August 15
Want to see the most baldly deceptive attack ad since the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Vicious Lies? It's an ad for a GOP senate candidate in New York, John Spencer, or rather it's a made up attack on the Democratic incumbent, Hillary Clinton. You can see the ad on a blog of the Albany Times Union. It was the subject of a story tonight on Countdown (the transcript isn't posted yet at this time). Olbermann and the blogger at the Times Union noticed the missing first "s" in fascist, but Olbermann also caught a lie. The ad mentions that Clinton opposed the Patriot Act and the NSA wiretap program --- except she voted for the Patriot Act and its renewal. Without further research I don't know her opinions on NSA wiretaps. I do know that when Spencer said the NSA wiretaps were vital in stopping the plot revealed last week, he was making it up. He could be right, but he has no way of knowing. Other than the expected insertion by the acting president of the pronoun "we" when talking about what the British and Pakistanis did, there's no reason to think the NSA was vital. We don't even know for sure they were involved. If US intelligence was involved, we don't know that it was the NSA. If it was the NSA, we don't know their involvement was related at all to the warrantless wiretaps they were caught engaging in. Since Spencer has no way of knowing these things either, for him to say what he said was a lie. Or maybe it's the classic definition of bull____, where the speaker neither knows nor cares if what he says is right.

August 13
This is my response to the first post yesterday from RebukeTheWorld:

I agree with roughly half of what you said. I'm not normally likely to defend Hillary Clinton when it comes to Iraq. She showed poor judgement voting for it in the first place, though I grant most of Congress voted for it and most of the public supported it (to blow my own horn, I always saw through it). She got in trouble with many of her base for refusing to admit the mistake, and for throwing around this important sounding phrase "date certain" when refusing to support getting out. She was right at the hearing though. Rumsfeld deserved everything she threw at him.

One thing Clinton can't be faulted for is doing her work, even when we don't agree with her votes. When Rumsfeld added a doozy to the long list of dumb things he has said, "You'd have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I've been excessively optimistic," it took Clinton and her staff just a few hours to find a slough of examples where he had done just that. The quote I thought of immediately was "It could last, you know, six days, six weeks, I doubt six months." There are more in the Countdown transcript I linked to above.

She wasn't chastising him just for being overoptimistic. Her exact question was, "We hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration's strategic blunders, and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy. Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?" I disagree with you when you said she showed a lack of historical understanding. She was right about the litany of mistakes by Rumsfeld, by people he appointed and oversaw, or by those taking his advice. Just off the top of my head: they withdrew resources from Afghanistan to prepare for Iraq and so left that war still raging five years on; got the intelligence 100% wrong on WMDs and Al Qaida connections; disbanded the Iraqi army and police leaving no security in place; let the army keep their weapons; didn't secure munitions depots; allowed looting except for the Ministry of Oil; gave reconstruction contracts to US firms instead of Iraqis and brought in foreign workers; appointed leaders who had no legitimacy with Iraqis; refused to hold elections in a timely way; reused Saddam's prisons and routinely detained suspects without charge and used torture. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but the point is she was completely right about his track record.

You might be right that a civil war was inevitable, but I hesitate to agree. The only prediction I made was that the war wouldn't go as Bush and the neocons predicted. History has few examples of those who start wars correctly predicting how they would go, so when they said a few weeks to invade followed by a blossoming of democracy, I knew that wouldn't happen. What makes me hesitant to agree with you is I don't at all share your understanding of Iraqi history.

You said, "The inner civil war isn't a symptom of Americas failure or the Iraq war, its the way of the Iraqi people." That's where I disagree. There wasn't a civil war going before our invasion. They had a murderous dictator, but so do lots of countries (ever notice how war proponents avoid answering the question "Why Iraq but not the other dictatorships out there?"). Many overthrows of dictators are followed by civil wars, but hardly all, so we can't assume a war would have happened without the US invasion. So a question I have for you is when was a prior Iraqi civil war? Saddam killed in order to maintain power, but government oppression isn't he same as civil war, and there was nothing particularly violent about Iraq before Saddam seized power. That takes us back only 1978.

I think there's sense in your analogy of a man let out of prison and being expected to smoothy fit into society. That certainly explains the anarchy after Saddam's fall with nothing to replace him. However, that also contradicts the idea that they would have been at each other without our intervention. A coup or popular uprising wouldn't have left the vacuum. It might not have been sweetness and light right afterward, but there would have been some order.

Where I have my strongest disagreement is seeing Iraq as a young country that knows only violence. This is the oldest civilization on Earth, literally. They get that title for being the first to have written records and probably the first to invent agriculture, thus the title "cradle of civilization". They managed before Saddam to not kill each other. There has been separatism on the part of the Kurds which has sometimes been violent, but no more so than separatist movements all over the world, including our own violence to break free of Britain. I doubt they see this as birth pangs in any way, not with a view of history that long. At the hazard of making a prediction, the one aspect of the aforementioned looting to be remembered, besides Rumsfeld blowing it off, will be US soldiers standing by while 6,000 years of history in the Baghdad Museum was looted. That will go down with Julius Caesar letting the library at Alexandria burn.

Besides, before we call anyone else violent, let's remember most of the ordinance used in Iraq was dropped by US planes and fired from US guns. The Sunni insurgents don't have planes. The Shiite death squads don't have tanks. Roughly 100,000 Iraqis are dead who wouldn't be without the invasion.

I do agree with you that the key thing for us to decide is how to get out, that the government was delusional when it went in, and we're making stability less likely. I just don't agree that Clinton was wrong in this instance, that Rumsfeld has any enlightenment to shed except as a bad example, or that the Iraqis have a history that shows they're more violent than anyone else.

August 12
I'm beginning an online conversation, "blogversation" as it was called by the blogger I did this with previously. A blogger handled as RebukeTheWorld and I started discussing Hillary Clinton and propitiously, she was on the news for her excoriation of Donald Rumsfeld at a Senate hearing. So which of them was right? That's our starting question. What follows is RebukeTheWorld's first post on the subject, and I need to get working on my response. Hopefully tomorrow, but keep checking back.

First, a bit of an introduction from RebukeTheWorld: "I started my News blog in 2005. My news blog has been promoted by AOL blog staff twice and my articles cited around the Internet. I'm a Christian, Republican, Environmentalist and a Humanitarian. I've a firm understanding about human nature and this is what I feel is my expertise."

RebukeTheWorld's first post:

Shall I say this respectfully, considering I believe Hillary will be our next president but her views on the Iraq war are borderline ignorant. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld isn't the reason for failed policy in Iraq. The problem is and will be for quite some time, the isolated culture in Iraq and its birth pangs. You can't push Democratic change with a nation that has only known dictatorship. You can't push the value of life when human bombs is their way of speaking out. Hillary says, "Under your leadership, there have been numerous errors in judgment that have led us to where we are. We have a full-fledged insurgency and full-blown sectarian conflict in Iraq." There is no magic wand in any leadership that will solve the problems in Iraq anytime soon. If Hillary Clinton spent some time studying history and society, her lack of insight might not continue to fail her.

I don't consider myself a genius but predicting civil war in Iraq was obvious from the onset. I said it, and others have too. The inner civil war isn't a symptom of America's failure or the Iraq war, it's the way of the Iraqi people. Did you know that the Iraqi people were killing each other under Hussein's leadership? If the answer to that question is so apparent, then why be surprised with inner civil war?

Removing Hussein's leadership freed up the political voice in Iraq, this is what happens when leadership changes, let alone a new government. You can't take a foreign culture and expect peace and stability within a few years. Its rarely been done in history and when it was successful it was for just a short season with these stipulations; dictatorship, terrorism from the government and the civilians ruled by fear and murder. A deadline date will give the minds of the Iraqi people closer but with a temporary stay. Why? The desire for power has been dormant to a much smaller degree under Hussein's leadership but now, a voice is allowed. This rallies the insurgents for their impending requests to the Iraqi people, "We want power. We want our leadership." The people of Iraq will continue this inner war into our children's children generation and who knows how much longer. America staying in Iraq will only slow the magnitude of their inner civil war but it will not stop it.

The Iraqi people have their first promise of Democracy. When freedom is given to those who have been under fear and control, reckless behavior is the equivalent to an immature society learning to grow up. Those who blame policy, should understand it like this. It's like locking someone up in prison and then upon their release expecting them to not desire to control their life. It's enough to say that man is doomed by his own need to control and leave it at that but then to turn it around with some inane logic, blaming policy when all along its been human nature, just conflicts with history. If you try and control a government as an outsider, you stir up those whose been held in prison. When you offer the key for freedom and leave, the stirring will still come. The answer for Iraq is not a pretty picture.

It will be hard for us draw back and watch the Iraqi people toss the baton but this is how it will be. The United States will fail with these illusions that our stay will bring stability to Iraq. A deadline date only offers marginal benefits because inner civil war is a given no matter your position is on this war. How we withdraw is what concerns me most. I've written on it but it must be done right, in order to keep the Iraqi people from blaming the United States for their future problems. I don't believe we should remove counsel, financial support and advice from the future Iraqi governments but our troops can't solve the long standing problems in the birth of a new government. If Hillary Clinton is elected, she will only be surprised at how little the United States can do and might consider hiring Rumsfeld with her soon to be enlightenment.

My response will be coming shortly.

August 8
I don't really mean to pick on Ohio. I'm not spending my day at the web sites of Ohio newspapers or streaming Ohio radio stations. It's just that when I focus on the Republican culture of corruption and its subset election fraud, Ohio keeps coming up. Maybe it's luck. Or maybe it's just incredible amounts of corruption. It does seem like Ohio keeps coming up even more than Texas or Florida, which is saying something considering they Katherine Harris, Tom DeLay, and a Bush apiece. What brings up Ohio now is election stuff, both 2004 and three months from now.

Next month, it becomes legal in Ohio to destroy the 2004 ballots. An Ohio group battling election fraud has formed Save the Ballots to stop election officials exercising their right to destroy the ballots, which are the evidence of the fraud we call the Bush victory. They have been examined by journalists and statisticians, but not by anyone with subpoena power. As of September 3, the mysteriously uncounted ballots go away. So does the white-out. So does the hope of anyone being able to verify the discoveries of those who have so far reported evidence of tampering. The claims made so far by those who allege fraud will forever be unprovable. The evidence can never be looked at again. We know that all assertion of the fraud of Bush's election will be met with the retort that there's not enough evidence without the ballots. We know that's what Republicans will say, and likely without the pangs of guilt that should come with having destroyed the evidence. To Republicans of conscience, I ask, what do you have to hide? If you really didn't steal the election, protect the ballots. Ohio law allows the ballots to be destroyed but doesn't require it. I don't know the particulars of Ohio law, so maybe not, but I'm guessing either the governor or secretary of state could order the ballots preserved. Of course, the secretary of state and this year's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Kenneth Blackwell, is the one accused of being behind much of the fraud, so look for him to do everything in his power to destroy the evidence. Also watch Ohio's election this year, when the fraud running it is running for higher office himself. Even though he was recently 20 points behind, and the Democrats lead in other statewide races, the Republicans get to count the votes.

Save the Ballots is organized by the same people behind the Columbus Free Press.

Another Ohio story also connects 2004 and 2006. the good news is the congressman most likely to be indicted next, Bob Ney, has dropped out of the election. That's not as sweet as seeing him get bounced at the polls, or doing the perp walk, but it's good he's gone. And you might think the Republicans would be anxious enough to vent out the stench of scandal to pick an honorable candidate. You would be wrong. Ney's replacement on the ballot is State Sen. Joy Padgett. You wouldn't have heard of her, but you might have heard of her opponent in the 2004 state senate race, Terry Anderson. He was held hostage by Hezbollah for seven years, long enough ago that the voters in that district must have forgotten who he was. That's why Padgett was able to win with a lie where she accused Anderson of being soft on terrorism, and sent out a leaflet showing Anderson in a photo with terrorists. She didn't say they were his captors. I don't understand how even dittoheads fell for that one. I do hope Zach Space, the Democratic candidate, hits her hard with it. Don't be a gentleman Zach. That's no lady.

August 5
I came upon a story that show the lengths conservatives are willing to go to in order to smear their opponents, a cautionary tale regarding when they claim a liberal has said something atrocious. And it isn't even the current campaign to swift-boat John Murtha.

Keith Olbermann made Rush Limbaugh the Countdown Worst Person in the World for last Thursday. This was because Limbaugh smeared Rep. John Dingell, D-MI, by saying he refused to condemn Hezbollah. His proof was a clip of an interview in which Dingell was asked to condemn Hezbollah and said no. The problem was the clip was clipped in such a way as to make it appear Dingell said no when in fact he said yes. That would be like I said, "The slaughter of innocents in war is wrong, and I don't understand those who find it excusable," yet someone edited it to be, "The slaughter of innocents in war is excusable," and went on to condemn me for it. That's what Olbermann went after Limbaugh for doing.

Olbermann maybe didn't know it wasn't just Limbaugh, perhaps because like me he hadn't heard Al Franken's show from earlier Thursday. I heard it Friday ($75 lets me podcast all of Air America's shows for a year, which I think is well worth it). Franken played the original and edited versions of the clip, and mentioned Dingell had been attacked for it by the Washington Times. Franken did give the Times credit for apologizing, while noting they obviously hadn't checked it before publishing like proper newspapers are supposed to do. Not that the Washington Times is a proper newspaper, but anyway. Franken also mentioned that he thought the Times got the clip from the conservative blog Powerline. Powerline claimed they got it from a reader, considered the possibility it wasn't accurate but ran it anyway, and did not apologize. Ironically, isn't using evidence they couldn't prove was genuine exactly what they went after CBS for in the Bush national guard service story? Besides the hypocrisy of doing that which they condemned in others, the refusal to apologize because the main point was sort of supported is a common defense for routine inaccuracy in conservative media. OK, all the facts are wrong, and the source is being dishonest, but the main point is right so that's good enough.

I have noticed sometimes that the conservative media and blogosphere can be incestuous. You'll notice they all used the same clip and no one checked it out. They rely on each other as sources. It would be like me finding a liberal blog saying "Rush's mother wears army boots", and so I repeat it as fact with my source being that blog, and someone else uses me as a source, and the first blog pointing out how other blogs saying the same thing is proof it must be right. That's sadly something to watch with blogs I've sometimes said, but apparently you have to watch it in other media too. I've seen that a lot with conservative blogs, and sometimes wondered if I was seeing that with liberal blogs too when they link to each other (you'll notice how rarely I link to other blogs -- I want the original source, or I can find another topic). Giving credit is fine and right, but commentators like me aren't a source when we aren't giving first hand information. If you want to link to me to show someone holds my opinion, that's fine. If you want to give me credit because I provided you an idea or sources, no complaint. If you want to use me as proof conservatives are using smear tactics, please go right the sources I linked to.

I'll mention a similar smear I've been meaning to mention. The Ohio Republican party sent an e-mail to religious conservatives saying the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, US Rep. Ted Strickland, is gay, so is his wife, and the proof was they're childless and live apart. Left out was that they married at age 46, and they live apart because she keeps the house in Ohio while he stays in Washington when the House is in session. You know, like a congressman. I love this quote from Columbus Dispatch editor Joe Hallet:

"Standing over the body with bloody knife in hand, the Ohio Republican Party pleaded innocent.

It didn't kill the candidate it had just stabbed to death, the party said. And if it did stab the candidate, it didn't know it was stabbing him. Most assuredly, the party protested, it would never condone stabbing the candidate it had just stabbed.

Only a political Houdini could rationalize that twisted logic. Still, that was the GOP's explanation — for a couple of days, anyway."

August 3
A couple shockers the last couple days, though I wonder if they'll get the attention they deserve. The story about the 911 tapes being released and the revelation that the 911 commission considered seeking criminal charges against NORAD witness who lied during their testimony is bound to be fodder for conspiracy theories. So here's mine, not that I'm the first to suggest this. I just think this is the most likely explanation for the new information in the Vanity Fair article, the refusal to have a commission for a long time, and the attempts to withhold documents. I believe the acting president's administration conspired to cover up bungling not just before 911 that blew everything that might have presented it, but now apparently on the day. What might be damaging to the acting vice-president is the revelation they did not give the order to shoot down a hijacked plane. It does shoot down the idea the air force shot down the fourth plane, Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania, but now it looks like Cheney lied when he said they made the tough decision to shoot down the plane. It turns out Bush authorized commanders lower down to make the decision, and he did so after the fourth plane crashed. Remember how Bush and Cheney refused to testify under oath, but met jointly with the commission in a private meeting? And Bush said afterwards he "visited" with the commission? That always struck me as the action of someone with something to hide. Now it looks like they lied in public statements. What else did they lie about regarding 911? We don't know. Somehow, they need to be compelled to testify under oath.

The other shocker is a proposed expansion of the military tribunals Bush has been using illegally which would not only make them legal sort of, if you ignore the blatant unconstitutionality. By that I mean the tribunals would be not just for Al Qaida suspects, but anybody could be tried for any crime. Rumsfeld would decide what crimes would be subject to the tribunal, and defendants would be stripped of protections intended to make a trail fair and make it comply with the Bill of Rights. According to the Washington Post article, "Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors."

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Following up from a month ago, when I wrote about a Kansas City Star story that quoted a global warming skeptic's editorial in the Wall Street Journal, a slandered scientist has replied. I pointed out how that the paid skeptic, Richard Lindzen, referred to the author of the Science metastudy of global warming articles, Naomi Oreskes, as a social scientist, thereby implying she doesn't actually know about natural science. That's technically true since she's a science historian, but a brief web search discovered her background as a geologist. In her response, she's too polite to call Lindzen and other skeptics liars, but she certainly says they continue to make arguments that have been debunked or have no supporting evidence, and that they mischaracterize the debate to try to cast doubt that scientists have a consensus on the basic questions. In other words, they're lying to keep those nice energy company checks coming by saying there's doubt where there isn't, by calling evidence, like Oreskes' study, refuted when it isn't.

In case you didn't follow that energy company link in the paragraph above, it refers to Prof. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia who is also Virginia's state climatologist. He accepted $100,000 from Intermountain Rural Electric Association to spread nonsense about global warming. Skeptics like to refute arguments like that by stating that someone is paying the scientists who support global warming theory. What they fail to point out is that the likes of Michaels and Lindzen get paid to promote a point of view beneficial to the corporate special interests who pay them. Scientists who have found evidence of global warming could get other grants, or would draw their salaries anyway. Not to mention they get paid a whole lot less than the skeptics and have to subject their findings to peer review. There are plenty of environmental problems to study so if there were no global warming, they wouldn't have to invent it. Nor would they have to go to Antarctica and Greenland, which are strangely devoid of global warming skeptics. So on the one side are a few skeptics getting paid by corporate special interests, while on the other is almost every scientist. on the one side is evidence, while on the other is a dishonest attempt to explain it away.

August 1
Can we have a truce on the Nazi comparisons, and likewise with the less awful word "fascist"? I'll admit it's both sides, and it's rarely accurate. I've been meaning to suggest a truce on this for a long time. What prompts me to finally get this said despite limited writing time, as is obvious I'm sure from the week without an entry, are two recent stories. The one with the by now famous photo is the story about Keith Olbermann supposedly giving the Nazi salute while holding up a Bill O'Reilly mask. In this specific instance that looks like the most relaxed Nazi salute I've ever seen, and Olbermann claims he was waving at someone in the back of the room at the annual press tour where TV channels present their new shows. You can believe him or not I suppose, but the point here is that if Olbermann was giving the Nazi salute, he was wrong. The same can be said of the posters in Netscape's comments area attached to the article who exchanged "Nazi" accusations.

The other story was the one about Sen. James Inhofe, R-OK, comparing proponents of global warming theory to Nazis: "It kind of reminds . . . I could use the Third Reich, the big lie." I'll fight the temptation to go into global warming being backed by a mountain of peer reviewed science while Inhofe is a looney. I'll instead suggest a slight difference between those who think human emissions of carbon dioxide are raising the Earth's temperature, and those who committed genocide.

I will also point out the difference between being a Dead Polar Bear Award candidate like Inhofe, and calling for one's own race to assert its superiority through conquest. I worry the word "Nazi" might lose some of its meaning if it becomes a word for anyone we disagree with strongly rather than a word for someone asserting Aryan superiority. I prefer some literalness to our use of the words "Nazi" and "fascist", as you might have gathered from my entry from July 23, where I wrote about the origin of "fascist". So no more describing as a fascist anyone who isn't preaching the superiority of his nation, ethnicity, or race, who isn't calling for the persecution of minorities, or who isn't calling for the conquest of other nations.