Regarding the bill in Oregon that would define demonstrators who block traffic as terrorists, Mark Kleiman has an argument that is entirely depressing and 100% correct. Go read it.

I've got to agree with Kaus here:

When I worry that the Iraq war is going badly, I remember that it wasn't only the Afghan war that seemed to be bogging down at first. The Kosovo bombing campaign of 1999 also seemed to be a disaster -- until, suddenly, it wasn't. ...

I was paying pretty close attention to the media during the first Gulf War. Even so, if you had asked me to write a short history of Gulf War I just after it finished, I would have gotten at least three big things wrong: I would talk about Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait that didn't happen, I would say that our Patriot missiles were highly effective in shooting down Scuds, and I wouldn't have mentioned the uprisings in the south of Iraq that were put down. Furthermore, I would have guessed that Bush would walk to victory in 1992, and I never would have guessed that failing to depose Saddam would be looked back upon as an obvious failure.*

In 2003, where the propaganda war is as important in the long term as the shooting war, we're getting a lot of disinformation from both sides. I think Jim Henley has the right idea when he says "Check back in June." Agnosticism is a hard habit to break.

* (Incidentally, the Gulf War wasn't my personal "end of history". That came earlier, when I lost my virginity to a drunken Jeanne Kirkpatrick.)

The Canadian Liberal party angrily debates censuring or even expelling the American ambassador from the country for his threats that the US would punish them for failing to back the war on Iraq. Be sure to click the second link; some of the comments are good. From Canadian Reader:

Yep, we trade a lot with the US. Sure do. In fact, we're your single largest trading partner. In January 2003, we sold you 17.8 billion dollars worth of goods. We also bought 12.8 billion dollars worth.

Notice... those numbers are per month. Even for the USA, that's not peanuts. Try to shut down the border, and just see how many nanoseconds it would take for all of the big-business Republican campaign contributors to get on the phone to the White House!

So, sorry, lua, a shutdown is not going to happen. What might happen is a bit of heavy-handed leaning. I guess Chretien figures we can survive whatever spitefulness Bush dreams up (my God though, isn't the man petty!) until the end of 2004.

Bloggers: anyone who can spin threatening Canada into a brilliant rope-a-dope strategy gets an automatic position at the magazine that used to be the National Review.

Via Counterspin.

If you haven't read Dalia Lithwick's reporting on the Supreme Court's sodomy case, hie ye hence. My emphasis added:

Smith responds that laws banning homosexual conduct didn't even exist until the 19th century. Scalia argues that sodomy laws have been on the books from the beginning of the republic, they just included heterosexual and married couples.

"It's conceded by the state of Texas that married couples can't be regulated in their private sexual decisions," says Smith. To which Scalia rejoins, "They may have conceded it, but I haven't." ...


Smith explains that fundamental rights are understood to apply to decisions about "sexual relations in the home" and decisions about "procreation and non-procreation." Rehnquist interjects that the laws at issue have little to do with "non-procreation." Smith says these laws say "you can't have sexual activity at all" if you are gay and Scalia objects: "They just say you can't have sexual intimacy with a person of the same sex." See? No problem. Homosexuals remain perfectly at liberty to have heterosexual sex in Texas....

Smith explains that the anti-sodomy laws have pernicious secondary effects—keeping gay parents from gaining child visitation or custody or employment, for instance—and Rehnquist wonders whether, if these laws are stuck down, states can have laws "preferring non-homosexuals to homosexuals as kindergarten teachers." Smith replies that there would need to be some showing that gay kindergarten teachers produce harm to children. Scalia offers one: "Only that children might be induced to follow the path to homosexuality." ...


In response to a question from Justice Anthony Kennedy as to whether Bowers is still good law, Rosenthal replies that mores have changed and that "physical homosexual intimacy is now more acceptable." Since he suddenly seems to be arguing the wrong side of the case, an astonished Scalia steps in to say, "You think there is public approval of homosexuality?"... Scalia wonders how there can be such widespread "approval" if Congress still refuses to add homosexuals to classes of citizens protected by the civil rights laws. "You're saying there's no disapproval of homosexual acts. But you can't ... say that," he sputters.

It's always terrribly disappointing to see people at the highest levels of government talking like goddamn Freepers, but it seems to happen all the time.

Roger Ailes has a sharp catch on the hard-working reporters at the Washington Times.

Jim Henley has an intriguing post that ends as follows:

All of which leads to the one thing I think I've figured out about the war so far. You can't trust what anyone tells you, but watching how they fight will tell you what they're thinking.

I ask, and Left in the West provides a great rant about how Republican anti-tax dogmatism hurts us. Thanks!

Alex Knapp at Heretical Ideas is no one's idea of a party hack. So when he mentioned that he has been looking into the evidence of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and he was surprised at how much of it held water, I thought that it would be worth checking out. If nothing else, it's a one-stop shop for stories that past Alex's bullshit detector.

Links here and here.

I should mention that I'm finally reading Kennth Pollack's The Threatening Storm, and it dismisses the Iraq- al-Qaeda connection. Of course, the book may just be too old to incorporate some of these stories. Here's what it says (pg 157):

As for its invovement with al-Qaeda, there have been connections between the groups, but these have been (as best we can tell) tenuous and inconsequential. Both Iraqi intelligence and al-Queda's various subgroups move in the underworld of Middle Eastern terrorism. They undoubtedly encounter each other and probably have assisted each other in different ways- such as selling forged passports or know-how. It may be that they have also supported some of the same terrorist groups, such as Ansar i-Islam, now said to be holed up in Iraqi Kurdistan. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told a Senate committee in March 2000 that Iraq "has also had contacts with al-Qaeda. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy towards the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though (Saddam) is well aware that such activity would carry disasterous consequences."

It remains to be seen, however, whether Saddam would be willing to risk such serious consequences to provide more active support to al-Qaeda and whether bin Ladin's Muslim fundamentalists would be willing to collaborate with a mullah-killing secularist like Saddam. Although there is no evidence that they have already done so, there is always a first time. Especially if Saddam and al-Qaeda find themselves desparate in the face of U.S. attacks, they might put aside their differences to make common cause against their common American enemy.

I should point out that the post about Barbara Bodine was nothing more than a lift from Julia at Sisyphyus Shrugged. But I just got an email on the subject from Jonathan Michael Hawkins, a current student at my alma mater (Northwestern (go Cats)):

I too find this choice funny. More to the point, regardless of her qualifications, this is a *predominantly muslim* country. This region is not generally used to having women in the highest post in the land. For an example of a country that has never had a woman in the highest point in the land, examine the U.S. Forcing a woman upon a culture which isn't entirely comfortable (yet) with female authority may prove to be a huge problem. They can't be Turkey overnight!

I'll be honest- I hadn't even thought of that- but I'll bet that he's right. Of course, Pakistan elected (more or less) Benazir Bhutto, but Iraq has no history of female political leadership that I'm aware of. (N.B., you could drive an armored division through what I'm not aware of.) Could Barbara Bodine really be the best choice?

Wouldn't it be fun to fact-check their resumes?:

From ERIC ALTERMAN:
How lame is The Weekly Standard?

When I told David Carr of The New York Times, that "Reader for reader, [The Standard] may be the most influential publication in America," I knew I was presenting its editor and publisher with a dilemma. They would love the quote but hate the source. Would they love it enough to use it anyway? Or would they hate the source too much to accept it as an accurate judge of anything?

What did they do? They deliberately misled their readers. The quote appears on p. 36 in the current issue and is falsely attributed to "The New York Times." But of course, I have no connection to The New York Times whatever. Thousands of people are quoted in The Times every day from Saddam Hussein to Jerry Falwell. They do not speak for the New York Times and being journalists, the Standard editors and publishers understand that. The quote is a deliberate attempt to deceive its readership. After all the honest accolades the magazine has received, who would have thought it would stoop so low?

Mark "Klei" Man has two great links (here and here) to his tax attourney friend Stuart Levine, about "the efficiency costs of the "all taxes bad" meme." Here's a little part that I think is extremely important, with emphasis added:

One need look no further than the budget proposed by the White House (which is easily accessible on-line) to discover that the non-military discretionary spending proposed by the White House is only 19.24% of the total proposed spending package. (Non-military discretionary spending is everything other than entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare, and interest on the federal debt. It represents the cost of operating virtually every governmental agency from the State Department, to the Justice Department, to the FAA, to the FDA, to the costs of running the White House.) This is less than the “off-budget deficit” (the amount that is spent on all items other than designated trust fund programs such as Social Security). In other words, even if non-military discretionary spending were cut to zero, the federal government would still be running a deficit with respect to its current operations. And, this would be the case even before any costs of a war on Iraq are factored in.

PLACEHOLDER: I had a rant about how difficult right-wing anti-tax political correctness makes rational discussion of taxation rates, but I wasn't happy with it. Anyone who wants to expand upon the theme will get a link.

Andrew Northrup has posted his version of the mix CD guaranteed to kill any party. Two can play at that game...

1. Don't Kill the Whale- Yes
2. Me and Bobby McGee- Jennifer Love Hewitt
3. Columbian Necktie- Big Black
4. Luka- Suzanne Vega
5. Magnificat- J.S. Bach
6. Standing on Shaky Ground- 90's era Temptations
7. She Believes in Me- Kenny Rogers
8. Holocaust- Big Star
9. Anti Social Masterbator- G.G. Allin
10. From a Distance- Bette Midler
11. Me and Bobby McGee- Olivia Newton-John
12. Windowlicker- Aphex Twin
13. Me and a Gun- Tori Amos
14. Too Hot- The Specials
15. Me and Bobby McGee- Skid Row

Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged is banging her head against the wall at the news that Barbara Bodine will serve as one of the head civilian administrators in postwar Iraq.

You may remember Barbara Bodine. She's the Ambassador to Yemen who single-handedly stopped the investigation into al Qaeda's (and bin Laden's) role in the attack on the Cole, going so far as to pull strings to have the ranking anti-terrorism expert in the region pulled out for persisting in his investigation after she told him it was undiplomatic. The Yemenis shut down their cooperation after that.

He later died in the World Trade Center.

Yes, you've got it - the Bush administration is putting the woman with arguably the highest personal responsibility for the death of 3,000 americans at the hands of terrorists of any U.S. official, through stupidity and an overpowering need to emphasize that no-one was the boss of her, in place in post-"liberation" Iraq.

Ms. Bodine's story, as it appeared in the Washington Post, Frontline, Reason, Matt Yglesias,Unknown News, Letter from Gotham, TalkBack Oregon, the Navy/Marine Corps MARS (sponsored by the Defense Department), the Sunday Times and ABC News.

I'm obviously in the wrong line of work. If I had screwed up like that, I would lose my job.

Instructions on how to surrender. It's funny cause it's true!

UPDATE: Proof of Iraq/Al Qaeda Connection Found in Country Song

NASHVILLE, TENNESEEE- For months the Bush Administration has been hinting at a linkage between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th, 2001. However, due to lingering diplomatic and intelligence gathering difficulties, the exact nature of the proof could not be brought out into public view, a fact that has made justifying the war with Iraq quite difficult. Now, thanks to B-level country singer Daryl Worley and his song "Have You Forgotten," the evidence is clear for everyone to hear.

According to Worley's manager, the inspirational pro-war tune is based primarily on highly-sensitive information leaked from the Pentagon and CIA. In fact, rumor has it that the Worley actually recorded it at the Central Intelligence Agency's recording studio in Nashville.

Have you forgotten how it felt that night
To see your career on fire
Exploitative song to write?

Have you forgotten that they swallow pap
Politics, beer, NASCAR,
And gliter-covered crap?


Now I'll sing "Iraq" in the same line as "Bin Laden"
Have you forgotten?

According to the song's subtext, the connection between the Iraqi leader and Al Qaeda was established shortly after the attacks and cannot now be repeated for reasons of national security, a fact that absent-minded anti-war protesters have simply forgotten.

I've started and stopped a post to the effect that there's hardly any piece of news that couldn't be spun to support either pro-war or anti-war positions. But Nick at Dark Machine underlines the point in an especially chilling way:

"A tragedy like this could have torn our country apart," said Billy Graham on September 14th, "But instead it has united us, and we have become a family."

What if an attack like that took place today? As I said earlier, I think that another attack would be taken by both sides as confirmation of their position. Given the emotion of that day, things could get really, really ugly.

With all sincerity, God, help us.

I thought that I might look over at the old FreeRepublic to see how some of our less presentable conservative friends reacted to tonight's Oscar telecast.

Then I realized that (a) no one pays me to do this, and (b) I'd rather read a note from my doctor saying "You have mouth cancer." So screw it. Godspeed, Kevin.