Goldberg and Guthrie

Kevin Drum summarizes some findings from British press about pre-war intelligence:

• Prior to the war, Britain claimed that Iraq had ongoing chemical and bio weapons programs. This intelligence formed the basis for a sensational charge that Iraq could deploy such weapons within 45 minutes.
• According to the Butler Report, MI6 withdrew its claims about active chem/bio programs in July 2003 after interviews in Iraq with the supposed sources of the intel showed they were unreliable.
• The Hutton inquiry, which began in August 2003, was not told that this intelligence had been withdrawn. This is despite the fact that Hutton was investigating charges directly related to chem/bio weapons and the 45-minute allegation.  
• Hutton isn't the only one who was kept in the dark. Apparently, neither the Prime Minister nor the Intelligence and Security Committee were told until yesterday that this intelligence had been withdrawn.

So a key piece of evidence was withdrawn a year ago, and Tony Blair says he didn't know about it until last week? Either he's lying or else his control of his own intelligence services is monumentally sloppy. I wonder which?

Now, last week John Edwards said the following, concerning Tony Blair:

"Tony Blair didn’t run from the report, he didn’t try to not acknowledge it. Instead, what Tony Blair said was, 'I take full responsibility for the mistakes....'

"What we need in the White House is somebody who has the strength and courage and leadership to take full responsibility and be accountable – not only for what’s good but for what’s bad. That’s what John Kerry will be."

Well, fine, but I don't see how saying you take responsibility is the same as taking responsibility. I think the only way to truly take responsibility over a fiasco this large and tragic is to resign. So I disagree with John Edwards (and Dick Durbin, who said basically the same thing)

 
Oh, you mean that Middle Eastern country with weapons of mass desctruction, a nuclear program in defiance of international law, a deep hatred of America, and operational ties to Al-Qaeda?
 
What is the Bush Doctrine anyway?  "Pre-emptive" military action?  States that harbor terrorists will be treated as terrorists?  Clearly, it's neither of these things, so what is it, besides manifest incompetence in foreign affairs?
 
What a f***ing joke. 

Transcribed (in full, I think) here.
 
thanks to Jon Ide.

 
So, I have a brand-spanking-new copy of Outfoxed at my apartment.  I'm thinking of having some sort of screening, but I don't think I'm going have an official MoveOn screening (mainly because I don't want to do it this Sunday nigh).  So, for my Chicagoland readers (ie, Guthrie), if any of you want to watch it, either email us (link at the right) or let us now in the comments.  Maybe we can put something together. 

The Best Writer in America strikes again:

I watched with interest over the past few days the spirited debate in which the Senate of the United States deliberated the crucial issue of who should be allowed to marry whom, and why that is in any way the business of the federal Constitution, which has had a pretty bad couple of years, poor thing, and should be left alone for a while to heal up, in my opinion.

Read the whole thing, because he takes this article places you only dreamed.  It's so good I can't even describe it.

Well, I saw Spiderman 2 yesterday, and, well, it was way, way better than the first one, which I didn't particularly like.  This one was really good--better action, better story, less ridiculous villian.
 
But, a few points (and, since I already told Guthrie, the only person who will read this, I guess there's no point to this):

• There are several practical and theoretical reasons why we have not achieved "cold" or controlled fusion, but the fact that we have not mastered how to control four Touring Test-worthy AI-infused mechanical arms is not one of them
• Why do all the bad guys in Spiderman have to be "good guys at heart who get taken over by some sort of machine and then become some sort of man-machine evil hybrid"?
• In the film, the bank forecloses on Aunt Bee's May's house because she's late on her mortgage payments.  Now, this is an elderly lady, who most likely lived in that house for 50 years, had to have paid off that mortgage in full, right?  Huh.
• Oh, last one...Peter Parker tells MJ that they can't be together because it's too dangerous for her, but considering how, in each of the first two movies, the fact that they weren't together didn't stop the bad guys from putting MJ in grave danger, I don't understand his reasoning on that one.

Oh, and Guth says the movie takes itself too seriously, which is clearly correct.  But overall, very good movie.

It seems a lot of our hits today are coming from people google searching for info on the jokes Whoopie Goldberg made about how Bush's last name is, you know, "bush." Get it, "Bush." Hysterical. Well, sorry folks, none of that here. But, I'd say our Bush-bashing is at least as good as Whoopie's.

Took his name out of the running for the Illinois Senate. I think Kevin Butler might be a decent replacement. Or maybe Mark Grace--he could probably win.

The Poorman has a link to the Sy Hersh speech in front of the ACLU. Watch the speech (it starts at 1 hour, 8 minutes). Watch it.

Some background on the speech:

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes."

The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."

Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is “in incredible chaos,” he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq.

"The disaffecion inside the Pentagon is extremeley accute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear."

The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information.”

He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government.

The war, he says, has escalated to "fullscale, increasingly intense military activity."

Hersh described the folks in charge of US policy as neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is."

He ripped the supine US press, pledged to bring home all the facts he could, said he was not sure he could deliver all the daming info he suspects about Bush administration responsibility for Abu Ghraib.

As Brad Delong said:

If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined--even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today. The scariest part: "[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened."

Emphasis added by G&G. Anyone want to put money on Hersh's being crazy? Not I.

Congratulations are in order for frequent (well, as frequent as anyone here besides jk) commenter MM. He recently scored a clerkship at the Supreme Court for the 2005-2006 term. So, a hearty congratulations to MM. Well done!

From, of course, the Onion:

LOS ANGELES—Sources close to Bill Maher report that the comedian and host of HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher spent Friday evening arguing with Carolyn Dobson, a prostitute from the London Escorts Agency and a supporter of the Republican Party.

Dobson and Maher, who occupied an executive suite at the W Hotel, reportedly argued on subjects ranging from the Bush Administration's financial accounting for the Iraq war to its refusal to release records to the public in accordance with the Freedom Of Information Act. The two also engaged in three consensual sex acts, for which the comedian paid $750.

Perfect. Read the rest.

I'm not sure, but I think Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto is arguing that we should start beheading people.

Link:

BOSTON July 14, 2004 — Barack Obama, the Democratic Party's candidate for the Senate in Illinois, will deliver the keynote address at the convention, officials announced Wednesday.
Obama, a law professor and state senator, will speak on July 27, the second night of the convention, with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. Obama will talk about the future of America that a Democratic administration would provide, along with the need to make jobs, families and communities top priorities in the lives of Americans.

Via Michael Berube, we get a good synopsis of how conservatives in the media view John Edwards:

In any event, the SCLM has dutifully reminded us that prior to being a U.S. Senator, Edwards was engaged in the criminal activity of being an attorney. For poor and disadvantaged people. Cases he won forced changes in medical and industry practice. And worst of all, he made money, which conservatives oppose.

There have been several articles, including a straight news article in the Times over the weekend, which kept saying that Edwards formed a "so-called S-corporation" to avoid paying taxes. Well, I guess, but it's no more "so-called" than any other corporate entity (a legal fiction, all, of course). And, well, it's what you do when you have the type of business Edwards had. And they're treating it like it's borderline tax evasion. Ridiculous.

Well, here Fox is apologizing for torturers by claiming that some other people do bad stuff, too, so what's a little rape, water boarding, and abuse of children when those people are the same color as the other, unrelated people doing bad stuff?

Thursday update: the pictures from Abu Graeb prison are disturbing. They have rightly provoked outrage. Today we have a picture -- aired on Al Arabiya -- of an American hostage being held with a scarf over his eyes, clearly against his will. Who's outraged on his behalf?

It is important that we keep the Abu Graeb situation in perspective. The story is beginning to live on its own momentum. The facts of the story may develop into the need to do much more in the days ahead. For the moment, however, the focus appears to be changing to finger pointing within the administration and how it plays out as an issue in the presidential campaign.

Oh, this makes me mad to no end. I mean, really, really pissed off. And they have the gall to call themselves "patriotic." They have no idea what that means.

From one of the Fox News memos...

For everyone's information, the hotel where our Baghdad bureau is housed was hit by some kind of explosive device overnight. ALL FOX PERSONNEL ARE OK. The incident is a reminder of the danger our colleagues in Baghdad face, day in and day out. Please offer a prayer of thanks for their safety to whatever God you revere (and let the ACLU stick it where the sun don't shine).

Go read this: Wonkette has some of the infamous Foxnews memos.

I don't think the most egregious quotes are the ones making the rounds on the blogs... go read them all for yourself. I wonder, seriously, if Foxnews will make good on its promise to produce similar memos from CNN and MSNBC.

The National Journal does not.

What a fucking idiot. I do not like him. Of course, this is being blown out of proportion by Drudge, but Kerry needs to think before he speaks.

After 9 days sans TiVo (I didn't even have TV!), all is well with the world. Maybe I'll get back to blogging!

Goldberg indicated below that he looked forward to my comments on the death of Marlon Brando. Here they are.

1.) First of all, this is the least surprising news since the Bob Huggins heart attack. I note that they can't seem to get the cause of death of right. I have a suggestion - the cause of death should be listed as: "being Marlon Brando."

2.) He really was the greatest actor we will ever see. In his prime, and for brief periods later in his career, he reached a level of pure and raw emotion that was unparalleled before and unmatched today. Many actors achieved a far greater command of their craft, none could even approach the level of talent that he possessed. It simply wasn't that hard for him. This talent was wasted and destroyed - and that's one of the great tragedies of the day. He sort of lived like a rock star - but an actor shouldn't do that. I am sure Goldberg can comment on this - but there is something about rock and roll and music that makes it an art of the young, and so many of the great musicians created something beautiful and either died or faded away. That's not what an actor should do. Brando should have kept getting better - he should have been playing Lear and the like right now. Instead, he faded into a fat joke, and all we have are a few films that capture what he used to be.

From the Newsweek obituary, that I read on the plane home:

In her 2001 biography, Patricia Bosworth quotes an ex-girlfriend who was watching TV with the actor when they came across "Streetcar." "Marlon told me, 'Turn it off,' but I said, 'Please let me watch.' So we did for a while, and then Marlon groaned, "Oh, God, I was beautiful then." Was he ever.

I'm a little more than halfway through "The Da Vinci Code", and, well, it's not so bad, and it's certainly a page turner, even if the prose leaves something to be desired. And, also, let's just say that Dan Brown does not have the ear for dialogue as Elmore Leonard. But in terms of melding scientific/historic fact with fiction, it's at least as good as anything Michael Crichton has done (and I'm still embarrassed that in 8th and 9th grade I was so into his books--although Jurassic Park was made into a great movie).

However, if you're going to have a conspiracy, which has a charge to keep a great secret, you can't have everyone in on it. Now, I'm not done with the book, but it seems as if every historical figure in the Western Canon and half of contemporary Paris is in on this little secret concerning Jesus and Mary Magdalene and all that. If everyone and their mom is in on it, it ain't a secret. That is all.

UPDATE: I finished. I give it a "eh."

ADDENDUM: I just read a sentence that I'm sure will give Dan Brown impeccable credentials to write the forthcoming "Foreshadowing for Dummies"

A miracle Lord. I need a miracle. Silas had no way of knowing that hours from now, he would get one.

Emphasis in orignal. Foreshadowing, unoriginal.

Does anyone think the "Seven Minutes" Bush sat on his ass in Florida can reach the public consciousness like the "18 1/2-Minut Gap" of the Nixon tapes?

Basically, I've been "insourced" to a company. So, for next few weeks/months (I have no idea how long), I'll be working in a different company, basically being an in-house lawyer for them. It's at a hedge fund that does incredibly well, so it should be interesting. But, I don't I'll be able to blog on company time, for two reasons: (1) I don't think I'll have time, and (2) I'm billing this client every minute I'm there, and I don't want to blog while I'm billing someone for my time.

Hopefully, I can transfer my blogging to the AM before I go to work, which worked fairly well when I was pretty busy last spring. But there won't be any more 5-post days for me, I'm pretty sure. But we'll see.

Also, I'm wondering if Guthrie will blog on the death of Marlon Brando. I think Guth considers him the best actor ever, or something like that.

Also, also, while I do like a lot of the Kinks (esp. the albums "Village Green Preservation Society" and "Lola vs. Powerman," the album "Misfits" which I found in MP3 format on my computer (I don't remember ever downloading it), seems kind of weak. I better stop blogging about music, or else Guth will kill me. One last thing...my friend, the inestimable Harvard astrophysicist The Goat, has just turned me on to a band called "The Notwist." You can download an awesome song called "The Ones With the Freaks" on their website.

Other that that, have a great holiday weekend, but I'll be around to entertain as much as I can here on G&G (no promises that I'll post, but hopefully I will). And read Krugman today. It's the best thing you've ever read about F9/11.

And pray for no rain for tomorrow night!!

Franklin Foer has Part I in this week's New Republic. If there's a subscription firewall, email me and I'll email you the article.

The reaction to this movie on the National Review has been hilarious.

Byron York makes some sort of attempt a point here. Apparently, the success of the movie is not real, because MoveOn has been trying to get its members to go see it.

The evidence for this is pretty solid:

Last week, MoveOn set a goal of persuading 100,000 members to take the pledge to see Fahrenheit 9/11 as early as possible. In fact, according to MoveOn, 116,649 MoveOn members signed up. While that number seems like a relatively small part of the movie's total audience, [MoveOn's Eli] Pariser says MoveOn's influence is far larger than the official number suggests. "When I went to Waterville, Maine and asked how many people from MoveOn were there, probably three-quarters of the people there said yes," Pariser told Variety on Monday.

I mean, when the actual numbers tell us that MoveOn couldn't have contributed that much to the total, but a show of hands in one theatre in Maine suggests differently... well, I'm convinced.

I wonder if we should think of The Passion's success as similarly tainted, given that every evangelical church in the country was likely telling its members they would go to hell if they didn't see it.

www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com

It's the third site that comes up on a Google search for John Kerry. I just started reading it - but it's pretty funny and captures my feelings well. Probably the best URL ever, though.

I did not like the first ten minutes of the movie. Moore rehashes the 2000 Florida debacle, which seems intended to reminds us throughout the movie that the legitimacy of Bush's Presidency is in question. Moore blames, at least through innuendo, many people for Bush's 2000 "victory": Katherine Harris, James Baker, Al Gore himself (for not breaking Senate rules during the certification process), the entire U.S. Senate, Jeb Bush, George H.W. Bush, every conservative on the Supreme Court, Foxnews and more!

This all may be true; but there is a much more simple way to determine why it is that Bush was elected President in 2000. Let's look at the final, certified popular vote totals from Florida in 2000:

Bush: 2,912,790

Gore: 2,912,253

Nader: 97,488.

Now, I'm no expert in political analysis, but is there another possible reason - one not mentioned in Fahrenheit 9/11 - that Bush was somehow able to win in Florida? Could some other person in some small way have helped to change the outcome of the race?

Of course, we know Michael Moore himself is in no way to blame. He has just produced a documentary that argues, in essence, that George W. Bush is the worst man in the world. In fact, (and I'm surprised I haven't seen conservatives harping on this), he explicitly compares Bush to Osama Bin Laden. Therefore, we can assume that when he offered commentary on the 2000 Election, he encouraged voters in Florida to do what it took to defeat Bush. Oh, wait.

From a 2000 interview with Michael Moore:

Number one, Bush is not going to win. I truly believe that, because the people of this country are not that stupid. He's behind 52 to 38 (percent) right now and every week he goes lower and lower. He's going to continue to sink like a stone...

Secondly, Gore doesn't own these people. He has to earn their vote, and I personally believe that a vote for Gore is a vote for Bush. It might be a kinder, gentler version of it, but still it's a vote for one of the two people running who are sponsored by big business...

George W. Bush is not going to appoint justices who would overturn Roe vs. Wade. He hasn't done it in Texas, and that's the only track record we have to look at. He's appointed moderate justices who have upheld Texas abortion laws. He's not a right-wing ideologue, he's a politician, and he'll do whatever he has to do to get elected. He reads the poll numbers, and two-thirds of the American public is pro-choice. It is part of our American culture, it will never go away.

I guess my point is that it's easy enough to blame the Court, Foxnews and the like, but the simple fact is that the Republicans controlled Congress and the Supreme court and the election, literally, came down to around 100 votes. The Democrats weren't going to win. And the reason the election was this close was because people like Michael Moore and Guthrie were telling other people that there was no difference between Bush and Gore; that the only way to take our country back was to vote for Ralph Nader, consequences be damned. Of course, only one of those two people had a popular web site at the time. Only one of them was a respected figure in the progressive community. Only one of them likely had the ability to convince a few hundred people in Florida to vote for Ralph Nader.

Of course, Moore spends half of his movie arguing that the war in Iraq is an immoral sin. That's why I suspect that he will lend his support to the Presidential candidate who opposed the war. Oh, wait, no such candidate exists. Maybe he was right the first time...

I saw it last night - by myself at the 11:00 showing at the Oak Street theatre. That was sort of depressing. I liked it more than I thought I would, and will have some comments on it throughout the week. (That should bring up our "refresh" count.)

Let me just say now that you should really go see this movie.

Via atrios, I'm suffering from severe cognitive dissonance when Jesse Helms, (warning: shrillness ahead) one of the most dispicable people to serve in the Senate, makes sense:

"I would not have voted for [President Bush's] tax cut, based on what I know. . . . There is no doubt that the people at the top who need a tax break the least will get the most benefit. . . . Too often presidents do things that don't end up helping the people they should be helping, and their staffs won't tell them their actions stink on ice."

-- Former senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), in a recent interview with Business North Carolina magazine.

Huh.

I'm not sure if his post will make sense because (1) I'm not sure my point makes sense; and (2) if it does, I'm not sure I can write it clearly and concisely. Because neither (1) nor (2) has deterred me in the past, it shall not here.

One of the problems with going to a truly extraordinary concert (and I consider the one I went to yesterday--see below--to qualify) is that you feel empty, in a way, afterwards. The beauty and magic that comes with seeing the concert fades, and want that feeling back. And you come home, put on the CDs, and try to recreate the mood, the feeling, the elation. You cannot. This is impossible, especially if you're listening alone. For, part of the high that can come with seeing live music is knowing that what you're experiencing is being experienced by everyone else in the concert hall. So, if you listen to the music with your friends who you went to the show with, you can approach the idea I'm talking about. But, alone, listening to the studio version of the songs you heard, you cannot even approximate the feeling. You can derive some satisfaction and solace by listening, but you cannot approach the elated sense of being you had 24 hours earlier when you saw Stephin Merritt pretend to take a gun out of his coat while singing "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure." So, you listen and pretend you're somewhere else.

Arab/Muslim expert Juan Cole has some worthwhile things to say about weakest parts of the Michael Moore film:

Fahrenheit 9/11

I saw Michael Moore's new film in Ann Arbor at the midnight show last Thursday, thinking I might say something about it over the weekend. But social commitments of a pleasant sort kept me away from the keyboard, and I don't know when I will get to posting extended comments.

The film is inspired polemic, and I enjoyed it (if that is the word--the second half was painful). It has some serious flaws of argumentation. I thought the best parts were where Moore just let the footage speak for itself.

It struck me during the second half how seldom one sees in mainstream US media any extended interviews with Iraqis who vehemently oppose the US occupation. Since these are probably by now a solid majority, according to polls, it is odd that we never hear from that point of view. There is an undertone of patriotism or even nationalism to national American news that is peculiar if one looks at the industrialized democracies in Europe, e.g.

The film has an affecting scene of a woman screaming that her innocent, civilian relatives had been killed, and calling down curses on the US (yikhrib buyuthum, may God demolish their houses). Given the thousands of Iraqis killed in the past 14 months, there must be a lot of persons who feel that way. Moore is the only one showing them to us, to my knowledge.

I thought the point that Bush spent a lot of time away from Washington in his first 8 months in office was well made, and dovetails with the revelations of former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke about Bush's unconcern with the terrorism threat. The way in which the Iraq war was a manipulated get-up job was also graphically and well portrayed. Likewise the cynical use of the "war on terror" to erode Americans' basic civil liberties is appropriately presented in canny and strident tones (James Madison would have been strident about this, too).

The interview with Michigan congressman John Conyers in which Conyers reveals that no one in Congress was allowed to read the Patriot Act before voting on it was breathtaking. I recently sat next to Conyers on a plane, and he explained to me that the final version of the bill, which had been very extensively changed, was delivered the night before the vote. He said it wasn't strange for a few minor changes to be made at such a late stage, but that it was his impression that virtually a new bill was dropped on the hapless Congress at the last moment. It is huge, and would have been impossible to read all the way through with attention under those circumstances.

The Patriot Act is so radical a departure from the American Civil Liberties tradition that if its most radical provisions are made permanent, as Bush desires, I think it would be legitimate to date from 2001 the Second American Republic. It is a much impoverished republic compared to the first, and ominously intertwined with Imperial themes. If Moore makes anyone angry about anything, I hope it is this.

I thought the bit connecting Bush to the Saudis was full of illogic. Wealthy people in the oil business are going to have relations with the Saudis, who at their best rates can produce 11 million of the 76 million barrels of oil pumped daily in the world. The Saudis can also get along with pumping 7 million barrels a day, so they are a pivotal swing producer and can affect the price deeply.

Another viewer asked me if it were true that the Saudis own 7% of the US economy, which was the impression the person brought away from the film. I'm not sure that is what Moore asserted, but it in any case cannot possibly be true. I think he said they had invested $700 billion in the US. Actually, total Saudi investments worldwide are about $700 bn., with about 60% in the US, or $420 bn. It is a nice chunk of change (and helps keep the US economy from collapsing from unwise US policies like running $500 bn. deficits--but note that one year of Bush deficits equals the whole value of all Saudi investment!). But even just the goods and services produced every year in the US amount to about $11 trillion. Moore seems to have started out by claiming that the Saudi investment equals 7% of the New York Stock Exchange. But NYSE investments amount to $15 trillion. My back of the envelope calculation is that Saudi investments are actually about 2.8 percent of that. Then Moore truncated that to "7% of the US economy." But the latter is not what he really meant to say. To get that, you'd have to know how much all existing property in the US is worth, and figure the proportion of it represented by $420 bn. The Saudis don't own more than a tiny proportion of the privately held wealth in the US. They are not even the major foreign investor in the US-- The British, Dutch, and Japanese top them.

Moreover, if it is true that the Saudis have so much invested in this country, then it makes no sense for wealthy Saudi entrepreneurs and governing figures to wish the US harm. Can you imagine the bath Saudi investments took here after 9/11? The Saudi royals and the Bin Ladens lounging about in places like Orlando, who were airlifted out lest they be massacred after the attacks, didn't know anything about the apocalyptic plots hatched in dusty Qandahar, and if they had they would have blown the whistle on them with the US so as to avoid losing everything they had.

The Saudi bashing in the Moore film makes no sense. It is true that some of the hijackers were Saudis, but that is only because Bin Laden hand-picked some Saudi muscle at the last minute to help the brains of the operation, who were Egyptians, Lebanese, Yemenis, etc. Bin Laden did that deliberately, in hopes of souring US/Saudi relations so that he could the better overthrow the Saudi government.

The implication one often hears from Democrats that the US should have invaded Saudi Arabia and Pakistan after the Afghan war rather than Iraq is just another kind of warmongering and illogical. There is no evidence that either the Saudi or the Pakistani government was complicit in 9/11.

The story Moore tells about the Turkmenistan gas pipeline project through Afghanistan and Pakistan also makes no sense. First, why would it be bad for the Turkmenistanis to be able to export their natural gas? What is wicked about all that? It is true that some forces wanted the pipeline so badly that they even were willing to deal with the Taliban, but this was before Bin Laden started serious operations against the US from Afghan soil, beginning in 1998 with the East Africa embassy bombings.

In any case, if Bush had been supporting the Taliban, why did he then overthrow them? If it was because they turned out not to be a Mussolini type of government that made the trains run on time, but rather to be supporters of international terrorism, then wasn't it logical for Bush to turn against them? The mid-90s temptation to support the Taliban, who seemed to be bringing order to Afghanistan (albeit the order of the mass grave) was bipartisan. Moore says Afghan president Karzai had been involved in the earlier pipeline plan, and now is president. I still cannot understand why the pipeline is evil. Afghanistans would collect $2 bn. a year on tolls, and the Turkmen would be lifted out of poverty, and Pakistan and India might have a new reason to cooperate rather than fighting. I personally wish it could be built immediately. It doesn't explain the US Afghan war (one thing cannot explain both the temptation to coddle the Taliban and the determination to get rid of them). The US only intervened to overthrow the Taliban reluctantly, and because it was the only way to get at al-Qaeda, which needed to be rooted out.

So, I think the second half the the film, on Bush's Iraq policy, has virtues. He turns out to have been prescient about how fictitious the reasons for the war were. But some of the innuendo about the Saudis and Afghans just seems an attempt to damn by association, and seem to me to be based on faulty logic and innacurate assertions.

So, yesterday I went to the Magnetic Fields concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music. They were awesome. It's amazing how great a songwriter Stephin Merrit is.

Opening the show was a guy named Andrew Bird. His show was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was truly mind-blowing, in the sense that I couldn't get my head around what he had just done. It was pretty avant-garde, to say the least. He would play something on violin, then loop it around and around in real time, using some device he operated with his feet. And he would keep looping tracks on top of each other, and eventually play guitar or sing over all the tracks. The idea that someone could do that, and keep time to it perfectly, was a little disconcerting. I think if you click on his website, you can see a video feed of one of his performances. I suggest you check it out if you're in the mood for something interesting and new.

Two must-see clips can be found here. Watch them. Laugh...and cry.

I played hooky yesterday afternoon and went to see "Fahrentheit 9/11." You need to see it--now! It wasn't perfect, and I'd argue with some of it, but overall a tremendously effective film. It was most effective at:

1. Reminding us how uniquely unqualified George W. Bush is for the Presidency of the United States.

2. Reminding us that the soldiers in our Armed Forces are just kids trying to do their best, being forced into some impossible situations, many of whom come back physically and mentally altered for the worst, and there's nothing we can do about it.

The parts about oil and the military-industrial complex were interesting, and his argument is clearly partly true, but that could have been fleshed out and qualified a bit more.

After it was over, my legs were weak leaving the theater. A profound film on many levels. Go see it.

Apparently the AP is reporting it. Don't have a link yet.

I've long said that the two greatest moral failings of the Clinton Administration(s) were the continuing escalation of the drug war and the failure to intervene in Rwanda. Here's President Clinton in a Salon interview:

In your book, you describe the American and allied failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 as one of your worst errors. How did you reach that decision to do nothing while the genocide was going on there?

That's one of the most regrettable things about it. It's not like we had a decision. I don't know that we ever had a high-level meeting on it. At that time I think the whole foreign policy apparatus, including me, was geared to getting into Bosnia as quickly as possible. We knew we were going to have a problem in Haiti. We were still reeling from what had happened in Somalia. And I think even though there were a lot of indications that Rwanda was going to be quite bad, I'm not sure anybody focused on the fact that 10 percent of a country, 700,000 or 800,000 people, could be killed in 90 days with machetes ...

If we'd moved right away, we might have been able to save a couple of hundred thousand people. They still could have killed a lot of people before we could have deployed in acceptable numbers there. [Later] we went into the camps and we kept a lot of people alive, both safe from violence and also rehydrating kids ... We saved tens of thousands of lives, but we could have saved a couple of hundred thousand more if we'd moved more quickly. We hadn't really developed a clear doctrine of when we would go in and when we wouldn't. There was a lot of sentiment against such intervention in the Congress. And the worst thing about it was that we didn't have a meeting with an options paper where we said yes, no, or maybe. We didn't even do that. And before we knew it, they were lying dead.

It was inexcusable. We didn't even seriously consider it, and I feel terrible about it. It's very interesting though: the only people who have never excoriated me for it are the Rwandans. When I went there and apologized to them, their response was, "You're the only person that ever even said you were sorry. There were other people who could have helped us, too."

It was inexcusable, and I'm glad he realizes that. He admits not only that he was wrong, but pathetically wrong.

Per Kos, the FCC may ban television ads for Michael Moore's film.

This is probably fair, and is exactly what liberal deserve for supporting stupid campaign finance laws.

Still, is this really a smart move, politically, for Bush to allow this? I think not.

From the Smoking Gun, this is unbelievable.

A choice excerpt from the complaint:

Judge Thompson violated these Canons by his repeated use of a device known as a penis pump during non-jury and jury trials in his courtroom and in the presence of court employees while serving in his capacity as a district judge.

Read

Sully has a post on this today, which I think is for the most part right on. Bush's record is actually good on AIDS - but when he gives a speech on AIDS and talks about AIDS in the United States, he doesn't mention the one group most affected: gay men. Then, he argues that AIDS can be prevented with his ABC approach - abstain, be faithful in marriage and (much to Bush's credit) when appropriate use condoms.

Fine. So why does Bush oppose marriage rights for the one group most affected by AIDS in this country?

(This is exactly the point Sullivan makes - I really added nothing to the blogosphere with this post.)

GOLDBERG ADDENDUM: I wrote this in the comments, but it was really too long for that, so I'm putting it here:

ABC is basically a prevention method used in Africa and other nations where AIDS is a heterosexual epidemic. In the U.S., where it did threaten to become a heterosexual epidemic, it did not (for whatever reason). However, new subcultures, like the (predominately African-American male) subculture of the "DL") still mean that it HIV could yet become a widespread heterosexual problem here.

As for the homosexual AIDS crisis in America, I believe (but am not sure), that transmission rates dropped greatly in the 1990s, but have either leveled off or are back on the uptick. ABC is clearly not a wise prophylactic prescription for the U.S. gay community, as the "A" and the "B" aren't really options. The key is (and this word is lame but I'll use it anyway) awareness that the crisis has not gone away, condom use, and requiring prospective partners to be tested before any intercourse.

As a worldwide problem, however, AIDS in America is not a big deal, and most efforts should be made towards Sub-Saharan Africa and certain parts of Asia/Indian subcontinent. This is especially true for pharmaceutical assistance, esp. drugs like AZT that can dramatically reduce mother-child transmission, which is a HUGE problem in Africa. Other public/private/NGO partnerships are needed to get drugs to the third world. AIDS in America just pales in comparison to these problems.

UPDATE: EDITed, thanks to Goldberg's cousin, to change effected to affected.

I haven't posted on the Veep search, mainly because I don't care about it. See Digby here and Atrios here, who both articulate the reasons why I don't care. But I did just read this on Talkingpointsmemo, where TNR's John Judis is guest-blogging, and it makes sense to me:

Speculation is rife about whom John Kerry will choose as his running mate. Newsweek reports that Kerry "is engrossed in the final shortlist of veep picks. Kerry sources say the choice is narrowing to Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt, and that the candidate remains personally uncomfortable with Sen. John Edwards." I have no idea whether this report is accurate, but if it is, the Democrats are in trouble.

There are different criteria Kerry and the Democratic convention delegates should use in choosing a running mate, but they should not include whether the candidate is "personally comfortable" with whomever he chooses. If John F. Kennedy had used this criterion in 1960, Richard Nixon would have won the election. If Ronald Reagan had used it in 1980 and chosen his friend Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt rather than his leading challenger George Bush, Reagan might have lost that election. Gore did use this criterion in 2000, and it's one reason why he lost. In the final tally, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman didn't bring Gore a single electoral college vote. Kerry has to choose a running mate who, above all, will help him win states in the Midwest and South that he may not be able to win on his own.

Among those prospects currently being discussed, there are only two who are sufficiently battle-tested and who could help Kerry where he may not be able to help himself. These are Edwards and Gephardt. In the primary, Edwards showed a Clintonesque ability to appeal to both of the constituencies with whom Kerry is going to have trouble--the white working class voters who used to be described as "Reagan Democrats" and the independent upscale suburbanites who have been trending Democratic, but are leery of the party's leftwing. Edwards could help Kerry be competitive in Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Ohio. (In a Mason-Dixon poll last month pairing Bush and Cheney against Kerry and Edwards in North Carolina, Bush was only ahead by 46 to 45 percent.) He could force the Bush campaign to expend resources in regions it would have liked to take for granted. Gephardt might help Kerry with white working class voters in Missouri, Iowa, and Ohio. But Gephardt's appeal may be more limited than Edwards'. Gephardt is very popular among labor leaders, but, as this year's primary made clear, not necessarily among the rank and file or among non-union workers. He would also reinforce Kerry's image as a Washington insider, making him less attractive to upscale suburbanites.

There is another reason to hope that Kerry puts aside his "comfort level" and picks Edwards. In 2004, 19 Democratic Senate seats are being contested, compared to only 15 Republican ones; and five of the nineteen are in Southern states where Democrats are retiring. Republicans could conceivably win all these seats. If they won even three of them, Democrats would have an almost impossible task of winning back the Senate in 2004, and would face an uphill challenge in 2006 when more Democratic than Republican seats are again up for grabs. Democrats have an interest in fielding a presidential ticket that has credibility, if not popularity, in the South. With Edwards as the vice presidential candidate, the Democrats could put forward a Southern face. If Kerry picks another Northern liberal like himself, Democratic candidates in the Carolinas, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia will be put on the defensive and forced to dissociate themselves from the national ticket. My advice to Kerry: forget chumminess, choose Edwards.

I thought that Jack! would get through this, and that maybe it wouldn't even prove all that damaging, but this is not a good sign. Via Kos, we get this report from the Capitol Fax:

EXTRA! RYAN FUNDRAISER CANCELED A fundraiser for Jack Ryan sponsored by US House Speaker Denny Hastert has been canceled, several sources confirmed today.

As Kos says:

That can mean one of two things -- Hastert is distancing himself from Ryan, or Ryan is preparing to exit stage left.

Chances are it's the latter. We may not have Ryan to kick around much longer.

Seeing as I didn't post my prediction that Ryan would stay in, I probably should pretend that I never even made such a prediction. However, that would not be keeping with the G&G pledge to restore honor and dignity to the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Someone commented on Kos that Ryan has a press conference scheduled for 7:00 this evening. We shall wait and see...

The General weighs in. I was just going to link to it, because it's pretty vulgar and tasteless, but it's too funny not reprint in full

Dear Sen. Allen,

On the surface, the Jack Ryan scandal looks like a simple case of a man taking his wife to sex clubs and then pressuring her to have sex with him while everyone else watches, but I think there is more to this story.

Ryan is a very bright guy. He saw the lavender menace infiltrating the centers of power in our country. He knew that the day was coming soon when there would be a great political battle fought between the forces of heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Ryan wanted to fight in that battle as a Senator. Given the direction society was heading, he worked quickly to establish his heterosexual bona fides. That's why he pressured his wife to have sex with him in front of an audience.

I wish other Senate candidates should do the same. That way, we could ensure that we're not electing Senators with dual loyalties as we consider the Homosexual Discrimination Constitutional Amendment.

As the Chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, you can make this happen by funding 30 second spots featuring Republican Senatorial candidates having sex with women. Now, thirty seconds may seem like a long time to be having sex, but you could put two Senators in each spot and then use the remaining time to discuss budget policy.

I can almost see the ads now. Arlen Specter squealing like Ben Shapiro at an Ayn Rand convention as his little soldier traces the path of Oswald's magic bullet, Sam Brownback, still and silent, lying atop his wife, reverently waiting for our Lord and Savior to command the Senatorial seed to implant itself, and in a future election cycle, Trent Lott, huffing, puffing, and groaning while his man-wig dances on his head to a jackrabbit-on-crack rhythm.

Maybe you can even get Ken Starr to do the play-by-play.

Please give it some thought and don't hesitate to give me a ring if you need any help.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

...is guest blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy this week. Check it out.

Listening to the Indians/White Sox game, and in the kind of non sequitor you only find with seasoned baseball announcers, one of the guys (either John Rooney or Ed Farmer, I guess) says, "You know what movie I want to see? That Fahrenheit 9/11. It's by that guy Michael Moore, I think." Then the other guy says something like, "Wasn't there another movie with the same name, or 'Fahrenheit something-or-other'?" "Uh, I don't know." "Yeah, it had to do with the temperature books burn or something." "Huh." Then, ten minutes later, they agree that there was a "Ray Bradbury movie" named "Fahrenheit 451."

I thought that DJ and The Hawk were the renaissance men of Chicago sports announcing, but it looks like they have company.

People sometimes ask me why I like Joe Biden so much. Here's Biden in Rolling Stone's really good "roundtable" on Iraq (Wes Clark, Rand Beers, Zinni, Biden, et. al. et al):

Surely the Abu Ghraib prison scandal didn't help. Should Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or other Bush officials resign?

...

Biden: I was in the Oval Office the other day, and the president asked me what I would do about resignations. I said, "Look, Mr. President, would I keep Rumsfeld? Absolutely not." And I turned to Vice President Cheney, who was there, and I said, "Mr. Vice President, I wouldn't keep you if it weren't constitutionally required." I turned back to the president and said, "Mr. President, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are bright guys, really patriotic, but they've been dead wrong on every major piece of advice they've given you. That's why I'd get rid of them, Mr. President -- not just Abu Ghraib." They said nothing. Just sat like big old bullfrogs on a log and looked at me.

There's no independent confirmation that this happened, so, if Bush or Cheney dispute this, then maybe I'll have to retract, but this is very cool that he said that. Frankly, I'm surprised Bush would ask.

Via Slate's "In Other Magazines", I found this passage from a Newsweek article:

Much has been made of the fact that "Spider-Man" was the first post-9/11 blockbuster, and the conventional wisdom is that the film was a phenomenon because America needed heroes again. But maybe it's something more. To the rest of the world, the superhero symbol of the United States is Superman—broad shouldered, unconflicted, virtually indestructible. For decades, we've preferred to see ourselves that way, too. Spider-Man is none of those things. He's burdened by self-doubt. He wants to do the right thing, but isn't always sure what that is. He's constantly forced to choose between helping others and helping himself. He looks tough, but he's easily injured. In America after September 11, Superman was who we wanted to be. Spider-Man was who we were.

The author, Sean Smith, should be embarrassed.

Seeing as he was my governor for four years, I figure I should note that John Rowland is resigning from office. I was supremely uninteresting in Connecticut politics while I went to school there, so I don't remember anything noteworthy about him except for the very, very, very, very stupid idea to build a stadium near Hartford to house the Patriots.

Today I noticed that we had over double our average hits for yesterday. I find this a little strange, because I don't think either of us posted anything yesterday, and the free version of a sitemeter I have won't tell me where the hits from yesterday came from (I can only find the previous 20 referrals specifically). It's doubly weird that these hits came on a Sunday, because that's, by far, our lowesttraffic day of the week. Anyway, the mystery will not be solved, it seems.

Sorry I don't have anything real to post. The Indians are opening a 4-game set with the White Sox today, though, and this gives the Tribe a chance to show whether they're contenders or pretenders. I'll be there tonight and maybe tomorrow night.

Read it today. I ask once again, how can you even argue that the New York Times has a liberal bias, let alone accept it as the gospel truth as so many do?