Better

The local Inquirer/Daily News portal site has long been a complete mess. At first glance, the redesign appears to be at least somewhat better.

Media Matters

From Jamison Foser.

Morning Thread

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

--Molly I.

Later Night

Credit Where Credit's Due

Didn't know Nancy's son had it in him.

Wanker of the Day

Jonathan Weisman.

Late Night

Rock on.

Your Liberal Media

Abu Ghraib/CBS Profiles in Courage edition.

Friday Cat Blogging

LolCat caption contest edition.

Oh My

Oh My.

Fresh Thread

Enjoy.

O'Reilly

Holy crap.

O"REILLY: Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they've had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don't think there's a black American who hasn't had a personal insult that they've had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don't think there's one in the country. So you've got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] "You call me that, I'm gonna be more successful." OK, it depends on the personality.

So it's there. It's there, and I think it's getting better. I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They're getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They're just trying to figure it out: "Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it."

You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he's made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia's, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.

And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin.

...

O'REILLY: That's right. That's right. There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, "M-Fer, I want more iced tea."

WILLIAMS: Please --

O'REILLY: You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all.

The Magical Month of September

As we may have noticed, John Warner couldn't even bring himself to vote for the Webb amendment. Still, where would we be with David Broder's powers of prescient prognostication? How would those of us outside the Village have any idea what was going on? Broder, last May:

These senators are centrists -- the kind who can exert leverage on their colleagues. But the man who can do the most to catalyze the shift among Republicans is Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the widely respected former chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Colleagues say that Warner is torn between his loyalty to the president and his deep anxiety about events in Iraq. And as a former Navy secretary, he has an acute awareness of the price America's fighting men and women are paying for the policy mistakes there.

If Warner shifts, many other Republican senators will move with him, and the policy will change. I think that time is coming soon.

Or the insight of Frank Rich:

As General Odom says, the endgame will start "when a senior senator from the president's party says no," much as William Fulbright did to L.B.J. during Vietnam. That's why in Washington this fall, eyes will turn once again to John Warner, the senior Republican with the clout to give political cover to other members of his party who want to leave Iraq before they're forced to evacuate Congress. In September, it will be nearly a year since Mr. Warner said that Iraq was "drifting sideways" and that action would have to be taken "if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function."

Mr. Warner has also signaled his regret that he was not more outspoken during Vietnam. "We kept surging in those years," he told The Washington Post in January, as the Iraq surge began. "It didn't work." Surely he must recognize that his moment for speaking out about this war is overdue. Without him, the Democrats don't have the votes to force the president's hand. With him, it's a slam dunk. The best way to honor the sixth anniversary of 9/11 will be to at last disarm a president who continues to squander countless lives in the names of those voiceless American dead.

Or Joe Klein:

John Warner will be the key to what happens next. He's on the record as saying he thinks it's not a good idea for American troops to be stuck in the middle of a civil war in Baghdad. And yet he's voted with Bush most every step on the way. And he's up for reelection in 2008...but he may not be running. My guess is--and perhaps I'm being optimistic--Warner's deadline is September.

Or David Ignatius:

President Bush said publicly last Thursday what his top aides have been discussing privately for weeks. He talked about a transition to "a different configuration" in Iraq after the surge of U.S. troops is completed this summer. When pressed on whether he was talking about a post-surge Plan B, Bush answered: "Actually, I would call that a plan recommended by Baker-Hamilton, so that would be a Plan B-H."

Let's make sure we've got that right: This would be the same Baker-Hamilton plan whose authors were lampooned by the conservative New York Post in December as "surrender monkeys"? The same Baker-Hamilton report that seemed to be all but buried by Bush's January embrace of a surge of 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq?

Yes, that same Baker-Hamilton plan now seems to be official White House policy. Administration officials insist that the president supported it all along, though you could have fooled me. Now it's back -- six months later than it should have been, with six extra months of political poison to corrode its bipartisan spirit. But better late than never.

...

What drove the White House discussion of post-surge strategy was a sense that the political timeline in Washington was out of sync with the military one in Baghdad. The U.S. clock needed to be slowed down, while the one in Iraq needed to be speeded up. The best way to synchronize clocks, officials concluded, was a less ambitious but more sustainable policy -- one that emphasized the training of the Iraqi army, U.S. Special Forces missions against al-Qaeda, a diplomatic opening to Iran and a reduction in U.S. troops. The shorthand name for this policy was Baker-Hamilton.

More Happy Housing News

Baghdad edition.

BAGHDAD -- Esad Ismael broke the most important promise he ever made.

As his father lay on his deathbed two years ago, Ismael, 43, vowed never to sell his family's home. His father and grandfather had spent all their savings to build the sprawling two-story house in Baghdad's wealthy Mansour district 70 years ago. Family memories were tucked between every tile on the floor.


But Ismael, a Sunni clothing merchant, was living in an area that was falling under the control of the Mahdi Army, Iraq's largest Shiite militia. Mindful of his promise to his dying father, he refused to move even after he began finding death threats pasted to his front door. After his brother was murdered, he gave up.

"It's bad that I sold our home, but what is worse is that I sold it for only 145 million dinars," Ismael said, naming a price equivalent to about $118,000 -- less than half the house's appraised value in late 2003. "It's an insult to my father to sell it so low. But what choice did I have? They would have killed us."

I guess this is that "soft partition" I keep hearing about in action.

Stasis

The relatively static nature of the polling in the presidential primary has had the benefit of making it less likely that I get sucked into writing much about it. Still one wonders if anyone's ever gonna make a move?

Sorta quiet, really.

In A Matter of Weeks!

These tend to get lost over the weekend, so I'll put it up now. On Sunday it'll be 3 weeks since David Broder's favorite senator, Lindsey Graham, said this:

In a matter of weeks, we're going to have a major breakthrough in Baghdad on items of political reconciliation -- the benchmarks -- because the Iraqi people are putting pressure on their politicians.

In his defense it's a completely arbitrary length of time. He may have meant "5 million weeks."

No More Lieberdems

Obviously if the choice is between Dem/Rep control of the Senate or a filibuster-proof/non-filibuster proof majority I'd prefer Kerrey to enter the Nebraska race. But as those thresholds are unlikely to be critical, I hope he does, indeed, stay out of the race.

New York's lovely, Bob!


(ht pony boy)

Blunder

Yglesias:

The only showdown that mattered happened months ago. Democrats passed a war appropriation that funded the phased withdrawal of troops. Bush vetoed that appropriation and said he would only sign an appropriation that funded open-ended war. Bush sought to portray a congressional refusal to appropriate money for an open-ended military involvement in Iraq as some kind of plot to leave the troops starving and without bullets in Iraq. The press largely bought into this frame, which was re-enforced by the fact that many leading Democrats immediately decided to buy into as well. The party then decided not to try to fight to reframe the issue but, instead, to accept it. Given that framing of the question, the only thing to do was surrender and give Bush his money. And given that precedent, the only thing to do is to keep on surrendering any time Bush rhetorically holds the troops' well-being hostage to his preference for perpetual war.

That was a blunder -- a decision that condemned hundreds of Americans to die in Iraq -- and one that appears to have resulted from a total failure of the leadership to do any advance planning about their legislative tactics. All of September 2007 has been a meaningless sideshow. People find it comforting, I guess, to try to convince themselves that MoveOn is the reason our troops will be engaged in at least 18 more months of futile combat in Iraq, but it's just not true -- legislative defeat in September was inevitable, and the war is still very unpopular and still a very promising issue for 2008.

.

Indeed. All of this was utterly predictable last Spring, and blindingly obvious by August. If people want to pretend that fake media controversies which didn't move public opinion in the slightest are the reason that they're failing to do the jobs they were elected to do they're welcome to do that, but they just reveal themselves to be petty childish mediocrities with fragile egos who don't want to take responsibility for their own failures.

Congrats, losers!

Compromise

Levin-Reed bill was, of course, a toothless "compromise" bill, and even that couldn't get support.

Tracy Flick Wannabees

One of the sad consequences of paying so much attention to politics is that one starts to get rather disturbed by what ridiculous little people many of Our Great Leaders are. It isn't that I had automatic respect for anyone with the word "Senator" in front of their name and I certainly knew that plenty of them were bad in a variety of ways. But I guess it'd never really internalized that idea that so many of them were just petty mediocrities and silly childish people with fragile egos.