Ah, the fair and balanced newspaper

Post-Crescent - Editorial: We need more letters to achieve a balance
Thanks to Buzzflash for the link to this incredible piece of so-called journalism -- this excuse for a Wisconsin newspaper wonders why it isn't getting very many letters supporting Bush -- they write "We’ve been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him. We’re not sure why, nor do we want to guess."
Perhaps because there are many more people among their readership who are critical of President Bush than who are are supporting him? Do you think that could possibly be it? Really? Naaah, couldn't be!

Great post at Billmon

Billmon:
"Dick Cheney - the other, dumber half of the Bush administration's answer to Laurel and Hardy - has already weighed in, demanding that all those pesky Congress critters 'get off his back' and let Rumsfeld return to the more important business of losing the war in Iraq. Wolfowitz and Feith can't do it all by themselves, as hard as they try."

Notes for a speech

to be given by Dubya on July 4, 2004.
- [start with Iraq - call it success] Taking nation to war vr hard but I prayed every day for God's guidance and support and he gave it to me. God made me a war president! [proud but humble tone]
- vr proud of successful handover to UN-mandated government. vr proud. got rid of world's worst dictator and started Iraq on road to democracy. No more mass graves and rape rooms. [mention rape rooms twice] Iraq will come to appreciate the great gift of freedom that we have given it. [subtext: any problems now are UN's problems and Iraq's problems, not America's problem any more.] Talk about safety for region [subtext: for Israel] Say I have made US safe from WMD and defeated world's greatest dictator [NOTE TO SELF: do not mention Iran, North Korea, Africa, Asia minor, middle-east. . .]
- God has blessed this great nation and great soldiers. God is proud of you'all. Yes, America can! Vr proud of troops, how well they fought, how brave for country. Country is putting the unfortunate incidents by just a few soldiers at Al Gah-ribby behind us. Moving forward, forward.
- terrorism - we've got them all on the run. but still have to be afraid, really afraid. Remember 9.ll, [repeat - 9.ll, 9.ll] I am the only one who can protect you, not that flip flopper who's running against me and against america. He doesn't know how to fight a war, his record proves that [laugh knowingly]
- economy strong, great - more tax cuts needed, creating more jobs every day, deficit to be cut in half [slur voice to make sure no sound bites for the D word] - job creation strong, great schools progress, Medicare strong, great families. [NOTE TO SELF - call everything STRONG, GREAT] - end with how God has blessed your war president [repeat- war president]
[NOTE TO SELF -- DO NOT mention immigration plan, anti-gay ammendment, Mars initiative, benefit cuts for soldiers, overtime pay rule changes, Medicate overcharges, Phlame investigation, memogate, energy policy, environmental regulation gutting, Halliburton, Enron . . .]

Latimer's dream

Latimer continues to question top-court ruling, won't apply for clemency
This is so sad -- another example of the dream world lived in by Robert Latimer.
Latimer's first mistake was to talk to RCMP without a lawyer -- he apparently thought that if they understood what happened, that would be it. But RCMP don't have that option though they might pretend to.
Then he should have pled not guilty due to insanity -- it was clear at the trials that grief for his daughter had driven him temporarily insane. But he couldn't accept this view of himself. Then the jury entered its own dream world with a meaningless one-year sentence recommendation, when they should have known that the only way he would escape the mandatory sentence would be if they found him not guilty.
So now he wants the supreme court to explain itself? Ain't gonna happen.
Latimer is not a murderer, but if he wants to get out of jail, he will have to accept that in the real world he is considered to be one.

High crimes

Fareed Sakaria - The Price of Arrogance
Since 9/11, a handful of officials at the top of the Defense Department and the vice president's office have commandeered American foreign and defense policy. In the name of fighting terror they have systematically weakened the traditional restraints that have made this country respected around the world. Alliances, international institutions, norms and ethical conventions have all been deemed expensive indulgences at a time of crisis. Within weeks after September 11, senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House began the drive to maximize American freedom of action. They attacked specifically the Geneva Conventions, which govern behavior during wartime. Donald Rumsfeld explained that the conventions did not apply to today's "set of facts." He and his top aides have tried persistently to keep prisoners out of the reach of either American courts or international law, presumably so that they can be handled without those pettifogging rules as barriers. Rumsfeld initially fought both the uniformed military and Colin Powell, who urged that prisoners in Guantanamo be accorded rights under the conventions. Eventually he gave in on the matter but continued to suggest that the protocols were antiquated. Last week he said again that the Geneva Conventions did not "precisely apply" and were simply basic rules. The conventions are not exactly optional. They are the law of the land, signed by the president and ratified by Congress. Rumsfeld's concern—that Al Qaeda members do not wear uniforms and are thus "unlawful combatants"—is understandable, but that is a determination that a military court would have to make. In a war that could go on for decades, you cannot simply arrest and detain people indefinitely on the say-so of the secretary of Defense . . . On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.
This is why I have been railing against what has been going on in the States since Bush was elected -- the world NEEDS a strong US, as a leader and as a model. Who will do it if the US does not? China? Russia? For sure, they will try to push forward now, but they present only models of dictatorship, not of democracy. Maybe the European Union and Britain can step up to the plate now, but they just don't have the economic health and international clout that the US had. The Bush administration has abandoned the world, and the rest of us will pay the price.

No pot bill?

Liberals prepared to allow marijuana bill to die
As I argued with my kids, this bill was far from perfect, but at least it was a start. Making a crime of pot possession has destroyed tens of thousands of lives, wasted billions of our tax dollars in enforcement and imprisonment, taken police away from catching other criminals, and has made dope so profitable to sell that the biker gangs are flourishing across the country. My kids thought the bill should be better, that the grow penalties shouldn't be so high, but I thought this could be changed later as long as we could decrimilize minor posession.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians have used dope with no ill effects whatsoever. They haven't damaged themselves or anyone else, they haven't taken harder drugs. It's vastly less harmful to individuals and to society than alcohol -- no one ever smoked dope then went home and beat up their wife and kids or wrecked their house or destroyed their health. If every alcoholic could switch to smoking dope instead, how much better off they would be, and how much less social and economic disruption we would have.
I just hope Martin has the courage to revive this bill after the election.

Shorter David Brooks

The New York Times > Opinion > David Brooks: Crisis of Confidence
"We have handled the occupation of Iraq so badly that now we should be telling the rest of the world how to deal with failed states."

Apologies all around

A Sorry State
Key paragraphs:
If Rumsfeld. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz or Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard B. Myers were honorable men they would resign in shame. But they are not. If Bush were of presidential caliber he would have sacked them by now -- and taken full personal responsibility for their incompetence. But wherever the buck stops these days, it surely is not on the president's desk. Yet nothing short of such an old-fashioned assumption of duty can now retrieve America's standing in the community of nations. To the rest of the world Bush's apologies are mere exercises in damage control. The same president who spoke of leading God's crusade against Evil and who basked in the self-congratulatory aura of his invincible warriors will have difficulty convincing the rest of humanity that he really cares about a few brutalized Arabs. Given the president's simultaneous and reiterated insistence that neither he nor his staff have done anything wrong and that there is nothing to change in his policies or goals, who will take seriously such an apology, extracted in extremis? Like confessions obtained under torture, it is worthless. As recent events have shown, America under Bush can still debase and humiliate its enemies. But it has lost the respect of its friends -- and it is fast losing respect for itself. Now that is something to feel sorry about.

Again with the gonzo journalism

Martin denies charge he uses private health care
Thanks to the Mop and Pail for another gonzo journalism story -- this time, we're supposed to be shocked! shocked! that Martin's doctor runs a clinic that offers X-rays and MRIs on the side. Big deal! My own doctor's clinic, right here in little old Saskatoon, has a lab attached that does blood tests and x-rays -- and they charge $10 for a once-a-week wart clinic. Its not exactly unusual, Mr. Seguin, nor does it represent the crumbling of medicare.
And get this straight -- whether Martin ever availled himself of these services or not, I DON'T CARE! I don't have the least interest in any politician's personal life -- I don't care that Chretin's kid has had legal problems and I thought it was mean of reporters to cover it. And I don't care where Martin gets his hair cut, I don't care how his wife dresses. I don't care whether Layton's wife runs for parliament, because its not in my riding. I don't even know who Stephen Harper is married to or how many kids he has.
The only reason for anyone to write a story about Paul Martin or about any political figure, and the only reason to read it, is when it relates to their actions as a politician.

Its not just the photos that are sickening

Posted today by Associated Press -- Yahoo! News - Early Iraq Abuse Accounts Met With Silence describes detainees punished by hours lying bound in the sun . . . being attacked by dogs . . . being deprived of sufficient water . . .. spending days with hoods over their heads . . . an elderly Iraqi woman tied up and lying in the dust . . .ill men dying in crowded tents . . .a man saw his sister being punished by being stretched out bound in the sun. He angrily tried to cross the razor wire ringing his tent, and they shot him in the shoulder . . . he saw another prisoner shot dead when he approached the wire at Abu Ghraib. "On Friday, the Red Cross disclosed it had repeatedly demanded last year that U.S. authorities correct problems in the detention centers. The Americans took action on some issues but not others, it said. "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," Pierre Kraehenbuel, the Red Cross operations director, said in Geneva."
He's wrong in one respect, I think -- there was no system, really, just ad hoc bumbling where prisoner of war camps were set up on the fly, then underresourced and poorly managed, with happenstance dictating whether the individual soldiers trying to run things were competent to do so -- like we've seen with so many other aspects of this occupation. The incompetence of the Pentagon in managing this war is breathtaking.

And millions voted for this guy?

The Misunderestimated Man - How Bush chose stupidity. By Jacob Weisberg
"But if "numskull" is an imprecise description of the president, it is not altogether inaccurate. Bush may not have been born stupid, but he has achieved stupidity, and now he wears it as a badge of honor."
"The most obvious expression of Bush's choice of ignorance is that, at the age of 57, he knows nothing about policy or history. After years of working as his dad's spear-chucker in Washington, he didn't understand the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, the second- and third-largest federal programs. Well into his plans for invading Iraq, Bush still couldn't get down the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the key religious divide in a country he was about to occupy. Though he sometimes carries books for show, he either does not read them or doesn't absorb anything from them."
"As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he's something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool."

Road to Fallujah

Matthew Fisher's article Iraqis reject Rumsfeld's apology contains two telling quotes:
Schoolteacher Saad al-Jabori: "How can they possibly congratulate each other about their democracy at this moment? The first question to be answered is why we are only being told about this now. The answer is not because their democracy is so wonderful. It is because the media released photographs of what had happened. Otherwise, we still wouldn't know. If this scandal is part of the freedom the Americans have always been telling us about, Iraqis want no part of it.'
Astronomer Mohammed Saleh: "It is clear they are trying to change the reality on the ground here to those disgusting photos by having Rumsfeld testify, but it won't work. Rumsfeld and others have apologized. But what Iraqis want is an apology from every American for all the chaos and sectarianism they have created since they came here. They seem to think these hearings will show us that the road to freedom and human rights. The road they have really been on in Iraq has just led them to Fallujah."

The right to choose but no place to choose it

Canadians For Choice is taking on the fight for access to hospital abortions
When my daughter told me that Canadian women were losing the right to chose, I didn't understand what she meant. I had no idea things were this bad. Now I read Peter Wilson's article in the Globe -- " A CARAL study last year concluded that more than four out of five Canadian hospitals do not perform abortions. In Prince Edward Island not a single hospital provided the service. Across the Prairies, women can obtain abortions in only 5 per cent of hospitals. Finding a hospital that performs abortions is hard enough, but in many cases that's just the first of many obstacles. Gestation limits range from 10 to 23 weeks, CARAL found, noting that inconsistencies exist even within individual hospitals. In New Brunswick, in direct contravention of the law, the approval of two doctors is required. When a CARAL researcher posed as a woman needing an abortion, 95 per cent of B.C. hospitals told her to contact a family physician or go to a walk-in clinic. Fifteen hospitals nationwide referred her to an anti-choice agency and 16 hung up outright."
This is deja-vu all over again -- we FOUGHT this battle 30 years ago. We WON it 20 years ago. And now we have to fight it again?
Well, OK, I guess we do, and we will win again. Because what other choice do we have? Access to abortion is the cornerstone of women's rights, pure and simple.

Bad apple talking points

Well, I guess the Republican talking points about Iraq prisoner abuse have been distributed.
I heard the chairs of the House armed services and Senate foreign relations committees (or maybe it was the other way around) on Lou Dobbs and on Hardball respectively. But they might as well have been the same person speaking -- "It was only six soldiers blah blah blah it wasn't Rumsfeld's fault blah blah blah in a war you have to expect these kinds of isolated incidents blah blah blah it was only six bad apples blah blah blah we are in an insurgency situation and we have to press hard to protect our troops blah blah blah Saddam was a lot worse than this blah blah blah the brigade commander should be held accountable but no one any higher is to blame blah blah blah and did I mention that it was only six bad apple soldiers?" The stress on the number six echoed the talking points last summer --"it was only 16 words". And Chris Matthews has got the message, he was repeating these talking points himself.
But Lou Dobbs hadn't read the memo -- I could tell he was particularly unimpressed with the "Saddam did it too" justification after two years of arguments that America represents a higher standard. And Dobbs pointed out the absurdity of the idea that we should blame it all on the brigade commander but no one any higher in the chain of command should have to fall on their sword.
What was particularly silly, too, was the repeated reference to "only six" soldiers, when the Washington Post photos today clearly show many soldiers standing in the hallways watching as the naked Iraqi prisoners are being bound together.

Bush can't understand the story without the photos

Rumsfeld Chastised by President for His Handling of Iraq Scandal
So was it the abuse that Bush was upset about, or just the photos of the abuse? From this story, it appears that it was the photos, not the events, that Bush worried about. The story reports that unnamed officials ". . . said the president had expressed his displeasure to Mr. Rumsfeld in an Oval Office meeting because of Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to tell Mr. Bush about photographs of the abuse, which have enraged the Arab world." Then down in the 19th paragraph, the story reports that Bush was told about the abuse "within weeks" of the mid-January noficiation to Rumsfeld. "Mr. Rumsfeld told the president about the case" the story says, "But it is not clear, the official said, whether Mr. Rumsfeld mentioned the photographs or their basic content to Mr. Bush at that point."
Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words.