This kind of talk (and this) may make Obama seem like a man with "serious" ideas, but it plays directly into the hand of the republicans by emphasizing dangerous and inaccurate stereotypes. Talk about it in private, Barack.

As perhaps the most prominent face on the Democratic party these days, Obama, as I've said before, should stop talking about what democrats need to do and just, you know, do it.

The Struggle of Our Generation

This point has been made in a number of places over the last few days: if this is such a big and important war, why are we fighting it with only 125,000 troops?

Amen

I agree completely with this.

We need to get past this completely idiotic notion that we're in some war against a threat the likes of which we've never seen. Umm, Hitler? What about the entire British Empire?

I'll bet Americans in the late 1700's, 1860's and 1940's felt significantly more put upon by their enemies than we do now. Let's all take a deep breath, calm down and treat this problem with the perspective it deserves.

After You

One of the better bloggers out there, Digby, noticed this passage from last night's political speech:

Winning this war will require the determined efforts of a unified country. So we must put aside our differences, and work together to meet the test that history has given us. We will defeat our enemies, we will protect our people, and we will lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty.”

To which he responds, "you first". Exactly.

So You Don't Have To...

I actually watched President Scaredy Pants giving his 9/11 rememberance speech. I watched thinking I was going to be annoyed at how his speechwriters would craft an eloquent speech to exploit the nation's emotions on this day.

I have to say, I was bored. Not outraged, not amused - just bored. I was expecting Reagan after the shuttle collapse, or Clinton in Oklahoma City, even the man himself during his post-9/11 speech to Congress. What I got instead was a monotonous litany of the reasons why we should stay the course in Iraq. I'm sure that's exactly what the families of 9/11 victims were looking to hear from their President tonight.

I guess it's time to realize that Karl Rove really doesn't have anything up his sleeve, because he's not that smart. These guys are just plain incompetent, and we really needn't be concerned about what they have to say anymore.

St. Rudy

I've never really understood the cult of personality surrounding Rudy Giulliani. I mean before 9/11, he was best known as the guy who was sleeping with his mistress at Gracie Mansion while his wife and children were across the hall.

Also, I've often thought that it would be smart of Democrats to start getting tough with this guy, as he positions himself for '08. For example, was it really wise after the first World Trade Center attack for America's Mayor to decide to locate the City's emergency response center in the World Trade Center?

Further evidence that Mr. Leadership made a few bad decisions can be found here. After watching the Republicans attack Democrats on their strentgths (Kerry on his military service, etc.), Democrats had better prepare to go after St. Rudy on his.

Wouldn't Change a Thing

Big-Time Cheney on Meet the Press yesterday:

CHENEY: The world is better off because Saddam Hussein is in jail instead of in power in Baghdad. It was the right thing to do and if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing.

RUSSERT: Exactly the same thing?

CHENEY: Yes, sir.

What's that they say about the definition of stupidity?

More Bedwetting

Looks like President Scaredy Pants is out there again trying to drum up enough fear to make people forget that they think he's an idiot. Could work - people do strange things when they're scared to death, like invade meaningless countries, capture their leaders, kill his sons and start civil wars. I'm betting on the smarter angels of Americans' nature, though, when I say that I don't think it's going to work this time. Bush may be soiling himself in fear, but judging by the fact that he feels the need to remind us how scared we should be, I think most people have put this all in perspective. Then again, what do I know - I thought Dukakis had a chance...

Another Reason Why I'm for Gore

The former VP at the MTV Video Music Awards:

"I actually was not intending to be here tonight, but then MTV explained that Justin Timberlake was bringing sexy back."