Our Leaders: The Boys who Cried Wolf

Really, they really seem to be stupid and/or desperate enough that they think busting these kind of threats, I dunno, proves something. I mean, really, the threats seem to be those who believe in good old fear and repressions, not these mooks....

Meet The JFK Informant

Terror scheme snitch dealt cocaine, plotted to kill rival druglord

JUNE 14--The government informant who played the central role in building the JFK airport terrorism case is a longtime New York City drug trafficker who began cooperating with federal investigators after NYPD detectives arrested him on a Bronx street and charged him with possession of about $2 million in cocaine, The Smoking Gun has learned.

Additionally, the informant, Stevie "Toro" Francis, was previously convicted on felony charges for his involvement with a violent drug gang, a role which included him attempting to murder the leader of a rival Brooklyn narcotics operation.

Earlier this month, when federal officials announced charges against four men for plotting to blow up gas lines at JFK, a paid "confidential source" was credited with infiltrating the terror cell and gathering critical information--via tape recordings, documents, videos, and photographs--on the alleged plot. A footnote in a criminal complaint notes that the source had two prior drug convictions and was, through his cooperation, seeking leniency in sentencing on the latter trafficking rap.

While investigators have offered no additional information on the source's identity, a TSG probe has confirmed that Francis, 36, is the informant who spent almost a year helping agents build the JFK case. Citing confidentially concerns, spokesmen for the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office declined comment on the government source and his prior criminal activity.

Along with recording dozens of meetings and phone calls in New York, Francis traveled several times to Guyana, where he spent a total of three months gathering evidence for the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Last month, days before arrests were made in the case, Francis flew to Trinidad in a failed bid to meet with a leader of Jamaat al Muslimeen, a Muslim terror group based in the southern Caribbean nation.

A review of court documents filed in Francis's last two criminal cases (one federal, one state) reveals that he has twice opted to snitch after being caught dealing large quantities of cocaine.

In March 1994, Francis was arrested by federal agents and charged with distributing "large quantities" of cocaine in West Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens. Prosecutors alleged that Francis was a member of a drug gang that trafficked crack cocaine and "engaged in violence, including murder, to intimidate and eliminate competing drug groups, and to enforce discipline among the organization's members." The group also distributed heroin under brand names like "Caution," "Predator," and "Undercover."

While accused of possessing "revolvers and semi-automatic pistols," Francis was not charged with a homicide (though it was not for a lack of trying on his part). According to a criminal information filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Francis and his cohorts attempted to murder Willie "Little Will" Mora, a notorious Brooklyn drug boss, in early 1994. Mora, who survived the hit attempt, headed a ruthless gang that dominated the crack trade in East New York, Brooklyn. He was later convicted of federal charges and sentenced to life in prison.

After his arrest, Francis filled out a financial affidavit in a bid to qualify for court-appointed counsel. He claimed to be jobless and described his sole income as a twice-monthly $264 unemployment check. He reported being married and listed three dependents: his mother, younger brother, and wife.

Francis was jailed following a detention hearing after a magistrate ruled that he was a flight risk due to the "severe penalty" he faced if convicted of racketeering and narcotics conspiracy counts. Also, Francis's "substantial" family ties to the Dominican Republic were cited in an order of detention (it is unclear whether he or his parents were born there). Francis was charged in the federal case under the name Steve Francis Taveras, though he is referred to as "Steve Francis" and "Stevie Francis" in other court documents. A charging document lists him as "a/k/a 'Toro.'"

In what would prove to be a template for his future work with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Francis--facing a possible lengthy prison stretch on the drug and RICO charges--cut a cooperation deal with federal investigators and pleaded to both felony counts. While the nature and extent of his government cooperation remains confidential, Francis benefited greatly from it when he was sentenced in 1996.

Though federal guidelines called for an "imprisonment range" of between 27 and 34 years, Francis was only hit with a seven-year sentence. In a court filing, Judge Loretta Preska reported that the greatly reduced punishment, known as a "downward departure," came following a prosecution motion citing Francis's "substantial assistance" to the government. Francis was also fined $100 and placed on five years probation upon his release from prison.

Francis eventually did about six years in custody and was released in April 2000, after serving the final six months of his term at a New York City halfway house.

Records indicate that Francis lived in Queens and upper Manhattan following his release. But it was in the Bronx where he ran into trouble in late-2002.

On November 2, Francis was arrested by detectives assigned to an NYPD Tactical Narcotics Team. He was nabbed carrying a Gap bag containing five kilogram packages of cocaine. A subsequent search of a Kingsbridge apartment connected to Francis turned up 44 more kilo-sized packages. When asked about his cocaine-filled satchel, Francis told one cop that he "just found the bag." At the time of his bust, a kilo of cocaine wholesaled for about $25,000. Since the street value was double that amount, the coke seized from Francis was worth around $2 million.

Indicted on four felony charges, Francis was jailed and his bail was set at $1 million.

He remained in custody, records show, for nearly a year, until mid-December 2003. It was then that Francis cut his second cooperation deal. Though that agreement and his guilty plea are not part of the public record, the criminal complaint in the JFK terror case notes that, "The Source was...convicted on drug trafficking charges in New York Supreme Court in 2003. His sentence in that case is pending as part of his cooperation agreement with the government."

On December 11, Francis's bail was slashed from $1 million to $50,000. He was released after his older brother Jan deposited $5000 with the court. As for the $45,000 balance, Jan; Francis's mother Kirsche; and a second woman signed affidavits pledging to cover the sum if Francis bolted. But the government's desire to spring Francis and put him to work was reflected by the fact that the bail package was only partially secured and the guarantors--a hospital clerk, a $15,000-a-year custodian, and a clothing store manager--were far from financially sound.

Since pleading guilty in state court, Francis's case has been continued 18 times over the past 3-1/2 years. The matter is next due to be called on August 13, when 1726 days will have passed since his indictment. As noted in the JFK criminal complaint, the unnamed government source eventually expects a "reduced sentence" in exchange for his most recent round of cooperation.

According to the JFK complaint, the government "has been working with the source since 2004." The document makes no mention of Francis's "substantial assistance" following his mid-90s plea to federal drug and racketeering counts. The complaint also fixes the start date of the alleged airport scheme as January 2006 and reports that the source first met with the plan's ringleader, Russell Defreitas, in July 2006. As for what Francis was doing for the government in 2004, 2005, and early-2006, that information will presumably surface at a future trial (ditto as to the extent of the "financial assistance" that investigators said they provided to the source).

Tracking Francis's whereabouts during that period is difficult, though New York City Board of Elections records show that he registered to vote in October 2004 from a small apartment building in East New York, Brooklyn, one of the blighted neighborhoods where his old drug gang peddled crack cocaine in tiny Ziploc bags.

Likely owing to a busy schedule of government informing, Francis has yet to find time to actually vote.

Link.

Read this and Weep....

Watergate's 35th Anniversary: Would That Story Have Been Broken Today?
Who knows, someone with a cell phone camera working in the parking garage might have snapped a photo of Woodward chatting with this unknown source. Or a blogger would have blown the whistle.

By Joe Strupp

NEW YORK (June 15, 2007) -- Sunday will be a memorable day for me, for two reasons. Yes, it is Fathers Day and a reminder of the joy my two children have brought to my life, not to mention some likely breakfast in bed.

But just as significant in my life, and that of many other reporters is that it's also the 35th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Even though I was no more than six years old at the time that the five burglars broke into the Democratic National Headquarters in that Washington hotel and office building, the impact it had on me was strong.

As I grew older and became almost obsessed with the break-in and subsequent investigations, trials, and finally resignation of Richard Nixon, I also marveled at the way two reporters from The Washington Post had broken the story of Nixon administration ties to the crime, and later his criminal cover-up. As interesting to me, and probably thousands of other young journalists, was the way Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and many others at the Post meticulously investigated the administrative crimes, using old-fashioned "shoe-leather" reporting, sources, and digging up information.

As any readers of "All The President's Men" know, it took Woodward and Bernstein, as well as others who broke elements of the story, hundreds of boring hours poring over documents, transcripts and finding often-reluctant interviewees to track down the stories. When the Pulitzer Prize went to the paper in 1973, it was not for any "gotcha" interviews, opinion-laden blog postings, or cable gasbag arguments over guilt, innocence or constitutional abuse.

These reporters used the journalistic basics that I, and all other seasoned reporters, would learn and hopefully practice during our careers. Taking time to find out what happened, why, and what it meant. They also did much of their reporting through anonymous sources, with little if any real threat of jail time or court subpoenas.

Yes, subpoenas were threatened and even served on the Post journalists, but no one ended up in a Judith Miller-style court appearance, or jail time, and likely would not have given the way reporters were treated then.

If Watergate had broken today, chances are someone would have posted a news story with inaccurate information too early, or the in-depth reporting needed might have been neglected in favor of quicker, more immediate, and more broad-interest scoops. That is not to say that the Post, still among the best daily papers and Web sites in the industry, would not have been on top of the story. But there is no doubt that online and immediacy demands of today could have impacted the careful, slow-building and meticulous coverage.

As for anonymous sourcing, it is clear the recent efforts to penalize confidential sources, and reporters who use them, may have an impact onreporting another Watergate today. Famed Deep Throat source W. Mark Felt, who helped guide Woodward during his parking garage meetings, may have felt more threatened with legal problems, and possibly jail, had he cooperated in today's climate -- as would Woodward and Bernstein.

Who knows, someone with a cell phone camera working in the parking garage might have snapped a photo of Woodward chatting with this unknown source. Or a blogger would have blown the whistle.

While it is important to remember the political tragedy and journalistic success that was Watergate, it is also sad to remember how much journalism has changed since then. Yes, the advent of online news and worldwide Web reach has helped newspapers, and most other media, tremendously by allowing daily papers to compete with other 24-hour news animals.

But it has also rushed much of the news process to the point where careful reviews and triple-checking of facts are often not done in time. During their award-winning reporting, much of it done over days and weeks, the Watergate reporters had their share of goofs and mistakes, but far fewer than the scoops and revelations that made such coverage valuable, and able to stand up to the scrutiny of those who regularly sought to criticize it.

I'm not saying all is lost in the realm of true investigative journalism. A look at the recent Pulitzer Prizes found a welcomed return, in many categories, to investigative packages and stories, with news microscopes focused on issues ranging from housing scandals in Miami to oceanic problems in the Pacific.

Still, the majority of today's newspaper reporting is having to be limited in some cases -- both due to staffing cuts and new 24/7 demands. The Watergate anniversary is a good reminder of the need for that vital part of newspapers, watchdog news, not to be forgotten.

Link.

An Expert of Security Expert who is Not a Mouthpiece for Our Leaders and their Enablers

Bruce Schneier:

Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot
The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.
Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots -- and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse -- is wrong.
The alleged plan, to blow up JFK's fuel tanks and a small segment of the 40-mile petroleum pipeline that supplies the airport, was ridiculous. The fuel tanks are thick-walled, making them hard to damage. The airport tanks are separated from the pipelines by cutoff valves, so even if a fire broke out at the tanks, it would not back up into the pipelines. And the pipeline couldn't blow up in any case, since there's no oxygen to aid combustion. Not that the terrorists ever got to the stage -- or demonstrated that they could get there -- where they actually obtained explosives. Or even a current map of the airport's infrastructure.
But read what Russell Defreitas, the lead terrorist, had to say: "Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow.... They love JFK -- he's like the man. If you hit that, the whole country will be in mourning. It's like you can kill the man twice."
If these are the terrorists we're fighting, we've got a pretty incompetent enemy.
You couldn't tell that from the press reports, though. "The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable," U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said at a news conference, calling it "one of the most chilling plots imaginable." Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) added, "It had the potential to be another 9/11."
These people are just as deluded as Defreitas.
The only voice of reason out there seemed to be New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said: "There are lots of threats to you in the world. There's the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can't sit there and worry about everything. Get a life.... You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist."
And he was widely excoriated for it.
This isn't the first time a bunch of incompetent terrorists with an infeasible plot have been painted by the media as poised to do all sorts of damage to America. In May we learned about a six-man plan to stage an attack on Fort Dix by getting in disguised as pizza deliverymen and shooting as many soldiers and Humvees as they could, then retreating without losses to fight again another day. Their plan, such as it was, went awry when they took a videotape of themselves at weapons practice to a store for duplication and transfer to DVD. The store clerk contacted the police, who in turn contacted the FBI. (Thank you to the video store clerk for not overreacting, and to the FBI agent for infiltrating the group.)

The "Miami 7," caught last year for plotting -- among other things -- to blow up the Sears Tower, were another incompetent group: no weapons, no bombs, no expertise, no money and no operational skill. And don't forget Iyman Faris, the Ohio trucker who was convicted in 2003 for the laughable plot to take out the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. At least he eventually decided that the plan was unlikely to succeed.
I don't think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker "terrorist." But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don't have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and -- regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue -- the media will aid you in terrorizing the entire population.
The most ridiculous JFK Airport-related story goes to the New York Daily News, with its interview with a waitress who served Defreitas salmon; the front-page headline blared, "Evil Ate at Table Eight."
Following one of these abortive terror misadventures, the administration invariably jumps on the news to trumpet whatever ineffective "security" measure they're trying to push, whether it be national ID cards, wholesale National Security Agency eavesdropping or massive data mining. Never mind that in all these cases, what caught the bad guys was old-fashioned police work -- the kind of thing you'd see in decades-old spy movies.
The administration repeatedly credited the apprehension of Faris to the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping programs, even though it's just not true. The 9/11 terrorists were no different; they succeeded partly because the FBI and CIA didn't follow the leads before the attacks.
Even the London liquid bombers were caught through traditional investigation and intelligence, but this doesn't stop Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff from using them to justify (.pdf) access to airline passenger data.
Of course, even incompetent terrorists can cause damage. This has been repeatedly proven in Israel, and if shoe-bomber Richard Reid had been just a little less stupid and ignited his shoes in the lavatory, he might have taken out an airplane.
So these people should be locked up ... assuming they are actually guilty, that is. Despite the initial press frenzies, the actual details of the cases frequently turn out to be far less damning. Too often it's unclear whether the defendants are actually guilty, or if the police created a crime where none existed before.
The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn't have ordinarily done. The Miami gang's Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases.
The rest of them stink of exaggeration. Jose Padilla was not actually prepared to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States, despite histrionic administration claims to the contrary. Now that the trial is proceeding, the best the government can charge him with is conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim, and it seems unlikely that the charges will stick. An alleged ringleader of the U.K. liquid bombers, Rashid Rauf, had charges of terrorism dropped for lack of evidence (of the 25 arrested, only 16 were charged). And now it seems like the JFK mastermind was more talk than action, too.
Remember the "Lackawanna Six," those terrorists from upstate New York who pleaded guilty in 2003 to "providing support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization"? They entered their plea because they were threatened with being removed from the legal system altogether. We have no idea if they were actually guilty, or of what.
Even under the best of circumstances, these are difficult prosecutions. Arresting people before they've carried out their plans means trying to prove intent, which rapidly slips into the province of thought crime. Regularly the prosecution uses obtuse religious literature in the defendants' homes to prove what they believe, and this can result in courtroom debates on Islamic theology. And then there's the issue of demonstrating a connection between a book on a shelf and an idea in the defendant's head, as if your reading of this article -- or purchasing of my book -- proves that you agree with everything I say. (The Atlantic recently published a fascinating article on this.)
I'll be the first to admit that I don't have all the facts in any of these cases. None of us do. So let's have some healthy skepticism. Skepticism when we read about these terrorist masterminds who were poised to kill thousands of people and do incalculable damage. Skepticism when we're told that their arrest proves that we need to give away our own freedoms and liberties. And skepticism that those arrested are even guilty in the first place.
There is a real threat of terrorism. And while I'm all in favor of the terrorists' continuing incompetence, I know that some will prove more capable. We need real security that doesn't require us to guess the tactic or the target: intelligence and investigation -- the very things that caught all these terrorist wannabes -- and emergency response. But the "war on terror" rhetoric is more politics than rationality. We shouldn't let the politics of fear make us less safe.

Leadership that Makes You Feel Safe

For instance, Barrett told us, Giuliani’s personal insistence that the city’s Emergency Operations Center be located in the World Trade Center’s Building 7 was “a disastrous decision with deadly consequences,” because once the building was damaged (it eventually collapsed), it “left no functioning command center” for emergency agencies to coordinate their work.

This decision was especially puzzling, said Barrett, because the World Trade Center (WTC) had already been the target of a 1993 terrorist attack. This was a key reason why top Giuliani officials, including his police chief and emergency management director, argued, against the mayor’s insistence, not to locate the headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
Ironically, the blunder that left the city without a unified command post and drove Giuliani into the city’s media-populated streets for a good part of the day was a major factor in cementing his image as the take-charge hero of September 11.

Failure of coordination

The loss of a fixed, unified command center was especially crucial, Barrett explained, because of other Giuliani administration failures: One, the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), an agency founded by Giuliani in 1996 to deal with crises demanding multi-agency coordination, utterly failed to coordinate fire, police and other emergency agencies on the day of the attacks.

On September 11, according to the 9/11 Commission, Giuliani’s OEM was not able to “overcome” a situation in which the FDNY and NYPD considered themselves “operationally autonomous.” The failure of the administration to bridge differences in the two often contentious departments, said the Commission, meant “the city’s police and fire rescue workers were not fully prepared to coordinate their work when terrorists struck the World Trade Center.”
But when Giuliani testified before the 9/11 Commission, he told the panel:

Part of my job description was to coordinate and supervise emergencies. The agencies that were the primary responders were all agencies that worked for the mayor. We had a format for how we did it, and part of that included my being there, so that I could coordinate and make sure everybody was working together.


The command situation was further compromised by the city administration’s failure to provide the firefighters with radios that worked properly and could communicate with police radios. The inadequate fire department radios were no secret; they had been publicly discussed for years, especially after they failed to perform properly during the 1993 WTC attack, shortly before Giuliani came into office. The 9/11 Commission noted this fact, while Barrett and Collins named names, fingering the Giuliani administration’s negligence of the long-standing security issue.

The faulty radios were so critical in 2001 because information available to police could not be communicated to firefighters. According to Barrett, unnecessary deaths resulted when firefighters were not privy to police warnings, based on information from police helicopters, that the towers were in danger of partial collapse. Unaware, firefighters continued their efforts in the towers instead of immediately evacuating. Similarly uninformed, according to Barrett, 911 emergency telephone operators were telling people in the towers to stay put, well after police warnings of possible collapse had been issued.

A fatal decision

But problems with the command center, the radios and interagency coordination might have been mitigated, said Barrett, but for another faulty Giuliani management decision on the day of the attacks.

With his command center out of commission, Giuliani took to the streets with top police commanders. At one point the mayor’s entourage traveled to a nearby location on West Street, near the Hudson River shore, where fire department brass had set up a temporary command post.

So far, so good: With police and fire department commanders together in one place, interagency communications problems could be managed. If the police and fire department brass had remained together, either on West Street or at another location, the tragedy might have been mitigated because, with police and fire department radios in the same place, the latest information could be relayed between the two departments.

But Giuliani made the fatal decision to go to another location, taking police brass with him and splitting the command centers. This left no way to communicate the latest information to the firefighters, who, making up the majority of the rescuers, would perish in far greater numbers than workers from other emergency agencies.

When Extra! asked why Barrett thought Newsweek and other reporters resisted citing his work, he was quick to say, “It’s not important whether they cite us,” pointing out “there are official reports calling the Giuliani myth into question.”

In addition to the 9/11 Commission report, citing administration failures from the incompetent OEM to the faulty fire department radios to the unwise decision to separate police and fire department commanders, Barrett said, “there are at least two other official reports available to reporters and the public.”

Barrett pointed to the McKinsey Report (2002), commissioned by the New York Fire Department to review the department’s response to the 9/11 attacks, and to a 2005 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The McKinsey Report was the first official inquiry to criticize Giuliani’s placing the emergency operations center at the troubled site that would become known as Ground Zero, and the failure of police and fire department command coordination.

NIST found that the collapse of WTC 7 likely originated on the building’s fifth floor, where the distribution system for diesel fuel reservoirs was housed. At least one of the fuel reservoirs had been built into WTC 7 to run Giuliani’s emergency command center, over the objections of fire department officials.

Link.

Duh

Can you find the absurdity in this headline? Read the first par., and it becomes obvious: 4 Sunni mosques get bombed. Why should the majority of Iraqis care? And aren't the Sunni "insurgents" active enough as it is? And does the headline writer have a clue what's going in Iraq, or the heads just shots in the dark?

Link.

Our Leaders' Love for American Democracy

Of course, when the worst president since, oh, I'd say, at least since Lincoln, was elected by only five voters (but they got to vote twice) with no respect for the system of law (even though they're judges*), what can one expect?

Are you saying that detaining people who are plucked off the battlefields is an assault on democracy? Are you kidding me? You're talking about the people who were responsible for supporting the Taliban, somehow detaining them is an assault on democracy?

Link.

Really, where is the shame, the outrage?

(*Of course, if you don't get the reference, you're really young, really decrepit, or just ast the wrong damn blog.)

He who Our Leaders Love

Link.

Actually, you could call him Our Beloved Leaders' Beloved Leader.

Amazing odd fact: he's a Muslim!

This is Real

I dunno, maybe it's me, but I dunno that I'm convinced that this is terribly accurate... I mean, Eve's face doesn't look, well, authentic... and this standing amongst the lily pads seems a little, well, strange.

Link and another link.

Idiocy of the Day

Does it matter who said this (as if you can't guess)?

I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us.
I will end illegal immigration, secure our borders, and identify every non-citizen in our nation.
I will restore fiscal discipline and cut wasteful Washington spending.
I will cut taxes and reform the tax code.
I will impose accountability on Washington.
I will lead America towards energy independence.
I will give Americans more control over, and access to, healthcare with affordable and portable free-market solutions.
I will increase adoptions, decrease abortions, and protect the quality of life for our children.
I will reform the legal system and appoint strict constructionist judges.
I will ensure that every community in America is prepared for terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
I will provide access to a quality education to every child in America by giving real school choice to parents.
I will expand America’s involvement in the global economy and strengthen our reputation around the world.

Civil Rights as Defined by Our Leaders

What the Justice Department fights for:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

¶Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.

¶Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration.

Natalie Neff on Internet Etiquette

Natalie is just about the only babe in all of North American auto-journalism. And she was apparently the target of gratuitous insults from a reader in response to which she felt a need to explain it all to us:

I felt compelled to share this e-mail with you to illustrate the simple point that an overreliance on technology can lead to a sort of mental laziness and, worse, the atrophy of some of our most basic skills. In our e-mailer’s case, I’m talking about decency.

We’ve all experienced the phenomenon, at some point been victims (and no doubt perpetrators) of the insulating effect that communication via QWERTY can have on our sense of common decency. We’ve all found insults fermenting in our mailboxes that no sober human being would dare unfurl to our faces, been emboldened to say normally frightful things thanks to the relative anonymity afforded by e-mail, where our basest thoughts may find easier expression in 10-point Times New Roman than through any deliberate articulation of the tongue.

Somehow, though, the insults hurt just as much, whether delivered in digital or analog.

P.S. I feel compelled to point out that however high she ranks as a babe and however much she knows her stuff (a lot, actually), she has been known to have her off days... well, actually, she once channeled Elizabeth Wurzel and her worst-ever piece for the New Yorker and wrote a piece that was, well, an auto wreck of an awful piece....

But on this she is of course dead on.

Examples of Perversity and Dishonesty of Our Leaders' Communications

Yeah, yeah, all pols lie -- politics is about lying and corruption, at a certain level -- but Our Leaders and their enablers take it all to an untenable extreme.

Take this TomDispatch quiz and see if you can guess which quotes are too wild, or not wild enough, for the battling bureaucrats of the Bush administration. Let's start with a warm-up round:

1. At his January confirmation hearings, General David Petraeus, readying himself to command the President's "troop surge" in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province, promised to offer Congress periodic reports on how the plan was proceeding. No dates were offered. Within months, however, this vague promise had morphed into a specific September report to Congress and has now become a focus of endless, near-obsessional media attention and questions.

Is this September report regularly referred to as:

A. A Disaster Report

B. A Regress Report

C. A Baghdad Report

D. A Progress Report

The answer, of course, is D. And now that "victory" -- a word the President once used 15 times in a single speech -- has left the administration's fighting language, think of "progress" as the second team of words. No matter how badly things are going, "progress" (or its lack) remains the frame of reference for U.S. officials -- and for reporters asking questions. Typically, in a May 31st press briefing, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, Petraeus's second-in-command in Baghdad, and the reporters questioning him, managed to use the word no less than 23 times. ("We've made some very clear progress.... Anbar's economic and political progress.... But progress has been made.... Every day we are making progress…")

Now, let's make the questions just a tad harder.

2. Spokesman for the American military command in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, was recently asked about "progress" in the "Baghdad security situation." He responded:

A. "Progress will not be like flipping a light switch -- it will be gradual, it will be nuanced, it will be subtle."

B. "Progress is going to seem like a balky jeep. It will stall, it will kick, but sooner or later it will lurch forward."

C. "Progress isn't like a faucet. You can't just turn it on and get hot water."

D. "Progress will not be like a cruise missile. You can't just fire and forget."

The answer is A -- and, by the way, General Bergner, the last one out of Baghdad, please turn off the lights. (Oh, sorry, we never got them on in the first place.)

Now, here's your next puzzler and it's you against the mob.

3. Another reporter with "progress" on the brain recently asked Secretary of Defense Robert Gates whether "the pace of progress [in Iraq] is sufficient or whether in fact it looks to you like the surge will have to last longer."

Gates responded with which of these images?

A. "I don't think that the goalpost has changed, really, at all."

B. "I think it's all still in the same ball park."

C. "There is a Baghdad clock and there is a Washington clock, and the people in Washington are also going to have to take into account the Washington clock.... Our military commanders should not have to worry about the Washington clock. That's for us in Washington to worry about."

If you guessed A, congratulations, you're right! Of course, if you guessed either B or C, you're still right. Gates used them all in the same press briefing on the same subject.

4. Actually, our Secretary of Defense seems to love sports imagery. Recently, explaining why a "long-term U.S. military presence" in the oil heartlands of the planet was crucial, Gates used which of the following sports analogies?

A. "It's important to remember that the September re-assessment is only the seventh-inning stretch, not the bottom of the ninth. Using the Korea model as a guide, we might even go into extra innings. We might be in Iraq until at least the bottom of the 15th."

B. "It's important to defend this country on the extremists' 10-yard line and not our 10-yard line"

C. "It's important for Team USA to win on the road in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and we can't allow the Bin Laden blitz to get into our backfield again."

D. "It's important for the insurgents to learn that we're the Harlem Globetrotters and they're the Washington Generals. I mean, of course they're not the literally the Washington Generals. My generals are the Washington generals, but also the Globetrotters. Well, you know what I mean."

By a process of elimination, you should have quickly reduced this foursome to a twosome. Neither baseball, nor basketball is smash-mouth enough for the Global Analogy-War against Terrorism and, in any case, for America's top officials, football has always been war (and vice-versa). So the answer is B.

5. And how about our military surge leader, General Petraeus, in Baghdad? He's been fretting about progress too. But what image did he reach for to make his point?

A. "We're in a horse race now. And our horse in Baghdad is simply slower than Washington's. We better figure out how to spike its oats fast."

B. "I learned at Princeton that there are many ways to measure progress. As you know you can actually progress backward, and backward progress is progress just the same. The important thing is to keep progressing, whether forward or backward, which we are doing, and in doing so we're showing the terrorists we're making progress and that, in itself, is progress."

C. "Clearly, we're in the pit and Washington's the pendulum and we better figure out how to climb out quick before the next IED goes off."

D. "We're racing against the clock, certainly. We're racing against the Washington clock, the London clock, a variety of other timepieces up there, and we've got to figure out how to speed up the Baghdad clock."

Since these turn out to be the months of onrushing clock analogies, if you guessed D, you're ticking right along. General Petraeus was evidently the first one to wind up that clock image and set the alarm. It now has all Washington on the clock.

6. U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, facing the news that, according to the Washington Post, "May was the third-deadliest month for American troops in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and the casualties reported over the past few days indicate that the insurgency shows no sign of abating," had what response?

A. "The road to ruin is paved with cement."

B. "When the tough get going, the going gets easier."

C. "This is going to get harder before it gets easier."

D. "This is going to get harder before it gets harder."

Given the history of the last four years in Iraq, the answer to this one, hands down, should be D. But reality and history are so overrated! If you guessed C, you were right on the mark. (By the way, few of the examples in this quiz are unique. For instance, just a couple of days after Garver made his comment, Deputy Director for Regional Operations, Joint Chiefs of Staff Brig. Gen. Perry Wiggins said of the surge at a Pentagon news briefing: "So, you know, it's going to get harder before we make it -- or it gets any easier.")

7. In that same May 31st press briefing, General Odierno (his official title is: Commander, Multinational Corps-Iraq) was asked the following question: "General, it's Lolita Baldor with the Associated Press. You started out talking about some of the progress but also suggesting that it may take 60 to 90 days before you can see what impact the surge is having. At that pace, do you think you will be able to make an assessment within that 60-day window or do you think it's going to take longer to assess whether or not the surge is having an impact?"

Odierno responded with which play analogy?

A. "It's kind of like a jungle gym. Lose your grip past the turning point and you're likely to fall and hit your head on the ground."

B. "It's kind of like a teeter-totter; you work your way up the teeter-totter, and when you go past the tipping point, it happens very quickly, and we've seen that out in Anbar."

C. "It's kind of like a pogo stick. What goes up must come down – and vice-versa. We've experienced this in Baghdad."

D. "It's kind of like a slinky. A surge begins slowly but as it walks downstairs sooner or later it just springs toward the bottom."

The correct answer is: B. It seems the official pre-September surge assessment is that we're on a Baghdad teeter-totter, though our guess is that neighborhood playgrounds in the Iraqi capital aren't much in use these days.

8. Okay, let's up the ante here with a two-part question. One aspect of the President's "surge plan" turns out to involve the hope that the enemy's counter-surge will smash right into a wall. Literally. The U.S. military has been making plans to build giant walls around whole troubled neighborhoods in the Iraqi capital. Think of giant, grey slabs of concrete going up around your neighborhood. What kind of place, according to the military, do you now live in?

A. A terrarium

B. A prison

C. A gated community

D. A strategic hamlet

If it were 40+ years ago and the setting were Vietnam, D would be the correct euphemism, but today the answer is C naturally. Just like in Southern California! And who wouldn't want to be part of such an obviously upscale living arrangement?

Of course, you can't account for the tastes of foreigners. Strangely enough, when the first wall started going up around the Sunni community of Adhamiyah, people objected vociferously, leaving surge types somewhat on the defensive. When pressed on the subject recently, how did Dr. David Kilcullen, an Australian counterterrorism expert whose current position is Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser to General Petraeus (and who also likes to term such walled-in, embattled communities "gated") sum up the ongoing project?

A. "It's something you do when a patient is bleeding to death. But you don't leave it there forever or it causes damage."

B. "Good fences make good neighbors."

C. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

D. "Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know what I was walling in and walling out."

Yes, indeed, the answer is A. Dr. Kilcullen likes to think of these walls as "tourniquets" applied to bleeding Iraq. And you guessed it, the other three lines come from Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall."

9. Here's another two-parter. On Friday, Secretary of Defense Gates announced that he was not nominating Marine General Peter Pace to a second term as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because he thought the congressional confirmation process would be "quite contentious" and possibly a "divisive ordeal." Instead, he picked Admiral Michael G. Mullen, whose record and views, he implied, would smooth the Congressional waters. What, then, has Adm. Mullen had to say about the President's Global War on Terror?

A. "I may be a Navy admiral, but I don't see us up to our eyeballs in millions of terrorists for a generation. I think this has all been overblown."

B. "Now is the time for sane policies that reflect a realistic assessment of the situation. With all due respect, I think we need a change of course and a fresh approach."

C. "Look, we can't go off half-cocked calling people ‘evil' and saying they hate us or they hate our freedom and democratic principles. Overblown rhetoric like that is unsophisticated, uninformed and won't do anything for us."

D. "The enemy now is basically evil and fundamentally hates everything we are -- the democratic principles for which we stand.... This war is going to go on for a long time. It's a generational war."

The answer is a hair-raising D.

Now for part 2: If you are one of the country's major newspapers -- yes, we're speaking of our hometown rag, the New York Times -- what do you label the admiral?

A. An Ideologue

B. An extremist

C. A pragmatist

D. A warmonger

It's C, naturally. (The paper's headline read: "Nominee for Joint Chiefs Is Called a Pragmatist.")

10. And how long will that "long war," which the admiral so likes to talk about, actually take? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice evidently glanced at her own curious version of a clock the other day, and then addressed this question at a meeting with the Associated Press editorial board. Which of the following did she say?

A. "And I think that what this President has done is in some ways comparable to beginning to set up the long struggle that we are going to have to resolve, particularly the problem of the growth of extremism in the Middle East, which was clearly there underneath the surface and exploded on September 11th so that we finally knew what the real problem was."

B. "Now, will we see the end of all of this? Maybe not. But when you're confronted with a fundamentally changed strategic set of circumstances, you can try to put band-aids on it or you can say we're going to have to deal with the root problems here and it may take a long time and it may take successive administrations to succeed."

C. "But we know what we have to put in place so that successive administrations can succeed, and you don't get there by covering the problems or trying to find a temporary solution to them that isn't worth the paper that it's written on."

D. "We're here at the beginning of a big historic transformation, and some of them may still work out on our watch and some of them may not. But now if you -- if you -- with all due respect, if you try to judge what you should do by today's headlines, you miss the fact that history's judgment is rarely the same as today's headlines."

If you guessed A, B, C, and D, all said practically in a single breath, you were 100% correct. It took Condi a bare few minutes with the AP editorial board to extend the last six years of mayhem and catastrophe another easy 12-20 years into the future ("successive administrations"). So it turns out that, while Secretary of Defense Gates and General Petraeus are looking at clocks whose second and minute hands are speeding along far too fast for their taste, the new head of the Joint Chiefs and our Secretary of State have timepieces whose minutes pass in weeks, hours in months, and days in years.

11. When discussing American efforts to arm Sunni groups who now claim they are willing to fight al-Qaeda, what did Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division, recently say?

A. "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but sometimes we renegotiate who we call terrorists."

B. "This isn't a black and white place. There are good guys and bad guys and there are groups in between."

C. "You see... in this war, things get confused out there--power, ideals, the old morality and practical military necessity."

D. "We've had good success in operations like this before. Look at Afghanistan in the 80s. We armed Sunnis to fight the Soviets and we ultimately won that one. Imagine what we can produce by getting behind Sunni fighters in Iraq today!"

If you thought you could imagine an Army general intoning answer C, there's a reason. The line comes from the fictional General Corman in the film Apocalypse Now. The real answer is B. One wonders, however, how such thinking fits with the strict dichotomy of good and evil proffered by the likes of Admiral Mullen and Vice President Dick Cheney who, as it happens, is the subject of our bonus challenge.

Bonus Challenge: The ever-stalwart Dick (in the throes of being) Cheney recently got up before the graduating class at West Point and said, in part:

D. "The terrorists know what they want and they will stop at nothing to get it.... Their ultimate goal is to establish a totalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital. They view the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again. And now they have chosen to make Iraq the central front in their war against civilization.... They are surging their capabilities, attacking Iraqi and American forces, and killing innocent civilians. America is fighting this enemy in Iraq because that is where they have gathered. We are there because, after 9/11, we decided to deny terrorists any safe haven."

Didn't he mean that, in Iraq, "we decided to deny terrorists any unsafe haven?" Anyway, yes, the answer is D. Now, it's up to you to create your own A, B, and C. Can you top Dick's "war against civilization"? Can you match him image for rabid image? Give it a shot.

After all, why should administration officials and military spokesmen be the only ones to run wild, guns cocked, in the fields of imagery, spraying everything in sight? Just remember though: When you're done, close the playground gate, shut down the ballpark, turn off the alarm on your clock, and turn out those lights. If you don't, I guarantee you, they won't.

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Our Leaders have Micro$oft's Back

The only reason would be the money.

In the most striking recent example of the policy shift, the top antitrust official at the Justice Department last month urged state prosecutors to reject a confidential antitrust complaint filed by Google that is tied to a consent decree that monitors Microsoft’s behavior. Google has accused Microsoft of designing its latest operating system, Vista, to discourage the use of Google’s desktop search program, lawyers involved in the case said.

The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm, Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department, he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.

Mr. Barnett’s memo dismissing Google’s claims, sent to state attorneys general around the nation, alarmed many of them, they and other lawyers from five states said. Some state officials said they believed that Google’s complaint had merit. They also said that they could not recall receiving a request by any head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division to drop any inquiry.

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Marching Ahead to Victory

Not only are we stuck in the Iraqi quagmire for no known, verified reason, we are working actively to prolong the mess:

Taking sides in the civil war wasn't a decision "for America" to make because the president had already decided to do so himself.

According to the New York Times, American commanders "earlier this year" began arming groups of Sunni insurgents who say they're willing to fight al-Qaida. In some cases, the Times says, the groups now getting American weapons and money are "suspected of involvement in past attacks on American troops or of having links to such groups."

They're also the same groups, of course, that are working to undermine the Iraqi government the Bush administration is trying to prop up.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters over the weekend that the United States wouldn't support any Sunni group that has attacked U.S. forces in the past. While that may be the case in Baghdad, the Times says the no-help-for-enemies ban appears to have been "set aside or loosely enforced in negotiations with the Sunni groups elsewhere, including Amiriya, where American units that have supported Sunni groups fighting to oust al-Qaida have told reporters they believe that the Sunni groups include insurgents who had fought the Americans."

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Way to go, Bushie! You are an exemplar of leadership....

A Couple of Exemplars

Of 201 House Republicans, at least six are known to have attracted the attention of federal investigators - and four are from California. Their woes come in the wake of the lurid corruption scandal that sent ex-GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of San Diego to prison last year for taking $2.4 million in bribes.

Although their situations have a few common threads, some analysts attribute the cluster of California cases to coincidence, plus the state's large size and district lines drawn to protect incumbents.

"When your seat is so safe that you're not concerned about perception, you become too wedded to Washington and you lose touch with your constituency, and you lose touch with your real purpose," said Karen Hanretty, a Republican strategist and former California Republican Party spokeswoman.

Rep. John Doolittle, a nine-term Northern California conservative under investigation in the influence-peddling scandal around jailed GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has his own theory about why federal corruption investigations seem to be concentrated in California.

"I think it's part of this manufactured culture of corruption that the Democrats have come up with and they decided to, given what's happened with Duke Cunningham, they decided that California Republicans on the Appropriations Committee would be a great place to start," said Doolittle, who plans to seek re-election next year.

The ethics cloud is discouraging the party faithful who've already watched the GOP shrink to minority status in California. And they add to the dilemmas of Republican strategists aiming to retake Congress next year following election losses blamed partly on GOP ethics problems.

"There is a sort of feeling among Republican activists who work hard to elect Republicans of, 'What the heck is going on here?'" said Los Angeles GOP analyst Allan Hoffenblum.

Republican Rep. Richard Pombo was chairman of the House Resources Committee when he lost in a GOP-leaning Central California district last November amid questions about his ties to Abramoff.

That reduced the number of Republicans in the nation's largest congressional delegation to 19, the lowest since their numbers shrank from 24 once district lines were redrawn after the 2000 census.

There are 33 Democrats from California, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, and none are known to be facing active FBI scrutiny. A 34th California Democratic seat is vacant after the cancer death in April of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald.

The GOP hopes to take back Pombo's seat next year. The districts of the four incumbents with ethics issues are heavily Republican, and will probably stay in GOP hands.

But their problems make them less valuable allies for Republican presidential candidates looking to compete in California's primary, newly advanced to February. And the ethics clouds discourage a GOP base already chafing at moderate Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's constant compromises with Democrats.

"This is presenting a huge distraction from the debate over ideas that really needs to happen in terms of who's going to control Congress," said Jon Fleischman, a GOP activist in Orange County. "It creates a degree of cynicism that is certainly real."

Besides Doolittle, California Republicans with ethics problems are:

_Rep. Jerry Lewis, now in his 15th term and chairman of the Appropriations Committee last year when federal prosecutors in Los Angeles began investigating his ties to a lobbyist with clients in his district.

_Rep. Gary Miller, in his fifth term, who's drawn scrutiny over a tax deferral strategy he used in a profitable real estate sale to a Southern California town outside his district.

_Rep. Ken Calvert, in his eighth term, who denies any conflict over pushing federal funding for a planned freeway interchange 16 miles from property he sold at a profit. The FBI pulled Calvert's financial disclosure forms a year ago, but he says there's no evidence he's under active investigation.

The four deny wrongdoing, and it's not clear that Miller, Calvert or Lewis are in immediate legal or political jeopardy. Not so with Doolittle, who barely won re-election last year in one of the most heavily Republican districts in California.

Many local officials still publicly back him, but some Republicans in Doolittle's district are starting to say they can't risk having him as their nominee.

"The fact of the matter is John Doolittle will be defeated by a Democratic candidate in an overwhelmingly Republican district because of the ethical morass of his own creation," said Steve Schmidt, a former White House adviser who backs a potential primary challenge by Eric Egland, a former Doolittle supporter.

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Tell me that these People Really aren't F^cking Nuts

Ahh, a blast from the past....

It all started, apparently, with this photo of several "a-list" liberal bloggers. It seems that conservative Ann Althouse took issue with Feministing Jessica Valenti's breasts ... and that nutter Reynolds and other buttheads and beavises got off on how Jessica gets off having breasts.
Says Althouse from a very high horse:
Making this colloquy into this new blog post, I actually click over to Jessica's blog, and what the hell? The banner displays silhouettes of women with big breasts (the kind that Thelma and Louise get pissed off at when they're seen on truck mudflaps). She's got an ad in the sidebar for one of her own products, which is a tank top with the same breasty silhouette, stretched over the breasts of a model. And one of the top posts is a big closeup on breasts.
Lovely insight there, Ann. Did they ban the concept of irony from your university?
Sooooo... apparently, Jessica writes one of those blogs that are all about using breasts for extra attention. Then, when she goes to meet Clinton, she wears a tight knit top that draws attention to her breasts and stands right in front of him and positions herself to make her breasts as obvious as possible?
The sexual hang-ups apparent in right-wing Clinton obsession are well known by now, so this boob-phobic bombast should be expected, I suppose. Even the juvenile Beavis and Butthead-worthy sentiments in the comments threads trod the well-worn ground of little green-with-envy right-wing bloggers.
But really, Ann, Glenn and you other dittoheads seemingly driven by nether puckering over other people's bodies and sexuality, this is 2006. It's been 23 years since Madonna danced around in lace singing "Lucky Star" on MTV. It should not be a big shocker to consider that women are entitled to their sexuality.
But of course, that's the "problem," isn't it? Women claiming independence from patriarchal claims on their sexuality? That's why all this fuss over Plan B, sex education, the cervical cancer vaccine, reproductive rights and the ERA, right? Women (and our breasts) should know our place, right?
Guys love breasts. I think Jessica knows that quite well. And I think for all her gasping outrage, she's thoroughly pleased to get this attention.
And that somehow seems to be wrong, according to Althouse. Women must not be sexual. That is wrong. That is dangerous. That threatens the self-control of men. It threatens men's control of women.
Women can only be free of they self-abnegate their sexuality, according to our good professor. The straw-feminist must be pilloried! Break out the burqas!
Jessica responds:
You know, I was psyched to be invited to this lunch and was feeling pretty honored. But then things like this remind me that no matter what I do or accomplish, because I'm a young woman all I'm good for is fodder for tacky intern jokes and comments that I don't "represent feminist values" because of the way I posed in a picture.
What's worse is that this comes from other women, other progressives, and other supposed feminists. How are we supposed to move forward as a movement if we're busy bashing each other with this ridiculousness?
For more on Althouse's boob obsession:

Echidne:
Anyway, about breasts. My feminist view on them is a very simple one: they are the property of the person who has them on her chest, having breasts does not preclude having brains and having breasts is perfectly acceptable in the public sphere. And women are not responsible for controlling the reactions of some men to the presence of breasts, women don't have to don burqas for the sake of these men or to bind their breasts, either....
...Sadly, the pragmatic approach often boils down to choosing the least unpleasant of the available options and the Democratic party is still the better choice for feminists, especially now that the Republicans have handed over all posts having to do with women's rights to their Taliban section.
zuzu at Feministe:
Althouse wasn’t the only one trying to put Jessica in her place; as I also mentioned, there were any number of commenters across the progressive blogosphere that made comments about Jessica’s fuckability. They didn’t know who she was, or why she was there, but they sure as hell felt free to speculate that it had something to do with sex.
Even those defending Jessica have often focused on the appropriateness of her posture, her pose, her clothing and her smile, as if those were really the issues. They’re not. The issue is that Jessica was invited to that lunch because of her accomplishments and her intelligence, but people like the commenters discussing her fuckability and Althouse criticizing her for having breasts are reminding her that no matter how much she’s accomplished in her life, no matter how smart she is, she doesn’t really belong in that group.
In other words, they smacked her down for being so uppity as to think that she had the right to be there.
(She also calls out some pertinent questions about the (lack of) racial diversity at this lunch in Harlem. Liza Sabater wonders, too. So does Elayne Riggs. Pam Spaulding has a thoughtful post on the dynamics and demands of blogging politics, and how that can shake out in the A, "B, C, D lists of Blogistan.")
Jill at Feministe:
Ann then accuses Jessica of not being a “real” feminist (compared, apparently, to… Ann…), and tells her that she’s misappropriated the word feminism and has done nothing for the movement....
I know [Jessica]'s inspired many more than just me. And talking about her breasts all the live-long day won’t change the fact that she is an amazing, brilliant, good human being who I’m sure will shape the world in more positive ways than Ann Althouse could ever aspire to.
What Jessica did wrong was show up at a political event in a female body. End of story. Ann, you should be ashamed.
Stone Court's Fred Vincy:
Who Killed Feminism?
Ann Althouse solves the mystery.
Last week, it was Ann Bartow and Belle Lettre, for not joining in the hilarity of David Lat's "hottest ERISA lawyer contest" and pointing out that being featured against one's will on a prominent website as a "hottie" might not be the best thing for a lawyer's career or psyche. ("I wonder if Belle has considered whether this grim, censorious, humorless -- nay, humor-phobic -- attitude helps women. I know you want to be taken seriously, but being so intent on being taken seriously is one of the main things that make people want to mock you. And not just you, but feminism.")
This week, it's Jessica Valenti for daring to stand up straight when she met with President Clinton.
Althouse seems to think feminism would be thriving, if only we didn't have all those feminists....
egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women wonders:
Would Althouse really be happy if Jessica were to bind her breasts, don a mumu, and cast her humbled gaze toward the floor?

Link.

No sense, no shame, and Big Media gives them a scintilla of credibility....

A Momentary Lapse: Chris Matthews is Right about Something

Of course, problem is he's dissing our next President....

I agree with what Fareed Zakaria wrote in “Newsweek” this week, which is terrorism isn‘t explosions and death, terrorism is when you change your society because of those explosions and you become fearful to the point where you shut out immigration, you shut out student exchanges, you shut people out of buildings, you begin to act in an almost fascist manner because you‘re afraid of what might happen to you. That‘s when terrorism becomes real and frighteningly successful. That‘s what I believe, and that‘s why I question the way Giuliani has raised this issue. He raises it as a specter. In a weird way, he helps the bad guys.

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Memorial Day 2007; Conclusion

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Scary Krugman: We are Doomed!

In Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan's birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the "gaffe of the night"?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven't changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies - for example, when he declared of his tax cut that "the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder." That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates' acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes - failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush's dishonesty. And that's how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam "had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction." He dismissed this as an "unreasonable hypothetical."

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney's remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday's debate. But it wasn't.

There wasn't anything comparable to Mr. Romney's rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, "we're all talking pretty much about the same things." While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she's received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they "came across."

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites - including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we're safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense - he didn't - but because he sounded tough saying things like, "It's unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror." (Why?)

Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts - not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.

For if there's one thing I hope we've learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it's that it matters who becomes president - and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush's tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don't know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.

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Right Wing Principles: Tort Reform Stops with My Accident

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Actually, he seems to be, well, what he more or less always was: A hypocrite and an idiot:

Judge Bork has been a leading advocate of restricting plaintiffs' ability to recover through tort law. In a 2002 article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy--the official journal of the Federalist Society--Bork argued that frivolous claims and excessive punitive damage awards have caused the Constitution to evolve into a document which would allow Congress to enact tort reforms that would have been unconstitutional at the framing:

State tort law today is different in kind from the state tort law known to the generation of the Framers. The present tort system poses dangers to interstate commerce not unlike those faced under the Articles of Confederation. Even if Congress would not, in 1789, have had the power to displace state tort law, the nature of the problem has changed so dramatically as to bring the problem within the scope of the power granted to Congress. Accordingly, proposals, such as placing limits or caps on punitive damages, or eliminating joint or strict liability, which may once have been clearly understood as beyond Congress's power, may now be constitutionally appropriate.

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Bork's quote just makes no sense.

Tort reform is needed because the system of law as a civilized means of recourse has encouraged pressure for a federal solution to state laws? The only way to that is for federal law to pre-empt a lot of state laws, the laws (I think) he's complaining about.

Including an old guy falling down a short flight of stairs.

Well once a dishonest, unprincipled scumbag, always a dishonest, unprincipled scumbag....

What Our National Security Relies on

Private contractors who do not answer to us:

The families of four American security contractors who were burned, beaten, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and their decapitated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River on March 31, 2004, are reaching out to the American public to help protect themselves against the very company their loved ones were serving when killed, Blackwater Security Consulting. After Blackwater lost a series of appeals all the away to the U.S. Supreme Court, Blackwater has now changed its tactics and is suing the dead men's estates for $10 million to silence the families and keep them out of court.

Following these gruesome deaths which were broadcast on worldwide television, the surviving family members looked to Blackwater for answers as to how and why their loved ones died. Blackwater not only refused to give the grieving families any information, but also callously stated that they would need to sue Blackwater to get it. Left with no alternative, in January 2005, the families filed suit against Blackwater, which is owned by the wealthy and politically-connected Erik Prince.

Blackwater quickly adapted its battlefield tactics to the courtroom. It initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.

After filing its suit against the dead men's estates, Blackwater demanded that its claim and the families' existing lawsuit be handled in a private arbitration. By suing the families in arbitration, Blackwater has attempted to move the examination of their wrongful conduct outside of the eye of the public and away from a jury. This comes at the same time when Congress is investigating Blackwater.

Over 300 contractors have been killed in Iraq with very little inquiry into their deaths. The families claim that Blackwater is attempting to cover up its incompetence, its cutting of corners in favor of higher profits, and its over billing to the government. Due to lack of accountability and oversight, Blackwater's private army has been able to obtain huge profits from the government, utilizing contacts established through Erik Prince's relationships with high-ranking government officials such as Cofer Black and Joseph Schmitz.

In addition to assembling its litigation troops, Blackwater also stonewalled the families concerning any information about how the men were killed. Over the past two and a half years, Blackwater has not responded to a single question or produced a single document. When the families' attorneys, Callahan & Blaine, obtained a Court Order to take the deposition of a former Blackwater employee with critical information about the incident, Blackwater quickly re-hired him and sent him out of the country. When the witness returned to the United States more than a year later, the families obtained another Court Order for his deposition. Blackwater again prevented them from taking his deposition by seeking the assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office to block the deposition under the guise that he possibly possessed national secrets. Following an investigation, the U.S. Army reported that the witness had no secret information and that it had no objection to the deposition.

Blackwater has now lifted this atrocity to a whole new level by going on the offensive and suing the families for $10 million. The families now find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun as Blackwater, armed with a war chest and politically-connected attorneys, is aggressively litigating against them. Blackwater has also threatened to hold the administrator of the estates personally liable to scare him into abandoning his position, and has threatened the families' attorneys as well.

The families are simply without the financial wherewithal to defend against Blackwater. By filing suit, Blackwater is trying to wipe out the families' ability to discover the truth about Blackwater's involvement in the deaths of these four Americans and to silence them from any public comment. In February, the families testified before Congress.

However, Blackwater's lawsuit now seeks to gag the family members from even speaking about the incident or about Blackwater's involvement in the deaths. This is a direct attack to their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

"I initially took this case because it was the right thing to do in helping the families find closure by discovering the events surrounding their loved ones deaths, " said Daniel J. Callahan, attorney for the families. "I have found the evidence concerning Blackwater's involvement in the deaths to be overwhelming and appalling. Even more disturbing though is the callous nature in which Blackwater has not only concealed the truth, but also outright sued to force the families to stop pursuing the case and to silence them." Blackwater has spent millions of dollars and hired at least five different law firms to fight the families, rather than meeting and addressing what should be Blackwater's top priority -- the safety and well being of the mothers, wives, and children left behind. Blackwater has said that it will not pay one red cent to assist or console the surviving families, but instead has counter sued for $10 million.

Without help, Blackwater will succeed in avoiding scrutiny for its conduct, escaping accountability for its actions, and silencing the families of the four Americans killed in Fallujah. A defense fund has been established by which the public is able to donate money to assist the families with litigation costs and expenses.

Donations can be sent to the estates' trust account, payable to "C&B ITF Blackwater Victims Defense Fund," c/o Callahan & Blaine, 3 Hutton Centre Drive, Ninth Floor, Santa Ana, California 92707. Donations may also be made securely online through PayPal by going to blackwatervictims.com. All donations will be kept confidential and anonymous.

This article is by the lawyers representing the families of four American contractors who worked for Blackwater and were killed in Fallujah.

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The World that's Coming; Big Media Continues its Decline

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The Idiocy of Our Leaders' Enablers and Supporters

There are a lot of reasons to be unhappy with George W. Bush -- we can think of 3,503 of them right off the bat -- and we're not the only ones who think so. As the Evans-Novak Political Report puts it, "It is hard to exaggerate the extent of Republican discontent with the president."
Some of it's about Iraq, or at least the political drain it has become for his party. Some of it's about the president's unwillingness to dump Alberto Gonzales, an attorney general the conservatives never much trusted in the first place. Some of it's about the president's endorsement of an immigration reform plan that has a lot of Republicans up in arms.

But what really gets in the craw of the GOP? If former Bush speechwriter and American Enterprise Institute fellow David Frum is to be believed, it's the president's failure -- so far -- to pardon Scooter Libby. "I don't understand it," Frum tells the New York Times. "A lot of people in the conservative world are weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness here."

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Questions to Ponder

The anti-missile system planned for Eastern Europe: Really, what rogue states exactly can reach that part of the world is the system designed to defenda against? North Korea? Pakistan? Iran? But, really, not Russia?

Next:

Let's you're an Iraqi person on the street. And the West -- well, the U.S. and Britain, really, and the U.N. to a far lesser extent -- hammered you for ten years or so, including sanctions and the odd gratuitous bombing of Bagdhad. And then, for no good reason, you're invaded mostly by those two then occupied, with such state as you had destroyed. How would that make you feel when you saw soldiers from those two countries? How happy are you to be occupied? Even when you'd see soldiers from those two countries protecting you (after destroying schools and hospitals and cities and killing or causing or enabling the deaths of at least tens, if not hundreds of thousands)?

Where I Go when I Need Inspiration

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Mitt Knows -- Not

Willful ignorance is S.O.P. for the GOP candidates. This guy is a complete joke, or worse.

Mitt Romney, in the Republican presidential candidates debate last night, said that the reason we went to war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein would not let weapons inspectors in.

That's right up there with Gerald Ford's gaffe, saying that "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe."

Romney's statement is manifestly not true. It is obviously not true. Did Hans Blix not exist?

It is true that the Iraqi regime was, by nature and practice, opaque. But it is also true that the inspectors got in, got access everywhere they asked to go, and that they found virtually nothing. It is also true that they wanted to continue their inspections until they could shine a light on any remaining gray areas and say with more absolute assurance, as was discovered after the invasion, that there were no weapons of mass destruction or any active programs to make any. It is also true that when the inspectors couldn't find weapons, that Colin Powell changed the rules and said it was not enough, that Saddam had to prove that they had all been destroyed. Then George Bush changed them again and said the only way to avoid war was for Saddam to abdicate, and gave him 48 hours to get out of town.

It is not only true that the inspectors got in, it is also a matter of record that it was the United States that demanded that the inspectors leave.

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Flash: Contrary to the Rightist Noise Machine, the American Legal Justice System Actually Works

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Reason for Hope for Success in Iraq

Not this:

Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, picked by President Bush as his White House war adviser, said Wednesday he had been skeptical of Bush's decision to send thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq.

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The government shows no will -- well, I'm sure the Iraqi pols' concerns are more making out well for their respective backers than peace and stability for the nation (as it were) as a whole (ditto). And seeing foreigners policing them is one big plus for the Iraqis (or "the occupied") -- not.

But Our Beloved Leader, dumb and ignorant, with some sort od demented hard-on for Saddam, has always followed his nutjob "advisors" rather than let facts and reality sway him. And he has neither the balls nor the intelligence (no pun intended) to change policy now.

The New Chairman of the Arkansas Speaks his Mind, Shows his Genius

“That is between the president and Congress, and I am just going to let them hash it out and work it out,” Milligan said. “I just think that is something for probably smarter people than me to figure out. It is a tough situation either way, but something definitely needs to be done.”

He said he’s “150 percent” behind Bush on the war in Iraq.

“At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001 ], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country,” Milligan said.

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Rudy: A Real American Hero -- According to an Expert: Himself

Critics charge that Rudy's failure to resolve the feuding between the city's police and firefighters prior to the attack led to untold numbers of deaths, the most tragic example being the inability of firemen to hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been "designed to work independently, not together," and that greater coordination would have spared many lives.

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Rudy giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

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In his years as mayor -- and his subsequent career as a lobbyist -- Rudy jumped into bed with anyone who could afford a rubber. Saudi Arabia, Rupert Murdoch, tobacco interests, pharmaceutical companies, private prisons, Bechtel, ChevronTexaco -- Giuliani took money from them all. You could change Rudy's mind literally in the time it took to write a check. A former prosecutor, Giuliani used to call drug dealers "murderers." But as a lobbyist he agreed to represent Seisint, a security firm run by former cocaine smuggler Hank Asher. "I have a great admiration for what he's doing," Rudy gushed after taking $2 million of Asher's money.

As mayor, Rudy had a history of asking financially interested parties to help shape important government policies. At one point, he allowed a deputy mayor who was on the payroll of Major League Baseball to work on deals for the Yankees and Mets; at another point he commissioned a $600,000 report on privatizing JFK and LaGuardia from a consultant with ties to the British Airport Authority, Rudy's handpicked choice to manage the airports.

And let's not forget Bernie Kerik, Rudy's very own hairy-assed Sancho Panza, who was nixed as director of Homeland Security after investigators uncovered a gift he received from a construction firm with alleged mob ties that wanted to do business with Giuliani's administration. It is a testament to the monstrous breadth of Rudy's chutzpah that he used his post-9/11 celebrity to push his personal bagman for a post that milks the world's hugest security-contracts tit -- at the very moment when he himself was creating a security-services company.

Then there's 9/11. Like Bush's, Rudy's career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you'd want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He's traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the "WTC cough." This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy's 9/11 hero image -- the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city's Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.

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Although respiratory-mask use was mandatory, the city allowed a macho culture to develop on the site: Even the mayor himself showed up without a mask. By October, it was estimated, masks were being worn on site as little as twenty-nine percent of the time. Rudy proclaimed that there were "no significant problems" with the air at the World Trade Center. But there was something wrong with the air: It was one of the most dangerous toxic-waste sites in human history, full of everything from benzene to asbestos and PCBs to dioxin (the active ingredient in Agent Orange). Since the cleanup ended, police and firefighters have reported a host of serious illnesses -- respiratory ailments like sarcoidosis; leukemia and lymphoma and other cancers; and immune-system problems.

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Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows -- but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning.

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The Mystery Continues: Why are We in Iraq?

Not for the oil after all. Maybe just imperial ambition fueled by a hard-on for Saddam? This administration is that stupid and crazy what with, amongst other failings, no significant leadership at the top.

Or maybe there was no substantive, national security-based reason?

Another Outstanding Appointment by Our America-Loving Leaders

A Surgeon General who does not believe in science.

And worse.

Way to go, Bushie!

Another Grossly and Baselessly Over-hyped "Threat"

Idiots bullshitting themselves.

Unlike the 9/11 terrorists caught preparing in significant and substantive ways.

The Truth about Us

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Comic Strip of the Day (Cont'd)

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