The Raven's Blog, Second Half of September 2004 Archive

September 30
I know the first debate was tonight, but I was moved to tears when I read this afternoon 35 children were killed in a car bombing in Baghdad, and it's my blog so I'm going to rant a moment. I won't repeat the details of the story. You can read them yourself. I'm just going to say I'm mad as Hell at the bombers who attacked a gathering of children, mad too at the big fool of an acting president who got us into this war, and mad too at the many fools who support Bush because there haven't been terrorist attacks within U.S. borders. Does that mean these dead children don't count, that the terrorist attack didn't happen? Do you really think Iraqi parents don't care if their children are killed, or that you shouldn't grieve like it happened in your own home town? Are you as unaware as that fool Bush that there has never been so much terrorism as there is now?

I know partisans are supposed to say their guy won the debate in every way. I did think Kerry did much better, but I know I'm not seeing through the eyes of a Bush supporter or undecided voter. I will say that the phrase that stuck out was when Bush said a president can't wilt under pressure. The first thing that came to my head was the picture of Bush sitting confused and quiet in that classroom when he was told the country was under attack. I saw that same look on him early in the debate, when he looked lost or irritated or something like that. Kerry's best moment was his reaction to Bush raising the charge he changed his mind on the $87 billion for Iraq. I could see as Bush raised it that Kerry was chomping at the bit to respond, like Bush put the ball on a tee. He said he made a mistake in the bad way he explained his vote, but Bush attacked the wrong country. Which was the bigger mistake? Brilliant. I would have explained that there were two bills, one which paid for the appropriation by rescinding upper class tax cuts, and the other didn't pay for it. I would have been wrong. Kerry's answer worked much better under the circumstances. As I'm writing, Larry King just announced a Gallup poll taken right after the debate indicated Kerry won 53% to 37%. That's the poll alleged to lean Republican.

A clear difference in philosophy came when Kerry said war should only be a last resort, and Iraq was not down to the last resort. There is a difference between hawks and doves, and it's not in the willingness to use force for a good cause. With some exceptions, both are. The difference is, as Kerry said, doves believe force must be the last resort, even if non-violent means look unlikely to work, for even a good cause to be morally right. Hawks believe that once the cause is considered just, then whatever means are most likely to achieve the goal are what get used, even if some non-violent options remain. Hawks didn't care that inspections were cut short because they thought they wouldn't work anyway. Doves believed there was an obligation to try until it was apparent they weren't working. The doves win this one, since the inspectors said they got full cooperation and found nothing. I was thinking about this after reading this column by Dennis Byrne. He used the classic strawman fallacy by misstating the objections of doves during the Iraq war, like, "The doves said a new Iraqi constitution could never be approved this year: wrong," which doves didn't actually say. It doesn't take much to form some kind of group to approve some kind of constitution, though whether the people would consider it legitimate was another issue. He also said the doves, among whom he counted himself, were wrong to oppose the first war. He doesn't get just what doves are, and he forgets recent history. In 1991, the dovish position was to give sanctions a time to work unless some circumstance required an immediate attack, which it didn't. We (I was one of them) didn't think sanctions would have worked, but we felt morally obligated to try. Hawks had the power and decided to invade when ready, since it looked like an invasion would work more surely and quickly. The second war was tougher, because we were told the threat was imminent, and even doves will back a war under such circumstances as many did. However, the evidence wasn't holding up. At least in 1991 both sides agreed on the facts , just not the philosophy. This time the dovish side felt we were being lied to even before the war started, so we never supported the cause, which caused the other side to feel the country was being betrayed. I believe that's the core of the bitterness in the country today.

The most irritating part of the evening came in the interviews after, when on CNN they talked to the campaign senior staff. They said their guy did great and the other just wasn't credible. Gee, what a shock. Why do they interview these spin masters?

September 29
I know it's not politics, but I'm an Expos fan and it's my blog, so here's a moving account of the Expos last home game. The franchise was run into the ground by its owners and then by Major League Baseball, which ownded it jointly the last three seasons. Of course, it's the fans fault for not showing up, right? Let me slap your face, and then tell me why you don't like to come into my house. I'm glad for DC, which was the last city to lose a team. I hope when they change the Expos name, they restore some tradition and name it the Senators.

Okay, back to big things. As if yesterday's entry didn't raise enough voting problems, here's a couple more. There are problems with absentee ballots for overseas voters. Some states didn't get the ballots sent out by the deadline, which means voters may not get them in time to get them returned in time. Soldiers can fax their ballots, but have to give up their privacy to do it. I recall a caller to the Al Franken Show claiming he was an officer who got chewed out by a superior for voting Democratic, so if that's true, then the few non-Republican officers and the enlisted men who won't be voting for Bush have every reason to worry about their privacy. The big problem is that in another instance of the privatization of our elections, a contractor has been hired by the pentagon to handle absentee voting. It was another no bid contract to a Republican connected contractor, and there have been problems.

Here's a thing to destroy credibility. The CIA considered rigging the Iraqi elections. Someone had the sense to kill the idea, but the mere fact they considered it is shameful. It's bound to lead to suspicion the plan wasn't really dropped, or that there's another plan to accomplish the same thing. It's not like the Bush administration has been honest about Iraq so far. What's more, if they have that little respect for the democratic process in another country, might they have as little respect here? It would seem in their own country, with their own offices up for election, the stakes are even higher. There's no smoking gun to show the Bush campaign is considering outright election theft, but taken with what Republicans have already tried in Ohio and Florida, and voting machine problems in Nebraska and Maryland, it looks mighty suspicious.

That pentagon contract to handle absentee ballots isn't just part of the trend of privatizing elections, it's part of privatizing the armed forces too. Over the last ten years the Defense Department, at the command of Congress, has gone privatization happy. The American Voice 2004 has summarized both sides of the issue with both sides' sources. I certainly get the impression from Iraq that Halliburton is getting a ton of money from taxpayers. So is Dick Cheney, who still draws pay in the form of deferred compensation from a company that lives on government contracts. It gives the impression that however privatization might work in theory, in practice it's white collar looting. What's often not mentioned is that many contractors are soldiers and security, which in plain language are called mercenaries. I'm also thinking of history, like how as ancient Rome declined, they had fewer Roman citizens in the legions and more barbarian mercenaries. The Byzantine empire also relied to an increasing extent on mercenaries as it declined. Of course, we're not Rome or Byzantium, and (so far) our mercenaries are Americans. Nonetheless, having armies running around whose loyalty is just to their paycheck is worrisome.

September 28
Today's blog is about voting problems. Eliminate one problem by registering this week, because in most states this is the final week for registration. Michael Moore has put a list of each state's deadline on his site. Even if you're not sure you want to vote, register so you at least have the choice when election day comes. That's November 2nd. If you don't register this week, at least check in case your state has a later deadline. Minnesota allows registration at the polls, and we've had no problems. I can only guess other states want to suppress turnout, as some of what follows likewise indicates.

To show how easy it is to hack touch-screen voting machines, Black Box Voting has a video of a monkey deleting the audit log in a Diebold central tabulator. Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris has been performing a demonstration where she shows how few mouseclicks and keystrokes are need to change voting results and remove all traces of the hack. A Diebold spokesman said physical access to the machines is necessary, and it's insulting to election workers to suggest the machines are so vulnerable. Actually, Diebold is doing the insulting. Even businesses protecting picayune business information protect their systems with passwords, so physical access isn't enough. Moreover, Diebold has remote access to their machines, so if a non-technical computer user can learn to hack in moments, imagine what can be done by Diebold's professionals who know where all the holes are. They've already been able to apply patches without state authorities knowing. That's a lot of trust to place in any company, especially one run by a Republican fundraiser. It's also a reason American elections are considered a joke overseas. This Register article is from February 2003, but notice it's from a British IT site. A search on that site for "touch screen voting" produced a string of articles. Computer professionals just don't trust these machines, which says something. I hope the international observers we have this year can help, but they can only report problems and give an opinion as to whether the election was free and fair. They can't fix problems. A frequent observer of foreign elections, President Jimmy Carter, says he wouldn't monitor Florida because the basic conditions for a free and fair election don't exist.

As Carter's concerns about Florida show, touch-screen voting isn't the only problem, nor is Florida the only state where Republican election officials are trying to suppress Democratic votes. Partisanship has crept into Ohio too, where state Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has ordered election officials to reject registrations on paper that's too thin. This law comes from when the paper record was the only record, but they're scanned now. Newspapers have printed the forms, and newsprint is too thin. Forms can be downloaded from web sites, which means they're printed on whatever the voter is using. So why is he doing this? Democrats have been registering new voters far faster than Republicans, which means people not included in those polls showing Bush with a lead will be showing up to vote for Kerry. If their registrations can be rejected by the technicality of an obsolete law, which violated federal law, then many will go to the polls only to find themselves wrongly turned away.

September 27
For your election season edification, I offer a senator lying earlier this evening, a lie exposed by a data mining journalist, two more signs of the worsening situation in Iraq by a journalist taken hostage, and Rumsfeld caught on paper encouraging torture. This is one of those days when it's hard to know where to start. I therefore make no promises that they are in order of proper priority, but they all matter.

In the national security archive at George Washington University, there's a declassified memo which I'm surprised was let out because it makes Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld look like he's encouraging rougher interrogation techniques, which led directly to the torture of detainees in Guantanamo and Iraq. In the first memo, wherein general counsel William Haynes is recommending restraint in interrogation techniques, Rumsfeld wrote in hand, "However, I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?" Um, Donald, that's four hours at once, not scattered across the day. You probably don't stand 8-10 hours without at least sitting down to lunch and a ride in the limo. But really Mr. Secretary, don't you think encouraging harsher interrogations has had just little something to do with the grotesque abuses committed by people taking direction from you? And Mr. Acting President, why on Earth haven't you fired this jerk? Can't you see that as his boss, you're culpable too? Look at the earliest memo in the file I linked to. It categorizes interrogation techniques in three categories. There are the things we saw in the photos: detainees stripped naked, kept hooded, threatened according to individual phobias like dogs, faked into believing they're suffocating (some detainees died from suffocation). And at the top, the comment from Rumsfeld asking why they should stand only four hours. As I recall, he acted like he didn't know about the abuses perpetrated by those under him, yet there he is acknowledging beforehand knowing those techniques would be used. Mr. Bush, show some sense of honor and fire him. Readers, since Bush seems disinclined to fire Rumsfeld, fire him, and demand to know how much he knew about. It's hard to believe Rumsfeld never mentioned this to him.

From torture committed by our side (yes, in case there is doubt, I do consider Americans fighting in Iraq to be "us", not some "them", which is why it gets me angry), to torture committed by their side. Canadian journalist Scott Taylor and Turkish journalist Zeynep Tugrul were kidnapped and released, apparently only narrowly avoiding beheading, though they were tortured. Taylor was interviewed on The Al Franken Show today. During their capture and captivity, they learned a couple things which show how Iraq is going downhill. They were captured by police. Not insurgents dressed as police, but police, who stopped them and handed them to waiting insurgents. After that, they realized they were being held by Turkomen, not Arabs. The Turkomen are an ethnic minority which fared poorly under Saddam and Arab rule, and were presumed to be supportive of our invasion and occupation. Some number have turned, and in his interview Taylor said there appeared to be Kurds among the insurgents too, which is very bad news because they're the one group that definitely welcomed U.S. troops. Probably most still do, but either disgust at the mismanaged occupation of the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism had pulled some to the other side. Now will Bush admit things are going poorly? Probably not.

Speaking of Iraq, that was what Sen. Orrin Hatch was doing when he told some whoppers on Paula Zahn Now. He was asked to comment on Sen. Ted Kennedy's remarks about a nuclear attack being more likely due to Bush's mistakes, which I admit went too far, just like the remarks by ideologue in chief Cheney and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Hatch mentioned Bin Laden and Zarqawi being loose, and asked if we should have waited for them to strike us. Zahn pointed out that he was tying the wars together. Maybe some kind person will tell Hatch that Bin Laden and Zarqawi weren't in Iraq. Hatch was doing the lie by nuance, talking about Al Qaida and Iraq in the same sentences to reinforce the impression they're the same war. That argument doesn't work in any country except this one. Only American are gulled, roughly half of us, but we in the informed half we must keep trying to wisen up the rest before they elect the fool who started the Iraq war. As for the lies I referred to above, they came in response to a question about the inspection report that said there were no weapons of mass destruction:

"Now, there's no question he had weapons of mass destruction. There's no question that he had the capacity of making them. There's no question that he had the teams in place to make them, also no question that he used them against the Kurds in the north and against the Iranians during the Iran war. The fact of the matter is, is that everybody in the world, including people in the United Nations, believed that he had them at the time this war began."

The one "no question" that's true is the one about the Kurds and Iranians. The rest are lies, because the inspectors said exactly the opposite, they weren't hedging, and if Hatch incredibly didn't already know this, Zahn had just told him! The part about the United Nations is a half truth, because the UN got information from us, so all that says is they believed Bush's misinformation. They did send inspectors to look and find out for sure, but they had to leave right after they arrived so as to get out of the way of American tanks and missiles.

The lie that was exposed was that Kerry has been changing his position on Iraq. Thomas Fitzgerald of Knight Ridder went through Kerry's statements in speeches, debates, and interviews going back to the vote to authorize force, and found Kerry was quite consistent. This has already been apparent to people who can understand multiple clause sentences and don't reply on spin and commercials for their information, and let's hope the press will start informing the rest. I call it a lie because this must have become apparent to the Bush campaign as they combed Kerry's record.

September 26
Now will Bush finally admit things aren't going well in Iraq? Lt. Gen. Talib al-Lahibi, a senior commander of the Iraqi National Guard, turns out to be working for the insurgents. In a classic case of no good choices, U.S. attacks in Fallujah killed civilians along with insurgents. I'm not accusing the armed forces of targeting civilians or even disregarding their presence. Given the situation in Iraq and Fallujah, they really had to take the opportunity to attack an insurgent compound. What I'm saying is that the fact they had to make the choice shows how bad things have gotten. Think about it. It takes a serious assault to take on insurgents in some areas. That's because they effectively control parts of Iraq, including Fallujah. The situation has deteriorated. We all hope it can be turned around, but given that Bush got us here, why does anyone trust him to fix it?

A couple points are raised to try to defend Bush's handling of Iraq. One is that Kerry's plan for Iraq is essentially what Bush is trying to do. The goals of their plans are similar, but the point is Kerry will go about it a different way. Remember my hypothetical business manager? Probably the manager you've got and the new candidate both say they want to cut costs, retain customers, etc. The manager you've got says he is already working on those things, so what's the difference? The difference is he's doing those things poorly. Wouldn't you pick the new guy over the one that put you in the bad situation in the first place?

The other point is that there haven't been terrorist attacks within U.S. borders since 911. Not strictly true (remember the DC sniper, and the anthrax mailer --- who never got caught) but close enough, because the point still doesn't hold. Worldwide, there's more terrorism than there has ever been. Terrorists don't have to penetrate our borders when they have us close to home. The point is to kill Americans. If they behead hostages in Iraq, assassinate aid workers in Afghanistan, or blow up night club patrons in Bali, the Americans are just as dead as if they were in New York or Washington. We can stay out of Bali night clubs, but Afghanistan wasn't an optional war and we have to reconstruct it lest it become Al Qaida Central again, and Iraq is a mess we made so we have to fix it. So that means Americans in harm's way.

One more related point if I may, though this is not confined to Bush supporters at all. I can't stand these people who are so scared by terrorism, who think the future has become so uncertain, that we've never been under such threat. What utter nonsense. The Cold War is recent enough that every adult lived through it, even if only in childhood. It was the central conflict of this country for over 40 years. There's no excuse for not knowing at least this much, that we and the Soviets had our nuclear arsenals pointed at each other with the atomic equivalent of a hair trigger, with enough firepower to destroy the planet maybe 100 time over. We wouldn't have known the war was on until the missiles hit, and if the human race somehow survived, civilization wouldn't. Now that was fear. Some planes blowing up some buildings? Whoop dee do. Whoop dee f____g do.

September 25
I poked around the Minnesota GOP site a bit longer after writing yesterday about their mischaracterization of a Mark Dayton quote in a fundraising letter, and found the magical web page of disingenuity. They put up a page of examples of Democrats behaving badly (it has a separate URL, but they declare it theirs at the bottom of the page). I call it disingenuous because I don't doubt the photos are real, but draw conclusions that are conveniently one-sided. At the top are photos of vandalism and graffiti. There's no excuse for such behavior of course, but then again, it was a Republican who fired Lynne Gobbell. My own car was egged 20 years ago for my Mondale/Ferraro bumper sticker (which wasn't as worrisome as the death threat I got for a letter to the editor, but that was one guy, not all conservatives). The Minnesota Democrats don't have a similar page, but they probably could. Point being, the implication the Republicans are making is that they're somehow only the victims, never the perpetrators. On both sides, these are the acts of individuals. What's more important is what party leaders and public officials do, like lie to mislead the country into a war.

Below the vandalism photos is Michael Moore at the Republican National Convention. He's identified as "The King of Angry Democrats." They say he "makes an appearance", leaving the readers to guess why he's there. Hopefully they'll assume something bad, like he's crashing the place. It would have been honest to mention that he was writing a column for USA Today and had proper press credentials and an assigned seat in the press gallery.

That photo is tucked in among photos of Al Franken arguing with someone at the same convention. There's no denying he's arguing. The other party is identified only as "a radio show producer". I'll take that as a given. One caption says Franken is being held back. The owner of the hands in that photo isn't trying terribly hard if that's what he's doing. What we're not told is who the other party is, what they're arguing about, and of course who started it. I guess we're supposed to assume Franken is at fault because after all, he's a Democrat, so he must be wrong. I guess wanting to hear both sides would be that nuanced thinking Republicans can't stand. By the way, Franken had press credentials too. Air America was set up at both conventions, as were conservative media outlets and talk show hosts.

The next photos show two t-shirts they find objectionable. I guess Republicans would never do something like that, so I wonder who it was putting bumper stickers on their cars that looked like Wellstone's distinctive stickers but said, "He's dead. Get over it."

Below that is a quote from the Star Tribune (without a link, and I couldn't find it on the Star Tribune site, but I'll take the GOP at their word again) about the harassment of Bush supporters by Kerry supporters at the Minnesota State Fair. There's no excuse for that, but it bears repeating that the Republicans shouldn't pretend it goes only one way.

Finally, there are photos of protestors holding signs which the Republicans disapprove of, and again with good reason in some cases, though in some photos, the signs are innocuous or unreadable, so it must be the protest itself they object to. They characterized the protests in party spin, "With no positive agenda to offer voters, Democrats have resorted to an endless chorus of shrill attacks on the President." So who do they think is heckling and protesting at Democratic events? It's wrong either way, and also wrong to play the victim. Let's keep the focus on things that really tell us about the candidates and the parties:

Anybody can attend a Kerry event, and he makes a point of finding undecided voters and letting them ask what they want. Bush requires a loyalty oath to attend his events and accepts only friendly questions.
Republicans have the White House, the Supreme Court, most federal judges, both houses of Congress, and the majority of governors and state legislatures. At some point, the country's problems are their fault.
Bush is hopelessly out of touch with the situation in Iraq. Just today, he said, "We're making steady progress."
The occupation and reconstruction needn't have been miserable failures. Bush's neocon policies have caused a lot of the problems and fed the insurgency.
All that is even without getting into the reasons for the war, Iraq's WMD and Al Aqaida connections, which proved completely false.
The war in Iraq came partly at the expense of the war in Afghanistan, which contained the terrorists who attacked us and the government that harbored them. Resources were held back for a war in Iraq which had been planned before 911. Al Qaida and the Taliban have survived and continue an insurgency.

I saw something today that would irritate the unilateralists who dismiss concern about our disintegrated alliances as going back only to World War II and the forming of the UN (which of course they consider a bad idea). The Chicago Historical Society has an exhibit on election campaigns. There's a poster from Jackson's 1832 reelection campaign mentioning that under him, the country had grown respected abroad. Aside from whether it's true or not, Jackson's campaign apparently thought being in international good graces was a selling point. So much for the concern for international opinion being new. What the heck, just to get the neocons really pissed, another exhibit has a copy of the Declaration of Independence from the first printing. It mentions "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" as a reason for putting the reasons for independence in writing. So this concern for foreign opinion stuff is new --- I can date it back only to 1776.

September 24
Republicans should be ashamed of how they try to use religion like it's part of the party platform. One example made the national news, and one I stumbled upon idly. Both are the same tactic varying really only in the states targeted. The idea is to take advantage of sincerely held faith and ignorance of politics to scare people into thinking their core values are under attack and only the Republicans can protect them. They get scared into thinking liberals at least don't believe in God, if they don't downright oppose God, and God will somehow become illegal.

In Minnesota, a Republican party fundraising letter accused Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton of questioning the faith of Republicans. In a bullet point, they say, "During a Homily at St. Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis Dayton called into question the faith of Republicans, saying 'They [Republicans] have been shameless about expropriating God and using Him or Her on their side.'" Not that a politician's opponents are the best source for accuracy in quoting him, but accept for the moment that he said that. He's plainly not questioning Repubicans' faith, but their use of religion for political purposes. Ironically, their misuse of his quote precisely proves his point.

In Arkansas and West Virginia, the Republicans mailed out fliers stating that liberals want to ban the Bible. They did include some specific things they charge liberals want to do. Probably anyone who took a moment to think about it realized they didn't mean literally ban the Bible, but then again the religious conservatives targeted by this take the Bible as literal, so I suspect a good portion really did believe that liberal want to ban the Bible, or take actions that lead that way. The one bullet point I saw referred to removing "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. An RNC (Republican National Committee) spokeswoman repeated the "activist judges" phrase in an e-mail explaining it to the New York Times. The one thing that would be allowed of course is gay marriage. The lie is the implication that all liberals support gay marriage. Whatever your opinions on the subject, the fact is liberals are split. I won't call claiming that liberals want to ban the Bible a lie since it's intended as an exaggeration to make a point, but it is a lie to say liberals oppose religion. We don't even all agree on removing "under God". I don't know what other specific points they raise. There is a legitimate debate about the application of the separation of church and state, but here too conservatives are not entitled to make up the facts. Just tonight on Paula Zahn Now, Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, said, "No, this whole thing of church -- separation of church and state, until the 1950s, when Lyndon B. Johnson actually amended the tax code, it was not an issue." I don't recall Johnson doing anything with the tax code in regard to religion, and I wonder if he was thinking of the 60's when Johnson was president, not the 50's when he was in the Senate. I wouldn't rely on his knowledge of history since it was an issue a little earlier, like the 1780's. The founding fathers used the phrase "separation of church and state". It was what they were thinking when they wrote in the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." I suspect Perkins really believed it, but some of the conservatives who spout this nonsense about separation of church and state being a new idea and not in the Constitution must know better.

September 23
Two outrageous things happened in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives today. It's hard to know which to start with, so I'll just pick one.

The House passed a bill banning judicial review of the Pledge of Allegiance. Aside from whether the pledge should include the words "under God", banning judicial review of any law is grossly unconstitutional. Interpreting the way statutory laws conform to the Constitution is a core part of the judiciary's authority. Banning it may appeal to those who've bought conservatives' "judicial activism" line every time they disagree with a decision (not that judges are "activist" if conservatives like the decision). This is part of the checks and balances or our government. It may make more sense if they imagine a bill includes a provision that this bill is not subject to presidential veto. Can anyone conceive of the Congress doing that? Banning judicial review is just as unconstitutional. Moreover, even though the courts can throw out a law for violating the Constitution, Congress is supposed to reject unconstitutional bills, and the president is supposed to veto them. All three branches bear that responsibility, but today the House acting with sheer irresponsibility.

When I say "the House", probably every reader knows I mean the House Republicans, led by the most arrogant leaders congressmen ever inflicted upon themselves, and by extension upon us. They know this law is blatantly unconstitutional, and the expectation is the Senate won't pass it, so it was a free vote in a way. If it does, we can hardly expect Bush to veto it since he knows a good wedge issue when he sees it, but they all know the courts won't allow it. They'll review the ban and declare it unconstitutional, as they should, regardless of how they rule on the issue. So why did they bring it up, and why did it pass? It can't be that the phrase is doomed because the courts seem inclined to continue allowing it. How about the pledge as a wedge issue? There we go.

A wedge issue is one that evokes a visceral response which discourages debate. Every one I've heard of is a social issue, like this, or school prayer, or gay marriage. They're usually minor issues but they serve to get grassroots Republicans whipped up enough to elect the country club Republicans who go on to make the rich richer. It's a great way to bamboozle people into voting against their own economic interests.

The reason for bringing this up now when so many other things need addressing is obvious. It's close to the election. Every Republican will use it to take cheap shots at every Democrat who opposed it. They cynically figure, and probably correctly, that voters will just see the issue of God in the pledge and figure opposition on the basis of unconstitutionality is just dodging by people who don't believe in God. The trap is a responsible Congressman could not have voted to violate the Constitution, so this is basically a way to get rid of the responsible House members.

This is the firmest proof of the corruption of the Republican leadership and the need to remove them from control of Congress anyone could ask for. Even if the presidency is settled in your state, you must get to the polls to remove this awful Congress.

The other outrage in the House today was the address by Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to a joint session of Congress. This is an honor accorded to few foreign leaders. This man, who has his own allegations of thuggery, was put in place by Bush and has no standing among Iraqis, who regard him as a quisling. He appeared only because the election is close, and Bush is trying to give the impression things are getting better in Iraq by pretending there's a real government. We keep hearing that the media doesn't show the whole picture, just the bad news. As much as we hope Iraq stabilizes and rebuilds, they still have less electricity than before the invasion, unemployment remains high while Iraqis see foreign contractors getting the reconstruction jobs, and the insurgents have greatly increased the number and sophistication of their attacks. Whole cities are in insurgent hands. Bush's own National Intelligence Estimate says a tenuous stability is the best case scenario. That's a far cry from what he and Allawi say is happening. In Allawi's speech itself, there was something that showed the hand of Bush's speechwriters. He thanked Congress for authorizing the armed forces to liberate Iraq. They actually authorized it to stop Saddam from supplying WMDs to his Al Qaida contacts. It turned out he had neither WMDs nor Al Qaida contacts. Human rights are the only justification left. Too bad Bush didn't sell the war based on that.

Maybe the problem in Iraq is summed up in this quote from an administration official who spoke only if not named. He was talking about the curiousity of other national leaders about the American election, and it displays the administration's naivete about the outside world: "They're all curious how it's going. They're all politicians, and at one time or another they all have their own elections." No, they don't all have their own elections. A bunch are dictators. They must have thought Saddam was the only dictator in world. No wonder they don't understand the question, why take out Saddam instead of some other brutal dictator? It's not like there was a shortage.

September 22
The armed forces are considered a Republican constituency, and the surveys I've heard of say officers are about 90% Republican. Veterans tend to vote Republican in a smaller proportion. Enlisted men are more Republican than the general population but not by much. However, that was before Fahrenheit 911 was getting shown at overseas bases, where it's finding an audience among the soldiers. The experience of how they've been treated, their first hand knowledge of the war, and getting information they've been denied about their incompetent-in-chief may shift those Republican leanings just a bit, which can change the election of course. Even without surveys, anecdotes show soldiers have the same diversity of opinions that civilians have. To point out the not so obvious, whoever it is that selects movies has a policy of picking whatever was popular back in the United States, but they could have found some excuse to leave out Fahrenheit 911. Maybe they thought that would just become a story itself, but I'm going to give credit for respecting free speech and diverse opinions. Somebody somewhere must have resisted some flunky's attempt to stop it from being shown.

Moving to the other war, the one in Afghanistan that's not going so well either but is often forgotten --- at least by the acting president when he wanted to invade Iraq before finishing the war he had already --- the LA Times has an account of a detainee dying from mistreatment by his American captors. The same sort of thing has happened in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Three different places, with different people committing the abuse. Can the whole U.S. armed forces have gone bad all at once, did they recruit based on cruelty, or perhaps the common denominator is the leadership of the Bush administration which established that detainees have no rights, international and U.S. law be damned. It was Bush who said, "I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world." This is the guy running for election on the grounds of his leadership.

There was a war protest in an affluent Chicago suburb led by Paul Vogel, father of a soldier who served in Iraq. He's quoted saying, "People don't want to be reminded that their passive support is killing their children," and for a while he had a sign in his business window which said, "Proud of our soldier! Ashamed of our president!" His soldier son is helping him update a current sign which reports the number of soldiers killed in Iraq. This is a classic case of a protest designed to make those who see it stop and consider things in a different light.

The touchscreen machines aren't the only potential voting problem this year. This will be the first presidential election with provisional ballots for those deemed ineligible to vote. The idea is that if they appeal and turn out to be eligible, they won't have lost their chance to vote. It's a marvelous idea, but there are problems. The main one is that, get this, most rejections came for improperly filling out the appeal form. Apparently no one could check that it was done right. If the touchscreens don't screw up the vote count, the election could be decided by eligible voters being turned away depending on how technicalities get enforced. Dear readers, please make sure you get registered properly, which in most states means get it done quickly as the registration deadline is approaching, and if you fill out one of these forms, make sure you mind your p's and q's because someone may be looking for an excuse to disqualify you.

Now something reassuring about the next generation. U.S. Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) got a good question at a form with high school students in her district. One student, junior Josh Lewis, asked her one of the key questions of this election, "Would you give up liberty for security?" McCollum appears to have gone into specifics about civil liberties violations. I presume the young Mr. Lewis would have answered his own question "no", because it seems only those who would answer "no" even ask the question. If you're someone who would answer "yes", I remind you that Benjamin Franklin said, "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."

September 21
I made it plain in prior entries that my main objection to the Bush administration is its dishonesty. It seems these guys lie like a habit, and that's enough for me to want Bush and the whole crooked crew gone, even before worrying about competence and policy. If I'm to be honest myself, I have to hold my side to as high a standard. Bill Burkett, CBS's anonymous source for the disputed memos, lied, so even if I'm in complete agreement with him about Bush, I must still denounce him. Mary Mapes, a producer of the story, may have screwed up the fact checking, which is CBS internal matter, but it seems odd she passed Burkett's phone number on to someone in the Kerry campaign. Maybe Burkett asked for his number to be passed on, but it seems odd because the Kerry campaign wasn't bound by the promise of anonymity and could have revealed his identity. Also, didn't she realize this could give the appearance she was biased in favor of Kerry? No doubt many journalists have the numbers of people in both campaigns, but she was passing on a phone number, not asking for information. For Joe Lockhart's part, he made the call to Burkett and says they talked three or four minutes and Burkett offered advice on how to respond to the swift boat ads. If he's lying, I hope Kerry fires him and anyone else who was involved. If Kerry knowingly helped perpetrate the fraud, he should quit the race. I say that feeling confident the accusations of the Bush campaign are groundless. The issue here is burden of proof. CBS didn't say the memos are fake. They said they can't verify them. They rightly determined it was their responsibility to prove they're real rather than anyone else's responsibility to prove they're fake. In the case of the accusations against Joe Lockhart and the Kerry campaign, the accusers have to prove they coordinated with Burkett or CBS. Even if a phone record proved Lockhart was speaking literal truth about that call to Burkett, there's no way to conclusively disprove they never met before and didn't know ahead of time about the memos, just a lack of evidence that they did. Even if they can't disprove the charges, it's up to accusers to provide proof, which so far they haven't.

Just to hold myself to a high standard too, I removed a quote from a Bush spokesman who said the memos were an attempt to read the mind of a dead man, which I found disingenuous, and still think so given that he believed them at the time, but since the memos aren't verified I removed it. However, I won't take back what I said about the charges about Bush lying about his service record being proven, because I stated the memos were opinion, not proof, and I relied on the other parts of CBS's report and the Boston Globe report, all of which has held up. There's also the account of the unit's secretary, who knew Bush and the other pilots and said the content of the memos was accurate. Then as in his presidency, Bush acted like the rules didn't apply to him, knew he was receiving special favor, and didn't see a problem with it. He's lying when he says he received no special treatment.

In the way of lying, Al Franken and Jim Hightower appeared on Larry King with two conservative talk show hosts, Janet Parshall and Martha Zoller. They both had down the smarmy smirk conservative pundits have when trying to act superior to supposedly ignorant liberals. They also pulled the neat maneuver of interrupting so Franken had trouble getting a word in, and when he got into a shouting match with Parshall she chastised him for interrupting. Franken did come up with one of his own, when she said Bush had never engaged in any fraud, asking her specifically about Colin Powell's speech at the UN Security Council when the war resolution was being debated. This was the one where he repeatedly said "these are facts" and then gave a speechful of misinformation. She refused to answer, tried to go back to Bill Clinton, tried to say Saddam was the weapon of mass destruction. Maybe the superior act worked for her audience, but it was a dodge painful to watch. Zoller repeated the lie that Kerry hasn't released all his records and claims this was independently verified with the Pentagon. The St. Petersburg Times reported last April he'd released them. At the same time, the Seattle Times said he'd posted some on his web site and more would be coming, and that he'd already shown all to some media organizations. Zoller answered Franken's retort that the records were on Kerry's web site by saying, "There are six documents on his Web site, the rest of them have not released." I just counted the documents on Kerry's site. There are 57, including some that look like medical records.

September 20
John Kerry gave a powerful speech dissecting Bush's failure in Iraq. I almost wrote "policy" instead of "failure", but Kerry attacked not just policy, but corruption and incompetence. I wish his speech could be heard by everyone who says he doesn't have a coherent position on Iraq, everyone who says he just has criticisms and no policy, everyone who says he hasn't hit Bush hard enough, and everyone who wants him to go after Bush's credibility as a leader. Actually, they can hear it, because Minnesota Public Radio played it on their Midday program. Here's the text on Kerry's web site. The soundbites I heard on news programs missed the best bits I thought, which is why I'm linking to MPR's archive (besides offering backing for my opinion) and asking readers to listen for themselves.

Though I share the general opinion that CBS was sloppy about its fact checking when it was conned into using the forged memos, someone needs to defend CBS so I will. When legitimate doubts about their authenticity were raised, CBS investigated further and admitted it when they found they couldn't prove their authenticity. Dan Rather, who could have said he was just reading a script and it was someone else's screw up, which I suspect is the case, personally apologized. Compare this to another case of believing forgeries, when the Bush administration used the documents which appeared to show that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger to prove their contention Iraq was about to get nuclear weapons. When those documents proved to be forgeries, they didn't apologize like CBS. They tried to talk around it by saying that because Bush prefaced the reference to them in the 2003 state of the union address by saying, "British Intelligence has learned...," he didn't technically lie. Never mind that the adminstration already knew they had been debunked. Of course, that wasn't the vicious part. When former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had conducted the investigation, revealed that the White House knew when it used them that they were phony, someone on Bush's staff revealed to Robert Novak, who revealed in his column, that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. Her cover was blown, and she and everyone working with her were endangered. The operation they blew was looking into WMD. So, to simplify the comparison, in similar circumstances, Dan Rather apologized, while Bush endangered the whistleblower's spouse. Slight difference there.

The records of Bush and Rather are a bit different too. Bush has been caught in a bunch of mistakes, and a bunch of lies. Rather has been a journalist for about 50 years and this is his first big bungle. Rather owned up. Bush won't, even when his own intelligence tells him things are going badly.

There's another interesting aspect to this story I've not heard mentioned, and it relates to the Plame case. CBS has revealed a source who was promised confidentiality because that source proved deceptive. Novak, by comparison, says his source told him Plame was an analyst, not an undercover agent, meaning his source lied too. But Novak still won't reveal him. I can't comprehend how in good conscience conservatives can call for Rather's resignation but not do the same with Novak, nor how can they criticize CBS when they don't mind Fox News, which gets caught in lies continuously but never apologizes. Apparently there's a different standard for Republican propaganda channels that just pretend to be doing journalism.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert's remarks about Al Qaida preferring a John Kerry victory, along with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's similar remarks, make me wonder if they're just shooting off their mouths or if the Republicans have started another "big lie" attack on Kerry. The "big lie" is a technique where a lie, especially a blatantly false one, is repeated widely and denials and debunkings aren't acknowledged. Hastert did admit he has no intelligence, just his opinion. It's good he said that, because what evidence does exist indicates Al Qaida prefers Bush. Now, a Bush supporter would be quite reasonable in pointing out that the BBC says the letter is "allegedly" from Al Qaida. Quite true. I'll add more doubts. That group may not speak for all of Al Qaida or allied groups. They probably don't know Spanish politics well enough to know what effect they really had. They probably don't know American politics well enough to know who would be the better president for their purposes, nor what to do to help that candidate's election. The point is, what evidence exists, weak as it is, contradicts what Hastert, Armitage, and those Republicans likely to join in their chorus are saying. Of course, having the evidence undeniably contradict them never stops them from spouting, like when Hastert said he doesn't know if George Soros got his money from "drug groups". Yes Mr. Speaker, he became a billionaire on donations from drug groups. Just more reason it's so important to vote even in areas where the presidency is settled, because we need to get Hastert out of the Speaker's chair too. And he said this on Fox News, where the interviewer clarified the remark but let it go unchallenged. Ah, that Fox journalism.

September 19
Today's entry comes from a couple conversations with my mother. In one, the subject was people we knew who came from eastern Germany after World War II. It's not commonly known that Germans in areas that fell under Soviet control in the last months of the war were horrendously treated. Many were murdered, women were routinely raped. This contrasted with the reputation Americans gained for treating prisoners well during the First Word War. It caused many Germans to surrender to American forces, even when they had to make a difficult trip West in order to do it. There's no knowing how many lives were saved on both sides, by contrast to the Germans' willingness to fight to the death against the Soviets.

This reputation for treating prisoners decently, which let me repeat caused enemy soldiers to surrender, has been blown apart by the decision of our acting president to withdraw protection for basic rights of prisoners from those taken in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We hated Al Qaida and the Taliban, but we hated the Nazis and Japanese too, but we still didn't tolerate prisoner abuse. We maintained this reputation with prisoners taken in subsequent wars, including the first Iraq war. Now the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have destroyed that reputation. We might rebuild it in the next wars, if we return to former practices. Might. This image will be hard to shake, and it doesn't just make people dislike us. Enemy soldiers will go into battle against us convinced they'll be badly treated if captured, possibly including death from their mistreatment. They'll fight harder, maybe to the death, leading to the death of more Americans. Future wars just got harder, thanks to the leadership of George Bush. Yes, he does bear direct responsibility for allowing these things.

The other conversation was about a couple people in her neighborhood who expressed the common opinion that Bush should be reelected because it's bad to change presidents during a war. There are a couple responses to this one. One is that even if a president should be supported unconditionally in wartime, a nonsensical position but accepted for argument's sake, an election is the one time where that doesn't hold true. It's the time when we have to decide who would be the best president from this point. The other response is that the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism, whether the individual in question considers them one war or two, have gone very badly. Afghanistan is a mess when it looked like it had been won quickly. Iraq has gone badly in the aftermath of the invasion, and the reasons for war proved false. The world has never known so much terrorism as now. If Bush didn't lie, then he fell for lies. He's either corrupt or incompetent. Either way, shouldn't he be replaced? If you hired a manager to run a business, and things went badly, and you found yourself narrowing the causes down to whether this manager lied or was incompetent, wouldn't you remove this manager? In Bush's case, the election is the only chance you get to replace him with a better manager.

September 17
There's a new turn in the Valerie Plame case. A reporter for the New York Times, who was not the one who used the story, has been ordered to testify before a grand jury. Several other reporters have received subpoenas too, reporters who were allegedly contacted by this source. There just something wrong with every aspect of this. The main thing is that one of his staff endangered a CIA undercover agent and anyone working her to punish her husband and deter anyone else from speaking out, and Bush won't do anything about it. Reporters are covering an anonymous source, which generally they need to be able to do, but there should be an exception when they get lied to as this source did if we're to believe the one "journalist" who used the information, Robert Novak. Maybe they should have been slower to promise anonymity. If they didn't promise anonymity, they should name the name of someone who may have committed treason. Novak, though he's the culpable one, is the one who hasn't been dragged before a grand jury. Though he claims he was lied to about what Plame did, not only does he protect the source, but he acted as a shill for Bush's political revenge, which should disqualify him as a journalist. Yet there he is on CNN and still a syndicated columnist, and no one calling for his head like they are for Dan Rather. Dan Rather may have been fooled, but he's been up front about the situation with those memos, including interviewing a source that says they're forged. That's assuming he did more than the on-camera stuff.

Don't say I won't call someone on my side for doing something wrong. There was a photo in today's Chicago Tribune of a three year old girl sitting on her father's shoulders and crying after someone tore up a sign they brought to a Kerry/Edwards rally. The silliness of showing up with a Bush sign at a Kerry rally aside, they had a right to do it, and a three year old has no idea what a rally is or what the sign says. However, lest anyone think this makes the left as bad as the right, compare tearing a sign to exposing the CIA agent. Or to stonewalling the 911 commission. Or starting a war on false pretenses.

September 16
Someone leaked the National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the acting president last November. Good for them, because the public should have known about its conclusions. It looked at three scenarios for what might happened in Iraq, and even the optimistic scenario is better than Bush's description of Iraq. The part that's relevant in terms of Bush's worthiness as a leader is that he saw this estimate last summer, or at least it was given to him. Bush is infamous for not reading intelligence reports, even with titles like "Bin Laden Plans to Attack U.S.", so this thing at 50 pages was probably not worth a look. Too bad he didn't look at it, because since then he keeps talking about how things in Iraq are getting better. Even his own intelligence says the opposite. Worse, if a Bush supporter wants to reject the idea he doesn't read these things, go ahead, because it means that when Bush says Iraq is getter better, he's just plain lying.

If you doubt the intelligence estimate, understandable after the WMD fiasco, then here's a marine's eye view of how bad it's gotten. If you think this is unavoidable, just remember that Bush made the decision to go in without international support except Britain, without checking the evidence, without a plan past the invasion, with hopelessly wrong expectations, and to top it off, he pulled resources from Afghanistan before that war was done, leaving that country in its own unstable situation. Bush chose the advisors he listens to, he chose the people who have been running thing. Is that the judgement you want in a leader?

See the archives for earlier entries.