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Cartoonist Ruben Bolling says 9/11 changed everything.

The Bush Administration is trying again to blame bad news from Iraq on reporters. “Dog bites man” isn’t news because it’s such a commonplace event. Isn’t bloodshed in Iraq so commonplace now that another bombing, another kidnapping, another heap of bodies murdered execution-style is all just a big yawn? Isn’t it about time we started to hear about Iraqi supermarket ribbon-cutting ceremonies?

ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz recently moved from covering the Pentagon to covering the White House, and she recently returned from her tenth trip to report from Iraq. On the PBS program Washington Week, she talked about the difference between what she hears at the White House and what she saw in Iraq:

I have to say that I was struck by a disconnect, and the disconnect is this: you hear the administration talk about this in terms of very stark black and white. There’s a few layers they talk about, but it’s good vs. bad; it’s good news vs. bad news; it’s terrorists vs. us. And when you’re there — and this time in particular to me, because I have just started covering the White House — it is so complex over there, and it gets more complex every time I go. There are more enemies. There are different types of enemies. And when you talk about the different types of enemies, it means there are different ways to defeat those enemies.

One of the things I did on this trip is that I vowed to go talk to the Iraqi security forces. Not to talk to the Americans about the Iraqi security forces, but the Iraqi security forces themselves.

I went to Sadr City, a place I’ve visited year after year, and the place where I last was, where American troops were in charge of that area, now there are 1500 Iraqi security forces, with some American trainers, about 36 American trainers.

So I started talking to them. Do you have enough equipment? No, we don’t have enough equipment. Do you have enough armored vehicles? We have no armored vehicles. Our enemy has better weapons than we do. We could be defeated by our enemy.

So I said — and there were a group of about 200 — I said, “So tell me, are you better off now, or before Saddam Hussein was taken down?” And almost all of them raised their hands and said, “We were better off before, because we had security. We have assassinations now, we have murders, we have all these things. We don’t have security.”

Now the irony here, of course, is that these are the people who are supposed to be providing security, and they were scared.

There was an interpreter there who I’d met years ago, who said, “Can you get me out of here? Can you help me get out of here? I have, in my room, I have all the interpreters that have been killed.”

So it’s very complicated over there.

Raddatz was asked whether the current conflict is a civil war.

Are they in a full-blown civil war? I can’t say that. Is the sectarian violence worse than I’ve ever seen it? Absolutely. I don’t know what the tipping point over there is, when you say we’re in a full-blown civil war.

These same Iraqi security forces said to me — the colonel, the one who’s heading all these troops — said, “We’re in a hidden civil war. You don’t even know the half of it.”

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

—Arthur Bloch

I wanted to write something last Sunday for the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. But I found that I didn’t have any fresh insights to offer.

I checked a lot of articles and blogs, looking for something to link to, but everyone seemed to be repeating the same arguments they had been making for years. It seemed to me that nobody was casting new light on the situation.

After three years, we have apparently all stopped thinking about Iraq. We are now in a new mode, the automatic repetition of previously recorded thoughts. The Bush Administration has been in this mode for years.

This is bad — very bad. The administration promises to keep doing more of what hasn’t worked so far, with faith that it will start working any day now. The administration’s critics tell us how much better things would be if Bush had never started this war. Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq seems to be deteriorating day by day.

As much as I wish we had never launched this war, I know of no magic that will turn back the clock and give us a do-over. Like it or not, we are in Iraq. I don’t know how to fix Iraq, now that we’ve done so much to break it. What I do know is that all of us — Republican, Democrat, independent, liberal, conservative, moderate, young, old, skinny, stout — we have all got to get serious about figuring out how to fix it.

Unless we start doing some better thinking than we’ve done over the past three years, Iraq will be the kind of failed state that, in the past, has been a fertile breeding and training ground for despotism and terrorism.

Yes, we’re tired, but we can’t stop thinking now.

Via Swing State Project: More than fifty veterans are running for Congress this year as Democrats, calling themselves a Band of Brothers (even though there are several women veterans among them).

There’s a video clip online, and the group is collecting money to air TV commercials. My favorite moment is when Andrew Duck, standing on Capitol Hill, says “we need to take the Hill back.”

Can you imagine? Fifty Democrats in Congress who know how to fight?

Since he took office, George W. Bush has stalled action to reduce greenhouse gases by calling for “more study” of global warming. Now, scientists seem to be forming a consensus that a catastrophic climate change is already under way, and conservatives are stalling action on greenhouse gases by saying it’s too late to fix the problem. From The New Yorker:

Antarctica is losing ice. The rate of loss, according to researchers at the University of Colorado, in Boulder … is around thirty-six cubic miles per year. (For comparison’s sake, the city of Los Angeles uses about one-fifth of a cubic mile of water annually.) … If the loss continues, it will mean that predictions for the rise in the sea level for the coming century are seriously understated.

The news from Antarctica follows a string of similarly grim discoveries. In September, satellite measurements showed that the extent of the Arctic ice cap had shrunk to the smallest area ever recorded, prompting a prediction that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer “well before the end of this century.” Around the same time, a group of British scientists reported that soils in England and Wales have been losing carbon at the rate of four million metric tons a year, a loss that is at once a symptom of warming and — as much of that carbon is released into the atmosphere — a likely cause of more. In January, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies concluded that 2005 had been the hottest year on record, and, in February, a team of scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas announced that the flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland had more than doubled over the past decade. … “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about,” one official told the Washington Post. “No. It’s now.”

In the face of such news, how does a country, i.e. the United States, justify further inaction? Certainly, there isn’t much tread left in the argument that global warming is, to use Senator James Inhofe’s famous formulation, a “hoax.” …

The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn’t matter — let’s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences. …

The beauty of this argument is its apparent high-mindedness, and this, of course, is also its danger. Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas — it lasts for about a century — and once released into the atmosphere it is, for all practical purposes, irrecoverable. Since every extra increment of CO2 leads to extra warming, addressing the effects of climate change without dealing with the cause is a bit like trying to treat diabetes with doughnuts. The climate isn’t going to change just once, and then settle down; unless CO2 concentrations are stabilized, it will keep on changing, producing, in addition to the “same old problems,” an ever-growing array of new ones. The head of the Goddard Institute, James Hansen, who first warned about the dangers of global warming back in the nineteen-seventies and recently made headlines by accusing the Bush Administration of censorship, has said that following the path of business-as-usual for the remainder of this century will lead to an earth so warm as to be “practically a different planet.”

On the plus side, think of the money we can save on the space program.

Some things you have to see to believe. Sand Art.

Humorist Art Buchwald is dying. Against medical advice, he has refused dialysis. Editor & Publisher paid him a visit at a hospice.

Readers pay tribute to Buchwald in letters to the editors.

Most of the time, Buchwald’s columns were funny. But not all the time. Right after the terror attacks of 9/11, he wrote this:

When President Kennedy was killed, my friend Mary McGrory said to Pat Moynihan, “We’ll never laugh again.”

And Moynihan, who later became a U.S. senator, replied, “Mary, we’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again.”

That is the way I felt last Tuesday.

…

I watch the same pictures over and over again. The buildings on fire, and tumbling down, the soot on the faces of the rescued and the rescuers and I know I’m entering a new world and things will never be the same.

How much freedom will I have to give up for safety? Nobody knows.

The only thing I can be sure of — “We’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again.”

Harry Truman said he wanted a one-armed economist. All his economic advisors would discuss an issue at length, and tell him what he wanted to hear, but they would continue with “on the other hand…”

The basic rules governing economics are pretty simple, but the number of variables that must be considered is staggering. I’ve made a few feeble attempts at understanding. When crude oil prices rise, I know that gasoline prices will go up. And when crude oil prices drop, gasoline prices go… up.

Prices jumped nearly 11 cents over the past two weeks to $2.35 for a gallon of regular-grade gasoline, even though the price of crude oil dropped, a national survey said Sunday.

…

The price rise came even as the cost of a barrel of crude fell from $62.91 on February 24 to $59.96 last Friday — a 7-cent-per-gallon drop.

I do believe the oil companies have found themselves a one-armed economist.

It’s been said, “You cannot break the law. You can only break yourself against the law.” The lawless Bush Administration likes to deal from the bottom of the deck, but there’s a price to be paid:

A federal judge today halted the death penalty trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and indicated she might throw out the death penalty entirely after prosecutors disclosed that a government attorney had violated the court’s rules about discussing witness testimony.

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema called it “the most egregious violation of the court’s rules on witnesses” she had seen “in all the years I’ve been on the bench.”

Her comments came after prosecutors said a Federal Aviation Administration attorney had discussed the testimony of FAA witnesses with them before they took the stand and also arranged for them to read a transcript of the government’s opening statement in the case. Both actions were banned by the judge in a pre-trial order.

This, of course, is why the right wing wants to undermine judicial independence. They think their lawlessness can prosper if only they can get rid of the judges. But the law remains, and they break themselves against it.

The quote from Judge Learned Hand yesterday comes from a speech he made in New York’s Central Park on May 21, 1944, in the midst of World War II and just shortly before D-Day. Judge Hand led 150,000 newly naturalized American citizens in the Pledge of Allegiance.

After posting yesterday, I realized I had a reprint of an old Life magazine with the text of the speech. Much of it reads like a rebuke to our current national leadership on both sides (emphases my own):

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land.

What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought. This we now believe that we are by way of winning.

What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.

And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will. It is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias. The spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to the ground unheeded. The spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be, except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the sprit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I now ask you to rise and with me to pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands — one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Via Ranchero: Microsoft design in action? What if Microsoft re-designed the packaging for Apple’s popular iPod? This video clip provides the answer.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

— Judge Learned Hand

Sometimes I worry that I’m an alarmist — that I’m too quick to see the dark side of political events. Now I’m in good company. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor spoke recently at Georgetown University. NPR had the story, and Raw Story has a transcript of NPR’s report:

In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O’Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. … The nation’s founders wrote repeatedly, she said, that without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government those rights and privileges would amount to nothing. But, said O’Connor, as the founding fathers knew statutes and constitutions don’t protect judicial independence, people do.

And then she took aim at former House GOP leader Tom DeLay. She didn’t name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case….

It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn’t help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that the senator disagrees with. She didn’t name him, but it was Texas senator John Cornyn who made that statement, after a Georgia judge was murdered in the courtroom and the family of a federal judge in Illinois murdered in the judge’s home….

Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

Look for Republican attacks on Sandra Day O’Connor, coming soon: How dare she warn us about dictatorship? Doesn’t she know it can’t happen here? She should be locked up for fomenting public mistrust of our anointed leaders.

George W. Bush’s poll numbers have been so bad lately that, if a presidential election were being held today, Bush would have to cheat really, really hard to win.

Bush is so unpopular at the moment that some Republicans in Congress are openly critical of his position on a handful of issues — particularly the plan to turn over operation of some U.S. seaports to a company owned by the government of Dubai, a deal so important to Bush that he threatened to veto any legislative attempt to interfere with it.

For the past five years, the Republican Congress has marched in rigidly-enforced lock-step behind almost every Bush policy, no matter how outrageous, so these rebellious murmurs have attracted a lot of attention.

These are the Republicans who got elected in 2002 by attacking any Democrat who said that in our rush to fight the terrorists, we must be careful not to trample our own rights. They’ve blocked investigations into suspicious no-bid contracts, war profiteering, and billions of dollars just plain missing in Iraq. They stalled an independent investigation into the terrorist attacks. They tried to whitewash the Administration’s response to Katrina.

They spent the Clinton-era budget surplus on tax cuts for millionaires. They tried to re-write their own ethics rules to protect Tom DeLay. They let lobbyists write the legislation on bankruptcy, environmental protection, the Medicare drug program and many other issues. Their House Speaker, Dennis Hastert, declared that no legislation could come to a vote unless a majority of Republicans supported it. Their Senate leader, Bill Frist, said Dick Cheney would declare Senate rules null and void if Democrats dared to prevent some judicial nominations from coming to a vote. Their “K Street Project” was designed to deny lobbying firms that hired Democrats any access to congressional leaders.

If some congressional Republicans now seem to be standing up to the unpopular Mr. Bush, you can rest assured they haven’t abandoned his agenda. The only way they can continue to advance his agenda is to get re-elected in November.

The Republican Congress is still busy writing blank checks for George W. Bush:

Imagine being stopped for speeding and having the local legislature raise the limit so you won’t have to pay the fine. It sounds absurd, but it’s just what is happening to the 28-year-old law that prohibits the president from spying on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge.

It’s a familiar pattern. President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the laws he’s broken.

In 2004, to take one particularly disturbing example, Congress learned that American troops were abusing, torturing and killing prisoners, and that the administration was illegally detaining hundreds of people at camps around the world. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, huffed and puffed about the abuse, but did nothing. And when the courts said the detention camps do fall under the laws of the land, compliant lawmakers simply changed them.

Now the response of Congress to Mr. Bush’s domestic wiretapping scheme is following the same pattern, only worse.

At first, lawmakers expressed outrage at the warrantless domestic spying, and some Democrats and a few Republicans still want a full investigation. But the Republican leadership has already reverted to form. Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has held one investigative hearing, notable primarily for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s refusal to answer questions.

Mr. Specter then loyally produced a bill that actually grants legal cover, retroactively, to the one spying program Mr. Bush has acknowledged. It also covers any other illegal wiretapping we don’t know about — including, it appears, entire “programs” that could cover hundreds, thousands or millions of unknowing people.

Mr. Specter’s bill at least offers the veneer of judicial oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A far more noxious proposal being floated by Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, would entirely remove intelligence gathering related to terrorism from the law on spying, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

…

The administration has assured the nation it had plenty of good reason, but there’s no way for Congress to know, since it has been denied information on the details of the wiretap program. And Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, seems bent on making sure it stays that way. He has refused to permit a vote on whether to investigate the spying scandal.

Time to throw the bums out.

Angry television writers have something to say about product placement. (Warning: Some material is in rather poor taste. Remember, these guys write for television.)

People often seem confused when I say that I’m anti-abortion and pro-choice. We don’t much care for ideas too nuanced to wear a convenient ready-made label. Reasonableness is seen as a sign of weakness. Today, South Dakota has struck the latest deliberately unreasonable blow in the battle over abortion:

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds signed a bill Monday that bans nearly all abortions in the state, legislation in direct conflict with the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in 1973.

…

State lawmakers had rejected proposed amendments that would have made exceptions for rape or incest.

Last week the PBS NewsHour reported on the ban. Reporter Fred de Sam Lazaro asked about exceptions under the new law:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: [South Dakota state senator Bill] Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

He certainly sets the bar high, doesn’t he? Yet the actual language of South Dakota’s new law does not allow even the type of exception Napoli describes. Allowing abortion for his brutalized, raped religious virgin would be too “convenient.”

(Crooks and Liars has video from the NewsHour report.)