"I am endorsing Dennis Kucinich for President because he stands up for heartland Americans who are too often overlooked and unheard. He has done that his whole political career. Big corporations are well-represented in Washington, but Dennis Kucinich is a rare Congressman of conscience and bravery who fights for the unrepresented, much like the late Senator Paul Wellstone. Dennis champions individual privacy, safe food laws and family farmers. A Kucinich Administration will put the interests of America's family farmers, consumers and environment above the greed of industrial agribusiness.

I normally do not get too heavily involved in politics, but this is more about getting involved with America than with politics. I encourage people to learn more about Dennis Kucinich at his website and I will be doing all I can to raise his profile with voters. I plan to do concerts to benefit the campaign."

The front page of your website has a quote from Dick Cheney, saying: "We know (Saddam) has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons,and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

This is, as far as I know, a completely accurate quote. On the other hand, it is perhaps the perfect example of how one can lie by telling only part of the truth.

Half the blogosphere -- and Dick Cheney's own office -- have pointed out many, many, many, many times that this was an on-air interview, not a written statement, and Cheney simply misspoke. In the context of the whole interview, he clearly mean to say "reconstituted nuclear weapons *program*." Indeed, he repeatedly refers to Hussein's *pursuit* of nuclear weapons, not his *possession* of them. As I say, this has been discussed to death, with one good example here.

So it would make sense to just drop this clearly misleading quote off your website, right? But not so fast, because it still leaves the difficult question of how you could *not have been aware of this issue*, despite the fact that it's been blogged ad nauseum.

I get the impression that you are someone who deals in good faith. I have no doubt that you're not intentionally trying to deceive your readers. But the alternative isn't exactly reassuring either."

First things first: I do aim for good faith. As readers of this blog know, my facts ain't always so hot, but they're faulty due to my softheadedness, not malice. Thanks to Jack are in order.

Having established that, let me say that I view the Cheney quote a little differently. If the Veep had just misspoken and the quote in question ran completely counter to his argument, it would definitely be bad faith to harp on it. I'd go farther: it would be deceptive and dishonest. But that whole speech was a snow job on an unsuspecting public; although the language was carefully constructed to adhere to a legal definition of not-lying, but the purpose of the speech was to give a false impression.

Let's look at what he said. He made arguments that: there was a link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq¹; the IAEA was incompetent²; and that Iraq was dangerous, imminent threat³. The discussion was clearly intended to rally a country for war. What he told us and what we found were dramatically different; now we have evidence that the CIA had been trying to get the White House to stop this kind of talk for months.

The issue repeats itself with the "sixteen words." Bush argues that, well it turned out all right in the end, so what does it matter what I said about nukes? Well, it matters because, although we see that the whole argument was a sham, these are the only sixteen words we can demonstrate were false and misleading.

If the White House had made the pitch for war on good faith, then my parsing language would be silly. But they didn't. All bets are off.


----------------------------------
¹ "I have argued in the past, and would again, if we had been able to pre-empt the attacks of 9/11 would we have done it? And I think absolutely. I think the American people would have supported it. We have to be prepared now to take the kind of bold action that’s being contemplated with respect to Iraq in order to ensure that we don’t get hit with a devastating attack when the terrorists’ organization gets married up with a rogue state that’s willing to provide it with the kinds of deadly capabilities that Saddam Hussein has developed and used over the years."

And later: "But the cost is far less than it will be if we get hit, for example, with a weapon that Saddam Hussein might provide to al-Qaeda, the cost to the United States of what happened on 9/11 with billions and billions of dollars and 3,000 lives."

And still later: "I look at President Bush and I see, for example, his setting a whole new standard about how we’re going to deal with terrorist-sponsoring states."

² "And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq’s concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don’t have any reason to believe they’re any more valid this time than they’ve been in the past."

³"And we don’t have the option anymore of simply laying back and hoping that events in Iraq will not constitute a threat to the U.S. Clearly, 12 years after the Gulf War, we’re back in a situation where he does constitute a threat."

John Kerry: 11312
Howard Dean: 10640
John Edwards: 9642
Joe Lieberman: 7261
Dick Gephardt: 5878
Bob Graham: 2747
Dennis Kucinich: 1287
Carol Mosely Braun: 227
Al Sharpton: 135
-------------------------
George Bush 20,367

Bush has raised over $33 million from 20k donors. The Dems have raised just about twice that--$66.5 mil from 50k donors. The Bush base is out and giving already, and giving a lot of money.

And by the way, that FEC site is BIG fun. Punch in some of your local luminaries and see who they're giving to. Or even some of your national luminaries.

Martin Sheen: $2,000 two two legislative Dems.
Arnold Schwarzenegger: $1000 to a Shriver (Dem!) in Maryland.
Maria Shriver: $3000 to Shrivers and Kennedys.
Clint Eastwood: $1000 to Sam Farr (a Dem)

It's not official yet, but she's off and running. That was the message at Arianna Huffington's home in posh Brentwood, Calif., on Sunday afternoon, where several dozen political activists and advisors gathered to hear the author and Salon columnist make her case for jumping into the race to recall California Gov. Gray Davis.

She's a wacky, wacky woman. And now--since we're running a Minute Man theme--it looks like the Democratic firing squad has formed a circle. Of course everyone hates Gray Davis. But piling on to this debacle will further sully the already-listing Cal Dems. And if Arianna runs, it may well be a pigpile.

Two things. 1) She could have run in the last cycle. True, she didn't have the juice she's got now, but she would have been a legitimate contender against the already-horribly-unpopular Governor, who seemed to be running against the only Californian less-liked than he. 2) Not waiting until the next election has the stink of desperation about it; she's striking while her iron is hot, and knows that this flaky format is a good opportunity for someone to steal an election.

But stealing elections is exactly what Dems should be standing against right now. Huffington has always seemed like an opportunist to me (remember way back in, oh 1999, when she was writing pretty damn conservative commentary?), and this does nothing to dissuade me of my fears.

(On the other hand, being from the smug state north of Cali, I can't help but be drawn to the spectacle. I think Arnie should definitely reconsider now.)

[An additional thought. I didn't mention that Huffington was thinking of running as an Independent, and this is relevant, sorta. She wishes to offer "progressive alternative." It is better that she runs as an independent, but I think doesn't obscure the opportunism of the move, nor the damage it could cause those progressives (particularly those not hiding behind the "independent" label) she claims to represent.]

We believe Americans once again face a grave threat to our security, and we will give top priority to mobilizing the nation's resources to meet and defeat our nation's enemies. We believe the most fundamental test of national leadership today is the willingness to stand up and fight for America.

National security is a HUGE issue--don't get me wrong. But there's not a word in that statement that couldn't have been written by Don Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney. Do the Democrats seriously want to run as neo-cons? And is that really the only policy they could come up with? If so, why not vote Bush? (Which will be the first, second, and last question Bush will ask any candidate with this message.)

We believe in expanding opportunity, not bureaucracy. We believe our elected leaders have a responsibility to spend every tax dollar as carefully as their own. Fiscal discipline is fundamental to sustained economic growth as well as responsible government. America cannot prosper if we don't live within our means.

Again, one might reasonably ask--where exactly does the DLC message deviate from the Republican? The document continues on with some nice language about helping everyone, not just the wealthy, but this seems disengenous: all the centrist Dems were in favor of the tax cuts; they didn't punish businesses who cheated shareholders; didn't look after those who were losing jobs. The DLC is funded by big money interests, and despite Clinton's popularity, no Democrat has ever been comfortable with their connection to big business.

But the worst part is the attack on Dean. And not only Dean, but his supporters. (Imagine a finger poking out from the middle of your monitor). You.

But the buzz largely missed what should be an alarming revelation for Democrats: The Internet may be giving angry, protest-oriented activists the rope they need to hang the party. The vaunted new medium for grassroots political organizing may in fact be contributing to the Iowafication of the nominating process, disproportionately magnifying the voices of the activist groups with the loudest, most combative, and populist voices.

They're not just pissed at Dean, they're pissed that the small voter has a voice--a voter they can't win over with pretty TV commercials. And pulling a page from the Bush playbook, they blame their opponents for their own bad behavior:

For instance, the defense forces fired angry emails at the Democratic Leadership Council's website after a political memo last May warning of the dangers of kowtowing to interest groups on the left.

Actually, the DLC is the only group to get nasty in the campaign. Deanies (I'm not one) rightly called them on it, and now the DLC calls the Deanies combative.

Meanwhile, in addition to its standard-fare official website, deanforamerica.com, the Dean campaign also maintains a weblog called blogforamerica.com that plays a curious role in keeping activist supporters emotionally invested and engaged in the campaign.

Good lord, noooooo! Supporters emotionally invested and involved in the campaign? That might make politics...relevant.

Oddly enough, the point of the article is that Dean's supporters are actually inconsequential--they're the freak fringe. I tell you, for a bunch of inconsequential freaks, they've sure got the DLC's attention.

In the last election, it was the DLC who complained so bitterly about the divisiveness of the Nader campaign. But it was exactly the short-sighted me-too-ism of the DLC that drove voters away from Gore. Like Mike Doonesbury said, Lieberman is the "safety Republican." People are excited by liberals because they have something to offer voters they can't get with Bush.

In 1985, when the Reagan Democrats were dictating who got elected, it made some sense to swing centrist. But in the age of a lying, war-mongering President, a McCarthy-like Attorney General, and the Supreme Court hanging in the balance, arguing that Democrats need to swing right is both idiocy and suicide.

So DLCers, you excoriated the Naderites in the last election; are you going to become them this time around?

And she [Condoleezza Rice] has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.

That's one convoluted sentence. In an effort to remain "objective," the writers have had to slide into quasi-passive language just to avoid saying the impolite (impolitic?) truth. Something like "And she made false statements, later proven when the facts emerged," would have been a cleaner sentence. But the Post, presumably wishing not to offend the administration and FOG (friends of George, ie, the Post's advertizers), mangled the line to avoid controversy.

It's reasonable to ask what the purpose of "objectivity" in the media is when one has to work hard to write around the facts in a story.

"But although dissent is a minority position, and most of us don't want to dispute with a more powerful constituency or to challenge an injustice that hasn't injured us, it is still an exercise, an impulse, that most of us indulge in, at least during our late years, for reasons of self-respect, and maybe in order to square ourselves with God. We all see outrages we gloss over--whether the price of glaucoma medicine to old people or the current mistreatment of Arab Americans.... But it's risky and consuming in a turbulent period like this, with even jail in the offing, and requires a pileup of atrocities to override our caution and numbness."

Actually, when I first started this blog it was the year 2000, and it wasn't a blog, it was a Microsoft Word file on which I documented the particularly egregious abuses of power as they happened, so that I wouldn't forget them. Maybe I was documenting them for myself, to ensure I was witness to enough of the atrocities to override my own caution and numbness. Hoagland (don't confuse him with Jim) captures the sense nicely, not only in this quote, but in the article. As always, I urge non-readers to check Harper's out; I regard it as the most indispensable reading in the dark days of the Bush II administration.

On the other hand, they showed relative leniency toward a millionaire industrialist convicted of defrauding the government. They went easy on a police chief who beat up an accused child molester, but were more punitive if told another prisoner had done the beating. Finally, they showed an even more striking double standard in sentencing an accountant and a "hippie panhandler" who got inot a fight. If the evidence showed the accountant started the fight, they favored leniency. But if the evidence showed the hippie had started the fight, they laid down the law. (AS, p. 23.)

He has a number of studies to support the evidence of RWAs applying double standards to support power structures. When Altemeyer dug around this tendency, he found that RWAs were far less able to think critically about contradictory ideas, or distinguish between poor or reliable evidence (see chapters 4 and 5). [Altemeyer has never found a correlation between IQ and right wing authoritarianism. The inability to identify as faulty evidence that doesn't support your own beliefs--creationism, say--is not an intellectual mistake, it's a cognitive or psychological one.]

In addition, RWAs are far more likely to be nationalistic, ethnocentric, rigidly religious, and opposed to equal treatment of individuals.

Now, what does all this have to do with Bill Pryor? In 1991, Altemeyer surveyed a number of legislators from Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wyoming and included three questions about abortion. The abortion question allowed him to divide the legislators into groups. "Forty-seven of the 145 participants with interpretable stands said they would shaprly cut back on the number of abortions being performed under Roe v. Wade." He then compared the means of those who wanted to roll back Roe against the others. This group had a mean score of 200.7 on the RWA scale, one of the highest means he'd ever seen for any group. In short, those legislators who wanted to roll back Roe were among the most authoritarian (Altemeyer uses the word "prefascist") he'd ever encountered.

Bill Pryor holds the same views as those 47. While there's no way to tell where he'd score on the RWA scale, it's enough to give me pause. We know that RWAs apply double standards and don't think critically about evidence that contradicts their own views. And we know that the desire to overturn Roe is linked to very high RWA scores (that is, people who are very strongly authoritarian, and therefore less likely to think critically and more likely to apply double standards).

Bush's single-item litmus test for judgeships is abortion, and he's found a good one: it seems like a great guide to finding people who will enforce the law in a way that benefits his own beliefs. But for those who do think critically about the law and don't wish to apply double standards (that is to say, those who have an abiding faith in democracy)--it is also a pretty good indicator.

Maybe Pryor's not an authoritarian; maybe he's just a nice Catholic boy after all. But based on the views he's already admitted to, his history, and the troubling allegations he lied about fundraising for the Republican Attorneys General Association, I'd rather not find out the hard way.

"I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying 'we probably shouldn't have said that."

"You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. I mean, you can't make as many calls as you have to make without messing up once in a while."

I think you'd have to call yourself "ambivilent."

The House voted yesterday to block the Federal Communications Commission from imposing rules that would allow the nation's biggest broadcasting companies to buy more television stations, setting up a potential showdown with the White House.

A bipartisan coalition pushed through the measure by attaching it to an appropriations bill to fund the Commerce, State, Justice departments and several agencies, including the FCC. The spending bill was approved by a vote of 400 to 21, despite a veto threat from the Bush administration and objections from the Republican House leadership.

I am shocked by the huge majority of congresspeople who voted for it. Bush can rattle his sword about vetoes, but he won't if he's looking down the barrel of a defeat this size.

Every now and again you just have to scratch your head and say, "Huh. Who'da thunk?"

"As my mother would have put it, 'when they were passing out moderation, you were hiding behind the door. I learned a very painful lesson on Friday. As members you deserve better judgment from me and you'll get it."

Rep. Bill Thomas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, choking back tears while sort of apologizing.

This in regard to the "poor judgment" he exercised when he called the cops on Democrats last Friday. (I really hope we aren't witnessing an emerging responsibility-dodging strategy: "and to the American people, let me just say I exercised poor judgment when I repeatedly mentioned that Iraq was a threat, when in fact, it merely represented an easy way for me to boost my approval rating...")

Though it was pretty striking (listen to his voice crack here), not everyone was impressed.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, one of a few members of her party not to stand in applause after Thomas spoke, told reporters that the record "does not bear" out a portion of the remarks he made. "So while I'm sympathetic to the generosity of spirit that it took for him to make those statements, and I respect the fact that he did that, it didn't mean that I had to stand up and cheer," she said.

That Pelosi wouldn't cut him slack shows how bad things have gotten. Looks like the Democrats have finally decided it's not good enough to suspend Democracy and then try to pretty things up (without accepting responsibility) later. Can't say I blame 'em.

SACRAMENTO — In a meeting they thought was private but was actually broadcast around the Capitol on Monday, 11 Assembly Democrats debated prolonging California's budget crisis to further their political goals.

Members of the Democratic Study Group, a caucus that defines itself as progressive, were unaware that a microphone in Committee Room 127 was on as they discussed slowing progress in an attempt to increase pressure on Republicans to accept tax increases as part of a deal to resolve the state's $38-billion budget gap.

D'oh! This is inexcusable; what more can you say?

John Kerry - $12,876,368
John Edwards - $11,936,277
Howard Dean - $10,240,306
Dick Gephardt - $9,750,802
Joe Lieberman - $8,151,575
Bob Graham - $3,136,326
Dennis Kucinich - $1,718,354
Carol Moseley Braun - $217,109
Al Sharpton - $159,615

Now, of the total, the percentage of gifts that are $200 and under:

Dennis Kucinich - 60%
Howard Dean - 53%
John Kerry - 45%* [13%]
Dick Gephardt - 42%
Carol Moseley Braun - 28%
Joe Lieberman - 9%
Bob Graham - 8%
John Edwards - 7%
Al Sharpton - 0%

Now, of the total, the percentage of gifts that are $2000 and over:

John Edwards - 50%
Joe Lieberman - 41%
Bob Graham - 41%
Carol Moseley Braun - 25%
Dick Gephardt - 13%
John Kerry - 13%* [45%]
Dennis Kucinich - 11%
Howard Dean - 9%

Of course Kucinich and Dean have gotten most of their money from low-rollers--that's to be expected. But how about Kerry? He's the number one fundraiser to this point, and he's still raising almost half his money from individuals giving less than $200. That's a broad base of support. (Compare the numbers to Kucinich's, who has a higher percentage, but who's raised so much less money in general; Kerry's gotten at least 30,000 individual small donations.) *

I've been lukewarm on Kerry for awhile, and I'll post soon on why. But I am impressed by these numbers; although he's not appealing to me, he is appealing to people like me. That could be good news for both small voters who've overlooked Kerry as well as Democrats, who may end up with him as the candidate.

I think it also shows weakness in Lieberman's, Edwards', and Gephardt's campaigns. If Lieberman doesn't get any traction soon, the Clinton high rollers will abandon him, and he obviously has no base. Ditto Edwards, who's been buoyed by trial lawyers. Gephardt shows some weakness, but he's not dead yet. Still, for the "labor candidate," there's more wealth and less sweat evident in his numbers than he'd like.
--------------------------------------
*[Correction (7/24). In the original post, I inverted Kerry's numbers. In fact, only 13% of his money has come from small donors and 45% from the largest. Thus, my analysis that he's a man of the people--now italicized--is hogwash. Thanks to the Mad Prophet for noticing this.]

A report by internal investigators at the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which department employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties violations involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.

The inspector general's report, which was presented to Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations under the 2001 law.

The report said that in the six-month period that ended on June 15, the inspector general's office had received 34 complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations by department employees that it considered credible, including accusations that Muslim and Arab immigrants in federal detention centers had been beaten.

Who knows what effect this will have. John Ashcroft seems singularly unaffected by the perceptions of others (eg: he was so brittle in message that he lost an election to a dead man). He's an ideologue of the most extreme order, functioning not within the context of administering law, but as a missionary for his political views. He'll ignore this report, and it will require congress to get involved. Will they? Hard to say. If Democrats think it will make them look un-American or soft on terror to criticize the AG, they'll stay away. But if they think they can exploit it, they might actually do something.

I, of course, am not holding my breath.

Portland Area Volunteer and Supporter meeting
11am-Noon Sunday July, 20
Oregon Pioneer Building
320 SW Stark, Room 202
Portland, Oregon

Sorry the news wasn't sooner--I'll tell you how it went.

The donnybrook began in the morning when the Ways and Means Committee met to consider legislation changing rules governing pensions and retirement savings plans. The bill, sponsored by Rob Portman, R-Ohio and Rep. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., is a complex bill dealing with rules for pension funding and 401(k) savings plans.

Democrats were angered because they said the chairman's final version of the 91-page bill did not get delivered to their staffs until nearly midnight Thursday. They said they needed an opportunity to study the complex legislation before voting Friday morning.

When Thomas refused to delay the vote, Democrats forced a lengthy, line-by-line reading of the bill. Leaving Stark behind to block Republicans from obtaining unanimous consent to proceed, the Democrats left to discuss strategy in an library adjacent to the committee chamber.

It was then, they said, that Capitol police officers appeared, saying they were responding to a report of a disturbance. Staffers for the Democrats said the report had been filed by Thomas's office.

Outraged Democrats, believing that Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., had threatened to have them arrested, at one point turned for guidance to committee member John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who was arrested many times in the civil rights protests of the early 1960s.

"In another period, people would use the threat of arrest, accuse people of being disorderly, and that's what Chairman Thomas did," Lewis told his colleagues. "You haven't violated any laws, any rules. Just hold your heads high and keep the faith."

In the end, police left without making arrests.

| Source |

Lest you think the Democrats were sole victims, note this wrinkle in the day's activities:

A transcript of the committee meeting quoted Stark as belittling Thomas's intellect. Although the transcript does not show it, McInnis interjected, ''Shut up.'' The transcript then shows Stark saying: ''You think you are big enough to make me, you little wimp? Come on. Come over here and make me. I dare you, you little fruitcake.''

Stark said in an interview later that he regretted calling McInnis a ''fruitcake.'' But he also said the transcript missed his telling Thomas, ''You're behaving like a fascist.''

(Though it should be noted that Stark's a 71-year-old.)

Yeeh.

1.) To strengthen corporate power relative to government oversight (or the reverse; weakening government to benefit corporations;

2.) To reallocate federal funds so that they go to the wealthy;

3) To strengthen the position of the executive branch relative to the judicial and legislative within the federal government;

4) To reduce individuals' rights as citizens;

5) To enforce a Christian moral agenda.*

(I wrote a parenthetical following this bold pronouncement, which I'll include here, because it still applies:

I'm tempted to say that it's limited to the first three; when I first wrote this, that's how I had structured it. Reducing individual rights and enforcing a Christian agenda may merely be fringe benefits to policies whose principal intent is one of the top three. But I'm waffling on that one.)

So there you have it, more analysis about the President. Enough of that movie business. All is right in the universe again: Emma has gone back to her earnest, President-watching ways.

[*Correction: as an astute reader noted, this shouldn't read "Christian moral agenda," but fundamentalist agenda.]

First, I take responsibility for putting our troops into action. And I made that decision because Saddam Hussein was a threat to our security and a threat to the security of other nations.

I take responsibility for making the decision, the tough decision, to put together a coalition to remove Saddam Hussein. Because the intelligence -- not only our intelligence, but the intelligence of this great country -- made a clear and compelling case that Saddam Hussein was a threat to security and peace.

I say that because he possessed chemical weapons and biological weapons. I strongly believe he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program. And I will remind the skeptics that in 1991, it became clear that Saddam Hussein was much closer to developing a nuclear weapon than anybody ever imagined. He was a threat. I take responsibility for dealing with that threat.

We are in a war against terror. And we will continue to fight that war against terror. We're after al Qaeda, as the Prime Minister accurately noted, and we're dismantling al Qaeda. The removal of Saddam Hussein is an integral part of winning the war against terror. A free Iraq will make it much less likely that we'll find violence in that immediate neighborhood. A free Iraq will make it more likely we'll get a Middle Eastern peace. A free Iraq will have incredible influence on the states that could potentially unleash terrorist activities on us. And, yeah, I take responsibility for making the decisions I made.

It's a remarkable response, steeped in the kind of misdirection, parsing, obfuscation, and (what appears to be outright) lying that has marked this President's administration. I highlighted a few of the statements I found particularly troublesome.

"I take responsibility for putting our troops into action." No kidding? I'm glad you cleared that up. But that's an answer to a question no one asked nor cares about, which is a classic Bush tactic. During the ramp up to the war, reporters would say, "Gee, looks to me like this is a country decimated by over a decade of international scrutiny, and after weeks of searching, Hans Blix has found not a single molecule of WMD. Why is Saddam Hussein, of all people, a threat?" And then Bush would talk about the oppressed Kurds.

"...a coalition to remove Saddam Hussein." Coalition? George, we were there when you failed so abjectly to put together a coalition that you couldn't even go back to the UN. Millions of people protested around the globe. It was six months ago.

Then the President made a series of remarkable claims, so far completely unsupported by the evidence:

"...because he possessed chemical weapons and biological weapons"

"...he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program"

"The removal of Saddam Hussein is an integral part of winning the war against terror."

"A free Iraq will make it much less likely that we'll find violence in that immediate neighborhood."

"A free Iraq will have incredible influence on the states that could potentially unleash terrorist activities on us."

All of these are dubious at best, particularly the bold (the President is always bold, even when making bizarre and obviously false statements) comment about how the invasion will reduce violence in Iraq.

I wrote a couple days ago about how I felt the press has dropped the ball on holding the President accountable. Well, here's another example of a truckload of BS, delivered when someone asked him about the last load he delivered. I await eagerly the media's response to his responses.

[US Attorney General John] Ashcroft also plans to meet with the Portland Joint Terrorism Task Force and hold a press conference at 11:30 a.m. in the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse, Duckett said.

A Portland Police Bureau spokesman said officials learned about the visit Tuesday, so he was not certain whether activists would have time to plan a large protest.

"This is a very short notice event," said Sgt. Brian Schmautz. "To my knowledge, the public is just now learning of it. We are monitoring the situation, and we will be working with the federal government to provide the appropriate security and crowd control."

Wanna see what kind of crowd we can get? Bloggers, get your engines started! Let's see how fast and far we can the word out. We absolutely MUST have a strong presence there tomorrow. Mebbe I'll even print out the Ashcroft Dossier for distribution (anonymously, of course).

Unemployment's at a nine-year high.

Deficits are at skyrocketing, hitting an all-time high in actual dollars, and slated to rise next year--even without considering the cost of occupation.

Despite Fed Chairman Greenspan's effort to keep the economy going, ultra-low interest rates have yielded only a 1.4% growth--causing some economists to fear deflation.

Due to deficits, the President has had to drain some of the social security surpluses, just as boomers are ready to start drawing on it (without dipping into social security, this year's deficit would be $614 billion).

The upshot? Despite the President's revisionist history about whose recession it was ("Two-and-a-half years ago, we inherited an economy in recession," he lied in June), the "recovery" is all George's. Which means the unemployment, the deficits, the sluggish growth, and raiding Social Security to pay for Iraq and tax cuts--all George's. Bush will never take responsiblity for this situation--rather, he'll deny it even exists at all, instead call it a booming economy and take credit for that. But this is one of those "reality fissures" when it will be hard to listen to White House spin (wait a few days, it'll come), then look at what's actually happening, and reconcile the two.

Westminster is to hold a world-first tonight, when around 120 bloggers descend on parliament for a discussion on how politicians can best use the "blogosphere" to further policy and public interaction....

Mr Watson, the blogging Labour MP, sees the advent of the blog as a better way of engaging young people in politics, pointing out that while 500 of the great and the good may have turned out for Peter Mandelson's Progressive Governance conference at the weekend, the 120 bloggers who have turned up at little more than a week's notice for tonight's event will probably be younger and less party-political.

| more here |

Meanwhile, US Vice President Dick Cheney continues to huddle in an undisclosed bunker, tapping out weekly information on a telegraph.

(Incidentally, Natasha refered to me as an amateur doomsayer in the same post, which is about the closest anyone's gotten to capturing the essential nature of this blog.)

The American Solar Challenge started when Kansas State University’s “CATalyst” became the first team from 20 U.S. and Canadian colleges to hit the road in a 2,300-mile race that will end in about 10 days in the southern California city of Claremont. Drivers will spend most of their time on the way to California on historic Route 66.

This is probably not the kind of thing that has legs as a viable transportation option (although they can go up to 95 mph--in Arizona.) Lose the sunshine, though, and they drop back to putt-putt speed. And they don't work at night at all. Still, this really is a no-environmental impact car, unlike electrics (which can be powered by coal burning). Plus, they look really cool. Might even make people realize their SUVs look like wheeled fridges.

A blogger can dream.

I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services. And it was a speech that detailed to the American people the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. And my government took the appropriate response to those dangers. And as a result, the world is going to be more secure and more peaceful.

(After which a reporter asked--amusingly--"But, sir, how did it get into your speech if it was erroneous?" He declined to answer.)

Why are lefties beating this horse? Because it's not dead--not by a long shot. The President has been playing a high-stakes game of "find-my-lie," playing essentially the Clinton game of parsing the meaning of language. The original statement in the State of the Union speech was relatively benign, and if the President had kept his mouth shut, he might have been able to shuck and jive his way through this mine field.

The quote in question: "The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Based on this statement, Bush could have shunted all responsibility off on the British. But by increments, he's made bolder and bolder statements--verifiable statements. Today's is the most declarative yet: "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services."

Now we have something to check. And guess what? Evidence is mounting that this comment is a lie (and thus the credibility about the whole justifcation for war is thrown into question). To wit, the New Republic recently published an article that reported the CIA knew this was bad information. Yesterday's Post had a similar article.

The CIA tried unsuccessfully in early September 2002 to persuade the British government to drop from an official intelligence paper a reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa that President Bush included in his State of the Union address four months later, senior Bush administration officials said yesterday....

Only eight days after the State of the Union speech, however, Powell himself did not repeat the uranium allegation when he presented the administration's case against Iraq to the U.N. Security Council....

The early drafts of the speech did not include Britain as the source of the information, according to administration officials. A senior official denied that Britain was inserted in the final draft because the CIA and others in the U.S. intelligence community were concerned that the charge could not be supported. The British addition was made only "because they were the first to say it publicly in their September paper," the official said.

Bush has blundered, and the Democrats should make him pay. Today's admission is the clearest example yet that the President's version of reality doesn't align well with the facts. Where he might have once argued "fuzzy intelligence," he is now on record saying this was information credible to the intelligence community from which it came. That's a testable statement, and we should take Bush up on the implicit offer and judge it against the facts. Inquiry, anyone?

Much is made of the damage to US civil liberties of Ashcroft, Poindexter et al’s new crusade against the enemy within. But, as Henry and I discovered at CFP 2003, few people Stateside have really grasped the deep and permanent damage the war on terror is doing to European human rights and civil liberties. This isn’t simply a case of the US pushing unpalatable policies on its hapless allies (though there’s plenty of that going about), but is a more complicated situation in which the law enforcement / Justice and home affairs crowd have used the US war on terror to ram through retrograde measures that no civilised democracy should tolerate.

I'm trying to branch out and locate international bloggers for wider perspective. This is exactly what I was looking for. I'm going to go through another big blogroll revision soon, look for Crooked Timber to be a welcome addition.

Both Amy Sullivan and Kevin Drum link to and give some analysis of this interesting Post article. Both agree now's the time for Dems to close ranks, and they're ready to back whomever emerges. Yet again an opportunity for liberal Democrats--the ones with the ideas--to seize the day.

Chris at Interesting Times posts the latest buzz numbers from Google News. As Dennis Kucinich supporter, it's what I like to see. According to those numbers, our man Dennis has passed both Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman to take the number 5 slot. Quick, somebody let Kos know. (It's an odd methodology, pioneered by Chris himself, I believe. He assigns hits for each name on Google News's search page. Kinda cool.)

Q Yes, Mr. President. Do you regret that your State of the Union accusation that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa is now fueling charges that you and Prime Minister Blair misled the public? And then, secondly, following up on Zimbabwe, are you willing to have a representative meet with a representative of the Zimbabwe opposition leader, who sent a delegation here, and complained that he did not think Mr. Mbeki could be an honest broker in the process?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I think Mr. Mbeki can be an honest broker, to answer the second question.

The first question is, look, there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace. And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends, did the right thing in removing him from power. And there's no doubt in my mind, when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind. And so there's going to be a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history, and I can understand that. But I am absolutely confident in the decision I made.

Reading the quote, you don't get the full sense of the sound of confusion in the President's voice. What sounds like some kind of Churchillian repetition here sounded a lot more like groping on the radio. And then I was reminded of a passage from the book I'm reading, the Authoritarian Specter.

Compared with others, authoritarians have not spent much time examining evidence, thinking critically, reaching independent conclusions, and seeing whether their conclusions mesh with the other things they believe. Instead, they have largely accepted what they were told by the authorities in their lives, which leaves them with time for other things, but which also leaves them underpracticed in thinking for themselves.

Sound like anyone you know? A bit later in the same chapter (four, for those of you reading at home), Altemeyer continues:

But they usually learned which ideas are bad in the same way they learned which ones are good--from the authorities in their lives. [Authoritarians] therefore have more trouble identifying falsehoods on their own because they are not as preapared to think critically.

Still later, he found that authoritarians believe things uncritically, and imagine they believe them staunchly. But they have selective belief. When Altemeyer asked authoritarians about the phrase in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus say "don't judge lest ye be judged," authoritarians endorsed it wholeheartedly. But in other dimensions of the test (including a self-righteousness section), they prove that they are incredibly quick to judge. Never does the contradiction even occur to them.

So Bush, who is seems clearly to be an authoritarian, had long ago taken as fact that Iraq needed to be invaded. He offered a bunch of lame, contradictory excuses, having already settled on the course of action. When I heard him sputtering this morning, it sounded to me like the two parts of his brain were actually meeting each other for the first time (the gears grinding unhappily)--the part that knew Iraq had no nukes and the part that was convinced he needed to invade (for unspecified reasons).

It seemed that for a moment at least, he actually understood what everyone was talking about. And was genuinely confused.

WASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties Union today said that it has found a consistent pattern of factually inaccurate assertions by the Department of Justice in statements to the media and Congress, statements that mischaracterize the scope, potential impact and likely harm of the now-notorious USA PATRIOT Act.

To wit,

The Justice Department’s repeated assertion that the USA PATRIOT Act’s surveillance provisions cannot be used against U.S. citizens. In fact, the surveillance provisions are applicable to citizens and non-citizens alike. Some of the surveillance provisions can be used even against citizens who are not suspected of espionage, terrorism, or crime of any kind.

The Justice Department’s repeated assertion that Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the government to demand that any organization – including a library, bookstore, or hospital – turn its records over to the FBI, cannot be invoked unless the government can show “probable cause.” In fact, the law contains no such restriction. Section 215 requires only that the government declare that the records are “sought for” an ongoing investigation.

Though the press release doesn't mention it, the Ashcroft dragnet has been largely a failure at producing links to terrorism (though it's great at harrassing immigrants). In addition to work done by the ACLU, the Migration Policy Institute released a report last month that described widespread arrests, but few terror-related convictions. Moreover, among those detained (and of the 1,200, the MPI could only identify a third) were "persistent violations of due process as well as harsh law-enforcement measures directed solely at males from Arab and Muslim countries." Forty-six percent had lived in the states over six years, and half had wives and children.

(And of course, there was the DOJ's own report that strongly criticized the AG.)

The only way to stop these abuses is to report them. Kudos to the ACLU for keeping up the fight. (Never been a better time to become a card-carrying member. I am.)

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

"The report had already been discredited," said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. "This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings."

Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said.

"He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."

Capitol Hill Blue? Nope, I've never heard of it, either. But if Wilkinson exists, and he was a CIA advisor, and if he was in the room when Bush got the news, this could be the elusive evidence of a lie. Once and for all, we'll be able to say Bush has made a complete Horlicks of the Presidency. And Wilkinson, bless his heart, will suffer the indignity of being called Terry Blue Dress.

And that, friends, is the conspiracy rumor of the day.

The rest of the American economy functions differently. In most businesses, workers are continually getting more productive and can produce a lot more per hour than they could ten or twenty years ago. In 1979, workers at G.M. needed forty-one hours to assemble a car. Today, they need just twenty-four. In the nineties, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, retailers boosted their sales per hour by sixty per cent, and that was nothing compared with computer makers, whose productivity since 1995 has gone up sixty per cent each year. Because companies are producing more for less, they can hold down costs, and when times are good they can raise wages without hiking prices. So, in the late nineties, as productivity rose, wages did, too, though inflation lay dormant.

Generally, productivity growth is a boon, but it creates problems for non-productive enterprises like classical music, education, and car repair: to keep luring talent, they have to increase wages, or else people eventually migrate to businesses that pay better. Instead of becoming nurses or mechanics, they become telecom engineers or machinists. That’s why teachers are getting paid a lot more than they were twenty years ago. (The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that’s if you adjust for inflation.) To pay those wages, schools and hospitals have to raise prices. The result is that in industries where productivity is flat costs and prices keep going up. Economists call this phenomenon “Baumol’s cost disease,” after William Baumol, the N.Y.U. economist.

This is a seriously illuminating article; go give it a look.

The central apprehension behind my research program, driven by twenty-five years of alarming findings now being confirmed in tragic headlines, is that a potential for acceptance of right-wing totalitarian rule exists in countries such as Canada and the United States. This acceptance boils down to essentially an attitude, a state of mind, a willingness to see democratic institutions destroyed, which in some people may even be a desire.

What’s an authoritarian? By this, the Professor means “a covariation of three attitudinal clusters in a person.” (Yeah, I could have said “three characteristics,” but his version is more punchy, don’t you think?)

1. Authoritarian Submission. A high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.

2. Authoritarian Agression. A general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.

3. Conventionalism. A high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.

I've just started the book--I'll blog in the future about some of his major findings.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, recently described the "dodgy dossier" compiled by Downing Street on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as "a complete Horlicks". The same phrase would serve equally well to describe yesterday's long-awaited report from the Commons foreign affairs select committee on the government's decision to go to war with Saddam Hussein.

You remember Jack Straw, don'tcha? He's the chap wot said: "People are now trying to suggest that somehow the decision to take military action was entirely conditional on subsequently finding chemical and biological weapons material. That wasn't the case."

It was in all the blogs.

"President Bush, like many dominant personality types, uses dependency-creating language. He employs language of contempt and intimidation to shame others into submission and desperate admiration."

Today, the President gave one of the most shameful speeches of his presidency. It was a paean to the worst impulses of America, an intimidating and aggressive speech designed to appeal to blind nationalism and stifle criticism. Reading it, I couldn't help but see Brooks' point. Bush is the consummate bully, and here, as we celebrate the country's finest hour, it signals how far from the founders' original vision our leader has deviated.

Brooks:

"Bush uses several dominating linguistic techniques to induce surrender to his will. The first is empty language.... Dominators use empty language to conceal faulty generalizations; to ridicule viable alternatives; to attribute negative motivations to others, thus making them appear contemptible; and to rename and "reframe" opposing viewpoints."

Now listen to Bush's language (emphasis mine):

"Our nation is still at war. The enemies of America plot against us. And many of our fellow citizens are still serving and sacrificing and facing danger in distant places. Many military families are separated. Our people in uniform do not have easy duty, and much depends on their success. Without America's active involvement in the world, the ambitions of tyrants would go unopposed, and millions would live at the mercy of terrorists. With Americans' active involvement in the world, tyrants learn to fear, and terrorists are on the run".

Brooks:

"Another of Bush's dominant-language techniques is personalization. By personalization I mean localizing the attention of the listener on the speaker's personality. Bush projects himself as the only person capable of producing results....

"Instead, there are numerous statements referring to himself or his personal characteristics--folksiness, confidence, righteous anger or determination--as the answer to the problems of the country. Even when Bush uses "we," as he did many times in the State of the Union speech, he does it in a way that focuses attention on himself. For example, he stated: "Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility."

Bush:

"I was there the day that Guadalupe Denogean took the oath of citizenship. From the hospital where he was recovering, this son of Mexico raised his right hand and pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. He had kept -- (applause) -- he had kept that oath for decades before he took it. I'm proud to call him a fellow America. (Applause).

"To be an American, whether by birth or choice, is a high privilege. (Applause.) As citizens of this good nation, we can all be proud of our heritage and confident in our future. The ideals of July 4th, 1776, still speak to all humanity. And the revolution declared that day goes on."

Brooks:

"Yet the public, their electoral resistance broken down by empty language and persuaded by personalization, is susceptible to Bush's most frequently used linguistic technique: negative framework. A negative framework is a pessimistic image of the world. Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from advertising and hypnosis to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us. Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener's head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower."

Bush:

"By killing innocent Americans, our enemies made their intentions clear to us. And since that September day, we have made our own intentions clear to them. The United States will not stand by and wait for another attack, or trust in the restraint and good intentions of evil men. We are on the offensive against terrorists and all who support them. We will not permit any terrorist group or outlaw regime to threaten us with weapons of mass murder. We will act whenever it is necessary to protect the lives and the liberty of the American people."

I would add to Brooks' analysis a fourth pillar of Bush's language of dominance: God. He consistently invokes God to make clear his moral universe. You are with God (and Bush and America) or you are against Him and with evil and terror. Of course, Bush used this ubiquitous technique today:

"On July the 4th, 2003, we still placed our trust in Divine Providence. We still pledge our lives and honor to freedom's defense. And we will always believe that freedom is the hope and the future of every land.

"May God continue to bless the United States of America."

I found the speech deeply divisive and cynical. On national holidays, it's usual to honor the country universally, so that all who feel patriotic are welcome at the celebration. The United States is a nation of great diversity and interests, and nearly all Americans would describe themselves as loyal, interested, patriotic citizens. The President is well aware that his policy of war is not popular with a majority of Americans. He knows that his pre-emption doctrine is now being seriously questioned, as is the information he gave to justify his war.

None of this should have been mentioned. It was cynical of the President to seize upon this day to try to silence his critics. Independence Day isn't a political holiday. It's a national holiday. It's for celebrating the union, the spirit of the country, the Declaration of Independence, and the patriotic citizens who believe in those things. Shame on you for politicizing it, Mr. President. Shame on you.

On the sodomy case, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, has labored to distance the administration from the Texas case. "The administration did not file a brief in this case, unlike in the Michigan case, and this is now a state matter," Fleischer said when asked for Bush's opinion on whether gay men have the legal right to sexual relations in private. When Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) caused a furor by speaking out on the sodomy case in April, Fleischer had said, "We also have no comment on anything that involves any one person's interpretation of the legalities of an issue that may be considered before the Court."

In fact, Bush has expressed a firm opinion on the Texas sodomy law that the court ruled unconstitutional. He supported it. Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, dug up an article from the Austin American-Statesman of Jan. 22, 1994, titled "Bush promises to veto attempts to remove sodomy law." The newspaper reported:

"Gubernatorial candidate George W. Bush on Friday promised he would veto any attempt by the Texas Legislature to remove from the state penal code a controversial statute outlawing homosexual sodomy. Bush, a Republican, was asked about the sodomy statute shortly after speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Ladies Auxiliary.

" 'I think it's a symbolic gesture of traditional values,' he said."

Damn that pesky Lexis-Nexus.

"Two-and-a-half years ago, we inherited an economy in recession," he told donors at a Bush-Cheney '04 reception yesterday in Miami. He has raised the same accusation in fundraising appearances since mid-June in Washington, Georgia, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

At the time, Bush accepted the [National Bureau of Economic Research's] verdict with perfect accuracy. "This week, the official announcement came that our economy has been in recession since March," he said in his radio address the next weekend. "And unfortunately, to a lot of Americans, that news comes as no surprise. Many have lost jobs or seen their hours cut. Many have seen friends or family laid off. The long economic expansion that started 10 years ago, in 1991, began to slow last year. Many economists warned me when I took office that a recession was beginning, so we took quick action."

Then, last summer, Bush revised his history of when the recession began. Beginning in August 2002, he began to say that "we did, in fact, inherit an economic recession." Addressing Republican governors in September, he declared: "I want you all to remember that when Dick Cheney and I got sworn in, the country was in a recession." In May of this year, Bush even gave the recession an official starting date three weeks before he took office, saying "our nation went into a recession, starting January 1 of 2001."

Whoops. And not only is this another lie (hmmm, better update the Dossier), but it exposes another of the weaknesses of the Bush economy. Even if he had inherited a recession, his tax cuts have done nothing to reverse the process. After a few years, you gotta own up to your lame policies.

I am happy to report that Ann Coulter has lost her mind. The evidence for this is her most recent book, "Treason," a nearly unreadable slog through every silly thing anyone on the left has ever said. Coulter conflates dissent with treason, opposition with treason, being wrong with treason, being right with treason and just about anything she doesn't like with treason. If the book were a Rorschach test, she would be institutionalized....

In some ways, the nutso American brand of archconservatism mirrors traditional anti-Semitism. Jew-haters proclaim that Jews control the media, international finance and almost everything else of importance -- but, somehow, Jews have accumulated a 2,000-year history of expulsions, pogroms and, finally, the mass murder of the Holocaust. It is the same with American liberals. They control everything, and yet, somehow, the White House, both houses of Congress and, with the exception of several delis in New York, the entire business community are in the hands of conservatives. It's hard to figure.

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George W. Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language--especially negatively charged emotional language--as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others.

The author, Renana Brooks, is a psychologist who works for the Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion "and is completing a book on the virtue myth and the conservative culture of domination." I should immediately refer you to the article, which is better read as a whole than excerpted, but I can't resist this paragraph:

Bush's political opponents are caught in a fantasy that they can win against him simply by proving the superiority of their ideas. However, people do not support Bush for the power of his ideas, but out of the despair and desperation in their hearts. Whenever people are in the grip of a desperate dependency, they won't respond to rational criticisms of the people they are dependent on. They will respond to plausible and forceful statements and alternatives that put the American electorate back in touch with their core optimism. Bush's opponents must combat his dark imagery with hope and restore American vigor and optimism in the coming years. They should heed the example of Reagan, who used optimism against Carter and the "national malaise"; Franklin Roosevelt, who used it against Hoover and the pessimism induced by the Depression ("the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"); and Clinton (the "Man from Hope"), who used positive language against the senior Bush's lack of vision. This is the linguistic prescription for those who wish to retire Bush in 2004.

This, of course, is a vanity citation, allowing me to mention that I had similar analysis in my Three-Point Plan. But then, blogs are fueled by vanity, so what can you expect? (Do read the article; it's fresh analysis you won't have encountered.)

"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

--George W. Bush to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, according to Abbas

I would probably let it stand, as did Josh Marshall, for it pretty much speaks for itself. (Prudent bloggers should note: it's a second-hand quote. There's a lot of room for misunderstanding there.) If it's relatively close to what the President said, it's not inconsistent with things he's said before, and publically.

But Kevin Drum asks: "I can't pretend to know what Bush really feels in his heart, but is this really so bad?" Adding some analysis about how the remark was made in confidence, when the President was presumably gaining trust, the Calpundit gives Bush a pass. "He's talking to a religious person engaged in a largely religious dispute and trying to gain his trust. The remarks were made privately, and were obviously an attempt to speak in language that would be appreciated by the Palestinians."

Two thoughts. The quote itself, if we take it at face value, is the same kind of simplistic moralism Bush has used to justify about every action he's ever taken. It's unyielding fundamentalism, and he means it very literally: he believes he was instructed by God to invade Iraq. How a Palestinian is to regard this as good news escapes me. If God is on Bush's side and Bush is on Israel's side, how could Abbas think this was a hopeful comment?

More importantly, if Bush is conducting his foreign policy based on religious dictates, we should all be concerned. I'm less interested in letting Bush off the hook on the comment, because he seems insistent on making the point that this is not a game of politics or confidence-gaining, it's moral clarity. You're with him or you're agin him. Kevin compares Bush to Jimmy Carter, who also used his faith to create agreement. But Carter used it in exactly the opposite way: he used the universality of religion and the compassion of Christ as a way of building bridges. Bush isn't interested in agreement--he's interested in others yielding to his (and God's?) will. Big difference.

Bloggers Gain Libel Protection

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers....

Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.

Kinda stands to reason, but in John Ashcroft's America, you never know. Thanks to Beefy, who forwarded me the news.