Digby: Dispatches From The Freashow Circuit

Back in the day I wrote:

This article in The Times seems to validate my theory that Bush saw Kerik as some sort of alter ego. It doesn't elaborate on his insistence on relying on his gut and therefore overruling the necessary vetting, but I'll bet you he did. These guys aren't usually sloppy about these things and this was outrageously sloppy. It has the mark of Codpiece all over it.

digby 12/19/2004

Waddaya know:

Bush met Kerik in the debris of the World Trade Center and was so impressed that he later sent him to Iraq to train police. The bald, mustachioed street cop appealed to Bush, who admired his can-do persona. By 2004, Kerik was sent to the Democratic National Convention as part of an opposition war room, given a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention and tapped to appear with the president on the campaign trail.

Digby: It's Hard Out Here Fo A Pimp

I've been listening to alleged journalists falling all over themselves on television to assure all of us that Don Imus is a really great guy underneath all the ugliness and that he's really, really, really sorry. Even David Gregory is vouching for him like a brother while that paragon of integrity Armstrong Williams is begging that he be given another chance.

I can't help but be reminded of the Imus profile of a year ago in Vanity Fair (not online, unfortunately) in which his psychotic freakshow was fully revealed. I'm sure all these disgusting sycophants read it.

Digby: Hey, Must Be The Money

So I make myself some coffee and open my dead tree version of the NY Times this morning only to see a call for blogger ethics on the front page. How interesting. Another call for "managed civil speech" (which is claimed to be "freer" than unfettered free speech.) There was no word on who would be the managers of such speech, but I think we can count on those who call for it to be the ones who feel they are most qualified to define and enforce it. (Apparently, this will all be done "voluntarily" and will be dealt with through purges and link boycotts and the novel concept of moderated comment sections. Or something.)

Hullabaloo: Blog Against Theocracy Part VI: The Continuing Influence Of Pat Robertson

by tristero

Another bonus post (and there will be one more post of excerpts from Morecraft following this one even though the blogswarm is officially over). In the comments to Part V, Enlightened Liberal wondered whether there was any real chance of a Christian Republic, ie a theocracy, ever happening in the U.S. I referred him back to Part IV of this series. But the takeover of the Texas GOP by christianists is old news. Here's an example "ripped from today's headlines:":

When Monica Goodling's name erupted into the news last week, the mainstream press discovered suddenly that Pat Robertson's Regent University exists. Not only that, the press learned that it has made a deep footprint in George W. Bush's Washington...

Washington's $8 Billion Shadow

Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the "body shops"—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war.

by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele | March 2007

One of the great staples of the modern Washington movie is the dark and ruthless corporation whose power extends into every cranny around the globe, whose technological expertise is without peer, whose secrets are unfathomable, whose riches defy calculation, and whose network of allies, in and out of government, is held together by webs of money, ambition, and fear. You've seen this movie a dozen times. Men in black coats step from limousines on wintry days and refer guardedly to unspeakable things. Surveillance cameras and eavesdropping devices are everywhere. Data scrolls across the movie screen in digital fonts. Computer keyboards clack softly. Seemingly honorable people at the summit of power—Cabinet secretaries, war heroes, presidents—turn out to be pathetic pawns of forces greater than anyone can imagine. And at the pinnacle of this dark and ruthless corporation is a relentless and well-tailored titan—omniscient, ironic, merciless—played by someone like Christopher Walken or Jon Voight.

Hullabaloo: Blog Against Theocracy Part V: How A Christian Republic Punishes And Taxes

by tristero

In Part III of this series of excerpts from With Liberty & Justice for All: Christian Politics Made Simple, Morecraft was seen interpreting as “figurative” an unambiguously clear Biblical injunction, one that, in fact, many Jews obey literally. Morecraft also laid out his justifications for and vision of a “Christian Republic” for America, a substitute term, as Morecraft explicitly says, for “theocracy.”

However, Morecraft appears not to advocate a strong, theocratic state. In fact, the state, ie, the civil government, has a very small role in Morecraft’s Christian Republic. Its primary function, as shown in the following excerpts, is swift, ruthless punishment of all who disobey God’s law. According to Morecraft’s interpretation of the Bible, the state has no right to collect taxes for anything beyond these minimal functions, has no business running public schools, or Social Security, or much of anything else beyond punishment.

Hullabaloo: Blog Against Theocracy Part IV: Takeover Of The Texas GOP

by tristero

For those of you following this series, this is a bonus post. One of the biggest misconceptions of American theocracy is that, "intelligent design" creationism aside, the most crackpot forms of christianism, such as those of Joe Morecraft and R.J. Rushdoony, are too marginal ever to worry about. Not so, unless you think Texas Republican politics has had nothing to do with national poltiics for the past seventeen years:

In February 1990 I received an unsolicited video in the mail. The video came from a Dr. Stephen Hotze and was entitled "Restoring America: How You Can Impact Civil Government." Filmed at a church in my neighborhood, I recognized the actors as the pastor and congregants of an Independent Fundamental Baptist church (the Jerry Falwell kind). The video was a guide on how to 1) take over a Republican Party precinct meeting, 2) elect "Christian" delegates to the GOP District meeting, and 3) put planks supporting the theocratic agenda of Christian Reconstructionism into the party platform...

Digby: Trash Talkin With The Terrorists

I've always wondered why Chris Matthews has Kathleen Parker on his syndicated week-end show so often. She's an attractive woman, but she has the personality of a door knob and makes deadly boring television. Today, I realized it's because they share the same anachronistic 50's sitcom view of life.

Parker's WaPo column begins rather humorously, although it's clear she didn't intend it to be:

On any given day, one isn't likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He's a dangerous, lying, Holocaust- denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug -- not to put too fine a point on it.

Hullabaloo: Blog Against Theocracy Part III: God's Law, Never Man's

by tristero

Excerpts from Joseph Morecraft’s book, With Liberty & Justice for All: Christian Politics Made Simple. In these passages, Morecraft explicitly argues for theocracy. He claims that all governments are inherently religious. The only question is whether the state religion will be "humanism" or Christianity. Civil authority must practice God's law which are laid out in the Bible, and the state has no right to add to or deviate from it. He claims that the primary function of a civil government is extremely limited. Its primary purpose is to punish and "terrorize" those who fail to follow the laws of God. He blames the miseries of a state - both manmade and natural- on the absence of theocracy.

Daily Kos: A Hollow Army - How the Bush Regime Broke America's Military

by Richard Cranium

Thu Apr 12, 2007 at 05:59:17 PM PDT

- Gen. Barry McCaffrey

James Kitfield is more than a war correspondent or Pentagon or national security reporter. He's lived and breathed military issues for many years. No one except Kitfield has won the Gerald R. Ford Award for reporting on national defense issues more than once - he's the only two time winner in the award's history. So, when Kitfield writes a lengthy and well sourced article on the readiness of the U.S. military, people listen (except for, naturally, the obvious tone deaf non-readers in the Bush administration's chain of command).

Americablog: American Family Association, Family Research Council, & Concerned Women for America disseminating Nazi-esque science...

by John Aravosis (DC) · 4/13/2007 02:26:00 PM ET

UPDATE: More from Pam Spaulding on the Paul Cameron hate group here.

How sad that the far-right Republicans are now embracing known hate groups in order to further their homophobic agenda.

"CAMERON'S 'SCIENCE' ECHOES NAZI GERMANY"

Yes, they're now promoting extremists who have been labeled "hate groups" by THE expert on hate, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Amazing. SPLC lists religious right hatemonger Paul Cameron's Family Research institute as one of the lead hate groups in Colorado - SPLC lists Cameron's FRI alongside the Klan and white supremacists.

[...]

Now, why does the Southern Poverty Law Center label Cameron and his Family Research Institute a "hate group"? Look at what Cameron espouses, per the SPLC:

He told the 1985 Conservative Political Action Committee conference that "extermination of homosexuals" might be needed in the next three to four years. He has advocated tattooing AIDS patients in the face, and banishment to a former leper colony for any patient who resisted. He has called for gay bars to be closed and gays to be registered with the government.

US court ruling for anti-Castro 'terrorist' denounced by Cuba, Venezuela

Justice Department may appeal district court decision to grant bail for Luis Posada Carriles, accused in a deadly 1976 airline bombing.

By Eoin O'Carroll | csmonitor.com

Cuba and Venezuela, along with relatives of those killed in anti-Castro attacks, are protesting a US district court ruling that releases from jail Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile militant and former CIA operative.

Mr. Posada, who is wanted by authorities in Havana and Caracas for the 1976 bombing of a civilian Cuban airliner, was detained in Florida in May 2005 for entering the United States illegally. Last Friday, US district Judge Kathleen Cardone ruled that Posada, who is currently held in a New Mexico jail, should be freed on bonds totaling $350,000 until his trial, which is scheduled for May 11. The Guardian reports that Posada's release was moved forward after Judge Cardone refused to "reverse her earlier ruling granting his request for bail."

When the lights go out

David Strahan and Duncan Clarke take opposing sides on the peak oil debate in The Last Oil Shock and The Battle for Barrels. Larry Elliott weighs up the evidence

Saturday April 14, 2007
The Guardian

The Last Oil Shock
by David Strahan
304pp, John Murray, £12.99

The Battle for Barrels
by Duncan Clarke
256pp, Profile Books, £20

Back in 1956, an American geophysicist called Marion King Hubbert came up with a startling prediction: that production of oil from the continental United States would peak within the next 10 to 15 years. Few paid any attention. This, after all, was the era when the car was king and king-sized; when James Dean was racing in the streets in Rebel Without a Cause and President Eisenhower was investing billions of dollars in the interstate network.

Justice Department Tracked Federalist Society Influence On U.S. Attorneys

Today, the House Judiciary Committee released a new set of documents from the Department of Justice relating to the firings of eight U.S. Attorneys.

The last page of document set 3 contains an email from Monica Goodling with an attached Excel spreadsheet on “USA data (GWB).”

Breaking: Buried government report reveals Abstinence-only a failure

Posted by Evan Derkacz on April 13, 2007 at 1:12 PM.

Scott Swenson, over at RH Reality Check breaks the news that the government's own quietly released report today shows that abstinence-only programs -- having eaten 10 years and $1.5 billion in public funds -- are a complete and total bust.

Releasing reports unflattering to the government on a Friday afternoon is a time-honored tactic.

Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment

By Prema Polit, AlterNet. Posted April 14, 2007.

In the U.S., over 2.13 million people are incarcerated. Sasha Abramsky's new book, American Furies, explores the bloated prison system and its tremendous financial and moral cost to our society.

The prison system in the U.S. stands alone in the modern Western world as a model of mass incarceration. The "tough on crime" stance taken by elected officials from across the political spectrum has not halted the resurgence of crime in the last few years, nor has it helped prevent ex-inmates from once again ending up behind bars.

How did the U.S. devolve into a nation that incarcerates over 2.13 million people, when just a quarter century ago the number was 475,000? What happens when the criminal justice system deals out vengeance instead of justice?

Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing

RNC Took Away His Access to Delete Files in 2005

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 13, 2007; A01

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman's account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove -- and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts -- from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.

White House lost Over FIVE MILLION e-mails in two year period

Submitted by crew on 12 April 2007 - 2:27pm. Bush Administration Presidential Records Act

Today, CREW issued a new report, WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and Violations of the PRA, and made the shocking new disclosure that the Bush White House has lost over FIVE MILLION e-mails in a two year period. The report also details the legal issues behind the growing controversy over the White House e-mail scandal.

Through two confidential sources, CREW learned that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over FIVE MILLION emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

Paul Krugman: For God's Sake

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement — the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right — suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure,” he wrote, “and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Moon waning in Washington?

Despite an upcoming appearance by George H.W. Bush at the newspaper's 25th anniversary celebration, a 20+ - year former Washington Times reporter says that the newspaper's survival is threatened

On May 17, former president George H. W. Bush will deliver the keynote address at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times newspaper at the National Building Museum. According to Fishbowl DC, a letter from the newspaper's President Thomas McDevitt pointed out that ''The evening includes a special reception; the inaugural Founding Spirit Awards; dinner; and a Founder's Address from ... [Moon], whose commitment to the need for diverse viewpoints in the nation's capital during the Cold War era led to the launch of the Washington Times on May 17, 1982.''

Will Women Ever Get Paid What They Deserve?

By Martha Burk, TomPaine.com. Posted April 12, 2007.

Opponents of fair pay predict that capitalism will collapse if women's earnings ever reach those of their male counterparts. It's a Big Lie.

We're coming up on Equal Pay Day again. That's the day in April every year -- this year the 24th -- when women's earnings finally catch up with what men made by Dec. 31 of the previous year. Women's groups, led by the National Committee on Pay Equity, will rally on Capitol Hill to call attention to the issue.

The pay gap is still a stubborn problem, with women who work full time year-round making 76 cents to a man's dollar. Though it consistently polls No. 1 with female voters in election years, politicians don't seem motivated to do much about it.

Divide and Rule: Bush's Doomed Plan for Baghdad

By Robert Fisk, The Independent. Posted April 12, 2007.

Revealed: a new counter-insurgency strategy to carve up the city into sealed areas. The tactic failed in Vietnam. So what chance does it have in Iraq?

Faced with an ever-more ruthless insurgency in Baghdad -- despite President George Bush's "surge" in troops -- US forces in the city are now planning a massive and highly controversial counter-insurgency operation that will seal off vast areas of the city, enclosing whole neighbourhoods with barricades and allowing only Iraqis with newly issued ID cards to enter. The campaign of "gated communities" -- whose genesis was in the Vietnam War -- will involve up to 30 of the city's 89 official districts and will be the most ambitious counter-insurgency programme yet mounted by the US in Iraq.

The system has been used -- and has spectacularly failed -- in the past, and its inauguration in Iraq is as much a sign of American desperation at the country's continued descent into civil conflict as it is of US determination to "win" the war against an Iraqi insurgency that has cost the lives of more than 3,200 American troops. The system of "gating" areas under foreign occupation failed during the French war against FLN insurgents in Algeria and again during the American war in Vietnam. Israel has employed similar practices during its occupation of Palestinian territory -- again, with little success.

Malpractice study -- Juries sympathize more with doctors

There's a common belief that juries frequently side with patients in lawsuits involving medical malpractice. A legal professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia's School of Law insists that's not the case.

Glenn Greenwald: A light bulb goes off on the Washington Post editorial page

Even more than most national journalists, The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt has been a stalwart defender of the Bush administration with regard to the U.S. attorneys scandal. On March 26, 2007 -- just two weeks ago -- Hiatt wrote:

Mr. Gonzales finds himself in this mess because he and others in his shop appear to have tried to cover up something that, as far as we yet know, didn't need covering. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president -- with the advice and consent of the Senate. The president was entitled to replace any he chose, as long as he wasn't intending to short-circuit ongoing investigations.

Teenage Holy War

Coming soon, to a battlefield near you? I hope not.--Dictynna

Jesus is really, really pissed -- at Hollywood, at the media, even at most Christians. But BattleCry, the nation’s largest and most radical youth crusade, is recruiting a new generation of Christian soldiers to fight back.

JEFF SHARLET

>> See it now! Judge America's crusade yourself: Watch footage from a recent BattleCry rally and see one teen's haunting testimony.

>>This is an excerpt from the new issue of "Rolling Stone," on newsstands until April 19th, 2007.

This is how you enlist in the Army of God: First come the fireworks and the prayers, and then 4,000 kids scream, "We won't be silent anymore!" Then the kids drop to their knees, still but for the weeping and regrets of fifteen-year-olds. The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers to them about sin and love and the Father-God. They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off "harlots and adultery"; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God. "Gimme what you got!" she shouts. They dance -- hip-hop, tap, toe and pelvic thrusting. Then they're ready. They're about to accept "the mark of a warrior," explains Ron Luce, commander in chief of BattleCry, the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in eighteenth-century New England. Nearly three centuries later, these 4,000 teens are about to become "branded by God." It's like getting your head shaved when you join the Marines, Luce says, only the kids get to keep their hair. His assistants roll out a cowhide draped over a sawhorse, and Luce presses red-hot iron into the dead flesh, projecting a close-up of sizzling cow skin on giant movie screens above the stage.

Spy chief wants to expand surveillance

By Katherine Shrader
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Bush's spy chief is pushing to expand the government's surveillance authority at the same time the administration is under attack for stretching its domestic eavesdropping powers.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has circulated a draft bill that would expand the government's powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), liberalizing how that law can be used.

The 1978 FISA law was passed to allow surveillance in espionage and other foreign-intelligence investigations but still allow federal judges on a secretive panel to ensure protections for U.S. citizens — at home or abroad — and other permanent U.S. residents.

Matt Taibbi: Campaign Journalism Is Back, More Evil Than '04

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted April 10, 2007.

You'll hear a lot in the next 20 months about which candidate has bony hands, who looks good in a parka -- but you won't hear anything about who voted for the bankruptcy bill and who didn't.

God help us, the 2008 presidential election is already here; they are already murdering huge forests in South America so that Jonathan Alter and Karen Tumulty can tell us what the latest Scripps/Howard poll says "voters believe the next president's haircut should look like." Hell is much too good for all of us ...

Mainly in an attempt to preserve my own tenuous grip on sanity, I made it through this past weekend without reading much coverage of the campaign. The election, after all, is nearly a full Martian year away, with a Super Bowl and two World Series still to play out in between -- which means that the "urgency" of breaking campaign news is now and will remain for at least a year an almost 100% media concoction.

Poverty Moves to the Suburbs

By Eyal Press, The Nation. Posted April 11, 2007.

America's suburbs evoke images of dream homes, plush lawns and neighborhood BBQs, not low-wage jobs and houses under foreclosure. Yet for the first time ever, more poor Americans live in the suburbs than in all our cities combined.

Rockingham County, North Carolina, has never been known for its opulence, but until recently most residents would not have hesitated to describe it as comfortably middle class. For several decades the county, a rectangular block of land in the north central part of the state, owed its prosperity to textile mills and tobacco plants, industries that weren't always friendly to unions but that nevertheless furnished the local workforce with jobs that paid enough to raise a family and buy a nice house somewhere.

Among those to do so was Johnny Price, a 44-year-old African-American who lives in a ranch house with green shutters on a street called Sparrow in a leafy residential subdivision on the outskirts of the town of Eden. Two towering oak trees dominate Price's front lawn. In his driveway sits a navy blue station wagon. By the standards of some newly built suburbs, the setup is modest, but for Price, the youngest of ten children whose father died when he was 6 and whose mother worked as a domestic servant, it's a testament to the rewards of hard work and perseverance, values he's tried to instill in his teenage son and daughter, who have lived with him since he and his wife divorced. Lately this has gotten more challenging. A year ago Price lost the job he'd held for nineteen years in company-wide layoffs at Unified, a textile manufacturer. He's now struggling to make do on $1,168 in monthly unemployment benefits and, like many people in Rockingham County, which has been ravaged by plant closings in recent years, wondering how long he'll be able to continue paying his mortgage.

Tropical forests -- Earth's air conditioner

Stanford, Calif. -- Planting and protecting trees—which trap and absorb carbon dioxide as they grow—can help to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But a new study suggests that, as a way to fight global warming, the effectiveness of this strategy depends heavily on where these trees are planted. In particular, tropical forests are very efficient at keeping the Earth at a happy, healthy temperature.

The researchers, including Ken Caldeira of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology and Govindasamy Bala at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, found that because tropical forests store large amounts of carbon and produce reflective clouds, they are especially good at cooling the planet. In contrast, forests in snowy areas can warm the Earth, because their dark canopy absorbs sunlight that would otherwise be reflected back to space by a bright white covering of snow.

Six U.S. Attorneys Given 2nd Posting in Washington

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 10, 2007; Page A03

A half-dozen sitting U.S. attorneys also serve as aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales or are assigned other Washington postings, performing tasks that take them away from regular duties in their districts for months or even years at a time, according to officials and department records.

Acting Associate Attorney General William W. Mercer, for example, has been effectively absent from his job as U.S. attorney in Montana for nearly two years -- prompting the chief federal judge in Billings to demand his removal and call Mercer's office "a mess."

NBC: Abramoff could get reduced sentence

Judge grants request for new hearing, rewarding lobbyist for cooperating

By Joel Seidman
Producer, NBC News
Updated: 9:44 p.m. ET April 9, 2007

WASHINGTON - Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff may be getting out of jail earlier than he expected, NBC News learned on Monday. A federal judge Monday granted the government's request for a new hearing to determine an appropriate reduction in Abramoff's sentence, a reward based on his continued cooperation with investigators in several federal probes.

Abramoff is currently serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence for his conviction in the Florida-based SunCruz Casinos gambling boat fraud case. In Miami, U.S. District Judge Paul Huck granted the request from prosecutors once they told him Abramoff's cooperation in the investigations is fully completed.

Six Crises in Search of an Author

By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

Monday 09 April 2007

How the Bush Administration destabilized the "arc of instability."

One night when I was in my teens, I found myself at a production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. I had never heard of the playwright or the play, nor had I seen a play performed in the round. The actors were dramatically entering and exiting in the aisles when, suddenly, a man stood up in the audience, proclaimed himself a seventh character in search of an author, and demanded the same attention as the other six. At the time, I assumed the unruly "seventh character" was just part of the play, even after he was summarily ejected from the theater.

Now, bear with me a moment here. Back in 2002-2003, officials in the Bush administration and their neocon supporters, retro-think-tank admirers, and allied media pundits, basking in all their Global War on Terror glory, were eager to talk about the region extending from North Africa through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the former SSRs of Central Asia right up to the Chinese border as an "arc of instability." That arc coincided with the energy heartlands of the planet and what was needed to "stabilize" it, to keep those energy supplies flowing freely (and in the right directions), was clear enough to them. The "last superpower," the greatest military force in history, would simply have to put its foot down and so bring to heel the "rogue" powers of the region. The geopolitical nerve would have to be mustered to stamp a massive "footprint" - to use a Pentagon term of the time - in the middle of that vast, valuable region. (Such a print was to be measured by military bases established.) Also needed was the nerve not just to lob a few cruise missiles in the direction of Baghdad, but to offer such an imposing demonstration of American shock-and-awe power that those "rogues" - Iraq, Syria, Iran (Hezbollah, Hamas) - would be cowed into submission, along with uppity U.S. allies like oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Radical Christian Right Preaches Liberal Evil

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted April 10, 2007.

Members of the radical Christian End Times movement are being taught to believe that America is ruled by evil, clandestine organizations disguised as liberal groups. As a result, the fearful are hoping for the end.

The Gilead Baptist Church, outside Detroit, is on a four-lane highway called South Telegraph Road. The drive down South Telegraph Road to the church, a warehouse-like structure surrounded by black asphalt parking lots, is a depressing gantlet of boxy, cut-rate motels with names like Melody Lane and Best Value Inn.

The highway is flanked by a flat-roofed Walgreens, a Blockbuster, discount liquor stores, a Taco Bell, a McDonald's, a Bob's Big Boy, Sunoco and Citgo gas stations, a Ford dealership, Nails USA, The Dollar Palace, Pro Quick Lube and U-Haul.

Digby: Ganders Excepted

This week, the right went completely ape over Pelosi wearing a scarf in a mosque. No matter what the local custom or religious requirement, they said, no American leader should stoop to such behavior.

Digby: Polarized Elites

Here's an interesting article in the new Democratic Strategist discussing "polarization." According to the authors, there do seem to be some signs that the nation is a bit at odds but the causes remain obscure and it seems the people themselves are just as centrist as David Broder. (And anyway, we aren't in a civil war so how bad can the polarization be?)

They quote heavily from a study that found that while the country may appear to be divided, it is actually the elites and the extremists like you and I who are making the Real Americans more polarized:

Digby: Oh No He Di-unt

Not only has former neocon pin-up boy Frances Fukuyama abandoned all of his former fans, he's gone and rubbed their noses in the dirt in the worst possible way:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Digby: Knee Jerk Jerk

I am getting really, really tired of this:

BARNICLE: And now you have Speaker Pelosi in Syria. You know, I think if she were Speaker Nancy Pelosi from Birmingham, Alabama, or Pensacola, Florida, or Chicago, Illinois, even, it might play a little better politically in Washington than it has been. But she‘s from San Francisco.

This is Mike "I promise not to plagiarize anymore" Barnicle from Taxachusetts saying this. He goes on to say that it doesn't matter what Nancy does, but he apparently felt he had to bond with the macho gasbags on Scarborough by gratuitously taking a shot at San Francisco. I wish these people would just stop it. It's chauvanistic, outdated and stupid.

Digby: Put A Scarf On Your Empty Soul

You've probably heard about the moronic rightwing tizzy of the day criticizing Nancy Pelosi for wearing a scarf on her head in a mosque, when the internet is filled with pictures of Laura Bush and Condi Rice doing the same thing. You'd think they would have thought of this, but then hypocrisy or just plain idiocy isn't really a concern for them. Another day another rightwing fool...

Digby: Can't Find His Bullhorn With Both Hands

Gene Lyons, writing his great column from outside the beltway, sees something that everyone else missed:

Here’s a puzzle: If President Bush really thinks he’s holding all the cards in his impending showdown with congressional Democrats over Iraq funding, why bother with a veto ? On previous occasions when Congress passed laws Bush found irksome, he’s quietly issued “signing statements” declaring in essence that the president is a law unto himself. Statutes Bush doesn’t like, he vows to ignore. He’s done it scores of times.

Digby: Internal Combustion

Can you hear all the heads exploding on the right this evening? How hard it must be for them to reconcile their knee-jerk assumptions in a world more complicated than their little games of Risk and super-hero comics prepared them for.

You'll all recall, I'm sure, that the wingnuts have been whining for days about CNN correspondent Michael Ware's comments about John McCain being in Neverland when he implied that Bagdad was as safe as a summer's day at Epcot center. And you also know by now that subsequently Drudge got punk'd by somebody who said that Ware heckled McCain at the press conference following his little Bagdad shopping trip with Huckelberry Graham (and 100 soldiers and 5 or six helicopters) over the week-end. The wingnuts went wild:

Digby: Tiny Tim's Inflated Past

Oh my goodness. It looks like our little friend Timothy Griffin, character assassin, dirty trickster and Karl Rove houseboy, may have embellished his resume. In fact, it would appear that Tiny Tim only prosecuted three cases as an assistant before he was installed in Hillary Clinton's backyard as a Patriot Act midnight appointee to be Arkansas US Attorney.

Little Rock’s interim U.S. Attorney J. Timothy Griffin – already at the center of a firestorm over whether the White House has put politics ahead of prosecutorial integrity – made claims about his experience as an Army lawyer that have been put in doubt by military records.

Digby: Mind Games

Atrios flags this nice Grover Norquist quote from Garance Franke-Ruta and, correctly I think, notes that it doesn't mean the base wants to leave Iraq. It just means they will go along with whatever Bush wants to do. In other words, Bush isn't being obstinate about Iraq because he's afraid that his base will desert him. He's not running, neither is Cheney, and neither one of them appear to particularly care about the fortunes of the Republican party. He's obstinate about Iraq for purely personal, philosophical reasons that have little to do with politics at this point.

Digby: Rabid Hobgoblins

One day you see this:

In February, Vice President Cheney traveled to Australia to visit with his close ally Prime Minister John Howard. At the top of Howard’s agenda was a plea to release Australian Gitmo detainee David Hicks. Last Friday, Hicks became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, accepting nine months of imprisonment and a gag order that will not allow him to discuss the case for 12 months.

Digby: Where Is The Iron Lady When You Need Her?

An American citizen is missing in Iran, the State Department said today.

Sources tell ABC News that the missing American was a former FBI agent, although they stressed that he was now a private citizen and that his trip to Iran was on "private business" and not associated with official U.S. matters.

Digby: Screwball

When the Washington Nationals play their home opener this afternoon at RFK Stadium, the president won't be there to toss out the ceremonial first pitch.

For the second straight year, reports the Washington Post, President Bush has turned down an invitation to participate in a Washington baseball tradition started by President William Howard Taft in 1910.

Digby: June Cleaver Democrats

Matt Stoller does good work here taking this egregious WaPo Jonathan Weisman piece apart. He also addresses the one quote that came leaping out at me when I read it:

Leon E. Panetta, who was a top White House aide when President Bill Clinton pulled himself off the mat through repeated confrontations with Congress, sees the same risk. He urged Democrats to stick to their turf on such issues as immigration, health care and popular social programs, and to prove they can govern.

Daily Kos: Reading and Discussion: Constitutional Hardball

by Kagro X

Sun Apr 08, 2007 at 03:44:50 PM PDT

Whenever I'm looking to put the political plays of the Bush "administration" in long-term context, I point people to "Constitutional Hardball," (PDF) a law review article written by Georgetown now Harvard Law Prof. Mark Tushnet. I think it's a real eye-opener for those who might otherwise advocate simply waiting out the Bush gang, and "fixing" the problems they've created at the ballot box.

What is constitutional hardball?

A shorthand sketch of constitutional hardball is this: It consists of political claims and practices -- legislative and executive initiatives -- that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.³ It is hardball because its practitioners see themselves as playing for keeps in a special kind of way; they believe the stakes of the political controversy their actions provoke are quite high, and that their defeat and their opponents' victory would be a serious, perhaps permanent setback to the political positions they hold.

Daily Kos: Rove, the WH, Abramoff, China & Tinian Casinos

by dengre

Sun Apr 08, 2007 at 12:47:22 AM PDT

Here we go again.

Another (very) long and winding tale of yet another bit of corruption that weaves in and out of the Bush White House, Chinese Casinos, Team Abramoff, the Mariana Islands and the purge of US Attorneys.

As the Bush era enters the scandal-a-day phase it is hard to keep up. Do you really need to learn more?

Perhaps.

This is a tale of exploitation, greed and money laundering. The targets of the scam are not only foreign guest workers, but also US tax payers and US service men and women.

WSJ op-ed attacking Pelosi baselessly asserts she may have committed a felony

In an April 6 Wall Street Journal op-ed touted on the Drudge Report and by NBC's Matt Lauer, attorney Robert F. Turner asserted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) "may well have" violated a federal criminal law, the Logan Act, when she met with Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad on April 3. But at no point did Turner note that the issue of whether a member of Congress has violated the Logan Act has never been adjudicated by a court. Nor did he inform readers of a 1975 State Department statement -- noted in a February 1, 2006, report on the Logan Act by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) -- that states: "The clear intent of this provision ... is to prohibit unauthorized persons from intervening in disputes between the United States and foreign governments. Nothing in [the Logan Act], however, would appear to restrict members of the Congress from engaging in discussions with foreign officials in pursuance of their legislative duties under the Constitution." Turner purported to know the scope of a member of Congress' legislative duties for purposes of the Logan Act, and to know that Pelosi has acted outside that scope. But he cited no judicial authority for that specific position -- nor could he, since there are no court decisions interpreting that statute as it may apply to actions by members of Congress.

Paul Krugman: Sweet Little Lies

Four years into a war fought to eliminate a nonexistent threat, we all have renewed appreciation for the power of the Big Lie: people tend to believe false official claims about big issues, because they can’t picture their leaders being dishonest about such things.

But there’s another political lesson I don’t think has sunk in: the power of the Little Lie — the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren’t meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong.

Land Roving

Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stands solidly behind President Bush's War in Iraq, opposes gays in the military, and compares the fight against abortion to the civil rights struggle. He also wants comprehensive immigration reform and more civil discourse.

More often than not, he is a proud defender of all things Bush. And, when his name comes up you don't usually associate it with the word "maverick," but recently Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has, in one way or another, strayed, not so much from the Bush Administration line, but from some of his conservative Christian brethren.

Paul Krugman: Children Versus Insurers

Consider the choice between two government programs.

Program A would provide essential health care to the eight million uninsured children in this country.

Program B would subsidize insurance companies, who would in turn spend much of the money on marketing and paperwork, and also siphon off a substantial fraction of the money as profits. With what’s left, the insurers would provide additional benefits, over and above basic Medicare coverage, to some older Americans.

Which program would you choose? If money is no object, you might go for both. But if you can only have one, it’s hard to see how anyone could, in good conscience, fail to choose Program A. I mean, even conservatives claim to believe in equal opportunity — and it’s hard to say that our society offers equal opportunity to children whose education may be disrupted, who may even find their lives cut short, because their families can’t afford proper medical care.

Scandal puts spotlight on Christian law school

Grads influential in Justice Dept.

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | April 8, 2007

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- The title of the course was Constitutional Law, but the subject was sin. Before any casebooks were opened, a student led his classmates in a 10-minute devotional talk, completed with "amens," about the need to preserve their Christian values.

"Sin is so appealing because it's easy and because it's fun," the law student warned.

Frank Rich: Sunday in the Market With McCain

John McCain's April Fools’ Day stroll through Baghdad’s Shorja market last weekend was instantly acclaimed as a classic political pratfall. Protected by more than a hundred American soldiers, three Black Hawk helicopters, two Apache gunships and a bulletproof vest, the senator extolled the “progress” and “good news” in Iraq. Befitting this loopy brand of comedy — reminiscent of “Wedding Crashers,” in which Mr. McCain gamely made a cameo appearance — the star had a crackerjack cast of supporting buffoons: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who told reporters “I bought five rugs for five bucks!,” and Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who likened the scene to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”

Five rugs for five bucks: boy, we’ve really got that Iraq economy up and running now! No wonder the McCain show was quickly dubbed “McCain’s Mission Accomplished” and “McCain’s Dukakis-in-the-Tank Photo Op.” But at a certain point the laughter curdled. Reporters rudely pointed out there were 60-plus casualties in this market from one February attack alone and that six Americans were killed in the Baghdad environs on the day of his visit. “Your heart goes out to just the typical Iraqi because they can’t have that kind of entourage,” said Kyra Phillips of CNN. The day after Mr. McCain’s stroll, The Times of London reported that 21 of the Shorja market’s merchants and workers were ambushed and murdered.