Math

I heard this morning on NPR that 100 people per day are dying in sectarian violence in Iraq, but the Decider says it's not civil war.

Let's run the numbers. 100 deaths per day equals 36,500 dead Iraqis a year. Gee - how many people have to die before we consider it a civil war?

Oh, but you say that people die violently in our Cities all the time. True. Let's do the math on that one: New York City has 8.2 million residents, approximately 1/3 the size of Iraq. So, the number of murders in Iraq would equate to 11,500 if they happened in New York City. So what? 1 out of 712? Big deal. Well, do you think people would notice if the murder rate in New York City went up by 2,100%? It might get my attention...

But, it's not civil war - maybe we just need to send Saint Rudy Giulliani over there to clean things up like he did in New York...

Time to Go Joe

Buried in a Hartford Courant article about the Lamont-Lieberman race is this startling paragraph:

On Iraq, Lieberman now tries to steer the debate away from the wisdom of the original decision to invade, a vote that Gerstein said Lieberman does not regret and would cast again.

So, Joe Lieberman feels that sacrificing the lives of 3,000 American soldiers and as many as 650,000 Iraqi civilians, starting a civil war and increasing international terrorism is a fair bargain to rid the world of a pesky nuissance.

Shocking.

My Misunderstanding

Vice President Cheney is denying that he advocates waterboarding. I feel badly that I misinterpreted his comments:

In an interview Tuesday with WDAY of Fargo, N.D., Cheney was asked if "a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives."

The vice president replied, "Well, it's a no-brainer for me..."

My mistake.

Outreach to Minorities

It's fascinating to watch closeted homosexual RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman defending his party's attacks on another minority group, African Americans, in their racist ad against Harold Ford of Tennesse.

Leaving aside the self-loathing of a man who is Chairman of a party that is hell bent on denying him rights, Mehlman's support of this kind of attack demonstrates the GOP's attitudes toward race, best summed up in this post from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, reacting to people who claim that these attack ads will hurt the alleged outreach of the GOP to minorities:

Again, let's be honest with ourselves. Racism is one of the key building blocks of Republican politics in the United States. Don't look at me with a straight face and tell me you don't realize that's true. That doesn't mean that all Republicans are racists. Far from it. It doesn't mean that a lot of Republicans don't wish the stain wasn't part of their party's recent political heritage. They do. But racism and race-baiting is the hold card Republicans take into every election. When times are good, guys like Mehlman 'reach out' to blacks and Latinos to try to take the edge off their opposition to the Republican officeholders. But when things get rough the card gets played. And pretty much every time.

Something He Actually Does Understand

Rush Limbaugh, an expert on all things pharmaceutical, believes that Michael J. Fox is deliberately going off his meds or acting like his Parkinsons is worse than it is in order to do political commercials.

I love this!

How's that Axis of Evil Doing Now?

Bush has been saying that the policy of the Clinton administration on North Korea wasn't working, and that is the reason why the third member of the axis of evil tested a nuclear device 6 years after Clinton left office. That's a little bit like blaming FDR for the Vietnam war. At this point, they've had almost as long to fix this alleged failed policy as the Clinton administration had to create it, and the results are: Clinton years - no nuclear devices; Bush years, nuclear devices.

During his press conference today, Bush said that his policy is working because now the Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans are engaged. Well of course they're paying attention - one of their neighbors and sworn enemies just tested a device that could blow them off the face of the earth.

One of the few things that this administration is competent at is taking failures that they caused and claiming them as proof that their way is the only way. In Iraq, the Country is in a state of chaos, so we have to be there. In North Korea, a nuclear bomb has developed so we have to be tough with them.

The truth of the matter is that by virtually any measure conceivable, each member of the storied axis of evil is more dangerous today than it was when that rhetorical flourish was first thrust upon us in 2002's State of the Union Address. No doubt this complete failure will be cited as the reason why we need to continue to stay the course.

Let's Make This Clear Volume II

A guy you work with has been alleged to be too cozy with kids. Let's be honest - every time you even think of that guy, or see him or read about him, that's the first thing that would pop into your mind. That's just human nature.

Now, you find out that that same guy is hanging around with a lot of kids he has no good reason to be around. Would that make you a little nervous? Would you do something?

Let's Make This Real Clear

It's an open secret in Washington that Foley was too close to pages - republican pages were warned about him in 2003. In that context, somebody shows Hastert an e-mail from Foley to an underage male page asking for a picture and talking about another guy's great body. Hastert claims that the e-mails in and of themselves weren't alarming.

That's what they'd have us believe.

Pathetic

I understand that Denny Hastert is scared for his life, and people who are backed into a corner will say and do almost anything. But really, this?:

Hastert asserted that any Republicans urging his ouster are playing into the hands of Democrats and blamed his problems on the media and Democratic operatives, even suggesting former President Clinton might somehow be involved.

“All I know is what I hear and what I see,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune on the eve of the ethics meeting. “I saw Bill Clinton’s adviser, Richard Morris, was saying these guys knew about this all along, If somebody had this info, when they had it, we could have dealt with it then.”

Hastert said “people funded by George Soros,” a liberal billionaire who has plowed millions into this and other election campaigns, want to see the scandal blow up. And he warned that when the GOP “base finds out who’s feeding this monster, they’re not going to be happy.”

Yes Denny, that's exactly right. George Soros, being the all-powerful force that he is, concocted this scheme to convince a reluctant Mark Foley to forge sexual relationships with underage male pages to engage in IM sex with him. He even got him to really sell it by showing up drunk at and getting publicly turned away from the page dorm several years ago. Then, George conned the house leadership into pretending that they didn't know all of this until the last possible moment, giving his pawn, Mark Foley, more time to cultivate his reputation as an internet paramour of underage pages. But, he couldn't get it done on his own - he Bill Clinton to put aside his differences with Fox News Contributor and spin master Dick Morris (who's recent "Rewriting History" trashed Bill's wife) in pursuit of the larger goal of making Hastert look like someone who surpressed knowledge of a known paramour of underage pages.

Brilliant, although one wonders why George Soros doesn't use this near-complete control over human events to simply install his chosen leadership into the White House and Congress....

Does this Make Sense?

Let's put this whole thing in context. We now learn that in 2004, Foley's cheif of staff told very senior people in Hastert's Office that Foley was getting too close to pages. If you're Speaker Hastert and somebody comes to you in 2005 with some e-mails asking male pages for pictures of yourself, wouldn't you think, "hey - based on what I heard a year ago, this is a problem."

For whatever reason, either the information never got to him or he wanted to protect the Republican seat or he just didn't think to do anything about it, it's pretty clear now that Hastert really dropped the ball. There is literally no way that he will survive this - I give it less than 48 hours.

For what it's worth, I've met Hastert, and he seems like a decent guy. I really do hate to see this kind of thing hapenning to anyone, but I don't hate it as much as I hate powerful people thinking they don't have the same accountability for their mistakes as the rest of the world does.

The Blame it on the Underlings Defense

Hastert is in pretty bad shape if he thinks this, the spin that's coming out of all their mouths almost in unison, is going to save them.

Shorter Denny Hastert: "we shouldn't be held responsible because it's our staffs that really run this place."

Simple Mistake?

I generally have a pretty high threshold for conspiracy theories, but this, this and this are beginning to look less and less like a coincidence...

Cut and Run Party

As if we needed more proof that the "war on terror (tm)" is nothing more than theater for the GOP, the New York Times reports this today, that the Republican congress allocated $20 million in 2006 for a victory celebration in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since we are unlikely to have such a celebration, they are rolling it over into next year's budget:

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

There are many tragic, amusing and ironic angles to this, but the one I find most interesting is that Republicans, as recently as this month, actually believe that our troops will leave victorious in the next year. Have they been reading the news? And this is the party that is serious about national security?

Neanderthals at the Gate

It has always amazed me that smart, even progressive, business people still subscribe to and read the Wall Street Jurnal, even after its editorial pages have been hijacked by total nutjobs. As if further proof is needed, here's a pearl from today's pages:

But in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?

I hesitate to point this out to my more eductated, if not slightly smaller, audience: What Mark Foley did was not wrong because it was directed at members of the same sex, it was wrong because they were minors. Note to the Journal: while the Dow Jones, despite your faithful cheerleading of Bush economic policies, has yet to advance beyond 20th century levels, as a society, the rest of us have.

He's Done

When the Washington Times calls for you to resign, your days are numbered.

If the Republicans were smart, they'd dump him today before this thing really gets out of hand. Sooner or later, though, he'll have to go.

Pick Your Poison

Some have said that the Foley issue is actually a blessing for the Republicans because it diverts attention from Woodward's book, which slams the administration for not telling the truth.

I think this is total nonsense. The Woodward book, while very damaging for Bush in that it essentially demonstrates that he has knowingly mislead the public, covers a line of debate that has largely been fought out over the last few years. There won't be many converts won based on this book.

The Foley issue, on the other hand, opens up an entirely new strain of criticism against the Republicans: that not only are they acting as Bush's rubber stamp on Iraq, they are so desperate to hang onto power that they're willing to let a man with a known history of troubling behavior have access to kids. My bet is that, when all is said and done, the Republicans, and Hastert in particular, will look a lot like Cardinal Law, the leader of Boston's Roman Catholics who took a remarkably similar tack in dealing with his diocese's priest abuse allegations. Law eventually was forced to resign.

But, while I have been critical of Woodward in the past and am more than just a little skeptical of him in general, his 60 Minutes interview is pretty damning, and you can watch it below:

Part 1


Part 2

Which is it?

Last week, Condi Rice claimed that the Bush administration aggressively pursued Al Qaeda before 9/11.

This week, she says she "can't recall" whether George Tenet and his deputies met with her and urged her to take action.

Seems to me that if I was taking something really seriously, I'd remember whether the guy who runs intelligence came to me and said that I should, umm, take that thing seriously.

Crickets

I am sure you remember the outrage at the National Organization of Women (NOW) for not vociferously condemning President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.

I am sure that Radical Clerics Jerry Falwell and Focus on the Family's James Dobson will no doubt be rushing to the micropones to take the GOP leadership to task for failing to act to stop one of its members from preying on minors.

Where to Begin

I don't really know where to begin on this whole Mark Foley thing. Let me start by saying that you'll no doubt notice the words "over-friendly" or "naughty" as part of the republican spin on the content of these e-mails. It is not an accident that these words are all over the media coverage on this topic.

Now - picture yourself as the parent of a 16-year-old boy serving as a page. Your son informs you that a 52-year old congressman who he barely knows sends him an e-mail commenting on another page's "hot bod". Would "over-friendly" be the way you'd describe it?

I think I might want someone to look into it...