The P-G Editorial Board Gets One Wrong

Here. By the way, I've blogged on this before.

I'm ususally a fan of the editorial board over there on the Boulevard of the Allies, but today they got it completely ass-backwards.

James Webb, graduate of the Naval Academy, decorated Vietnam War veteran, former secretary of the Navy, acclaimed novelist and senator-elect from Virginia, should know how to be an officer and a gentleman.

Apparently not. According to The Washington Post, the Democrat attended a recent White House reception where he went out of his way to avoid his host, President Bush, declining to stand in a receiving line or have his picture taken with the president. But Mr. Bush found him anyway.

According to the Post, Mr. Bush asked him, "How's your boy?" Mr. Webb's son is a Marine in Iraq.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Mr. Webb responded.

"That's not what I asked you," Mr. Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Mr. Webb said to end the conversation.

Plenty of people criticize George W. Bush and poke fun at him in public arenas -- that's called democracy. But to meet a president, any president, and show cold contempt -- that's called rudeness. The discourtesy was compounded by the fact that Mr. Bush was asking a friendly question about the welfare of Mr. Webb's son, a fair and decent inquiry. It would have been better had the senator-elect not attended the reception than behave like this.

Let's trace the story a little. Here's the piece from the Washington Post.

At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.

"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

Now here's the same story in The Hill.

Webb, a decorated former Marine officer, hammered Allen and Bush over the unpopular war in Iraq while wearing his son’s old combat boots on the campaign trail. It seems the president may have some lingering resentment.

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon. [emphasis added]

Note the part about wearing his son's combat boots - the war in Iraq is obviously a very personal issue for the Senator-Elect. At the end of the Post article, there's a bit more detail from the Governor of Virginia:

"He is not a backslapper," Kaine said. "There are different models that succeed in politics. There's the hail-fellow-well-met model of backslapping. That's not his style."

But Kaine said that Webb's background, including a stint as Ronald Reagan's Navy secretary, will make him an important -- if unpredictable -- voice on the war in Iraq.

"There are no senators who have that everyday anxiety that he has as a dad with a youngster on the front lines. That gives him gravitas and credibility on this issue," Kaine said. "People in the Senate, I'm sure, will agree with him or disagree with him on issue to issue. But they won't doubt that he's coming at it from a real sense of duty." [emphasis added]

A little context. Webb's son is in the middle of the bloody mess Bush manipulated the nation into. Webb's son is in serious danger every day directly due to the president's on-going failed foreign policies. Bush's own daughters, of course, are competely safe and sound. Neither daughter is in any danger of being harmed by any IED, shrapnel, bullet wounds or the stress of living each day in a war zone - the worst thing to happen to them in recent days is that one of them got her purse stolen in Argentina. Ee gads.

And so it's in that context that Bush saunters over and asks "How's your boy?" Seems to me that dubya, far from asking a "fair and decent" question, was showing Webb exactly who was in command. And as I wrote previously it was Bush who got testy when the conversation veered someplace he didn't want it to go.

Perhaps the Senator-elect should have declined the invitation. Perhaps he should have played nicer with the man who put his son in harms way. But it was Bush's cavalier question that angered Webb and so perhaps Bush got all the respect he deserved (Each question did end with the necessary "Mr President.")

So I have to ask, which one was showing contempt for the other? Which one was cold?

I guess you already have my answer.

It's Hard Work Being Trendy

We here at 2pj like to stay on top of the latest trends for our readers. One that you may have read about is the rise in staff infections.

Actually, the linked article talks about infections caused by hospitals, and while I can't swear to the genesis of mine, I do have a pretty nasty one that caused me to be hospitalized again for eleven days.

I'm now convalescing at home with the aid of a Wound VAC machine, two antibiotic pumps, and home care nursing.

Expect my blogging to be spotty at best for a while.

Major Shout Out to David for keeping the blog going!

Also, apologies to any of you who emailed me without response in the couple of weeks before I was hospitalized. I didn't realize how anemic I had become and was just too tired to read all my email and respond to it properly.

Rob Owen spanks Marty Griffin

And it ain't pretty. Take a look. Owen sets the scene in the opening:

The Marty Griffin Reputation Rehabilitation tour continued unabated last week with the KDKA reporter's second pro-church story. It comes in the aftermath of the Rev. Brent Dugan's suicide following KDKA promotions for a Griffin report that accused the minister of "public and illegal sexual behavior."

For more background, here's the P-G's initial reporting. And Rob's previous reporting. Seems that our boy Marty had (or thought he had) some sort of "gotcha" story on Pastor Dugan and the story took a tragic turn.

Promos for the report were broadcast for several days last week. They showed Griffin confronting Dugan about his alleged visits to an adult bookstore. It was unclear from the promos what other details the report would reveal.

During the 11 p.m. news Thursday, Griffin said his investigation "uncovered illicit, possibly illegal, activity by a local minister, activities which, at the very least, violated the rules of his denomination."

It's the use of key words -- possibly illegal, at the very least -- that call into question whether the report was worth doing in the first place. If the best Griffin could dig up was a trip to an adult bookstore (not illegal) and violation of church rules, then there's not much in it to serve the public interest. It comes off looking like another "gotcha"-style story designed for no benefit except the TV station's ratings.

What aired Thursday did not mention Dugan by name; he wasn't shown on screen. His church and denomination were not named. But Dugan was pictured in promos that aired for several days earlier on KDKA. The damage was done.

How much damage? Read this statement from Jim Mead, Pastor of the Pittsburgh Presbytery.

Brent had been missing since late Wednesday afternoon, shortly after he learned that he would be featured in an undercover television news story by KDKA that would make sensational revelations of what KDKA alleged was misconduct. Members of the congregation made every imaginable effort to reach Brent through friends and family members, and a missing persons report was filed, but to no avail. Ultimately, KDKA decided not to air the story after they learned that Brent may take his own life. It is the view of many, including me, that KDKA may well be said to have crossed boundaries of acceptable journalistic practices in its development and treatment of this story . . . and its treatment of our pastor who was its subject. On Friday evening we were notified by the State Police that Brent had been found lifeless as a result of a self-induced overdose of medication.

I don't think anyone can argue that Marty didn't cross a serious journalistic line. Thus, I guess, the need for "The Marty Griffin Reputation Rehabilitation Tour."

But take a look at how much Marty screws that one up. Owen begins with the KDKA piece itself:

"Tonight one of the area's most hallowed churches, the mother church of the Catholic church, is the scene of a crime," said Patrice King Brown, reading the newscast's top story on Nov. 22. "Thieves have stolen everything from the vestments of the priests to the poor boxes from St. Paul Cathedral in Oakland, virtually anything that was not nailed down."

And then he rattles off all of the (very serious) problems with Marty's reporting.

Problem No. 1: By using present tense, this script left parishioners with the mistaken impression that all these things had been stolen recently, said the Rev. Thomas Burke of St. Paul. Burke was interviewed for the report and said he was asked to list the things that were stolen, including Oriental rugs, a bride's honeymoon tickets and candle money. But the way the report presented the information, it appeared to have all happened recently and within a short period of time.

Problem No. 2: "Thieves started hitting this church a year ago," Griffin reported.

The reality: The Oriental rugs were stolen more than five years ago, the bride's tickets were taken three years ago. The vestments were stolen last year and theft of poor box and candle money has been going on "since eternity," Burke said.

So the chronology is skewed. That should've been enough to tank the story right there, but there's another, vastly larger, problem:

Problem No. 3: "Back in the day when I was growing up, when I was an altar boy, I could do this with no problem, come up to St. Paul's [sic] Cathedral 24 hours a day, seven days a week and go inside. Not anymore," Griffin said, yanking on the locked church doors at 6 p.m. "They have to lock the doors."

In reality, the church doors are normally open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., but because it was the day before Thanksgiving, the church staff left early and the doors were locked at 5:30 p.m. The usual 8 p.m. closing time has been in effect for at least three years, and Burke, 36, doesn't remember the doors ever being unlocked 24 hours a day.

Whah? Didn't Marty Griffin check to see why the doors were closed that day? Didn't he bother to check to see when the doors are usually closed? Either he did or he didn't - either way this is bad bad reporting. I'm only a blogger and even I know that.

Why would KDKA let such absolutely shoddy work go out over it's airwaves? The word "reprehesible" comes to mind. As does "incompetent" and "garbage."

And tell me again: why, after such grotesque blunders as the death of Pastor Dugan and the story about the "crime scene" at the Cathedral, is Marty Griffin even allowed in the KDKA building anymore?

I'm just asking.

Technorati tags: Marty Griffin, Brent Dugan, KDKA

KDKA TONIGHT!

For those few who may be interested in such things, I'll be on McIntire's show tonight at 9pm.

See you then!

The "War on Christmas" has a local warrior

And that would be Fred Honsberger.

I heard him yesterday on KDKA on the one hand ranting about a story where red and green cookies were banned at a local school. On the other hand, he said he has a problem when people complain about businesses substituting "Happy Holidays" for "Merry Christmas."

I guess he's for protecting Christmas unless he's against it. Or is that the other way round? Anyway, he also said that this is a "predominantly Christian nation."

Well I guess on how he defines that phrase. On the one hand, 2001's American Religious Identification Survey showed that about 77% of Americans identified themselves as Christian.
So if he was merely pointing out the nation's religious democraphics, then the facts speak for themselves. End of story.

It's what happens after those facts have spoken for themselves that there's trouble.

We do have two parallel streams here - one legislative (how school districts should act in the month of December) and commercial (should Walmart tell its employees how to greet people in the month of December).

I have to say that I'm with Fred on the latter. Hey, who would've guess I'd EVER agree with Fred Honsberger? A business can do what it wants. If it makes the wrong decisions on how it treats its customers, then it looses business. If it makes too many wrong decisions, it goes out of business. Calling them "Holiday sales" instead of "Christmas sales" recognises that there are more than a few non-Christians who might want to shop in December. It's not personal, it's business.

I'm more interested in the legislative stream.

If it's the case that a majority of citizens in this country are Christian, then does it follow that the laws should reflect that? Are Christians entitled to more rights because they're in the majority?

If so, then that runs head first into that pesky First Amendment.

Here's the text, and it contains some of my favorite words in the English Language:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It should be noted that Justice David Souter (a G. H. W. Bush appointee, by the way) wrote in the majority opinion in Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion."

While I am not a lawyer, it still sounds very very good to me.

I know there are legal originalists who do their best to try to read the Constitution the way the Founding Fathers wrote it. Not sure how they'd rearrange the First Amendment, but to them there's still the issue of the Treaty of Tripoli and it's Article 11.

What's that, you say? It was a treaty unanimously ratified by the Senate in 1797 and it contained this phrase:

As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion...

Whah??

It was first sent to the Senate late in George Washington's second term and ratified during the Adams' administration. There's no record of any dissent or debate when the treaty was read into the Senate record. Nor was there any record of any public outcry when the treaty was published in three of the nation's newspapers.

No debate, no outcry. I am assuming there were still a few founding fathers wandering around Philadelphia in the late 1790s. If the nation was founded on Christian principles, don't you think there'd be some disagreement with the treaty?

This "War on Christmas" is a silly diversion. Any minute a conservative spends complaining about an assault on Christmas is one more minute that that conservative doesn't have to defend the failed policies of the Bush Administration.

And that, I suspect, is the whole point.

Olbermann's Special Commentary on Newt Gingrich

The text in full:

“This is a serious long-term war,” the man at the podium cried, “and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country.”

Some in the audience must have thought they were hearing an arsonist give the keynote address at a convention of firefighters.

This was the annual Loeb First Amendment Dinner in Manchester, N.H. — a public cherishing of freedom of speech — in the state with the two-fisted motto “Live Free Or Die.”

And the arsonist at the microphone, the former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was insisting that we must attach an “on-off button” to free speech.

He offered the time-tested excuse trotted out by our demagogues since even before the Republic was founded: widespread death, of Americans, in America, possibly at the hands of Americans.

But updated, now, to include terrorists using the Internet for recruitment. End result — “losing a city.”

The colonial English defended their repression with words like these.

And so did the slave states.

And so did the policemen who shot strikers.

And so did Lindbergh’s America First crowd.

And so did those who interned Japanese-Americans.

And so did those behind the Red Scare.

And so did Nixon’s plumbers.

The genuine proportion of the threat is always irrelevant.

The fear the threat is exploited to create becomes the only reality.

“We will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find,” Mr. Gingrich continued about terrorists, formerly communists, formerly hippies, formerly Fifth Columnists, formerly anarchists, formerly Redcoats, “to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech.”

Mr. Gingrich, the British “broke up our capacity to use free speech” in the 1770s.

The pro-slavery leaders “broke up our capacity to use free speech” in the 1850s.

The FBI and CIA “broke up our capacity to use free speech” in the 1960s.

It is in those groups where you would have found your kindred spirits, Mr. Gingrich.

Those who had no faith in freedom, no faith in this country, and, ultimately, no faith even in the strength of their own ideas, to stand up on their own legs without having the playing field tilted entirely to their benefit.

“It will lead us to learn,” Gingrich continued, “how to close down every Web site that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear and biological weapons.”

That we have always had “a very severe approach” to these people is insufficient for Mr. Gingrich’s ends.

He wants to somehow ban the idea.

Even though everyone who has ever protested a movie or a piece of music or a book has learned the same lesson:

Try to suppress it, and you only validate it.

Make it illegal, and you make it the subject of curiosity.

Say it cannot be said, and it will instead be screamed.

And on top of the thundering danger in his eagerness to sell out freedom of speech, there is a sadder sound, still — the tinny crash of a garbage can lid on a sidewalk.

Whatever dreams of Internet censorship float like a miasma in Mr. Gingrich’s personal swamp, whatever hopes he has of an Iron Firewall, the simple fact is, technically they won’t work.

As of tomorrow they will have been defeated by a free computer download.

Mere hours after Gingrich’s speech in New Hampshire, the University of Toronto announced it had come up with a program called Psiphon to liberate those in countries in which the Internet is regulated.

Places like China and Iran, where political ideas are so barren, and political leaders so desperate that they put up computer firewalls to keep thought and freedom out.

The Psiphon device is a relay of sorts that can surreptitiously link a computer user in an imprisoned country to another in a free one.

The Chinese think the wall works, yet the ideas — good ideas, bad ideas, indifferent ideas — pass through anyway.

The same way the Soviet bloc was defeated by the images of Western material bounty.

If your hopes of thought control can be defeated, Mr. Gingrich, merely by one computer whiz staying up an extra half hour and devising a new “firewall hop,” what is all this apocalyptic hyperbole for?

“I further think,” you said in Manchester, “we should propose a Geneva convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules, that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism …”

Well, Mr. Gingrich, what is more “massively destructive” than trying to get us to give you our freedom?

And what is someone seeking to hamstring the First Amendment doing, if not “fighting outside the rules of law”?

And what is the suppression of knowledge and freedom, if not “barbarism”?

The explanation, of course, is in one last quote from Mr. Gingrich from New Hampshire and another from last week.

“I want to suggest to you,” he said about these Internet restrictions, “that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of the threat.”

And who should those “impaneled” people be?

Funny I should ask, isn’t it, Mr. Gingrich?

“I am not ‘running’ for president,” you told a reporter from Fortune Magazine. “I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.”

Newt Gingrich sees in terrorism, not something to be exterminated, but something to be exploited.

It’s his golden opportunity, isn’t it?

“Rallying a nation,” you might say, “to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.”

That’s from the original version of the movie “The Manchurian Candidate” — the chilling words of Angela Lansbury’s character, as she first promises to sell her country to the Chinese and Russians, then reveals she’ll double-cross them and keep all the power herself, waving the flag every time she subjugates another freedom.

Within the frame of our experience as a free and freely argumentative people, it is almost impossible to conceive that there are those among us who might approach the kind of animal wildness of fiction like that — those who would willingly transform our beloved country into something false and terrible.

Who among us can look to our own histories, or those of our ancestors who struggled to get here, or who struggled to get freedom after they were forced here, and not tear up when we read Frederick Douglass’s words from a century and a half ago?: “Freedom must take the day.”

And who among us can look to our collective history and not see its turning points — like the Civil War, like Watergate, like the Revolution itself — in which the right idea defeated the wrong idea on the battlefield that is the marketplace of ideas?

But apparently there are some of us who cannot see that the only future for America is one that cherishes the freedoms won in the past, one in which we vanquish bad ideas with better ones, and in which we fight for liberty by having more liberty, not less.

“I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.”

What a dark place your world must be, Mr. Gingrich, where the way to save America is to destroy America.

I will awaken every day of my life thankful I am not with you in that dark place.

And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are entitled to tell me about it.

And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea it represents and what a cynical mind.

And that you are entitled to do all that, thanks to the very freedoms you seek to suffocate.

Good guy, that Keith.

From Ronald Reagan's favorite Newspaper

The Washington Times:

Rival Shi'ite and Sunni groups are massing their militias in expectation of major confrontations, Iraqis say, even as President Bush prepares to meet today with the nation's embattled prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

A little later:

But Iraqis on both sides of their nation's sectarian divide report worrisome signs that the conflict will soon evolve into pitched battles between large armed groups.

Civil War anyone? Even the Washington Times says it's close:

Any emergence of pitched battles between massed groups of Sunnis and Shi'ites would largely settle a long-running argument in Washington over whether the conflict in Iraq should be described as a civil war -- a description the Bush administration has so far rejected.

Hey, wasn't one of the reasons (along with the fraudulent WMD reports and the fraudulent Iraq-al Qaeda connection) for the US invasion of Iraq that toppling Saddam Hussein would bring stability to that nation and the region?

Now even The Gipper's morning paper says that if the Sunnis and Shi'ites go at it, it's Civil War.

And it was all triggered by Dubya's invasion - what a great idea that turned out to be, huh?

Another reason Bush is the Worst. President. Ever.

Bush gets spanked - again

From the AP:

A federal judge struck down President Bush's authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutional and vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday.

A Bush EO was unconstitutional and vague? Stop the presses, we have something that's news!

"This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists," said David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the group. "It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era."

But wait, according to Ann Coulter, Joe McCarthy was a victim of a liberal witch hunt:

The myth of "McCarthyism" is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis. As Whittaker Chambers said: "Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does."

If anyone knows about Orwellian frauds, it's Ms Coulter and the Conservatives. But hey, did you notice how she continued the McCarthy-ite attack? Liberals were guilty of treason because they denounced McCarthy.

Anyway back to Bush. The wingnuts over at freerepublic have already begun to seethe. Here's one response:

Well, ol' Audrey apparently wants more terrorists to get into the country and then kill thousands of more people so that we can all be "victims" again and feel good about it.

Ah, there it is. Disagree with Bush and you want more terrorists to kill more Americans. Such rational thinking from the right. William F. Buckley must be so proud.

Meanwhile, there's this from The Hill (via talkingpointsmemo.com):

President Bush has pledged to work with the new Democratic majorities in Congress, but he has already gotten off on the wrong foot with Jim Webb, whose surprise victory over Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) tipped the Senate to the Democrats.

Webb, a decorated former Marine officer, hammered Allen and Bush over the unpopular war in Iraq while wearing his son’s old combat boots on the campaign trail. It seems the president may have some lingering resentment.

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

Nice guy that Dubya. Asks a father about how his son is doing in the war he manipulated the nation into and then gets his panties in a knot when he doesn't hear the answer he wants to hear.

The article goes on:

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

To which Josh Marshal asks:

Can he vote on bills from Gitmo?

How long before they Swiftboat Webb?

Civil War

I've never quite understood why the adjective "Civil" is used to describe such a war. I mean, what's "civil" about it? I'm also by no means the first person (or probably even within the first million) to ask that question. So sue me.

In any event, a major media outlet, NBC has begun to use the term to describe Bush's debacle in Iraq.

President Bush is now in the midst of an overseas trip that will take him later this week a meeting in Jordan with Iraq's prime minister. But behind in Washington, D.C., the nation's Capitol is now gripped by a ferocious debate over the term "civil war."

Today, as Air Force One was halfway over the Atlantic Ocean, a White House spokesman protested a decision by several American news organizations, including NBC News, to call the violence in Iraq a civil war.

If it walks like a duck.

This morning, on the Today Show, Matt Lauer said, "NBC News has decided a change in terminology is warranted -- that the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas -- can now be characterized as a civil war."

Bush administration officials fear that when most Americans hear the term civil war, they associate it with out own war between the states 140 years ago. That was a conflict between the Union North and the Confederate South that produced 650,000 casualties, or one out of every 50 Americans at the time. To this day, the U.S. Civil War remains a force in America's historical identity and psyche.

And quacks like a duck.

However, the U.N. reported last week that an average of 120 Iraqi civilians are getting killed every day. This weekend, the violence in Baghdad claimed the lives of 215 people in one day. Several experts say Iraq reached civil war status months ago.

It's probably a duck.

But leave it to the administration that "makes it's own reality" to describe it otherwise.

This fall, press secretary Tony Snow declared Iraq does not qualify as a civil war because the violence is different. "You do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it,” Snow said. “But it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force."

Here's the transcript from Whitehouse.gov. The press briefing was from October.

Q Tony, a couple of minutes ago, you said one of the goals in Iraq is to prevent civil war. Can you take a minute and give us the definition that the President is working with? Because he continues to say it's not at that state yet; lots of analysts do say it's at that state. What's the threshold that the administration is working with --

MR. SNOW: I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within Iran.

Q And there's nothing on the ground that the President is looking at that he thinks is a prospect --

MR. SNOW: At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don't have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no.

What you do have is a number of different groups -- you know, they've been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government.

So to the worse administration ever, unless the situation on the ground more or less matches the American Civil War (known to our southern friends as "The War Between the States), it ain't the walking quacking duck that everyone else sees.

And why would this be?

Bush administration officials fear that when most Americans hear the term civil war, they associate it with out own war between the states 140 years ago. That was a conflict between the Union North and the Confederate South that produced 650,000 casualties, or one out of every 50 Americans at the time. To this day, the U.S. Civil War remains a force in America's historical identity and psyche.

And that would further undermine support for Bush's war. Further undermine?

And let's remember that Iraq's population (according to the CIA Factbook) was estimated at 26,783,383 . So we're talking that the population of that country is a little less than one-tenth of the US.

So to imagine the same numbers here, on average at least 1200 people would have to be dying per day. Imagine if 2150 died in violence in NYC or Washington DC on one day this weekend.

No of course it's not civil war - because according to Tony Snow, there isn't a "clearly identifiable leader" on the otherside.

And the funny thing? Since we are the occupiers of that country, we're responsibile for the security of that country.

Another Bush failure.

I'm ba-a-a-a-ak!

Just a note to let everyone know that I'm back from my mini-vacation.

It was great to have a break.

From Reg Henry

In today's P-G. He declares upfront that he's not a Bush "hater" but a Bush "Can't stander."

I will further admit that my skin creeps every time I watch Mr. Bush on TV, but that merely indicates a very fastidious epidermis. It's not like I have an insane hatred of the president. Just because you can't stand a person doesn't mean you are sufficiently bothered to hate him.

See? And:

My attitude to Mr. Bush is that hate is a very strong emotion and it shouldn't be wasted on politicians. When it comes to hate, I have my standards.

Good Advice.

But then he gets down to it:

Yes, his administration has made this nation reviled by much of the world, it has spent money like a drunken sailor, led the vital pursuit of terrorists into a cul-de-sac called Iraq, ridden roughshod over constitutional protections and been contemptuous of the environment, but I agree with my critics that it would be awfully picky and irrational to hate the president for this.

After all, we all know that it's not his fault. He comes from a privileged family and went to some of the most exclusive schools in the country. No wonder he has no grasp of reality.

Point one: No grasp on reality.

As a Vietnam veteran myself, I am not here to tell you that it was about time. If I had been given the opportunity to fly jets in Texas during the time of the Vietnam War, as Mr. Bush did, I would have jumped at the chance.

I don't reproach Mr. Bush at all. As the old saying has it, they also serve who but stand and wait. The young Mr. Bush stood at attention, he waited, then he waited some more, and finally he got tired of waiting and sort of wandered off without a word being said. In the meantime, he saved Texas from the Reds and presumably flew over some fields and woke up some cattle.

Point two: "Wandered off" refers, I understand, to Bush's failure to complete his military service.

While Mr. Bush sought to avoid comparisons between the Iraq morass and the Vietnam quagmire on his visit, he managed a few inanities for the sake of his fans. He said that Vietnam's progress gave him hope for Iraq and that the lasting lesson of America's defeat more than three decades was that now "we'll succeed unless we quit." Actually, Vietnam succeeded after we quit, but hey! Can't hate a man just because he is historically confused.

Point three: Historically confused.

In the picture run by The New York Times, Mr. Bush is whispering something to Russian President Vladmir Putin, both of them looking fetching in blue. In front, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is in pink with a traditional hat, looking apprehensive, as if some clown is about to descend and give her a back rub. For all the world, it could be the family picture at a gay wedding.

Point four: A clown.

With that I'd like to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving. I'll be off-line for a few days.

Be excellent to each other and don't let the trolls bother you. They're just so filled with "anti-Democrat" hate that they clearly can't think clearly.

Winter Soldier on Sundance

I don't know if the Sundance Channel planned it this way or whether it was just one big strange karmic coincidence, but the same day Keith Olbermann commented on Dubya's ignorant and shameful ignorance of the lessons of Vietnam, the Sundance Channel broadcast Winter Soldier.

Good for them. I hope they broadcast it again.

Here's the documentary's website and here's the full transcript of the testimony.

By the way, it was the Winter Soldier Investigation that John Kerry was speaking of at his Senate Testimony in April, 1971. He was Swift-Boated for this paragraph:

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Wingnuttia charged that it was Kerry who was making these allegations - and thus attacking the troops. But take a look at this. These are from the Winter Soldier testimony - neither man is John Kerry.:

On cutting off ears:

People cut off ears and when they'd come back in off of an operation you'd make deals before you'd go out and like for every ear you cut off someone would buy you two beers, so people cut off ears.

Or this on the telephone wires being hooked up to genitals:

You tied them to a tree and get the dog handler to let the dog jump and bite at the person tied to the tree. Or again, with the field telephone, you wired it up to his ears, his nose, his genitals. This was done to women; I've seen it done to women.

So Abu Ghraib wasn't the first dog-based "interrogation"?

Huh.

Olbermann's Comment last night

In case you missed it, here it is.

It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.

And it is pathetic to listen to a man talk unrealistically about Vietnam, who permitted the “Swift-Boating” of not one but two American heroes of that war, in consecutive presidential campaigns.

But most importantly — important beyond measure — his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans.

And that is indefensible and fatal.

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.

“One lesson is,” he said, “that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.”

“We’ll succeed,” the president concluded, “unless we quit.”

If that’s the lesson about Iraq that Mr. Bush sees in Vietnam, then he needs a tutor.

Or we need somebody else making the decisions about Iraq.

Mr. Bush, there are a dozen central, essential lessons to be derived from our nightmare in Vietnam, but “we’ll succeed unless we quit,” is not one of them.

The primary one — which should be as obvious to you as the latest opinion poll showing that only 31 percent of this country agrees with your tragic Iraq policy — is that if you try to pursue a war for which the nation has lost its stomach, you and it are finished. Ask Lyndon Johnson.

The second most important lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If you don’t have a stable local government to work with, you can keep sending in Americans until hell freezes over and it will not matter. Ask Vietnamese Presidents Diem or Thieu.

The third vital lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not. For decades we were warned that if we didn’t stop “communist aggression” in Vietnam, communist agitators would infiltrate and devour the small nations of the world, and make their insidious way, stealthily, to our doorstep.

The war machine of 1968 had this “domino theory.”

Your war machine of 2006 has this nonsense about Iraq as “the central front in the war on terror.”

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of “peace With honor” are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they’re probably just as wrong now, as they were then ... Dr. Kissinger.

And the fifth crucial lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush — which somebody should’ve told you about long before you plunged this country into Iraq — is that if you lie your country into a war, your war, your presidency will be consigned to the scrap heap of history.

Consider your fellow Texan, sir.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson held the country together after a national tragedy, not unlike you did. He had lofty goals and tried to reshape society for the better. And he is remembered for Vietnam, and for the lies he and his government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who needlessly died there.

As you will be remembered for Iraq, and for the lies you and your government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who have needlessly died there and who will needlessly die there tomorrow.

This president has his fictitious Iraqi WMD, and his lies — disguised as subtle hints — linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and his reason-of-the-week for keeping us there when all the evidence for at least three years has told us we need to get as many of our kids out as quickly as possible.

That president had his fictitious attacks on Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, and the next thing any of us knew, the Senate had voted 88-2 to approve the blank check with which Lyndon Johnson paid for our trip into hell.

And yet President Bush just saw the grim reminders of that trip into hell: the 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese killed; the 10,000 civilians who’ve been blown up by landmines since we pulled out; the genocide in the neighboring country of Cambodia, which we triggered.

Yet these parallels — and these lessons — eluded President Bush entirely.

And, in particular, the one over-arching lesson about Iraq that should’ve been written everywhere he looked in Vietnam went unseen.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit”?

Mr. Bush, we did quit in Vietnam!

A decade later than we should have, 58,000 dead later than we should have, but we finally came to our senses.

The stable, burgeoning, vivid country you just saw there, is there because we finally had the good sense to declare victory and get out!

The domino theory was nonsense, sir.

Our departure from Vietnam emboldened no one.

Communism did not spread like a contagion around the world.

And most importantly — as President Reagan’s assistant secretary of state, Lawrence Korb, said on this newscast Friday — we were only in a position to win the Cold War because we quit in Vietnam.

We went home. And instead it was the Russians who learned nothing from Vietnam, and who repeated every one of our mistakes when they went into Afghanistan. And alienated their own people, and killed their own children, and bankrupted their own economy and allowed us to win the Cold War.

We awakened so late, but we did awaken.

Finally, in Vietnam, we learned the lesson. We stopped endlessly squandering lives and treasure and the focus of a nation on an impossible and irrelevant dream, but you are still doing exactly that, tonight, in Iraq.

And these lessons from Vietnam, Mr. Bush, these priceless, transparent lessons, writ large as if across the very sky, are still a mystery to you.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

No, sir.

We will succeed against terrorism, for our country’s needs, toward binding up the nation’s wounds when you quit, quit the monumental lie that is our presence in Iraq.

And in the interim, Mr. Bush, an American kid will be killed there, probably tonight or tomorrow.

And here, sir, endeth the lesson.

'Nuff said.

Get Well, Maria

I just got off the phone with Maria.

She'll won't be blogging for a few days as she is under the weather big time.

Get well, Maria.

--David

Thus Spake Kissinger

This is bad. For Dubya.

When a war criminal like Henry Kissinger says:

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Notice also how Kissinger (who obviously chooses his words carefully) states things: "an Iraqi government...that gets the civil war under control." He puts it in the present tense with no qualifiers.

So not only does the say military victory isn't possible, he says there's a civil war. Now.

Bad. Bad for Dubya.

Filibuster this, filibuster that

Check this out It's from the AP.

The Senate's next Republican leader issued a veiled threat to block action on legislation if Democrats refuse to allow confirmation votes on President Bush's troubled judicial nominations.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (news, bio, voting record) of Kentucky, who will become minority leader Jan. 4, told the conservative Federalist Society Friday not to feel bad about the Senate election results because Republicans will hold 49 seats in a body that requires 60 votes to end a filibuster and bring legislation or presidential nominees to a final vote.

If the "Democrats want our cooperation, they'll give the president's judicial nominee an up-or-down vote," McConnell said.

Wait a sec. Is Senator McConnell really threatening (and I suppose he is) to filibuster other legislation unless Dubya's nominees get to bypass the entire Senate process and get an up-or-down vote?

Even though Senator Frist admitted on the Senate floor on May 12, 2005 that there's no Constitutional requirement for all Judicial nominees to get an "up or down" vote:

Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I would Mr. President, here is my guide, the Constitution of the United States. What does it say? Does it say that each nominee shall have an up-or-down vote? Does it say that? I ask the Senator from Tennessee, I ask any Senator to respond to that question. Does this Constitution accord to each nominee an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor?

Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I would be happy to respond to the question that has been directed to me.

Mr. BYRD. I ask unanimous consent that I may yield without losing my right to the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The Senator from Tennessee is recognized.

Mr. FRIST. To the question, does the Constitution say that every nominee of the President deserves an up-or-down vote, the answer is, no, the language is not there. [emphasis added]

So Mitch McConnell is threatening to stop legislation (unreleated legislation) for in order to force something that is not even Constitutionally mandated.

Ah, Republicans. You have to admire such a respect for tradition.

This brief primer should suffice to illustrate how the GOP views rules and traditions that get in the way of their power:

Originally, after Republicans gained control of the Senate in the 1994 elections and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch assumed control of the Judiciary Committee, the rule regarding judicial nominees was this: If a single senator from a nominee's home state objected to (or "blue-slipped") a nomination, it was dead. This rule made it easy for Republicans to obstruct Clinton's nominees.

But in 2001, when a Republican became president, Hatch suddenly reversed course and decided that it should take objections from both home-state senators to block a nominee. That made it harder for Democrats to obstruct George W. Bush's nominees.

In early 2003 Hatch went even further: Senatorial objections were merely advisory, he said. Even if both senators objected to a nomination, it could still go to the floor for a vote.

Finally, a few weeks later, yet another barrier was torn down: Hatch did away with "Rule IV," which states that at least one member of the minority has to agree in order to end discussion about a nomination and move it out of committee.

Here's a thought for the new Judiciary Committee: Reset the rules to exactly what they were when there was a Democrat in the White House and the Republicans used the rules to block President Clinton's nominees. Senator Feinstein in 2005:

When Democrats were in the White House -- I will talk for a moment on Senate procedure -- Republicans used the filibuster and other procedural delays to deny judicial nominees an up-or-down vote. So denying a judicial nominee an up-or-down vote is nothing new. It has been done over and over and over again. I speak as a member of the Judiciary Committee for 12 years, and I have seen it done over and over and over again.

So why suddenly is an up-or-down vote now the be all and end all?

Last administration, Republicans used the practice of blue slips or an anonymous hold, which I have just described, to allow a single Senator -- not 41 Senators, but 1 -- to prevent a nomination from receiving a vote in the Judiciary Committee, a 60-vote cloture vote on the floor, or an up-or-down vote on the floor of the Senate. This was a filibuster of one, and it can still take place within the Judiciary Committee.

The fact is, more than 60 judicial nominees suffered this fate during the last administration. In other words, over 60 Clinton judges were filibustered successfully by one Senator, often anonymous, often in secret, no debate as to why. It was an effective blackball.

Tradition - reset the rules and ignore McConnell's childishly absurd threat.

I'm on KDKA tonight!

I'll be on The Flipside with John McIntire's tonight at 8pm

Give a listen.

How is this not abuse?

Perhaps you've already seen this video:


It shows UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad being repeatedly tasered by UCPD police.

His offense? Here's an account of the incident from the Daily Bruin:

By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell "get off me," repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.

Video shot from a student's camera phone captured the student yelling, "Here's your Patriot Act, here's your fucking abuse of power," while he struggled with the officers.

As the student was screaming, UCPD officers repeatedly told him to stand up and said "stop fighting us." The student did not stand up as the officers requested and they shot him with the Taser at least once more.

"It was the most disgusting and vile act I had ever seen in my life," said David Remesnitsky, a 2006 UCLA alumnus who witnessed the incident.

As the student and the officers were struggling, bystanders repeatedly asked the police officers to stop, and at one point officers told the gathered crowd to stand back and threatened to use a Taser on anyone who got too close.

Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.

[Emphasis added courtesy of Pam's House Blend]

While the article mentiones the student being tasered twice, other student accounts (and the video) indicate as many as six shocks were administered.

According to a later article in the Daily Bruin, Tabatabainejad was also stunned with the Taser when he was already handcuffed.

Also from the Daily Bruin:

But according to a study published in the Lancet Medical Journal in 2001, a charge of three to five seconds can result in immobilization for five to 15 minutes, which would mean that Tabatabainejad could have been physically unable to stand when the officers demanded that he do so.

"It is a real mistake to treat a Taser as some benign thing that painlessly brings people under control," said Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney at the ACLU of Southern California.

"The Taser can be incredibly violent and result in death," Eliasberg said.

According to an ACLU report, 148 people in the United States and Canada have died as a result of the use of Tasers since 1999.

During the altercation between Tabatabainejad and the officers, bystanders can be heard in the video repeatedly asking the officers to stop and requesting their names and identification numbers. The video showed one officer responding to a student by threatening that the student would "get Tased too." At this point, the officer was still holding a Taser.

Such a threat of the use of force by a law enforcement officer in response to a request for a badge number is an "illegal assault," Eliasberg said.

"It is absolutely illegal to threaten anyone who asks for a badge â€" that's assault," he said.

Tabatabainejad was released from custody after being given a citation for obstruction/delay of a peace officer in the performance of duty.

The officers claimed that Tabatabainejad deserved the shocks because he was a non-white Muslim he "went limp and refused to exit as the officers attempted to escort him out" and because he ""encouraged library patrons to join his resistance."

There is no evidence of the student encouraging resistance by others on the six minute tape. Eyewitness accounts said that Tabatabainejad repeatedly told officers "I'm not fighting you" and "I said I would leave" as he was being dragged out. They also note that at the beginning of the conflict, he had already logged off the computer, grabbed his backpack and was headed towards the door.

If I understand the officers explanation correctly, it would have been perfectly OK to Taser Gandhi, civil rights lunch counter protestors, or anyone else who display civil disobediance by going limp.

It's a nice world we live in.

Do we really have two more years of this???

So Little Georgie Bush finally makes it to Vietnam and -- who would have guessed it -- he isn't doing too well on his field trip.

First, his White House puts up the wrong Vietnam flag on their website (they used the old South Vietnam flag).

Then he completely flubbed the oral exam.

While talking about Iraq in comparison to Vietnam, he clearly demonstrated that he had not been paying attention to the lesson plan when he said:

"One lesson is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while," he said.

"We'll succeed unless we quit," he said.

Fortunately for the class, student nwskinner from the Daily Kos school followed Georgie's report with his own summation:

1. vietnam was not ours to lose - it was a sovereign country.
2. we did not lose the war because we left too soon - we stayed there for at least 15 f***ing years.
3. we did not lose because of lack of effort - we dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on vietnam than all parties dropped in wwII and at times we had over a million troops in that theater.
4. we did not lose because we did not kill enough people - we killed at least a million vietnamese in our sojourn there and we are still killing them.
5. we lost because it was unwinnable - these pig f**ing morons, including kissinger, still cannot get over the fact that war is generally a piss poor idea and sometimes one cannot win. ask the chinese - they have not beaten the vietnamese in 2000 years.

Grades?

That's another F for Georgie and an A for nw.

Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) and the Phantom Revenue

More details on the Phantom Revenues - the PILOT revenue.

In this recent posting, I touched upon the "phantom revenue" from the consortium of non-profits. Here's the quotation from the P-G again.

A consortium of nonprofit groups has said it doesn't plan to give the city money after 2007, but the city's plan counts on $5.7 million a year from such organizations through 2011.

But I still wondered what the story was with the PILOT stuff anyway. The P-G's Rich Lord from 2005:

The issue first emerged in the 1980s, when the city and Allegheny County both saw their property tax bases erode as expanding nonprofit institutions took land off the tax rolls.

And then

In the late 1980s, the city and county tried what was then a novel approach. They went before the county's Board of Property Assessment Appeals and Review to challenge the tax-exempt status of big nonprofit organizations including large hospitals, the Downtown YMCA and the Central Blood Bank.

"That forced some of them to come in and justify that they were purely public charities," said Ron Pferdehirt, an associate city solicitor who was involved in those efforts.

At the time, state law put the burden on nonprofit entities to prove that they advanced charitable purposes, had no private profit motive, provided free services, helped people in need and relieved the government of some of its burdens.

Rather than roll the dice before the assessment board, nonprofit groups settled with the city, signing on to multiyear contracts to make payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, to the city.

And

The fund negotiated an agreement with Mayor Tom Murphy in which it pledges to contribute to the city through 2007. During its three-year term, the agreement would bar the city from pursuing any new taxes or fees on charitable organizations that make contributions, or from unduly slowing their applications for permits and licenses.

Murphy has estimated that nonprofit groups will contribute $5.7 million this year.

So that's where the $5.7 Million figure comes from. But there's the 2007 date as well. A month or so later Lord had more:

The fiscally troubled city set out last year to raise $33.5 million over five years from tax-exempt nonprofit organizations.

Yesterday, Mayor Tom Murphy and City Council received a response from the Pittsburgh Public Service Fund, which represents universities, hospitals, foundations, arts groups and nonprofit insurers. Their pledge: $12.1 million over three years.

"They're just present pledges," said the Rev. Ron Lengwin, spokesman for the fund and the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. Under a proposed contract between the fund and the city, he said, "it could go up, it could go down."

The fund pledged $4.57 million in 2005, $3.89 million in 2006 and $3.69 million in 2007.

Mr. Murphy's 2005 budget called for $6.7 million from nonprofit organizations. In a new budget unveiled in February, he scaled that back to $5.7 million for 2006 and 2007.

There it is again. $5.7 million in 2007. And that's what Mayor Murphy asked for. The fund itself was pledging less.

And what of the possibility of extending the three year contract (or adding another or whatever)?

Here's The Trib's Jeremy Boren (again from 2005):

The Rev. Ron Lengwin, spokesman for the fund and the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese, said he promised in a meeting with the council last week to ask his ruling board if members would be open to future contribution talks, but nothing more.

"I was asked if we would be willing to consider continuing, and I said I would take that request to the board, but it was my strong opinion that the board would not be interested.

"Did I acknowledge that there's some slim possibility? Well, never say 'never,' " Lengwin said.

Why the shift? Here's Rich Lord again:

In 1997, the state passed the Purely Public Charities Act. It shifted the burden of proof, creating a presumption that certain organizations were tax-exempt.

That undermined city leverage in negotiating PILOT agreements, said Pferdehirt. The city can, and occasionally does, challenge the tax exemptions of specific parcels of property, he said. But it no longer challenges the nonprofit status of entire institutions, nor vigorously pursues PILOT agreements.

Unless things have changed in the past few years (and I don't see where they have) adding revenue from the Pittsburgh Public Service Fund that the fund itself hasn't promised to deliver, is not really a good idea.

To say the least.