Two Hard and Fast Rules

1) No matter how hungry you still feel after that first one, do not, repeat DO NOT eat a second reuben.
2) Supporting war means never having to say you're sorry.

On the first topic, bleauggghhhhh.. I feel awful.

On the second, I think we're now seeing the ultimate consequence (you know, other than tens of thousands of innocent people killed for no good reason) of the Democrats' craven support for Bush's Iraq invasion. Afraid of being labeled soft in the short term, the Dems have provided the GOP with talking points in the long term that - in a refreshing departure from usual GOP talking points - are completely true.

Democrats DID support President Bush's Iraq war. Democrats DID hype the nonexistent threat posed by Saddam's nonexistent nuclear weapons, and they did it in the basis of the same shitty evidence as the Republicans.

Of course, there were some Democrats who didn't. In a sane world, we would be turning to those people as a party and asking them to take the lead on castigating the Republicans. But no. We've got Delaware Joe Biden and the rest of the guys who all couldn't wait to suck Bush's dick in 2002 lining up to pretend like they were dragged kicking and screaming into this war.

Some American generation, some day, is going to have to face up to the real implications of this country's cultural bias in favor of aggressive war. Until that happens, there will be another Iraq, and another, and another. Until, of course, we finally invade a country that really DOES have a nuclear weapon. And then our last chance will finally be gone.

Ignorant, self-important, warmongering fuckasses.

After Further Review...

Apparently they aren't into Instant Replay at the White House. I can sympathize - I've always felt that video replay basically gives the officials two chances to screw up instead of just one.

But when it comes to official transcripts, it can be hard to explain why the documents can't be squared with the video. Editor and Publisher has the story complete with a humorously snarky headline, and American Progress has the video.

Doubly hilarious because the dispute is over a quote about "accuracy."

Now I'd like to give a caveat here - it could very well be that the White House is right, and McClellan did say "I don't think that's accurate" and the "I don't think that's" wasn't picked up by the microphone. But this is a good example of the "calling in sick when you're well" phenomenon. If I call in sick to work once a week, and then get some rare disease, my employer is going to think I'm goldbricking even though I'm actually sick.

The White House spins, prevaricates, obfuscates and denies reality so often that it's impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt in a situation like this.

Too bad for them.

Gresham's Law - And a Thank You

Recently I've realized that I need to give up message boards again. I've had to do this in the past, and I always backslide. This time it's going to be more difficult, because I don't plan to give up reading blogs. I do, however, plan to give up reading the comments.

Why?

Well, I guess I'd break the question into two parts. First, the question is why do I read message boards to begin with? The answer is that there are people out there who really have a lot to say, and have an interesting perspective. The prospect of reading a debate or discussion among such people is very attractive.

Unfortunately, such debates cannot really occur. They may begin as such, but a version of Gresham's Law invariably takes over - Bad Money drives out Good Money.

Every discussion thread always devolves into an argument among the three biggest idiots on the thread. 100% of threads are like this. There is no way for a serious discussion to occur on any message board that's frequented by a large number of people.

But those first few posts suck you in, and soon you find yourself wanting to respond to one of the idiots. It's maddening.

So in addition to notifying everyone of my swearing off of message boards, I also wanted to thank my own commenters, who have made sure that Gresham's Law cannot take hold on THESE comment threads. We've taken a little troll bait in our day, but as far as I know we have no regulars who qualify as idiots.

So thanks, all you non-idiots out there. The Ape Man appreciates your erudite presence on his comment threads.

[edited to remove the nonsense phrase "frequented regularly."]

Judy Gone

Judith Miller has finally been fired for her role in causing the NY Times to once again be the laughingstock of the journalistic world.

That's not exactly how it's being presented, of course, but I think we can all read between the lines.

There's a lot of funny stuff here, mostly in the form of Miller quotes:

I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be."

Yeah, Judy Miller just loathes the spotlight. Her and Terrell Owens.

Though some colleagues disagreed with my decision to testify, for me to have stayed in jail after achieving my conditions would have seemed self-aggrandizing martyrdom or worse, a deliberate effort to obstruct the prosecutor's inquiry into serious crimes.

Pure comedy. Miller is mind-bending in her ability to live in an absolute fantasy world with regard to the essential framework of the story in which she is operating. Reminds me of, I don't know, some kind of neocon wingnut.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. Though of course she'll be on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal in ten months or less.

Carry Me Back to Ole Virginia

As most of you already know, I've recently relocated to Richmond, VA, and I've recently found out that my first guvna, will be a Democratic guvna.

Life is Sweet.

The Hiatus

Very sorry for the extended hiatus. I've recently relocated to Richmond, VA and things are very hectic. Next post should be a real humdinger. Stay tuned.

AM

Attention Math Geeks

As most of you probably know, I'm very much into odds and handicapping and the like. I got into an argument with a random stranger about the Pick 3 lottery on the bus, and it was very maddening because I found that while I am absolutely convinved that he is wrong and I am right, I cannot actually demonstrate this because I lack the probability background.

I won't describe the argument itself for fear of prejudicing you, but here's the question:

If I run the "Pick 3" experiment over and over again, eventually I will observe every possible outcome from 000 to 999. The question is, how many times, on average, should I expect to have to run the experiment before I have observed all those results? Or, to put it a different way, what is the percentage chance that I will achieve all 1000 results before I have run the experiment 10,000 times?

I can actually come up with a pretty close approximation of the answer to this question by writing a program that defines an array with 1000 entries in it with all of the entries set to 1 initially, and whenever the test returns a number, the corresponding spot in the array is set to zero. The program terminates and reports on its results once the sum of all the numbers in the array is zero.

So I'm actually less interested in the actual answer to the question as the "how" of answering the question. I need to know the formula that an actual probablity person would use to determine this algebraically.

At issue is the correctness of my guiding maxim as a gambler, that no betting strategy can give a series of negative expectation bets an overall positive expectation.

New Spam Technique

One of the most interesting things to me about the Internet is the struggle between spammers and end-users who don't want to get spam. There is a lot of good spam filtering out there now, but in my opinion we will never significantly reduce the nuisance of spam until we come up with a new mail transfer protocol that can actually verify the sender somehow. I'm working on this along with I assume the rest of the population.

In the meantime, the back-and-forth is fun to watch. One new technique I'm noticing is that you'll get a spam email that is basically just text pulled from some news site, and the link to whatever site they are hawking is just there in the middle.

This is a neat innovation. Annoying, but neat.

Judy May Be Going Back To Jail

Now, people do forget things. But I would advise any of my readers who ever find themselves before a grand jury to avoid the following situation:

Prosecutor: Ms. Blogreader, did you have a meeting at the White House with Wesley Wrongdoer any time before July of 2003?

Ms. Blogreader: No, Mr. Prosecutor, I don't recall any such meeting.

Prosecutor: Are you sure? Think hard.

Ms. Blogreader: No, Mr. Prosecutor, I have no memory of any meeting at the White House with Wesley Wrongdoer before July of 2003.

Prosecutor: 'Cause see, I have this Secret Service log book here, and here's your name, and the time you arrived, and the length of your meeting with Wesley Wrongdoer. And it's signed by you. Twice.

Ms. Blogreader: Oh, THAT meeting.

Like I said, people forget things. But exchanges like this, well, they just don't go over well with perjury juries.

More Popcorn! More Popcorn!

This exchange actually occurred today. Repeat, this is not a parody. This exchange actually occurred in the White House briefing room.

QUESTION: Is it true that the President slapped Karl Rove upside the head a couple of years ago over the CIA leak?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Are you referring to, what, a New York Daily News report? Two things: One, we're not commenting on an ongoing investigation; two, and I would challenge the overall accuracy of that news account.

QUESTION: That's a comment.

QUESTION: Which part of it?

QUESTION: Yes, that is.

QUESTION: Which facts --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: No, I'm just saying -- no, I'm just trying to help you all.

QUESTION: So what facts are you challenging?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Again, I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation.

QUESTION: You can't say you're challenging the facts and then not say which ones you're challenging.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Yes, I can. I just did.

Now, this is funny stuff. But there's an interesting backstory developing here. The report being discussed is this one from the Daily News, which is not the most well-respected paper. Even so, this is the first story of its kind, that connects Bush directly to the Plame leak, albeit after the fact. Up until now it seems like most of the stories coming from "sources with knowledge of the case" have been talking up Cheney's involvement.

This could be a shot across the bow of the White House from Cheney's people, saying "don't forget we're all in this together."

Fitzgerald in the Windy City

Uncle Kevin is skeptical that Fitzgerald would really indict that many people. Let me start by saying he may be right. However, it's definitely worth remembering that when Fitzgerald took on the Daley political machine in Chicago, he did not use a "tread lightly" approach.

Instead, he just threw everybody in jail.

Thirty people were indicted in the case, and twenty-two were convicted of crimes.

I should also note, though, before we start salivating too much, there was a long lag between when the first indictments handed down in that case and when Daley, the head guy, actually started feeling the heat. So it may be some time before Bush's or Cheney's own feet are held to the fire.

Has The CIA Morphed Into a Liberal Think Tank?

See, when I headline a post like that, it's obviously funny. Because I'm not, you know, a complete nincompoop.

What's really strange about this piece is that it makes a lot of sense, if you ignore the title, and the fact that the erosion of the capabilities that the author quite rightly calls the CIA's appropriate core competency has been 100% the fault of the Bush White House and their asinine approach to intelligence-gathering as a means to advancing predetermined policy goals rather than as an end unto itself.

Thus the article serves as a nice reminder that Bush defenders aren't stupid, they're just locked into a reality framework that does not allow them to question whether the Bush administration might be the problem rather than the solution.

Blast from the Past

Longtime readers may remember a DU article by a dashing, massively sexy columnist (who has since given up the virtual ghost) which made mention of a man named Larry Johnson, a "former" CIA analyst who was spearheading a counterattack of the Bush administration by current and former CIA pros outraged over the outing of Valerie Plame.

If you've ever seen Johnson on TV, he is one scary fucker. His eyes are like blacklights.

Anyway, LJ apparently had lunch today with somebody who has knowledge of the Fitzgerald probe and he is saying there could be up to 22 indictments coming. Here's the post in its entirety:

Had lunch today with a person who has a direct tie to one of the folks facing indictment in the Plame affair. There are 22 files that Fitzgerald is looking at for potential indictment . These include Stephen Hadley, Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney, and Mary Matalin (there are others of course). Hadley has told friends he expects to be indicted. No wonder folks are nervous at the White House.

Emphasis mine. If 22 people including the vice president are indicted, I think we can officially call this whole thing a pretty big deal.

In related news, there are apparently unsubstantiated but widespread rumors floating around that a hasty exit for Deadeye Dick may be in the offing. The US News piece makes it clear that these are just rumors, percolating among junior staffers. But it's not completely beyond the realm of possibility that there might be some truth in there.

Speaking from experience, let me caution everyone to take it easy and not expect this all to happen fast. We may not have any indictments at all until next Friday, and even then the GJ could be extended. But this is definitely the strongest sense I've had since back in the heady days of 2003 that strange things are afoot at the Circle K. Stay tuned.

Armageddon

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

CIA leak probe 'widening to include use of intelligence.'

Translation: Patrick Fitzgerald is now investigating the Bush White House for lying the nation into war.

Pop some popcorn.

Hey Sports Guy - Rate this on the UC Scale!

I'm sending this in an email to Bill Simmons. Boy howdy, this is some funny shit.

There's plenty here, but if you're in a hurry, this one sentence is really all you need.

Now, at this point, it is customary for women to immediately reject any assertion that women's rights are wrong as the Talibanistic ranting of an embittered man who has been denied ready access to attractive women's bodies. In the interest of dismissing this red herring, I merely note that few men fortunate enough to possess a turbo Porsche and a record contract at 23 have any reason to be bitter about the hand that life has dealt them.

Yep. He has a Porsche, so there's NO WAY he's got a chip on his shoulder about his ability to attract women. NO WAY.

Conservatives Gearing Up the Waterworks

Here's another up-is-down sort of piece from the roots conservative online presence, echoing a lot of the same arguments we saw in the American Thinker piece a week or so ago. This one comes from The American Daily; as far as I know the two outlets are not affiliated.

One interesting note before we get into the actual text - the author of this post is part of "Accuracy in Media," which tries to bill itself as the conservative answer to FAIR, which is perceived by archconservatives as being an unltraliberal group.

So this is a glimpse of sorts into just the sort of "accuracy" Accuracy in Media is interested in.

The case has been a revealing and disappointing look into how Bush administration officials tried to work with various reporters, in order to counteract false accusations about the administration’s Iraq policy that had appeared in the press. In the end, they failed. It’s a failure that demonstrates the folly of trying to curry favor with the liberal press.

The only "accusations" material to this case are that the Bush administration overstated the extent of Iraq's nuclear program. It is now known that there was no such program. In what way, then, were these accusations false? Accuracy in Media doesn't get into that.

In the same way that Democrats still call the shots on Capitol Hill, despite a Republican Senate majority, the Times and other liberal media forced the Bush administration to agree to their demands for an investigation in the CIA leak case.

Here's the chronology being described here. Robert Novak, a conservative columnist, leaks the name and occupation (CIA operative) of Valerie Plame in a column. Then the CIA demands an investigation, and John Ashcroft, a Republican, recuses himself from the case. Jim Comey, a Republican, appoints Patrick Fitzgerald, a Republican, to head the case going forward.

Even if we accept what you might call this very strange description of the facts of the case, the logic of the article is extremely tortured. In what way does Miller's testimony "exonerate" administration officials? If we take the most generous view possible, we could say that Miller's testimony may offer some mitigating circumstances. But none of it changes the fact that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove disclosed the identity of a CIA operative to the press in an effort to take heat off the White House, then repeatedly lied about it to a grand jury and, at least in Libby's case, tried to put pressure on Judy Miller not to reveal the substance of her conversations with Libby.

These are crimes. Once the indictments come down (especially if Cheney is somehow mixed up in all this) you can expect conservatives to try to draw a parallel between the current investigation and the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. But the piece of the Clinton situation they conservatives were never able to accept is that when you file secondary charges like perjury and obstruction of justice, it really does matter what sort of behavior was at the root of the initial investigation. Obstructing an investigation into a campaign of intimidation by the White House against a administration critic is fundamentally more serious than obstructing an investigation into a President's reputation as a playboy.

Note to All

I posted a comment to this effect on someone else's blog during the Katrina debacle, and I'd like to reiterate it in a more general way here.

While I'm alive, and in great danger, honor and respect me by coming to save my ass. In exchange, after I'm dead, you can take all the fucking pictures you want.

Robert Fisk puts it differently.

Antiwar correspondence

I've written some emails in the past couple of days that deal with issues that, for whatever reason, I've had trouble putting into words on the blog. It's about the nature of the resistance to the Iraq war, and also anger at the folks who probably could have done something to stop it, but didn't.

I thought I'd post them here because although I would like to write something that sums all this up and that's designed specifially for blogorific consumption, I doubt that will ever happen. So here are the emails; see what you can get from them.

The first one is to Josh Micah Marshall, and in copying it over I noticed some editing errors. The version here makes more sense than the one he actually received.

The second is an email to Ethridge in response to a link he sent me to this Rolling Stone article about the peace movement.

Dear TPM:

If I really did materially misstate your position, I apologize. I consider that a very serious charge and I hope you believe me when I say that is not and was not my intention. It's a hard accusation for me to deal with because I don't have anything concrete from you. As I said I know you don't have a lot of time to devote to this and I'm truly not simply trying to demand your attention; I know you must deal with that almost constantly.

I don't expect you to look at this today, but even though it's long I'd respectfully ask that you find some time in the near future to at least look at it and consider my attempt to provide you some background on why I wrote what I did, and why this means so much to me, both on a personal level and because of the very real and destructive division in the Democratic party of which this dispute is symbolic.

First of all, I said I'm a longtime reader of TPM and I am. It's not because I like to torture myself; I think you're one of the great young minds in the Democratic party and if the Washington Post swapped you out for absolutely anybody on their Op/Ed page I would consider it one of the great moves in the modern history of opinion journalism. That probably comes across as flattery, and I guess it is, but to mitigate that I'll tell you I have a real low opinion of the Post's Op/Ed page. :-p

Back to February 2003...

I was supposed to attend the Valentine's weekend protest in New York, but I had a German national staying with me who was nervous about getting arrested (and he had a back injury, or claimed to), so we stayed in the District. I remember you posted a
picture of the snow in Dupont Circle and I felt a real kinship with you because not only had you posted something vaguely laudatory of the protests (focusing mostly on the international protests, which were very large) I was out there walking around Dupont in the snow that day, and I had this feeling that we really were going to stop the war. It seems silly now, with things so far along at that point we were going to war no matter what, but I felt like it might really happen, the war might really be averted. I remember that Sunday night it was so quiet and you could look out into the blackness of Rock Creek and see the boughs heavy with snow, all the way back to the vanishing point. War felt so far away, so crazily wrong that it could never come to pass. I had just gotten engaged the previous weekend and I felt indestructible.

About a week later you ran I think the second piece of your Ken Pollack interview where the two of you were sitting around worrying about whether things had gone a little pear-shaped and maybe this wasn't such a good idea. You didn't express any reservations about the positions the two of you had taken in the interview, particularly Pollack's assertion (hard to square with the actual document) that the Blix report was a "smoking gun" proving Saddam was hiding a major weapons program.

I remember reading this and actually getting teary. It took a while for me to really place what hurt so much about reading this and realizing that you weren't going to change your position on the war, that at best you would concede not that it was wrong for the world's hyperpower to launch an aggressive war on a defenseless, poor country, but that maybe it might cost too much or something.

The reason I felt all this betrayal at the writings of someone I didn't know was because it became clear in that moment not only that yes, we really are going to do this, to make this horrible mistake, but also that it wasn't going to be solely because of the right's control of all three branches of government, their essentially unchecked power to do whatever they want. We were going to war in Iraq at least in part because the people that I considered my allies had spent months pushing the storyline that the only serious position on US/Iraqi relations was supportive of some sort of war aimed at deposing Saddam Hussein, and that no one had ever made a convincing case for any reasonable alternative, despite the fact that I'd spent the past six months reading about seven hundred versions of exactly that, all of which made a hell of a lot more sense to me than Ken Pollack's book, which I had read on your recommendation. I felt like someone dying in a room full of doctors, trying to scream and no one can hear him.

Again, let me make it clear this isn't just you. It's dozens of liberals at Slate, The New Republic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, everywhere. And now there's this tension in the Democratic party between people like me and those we count on to be our voice in the mass-media discourse (not to mention our elected officials, but I'm still naive enough to believe they basically go where we lead them.)

It's very hard for us to square our respect for our opinion leaders with the fact that we were let down on what is without any question the defining issue of our generation. And it's been even harder to watch as they've all found numerous creative ways to avoid admitting what is so obvious to anyone who will look at what they wrote from June 2002 to March 2003, that despite some whimpers at the end about how badly Bush was blowing the runup to the war, they spent that critical time mostly carrying water for the bad guys.

I completely understand your protestations that you have to call them like you see them. That's the piece of all of this that's very hard to articulate. I'm glad you call them like you see them. I don't want you crafting analysis of real-world policy questions based on what you think will be good for the Democrats, and bad for the Republicans. Leave that kind of crap to Instapundit.

What I need you to hear from me is that you saw this one wrong, and for reasons that go deeper than just a simple error in judgment. A tie goes to the runner, and a shaky case for war, even a very slightly shaky case for war, is no case at all. It is much worse to get it wrong when you're wrong in calling for the destruction of another country. I want to understand that you understand the gravity of that reality.

Now as I conceded in an earlier email, it's possible you actually have come clean on this and I just missed it. But the tone of the recent writing that I have read from you on the matter certainly suggests otherwise.

Again let me reiterate that I am only writing you this because I respect you, and I want to understand with clarity what your feelings really are on this subject. But this is bigger than just you and me having an argument over email. Obviously I'm a very small fish, and you're a very big one. The steel cage match between What I Think and What You Think is moot, because what you think actually has an influence over people with power, whereas What I Think influences the 50 people who read my blog and the Democratic Underground front page articles, a grand total of probably five hundred people.

This exchange is emblematic of a tension, though, that is strangling the Democratic party. Intraparty animosity over Iraq remains the biggest obstacle to Democrats coming together to sweep the 2006 elections, which by all rights we ought to do. But how can I stand beside my Democratic allies and really do the work that's necessary for this election cycle when there's this horrible unresolved conflict just festering between us?

The bottom line is that if you and all the others who supported this war still don't think you did anything wrong, not only can't we work together, we SHOULDN'T be working together, because we aren't working for the same things. We need to come to terms with this and part ways.

I don't think that's reality, however. I think it's just really hard to be the first guy to stand up and say "I was totally, dead wrong. I gave critical support to a war I should have unequivocally opposed. I'd do anything to go back in time and do it over again, but I can't, and I'm sorry."

Again, I don't expect a response. You're probably deaing with 50 of these right now. I just want you to hear me. I'm not some crazy person, as I hope you can tell. I'm just a guy who's been waiting all my life for that moment when I understand what the hell the grownups are thinking, and I'm almost thirty with a baby daughter, and I'm starting to think I'm never going to get it.

It would be excellent, I think, if you found time in the next couple of weeks to deal with some of these issues and the others that have no doubt been raised by other loyal antiwar TPM readers in response to your post.

Thanks for your time and your attention to my words.

Sincerely

AP Short
apshort.blogspot.com

-------------
Ethridge

Very good treatment of this; one of the better
articles I've seen. The situation is very complex.
I've written about it, but not at great length or
depth.

On the surface, here's the main issue. The full-time
antiwar movement (meaning people who are antiwar
generally as opposed to people who are anti-Iraq war
only) is a lot of very different people, academics,
writers, labor organizers, community organizers, etc.
They do a ton of great work at a local level that no
one ever hears about, and they are really the backbone
of the antiwar movement.

The public face of the antiwar movement is street
protests. They are the only thing the antiwar
movement really does that anybody who isn't part of
the antiwar movement or directly involved with some
aspect of their activities ever sees.

Now here's the part that very few people understand,
because they haven't been part of the movement at a
high level, a planning level. Putting on an antiwar
protest is basically event planning. It's no
different than putting on a convention or a county
fair or any other large public gathering of people.

Event planning for large numbers, especially large,
unpredictable numbers, is a really difficult task.
You have to have permits. You have to have trash
cans. You have to have Port-a-potties. You have to
get the word out. You have to get buses. You have to
do a thousand things. There are a couple of groups
that have it down, United for Peace with Justice and
International ANSWER.

UFPJ is an organization I have a lot of respect for.
Their core politics are a little different from mine,
but not fundamentally so. They're socialists, mostly,
but it's a broad, grassroots coalition of bona fide
activists who built the organization from the ground
up.

International ANSWER is basically a Maoist cult. It's
a couple of megalomaniacs and their loyal horde of
weirdos. They have a huge amount of money and nobody
really knows where they get it.

So what used to happen back in the post-September 11th
days when the core antiwar movement was trying to
distance itself from ANSWER was that UFPJ and the rest
of these disparate groups would sit down and form a
steering committee and say "We're going to have a
protest."

And so you go to the calendar and you pick a date.
Then you form subcommittees like the logistics
committee, the outreach committee, the media
committee, etc. You apply for permits. You print
flyers. You go "wheatpasting" (wheatpaste is the glue
you use to put up posters.)

Then, about two months out, ANSWER decides they are
going to have a protest the same day. They have a big
stage and a bunch of speakers people have actually
heard of, musical acts, etc. They've printed 50,000
full-color signs. They have posters up everywhere.

So now the problem becomes, what do you do about this
if you're UFPJ? Back on April 20, 2002 (I was on the
logistics committee for that one) what we did was just
to say "well, there's not much we can do. We'll have
ours and they'll have theirs and it's OK."

And then you show up to the march and it looks like an
ANSWER march. The speakers on the stage are there at
ANSWER's invitation. The nice-looking signs all say
ANSWER on them. As far as actual numbers, ANSWER
probably put five thousand people in the street, but
it looks like they planned the whole thing because
their shit is everywhere.

After the April 20th experience, antiwar groups
decided that in the future, it would be better to
allow ANSWER to be part of the coalition from the
beginning because then at least we could exercise some
control over their message. So a provision was put in
place for the next march that if any of the three
major groups involved in the coalition objected to a
given speaker, that speaker would not be invited.

Well, the result of that was that ANSWER blocked an
antiwar rabbi from speaking at the march. This became
a big distraction and it was the big story of the
protest, made worse by the fact that ANSWER has a very
well-earned reputation for anti-semitism. So the
effort to reign in ANSWER actually winds up allowing
them to flaunt probably their worst feature, from a
Public Relations perspective.

For the most recent protest, the solution that was
tried was simply to prevail upon ANSWER to enforce
some message discipline. From my perspective, I would
say it worked really well, better than it ever has
before.

But in the end it's still an ANSWER rally, and at
ANSWER rallies there are going to be people chanting
"Death to Israel" and other crazy shit (though I did
notice that for the most part they were chanting this
in Arabic, which I guess is a step in the right
direction from a PR standpoint.) That's just reality.


So you have this big swath of the population that
looks at street protests and says "this antiwar thing
isn't for me." And you can understand where they are
coming from because I don't want to be part of a
Maoist cult chanting "death to israel" either. If I
hadn't been involved in the movement I wouldn't have
the understanding that I do, that this actually
represents a small fringe element in the movement that
happens to have a ton of money and manpower that it
uses almost exclusively on protests.

The problem is, even if you are able to completely
purge ANSWER from the movement, at great expense in
terms of effort and focus, where does that leave you?
As you see in the article, even UFPJ is considered
way, way outside the mainstream. What people who
aren't involved in the movement don't understand is
that if you take away UFPJ and you take away ANSWER,
there are no protests. They simply don't exist. A
protest has to be planned, organized and executed, it
doesn't just spontaneously happen because people
oppose the war.

And so the question of whether to "forge ahead in the
mainstream" doesn't really exist for the antiwar
movement. We can highlight the antiwar piece as we
did at the September march, but we can't just make the
socialists and the "anti-globalization" people
disappear. Those people ARE the antiwar movement.
They print the fliers, book the speakers, file the
permits, pack the buses, and pay for the sound system.
You can't kick them out of the club - it's their
club.

So Russ Feingold wants the antiwar movement to adopt
as our core platform that the Iraq war is bad because
it undermines the War on Terror. Well, that isn't
going to happen, because 100% of the leadership in the
antiwar movement, right down to the guys who design
the fliers, thinks that the War on Terror is a fraud.


This is very emotional for people who have opposed the
war all along, too, because it hurts for all these
people to show up two years into it and say "well, the
war is bad, but you people are never going to be able
to stop it with all this jibber-jabber, you need to be
more like us." Well, we tried to stop this war before
it started, and you guys were all supporting it. I
didn't have a vote in the Senate and I did what I
could. You had a vote and you pissed it away because
you were afraid if you voted against the war your chin
wouldn't look sharp enough when you ran for President
later.

So it's complicated, emotional stuff. Hard to
overcome. But we're doing our best.

Defending the Indefensible

I sent an email to Josh Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo today. He's never responded to or acknowledged any comment I've sent him and I certainly don't expect him to start now. But I think the sentiment I express here I really want to express to a whole great slate of people, both celebrity journalists and also people I know. Here's the post that set me off.

Defending the Indefensible

As the war in Iraq slides into severe unpopularity, the silence of liberal academics and journalists who supported the war is deafening. To my knowledge, not one single such columnist has admitted to making a grave error in moral and intellectual judgment.

Indeed, many columnists, yourself included, are mounting weird, incoherent (to borrow a word you and others were fond of using for people like myself who opposed the war on practical and moral grounds) defenses of positions they never took, without bothering to actually examine their actual prewar positions at all, much less repudiate them.

Your “intellectual exercise” today is an excellent case in point. I could offer numerous examples of what you wrote at the time, and how it squares with your recent attempt to justify what you now call your “conditional, one-time support” for war in Iraq. But you have the archives. You can see for yourself how you praised the New Republic for knocking down antiwar straw men, and wrote unequivocally and without support in the conclusion to a feature article on the neocons that “Saddam really must be removed.” And on and on and on.

At some point, perhaps when you are very old, you will probably have to accept the part you played in justifying a war that has killed tens of thousands and will undoubtedly kill many, many more. A war that, as you note, was fought for no good reason at all. Perhaps then you will look back with shame on your tireless efforts to make the people who got it right out to be softheaded fools.

I only hope that in the intervening years, when you are in a position once again to offer your pronouncements on the subject of sending young sons and daughters off to kill and die (as you no doubt will be, since no one is ever discredited for supporting a war, no matter how disastrous or criminal) you think twice about what war really is, and how heavily the burden of proof ought to fall on those who urge us to make it.

The Ape Man

Update: JMM actually responded quickly, and he seems to think I'm being unfair. I'm willing to entertain that notion but it's not clear from him short reply what part of what I wrote he takes exception to. If he comes back with something more concrete, I will investigate to see if perhaps I've overstated the case in some way.

After Two Years, AP Still Doesn't Get It

Looks like Karl Rove will testify one last time before the Fitzgerald grand jury in an attempt to stave off an indictment.

Many rumors were swirling around the insider blogosphere that Fitzgerald would indict somebody today. That never seemed likely to me as things in this case seem to move very slowly; I still think we'll be waiting right up to the end of the grand jury charter at the end of this month. But we'll see.

Anyway, the AP used the opportunity to once again bungle the story, as they have off and on about a thousand times since it broke over two years ago. Here's the key graf:

Plame is married to former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who says his wife’s identity was disclosed to discredit his assertions that the Bush administration exaggerated Iraq’s nuclear capabilities to build the case for war.

Actually, that is and always has been the DEFENSE against Wilson's accusations. The White House claims their aim was to discredit Wilson by making it appear that his wife had landed him a cushy junket to Niger, and that it wasn't a serious inquiry. Wilson's position is that the White House leaked his wife's identity intentionally in order to retaliate against him by destroying her career.

It boggles the mind that after two years, reporters covering this story still do not understand its basic elements. It's a moderately complex case, but the basic story is pretty simple. Joe Wilson says something the White House doesn't like. His wife's identity is revealed to the press by White House sources. He claims they did it on purpose to damage him as a warning to other potential whistleblowers and their families. The White House says it was an accident; they didn't know she was covert.

Can we all spend one minute reading this paragraph please?

Did I say "Guilty?" I meant "Not Guilty."

Seems Delay has a new problem - in his Grand Jury testimony, he may have accidentally confessed to the money laundering scheme.

For those who aren't following this story that closely, here's the basic thrust of the new charges against Delay. There was a little under $200,000 that Delay had raised from corporate donors that he allegedly intended all along to be used in the Texas state legislature elections in November 2002. But since Texas law prohibits corporate giving to political candidates, Delay decided to funnel the money through the RNC.

However, it was late in the game, and Texas law also prohibits donations to political parties from corporations in the final 60 days before on election (that restriction exists in part to prevent schemes like this one.) So TRMPAC, Delay's state PAC, couldn't write the check to the RNC.

Thus John Colyandro, head of TRMPAC, sent a check to Jim Ellis, head of ARMPAC, Delay's national PAC. ARMPAC sent the money over to the RNC, and the RNC turned around and gave the money to the political candidates for whom it was originally raised.

There seems to be little question that Ellis and Colyandro violated the law. The question in recent weeks has basically been whether Delay knew about this transaction, which occurred on October 4th, 2002. In Delay's interview before Earle's first grand jury, Delay reportedly admitted to having known about the transaction in advance.

When Earle got this new piece of information, he immediately impaneled a grand jury, presented them with Delay's statement, and tried to get them to indict Delay on money-laundering charges. The grand jury declined to indict, so Earle went back to Ellis and Colyandro to lean on them for additional info. Once he got some more information out of them, he impaneled a third grand jury which indicted Delay quickly.

Now Delay claims that he simply misspoke, and that he didn't learn of the transaction until after the fact. That's a doomed defense if he's actually going to try to present it at trial - verbal confessions are notoriously hard to live down, even if they are coerced (as this one clearly was not - Delay wasn't even under oath.)

But it's somewhat understandable how this might have happened. The reason people under investigation often refuse to appear in front of a Grand Jury is that the proceedings are heavily weighted in favor of the prosecution. You can't call any witnesses, you can't cross-examine anyone, and while you are in the witness box you can't get any help from your lawyer.

So Delay, being an arrogant bastard, took the stand in front of the grand jury without proper preparation, and he didn't realize that in addition to maintaining that the scheme was legal, he needed to profess no prior knowledge of the transaction. So when Earle asked him about the check, he didn't deny knowing about it because he thought the defense was that the check was a legal transaction.

As I said before, it's hard for me to have Schadenfreude about somebody facing life in prison for something like this. It's illegal, and it's a serious subversion of democracy, but it's not a capital crime. However, I do take some small measure of satisfaction in knowing that the reason you can go to prison for life on money laundering charges is mostly due to the hysterical crusade to overcriminalize every level of the illegal drug economy, and that of course Delay has been a champion of the drug war whenever it suited his needs.

Earle Playing for the Big Money

Earlier I speculated that Ronnie Earle might be trying to put pressure on Delay to plead out to a lesser charge by indicting him under statutes that carry life sentences. Now it seems from this Houston Chronicle article that Earle is actuall swinging for the fences on Delay.

Also Tuesday, DeGuerin criticized Earle at a Houston news conference, accusing him of offering "a sweet deal" to DeLay's co-defendants, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, to get them to testify against his client.

Ellis' lawyer, J.D. Pauerstein, of San Antonio, said prosecutors made offers but they were inadequate.

"I didn't perceive anything they offered as acceptable, let alone sweet. They were talking in terms of wanting to put these poor guys in jail," Pauerstein said.

So Earle offered Delay's co-conspirators "deals" that did not include a walk. That's extremely significant because if Earle were really interested in what I suggested earlier, a guilty plea from Delay in return for a light sentence (such as a year and a day suspended), he would be offering the little guys much better deals, that is, immunity from prosecution.

Instead, Earle is offering the guys deals that suggest that he has them by the balls. If he really does, Delay could actually go to prison for a serious term, which is almost unthinkable given his level of power. Also keep in mind these are state charges, so we're not talking "Club Fed" here. We're talking real hard time, year after year in a little tiny cell. I hate Tom Delay and even I get a little queasy thinking about that. Prison is no joke.

Behold. a Fool

I have long since abandoned the "Bad Blog of the Day" feature, but I simply have to point my readers to this mind-boggling bit of head-in-the-sand wingnuttery. In fact I may also alert the Poor Man. There are some things that are simply too silly not to make fun of, and this is one of them.

Here Clarice Feldman of the American Thinkerthinks a lot of thinkety thoughts about the Valerie Plame case, and comes to some very thinktastic conclusions. Clarice cuts through all the chaff and discovers the hidden truth that the Valerie Plame case is actually a secret conspiracy to discredit the war in Iraq, directed by the CIA and involving the John Kerry campaign, Hillary Clinton supporters, and the New York Times. I can tell already that you think that I am making this up. Alas:

I am persuaded that the CIA counter-proliferation group was incompetent, and actively involved in undermining the President's war on Iraq, working with the Kerry campaign, tacitly or not.

...

All reports from Matt Cooper, Walter Pincus, Judith Miller, Lewis Libby and Karl Rove about their grand jury testimony indicate one consistent thing: Libby and Rove did not leak any classified material to the reporters in this case. There is in the pirouette of Miller and her lawyer and Libby's a hint of what I have believed all along: it is highly likely that Miller, an expert in bio-chem warfare who seems to have had significant sources in the intelligence community, may have passed along to Libby more information than he gave her, and some of that may have been classified data obtained from leakers inside the agency.) See also this, this, and this.

And there is also a hint in the record that Cooper (whose wife is a Hillary Clinton consultant) was trying to set-up Rove.

...

Is the press merely being partisan? Are they just terminally gullible? Or are these people covering up a role they played in a conspiracy hatched at Langley? Blogger macsmind says that if there is anyone indicted in this" he'll be wearing press credentials."

Clarice goes on to quote another wingnut's post listing a number of reporters who will probably be going to jail for their evil conspiracy to, eh, do something very bad, I guess. That's not really fleshed out. David Corn is on the list, presumably for a story he wrote about Plame after her cover had already been blown by Novak's column. Novak is not on the list, which makes sense because, uh...

Because of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Yeah. That explains everything.

There are a lot of funny little errors and bad bits of writing in this post, but it's the bolded text I find most humorously puzzling. The CIA was working together with the John Kerry campaign, "tacitly or not?" If it wasn't tacit, wouldn't we like, know about it or something? If something is secret, isn't it "tacit?"

Sports Update

There has been a request for an explanation of the recent sports happenings.

Baseball

The Yankees and Red Sox made the playoffs; the Indians did not. The Indians suffered a late-season collapse reminiscent of, well, of the performance of just about every decent Indians team in the history of the universe.

I hate to be callous, but here are two pieces of knowledge that Indians fans NEED to have. One, by caring at all about any American League team, you are damning yourself to an eternal roasting on Boog Powell's barbecue spit, watching four-and-a-half hour, 11-9 games that feature pitchers you have never heard of, old fat guys hitting .240 swinging for the fences on every pitch, and no offensive substitutions of any kind. Two, when you have a thought that begins with "Maybe the Indians will..." and ends with anything other than "collapse down the stretch," you are having an acute hallucination. Seek medical attention.

All non-Yankees fans everywhere (translation - all humans not born in the Bronx who do not deserve to be beaten to death with a tire iron) are asking the same question - can anyone stop the Yankees?

The answer, for once, is "probably." These Yankees aren't that good. They've gotten some really good performances from young, inexperienced starting pitchers, and that simply never holds up in the postseason. You need real pitching, not "overachieving" pitching, to win the series. What you should really be asking is if anyone can stop the Cardinals from holding a World Series celebration in the ugliest sports venue in the non-Minnesota world. The answer to that is "probably not." The team with the best hitter and the best pitching staff usually wins the Series in five games or fewer. That's the Cards.

Football)

So, the Pats are 2-2 and got stomped by a San Diego team that hasn't looked all that good this season. Is the Belichek era finally drawing to a close? No, but this isn't the Pats' year. I see a 9-7 type year for them, with a return to glory in 2006.

The schedule makers showed their amazing understanding of the ebb and flow of the football tides by scheduling teams with a combined record of 2-10 in the two Week 4 prime-time games. These schedules were made before the season, but I know of no serious football fan who thought that Green Bay, Arizona or San Francisco would field a decent team this year. I'm not sure what the NFL was thinking here.

The Cards and Niners lived down to expectations last night, staging a contest that included six lost fumbles, tying it for sixth on the all-time list for most lost fumbles in a game. The teams played like there wasn't much on the line - which there wasn't, since neither team shall sniff the playoffs this season. There is a lot at stake in the Monday night game, though - the team that loses will retain sole possession of last place in its respective division, while the team that wins will merely be tied for last place. Feel the excitement!

Boxing

Roy Jones, Jr. lost to Antonio Tarver again, this time by a decisive and largely uneventful unanimous decision. Roy wants to fight Tarver a fourth time, because fighters can never internalize the fact that they aren't very good anymore. Roy Jones was once one of the greatest fighters of all time. Now he is a bum. The longer he fights, the greater the chance that he will be remembered as a bum instead of as one of the greatest fighters who ever lived. Time to retire, Roy.

Side note - there are only a few great fighters who retired when their skills began to tarnish, Rocky Marciano and Lennox Lewis. Neither is a consensus pick to be among the top five fighters of all time. As boxing fans, if we would really prefer to see the best fighters retire before they are old, pitiful and brain-injured, we shoud think about giving Rocky and Lennox a bit more historical credit. One retired undefeated, the other with no unavenged losses. They are the only two heavyweight champs ever to accomplish these feats. Pretty good. Yet there are MANY top-five lists that include neither fighter. So when boxing enthusiasts lament that the champ always hangs on too long, we should remember that it's partially our fault.

The only argument against either man is competition. In Marciano's case, it was partially Rocky's fault, since he didn't become champ until he was fairly old, and didn't defend his title very many times before retiring. But Lennox Lewis held the linear title for the better part of six years, and fought everybody worth fighting. He just happened to be around in an era where there weren't a lot of other great heavyweights. We should note in Lennox's favor, as well, that two guys who were considered to be potential champs were destroyed by Lewis and were never the same again (Michael Grant and "Foul Pole" Andrew Golota.) These guys are considered cream-puffs now but both were thought of as very good until they ran into Lewis.

BTW, anyone with Mike Tyson on their top-five list is simply wrong, and probably a Yankee fan.

Roy Blunt, Mini-Delay

So Tom Delay is out, and Roy Blunt, a slightly less foul-smelling version of Delay (this does not even rise to the level of damning with faint praise), is in.

The DLC has put out a somewhat wishy-washy call for Democrats to make Delay out to be merely an example of the corruption and cronyism that's killing our democracy, as I argued much more eloquently (and months ago) in King of Crooks, if I do say so myself (and I do.)

Ed Kilgore wonders over at TPMCafe why the liberal blogosphere has not been overtaken by sudden fits of grateful rapture at the DLC's late arrival at the "Republicans are Destroying the Country" party. In answer to Big Ed, allow me to quote the excellent Magnetic Fields:

So, you quote "love" unquote me
Well, stranger things have come to be
But let's agree to disagree
Cause I don't believe you
I don't believe you

It's one thing to put out a press release saying that Democrats have to turn Delay's accountability moment into a "reform moment." That's fine, but the DLC making some aggressive noises while there's no political cost (almost no one with any self-respect is defending Delay at this point) is nothing new. Unfortunately, when it comes to actually putting their chips on the table when there might be some actual risk involved, the DLC has quite a history of pulling a Bay of Pigs and leaving the real Democrats swinging in the wind while they cluck about how shrill and uncouth we "activists" have become.

Roy Blunt's assumption of Tom Delay's duties is a wonderful opportunity for the DLC to get out and lead the push to clean up the House of Representatives. Blunt is a corrupt asshole, and EVERYBODY knows it. The GOP replacing Delay with Blunt is an overt "Fuck You" to everyone who is calling for greater accountability and transparency in the federal legislature.

The difference between Blunt and Delay is that Blunt hasn't done anything overtly illegal. But if there's a systemic problem with the way the legislature is run, Blunt is just as emblematic of that problem as Tom Delay.

Case in point. Blunt is notorious for making last-minute changes to bills just before they are about to be brought to a vote, and the changes always seem to have one thing in common: They benefit Blunt's biggest contributors. He's an opponent of any kind of restriction on corporate financing of federal elections, and he supported the craven Republican effort to change House rules so that Delay wouldn't have to step down from his leadership post once he was indicted.

In short, Roy Blunt is not just part of the problem - along with Delay and Hastert and other toads just like him, Roy Blunt IS the problem.

So if the DLC is serious about holding the GOP's feet to the fire on this issue, they'll be right out on the front lines harshly criticizing Blunt's ascension to the House leadership.

I'll be waiting, but not holding my breath.

Snark, or Utter Cluelessness from the Post?

I'm thinking snark. For the non-junkies, here's the backstory - Congressman David Dreier, Delay's successor as Majority Leader (at least for now) is widely rumored to be gay. Actually, really, he's gay. Everybody knows he's gay. His chief of staff (a man) lives in his house. They're a gay couple. Everyone knows this.

But it's not official, for obvious reasons, because the guy is an important Republican poo-bah with Senate ambitions, so he's officially neither gay nor straight, he's just Congressman David Dreier whose chief of staff happens to be a man and live in his house.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

So, knowing all this, now read this very strangely-headlined story in tomorrow's Post.

Yeah. They don't put italics in headlines, but if they did, couldn't you see this headline becoming:

Dreier a Different Kind of Republican

Also, note the last line of the piece:

"A native of Kansas City, Mo., Dreier is unmarried."

If this is just a coincidence, and the editor and reporter just have no idea about the rumors that Dreier is gay, then it's just sort of a funny coincidence. If it's not a coincidence, and it's supposed to be this weird sort of in-joke, I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's probably harmless, but it seems like what a character in a journalism-themed version of "Days of Thunder" might have called "low-down, shit-ass journalism."

And if NASCAR won't call it that, I sure as hell will.

If You Strike the King, You Better Kill Him

Today Ronnie Earl finally indicted Tom Delay on charges of conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud in the Texas TRMPAC case.

A couple of quick points about this:

One, Ronnie Earle definitely has it out for Delay. However, it's less of a partisan vendetta than a personal one - he and Delay just hate each other. Ronnie Earle is actually something of a pseudodemocrat, like a lot of Democratic attorney generals. It's hard to get elected AG on a social justice platform.

Two, now that Earle has secured this indictment, he is going to do absolutely everything in his power to bring down Delay. He has to; Delay is too powerful. As the saying goes, if you strike the king, you must kill him. That goes double for the King of Crooks.

Three, I would stop short of drawing the conclusion from #2 that Earle has an ironclad case against Delay. Conspiracy cases are hard to prove, and given #1 above, I think even if Earle has a weak case he wants to see it through to the end because he wants Delay very badly.

Four, this is a very serious charge and since there is no one above Delay that he can roll over on, there is a real possibility that if Delay is convicted, he will do actual prison time. That will be awesome.

Five, the conspiracy count is not necessarily the only one Delay will face. Other charges can always be added, up to a certain point in the process. The reason that's significant is that there is a very wide range of Delay's conduct that could be potentially criminal, and the more charges you tack on, the greater the chances that something will stick.

Bottom line, this is a critical factor, possibly THE critical factor, in the 2006 presidential elections. As I argued in King of Crooks, the Democrats MUST work hard to portray Delay not as a "bad apple," but as just a symptom of an ethical rot that has shaken the foundations of our republican system of government.

Our current leadership probably isn't up to the job, but there's a real opportunity here, just as there was in 2004, for some new leaders to emerge and take back the legislature just as the Gingrich Republicans did in 1994. If the Dems can recapture the Senate in 2006 (a moderate long shot) or take back the House (possibly more likely than people think; hope to detail why in a later post), we may be able to stop the bleeding on the budget.

Here's hoping.

Criminally Full of Shit

Intelligent people who support the Republican party in a lukewarm manner (there aren't too many who support the Republicans in a toasty manner) tend to be pretty vague about their reasons for supporting the Republicans to the degree that they do. This allows them to dodge the tough questions about why, exactly, they would lend their support to a party that, as these folks will admit when pressed, does not seem to share very many of their priorities.

One thing that makes life easier on these people is that the Democratic party is often obviously full of shit. And pointing out the various, often hilarious ways in which the Democrats are full of shit allows our tepid Republican-supporters to reassure themselves periodically that supporting the GOP does not mean that they are world-class suckers.

Let's stipulate that the Democrats are full of shit. Put that behind us. However, the painful reality that we need to force these folks to face up to is that the Republicans are Criminally Full of Shit.

Over the next fifteen minutes (and possibly longer if I feel like it) I will be chronicling one (possibly more) of the various ways in which this Criminal Shitfulledness is manifested in the Republicans' current piloting of our Ship of State. To show my versatility, I will do this while installing Windows 2000 on a Dell desktop AND while talking on the phone with Apple about my iPod AND while wrangling with my real estate agent via email regarding our move-out date (it's a busy week.) I will do this in an extra pissed-off manner because today my favorite pair of shoes (black Kenneth Coles for which I paid a whopping seven dollars at the Value Village) has died. Rest in peace KC's, you served me well.

CFOS File I - Budget Bamboozlement

Fact: The much-ballyhooed White House plan to halve the deficit over five years is in fact a plan to steadily increase the deficit, just as all Republican presidents have consistently done since Ronald Reagan.

A distinction must be made here, as it must be in most cases, between the rabid wingnut position and the position of honest conservatives who support the GOP because they dislike Democrats.

The rabid wingnut position on deficits is somewhere between the Dick Cheney position, "Deficits don't matter," and the Grover Norquist position, "Deficits are good because the proper goal of federal budget policy is to bankrupt the government."

These arguments are fairly easy to defeat, since they are basically insane. However, I don't reccommend engaging such a person in any kind of political debate, or really even talking to them at all. There is no point to it because here you are dealing with someone who is basically either a member of a cult or one of its leaders, and you can talk to them for a thousand years and nothing will ever come of it, except you may get a headache as you die of old age.

Instead, you should focus your energy on people who believe that the GOP really has a desire and a plan to reduce the federal deficit.

Exhibit A in debunking this myth is The Deficit Graph, pictured below with helpful markings:



The first thing you will notice about this graph is that, contrary to protestations that you will hear from conservatives blaming Congress for any and all budget problems, the federal budget certainly seems to behave in characteristic ways under any given president.

Proportionality being what it is, it's hard to draw many conclusions from the graph about any president before Reagan. Once we get to Ronnie, though, we can see some pretty obvious things happening.

First, Reagan brought us the Modern Era of extremely large deficits. Before Reagan, all postwar presidents had run fairly modest deficits, with some variation among administrations mostly having to do with external conditions.

When the Reagan administration came along, they completely changed the way the budget process worked. They did this by selling a snake-oil that they called "supply-side economics," which predicted that by decreasing marginal tax rates, the government would increase its revenue.

This may sound really stupid, but in fact you can demonstrate that at SOME unknowable marginal tax rate, decreasing tax rates will increase government revenue. The leap the Reaganites made was to assume that this would work in actual practice, at the marginal tax rates that existed at the time. They offered no evidence of this because none existed.

It didn't work. Many, many Republicans, both rabid and lukewarm, will claim that it did work. But it didn't. And the evidence that it didn't work is right there in the graph. Reagan increased the size of the federal deficit to levels that had not existed since the end of World War II by drastically slowing the growth of federal revenue while allowing federal expenditures to grow at the same rate as before. There are many people who will dispute this characterization, and they fall into two categories, people who don't know what they are talking about, and liars.

So Reagan made the deficit much bigger. At the tail end of his administration, some of the damage was repaired, but in the end the deficit when he left office was approximately double the size it was when he took over.

George H.W. Bush pulled the exact same trick, but over the course of just four years, doubling the size of the deficit again. When Bush left office, the deficit was seen to be approaching unmanageable levels, leading Bush to renege on his "no new taxes" pledge and also giving Ross Perot the key issue that led to him getting a substantial number of votes in the 1992 election.

When Bill Clinton took over, he immediately put together a team of economics professionals to help him understand how to get the government out of the red and allow the administration to place Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on a sound financial footing. The plan they came up with was threefold - raise taxes, cut large numbers of workers from the federal payroll, and invest a portion of the Social Security trust fund in equities rather than investing it all in T-Bonds.

Republicans reacted as if Clinton had proposed the creation of a network of free heroin distribution centers across the continental United States. They howled about how the Clinton budget would bankrupt the United States, cause the second Great Depression, and bring about the end of everything good and righteous about our noble nation.

The third prong of the Clinton plan (investing Social Security money in the stock market) was unpopular and got mothballed, but the first two prongs were passed, and the result was that over the eight years Clinton held office, through four Congresses under several different combinations of friendly and opposition control, Clinton decreased the federal budget deficit every year, culminating in a 2000 budget surplus of 236 billion dollars.

During the 2000 campaign, Al Gore reccommended using the surplus to increase payments to the Social Security trust fund, while George W. Bush touted a plan to "give the money back" by lowering taxes primarily on extremely wealthy people. Bush took office and made good on his promise, passing his massive tax cuts with ease. He even had the audacity to use a version of the old Reagan snake-oil pitch, telling us that the tax cuts would "pay for themselves" by stimulating economic growth and thus increasing federal revenue.

Surprise! It didn't work. Bush II became the first president to actually decrease federal revenue, and he did it in a big way. The result is that the deficit for fiscal 2004 was a staggering 412 billion dollars.

So we can see pretty easily, first of all, that the 2004 Bush campaign promise to halve the federal deficit sets the bar pretty low, considering that if Bush achieves this lofty goal he will have increased the budget deficit during his two terms by over 400 billion dollars, by far the worst fiscal record of any president in modern history.

The trouble is, merely by using the numbers I'm using I'm actually Criminally Full of Shit. As bad as the Bush record (and the GOP record generally) looks using these numbers, in reality it's much, much worse.

You see, these numbers, which are the numbers we usually hear, include normal federal budget numbers AND Social Security numbers, when in fact Social Security is a completely separate deal and has nothing to do with the general fund. It's funded by its own tax receipts (the payroll tax) and even has its own investment account, the Social Security Trust fund, which contains billions of dollars worth of T-Bond securities to insulate it against the coming retirement of the baby boomers.

Social Security runs a surplus due to some hefty tax increases passed under the Reagan administration. Reagan didn't mind these tax increases because they are only paid on the first 90,000 or so of income, thus the tax burden of the payroll tax falls much more heavily on the poor than does the income tax, which funds the federal budget. Since neither Reagan nor anybody in the GOP gives a shit about poor people, they never howl about this obvious injustice. (Sadly, since the Democrats are mostly rich guys, they don't bother making much noise about it either.)

So when we consider Social Security and the general fund together, we're not getting a great picture of what is really happening with the federal budget. After all, the Social Security surplus is used to buy government debt, so from a general-fund perspective, that money is a zero-sum proposition.

If you look at the real federal budget numbers, which you can do at the handy CBO Historical Budget Data Webpage, you will see that the actual federal surplus in 2000, Clinton's last year, was a mere 86.3 billion dollars. The rest of the 236 billion dollar surplus was due to Social Security.

This was still a nice turnaround from the Bush I number, which was actually a 340 billion dollar deficit. Not chump change, to be sure, but look at what his son has achieved in the same time frame.

That's right, the federal budget deficit for 2004 was 567 billion dollars. George W. Bush took an 83 billion dollar surplus and turned it into a 567 billion dollar deficit. That is a staggering achievement, folks, up there with the very worst management disasters in history.

Many uncomfortable Bush supporters will claim that this is a result of external factors, not policy choices. This is just bunk, and they probably know it. But leave that point aside for the moment and pop over to the also extremely handy CBO Current Budget Projections Webpage and take a look at the CBO projections for the next ten years. These projections assume no change in current policy.

Here we can see two things. One, the White House claim that they are going to cut the budget in half in five years is a little off. If we include the Social Security numbers in our calculations, the budget deficit does decrease from 412 billion in 2004 to 218 billion in 2011. That's almost half, though 2004-2011 is eight years, not five. But we'll allow them this little bit of fudging. Five years vs. eight is, after all, a rather Democrat-sized fib.

But we can quickly draw a second conclusion that should start to make our GOP-lite readers a little nervous. The On-Budget deficit, that is, the deficit without taking into account Social Security, doesn't change much at all during the period from 2004 to 2011. Indeed, the shrinking deficit would be almost completely the result of the increasing Social Security surplus. You'll recall with us at this point that Social Security is the program that Bush keeps threatening to "save."

So in fact the fiscal policy of the Bush White House is to continue running massive general account deficits until the end of their term, making no effort of any kind to repair the unprecedented damage they have done to the solvency of the federal government, whose stewardship responsibilities they inherited at a historical solvency zenith.

Almost unbelievably, it actually gets worse.

You'll notice that after 2012, the outlook gets much rosier. The general fund is still running a high deficit, but not nearly as high as 2011 and before. That's because the current projections reflect the fact that the deep tax cuts passed by Bush are mostly set to expire in 2011, a provision that was added for the express purpose of creating artificially rosy budget projections. The GOP has announced that a major policy goal of the current congress is to extend these tax cuts permanently. If that does wind up happening, we can all head back to the CBO web page to watch that final number - the total public debt accrued from 2006-2015 - skyrocket from two trillion dollars up to some unforeseeable (but definitely really, really, huge) number.

So if you read this blog and you vote Republican, or if you vote for someone other than the Democrats on the theory that "Democrats are just as bad," please, please take two hours over the next couple of weeks to look over the historical budget numbers. Break them down however you want, by control of congress, control of White House, or any other delimiter you want to use.

If you're honest with yourself, you'll come to the only conclusion the numbers allow - another four years of a Republican controlled White House after Bush leaves office will mean the continued erosion, possibly terminal erosion, of the solvency of the U.S. government. And even if you don't care about food stamps, Social Security, aid to indigent children, or any of the other programs that keep people from starving in the fucking street, think about your precious War on Terror, and how much easier it's going to be for all the people who want to come kill you to do just that, once the government can't pay its bills. Think about the fact that you'll never again be able to invade some defenseless, poor country just because you don't like their president's beard, or the word he uses for god.

For fuck's sake I don't care what you think about, just think. For one goddamn second, think.

I told you I'd be extra pissed off. That's all for today.

The Ape Man

The Dog Ate My Article

Apparently, my DU article either got lost in the mail or they just decided not to use it (which would be a first), so I'm just going to post it here. It's a little dated now as it contains no reference to Bush's speect last week, but to my mind it's still operative. Enjoy.

The Fire Next Time

“We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

- National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice

When Condoleeza Rice spoke those fateful words almost exactly three years ago, kicking off the administration’s ultimately successful push for an invasion of Iraq, I reacted as most peace activists who knew half of anything about global politics did. I laughed, mixed a drink, and settled in for a nasty battle I knew the antiwar movement ought to win, but probably wouldn’t.

By the following February, the whole thing was beginning to seem faintly ridiculous. Hans Blix had found nothing and said so, noting that more time was needed for weapons inspections but that access to inspection sites was unfettered and there were scant signs that Iraq was hiding any significant banned weapons program. The normally pliant UN Security Council had made very clear that it was not interested in supporting a US invasion of Iraq under current circumstances, and despite the fawning reception by the stateside punditocracy, Colin Powell’s disgraceful speech had done nothing to change the ambassadors’ minds.

Though there had been some crucial missteps by the antiwar movement in late 2002, such as the failure to stage a significant D.C. protest the weekend before the congressional vote to give the president a blank check for war, it seemed that after one last push the administration’s crazy swashbuckling might actually be thwarted by an engaged global populace. Protesters poured through the snow-covered streets of New York over Valentine’s Day weekend, chanting the only slogan that’s ever mattered to really serious rebellion junkies: “El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido.”

I remember chatting that winter with a friend of mine from GW, joking lightheartedly about one of the many boneheaded gaffes that had led the man who, seemingly indestructible after the attacks of September 11th, had somehow found himself on the fast track to become the first president in history to have his very public push for war headed off by popular protest.

Then it happened – Eliza’s face hardened slightly and she stammered “I mean… We can’t invade Iraq.” In that one unmistakably italicized word I heard every unthinkable consequence we had fretted about all summer, tens of thousands of innocent people killed, the most volatile region in the world destabilized still further, the strain of occupation leading another generation inevitably toward a military draft.

In the lines of her face in that moment, dramatically lit by a distant D.C. streetlight, I saw a harsh mirror, reflecting my own feelings of deep unease. With the New York protest approaching and the Bush administration on its heels, we felt confident. But how much of that confidence was fueled by the fact that the prospect of a second Iraq War, so much more arrogant and misguided than the stupidest of Ronald Reagan’s doddering overseas adventures, seemed like The End of Everything?

In the end, of course, the good guys lost. The slogan, it turns out, is good-natured hyperbole. The people, divided, will always be defeated. Otherwise, it’s a crapshoot, which is all we were ever promised, after all.

Now, two and a half years later, the Iraq invasion is in the books, and those tens of thousands of Iraqi innocents are in the tomb. The military is groaning and listing and ready to sink under the weight of Bush’s massive war of choice. As has happened so many times in history, the end of everything has come and gone, with little of the expected fanfare.

We stand, this September, amidst the rubble of yet another spectacular Bush administration failure, the almost impossibly inept government response to the worst hurricane disaster in United States history. Bush’s last defenders protest thinly that state and local governments failed, too, and perhaps they did. But that is a matter for the Louisiana electorate. Here in the capital we must consider the common peril of the whole nation. What a grave peril it is turning out to be.

The American people have watched as the Bush administration turned a budget surplus into a massive deficit, cutting essential services and public projects while lining the pockets of the Republican base, the very richest and most prosperous people in the world. We have seen a lackadaisical intelligence apparatus caught flat-footed by a low-tech terrorist attack on two major U.S. cities, followed by a wildly popular but poorly planned military invasion that failed to apprehend the perpetrators.

We have been shamed by revelations that our president rose to power largely through the patronage of men who were nothing but common criminals in expensive suits, and that he stood by as those same bandits milked a desperate situation in California for all they could before Enron, their sham of an enterprise, evaporated into the dusty, smog-choked Texas sky.

We stared in disbelief as the American military became bogged down in a massive, unwinnable war against an ill-defined, shadowy opponent in Iraq, pouring more and more part-time soldiers into a buzzsaw that today is just as dangerous as Vietnam in 1966, and that is showing no signs of improving.

Yet still there are those, some of them in the highest levels of the Democratic party, who refuse to admit that Bush is what he is – the most incompetent president in modern history. “September 11th was a systemic intelligence failure; could have happened under any administration,” these bitter-enders assure us. “Enron was a business scandal, not a political one,” they cluck. “Catching bin Laden was never that important,” they assert beyond all reason. “We were all wrong about Iraq,” they lamely concede.

As if that weren’t enough to swallow, we are now asked to believe that the federal government's feckless response to the Katrina disaster was the fault of New Orleans’ mayor. Nothing, it seems, is sufficient to convince the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, or the Joe Liebermans of the world that Bush is a dangerously inept and useless leader. So we press on with a government that every serious person knows has been stripped of its ability to perform its essential functions, turned into an enormous revolving cash machine by Bush and his crony capitalist to-the-victor-go-the-spoils approach to governing.

How many more people have to die before we say enough is enough? How many more years can we take under leadership that seems more appropriate to a drunken Mardis Gras bender than the presidency of the world's most powerful nation? How many critical ground balls does Bush have to boot before we bench him and replace him with some hot prospect just called up from the political minor leagues?

Does the smoking gun really have to be a mushroom cloud?

The question is more than just hyperbole. It’s true that in the context in which she uttered it, Condoleeza’s Rice’s fretting about a nuclear attack on US soil was plainly absurd. Iraq was among the least nuclear-capable countries on earth at the time of the US invasion; we had about as much to fear from Bolivia or Cameroon in terms of possible sources of bomb-making materials.

In a more general sense, however, Ms. Rice’s warning was a prudent one. The only significant large-scale terrorist threat to the United States remains a nuclear attack on an American city. Despite the misleading omnipresence of the catch-all term “weapons of mass destruction,” no unconventional weapon approaches the destructiveness of a nuclear bomb, and no other weapon of any type carries with it the same potential for touching off a catastrophic global thermonuclear war.

So how much progress has been made in protecting the country against the proliferation of bomb-making materials? I could list, as many writers of conscience have done, the many egregious missteps the Bush administration has made, on nonproliferation, disarmament, nuclear site security, the list goes on.

In the wake of Mike Brown’s ignominious departure from FEMA amidst revelations that his already anemic background in emergency management had been fabricated (by him or by the White House, it is not known), let us take a different tack. Let us ask whether nuclear nonproliferation has, like FEMA, been transformed from a vital and serious government function into a stagnant pool of political patronage.

A quick glance at the cast of characters reveals much to be worried about. Until recently, the top US official on international arms control was John Bolton, a man who has been almost universally derided as incapable of relating constructively with anyone except his ideological masters in the White House.

At Bolton’s Senate committee hearings, one of the key exceptions to the cacophony of scathing denunciations of Bolton’s leadership style was the testimony of his second-in-command at the State Department, GOP loyalist Stephen Rademacher. Rademacher himself was appointed to his crucial arms control post after working for the previous ten years as a big-shot Republican lawyer during a time when the GOP was working overtime to craft legal justifications for weakening and dismantling existing arms control treaties. According to his State Department website, Rademacher’s educational background in arms control is none. Of course, in his defense, we have no real reason to believe the information in his official biography is true.

Picking on Rademacher is probably unfair. In truth he is no different from any number of Bush executive branch officials, whose main qualification for their current complex, demanding positions is that they are very good at being friends with George W. Bush. But do the American people have to wait for the next great catastrophe to befall us before we demand that these sycophantic nincompoops be replaced by people who have some idea what they are doing? Is the time for examining these peoples’ qualifications now, or after another American city has been turned into a mass grave?

To shirk these matters because we are afraid of the implications is cowardice. To pretend these concerns are not realistic is insanity. To call such questions “the blame game” is pathetic and dangerous.

Perhaps, as de Tocqueville is supposed to have warned, in George W. Bush’s manically incompetent administration we Americans have finally gotten the government we deserve. But one thing is certain: in a world such as ours, full of grave dangers that threaten the very survival of our species, it is past time we demanded the government we need.

Swirling in the fetid waters left behind in New Orleans by hurricane Katrina are the last echoes of an old southern plantation song, stretching back into ancient history to bring us what may be our last warning:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water
The Fire Next Time

AP Short

Browns Win One!

So the Browns were on TV yesterday, playing the equally-horrible (possibly more horrible) Green Bay Packers, and lo and behold, in their first nationally televised game under new head coach Romeo Crennel, they actually got a win, 26-24, at Lambeau Field.

People make a big deal about Lambeau field because in the Packers' glory years (the 1990's and the 1960's) it was almost impossible to win there due to the often ridiculous field conditions. Yesterday it was less of a big deal because the conditions were balmy (76 degrees at kickoff) and the 2005 Packers may be the worst team in the NFL.

Still, it felt good to get a win. This week we get the Indianapolis Colts, a popular pick to win the Super Bowl. Coming off a win, I'm tempted to believe we have a shot to beat these guys, and if the game were in Cleveland in the swirling wind, on natural grass, I might be able to convince myself. But the reality they have an extremely talented team with a few holes at the margins, and we have a marginally talented team with extremely huge holes almost everywhere. Not a good matchup.

One thing, though, sports fans. There are many claims among the NFL punditocracy that the Indianapolis defense is much improved this year. I am not buying it. Though they've given up very few points so far, they've done it by capitalizing on some bad mistakes by the opposing team, not by overcoming their key weakness - stopping the run. They still can't stop the run, so that's going to be the key to keeping the score under control next week. Run, run, run, then run some more. Maybe you can keep it within 10 points and steal it in the fourth quarter.

Then again, as they say, hope is not a plan.

The Bush Administration is a Caricature of Itself

Bill O'Reilly tries to get Condi Rice to come clean about the situation in Iraq:

O’Reilly: The truth of the matter is our correspondents at Fox News can’t go out for a cup of coffee in Baghdad.

Rice: Bill, that’s tough. It’s tough. But what — would they have wanted to have gone out for a cup of coffee when Saddam Hussein was in power?

You have to be kidding me.

Firefly Aside

Ah, Ethridge showing up reminded me of a post I wanted to write about Firefly, a TV series he recommended to me. I just finished watching the final episode last night.

The narrative from the show's hardcore fans is that this was one of those shows that was canceled essentially for being too good, something the network didn't quite know how to deal with. I see where these folks are coming from, but I don't think that's quite right.

It's true that the show was daring and effective in a way that most television is not. I would say that for me personally, Firefly is better than almost everything on television right now. I don't much non-sports TV but I have seen most network stuff at least in passing and the only show I would say is definitely better than Firefly right now is Lost.

However, when you push the envelope and really go for something original, you have to really stick it. The West Wing is a good example of this - the show was phenomenal in the early years, but if it had been just a little bit worse it would have failed mightily. When you go big you have to be better than you do when you are trying to do something that everyone already knows works.

Firefly, for those who aren't familiar with it, is science fiction without any real element of "superscience," that is, high-tech gadgets or alien races playing an important role. The action takes place in space or on alien planets, but there is no life that didn't originate on Earth, and most of the people on the show use regular guns that fire regular bullets, etc.

To put it in a way that makes it sound cheesier than it is, Firefly is a space western. There are horses and shotguns and cowboys, but the main characters fly from planet to planet in a spaceship.

What makes it work (when it works, which it mostly does) is the ensemble cast, consisting of a captain, his old friend the first mate, her husband the pilot, a mechanic, a priest, a brute, a doctor, the doctor's weird psychic sister, and high-class space hooker (seriously.)

In watching the interviews with the people in charge of the project, it was interesting to me that one of their complaints was that the network really wanted to force them to drop the audience down in media res whereas they wanted to develop things more slowly. In my experience the weakest shows were the ones where there was no high-tension situation driving the story. Things worked best when the characters were on the clock, or when there was a deadly killer in their midst.

Most of the interactions that took place outside of this context wound up feeling forced. Part of this is the fact that I watched the entire series over the course of a couple of weeks, but I got really tired of the Captain and the space hooker having the same boring argument on every show, and of the doctor's dully predictable bollocksing of the country-girl mechanic's painfully obvious wooing.

In the end, there are three types of TV show : the amazing, cutting-edge series like the early Simpsons, Seinfeld, West Wing, even Survivor, solid gold crap like Everybody Loves Raymond and Friends (which I liked, BTW, but it was solid gold crap), and stuff that gets buried and then canceled. Firefly was better than solid gold crap because it had a vision and a flavor that you don't find on other shows, but the reason it was canceled was because it just wasn't quite good enough.

Whaddya Know - Sports is Depressing Too

So I'm disgusted by politics, eh? Well, at least the election was close. The Browns got pummeled 27-13 by a mediocre Bengals team, the Mets have completely collapsed, and my fantasy team scored the fewest points in the league this weekend. Oh, and Agassi got wiped off the court by Roger Federer.

Did anything good happen this weekend? Well, the Washington football team and the Buffalo Bills won, and those are the two teams I'm following this season while the Browns stink up the league. The Bills looked particularly impressive in dismantling the Houston Texans.

So if sports is as depressing as politics, what's a junkie to do? Apparently, it's back to politics. I submitted an article to DU yesterday for the first time in many moons. Watch for it at The Democratic Underground Front Page. It's the feel-good article of the year.

Reevaluating our Core Mission

I haven’t posted in a long time, obviously. But here are two of the things that are keeping me from coming back (other than the taking-care-of-infant, looking-for-new-jobs, selling-my-house stuff):

A) I’m completely disgusted with American politics right now. It took me longer to get there than a lot of my liberal friends because I just love politics as a sport and so my threshold is just really high. But this most recent rash of failures by the Bush administration is like that moment in a buddy’s relationship when the girl he’s seeing starts doing something like inviting her other boyfriend over to their house that he paid for while he’s there, and he still won’t break up with her. There comes a point where you just have to stop calling the guy or you’ll lose your mind. After they finally break up you can become friends again, because after all, you’re guys and there’s no statute of limitations on the friendship.
B) It’s September (implications below.)

So at this point I am temporarily getting out of the pundit game. I don’t have time to write features for DU right now, and most of the writing I’ve been doing recently is my own quick rundowns of stuff that’s happening in the sports world. Which brings me to the fact that…

It’s the first weekend of September, which is possibly my favorite weekend of the year from a sports perspective. The US Open tennis tournament is finishing up, the NFL season is starting, college football is through with its useless Week One mismatches (though the VT/NC State game was exciting) , and the baseball playoff races (isn’t it sad we can’t say “penant races” anymore?) are heading to the home stretch.

Of course on as a Mets fan, I get to enjoy the home stretch of the playoff race in only the most rueful sense, since the Mets have already completed their annual post-All-Star-break eight game losing streak and removed themselves from contention. But it’s still baseball.

Long story short, this is now a sports blog. To all who read this blog who hate sports, well, tough shit. To all my non-Dem friends who do like sports, come on down. I promise to keep the GOP-bashing to a lighthearted minimum.