Solipsistic

Lots of headaches with making Dreamweaver CSS do what I wanted it too. Sorry about the low posting today.

Via Daily Kos:

[In the Hamdan decision,] Justice Thomas refers to Justice Stevens' "unfamiliarity with the realities of warfare"; but Stevens served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945, during World War II. Thomas's official bio, by contrast, contains no experience of military service.

I'm not going to start throwing around the label "chickenhawk," but there is an unfortunate and consistent tendency on the right to disparage the military service of liberals who have served. See John Kerry and the disgraceful smear job of Max Cleland.

Written by musician Nick Cave, "The Proposition" is an unflinching look at brutality in the Australian wilderness during British colonization. Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) is on a mission to bring order to the wilderness. As part of this mission, he is determined to track down the vicious outlaw and murderer Arthur Burns (Danny Huston). To do so, he convinces Arthur's brother Charlie (Guy Pearce) to track down Arthur in exchange for the life of the Burns family's youngest son (Richard Wilson).

Captain Stanley's plan, of course, goes awry even as he tries to shield his proper wife (Emily Watson) from the unyielding violence of their environment. The movie is close in tone to Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian." Yet, thankfully, "The Proposition" promises and finds mankind capable of redemption. Depending on your outlook, you will either find the ending a cop out or a thankful affirmation that mankind unrestricted is not solely ruled by Darwinian impulses. Order and redemption are possible.

The performances are uniformly excellent and the direction by John Hillcoat is accomplished. Ray Winstone as Captian Stanley brilliantly portrays a lawman grappling with his conscience as he tries to bring justice to the wilderness. Will likely be the year's best performance. The always excellent John Hurt is fantastic as an unscrupulous, driven bounty hunter.

Be forewarned, though, this movie is truly brutal. It is not enjoyable and I would caution against viewing the film. It is unrelentlingly brutal and incredibly tense.

Recommended, but it definitely contains an NC-17 level of violence. Of course, the movie is rated R. If a movie features more than a few seconds of male nudity or realistic sex scenes, it is given an NC-17. Unrelenting violence like the kind featured in "The Passion," "Munich," and "Saving Private Ryan" earns an R rating. This sort of double standard renders ratings practically useless. Content description is truly the best way for adults to gauge the suitability of movies for their particular sensibilities.

While browsing the magazine shelves at Borders, I found a new music magazine called "Under the Radar." On the cover was Jack White's band The Raconteurs.

I haven't been able to pick up a recent music magazine without being hit with muy info about The Raconteurs. Maybe they ought to change the name of the magazine to "Under a Rock."

This is one of my favorite super hero related and humor web sites. It's a collection of vintage Superman comics that displays his often mean and bizarre behavior. Enjoy.

Unfortunately, the load times are slightly slow. If you have a dial up connection, I wouldn't recommend visiting.

I read a very interesting article in The New Republic last night from their most recent issue devoted to conservative culture. This graf particularly stuck out:

Ask a conservative activist to explain what anchors and unites their fractious movement, and he will point to ideas: to weighty tomes by Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, Wilhelm Roepke, Edmund Burke; to the development of the philosophy of "fusionism," by which the furrow-browed theorists at National Review cogitated their way past the conflicts between the traditionalist, libertarian, and anti-communist strains of the American right. They will make it sound almost as if the 87 percent of Mississippians who voted for Barry Goldwater did so after a stretch of all-nighters in the library.

It's a funny and engaging article. You can read the whole thing on line at their website, but it requires a short registration.

Bush was in my neck of the woods last night and has this to say about the Democrats:

"There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done," he said. "They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off."

Bush's tone has turned tougher as he appears at more political events. At a Washington fundraiser this month, he said it was important that lawmakers "not wave the white flag of surrender" without asserting that any of them were actually doing so. In his appearance in this St. Louis suburb, he said directly that some Democrats want to surrender, adopting the more cutting approach of his senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

Question to the president: Name one Democrat who was called for surrender.

According to San Francisco conservative radio show host Melanie Morgan, she would have no problem with sending the New York Times editor to the gas chamber.

Before this issue gets any more insane, let's pause and remember that the information "revealed" by the New York Times was in the public record.

The Supreme Court's ruling today is a win for sanity and the Constitution. The President does not have the authority to conduct the ill-defined, neverending "war on terror" any way he deems necessary. Though the Court didn't rule out all of the president's excesses, the ruling does curb his power to a degree.

Surprisingly, Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns" is a meditation on post September 11th America. The movie imagines a world in which Superman has been in space for the past five years. This of course means Superman wasn't here on September 11th, 2001. The world, though, has missed and needed Superman--contrary to spurned Lois Lane's Pulitzer prize winning editorial "Why the World Doesn't Need a Superman."

The movie is quick to remind us, as Superman stops a jet from crashing into Metropolis, that this world does indeed need a Superman. We hear Jor El (Marlon Brando), Superman's father, tell us about the wonder of human potential and how they need a true leader to bring their justice to the fore. The world is lost and Superman, the embodiment of truth and justice*, is here to right the world once again.

In the film, Superman (Brandon Routh) battles the maniacal Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) who wants to radically reform the United States in his own image. Draw your own parallels.

Is the movie good? Singer's film supposedly is a remake of Superman III, so the horrors of Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor), Lenny Luthor (Jon Cryer), and Nuclear Man never occurred. Singer is trying to return the franchise to it's Richard Donner roots. "Superman Returns" is Kal El as the mythic hero and not the goof of "Superman's Girlfriend: Lois Lane." Every shot of the hero is meticulously framed and iconic. The tone of the film is reverent. Superman as Christ and the resurrected savior.

As a result, the movie is both magnificent and a little cold. Some of the movie is tremendous, but it is about a half hour too long. There is a little comic relief in the film supplied by Sam Huntington as Jimmy Olsen, Routh as Clark Kent, and the always dependable Parker Posey. Kevin Spacey is deliciously evil as Luthor.

I got to see about twenty minutes of the movie in 3D and these moments were pretty entertaining. I'm not sure it added much to my experience, though. The 3D was not used anywhere near as well in this film as in the magnificent looking and immersive "Deep Sea 3D." The image was still somewhat flat and had more of a pop up book look.

"Superman Returns" is magnificent in many ways. The John Williams score still gives me chills and is used exceedingly well in the film. If only the movie had been funnier and shorter, this would be a Superman for the ages.

*When Perry White (Frank Langella) is talking to his staff about Superman, he says that Supes represents "truth, justice, and all that other stuff." The screenwriters and Singer make a concious effort to portray the hero as an emodiment of justice rather than an embodiment of America.

In the new book "Oath Betrayed," Dr. Stephen Miles, professor of medicine from the University of Minnesota, documents and describes the torture and neglect of US detainees by military doctors. On the Diane Rehm show this morning, Miles talked about his book compiled through documents obtained by the ACLU through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests. His presentation was sober and chilling.

Dr. William Winkenwerder, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, was on the show as well and he claimed ignorance of many of the incidents described by Dr. Miles. He also repeatedly acknowledged the horrors of Abu Ghraib, but like so many others he described the abuses at Abu Ghraib as an isolated, regrettable incident. (And we all know that we caught the person responsible for Abu Ghraib.)

Amazingly, many callers into the show sought to justify the torture with such justifications such as "well they caught the heads off our soldiers." Have we become so callous? (Of course, "they" is ill-defined as always. It's an all encompassing pronoun and paves the way for dehumanizing.)

Torture and abuse of US detainees is real and ongoing. The question you have to ask yourself is if this is okay with you. Is this what your god or conscience tells you is acceptable? Are we a nation of torturers?

This was how Fox was described by Jon Stewart.

Check out this ridiculous statement by E.D. Hill on this morning's Fox and Friends.

Fox is supposed to be a news network, not a gathering of talk radio loonies. They never cease to amaze and horrify.

From The Hill:

House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records.

But as we all learned yesterday, the monitoring of the SWIFT database was already a matter of public record. President Bush stated publicly that following the money trail is a primary method used by the US to track terrorists:

Before September the 11th, law enforcement could more easily obtain business and financial records of white-collar criminals than of suspected terrorists. See, part of the way to make sure that we catch terrorists is we chase money trails. And yet it was easier to chase a money trail with a white-collar criminal than it was a terrorist. The Patriot Act ended this double standard and it made it easier for investigators to catch suspected terrorists by following paper trails here in America.

This seems to me a matter of common sense. Good law enforcement requires following the money wherever it leads. (See HBO series "The Wire.) Unless terrorist suspects are completely ignorant, they knew we were doing this anyway.

We should also remember that the only target of the White House's ire is The New York Times. Who else published the story? The Wall Street Journal.

Why hasn't The Wall Steet Journal been publicly lambasted?

When asked why the administration had not asked the Wall Street Journal to hold off publication as it had with the other two papers, Snow said he did not know, referring such inquiries to Treasury Department Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tony Fratto.

I'm very glad the flag burning ammendment did not pass yesterday. Why?

A)Because who burns flags these days anyway? This bill was spurred on by memories of the Vietnam era.

B)It's a restriction of free speech. Now if you burned a flag in a crowded theater...

Thank goodness. Isn't some other entity also dropping in popularity?

Coincidence?

Pat Boone is really into gold.

Yes, the Miami Seven had no connection to al Qaeda, had no weapons or explosives, and were some sort of weird Christian sect. Yet, their capture warranted a press conference by Gonzalez. "The Daily Show" has the hilarious details.

My wife called this one and I was dismissive of her skepticism. Remember, when analyzing the statements of the Bush administration skepticism is healthy and necessary.

Calls for the New York Times staff to be lynched are based on the premise that the paper harmed our national security by letting terrorist suspects know the US was following international financial transactions. This, though, was already a matter of public record:

Yesterday’s New York Times Story on US monitoring of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) transactions certainly hit the street with a splash. It awoke the general public to the practice. In that sense, it was truly new news. But reports on US monitoring of SWIFT transactions have been out there for some time. The information was fairly well known by terrorism financing experts back in 2002. The UN Al Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Group , on which I served as the terrorism financing expert, learned of the practice during the course of our monitoring inquiries. The information was incorporated in our report to the UN Security Council in December 2002. That report is still available on the UN Website. Paragraph 31 of the report states:

“The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.”

Suggestions that SWIFT and other similar transactions should be monitored by investigative agencies dealing with terrorism, money laundering and other criminal activity have been out there for some time. An MIT paper discussed the pros and cons of such practices back in 1995. Canada’s Financial Intelligence Unit, FINTRAC,, for one, has acknowledged receiving information on Canadian origin SWIFT transactions since 2002. Of course, this info is provided by the banks themselves.

So calm down crazies and quit trying to abolish the free press. The press is a valuable part of our democracy. Ideally, they help us to be better citizens by highlighting the abuses and mistakes of our government.

If we lynch Bill Keller, Editor of the New York Times, the terrorists have won.

Link provided by the excellent blog Unclaimed Territory. Go read his whole post on the issue. Great stuff.

Lee Siegel at The New Republic caught some flak over the weekend for coining the term blogofascism and broadly applying it to the blogosphere. I think Siegel's conclusion is simplistic and too generalized, but I won't rule out the existence of fascists in the blogosphere. (The guys at Little Green Footballs are very scary.)

Case in point: While posting on The Washington Monthly comments board, I reprinted some of my comments about how Joe Biden's recent swipe at Cheney was ridiculous and uncalled for.

The aptly named Reprobate blasted me for failing to embrace the vitriol--his comments are the italicized ones:

Dick Cheney is the Vice President of the United States

Dick Cheney is a crook and a coward. He's also the de facto president, and has been from the beginning.

and one of the most powerful men in the world. I agree that the White House plan on Iraq has been and continues to be disastrous, but Cheney by virtue of his office deserves to be heard.

Why should we continue to give credence to the architects of failure?

Biden is not a talking head, shock jock, or Newsmax writer. He is a senator and he should conduct himself accordingly.

I'm no fan of the man, but at least he's grown a spine.

Biden comes off badly here and it strikes me as a desperate pandering. Make some substantive arguments. This kind of vitriol is uncalled for and harmful. Who cares where Cheney is polling? He's the (Vice) President.

The public is coming around to the realization that Cheney has botched this motherfucking war beyond the barest trace of repair. And you expect us to bow in deference to the prick? Whose side are you really on, anyway?

"No, I don't want to respond to him. He's at 20 percent in the polls. No one listens to him. He has no credibility. It's ridiculous."

Beautiful. It's time someone said it.

I responded thusly:

Reprobate, I'm not gonna take some loyalty oath just so you can be sure of my liberal bona fides. Are we fascists or are we free thinkers?

My point is that Biden failed to do anything substantive concerning the war since its dreadful conception. Then he throws some red meat to the bloggers and we are supposed to rise up and call him blessed.

Give me a break. Biden's no hero.

Eviscerating the Vice President through substantive argument--and it wouldn't be hard--would have been a better and wiser choice. No one need bow in unnecessary deference, but as a Senator, he shouldn't be sounding like Randi Rhodes.

And let me reiterate, what do Cheney's poll numbers have to do with anything?

We all remember the rock solid evidence of mobile weapons labs in Iraq--blurry satellite photos, drawings of what the labs would probably look like, and "first hand descriptions" of the labs. As we have learned about so much of Powell's presentation, the mobile weapons labs evidence was dubious. From the Washington Post yesterday:

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.

"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."

This is just another reminder of the White House's modus operandi in preparation for the war: dubious evidence presented as actionable intelligence. The 1% doctrine at work.

So much of Powell's presentation was laughable--the faux anthrax, the drawings of mobile weapons facilities. Yet it was presented as conclusive and a definitive call to action.

And the fact that there were and are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Maybe if they clap enough...

Warren Buffet, one of the nation's richest men and one of the most vocal opponents of repealing the estate tax--or "death" tax to you ditto heads--is giving 85% of his fortune to charity.

Buffet, quoted today in The New York Times, concerning the nation's other welfare state:

“I love it when I’m around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society,” he said. “At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds.”

This T.C. Boyle novel about the lives of Alfred Kinsey's ("Sexual Behavior in the Adult Male") dedicated research team is a fascinating, bracing study not for the squeamish. The story is told from the point of view of John Milk--a milquetoast--desparate for a father figure. He quickly falls under the sway of the charismatic, but manipulative Kinsey.

Though the book is frank and descriptive in its exploration of human sexuality, it is surprisingly conservative in its message. Sex is not merely a biological function--as Kinsey preaches--but a powerful, spirtual act. Milk dabbles in promiscuity, but it nearly destroys his marriage. Much like "Eyes Wide Shut"--sold as a sexploitation flick, but a surprisinly moral tale--"The Inner Circle" is an affirmation of fidelity.

Highly recommended, but be forewarned. Many of the book's sex scenes are graphic and some are disturbing.

Right wing pundits have been wringing their hands this weekend and saying that the media are more concerned about hurting Bush's popularity than protecting our national security. The basis for their claim is that the New York Times broke the story of the government gaining access to financial transaction records via the data collection firm SWIFT.

How did breaking this story hurt our national security?

Are terrorist suspects, who do not realize they are suspects, going to suddenly only transfer money via briefcases and bags dropped in trash cans? Are terrorist suspects going to suddenly switch to a barter system--dry goods for plastique--because they now know the government is concerned about terrorism?

Joe Biden (D-DE) had this exchange with Wolf Blitzer recently:

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The worst possible thing we could do is what the Democrats are suggesting, and no matter how you carve it, you can call it anything you want, but basically, it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight.

BLITZER: All right. You want to respond to the vice president, Senator Biden?

BIDEN: No, I don't want to respond to him. He's at 20 percent in the polls. No one listens to him. He has no credibility. It's ridiculous.

The talking heads on the right are going to have a field day with this and rightly so. Dick Cheney is the Vice President of the United States and one of the most powerful men in the world. I agree that the White House plan on Iraq has been and continues to be disastrous, but Cheney by virtue of his office deserves to be heard. Biden is not a talking head, shock jock, or Newsmax writer. He is a senator and he should conduct himself accordingly.

Biden comes off badly here and it strikes me as a desperate pandering. Make some substantive arguments. This kind of vitriol is uncalled for and harmful. Who cares where Cheney is polling? He's the Vice President.

Ridiculous. If Biden had wanted to make a real difference, he should have voted against the authorization to use force and used his office to make a substantive critique of the disastrous plan to invade Iraq.

Biden is a wind sock.

If there's one thing I hate about my ice cream, it would be its consistent liberal bias. Glad Star Spangled Ice Cream is here to help.

Discovered via Bob and David.

This is very old news, but David Cross ("Mr. Show") and Larry the Cable Guy have been sniping back and forth for awhile now. David Cross wrote a long open letter to Mr. the Cable Guy after Mr. the Cable Guy grew upset that Cross called his act racist. Cross provides some examples of the racist humor in Larry's act as proof. Prepare to be astounded (the stuff in quotes is from Mr. the Cable Guy, the rest is David Cross):

Re: Abu Ghraib Torture -

"Let me ask some of these commie rag head carpet flying wicker basket on the head balancing scumbags something!"

Re: Having a Muslim cleric give the opening prayer at the Republican Convention -

"What the hell is this the cartoon network? The Republicans had a muslim give the opening prayer at there (sic) convention! What the hell's going on around here! Is Muslim now the official religion of the United States!... First these peckerheads ( Ironically, "peckerhead" was a derogatory word slaves and their offspring used to describe white people) fly planes into towers and now theys (sic) prayin' before conventions! People say not all of em did that and I say who gives a rats fat ass! That's a fricken slap in the face to New York city by having some muslim sum-bitch give the invocation at the republican convention! This country pretty much bans the Christian religion (the religion of George Washington and John Wayne) virtually from anything public and then they got us watchin' this muslim BS!! Ya wanna pray to allah then drag yer flea infested ass over to where they pray to allah at!" End Quote. So... yeah. There you go. This quote goes on and on but my favorite part is when you say towards the end, "...now look, I love all people (except terrorist countries that want to kill us)..."

There are numerous examples and I don't think I need to reprint any more. You get the idea. Oh, what the hell, here's one more - "They're dead, get over it! Poor little sandy asses! I'm sure all them dead folks'd they'd killed give 40 shekels or whatever kinda money these inbred sumbitches use, but I'd give 40 of 'em whatever it is to be humiliated instead of dead!"

Until now, I have just found Larry annoying and unfunny, but after reading this I find him pretty horrifying. Those aren't jokes. That's KKK cocktail party chatter.

He also starred in the worst titled movie this year: "Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector."

Saw Beatle Bob today at the Bread Co. Love him or hate him, the dancing mop top is a Saint Louis institution.

Zack Snyder, director of "Dawn of the Dead" and the upcoming Frank Miller adaption "300," will direct an adaptation of Alan Moore's "Watchmen."

The filming of "Watchmen" has started and stopped so many times, but after the success of "Sin City" and Moore's "V for Vendetta," I think it will finally happen.

"Watchmen" is one of the great novels. Don't let the fact that it's a comic book fool you. It's a fascinating, complex, and gripping read. There is no way a movie can do the material justice. Maybe it will be fun to watch anyway.

(Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead"--if you don't mind gore--is fantastic as well.)

I'm probably going to go see it this week. Was the case convincing? Was it gripping, regardless of whether or not you bought Gore's presentation? Will it be influential?

Newsweek reveals Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's plan for the future of Iraq:

A timetable for withdrawal of occupation troops from Iraq. Amnesty for all insurgents who attacked U.S. and Iraqi military targets. Release of all security detainees from U.S. and Iraqi prisons. Compensation for victims of coalition military operations.

These demands are going to create some waves and one wonders how Maliki will fair with the US after advocating this plan.

As long as the White House has its way, the US will not set up any kind of timetable for leaving Iraq. We are on track to build permanent military bases there and Iraq is part of the larger plan to democratize/stabilize/control the Middle East.

Watching the World Cup this week, I once again realized that soccer will never become hugely popular in the US. The US fought hard against Italy and viewers had to settle for a 1-1 tie. Bleah.

The biggest reason it will not catch on with American viewers is that there is not enough offense. We love our homeruns, slam dunks, and touchdowns.

Of course not, but a new study conducted at the University of East Carolina suggests just that:

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

That's particularly dismaying news because the show is hugely popular among college students, many of whom already don't bother to cast ballots.

Two things:

Many college students don't vote--and "The Daily Show" has nothing to do with that-- and when your two candidates are George Bush and John Kerry, isn't cynicism in order?

Democrats are being accused of wanting to cut and run in Iraq, but Republicans as of yet have offered no substantive plan except "more of the same."

More of the same isn't working.

Who was surprised to learn that the White House was collecting bank records of thousands of Americans?

Anyone?

Anyone?

There were some real gems in today's Tony Snow press conference:

Separately, President Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said the program complies with "the letter and spirit of the law." He said members of Congressional intelligence committees had been apprised of the program, though he did not provide specifics.

Mr. Snow derided criticisms of the program as "entirely abstract in nature." He said it had been subjected to outside auditing, and that the president did not need to seek authorization from Congress for it.

"Let me tell you why this is important: it works," Mr. Snow said. "It is sought only for terrorism investigations. A series of safeguards have been put in place."

The program is within "the letter and spirit of the law." What do we know about how the White House interprets the Constitution? We know that they have decided whatever the President wants to do to conduct "the war on terror" is legal. This assurance of legality is hardly comforting.

"Mr. Snow derided criticism as abstract in nature." Of course criticism is going to be abstract when the program is conducted under a shroud of secrecy.

Why is the program important? "It works." These days pragmatism trumps civil liberties. I just we'd gotten a say in whether pragmatism was our nation's watchword. You know, because this is a democracy and all.

Today's story is just further proof that we are all suspects first and citizens second.

TPM Muckraker has the details, culled from the newly released McCain report:

[W]hen Ralph Reed...went to work for Jack Abramoff's Indian casino clients (his job was to roust grassroots Christians against competiting gambling platforms), he got skittish about accepting money from the tribes directly, since he's, you know, supposed to be anti-gambling. So he used non-profits, like Grover Norquist's American for Tax Reform, as pass-throughs to disguise the origin of the funds.

So inaccurate it makes your head spin:

From the media-bias corner, my early two cents: the anti-war media has often used inaccurate hyperbole here when they have stated there were “no” weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The discovery of a single canister of sarin makes that claim inaccurate, and the media are supposed to care about getting it right, even when they were not called upon it by top officials.

The anti-war media? Surely he's referring to Z Mag or Democracy Now! Certainly, they are not referring to televised and print news who fell over themselves to beat the war drums and spout White House press releases. He should really go look at the big three networks news coverage as we rolled into Iraq. The coverage was positively giddy.

A canister of degraded sarin is not a viable WMD program. That is what we were told Saddam had.

Do not let these guys move the goalposts.

As a young Presbyterian, sincere in my faith and eager to formulate a vibrant, consistent "world and life view," I frequently turned to World Magazine, a Christian news publication sold to and written by many in the reformed community. I was convinced that World's interpretation of world events was Christian--and not just Christian, but reformed--and therefore should be my own.

As I grew older, though, I grew more skeptical of the magazine, particularly as I saw their tendency to toe the GOP party line. Then in the lead up to the Iraq war, I found their coverage simple and atrocious. I was heartbroken and outraged. They helped sell Bush's unjustified and immoral war to my church. They gave it the reformed seal of approval.

And surprise, surprise, in the most recent issue of World, they come out against John Tester who is running against Senator Conrad Burns (R-MN) for a spot in the US Senate. World Magazine, rather than take a substantive look at Burns, offers this up as a reason not to vote for him:

Mr. Tester is the favorite of the "netroots," the often wild and almost always hard-left bloggers and MoveOn.org activists who have flooded the Democratic Party with their particular brand of energy and vitriol. Mr. Tester won his primary race over the favorite of Democratic Party regulars, State Auditor John Morrison, and his campaign—along with Ned Lamont's primary challenge in Connecticut to Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman—is now the rallying point for the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party.

Mr. Tester is favored by the scary "netroots," MoveOn crowd and the Michael Moore wing of the party. Ken Mehlman couldn't have written a better smear.

World Magazine is just another voice in a sea of partisan right wing media. They have done, and continue to do, a great disservice to the churchgoers they represent.

National Review ticks off some tired talking points to downplay US brutality against Iraqis:

Why will Menchaca and Tucker be forgotten while incidents like those under investigation — or the grotesque theater of Abu Ghraib — will persist, fester, be written about, analyzed, become vehicles for critiques of U.S. policy, the military, or the whole of American culture?

By rights these incidents should demonstrate that we are better than our enemies. We are civilized, they are barbarians. What we are fighting for is objectively superior to what they are fighting for. Our struggle is legitimate, theirs is not. There is no room for moral relativism in this war. Certainly those who view torture and beheading as acts of piety have no problem seeing it as a black and white conflict. And when faced with extremism of this sort, we should take it at face value.

What is our mission? Why is it legitimate?

The treatment of US soldiers was brutal and horrible. Unjustified and evil. US mistreatment of Iraqis has been brutal, horrible, unjustified, and evil. I think National Review may want to rethink calling critics of the war "relativists." There seems to be a little nationalist relativism occurring at Buckley's flagship.

And why do Americans get upset over US atrocities in wartime? Because such acts are atrocious. They are not what we want from our nation. It is not part of the value system that we want for our troops and ourselves. We know that those we fight in war will at times be brutal and evil, but we don't desire the same of our own.

Media coverage of US atrocities is important and essential. It shines a light on the dark underbelly of warfare--particularly an endless war with ill-defined goals and parameters.

Also, referring to our enemies as barbarians is a dangerous caricature that dehumanizes and leads to an environment in which abuse occurs and is tolerated. Why not torture our enemies, they're just barbarians?

From Santorum's press release concerning the news of WMD in Iraq:

Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.

Did we go to war over degraded chemical weapons or over the existence of an active, thriving chemical weapons program that the Iraqis were ready to use against us via unmanned drones and Saddam's al Qaeda pals?

Everyone knew there were degraded chemical weapons in Iraq. Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector, said on numerous occasions that while Saddam did have chemical weapons, none of them were useful anymore. No one denied or doubted the existence of old, unusable weapons in Iraq.

Are these bum weapons the same ones that we so feverishly demanded that Saddam produce in order to calm our fury? (The whole Iraq WMD debacle just makes my head hurt.)

Santorum is simply trying to move the goalposts.

It's a number.

Ron Suskind was featured on "The Situation Room" last night and dropped some more bombshells from his new book "The One Percent Solution."

The US deliberately bombed an Al Jazeera office in Kabul to send a message to the news organization.

The White House's definition of actionable intelligence was highly suspect. "Suspicion, both inside America and abroad, became the threshold for action." If there was a 1% chance that a threat might materialize, then the White House treated it as a certainty. (Ed. note: This is consistent with our actions against Iraq based on highly dubious intelligence.)

The CIA concluded that the bin Laden tape released shortly before the November 2004 election was intended to help Bush win the presidency.

Go take a look at the link above, read the book, and decide for yourself.

Rush Limbaugh lied yesterday about lefties in the blogosphere. Said that we were celebrating the torture and death of the two US soldiers in Iraq. He fails to cite any blog where such opinions were expressed and his statement implies that this a consensus opinion:

"You know, it-it's-I-uh...I gotta tell ya, I-I-I perused the liberal, kook blogs today, and they are happy that these two soldiers got tortured. They're saying, "Good riddance. Hope Rumsfeld and whoever sleep well tonight."

Booman Tribune did an extensive look across the internet in order to fact check Rush.

Why do I spend time writing about the slanders and lies of right wing talking heads? As a reminder that they are often unscrupulous, they lie, and they must be viewed with skepticism.

I am highly skeptical of much of what I hear on Air America as well. Particularly Randi Rhodes. The right wing media machine, though, is far more popular and has a more extensive reach.

More specifically metropolitan Saint Louis. More specifically Bridgeton, MO.

Slate has the details:

In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.

In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to the room, located inside AT&T's facility in Bridgeton. The room's tight security includes a biometric "mantrap" or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were "monitoring network traffic" and that the room was being used by "a government agency."

The details provided by the two former workers about the Bridgeton room bear the distinctive earmarks of an operation run by the National Security Agency, according to two intelligence experts with extensive knowledge of the NSA and its operations. In addition to the room's high-tech security, those intelligence experts told Salon, the exhaustive vetting process AT&T workers were put through before being granted top-secret security clearance points to the NSA, an agency known as much for its intense secrecy as its technological sophistication.

The author of the piece cannot confirm defintively that AT&T is monitoring internet traffic in cooperation with the NSA so take the story with a grain of salt. I think we are becoming--have become--a nation in which we are all suspects and this philosophy will pave the way for the development of an intrusive police state. If this is occurring, then the terrorists have won.

The same Slate story reminds us of the new understanding of presidential authority:

The Bush administration has acknowledged the use of domestic surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, but maintains they are conducted within the legal authority of the presidency. Several cases challenging the legality of the alleged spying operations are now pending in federal court, including suits against the federal government, and AT&T, among other telecom companies.

Is domestic spying legal? Whatever the president wants to do in pursuit of his "war on terror" is legal according to the White House.

The White House condoned the torture of a mentally ill man in an effort that yielded no actionable intelligence, according to Ron Suskind in his new book "The One Percent Doctrine."

The Washington Post has the details:

[The book tells of] the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques...

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

According to Mark Levin at National Review Online:

For the past few years, we’ve watched the Senate debate, the Congress adopt, and then the president sign legislation that would confer constitutional rights on unlawful enemy combatants captured on the battlefield and detained at Guantanamo Bay, while we watch as our Marines are accused of war crimes at Haditha without the benefit of any due-process rights. (And notice, not a word from John McCain, Lindsey Graham, or Chuck Hagel.) We’ve watched as self-labeled human-rights groups have demanded that the Geneva Conventions be applied to terrorists, even though they’re applicable only to those who honor the rules of war. We’ve watched as the ACLU and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s offspring have brought lawsuits before activist courts challenging the conditions of the detained terrorists. We’ve watched as virtually every intelligence gathering technique is attacked as a civil-liberties and constitutional violation, from the Patriot Act and the NSA intercept program to data-mining and interrogating the enemy. We’ve watched as the Supreme Court and now lower federal courts have intervened in the president’s constitutional commander-in-chief duties, substituting their policy preferences for his despite their lack of information, experience, or competence. We’ve watched as the media have used every opportunity to undermine our war effort with flat-out false reporting (the phony story about flushing of a Koran down a toilet at Gitmo), the exploitation of Abu Ghraib (with overkill coverage), the promotion of irresponsible antiwar voices (such as Cindy Sheehan and Michael Berg), and the support of antiwar politicians like John Murtha (who went from a relative unknown to an overnight media sensation because of his shrill and irresponsible antiwar allegations). And we’ve watched as the media have splashed some of our nation’s most important war secrets across their front pages, and then give themselves awards for aiding and abetting the enemy.

Is this a war? Major combat operations are over, right? When will this war be won? What are our objectives? Who are the enemies? How will we defeat the enemy? When will we know we have won?

Until this war is defined, we are locked into a war without end where the executive is all-powerful and human rights can be overlooked.

Levin then says we should go and do some major ass kicking in retaliation for the brutal murders of our soldiers:

Meanwhile, two kidnapped U.S. soldiers were apparently brutally tortured and murdered today. And the question I pose to those who rightly honor the Greatest Generation is this: What would our country have done 60 years ago in response to this war crime? How would our political and military leadership have acted? By all accounts, they would have demanded severe retaliation and retribution. And by that I don’t mean “bringing the perpetrators to justice,” as if we’re talking about some law-enforcement response to a white-collar crime. No, I’m talking about a military response of such devastation that the enemy fears the consequences of future kidnappings and executions of our men and women in uniform. And that’s what’s missing in this war — the enemy does not fear us (at least not enough) and defeatism (rather than victory) is being preached from Capitol Hill and the news and editorial pages.

The whole crew at National Review seems to think the only way to win this war is blow the hell out of Iraq. Go ahead and vaporize all those hearts and minds then we won't have to worry about winning them.

The Washington Post gives us all good reason to:

The topic was the largest defense procurement scandal in recent decades, and the two investigators for the Pentagon's inspector general in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office on April 1, 2005, asked the secretary to raise his hand and swear to tell the truth.

Rumsfeld agreed but complained. "I find it strange," he said to the investigators, on the grounds that as a government official "the laws apply to me" anyway.

His consistent arrogance and contempt for democracy are detestable.

Via Atrios.

According to Tony Snow:

"The president understands people's impatience — not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, 'Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?' But you cannot conduct a war based on polls."

Josh Marshall at TPM reminds us why such a statement is ridiculous:

For those of you who aren't familiar with the reference, the Battle of the Bulge took place as the Allies were moving across France and Belgium several months after D-Day. The Germans launched a counter-offensive the strategic objective of which was to force the allies to give up their goal of unconditional German surrender and force them to come to some sort of negotiated peace. The German effort was initially successful, opening up a large salient or 'bulge' within the allied lines. But the allies eventually recovered the lost ground. And I believe the general consensus is that the whole battle greatly accelerated the Nazis' eventual collapse because they lost a lot of armor and other resources in the effort.

In any case, you don't need to know those details to understand one key fact. The Battle of the Bulge began in the middle of December 1944. And it was over by the end of January 1945. So the whole thing lasted less than six weeks. It must have been an eternity for the American and British soldiers in this incredibly hard-fought battle in sub-zero temperatures. But in terms of time, or what Snow terms 'impatience', it's simply not comparable to the last three years in Iraq...

Snow's point isn't just historically silly, it's morally obtuse and cynical. It shows as much contempt for the public as the White House seems to have for our soldiers in the field. For the United States, the situation in Iraq is close to unprecedented in the last century in terms of the duration of time an American president has left a war policy on autopilot while more and more evidence comes in that it's simply not working. Even in Vietnam, for all the mistakes the US made there, Richard Nixon kept escalating the conflict. There's at least some strategic movement on the policy brain scan. I'm not saying that's preferable. And I don't want to get into an argument about bombing Cambodia. But it is at least different from letting a flawed policy grind through money and men for three years because you don't have the moral courage to rethink it or adjust course. It's denial elevated to the level of high principle.

It's a shrewd move to compare WWII--a necessary and costly war--to Iraq--a disaster of choice. It clouds the issues surrounding the leadup to the war and tries to make us believe that our current campaign is necessary and just. While shrewd, though, the comparison is ridiculous.

Surprisingly, McDonald's has been a success in France:

...But even as protesters sought to cast McDonald's as the embodiment of all that is wrong with fast food and American culture, the French never stopped eating its hamburgers. Indeed, for all the attacks on the company, McDonald's operating profit in France last year was second only to that of McDonald's in the United States...

McDonald's success in Europe comes amid its resurgence in the United States. As in Europe, McDonald's in the United States attracted attention by introducing healthy food items, like salad and fruit. But unlike Europe, McDonald's revival in the United States came in recent months partly because of the enormous success of the Dollar Menu, where all items, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches, cost $1.

France and the rest of Europe did not suffer as harsh a slump as did McDonald's in the United States. In fact, the strength of the French and other European restaurants helped the parent company get through the rough patch. In several quarters last year McDonald's noted that the company got a boost from its European restaurants, its second-biggest market...

He says the French took so quickly to McDonald's, despite their own sophisticated cuisine, because it was fast, convenient and affordable. And it was child-friendly, not a characteristic of the traditional French restaurant.

"If you had kids and tried to go to a traditional restaurant," he said, "it was a nightmare, not a pleasant experience."

Also crucial, he says, was a French "fascination with America."

When I visited France, I first arrived past 10 at night and was very hungry. The only restaurant still open McDonald's. So my first taste of French cuisine was from the golden arches.

"Napoleon Dynamite" director Jared Hess leaps forward as a filmmaker with his second effort "Nacho Libre." The movie is more cohesive, sweeter, and it jettisons much of the ridicule that soured so many audiences to "Napoleon." (And which made the movie play like Todd Solondz ("Welcome to the Dollhouse") for kids.) With this second effort Hess shows much more promise and has me looking forward to his third effort.

The movie is definitely weird. The opening fifteen minutes are charming, strong, and straight out of Wes Anderson ("Rushmore") right down to the twee and international pop soundtrack. The movie then tosses in a little Jann Svankmajer ("Little Otik"), followed by Sid and Marty Kroft ("Land of the Lost.")

The story follows Nacho (Jack Black) as he tries to realize his lifelong dream of becoming a real luchador, or wrestler. The movie, like "Napoleon", lacks momentum, but its comic inventiveness is so refreshing that I was still entertained.

A weird, at times surreal film recommended for its unique vision and unbridled goofiness.

Funny stuff.

According to 35,000 pages of government documents and witness testimony the following practices have been used against detainees at Gitmo:

Beating; punching with fists; use of truncheons; kicking; slamming against walls; stretching or suspension (to tear ligaments or muscles to cause asphyxia); external electric shocks; forcing prisoners to abase and to urinate on themselves; forced masturbation; forced renunciation of religion; false confessions or accusations; applying urine and feces to prisoners; making verbal threats to a prisoner and his family; denigration of a prisoner's religion; force-feeding; induced hypothermia and exposure to extreme heat; dietary manipulation; use of sedatives; extreme sleep deprivation; mock executions; water immersion; "water-boarding"; obstruction of the prisoner's airway; chest compression; thermal burning; rape; dog bites; sexual abuse; forcing a prisoner to watch the abuse or torture of a loved one.

Is the nation that practices such cruelty the one we want for ourselves and our children? Are we a nation of torturers?

Iraqi workers at the US embassy in Baghdad are fearing for their lives.

How much longer do we have in Baghdad before complete FUBAR?

Estimates?

My wife and I thrilled to this appalling show last night on WE. (Yes, yes, not a very masculine show or network, but when you're married you have to make these concessions.)

They found one bride so mean and fascinating that they are stretching her story out over at least three episodes. Catch the nastiness next Sunday night.

Very busy today. School has started back. Many chores as well as good friends to see.

Refereeing at World Cup stunk.

Paul Rieckhoff's new Iraq war autobiography "Chasing Ghosts" is a brisk and challenging read. Like other recent works on the war, it serves the valuable purpose of putting a human face on both the Americans fighting and, to a much lesser extent, the people of Iraq. By humanizing the participants, we are more acutely reminded of the human cost of the war.

The combat descriptions are brief and intense. Particularly harrowing is Rieckhoff's description of working at Ground Zero after 9-11. The story of what he saw is gruesome and haunting. Rieckhoff spends much of the book talking about the challenge of leading men in combat when the military is underequipped, the mission ill-defined, and the war managed badly by the higher-ups. The latter portion of the book is devoted to his attempts to reintegrate into civilain life and his mission to gain political influence in the debate on Iraq.

Rieckhoff's story is fascinating. He believed Bush's mission in Iraq was faulty, but he also desired to serve and defend the nation. Believing that Bush's war is wrong, he still believes that we owe it to the Iraqis to create a more stable nation.

As Rieckhoff reaches the conclusion of his work, he assures us that both sides of the Iraq debate have it wrong. We cannot pull out and we cannot "stay the course." He says there is a third, fourth, and fifth way, but he does not elaborate. I wish he had, but his account challenged me to reexamine the nasty consequence of leaving Iraq. We will create a power vaccum when we leave and great violence will ensue. But do we have a choice at this point? Can we win this war? If we should never have gone in the first place, is it just to stay? Can we afford to leave?

According to Press Secretary Tony Snow. From TPM:

QUESTION: Tony, American deaths in Iraq have reached 2,500. Is there any response or reaction from the President on that?

SNOW: It's a number. And every time there's one of these 500 benchmarks, people want something.

The president would like the war to be over now. Everybody would like the war to be over now. And the one thing that we saw in Iraq this week is further testimony to the quality of the men and the women who are doing that, and the dedication and determination to try to ensure that the people of Iraq really do live in a free, effective democracy of their own creation and design.

Any president who goes through a time of war feels very deeply the responsibility for sending men and women into harm's way and feels very deeply the pain that the families feel. And this president is no different.

You've seen it many times. You saw it. You saw it when he was in that ballroom. You had this crowd of service men and women who were cheering loudly for the president, and he got choked up.

So it's always a sad benchmark.

Snow quickly dismisses the number and then rattles off a list of positives: troops working hard, Iraqis working hard, and a president who cares. It's a slick piece of redirection, but it's also a disservice to the country. As each live is lost, the price of the mission becomes greater. Americans need to stay aware of the human cost so that they can reevaluate the necessity of the mission.

Also, the "It's a number" quote comes off as a callous. Intentionally or not, it makes it sound like our troops are expendable and disposable. 2,500 is a large number and it represents a tremendous loss.

The New York Times offers a rundown of yesterday's House debate on Iraq. As expected, the Republican led debate was not substantive but was a recycling of talking points. The intent was to make Democrats look weak, against our troops, and unable to handle the war on terror.

Take for instance this morally irresponsible statement from Senate Majority Leader Hastert (R-IL):

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois opened the formal debate on a war that, the government announced Thursday, had claimed the lives of 2,500 American troops. "It is a battle we must endure and one in which we can and will be victorious," he said of the fight in Iraq and beyond. "The alternative would be to cut and run and wait for them to regroup and bring the terror back to our shores."

When did Iraqis ever invade our shores? Hastert is perpetuating the myth that Iraq was connected to the 9-11 attacks. It is a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people. It is reprehensible.

Looking at the merely symbolic but politically shrewd resolution being debated by the House, we see the Republicans engaging in classic bait and switch:

The resolution under debate in the House declares that the United States and its allies are "engaged in a global war on terror, a long and demanding struggle against an adversary that is driven by hatred of American values and that is committed to imposing, by the use of terror, its repressive ideology throughout the world." It also declares that "the terrorists have declared Iraq to be the central front in their war against all who oppose their ideology."

Forget the stated reasons for going to Iraq. That doesn't matter at this point. The terrorists have gotten together in committee and determined to make Iraq their central front in the war on terror--a highly dubious claim. (I do not believe that terrorists aren't also planning attacks elsewhere and that they as a group have concentrated all furor on Iraq. Case in point: last summer's London bombing.)

Forget the WMD. Forget the ties of 9-11. Iraq is now a hotbed of terrorism--which many against the war, myself included, believed would happen--and in order to combat terror, we must stay. By attacking Iraq and continuing to fight we are creating new enemies and future terrorists.

The resolution and rhetoric on display doesn't seem to make a distinction between terrorists in Iraq (al-Qaeda) and the armed insurgency. This is misleading and an attempt to make this complicated mess appear to have a simple solution.

Police can enter your home without warning according to the Supreme Court.

Nathan Newman at TPM Cafe asks what happens if you shoot an unannounced policeman who you assume is an intruder?

Is the Iraqi PM considering giving amnesty to those who have killed American troops?

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office Thursday accepted the resignation of an aide who had told a reporter that Maliki was considering a limited amnesty that would likely include guerrillas who had attacked U.S. troops, the aide said.

The aide, Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, stood by his account, reported in Thursday's issue of The Washington Post. Kadhimi said Maliki himself had indicated the same position less directly in public.

Maliki's office issued a statement earlier Thursday saying: "Mr. Adnan Kadhimi doesn't represent the Iraqi government in this issue, and Mr. Kadhimi is not an adviser or spokesman for the prime minister."

Kadhimi, who also worked as an aide to the previous Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, said he had submitted his resignation earlier in the week. He was informed Thursday that his resignation had been accepted, he said.

Another Maliki aide, asked if the amnesty being considered by the government was likely to apply to those who had attacked U.S. forces, said Maliki had been ''clear, saying those whose hands weren't stained with Iraqi blood" may be eligible for any amnesty.

If this story is true, it will represent a major step toward Iraqi autonomy and will likely be there last for a long while.

Story via Atrios.

From the opening moments of "A Prairie Home Companion", you know you are in the hands of a master. The subdued opening credit sequence takes place in a quite, serene Minnesota prarie with the Aurora Borealis shimmering above. An offscreen radio scans through various stations and we hear snippets of talk radio and evangelizing. A beautiful opening sequence.

We then meet Guy Noir(Kevin Kline) who is in charge of security at the Fitzgerald Theater, home of the radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." It is the show's last night. The theater has been bought by a Texas corporation that will tear the place down and turn it into a parking lot.

The show's cast, including Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, and John C. Reilly, puts on one last show all while an angel(Virginia Madsen) wonders around the set. A weird, meandering movie that is very charming and a must for Altman fans. It's much better than the radio show on which it is based because it jettisons the interminable comedy skits.

Recommended.

There is an intriguing piece in The Washington Monthly that looks at why conservatism will never work as a governing philosophy:

...The collapse of the Bush presidency, in other words, is not just due to Bush's incompetence (although his administration has been incompetent beyond belief). Nor is it a response to the president's principled lack of intellectual curiosity and pitbull refusal to admit mistakes (although those character flaws are certainly real enough). And the orgy of bribery and special-interest dispensation in Congress is not the result of Tom DeLay's ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was. This conservative presidency and Congress imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.

Contemporary conservatism is first and foremost about shrinking the size and reach of the federal government. This mission, let us be clear, is an ideological one. It does not emerge out of an attempt to solve real-world problems, such as managing increasing deficits or finding revenue to pay for entitlements built into the structure of federal legislation. It stems, rather, from the libertarian conviction, repeated endlessly by George W. Bush, that the money government collects in order to carry out its business properly belongs to the people themselves. One thought, and one thought only, guided Bush and his Republican allies since they assumed power in the wake of Bush vs. Gore: taxes must be cut, and the more they are cut--especially in ways benefiting the rich--the better.

But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions--indeed, whose very existence--they believe to be illegitimate. Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.

"Ideas," a distinguished conservative named Richard Weaver once wrote, "have consequences." Americans have learned something about the consequences of conservative ideas during the Bush years that they never had to confront in the more amiable Reagan period. As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster. And the disasters will continue, year after year, as long as conservatives, whose political tactics are frequently as brilliant as their policy-making is inept, find ways to perpetuate their power...

If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well...

Upon assuming office, George W. Bush turned to former Texas campaign aide Joe Allbaugh to run FEMA and then shifted it into the new Department of Homeland Security (whose creation he had opposed). Allbaugh, and his hand-picked successor Michael Brown, like so many Bush appointees, were afflicted with what we might call "learned incompetence." They did not fail merely out of ignorance and inexperience. Their ineptness, rather, was active rather than passive, the end result of a deliberate determination to prove that the federal government simply should not be in the business of disaster management. "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management," Allbaugh had testified before a Senate appropriations subcommittee in May, 2001. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level." There was the conservative dilemma in a nutshell: a man put in charge of a mission in which he did not believe...

[L]ibertarian economics: relying on government while refusing to pay for it.

The FEMA story brings to mind the appointment of John Bolton to the UN, a very-counterintuitive move. Bolton does not support the UN so let's send him to be our voice in it. Not a constructive choice.

If taxes are a bad idea, how do we support the military and the large corporate infrastructure on which it relies? If you don't believe in federal agencies like FEMA, what do you do when a FEMA-like agency is needed by the nation?

The number of US soldiers who have died in Iraq.

Why?

I had very low expectations for this one. All I knew going in was that it was French sci-fi flick. I was expecting a bad space opera. I was in a for a shock, though. It turned out to be a frenetic, amazing action film that seemed to be enjoyed by the entire preview audience—young and old, male and female. It was a real crowd pleaser that barely qualifies as sci-fi. (It takes place in 2010 and features a super-bomb.) Looking at the poster, I can see this film is being marketed badly. Play up the action, play down the sci-fi, and promise audiences an incredible ride.

The movie follows vigilante Leito (David Belle) as he tries to reclaim his ghetto from the infamous drug dealer Taha (Bibi Naceri). He is joined in his quest by a cop (Cyril Raffaeli) out to track down the aforementioned super bomb. The movie is a genre mash-up with fast, tricked out cars, amazing wire fighting, and a little sci-fi. If you like watching Jackie Chan leap quickly up the side of buildings and through windows, you will love this movie. The opening moments where Leito jumps from rooftop to rooftop while being pursued by a band of thugs are magnificent. Will likely be this year's best, most original action sequence.

The movie is thinly plotted—who cares—but the characters, except for woman-in-distress Lola (Dany Verissimo), are vibrant, quirky, and fascinating. There are so many surprises in this movie, so many jaw-droppingly beautiful action moments, that you will quickly fall for this movie. It's enough to make many Americans forget they hate the French. At least for an hour and a half.

Reflecting on this movie versus summer box-office behemoth “The DaVinci Code,” I can only think that the same people who will scoff at “B13” gladly dragged themselves to be bored to death by that bloated carcass of a film. In a just world, “B13” would be a box office smash. It's far less ridiculous than “DaVinci.”

Also, this movie is a pretty loving tribute to John Carpenter. We get a bit of “Assault on Precinct 13,” “Escape from New York,” and many more. Carpenter fans will be thrilled.

Glenn Greenwald points out a Glenn Reynolds post that gets its facts and analysis of them completely wrong.

Instapundit's intent was not to mislead. The post does reveal, however, how much he wants to reinforce the characterization that the wired left is out of touch and ineffective.

It appears that Eminem is coming back to the big screen to star in a modern day updating of the old west TV series "Have Gun Will Travel."

I enjoyed "8 Mile" even though it was pretty predictable and disingenuously reinvented Eminem as a softy and friend to the gay community.

It's surprising that he hasn't made a film since "8 Mile." Many, many rappers are content to make strings of straight-to-video low budget, low concept pics. It seems he may be trying to develop a legitimate film career.

David Igantius of the Washington Post pleas for rehumanizing our detainees:

When I hear U.S. officials describe the suicides of three Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last Saturday as "asymmetric warfare" and "a good PR move," I know it's time to close that camp -- not just because of what it's doing to the prisoners but because of how it is dehumanizing the American captors.

The American officials spoke of the dead prisoners as if they inhabited a different moral universe. That's what war does: People stop seeing their enemies as human beings and consign them to a different category. It was discomfiting to see this indifference stated so bluntly, and subsequent U.S. statements tactfully disavowed the initial ones.

We might call it the Guantanamo syndrome -- this process of mutual corrosion and dehumanization. The antidote is to get inside Guantanamo, to see the prisoners as individuals and begin to make distinctions. That's why due process for the detainees is so important -- because it will allow courts to distinguish between prisoners who are vicious killers and deserve the harshest punishment, and those who may be innocent of any terrorist crimes. We need to stop seeing everyone in the same orange suits.

The argument will be made that because these men were not American, the Constitution does not give them the same protections. A quick read of the Constitution reminds you that the forefathers believed the rights in the Constituion were God-given. So did God just give these rights to white landowners residing in the US?

At the very least, a basic understanding of decency and justice should make it clear that these detainees should be charged with crimes and then be allowed to defend themselves in a court. Do we really believe that our troops and military intelligence are so infallible as to have only be detaining the guilty? And if they are guilty, shouldn't they be tried?

We are trying to export democracy and the American way to the world, but if America is overlooking basic justice and human rights issues, what right do we have to tell the world how to behave?

Thanks to Think Progress, you can read the confidential Republican memo distributed in anticipation of tomorrow's House debate on Iraq.

Go read it. It's very short. I'll wait.

[Waiting]

What struck me about the memo is how simplistic the talking points are. I thought I was reading a transcript from the Sean Hannity show.

The memo urges representatives to continually link 9-11 and Iraq, yet we all know there's no substantive evidence linking pre-war Iraq with the terrorists responsible for 9-11. The White House links the two repeatedly. They don't offer evidence of Iraq conspiring with the 9-11 terrorists, but by mentioning Iraq with 9-11 they imply a strong connection between the two.

Reading the memo, you can see the debate will be all about making the Democrats look weak and with have little to do with debating the needed changes in our current Iraq policy. The "debate" is all about making sure they don't lose the House in November.

Maybe I am misreading their facial expressions, but Tony Snow and Dan Bartlett look very unsettled.

See for yourself, via TPM.

Here is an example of the quality discourse from the cable news talking head programs:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Do you find her physically attractive, Tucker?

TUCKER CARLSON: I'm not going to answer that, because the answer, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. That's not the point.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Positively.

RITA COSBY: Don't ask me that question.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Mike, do you want to weigh in here as an older fellow. Do you find her to be a physically attractive woman?

MIKE BARNICLE: I'm too old to be doing that. I had enough fights in my life.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: OK, Rita, do you find her to be a physically attractive woman?

RITA COSBY: I'll throw it back to you, Chris, do you find her attractive?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: You guys are all afraid to answer. No, I find her—I wouldn't put her—well, she doesn't pass the Chris Matthews test.

Jon Stewart interviewed RNC head Ken Mehlman on "The Daily Show" last night.

The interview was outstanding. Stewart cut through the haze of talking points and rhetorical misdirection. Better than an entire year's worth of cable news talking head shows.

David Horowitz, head of the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, defended Ann Coulter on a recent Larry King panel discussion:

"I don't think for a second that she wrote this book for money, ahhh..."

He then gets laughed at by the rest of the panel. And then seems to laugh at himself. Watch the video.

Apparently, attracting media attention is a significant acheivement for the POTUS:

Kenneth M. Duberstein, a former chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan, said the Baghdad trip proved that the president can "dominate the agenda whenever he wants to" and that Mr. Bush is aware that "Iraq is central, not only to his presidency, but his legacy." He said it was possible for the White House, slowly but steadily, to turn public opinion around, drawing a football analogy to describe how the president might reach that goal.

He cited the strategy of the legendary football coach Woody Hayes, which was not to rely on dramatic Hail Mary passes, but to focus on winning a game bit by bit with what was known as "three yards and cloud of dust."

Mr. Duberstein went on, "What Bush is doing is not Hail Marys, but three yards and a cloud of dust. And he has to earn it every day."

Of course the President can dominate the agenda whenever he wants to. He holds the most powerful office in the world. (Unless, you know you are the head of...The Illuminati. "No one expects the Illuminati!") This is hardly significant.

I would say that President Bush is more kicking up dust then moving three yards, but maybe Hannity's right and "I am the wrong side of history." History being predetermined obviously.

Reading John Derbyshire's destructive, disturbing foreign policy views reminded me of the lyrics to Randy Newman's "Polictical Science":

No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them

Asia's crowded and Europe's too old
Africa is far too hot
And Canada's too cold
And South America stole our name
Let's drop the big one
There'll be no one left to blame us

We'll save Australia
Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo
We'll build an All American amusement park there
They got surfin', too

Boom goes London and boom Paris
More room for you and more room for me
And every city the whole world round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it will be
We'll set everybody free
You'll wear a Japanese kimono
And there'll be Italian shoes for me

They all hate us anyhow
So let's drop the big one now
Let's drop the big one now

Immediately below this post you will find a quote from National Review writer John Derbyshire in which he bemoans the situation in Iraq. The quote comes from a longer piece in which he apologizes for supporting the war effort. (Why does he hate America/freedom/the troops so much?) While it's refreshing to see his apology, much of the rest of the piece is horrifying.

He really hates Iraq and thinks much of the Middle East should be leveled. Reading his argument reminds me of conversations with my wife's family.

We are stuck there in that wretched place...

One reason I supported the initial attack, and the destruction of the Saddam regime, was that I hoped it would serve as an example, deliver a psychic shock to the whole region. It would have done, if we’d just rubbled the place then left. As it is, the shock value has all been frittered away. Far from being seen as a nation willing to act resolutely, a nation that knows how to punish our enemies, a nation that can smash one of those ramshackle Mideast despotisms with one blow from our mailed fist, a nation to be feared and respected, we are perceived as a soft and foolish nation, that squanders its victories and permits its mighty military power to be held to standoff by teenagers with homemade bombs—that lets crooks and bandits tie it down, Gulliver-like, with a thousand little threads of blackmail, trickery, lies, and petty violence...

I worry a lot that the civilized world, of which this nation is faute de mieux the leader, has sunk into an enervated lassitude, a condition in which it is unwilling to act against threatening, or just annoying, barbarians...

So why am I eating crow? Because I think it was foolish of me to suppose that the administration would act with the punitive ruthlessness I hoped to see. The rubble-and-out approach was not one that this administration, or perhaps any administration in the present state of our culture, would be willing to pursue. The universalist dogmas that rule unchallenged in our media and educational institutions have fixed their grip on our foreign policy, too. When the Founders of our nation said “all men” they had in mind Christian Anglo-Saxon men. Our leaders, though, want to bring the whole world under the scope of those grand Lockeian principles...

The effort to stabilize Iraq, and the reluctance to just leave the Iraqis to fight each other among the rubble, followed inevitably from that belief, which is, according to me, a false belief. I see all that now. I didn’t see it then. I am sorry.

Truly atrocious.

Derbyshire wishes we had just gone in and leveled Iraq, that "wretched place," in order to send a message to the rest of the world not to mess with the big dogs. Then we should have just let the "barbarians" sort it out amongst themselves.

Is this truly how Derbyshire sees the world?

We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of.

Nancy Pelosi?

Al Gore?

Al Franken?

No, it's John Derbyshire of National Review.

Via Think Progress.

"Boo-Freakin-Hoo"

Michelle Malkin's words of remembrance for the three Guantanamo Bay detainees who committed suicide.

I missed this, but the New York Times Online included my blog in a section devoted to blogger reaction to their recent "best of" fiction list.

Cool.

If you use a news reader/aggregator service, you can now receive feeds from Solipsistic. Just click on the orange button to your left--right above the "Links" section--for more info.

I was revisiting the tenets of just war theory today, and how conservative christians wielded these tenets to rally support for our current destructive and unjust campaign. This Michael Novak speech from February 2003 gives a spirited, if thoroughly wrong, defense of our quest to change the Middle East:

...What is uppermost in American national interests is that, at a time we did not choose and in a way we did not will, war was declared upon us in word and deed on 09/11/01. That aggressor had no standing army, whose movements in advance gave notice of an imminent attack. On the contrary, the attack came all unexpected, striking its innocent victims on a soft, warm, blue-skied September day. The weapons employed were not conventional military armaments, but rather American civilian aircraft heavy with fuel for the long trip to California. The targets chosen — tall skyscrapers — left their unsuspecting victims particularly helpless.

Normal criteria watched for by just-war theorists were not literally present: neither conventional military movements, nor visible signs of imminent attack, nor the authority of a hostile nation state. The horror of the damage was immense, just the same.

International war had clearly been launched. Its perpetrators called it an international jihad, aimed not only against the U.S. but the entire West, indeed, against the whole non-Islamic world. (The world had already mourned the destruction of ancient and priceless Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan.)

No major moral authority had any difficulty in recognizing that a war to prevent this new type of terrorism is not only just but morally obligatory.

How does Iraq fit into that picture? From the point of view of public authorities who must calculate the risks of action or inaction vis-à-vis the regime of Saddam Hussein, two points are salient. Saddam Hussein has the means to wreak devastating destruction upon Paris, London, or Chicago, or any cities of his choosing, if only he can find clandestine undetectable "foot soldiers" to deliver small amounts of the sarin gas, botulins, anthrax, and other lethal elements to predetermined targets. Secondly, independent terrorist assault cells have already been highly trained for precisely such tasks, and have trumpeted far and wide their intentions to carry out such destruction willingly, with joy. All that is lacking between these two incendiary elements is a spark of contact.

Given Saddam's proven record in the use of such weapons, and given his recognized contempt for international law, only an imprudent or even foolhardy statesman could trust that these two forces will stay apart forever. At any time they could combine, in secret, to murder tens of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting citizens.

Please note: Were such an attack to come, it would come without imminent threat, without having been signaled by movements of conventional arms, without advance warning of any kind.

Somewhere between 0 and 10, in other words, there already is a probability of Saddam's deadly weapons falling into al Qaeda's willing hands. (There are also other branches of the international terror network). Reasonable observers can disagree about whether that risk is at 2 or 4 or 8. But this much is clear: Those who judge that the risk is low, and therefore allow Saddam to remain in power, will bear a horrific responsibility if they guessed wrong, and acts of destruction do occur.

It is one thing for other observers to calculate these risks; it is another for duly constituted authorities, responsible for protecting their people from unprovoked attack.

Of course, those who today choose the path of war will bear responsibility for all the bitter fruits of war to come. The moral question here, as in so many areas in which prudence must be invoked, requires the responsible weighing of risks. To settle this moral question also requires knowledge of information from intelligence services, which monitor terrorist networks and their activities.

In brief, some persons argue today (as I do) that, under the original Catholic doctrine of justum bellum, a limited and carefully conducted war to bring about a change of regime in Iraq is, as a last resort, morally obligatory. For public authorities to fail to conduct such a war would be to put their trust imprudently in the sanity and good will of Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein is a leader of proven "megalomania " (a term applied to him by President Mubarak of Egypt), an unusually cruel leader, who has made long and regular use of weapons of mass destruction even against his own citizens.

Should Saddam violate their trust by a violent biological attack in some Western city, public authorities who made themselves hostage to his moral reliability would have inexcusably ignored his record.

A word should be said here about the original Catholic doctrine of justum bellum, but especially of those ad bellum questions that arise in making the decisions that lead up to war. These questions quite naturally come before the in bello questions, those that query the conduct to be followed in waging war. Just-war doctrine has at its root the Catholic understanding of original sin, articulated in this context by St. Augustine in Book XIX of The City of God. In this world, Christians will always have to cope with the evil in the human breast that sows division, destruction, and devastation. Augustine had seen many such evils in his lifetime, including the horrors of the Sack of Rome in 410 A.D. Nonetheless, he held that Christians acting as public authorities are bound by laws of charity and justice even in waging war.

Augustine defined peace as the "tranquility of order" represented by a dynamic, changing international order, created by just political communities, and mediated through law. When public authorities move to defend this order against unjust aggressors, theirs is a just political end. Just-war doctrine in its ad bellum considerations sets forth the rules under which public authorities are obliged to move to defend their own peoples, and to restore the minimum conditions of international order, by means of warfare. Warfare under this teaching is a morally appropriate political end, and may be morally obligatory upon public authorities, when circumstances dictate that evil must be stopped.

The aim of a just war is the blocking of great evil, the restoration of peace, and the defense of minimum conditions of justice and world order. For both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, thinking about war falls under the principles of charity and justice. In their view, just war does not "begin with a presumption against violence," but rather with a presumption that addresses first the duties of public authorities to charity and justice and, second, that takes seriously a sinful world in which injustice and violence against the innocent will continue for all time. These have certainly continued in the 21st century as in the 20th.

No one today denies that international terrorism is a deliberate assault on the very possibility of international order. That public authorities have a duty to confront this terrorism, and to defeat it, is universally recognized.

This is the context in which the ad bellum question concerning a limited and careful war upon Iraq is properly raised today. The primary duty of public authorities in well-ordered democracies is to protect the lives and rights of their people.

Moreover, in assessing the many circumstances that must be weighed in moving toward a decision ad bellum, those public authorities who bear the immediate responsibility and who are closest to the facts of the case, have moral priority of place. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states this with no ambiguity, as we have seen above (#2309).

The first reason, then, why public authorities in the United States have urged the United Nations to become serious about Iraq is the war preemptively declared upon the United States on 09/11/01. It was obvious from the beginning that 19 graduate students from middle-class families (mostly in Saudi Arabia) did not perform that deed unaided. They had the support of states (Afghanistan in the first place, but also Yemen, Iran, Sudan, and others) willing to act clandestinely but not openly, as international outlaws.

Meanwhile, for 12 long years Saddam has flagrantly violated the conditions laid down by the United Nations for the continuation of his presidency. In the world become far more dangerous after September 11, 2001, either the world community now upholds international order, or it backs down from its own solemn agreements. In the latter case, individual sovereign nations will refuse to be complicit in the policy of appeasement. To do otherwise would join Saddam's conspiracy against international order, and to accrue responsibility for anything he might do.

Many other nations besides Iraq have been obliged to disarm, and to show proof of it, for instance, South Africa, Kazakhstan, and other nations of the former Soviet Union. All have complied fully and openly. Iraq has not. It has not accounted for immense supplies of chemical and biological weapons which on earlier occasions it either admitted that it possessed, or was shown by international inspectors to have possessed.

It is not the burden of the international community to prove Iraq's noncompliance. That fact was publicly and internationally well established years ago. It is Hussein's obligation, as a condition for continuing in his presidency, to present evidence that he has disarmed. This he has so far disdained to do. Hussein has judged that the international community lacks the will to enforce its decrees.

For some years, it seemed reasonable (if shameful) not to force Saddam Hussein to comply, but just to wait him out. However, the maturation of al Qaeda and other highly trained international terrorist groups adds to Hussein's violation of U.N. decrees a new peril. On the record, Saddam is capable of ordering a tremendous loss of life, through a secretive, sudden attack upon major western cities with small amounts of biological or chemical agents.

With less than a teaspoon of anthrax distributed in letters, for instance, thousands of government workers in Washington were obliged to be screened and preventively treated for anthrax poisoning, one Senate office building was closed for many weeks for decontamination, two post-office workers died, and many others fell ill for some time.

Saddam Hussein has failed to account for more than 5,000 liters — five million teaspoons — of anthrax which he is known to have possessed just a few years ago.

This does not include the thousands of liters of botulin and other forms of biological weapons, including nerve gas and sarin gas, reported by U.N. inspectors to have been present in his arsenals. Nor does it include the stockpiles of mustard gas the U.N. reported in his possession. "Mustard gas is not like marmalade," Hans Blix famously announced in January. "Governments must know exactly where it is, and what is done with every container of it." It is a deadly gas...

So much speculation. So much conjecture.

Because Saddam launching an attack against the United States was in the realm of all things possible, it was our responsibility, our moral and ethical obligation, to attack Iraq. Much of Novak's evidence is speculative. The fact that we had not definitively gained evidence that Saddam didn't have some weapons hidden somewhere became evidence that he had a dangerous, viable WMD program that he would make available to terrorists.

Sure, the faulty justification for war has been written about ad nauseum by countless others. I offer up Novak's "moral" justification above as a timely reminder as we consider other wars of choice in Iran and throughout the Middle East.