There is only one thing I can say about this:
Trump’s The Apprentice Aspires to Broadway as a New Musical
. . . and that’s this: Vomit.
It’s shows like that which cause people to hate—and I mean, hate—musical theatre.
Rupert Murdoch Endangers Soldiers
From the New York Times
The United States military expressed anger and dismay today over the unauthorized release of photographs of a jailed Saddam Hussein in his underwear and performing menial activity. …
“These photos were taken in clear violation of Department of Defense directives and possibly Geneva Convention guidelines for the humane treatment of detained individuals,” the military statement, issued in Iraq, said, promising an investigation. …
The pictures were published today on the cover and inside pages of two tabloids controlled by the media magnate [and Fox News owner] Rupert Murdoch, The Sun, a British daily, and The New York Post.
Not surprisingly, a week after lambasting Newsweek, President Bush now suddenly can’t see much of a connection between media coverage and insurgent activities:
President Bush, when asked if he thought the pictures would stoke more anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, voiced some doubt. “I think the Iraq insurgency is inspired by their desire to stop the march of freedom,” he said. …
“You know, I don’t think a photo inspires murderers,” Mr. Bush said, at an appearance with Prime Minister Anders Rasmussen of Denmark.
No, only text, right? Right? 
I don’t mind it when theo-neocons take a contrary position to me. That’s fine. It’s their inability to adhere to their own arguments that makes them opportunistic and morally groundless pussies. The strength of their convictions is about as solid as jello.
Somebody Fire The Editor Of The New York Times!
…for printing facts that reflect badly on America:
Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.
The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar’s face.
“Come on, drink!” the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. “Drink!”
At the interrogators’ behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.
“Leave him up,” one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.
Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen…
It goes on, but you get the idea…
Sssshhhhhhhhhhhh!
Instapundit.
Powerline.
Blogs for Bush.
NRO’s The Corner.
GOPBloggers.
Andrew Sullivan.
Lashawn Barber.
Michelle Malkin.
Redstate.org.
As of this posting, not one of these blogs has a single word on Rick Santorum calling the entire Democratic party Nazis.
That’s how they work, folks. This is how they do it.
I guess we need someone like Newsweek or Eason Jordan to say it for them to notice.
[Hat Tip: Pandagon]1,346
Amanda Marcotte notes something:
The number above is the number of days between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and V-J Day. Since it’s not unheard for the warbloggers to compare the War on Terra favorably to WWII, this number has some significance today, the 1,346th day after September 11th, according to Shakespeare’s Sister and Angry Bear.
Contrary to the heavy-handed war romanticism from the 101st Fightin’ Keyboardists, the Greatest Generation Part Deux we are not. Mostly we are a nation of sniveling cowards who re-elected someone we knew for a fact to be a goddamned lying, money-grubbing piece of shit who only squeaked by with serious fear-mongering. And he did so because he’s a coward himself, afraid to follow in FDR’s footsteps and tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself because he knew that kind of courage doesn’t win you elections. Not when you’re a smirking frat boy with nothing to back it up.
In the time it took the Greatest Generation to fight off both the Germans and the Japanese, the Cowardly Generation has managed to make Newsweek look stupid and Dan Rather retire, though, so I guess we can’t be too hard on them.
The Greatest Generation knew that a war effort this massive would require effort from everyone and with that end in mind, they intergrated women into the military for the first time with the WAC and while black Americans were still serving in segregated units, the contributions of both blacks and women during WWII set the stage for rebellions that came later and society progressed. The Cowardly Generation thinks the best way to win a war is to exclude gays and women from military duty as much as you can while rolling back social reforms at home.
The Greatest Generation rationed sugar, coffee, fabrics and mostly oil for the war effort. The Cowardly Generation decided that the best way to show support was to purchase massive SUVs that looked manly while increasing our dependence on the oil that got us into this shit to begin with.
The Greatest Generation fought because they had to, and they fought invading armies with long, long track records of aggression. The Cowardly Generation made up some bullshit about what a country that had nothing to do with attacks on us might do in the future possibly if what we know to be true could concievably be true according to some outdated information and used that as an excuse to divert military resources into an attack on a country that didn’t attack us.
Warbloggers of the world, please take note of the day and explain what the magic bullet is that will make all of this work out in the end.
Rules And Regs
Anybody else besides me find it ironic that these are the rules for students at Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s school)?
More Bad Polls For Repubs
Another poll is out—this time by NBC/Wall Street Journal (yes, that bastion of liberalism, the WSJ)—and it looks especially bad for the theo-neocons in the 2006 election. Democrats have a 47%-40% edge over the GOP in the generic ballot question for 2006, the largest advantage for the Democrats in this poll since 1994, while respondents felt by a large margin that Congress doesn’t share their priorities. According to the poll, the largest drop-off in support for Congress has come from Republicans.
This is remarkable since the Republican agenda is front and center, while the Democrats agenda isn’t even suited up for the game. For example, Bush goes across the nation to sell his Social Security plan, and the views of him and his plan plummet . . . even without a Democrat alternative! (The Democrats offered no alternative because they deny the “crisis"). Imagine what happens in 2006 when Democrats actually start talking about their core issues again: health care, education, jobs and the economy . . . the issues that respondents in the poll thought are being ignored. Even though the poll is down on Dems (although not nearly as much as Repubs), the meta-message is that it is time for Democrats to start pushing their (and the peoples’) agenda once again.
Thoughts On The Nuclear Option
I have no particular warm spot in my heart for the filibuster. I don’t particularly loathe it either. I just view it as one of many silly and arcane congressional rules that has been around for decades, like the entire committee process which can effectively kill bills from even being considered. If I could make the rules for Congress, I would take power away from committees, and remove some partisanship by requiring that every bill be submitted “blindly” (i.e. no author or party affiliation tied to any piece of legislation).
Nor does by agnostic view of the filibuster change when it comes to judicial nominations (as opposed to legislation). It is what it is.
My problem with the Repub’s nuclear option to get rid of the filibuster (for judicial nominations only) is that it involves cheating. There’s no dispute that the Senate needs 67 votes in order to change an existing procedural rule, which the filibuster is. But Repubs don’t have that 67%. So we have the “nuclear option”, which in essence allows the Senate to change the rule with only a majority (50 plus Cheney).
How can they hope to do this? Only one way. By taking the position that the filibuster is UNCONSTITUTIONAL, because (in essence, winnowing out all kinds of moronic legislative slang) you can change a “rule” if a majority of Senators agree that the “rule” is unconstitutional. And since they are trying to preserve the filibuster when used for, say, legislation, the Repubs must take the position that the filibuster is UNCONSTITUTIONAL ONLY WHEN APPLIED TO JUDICIAL NOMINEES.
This is clearly an untenable position. There are only two clauses of the Constitution that have major bearing on the present issue. I’ll examine them separately, as well as the interplay between the two.
Article One, Section 5, Clause 3 states that “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings…”. Now, occasionally, the Constitution might compel a rule—for example, the Constitution requires that each House keep “a journal of its proceedings”. But in the absence of a specific Constitutional requirement, each House may determine its own internal rules of procedure—that’s clear as crystal. This means that if the Senate Rules require that its members cast their votes by dropping their pants and farting once for “Yay” and twice for “Nay”, that’s fine as far as the Constitution is concerned.
The filibuster, which is only slightly less stupid than my example above, is one such rule that the Senate has established for itself. It is neither constitutionally compelled, nor constitutionally forbidden. Like vote-farting, it is constitutionally permissable.
Now, we turn to the other (arguably) relevant constitutional clause in the controversy.
Article Two, Section 2, Clause 2 says that the President “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint . . . judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States . . .”. This is relevant to the nomination of appeals and district court judges as well—i.e., the current controversy.
The Constitution does not define the form in which the “advice and consent” must be rendered—it certainly does not MANDATE an up-or-down vote, as some Repubs argue. The Advice and Consent Clause merely gives the Senate a power, but is silent on the procedure to carry out that power.
Logically, therefore, the MECHANICS in which the “advice and consent” is given is left to the Senate. Which means, we are thrown back to Article One, Section 5, Clause 3—the Senate gets to make up its own rules about how that advice and consent is given.
Therefore, nothing is unconstitutional about the filibuster, and nothing unconstitutional about the filibuster-as-applied-to-judicial-nominations. And the dirty joke is that everyone, including Frist I’m sure, knows this.
So . . . get rid of the filibuster? Sure, count me in. But don’t break your own rules of procedure and torture the Constitution in order to do it. As Josh Marshall write:
You can think the filibuster is a terrible idea. And you may think that it should be abolished, as indeed it can be through the rules of the senate. And there are decent arguments to made on that count. But to assert that it is unconstitutional because each judge does not get an up or down vote by the entire senate you have to hold that the United States senate has been in more or less constant violation of the constitution for more than two centuries.
UPDATE: Josh Marshall makes an additional interesting observation:
Remember that this entire political uproar is supposedly about originalism, the need for judges who will interpret the law and the constitution not according to our personal wishes or the political needs of the moment, but according to its original and long-settled meaning. That is, we’re told, their aim. And yet to accomplish this they are quite happy to use a demonstrably bogus interpretation of the constitution to overturn two centuries of settled understanding of what the document means and requires.
Their very victory, should it come to that, is their badge of hypocrisy. Their arguments are all at war with themselves. But they don’t care.
Silent Majority Speaks Up
President Bush is, not surprisingly, speaking at the commencement of a Christian college in a few days. But what warms my heart, is this, as reported here:
[Calvin College is] a liberal arts school that defines its mission as “developing the Christian mind,” and requires what its spokesman, Phil de Haan, calls “an allegiance of faith” from its faculty, and theology studies from its students.But 100 members of the faculty and another 40 staff and former faculty members have signed an open letter of rebuke to the president that’s scheduled to appear as a half-page ad in the Grand Rapids Press on the day of the president’s speech.
While welcoming the president, the letter delivers a carefully worded critique of administration policies from a Christian viewpoint. It calls the Iraq war “unjust and unjustified,” expresses dismay at policies that “favor the wealthy … and burden the poor,” challenges policies of intolerance toward dissent, and environmental policies that are at odds with being “caretakers of God’s good creation."
The letter signers view the occasion of the president’s speech as a teachable moment.
David Crump, a Calvin professor of religion who helped draft the letter . . . says that news of the open letter has gotten response from around the country. It’s tapped into what he sees as "a silent majority in the Christian evangelical community that resents the Christian vocabulary being hijacked by the religious right."
How very MLK of them.
“Traditional” Marriage
As reported here, an enterprising blogger sought to get a bead on what constitutes a “traditional” marriage. He unearthed a judicial opinion from Kansas from 1886 (and can you get any more “traditional” than Kansas in 1886?), in which the judge wrote:
In my opinion, the union between E. C. Walker and Lillian Harman was no marriage, and they deserve all the punishment which has been inflicted upon them. … In the present case, the parties repudiated nearly everything essential to a valid marriage, and openly avowed this repudiation at the commencement of their union.
What did the couple repudiate, thus making it “no marriage”?
* the bride declined to take a marriage vow of obedience to her husband
* the bride declared her individuality by keeping her maiden name
* the groom acknowledged at the wedding ceremony that his future wife could “repulse…all advances of mine”; in other words, he acknowledged that he could not rape his wife-to-be
* the groom acknowledged that he would share responsibility for child-rearing
* the groom disavowed that his wife-to-be was to become his property
Yup. So, as pointed out—in 1886, the idea that a woman owned herself, even when married, and had the right to not be raped was a radical redefinition of marriage, so much so that a court refused to acknowlege it as a marriage at all. Moreover, there is hardly a marriage today that comports to this old-timey view of marriage.
The point, if it is not obvious, is that the societal concept of a “marriage” evolves over time, so it is simply incorrect to assume that there even is a “traditional” notion of marriage.
Puritanical Sexism
I don’t know what to say about this. It boggles the mind.
Alysha Cosby, an Alabama high-school student, was banned from participating in her school’s graduation last night because she is pregnant.
So she announced her own name and walked across the stage anyway. (I love it!)
Cosby, her mother, and her aunt were then escorted out of the room by police.
Officials from St. Jude Educational Institute in Montgomery, Alabama told Cosby to stop attending the school in March, due to “safety concerns.” She completed her courses at home. And even though she met all of the academic requirements and received her diploma, the school refused to recognize her at the ceremony.
The kicker? The father of Cosby’s child– a student at the same high school– was allowed to graduate with the class.
From Feministing.
Iraq – A Sobering Assessment
Despite the pie-in-the-sky propagandistic high-fives of those in the non-reality-based community, it seems that things in Iraq aren’t going that well:
In interviews and briefings this week, some of the generals pulled back from recent suggestions, some by the same officers, that positive trends in Iraq could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000 American troops late this year or early in 2006. One officer suggested Wednesday that American military involvement could last “many years."
But the officer said that despite Americans’ recent successes in disrupting insurgent cells, which have resulted in the arrest of 1,100 suspects in Baghdad alone in the past 80 days, the success of American goals in Iraq was not assured. “I think that this could still fail,” the officer said at the briefing, referring to the American enterprise in Iraq. “It’s much more likely to succeed, but it could still fail."
He said recent polls conducted by Baghdad University had shown confidence flagging sharply, to 45 percent, down from an 85 percent rating immediately after the election.
The senior officer who met with reporters in Baghdad said there had been 21 car bombings in the capital in May, and 126 in the past 80 days. All last year, he said, there were only about 25 car bombings in Baghdad.
I mention this, of course, because it is the truth, not because I approve. The Bush Doctrine simply has not manifested itself in the way that its proponents are claiming. There’s no reason to think that it might eventually work, but that day is not upon us yet. And even if peace and democracy do come to Iraq, it still does not translate to a “domino theory” of democracy spreading throughout the Middle East. More importantly, it does not translate to a safer America. Remember, 9/11 is what started this.
SIDEBAR: Speaking of “installing democracies” as being central to Bush Doctrine Version 3.0, let’s remind ourselves of how little that was a part of the original doctrine. This time, let’s remind ourselves with linkety goodness. There was no mention of “democracy” in President Bush’s address to Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001. Aside from a reference to Russia, it cannot be found in the June 2002 West Point speech. “Democracy” was absent from Bush’s September 12, 2002 address to the UN and his October 7, 2002 Iraq war justification in Cincinnati. And in the run-up to the invasion, democracy promotion remained essentially invisible in the 2003 State of the Union (ironically, it is mentioned regarding Iran), March 17 press conference, and even during Bush’s March 19 address to the nation declaring the commencement of hostilities.
Tolerance For Terrorism?
A guy plants a bomb on a plane, and it blows up, killing all the men, women and children civilians on board. That’s a terrorist act, right? And if were up to Bush—the architect of the “war on terrorism”—that guy would be captured, killed, prosecuted, tortured, etc., right? Right?
Well, Daddy Bush picked up the bat on this issue once, and whiffed:
Most controversially, at the request of Jeb, Mr Bush Sr intervened to release the convicted Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch from prison and then granted him US residency.
According to the justice department in George Bush Sr’s administration, [Orlando] Bosch had participated in more than 30 terrorist acts. He was convicted of firing a rocket into a Polish ship which was on passage to Cuba. He was also implicated in the 1976 blowing-up of a Cubana plane flying to Havana from Venezuela in which all 73 civilians on board were killed.
***
Bosch’s release, often referred to in the US media as a pardon, was the result of pressure brought by hardline Cubans in Miami, with Jeb Bush serving as their point man. Bosch now lives in Miami and remains unrepentant about his militant activities, according to Bardach.
Now, it is the son’s turn—and this time—it is a post 9/11 world. Kevin Drum sets the stage of the upcoming Dubya dilemna:
On Tuesday, immigration officials finally arrested Luis Posada Carriles, a man convicted of bombing a Cuban airliner in 1976 and subsequently accused of numerous other acts of terrorism since he escaped from a Venezuelan jail 20 years ago. Venezuela wants him back, so shortly we’ll know what’s most important to the Bushies: punishing terrorists or thumbing their noses at Hugo Chávez.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
UPDATE: In case it’s not clear, both Bosch (the terrorist now living as a free man in Miami) and Carriles (the terrorist now in custody) are comrades-in-arms, having both committed the EXACT SAME ACTS of terrorism (i.e., bombing the Cuban airliner in 1976).
Frist Chokes Bigtime
Shorter Frist: Single judicial filibusters are constitutional, but judicial filibusters of more-than-one judge is not.
This morning on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer asked Majority Leader Bill Frist a simple question:
SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?
Here was Frist’s response:
The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination – we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe – a point – and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.
Bill Moyers Explains It All
Unfortunately, Bill Moyer’s speech on the failure of journalism and the independence of public television is far too long to reproduce here, even for an extended post. I therefore encourage everyone to read it all.
Choice excerpts are below the fold.
On “radical right-wingers”:
Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.
On what passes for “journalistic objectivity” nowadays:
Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading. . . . I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. . . . I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.
On getting a news story nailed down as right:
This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell’s 1984. They give us a program vowing “No Child Left Behind,” while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” that give us neither. And that’s just for starters.
On right-wing idealogues:
This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid.
Moyers also talks about the forces—past and present—who seek to rein in the independence of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because they don’t like the fact that, on occasion, the CPB reports the truth about power to the American people. ("Power", by the way, is not limited to right-wing power, in Moyer’s view). He then closes with faith in the American people, something which the interferors lack:
We’re big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it’s political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent and sometimes violent confusion. “There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by,” John Steinbeck wrote. “It was called the people.”