Hey, David Brooks! Now THIS is an Inquisition!

That doesn't look like either Ned Lamont OR Markos Moulitsas in the red robe. And I don't think either one of those guys is a tummler.

(hat tip: Pachacutec at firedoglake)

Movie Break: Weepies Edition

This morning I was watching the end of Field of Dreams while drinking my vanilla yogurt/flaxseed/wheatgerm/banana breakfast smoothie, and damn it if the damn thing didn't make me go all goopy AGAIN?

What are your favorite weepies (male and female categories)? Which weepies can you watch over and over again, and which have lost their charm? ARE there any male weepies other than Field of Dreams and Brian's Song?

Bush Monarchy Watch for Tuesday, July 11, 2006

The latest trial balloon:

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has frequently said he won't run for president in 2008, but he's never ruled out being a running mate.

And he didn't Monday when asked about teaming up with Arizona Sen. John McCain.
"I like Sen. McCain. I think he's a good guy," Bush told reporters after returning from a holiday in Maine with his family.

Bush, 53, would provide some age balance on such a ticket. McCain turns 70 next month.

When prodded about the likelihood of a McCain-Bush ticket, Bush hedged just slightly.
"There's all sorts of time to worry about the 2008 election," he said. Bush is prohibited from seeking a third consecutive term as governor by Florida law.

There's your quid pro quo, folks. McCain gets the endorsement of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade over the unacceptable Rudolph Giuliani in exchange for putting Bush the Youngest in the #2 spot.

If McCain is dumb enough to make yet another Bush scion his running mate, he'd better hire someone to taste his food before he eats it.

And the Democrats ought to stop this bullshit about appealing to evangelicals and start rehearsing how best to hang the corpse of Terri Schiavo around Jebbie's neck -- along with the mug shots and police reports of his children..

Best New Flavor

MMMMMmmmmmmmm.......tea. [/Homer]

(hat tip: Digby)

Ned Lamont: Bringing the Funny

Via Hoffmania comes this terrific campaign ad from Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont:



This reminds me of an SNL sketch that Al Franken did back in the days when he was funny. He and Tom Davis played rival political candidates, each making ever-more scurrilous and increasingly ridiculous claims about the other. I don't remember the particulars, other than one of them claiming "We'll kill criminals BEFORE they can commit crimes", and Franken's tag line: "Vote for me. Pete Tagliani."

I suspect that Lamont's people remember that sketch too.

Why do people let it get to this point?

In 1971, unemployed accountant John List killed his wife, mother, and three children in Westfield, New Jersey, then disappeared for eighteen years until he was apprehended largely because the television program America's Most Wanted did a profile on the case.

I was sixteen, a classmate/peripheral friend of Patricia List. We were both in the community theatre group that had her father convinced that she was headed down the wrong path, away from Jesus. This was my first real experience with death, and my first experience with the Christofascist Zombie Brigade. It was a horrific crime that gained national attention and spawned a television movie and a slew of books.

We've seen high-profile cases in recent years of women killing their children -- Susan Smith pushing her car into a lake with her two children inside after receiving a Dear John letter from her lover stating that he didn't want to deal with them; a clearly unhinged Andrea Yates drowning her children in the bathtub. But it's been a while since we've seen another case that even approached the horror and grotesquerie of the List case.

Until yesterday, when a Bergen County man shot his two sons, age 20 and 14, while they slept, then turned the gun on himself.

It's virtually the same story -- a family living in the most prestigious section of a tree-lined suburban town, a 46-year-old father with financial worries, guns in the house, and interviews with shocked neighbors saying they had no idea there was anything wrong. At least Thomas Frazza had the decency to include himself in the carnage. Frazza's wife and 19-year-old daughter were at the family's shore house at the time, or they too would no doubt have been carted out with sheets over their faces.

John List was an accountant who couldn't seem to hold a job, living in a majestic house he couldn't afford. Frazza apparently ran a company that installs and maintains pay phones, which of course has not exactly been a banner business in recent years, living in a house he could no longer afford, with a beach house he was having problems selling in a soft real estate market. Perhaps he had succumbed to the siren song of the home equity loan to buy the SUVs and the wide-screen TVs that seem to be mandatory accessories of upscale suburban life. And now, with his business in tatters and a lifestyle he was unable to sustain, at an age when opportunities to shift gears are limited at best, he saw no other way out.

John List was a religious nutcase, but this seems to be a case of pure economics: a father so distraught at his inability to continue to provide his children with the lifestyle to which they'd become accustomed that he decided that they -- and he -- would be better off dead.

All of northern Bergen County has been a beehive of conspicuous consumption for the last few years. It seems that every block has a new McMansion, or an older home with a dumpster in front of it and an add-a-level AND a two-story addition in progress. It is a land of multi-car driveways and manicured lawns and more SUVs than there are licensed drivers in the household. It's not cheap to live like this, and the tendency is to borrow money for all this consumption rather than to save up to pay cash.

Two years ago, after four years of saving money, we had a new roof, new windows, and new siding installed on our house, along with some other minor work. Everyone who knows that almost nothing in my house had been updated by the previous owners wondered why we didn't just borrow the money and have the kitchen and baths remodeled while we were at it. After all, rates were cheap, why not get what we really want NOW?

Because sometimes you can't have everything you want NOW. Because sometimes you have to wait, or compromise, or do without, so that you don't find yourself drowning in debt. After all, a nice new kitchen doesn't do you a whole lot of good if you lose your job and you're lying awake nights feeling like monsters are gnawing on your intestines wondering how you're going to repay all the loans. But in these Jersey suburban towns, the "keeping up with the Joneses" is utterly ferocious. In my neighborhood, there are two guys whose families have been friends for years. One of them had a pool that he never used. He and his wife divorced, he remarried a woman with kids, and now they use the pool. A year after he started using his pool, the other guy decided HE had to have a pool too. We put a new roof, siding, and windows on our house two years ago because we had leaky windows and asbestos shingle siding that was cracking, and almost immediately THIS guy started making plans for doing even MORE remodeling of his already-updated house.

Most towns in Bergen County have undergone a revaluation in the last two years, and some have just received their new tax bills. The town in which this murder took place is one of them.

$3.00 gasoline. Four-figure property tax increases. Layoffs. Pensions being dismantled. Skyrocketing fuel costs. Rising borrowing costs. A flat real estate market. And the borrowing to keep up appearances continues.

Why do I think we're going to see more stories like this?

I guess the Freepers will say that this one asked for it too

Child rape: It isn't just for Iraqi girls anymore:

The rape of an 11-year-old girl may have involved as many as 10 men, most of whom are football players at local community colleges, police said.

Police arrested two men in connection with the rape Saturday night, and officials said they identified eight others as persons of interest in the case. Most or all are students at either Fresno City College or Reedley College, police said.

The victim, a runaway from a group home, went to a Fresno apartment complex Saturday night to visit an acquaintance, said police spokesman Jeff Cardinale.

While she was inside one of the units, she allegedly was sexually assaulted multiple times by several men, he said.

The girl then fled the apartment and sought help from a couple on the street who called police, Cardinale said.

One could argue that what happened in Iraq is the product of burnt-out, emotionally damaged soldiers stop-lossed into monstrousness by war. What the hell is THESE guys' excuse?

(hat tip: Pam's House Blend)

Iran: The Christofascist Zombie Brigade's wet dream

At least as far as its treatment of evil unchaste women is concerned:

Once again, another Iranian woman has been sentenced to death by the barbaric practice of public stoning. On June 28, 2006, a court in the northwestern Iranian city of Urmia sentenced Malak Ghorbany to death for committing "adultery." Under Iran's Penal Code, the term "adultery" is used to describe any intimate or sexual act between a man and a girl/woman who are not married. The crime of adultery is also used in cases where a girl is deemed to have committed "acts incompatible with chastity," which includes instances of rape. The punishment for "adultery" is death.

On the day of her punishment, the woman's hands are tied behind her back as she becomes covered from head to toe in winding sheets and is placed seated in a pit. The pit is then filled up to her chest with dirt and the dirt is tamped down. At that point, members of the community are invited to murder her by hurling rocks at her. However, to ensure that the condemned woman/girl receives the absolute maximum amount of pain and torture, the Iranian government has even mandated the size of the stones that are to be used in this barbaric act of public execution. By law, the stones must not be too small as to prevent ultimate death, nor must they be too large that they could cause the girl's death "too soon."

This kind of barbarity differs from wanting young girls to die of cervical cancer rather than be vaccinated; wanting women to not have access to safe, legal abortion; wanting to deny emergency contraception even to rape victims; only in the matter of degree, not of underlying sentiment.

(hat tip: Feministe)

Why I don't put bumper stickers on my car

This is why.

I wonder what's so terrifying about the notion of peace that some pencil-dick thinks he has to do this?

Please tell me this doesn't mean I have to say Adam Corolla is funny?

I still think he's a jerk. But last week Adam Corolla showed the rest of the media the only way to deal with Ann Coulter.

So does Bill Napoli think that Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi qualified to have an abortion had she not been shot to death?

Private Steven Green and his four cohorts didn't "rape a woman" in Iraq, they raped a 14-year-old girl before killing her and her entire family.

Think about it.

A 14-year-old girl.

How fucked up do you have to be; how far removed from your own humanity, let alone the humanity of your victims, to commit this kind of violation, even in wartime?

Yet this is what the Iraq war is doing to the people that George W. Bush is sending there.

Here's the ugly story:

Days after former private Steven Green was charged as a civilian in a U.S. court with rape and four murders, four serving soldiers were charged with the same offences, the U.S. military said in statement. It did not name the troops.

Another soldier, apparently a sixth member of Green's former unit in the 502nd Infantry Regiment, was charged on Saturday with dereliction of duty for not reporting the crime in March.

All five were charged with conspiring with Green, accused by U.S. prosecutors of going with three others to a house near the checkpoint they were manning outside Mahmudiya, near Baghdad, and of killing a couple and their two daughters. The five could face the death penalty.

Court documents described the raped daughter as an "adult female" and estimated her age as 25. U.S. military officials in Iraq say their documents have her as 20. Local officials and relatives had said she was 15 or 16.

Her identity card and a copy of her death certificate obtained by Reuters, however, show she was 14.

Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was born on August 19, 1991 in Baghdad, according to the identity card, provided to Reuters by a relative. Issued in 1993, it features a photograph of her at 18 months, wide-eyed and with a lick of dark hair over her brow.

A copy of her death certificate, dated March 13, gives the same birth date. She was found at home by a relative on March 12 and had died from "gunshot wounds to the head, with burns", said the document, signed by doctor Wael Habib and a registrar.

No independent verification of the documents was immediately available.

The age of consent with parental approval in Iraq is 15, though it is not uncommon for girls to marry younger in rural areas.

Abeer's sister Hadeel was aged six when she died of "several gunshot wounds".

SCORCH MARKS AND BLOODSTAINS

The killers tried to burn the bodies and house to cover their tracks, relatives and local officials have said. Scorch marks and bloodstains can still be seen in the one-storey home.

Some relatives have said they would not object to exhuming the dead for forensic tests, a religiously sensitive process.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, balancing a dependence on U.S. firepower with a need to show Iraqis he is in charge, has voiced frustration with a mounting number of cases against Americans and wants a review of their immunity from Iraqi law.

Since revelations in March of a U.S. probe into whether Marines killed 24 people at Haditha, Mahmudiya is the fifth case of serious crime being investigated by the U.S. military. In all, 16 soldiers have been charged with murder in the past month or so -- as many as in the previous three years of fighting.

[snip]



"She was a beautiful girl," one relative said, asking not to be named. "She complained to her mother about trouble from American soldiers. She gave them no encouragement as we are a conservative and respectable family."

These guys stalked a 14-year-old girl for a week before raping and killing her -- and killing anyone else who happened to be home.

We in the United States like to think of ourselves as superior to the rest of the world. The janjaweed in Darfur rape and kill women, and we turn the other way because after all, it's in Africa, and "we're more civilized." Rape was a common outgrowth of warfare in the former Yugoslavia. Whenever you give men guns and tell them to kill, rape is sure to follow. Even on U.S. soil, where you have war you have rape.

Why is this? Does war make men feel invincible? Or does watching your buddies get blown to pieces turn ALL humans into just so much meat?

And why on earth target a 14-year-old?

And this is the course that Republicans (and Joe Lieberman) want to continue to pursue?

UPDATE:

Eric Blumrich's comments on this horrific crime perpetrated by Americans under the command of George W. Bush are worth reading. He also has a picture of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi's identity card -- the one proving that she was fourteen years old. You'd better look at it there, because you can bet your life that the mainstream media, who are still insisting that this girl was 20 years old (and by implication, insisting that she was "asking for it" or at the very least, that raping and then shooting a 20-year-old in the head is somehow less heinous), won't touch it.

Can this Administration do ANYTHING right?

Yup, freedom is on the march:

Dateline Iraq:

Two car bombs struck a Shiite district in Baghdad on Monday, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens, officials said, as sectarian tensions rose following a rampage by Shiite gunmen killed 41 people, most of them Sunnis.

The violence began when a car parked near a repair shop on the edge of the Shiite slum of Sadr City blew up, followed within minutes by a suicide car bomber who drove into the crowd that had gathered near the site.

Hospital officials said at least eight people were killed and 41 wounded in the blast. AP Television News footage showed the devastated repair shop with a crumpled roof and the blackened hulks of cars on the street outside.

A roadside bomb also struck a police patrol near a restaurant elsewhere in eastern Baghdad, wounding three policemen, police Lt. Ahmed Qassim said.

And a bomb exploded in the Shurja market in central Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 18, police Col. Adnan al-Obeidi said.

In Kirkuk, a suicide truck bomb struck an office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the main Kurdish political parties in Iraq, killing five people and wounding 12 others, police Brig. Sarhat Qadir said.

A police patrol in the predominantly Shiite city of Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, also hit a roadside bomb, leaving one policeman dead and four wounded, army Capt. Hassim al-Khafaji said.

'A dangerous precipice'

The streets in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad were calm on Monday after the deadly rampage the day before by Shiite gunmen, who dragged Sunnis from their cars, picked them out on the street and killed them.

Police said 41 people were killed, although there were conflicting figures. An official in the prime minister's office, Haidar Majid, said only nine people died in Jihad, while police Lt. Mohammed Khayoun insisted the figure of 41 was correct, with 24 bodies taken to Yarmouk hospital and 17 to the city morgue.

Some Sunni clerics put the death toll at more than 50 in Jihad, a once prosperous neighborhood of handsome villas owned by officials of Saddam Hussein's security services.

Sunni leaders expressed outrage over the killings, and President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, appealed for calm, warning that the nation stood "in front of a dangerous precipice."

And all the while, President Delusional insists that it's all the media's fault, that the press isn't reporting the good news:

We occasionally are able to pop in with great success, like Zarqawi or 12 million people voting. But increasing electricity in Baghdad is not the kind of thing that tends to get on the news, or small business formation is not the kind of thing to get -- or new schools or new hospitals, the infrastructure being rebuilt that had been torn apart. And I'm not being critical. I'm just giving you a fact of something I have to deal with in order to make it clear to the American people that the sacrifice of those families is worth it. We are winning. And a free Iraq is an essential part of changing the conditions which causes the terrorists to be able to recruit killers in the first place.

But while Captain Codpiece is all snug in his bed, those who are seeing what's happening in Iraq have a different story, and say that it's even WORSE than the media are reporting:

FP: The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad recently sent a cable to Washington detailing the dangerous situation under which its Iraqi employees work. Is the situation in the Green Zone as bad as the cable made it out to be?

RN: Yes, it is that bad. [The cable] didn’t come as a surprise to me, except that somebody in the embassy was courageous enough to outline the hardships in very frank detail, and the ambassador was honest enough to put his name to it. It is exactly what our own Iraqi staff has gone through for years now. As early as 2003, the Iraqis who work for us were not telling their family or friends that they worked for Americans. At the time, we thought it was a ridiculous precaution—a throwback to the Saddam era—but as time went on, they proved that they knew their society a lot better than we did.

FP: Where do you get information about the insurgency?

RN: There was a stage in the war when we could talk to insurgents and people representing insurgents. Now, it’s just too dangerous. There is no way to safely contact them. We talk to Sunni leaders who are in touch with at least the Iraqi insurgents, the distinction being that al Qaeda insurgents are mainly foreign terrorists. [Iraqi] groups have a political constituency among Sunni politicians and they are in touch. So we can and do talk to them frequently. In fact, so does the U.S. Embassy.

FP: Are journalists and the military seeing two different pictures in Iraq?

RN: Sometimes it’s hard to say. Many in the military are here on their second or third tour and they don’t want to feel that this is all a doomed enterprise. I’m not saying it is, but to some extent they are victims of their own propaganda. Two reasonable people can look at the same set of information and come to different conclusions. A good example: I traveled recently to Taji for the handover of a large swath of territory north of Baghdad to the Iraqi Army’s 9th Armored Division. This was meant to be a big milestone: an important chunk of territory that has lots of insurgent activity, given over completely to the control of the Iraqi Army. But when we spoke to the Iraqi Army officers, they said they didn’t have enough equipment. They are still completely dependent on the U.S. Army for their logistics, their meals, and a lot of their communications. The United States turned territory over to them, but they are not a functioning, independent army unit yet.

Bush insists that our presence in Iraq is keeping the carnage from being even worse than it is. Others who are there say that our presence is exacerbating the violence. What this means, given that Bush has anointed himself "the Decider" and no one seems willing to contradict him, is that more people will die, more American young people will be killed in the insurgency, more Iraqi civilians will die, more soldiers will flip out and we'll read more stories like this -- and nothing will ever change.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan (yes, the country from which Bush pulled troops so he could invade and ruin Iraq):

American and allied troops are engaged in their biggest operation against Taliban forces in Afghanistan since they drove the fundamentalist movement from power in 2001. These photographs were taken over two weeks in June with Charlie Company, Fourth Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, near Hazarbuz, in Zabul Province.

The Americans face the hard job of trying to tell local farmers from Taliban insurgents, who have gained strength across southern Afghanistan. The Americans set up a base, then probed into villages. They were soon ambushed. The Taliban can easily persuade or coerce villagers to assist them. They arm the villagers or equip them with radios. Almost any man is suspect. During one raid, which was typical, the Americans separated the men. Homes were searched, and the men were marched to the base for questioning.

The Americans feel the hands of those who claim to be farmers, to make sure they are rough. They check under the men's shirts for calluses from carrying rifle clips, or for bruises from firing rocket-propelled grenades. As often is the case, almost all are released for lack of evidence.

Col. Tom Collins, the American military spokesman in Kabul, said, "We have intelligence that leads us to a certain village where there are antigovernment elements and we take in those we find, screen them, and some are then let go immediately, but they still have to be questioned."

The day after the raid, the Americans were ambushed again, this time at their base. Automatic rifle fire sprayed just inches above a row of soldiers as they lay resting.

On the final day of the operation, a raid on a village sent several men fleeing for the mountains. They were met by American Ranger Scouts. Three men were captured. They confessed to being Taliban fighters and were brought back to the base to be handed over to the Afghan authorities.

Wait a minute....I thought we had the Taliban "on the run".

How long do we want to go on like this?

Happy Birthday, Tai Shan!

Because sometimes only cuteness can keep you sane in the face of an insane world, let's join all the other lunatics to wish Tai Shan, the panda born last year at the National Zoo, a happy birthday.

For more gooey, panda-y goodness, check out the birthday boy's photo gallery.

Air America Radio blows it again

In one of the most spectacular employee shaftings to take place since the demise of Enron, the latest group of revolving-door suits at Air America Radio has decided to deliver the Screwing To End All Screwings of someone who should be one of their marquee personalities by now, Marc Maron.

As most of you know, AAR brought in as CEO last year a man named Danny Goldberg. Goldberg is a longtime music industry guy who wrote a book called How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. This particular genius decided that the thing to do with Air America was to suck all the humor out of it by giving us a completely arid, unlistenable weekend lineup, and to cancel the brilliant and gonzo Morning Sedition, replacing it with two hours of dumbass sports talk, pre-recorded interviews, fifteen minutes of listener calls, and for some strange reason, the supposedly humorous comic stylings of Jim Hightower, all hosted by Mark Riley, who has been lost without his neurotic Jewish comic counterpart ever since MS was cancelled. Yes, there is also two hours of Rachel Maddow, aided tremendously by the funny and talented Kent Jones, but not even Maddow, who's as smart as a whip, makes up for the loss of Pendejo the Revolutionary, Sammy the Stem Cell, the Milfingtons, the Dream Diary, the Presidential Palm Pilot, and the other Manifestations of the Funny that Marc Maron brought to the morning hours.

In February, Marc Maron started a new show on KTLK out of Los Angeles, which he returned to after the cancellation of the morning show, along with sketch sidekick Jim Earl. This was his SECOND cross-country relocation at the behest of Air America. The show ran from 10 PM to 1 AM Pacific time, subject to change or cancellation due to Clipper games. First the show was live, which meant fun calls from die-hard Maronistas like Gypsy and Kristapea and Seanie the cross-country trucker. Then it was taped in advance, which meant a full hour and 15 minute podcast every day, but a loss of spontaneity. The show was supposed to be syndicated starting in April, but never was. And last week, one of the suits flew out to L.A. to tell Maron that his show was being cancelled as of the 14th, and with what AAR is presenting as "a better offer."

I suspect that this "better offer" involves being second banana to someone else; perhaps a lame attempt to revive Morning Sedition, or as a comic foil for Rachel Maddow, or God only knows what. I also suspect that this "better offer" doesn't include Jim Earl, who is a brilliant sketch comic, but as a co-host can be curmudgeonly and self-righteous. I also suspect that this "better offer" involves yet another cross-country relocation, which I can't imagine anyone wanting to do for an employer that has already shafted him twice. As he said on one of last week's shows, it's like when your mom gets a new boyfriend who beats you, and she does nothing. Then after they break up, she tells you she loves you, but you never quite trust yoru mom again.

I've been a supporter of Air America Radio since the beginning. I paid to be an affiliate. I paid to be a premium member so I could get the podcasts. I'm an avid listener, even when Franken is boring. I only draw the line at the odious Satellite Sisters, who paid to take over Mike Malloy's airtime on WLIB in New York. But AAR is sorely trying my patience at this point.

With the gasbags of the right continuing to have unlimited outlets for their delusional spew, a clever, progressive alternative is vital for national dialogue. And to the extent that there IS now a debate in this country about Iraq, about how veterans are treated, about the NSA spying programs, and about black box voting, it's largely because Air America and the blogs, sometimes working together, have managed to get the word out into the ambient air. But however well-intentioned these attempts to somehow atone for Danny Goldberg's shabby treatment of one of AAR's brightest stars may be, they are being clunkily delivered, and I suspect will ultimately result in the permanent loss of this unique voice on AAR's airwaves.

Republicans: The party of, well, "Let's Party"

But only for their own.

First, Rush Limbaugh cops a plea bargain when charged with doctor-shopping to satisfy his addiction to Oxycontin. This is a guy who in 1995 said:

There's nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods, which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.

What this says to me is that too many whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff. The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too.

Now it's Senator Orrin Hatch, who has decided that the best use of his time is in pulling strings to get a music producer released from a Dubai jail, where he's been sitting for bringing in a gram of cocaine.

Dallas Austin, 35, who has produced hits for Madonna, Janet Jackson and others, flew home to Atlanta on Wednesday, after being released after midnight on Tuesday from a holding cell in a Dubai jail. Hours earlier Mr. Austin had been sentenced to four years in prison for carrying just over a gram of cocaine with him when he entered the country on May 19 to attend a birthday celebration for Naomi Campbell.

Senator Hatch made numerous phone calls on Mr. Austin's behalf to the ambassador and consul of the United Arab Emirates embassy in Washington — Dubai is one of the seven emirates — and served as an intermediary for Mr. Austin's representatives, the producer's lawyers said.

"The senator was one of a number of people who were very actively involved," said Joe Reeder, the Washington lawyer, who, with an Atlanta colleague, Joel A. Katz, spent 10 days in Dubai working to secure Mr. Austin's reprieve.

Mr. Katz, an entertainment lawyer, represents both Mr. Austin and the somewhat less musically successful Mr. Hatch, a singer and songwriter who has recorded religious-oriented albums. After hiring Mr. Katz's firm, the senator last year took in $39,092 in income from music publishing, according to financial documents filed in May under the Ethics in Government Act.

The senator declined to be interviewed or to confirm details of his efforts on Mr. Austin's behalf, but he issued a statement acknowledging his involvement and said he was asked by Mr. Austin's lawyers to help.

A spokesman for Mr. Hatch said that the senator was a proponent of rehabilitation for drug offenders, and that he had worked to revise federal sentencing guidelines regarding cocaine, and, through legislation in 2005, had advocated treatment for nonviolent offenders and the easing of restrictions on medication to treat heroin addiction.

In the statement Mr. Hatch said he was "confident that this talented young man will learn from this experience." He did not say if he requested that Mr. Austin seek treatment.

Orrin Hatch supports:

• Increasing penalties for selling illegal drugs.
  
• mandatory jail sentences for selling illegal drugs.
  
• capital punishment for convicted international drug traffickers.
  
• expanding federally sponsored drug education and drug treatment programs.
  
• Increasing border security to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the US

In 1999, Hatch voted "Yes" on bill S.625, which would increase penalties on certain drug-related crimes and specifically targeted the manufacturing or trafficking of amphetamines & methamphetamines and possession of powder cocaine, and set stronger penalties for dealing drugs.

I wonder if he thinks increased penalties should apply to his friend Mr. Austin? Or is Orrin Hatch now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dallas Austin, Music Producer?

Someone please take away David Brooks' car keys

I am not making this up:

A man drove his car into a crowd at a New London waterfront festival Saturday afternoon, injuring more than two dozen people, police said. The car narrowly missed Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont, who was campaigning nearby, a spokesman said.

At least three of Lamont's campaign workers were hurt. One, Susan Goldman of Norwich, suffered a broken leg, said Lamont spokesman Tom Swan. The car missed Lamont by 6 to 18 feet, Swan said.

All 27 of the injured, many of them with scrapes, cuts and bruises, were expected to be treated at Lawrence and Memorial Hospital by late Saturday or early today and released, said Kelly Anthony, a hospital spokesman.

Just kidding about the headline. But it IS a good one, isn't it?

No charges had been filed against the driver of the car, Robert Laine, 89, of Wallingford, late Saturday. New London and Amtrak police were still investigating.

And from the whiny-ass titty baby (™ Atrios) file....

David Brooks is all up in arms about those nasty bloggers being so mean to poor widdew Joe Lieberman:

What's happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can't reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate.

Presumably at this point, Brooks had to loosen his corset, fan himself, and lie down langourously on a chaise longue.

Remember, this is a guy who is an apologist for people who think Ann Coulter represents civilized political debate.

Brooks just doesn't get it. Our disgust with Joe Lieberman isn't about hate for Lieberman himself; it's about his complete abandonment of everything that a Democrat should stand for in favor of the short-term political expediency of acquiescing to George W. Bush's notion of an unaccountable, imperial presidency.

So these days, for example, one hears that Lieberman is a crypto-conservative, a Bible-Belter. In reality, of course, this is a man who has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign. He has a Christian Coalition rating of 0.

But a lifetime's record is deemed not to matter any longer. For in the midst of the inquisition all of American liberalism has been reduced to one issue, the war. Just as some edges of the pro-life movement reduce all of conservatism to abortion, the upscale revivalists on the left reduce everything to Iraq, and all who are deemed impure must be cleansed away.

No, a lifetime's record doesn't matter -- not when a politician has done a complete turnaround on too many important issues. Staying the course in Iraq is an insane policy. Lieberman stood in front of a podium in last week's debate expounding on how wonderful things are in Iraq -- just like the Republicans told him to; just like the so-called "journalists" who are being vetted for embedding by the Administration only if they toe the party line on positive reporting. Whether one believes we should withdraw now because the insurgency is driven SOLELY by our presence, or if you believe we should set a timetable for a gradual phase-out, either notion is preferable to mindless adherence of a Bush policy that is going nowhere.

Planned Parenthood's endorsement of Lieberman is a mystery -- and appalling, in light of Lieberman's callous statement that "In Connecticut, it shouldn't take more than a short ride to get to another hospital" if a rape victim's closest hospital refuses to give her emergency contraception "on religious grounds."

In the recent NJ primary for the 5th Congressional District, I took a fair amount of heat from some people for having the temerity to believe that offering voters a choice of candidates, even in a primary, was a good thing. Brooks seems to believe that Lieberman, by virtue of incumbency, is to be somehow exempted from any scrutiny of his positions, and that a primary challenge is somehow unseemly. This is a disservice to the voters. It is for the Democratic primary voters of Connecticut to decide who should represent them, not armchair pundits.

But perhaps the most offensive aspect to David Brooks' apologia for Lieberman is his quite deliberate use of the word "inquisition" -- implying that the progressives' distaste for someone so callous about the lives of our soldiers and to the needs of rape victims is somehow related to anti-Semitism. I've been tubthumping about bigotry weekend, and believe me, growing up Jewish in a largely Christian town and then going to a small, church-related college where I was actually asked a) where my horns were; and b) why I drive an old car if I'm Jewish; I know what anti-Semitism is. But for Lieberman and his apologists to play the anti-Semitism card when there are legitimate reasons to oppose him for another term, is unconscionable, and all too reminiscent of Clarence Thomas trying to liken questioning at a confirmation hearing to being kidnapped, strung up on a tree and butchered. Asking Joe Lieberman to defend his position on the war is hardly the same as being tortured, then burnt at the stake, sawed in half, or slowly disemboweled, and frankly, it cheapens the suffering of Jews who were so victimized during the Spanish Inquisition by using this word to describe Joe Lieberman's so-called travails.

Republicans love to say that racism and bigotry no longer exists, until it's time for THEM to play the race or religion card. I suppose this is another example of "Everything is OK if you're a Republican."

Or if you fall in line behind them like a good little sheep -- or like Joe Lieberman.

American Bigots

Last night I was looking at a web site run by our local community gadfly, looking for information on the love letters everyone in town received from the tax collector yesterday as a result of our recent revaluation. This is a fellow who's clearly a wee tad unhinged, but performs a valuable public service with this site.

I'm well aware of how white my town is (96%). There are a few black families scattered around town, and a few Asian families, but were it not for the ubiquitous SUVs, the recent spate of McMansions being built to replace tear-downs, and the additions designed to put McMansion costumes on 1950's Cape Cod and ranch houses, one would often think one had been transported back to 1959.

One of our neighboring towns is somewhat more diverse, but does have what's quaintly referred to as a "black section" -- a neighborhood of homes that sell for upwards of $400,000; hardly the "blighted neighborhood" that some of the more ignorant denizens of the area who have never ventured therein seem to think it is.

One local resident recently posted a comment on this site complaining about the preponderance of Latinos at a local park. And lo and behold, it is as if a rock had been moved to reveal the maggots beneath. A sample from the poster's spew:

The grassy area to the right looked like warm ups for the World Cup, and not team USA either unless they're all some kind of latinos. As we walked around, aside from a small softball game going on, NOBODY spoke English. Spanish, spanish, spanish. Up close to the playground and litter was everywhere. The kids were throwing candy wrappers on the ground and their mothers weren't telling them to pick them up. They had water bottles and threw them on the ground when they were done. Boy, I never would have thought I'd see this in this part of Bergen. I mean years ago they would bus people into Van Saun, but then at the end of the day, usually a weekend, they would leave and the park would get back to normal...where the hell did all these people come from ? Are they renting rooms or houses along ****** Road, or are they coming from ***** Rd ? It was very disheartening to see that park today. We'd better wake up or one day we're going to wake up and hear that not much English is being spoken around Emerson anymore. I'm glad I don't live in ************. The people there should be furious.

Where does one begin with a sentiment like this? Language has been a huge issue in this county, largely in the towns closer to New York City that have seen an influx in Koreans in recent years, to the point that many shops in some towns post their signs in only Korean. But in the case of this individual, people speaking Spanish amongst themselves during a weekend outing opens the door to a vast stereotyping of everyone who is not an Anglo-Saxon-appearing Caucasian. It's especially amusing that this person believes only Latino children drop candy wrappers and water bottles on the ground. Anyone who has ever visited the strip mall in my 96% white town knows that no one has a patent on littering. As for the assumptions about where the "offending" people live, guess what -- those are streets in what's quaintly referred to as "the black section."

I wonder if this person uses a lawn service....or has had a new roof put on his house recently?

Because hatred of the "other" isn't limited to the Spanish-speaking, though Latinos seem to be the trigger point for these screeds in the aftermath of the shameful Republican exploitation of immigration as a campaign issue.

This particular piece of spew led of course into all the Usual Suspects of racist diatribe -- Prof. Leonard Jeffries, who's been out of the news for nearly two decades; Paterson drug dealers, even the apocryphal Reaganesque "welfare queen":

A black woman with really long, painted nails with the studs on them, lowering her talons into her Gucci bag to pull out FOOD STAMPS to pay for groceries, which she then loads into a white Caddy, a new one at that, and pulls away.
Just what happened at Shop Rite last week. What I want to know is what's up with that ? Her bag was nicer than mine and so was her car, and yet SHE had food stamps and I didn't. I guess welfare pays real good these days !

Aside from the fact that the poster of this comment has never heard of "designer knockoffs" and no self-respecting upwardly-mobile person has driven a Cadillac in years, the use of food stamps in Bergen County isn't all that unusual in an age of reduced incomes and high cost of living.

But when Americans are frightened about terrorism, about job insecurity, about skyrocketing property taxes (mine "only" increased by $700/year in this revaluation, far less than I'd expected), reduced pensions, an unstable stock market that holds their retirement funds, and a generally bleak future, it's far easier to blame dark-skinned people than to look at the corporatists in Washington who are the REAL villains in America's reduced horizons.

This fear and loathing of Latinos has been legitimazed by the immigration debates and has been absorbed into the general fear of terrorism. The recent Miami arrests of seven Haitian kooks who mused on blowing up the Sears Tower has expanded the bigotry to black Americans.

This mindset can be summed up by one particularly loathsome comment from an "elite" white resident of Bergen County on the aforementioned public web site:

The ELITE communities ... are populated by the best and the brightest, mostly WHITE families. These are the doctors, lawyers, engineers, the ACTUAL "prospective home buyers" who are paying from a half-million to upwards of one million to live near FELLOW ELITES. There are asian and indian families here as well, but these families assimilate into the upscale white society within which they live. These values are not racist at all. Should elite whites be apologetic for such ? Certainly not. This has nothing to do with hate and everything to do with choice. I hate no one and resent accusations of such. As an AMERICAN, I have the right to choose my neighborhood and my neighbors, and I choose to live among elite whites...It's not the white families who destroy real estate values. It's the black and mexican ones. This is documented fact for which no one owes an explanation save for members of these groups.

As I wrote yesterday, I grew up in Westfield, NJ -- a town in which most of the African-Americans and Jews lived on the south side and the fringes of town, and the so-called "real Americans" who went to good Christian churches like the Big White Presbyterian church in the center of town, lived in the stately old Colonials on the north side. It's appalling that some 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, racists are not only still denying that they are racist even as they spew their sweeping generalizations, but that racist scapegoating is still alive and well -- and still being exploited by those who actually DO bear the responsibility for the economic uncertainty that triggers Americans' anxiety.

King George doesn't think he has to live by Supreme Court decisions either

I can't say I'm surprised about >this, but it is truly horrifying the way this president thinks that the law is whatever he wants it to be. I read this in the Times this morning, and I've been shaking my head about it all day:

In his most detailed comments to date on the Supreme Court's rejection of his decision to put detainees on trial before military commissions, President Bush said Friday that the court had tacitly approved his use of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"It didn't say we couldn't have done — couldn't have made that decision, see?" Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Chicago. "They were silent on whether or not Guantánamo — whether or not we should have used Guantánamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantánamo, the decision I made."

Mr. Bush's remarks put a favorable spin on a ruling that has been widely interpreted as a rebuke of the administration's policies in the war on terror. The court, ruled broadly last week in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that military commissions were unauthorized by statute and violated international law.

The question of whether Mr. Bush had properly used Guantánamo Bay to house detainees was not at issue in the case. At issue was whether the president could unilaterally establish military commissions with rights different from those allowed at a court-martial to try detainees for war crimes.

Mr. Bush has said since the ruling that he will work with Congress to figure out how to use military commissions to try detainees, a promise he repeated on Friday in Chicago.

What part of "unauthorized by statute and violated international law" does this man not understand?

First, they came for the Jews....

The "purification" agenda of the Christian right is beginning to crawl out from under the rocks they have used to hide it for decades. It's directed at Jews, but also at everyone who doesn't adhere to their particular vision of America

First, we have the case of the family in Delaware forced to flee their home because they dared to fight back against the proseletyzing of Christianity and anti-Semitism in their children's schools:

A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit. The religion (if any) of a second family in the lawsuit is not known, because they're suing as Jane and John Doe; they also fear retaliation. Both families are asking relief from "state-sponsored religion."

The behavior of the Indian River School District board's behavior suggests the families' fears are hardly groundless.

The district spreads over a considerable portion of southeast Delaware. The families' complaint, filed in federal court in February 2005, alleges that the district had created an "environment of religious exclusion" and unconstitutional state-sponsored religion.

Among numerous specific examples in the complaint was what happened at plaintiff Samantha Dobrich's graduation in 2004 from the district's high school. She was the only Jewish student in her graduating class. The complaint relates that local pastor, Jerry Fike, in his invocation, followed requests for "our heavenly Father's" guidance for the graduates with:

I also pray for one specific student, that You be with her and guide her in the path that You have for her. And we ask all these things in Jesus' name.
In addition to the ruined graduation experience, the Dobrich-Doe lawsuit alleges that:

• The district's "custom and practice of school-sponsored prayer" frequently imposed ... on impressionable non-Christian students," violating their constitutional rights.
  
• The district ignored the Supreme Court's 1992 Lee decision limiting prayer at graduation ceremonies -- even after a district employee complained about the prayer at her child's 2003 graduation..
  
• District teachers and staff led Bible clubs at several schools. Club members got to go to the head of the lunch line.
  
• While Bible clubs were widely available, student book clubs were rare and often canceled by the district.
  
• When Jane Doe complained that her non-Christian son "Jordan Doe" was left alone when his classmates when to Bible club meetings, district staff insisted that Jordan should attend the club regardless of his religion.
  
• The district schools attended by Jordan and his sister "Jamie Doe" distributed Bibles to students in 2003, giving them time off from class to pick up the books.
  Prayer --often sectarian -- is a routine part of district sports programs and social events
  
• One of the district's middle schools gave students the choice of attending a special Bible Club if they did not want to attend the lesson on evolution.
  
• A middle school teacher told students there was only "one true religion" and gave them pamphlets for his surfing ministry.
  
• Samantha Dobrich's honors English teacher frequently discussed Christianity, but no other religion.
  
• Students frequently made mandatory appearances at district board meetings -- where they were a captive audience for board members' prayers to Jesus.

The acceptance of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade among those at the highest levels of government, combined with the fearmongering in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, has resulted in an environment in which hostility to ALL non-Christian religions is on the rise.

In Illinois, a woman was fired from her job after disclosing that she is a practitioner of Wicca:

A Schaumburg company allegedly fired a woman, and one employee is accused of calling her a "devil worshipper" after she disclosed she practiced Wicca -- a pagan religion viewed by some as witchcraft.

Now, the woman is suing.

Rebecca Sommers said the company fired her in 2004, citing poor job performance. She had worked with the firm since 2002.

But Sommers insists in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that Crawford & Company Inc. fired her because supervisors there didn't like her religion.

Crawford is a Georgia-based insurance adjusting firm with an office in Schaumburg. Representatives there could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Sommers, an accounts analyst, said when she requested a day off for a Wiccan holiday, she was told by a manager to keep her religion "to herself." She said another supervisor who knew she practiced Wicca called her a devil worshipper in front of other employees.

Sommers said that before revealing her religion she received a favorable review and a bonus. But after her supervisors knew about Wicca, she started getting warnings and told she wasn't returning customer calls fast enough.

And a girl in Hardesty, Oklahoma was kicked off her school's basketball team for refusing to recite the Lord's Prayer.

It's incidents like these that make me oppose ANY attempt to break down the wall between church and state -- because for these people, an inherent part of their religion is the forced conversion of others and the conversion of the U.S. into a "Christian Nation."

I believe I've blogged on this before, but when I was growing up in Westfield, NJ, the high school had a Christmas tableau every year, accompanied by the singing of Christmas carols by the choir. If you wanted to be in the choir, you were required to sing in the Christmas program. No Christmas, no choir. Instead of allowing nonbelievers to sing in other programs but opt out of the Christmas program, the high school held fast. In 1972, The Jewish Committee Against Religious Encroachment in Schools filed in Federal Court to have the Yule Pageant in Westfield, N.J. banned. The suit charged, "the pageant favor belief in religion over non-religion and favors the Christian Religion over others [Jews].

With this, the ugly side of the suburban town came to the fore. Anti-Semitic letters appeared in the local paper. Owners of Jewish-owned businesses found swastikas spray-painted on their storefronts. I don't recall what the outcome was, but it was a very ugly time to be a Jew in Westfield.

Those who say that we must be more accommodating to these people are mistaken. Accommodation means capitulation, and the result of capitulation is going to be pogroms against all those who do not adhere to a particular flavor of Christianity -- right here in the United States. It's happening on a small scale already. Those like Barack Obama who think we need to attempt to dialogue with these people are going to find themselves being likened to the Germans who pointed out which apartments were occupied by Jews in Hitler's Germany.

This country was formed as a secular nation for a reason. We decry theocracies in the Middle East when the theocrats are Muslim. Christian theocrats are no more enlightened.

(hat tip: Frederick Clarkson)

Time to "aspirate" Republican rule

Ordinarily, summer is when politicians start collecting checks in earnest for their November election runs. They show up at parades, start collecting the mandatory "I care about the people" photos, and lay generally low until after Labor Day, when the fun begins. Of course we also have our illustrious NJ Fifth District Democratic candidate, Paul Aronsohn, whose web site hasn't been updated since June 19, but that's another post for another time.

But this year, Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, and the other illustrious fearmongers of the Republican National Committee are trying to make damn sure you never forget 9/11, and who stood up heroically that day to face down the evil terra-ists.

Oh, wait. He didn't. But no matter, the meme of "Only Republicans, let by George W. Bush, can keep you safe" has worked so far, so why not use it? It's a bit early for the terror alerts to start; usually they wait till September to start announcing their mythical foiled terrorist plots, which means they must be nervous. Why, I have no idea, since George W. Bush has already stated on Larry King that the Republicans will retain control of both houses of Congress (and his people at Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and various statehouses have already made sure that they will), but I suppose they have to put on at least a show that the fix isn't already in.

First we had the Florida Ninja Turtles; a bunch of disaffected Haitians who, like the kids in Stand By Me discussing whether Batman would beat Superman, talked about how they could get money from Al Qaeda. Then yesterday we had the news that a bunch of crack terrorists were planning to blast a hole in the Holland Tunnel to flood lower Manhattan and destroy America's economy.

There's just one problem: Lower Manhattan is ABOVE sea level.

Either this country is lousy with some of the most inept terrorists ever (in which case I want to know why, almost five years after the 9/11 attacks, they are still able to get in), or the whole thing is bullshit.

As Buzzflash notes, there's only one mind moronic enough to come up with this last one:

Is it possible that Bush himself brainstormed with Rove about the latest “Terrorist Aspirational Scare”?

The first “reports” coming from the Rovian propaganda machine claimed that a vague group of suspected terrorists were planning to flood lower Manhattan by blowing up the Holland or Lincoln Tunnels.

There was just one major problem with this latest “scare them into voting Republican for a third time” tactic: it defied the laws of gravity and basic physics.

You see, Manhattan is ABOVE sea level. A body of water, such as the Hudson River, won’t rise UP without a rather sophisticated plumbing system. In short, bombing the Holland or Lincoln Tunnels could not possibly, according to the law of physics, flood lower Manhattan and “ruin the American economy by destroying Wall Street.”

There might be some basement flooding, but that’s about it.

It’s an idea so contrary to reality and the laws of physics that only Bush himself could have come up with it.

Some first media reports even dutifully noted that government sources told them that the alleged “aspirational” terrorists got their idea of blowing up the tunnels from the Katrina disaster and the flooding of New Orleans. This is a sure sign that the idea came from the man who completely bungled Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush. Only Bush could fail to realize that New Orleans is situated BELOW sea level, while Manhattan is ABOVE sea level.

How else do you explain the second-in-a-row crack-head scheme (after the Miami clown posse “plot”) that is so ludicrous, it couldn’t make it past peer review in a class of idiots?

By mid-day, Rove must have realized that he had made a big mistake going with Bush’s “brainstorm” contribution to the third cycle of resurrecting the al-Qaeda bogeyman. (Even though, in a horribly cynical move that shows its true hand, the Bush Administration had the CIA close down its unit hunting Osama bin Laden. That’s the reality side. On the propaganda side, they planted a recent story that Osama was reconsolidating his power over al-Qaeda, a story clearly aimed at instilling fear in the American public. After all, if the CIA isn’t hunting him anymore and Bush says that he’s not important, how could he becoming an increasing threat? You can’t have it both ways in the real world, unless you are a demagogue.)

Because by the afternoon, we were hearing that really the alleged “aspirational” target was something more vague, like flooding the New York Subway system, which no doubt would send shivers of terror through Manhattanites because of all the rats that would hit the streets.

Rather that continuing to cower in the corner with their plastic sheeting and duct tape, it's time for those "patriotic" Americans whose forefathers ran the gamut of defiance from "Live free or die" to "Better dead than Red" and whose motto now is "I'll do anything you want, Mr. President, just promise I won't die" to start questioning why there are ONLY terrorist threats around election time, why five years into their president's so-called "war on terror" they are STILL saying we are under constant threat, and at least demand that they come up with better stories than the last two. Because if the only "plots" that Federal officials are disrupting are from Gangs That Couldn't Shoot Straight, then we are in serious trouble.

Friday Kitchen Blogging, or Why Does That Nice Buff Color Turn Into Buttercup Yellow in MY Kitchen

It has not been a banner couple of days here at Kitchen Painting Central. After being insufferably pleased with myself yesterday morning for managing to nicely paint the ceiling with only a few accidental dabs on the ceiling fan housing, I loaded up the old PaintStick with "Pear" from the Eddie Bauer collection at Lowes, and went to work. "Gee, that's awfully yellow," I thought, as the color started to coordinate entirely too well with our ghastly floor. "Did they mix this right?" I dabbed a bit on the 6-up taped-together paper chips that had been hanging on the wall for months so I could be sure it was the color I wanted. Yup, same color. On the chip, it looks like a lovely Arts & Crafts buff color, but on the wall it became buttercup yellow. It probably has something to do with the fact that a big blank painted wall just isn't going to look the same as one with lovely wood wainscoting and a plate rail.

So this morning I high-tailed it down to Norton's, the big paint and wallpaper store on Route 17 in Paramus, in search of Benjamin Moore color sample bottles to slap on the wall and make a better choice. Two hours later, after rejecting various shades of khaki (too green), beige (too drab), taupe (too gray) and various creams (too pink), I found that "Rich Cream" was the least obnoxious color available, and more or less coordinated with the Arts & Crafts wallpaper border I'd bought LAST YEAR. So after unloading some stuff from the basement and piggybacking onto my neighbors' garage sale I painted the soffits a lovely velvety shade called Peale Green, which looks awful with the dark laminate of the current cabinet veneers, but will look fabulous with the border up and the new, warmer oak doors. Then I high-tailed it back to Norton's, where I tormented the poor guy in the paint department, who was ten minutes from quitting time, and faced with this short, middle-aged woman asking him to tone down the yellow tone in this color a bit, but please don't make it pink.

By this time, my sciatica was really flaming up, and my feet were killing me, so I cried uncle and called it a day.

Tomorrow it's back to the PaintStick, and more photos. And somehow convincing Mr. Brilliant that all this is NOT going to be hideous.

Thursday Kitchen Blogging, or Why Am I Putting Myself Through This?

No cool photos today, folks. Looking at primer smeared on walls just isn't that exciting, and now that you've seen the floor, that's about the end of the snark factor -- at least until I can find the photos from when we moved in.

But at a time when most people in search of a nicer kitchen are taking out $75,000 or more in home equity loans to have their old kitchens gutted and completely remodeled, why on earth would a middle-aged woman go through all this? Why not just be like everyone else, take the loans, and get exactly what I want NOW?

Perhaps it has to do with the peculiar notion I have that perhaps one doesn't NEED to live up to one's financial limit. Mr. Brilliant and I are two people living in a four-bedroom, two-bath house. And as much as Maggie and Jenny like to spread out and take up as much room as possible, there's only so much space two smallish cats can occupy. So Mr. Brilliant has his "cave" that I don't touch; not even to clean; we have a guest room for overnight guests that we rarely have, and an office. Our living room largely serves as a giant entry foyer and cat lounge. We basically live in four rooms.

And yet, I've been asked when we're going to expand our upstairs dormer into a full add-a-level. Now why on earth would I want to do that? It's expensive enough to heat what we have.

Oh, sure, it would be lovely to have new custom cabinets with corners that don't involve crawling into the cabinet to get what's in the blind corner, and good task lighting and high-hats in the ceiling and Silestone countertops and a nice new stove. What wouldn't be so nice would be to have workmen in and out of the house for weeks on end, worrying about the cats getting out, inhaling plaster dust, not having a working kitchen and living on Subway for an indeterminate period. So this way I just put a nice new dress on the perfectly solid cabinets I have (saving myself about $8000 in labor costs by doing it myself), maybe install a floating laminate floor myself, and then bring in a guy to do the minor demolition of that bump-out I mentioned yesterday.

And it need not be done all at once, and we need not worry that we might not be able to afford to pay the mortgage if someone loses a job.

But these days, most Americans don't think that way. In my neighborhood of postwar capes and ranches, the teardowns and add-ons are rampant. Some of them are done quite nicely. Two blocks from here is a cape that was turned into a neo-Victorian, and it's quite lovely. But on the next block, someone took a tiny ranch and turned it into a monolith that resembles nothing so much as one of those drab 1950's vintage brick garden apartment buildings. And on my block, a developer bought a tiny ranch house, tore it down, and put up a big stucco McMansion, building to within 8' of the property line. It now looks only marginally less ridiculous now that the homeowners have replaced the stucco with vinyl siding, shutters, and some decorative trim -- which actually makes it look slightly more like it belongs here.

Why, when jobs are being outsourced and everyone is worried about the future, are homebuyers and homeowners looking for more, more, and more? Is it just a desire to believe in an upward mobility that no longer exists? Or is it something else?

When asked to speculate on why houses are getting bigger and bigger, Fergerson and her dining companions at Bobby Van's, a classic, old Bridgehampton restaurant, throw out dozens of ideas. Real estate agent Barbara Bornstein says land is so expensive, builders have no choice: They have to build big houses to make a profit.

"You know, we are very tenuous," says local architect Ann Surchin. "No one knows when the next 9/11 will happen. And these houses represent safety -- and the bigger the house, the bigger the fortress."

Town planning-board member Jacqui Lofaro says that people who work in cities see bigger homes as a source of peace of mind.

"If you have people coming out from the city, where they are bombarded by people, the tendency is to isolate themselves," Lofaro says. "Their house is their community. It is not the community's community, it is their community."

Way Beyond Keeping Up with the Joneses

Robert Frank, a professor of management and economics at Cornell University, says the growth of big houses is not really about greed. It's all about context.

If you live in a village in Africa, even a modest American house seems huge. But in the United States, there are now millions of people with lots of money, and their wealth shifts the frame of reference for those just below them.

So let's say you want to find the best school district for your child, but the houses there are huge and expensive. You might take fewer vacations, endure a much longer commute, save less. But you don't forgo the bigger house, because it means a better neighborhood and a better education. This is a deeper phenomenon, Frank says, than keeping up with the Joneses.

"This is about what we feel we need as a function of the context in which we live," he says. "We know that when everyone stands up, no one gets a better view. We know there are all sorts of situations where individual choices that are perfectly rational add up to a total outcome that none of us likes very much. This is one of those."

Sometimes I wonder about the children growing up in these McMansions. These houses are often built on the same 75 x 100 lots as the houses they replaced, so they have no backyards. Not only do children no longer ever share a bedroom, in many cases they don't even share a bathroom. There are master wings so parents and children don't need to interact, home theatres so they don't have to go to the movies, home gyms and spas so they don't have to leave home to get a workout. Given the diminished expectations these children are going to have, is it fair to them to raise them in the lap of luxury, while wallowing in debt, when they won't be able to duplicate that lifestyle?

Meanwhile, I'm going to get busy edge-priming the kitchen this morning and perhaps even start with real paint this afternoon. Because for me, right now, a nice paint job done with my own hands and aching muscles will do for a start.

OK, now I'm putting on the tinfoil

Hmmmm.....maybe Ken Lay didn't die of a heart attack; maybe he committed suicide to spare his family financial ruin. Or maybe he fled to Argentina.

Because this is AWFULLY convenient:

In yet another bizarre twist to the Enron saga, the sudden death of Kenneth L. Lay on Wednesday may have spared his survivors financial ruin. Mr. Lay's death effectively voids the guilty verdict against him, temporarily thwarting the federal government's efforts to seize his remaining real estate and financial assets, legal experts say.

"The death of Mr. Lay in all likelihood will render the government's hard-fought victory null," said Christopher Bebel, a former federal prosecutor based here who specializes in securities fraud.

But while the death of Mr. Lay may have limited government efforts in his criminal case, he remains the subject of civil lawsuits by the Securities and Exchange Commission and former investors and Enron employees. Those lawsuits could still proceed, with the aim of taking control of some of Mr. Lay's remaining assets.

[snip]

The government's forfeiture effort ahead of the planned sentencing of Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling this fall, however, has been thrown into doubt, at least in relation to Mr. Lay's assets since the death of a criminal defendant before his sentencing and the appeal process may void the criminal case against him.

"Technically, he was found guilty, but that's extinguished as of today," said Joel M. Androphy, a prominent defense lawyer in Houston.

A person involved in the government's action against Mr. Lay, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case, said that Mr. Lay's death did not necessarily rule out proceeding with forfeiture actions, explaining, "The family at the end of the day cannot sit on the fruits of the fraud." But, this person said: "Even if the verdict is nullified, he paid for his actions with his life. That is more tragic."

The civil lawsuits against Mr. Lay may continue with efforts to seize his remaining assets, but even those moves may be complicated by his death since technically there was no conviction of Mr. Lay in the criminal case to rely upon as proof.

What did the president know and when did he know it?

On Monday, Murray Waas wrote:

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's interview.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, to covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental declassification processes.

Bush also said during his interview with prosecutors that he had never directed anyone to disclose the identity of then-covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife. Bush said he had no information that Cheney had disclosed Plame's identity or directed anyone else to do so.

[snip]

One senior government official familiar with the discussions between Bush and Cheney -- but who does not have firsthand knowledge of Bush's interview with prosecutors -- said that Bush told the vice president to "Get it out," or "Let's get this out," regarding information that administration officials believed would rebut Wilson's allegations and would discredit him.

A person with direct knowledge of Bush's interview refused to confirm that Bush used those words, but said that the first official's account was generally consistent with what Bush had told Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

So what, then, did Bush want them to use to discredit Wilson? Dan Froomkin wonders:

Publicly, Bush has consistently portrayed himself as not only uninvolved with the leak of Plame's identity, but utterly in the dark about it -- and determined to punish any wrongdoers.

But Waas's story suggests that Bush was directly responsible for the sequence of events that resulted in that leak.

As it turns out, there were two major byproducts of Bush's charge to Cheney to counter Wilson's ultimately substantiated charge that the White House had misrepresented intelligence in the runup to war in Iraq: Cheney's top aide, Scooter Libby, distributed highly classified but nevertheless disproved and inaccurate information to reporters; and Libby and White House political guru Karl Rove outed Plame in a specious attempt to suggest that Wilson's trip was a junket arranged by his wife.

Fitzgerald's grand jury has charged Libby with perjury and obstruction of justice in the Plame case. Among other things, Libby told investigators he had first heard of Plame's CIA job from reporters when his own notes showed he had learned about it from Cheney.

Waas has previously reported that prosecutors suspect Libby may have lied to cover up for Cheney. This new report raises the possibility that Libby lied to cover up for Bush, too.

But even if that's not the case, it certainly seems clear by now that Bush knows a lot more about this case -- and his White House's enthusiasm for discrediting its opponents -- than he's let on in public.

Isn't it about time Bush stopped pretending ignorance about this story -- and came clean on his own role? Why should that information only be shared with criminal prosecutors?

Is it approved White House procedure to distribute misinformation? Is it okay to out a covert CIA operative? If it's not okay was he disappointed in how top deputies like Cheney and Rove -- both still very much at work at the White House -- carried out his orders?

Especially when you take into account Bush's so-called righteous indignation about the New York Times publishing a story about tracking terrorist financing about which the Wall Street Journal also wrote WITHOUT finger-pointing by the Administration, his use of leaks to discredit political enemies not only makes him a hypocrite (which we already knew) but puts him up there in Nixon territory.

Helen Thomas, call your office. Because God knows no one else in the White House press corps will dare to ask.

(hat tip: Americablog)

An election right out of the Bush playbook

And this one isn't even in the U.S.

Mexico endured a new cycle of suspense on Wednesday as the authorities tabulated their final official count of votes from Sunday's disputed presidential election, in which preliminary results separated the candidates by less than one percent.

With tallies taken from about 93 percent of the polling places, the electoral authorities reported that the count had tilted toward the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had 36 percent of the vote, while the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón, had 35 percent.

But with a race this close, elections officials said they would not announce a winner until all the tally sheets had been counted. As the night wore on, Mr. López Obrador's lead steadily narrowed as tallies arrived from the northwestern states that voted heavily in favor of Mr. Calderón. Even some of Mr. Lopez Obrador's advisers acknowledged privately that they were not confident their candidate's lead would hold.

The final tally, usually little more than a formality, turned into another cliffhanger of a moment in the most competitive presidential race in Mexican history. As the count ticked along on newspaper Web sites into the night, the president of the electoral institute said he would announce the final results as soon as he had them, no matter the hour.

Leaders of the Calderón campaign were huddled at their party headquarters. Officials from Mr. López Obrador's campaign remained at the electoral institute, making clear they would not recognize the results until there was a vote-by-vote recount.

The expectation among election observers was that any result would again be challenged, this time in an electoral court.

Security was increased around the presidential palace and the electoral institute, where authorities expected protests if the final results did not go in Mr. López Obrador's favor.

Still, for most of the day the official tallies indicated a shift from the preliminary count, which had shown Mr. Calderón in the lead from the beginning, and had ended giving him a feather-thin margin, 0.6 percent.

The official count began amid a volatile political storm kicked up Tuesday by the announcement by federal electoral authorities that some three million votes went untabulated in the preliminary count; by demands from Mr. López Obrador for a vote-by-vote recount; and by objections to those demands from the government.

Mr. Calderón, backed by big business and President Vicente Fox, appeared before the news media to repeat his claims of victory. Mr. López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City who has the support of the poor, held his own news conference to restate his case that the election had been rigged.

He said his campaign had uncovered irregularities at tens of thousands of polling places. Among them, he said, there were polls where the numbers of votes exceeded either the numbers of registered voters or the numbers of ballots. He said that in some cases votes from a single polling place had been tabulated several times.

If James Baker shows up, you'll know for certain that the fix is in.

UPDATE: Surprise, surprise:

Mexico's conservative presidential candidate Felipe Calderon appeared headed for a razor-thin victory on Thursday although his leftist rival could fight the result with legal challenges and street protests.

Calderon had 35.62 percent support with results in from 97.84 percent of polling stations, just 0.05 points ahead of anti-poverty campaigner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in a tense vote recount, the Federal Electoral Institute said.

Lopez Obrador had led the recount from the start but Calderon caught up and overtook him in the early hours of Thursday as late returns came in from northern and western Mexico, his conservative strongholds.

Funny how the votes of the conservative districts ALWAYS come in later than the others. This sounds like the Ohio Hackett/Schmidt special election, in which returns from Clermont County, Schmidt's home district, came in very late due to -- are you reacy -- a "technical malfunction" with the district's optical scanners due to the "humid weather."

Anyone see a pattern here?

Ken Lay Avoids Jail

Yes, OK, I admit it. It's a cruel headline. I'm sinking to the level of the right. But it's just human nature:

Sorry, Nicky, human nature-
Nothing I can do!
It's...
Schadenfreude!
Making me feel glad that I'm not you.

Or maybe it's that I'm still laughing from Cats Who Look Like Hitler. But MSNBC is reporting that former Enron CEO Ken Lay has died of a heart attack.

If I weren't so sure that the frothing gasbags on the right are going to start screaming "LIBERALS KILLED KEN LAY!!!" (and if you encounter one before I do, please leave the link in the comments), I'd say that it's sad that the case against Ken Lay has in essence resulted in the death penalty -- or maybe it's not. Now, I have no sympathy for the Enron traders who raked in millions while starving California of electricity losing their life savings because of the chicanery of Messrs. Lay and Skilling, but I do feel badly for the secretaries, the clerks, the janitors, cafeteria staff, and other low-level employees who thought they were being loyal to the team, only to find that the coach had stolen everything from them.

But if Ken Lay had had a conscience and a soul, perhaps he might not have ended up like this.

I'd like to believe that other corporate robber barons will learn from this, but somehow I don't think they will.

Why net neutrality is important

...because if sites like Cats That Look Like Hitler have to pay in order to load, the world might as well stop spinning on its axis.

Wednesday Kitchen blogging, or Eat My Dust

I'm off from work this week, and of course the project isn't going as quickly as I'd hoped. Yesterday I spent hours sanding the corner tape job I did on the cabinet soffits:



...and more hours cleaning up the resulting dust.

Of course, once you get started, you think about what you're going to do next. Our kithen is an L-shape, with a drop-in cooktop next to the wall, and this completely pointless and intrusive bump-out holding a wall oven and three cabinets:



My eventual plan is to line the long wall opposite the work area with more cabinets so I can sacrifice the three cabinets on this bump-out, then replace the cooktop with a real range when I have a new countertop installed.

And now, by popular demand, here is the World's Ugliest Kitchen Floor:



Can you imagine anyone looking at this and thinking, "Gee, that's pretty!" -- even in 1975?

Today it's rainy and humid, and I am off to apply primer to the entire mess.

What the media rean't telling you about the North Korea missile launch yesterday

Greg Palast:

George Bush is upset, distraught, that North Korea has fired a missile that could reach Alaska — carrying a nuclear warhead.? Well, Mr. President, you have only yourself to blame.

In case you can’t recall, your intelligence chiefs ordered US agents to curb their investigation of A.Q. Khan, head of Pakistan’s bomb-building program.? There was mounting evidence Khan was selling his nuclear and missile material technology to Libya and North Korea.
The reason for the spike order, the “back off” directive, was that the investigators had tracked the source of funds for Mr. Khans flea market in fissile material to Saudi Arabia.? Apparently, Team Bush did not want to make the Saudi’s uncomfortable by exposing their payments to Khan.

We reported this on BBC in November 2001, based on informants within the top levels of our intelligence agencies, men unhappy with politicians who would have them avert their gaze.

Interesting reading on the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network here.

Our nation's self-styled King George

Editorial, San Francisco Chronicle:

Americans did not undertake a revolution against the reign of King George III to create a government that would spy on its citizens, torture enemy combatants, detain suspects without charges for extended stretches on an island beyond reach of U.S. law, invade foreign countries without just cause and attempt to edit not only the press -- but laws that have been duly crafted and approved by our elected representatives in Congress.

This nation is veering too far from the course of its Founding Fathers. Two hundred-thirty years ago, the Declaration of Independence reproofed that a government's power is "derived from the consent of the governed." Those words ring true today.

If Americans are ceding too many freedoms under the guise of a war on terrorism -- which, by its nature, may never officially end -- it is because their absence of outrage is taken as a nod of assent.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not doing so to commission an annual party. They were making a covenant with history that requires day-to-day vigilance to defend the liberties it asserted. Honor them by speaking out.

Let's look again at what they said; at what caused the American Revolution that we celebrate today:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes [My note: like presidential blowjobs]; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

[snip]

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

[snip]

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

[snip]

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Indeed.

"the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it"

Nick Kristof, on freedom of the press:

... so far there is no evidence that the banking story harmed national security, and I'm sure that editors of this newspaper, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal weighed their responsibilities seriously, for they have repeatedly held back information when necessary. In contrast, the press-bashers have much less credibility.

Take Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Senator Roberts has criticized The Times, but he himself is responsible for an egregious disclosure of classified intelligence. As National Journal reported in April, it was Senator Roberts who stated as the Iraq war began that the U.S. had "human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein."

That statement horrified some in our intelligence community by revealing that we had an agent close to Saddam.

No responsible newspaper would risk an agent's life so blithely. And The Times would never have been as cavalier about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as the White House was. The fact is, journalists regularly hold back information for national security reasons; I recently withheld information at the request of the intelligence community about secret terrorist communications.

More broadly, the one thing worse than a press that is "out of control" is one that is under control. Anybody who has lived in a Communist country knows that. Just consider what would happen if the news media as a whole were as docile to the administration as Fox News or The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage (backed by delusional Journal editorials baffling to anyone who was actually in Iraq) misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. In retrospect, the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it.

[snip]

So be very wary of Mr. Bush's effort to tame the press. Watchdogs can be mean, dumb and obnoxious, but it would be even more dangerous to trade them in for lap dogs.

The desire of the American people to be fat, dumb, happy, and oblivious to the crimes of their leaders does not trump their obligation to be informed.

Hey, Bush voters! You were PUNK'D! And by Osama Bin Laden, no less!

Anyone who voted for Bush in 2004 ought to feel pretty damn silly:

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as “Osama’s endorsement of John Kerry.” But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term.

This stunning CIA disclosure is tucked away in a brief passage near the end of Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin-Laden wanted Bush to stay in office.

According to Suskind’s book, CIA analysts had spent years “parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin-Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. …

“Their [the CIA’s] assessments, at day’s end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today’s conclusion: bin-Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.

“At the five o’clock meeting, [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: ‘Bin-Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.’”

McLaughlin’s comment drew nods from CIA officers at the table. Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, suggested that the al-Qaeda founder may have come to Bush’s aid because bin-Laden felt threatened by the rise in Iraq of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; bin-Laden might have thought his leadership would be diminished if Bush lost the White House and their “eye-to-eye struggle” ended.

But the CIA analysts also felt that bin-Laden might have recognized how Bush’s policies – including the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the endless bloodshed in Iraq – were serving al-Qaeda’s strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.

“Certainly,” the CIA’s Miscik said, “he would want Bush to keep doing what he’s doing for a few more years,” according to Suskind’s account of the meeting.

As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts drifted into silence, troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. “An ocean of hard truths before them – such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin-Laden would want Bush reelected – remained untouched,” Suskind wrote.

One immediate consequence of bin-Laden breaking nearly a year of silence to issue the videotape the weekend before the U.S. presidential election was to give the Bush campaign a much needed boost. From a virtual dead heat, Bush opened up a six-point lead, according to one poll.

Now, whether Bin Laden was just operating on reverse psychology (which worked like a charm, and indeed is still working, as Americans justify no end of crimes and violations of Constitutional law by this Administration in the name of the so-called "war on terror") or if he and Bush are in cahoots, the tough stance of each benefitting the other, remains to be seen.

But the fact of the matter remains: anyone who voted to elect George W. Bush in 2004 played right into Osama Bin Laden's hands. The old boy couldn't have been any happier if they'd given him a present. And indeed, they did.

And by the way, in case you thought that the "hunt for Osama" is still on? It isn't. The unit whose mission was the hunting down of Osama Bin Laden and his top deputies was closed last year.

Happy 4th of July.

UPDATE: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi's wife is claiming that Al Qaeda leaders sold out her husband in return for letting up the search for Osama Bin Laden:

Al-Qaida leaders sold out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to the United States in exchange for a promise to let up in the search for Osama bin Laden, the slain militant's wife claimed in an interview with an Italian newspaper.

The woman, identified by La Repubblica as al-Zarqawi's first wife, said al-Qaida's top leadership reached a deal with U.S. intelligence because al-Zarqawi had become too powerful. She claimed Sunni tribes and Jordanian secret services mediated the deal.

Al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, died June 7 in a U.S. airstrike outside Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad.

"My husband has been sold to the Americans," the woman said in an interview published Sunday. "He had become too powerful, too troublesome."

She was identified only as "Um Mohammed," which means "mother of Mohammed" and would be a nickname, not her full name. The Rome-based newspaper said the interview was conducted in Geneva and described her as Jordanian and about 40 years old.

In Jordan, Al-Zarqawi's eldest brother, Sayel, said the family had not been aware of the woman's whereabouts for about two years.

"I think a secret pact was struck whose immediate goal was his death," she told the newspaper. "In return, the American troops promised to ease, at least momentarily, their hunt for bin Laden."

While Bush was promising today to keep feeding more American kids into a meatgrinder so he doesn't have to tell the parents and wives and siblings of the ones who died already that they died for the lies and failure and hubris of their commander-in-chief, let us not forget his words from the March 13, 2002 press conference:

And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.