Temporary Blog Hiatus

I apologize to everyone that blogging has abruptly ceased. The fallout at work from Wednesday's excitement is continuing, and in fact escalating. I am spending all my time dealing with it. I will resume normal blogging Monday, VP's willing.

Never Mind

Looks like it's going to be a busy day on the job today (not blogging, I mean the job that pays me money.) So my examination of the WaPo front section is cancelled. Sorry.

A Trip Through the Wednesday Post

The blog today is going to focus on today's A Section of the Washington Post, which has many nice examples of the strange maladies that afflict modern print journalism.

This wasn't a typical Wednesday in the news business, as some stuff actually happened. When something happens, and the papers report on it the next day, that's "hard news;" reporters are more or less out there actively chasing stories like in the old days.

Mike Allen filed one such story, headlined GOP to Reverse Ethics Rule Blocking New Delay Probe. It appears above the fold on page A1 of the post, next to a picture of Bush and Delay.

The article is very well done, and chronicles what appears to be a complete retreat on the part of Dennis Hastert and the Republicans, though Hastert does his best to muddy the waters by "suggest[ing] that one option might be to lengthen the time before the automatic dismissal occurs, to perhaps 90 or 120 days."

That would basically be no change at all, since the point of the impasse is not the 45-day rule itself but the fundamental change to the ethics process that makes it impossible for a member to be investigated by the committee unless members of his party agree. Just lengthening the amount of time the member's party has to stall before he gets off the hook is not really going to help matters, and I sincerely hope the Democrats are not going to fall for this "compromise."

All in all, very little to find fault with in this article. He gets a quote from a relevant Democrat, instead of just talking to some celeb Democrat who has nothing to do with the ethics process, the piece is well-put together and is very straightforward.

Kudos to Mike Allen and his editors.

Next - the rest of the front page.

Military Matters

Via Atrios - this indictment of the most recent round of Blame The Troops First being played by the Bush Administration is an extremely important point that almost no one is making.

The idea behind the command structure in the army is that the higher pay grades take responsibility for that their units do. That's the basis of our entire system of military organization. What's happening today is the opposite. Conduct that was clearly authorized by top brass in documents that are now in the public domain is being punished by long prison terms.

Personally, our monstrous military does very little to help me sleep at night. I wish the military were a lot smaller, I am among the 10% or so Americans and 90% or so of the world population who has not agreed that it is obvious that America can "no longer wait until we are attacked" before blasting some defenseless country or other to kingdom come, and if the military were about 1,000 times smaller I would not feel in the least bit concerned about it, since I don't worry too much about being killed generally, much less by some unidentified foreign power.

But I know I am in the minority here. Most Americans believe that a strong military is vitally important to our individual safety as Americans. Which is fine; eeryone is welcome to their opinion. But if you really believe that, you should be deeply concerned at what is happening here. The unwillingness of the military command to accept responsibility for its decisions is going to undermine, perhaps irretrievably, the confidence of enlisted personnel in their freedom to enact their superiors' plans without fear of criminal prosecution.

So for all of you out there in blogland who think it's really important to have an effective military, get on the horn to your congresspeople and let em know you aren't happy. This isn't a liberal or conservative issue. It's an issue of National Security.

Sirens of Titan

I noticed this article because I am a big fan of Vonnegut's excellent early novel "Sirens of Titan" and I find it intriguing that there might actually be something on Titan worth studying.

I recommend the book to anyone who likes science fiction - it's strange, like all Vonnegut's work, but it doesn't have any of that lazy defeatism that crept into his later work. A real masterpiece and very underrated.

Some Good Press for the Democrats

Check out this article from today's Washington Post.

This is the type of piece we're used to seeing run on the GOP - the author uses words like "persistence" and "resilience." We also get "relentless" and "stubborn," along with "solidarity" and "loyalty." Very strong positive associations with those words (except perhaps stubborn, which can go either way but in amongst all those others is pretty clearly positive as well.)

Meanwhile the Republicans are "frustrated," making moves that are "unwise" and "deeply unpopular." The article alleges that "some Republicans" give the Dems "grudging credit" for their pluck, but the quotes they get from John Thune (the only Republican quoted in the piece) don't really back that up.

In short, it's the type of feel-good, empty language piece that has contributed to George W. Bush's weird status as an all-around nice, competent, regular-guy president, despite his repeated demonstrations of his own elitism, meanness, and complete inability to direct or even understand the most basic elements of American government.

In this case, though, I'm bout it bout it.

On Second Thought

The changes to the template do not seem to be sticking. I'll work on them sometime in the near future.

The Monday Krugman

Krugman's column today has some elements in common with The Turning Tide. Clearheaded and precise as usual, PK does a nice job explaining some more concrete reasons why the GOP seems a little out of sync these past few months. Nothing new, but a good rundown of the basic situation.

More changes to the template, I've added an Articles Archive, where you can access any of my DU articles whenever you like. In case you, you know, wanted to email them around or anything. Just as an example of something you might do. Just saying, is all.

Breakfast and Tom Delay

Sitting eating my normal breakfast of omelette, sausage and strong coffee and looking after the monkeyworm, I had a piece of random gastronimical advice I wanted to offer my readership.

If you're not currently starting your day with an enormous breakfast, you should consider it. I know it seems like a huge hassle to wake up and cook a bunch of food for yourself. But if you get in a rhythm it doesn't actually take very long even to cook something fairly complex like an omelette. Even pancakes from scratch are doable - you'd be amazed how easy they are. You're probably sitting there shaking your head, and if you happen to have four kids, you may be right. But for the rest of you folks, I implore you, give it a shot for one week and see what you think. Wake up a half hour earlier and cook your favorite breakfast every morning. It changed my life. Seriously.

In political news, check out this article in the New York Times on the ethics committee impasse. It amazes me, particularly with print dailies supposedly on this neverending quest to attract a less savvy reader, that a reporter could get through an entire article without actually describing what the ethics impasse is.

For completeness let me spell it out once again - after Delay was admonished by the House Ethics committee, three changes were made by House Republicans. First, they removed the Republican members of the committee who had voted to admonish Delay and replaced them with folks who rely on Delay for financial and logistical support. Next, they changed the ethics rules so that Delay could remain Majority Leader even if he were indicted in Texas on charges peripherally related to the activities for which he had been admonished by the ethics committee.

Third, and this is the big one, they changed the Ethics committee rules so that the majority party can kill an investigation by simply not doing anything about it for 45 days. It used to be if Ethics got to an impasse, an ethics investigation was automatically triggered. The reason it was that way was for the obvious reason - with three Dems and three Repubs on the committee, one party cannot block an investigation.

The rule change was so brazen that to my knowledge the Republicans never even made an attempt to explain why the change was necessary. It was done purely to derail any chance that Tom Delay could be investigated for ethics violations. It is under these conditions that Delay is so valiantly offering to appear before the ethics committee, because he knows no matter what he says, including "Your MOM took money from lobbyists," he won't be investigated.

If the New York Times would report on this situation in plain english, the article would appear to be partisan because it would make the Republicans look like they have gone crazy with power. The trouble is, that's reality, so in the interest of "balance" we have to obscure what's really happening.

This is your fourth estate, ladies and gentlemen. Take a good look.

The Liberal Avenger and Steve Gilliard

Couldn't get to sleep, so I decided to make some changes to the blog I'd been wanting to make for a while. I've now separated the sites that I link to that are too big-time to link back from the sites that also link back here. And upon my return I saw a need to add one more of each - The Liberal Avenger and Steve Gilliard's Iraq blog.

The Liberal Avenger is actually the Liberal Anti-War Avenger; we have a lot of jumping-off points for some quality debate and discussion, so hopefully we can both find some time to spew a little drivel in one another's direction. Steve Gilliard has a blog devoted largely to Iraq war news, and I've seen several folks directing readers to this blog over the past few weeks, most recently the Liberal Avenger, so I decided to add it tonight.

Other changes - the Description and Profile sidebars are gone - there was no information in them anyway. I still hope to add a poll and possibly a daily photo sidebar, but that will have to wait for some other sleepless night. Right now I'm going to make another attempt to storm the gates of dreamland.

G'night.

New DU Article This Weekend

Well, I never really did come up with a topic for a DU article, but I didn't let that stop me... I just rambled on incoherently for 2000 words and then stopped. Anyway, it'll be appearing in this weekend's Democratic Underground, so check it out if you have a moment.


Actually, it looks like the thing is already available to folks in the know here, so if you're killing time late on Friday you can get a jump on the rest of the world. Enjoy.

Comments in this thread, of course.

Bolton in Big Trouble

Just a few days after three brave Republicans (really just one plus two cowards who piled on after the fact) blocked John Bolton's recommendation by the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Colin Powell's now getting in on the act.

I have to admit I am not 100% sure why this particular Bush nomination is getting so much focus. As bad a nominee as he is (and he's very, very bad) I have to say that the Elliot Abrams appointment, both Negroponte appointments, and probably even the John Snow appointment were at least as bad as this one.

But it does warm my heart to see the Dems actually get dirty trying to stop one of these garbage appointments. There are a lot of fault lines within the Republican party right now, perhaps even as many as there are in the Democratic party, and if the Dems can come up with a strategy to exploit those divisions they can actually start functioning as a useful opposition again.

What bothers me slightly about this Bolton appointment is that while the Dems are doing a good job actually opposing it, they aren't doing a good job putting it in the larger context of the Bush administration's willingess to - in fact zeal for - appointing people who have demonstrated their obvious unfitness for the post for which they are being sent up.

Which in a sense is a policy that goes right to the top of the ticket.

The Basic American Catholic Misunderstanding

This Buzzflash article will give you a basic understanding of what, to my mind, is the prevailing attitude of progressive American Catholics. Below are my specific beefs with this line of thinking.

"I love being a Catholic. I love the stories, the art, the ritual, the rich (if not always proud) history of the tradition into which I was born. Most of all, I love the Eucharist, the central mystery of my faith tradition."

I completely identify with this thinking. But underlying all this is the essential belief that we can retain the trappings of faith and reject the substance of the system while still being somehow within that system. If that were really true I would still be a Catholic. I like mass too. But Catholicism isn't just mass.

"The pope simply doesn’t have the authority to take my religion or my ministry away from me."

Um, yes he does. He's the Pope. In Catholicism, for good or for ill (Ill! Ill!) he's the guy who decides. If you don't accept that, you aren't Catholic.

Here’s the secret, I think: progressives are indeed alive and well not only in Chicago, but all over the world, despite the Vatican’s deep desire that we just shut up, submit, and/or go away. (Ratzinger has expressed the thought that it would be swell if the church got smaller and all the riff-raff like us would just leave already!) But we’re not going anywhere. We’re the Catholics of Nigeria, the Catholics of Latin America, the Catholics of the Philippines, the Catholics of China, the Catholics of Europe, the Catholics in the United States . . . we are literally everywhere.

This is the depressing part. This whole catalog of countries is simply a fantasy. Only in the U.S. and Western Europe is there any significant strain of liberal Catholicism. Certainly there are liberal Catholics in Nigeria, but they are a tiny minority. Ditto the Philippines, China, and Latin America.

American Catholics want desperately to believe that the transformation of the American Catholic church into one of the more pluralistic, progressive religions in the world will one day spread to the rest of the church. I can't say it will never happen, but I see no evidence that it is happening.

Catholicism and Yours Truly

We got into a fairly interesting discussion in the Benedict XVI thread, and it caused me to write at some length about my relationship with the Catholic church. This subject, and the subjects of God and religion generally, are areas I don't wander into that often in writing, but that I have always enjoyed discussing over a few beers.

It would probably come as a surprise even to many people who know me well that thinking about spiritual and religious matters occupies a significant slice of my inner life. I subscribe to no particular doctrine, though I do have a particular "line of inquiry," if you will, that I have chosen to concentrate on to the exclusion of other avenues.

My experiences as a youth in the Catholic church are probably among the most important formative experiences of my life. I learned more by being a Catholic than I did as a student in any school, and if it were possible for me to raise my children Catholic with any degree of honesty I would be inclined to do so. As orthodox religions go, it is a good one.

I probably wouldn't have put it that way as recently as two or three years ago, but time has healed a lot of the wounds left by my rejection of, and by, the church. There is, of course, the fact of the church's awful and bloody history, but of course if we are to enter the business of rejecting cultures and institutions solely on the basis of awful and bloody histories, we have a lot of work ahead of us. In the end we would probably have to reject the whole human experiment and, in a sense, the question of why exactly we should not do that is the very foundation of spiritual discovery.

In any case, I thought I would bring this piece of the discussion to the front page, since I think it provides an interesting glimpse at a few edges of my personality that many of you have perhaps encountered in person. It's presented with some edits.

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In America, as in Western Europe, most people left the real fundamental doctrines of the Catholic Church behind a long time ago. They basically extrapolated out from Vatican II and decided that their version of Catholicism was going to follow that trendline.

So now, after about 40 years of anti-VatII backlash, American Catholics are hopelessly out of step with the church. And the funniest thing about this is that nobody is really seriously considering the idea of just breaking off and becoming the American Catholic Church or the Western Catholic Church. Why? I have no idea.

Most American Catholics do not believe in papal infallibility. Many believe women and married men should be allowed to be ordained as priests. A large number of American priests - I had a few as pastors growing up - actually subscribe to many of the very ideas that Ratzinger (correctly in my view) uses to denounce Liberation Theology as apostasy. Among American Jesuits these ideas are more or less common currency.

One of the greatest homilies (same as a sermon, for the Lutherans et al) I ever heard growing up was actually key to my deciding to stop going to church as an adult. The priest was Bob Perkins, and the homily was themed "The Kingdom of God is Now."

The message was essentially a gnostic one - corporal works of mercy (helping the poor and afflicted, basically) are social necessities in the here and now, not spiritual poker chips to be cashed in after you die. The purpose of spiritual life is increased understanding and awareness of the fundamental unity of God's creation, so that we might fit better into God's plan and help to build the Kingdom of God. The idea of a literal afterlife was not specifically rejected, but certainly obviated by the homily to a large degree.

I remember hearing that sermon and thinking "yeah, that makes a lot of sense." I had thought for a long time (since about third grade) that the whole Heaven thing sounded kind of fishy - a lot more like something humans would come up with than something God would think of. And over the next three or four years I went through the ranks of the church youth basically talking about this and getting pretty excited about being a Catholic.

But the more I thought about this idea, the more I realized it wasn't really Catholicism at all. Theologically, it's well-supported by the Gospels, but contradicted in large part by Paul. So in order to really get to a place where you can accept this doctrine you have to reject Paul almost in his entirety, which I had no trouble doing because Paul is a loser.

Trouble is, the epistles of Paul are more or less the bedrock foundation of Catholicism, much more so than the Gospels, which like most real scripture are pretty vague and can be interpreted in any of several ways. And to actually bring up these ideas with American Catholic lay people tends to elicit something approximating the reaction of a high-society wedding party to the arrival of a Hell's Angel at the rehearsal dinner - that is, they won't quite have the guts to argue with you to your face, but you can feel the hatred building just the same.

So that's probably more than you wanted to know about why I'm not Catholic. I left the church when I became persona non grata in my region's lay power structure (for my age, if you can believe it, I was actually a somewhat important person in the church at that time) because of comments I made as one of the leaders on a youth retreat. I had said something which I meant to mean "God to me does not have a discrete consciousness in the normal sense" but which the other leaders on the retreat clearly interpreted as "I don't believe in God."

So the rest of the adult leadership started to treat me as an outcast on the trip, which at the time I chalked up to my being somewhat abrasive and reckless, qualities which certain people do not find nearly as hilarious as I do. I was prepared to laugh the whole thing off, but I had the very disorienting experience of bringing this up to another friend of mine in the church a few weeks later, in the context of explaining to him why I felt like I had blown my romantic chances with this one particular adult leader on the trip. The telltale sign - early in the trip we got to talking, and she described this guy I had seen her with as "a friend." By the end of the week, their relationship had advanced to the point where she referred to him exclusively (and gratuitously) as "her boyfriend."

In any case I mentioned this to my friend and he actually already knew about the situation and explained to me why the other adults on the trip had treated me the way they did. Which was weird not only because it simply hadn't occured to me that I could be suddenly blacklisted just for saying some unorthodox things, but also because it meant that the other trip leaders had been sufficiently affected by the experience that it was being discussed in great detail by the entire parish.

At the time I chalked this up to narrowmindedness on the part of these lay folk - after all, I was basically echoing the sentiments of one of our parish's most beloved pastors. But over the years I've come to understand that in a sense the lay folk were right, and it was Father Perkins who was wrong. There is a great deal to be said for ideas like his, and I personally happen to think they show a lot of promise. But they aren't Catholicism, and they probably never will be.

Pope Benedict XVI

A couple of things about the new pope:

I was raised catholic, but don't go to church anymore. Still, I know a little bit about the church and I've been a little shocked at the level of basic ignorance about the reality of the politics of the modern catholic church that I've encountered on the blogosphere both before and since the election of Pope Benedict XVI.

First of all, the hope among American catholics that a "liberal" pope; that is, someone who would be down with women or married men being priests, who would OK birth control, etc., was always wishful thinking. In the American church these are mainstream ideas, so to people in the U.S. it probably seems like thes reforms are right around the corner.

In fact, since the 1960's the church has been moving in the other direction. The Latin American church, which is where the real action is these days, along with Africa, is massively conservative in terms of liturgy and theological doctrine. The point being, if American Catholics really want big-time reforms sometime soon, they need to split from Rome. Period.

Second, I've been surprised at how little analysis has been devoted to the new Pope's choice of names. This is extremely significant and tends to tell a lot about where a new Pope sees himself fitting in the historical scheme of things.

Ratzinger chose Benedict XVI. Now obviously there are a lot of Benedicts before him, and I'm not going to do a rundown of every single one. But the most recent Benedict, number XV, was known for basically one thing - he was anti-war.

So American conservatives, as Ed Kilgore noted, are probably misunderstanding the real situation when they rejoice at the election of this "conservative" Pope. Inasmuch as the key political issues of our day are linked to global industrialization and its necessary results (military aggression by rich nations against poor ones), Pope Benedict XVI is likely to be on the side of wooly-headed leftists like myself.

Indeed, since the dominant ideology of American conservatives seems to be the belief that making war without credible pretext on defenseless, poor nations is some kind of great moral triumph, they would probably be closer to the truth to consider Pope Benedict XVI their mortal enemy.

Dems Win A Battle for Once

Tuned in to the Bolton nomination hearings in committee this afternoon... Wasn't expecting much to be happening, but I wanted to see what the Dems on the committe had to say about this unrealistically awful appointment. John Kerry did a nice job listing the numerous things Bolton has baldly lied about, which was pretty cool, and then suddenly a Republican named Voinovich from Ohio said he wouldn't vote to send the nomination to the full Senate.

Lugar, the committee chair, got all flustered and lost control of the meeting; it was a weird and slovenly performance by old Dicky Loo. At one point he actually had a brain lock and said "Well, a tie vote doesn't matter," which caused some puzzlement around the table and Biden had to correct him, since in fact a tie vote is the same as a win for the "nay" side. This was met with some muffled chuckles among the committee members, especially (OK exclusively) the Democrats.

So then Lugar appeared to try to bring it to a vote anyway, to which one of the other Republican members replied "are you SURE you want to do this now" and then Lugar tabled the whole thing until tomorrow.

None of which probably seems like a big deal, but out in the full Senate it makes Bill Frist look pretty dumb because he had gone through a bunch of machinations to make sure no one could object to today's hearings on the Senate floor. Now he'll have to do the same thing tomorrow unless the FR committee decides to have Bolton come back to answer questions about the numerous allegations against him that are currently floating about.

All Inside Baseball stuff, to be sure, but as CSPAN internet feeds go it was pretty exciting. Score one for the good guys.

Struggling with Topic Selection

With the work week 2/5 over, I've been unable to select a topic for this week's article. It takes me most of a workday to bang out 2000 words of usable copy, so I need to come up with something in the next 24 hours. Any suggestions, even sarcastic or ridiculous ones, are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Speaking of 2000-word screeds, Tom Delay sent a nice long letter to his constituents yesterday defending himself against the scurrilous attack journalism of such communist rags as the Wall Street Journal and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Think Progress has a handy guide to all the misleading and false shit that Delay had to put in the letter to make it seem like he's not a crook.

Welcome, Constant Readers!

We set a record today for traffic on a non-article day. Metrics on Statcounter suggest that I now have about 20 regular readers. About a dozen of these are people who know me IRL, which means that after publishing 4,500 words as AP Short, I am averaging about 562.5 published words per new reader. Or, more depressingly, each word that I publish attracts 1.8 x 10^-3 readers.

Thus in order to attract the approximately 1,000 readers per day that it takes to become "Ad-Viable," I need to publish about half a million words, approximately equal to the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

So, probably not. I guess I should devote myself to pleasing the readers I have. So welcome! Stay awhile, leave a comment, laudatory or biting, and of course, tell a friend!

And keep in mind I appreciate you a lot more than those popular bloggers.

Jerks.

From America's Finest News Source

What the man on the street has to say about the Tom Delay situation.

Iraq News

Patrick Cockburn is, according to Iraq expert Juan Cole, probably the best English-language Iraq reporter going right now. This report, which you will not see in any large American paper, explains why U.S. casualties are down since the election of the Iraqi parliament in January.

What's crazy about this moment in the history of the Iraq war is that if the after-the-fact justifications for the war (starting a revolution of democracy in Asia Minor) had any validity, at this precise instant the U.S. is in an incredibly advantageous position. We could easily allow Iraq to become a religious, Shiite-dominated parliamentary state much like Iran, and walk away amid relative stability and substantial popular goodwill, at least among the majority Shiites, and quite probably the Kurds as well. We would have more influence over Iraq than we do Iran, and we could use that influence to encourage them to secularize and modernize, which might then have the effect, over time, of encouraging Iran to do the same.

If, on the other, hand, we allow some loose connection with reality to enter into our analysis, we have to conclude that the primary goal of the Iraq war is now and has always been to ensure permanent U.S. dominance of the Arabian peninsula by U.S. ground forces stationed inside Iraq.

If this were not the case, U.S. forces could now be withdrawn in their entirety or very nearly so. There would be some unrest, certainly, as there is now, but right now the majority is in control (with the cooperation of a large, affluent minority), they have formed a government, there is no widespread hot war beyond the generalized lawlessness that necessarily prevails after a strongman is deposed; the basic components of home rule are there.

The trouble with this scenario is that it would cause us to lose our grip on Iraq. It is not specifically about U.S. corporate control of Iraqi oil, although that is obviously an important consideration. As I wrote long ago, the plan in Iraq is to fashion a state much like Turkey, which is a military-dominated parliamentary system with most military hardware and training supplied indefinitely by the United States (thus giving us leverage over the government there.) Also like Turkey, we would maintain a substantial standing army inside the country.

You'll notice that unlike the mainstream or conservative media, it has not been necesary for me to change my analytical model every couple of months in order to incorporate new facts. Having to do this is always a sign that you are working at variance with reality.

Making Iraq look like Turkey will not be easy - the countries and the cultures are very dissimilar. In fact, in the long run, and this is where our brave leaders' realpolitik calculations fall apart, Iraq can probably never be made into a Turkish-style military/parliamentary hybrid. There are too many obstacles.

So what will happen? Most probably, the current waning of U.S. casualties will continue until the resistance becomes bold enough to actually mount an assault on U.S. forces inside the Green Zone. Once this happens, the war will reescalate and U.S. troop levels will be increased, which will escalate the war further. At this point the U.S. will be in a bind because it will need to get a massive number of troops from somewhere, either much wider use of mercenaries or, possibly, a military draft.

The only way out of this future is probably to bounce a massive percentage of the U.S. congress in the 2006 elections. That means Republicans and pro-occupation Democrats. This probably isn't as tough as it sounds - you don't have to be a pacifist (or even a Democrat) to want U.S. troops out of Iraq now. Under the official rubric, there is simply no good reason for them to remain there. Our government should either come clean about its intentions in Iraq or get the troops out.