brainrow

The Washington Post reports that John McCain’s fight to respect the Geneva Conventions and oppose legalized torture is gonna cost him:

Sen. John McCain’s bid to position himself as the natural heir to President Bush as a wartime commander in chief and to court conservative leaders in advance of his likely 2008 presidential campaign has threatened to run aground in recent days, as the two men clash over how to detain and try terrorism suspects.

…

In a reprise of criticism showered on McCain during his 2000 campaign, some prominent conservatives are branding him a disloyal Republican and an unreliable conservative because of his assertiveness on the detainee issue.

Let me understand this. Torture is now one of the core values of the Republican Party, and you’re not a good Republican if you’re against it?

Bill Frist (he of the Fristian Bargain) says Republicans will filibuster an interrogation bill if it contains McCain’s anti-torture language:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist signaled yesterday that he and other White House allies will filibuster a bill dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of detainees if they cannot persuade a rival group of Republicans to rewrite key provisions opposed by President Bush.

Frist’s chief of staff, Eric M. Ueland, called the dissidents’ bill “dead.”

You know what’s dead? The Party of Lincoln.

Bob Geiger:

How did Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) commemorate Constitution and Citizenship Day, when he returned to the Senate floor on Monday? In an odd twist of logic, he blamed the minority party for how little work has been done in the 109th Congress.

September 17, which fell on Sunday, celebrated the ratification of the United States Constitution and Frist used that occasion to announce that Senate Democrats are actually the reason that the last 20 legislative months have been proclaimed the “Do-Nothing Congress.”

…

Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who has endured this Congress with control of no committees, an inability to pass any meaningful legislation and no say over the Senate’s legislative agenda, was on Frist faster than Halliburton snaps up a no-bid contract.

“For more than 3 years, this Congress, which has been given the name of the ‘do-nothing Congress,’ has turned a blind eye to the intractable war in Iraq, ignoring the administration’s many mistakes and allowing it to stay on a failed course,” said Reid. “Here we are, with 6 days left in the 109th Congress, and the Republicans, who control the House and Senate and the White House, have not held one hearing — not one — into the President’s wartime failures.”

…

Reid went on to give the Senate leadership a quick history lesson on how Congress is suppose to work and how it indeed operated before the current crop of Bush rubber-stampers took over:

During the Civil War, President Lincoln was faced continually with oversight hearings by his Congress. Of course, we know during World War II, there were a number of commissions. The most famous was that conducted by Senator Harry Truman of Missouri, which led to his becoming Vice President. Some say, but for that he would not have been chosen as Vice President.

…

“This Republican Congress has wasted 20 months on horse slaughtering; the Schiavo case, dealing with someone’s personal relationship, which should not even have been before this body; gay marriage; the nuclear option; flag burning; repealing the estate tax,” said Reid. “But they could not find a day for some time to look at the President’s mistakes, missteps, and misconduct, which have hurt American security and plunged Iraq into a civil war — not a day.”

There’s more. Go read the whole thing. There’s video at Alternet — click the picture of Liza Minelli and Joel Grey. (No, I don’t know why it’s a picture of Liza Minelli and Joel Grey.)

Some physicists have speculated that there might exist countless parallel universes, each different in some small or large way.

Intrigued by this idea, I’ve done some exploring, and discovered a parallel earth almost identical to our own, except that Americans were greeted as liberators after invading Iraq. With a crude telephone constructed with two tin cans and a piece of string theory, I’ve been able to communicate with this alternate world’s version of myself.

He wasn’t surprised to hear from me because he had been working on an identical telephone himself. In several long conversations we established just how similar our two worlds were: I described a dust bunny under his coffee table, and he told me where I’d left my VCR remote.

“Okay — who’s your vice president?” I asked.

“Dick Cheney,” he replied. “Former congressman from Wyoming. He was Secretary of Defense for Bush’s father, Chief of Staff for Jerry Ford. Real jerk.”

“Same guy. Did — did he shoot a guy with a shotgun earlier this year?” I asked.

“Yeah, in a hunting accident. Fortunately the guy survived. Cheney apologized for being so careless.”

“Cheney apologized?” I said. “In this world, the guy he shot apologized to Cheney.”

There was a long silence. Then my alternate self said, “Ha ha. Very funny. Who is this, really?”

“Really, really, it’s true,” I said. “See, there’s a difference right there. But what I really want to know is why Americans were greeted as liberators in your world and not here. Let’s run through it again.”

“Okay,” my other self said. “War starts. Dubya was president, Cheney vice-president. Colin Powell was Secretary of State, now it’s Condi Rice. Rumsfeld at Defense.”

“Yeah, just like here,” I said, frustrated. “And before the invasion, Rummy said he would fire the next man who said we needed a post-war plan.”

“All right, funny guy, I’m hanging up right now,” my other self said angrily.

“I wish I was joking, but I’m not,” I said.

“Good Lord!” he said. “I mean — the military’s very tough on mistakes, you know? Admiral Kimmel and General Short lost their commands after Pearl Harbor. Colonels Geraghty and Gerlach were raked over the coals after the Beirut truck bombing even though they hadn’t been given adequate intelligence. The navy can throw a sailor in the brig just for smoking on deck at night, because the glow might give away the ship’s position. It’s a tough culture, because one mistake can get a lot of people killed. But deliberate obstruction of essential planning — that’s a whole other level. That’s criminal. So, what happened to your Rumsfeld when it came out that he actively interfered with post-war planning? Hanging? Firing squad? I’ll bet, since he’s a civilian, that he got off with just life in prison.”

“He got off, alright,” I said. “He’s still Secretary of Defense, still calling the shots in Iraq, and calling those who criticize him ‘appeasers’. Some retired generals have called for him to resign, but Bush is sticking with him.”

“Okay, Charlie, joke’s over,” said my counterpart. “You didn’t fool me for a minute. Parallel worlds I can believe, but next time, if you want to string somebody along, you’ve got to make the story at least half-way believable. I’ve never heard anything so stupid in my life.”

I felt a sharp tug on my tin-can telephone, and it vanished.

From Crooks and Liars, Bill Maher on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country:

Let me suggest that in a world turned hostile to America, the smartest message we can send to those beyond our shores is, “We’re not with Stupid.” Therefore, I maintain that ridiculing this president is now the most patriotic thing you can possibly do.

…

And by the way, when people like me ask questions about “does it still make sense to have these troops under fire?” That is supporting the troops. Asking for a plan is supporting the troops. Sitting around and parsing the meaning of “civil war”, that’s not supporting the troops, that’s supporting the President, and he’s not a troop, he just plays one on TV.

Here’s a blog about Ohio’s 15th congressional district, where Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy is challenging Republican incumbent Deborah Pryce.

Via Crooks and Liars: Jesus Camp.

Worshipping to a picture of President Bush.

…

Pastor Becky Fisher: This means war! …

I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places.

Kid: You know a lot of people die for God and stuff and they’re not even afraid.

Girl: We’re kinda being trained to be warriors, only in a much funner way.

What a great idea. Let’s make America more like Pakistan and the Middle East, because things are going so well over there.

Six months from “Wanted Dead or Alive” to “I truly am not that concerned about him.” Earlier this year the CIA made plans to shut down their bin Laden unit.

And yet we’re supposed to believe the Republicans are the best team to fight the terrorists?

A few snippets from the new PBS program AIR: America’s Investigative Reports illustrate the difference between real reporting and the journalistic stenography that tries to pass as reporting:

Bryan Lonegan, Immigration Attorney:

He [NPR investigative reporter Daniel Zwerdling] didn’t believe anything I said until I proved it to him. If I said something happened, then I’d better be able to prove that, either with documents or a witness. And then, wouldn’t you know, he’d go back and check with that witness to make sure.

…

I deal with a lot of journalists. Invariably, they call me up; they say “I’m doing a story on XYZ, what do you think?” I give them three or four sentences of, you know, a sound bite or a nice pithy quote to put in a story, and then they call up the government and they get a counterpoint. And so you have point, counterpoint: Bryan Lonegan says this, the government says that. There’s your story.

Daniel Zwerdling, Reporter:

That doesn’t do anybody a service, because we’re all bombarded with different points of view that all have equal weight. Well, every point of view does not have equal weight. Lies should not get the same amount of weight as the truth.

Opinions are not facts. Facts are not opinions. Facts are susceptible to test and verification. But that’s a lot of work, and in the 24-hour news cycle, too many so-called reporters have decided it’s easier to treat facts and opinion as interchangeable.

No wonder the Bush administration ridicules the reality-based community.

If you’re having trouble with your PC and you call for help, one of the first suggestions you’re likely to hear is “reboot.”

Before I began my current life of leisure, I was a professional Computer Guy. I helped support big OpenVMS servers with hundreds of simultaneous users. When our systems were acting flakey, we couldn’t just reboot. Instead, we took a careful look at the status of the system. Memory low? Running out of disk space? Any processes hung up, or running wild? Network trouble?

Sometimes we could fix a problem with a quick command or two. Sometimes we discovered configuration tweaks or software patches to fix the root cause and prevent similar problems in the future. And sometimes we were forced to throw up our hands and simply reboot.

A simple reboot doesn’t actually fix anything. It wipes the current current state of things from your computer’s memory and tries to start fresh, but the fundamental defects that led to your troubles haven’t been fixed, and it’s usually only a matter of time before everything’s snarled up again.

At The Washington Monthly, a number of conservatives are saying it’s time to reboot the conservative movement — Time for us to go:

Christopher Buckley:

Six years of record deficits and profligate expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The actual cost of the President’s Medicare drug benefit turned out, within months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated price. Weren’t Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at accounting?

Bruce Bartlett:

As a conservative who’s interested in the long-term health of both my country and the Republican Party, I have a suggestion for the GOP in 2006: lose. Handing over at least one house of Congress to the other side of the aisle for the next two years would probably be good for everyone. It will improve governance in the country, and it will increase the chances of GOP gains in 2008.

Joe Scarborough:

When The Washington Monthly reached me at my office recently, a voice on the other side of the line meekly asked if I would ever consider writing an article supporting the radical proposition that Republicans should get their brains beaten in this fall.

“Count me in!” was my chipper response. I also seem to remember muttering something about preferring an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America’s checkbook for the next two years.

William A. Niskanen:

Divided government is, curiously, less divisive. It’s also cheaper. The basic reason for this is simple: When one party proposes drastic or foolish measures, the other party can obstruct them. The United States prospers most when excesses are curbed, and, if the numbers from the past 50 years are any indication, divided government is what curbs them.

Bruce Fein:

The most conservative principle of the Founding Fathers was distrust of unchecked power. Centuries of experience substantiated that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Men are not angels. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition to avert abuses or tyranny. The Constitution embraced a separation of powers to keep the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in equilibrium. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.”

But a Republican Congress has done nothing to thwart President George W. Bush’s alarming usurpations of legislative prerogatives. Instead, it has largely functioned as an echo chamber of the White House.

Jeffrey Hart:

Today, the standard-bearer of “conservatism” in the United States is George W. Bush, a man who has taken the positions of an unshakable ideologue: on supply-side economics, on privatization, on Social Security, on the Terri Schiavo case, and, most disastrously, on Iraq. Never before has a United States president consistently adhered to beliefs so disconnected from actuality.

Richard Viguerie:

If Big Government Republicans behave so irresponsibly and betray the people who elected them, while we blindly, slavishly continue backing them, we establish that there is no price to pay for violating conservative principles.

In the Washington Post, Scarborough suggests that Republicans should just blame George W. Bush:

How exactly does one convince the teeming masses that Republicans deserve to stay in power despite botching a war, doubling the national debt, keeping company with Jack Abramoff, fumbling the response to Hurricane Katrina, expanding the government at record rates, raising cronyism to an art form, playing poker with Duke Cunningham, isolating America and repeatedly electing Tom DeLay as their House majority leader?

How does a God-fearing Reagan Republican explain all that away?

Easy. Blame George W. Bush.

I can’t help thinking that what these guys want most is, before the 2008 elections, to wipe from the voters’ memory the fact that Republicans got us into this mess.

A simple reboot doesn’t actually fix anything. It’s not enough to put the Democrats into a position to share blame for the deeply screwed-up state of the nation. We’ve got to root out the fundamentally defective ideas that have got us into this state.

PC World has a list of the 25 worst web sites:

From unforgettable flame-outs to some of the most popular destinations around, no one is safe from our look at the world’s dumbest dot-coms and silliest sites.

I hate it when I lose out on an award just because I wasn’t even considered. Oh, well. There’s always next year.

Via 43 Folders, Cory Doctorow on why we should stay away from Amazon Unbox (Warning: strong language):

Amazon’s new video-on-demand store may sound like a good idea, but once you take a look at the “agreement” you enter into by giving them your money, that changes. The Amazon terms-of-service are among the worst I’ve ever seen, a document through which you surrender your rights to privacy, integrity of your personal data, and control over your computer, in exchange for a chance to pay near-retail cost to watch Police Academy n-1.

…

When you sign onto Unbox, you sign away all the amazing customer rights that Amazon itself is so careful to protect. Amazon Unbox takes away your privacy and every conceivable consumer right you have, and then tells you that the goods you buy from them don’t belong to you, and they can take them away from you at any time, or change the deal you get from them without any appeal by you.

Amazon Unbox’s user agreement isn’t just galling for its evilness — it’s also commercially suicidal. No sane person will agree to this.

Via Bob Geiger: Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana responds to a Republican rant that “when it comes to securing America’s homeland, the Democrats are dangerously naive”:

I would like to state for the record that America is not tired of fighting terrorism. America is tired of the wrong-headed and bone-headed leadership of the Republican Party that has sent $6.5 billion a month to Iraq, when the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. That led this country to attack Saddam Hussein when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. Who captured a man who did not attack the country and left loose a man that did.

Americans are tired of bone-headed Republican leadership that alienates our allies when we need them the most. And Americans are most certainly tired of leadership that, despite documented mistakes after mistake after mistake after mistake — even of their own party admitting mistakes — never admit that they ever do anything wrong. That is the kind of leadership Americans are tired of.

During the Clinton years, I got so very tired of that Fleetwood Mac song with the line, “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” Aauuugghhh!

But now, I’m feeling nostalgic because of the current government’s mantra: “Don’t start thinking, period.”

When a reporter at Friday’s Rose Garden press conference said, “former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” George W. Bush responded:

If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic. I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective…

Let’s get this straight right now: We are good. Our opponents are evil. Case closed. Don’t even think about doubting it.

No, no, you can’t look at any particular thing we might have done and find it morally wanting. We’re good, they’re bad, case closed. Don’t you see? We are incapable of doing a wrong thing. Let’s move on.

No, you can’t argue that there are better ways to accomplish our objectives without surrendering the moral high ground. See, that opens up the whole concept that there’s a sort of continuum of morality, and that we’re somewhere on it, and so are our opponents — that’s it’s possible for us to be wrong. Nope, it’s a completely binary situation. You’re either for us, or you’re for the terrorists. Us good, them bad. We are incapable of doing better. Moving on…

No, you can’t say that we need to show high moral standards to win over people who don’t already agree with us. If you think that, you weren’t paying attention earlier when I said you’re for us or you’re for the terrorists. If somebody doesn’t get it that we’re good and our opponents are bad, it’s a wasted effort to persuade them. No, we just wipe ’em out. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Pow! Pow! Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Ka-boooom!

What you’re talking about is moral relativism, and I’m not buyin’ into that. Blam! Blam!

Don’t start thinking. It’s a slippery slope.

Marianne Faithfull has cancer. Rats.

Her publicist says her prognosis is good. Best wishes to her for a complete recovery.

I got some mail from Mary Jo Kilroy’s congressional campaign. She’s challenging Deb Pryce, my congressional representative and the chair of the House Republican Conference.

Right away I noticed a difference between the two campaigns’ way of getting their message to me.

Deb Pryce:

Mary Jo Kilroy: