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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.)

Bill Clinton used to bite his lip and tell suffering Americans, “I feel your pain.” George W. Bush is different. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says Bush feels no pain:

Why doesn’t Mr. Bush get any economic respect? I think it’s because most Americans sense, correctly, that he doesn’t care about people like them. We’re living in a time when many Americans are feeling economically insecure, but a tiny elite has been growing incredibly rich. And Mr. Bush’s problem is that he identifies so totally with the lucky, wealthy few that in unscripted settings he can’t manage even a few sentences of empathy with ordinary Americans. He doesn’t feel your pain, and it shows.

Here’s what Mr. Bush said in India, when someone raised the question of the political backlash against outsourcing: “Losing jobs is painful, so let’s make sure people are educated so they can find — fill the jobs of the 21st century. And let’s make sure that there’s pro-growth economic policies in place. What does that mean? That means low taxes; it means less regulation; it means fewer lawsuits; it means wise energy policy.”

…

The fact is that we’re living in a time when most Americans are seeing little if any benefit from overall income growth, because their share of the economic pie is falling. Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40 percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80 percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.

And those fortunate few are the only people Mr. Bush seems to care about. Look at what he had to offer after asserting, in effect, that workers get outsourced because they don’t have the right education: lower taxes, deregulation and fewer lawsuits. Funny, that doesn’t sound like “pro-growth” policy to me. Instead, it sounds like a wish list for wealthy individuals and big corporations.

Mr. Bush once joked that his base consisted of the “haves and the have-mores.” But it wasn’t much of a joke.

I just watched the Academy Awards show, all the way through, because Jon Stewart was hosting. Big mistake. Every time I’ve watched the Oscars, I’ve sworn I’ll never watch again. This time I double-dog swear. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

The only good moment in three and a half hours came early, when George Clooney won for best supporting actor:

And finally, I would say that, you know, we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it’s probably a good thing. We’re the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects. This Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I’m proud to be a part of this Academy. Proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch.

For a moment there, I got my hopes up. Words of wisdom: never get your hopes up while watching the Oscars. (Quote courtesy of Crooks and Liars.)

While flipping channels this weekend, I heard a pundit discussing George W. Bush’s recent dismal polling numbers, and the difficulty Bush faces in improving those numbers. At the end, he said that about the only thing that could help Bush’s popularity right now would be another terrorist attack.

The pundit didn’t mean to suggest that Bush would actually welcome a new attack. He just wanted to show how tough Bush’s position is right now.

You’d have to search for a while to find someone with a lower opinion of Bush than my own, and even I think the notion that Bush wants a terrorist attack is outrageous. And yet I don’t think we can put that thought completely out of mind, either.

This New York Times editorial says George W. Bush is Iran’s best friend:

At the rate that President Bush is going, Iran will be a global superpower before too long. For all of the axis-of-evil rhetoric that has come out of the White House, the reality is that the Bush administration has done more to empower Iran than its most ambitious ayatollah could have dared to imagine.

In Iraq, Bush has empowered Iranian-aligned Shiite fundamentalists. In India last week, Bush unilaterally abandoned the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and handed Iran a great argument to use when their own nuclear ambitions come before the United Nations.

The Iraq war has given al Qaeda a great recruiting tool and a practical training ground for trying out new terror tactics.

The Dubai ports deal will provide considerable inside knowledge about U.S. port operations and security to a government whose royal family has had friendly relations with the Bush family and with Osama bin Laden.

At what point does incompetence cease to adequately explain this administration’s behavior? Is there some point at which even the most skeptical observer has to acknowledge that there is some malign will at work here?

In some ways, the terrorists have done more than anyone to advance George W. Bush’s fortunes. Whether through ineptitude or malice, his presidency has been helpful to them, too. Their fatal embrace has benefitted both Bush and the terrorists. It’s been very bad for the rest of us.

For several weeks now, I’ve had just one final chapter yet to read in The Once and Future King, T.H. White’s novel about the legendary King Arthur.

I keep putting off reading that last chapter. I don’t want to let go of this book.

The novel brings together four shorter books. The Sword in the Stone, originally published in 1938, tells of Arthur’s childhood and his education by the wizard Merlyn. The Queen of Air and Darkness, first published (with a different title) in 1939, tells of Arthur’s early years as king. The Ill-Made Knight, published in 1940, tells of Lancelot and Guenever. The Candle in the Wind recounts the end of Camelot. It was not published separately.

The early parts of the novel are full of mythical creatures, magic and humor. Merlyn turns the young Arthur into various kinds of animals, so he can live among them and learn from them. As the story progresses, it grows more serious and more rooted in reality. By the end, we are left only with truth and consequences.

One legend says that Arthur did not die, but only sleeps under a hill in Avalon. He will return in England’s hour of greatest need. The legend is poetic and poignant and beautiful. That may be why three books about King Arthur were popular in the early years of World War II.

The legend is also, of course, utterly wrong. White’s Merlyn understands this. Early in the young king’s career, Merlyn refuses Arthur’s entreaties to tell him what to do. Arthur was educated so that he could think for himself. When the king finally does start thinking for himself, Merlyn’s relief and elation is electrifying.

In any era, people don’t solve their problems by waiting patiently for a hero to appear. Real heroes do not rise out of an enchanted mist. They are mortal people who step forward in a time of trouble to do what is needed. That kind of heroism is within the reach of anyone, yet it is so exceedingly rare that those who exhibit it become the stuff of legend.

A perennial:

Did you hear about the fire at the White House? Firefighters were able to confine it, but Bush’s personal library was completely destroyed. Both books. Including one he hadn’t finished coloring yet.

Last week on PBS, I saw an ’80s video clip of Gore Vidal telling the same story about Ronald Reagan. It was an old joke even then. I first heard it on a 1971 comedy album by an odd comedian named Stanley Myron Handelman, with Spiro T. Agnew the butt of the joke.

The following joke arrived in email. I see that it’s already been posted around the web in various forms, with various people the butt of the joke. I suspect it’s another perennial.

President Bush recently went to a primary school in Macon, Georgia, to talk about the world.

After his talk, he asked if the children had any questions. One little boy put up his hand, and the President asked him his name.

“Kenneth.”

“And what is your question, Kenneth?”

“I have three questions:

1. Whatever happened to the weapons of mass destruction?
2. Why did you give a tax break to the super wealthy?
3. Did you steal votes to win both elections?”

Just then the bell rang for recess. President Bush informed the kiddies that they would continue after recess.

When they resumed, the President said, “OK, now where were we? Oh, that’s right, question time. Who has a question?”

A different little boy put his hand up. Bush pointed him out and asked him his name.

“Larry.”

“And what is your question, Larry?”

“I have five questions:

1. Whatever happened to the weapons of mass destruction?
2. Why did you give a tax break to the super wealthy?
3. Did you steal votes to win both elections?
4. Why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early?
5. What happened to Kenneth?”