Uggabugga has a great list, called "All Together Now", of conservative critics of the NYTimes poll that showed that more people are concerned about the economy than the war.

Demosthenes addresses their concerns rather well.

I agree with Brian Linse about Carter's Nobel Peace Prize.

ANBD congratulates President Carter on this honor. He was perhaps not the best American president, but is, surely, a great man of peace.

Thanks, Brian.

THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR ALL AUDIENCES

In a world

where trouble can strike at any moment

and danger can be your only friend

One man fights back the only way he knows how-

By drinking a homemade solution of colloidal silver

This fall, comedy has a new face

in

Even Libertarians Get the Blues

Buy the soundtack on Poor Man Records. (click this link; you'll be glad you did)

Charles Kuffner is urging us to support Ron Kirk for Senate in Texas. He's got some great information and a lot of links. Thanks, Charles; I'll make a donation.

So you probably know that a Republican candidate in Montana, Mike Taylor, has stepped down. Taylor blames an ad purchased by the Montana Democratic Party, which attacks him for running a hair design school that defrauded the U.S. Department of Education and the Colorado Student Loan Program. The ad shows an old clip of Taylor in a full "Saturday Night Fever" lesiure suit, talking and demonstrating makeup application on another man. Taylor says that this ad, with its image of him as a hairdresser/ beautician, is appealing to homophobia, and that it destroyed his campaign.

Josh Marshall has posted the ad itself, so you can judge for yourself. (Side note: I know this isn't the issue, but the Billings-Gazette article is awfully slanted. It inaccurately describes the ad, doesn't quote anyone who isn't attacking the ad, and buries the substance of the ad ("Taylor defrauded student loan programs") in the last paragaph.)

Here's what Republicans don't want you to think about:

- Mike Taylor was going to lose, and everyone knew it. He was out of money and way behind in the polls. The idea that "the ad has destroyed the campaign," as his campaign manager implied, is so blazingly stupid that it could melt steel.

- If he hadn't resigned, he would have been just another quickly forgotten Republican loss. Instead, he saw an opportunity to blame his loss on the nefarious actions of hypocritical, gay-bashing Democrats. Instead of fading away, he went down in a blaze of glory, and his story has lit up the Right. He's going to be a cause celebre for the Right for years. This poster at Free Republic says it for me:

Publicity stunt. Taylor has received more free publicity than he could have ever hoped for, taken the heat off of the actual charge, and demonized Cleland. When you don't have cash for ads, free publicity is your best recourse, and he was presented with a golden opportunity.

It reminds me of what David Brock did when he was a Republican activist. Around the time that someone wrote a column about him that said he was anti-woman. He took the opportunity to announce he was gay, say that "anti-woman" was a well-known code word for "gay", and accused the author of the column of violating his privacy and being a hypocritical left-wing homophobe. The guy who wrote the "anti-woman" column never knew what hit him.

- Needless to say, the ad was not remotely about Taylor's sexual orientation. It was about Taylor's fraud as the head of a beauty school. It showed Taylor himself, running that beauty school, looking like Disco Stu. That is, it showed him looking ridiculous. This happens every day, in every race.

- I could easily imagine what would happen if the situations were reversed.

- Andrew Sullivan would spend a week outraged at the Democrats, who were perpetuating the outdated stereotype that men who cut hair must be gay.
- The cast of FOX News would spend the week screaming, "Is this what the Democrats think of their base- that they hate gays so much that the mere sight of a man with scissors would make them stay home on election day? Where do Democrats get their hair cut? I mean, looking at some of these WTO demostrators, you can believe that they cut their own hair, but...."
- Jonah Goldberg would write a piece in which the cast of "Barbershop" mince around.
- Mickey Kaus would write, "Let me get this straight. The Democratic candidate, who is an ex-hairdresser, is being accused of being an ex-hairdresser? And this scurrilous charge has ruined his campaign? Am I missing something?"
- The right would insist that now that the Democratic candidate had resigned, the Republican candidate had to run unopposed. "Fool me once..."

Here's what Democrats don't want you to think about:

- The opportunity for Taylor to pull this stunt exists for one reason: because the Montana Democratic party got cocky in a blowout race and put out a stupid, offensive ad that handed him that opportunity. They've got no one to blame but themselves.

Guys: you want to tell people that Taylor defrauded the student loan program? Great! You want to show him looking like Superfly? Hilarious! You want to show him massaging a guy's temples and putting on makeup? And then repeat it several times? And then bat your eyes and pretend you didn't intend any sort of innuendo? Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. They knew what they were doing, and they should be ashamed.

- This was at least as bad as putting a subliminal "RATS" in a campaign ad. It was at least as bad as Jesse Helms' ad where the white hands crushed a piece of paper that turns into a black head.

- If the situations were reversed, the howl from liberals would be tremendous. I know I'd howl. This ad would be cited thousands of times, every time we wanted to talk about the homophobia in the Republican party.


Is there any wonder that people hate politics?

We're going to war. There's not much point in having doubts now, not that there ever was. I hope that we achieve our goals quickly and leave the region better off, with a reasonable facimile of liberal civil society. Nothing will make me happier than looking back at this time next year and wondering what I was so worried about. Here's hoping.

Friends,

I'm making my Amazon wish list a little early this year, and I'm asking for help. Specifically, I would like people to recommend novels that they've really loved in my comments section. I'm hip-deep in non-fiction, and it's been too long since I've been blown away by a novel.

I was going to list some books that I've really adored, to give you some idea of my taste, but I got too self-conscious. So I'll just list them in the comments; feel free to overlook them.

UPDATE: This has got to be one of the best comment threads I've ever had. Thanks, folks; keep 'em coming!

CalPundit writes an absolutely hilarious parody of fisking. If you find the average "fisk" as unreadable as I do, you'll love it.

Two excellent posts:

- Charles Kuffner relates the story of how one of Houston's civic leaders met the upcoming budget crunch: He made shit up.

When Municipal Courts Director Barbara Sudhoff turned in her 2003 revenue predictions to the city this spring, she estimated the courts would produce about $43 million. But with the flick of a pen, [Finance and Administration Department director Phil] Scheps increased that estimate to $48 million, and thus was born a deficit.

You'd never guess that Enron came from Houston, would you?

- If you only read one Daily Howler this month, make it this one. He actually calls David Broder a whore.

Broder—playing shrink, as fools run to do—offers a ludicrous judgment. The facts that Dems don’t all agree shows that they “carry the scars” of Nam. By contrast, the fact that Republicans have all “fallen into line” somehow shows that—well, what does it show? In Broder’s view, the fact that Dems don’t hold one view calls for psychiatric explanation. The fact that Republicans all share a view is subject to no such deconstruction.

Incredible, isn’t it? To Broder, it’s strange when people don’t agree on how to deal with a difficult, dangerous situation. “By contrast,” when a party’s members all “fall into line,” that seems to show inner health.

If you were amazed at the Larry Miller story from the Weekly Standard that the Buzzcocks were booed off the stage after shouting anti-Bush slogans, wonder no more. It didn't happen.

Giving credit where credit is due, I first heard about it from Damian Penny, who heard it from Best of the Web. Points for correcting an apparently honest mistake quickly.

UPDATE: Apparently, the story was substantially correct, but the band was wrong; it was Blink-182. I'll have to look at the latest Rolling Stone to see what the story is. Via Instapundit.

If you're a regular blog reader, you've probably heard some of us pointing out that Saudi Arabia is bad, bad, bad. Uggabugga points out something that I didn't know.

Someone made M.C. Escher's endlessly ascending staircase out of Legos. Via Pigs and Fishes.

This is pretty awesome: 30 Reasons Why Eminem is Bad for Music.

Just two examples:

(after explaining that Eminem has named his penis "Haley")

3. Get the man a therapist part 2...

The "Haley" references include this bizarre and deeply disturbing threat toward his mother:

"Ma.... Haley's getting so big now, you should see her, she's beautiful!
But you'll never see her, she wont even be at your funeral!"

....

27. Isn't it obvious?

In his hit Mongrels, Eminem states:

Mongrels and gays
Come face to Face
Don't try to mess with the master race.

See anything wrong with those lyrics? That's right; they're stolen word-for-word from the hit Unwhite Holocaust by Simon and Garfunkel.

H-Town Blogs was mentioned on MSNBC's Weblog Central! Word!

(Thanks to Larry for pointing that out.)

Via the Bloviator:

Oregon is voting on a single-payer system for all residents. This article is unusually good; it's long and presents both sides of the argument in more than reasonable detail.

One of my first serious posts was about single-payer health care systems. I've always intended to write more about it, but never got around to it. Interesting story.

Three new-to-me blogs worth checking out:

-- The Lincoln Plawg, an intercontinenal blog on politics and law in the UK and US. Intelligent, unusal perspective. For example, this post about the comical unpreparedness of the British Armed Forces is the kind of thing I used to giggle at when I lived in the UK. The story cites:

helicopters failed to perform as expected against the rigours of desert life - whilst self-propelled guns failed to discharge.

In the face of desert conditions, soldiers' boots fell apart and heavy lifting vehicles were beset by technological problems.

The problems affecting the Clansman radio system were so great that the [NAO] concludes that it will be "incapable'' of operating in a real conflict.

Whilst the Challenger II main battle tank "worked well", it required substantially more air filters, road wheels and track pads than planned to keep it operational.

Troops manning the tanks discovered that the fine dust clogged up the air filters - resulting in them grinding to a halt in just four hours.

My favorite story (I can't find a link) was about a series of British bomber planes which were expensively updated in the late 90s. After the updates, they discoverd that the new equipment made it impossible for the bay doors to open; the planes could no longer drop bombs. It's not so funny nowadays, of course.

-- The Road to Surfdom: This blog has become unexpectedly dramatic, as the author and his child are currently in Maryland, in the epicenter of the shooting spree. But usually, he's a lighthearted scamp with an unusually well-written lefty blog.

This post is good all the way through, but the beginning made my day.

You know, I can kinda handle the fact that a government is not always in a position to provide every last bit of evidence that it has about security matters, that some information is sensitive and that it needs to be used with discretion. Of course, most governments these days work on the basis that something is considered secret until someone wants to see it, placing the presumption on secrecy rather than openness. This is especially true of the Bush Administration which is as committed to transparent government as I am to wallpapering my bedroom with Rush Limbaugh centrefolds.

-- If you can't enjoy the image created by the title tea bag blogspot, the terrorists have won.

CalPundit has got a great post detailing just how much better the economy has run since 1948 under Democratic presidents than under Republican ones. The years with Democratic presidents are better on inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth.

Idea for a new bumper sticker:

GREEDY PEOPLE VOTE DEMOCRAT

Do warbloggers idolize Oliver North? There's a little fracas in the blogosphere over an offhand line by Max Sawicky to that effect. Dr. Weevil has gone and checked and the links that Max provided, and showed, to my satisfaction, warbloggers do not idolize Oliver North. It seems that a fair number of bloggers cite him uncritically, but actual praise for him is pretty thin. So, bad Max.

But, of course, that's not the end of the story. It's a shame that the question has been defined this way, because Max was on to a reasonably important point:

Hey, right-wingers! All of you! Your president, vice-president, and a motley gaggle of associates caved to terrorism, tried to buy off terrorists, gave arms to terrorists, committed bushels of felonies, bungled the investigation of wrong-doing, and pardoned themselves! They should have been roasted on a spit but they got off scot-free! These are your guys! Your heroes! They're still in power, and your slavish devotion to them has never ebbed! Fact-check that!

J.C. on a pogo stick, I'm glad somebody said it. If you want to see a left-winger lose his shit, try to explain to us why "the flag was falling" during Zippergate, but Iran-Contra was no biggie. Explain why the Marc Rich pardon is a subversion of democracy while the Bush I pardons of key Iran-Contra figures were not worthy of comment. I cannot tell you what a joke Rich-rage looks like to people like me who were vaguely paying attention in the early 90's.

Oliver North is a traitor and a felon. After being convicted of selling arms for hostages, obstructing justice, and illegally accepting a $16,000 home security system from a defense contractors (oh yeah, I remember), Oliver North should have faded away. (What did he think happens when you give terrorists access to prizes for kidnapping Americans? Didn't he understand incentives?)

Instead, Oliver North is a famous millionaire. He won the Republican nomination in an unsuccessful run for Virginia's Senator. (Kind of puts Torricelli into perspective, doesn't it?) And he was able to raise $21 million along the way. He had a best-selling book and a series of columns, radio shows, and speaking tours. You can read his latest column at TownHall.com. (His latest column, "The Clinton Legacy Lives," was apparently ghostwritten by either R. Robot or Neal Pollack.)

Is it unfair to point out that the people who bestowed this cornucopia of good fortune on North are... um... not liberals? Let's make the important point that not all conservatives support Oliver North. Bob Dole, for example, apparently thought he was an embarassment. But he's got quite a fan club, and they've made him a rich man. They may not be bloggers, but some of them are even more important:

* Sen. Orrin Hatch introduced him at his tenth anniversary party for his testimony before Congress, giving him and other Republicans credit for the fall of Communism.

* Senator Jesse Helms praised Oliver North as "a genuine American hero" at the same party.

* "The Boland Amendment, which was passed by the liberals in Congress, was just another obstacle and obstruction to the fight against the communists," Representative Dan Burton said at the anniversary celebration. "Ollie North found innovative ways to help, and I congratulate him for that."

* "After Iran/Contra figure Oliver North lied to Congress, (Henry) Hyde leaped to his defense, cautioning against 'sermoniz[ing] about how terrible lying is, when a political principle is at stake; it just ... '" (Et tu, Henry?)

* "What did Trent Lott have to say about the possibility of the man who lied to senators becoming one of their number? This: 'I'm going to support Ollie any way he will allow me to, and I cannot wait till I see the expression on the faces in Washington when North walks down the aisle and is sworn in next January.'"

* Phil Gramm proclaimed himself "in full support of Ollie North."

* Oklahoma's Don Nickels decried the "quite zealous" prosecution of North... and said "I'm supporting Oliver North. I think he would do well here."

Matthew Engel urges the removal of "Hitler" and "Nazi" from contemporary political arguments. Hallelujah, man, hallelujah.

Somebody better tell Senator Charles Grassley (R- Iowa):

"In an election year, too many candidates still like to divide the American electorate, and they do that in the demagogic way of pitting the rich against everyone else. I am sure voters will get their fill of statistics claiming that the Bush tax cut hands out 40 percent of the benefit to the top 1 percent of the taxpayers. This is not merely misleading, it is outright false. Some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. That was how Adolf Hitler got to the top."

So I picked up Lenin's Tomb again last night, after putting it down for a while. And it reminded me of a quick anecdote:

In junior high, my English class read Animal Farm by George Orwell. At the time, throughout the whole segment, we were taught that the book was an allegory for the rise of Adolf Hitler. Not Stalin- Hitler. I didn't learn the truth for years, and I'm sure there are still people from my school who still believe it was about Hitler.

What the fuck was that?

Re: who trashes their opponents in nastier terms, the left or the right:

--- Interesting thoughts from Eve Tushnet (look for "Smothered by Marshmallows"):

But one of the reasons this debate feels both futile and bassackwards, I think, is that we should try to form our political stances in such a way that we could take a stand even if the most public adherents of that stand are lying jerks. Otherwise we're a) ignoring the non-lying-jerk people, who seem like the ones who should get more of our attention!, and b) abdicating our responsibility to judge the issues--the message, not just the messenger.

She goes on to say that the liberal language that really bothers her is the "Smothered by Marshmallows" approach:

""I'm a liberal because I care!" "I'm a liberal because I think about the poor!" The Yale College Democrats at one point posted recruiting signs with their name and the slogan, "We're the good guys." Frankly, I would rather they'd just posted, "Republicans are fetid hateweasels!"--it would be less smarmy."

--- Jeff Cooper has his long-promised post on civility. More specifically, it's about the assumption that he sees in some hawks that people with doubts about the war on Iraq cannot be thinking reasonably; they must be disingenuous, attention-seeking, or hate America:

I wish that Mr. Aubrey, and others like him, would acknowledge the possibility of error, or at least the possibility that reasonable people might have honest disagreements. In my civil procedure class, I teach about a procedural device called summary judgment. When, after discovery, a party believes that its case is far stronger than the other party's case, the party will ask the court to enter a summary judgment, which the court will do if, on review of all the evidence, it is convinced that no reasonable jury could possibly find for the opposing party. In making this decision, the judge doesn't simply decide how the judge would decide the case if she were a juror. Rather, to enter a summary judgment, the judge has to be convinced that even if a jury decided to give the opposing party every reasonable benefit of the doubt, it still could not possibly find for that party. The judge, in other words, has to recognize and take seriously the possibility that, even though she is inclined to view the case in a particular way, other reasonable people, reviewing the same evidence, might come to a different conclusion. Every year, there are a few people in the class who simply cannot take seriously the notion that someone could disagree with them and still be a reasonable person. By all appearances, Mr. Aubrey would fit in well with those few unfortunates.

--- And if you thought I was being unfair above when I said that some hawks feel people with doubts "must be disingenuous, attention-seeking, or hate America," Atrios has a really disgusting example of what I meant.

GALLAGHER: Well, Gila needs to remember that this is about national security. And Gila shouldn't have a short memory and forget what happened September 11, 2001. And that's what this is about. If people want to play political games and already say -- have Joe Madison sit there in Washington and say this won't be a slam dunk before hearing the first word out of President Bush's mouth, tonight. That's because people like Joe and Gila are rooting against the president and against this country. And listen, I say to Gila or to Joe, if you don't like what this government stands for, go over to Baghdad and be a loyal to Saddam Hussein like McDermott is.

Sorry, that's totally unacceptable.

I was a little tardy to read Slate's Today's Papers today, but I finally did, and found a bit of Times-bashing (well, constructive criticism) and a bit of Dem-bashing that I wholeheartedly agree with.

On the Times lead story, a poll about Americans' attitude towards war and the economy, Eric Umansky says:

Most of the poll's questions seem fairly worded, but a few are a wee bit leading. One example: "Overall is Congress asking enough questions about President Bush's policy toward Iraq?" Actually, there could be plenty of other examples, but the Times—in what is standard operating practice for the papers—doesn't post all the questions and data from its poll. Why not? It'd be pretty useful (at least for TP!) and presumably pretty easy. (If you think the Times should do that, let 'em know.)

Hear, hear. Also, on the subject of "a Senate committee report charging that the SEC should have caught the Enron malfeasance but didn't because the agency was super-lax in enforcing its own regulations," Umansky notes:

Unlike the LAT, which led with the story, the Post reminds readers that back in the 1990s Congress repeatedly blocked attempts to strengthen the SEC. According to former SEC chief Arthur Levitt, who had lobbied (unsuccessfully) for that strengthening, "none was a more formidable foe than Sen. Joe Lieberman."

I have a niggling doubt that Lieberman was the Numero Uno roadblock to effective SEC action. I'd have to nominate Billy Tauzin (R, LA) who, along with two other GOP Congressmen, sent a letter to Levitt actually threatening to pull funding to the SEC if they followed through on their proposal to prevent accounting firms from auditing the same firms that they consulted. (See more here, here and here.) It's sheer nonsense to pretend that there's a pox on both houses, and leave it at that.

But it seems that Lieberman was a genuine obstacle to effective corporate oversight. He was one of the biggest obstacles to the eminently rational campaign to start counting stock options as an expense in financial reporting. (Corporations already count them as an expense in their reports to the IRS.) He deserves to have his nose rubbed in it a little bit.

Here's a GMAT-style question for fun:

In 1981, Israel pre-emptively bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq, which at the time was an ally of the United States. This action was criticized by (among others) Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Margret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and the New York Times. In retrospect, however, it seems that this action probably spared us the horror of facing a nuclear-armed Iraqi army in the Gulf War ten years later.

Which of the following arguments could reasonably be supported by the passage above?

(a) Pre-emptive attacks on weapons of mass destruction may pay off in the future
(b) Israel sometimes comes under attack for actions which could legitimately be called self-defense
(c) The U.S. sometimes made terrible alliances, assisting countries with awful leaders who would turn on us
(d) Sometimes actions that are unpopular in real time only reveal their wisdom in time
(e) The New York Times was showing its liberal bias; observe the moral equivalence, the short-sightedness, the moral preening, all disguising a fantastic error of judgment

If you chose (e), you might already be Andrew Sullivan.

Atrios had a post on this same issue that seems to be swallowed under the mists of time.

Josh Marshall was on a roll this weekend. First, he makes the case that:

the Washington Post was wrong to argue that the Bush tax cut was both an economic stimulus and didn't contribute much much to the budget deficit.

(The Slacktivist has a similar point:

A parody/analogy/allegory:

The president is asked to pick a number from 1 to 10.
Bush: I pick 1, 2, 3 and 4. Along with 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. And I can't rule out 10, 11 or 12.

Krugman: First of all, the president cheated. Secondly, he was still wrong more than 9 times out of 10.

Kaus: The answer is 7, and Bush said "7"! Bush was right! He said "7" and those idiots at the Times won't admit he was right! Krugman said Bush was wrong, but he was right - he said "7"! I demand a retraction and a correction from Krugman and the Times!

[Then later, after lefty bloggers point out that the answer is actually 8, not 7 ...]

Kaus: Good point! But Bush is still right -- he said “8” too! Krugman, therefore, was still wrong to say Bush was wrong. Advantage Kausfiles!

And he points out that in New Jersey, Douglas Forrester and Frank Lautenberg are in violation of the same 51-day deadline. A consistent court that threw Lautenberg off the ballot should throw Forrester off, too. Ha ha ha.

Did you notice that Mickey Kaus has finally removed his link to Ann Coulter? Good job, Mickey; you're acting like a grown-up.

Made you look!