Hobbits Against Rove
I hope you've heard where the frogmarching remark came from. The quote's from Joseph Wilson. I doubt that will actually happen, but a resignation and pardon isn't too far off the mark, under the circumstances.
As for being a hobbit, I'd post pictures of my hairy feet, but I'm not a Proudfoot, am I?
Global Rich List
I am in the top 7.27% richest people in the world. I am the 436,606,684th richest person in the world.
How about you?
The Pledge
We hold this truth to be self-evident:We will not let our partisanship towards any particular candidate for President cause us to lose sight of this basic truth. As such, we pledge ourselves not to become enablers of any campaign designed to divide us in our struggle to remove Bush from power. We pledge that no more will we be:
- Having George W. Bush as President has been and will continue to be a disaster.
We will uphold this pledge to the best of our ability.
- Tools of those who would disrupt the Anybody-But-Bush movement.
- Partisans who would rather bring down the other guy's candidate than find reason to elevate our own.
- Dupes who will automatically assume that anything negative about the other guy's candidate is more likely to be true than the negative things said about our guy.
- Fools who lose sight of the ultimate goal: the defeat of George W. Bush on November 2nd, 2004.
We will encourage others to do the same.
This we do solemnly swear.
MS-NBC
How many weeks until Karl Rove is frogmarched out of the White House? The whole affair has been proceeding slow and steady, but this is a bombshell. Pressure's going up...this is got to be a major topic on the Sunday shows...
I'm giving this one more month before Rove resigns. Disclaimer: I am no prophet nor the son of a prophet...it could be merely two weeks.
Yahoo!, via Right on the Left Beach
Breaker posits this deck as more proof the French are not our friends. Well, there are definitely groups of French who despise America, and Theirry Meyssan is among them. He's the creator of the "Find the Boeing" website, which purported to show that no plane struck the Pentagon on 9/11. He is a nutcase, in other words, or someone who's found a way to profit off inane conspiracy theories.
And this card deck is his latest product. I bring it to your attention because of an interesting twist in the deck - Osama bin Laden is one of the jokers in the deck!
I've spent a lot of time debunking crazy theories like Meyssan's. I'd always heard that Osama was just a patsy (kinda like Oswald in the JFK conspiracy theories, another one I'm not buying). This does make his selection as a joker rather apt in Meyssan's world, but the caption gives Osama a different role than patsy: he's made out to be a CIA agent in charge of "dividing Islamists from nationalists," whose current mission is "to foment a clash between the 'Arab-Muslim' and 'Jewish-Christian' worlds." Hooboy! Stop bogarting that joint, Theirry!
As you can tell, this theory degrades into the most repugnant anti-Semiticism imaginable, and a lot of French-based anti-Americanism probably finds its root in this savage belief. But none of this shows that the French as a whole hate America. Does America have enemies who are French? Yes, they do. But France is not America's enemy. Let's keep that in mind...
When George W. Bush fell off a Segway scooter during a family weekend in Maine this summer, it spawned a thousand jokes about his "lack of balance". But the presidential tumble may actually have been the result of a design fault, it emerged on Friday.The Financial Times appears to be providing a little cover for Bush's escapade. According to the Segway website:
The makers of the revolutionary self-balancing scooter have recalled the 6,000 currently in circulation after reports of riders falling off when the batteries are low.
Such mishaps can occur if "the rider speeds up abruptly, encounters an obstacle or continues to ride after receiving a low battery alert", the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said on Friday.
Not having attended orientation (and maybe deciding not to listen to his mother), President Bush did not turn the Segway HT on before climbing aboard (and, we might add, neglected to put down his tennis racket). The result, of course, was that he didn't balance!So Bush is still a goof despite this recall.
BBC
I don't know much to say about this. It's distressing news. Bush's arrogance may be the undoing of us all.
The "Rubber Ducky" is Paddy Chayevsky's term for when the hero or villain, at a lull in the action, explains that he is the way he is because his mother took away his rubber ducky when he was three. It's always a nice scene, well acted, beautifully lit, with a powerfully written monolog that the writer spent days on. [snip]As re: screenwriting - don't give us the Ducky, meet our concerns with the character.
A Ducky cheapens the character. Kurt Russell's character Jack O'Neil in Stargate is suicidal because his young son killed himself accidentally with a pistol he left around the house. To make us care more about his otherwise unpleasant character, O'Neil delivers a small monologue to James Spader's character Daniel Jackson. It is important to the picture that O'Neil is suicidal, but not why; and given O'Neil's contempt for Daniel Jackson, it's unlikely that he would open up to him about his guilt and shame. The emotional truth of the situation is that Daniel Jackson would never know why O'Neil is so willing to die. It might have been more emotionally truthful for the movie never to relay this information. But I wouldn't be surprised if Kurt Russell wanted the audience to know that his character had a good reason for being such a bastard. Actors want you to have sympathy for them.
A good example of a Ducky that never comes up is Thelma and Louise. It becomes clear over the course of the movie that something terrible happened to Louise (Geena Davis) in Texas; that's why the two women take the long way around to the Mexican border. You begin to realize that she must have been raped in Texas, and then disbelieved in court. But Louise never says anything explicit about it in the movie, and that makes her backstory all the stronger.
If development execs are asking you for the Ducky, the screenplay isn't working for them. Don't give them the Ducky, but do focus your scenes so they show the character. Go through your script again, scene by scene, and make sure that every time the hero acts, it shows us who he is. Make sure you communicate how he feels about what he's doing, and give him a fresh way of doing it, one someone else wouldn't have...
Front Line Voices Meetingplace
The proposal is to counter the "police blotter" media slant against the war by collecting actual 1st person accounts from soldiers who were or are in Iraq. There are several problems with their methodology, enough so to qualify this as a standard-issue propaganda piece with a veneer of objectivity.
One, the proposal aims to verify stories by collecting the name, rank, and serial number of each account. Any form of this, as one commenter pointed out, will narrow the stories to positive, "rubber ducky" stories. Soldiers are mandated to support the military actions they are undertaking. Any soldier caught "undermining" those actions by reporting negative stories with their names attached risks reprimand. Even if the website allows the publication of rank only while maintaining a file with all pertinent information, the soldiers who whistleblow will be at risk.
Two, the stated aim of the website is not an accurate picture of Iraq, but publishing the "positive aspects" that aren't being reported. If a soldier does give an account that has negative aspects or is negative overall, will the website go ahead and publish the account without editing? It's likely that they wouldn't on the grounds that they'd be doing the work of the "liberal media" for them.
Three, stories may not restricted to the Iraqi soldiers. They're also considering using the accounts of people who know the soldiers (hearsay) and the stories of "private-industry personell (sic)" that are in Iraq or Afghanistan (public relations bonanza). The potential for innocent and open abuse of this system is bad enough as is; these proposals could turn such abuse up to eleven.
Four, the assumption is that only the above named can provide a clear picture of what's going on in Iraq. What about accounts from Iraqi citizens? Would the website publish such first-hand accounts as Riverbend's Baghdad Burning weblog? Resistance to this would be along lines of verifiability and such accounts being propaganda for whatever Iraqi faction is trying to get a leg up in the country. But the American accounts are subject to the same failings. The Americans in Iraq are a faction as well, with their own agendas in play, one that soldiers will be inclined to support. Why not publish all stories from Iraqi?
Five, other than verifying the identity of the soldiers, there will be no effort to verify the facts reported in the accounts. There's no one behind the project (so far as I can tell) who's in a position to do so.
I could be cynical and assert that the faith of the project's leaders in coming up with overwhelmingly good stories out of Iraq is because they're absolutely aware of their methodology's misgivings. But I don't think that's the case. Theirs is a blind faith - similar to the Bush Administration's blind faith in finding WMD, so much so that they were willing to use faulty intelligence to lead this nation to war. This website is more of the same - it's expecting a flood of positive raw data that it intends to publish without (or even in the face of?) sufficient vetting.
Bottom line: I don't doubt that there are American soldiers playing on swing sets with Iraqi children. Is it worth $87 billion dollars to keep that happening?
Before we go further, I should explain the genesis of this column. It's a reaction to the seemingly innocuous question writers ask, "I just sent my screenplay off to an agent. How long should I wait before I can expect a reply?"
Most answers to this are along the lines of, "Make a follow up call after two weeks to make sure it's arrived, and then if you don't hear anything back in six weeks, they're probably not interested, so..."
Not me.
My reaction to the question I've always held back.
What I want to do is jump out of my chair and yell "How long do you wait? What the fuck are you doing waiting? Waiting is death! Waiting is screwing up on a cosmological scale! If you spend even the tiniest fraction of a glorious, invaluable second with your attention on where you last sent your screenplay and you're actually waiting for a response, then you've already lost the whole damn game already, you might as well go back and complete the seventh level of Legend of Zelda over again!"
But that response is harsh, sounds crazy and would probably not be understood, or much appreciated.
The shorter, Yoda-inspired version, "You must do, never wait, and fuck hope," isn't much better.
So instead, you get this column.
I've got an ongoing conversation about Clark at baldilocks' blog. It starts here and continues here. This is not asking all three of you reading this thing to pile on! Just go read it if you like, and say hi to baldilocks. What a cute baby picture...
Talking with people who don't agree with what I have to say is a good thing. Sometimes I convince them, sometimes they convince me, sometimes we just disagree. We have to remember that there's good people on both sides of the issues.
Paul was in Corinth, getting ready to travel to Spain. However, he was going to Jerusalem first to deliver money donated from Greek churches for the Jerusalem poor (15:25-26). He was anticipating trouble there, but hoped that he could avoid this and see Rome for a little while before heading to Spain (15:30-32).
If he did run into trouble, he would be heading for Rome anyway. So Rome was on his mind, and the controversy that might overwhelm him. Already Claudius had thrown the Jews out of Rome because of arguments over Christ - two of Paul's closest allies were among the exiled (Acts 18:1-3). Paul had also been arrested in his time before, and such a background wouldn't reflect well on him if he were arrested in Jerusalem and taken to Rome for trial.
Should Paul be arrested, it would help his case to have Christians in Rome (after Claudius' death, many returned) on his side, especially if these Christians were Jews and Gentiles living and worshipping together in peace. In any case, a document that was clearly from him advocating such a message would be worthwhile. And it wouldn't hurt if this document could soothe Roman fears of Paul's motives. As an organizer of an illicit religion, he was running afoul of secret society laws, where insurrection could be in the works.
Therefore, the letter to the Christians in Rome had several audiences. The direct recipients were the Christians in Rome, both Jew and Gentile. The letter would serve as an introduction to this controversial figure, and be an opportunity to hear what he had to say firsthand. It even raises hopes of financial support in Paul's mission to Spain. But an intended, though indirect, audience would be the Roman officials in charge of Paul's trial. They needed to see a man dedicated to peace who in no way posed a threat to their government. If the Christians in Rome could point to this letter as something that united them and brought peace to Rome, all the better. A few nods to the power of the civil government would be in order as well.
Paul's letter to the Romans, then, is a principled defense of Paul's place in the early church and the Roman empire; an apology, if you will. He would not be in Rome to defend himself for some time, so those delivering the letter would use it in Paul's absence to defend his point of view. It had to be reasonable and appeal to people from a wide range of backgrounds. And it was written with the knowledge that it might be used against him in a court of law. It was a document meant for public scrutiny, for Paul had nothing to hide.
It did not save him from Nero, but the letter, basically intact, still speaks for him and the gospel he preached.
I see that some religious bloggers are blogging the book of Mark, one chapter a week. Being new to blogging myself, it's my first experience with the concept, and I like it! Instead of just pointing out how crazy some people's expression of religion can be, I'd like to do some building up as well. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and criticize, but I should be willing to stand up and say what I believe and subject my thinking to the purifying light of critique.
However, I'm devoting my Tuesday blogging to religion, and this would put me behind a week if I were to pursue the book of Mark. So I've decided to go to the book of Romans instead. I studied it a bit in my youth, and I'd like to see how my impressions stand up to my current frame of thought.
Which bears stating out loud, although it will become clear pretty quickly. I am no longer the Christian I was in my youth. In my mid-to-late twenties, my faith was beaten out of my life in several battles with reason and the humanity of people I trusted. Faith became, in a concept I've borrowed from Peter Straub, radioactive in my life. It's not just that I was one more gay man trying to atone for my desires by serving Jesus. It's not just the many places where I found the Church of Christ hermenuetic incapable of transmitting a good portion of the message of Scripture. It's not just being betrayed in different ways by a variety of people, two being an elder and deacon of the Church of Christ. It's all of them combined. Faith has wounded me greatly.
Another reason I approach faith reluctantly is I know how I act under the influence of the faith meme. I look back on my life as a Christian and see a Paul-like fervor, a willingness to travel to foreign lands and race Jehovah's Witnesses to the doors. I can think of several times when my assurance of being correct doctrinally made me an insensitive jerk to other people. Perhaps my pursuit of politics is a substitute for the faith I dare not reach for any longer, for I see many of these traits in my political writings and actions today. I guard against this better in my thirties, but still stridency will be my undoing.
I also approach discussions of faith with caution, because there are others who believe, whose faith is not the damaging thing mine was. My loss of faith was a dark period for me, and I wish it on no person alive. Life without my faith has been no bed of roses, but at least it's not the bed of torment my faith drew me into nightly. Perhaps there are those who are just as racked with pain as I out there, and to them I would speak. The nature of blogging emboldens me a bit as well. If you're here and you've read this far, I can't help that. Nobody is being forced to read, much less believe, what I'm blogging here.
So this is where I stand: an agnostic skeptic returning to the biblical texts of my youth and recording my past and current impressions. I'm a graduate of a Church of Christ Bible college, with two years of graduate school under my belt. Welcome to Bolo Boffin Tuesdays.
Calpundit
Correcting the "Clark didn't call Rove" meme, with a sweet KO punch concerning the Wilson felony charge...
Marisa Buchanan
In which we finally learn General Clark's favorite song: "This Land Is Your Land," by Woody Guthrie.
Good choice.
Yeltsin couldn't follow up the dash to Pristina, further evidence that Clark wasn't risking WW3 by sending NATO troops to Pristina.
The second incident came as NATO forces were about to enter Kosovo to establish its peacekeeping operation. Russia managed to steal NATO's thunder by moving several hundred Russian troops, who had been serving as part of the Stabilisation Force (SFOR) in Bosnia into Kosovo, establishing themselves at the main airport in Pristina.
The dash to Pristina seemed a clever ruse, creating a bargaining position out of nothing. But in the end Russia lacked the funds and spare military capacity to follow it up. Within a short time, NATO forces surrounded the airport and took up positions throughout the province, thus smothering the Russians with condescension. KFOR personnel eventually became the Russians' only supplier of water.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: It was a surprising moment to me. It was Sunday the 13th of June, about 8:30 in the morning. And he said, "I'm not going to take your order to block these, this runway." And so we talked about it. He was extremely agitated and emotional and making all kinds of statements. So I said, "let's get your chief of defense," his boss in the British chain of command, "on the line." I talked to General Sir Charles Guthrie, the British chief of defense, and he said, "let me talk to Mike." And so I pass the phone over and then Mike handed the phone back to me. And the British chief of defense said, "well, I agree with Mike." And he says, "so does Hugh Shelton," the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I was very surprised because I had gotten word from Washington that Washington supported, in fact, suggested that I block these runways and strongly supported how I did it, how I wanted to do it. So I called Hugh. It was about 3:00 in the morning in Washington, and I said, "well, you know, here is the problem and Guthrie says you support Jackson, not me. What... Do you support me or not?" Because you can't take actions in war without support of governments. He said, "well," he said, "I did have a conversation with Guthrie. I knew you were getting this order. Guthrie and I agreed we don't want a confrontation but I do support you." So I said, "well, then you've got a policy problem." And it really was a policy problem caused by the British government's differing perception than the American government's, and by Mike Jackson's perception of the situation.Mike Jackson's perception of the problem might have stemmed from his association with Bloody Sunday, something that must still haunt him and his career. And there he was in the same area of the world that kicked off WW1, with the Russians on the move. And if Clark was wrong, it would be Jackson that fingers were pointed at back at home - it was British troops on the line, he possessed the power to stop it, and his government saw the situation differently from the Americans. That's why he let fly such an emotional remark. He wasn't about to repeat the scrutiny his life had undergone since Bloody Sunday.
MARGARET WARNER: What does this tell you about alliance warfare? I mean, that if push comes to shove, does the whole alliance command structure break down?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, only in... It tells you the same lesson we've always known about alliances, that if you are going to lead and you have the command positions, you have to back up that command position. You have to earn it by committing the resources. Now, in this case, although we had the majority of the aircraft and the air campaign, we had done our best to avoid taking a leadership role on the ground. The British had the vast majority of the forces. They were there first. They had the capital sector around Pristina and the Pristina Airport sector, and they had the commander on the ground. So it was going to be, except for the Apaches, it was all British troops at risk, and it was a British commander and therefore it was essentially a British operation under my command. It's the same thing that we would have found in the Second World War. Eisenhower was the supreme allied commander because the United States put the bulk of the forces in, not the Brits. In this case, because the United States didn't want to take the lead by committing its resources on the ground, when push came to shove, it was another country that actually set the policies.
People, Get Ready
Ted at Crooked Timbers brings up a fact about Clark's meeting with Mladic.
Have you seen the handshaking picture yet? It was taken almost a year before the warcrimes that Mladic was convicted of. As Ted says, it's like knocking the makers of Tyson's Nintendo game for using a convicted rapist as their spokesperson.
Nothing at all like Rummy shaking Saddam's bloodstained hands.
Washington Post, via Daily Kos
Go, scroll down to the third heading, read. Reflect on how well privatization has worked in the past. Think about flying the friendly, low-bid skies.
Will air traffic controllers be exempt from overtime pay in Bush's world?
Economic Policy Institute, via Daily Misleader
The usual Bush policy MO: give a little with one hand, and steal as much as you can with the other. The carrot? Raising the salary floor below which a worker automatically qualifies for overtime pay. The payoff? Millions of workers lose their eligibility for overtime pay, greatly offsetting the cost of the salary floor raise.
Currently, an employee must meet three separate criteria for being eliminated from overtime pay regulations. They must be salaried employees, not hourly - the salary-basis test. The salary must be above a certain amount (currently $155 a week, $170 for "professionals") - the salary-level test. And finally, the employee's duties must be primarily "administrative", "professional", or "executive - the duties test. If all three tests are met, then the employer is free to exempt the employee from overtime pay.
Those quotation marks are important. How the government defines those terms is at the heart of the bait-and-switch of the proposed legislation.
The salary-level raise to a flat $425 is overdue - how many salaried workers do you know that make under $155 a week? The Labor Department estimates that 1.3 million will become eligible for overtime pay under this new guideline, and they have a pretty pie chart that shows how many of these people will be women and Hispanics, coming to a Limbaugh stack of stuff near you.
Which is all well and good, although the salary-level raise would be better if it were indexed for inflation. But there are other goodies deeper inside this bag.
The new definition of "learned professional" now includes workers who have knowledge that cannot be gained at a high school level. You don't need an associate's degree or the power of discretion and independent judgment in your work anymore - that correspondence course you took to be a paralegal will qualify you as a learned professional.
Assistant managers at your local Taco Bell will be surprised to know they are now "executives". And "administrative" exemptions no longer require that the "administrator" spend a majority of his time on the administrative duties. As long as you hold a position of "responsibility" with "a high level of skill or training," you can be exempt from overtime pay. Don't learn how to work the cash register, folks.
Now for the best trick of all: meeting the duties test includes determining your "primary duty." Do you have to spend a majority of your time doing your "primary duty"? Not by the Bush Administration's proposals. If you do, then your primary duty is obvious to all and enshrined in the guidelines, but if the "professional, administrative, or executive" duties fall under 50% of your time, the employer can still exempt you from overtime pay if the employer considers those tasks your "most important" duties.
Wow. That's the same logic as cutting taxes in the face of surplus and deficit spending. When this government likes a horse, they ride that poor thing as far as it will go.
Hourly employees, regardless of duties, remain fully vested in their rights to overtime pay, but with such gaping holes being established in the current guidelines, the incentive to convert hourly employees to salaried employees is growing. The DOL fesses up to 644,000 workers losing their rights in this way, a conservative estimate. The Economic Policy Institute only looked at one-third of the occupations most affected by the new proposals and came up with 2.5 million salaried workers who will lose their overtime pay outright, and 5.5 hourly workers who risk conversion. And they weren't even trying that hard.
Even using the DOL's numbers, 1,300,000 new eligibles minus 644,000 non-eligibles is...
Wait. If you already know the answer, you might not qualify for overtime pay. Keep it under your hat.
Tennessean
Apparently, Bush is tired of taking it on the chin.
The officials said Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, was concerned about new polls that suggest sinking support for the president's handling of Iraq.So that's what's behind Bush's recent admission of no Iraq-9/11 connection. This is starting to sound like Ditch Lott 2: The Veep.
Rove also is worried about a potential schism between traditional Republican conservatives wary of spending huge sums in Iraq and neoconservatives who want to remake not only Iraq but also Iran, Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Even some of Bush's strong support from military families appears to be ebbing, one official said, as overseas tours are extended and casualties mount.
''The election is still ours to lose,'' one senior official told Knight Ridder. ''What's new is that some people now see ways we could do that, even against this field of Democrats."
He stated this in jest and yet was still upset that he hadn't been called to help pull together a coalition. People use humor to offset their genuine anger all the time. This aside is being thrown out by Republicans who see that his voting past (before Clinton/Gore) is getting some play in public forums.
Can no one see that the joke doesn't make any sense unless he identified as a Democrat at the time?
DemocracyMeansYou.com
A brief sample:
35. Proposes to re-draw boundaries of nation's monuments, which would technically allow oil and gas drilling "outside" of national monuments.This thing needs to be updated, though. Only 84? I'd like to include #85: Appointed L. Jean "I Can't Handle The Truth.....Faint" Lewis the chief-of-staff for the DOD Inspector General.
36. Gutted White House AIDS Office.
37. Renegotiating free trade agreement with Jordan to eliminate workers' rights and safeguards for the environment.
38. Will no longer seek guidance from The American Bar Association in recommendations for the federal judiciary appointments.
39. Appointed recycling foe Lynn Scarlett as Undersecretary of the Interior.
40. Took steps to abolish the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
41. Cut the Community Oriented Policing Services program.
42. Allowed Interior Secretary Gale Norton to shelve citizen-led grizzly bear re- introduction plan scheduled for Idaho and Montana wilderness.
43. Continues to hold up federal funding for stem cell research projects.
44. Makes sure convicted misdemeanor drug users cannot get financial aid for college, though convicted murderers can.
Clark's Military Record Offers Campaign Clues
It repeats the "World War 3" meme without noting that Jackson and Clark sent troops to Pristina several days later, which didn't start off WW3. It's more a story of Jackson's stubborness than Clark's foolhardiness, but will we see a correction? The Times calls this "Clark at his worst". Well, thank God that's as bad as it gets. If seen in context, Clark's decision was based on White House policy and was later shown to not be as volitile as Jackson hyped it to be. It must be gratifying to Jackson that his unfounded remark is still an albatross around Clark's neck.
It also refuses to understand Clark's position on the Iraqi war. He would have voted for the Iraqi war resolution as leverage for a UN-based solution, but consistently opposed Bush's unilateral and ill-planned use of that resolution. There, was that so hard, guys?
