Time Warp Redux

NYT: "Yesterday, the same day New Yorkers were warned there was a "specific threat" of a bombing on their subways, President Bush delivered what the White House promoted as a major address on terrorism. It seemed, on the surface, like a perfect topic for the moment. But his talk was not about the nation's current challenges. He delivered a reprise of his Sept. 11 rhetoric that suggested an avoidance of today's reality that seemed downright frightening."

"The president's inability to grow beyond his big moment in 2001 is unnerving. But the fact that his handlers continue to encourage him to milk 9/11 is infuriating. For most of us, the memories are fresh and painful. We mourn the people who died on Sept. 11, as we mourn Daniel Pearl and other Americans, not to mention innocents from other countries, who were murdered by terrorists. The administration's penchant for using them as political cover is offensive. It threatens to turn our wounds, and our current fears, into cynical and desperate spin." [NYT]

NYT: "We've lost track of the number of times President Bush has told Americans to ignore their own eyes and ears and pretend everything is going just fine in Iraq. Yesterday, when Mr. Bush added a ringing endorsement of his own policy to his speech on terrorism, it was that same old formula: the wrong questions, the wrong answers and no new direction." [NYT]

Isn't the general public getting tired of the same old Bush rhetoric? The guy has been saying the same thing since 2001. "We have to stay the course." Well, the course is leading us into another quagmire where nearly 2,000 of our brave men and women are dying for oil and to profit the Bush Family Evil Empire. But, a lot of the public is ok with this, just as long as those stem cells don't come and get us. We must stop the stem cells above all else. And those gays, wanting to marry and join the military and the priesthood. What gives!?

Contest

I'm looking for suggestions on what my title bar should say (besides the name of my blog). Currently, it says Eamus Catuli!!!, which loosely translated means "Go Cubs!"

So, now that the Cubs season is regrettably over, I need a new header. I'm having a contest of sorts to help me decide what to put up there...suggestions welcome!

*Disclaimer: No actual prize will be awarded in said contest as writer and wife are currently expecting a daughter in December. Instead, you win the satisfaction of naming my header, which sounds funnier than it is.

Carnival Badger 8

Belle of Leaning Blue has the 8th editon of the Carnival of the Badger. And a fine job indeed...

Barry Melrose!

Time to drop the puck, the NHL is back!!! Finally returning after over a full year off, the NHL comes back better than ever. [Yahoo]

As with all sports, I am again a paradox, as I cheer for the Detroit Red Wings AND the Chicago Blackhawks. But the big constant, and what I am most excited about, is BARRY MELROSE. You know, everyone's favorite west-coast Canadian with the mullet. Best. Announcer. EVER.

Suitable Pick?

"In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met." --David Frum

I agree with Brewtown Politico and Stacie; the SCOTUS nominee does not have to have judicial experience. This is not required, nor does it automatically disqualify her. One, for example, me, would hope that the nominee does have some experience. But that is not for me or anyone but the Senate to decide. I will try to reserve judgement on her until confirmation hearings begin.

What scares me is the blind allegiance to Bush.

Hat tip to Brewtown Politico, Vast Dairy State Conspiracy, Folkbum, and Xoff Files.

Wait 'Till Next Year

Congrats to the Brewers, who finished at .500 this year (81-81), the first time since 1992. The franchise is definitely moving in the right direction. This year brought unprecedented fan interest to the team, along with attendance. Immediately following the game, they fired bench coach Rich Dauer, and third-base coach Rich Donnelly.

As most of my readers know, I love the Brewers, but my heart follows the Cubs. I don't really have an issue following two teams, except when they play each other...which I hate. It brings out too much nastiness on both sides.

Much has been said about the Cubs, and their season. The Cubs get more press because they are a higher-profile team, and because of their history. After their game 7 loss in the NLCS in 2003, then the rising hopes of 2004, destroyed by a last week crash in New York, this season brought renewed hope of the elusive championship. Alas, it was not to be. Too many injuries, too many mistakes, not enough of this or that...

I have many feelings about this year's version of the Cubs, and a lot of questions. What if Nomar wouldn't have gone down in St. Louis in April? Would have have gotten hot like he was in September? What if Kerry Wood would have stayed healthy and returned to the form he was in in 2003? What if Mark Prior wouldn't have gotten hit on the elbow in May? What if that ball would have hit him just an inch or two over, and ended his career? What if the Cubs would have made Dempster the closer on day 1? He went 33-35 in saves, and they still won the two "blown saves." What if Corey Patterson would have really focused on playing this year? What if the Cubs would have won a few more games that they should have easily won. I guess we'll never know the answers to those questions.

They did some things right: they locked up Dempster for 3 more years. Derrek Lee put on a show that this Cubs fan will never forget, in route to winning his first batting title.

What will the Cubs look like in 2006? No one knows yet. I'd like to see Matt Murton and Ronny Cedeno get full-time gigs. I'd love to see Todd Walker come back. I wouldn't mind Nomar coming back, and maybe playing left field. Give Felix Pie a shot in CF. I'd like to see Aramis Ramirez and Carlos Zambrano really focus on losing some weight and strengthening their lower bodies. I'd REALLY LOVE to see some durability and a major reduction in the number of injuries. I'd love to see some defense, some fundamentals, and some HEART.

Here's some season recaps. [MissedGoals] [SeasonInReview] [Sportsline] [Tribune]

The latin phrase "Eamus Catuli" that I have in the header of my site loosely translates to "Let's Go Cubs!" I'll have to come up with something else to replace it until next spring training. Just remember, hope springs eternal! Keep the faith! Believe!

Baby Update

I haven't written about myself or my family a lot on this blog. I guess I've tried to shelter that as much as possible. I did announce back in May however, that my wife and I are expecting our first child, a daughter, on December 1st (or when she is good and ready to appear!).

Becky is doing well...she is currently 31+ weeks in. She's been uncomfortable, and had some "power outages," where she is just beat-tired, but otherwise fine. I know you'd be tired too if you were a teacher and 31+ weeks pregnant!

We bought a crib and changing table, that was just delivered on Friday. Otherwise, I feel pretty unprepared. Mentally, I'm ready, but we just have to make a space in our house for her.

For anyone that wants to know, we are registered at Target. :)

Illegal Propaganda

"Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party."

"In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban." [NYT]

When has this administration done anything within the realm of the law? Will they pay any consequences for this? NO.

Bill Bennett: Pillar of Racism

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." -- Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education, author of "The Book of Virtue" and conservative poster boy, in a radio interview.

This all started with one callers suggestion that the "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years" would be enough to preserve the solvency of Social Security.

"Bennett's remark was apparently inspired by the claim that legalized abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But Levitt and Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to grow up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based argument." [Xoff] [MediaMatters] [Yahoo]

Bush stooge Scott McClellan came out and stated that President Bush believes that the comments were not appropriate. Notice he didn't condemn them, as the media is reporting...he just said that maybe they weren't appropriate.

Yes, this is what the GOP really thinks of America and it's citizens.

The Bare Necessities

Sirota: "Despite thousands in Louisiana having lost their homes, jobs, and life's possessions, the Wall Street Journal reports today that HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said that extending health care benefits to hurricane victims is "unnecessary." The public is expected to accept this rationale as an explanation for why, as CBS News reports, the White House is "blocking a bipartisan $9 billion health care package for hundreds of thousands of evacuees" from the hurricanes. Shocked at the Bush administration's indifference? Don't be - over the last few weeks, the Republican Party has made clear what its priorities really are in these very terms."

Necessary for the GOP after Katrina:
New tax cuts for the wealthy
Cutting programs that serve military families
Increasing audits on the working poor
Skewing tax relief for victims to the wealthy
More oil industry tax breaks
Lowering workers' wages

Unnecessary for the GOP after Katrina:
Stopping $336 Billion in new tax cuts for millionaires
Stopping $200 Billion in new tax cuts for millionaires
Cracking down on wealthy & corporate tax cheats
Independent commission to find out what went wrong
Cracking down on oil industry profiteering
Taking FEMA director off the federal payroll

Throw in some indictments on DeLay, investigations on Rove and Frist, and you've got a recipe for GOP disaster.

Drinking Liberally 2

Last night was the second edition of Drinking Liberally - Milwaukee. A great time was had by all (especially when toasting at DeLay's expense!). Got to meet some new faces and some familiar ones.

I still think that we need to get more organized when it comes to blogging and our online presence. The conservatives seem to have their stuff together, and a Badger Blog Alliance. Of course, it helps when they have domination of all forms of media in Milwaukee. What do we have? A loose coalition of liberal bloggers. I think Jason is definitely on the right trail with podcasting.

Let's find a way to work together (and work smarter) and spread the democratic message with a unified front.

Hammered!

This is the best news that we've gotten in a while!

"House Majority Leader Tom Delay was indicted Wednesday by a Texas grand jury on a charge of conspiring to violate political fundraising laws, making him the highest-ranking member of Congress ever to face criminal indictment and forcing him to temporarily step aside from his GOP post." [Yahoo] [CNN] [RandiRhodes] [Video] [Indictment]

Of course, DeLay says the charges are a "sham." [DallasNews]

""This morning, in an act of blatant political partisanship, a rogue district attorney in Travis County, Texas, named Ronnie Earle charged me with one count of criminal conspiracy, a reckless charge wholly unsupported by the facts." — DeLay." [Statements]

Ronnie Earle has prosecuted 15 politicians in Texas, 11 of the Democrats. I'd hardly call him a "rogue district attorney." It really is about time that the "Hammer" gets what has been coming to him for a long time. If convicted, he faces up to a $10,000 fine and two years in prison. Good riddance. There are good honest people on both sides of the aisle. Let's send a clear message that we the people will not tolerate this kind of corruption from the Republicans that are dominating the government.

Sign this petition to publicly call for DeLay's resignation from Congress. Also visit Dropthehammer.org.

The Real Blame Game

Deposed FEMA director Michael "Brownie you're doing a heckuva job" Brown today blamed others for most of the government failure in responding to Hurricane Katrina.

""My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional," two days before the storm hit, Brown said."

"I've overseen over 150 presidentially declared disasters. I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it," he said." [Yahoo] [Video] [CNN] [CNNVideo]

What a tool. Where does this guy get off blaming everyone else but himself?! He's a political appointee in a critical position, with NO experience. He even lied on his resume! I understand fully that it's not completely his fault. Local and State Governments need to shoulder some blame. But look, this guy did nothing. He didn't know that there were people in the Convention Center in New Orleans until nearly 4 days later. Turn on a TV you moron! The best part is, he wasn't even fired! He's still on the payroll as a "senior consultant to FEMA." What a joke. This administration takes no responsibility for it's failures.

War Protest

On Saturday, well over 100,000 people lined up in front of the White House in Washington, DC, to protest the Iraq War. Media outlets are putting the number of protestors at over 100,000, but credible outlets and the DC Police are saying more like 500,000.

Even Cindy Sheehan got arrested today: "Sheehan's arrest came after a massive antiwar demonstration Saturday in Washington which drew more than 100,000 people -- the largest such demonstration since the Iraq war began in spring 2003. A demonstration supporting the war drew roughly 500 people Sunday." [WP] [NYT] [CNN]

Anti-War fervor DC, LA, & SF. [WP]
How do 500,000 people vanish in DC? [DetNews]
Protest Photos [Yahoo]

Funny, on Sunday, the Pro-War sheep only mustered a few hundred. [SunTimes]

A second protest was also held today in front of the White House, where tens of thousands gathered. [Yahoo] Does this tell you something? In a few days time, the war opposition gathered forces in excess of half of a million. The pro-war crowd gathered 500. I utterly reject their argument that opposition to the war gives the enemy hope. Who is this "enemy?" Terrorists in Iraq that we created? Osama Bin Laden that we created, and Bush hasn't mentioned in a speech in over 1,500 days? Regardless, that's not the point. Bush got us into this illegal war, and refuses to get us out. We are now over 1,900 dead US soldiers. I fully realize that this is much less than many "wars" and other conflicts. But how does even one dead soldier make this ok? How do you ask the last person to die for a lie?

DL Update

The next gathering of the Milwaukee edition of Drinking Liberally is next Wednesday, September 28th, at 7 PM at Club Garibaldi at 2501 S. Superior St. in Bay View. I've posted the informational flyer that has been drawn up.

Come on down and bring a friend! [pdf]

Museums Fight Back

"Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution. They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply."

"Similar efforts are under way or planned around the country as science museums and other institutions struggle to contend with challenges to the theory of evolution that they say are growing common and sometimes aggressive. One company, called B.C. Tours "because we are biblically correct," even offers escorted visits to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Participants hear creationists' explanations for the exhibitions." [NYT]

Wonderful. We have traveling packs of creationists in the museums questioning everything and creating more controversy. Now, my opinion is clear: I side with science, and with evolution. It's not always a pleasant thought that my very very distant ancestors may have been flinging their own dung at each other for sport, but I think it's better than some fantasy land that the world was created in 6 days ("he" rested on the seventh, remember), 4,000 years ago. Science has proved that the Earth is much older than the 4,000 years the bible states, and we also have mountains of fossil and evolutionary evidence. I'm always open to new ideas, and call me atheist or whatever, but I don't believe that some higher power created the world in six days, 4,000 years ago. Rubbish. Is there a God? I really don't know. That's between you and your faith.

Random Ramblings

Sorry about the lack of postage...TV premiere week happened at the worst time. The Cubs were playing the Brewers, mass hysteria!

Things I've learned from TV Premiere week:
1. I watch entirely too much TV.
2. I watch entirely too much reality TV.
3. Why can I only watch the Brewers - Cubs series on Fox North? WTF WGN!??
4. I need to start exercising.

What's up with the New York Times anyways? They introduced Times Select on Monday, meaning that we now have to pay to read online articles by such wonderful columnists like Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and Maureen Dowd. That's spectacular. I really want to pay $49.95 a year to read the articles that last week I could read for free.

I have updated my blogroll to include some of the fine people that I met last Wednesday night at Drinking Liberally (those that I was missing).

Don't miss the sixth installment of the Carnival of the Badger, this week hosted by liberal blogger, Paul Brewer. Good times.

Season Tickets

In 1945, my maternal Grandfather, then 16, walked up to the Green Bay Packers ticket booth on opening day, and bought two season tickets. Total cost: $16.00...for BOTH...for a SEASON. Now, that won't even buy you two brats and a beer.

60 years later, my Grandfather, accompanied by my Mother, Brother, and Sister entered the gates with a sign:

"This is my 60th year with Packers Season Tickets"

Now, I'm not a Packer fan...believe it or not, born in raised in Green Bay, I'm a Bears fan. But words cannot express what that means to me; that my Grandfather has been attending games for over 60 years and has spread his love of the Packers down to successive generations of my family. Like the Packers or not, not a lot of people around anymore can say that they have had season tickets to such a storied franchise like the Packers.

Bush Unmasked

Rich: "The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action."

"Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam."

"The cashiering of "Brownie," whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did "Kenny Boy," changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an "incident of national significance," the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush's "culture of responsibility" does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing "emergency plans in every major city in America." Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job." [NYT]

New HP GoF Trailer

Here I go proving my dorkiness again. Sorry, but I LOVE the Harry Potter stories. The new trailer is out...it's AWESOME!

New Trailer

Oedipal Loop-de-Loop

Dowd: "All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail."

"In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?"

"Bush père did make a real mistake in responding slowly to Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but that blunder has been dwarfed by what the slothful son hath wrought. Because of his fatal tardiness, W. now has to literally promise the moon to fix New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, driving up the federal deficit and embarking on the biggest spending bonanza and government public works program since F.D.R." [NYT]

Always out to prove that he's a "bigger man" than his father.

That Bullhorn Moment

Dowd: "You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and betrayed by your government. At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door. Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."

"Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention."

"W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie."

"The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late." [NYT]

I'm glad that he's at least giving the public appearance that he is going to take some responsibility for this colossal disaster. But we all know where that will lead. He will open his own investigation of himself, which will lead nowhere. Call me cynical, but this was a case of a red state with a blue governor and mayor. Why should he help the poor? Their much easier to blame.

The Anti-FDR

Krugman: "It's a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax."

"Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of good faith). He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption." [NYT]

Herbert: "It was the stuff of nightmares. Poisonous water moccasins were swimming in the filthy water of the flooded first floor, and snipers, rats and even a 12-foot alligator were roaming the treacherous area just outside the hospital's doors. "To me, it was like being in hell," said Carl Warner, the chief engineer for Methodist Hospital in the hard-hit eastern part of New Orleans. "There were bodies floating in the water outside the building, and our staffers had to swim through that water to get fuel for the generator."

"Significant relief began to reach the hospital on Thursday, and by Friday evening everyone had been removed from the ruined premises. They had endured the agonies of the damned, and for all practical purposes had been abandoned by government at all levels. When you consider that the Methodist Hospital experience was just one small part of the New Orleans catastrophe, you get a sense of the size of the societal failure that we allowed to happen."

Welcome to the United States in 2005. [NYT]

Vang Found Guilty

Wow...so, that was quick:

"A jury today rejected Chai Soua Vang's claim of self-defense and found him guilty of six counts of first-degree intentional homicide in the shooting deaths of six deer hunters after a confrontation in Wisconsin's north woods last fall."

"Killed in the confrontation last Nov. 21 were Dennis Drew, 55; Mark Roidt, 28; Robert Crotteau, 42; his son, Joey, 20; Allan Laski, 43, and Jessica Willers, 27. Wounded in the shootings were Terry Willers, 48, and Lauren Hesebeck, 49."

"Four of the victims were shot in the back, and all but Willers were unarmed." [JSOnline]

This "person" killed six people, and wounded two others. Most were shot in the back as they fled. The jury seems to have gotten this one right.

Delayed Response to Drinking Liberally

I've been just swamped since I met a whole bunch of really great people on Wednesday. I wanted to post this on Wednesday night when I got back from Drinking Liberally, but unfortunately it got put off until tonight.

Special thanks to Stacie, Scott, and Jason for hosting! Along with those extremely fine people, it was VERY nice to meet some of the champs of the Milwaukee blogosphere like Brewtown Politico, Public Brewery, Folkbum, HeraldBlog, CharlesGray, and JennaGray.

We had 22 people show up for our inaugural! Check out the Pictures! Yes, good reader, you guessed it. I'm the stud with the red hair and blue shirt drinking the Guinness.

Drinking Liberally

I'm going to try to make it down to Club Garibaldi for the first Milwaukee edition of Drinking Liberally.

Here is a map.

The festivities start at 7. I'll be the one drinking Guinness (if they have it on tap!).

All the President's Friends

Krugman: "The lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self. The hapless Michael Brown - who is no longer overseeing relief efforts but still heads the agency - has become a symbol of cronyism."

"But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there?"

"The point is that Katrina should serve as a wakeup call, not just about FEMA, but about the executive branch as a whole. Everything I know suggests that it's in a sorry state - that an administration which doesn't treat governing seriously has created two, three, many FEMA's." [NYT]

Update: "Three Days After Losing Katrina Duties, FEMA Chief Resigns Post." [NYT]

A Rush of Stories:
Herbert: "The stories - freakish, tragic and sadly true - continue to come out of New Orleans in an awful, unending rush, like blood from a sudden gaping wound. The stunned survivors have scattered to places like Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge and here - Lafayette - where the Cajundome (yet another sports palace turned homeless shelter) rises like a giant mushroom from the flat, shimmeringly hot parish landscape." [NYT]

Breaking: Brown Relieved of Katrina Duties

" Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown is being removed from his role in managing the Bush administration's Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and is returning to Washington" [Yahoo]

"Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen will replace Michael Brown, the embattled FEMA director, as the on-site head of hurricane relief operations in the Gulf Coast, a senior administration official told CNN." [CNN]

This comes after a published report showing that Michael Brown was MORE unqualified than thought:
"Astoundingly, FEMA Director Michael Brown is even more unqualified for his job than previously believed. The reason: he's been lying on his resume. A 2001 White House press release states that "from 1975 to 1978, Brown worked for the City of Edmond, Oklahoma, overseeing the emergency services divisions." Brown's official government biography says he served "as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight." Time Magazine contacted Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond and got the real story. Deakins revealed that Brown "was an 'assistant to the city manager' from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. 'The assistant is more like an intern,' she told TIME. 'Department heads did not report to him.'" It's just one of several fabrications Brown has made about his professional experience." [CAP]

Cronyism anyone?

Timelines of Bush Failure

Here are four (4) timelines of what really happened in Louisiana and Mississippi while Bush and his cronies were out on vacation (AGAIN).

Visual Timeline

ThinkProgress Timeline

Wikipedia Timeline

Dkospedia Timeline

Here is what Air America Radio is doing to help.

Donate to the Red Cross

Killed By Contempt

Krugman (9/2): "So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability."

"Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago."

"Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk. So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying." [NYT]

Krugman: "Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized."

"But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?"

"The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren't caused by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we listen?" [NYT]

United States of Shame

Dowd (9/3): "America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America."

"Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses. Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs. Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports. Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl." [NYT]

Dowd: "Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching Dick Cheney to the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice president has at long last lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation, and, reportedly, from shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home, where "Wedding Crashers" was filmed and where rich lobbyists hunt."

"But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don't see freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see some conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.'s "culture of life." [NYT]

Bush to New Orleans: "Drop Dead"

Herbert: "Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world."

"Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration."

"And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities."

"Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble." [NYT]

Falluja Floods the Superdome

Rich: "After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."

"But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington."

"The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever, and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the war with the president we have." [NYT]

Gas Prices

So, I'm driving to work this morning, and pretty much every gas station from the East Side (where I live) to the Glendale/Whitefish Bay border (where I work) was at $2.99, a rise of $.30 in about a day. I did see one Citgo station at Oakland and Capitol that was $2.88, and the high was a Shell on Hampton for $3.25.

Then I drove home. I had to take the long way down Capitol Dr because my wife and I stopped at Sprecher Brewery to get weekend supplies. EVERY gas station I saw was at least $3.29!

Check out this website to see updated local gas prices. [MilwGasPrices]

Experts: "$4 a gallon gas coming soon." [CNN]

I can't wait! I wish my income rose as fast as the gas prices!

A Lipstick President

Dowd: "Luckily, the first woman president is tall, a shade taller than W., so she's eyeball to eyeball with generals and ambassadors. And she's a redhead. Redheads, a recent study showed, have a higher tolerance for pain. In the show's premiere, a lot of pain is dished up for Ms. Davis's character, Mackenzie Allen, the vice president of a conservative president who keels over before the first hour is over."

"He told me he modeled his female president not on Hillary Clinton but on Susan Lyne, the smart, elegant former president of ABC Entertainment who is chief executive at Martha Stewart Inc. He said he wanted someone "of rather unimpeachable integrity, very kind, very calm."

"But now Hillary's voice is often pianissimo on the current hot issue: how to get out of Iraq. Once we made sure Saddam was armed against Iran. Now we may have to arm an Islamic protégé of Iran if we want to pull out. But Hillary's not playing the vocal peacenik this time - she's the cagey hawk. She knows if she wants to be the first woman president, she can't have love beads in her jewelry box."

"But by hanging back and trimming her positions, by keeping her powder dry until a more politically advantageous time, she may miss the moment when Americans are looking for someone to emerge from her cowering party to articulate their anger about Iraq or their fear about a Supreme Court that will scale back women's rights and civil rights here, as Islamic courts do the same in Iraq. Hillary may get caught flat-footed. Or she may be right in betting that there's no need to do anything rash now, like leading." [NYT]

Left Behind, Way Behind

Herbert: "First the bad news: Only about two-thirds of American teenagers (and just half of all black, Latino and Native American teens) graduate with a regular diploma four years after they enter high school. Now the worse news: Of those who graduate, only about half read well enough to succeed in college."

"Don't even bother to ask how many are proficient enough in math and science to handle college-level work. It's not pretty."

"The report makes several recommendations. It says the amount of time that children spend in school should be substantially increased by lengthening the school day and, in some cases, the school year. It calls for the development of voluntary, rigorous national curriculum standards in core subject areas and a consensus on what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school."

"The report also urges, as many have before, that the nation take seriously the daunting (and expensive) task of getting highly qualified teachers into all classrooms. And it suggests that an effort be made to connect schools in low-income areas more closely with the surrounding communities. (Where necessary, the missions of such schools would be extended to provide additional services for children whose schooling is affected by such problems as inadequate health care, poor housing, or a lack of parental support.)"

"The task force's recommendations are points of departure that can be discussed, argued about and improved upon by people who sincerely want to ramp up the quality of public education in the U.S. What is most important about the report is the fact that it sounds an alarm about a critical problem that is not getting nearly enough serious attention." [NYT]

Greenspan and the Bubble

Krugman: "Most of what Alan Greenspan said at last week's conference in his honor made very good sense. But his words of wisdom come too late. He's like a man who suggests leaving the barn door ajar, and then - after the horse is gone - delivers a lecture on the importance of keeping your animals properly locked up."

"Regular readers know that I have never forgiven the Federal Reserve chairman for his role in creating today's budget deficit. In 2001 Mr. Greenspan, a stern fiscal taskmaster during the Clinton years, gave decisive support to the Bush administration's irresponsible tax cuts, urging Congress to reduce the federal government's revenue so that it wouldn't pay off its debt too quickly. "

"Since then, federal debt has soared. But as far as I can tell, Mr. Greenspan has never admitted that he gave Congress bad advice. He has, however, gone back to lecturing us about the evils of deficits."

"A housing slowdown will lead to the loss of many jobs in construction and service industries but won't have much direct effect on the trade deficit. So those jobs won't be replaced by new jobs elsewhere until and unless something else, like a plunge in the value of the dollar, makes U.S. goods more competitive on world markets, leading to higher exports and lower imports."

"So there's a rough ride ahead for the U.S. economy. And it's partly Mr. Greenspan's fault." [NYT]

The Vietnamization of Bush's Vacation

Rich: "We have long since lost count of all the historic turning points and fast-evaporating victories hyped by this president. The toppling of Saddam's statue, "Mission Accomplished," the transfer of sovereignty and the purple fingers all blur into a hallucinatory loop of delusion. One such red-letter day, some may dimly recall, was the adoption of the previous, interim constitution in March 2004, also proclaimed a "historic milestone" by Mr. Bush. Within a month after that fabulous victory, the insurgency boiled over into the war we have today, taking, among many others, the life of Casey Sheehan."

"When the war's die-hard cheerleaders attacked the Middle East policy of a mother from Vacaville, Calif., instead of defending the president's policy in Iraq, it was definitive proof that there is little cogent defense left to be made. When the Democrats offered no alternative to either Mr. Bush's policy or Ms. Sheehan's plea for an immediate withdrawal, it was proof that they have no standing in the debate."

"Among Washington's Democrats, the only one with a clue seems to be Russell Feingold, the Wisconsin senator who this month proposed setting a "target date" (as opposed to a deadline) for getting out. Mr. Feingold also made the crucial observation that "the president has presented us with a false choice": either "stay the course" or "cut and run." That false choice, in which Mr. Bush pretends that the only alternative to his reckless conduct of the war is Ms. Sheehan's equally apocalyptic retreat, is used to snuff out any legitimate debate. There are in fact plenty of other choices echoing about, from variations on Mr. Feingold's timetable theme to buying off the Sunni insurgents."

"But don't expect any of Mr. Feingold's peers to join him or Mr. Hagel in fashioning an exit strategy that might work. If there's a moment that could stand for the Democrats' irrelevance it came on July 14, the day Americans woke up to learn of the suicide bomber in Baghdad who killed as many as 27 people, nearly all of them children gathered around American troops. In Washington that day, the presumptive presidential candidate Hillary Clinton held a press conference vowing to protect American children from the fantasy violence of video games." [NYT]

Bike-Deep in the Big Muddy

Dowd: "W. has jumped the couch."

"Not fallen off the couch, as he did when he choked on that pretzel. Jumped it. According to UrbanDictionary.com, "jump the couch" has now become slang for "a defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end. Inspired by Tom Cruise's recent behavior on 'Oprah.' Also see 'jump the shark.' "

"Dan Froomkin wrote on the Washington Post Web site that many of the reporters "fawned over Bush, following him around in packs every time he moved." W. chatted about sports and the twins, still oblivious to the cultural shift that is turning 2005 into 1968.
As the news correspondent Dan Harris noted on ABC on Wednesday, the mood is much different now from what it was when the Dixie Chicks got pilloried for criticizing the president just before the war began."

"The No. 1 music video requested on MTV is Green Day's antiwar song, "Wake Me Up When September Ends," about the pain of soldiers and their families. On Sunday, Joan Baez sang peace anthems at Camp Casey, including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" The N.F.L. did not cancel its sponsorship of the Rolling Stones tour, even though the band has a new song critical of Mr. Bush and the war." [NYT]

And yet, the media follows this man around like a pack of lost puppies, hanging on his every mispronounced word. What ever happened to reporting what is going on? Obviously, Bush doesn't care that our men and women are dying in Iraq, or that he hasn't mentioned Osama Bin Laden in over 1,400 days.

You know what, if you voted for this giggling murderer, live with it. For those of us that voted for our best interests, let's work together and find out how to reverse course and take our country back, and make it safe again.

Frederick Miller 1855 Lager

As many of you know, this year is Miller Brewing Co's 150th Birthday! First came the Big Brew-Ha, which I had the pleasure of attending at beautiful Milwaukee's Best Stadium.

In honor of this event, they have created a delicious lager beer called Frederick Miller 1855 Lager. Now, my friends and I have been asking Miller to produce a quality lager beer for quite some time now. The problem is that it is only available if you take the tour.

Please try this delicious Milwaukee beer, and send an e-mail to Miller (click on Ask Miller), urging them to distribute the FM 1855 Lager!

Summer of Our Discontent

Krugman: "For the last few months there has been a running debate about the U.S. economy, more or less like this:

"American families: "We're not doing very well."

"Washington officials: "You're wrong - you're doing great. Here, look at these statistics!"

"You may ask where economic growth is going, if it isn't showing up in wages. That's easy to answer: it's going to corporate profits, to rising health care costs and to a surge in the salaries and other compensation of executives. (Forbes reports that the combined compensation of the chief executives of America's 500 largest companies rose 54 percent last year.)"

"The bottom line, then, is that most Americans have good reason to feel unhappy about the economy, whatever Washington's favorite statistics may say. This is an economic expansion that hasn't trickled down; many people are worse off than they were a year ago. And it will take more than a revamped administration sales pitch to make people feel better." [NYT]

Journal-Sentinel News Update: 08.25.05

Two of my favorite headlines from today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

"Schools Consider Limiting Recruiters":
"A campaign to give military recruiters a decidedly cooler welcome in Milwaukee high schools and to make parents more aware of their right to keep recruiters at a distance from their children has hit the front burner of the Milwaukee School Board and may bring results as soon as tonight."

"Walker May Cut Health Care For Poor":
"Seven years after Milwaukee County committed to serving the uninsured after closing Doyne Hospital, County Executive Scott Walker is contemplating major cuts in - or elimination of - the county's health care program for the poor, which served 29,000 residents last year."

Bullshit Protector

I think everyone not only in America, but in the World should have a pair of these when Bush comes to visit...or when he is on TV...or...

Vacation from a Vacation

Dowd: "W. vacationed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation.
The most rested president in American history headed West yesterday to get away from his Western getaway - and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock - and spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountains."

"I'm kind of hangin' loose, as they say," he told reporters."

"Gas is guzzling toward $3 a gallon. U.S. troop casualties in Iraq are at their highest levels since the invasion. As Donald Rumsfeld conceded yesterday, "The lethality, however, is up." Afghanistan's getting more dangerous, too. The defense secretary says he's raising troop levels in both places for coming elections."

"Just because the final reason the president came up with for invading Iraq - to create a democracy with freedom of religion and minority rights - has been dashed, why stop relaxing? W. is determined to stay the course on bike trails all over the West."

"This president has never had to pull all-nighters or work very hard, because Daddy's friends always gave him a boost when he flamed out. When was the last time Mr. Bush saw the clock strike midnight? At these prices, though, I guess he can't afford to burn the midnight oil." [NYT]

Grasping the Depth of Time

Understanding Time and Evolution: "One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising because our own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution."

"That is a lot to absorb and, not surprisingly, many people refuse to absorb it. Nearly every attack on evolution - whether it is called intelligent design or plain creationism, synonyms for the same faith-based rejection of evolution - ultimately requires a foreshortening of cosmological, geological and biological time."

"Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education."

"The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that failure. To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation."

"The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life." [NYT]

Truth in Recruiting

Herbert: "So here's a question: Should people who are being recruited into the armed forces be told the truth about the risks they are likely to face if they agree to sign up and put on a uniform?"

"Right now, that is not happening. Recruiters desperate for warm bodies to be shipped to Iraq are prowling selected high schools and neighborhoods across the country with sales pitches that touch on everything but the possibility of being maimed or killed in combat."

"The recruiters themselves are under enormous pressure from higher-ups who are watching crucial components of the all-volunteer military buckle under the strain of a war that was supposed to have been won in a jiffy, but instead just goes on and on."

"But war is not a game. Getting your face blown off is not fun. The fundamental task of the military is to fight and kill the enemies of the United States, and fighting and killing is a grotesquely brutal experience. Potential recruits should be told the truth about what is expected of them, and what the risks are. And they should be told why it's a good idea for them to take those risks. If that results in too few people signing up for the military, the country is left with a couple of other options:

Stop fighting unnecessary wars, or reinstate the draft." [NYT]

Don't Prettify Our History

Krugman: "About the evidence regarding a manual recount: in April 2001 a media consortium led by The Miami Herald assessed how various recounts of "undervotes," which did not register at all, would have affected the outcome. Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts would have given the election to Mr. Gore. The third involved a standard that would have discarded some ballots on which the intended vote was clear. Since Florida law seemed to require counting such ballots, this standard almost certainly wouldn't have been used in a statewide recount."

"Not to be coy: election 2000 may be receding into the past, but the Iraq war isn't. As the truth about the origins of that war comes out, there may be a temptation, once again, to prettify the story. The American people deserve better." [NYT]

This wouldn't even be an issue if people would just stop voting against their best interests. I hate hearing the stories of how a poor worker in the South, barely making minimum wage, voted for Bush because he was "so religious," or he was "going to change the tone in Washington." Yep, he changed the tone alright. And now, over 1,800 of our brave men and women are dead because of it.

The Swift-Boating of Cindy Sheehan

Rich: "CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms. Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not attack inside the United States in 2001."

"The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr. Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by actually meeting with her."

"THIS summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once too often. When Mr. Bush's motorcade left a grieving mother in the dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far. The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war's critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq." [NYT]

This arrogant, giggling murderer doesn't care if soldiers die for his lie. And he certainly doesn't care about the families that remain behind in this war. There is no shared-sacrifice with the American people. Yes, we have lost a lot fewer troops in this illegal war than in other wars and conflicts...but does that make it right? We were lied into this war, and now we have no hope of getting out of it anytime soon. Meanwhile, the village idiot remains on vacation.

What They Did Last Fall

Krugman: "By running for the U.S. Senate, Katherine Harris, Florida's former secretary of state, has stirred up some ugly memories. And that's a good thing, because those memories remain relevant. There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn't change the outcome. And the next election may be worse."

"Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation." [NYT]

I think the lids of some of these simmering scandals would come off if the pansy democrats would get off their butts and serve their constituents and their country. I don't care if repugnicans want to call them shrill, or call them worse names...bring these stories to light, and stand up for a nation at war with itself.

Start Making Sense

So, I got the mail the other day, and the GREAT people at Chelsea Green Publishing sent me a new book: Start Making Sense: Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Winning Progressive Politics.

Here's what they have to say about it:

"Picking up where George Lakoff left off in Don't Think of an Elephant!, Start Making Sense brings together the best progressive thinkers, critics, and organizers, who offer creative ways to think about organizing, communicating, and investing, in a truly democratic grassroots movement. The book's 42 contributors (among them Arianna Huffington, Howard Dean, Jim Hightower, George Lakoff, Van Jones, Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, and Naomi Klein) deliver concise, frank, and ferociously smart interviews and essays. This book is an essential read for all those who are working to move progressive ideals to the forefront of American political discussion." [ChelseaGreen] {Trackback}

It's next on my reading list. They also give really good suggestions for other reading material for progressives to read.

Blood Runs Red, Not Blue

Herbert, in a VERY powerful article: "You have to wonder whether reality ever comes knocking on George W. Bush's door. If it did, would the president with the unsettling demeanor of a boy king even bother to answer? Mr. Bush is the commander in chief who launched a savage war in Iraq and now spends his days happily riding his bicycle in Texas."

"This is eerie. Scary. Surreal."

"For all the talk of supporting the troops, they are a low priority for most Americans. If the nation really cared, the president would not be frolicking at his ranch for the entire month of August. He'd be back in Washington burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out how to get the troops out of the terrible fix he put them in."

"Instead, Mr. Bush is bicycling as soldiers and marines are dying. Dozens have been killed since he went off on his vacation."

"For the most part, the only people sacrificing for this war are the troops and their families, and very few of them are coming from the privileged economic classes. That's why it's so easy to keep the troops out of sight and out of mind. And it's why, in the third year of a war started by the richest nation on earth, we still get stories like the one in Sunday's Times that began:

"For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents."

"If the war in Iraq is worth fighting - if it's a noble venture, as the hawks insist it is - then it's worth fighting with the children of the privileged classes. They should be added to the combat mix. If it's not worth their blood, then we should bring the other troops home."

"If Mr. Bush's war in Iraq is worth dying for, then the children of the privileged should be doing some of the dying." [NYT]

Left Behind

Excellent article on the arrogant, lying, bubble-boy, who is fishing and napping in Crawford, TX, instead of caring about those that he sent to die.

"Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart." ---Yeats

"And maybe this is the part I find most distancing about my president, not his fanatic heart - the unassailable sense he projects that God is on his side - we all have that. But that he seems to lack anything like real remorse, here in the third August of Iraq, in the fourth August of Afghanistan, in the fifth August of his presidency - for all of the intemperate speech, for the weapons of mass destruction that were not there, the "Mission Accomplished" that really wasn't, for the funerals he will not attend, the mothers of the dead he will not speak to, the bodies of the dead we are not allowed to see and all of the soldiers and civilians whose lives have been irretrievably lost or irreparably changed by his (and our) "Bring it On" bravado in a world made more perilous by such pronouncements." [NYT]

Biking Toward Nowhere

Dowd: "I'm determined that life goes on," Mr. Bush said stubbornly."

"That wasn't the son, believe it or not. It was the father - 15 years ago. I was in Kennebunkport then to cover the first President Bush's frenetic attempts to relax while reporters were pressing him about how he could be taking a month to play around when he had started sending American troops to the Persian Gulf only three days before."

"On Saturday, the current President Bush was pressed about how he could be taking five weeks to ride bikes and nap and fish and clear brush even though his occupation of Iraq had become a fiasco. "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life," W. said, "to keep a balanced life."
"Pressed about how he could ride his bike while refusing to see a grieving mom of a dead soldier who's camped outside his ranch, he added: "So I'm mindful of what goes on around me. On the other hand, I'm also mindful that I've got a life to live and will do so."

"At long last, a senior Bush official admits that administration officials can no longer cling to their own version of reality. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning," the official told The Washington Post. They had better start absorbing and shedding a lot faster, before many more American kids die to create a pawn of Iran. And they had better tell the Boy in the Bubble, who continues to dwell in delusion, hailing the fights and delays on the Iraqi constitution as "a tribute to democracy."

"The president's pedaling as fast as he can, but he's going nowhere." [NYT]

Responsibility

Rich: "A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire."

"But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press."

"Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month." [NYT]

This comes after this gem of an article from the Washington Post stating that the Administration has lowered expectations on what can be achieved in Iraq. Thanks for clearing that up for us...I think we were all under the impression that we were winning the "hearts and minds" of the people. Oh, that's just what the media wants us to believe. This shows only what has been reported for Iraqi civilian casualties; or the hundreds of billions in borrowed money the war has cost.

From one soldier: "Hospital Visit: One day a nurse came in to ask Rodgers if he wanted to meet President Bush, who was visiting the hospital. Rodgers declined. "I don't want anything to do with him," he explains. "My belief is that his ego is getting people killed and mutilated for no reason -- just his ego and his reputation. If we really wanted to, we could pull out of Iraq. Maybe not completely, but enough that we wouldn't be losing people -- at least not at this rate. So I think he himself is responsible for quite a few American deaths."

Lives Blown Apart

Herbert: "When you talk to close relatives of men and women who have been wounded in the war, it's impossible not to notice the strain that is always evident in their faces. Their immediate concern is with the wounded soldier or marine. But just behind that immediate concern, in most cases, is the frightening awareness that they have to try and rebuild a way of life that was also blown apart when their loved one was wounded."

"There is nothing unusual about Ms. Olson's situation. Families forced to absorb the blow of a loved one getting wounded frequently watch other pillars of their lives topple like dominoes. What is unusual with regard to this war is the absence of a sense of shared sacrifice. While families like Ms. Olson's are losing almost everything, most of us are making no sacrifice at all." [NYT]

Krugman: "In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. Oh, I'm sorry - was that a rude thing to say? Still, the fact is that Mr. Bush repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false. The falsehoods ranged from his claim that Social Security is unfair to African-Americans to his claim that "waiting just one year adds $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security."

"The other is that the public's visceral rejection of privatization, together with growing dismay over the debacle in Iraq, offers Democrats an opportunity to make an issue of the administration's pattern of deception. The question is whether they will dare to seize that opportunity, when for some of them it means admitting that they, too, were fooled." [NYT]

No End in Sight

Herbert: "The president is on vacation. He's down at the ranch riding his bicycle and clearing brush. The death toll for Americans has streaked past the 1,800 mark. The Iraqi dead are counted by the tens of thousands. But if Mr. Bush has experienced any regret about the carnage he set in motion when he launched the war, he's not showing it."

"George W. Bush has no strategy, no real plan, for winning the war in Iraq. So we're stuck in a murderous quagmire without even the suggestion of an end in sight."

"The president, ensconced in a long vacation, exemplifies the vacuum of leadership on this crucial issue, which demands nothing less than the sustained attention of the wisest men and women the U.S. has to offer. They could be politicians, academics, civic or religious leaders, corporate executives - whoever. The longer they remain on the sidelines, the longer the carnage in Iraq will continue." [NYT]

We went in without a strategy or a plan...now, over 2,100 coalition soldiers (1,835 US soldiers) have paid the ultimate price. The families of these brave individuals just want to believe that their deaths had a reason, a purpose...a greater good. Which leads me to:

Cindy Watch: Day 6. Cindy Sheehan: "The President says he feels compassion for me, but the best way to show that compassion is by meeting with me and the other mothers and families who are here. Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and we want answers. All we're asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq. He says he is spreading peace. How can you spread peace by killing people?" [MediaMatters] [TruthOut1] [TruthOut2] [PNIOnline] [Buzzflash]

The Anti-Humanitarian

MoDo the Dragon Lady Returns: "Cindy Sheehan, a 48-year-old Californian with a knack for P.R., says she will camp out in the dusty heat near the ranch until she gets to tell Mr. Bush face to face that he must pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Her son, Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in a Sadr City ambush last year."

"It's getting harder for the president to hide from the human consequences of his actions and to control human sentiment about the war by pulling a curtain over the 1,835 troops killed in Iraq; the more than 13,000 wounded, many shorn of limbs; and the number of slain Iraqi civilians - perhaps 25,000, or perhaps double or triple that. More people with impeccable credentials are coming forward to serve as a countervailing moral authority to challenge Mr. Bush." [NYT]

Herbert: "Specialist Craig Peter Olander Jr. has the look of a mischievous kid, except that his eyes sometimes telegraph that they've seen too much. And there's a weariness that tends to slip into his voice that seems unusual for someone just 21 years old. Killing can do that to a person." [NYT]

These articles are both excellent looks into what the war is REALLY costing us. It's more than just a poll number, or a number that we (rarely) hear on the news, it's the HUMAN cost of the war...2,100 coalition soldiers dead...15,000 US soldiers severely wounded...over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead...

Design for Confusion

Krugman (8-5): "The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil."

"There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?"

"Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools."

"The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom." [NYT]

CNN Suspends Novak

Novak swears and storms off the set. "I was just listening to CNN and Novak is blathering about Katherine Harris running for senate - James Carville said something about how Novak was posturing to look tough for the right, and Novak got really blustery and said - "I think that's bullshit. Change the subject." Very quickly, the subject moved on. It looked like Novak was ready to bolt from his chair just before he said it was bullshit. Swearing on the air! The FCC better get all over this." [DailyKos] [Yahoo]

Why this buffoon is even on the air is a crime. This jerk should be in jail. Novak proves yet again why he is a partisan hack, a hypocrite, and that he was indeed involved in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

From the Daily Show, 8/3/05: "Jon Stewart goes after the energy bill..."Oh, Oil!! Giver of power, corrupter of governments, non-sticker of surfaces...Must you taunt us with your slick, non-renewable goodness?
Yes, energy is clearly an important topic with Americans. That's why, before going on recess, Congress broke a 4-year impasse by approving a massive energy bill. And while it did nothing to address our dependence on foreign oil, or fuel efficiency, or in any way simplify the strategic nature of our relationship with the Middle East, it does give oil and gas industries 500 million dollars for research and 2.7 billion dollars in tax breaks, even though a company like Exxon-Mobil made 7.6 billion dollars in pure profit just this last quarter...

Now, you might find the idea of the government using billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the oil companies as the antithesis of private, free-market capitalism. You are wrong...

Clip of Republican Representative Joe Barton of Texas: "This bill is based on the premise that we believe in private, free-market capitalism to develop the resources of this land in a cost-efficient manner."

Oh my God we have a winner! Congratulations, Rep. Joe Barton, you have achieved a lie-to-word ratio of one-to-one!"

P.S. Before cutting to commercials, they played this 1-to-1 lie-to-word ratio'd goodie from George W. Bush's 2005 State of the Union address: "America's prosperity requires restraining the spending appetite of the federal government. I welcome the bipartisan enthusiasm for spending discipline." [DailyKos]

Forget the War?

Herbert: "On CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday, there was a discussion of "Iraq fatigue," the idea that viewers, readers and editors are tiring of stories about the war and the number of deaths. But despite the fatigue, the war continues to force itself on us, with jolting developments like this week's terrible death toll for American marines."

"These are the kinds of sacrifices some Americans are making because of the war. If we're already sick of hearing about the troops getting killed, there's not much hope left for increased attention to those who are wounded." [NYT]

Guns in the parking lot: "Fresh from its victory last week, when a timorous Senate voted to protect the gun industry from damage suits, the National Rifle Association is now urging a boycott of a major energy company, ConocoPhillips, that dares to protect its employees from gunplay in the workplace. With a sense of civics worthy of the O.K. Corral, the N.R.A. announced a national campaign, replete with billboards, to urge gun lovers to bypass Conoco and Phillips 66 gasoline stations until the company drops its ban on employees' keeping firearms in company parking lots." [NYT]

Out of the Office

Talk about vacation: "The August getaway is Bush's 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and Tuesday was the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford -- roughly 20 percent of his presidency to date, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS Radio reporter known for keeping better records of the president's travel than the White House itself. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents' compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush's time away from Washington even further."

"Until now, probably no modern president was a more famous vacationer than Ronald Reagan, who loved spending time at his ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif. According to an Associated Press count, Reagan spent all or part of 335 days in Santa Barbara over his eight-year presidency -- a total that Bush will surpass this month in Crawford with 3 1/2 years left in his second term." [Post]

This is the same guy that takes off two hours every afternoon to "work out." This is the same guy that goes to bed at 8:30 PM every night. Now, he's going to take off another five weeks to spend at his fake ranch in Texas. He's been on vacation for over 20% of his presidency, and he's got 3 1/2 years left! *Shudder* Most Americans are lucky to get two weeks a year; this president takes five weeks at a time.

All this coming after we lost 21 Marines in 24 hours [USAT] , and Karl Rove is still not in jail (or in the headlines). We've now lost over 1,800 soldiers, and he's taking another five week vacation. Yee Haw!

Analyzing the Daily Show

As you have probably guessed, I am a regular viewer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I found these excellent posts about a research project involving this program, and how people get their news.

Not surprisingly, many Americans--particularly younger ones--use political comedy shows such as TDS to get political news and that those who watch TDS appear to be better informed than those who do not, all else being equal.

I find it completely hilarious that more young people get their news from watching a "fake news" program than by watching actual news. Of course, if you live here in the Milwaukee area, the local news is well...CRAP.

Special thanks to Public Brewery and Brewtown Politico for this most excellent post.