brainrow

Think Progress reports that Bill “Nuclear Option” Frist sorta melted down on the Senate Floor this morning:

This morning on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer asked Majority Leader Bill Frist a simple question:

SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?

Here was Frist’s response:

The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination – we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe – a point – and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.

Frist himself has supported a filibuster against a Clinton judicial nominee. Now he wants the practice declared unconstitutional. These guys always want to play by their own set of rules.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling on The Nuclear Option.

As before, you’ll probably have to look at an ad to get access to the site. Click for a Site Pass. After you’ve endured the ad, you can browse the entire site all day without facing additional ads of that type. While you’re there, you might as well look around.

Bolling and Tom Tomorrow are shedding light on creationist revision of science.

Tom Tomorrow exposes a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. He says Republicans Believe the Darnedest Things. He’s got artistic range, too. He can do film noir.

Salon.com isn’t all funnies. Here’s their primer on the nuclear option:

Unless somebody blinks first, we’re in for a mind-warping set of unprecedented Senate maneuvers that could put Dick Cheney in charge of deeming the filibuster “unconstitutional” — without a word from those folks in black robes across the street — and grease the way for each and every right-wing extremist George W. Bush ever cares to put on a district court, an appellate court or the U.S. Supreme Court.

A little more than ten years ago, I was summoned to jury duty. It was an endlessly educational experience.

A jury throws together people who don’t often mix in modern America. My fellow jurors came from many walks of life. We each saw and understood things from our own perspective. When another juror’s perspective was very different from mine, I was tempted to see that perspective as a bias. I suppose my own perspective may have looked like a bias to other jurors. All the jurors took their duty seriously, and we all found ways to get along while we were stuck together.

I was there for three weeks, and sat on two juries, each trying a civil lawsuit. A lawsuit that reaches a jury is unlikely to be a simple open-and-shut case. Those cases are usually settled out of court.

These were not celebrated cases, so there was no thought of sequestering the juries. We wandered around downtown during the long lunch breaks, and went home every evening. But each day the judge gave us “the admonition,” reminding us not to discuss the case with anyone, including our fellow jurors. We talked about sports, music, movies — anything but the case.

There were ten of us in the jury box during the trials: eight regular jurors and two alternates. At the end of the trial, the alternates were sent away, and only the eight regular jurors participated in deliberations.

We were given a series of questions, called interrogatories. Had the defendent done this specific act? If not, we had to return a verdict for the defendent. Had the plaintiff suffered actual harm from the act? If not, we had to return a verdict for the defendent. Had the plaintiff taken reasonable care to avoid that harm? And so on. We discussed each question and voted on it. A jury in a criminal trial must reach unanimous agreement. In our civil cases, we needed 75% agreement to answer each question.

A friend asked whether I had more or less confidence in our system of justice after my three weeks of jury duty. It wasn’t an easy question to answer.

I worried about the biases I had noticed. In each jury I thought there were one or two jurors with a predetermined bias against the party with more money. In one case that was the plaintiff, in the other case it was the defendant. There was a different juror who didn’t seem to understand some particular rule of logic. There were disagreements about the meaning of terms like “reasonable care.”

But those disagreements and rough edges were good, too. Because we jurors saw things from different perspectives, we collectively saw and understood more than any one of us alone would see.

What smoothed out the rough edges was this: we couldn’t reach a verdict without a 75% majority. If half the jurors held a wrong-headed bias, they had to persuade not just one, but two other jurors to join them. If they could do that, maybe they weren’t wrong-headed after all. My confidence in the jury system is based very much on its requirement of supermajorities.

You know, there once was a time when the Senate commonly approved federal court nominees unanimously. That wasn’t because the Senate thought its constitutional duty to “advise and consent” was to rubber-stamp all the president’s nominees. No, it was because presidents understood that federal judges serve for life, and make life-and-death decisions from the bench. They nominated people with excellent credentials, with impressive records of achievement, and without extremist ideologies. It wasn’t too hard to get unanimous approval of nominees like that.

We have a different kind of president now, sending a different kind of nominee. We have a different kind of Senate, too, weighing a “nuclear option” to let them ram through judicial extremists on a straight party-line vote.

How do I know the nominees are extremists? The Republicans can’t find five Democrats to join them to vote for cloture to end a filibuster and bring the nomination to a vote.

How do I know it’s not just the Democrats being partisan? Because they’ve tried to block only ten of Bush’s 214 federal court nominees.

Judges with life-and-death power. Serving for life. Approved by strict party-line votes, over all objections. If you want to undermine confidence in the government of the United States, that’s the way to do it.

One of my brothers called me this morning and asked whether I’d seen Bill Moyers’ speech to the National Conference for Media Reform, broadcast on C-SPAN. I hadn’t, so he helped me find the prepared text and an MP3 audio file of the speech online.

The speech is one hour and four minutes long, and I really think you should take the time to listen to it. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time. (The prepared text differs in places from Moyers’ spoken words. The quotes below are mostly from the prepared text, with only one or two changes, by me, to reflect the version as delivered.)

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Moyers helped create NOW, a PBS news magazine program featuring voices not usually heard on traditional news programs — not just people from across the political spectrum, but poets, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens who could not be characterized by something as narrow as a political spectrum. From the start, Moyers became a lightning rod for right-wing wrath.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now, and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead.

…

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s OK to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

The Rules of the Game

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

…

These “rules of the game” permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” … I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

Orthodoxy Can Kill a Democracy

In Orwell’s 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.

Moyers talked about the original concept behind NOW:

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

…

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian Richard Reeves answered a student who asked him to define real news. “Real news,” Reeves responded, “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”

NOW was praised by reviewers. Moyers cites the Baton Rouge Advocate, which said NOW draws on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid.

Our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong… The problem was that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told … we were getting it right, not right-wing.

I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.

The Flag in the Lapel

One night Moyers put an American flag pin in his lapel and sent the right wing into a fury by talking about it:

I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart’s affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

So what’s this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s little red book of orthodoxy on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.

Powerful Republican politicians started to demand that Moyers be silenced.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the [Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)] board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation.

…

I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was naïve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done.

…

Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

…

That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s “Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay.” Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He’s apparently decided not to share the results with his staff, or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it — but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10 op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution that he did not want to “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

The Big Donor and the Widow’s Mite

In his op-ed essay this week in Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: “The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from [the widow of a New York City fireman killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks], five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that “… since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family’s world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day.”

She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. “He was home with me having coffee… But my Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. ‘Bring my gear to the plaza,’ he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower. … He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved.”

In the FDNY, she said, chain-of-command rules extend to every captain of every fire house in the city. If anything happens in the firehouse — at any time — even if the captain isn’t on duty or on vacation — that captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7.”

So she asked: “Why is this administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership…”

And then she wrote: “We need more programs like yours to wake America up. … Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name-calling that divide America now. … Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda.”

Framed above my desk at my office is [a copy of] the check she made out to “Channel 13 — NOW” for $500. When I go discouraged or need to remind myself that public media truly matter, I look at that check, and think of the woman who wrote it, and the husband who did his duty, and their belief in us. And I will take — over the big check that Ken Tomlinson could have gotten from the demanding right winger — I would take the widow’s mite any day.

Go listen.

I’ve been watching HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher for about a month now. Even though it sometimes makes me cringe, it seems there’s something good on there every week. Now the show is going on summer vacation, so this blog may not have so many quotes from comedians and foreign dignitaries for the next few months.

Bill Maher on liberals:

We don’t hate America. We love America. We just want it back from the cretins who’ve taken it over.

Al Franken on the people who opposed having a paper trail on electronic voting machines:

If they wanted people not to have conspiracy theories, they would have a paper trail. So, if they wanted to actually play this clean, and not get people doubting — if you really believe you’re gonna win, you don’t want people doubting that you won. You want the certainty.

The Republicans don’t mind a little doubt, so long as they have the power. If they can make the doubters look paranoid, then heck — that’s just a bonus.

I guess I’m not the only person who’s noticed that the Dark Side of the Force looks a lot like the Bush Administration. Here’s Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post:

“Revenge of the Sith,” it turns out, can also be seen as a cautionary tale for our time — a blistering critique of the war in Iraq, a reminder of how democracies can give up their freedoms too easily, and an admonition about the seduction of good people by absolute power.

Some film critics suggest it could be the biggest anti-Bush blockbuster since “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

A. O. Scott’s review of Revenge of the Sith in the New York Times is fun to read:

This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That’s right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it’s better than “Star Wars.”

“Revenge of the Sith,” which had its premiere here yesterday at the Cannes International Film Festival, ranks with “The Empire Strikes Back” (directed by Irvin Kershner in 1980) as the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle. It comes closer than any of the other episodes to realizing Mr. Lucas’s frequently reiterated dream of bringing the combination of vigorous spectacle and mythic resonance he found in the films of Akira Kurosawa into American commercial cinema.

…

“This is how liberty dies – to thunderous applause,” Padmé observes as senators, their fears and dreams of glory deftly manipulated by Palpatine, vote to give him sweeping new powers. “Revenge of the Sith” is about how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.” Obi-Wan’s response is likely to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign: “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.” You may applaud this editorializing, or you may find it overwrought, but give Mr. Lucas his due. For decades he has been blamed (unjustly) for helping to lead American movies away from their early-70’s engagement with political matters, and he deserves credit for trying to bring them back.

The Hubble Space Telescope marks fifteen years of service.

Can a thing that has been used to do evil be turned to do good? The filibuster isn’t the problem. Like a hammer or a knife, it’s just a tool. What is the tool being used for? Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

The president claims he should have the judges he wants because he won the last election. He has a mandate, he alleges, but if so, it is an insubstantial one — a bit more than 2 percent of the popular vote. When you compare that with recent second-term victories — FDR, who won by 24.3 percentage points; Ike, by 15.4; LBJ, by 22.6; Nixon, by 23.2; Reagan, by 18.2; Clinton, by 8.5 — it becomes clear that Bush’s mandate is, like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a figment of his imagination. His mandate, such as it is, should be to realize he ain’t got one.

I concede that I was not always so kindly disposed toward the filibuster. There was a time when it was used to thwart civil rights legislation and other legislative acts of basic decency. Now, though, it is being brandished to block a handful of prospective judges from narrowing those hard-earned rights.

Amy Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times:

Maybe my Bible was just a different translation from the one used by Pastor Chan Chandler. Chandler was the minister of East Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina who told members of his flock that if they voted for John Kerry, they needed to repent their sin or resign from the church.

Calling himself “merely the spokesperson” for “the most high,” Chandler charged that Kerry was an unbeliever…

The New Republican Standard Version of the Bible has been gaining popularity among evangelicals and Catholics. Just a few weeks ago, conservative political and religious leaders lined up on their so-called “Justice Sunday” to charge that those who oppose the ideologically extreme judicial nominees whom they support cannot be true people of faith.

Some members of the American Catholic clergy told Catholic voters last year that a vote for the pro-choice Democratic nominee would be punishable by exclusion from the sacrament of Holy Communion.

This is a shift — however slight — in conservative rhetoric and tactics.

The charge used to be that Democrats were godless, a party of secularists run amok. That changed somewhere around the time when Barack Obama boomed, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states!”; progressive minister Jim Wallis became one of the best-selling authors in the country; and Americans began to reconnect with their history, including centuries of religiously motivated political causes such as abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.

So having failed to prove that Democrats are all secularists, conservatives now assert that liberals are not religious enough…

This is a debate that conservatives are going to lose. Because you don’t have to be liberal or conservative to be offended by the idea that a political or religious leader can decide whether your faith is good enough.

Somehow, it’s always about who will be the judge.

It’s been a while since George Lucas has had much worth saying, I think. But I’ve read about a scene in the new Star Wars movie: the Galactic Senate cheers when the Emperor declares the end of the Galactic Republic, “for a safe and secure society.”

Senator Amidala says, “This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.”

Rats. I wasn’t going to see the movie. Now I’ve gotta.

This is a fairly old story, from earlier this month: Ken Tomlinson, Republican Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, reportedly told PBS officials to make sure their programming reflected the Republican mandate.

He hasn’t denied that he said it, but says he was kidding! Sheesh, can’t you take a joke?

Gosh, I suppose I should lighten up. So here’s a cartoon from Mark Fiore, introducing the new PBS.

I bought my first computer 22 years ago today, on May 11, 1983. Changed my life.

It was an Apple IIe, a minor 1983 update to the classic Apple II that had been introduced in 1977. The pace of technological change has accelerated since then.

The central processing unit (CPU) in my Apple IIe was a 6502 chip running at 1 MHz, just like the original Apple II. When I tried my hand at typing in programs in the built-in BASIC language, I was astonished at the speed of the machine. Error messages might flash by too quickly for me to see. My daisy-wheel printer could hammer out about 12 characters per second — very impressive compared to my own halting manual typing.

The computer I’m using right now has two CPUs, each running at 2GHz — 2,000 times the clock speed of my first computer. The CPUs are of a different design: they can deal with data in bigger chunks than the 6502; they use a RISC instruction set that operates significantly differently from the 6502. My new computer might be many thousands of times faster than my Apple IIe, or it might be only about 1,000 times faster. I’m sometimes frustrated that some operations seem to take too long. My expectations have changed during the past 22 years, but I’m also doing things with this computer that I never would have imagined doing with the Apple IIe.

My Apple IIe came fully loaded with 64K of RAM memory, the maximum amount of memory that could be directly accessed by the 6502 CPU. The Apple Writer word processor fit into a lean 16K, leaving ample memory for documents of about twenty pages. Longer documents could be saved in a series of files. Having plenty of RAM, I got spoiled. I’ve stuffed my current machine with 2.5 gigabytes of RAM — more than 40,000 times as much memory as my Apple IIe. When that’s not enough, the operating system on my current machine can use virtual memory to make it seem as if I’ve got even more memory.

My Apple IIe had two floppy disk drives, each capable of holding 144K of programs and data. A few programs were too complicated to fit in the machine’s 64K of RAM, so it was often a good idea to leave the program disk in one drive so segments of the program could be loaded as they were needed. The other drive could be used to hold any files I might create while running the program.

My current computer has two hard drives, totaling over 400Gb. That’s a little less than 1.5 million times as much storage as I got with my first computer. I have most of my CD collection instantly available on my computer. I can edit video clips and burn DVDs. Every now and then I look into adding more disk space.

I can’t prove this, but I feel fairly confident that when I bought my Apple IIe, I owned more computer power than existed in the entire world at the end of World War II — more than was used by the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, more than was used by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park to crack the German Enigma codes, more than was possessed by all the governments on both sides of the war.

It’s nice to have the latest and greatest hardware and software, but a fast computer is no substitute for a good brain.

More news from the Republican jihad:

For many residents of this hamlet nestled in the Smoky Mountains, nothing is as important as church. That’s why nine longtime members of East Waynesville Baptist Church are so devastated after being kicked out of the congregation for, they say, supporting Democrat John Kerry’s presidential bid.

The minister delivered his fatwa in a sermon last October:

But the question then comes in, in the Baptist Church, how do I vote? Let me just say this right now: If you vote for John Kerry this year, you need to repent or resign.

Oh, yes. He’s going far in today’s GOP.

Frank Rich on the sycophantic White House press corps:

It was only too fitting that Mrs. Bush’s performance occurred on the eve of the second anniversary of the most elaborate production of them all: the “Top Gun” landing by the president on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The Washington reviews of her husband at the time were reminiscent of hers last weekend. “This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command,” David Broder raved on “Meet the Press.” Robert Novak chimed in: “He looks good in a jumpsuit.” It would be quite a while before these guys stopped cheering the Jerry Bruckheimer theatrics and started noticing the essential fiction of the scene: the mission in Iraq hadn’t been accomplished, and major combat operations were far from over.

“We create our own reality” is how a Bush official put it to Ron Suskind in an article in The Times Magazine during the presidential campaign. That they can get away with it shows the keenness of their cultural antennas. Infotainment has reached a new level of ubiquity in an era in which “reality” television and reality have become so blurred that it’s hard to know if ABC News’s special investigating “American Idol” last week was real journalism about a fake show or fake journalism about a real show or whether anyone knows the difference — or cares.