Thank you, Leonard Pitts.

As always, Leonard Pitts cuts to the simple truth of the issue at hand: God is not a Republican.

The president as towel-snapper

There's a brilliant piece today over at the Santa Cruz Sentinel on the rise of "bully culture" in politics, entertainment, sports, and business. The snarling John Bolton. The swaggering Donald Trump. The sneering Darth Dick Cheney. Reality TV, American Idol, and Survivor. The screaming End Timers. The Republican Party as "spiritual home of the bully, where merry thugs like Tom Delay and Rick Santorum thrive like cockroaches in a junkie's kitchen."

And W?

As for the president, he’s always struck me as a particular sub-species of the bully you might call a "towel snapper." You know the type, the guy who puts his arms around your shoulders for a good-natured, insincere apology after pulling a nuclear wedgie on you in front of the whole school at assembly.

The author thinks bullies always get their comeuppance; let us fervently pray he is right and work to make it so.
UPDATE: For a truly hair-raising account of W's early crimes and misdemeanors - animal torturing, coke dealing, drunk driving, abortion procuring, etc., etc. - check out this piece of muckraking over at Counterpunch. (Can't say it's fully sourced, but it will certainly get you thinking.)
UPDATE II: And while we're on the subject of misanthropic frat boys, Garrison Keillor had a few choice words. Here's a taste:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

UPDATE II: This passage really calls to me. I wonder how many of those epithets I can work into a conversation or post over the next 30 days?
UPDATE III: I'll put them in bold whenever I score....

The Downing Street Memo

A group of energetic Kossacks has put together a terrific website to host info and action points on those leaked minutes from Britain. While the press has begun, lamely, to mention the story their collective take seems to be "This is old news, since everyone knows Bush lied about the WMD, and we're only mentioning it at all because a group of insane left-wing bloggers seem to be obsessed with it."

This position is unacceptable. They have never definitively reported on The Big Lie, and now that they have proof they are burying the story.

Please check out the Downing Street Memo site.

Changing minds in a crisis

There is a two-part diary at Kos that addresses a searingly important topic - how to snap people out of the mass psychosis that enables them to pretend the Bush administration is "business as usual."

Without rehashing too much, the author riffs off a piece about surviving plane crashes and other profound disasters. She likens the current administration to a slow-motion disaster on an epic scale, but nevertheless a disaster sharing the same characteristics as, say, a plane crash in terms of our human reaction to it:

• When faced with disaster, most people do not respond by fighting or fleeing. Their first response is to disbelieve.
• To overcome this stage of disbelief, people seek advice from others nearby, especially people they trust.
• Even when disbelief has been overcome, most people do not flee, they FREEZE.
• This sort of "trance" reaction is surprisingly common. In one study, 45% of people "shut down," when asked under pressure to perform unfamiliar but basic tasks. Unfortunately, this inability to act can mean the difference between life and death.
• People are more likely to act if they have previous experience with disaster or are properly informed.
• People can escape their "trances" if helped by others -- either by being told what to do or by being helped to act.

She goes on with specific recommendations to help people overcome each step of this disbelief. The whole article is a must read.

Three cheerful notes on Social Security

If, like me, you'd prefer not to think about the Bolton nomination right now, here are three cheerful notes on a different topic.

First, Bush’s 60-day, 60-city Bamboozlepalooza Tour (to use Josh Marshall’s felicitous phrase) did not yield quite the results they they wanted:

(Source: Democratic Underground. Click here to enlarge.)

Second, a few diehards keep splitting hairs over terminology, most recently Michael Medved going to hilarious lengths and getting called out as a liar on his own radio show by the folks at Rock the Vote.

And third, David Sirota has dug up a most interesting quote:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54

Read, savor, and enjoy your day.

You will be shocked, shocked to learn this.

Would you have guessed this in a million years?

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says. – USA Today, May 11, 2005.

Juliusblog did, in August of last year. He observed that whenever Bush’s ratings dipped, there was a new terror alert. He compiled all the HSA terror alerts for a period of 46 months and logged them against Bush's poll data from 15 different sources to create this chart (click here to enlarge):

And here's what he found out…

Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings.

Whenever there are many unfavorable headlines, there's another alert or announcement (distraction effect).

As we approach the 2004 elections, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing, to the point that they collapse in the graphic. At the same time, Bush ratings are lower than ever.

In response to today's inconvenient news outbreak, the administration briefly evacuated the White House and the Capitol to protect our government from a possible terrorist attack. Really and truly, they did.
UPDATE: Something I hadn't thought of...

Everytime the Fed Government raised the terra alurtz states had to shell out millions of dollars for readiness.

However at the same time:

Bush cut funding to the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Domestic Preparedness, which supplies a variety of first-responder grants to state and local governments, by $800 million, to $3.6 billion in 2005 from $4.4 billion in 2004. [Department of Homeland Security, 2005 Budget in Brief, www.dhs.gov; Congressional Quarterly, www.CQ.com]

Thanks to Parker for the catch.

Nationalism and the soul

Robert Scheer on the dangers of nationalism:

I believe that my German uncle, the spitting image of my American father, was a decent man who, like the new pope who once joined the Hitler Youth, was swept along by events far beyond his control. He recalled that as a teenager, Hitler was a distant voice on the radio promising to return order and prosperity to a depressed country. Little did he know that the highway built near the town in the '30s, eagerly welcomed for creating local jobs, was intended to carry tanks to conquer Paris, or that the coming war would leave him near death on the Russian front.

After the war, my late father never visited Germany. He couldn't get over the shock that his "landsmen," whom he had respected as the best-educated and most industrially proficient people in the world, had descended to the lowest level of primitive barbarism yet recorded in human history.

We have the Iraq smoking gun with fingerprints all over it. US media not sure it's newsworthy.

This advisory from FAIR is important enough that I'm printing the whole thing. It's worth noting that the document under discussion - the smoking gun on how Bush lied us into Iraq - is not a "memo" or an "anonymous email" or a "photocopy of an old letter printed in dubious typeface." We're talking about the legally recorded minutes of a meeting held in prime minister Tony Blair's office in July 2002. Read on:

Journalists typically condemn attempts to force their colleagues to disclose anonymous sources, saying that subpoenaing reporters will discourage efforts to expose government wrongdoing. But such warnings seem like mere self-congratulation when clear evidence of wrongdoing emerges, with no anonymous sources required – and major news outlets virtually ignore it.

A leaked document that appeared in a British newspaper offered clear new evidence that U.S. intelligence was shaped to support the drive for war. Though the information rocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair's re-election campaign when it was revealed, it has received little attention in the U.S. press.

The document, first revealed by the London Times (5/1/05), was the minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting in Blair's office with the prime minister's close advisors. The meeting was held to discuss Bush administration policy on Iraq, and the likelihood that Britain would support a U.S. invasion of Iraq. "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided," the minutes state.

The minutes also recount a visit to Washington by Richard Dearlove, the head of the British intelligence service MI6: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

That last sentence is striking, to say the least, suggesting that the policy of invading Iraq was determining what the Bush administration was presenting as "facts" derived from intelligence. But it has provoked little media follow-up in the United States. The most widely circulated story in the mainstream press came from the Knight Ridder wire service (5/6/05), which quoted an anonymous U.S. official saying the memo was ''an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" during Dearlove's meetings in Washington.

Few other outlets have pursued the leaked memo's key charge that the "facts were being fixed around the policy." The New York Times (5/2/05) offered a passing mention, and the Charleston (W.V.) Gazette (5/5/05) wrote an editorial about the memo and the Iraq War. A columnist for the Cox News Service (5/8/05) also mentioned the memo, as did Molly Ivins (WorkingForChange.com, 5/10/05). Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler (5/8/05) noted that Post readers had complained about the lack of reporting on the memo, but offered no explanation for why the paper virtually ignored the story.

In a brief segment on hot topics in the blogosphere (5/6/05), CNN correspondent Jackie Schechner reported that the memo was receiving attention on various websites, where bloggers were "wondering why it's not getting more coverage in the U.S. media." But acknowledging the lack of coverage hasn't prompted much CNN coverage; the network mentioned the memo in two earlier stories regarding its impact on Blair's political campaign (5/1/05, 5/2/05), and on May 7, a short CNN item reported that 90 Congressional Democrats sent a letter to the White House about the memo – but neglected to mention the possible manipulation of intelligence that was mentioned in the memo and the Democrats' letter.

Salon columnist Joe Conason posed this question about the story:

"Are Americans so jaded about the deceptions perpetrated by our own government to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer interested in fresh and damning evidence of those lies? Or are the editors and producers who oversee the American news industry simply too timid to report that proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?"

As far as the media are concerned, the answer to Conason's second question would seem to be yes. A May 8 New York Times news article asserted that "critics who accused the Bush administration of improperly using political influence to shape intelligence assessments have, for the most part, failed to make the charge stick." It's hard for charges to stick when major media are determined to ignore the evidence behind them. [emphasis added]
- Advisory, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, May 10, 2005

Well, gee. Do you see a story here? Seems to me there's a story here. Seems to me that lying us into a war is at least as newsworthy as having sex with an intern. I don't know if this media blackout demonstrates bias, cowardice, malice, or sheer oblivion on the part of our fourth estate. I do know that it makes the case for media reform.

If you would like to make your voice heard on this outrage, read FAIR's excellent advice on how to communicate with journalists and then check out their media contacts.

Our voices do make a difference.
UPDATE: for inspiration, read dozens of letters already sent to the Washington Post on their refusal to cover the story.

Best weekly news series on the web

If you haven't met up with Newsie's Week in Reviewsies or Media News Monday series, you're in for a treat. If you're a news junkie, that is.

Until the end of time

An interesting series on the End Times is underway over at Kos. The author was kicked out of his fundamentalist church two years ago for questioning the war and has put together a mix of personal conjecture and facts on dominionism, the Rapture Index, and Christian reconstructionism. He opens with a provocative question: is Bush deliberately trying to trigger Armageddon?

Most commenters agree that, at the very least, his handlers are fully aware of Rapture symbology and use it plentifully. Attacks on the UN (the AntiChrist), provoking Russia (Gog), demonizing abortion (Moloch), unqualified support for Israel (though to my knowledge the feds are not yet funding the Red Heifer breeding program), the code words embedded in his speeches ("the untamed fires of freedom," "yesterday, today, and forever," etc.)....

Says Jon Carroll at the San Francisco Chronicle, "The Rapture Index, as of this writing, stands at 153. Anything over 145 is labeled by the Rapture Actuaries as 'Fasten your seat belts.'"

Check in on the series if you're interested. Personally, I prefer the more ecumenical approach of Tom Lehrer:

Oh we will all fry together when we fry.
We'll be french fried potatoes by and by.
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie,
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry.

... You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas.
Go directly, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollahs.

And we will all go together when we go.
Every Hottentot and every Eskimo.
When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous.
Yes, we all will go together
When we all go together,
Yes we all will go together when we go.

(c) Tom Lehrer, 1959

Stop, stop! You're killing us!

Vanity Fair’s June issue [no link yet] has Michael Wolff castigating liberals for being “achingly serious” while the folks across the aisle are just cracking us up with the likes of Ann Coulter ("facile, funny, irreverent, eccentric, jaunty, pithy”) and Roger Ailes ("sly, charming, sometimes farfetched, and irresistibly cynical”).

Gosh, that is a problem. Not only are we out of power, fighting cryptofascists with one hand and lunatic televangelists with the other while trying to get the media to do their job and report how the president lied his way into Iraq… we’re just not funny! If only we had the wits to advocate murdering journalists, assassinating a sitting president, mocking triple amputees, and attacking Republicans with baseball bats. Maybe we’d be in power right now!

Fellow VF writer James Wolcott ruefully agrees that libruls just aren’t as funny as, say, Zell Miller, Tom DeLay, James Dobson, and the like. And this has been going on some time, he adds:

I can remember what the media pundits were saying about Martin Luther King in the Sixties back when they were on their tricycles. If only the Negro would lighten up some, they lamented, and open his sermons with a few jokes, this whole civil-rights thing would be easier for people to accept. He keeps appealing to our consciences, and where's the entertainment in that? Same thing with the anti Vietnam movement. Those placards with photos of napalmed Vietnamese children were such a bringdown, they kind of took the fun out of opposing an illegal, immoral war.

So, friends, let’s all try to be hilarious next week. To get in the proper mood, try this column by the incomparable Cindy Sheehan, founder of Gold Star Mothers for Peace. She’ll really get you going.

Excommunication, anyone?

I’m on my way out the door for dinner but am compelled to post this news: the East Waynesville, NC, Baptist Church has kicked out all of its Democratic parishioners. The story broke yesterday, on the National Day of Prayer.

Pastor Chan Chandler, 31, evidently told his congregation that anyone who supported John Kerry or the Democratic Party was against the church. He called on them to repent and agree to vote Republican. Nine members said the minister led the charge to excommunicate them because of issues of abortion and homosexuality. Forty other members resigned in protest. The story is backed up with video links and there is also a link with suggested actions to take.

Certainly any church is entitled to state its views on controversial issues of the day. But according to my understanding of the U.S. Constitution and IRS tax code, they cannot become an arm of the GOP.

I think it is becoming an urgent matter for people of faith to speak up and state that God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. (Though one commenter was moved to add, "In related news, Jesus Christ, a notorious liberal, also left the church in protest....")

UPDATE: Excellent, passionate rant here on the arrogance and blasphemy of those who claim to have God's vote.

Time to defend and nurture

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, though I don’t recall reading much about it in the Portland Press Herald. The real news was the annual report of global freedom of the press put out since 1980 by the nonpartisan watchdog group Freedom House. In this year’s survey of 194 countries, two trends stand out:

1. Overall press freedom dropped for the third year in a row, despite bright spots in Ukraine, Lebanon, Guatemala, and Namibia.
2. Notable setbacks in the U.S. helped drag down the global score. While our press still qualifies as “free,” the U.S. dropped from 15th to 24th place, tied with Barbados, Canada, Dominica, Estonia, and Latvia.

We lost points for heavy-handed legal tactics against journalists trying to protect sources (as in the Plame investigation) and for the noxious use of covert government propaganda masquerading as news content (as in Armstrong Williams and friends). The money quote comes from Freedom House Executive Director Jennifer Windsor:

Even in established democracies, press freedom should not be taken for granted. It must be defended and nurtured.

The worst-ranked countries were Burma, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, and Turkmenistan, where “the press is reduced to serving as a mouthpiece for the ruling regime, and citizens' access to unbiased information is severely limited.” Phew! I’m glad we don’t live anywhere like that!

The world’s freest press can be found in the hideous socialist gulags of Finland, Iceland, and Sweden.

Are you a Republican? (poll)

Disclosure: I have just learned that I am 13% Republican, as determined by this helpful questionnaire. If we are to have meaningful dialog, it's important to know where we all stand.

Why the media isn't working

Two great media pieces over the weekend. The first is a terrific interview with Helen Thomas, doyenne of the White House press corps, in which she castigates the media for having rolled over and played dead on the war, “just like Congress,” she adds. In her view, reporters fell prey to the politics of fear, self-censorship, and groupthink. She sees signs of life returning – thanks to public pressure – and calls on us to keep pushing. Meet with local editorial boards and ask for an accounting; complain to TV talk and news shows about their one-sided lineups. Shame Congress for that blank check they gave Bush and for defaulting on their responsibility to ask tough questions. Best of all, here she is on holding the president’s feet to the fire:

Reporters should put presidents on the line as well, and the public should demand that presidents have regular press conferences. During the campaign we should make them say that they will hold regular news conferences every two weeks. Bush hated talking to the press and only did when forced to. He had a seating chart and would pick the journalists he wanted. He was told to not call on me because I would ask a very tough question. He didn't allow any follow-up questions and would get mad if a reporter asked a two-part question. I mean, c'mon. The president of the United States should be able to answer any question, or at least dance around it. Presidents should be obligated – early and often – to submit to questioning and be held accountable. The presidential news conference is the only forum in our society, the only institution, where a president can be questioned. If a leader is not questioned, he can rule by edict or executive order. He can be a king or a dictator. Who's to challenge him?

This is the woman Ann Coulter called an “old Arab” and a security risk to Bush, and the Wall Street Journal and Fox refer to as the “crazy Aunt in the attic.” Read her piece, if only for the great description of Condi going nuclear after being challenged.

Meanwhile, Robert Parry at Consortium News looks at systemic issues. Following Watergate, he notes, the left and right had access to similar sums of money from foundations and wealthy individuals but made fateful, very different choices on how to invest it. The right built infrastructure for their “war of ideas”; the left chose to “think globally, act locally.” We concentrated on grassroots organizing and programs, trusting the media to stand up to conservative pressure. And while we bought up wetlands, fought AIDS, and fed the poor...

[T]hrough the 1990s, the conservatives poured billions of dollars into their media apparatus, which rose like a vertically integrated machine incorporating newspapers, magazines, book publishing, radio stations, TV networks and Internet sites. Young conservative writers – such as David Brock and Ann Coulter – soon found they could make fortunes working within this structure. Magazine articles by star conservatives earned top dollar. Their books – promoted on conservative talk radio and favorably reviewed in right-wing publications – jumped to the top of the best-seller lists.

While progressives starved freelancers who wrote for left-of-center publications like The Nation or In These Times, conservatives made sure that writers for the American Spectator or the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page had plenty of money to dine at Washington’s finest restaurants.

Well, we know who won that round. They've been dining out on Democrats for more than a decade. So far, no real news.

What’s truly worrisome about Parry’s story is that he still can’t get a hearing with the left. He’s been making the rounds of liberal foundations since the early 1990s looking to counter media imbalance. First he was told it wasn’t a problem or that they “didn’t do media.” Then the problem became too big. Then all resources had to go into defeating Bush. Then everyone was tapped out from the campaign. And now we’re focused on all these urgent legislative and judicial fights….

Parry says the time to invest in progressive media is now. He doesn’t think the pendulum of imbalance will swing back on its own accord.