Saturday, August 03, 2002

More proof that Florida is just a cesspool of political corruption.



With three days left to qualify for the November ballot, supporters of a plan to revamp higher education in Florida are scrambling to replace thousands of signatures they say are missing from the Broward County elections office.

Supporters, led by U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, said Broward election workers misplaced seven boxes containing 10,000 voter signatures that the group needs to get its proposed constitutional amendment on the Nov. 5 ballot.

"They got all the boxes," said Alice Skelton, the initiative's campaign manager who said she has Federal Express receipts showing the boxes were delivered months ago.

Broward officials dispute that, saying Education Excellence for Florida didn't mail the petitions.

"We don't have those petitions. We've looked," said Mary Hall, the elections official in charge of the constitutional initiatives at the Broward supervisor's office.





Dems better find a way to fix this. Or, Floridians, you'd better throw those criminals out.

Okay, I couldn't resist. I had to visit AndyLand, where he is currently taking NPR to task for their bias because (I think) they have Edward Said recommend books about Islam. Either that or because they interview Ray Charles. Aside from the hilarious idea that one can prove "bias" from one data point, I just have one question:

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU HOSTED NPR'S SATURDAY MORNING SHOW ANDY?

I guess they haven't come calling recently.

Maybe they've learned not to.

All the news unfit to be heard.



Al sez:


For well over a year, the Bush administration has used its power in the wrong way. In the election of 2000, I argued that the Bush-Cheney ticket was being bankrolled by "a new generation of special interests, power brokers who would want nothing better than a pliant president who would bend public policy to suit their purposes and profits." Some considered this warning "anti-business." It was nothing of the sort. I believe now, as I said then, that "when powerful interests try to take advantage of the American people, it's often other businesses that are hurt in the process" - smaller companies that play by the rules.



Wise words from George Akerlof:



GEORGE A. AKERLOF If you let your toddler out of her playpen, you need to watch her more carefully. This wisdom is known by every American parent but has been systematically ignored in economic deregulation. For example, in the 1980's, savings and loans were given greatly expanded freedoms. But in misguided zeal for deregulation, regulatory budgets were cut, not raised. Enterprising individuals found ways to loot the savings and loans for their own gain. Taxpayers, as the ultimate guarantors of deposit insurance, were left holding the bag.

Californians also learned the lesson of the playpen in their experiment with electricity deregulation. Regulators fell asleep on the job; amid blackouts and skyrocketing prices, energy producers and traders manipulated the market.

Over the past generation, financial deregulation has increased the scope for financial mischief. Also, increasingly complex financial derivatives have reduced the transparency of corporate accounts, making mischief harder to track. We must revise our accounting codes accordingly and shore up the regulatory agencies, especially the S.E.C., which have been starved of funds for so long.

Now is the time to remember the lessons of the playpen: increased scope for action must be accompanied by increased regulatory oversight.




Overlooked due to the other hilarious revelations about Bill Simon is his proposal of federally subsidized (65%) health care for low income workers who currently qualify for California's Healthy Families program.
Anyone found out who was involved in all those sneaky Enron partnerships?

Anyone?
Polk Seniors Target Local Terrorists

This would be funny if it wasn't true. (sent in by E.M.).


LAKELAND -- Call them the Grannies against Osama.

With the help of $81,772 in federal money, 150 senior volunteers will patrol three lower-income areas in Polk County.


TO LEARN MORE
The patrols will gear up with training beginning Oct. 1. Anyone 55 or older interested may call 648-1500.



They'll be on the lookout for terrorists, who local officials say may find it easy to blend into neighborhoods where people frequently move in and out.

Targeted for patrols beginning later this year are the Bradley community south of Mulberry and the Combee Road and Wabash Avenue neighborhoods in Lakeland.





Sam Heldman has the text of the relevant part of the corporate reform bill:


No company with a class of securities registered under section 12 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78l), or that is required to file reports under section 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78o(d)), or any officer, employee, contractor, subcontractor, or agent of such company, may discharge, demote, suspend, threaten, harass, or in any other manner discriminate against an employee in the terms and conditions of employment because of any lawful act done by the employee --


`(1) to provide information, cause information to be provided, or otherwise assist in an investigation regarding any conduct which the employee reasonably believes constitutes a violation of section 1341, 1343, 1344, or 1348, any rule or regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or any provision of Federal law relating to fraud against shareholders, when the information or assistance is provided to or the investigation is conducted by--


`(A) a Federal regulatory or law enforcement agency;


`(B) any Member of Congress or any committee of Congress; or


`(C) a person with supervisory authority over the employee ...




Bush's E.O. clearly violates this.

(via Public Nuisance)
Nice of Clarence Thomas to try and publically humiliate his sister, especially when it isn't really true.



If there's anything America knows about Clarence Thomas's sister, it's that he once singled her out publicly as an illustration of what welfare dependence can foster. She is so dependent, Thomas told The Washington Post in 1980, "she gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check . . . What's worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check, too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation."



[...]



She's asked whether her brother's characterization of her more than 20 years ago, as some kind of welfare queen, still bothers her. "People ask me that question--this, that and the other. I was off public assistance at the time he said this."

Martin seems to want to dismiss the slight as much ado about little, and yet she seems to relish the chance to talk about it, to explain herself.

When she was on welfare, she says, she was not only taking care of her kids but had responsibility for her elderly aunt, who raised her, and an uncle. "I had a choice of taking care of these old people or keeping a job."

Martin wishes her brother would come to Pin Point more often, speak to the kids, try to influence them to make something of their lives. "We have to catch him when he doesn't have a function or something like that," she says.

"But he comes through sometimes," she adds. "Sometimes he don't . . ."




Cruella's replacement says:


"The elections are kind of nonpartisan, and we want to make sure it works as well as it should."




Yep.


Eric Alterman gets email from one of my heroes, Reba Shimansky:


Name: Reba Shimansky
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY

I do not understand why liberals waste their time attacking Anne Coulter. It is obvious that she is a psychotic right-wing nut who is not terribly bright nor well informed. She is preaching to the converted and does not have the skills to influence the thinking of anyone except a rightwing zealot like herself. The main reason she gets so much air time is because dirty old men like to look at her blonde hair which dominates her appearance on her and her skinny body which she highlights by always wearing miniskirts. I was profiled in The New Yorker because I am liberal partisan but the media is not interested in a fat middle-aged woman on their programs.

Eric adds: For those of you unfamiliar with the source of Ms. Shamansky’s celebrity, I happened to have saved the following paragraph from The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, March 25, 2002:
Issue of 2002-03-25
Posted 2002-03-18

It was question-and-answer time at the Barnes & Noble on Broadway at Eighty-second Street on a recent Friday night. Frank Bruni, a reporter for the Times, had just finished reading from “Ambling Into History,” his account of George W. Bush’s Presidential campaign and first year in the White House. A pale woman in the third row spoke up: “Many media outlets, including the Village Voice, Salon, and The New Republic, have accused you, for lack of a better word, of being a major suckup,” shesaid, her voice reflecting a half century’s tenure in Brooklyn. As the woman spoke, Bruni’s eyes widened behind his green-rimmed glasses. “Are you Reba Shimansky?” he asked, cutting her off. ”


Eschaton Quiz

Which Blogger wrote this on November 7, 2000:


Hello,
Idiots!

You get what you deserve. You are
sad, ignorant people. I hope you
enjoy the Coming Terror.

Goddamn you people. Goddamn you
stupid, doomed people. Enjoy your
teevee, enjoy your next two
months of economic fun. Because
it's over.

It's over, you fucking idiots.

It's over, Nader jackasses.

Thanks, to all of you. Thanks for
making this country the
mother-fucking laughing stock of
the Earth.

What I hope for those of you who
voted for Dubya, it's death. A
sad, slow death, in the night,
where nobody cares, and missiles
from Iraq and North Korea will
rain upon your fat, hydrocephalic
head.

Good luck, jackasses. Thanks,
Nader. I hope you enjoy this. I
hope you enjoy turning the U.S.
over to the Right Wing Psychos
who turned America into an
Economic Graveyard. Yes, the
Senile Reagan "ended" the Soviet
influence over Europe -- never
mind that the USSR bankrupted
itself long before he said "Tear
down that whatever it is!"

Whatever. You get what you
deserve. Basart, what's the song
lyric?

"Bow down before the one you
serve. You're going to get what
you deserve."

That's the Nine Inch Nails, ain't
it? Yeah. Be good to get one of
those nine-inch nails shoved up
Nader's motherfucking face.

And Bush's.

And Gore's.


And this, just hours later:


YOU'VE BEEN
HAD

This, friends, is a coup.

Think about it. Last night, early
last night, Gore was far ahead in
Florida. The great shame ...
Brokaw kept jabbering about the
"grim Thanksgiving" between the
Brothers Bush and Pappa George.

Then, suddenly, Karl Rove is on
EVERY channel, firmly and weirdly
demanding the networks quit
saying Gore had Florida. And, an
hour later, the numbers flip in
Florida. (Florida, as in, Gov.
Jeb Bush, who directly runs the
election process in that state.)

Paranoid? No. Is there any such
thing as paranoia when
considering the Bush Dynasty?

Pappa Bush is a Nixon-era spook,
the former head of the CIA, the
right-hand man to Senile Reagan,
the architect of Iran-Contra and
the covert wars in Central
America.

There is a *direct* line from the
JFK coup to Watergate to last
night.

They tried to destroy Clinton in
every way, shape and form. They
did the same to Gary Hart. They
did the same to McGovern, via
Eagleton.

You've been had.


No Googling!

Update: Jesse, of Pandagon , wins the prize!

It was Ken Layne.

Well, duhh, Josh.


They seem to believe that 9/11 frees them\ from any concern with precedent or discretion.


Actually, they behaved this way before 9/11. After 9/11 people were just more willing to go along with it, and the press more willing to give it a pass.
Judge seizes control of woman's uterus.

"Wilkes-Barre, PA — After a hearing in court today, a Pennsylvania judge blocked a woman from exercising her legal right to choose abortion, in complete disregard of legal precedent. The woman was scheduled to obtain an abortion yesterday until her former boyfriend filed a lawsuit to force her to carry the pregnancy to term and the judge agreed to an injunction pending today's hearing."


Friday, August 02, 2002

Jeebus, the Media Horse is back with a whole magazine's worth of stuff. Something to keep me busy while I'm playing with my new wireless modem. You know you're getting old when new technology starts to mystify you just a little bit..
Try the Kartoo search engine. Quite fun.
Try Pandagon which finally seems to be updating on a regular basis...

Who knew that John Ashcroft was such a financial wizard?


In one of more than 50 transactions he reported, Ashcroft bought shares of the Denver-based ICON Consumer Discretionary Fund on April 4, 2001, for between $1,001 and $5,000 and sold shares in the same fund three weeks later for between $50,001 and $100,000. The report does not indicate the number of shares in either of the transactions.


That's pretty damn amazing. Wow.
While I agreed with Mickey Kaus that the New York Times article didn't have any kind of smoking gun on Cheney, I disagree with his obsessive analysis of it this way:

1) The Times didn't hype it - Drudge did.

2) It was a reasonable front page story. It did have new information. It did raise new questions - not about Cheney's corruption, necessarily, but about whether he did his job as a CEO well.

3) Whitewater was a front page story too. While there wasn't anything in that story either, it sure did raise a lot of questions.


They've set up a straw man to knock it down, pretending that the Times claimed they've got the goods to lock Cheney away.

Gerth stories always read as if "there's more there..." and I'm no fan of the guy, but the Kaus-Lucianne-Drudge axis of love has invented a fantasy world in which this was presented as The Big Story and then they've gone about critiquing that spin. They're the only ones spinning it that way.




Acting in very good faith, to try and help cultivate some alternative viewpoints in Blogistan, Brian Linse has set up a nice lefty blogroll. Unsurpsingly, some on the list have reacted as if they'd been thrown into a pit of vipers, or forced to go out on a date with Barbra Streisand, or something...

Without naming names, I'm quite amused at the extent of posts by "lefties" in Blogistan that go something like this. "I'm not sure if I'm really liberal, I support free trade..." Or, "I'm not anti-war, so maybe I'm not a liberal..." Or "I don't think the U.S. Govermnment should nationalize the entire economy instantly, so maybe I'm not a liberal..." Or, my favorite, "Those other lefties are just icky!"




FBI asks lawmakers to take lie detector tests.


WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI has asked members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to take lie-detector tests as part of an investigation into the leak of information related to the Sept. 11 attacks, a law enforcement official said.

The official emphasized that the exams "are always voluntary." Lie-detector tests are a standard element of FBI investigations and are meant to eliminate people from suspicion.


Lovely.
Florida law implies that Harris should be disqualified from running for Congress. She won't be of course.



Florida's "resign to run" law requires that elected officials seeking another office submit a letter on the day of qualifying for the upcoming race stating when they intend to resign. If they do not, their resignation becomes effective immediately. Ms. Harris, whose office enforces state elections law, said she did not realize that the law applied to her because secretary of state becomes an appointed position next year.




FBI says no. CIA says no. White House says yes!




WASHINGTON — Despite deep doubts by the CIA and FBI, the White House is now backing claims that suspected Sept. 11 skyjacker Mohammed Atta secretly met five months earlier with an Iraqi agent in Prague, Czech Republic, a possible indication that Saddam Hussein's regime was involved in the terror attacks.

In an interview, a senior Bush administration official said that available evidence of the long-disputed meeting "holds up." The official added, "We're going to talk more about this case."

Convincing proof that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks would give strong ammunition to the administration in its efforts to build domestic and international support for a military campaign to topple the Iraqi leader.

But the CIA and FBI concluded months ago that they had no hard evidence to confirm claims that the Prague meeting took place.

A federal law-enforcement official said yesterday, however, that the FBI has been reviewing Atta's possible ties to Iraq, including travel and phone records, with "renewed vigor" in recent weeks. Until now, the administration has largely argued that military action against Iraq is justified because of the danger the regime is secretly building nuclear, chemical or biological weapons that could be used against the United States or its allies. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a news conference that Iraq had "a relationship" with al-Qaida, but declined to be more specific.


What a load of horse hooey.



Thursday, August 01, 2002

Iraq inviting weapons inspectors...

Jonah Goldberg (I've just discovered the the Corner is kinda fun) obviously didn't get up very early this morning, unlike me. The U.N. report on the Jenin massacre was getting a lot of play on the news networks I was surfing through, contrary to what he says. I just think it was pushed aside for the various and many Breaking News stories of the day.

Pre-order the VLWC Soundtrack before it's too late!

My guest conservative commentator Snotglass has this to say about Iraq:


Unpatriotic liberals in the Senate have been unconstitutionally obstructing our elected President's brave efforts to protect America by extending the War on Terror to its source in Iraq, and the liberal media has been whining about the potential costs of liberating Iraq.

While the sniveling left-wing crybabies in both the Senate and the liberal press fail to address the costs of allowing Saddam Hussein to continue his international scheme of mass terror, recent studies released by the Francesco Sforza Defense Policy Institute at the Heritage Foundation have concluded that vigorous prosecution of an active defense policy could provide a substantial economic stimulus to offset the failed fiscal policies of the Clinton administration.

Independent research conducted by noted military historian Jonah Goldberg reveals that operations conducted by great commanders such as Henry Morgan and Francis Drake made military campaigns both victorious and profitable. Coupled with targeted tax cuts, a war with Iraq can provide a much-needed boost to the government output sector of the Gross Domestic Product. Since this sector normally constitutes a negative impact on the economy, profitable military operations will have a drastic effect on both the market and on unemployment.

You liberals need to support our elected President.
A much repeated joke by Christopher Hitchens:

I attended Oxford with Bill Clinton (at one point sharing a girlfriend in common—she later became a radical lesbian), so I have a deep-rooted understanding of both the President and the President’s wife.



Which tells us just about everything we need to know about Hitch.
Joe Conason brings up the un-answered Halliburton-Dresser question:

Did the Bush family still possess any significant interest in Dresser at the time of the questionable merger? Many years ago, the president's grandfather sat on Dresser's board; later his father worked for the company, and named one of his sons (Neil) after its president. If the Bush interests no longer own any Dresser/Halliburton shares, when were they sold?
"Through my furity ... I still believe peace is possible."
Katherine Harris resigns retroactively.

Sadly not retroactively enough.
Great Howler.


At any rate, don’t forget the two approved tales theWashington press has now told you. The two stories plainly self-contradict. But your press corps has sworn to each one:

OFFICIAL PRESS CORPS STORY #1: Al Gore will do and say anything to win.

OFFICIAL PRESS CORPS STORY #2:Al Gore refused to do the one thing which would have won the election. Neither story made much sense. Your press corps, of course, swore to both.


And a moment of truth from Bow-tie Boy Carlson:


TUCKER CARLSON (10/4/00): I mean, you know, and it’s interesting—I mean, there is this sense in which Bush is benefiting from something, and I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s the low expectations of the people covering him. You know, he didn’t drool or pass out on stage or anything, so he’s getting credit for that. But there is this kind of interesting reluctance on the part of the press to pass judgment on it. I think a lot of people—they don’t, necessarily, break down along ideological lines—believe that, you know, maybe Bush didn’t do as good a job as he might have. And yet, the coverage does not reflect that at all. It’s interesting.

Norah, Norah, Norah...

Just shut the hell up.
Said today during press conference with Prince Abdullah.


"And I just -- I cannot speak strongly enough about how we must collectively get after those who kill in the name of -- in the name of some kind of false religion. "


Stay tuned for entire fun-filled transcript which will include the observation that killing is negative.




UPDATE: Changed to reflect official version.
More brilliance:

"...because there's somenfanatic who believes that killing innocent life is positive. It's incredibly negative. "

"I do believe that we can get to a so-called conference within the three-year period of time."

3 years? Gee -2005. How Rovian. Success won't come until after the next election, you see.





To comment a bit more on the Glassman+Hassett article -- they're emphasizing the "stock market good investment in long run" and "by and hold" aspects of their book. However, despite the spin they're putting on it now, their big point was that stocks were undervalued, and:


Stocks are now, we believe, in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground -- to the neighborhood of 36,000 for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. After they complete this historic ascent, owning them will still be profitable but the returns will decline. You won't be able to make as much money from them each year. We believe that in the meantime, however, astounding profits will be made.


In other words, we were previously stupid about the riskiness of a balanced stock portfolio, and now we are in the midst of waking up.

I'm not going to bother rehashing all the various complaints people had with their book -- I just think they're being very disingenuous about what they were claiming. Now they say "we warned that 'it is impossible to predict how long it will take.'"

Well, I predict barring planetary catastrophe the Dow will hit 36,000 one day too, but that's a far cry from claiming that we are "in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground."

On that prediction they were obviously wrong. Fess up, guys.


Tresy adds:


I don't know if others remember this, but Mr. Glassman, when not touting the arrival of Equities Nirvana, was equally outspoken about the bottomless criminality of the Clintons. Not only does this make him 0-for-about-200 in matters punditocratic, it also identifies him as a member of that subspecies mendax pathologicus, whose survivial mechanism, when confronted with evidence of past lying, is to reflexively spray new lies.

No surprises here, in other words.


UPDATE: Brad DeLong says basically the same thing only much better.
.
Bush admin screwing Vets.



A top official at the US Department of Veterans Affairs has ordered local VA administrators across the country to stop marketing their health care services and recruiting new veterans to use them because of tight finances and the risk of increasing already long waiting times for services.

''Even though some sites might have local capacity, as a national system, all facilities are expected to abide by this policy,'' wrote the official, Laura J. Miller, deputy undersecretary for health for operations and management, with the approval of the Veterans Affairs secretary.

Disclosure of the July 18 memorandum prompted Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to send a letter yesterday to President Bush seeking a reversal of the policy, as well as Miller's resignation.

Kerry, a Navy veteran of Vietnam and possible 2004 presidential contender, complained on the floor of the US Senate: ''The resources don't have to be exceeded. That is a matter of budgeting priority of this administration. And there are many areas where it's obvious the administration has decided it's more important to put money than to put it into veterans in order to keep the promise to the veterans of the country.''


UPDATE: Josh Marshall also posts on this and has a copy of the memo.
Charles Kuffner points me to an interesting story about a reporter running a pseudononymous blog, getting caught, and being forced to take it down.

This touches on a whole variety of interesting issues. First, I don't see any problem with his doing this, at least until he got caught. Once it was discovered, given the current ridiculous adherence in American Journalism to this fake notion of "objectivity," I suppose it had to go. I also guess that expressing too many opinions might make it hard to do your job as a reporter by making some of the people you're supposed to report on a little unhappy.

I do think that a move to European-style journalism is preferable. We have been moving towards it - but we haven't yet been honest about it.

I find this post by Robert George rather revealing.




On the other hand, Rubin is also the living embodiment of the '90s Boom years. It might be fashionable now to try and suggest that that economic environment was ALL binge, but hardly anyone believes that. Certainly not Republicans and conservatives -- our argument was that the Reagan tax cuts were responsible for a lot of what occurred in the '90s (ONLY the "non-binge" stuff? a difficult argument to make).



Completely indepdendent of what one thinks of Lieberman, it seems obvious to me that a primary campaign would be dead in the water. I think Josh Marshall's comparison of him to Phil Gramm is apt.

UPDATE: You know, Josh Marshall doesn't actually compare Lieberman to Gramm. *SOMEONE* did recently, or maybe I dreamt it, or maybe I had a bit too much to drink last night and then woke up too early this morning and...oh who the hell knows where I got that.

UPDATE 2: It was Gene Lyons.

The Dow 36,000 folks are saying people have distorted their book.

Actually, they're desperately distorting it themselves. More on this later.

Kaus is actually right about this Gerth story on Cheney. Nothing there. But, hey, is it now conventional wisdom that Gerth is a hack who specializes in making mountains out of molehills? I guess that memo came down January 2001, or so.

Wednesday, July 31, 2002

Cats are sleeping with dogs, and those wacky folks over at The Corner are praising Signorile's latest column and implicitly blasting the positions of some other guy.

(via Instapundit)
Olbermann convocation speech at Cornell University, 1998.

excerpt:



Since Jan. 21 the news program I do for the MSNBC cable network has been devoted to what we have euphemistically called "the Clinton-Lewinsky investigations." Virtually every night, for an hour, sometimes two, I have presided over discussions about this stuff, so intricate, so repetitive, that it has assumed the characteristics of the medieval religious scholars arguing for months and even years over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

At first I genuinely believed this was a relevant matter for fairly constant discussion. I used my moral force to keep sex out of it whenever possible. I didn't allow the word "scandal" or even "affair" to be used. I tried to be non-partisan and skeptical about both the accused and the accusers.

But as the weeks have gone by, it has become more and more clear to me that there is no moral force at work in this process, whatsoever. Nobody is doing the right thing. Let's review this briefly and see if we can spot anybody doing something because it's better for somebody else, or because of their own ethical standards.

If the worst that all is alleged is true, the president runs a job exchange program. Simple as that. Thank you, seniors! That was me not using my Moral Force, I'm sorry.

A willing participant in this, a Miss Lewinsky, blabs proudly to her gossipy friend, a Ms. Tripp, who is just paranoid enough to think that she'll lose her own job because she knows this.

I must at this point quote a man with whom I shared a work cubicle at ESPN, the humorist, and former overnight-shift worker at UPS, my friend Craig Kilborn, who himself paraphrased the comedian Mike Myers by saying "Linda Tripp is a man, baby!" That was also me not using my Moral Force.

Anyway, this Tripp person, at the urging of her friend, a book agent ---"Lucianne Goldberg is a man, baby" -- she secretly and at least unethically, records hours of conversations with her young friend Monica ... and takes them to the FBI.

The FBI then cleverly tries to force the young woman into stinging the president of the United States! A news magazine finds out -- it makes the rare moral choice to delay publication of the story (because it'll be a juicier one later, and they've been promised an opportunity to listen to these sleazy tapes).

Then the magazine gets scooped by an idiot with a modem who has decided that his job is to take any rumor he hears and put it out onto the Internet.

All of this comes to the attention of an independent counsel who may or may not be politically independent, but who is dumb enough to have accepted in advance a future job at a university, a job funded by a rabid hater of the president that the independent counsel is investigating.

Then, my network starts covering this story 28 hours out of every 24, and six days after the story breaks more people watch my show than watch my old show Sportscenter. And while I'm having the dry heaves in the bathroom because my moral sensor is going off but I can't even hear it, I'm so seduced by these ratings that I go along with them when they say do this not just one hour a night, but two, thus bringing my own skills and talents to bear on the process by which the snowball runs faster and faster down the hill.

In the ensuing four months ending day before yesterday, we are visited by the chairman of a committee investigating the president who publicly announces that the president has no morals or character and who then reveals his own character by calling that president the term for a previously owned prophylactic device.

A speaker of the house who divorced his own wife while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer first tells his colleagues to stay out of this mess, then after reading some research about how his constituents are angry that he hasn't pointed a moral finger at the president, he turns into a self-proclaimed judge and jury and tells his colleagues to stop referring to what the president may or may not have done as "scandals" and start calling them "crimes."

The networks, including my own, then each broadcast stories about a private investigator who claims a man in Arkansas told friends that a woman he knew 20 years ago told him she'd been assaulted by the president even though she swears she wasn't and his only evidence is a letter he wrote to her expressing his sympathy for the terrible thing that didn't happen to her.

A convicted felon and attorney then has a series of very odd phone calls to his wife and his lawyer. Though he is standing next to a sign saying "All phone calls are recorded," he is surprised when tapes of these calls are released publicly by the politician who had made the remark about the used device.

The politician then assumes responsibility for his "error in judgment." As the comedian David Frye said during Watergate, while doing his perfect impression of Richard Nixon, "The difference between responsibility and blame is that those who are to blame lose their jobs. Those who are responsible do not." The responsible politician thus fires his chief investigator.

All the while, the operatives of the president who are howling over how their personal lives are being improperly investigated, are themselves investigating everybody else, spending taxpayer dollars to release information about how Linda Tripp was arrested on a dismissed vagrancy charge 29 years ago, and to chase down a story about whether or not one of the president's key opponents used to like to wear dresses when he was 6 years old.

In the interim, as this tepid and not steamy story of maybe sex registers no impact whatsoever on the American public, the president's opponents then switch to the campaign finance issue, then to the Chinese influence on our elections issue, and then finally to the we gave the Commies secrets issue. That same politician who used that very unfortunate term says, day before yesterday, "Is this treason? No, right now I don't think it's treason." Meaning I got to say the word treason without saying the word treason. The president's people reply by insisting they didn't sell a change in policy -- this was the policy that the previous Republican president wanted.

I'd love to tell you the punch line to this story. But, I can't because it ain't over yet. All I know is that if even the slightest part of any religion known to man is factually correct, all of these people are going to meet again some day -- in hell. (Extended applause) And I haven't mentioned Paula Jones' attorneys yet.

A month ago I went to Washington for the White House correspondents' dinner, where two people who jokingly admit to being a part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" told me that even they were sick to death of this story and only my jokes about it kept them going. I was proud of this for about a week until it dawned on me that if I never had joked about it, they might have stopped participating in it.

But at that dinner, I was also seated next to a fellow member of what will in 24 hours be your alumni association, a former congressman. He told me about how his roomate led the armed takeover of the Straight and that as nuts as all that group was, and how nobody then or now really thought that was an appropriate expession of political or social activism, they actually did believe in something. I told him of the day in 1979 when we VBR types rushed to Day Hall upon the news of a takeover there. Our takeover turned out to have been by six students who were late on their tuition and were going to hold the place until they got extensions.

This was my first hint that the idea of Moral Force had been declining for some time.

Anyway, my fellow Cornellian and I got talking about a prominent politician, and I said, "At least he believes in this stuff he's saying" and he said, "No he doesn't. He gets focus groups to tell him what to believe." And I asked how many members of Congress really believe in something, and he thought for a moment and then he answered... "Six." He then named them.

I went back to the hotel and prayed that I would wake up in a more honorable time, like maybe the McCarthy era.

I'm going on like this for a reason. If I live so long, eight months from now I'll turn 40, and I hope I'll still be surprised and saddened that there are only six congressmen who believe a damn thing. And I hope that eight months from now, or whenever, my moral sensor will be a little sharper than it has been.

There are days now when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depessed, makes me cry. And it occurs to me that this moral sensor has been fine-tuned within the walls of this campus. Forty years ago the great news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow got up in front of the convention of the radio and television news directors and announced that without moral direction all this great medium would become was "wires and lights in a box," and there are days when I wish it would still be even that idealistic.

About three weeks ago I awakened from my stupor on this subject and told my employers that I simply could not continue doing this show about the endless investigation and the investigation of the investigation, and the investigation of the investigation of the investigation. I had to choose what I felt in my heart was right over what I felt in my wallet was smart. I did not tell them they had 24 hours. I did not threaten them. I let them balance for themselves their professional and moral forces and set their timetable. I await their answer. Of course, I am not buying any new furniture for my home.

I heard an interview the other day with a brilliant British television screenwriter named Dennis Potter. He was ruminating on society and TV from a position which commands my attention: He knew he had less than three months to live. Potter described the change in society so well that I actually transcribed it. He said that in the mid-80s, quote, "Everything was given, in a sense, its pricetag. And the pricetag became the only gospel. And that gospel, in the end, is a very thin gruel indeed. And if you start measuring humankind in those terms, everything else then becomes secondary, or less important, or, in some sense ... laughable."

So this, ultimately, is my point. You are about to go out there and be confronted with choices. This is a real world and you may actually only be able to do this one time out of 10. But that seems to be about one time more out of 10 than those of us out here are pulling off.

On Being Called a Commie.
Revised GDP growth figures not good.


Second-quarter gross domestic product grew at a disappointing 1.1 percent pace vs. the 2.4 percent growth rate that had been expected by economists polled by CBS.MarketWatch.com.

Additionally, first-quarter GDP was downwardly revised to show a 5 percent growth rate from the previously reported 6.1 percent rate. Inventory restocking fueled the brisk rate of expansion early in the year. And 2001 GDP rose only 0.3 percent, a steep downward revision from the 1.2 percent growth rate that had been previously reported.
Am I the only one who thinks that Wesley Clark looks a lot like Sam the Eagle from the Muppets?
As Nathan Newman notes, Bush has announced his intention to put a rather Heller-esque spin on the Whistleblower Protection aspects of the corporate reform bill.

You see, you can't get whistleblower protection until after a congressional investigation has started. Until someone blows the whistle, no investigation. Makes perfect sense to me!

Time to go check on Egyptian cotton futures...

I've always been a big fan of the men and women in brown. Well, at least until they showed up hours early for a pick up and I had to take 20 boxes to their @##$#@$ depot myself...but all is forgiven because of my new hero Butch Traylor.



The TIPS program, in fact, reminds me of Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife. Growing up in the 1960's, my sister Marie and I would watch "The Andy Griffith Show" every Saturday night. And every week, if there was even a hint of crime or danger in Mayberry, the ever vigilant Barney was eager to spring into action, lay a dragnet around the city, form a posse and deputize everyone from Otis the town drunk to Floyd the barber. Always on the ready, Barney would pull out his lone bullet, chamber it into his side arm and inevitably fire it into the ground, barely missing his own foot.

Now I see that the same people who last summer thwarted an F.B.I. field office investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attack, want to enlist every goober who installs phone lines or delivers pizza to be the next Ace Ventura terrorist detective.

It bothers me that those charged with defending our freedom would so cavalierly foster such an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. It bothers me to think that my postman might be paying more attention to where my mail is coming from than to where it's supposed to go.

Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Ann Coulter doesn't condemn murderers, as long as they kill the right people.


Coulter was asked why she condemns the terrorists so strongly, but not those who kill abortion doctors. She said that the latter have been extremely frustrated by the fact that they can’t vote on this issue, thanks to Roe vs. Wade, and that they worked within the system for twenty years withoutsuccess before turning to murder. She said that those individuals believe they had been left with no other routes for dissent in the face of an ongoing atrocity. Coulter further suggested that althoughshe would not take it upon herself to take extreme actions on the abortion issue, she will not condemn those who do.

Kudos to Olbermann for continuing to remind us, as he did when he left his show, that maybe, just maybe, there were more important things than Bill Clinton's Tubesteak Messiah.


Last September I went back and checked the logs of my old MSNBC show and discovered to my surprise that in the two months before we changed the meaning of the parent company's acronym to "Nothing But Clinton," my most frequent guests were James Dunegan, a craggy bespectacled man who talked endlessly of terrorism and the Middle East and the threat of anthrax being delivered to Broadway, and Dr. Richard Haas, then of the Brookings Institution, who warned constantly of terrorism and the Middle East and the threats to, and in, this country.

Then one day Mr. Dunegan and Dr. Haas were swept away, never to appear again. Instead we got Terry Jeffrey and Bob Barr and Christopher Hitchens, and our lower-grade sister shows got Newt Gingrich and Barbara Olson and Ann Coulter. That I escaped Coulter was merely a throwaway favor from my masters. They had been hinting she'd have to be a guest sooner rather than later. Then she went over-the-top: Despite an eye infection, she could not keep herself off television. I begged my bosses not to make me interview a guest who was literally wearing a huge, distracting eyepatch. Thus my imagery of her as a pirate: For a week she continued to flail away at the wrong evil while looking like a refugee from some camped-up version of "Treasure Island." But not on my show.



Mistake me not here: Ann Coulter didn't cause Sept. 11. Not in a billion years would I accuse her, or any of the others (not even Barr), of that. But with hindsight one has to ask why the prospect of a country unprepared for terrorism wasn't a sexy enough topic for her and the others to use to pound Clinton and the Democrats. Certainly they got with the program after Sept. 11, blaming Clinton for being soft on Osama bin Laden and terror. The Clinton folks struck back, and for a while it was compelling television controversy and worthwhile political debate, a hot TV commodity that at least contained some crumb of public good. Why wasn't that interesting before Sept. 11?
The Liberal Case for Gray Davis.

It really doesn't matter who Matt Welch wants to vote for.. It's one thing to take the rather juvenile stand that your conscience won't let you vote for the "lesser of two evils" and use that reasoning to justify your vote for, say, Nader, but yet another thing to try and make the case that voting for the clear greater of two evils is the liberal thing to do.

What poisoned Nader's campaign for me was the "Bush=Gore" rhetoric. What poisons Matt Welch for me is his "Simon>Davis" rhetoric.

Vote for who you want, Matt, but unless you can make a positive case for Bill Simon, you really are playing the fool, and perhaps convincing others to do the same.

Bob Somerby is doing a takedown of McGowan's Coloring the News. Not having read the book, I am not qualified to comment on it per se, but I did hear him a couple of times on interview/call-in shows. The man was about half a step above Coulter in his ability to deal with anyone trying to debate him - he would either start screaming or refer to his book much in the same way Coulter refers to her "footnotes."

Remember how the Clinton administration "sold secrets to China" back in 1987, or whatever. For those not paying attention, in the end the big flap was just about high speed computers. Look what's going on now...


The scandals on Wall Street have taught us that industry tells lies, that our government does not protect us from those lies and that the result can be bad for our pocketbooks. The same process can also increase the nuclear threat to our nation.

In a report scheduled for release this week, the U.S. General Accounting Office concludes that the Bush administration made a dangerous mistake on nuclear arms proliferation.

According to the GAO, the administration improperly relied on false industry data to lower the barriers on the export of the United States' most powerful computers--machines that could be used to build the most fearsome weapons that terrorists could get their hands on.

The report shows how a computer industry lobbying group co-chaired by an official of Unisys Corp. duped the White House at the expense of the nation's security.


Oops.
Ted Barlow has a full set of links and comments related to poor Michael Novak.
Hey Chris, did he *really* say 'Franklin and Delano Roosevelt?'
The Independent is reporting that Italian police have admitted to planting Molotov cocktails to frame G8 protesters.

Ethel the Blog has this to say:



Today's quiz question: Name three other countries wherein, if such a thing happened, it would be held up as necessary and sufficient evidence to forcibly overthrow the government. Of course, given that this is Italy, the government will be changing in a couple of weeks anyway.


and, while you're there, scroll down to read this post about our favorite columnist from Planet K-Peg:


And speaking of the Pegster, I quiveringly await her inevitable column along the same lines, wherein she implies how much more she'd rather pull a train with The Nine (well, at least as soon as she's finished with every fire and police department in the country) than with any namby-pamby pack of commie liberals. I'll bet she even finds a tasteful way to work in how magical dolphins (touched by the hand of Bog, of course) swam around in the mine to ensure that Arab terrorists wouldn't sneak up on The Nine while they were being rescued from the failed liberal social policies of the 60s.




Bush speaks, Dow sinks.
That evil Paul Krugman has some mean things to say.

It'll be interesting how states respond to declining revenues if this is more than a 1-2 year hit. "Tax reform" in PA seems to involve shifting the tax burden from property taxes to income taxes. Anyone know how this is expected to hit people in various parts of the income distribution? I'm not yet familiar enough with PA taxes, but my guess is it'll whack the "poor" quite a bit.

Monday, July 29, 2002

Rittenhouse Review notices that AEI flunky Michael Novak discovers the Working Class and is a bit confused by what he sees.

UPDATE: just wanted to add, this is a MUST READ. Hilarious.
Poor Marshall. I almost think he's starting to wish he'd voted for Gore.


President Gumby.
The Moose tracks course of the Gumby Presidency.

With the President's embrace of the corporate governance bill, the symbol of his Administration becomes Mr. Gumby. Bend them, stretch them, they will conform to the circumstances. In the absence of his own domestic agenda, W will accommodate the Democrats'.

This has been the M.O. of the Bushm Presidency, with the exception of the tax cut. In that case, the donors had to be reimbursed. The adaptation of the Democratic agenda applies to the congressional Republicans, as well.

Every time that the Republicans have confronted a popular Democratic measure, they have largely accepted it or offered a discount version of their own. The President eventually signed campaign finance reform, the farm bill, the federal airline security legislation and now corporate governance. All of these measures were initiated by Democrats or maverick Republicans. The White House offered their discount variations on Democratic legislation on HMO reform and prescription drugs.

Even the presumptive White House initiatives were expropriated from others - the national service proposal and the new homeland security agency. Trade promotion authority is a long cherished power by Democratic and Republican Presidents. The much heralded education reform law was more Ted Kennedy than George W. Bush. And the President hardlyeven mentions his own faith based initiative anymore.


Ah, now it is clear. Iraq is going to "attack Kuwait." I wonder if Ms. May Klaspie will give her approval first.

Let's Do The Time Warp Again....

Jordan says don't attack Iraq..


Salon has some new money.

Not dead yet, thankfully.
CNN's Austin Powers cross-promotion is really embarassing.
Ah, the National Review, clueless as always.

While Born in the USA may well have been swept up in the "morning in America" sentiment of the Reagan years, The Rising is equally likely to capture the hearts and minds of an America still shaken by the events of last fall — as well as an America ready to move beyond boy bands and Britney Spears.

Though the reviewer is perhaps correct about Born in the USA being "swept up in the... sentiment of the Reagan years" methinks he doesn't actually mean it that way.


Let's punch up the lyrics to "Born in the USA."

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A....

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man said Son if it was up to me
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said Son, don't you understand

I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go

Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A., I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.

Born in the U.S.A., Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A., I'm a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A
How did I miss Matt Welch's announcement of his intention to vote for Bill Simon?


Well, maybe 'cause I don't read his site very much, but in any case there you are.
Apparently one of the things that was actually discovered during reporters' brief look at California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon's financial papers is that he isn't actually all that rich. Part of his appeal was the implied promise to sink tons of money, Huffington style, into his own campaign. He may not actually have enough to do that. Oops.


To whomever linked on their search for "Bill Hemmer Gay," I have no idea but I do believe he's married.
Instapundit and Bob Novak think this is a Smoking Gun of...well something having to do with IRS audits.

I'm a bit confused here, frankly. The White House gets an email complaining about Judicial Watch and their supposed "non-partisan status." This email is forwarded to the IRS. Other Dems also complain to IRS. IRS opens investigation.

Where's the problem? Who exactly IS supposed to bring to the attention of the IRS organizations that may not deserve their tax-exempt status? Actually, forwarding a complaint email to the proper authorities to deal with the particular problem is likely standard practice, no? If not, then maybe there's an issue here.

Maybe I'm just missing something...



Norah Vincent, actually being reasonable for a change, sounds a lot like Steve Earle.


Lindh is a messed-up kid who made foolish decisions, as all young people do in search of ideals. Yes, he committed crimes, and he will be duly punished for them. But liberalism wasn't the cause of his demise.


Rittenhouse Review has some fun with Camille and some guy.
I've been easier on Lieberman than some of my fellow travelers, but his recent remarks against Gore and his announced intention to run a "me too" campaign that will be about as effective as his "me too" debate with Dick Cheney demonstrate a few things:

1) His lack of loyalty alone makes him undeserving of support.

2) He seems to believe he can win a presidential campaign by running against fellow Democrats. While this is an inevitable necessity in a contested primary, this early in the game it is a bizarre attempt to position himself as a George Bush Democrat.

3) Coming out fighting like this might signal his intention to run even if Gore does, which he had promised not to.

4) Raise all the money you want Joe, you'll be about the first to drop out of the primaries. Why bother?

Joe Conason has some similar remarks:


One possible pleasure of the 2004 presidential primaries would be watching the swift elimination of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who represents the insurance industry in Washington and infrequently visits his home state. The sanctimonious senator attacks Al Gore -- a man deserving rebuke because he so foolishly overestimated Lieberman's talent and appeal -- for behaving too much like a real Democrat in 2000. He must not have read the polls after Gore's populist convention speech, which kicked their numbers upward. It's hard to remember anything Lieberman said or did that helped as much, and easy to recall much he did and said that was useless. And if Gore runs again, Lieberman might have to honor his pledge not to run against the former vice president.




I wonder if Kaus will comment on this story.

The article mentions nothing at all about the plotters' affiliation with an underground leftist group known only as the "Horseheads."


A neo-Nazi ex-convict and his white supremacist girlfriend were convicted yesterday in federal court of hatching an elaborate plot to bomb Jewish and African-American targets in Boston and across the nation to spark ''a racial holy war.''

Leo Felton, 31, and Erica Chase, 22, were arrested before assembling a potentially devastating fertilizer bomb and embarking on Felton's plan for ''Aryan Unit One,'' a Boston-based underground revolutionary cell to eliminate what Felton called ''mud people'' - Jews, blacks, Asians, and other minorities.

I'm kinda glad that Ricky Silberman is so inconsequential that when you search for her name in google my little blog comes up first.
Wow. Daniel Mitchell actually refers to anti-inversion legislation designed to prevent corporations from escaping U.S. taxes as the "Dred Scott Tax Bill" (and compounds the atrocity by pretending this is a commonly used term).

Wow.

Trifecta Wow.

In any case, Mitchell, if you feel this way you should work on removing the $#@%#$ double taxation that U.S. ex-pats sometimes face.

Although, Brad...did Heritage ever have any credibility?


Why do so many conservatives always complain about campus leftists? Leaving aside the merits of this particular point for the moment, given that most elite institutions are private - if you don't like it, start your own goddamn university!
I really really hate when people employ fake civility in an attempt to tar their critics with the charge of rudeness in order to undermine them.


I also really really hate when people try to pretend they meant something other than what any normal english speaker would have interpreted their words to mean. We all make MISTAKES along those lines sometimes, but...admit your mistake, as in "yes I did have my head up my ass when I wrote those words and despite what it says in plain english it wasn't actually what I had been thinking."

The Mickster does both!

Kaus said, and Eric Alterman took issue with, this statement:

"But the New York Times seems no more embarrassable on the subject of Bush-bashing overkill than the Wall Street Journal ed-page was on the subject of Clinton-bashing overkill."


This sentence pretty clearly equates, in any reader's mind, the "overkill" on the pages of both newspapers.

I'm glad you admit that it wasn't what you meant, but it was what you said.
Krugman on "Get Rubin."*

excerpt:

If you want to see the smear machine at work, this latest - apparently abortive - attempt to implicate Robert Rubin in the Enron affair is a classic.

Here's what happened: we have learned that Citigroup helped Enron by structuring loans in a way that inflated reported revenue. This is not good, but also no surprise. For sure we will eventually learn that every major bank did something like that for some company. It was, alas, what was happening during the bubble years.

But it took about 30 seconds for the right-wing scandal machine to pounce. Robert Rubin works for Citigroup! And he was a Clinton-era icon! So he's guilty! Off with his head! Republican operatives began sending thousands of faxes; talk radio made Rubin's sins topic # 1; and Andrew S******* dutifully attacked Rubin in his blog. And with amazing gullibility, the likes of Tim Noah at Slate jumped on board, without bothering to check even the most basic facts.

The big joke is that the Enron deal took place months before Rubin joined Citigroup. Oh, well, maybe he had a time machine. (Reports suggest that S******* does - that rather than admit to a mistake he revised his post, a big no-no in the blogging world.)

But even without the nonsense over the date, would this have made any sense? Rubin doesn't run Citigroup; his actual duties are vague, but probably involve a little bit of big-think and a lot of door-opening. Clearly he is not in the operational chain of command; the people structuring financial deals are very unlikely to run them through his office. It's sort of like blaming me for the Princeton web-snooping fracas - hey, I wonder why S******* hasn't tried that?

To get a sense of what would justify a real presumption of guilt, consider the case of Thomas White. The Secretary of the Army was actually in charge of Enron Energy Services, which created $500 million in fictitious profits during his tenure - and that was all it accomplished, since it was actually bleeding cash. But he's still in his post, because, say his defenders, you can't prove that just because he was in operational charge of the division he had any idea what it was actually doing.




*A certain name has been asterisked out in order to comply with my self-imposed rule for the week.
I'm sure this is just an isolated incident.




On the morning of July 23, 1999, law enforcement officers fanned out and arrested more than 10 percent of Tulia's tiny African-American population. Also
arrested were a handful of whites who had relationships with blacks.Most of Tulia's white residents applauded the arrests, and the local newspapers were all but giddy with their editorial approval.

[...]

The first convictions came
quickly, and the sentences left the town's black residents aghast. One of the few white defendants, a man who happened to have a mixed-race child, was
sentenced to more than 300 years in prison. The hog farmer, a black man in his late 50's named Joe Moore, was sentenced to 90 years. Kareem White, a
24-year-old black man, was sentenced to 60 years. And so on.

Mr. Coleman's alleged undercover operation was ridiculous. There were no other police officers to corroborate his activities. He did not wear a wire or
conduct any video surveillance. And he did not keep detailed records of his alleged drug buys. He said he sometimes wrote such important information as
the names of suspects and the dates of transactions on his leg.

In trial after trial, prosecutors put Mr. Coleman on the witness stand and his uncorroborated, unsubstantiated testimony was enough to send people to
prison for decades.

In some instances, lawyers have been able to show that there was no basis in fact — none at all — for Mr. Coleman's allegations, that they came from some
realm other than reality.

He said, for example, that he had purchased drugs from a woman named Tonya White, and she was duly charged. But last April the charges had to be
dropped when Ms. White's lawyers proved that she had cashed a check in Oklahoma City at the time that she was supposed to have been selling drugs to Mr.
Coleman in Tulia.


Sunday, July 28, 2002

Don't get left behind...

I wonder why the implicit anti-semitism in this stuff doesn't get remarked upon very much.



hmm
Hey, Diana, I'm still a fan, but why the "I'm not like those other liberals" post?

For the record, I've never poured water on anyone's head. Well, maybe beer a couple of times, but only in college...


And, you know what? I've been doing this since April, and I'm still not entirely sure what a Warblogger is...
All kindsa new Blogs over at Salon. Here's one I stumbled on containing a nice Bush scorecard.
For anyone living in the Philadelphia area, I highly recommend going to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Painted Bride Theater.

Letter to the Arizona Republic.

I was warned that if I voted for Al Gore, government would expand, the economy would fall apart, criminals would run free, war would erupt, and there would be nationwide corruption and scandals.

Well, I voted for Gore ... and they were right.

— Sue Williams Sedona
Put those ungrateful godless bastards back in the mine!!

Re: Miners Didn't Sound TOO Grateful
by: bored_cops
07/28/02 02:30 pm
Msg: 4505 of 4704

<
"What Took You So Long?"

"There are nine miners ready to get the hell out of here..We need some chew"

And then most of them ask for beer in the hospital.

No one thanked God, or even thanked the workers.

I say put em back in and see if they come out a little more thankful next time.




-------------------------------------------------------------------------------->>

Exactly my thinking. Agree 100%. So many people in this country are getting so arrogant they no
longer seem to remember the all Mighty the One and Only.


Here's a handy Bill Simon fact sheet.
Hey Robert, Kurtz is a noted Republican National Committee shill.

Let's look at this week's Reliable Sources.

Guests were journalists (or editor(s)? from memory here) from Time and Newsweek and..... Rich Lowry!

Howie does this almost every week. He pits supposedly "straight journalists" (not referring to their sexual orientation here) against writers for conservative weeklies. This further reinforces the nonsense that the mainstream media is liberal, and must be counterbalanced by the conservative media.