On today's program, unless things get too busy:

- The greatness of The Bloviator, a remarkable medical and public policy blog, and why in a sane world he'd be a hit king. I found a number of important and interesting stories on there that I never would have found on my own.
- More on barebacking
- The Monks bizarre attempt to sell out

In the meantime, here are two serious, somewhat contradictory thoughts about Iraq. I find myself nodding along with one, then nodding along with the other.

- from Jane Galt:

I came across this comment on Brink Lindsey's site, which I thought was interesting:

"I've always thought that the best argument for Saddam's fundamental irrationality is at the core of Brian's comment. If Saddam were a rational actor, and his goal was to get nuclear weapons, he would have allowed full, unfettered inspections and waited for the sanctions to be lifted. He would have then had many billions of dollars with which to buy WMDs or buy the means to develop them after the inspectors left."

This raises the question: why is Saddaam stonewalling? The commentator is completely right; it would have been smarter to bury the stuff.

I get two answers, neither of which I like: either Saddaam is close, or thinks he's close, to something very nasty -- something he thinks will force us to capitulate.

- from Josh Marshall:

But let me discuss with you for a moment what I find the most difficult about this debate. The more ardent supporters of regime change lie a lot. I really don't know how else to put it. I'm not talking about disagreements over interpretation. I mean people saying things they either know to be false or have no reason to believe are true. Perhaps the word 'lie' is a very slight exaggeration. Perhaps it's better to say they have a marked propensity to assert as fact points for which there is virtually or absolutely no evidence. How's that?

Holy macaroni, we're making anti-matter. I am more than a little stunned.

Word counts are the last refuge of the scoundrel, so please don't take this too seriously. But...

Rob Lyman, in my comments, brings up a broader point about disproportional liberal punishment of minority conservatives. I think he’s got a grain of truth in there- a few minority conservatives, notably Andrew Sullivan and Clarence Thomas, get a lot of attacks- but I basically disagree with his assesment. I’ll try to express myself better in the near future, but in the meantime, I found something fun.

He asks why black politicians who call Clarence Thomas "Uncle Tom" don't get criticized. “Uncle Tom” is a hurtful slur, and it seemed completely out of place in the mouths of statesmen. Well, I got a’Googling, and I found that:

(a) black politicians who call Clarence Thomas “Uncle Tom” are regularly, loudly criticized,
(b) these black politicians are never criticized by name. Because, as far as I can tell, they don’t exist.

I tried to find prominent blacks calling Thomas an Uncle Tom, and all I found was Spike Lee and two members of the Hawaii ACLU. I’m not going to pretend they don’t exist, but I couldn’t find them. It's always "many" blacks, or "some" black leaders, who called him an Uncle Tom. Sorry.

Anyway, just as a lark, I thought it would be fun to see if black liberals got "special treatment" from the conservative press. Here’s the problem- I don’t have NEXIS, and the only online conservative magazine with a good search function that tallied nicely that I could find was FrontPage Magazine. (I tried searching for "Jesse Jackson" at the National Review Online, paged through the 400th story, and gave up.) Let me start by stating that I know the problems with this- Frontpage Magazine is a pretty disreputable magazine, Horowitz is obsessed by reparations, and so on. So it’s just for fun.

Do black liberals get more attention from FrontPage than white liberals with much more power and influence? Judge for yourself:

"Jesse Jackson"- 100 mentions

"Al Gore"- 91 mentions

"Al Sharpton"- 62 hits
equals

"Hillary Clinton"- 40 hits plus
"Tom Daschle"- 23 hits

"NAACP"- 72 hits
equals

“ACLU”- 51 hits plus
“Planned Parenthood”- 8 hits plus
“Amnesty International”- 9 hits plus
“NEA”- 4 hits

"Cornel West"- 18 hits
"Johnnie Cochran"- 12 hits

"Dick Gephardt" plus "Richard Gephardt"- 16 hits

“Spike Lee”- 8 hits
“bell hooks”- 7 hits

“Terry McAuliffe”- 7 hits

Thoughts last night while watching the shitty movie Dr. T and the Women (contains spoilers, such as they are):

"If my wife was being treated by a psychiatrist who based her therapy on Greek mythology, I'd disable her (the psychiatrist) with a knee kick and get my wife the hell out of her. If I wanted that, I could save some money and hire a drifter to read Camille Paglia to her. Actually, Camille Paglia herself might be available."

(after the sixth scene of Dr. T's waiting room, where a dozen squabbling women are always there fighting to be seen) "Is this guy the only gynecologist in Dallas? If so, how does he manage to play golf every day?"

"Shelley Long- how hard is it to keep the same accent from scene to scene? It's your job! You don't have anything to do but show up, let people dress you, and talk, so fucking practice!"

"There's no talking in duck hunting, I'm pretty sure."

"This movie has multiple scenes of Liv Tyler and Kate Hudson making out, and it still sucks."

"This tornado blew him from Dallas to Mexico? Sorry, not nearly charming enough. Why not end the movie in Munchkintown?"

Ginger Stampley on the shallowness of the "Saddam's another Hitler" argument.

Andrew Edwards over at Sketch just posted a little musing about Andew Sullivan which pretty much hits all the right notes for me. He notes that Sullivan takes some of the most heated abuse that us lefties can dish out. Most of it is justified, in my opinion; as Max Sawicky notes, it makes sense to aim criticism at the most prominent targets. And, time after time, he so richly deserves it. But on one issue at least, it slips out of bounds.

I wrote this in his comments

I'm glad you brought up the "barebacking" story. That one always bothered me. I always felt that if conservatives tried to discredit a well-known gay liberal by revealing his sex life (Barney Frank, as a not-so-hypothetical example), good liberals would be absolutely furious. We would say that a person's private sex life has absolutely nothing to do with their politics. And we'd be right. There's no reason to abandon our principles to stick another microshiv into Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew, I finally put you in my blogroll. Don't know what took me so long.

I wish that we would leave the damn barebacking story alone. I've lived a pretty clean life, but if anyone ever tried to discredit me by spilling the details of my personal life, I would never forgive them. I can only imagine how hurtful that would be and how angry it would make me.

Anyway, Andrew (Edwards) then correctly notes that Sully's latest Salon column is truly, madly, deeply half-assed. It's 322 words of fury, compared to 303 words he wrote for free in the first paragraph of his blog today. It doesn't contain a single fact that Sully would have had to look up. It's a semi-OK blog piece; Eve Tushnet (for example) writes conservative posts for free that are 10 times better than this, five days a week. In a normal publication, Salon's editors (if they have any) would tell him to try again.

However, to be fair, the fault lies with Salon as well as Sully. If they translated a monkey's diaper in braille, they couldn't come up with something less insightful than this steaming pile of juvenilia, ""You really should buy a house. I mean it."

And the chilling....

"Part I." Ugh.

Paul Musgrave has a post on a story I hadn't really paid attention to: Gale Norton, the Secretary of the Interior has been held in contempt:

federal judge Tuesday held Interior Secretary Gale Norton in contempt for failing to heed his order to fix oversight problems with a trust handling hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties from Indian land.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth called the department's handling of the Indian money and the action of government attorneys in the case disgraceful, noting that he has the authority to take management of the funds away from the department.

Wow. I imagine that we'll hear a lot about this in the next few days. You know, with the liberal media and all.

(Sorry, cheap shot.)

Two sources (here, courtesy of Rob Lyman, and here) make it sound like inspections are not as unconditional as I had thought. Hmm.

"Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards." Sören Kierkegaard

Sissyphus Shrugged has a longer, better researched, more detailed take on the Bush administration removing scientific advisors who clash with the President's positions. Go read it.

What a wonderful world. Go to this Italian coffin maker's site and click on:

Filo oro
Stile impero
Articolo 109
Padre pio
Cristo Europa
Greca
Madonna

What kind of friggin' coffins do they sell in Italy? If this is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

A particularly good discussion of pharmaceutical prices can be found in the comments section over at Brad DeLong's site. I've been pretty down about blogging recently, and have actually considered pulling the plug on this site, but this kind of exchange illustrates some of the best things about the format. You can get a vigorous debate among people who actually know something about the subject, which is much more valuable than just reading the article alone.

Anyway, hie ye hence.

The American Prospect has a good article about conservative attacks on Howell Raines and the New York Times. The second half is better than the first, so I'm quoting that part:

It's tempting to ascribe the criticism to a combination of paranoia, self-pity and intellectual bankruptcy.

Boy is it ever.

But the real problem is structural. While a few conservative pundits -- Robert Novak, Fred Barnes, Paul Gigot -- got their start in daily journalism, most have spent the bulk of their careers in politics and political advocacy. Kristol was Dan Quayle's chief of staff. The National Review's Kate O'Beirne was a lobbyist for the Heritage Foundation. Krauthammer was a psychiatrist and then a speechwriter for Walter Mondale before joining The New Republic during the 1980s. And nearly anyone who ever set foot inside the White House under Ronald Reagan or the elder George Bush, it seems, now holds down a syndicated column, from Linda Chavez to Mona Charen to Oliver North.

For that matter, few conservative journalists have spent serious time in a newsroom. Most advance through a network of movement magazines, journals and think tanks: summers at the National Journalism Center, internships at the Heritage Foundation and articles in the National Review (followed, for the lucky ones, by a lucrative book deal with the Free Press and a cushy sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute). By contrast, a typical reporter starts on the metro desk, bounces around to a few domestic bureaus and may even spend time overseas before getting to cover the White House for a paper like the Times. Editors also come up through the reporting ranks. Raines earned his stripes at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before coming to the Times as chief of the Atlanta bureau in 1979.

That doesn't mean that the Times' critics are all mindless partisans. But most of them are divorced from the professional culture of journalism in general and large metropolitan newspapers in particular. Like most conservative activists, they tend to think of mainstream and establishment media organizations, such as the Times, as less professional and more nakedly partisan than they actually are.

...In 1988, for instance, editors (at the Washington Times) altered a story to suggest that presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis had visited a psychiatrist in the late 1970s, changing the quote of a Dukakis relative from "it is possible, but I doubt it" to "it is possible." Reporter Gene Grabowski promptly resigned. Quick: Name a reporter who's quit The New York Times because an editor slanted his or her stories. Ever heard of a Times staffer complaining about "Howellizing"?

UPDATE: Media Minded has a counter-argument. I used to write a lot about about media bias, but I ended up finding it too frustrating- there's just absolutely gobs of media out there, and it's just too easy to grab a few representative examples of whatever your angle is and call them "media bias." Even with conservatives who I think are amazingly clear thinkers, we'd just end up talking past each other. I doubt that we'll ever change one another's mind.

Just one thing: Media Minded thinks it's "arrogant" to note that most conservative critics of media bias aren't reporters. Well, if the charge is true (and no one seems to be denying it, although MM is a professional journalist), then it ain't arrogant, is it?

Dang, that's funny:

One day after President George W. Bush accused Saddam Hussein of buying high-strength aluminum tubes used in the making of nuclear weapons, the Iraqi strongman defended his purchase of the tubes, saying that they were for his “aluminum tube collection.”...

One page of the study guide made available to the media shows a diagram of what appears to be a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile but is actually a giant lipstick, commissioned by Saddam Hussein for a proposed Museum of Giant Lipsticks in Baghdad.

If you missed this article in the Washington Post, you missed a lot:

HHS Seeks Science Advice to Match Bush Views

The Bush administration has begun a broad restructuring of the scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy in areas such as patients' rights and public health, eliminating some committees that were coming to conclusions at odds with the president's views and in other cases replacing members with handpicked choices.

In the past few weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services has retired two expert committees before their work was complete. One had recommended that the Food and Drug Administration expand its regulation of the increasingly lucrative genetic testing industry, which has so far been free of such oversight. The other committee, which was rethinking federal protections for human research subjects, had drawn the ire of administration supporters on the religious right, according to government sources.

A third committee, which had been assessing the effects of environmental chemicals on human health, has been told that nearly all of its members will be replaced -- in several instances by people with links to the industries that make those chemicals. One new member is a California scientist who helped defend Pacific Gas and Electric Co. against the real-life Erin Brockovich.

It's long, and deserves your attention. Jebus, why do they even bother having scientific advisors if they've already made up their minds? Why not just auction off their scientific positions to the highest bidder?

So is Dr. Frank's Blogs of War dead or what? I've got a 40 full of malt liquor ready to pour on the ground in its honor, and it's getting warm.

I hate it when Jane Galt criticizes the Democrats and I have to agree with her. But she's right about Robert Torricelli (permalinks might be out):

At least with Clinton, they could argue (wrongly, I think, but no matter) that it had nothing to do with his job. This guy was taking bribes. And the Democratic Party is letting them run as their last great hope for control of the Senate. Are they nuts? Do they not realize what this says to independents -- who, incidentally, make up a majority of the voters in New Jersey? "We don't care what the hell they do when they're in office, just as long as we hold onto power."

The Democratic Party has gotten into the habit of relying too heavily on its base -- not caring, in effect, what image they project to large swathes of the country that reliably go Dem. This thing is incredibly short-sghted, and the Republicans would be insane to pass up the opportunity to take a few shots. The Republicans may be lucky that they do not inspire this kind of religious devotion. Their voters, when they get mad, stay home. And as a result, when their legislators got themselves into scandals, they didn't try to defend them -- they kicked them out, double quick. Which is going to give them the ammo they need to pound the Democrats into a pulp if the Torch gets re-elected.

She's right. Not only is the guy obviously unfit for office, he's bad for the Dems. If the Republicans re-elected a Senator who had been convicted of taking bribes, I'd expect James Carville to mention "Senator and convict Joe Jablooey" every time he opened his mouth. You can be damn sure that, if the Torch is re-elected, the Republicans will make him the honorary head of the Democratic Party. I sincerely hope that he loses.

You don't need me to tell you to read Paul Krugman. But just in case, go read Paul Krugman.

If you read this and want to say, "How can he worry about this sort of thing when there's a war on?" go right ahead. But if you do, think for half a second before criticizing Democrats for asking why the timing of Bush's Iraq initiative coincides so nicely with mid-term elections. Maybe it's because "from a marketing perspective, you don't introduce new products in August," as Andy Card said. Or maybe, it's so you can imply that your opponents are frivolous about national security when they try to discuss anything else before the election. It seems kind of obvious to me, but I'm biased.

A few days ago, I noted that I was among the lefties impressed by Bush's speech to the UN. I also wondered aloud how some people would take it if we actually got unfettered inspections, like Bush said he wanted.

It's too early to tell anything for sure, but it sure looks like I was a chump to wonder. There's no question that Iraq doesn't get to vote, right? No one thought they did. So why is that the point the administration chooses to emphasize? We've got Iraq against the wall, and Bush's hard line deserves credit for that. Iraq's letter should make it much easier, not harder, for us to win the approval of the Security Council. It sharply diminshed the downside of voting along with the US. If we actually wanted Iraqi cooperation with inspections, and we wanted to convince skeptical nations to back us on an inspections regime, why aren't we welcoming their letter? We could express skepticism, but wouldn't our message be, "We are pleased that, after a decade of gamesmanship and resistance to unconditional inspections, Iraq has expressed its willingness to cooperate with the 1991 UN resolution. Now that Iraq has expressed its willingness to cooperate with unconditional inspections, we encourage our partners in the UN to approve our request quickly."

On the other hand, what if we wanted the Security Council to vote against us, in order to provide a fig leaf for a unilateral invasion? It seems to me that we'd make a show of rejecting any sign that Iraq was willing to cooperate. Skeptical countries would percieve this as a reflection of the true US agenda, and reject our appeal. Then the Administration could turn around and says, "hey, we asked." US invades, Saddam unloads everything he has onto Israel, then dies in a bloody battle. It doesn't take a cheese-eating surrender monkey to consider this the worse resolution.

I'll be the first to admit that I want to see Bush fail on, say, keeping the tax cut permanent. But I want him to succeed in Iraq. When I get some time, I've got to read some conservative blogs today to see why this is all part of Bush's brilliant scheme, rather than an attempt to snatch diplomatic failure from the jaws of victory. If I find a bunch of posts about why inspections won't work, I'm going to have to stock up on iodine pills.

Not in the mood right now. Be back soon. Meanwhile, check out:

Uggabugga's flowchart about the potential good and bad consequences of an invasion on Iraq;

Atrios on whether Clinton used Tim McVeigh to smear the right, and attempts of some on the right to establish a connection between Arab terrorists and Democrats.