Click to Buy My Book
If you're interested in e-publishing, this is the book that tells you how to go about it:
everything from html to web sites to e-publishers and marketing, all discussed in simple,
non-technical language. Find out how easily you can become a part of what many have said
is the most revolutionary advance in publishing since Gutenberg. A Writer's Digest Book Club Main Selection!
"Although the world's sole superpower possesses the strongest economy, the most advanced military equipment and the most influential diplomacy worldwide, deep inside it is grappling with manifold challenges," said the English-language paper 'Iran Daily' in its Media Monitor column on Saturday quoting the Persian daily 'Afarinesh'. The deadly attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon exposed a more vulnerable facet of the US to the outside world by incurring multi-billion-dollar damage on its economy, believed the paper.
Iran Gross Domestic Product (in US dollars), 2000: 118 billion
New York City Gross City Product, 2000: 373 billion
United States Gross Domestic Product, 2000: 9,257 billion
Guess what, Iran Daily? I think we'll survive. Not too sure about your joint, though.
THINGS WE ALREADY KNEW DEPARTMENT: CNSNews.com reports:
the General Accounting Office (GAO) has issued a report saying that terrorists and drug dealers routinely abuse the U.S. immigration system to facilitate their crimes.
And congress is for sale, the International Oilympic Committee loves its hookers, Santa Claus isn't real - and the INS isn't a functional agency, it's a political tool for entrenched liberal bureaucrats mining the motherlode of immigration for Democratic voters.
'Our staff have been told that the whole population, unless they are bedridden or on security duties, must attend a ceremony on Saturday,' said one foreigner based in Pyongyang. 'They have been told it will be considered a 'near crime' to ignore the order. It is the first time I have known this for Kim Jong Il's birthday.'
Unless they are hereditary royalty, family dictatorships have historically been rather short-lived. "From rags to riches to rags" applies as much to this sort of familial enterprise as any other. Oddly enough, two such attempts are underway in nations more than half a dozen people have heard of: Bashar Assad's Syria, and Kim Jong Il's North Korea. If the past is any guide, both efforts are doomed.
Tyrannies are by nature fragile. They have to expend an enormous amount of effort keeping their own populaces docile, usually in the face of terrible internal conditions, because all tyrannies are command economies (yes, even the Third Reich). Command economies are terrible at producing bread that doesn't taste like shoe-soles, and shoe-soles that don't wear like bread. And not a damned one of them has ever been able to grow enough wheat and corn to feed their meat and dairy animals, let alone their people.
Trembling tyrannies usually resort to a pair of time-honored methods of buttressing power: a nationalist refocusing of internal attention on an external threat, and an attempt to deify the leader. North Korea has been increasingly invested in both methods, sometimes to ludicrous extremes, as this example indicates.
There can be no question that Kim Jong Il and his evil regime are feeling the heat of George Bush's warnings. The increasingly hysterical rhetoric issuing from that quarter, as well as this latest hint of growing internal fears, make it quite clear that the gangsters currently raping North Korea are feeling the heat. Traditionally, the threat dictators use as a political straw man has been a fantasy. But any nation that doesn't, after Afghanistan, take an American threat seriously, has lost any touch with reality. And any serious threat is a huge danger for an inherently unstable political structure like a second-generation tyranny.
I believe that George Bush and his advisors are strongly aware of this, and are even counting on it. As I noted, tyrannies are fragile. Apply enough pressure to overcome the nationalist dogmas and the divine right of dictators ploy, and surprisingly often, these dysfunctional regimes collapse of their own bloody weight.
In Kim Jong Il's case, it couldn't happen to a more deserving monster. Too bad it won't be his father who lives to see his own guts waving from a streetlamp.
UPDATE: Remember all the whining about supposedly starving Afghans reduced to eating grass? Well, in North Korea, grass really is an everyday staple of many diets. But the second generation abomination who runs the place can always find more money to support his million-man army and develop new weapons of mass destruction. The sooner he is gone, the better.
Glenn Reynolds notes that he's been receiving press-release style e-mail recently. If you're the Hyperblogger, or Andrew Sullivan, with their huge readerships, that makes sense. But I've been getting some stuff like that addressed to the DailyPundit email address, and it doesn't seem to be spam.
My thoughts about the future of the blogosphere are still in rapid flux, but one word is beginning to crystallize: Gatekeepers.
And I'm beginning to wonder if the PR dogs aren't well ahead of me.
Though I have to say, I'd love to hear what Bill Clinton would testify. Clinton testimony always provides some comedy.
And you know what? He's right. There was a time when the merest mention of the Big He's name would cause my eyes to cross, my gut to clench, and my tongue to rattle off a litany of choice obscenities.
No longer. Clinton's only remaining power is as a figure of fun. I mean, what can you say about an aging, flabby, money-grubbing, openly manipulative and cynical gas bag whose entire raison d'etre these days seems to be laughing his head off all the way to the bank?
Least we can do is laugh along with him. Or at him.
Raven said he is distressed by the skeptics who deliver good news about the environment. "They basically win fame by telling people what they want to hear," he said, singling out Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg as a case in point. Lomborg, whose recent book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, was excerpted by many newspapers and magazines, argues that concern about global warming and other environmental problems has been exaggerated. Raven, echoing many scientists who have criticized the book, says Lomborg "repeatedly exposes his ignorance of facts and critical analysis in areas of great importance, such as the extinction of biodiversity."
Raven, "who is director of the Missouri Botanical Garden," is hardly the disinterested actor he pretends to be. That said, his particular hobbyhorse, bio-diversity, is a shaky position for several reasons: first, species destruction has been the rule, not the exception, over all of earth's history.
Second, the "preserve everything at any cost" school of thought is the same one that tries to keep any fires from burning in national forests, only to have vast swaths of old-growth wood go up in smoke because of decades-long buildups of flammable underbrush.
Finally, Raven is cooking the taxonomical books. There are only 1,380,910 major "taxa" of species. By far the vast majority of these species are insects (751,000). When Raven rants (and that is what he is doing, title notwithstanding) that, "Human beings, only one of the "estimated 10 million species of organisms" on the planet, "are consuming, wasting or diverting an estimated 45% of the total net biological productivity on land and using more than half of the renewable fresh water," one must presume he advocates something more equitable, such as the equality-based outcomes systems so beloved by other quota-mongers on the left. But do we really wish to allocate 55 percent of the earth's "resources" to bugs?
Democrat Says Campaign Bill Would Clean Up Politics Cash control laws for politicians will be as effective as gun control laws for Washington, D.C., and drug control laws for the citizens of the United States.
When will the feckless claque of media supporters for this fool's mission learn that prohibition never works as long as willing markets exist for the goods?
He's only seventeen, and he's white, but people like Tom Spicer are the reason the Robert Mugabes of the world will never triumph. Oh, and tell me again the one about how people under twenty-one are all "children?"
The wave of American jingoism and intense security that has marked the first week of the Winter Olympics here has led to senior officials of the International Olympic Committee privately expressing concerns about whether the US can ever stage another Olympic event.
The wave of whoremongering, bribery solicitations, hypocricy and corruption that has marked the behavior of senior officials of the International Olympic Committe has led Americans to question whether they should ever allow that glob of buttslime to cross our borders again.
Editor -- Your interview with Laura Bush opens another window into the Bush White House ("First lady says Lindh a lesson for parents," Feb. 13). The first lady speaks of the parents of John Walker Lindh without any acknowledgment that their private e-mail to their son had been used by the U.S. attorney to justify a request to deny bail for their son. Nor does Laura Bush think that being placed in a shipping container jail cell while being denied a visit from his dad and his attorney, James Brosnahan, is worth comment. Young Lindh belongs in that undisclosed location that the Bush family reserves for those not as fortunate as, say, Kenneth Lay. While we were saluting the flag, Enron's Lay was still picking our pockets. President Bush assures us that Lay backed Ann Richards for governor of Texas when Bush first ran for the office. Mrs. Bush has a closer connection to un-American activities than she may have bargained for. I hope she provides us with her mother's IRS file so we can all sympathize with her loss on Enron stock. JOSEPH C. BOYLE Rohnert Park
Thanks, Joe Boyle, I almost forgot. In San Francisco, Laura Bush: Personification of evil.
Editor -- Thank you for printing the article, "Why does anti-establishment Berkeley love Clinton?" by Monica Friedlander (Open Forum, Feb. 11). It is heartening to know that the youth of the country have not been swayed by the right-wing control of major media, feeding the public half-truths and outright misinformation about the Republican agenda. It probably tells us, as well, that these young folks will be remembering how the Republicans "won" the last election for president, and will be strong advocates for seeing to it that election reform and campaign finance reform will be carried out and maintained. They inspire me to hope that democracy may win again one day. LUCILLE ARNESON San Francisco
I didn't know "democracy" was running. When can I vote?
Sort of amazing that it takes a French socialist to point out EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten's bone-deep hypocricy. Must be one of those shitty little Jewish conspiracies.
Interesting whiplasher here. Read the second paragraph of this story, and then compare it to one buried near the end:
The back-to-back visits by the two foreign ministers have kept alive perceptions of a divergence between the United States and Europe over how to handle the Middle East Crisis following a high-level EU meeting at the weekend in which it called for less stress on security and more on a political solution.
And...
His [British Foreign Minister Jack Straw's] views, in which he called for Arafat to clamp down on terrorism as a first step toward opening the way to renewed negotiations, appeared closer to the United States' position than that of some other European Union members.
In other words, Straw "kept alive the perceptions of a divergence between the US and Europe" by going to the Middle East and urging precisely the policy advocated by the United States.
What's next? Perhaps more evidence of a rift, consisting of Tony Blair assaulting George Bush with a big, sloppy tongue-kiss? Of course, Straw is British. The Germans arrived a day later:
However in a sign of how little diplomacy has helped so far, Fischer's visit coincided with a Palestinian suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv discotheque in which 21 people were killed.
Maybe the Germans have been reading the NYT for tips on how to handle murderous rogues and terrorists.
One of the most amazing thing about the "homeless" is their ability to utterly disappear for years on end, only to resurface in huge, expensive numbers within a few months of the election of any Republican president.
But those declarations will merely paper over a fundamental debate about the best way to deal with North Korea, one of the most isolated and militarized nations, and stanch the flow of its missile technology to other countries. Former American officials who have negotiated with North Korea have said that the administration's strategy is a virtual prescription for deadlock and that the North Koreans, while difficult negotiating partners, have kept to previous commitments.
In the interest of accuracy, we'll note that the mysterious "former American officials" are all former Clinton officials, none of whom have yet had anything good to say about President Bush's policies except those that dealt with Aghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the WTC terror attack. And with that bit of Timesian slipperiness out of the way, what about what the Clintonistas said about North Korea's hewing to previous agreements?
Well, let's just note that agreement on the issue is not universal. Last June, for instance, AP reported:
In announcing the policy review in March, Bush used the occasion to take some verbal shots at North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who he said was untrustworthy and did not live up to agreements.
In April 2001 – during the tense crisis in Sino-U.S. relations over the collision of a Chinese fighter (lost in the sea) with a U.S. reconnaissance plane (forced to land on Hainan Island and subsequently occupied by the Chinese) – Pyongyang officially stated that it will launch attacks on the U.S. (or at least against U.S. forces in South Korea and Japan) if America and Japan go ahead with plans to construct an East Asian theater missile defense (TMD) system or irritate North Korea in any other way.
It's getting to be quite sad. Howell Raines's new regime at NYT appears to be so knee-jerk in its opposition to anything the Bush administration attempts that it is in danger of becoming little more than a "smart tool" for Democratic Party interests. If this was the case with just any newspaper, it wouldn't matter so much. But such a huge proportion of the national media takes its cues from NYT that the end result is to convince at least half the country that Times-influenced media viewpoints have little or nothing to do with the real world or their lives in it.
During the last months of 2001, [...] evidently with Beijing's and Moscow's blessings – redoubled its efforts toward development of chemical and biological warfare. This was accompanied by a new "anti-imperialist" propaganda campaign in the Pyongyang media.
Without doubt, by the end of 2001, the Pyongyang regime has become a useful ally of both China and Russia in Northeast Asia, as well as a smart middleman in supplying very dangerous "asymmetric technologies" (chemical and biological weapon technologies)" and short-to-intermediate-range ballistic missiles to rogue countries of the Middle East.
In effect, North Korea has become a "department store" for these nations of concern and for terrorist movements interested in acquiring missile and chemical-biological warfare technologies.
North Korea's development of nuclear arms is also proceeding apace. Simultaneously, China and Russia are guaranteeing the safety of the Pyongyang regime against possible retaliatory strikes by U.S. or Japanese forces.
Clinton officials "believed they were in striking distance" of a deal to ban North Korean exports of missiles and missile technology. But they didn't get a deal, and the bottom line is that North Korea continues to functions as an international distributor of deadly weapons to rogue and terror-supporting regimes. It also maintains its million-man army as a threatening force on the border with South Korea, at the cost of starving its own people, and it continues to spout the most inflammatory and aggressive rhetoric possible.
Osama bin Laden said he would attack the United States, and he did. Saddam Hussein said he would kill Americans and he did, including trying to assassinate former US president George Bush. North Korea has threatened to attack the United States or US forces and -
And Howell Raines's NYT prefers the efforts of "former US officials" to those of the current administration, efforts that did nothing to prevent the current dangerous situation vis a vis North Korea.
I wonder. Does North Korea have any aspirin factories we can bomb, to teach them a lesson? Or will we follow the wishes of the Times, and let North Korea teach us a lesson? Perhaps a lesson that lands squarely in the middle of the NYT's newsroom?
Edmonds [a Cheyenne city prosecutor] goes on to say that ‘there are some obvious rules about the use of force. You cannot use deadly force to protect property. There is a perceived duty for a person to retreat from situations that might escalate into using deadly force. If you have the ability to retreat, use it.’
This raises all sorts of libertarian warning flags with me. The notion that one cannot protect one's property with deadly force, if necessary, essentially means that the entire concept of property ownership is a farce. It means that if a man with a knife demands my car, even though I am armed with a firearm, I must allow him to take my vehicle. Even worse is the enshrinement of state-ordered cowardice inherent in the notion that you have a "duty" to retreat from "situations that might escalate into using deadly force." This places the balance of social power entirely in the hands of any lawless desperado willing to threaten to use deadly force.
Let me say it again: any law that prohibits the use of whatever force is necessary to protect one's life, property, and the lives of others, renders any guarantees of their sanctity meaningless. One cannot have a right to life and at the same time have no right to defend it. One cannot have a right to own property, and at the same time have no right to defend it.
Until the cops can be at the scene of every potential crime in time to prevent it occurring, the idea that the sovereign citizen must yield the right of self defence to the state is nothing more than evil.
from power and ordered the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic and covert steps to achieve that goal...No military strike is imminent...
It makes parsing Gerhard Shroeder's recent statement even more difficult. Shroeder said that:
he has received assurances from President Bush that the United States has no intention of attacking Iraq, according to an interview with Schroeder published Sunday.
Now, this was in an AP report, and Steven Den Beste notes that Shroeder's words may have been taken out of context. It looks as if we may all have to dust off our old Cliinton-watching skills and start trying to figure out what the meaning of "attack" is.
The story goes on to "report" (quagmire! quagmire! quagmire!) that:
The course also is fraught with potential military difficulties, with most experts on Iraq warning that a campaign there would not be as swift or virtually free of American casualties as Afghanistan.
Maybe not, but given the dilapidated state of Saddam's military, it will probably be at least as swift and casualty-free as the last campaign against Iraq, which produced only 148 battle deaths.
In today's Fun Facts Department, we learn that smoking crack will not set off the smoke detectors in airplane bathrooms. Neither will same-sex boinking.
Editor -- Tom Carter (Letters, Feb. 8) has it backward. He says that because of out-of-control rents, high unemployment and the national recession, San Franciscans should be allowed to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge for free while visitors and commuters are charged $5. Nonsense. It's the visitors and commuters who should be allowed to drive across the bridge for free -- they're the ones who bring money and life to the city. Without them, San Francisco would shrivel up like a moldy prune. San Franciscans should be charged $5 -- make that $50 -- to exit the city by any route. They're already in paradise -- they don't need to go anywhere else. They need to remain in place to provide the services and amusements that attract visitors. Stay, San Franciscans, stay! DAN ROBERTSON Crockett
Shriveled prunes at the national zoo. That's us, all right.
Lord of the Rings picked up 13 nominations, including best picture, director, script, supporting actor, score, and visual effects. Only two other flicks in history have garnered more nominations (All About Eve, Titanic), and only six have received as many. I think this is the finest fantasy film ever made, and I am thrilled to see this further evidence of its success.
Editor -- Five bucks to cross the Golden Gate Bridge? What a bargain! When the bridge opened in 1937, the round-trip toll was nearly $15 in today's money. My fellow drivers, please stop bellowing. Cars are not people. They have no rights, constitutional or otherwise. Get ready to pay for the resources you use, the damage you cause to the environment and the costs of defending the global pipeline to your self- centered SUVs, mock-masculine muscle cars and gluttonous gas-guzzlers. RANDY ALFRED San Francisco
In your annoyingly affected alliteration, don't forget "authoritarian assholes" - those who want to force the rest of us into driving only the vehicles of which they approve.
UPDATE: And, of course, being a typical SF hysteric, Alfred is wrong. The inestimable Inflation Calculator says that the fifty cent bridge toll in 1937 correlates to $6.15 today.
UPDATE II: I fixed the link to the Inflation Calculator. It's a great little page. It lets you calculate U.S. inflation differentials for any two years between 1800 and 2001.
Bush vs. Daschle Americans, by a wide margin, trust President Bush more than Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to reform the Social Security system, according to a new poll. The nationwide survey of 1,200 adults, conducted by the Republican polling firm Fabrizio McLaughlin Associates for the 60 Plus Association, found that Mr. Bush outdistanced the South Dakota Democrat 51 percent to 34 percent on the Social Security issue. Fifteen percent said they trusted neither side more than the other and 1 percent said they trusted both equally.
And the [bad] news just keeps on coming. If you're a Democrat, that is.
The Clintons' White House gift scandal is set to reignite today as a congressional committee reveals new records showing dozens of presents that probers charge the couple concealed in their official disclosure report. A yearlong House investigation concludes the Clintons never revealed goodies like champagne, Ferragamo silk ties, hundreds of cigars, imported suits, Bulova and Citizen watches and Ming Dynasty jewelry given during their White House tenure.
This is a problem for the agenda-driven ideologues now attempting to turn the Enron collapse into a Bush-smearing political scandal via the tried and true means of an old fashioned political mud fight. The only problem is that the most enthusiastic mudslingers in the campaign - the elite media - have also spent a lot of time making sure former President Clinton remains in the limelight and on the road to his "rehabilitation."
So when the mud begins to fly toward the current occupant of the White House, there is simply way too much of the brown stuff still lying around that can be heaved in the opposite direction, at the Only Elected President Ever To Be Impeached. That the Big He remains so prominent, and hence so distracting to the goals of the Bush attackers, is only their fault. The situation needs a clever cliche, but nothing seems to fit. Sometimes a stogie is only a petard and, as everyMonica knows, it's the exploding cigars that make the deepest impression.
Kinsley, whose weekly column appears in The Washington Post, says he will write more pieces for Time to fulfill a contract but otherwise will remain immersed at Slate. He plans to develop a "corner" that will "let the reader play with the technology in a totally unprofessional, amateurish way."
You know what I think this means? Kinsley's starting a blog. But aren't some other bloggers already using the name "Corner?"
Broadcasters are lobbying hard to have the House strip from a campaign spending bill a requirement that they give politicians their lowest advertising rates.
Paid political ads produced about $770 million in revenues for television and radio stations in 2000. But legislation passed by the Senate last year would require that political candidates get the cheapest price charged any advertiser for a given time slot.
This is part of the annual Incumbent's Protection Racket (oops, sorry, I mean "Bill"). And the pols who cobbled this chunk of self-serve pork together are the same people naifs of a special dimness think are going to pass effective campaign finance reform laws.
This response to President George Bush's bombastic state of the union address did not come from "axis of evil" Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, but from former U.S. secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She is dead right.
This would carry a lot more weight with me if I could just get out of my head the picture of Albright wobbling and jiggling as she frantically rushed after Yassar Arafat to beg him to return to the bargaining table in Paris.
This is great fun. The culture of entitlement that the NYT has worked so hard and so long to cultivate in the United States now runs head-on into "Howlin'" Howell Raines's efforts to remake The Old Gray Dame.
AS A RESULT OF U.S. MILITARY OPERATIONS IN AFGHANISTAN AND ON-GOING INTERVIEWS OF DETAINEES IN GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA, INFORMATION HAS BECOME AVAILABLE REGARDING THREATS TO U.S. INTERESTS. RECENT INFORMATION INDICATES A PLANNED ATTACK MAY OCCUR IN THE UNITED STATES OR AGAINST U.S. INTERESTS IN THE COUNTRY OF YEMEN ON OR AROUND 02/12/02.
Pardon the shouting. It's the Feds, not me.
A few thoughts: evidently all that "torture" going on down in Gitmo is paying off. Also, once again, most of the suspects hail from Saudi Arabia. Good thing we need those guys so much. A few more like this, and somebody might accuse them of being part of the Axis of Evil. Finally, we probably won't catch any of these guys by shaking down little old grannies from Waukegan in airport security lines.
As a libertarian, I can barely describe how much more concerned I am about Rosie O'Donnell's positions on the right to keep and bear arms than I am on her positions in bed.
Ninety-four countries have now signed the optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits governments and rebel groups from deploying children under the age of 18 in any form of armed conflict. With 14 countries ratifying the treaty since it was adopted by the UN General Assembly in May 2000, the protocol is now no longer optional, but enforceable.
This will be interesting. The United States has signed, but not ratified, the optional protocol (May, 2000). Traditionally, the U.S. military has accepted enlistments from youths under the age of eighteen. Twelve fatal casualties in Vietnam were seventeen. According to the current U.S. Army recruiting site, seventeen year olds are still permitted to enlist.
I have a libertarian take on this, of course. The ongoing process of "childification," where ever-more mature humans are re-classified as "children," is both dishonest and silly. Some thirty year olds seem barely more than infants. Some fifteen year olds I'd entrust my life to. As for military service, a draft, no matter whether it is carried out by the United States or some Congolese warlord, is involuntary servitude - slavery - plain and simple. But the idea that a seventeen year old should not be allowed to make an informed and free decision to enlist in the military is ridiculous. Not only that, in the U.S. it may adversely impact on those who view military service as the most logical and appealing way to escape horrible lives, get an education, and improve their future.
I suppose we'll split the weiner on this, and continue to accept seventeen year old enlistees, while not allowing them to serve in whatever kinds of combat are forbidden by this protocol. And the warlords and rogue nations who wish to ignore it entirely, whether they've signed or not, will continue to do exactly that.
I wonder if this will change the age requirements for Palestinian street rioting...?
Gary Farber has a fine rant about some pathetically obvious dissembling from General Stufflebeam:
Asked about U.S. troops threatening to shoot an American reporter on the scene, Stufflebeem said he had no direct information about the confrontation but doubted that it took place. "To believe that a U.S. American serviceman would knowingly threaten, especially with deadly force, another American is hard for me to accept," he said.
It was bullshit like this that led to the Vietnam war briefings by MACV in Saigon being called "The Saigon Follies" by the press corp. When the military spokesperson tells you absurd lies, why should you believe anything else he tells you?
Gary's right. Why on earth would anybody be surprised that a bunch of U.S. Special Forces in an uncleared fire zone wouldn't threaten some stranger with deadly force? Actually, when you read the quote of the guy on the scene, he was told that the area hadn't been secured, and if he proceeded, he would be shot. It doesn't specify who would do the shooting, although we know for a fact that the Taliban has killed more reporters than the US military has. In any event, the WaPo reporter's cluelessness was exceeded only by Stufflebeam's shocked, I tell you, shocked attempt to deny anything like that could ever occur.
And the Karine A, which amounted to a brazen example of state-sponsored terror--a practice to which the president insists the United States will no longer turn a blind eye--sank it altogether.
This is the most important line in this entire TNR article. It encapsulates the disconnect between the Bush administration and the rest of the world. For decades, world governments have grown accustomed to assuming that any US position is couched in shades of gray, with plenty of wiggle room for later alteration, plausible deniability, or even withdrawal. The most difficult thing for these government now to parse about Bush position statements is that they mean what they say.
When Bush says that you are either with us or against us, it means that incidents like the Karine A place you in the "against us" camp. Most Americans have little trouble understanding this, but the Texas idea of a straight-talking, straight-shooting leader is nearly incomprehensible to the rest of the world, despite Bush's destruction of the Taliban, abandonment of Kyoto, withdrawal from the ABM treaty, and going ahead with building a strategic missile defense.
It will probably take the fall of Saddam Hussein and the deconstruction of the PLO (and death of Yassar Arafat) before it sinks in to certain capitals that "figuring out what the US really means" is a lot simpler than they assumed it was.
Russia's president Vladimir Putin has warned the US not to take unilateral military action against Iraq. Mr Putin told the Wall Street Journal that any use of force by the US against Iraq "should be justified" and have the backing of the international community.
Afghans tell of beatings after botched U.S. raid - Carlotta Gall, New York Times House to begin struggle over political soft money - Zachary Coile Lay to take 5th after panelists criticize cohort Specter of perjury by Skilling - New York Times Marin reeling over tot's death Father of 13 and 4 women accused of child neglect - Jim Doyle Protesters run rings around Salt Lake City Thousands clamor at gates of Olympics - Joe Garofoli S.F. vote appears flawed but legal Probe of 2000 election finds work was sloppy - Erin McCormick
To sum up the happy world of San Francisco journalism this morning: The evil of Ken Lay is exposed for only the three hundredth time so far this month, the protesters (of whatever, it doesn't matter) are winning, the US botched something again in Afghanistan, campaign finance reform is alive and well inside the House of Representatives (where it has been quietly beaten to death any number of times over the past decade), weird Marin County child-rearing tragedies make the news (what a surprise!), and San Francisco elections are only sloppy, never corrupt, no matter how many ballot boxes they find floating in the Bay after the votes are counted.
Editor -- Afghanistan is a country with little infrastructure and a crying need for reliable transportation. We have a surplus of mustangs and donkeys removed from the open range that their numbers were destroying. They are not being adopted at a sufficient rate. We could ship the animals to Afghanistan to provide dependable service transporting goods to remote villages that are not connected by reliable roads. This is a win-win situation. JAMES KEEFER San Francisco
I don't know about shipping horses to Afghanistan, but I'm all for the notion of shipping just as many donkeys over there as we possibly can. Do you think we could start with Tom Daschle, Barbara Lee, and the Big She?
We might need to codify a new poli-language to erase confusion over this, but for now I'll use "left" to describe the more doctrinaire, Marxy type of (generally) British lefties, and "liberal" to describe liberals: people who don't want to overthrow capitalism but would prefer to see more of it regulated or placed under government control.
I expect Perry de Havilland will note there are those who don't want to overthrow capitalism, don't want to see more of it regulated or under government control, yet who don't support the theocratic wing of any party, who abominate the zero tolerance, anti-sex, anti-human authoritarian bullshit emanating in various guises from paleocon and paleolib jackholes, and in general manage to piss off anybody who deals in traditional political/ideological labels like leftist, liberal, rightist, and conservative.
They call themselves libertarians.
I expect Perry to note this, but just in case, I'll note it first.
they chanted as they forced their way through the 10,000-strong crowd in the impoverished Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. It was the largest rally in six months held by the group that opposes Palestinian-Israeli peace deals and does not recognize the state of Israel. Hamas said in December it was freezing suicide attacks in Israel after Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, appealed for a ceasefire following a wave of suicide bombings. It rescinded the decision in January after it said an Israeli raid that killed four of its members had opened the door to a "fierce war" with Israel.
It's beginning to look as if the Palestinian movement is seeking death for its own sake, rather than as a method of advancing any particular agenda.
Islam is said to frown on suicide, yet we see entire communities, and even nations, whipped into a self-destructive frenzy. It's as if the most downtrodden of the Palestinian refugees have adopted the policy of Win or Die. There's only one problem with that: they can't win.
Here's where the real problem for the Donkeys lies:
On CNN's "Late Edition" on Feb. 3, Wolf Blitzer asked Miss Brazile to comment on the legacy of Mr. Reagan, widely credited with restoring America's economic health and helping end the Cold War. "Big spender, deficit spender. And that's what he'll be remembered as," Miss Brazile said.
Bitter Democratic ideologues, stung by the thrashing they were forced to endure under Bill Clinton, yet unable to blame the real cause (ie. Clinton himself) are reduced to stupidly offensive ploys such as this. Either Miss Brazile, who has some reputation for political astuteness, is badly misreading the mood of a country that has often turned to Republican presidents in time of war, and has done so again, or she actually believes this bit of bilge she's spouted. Either way, if this is going to be the approach the Democrats use in the fall campaigns, the catastrophe that awaits them will make them long for their "triumphs" during the Clinton era.
RICHARD BENNET at Omphalos and I are looking to find out if anybody is interested in a SF Bay Area blogfest along the lines of the debauch recently hosted at the Brian Linse mansion. If so, email me or Richard and let us know. If there's enough interest, we'll try to put something together. And yes, Linse, damn you, you are invited. Along with any of the rest of the grisly LA crew who'd like an excuse to visit the filthiest city in California.
'Halo' Cows Democrats WaPo offers a gloomy analysis of Democratic prospects for the upcoming elections. Despite Demo hopes, George Bush's approval ratings haven't lessened by much; worse, they seem to be rubbing off on Republican candidates in the "halo effect" cited in the article's hed.
Perhaps most alarming to Democrats, the poll found that Americans, by a 2 to 1 ratio, say they trust Bush more than they trust Democrats in Congress to deal with the country's biggest problems. Fifty percent of registered voters said they would vote for a Republican candidate for Congress in November, while 43 percent said they would vote for a Democrat.
Worse than this, though, is the plight of the party itself:
In particular, said Menendez, who serves as vice chairman of the House Democratic caucus, the poll suggests that candidates in marginal districts who are too closely identified with overarching Democratic principles -- such as on gun control -- could pay a price in November. "What it really does is confirm [former House speaker] Tip O'Neill's admonition that all politics is local," he said.
How bad must it be for a party to admit that its core values have become a political liability? Well, this bad:
And especially since the release of the president's budget last week, he and other Democratic leaders have been busily accusing Bush of undoing the fiscal progress of recent years with an unsustainable tax cut.
"You've got, really, the worst of all worlds," Gephardt said in an interview last week. "From a fiscal standpoint, you've got a Republican Party that's for the big tax cut, and for domestic and defense spending -- pretty full throttle. So you could face deficits that would make the '80s and '90s look tame."
In other words, the party of the Big Deficit, which has never quailed at "spending money on the people's needs," even when the checkbook was overdrawn, is now reduced to campaigning on one of their secular opponent's longtime issues: fiscal restraint.
Some have said that the world changed forever on September 11, 2001. This isn't true; the world was already changing even before then, as seventy years of Democratic political dominance faded and began to disappear. What 9/11 may have done is speed up that process. From the tone of this article, Democrats are finally beginning to understand how fast, and how deep, that change may be.
The candidate had never heard of actor Leonardo DiCaprio or television newscaster Stone Phillips — despite the enormous nationwide exposure of both, Bruni writes. Asked about HBO's smash hit "Sex and the City," Bush thought it was "an inquiry into his erotic and geographic whereabouts," Bruni writes. Bush, who gets generally positive treatment from Bruni in the book, nonetheless comes off in parts as a stranger to America outside his own upper-class WASP background. When reporters on the campaign trail used words like "vegan" or "yenta," Bush had no idea what they were talking about, Bruni writes.
President Bush's father was done in by a grossly distorted story about his supposed unfamiliarity with a grocery store scanner. Somehow, I don't think Bush being unfamiliar with Leonardo di Caprio, "Sex and the City," or vegans (I always thought they were from the star system of Vega - and meeting a few didn't change my mind much) is going to have a similar impact on 43's political potency.
Over at Amygdala, the estimable Gary Farber takes note of a NYT article depicting Somalia as a wasteland without government, and uses the opportunity to snicker that Somalia is now "the Libertarian paradise," where "At last, the heavy hand and boot of the State are lifted."
But what Gary misses is that there are many things in earth and under heaven (and even Somalia) that the NYT ignores, doesn't understand, or mis-reports.
Here is another view of Somalia, a very libertarian view, from the equally estimable people at liberalia.com. And from the same source, Michael Van Notten fleshes out the issue even further.
I am sure that objective readers will check out all sides of the issue, and then make up their own minds.
Editor -- Stephanie Salter is right on in her portrayal of the GOP's ability to market a mediocre product, George W. Bush. One of the founders of the Republican Party must have been P.T. Barnum with the idea that no one ever went broke overestimating the gullibility of the American public. In addition to being mediocre, Bush is extremely cunning and convinced of his divine right to be president. He reminds me of those strutting French kings of the 17th century. Bush regards the Constitution as a hindrance and would not hesitate to have himself declared president for life if he thought he could get away with it. JOSEPHINE E. ORTEZ Santa Rosa .
Bush is stupid but cunning, a French king who instead wants to be President for life. Barnum was right: no one ever did go broke overestimating the gullibility of the American public, especially in San Francisco. Here's a link to that Salter column, by the way.
![[Powered by
Blogger]](http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif){kind=small}
Click to Buy My Book