The abuse of war prisoners is a national disgrace. It’s a reminder of what a few bad apples can do to make our nation look criminal. Yet of all the things that we’ve done wrong in Iraq, I have faith that these few will be properly punished. I also believe most Muslims will see clearly that they do not exemplify all Americans and that their prosecution does.

The trouble is, young men are inexperienced and lack the wisdom of life and of history to judge events like these with objectivity. The young are filled with passionate emotionalism all over the world. And young Muslims are more likely to judge us harshly because of these bad apples and other gaffes we’ve committed. Older folks with a power agenda will find them ripe for recruitment to extremist or criminal orgs.

I read one report that said these soldiers were not properly trained in the rules of the Geneva Convention. That defense is akin to saying we forgot to train them not to kick babies. People who lack the common sense to act like civil people do deserve no place in any position of responsibility. They belong in jail.

It doesn’t take a radical response from the majority of Muslims to get paid back as a nation for what these soldiers did. The minority, the angry ones newly committed against us by these atrocities, can do plenty of damage without the support of mainstream Muslims.

But there remains one way to limit that yet. No, not by being tough to those who dare oppose us. This time, the task is simple and inexpensive. On behalf of our nation, George Bush must apologize to all Iraqis for those wayward soldiers. If he doesn’t, we’re all at greater risk.

It’s the only way forward, the best way to demonstrate that we’re not amoral or immoral monsters. A simple gesture that could save thousands of lives; Bush has no other logical choice.

Riverbend, in Baghdad, describes how popular Ahmad Chalabi has become in Iraq:

Chalabi has only lately ventured out from under his rock (in the usual flashy tie) to cry out that Lakhdhar Il Braheimi, the special UN representative sent by Kofi to check out the possibility of elections, is completely and totally biased against Shi’a. So now Chalabi seems to consider himself a champion of Shi’a everywhere in Iraq. The amusing thing about this is the fact that, apparently, no one has told Chalabi that he has become the joke of the Shi’a community. We (Sunnis and Shi’a) tease each other with things like, “So… the Shi’a man of the moment is Chalabi, ah?!” and the phrase is usually received with an indignant outcry and a comparison of the man of the moment to… Britney Spears, for example.

An already wealthy man, getting wealthier by both the bullet down and build up, on the power of myth and makeup and a song about love by an inexperienced lover. Wherever he goes, people scream. Yup, the Brittany analogy is perfect.

At the top of the charts: “Oops, I cashed in again.”

Percentages are useful for creating misperceptions, as noted in this Brad DeLong post about manipulative campaign ads touting economic numbers.

Consider this point in a new ad, titled “Working to Keep America Working,” which hypes the Bush administration’s record: “Unemployment rate after Bill Clinton’s third year, 5.6%. Unemployment rate after G.W. Bush’s third year, 5.6%.” True, but isn’t it gutsy to say this seeing as the unemployment rate was about 4 percent when Bush was elected (therefore it rose 1.6 percentage points to 5.6 percent) and was 7.5 percent when Clinton was elected (therefore it fell almost 2 percentage points to 5.6 percent)?

It’s also worth noting that, as years roll by, the population grows, so more actual numbers of people would be unemployed even with identical unemployment rates.

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin is one of the founders of the Clergy Leadership Network. He was very kind to spend some time this afternoon on the telephone with me to discuss his views on the 2004 elections, the conflict in Iraq, and his views on what role churches should play on public policy issues.

CLN is hosting a National Gathering of progressive religious leaders on May 16-18 in Cleveland. This interview is the second in a series with CLN leaders before the May gathering. The first was with The Rev. Dr. Albert Pennybacker. A video presentation featuring Rev. Coffin will be shared in Cleveland.

William Sloane Coffin has been a leading voice for religious progressives for decades. For many years he served as the Chaplin at Yale University and as the senior minister of Riverside Church in New York City. He later served as president of SANE/FREEZE.

The first time I heard him speak was when I was a student at Pacific University and he was brought to campus by Dr. Russell Dondero. The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, a professor of mine at Eden Theological Seminary, is a CLN member and friend of Rev. Coffin’s and helped to facilitate my conservation with Rev. Coffin this afternoon.

Rev. Coffin just published his latest book, Credo, which is a great read. If you missed his recent interview with Bill Moyers it is available online here.

You can read his interview with me here.

I comfort myself with those words from Matthew 16:18, because I have now been sniped at by what seems to be an actual Satanist. Who else would entitle their web log “Lucifer’s Condiments“? The silly blogger, who thinks his mocking the Bible is amusing, must be another illustration of why The Evil One complained, in the first version of “Bedazzled”, about his personified seven deadly assistants: “It’s tough to get good Sins these days. It must be the wages.” [Perhaps he should have considered outsourcing to the Philippines.]

In “Persecution Complex”, the so-called “Devil You Know” wrote “We can’t shake the feeling that when Ayn Clouter writes in French, she’s slandering us.” Au contraire. “Beelzebub’s Bottle of Pepper Sauce” has made a frequent error, confusing me with someone else who has the same initials. That moderate punditress (who only advocated converting Muslim nations after invading them, rather than my own suggestion of sending them all straight to Allah with a massive “nuculur” attack) did call one of her books “Slander”, but my own was titled “Libel”, thus proving that I at least know how to use a dictionary, and believe in truth in labeling.
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“… how do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case.” —- GWB 10/11/01

A photo from TV shows an Iraqi prisoner with a hood over his head, standing on a box and with wires connected to his hands. Photo: Sky News
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I have located secret transcripts from the 9/11 Commission Hearing this morning. Selections are below.

KERREY: Mr. President, there’s some question as to the frequency and quality of contact between yourself and George Tenet in the weeks leading up to 9/11–

COUNSEL GONZALES: What are you asking?

KERREY: I’m asking the President about his recollections from that time.

CHENEY: The President received daily briefings from George Tenet.

KERREY: What about the month vacation you took in August, sir?

[CROSSTALK]

CHENEY: According to our records, we met Tenet twice.

KERREY: You were there in Crawford?

CHENEY: I meant he. He met Tenet.

KERREY: Mr. President, we’ve heard testimony from Richard Clarke and George Tenet that they were “running around with their hair on fire.” All I’m trying to do is understand whether you were similarly alarmed.

[CROSSTALK]

GONZALES: He–

BUSH: No.

KERREY: You were not alarmed.

BUSH: I was tired of swatting flies.

GONZALES: You’ve heard enough.

CHENEY: Let’s move on.

KEAN: Commissioner Ben-Veniste?
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Although Ed Fitzgerald wants to avoid the Dick & Georgie show, he asks the burning question on everyone’s mind.

The spouse of a 9/11 victim has a few more she’d like the commission to ask, to find out the ugly truth.

It’s not the first time folks have suggested Bush is Cheney’s puppet. But I feel the joint appearance has another purpose.

Like two folks arrested together, they don’t want to be questioned separately for fear their stories won’t jibe. Because then Andy Sipowitz will start bearing down and Fuentes will play the good cop and the pressure will become unbearable and George’ll start whimpering in that high pitched way he does and Sipowitz will be giving him the evil eye and finally he’ll start sobbing uncontrollably while Dick starts grumbling “Shut up, you simpering sack of…” and BAM! Sipowitz will smack him down and as Fuentes starts dragging George away to the chair, George will start screaming “No! No! Mommy, not the Lick-Mommy game!” and he’ll start crying and collapse while Cheney tries to make a break for it and everything will be ruined!”

At least, that’s what Bob Woodward says Bush told him.

Elsewhere, we were surprised to discover our very own skippy turned out to be a Senator from New Joyzee. And John McCain continues to get in touch with his inner Democrat.

Kerry puts the gloves on for national security, going after Bush lobbyists in the chemical industry. Reportedly, Bush wants a Purple Heart for this wound, so he can throw a real medal over a fence to protest the Iraq war and claim some American troops are committing war crimes.

Susie’s been on a major roll lately, reporting on Bush’s Iraq Clean Air Initiative. On the plus side, now that we’ve discovered who’s doing the nuclear proliferation in Iraq, we can eliminate the radioactive material the American way, moving it to American Indian reservations. Bush can then claim he eliminated the nuclear threat in Iraq to a cheering crowd of glowing corpses.

Susie’s also right about Aaron McGruder’s funniest. And her lede to the Ashcroft expose is just as good.

And why does it seem so fitting for me to be thinking that sunlight has broken out across the land?. It makes me think of the title to an e. e. cummings poem… In Just Spring.

I mean, everywhere I look, there’s a reason to smirk. Norbizness gets all Monty Python-like. Fact-esque beams up Scotty. And did I mention the flashbacks? (link via WhatReallyHappened).

Of course, not everything’s coming up roses. Our media and government continues their long record of racism. (Or is it pro-oilism?) When will we bring democracy to Africa? On second thought, if we did, it’d likely get worse there, based on the Iraq record.

Robyn Blumner calls upon America to fight for the working poor, specifically mentioning WalMart, which is gonna make Nathan Newman happy, too. Workers Unite, indeed! On the other hand, there remains one compelling argument for outsourcing. (Note the Database of Deception, too).

And our Bill Scher gets an exclusive interview with Greg Palast whose new book looks like it contains some bombshells.

I think I’m gonna go put on some James Brown singing “I Feel Good”.

Modern technology compels me to fresh antagonisms:

1) My main online email site has been ‘down for site maintenance’ for three days.

2) Mail that was supposed to be forwarded to it from my despammed.com account between March 30th - April 2nd never got forwarded. I discovered two dozen emails that had sat there for over a month (My apologies for the lack of replies).

3) Finally entering the cellphone age a month ago, I made rookie errors that discharged the batteries 2 or 3 times because I failed to lock the keypad. Two days ago, after using it mid-day, it suddenly went dead though the battery was 75% charged at the time and the phone sat unmolested on my desk. It’s dead; I have no idea why. And before it died it only reached a signal half the time. I’m very P.O.ed at the ATT service; they assured me it would work here and half the time it didn’t. Good riddance.

Which means I’m rather incommunicado via email or by phone, so if you must reach me, for now, leave a comment till some of this truly special modern crap starts working again. {HORRRRRRK. SPIT. PTUUUI. PING!}

My apologies if you’ve left messages at either location. I hope something gets resolved soon.

Issues of race are not always simple things. Consider the case of Zephyrhills, Florida, where a non-resident of the city petitioned for a street name change. The city, built on a numbered grid system of east/west avenues and north/south streets, was petitioned to have Sixth Avenue changed to MLK Avenue, to honor the slain civil rights minister.

Note that the article says of Dobson:

Most notably, she successfully lobbied Zephyrhills to sponsor efforts to obtain federal community block grant dollars to pave streets and demolish ramshackle houses in the low-income Otis Moody neighborhood, just outside the city limits.

I’ll be coming back to that point later in this post.

The city’s approval provoked an uproar that culminated in direct challenges for city council seats, beginning with R. J. Morgan, who ran against a six-term incumbent..

I’m familiar with the city because my maternal grandmother had a vacation shack - yes, shack - there. My folks bought it upon her death and after 28 years in the Air Force, my Dad chose to retire there. I arrived here the day before the election took place, knowing nothing of the contentious issue.

Morgan lost… by one vote. In an ironic twist, his wife was too busy to vote that day, along with a few of his friends. But the message to an entrenched incumbent was clear, because he was not alone.
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the lovely rose, a long-time reader of and contributor to our own radio-active blog, sends us this commentary from the latimes talking about howard stern’s new anti-bush slant by judy rosen:

these days, stern’s broadcasts are divided between his usual schtick — interviews with strippers, off-color song parodies, jokes about celebrities — and rants against the president. stern will never be mistaken for a policy wonk, but tune in to his show and you’ll hear him cogently attacking administration positions on an impressive range of issues: stem-cell research, abortion rights, gay marriage, media consolidation, the handling of iraq.

meanwhile, stern’s revamped website looks more like mother jones magazine than maxim: it features articles about the administration’s trade violations in myanmar and includes a link to the contributions page of the john kerry for president site. indeed, stern has become an ardent kerry advocate. “i call on all fans of the show to vote against bush,” he said on a recent broadcast. “we’re going to deliver the white house to john kerry.”

some might dismiss this as bluster, but stern’s words should send a shiver up karl rove’s spine. stern has a record of successful election-year activism; political observers in new york and new jersey remember how his on-air endorsements delivered key votes to george pataki and christine todd whitman in past gubernatorial races.

what’s more, although stern’s approximately 8.5 million listeners are often dismissed as overgrown frat boys, they might more accurately be called swing voters. they are overwhelmingly white and male, many are well educated and well off, and they vote. and millions of them listen to stern’s show in battleground states — pennsylvania, michigan, ohio, missouri, tennessee, florida — where the election will be decided.

and how’s the new anti-awol stand doing for howard? ms. rosen informs us,

by all indications, stern’s message is getting through. since the fcc crackdown, his ratings have been going up. for example, arbitron says he’s now no. 1 in los angeles in the 25-to-54 age group, a spot he last occupied in 1995. and among entertainer websites, his was rated second (behind oprah’s) in mid-april.

and if anyone knows about politics and media, it’s ms. rosen, who is currently working on a book about benjamin franklin’s glass harmonica.

cross-posted on daily kos and our own snapple-drinking blog.

Antonin Scalia went hunting for morons yesterday with Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Cheney thinks they can bag over 50 million of them by setting up a moron blind and using executive privilege as a decoy.

Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club say “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there’s a bill to pay and some fupped duck stuff going ‘down’.”

Elsewhere in the news, the party that derided Clinton for his definition of the word ‘is’ are having great difficulty understanding what the definition of the word ‘hero’ is. They think it’s unpatriotic of Kerry that he wasn’t wounded enough in Vietnam and that Max Cleland was wounded too much. Yet in trying to find the proper midpoint of wounds where heroes exist, they’re having difficulty finding any Republican ones who ever came under fire. When asked for details, administration officials declared, in unison, “Mnphmnmmmmnpt.”

Over at my favorite bar, Billmon’s added a great puppet show for your entertainment.

Jim Capozzola provides your moment of xenophobia from a poor excuse for a human who wrote in a publication that’s obviously lowered its standards to subterranean depths.

With all the firefights in Iraq going down, there’s too many good things to be reading here daily to single out the very best Juan.

Spade Hammer lost his dog and thinks Americans have lost their minds. I think many have lost their sense of conscience.

And in the ongoing drama of the 9-11 commission, even the Daily Show is attracting fire:

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) issued a statement criticizing commissioner Bob Kerrey’s appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” during which host Jon Stewart jokingly offered advice on questioning Cheney. Blunt said the appearance by the Democratic former senator “makes me wonder whether he is interested in finding the truth about intelligence failures or staging a comeback tour.”

Kerrey lost a leg in Vietnam and they just can’t overcome their addiction to kicking the wounded and crippled, can they? After November, they’ll switch to kicking widows and orphans.

Religious progressives have been active this month on a range of issues important to the American people.

The National Council of Churches Justice for Women Working Group has published a new guide for churches “that equips churches to act on public policy and justice issues affecting families. The resource For the Good of All Families: Affirming Our Interdependence offers basic information on these issues, Bible study ideas and other helps. Click here to download the book.

The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choices was one of the major sponsors of the historic March for Women’s Lives held in Washington, DC over the weekend. Click here to visit their site and click here to see photos of the march.

The Clergy Leadership Network is gearing up for their National Gathering to be held May 16-18.

At the National Gathering, progressive religious leaders will come together to speak and to be heard! Outraged by economic policies that pander to greed and favor the rich, and international policies that set our nation against the world, we are inviting all clergy and religious community leaders to gather in Cleveland to stand together. The Gathering will express the Clergy Network’s passion for change in national leadership and national policy directions.

In Cleveland, we will offer a brief but dramatic witness to God’s gift of hope and to a future marked by integrity and compassion.

Make sure you attend this important event. Click here to register.

Call to Renewal is all set for their Pentecost 2004 Call to Unity: Making Poverty a Religious and Electoral Issue Conference from May 23-25, 2004 at the Washington Plaza Hotel, Washington, DC. Bill Moyers, Rev. Dr. James Forbes, Jr., Jim Wallis and others will speak.

Earth Day was the occasion when thousands of religious leaders sent a letter to President Bush saying that his ‘Clean Air’ policy is immoral. Read the press release and the letter.

The Interfaith Alliance, the nation’s largest interfaith organization called on the United States Congress to reject a proposed amendment to the Constitution, known as the Federal Marriage Amendment. Click here to read their statement.

No one can legitimately charge that progressive religious folks aren’t speaking out and organizing on some of the most important issues of our day.

cross posted from here

Clicking through the channels (I’m male) I landed on MSNBC for a few minutes where they were having a discussion about Senator Hillary Clinton bad-mouthing Bush “in the Arab press.” Since these things usually come in orchestrated patterns, I checked, and sure enough the same story is running at Scaife’s NewsMax, “Hillary Blasts Bush in Arab Press“. They’re implying she committed treason for saying bad things about Bush to Arabs. (Remember how they accused Clinton of “protesting against his government on foreign soil”?)
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Now that the speculation about Dick Cheney being Bush’s ventriloquist is spreading to mainstream publications, I wonder if it’ll make any difference to the average American voter. The speculation went mainstream after they said they’d be appearing before the 9-11 commission jointly.

Is the Dallas political scientist quoted in the article correct?

the average voter’s interpretation of the joint appearance will probably track with how he or she views Bush in the first place: If you support him, the joint appearance is fine; if not, it’s a sign that Bush isn’t up to the job.

If so, it points to the rigid polarity being maintained in the electorate. In my lifetime, I only recall one similar period when voters stubbornly clung to a failed president like this, during the early phases of the Watergate investigation. Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, partly brought on by the ineptness of McGovern with the Eagleton affair, but even without that, he was headed for an easy win.

Nixon tapped a core vein in the American electorate, calling upon the Moral Majority and vowing he wouldn’t ‘lose’ in Vietnam. He also was downsizing the military force there, as he’d promised in his previous campaign, claiming that Vietnamization was working. The parallels between that period and this are chilling.

The transfer of power to the South Vietnamese failed two years after most US troops had left. While he was downsizing troop strength, Nixon and Henry Kissinger were certain they could get the North Vietnamese to relent by bombing them unmercifully. By the end of the war, nearly 60,000 US troops had died. Estimates of North Vietnamese dead ranged to more than a million. (Right-to-Lifers take note: are NV lives equal to unborn US fetuses in the eyes of God?)

What is it in the national psyche that insists upon support for presidential policies that, over time, display a continual pattern of failures?
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A letter to the editor in today’s San Jose Mercury News show a lot of what is going on in this election, and in America today:

“The Democrats and their sycophants in the media criticized George W. Bush for using pictures of 9/11 in his campaign ads. However, they seem to have no problem with using the issue of photographs of coffins of American soldiers in their attempt to damage the president politically for the war in Iraq. Look up hypocrite in the dictionary, and it will say, ‘See Democrat, also Media.’ “

The news runs pictures of coffins coming back from Iraq — that’s news, no way around it. But to this Republican, those pictures make Bush look bad, and therefore news outlets showing such pictures must be biased against Bush.
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Unless you live under a rock, you’re aware that spineless moderate Arlen Specter and right-wing nutcase Pat Toomey are squaring off today in my beloved home state of Pennsylvania’s Senate Republican primary. Polls close at 8:00 pm EST.

Bush, Santorum, and the RNC have endorsed Specter, and they’ve poured a lot of resources into the state on his behalf. Yet Toomey, backed by the uber-conservative Club for Growth, has proven to be a tough challenger. It’s been an ugly race dominated by nasty attack ads, with a total of $17.8 million spent between the two candidates.

As of yesterday, the race was tight, and it looked like Toomey had the big mo on his side.

I have no idea which one of these two clowns is going to be announced as Democrat Joe Hoeffel’s general election opponent, so I’m going to rely on the opinions of others.
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The current economic recovery has been remarkable in several ways, not least of which is the dramatic difference between the growth in corporate profits and the lack of growth in wages and employment. The Economic Policy Institute recently posted a brief analysis of the subject, and the chart below summarizes their findings:

Put simply, workers have not been benefiting much from the sizeable increase in national income over the past few years. Why is this?
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i’m not quite sure how i missed this last week, but i’m fairly sure that it’s because it was announced on a Friday: Judge accepts new map of Arizona legislative districts

what caught my eye was this:

Because Arizona has a history of violating minorities’ voting rights, the U.S. Justice Department must approve the map before the new boundaries can take effect.

several minority coalitions have filed suit in order to get the districts in use now, instead of having to wait up to 60 days for that approval from the Justice Department:

Hispanic Democrats on Friday asked a federal court to order the use of new legislative districts in this year’s elections because of fast-approaching election deadlines.

The Arizona Minority Coalition for Fair Redistricting filed its lawsuit in U.S. District Court one week after a state trial court judge accepted and ordered use of a new map of legislative districts.

The Navajo Nation joined the coalition in its lawsuit, filed against the Independent Redistricting Commission and the state’s top election officer, Secretary of State Jan Brewer.

Because of election deadlines that include June 9 for candidate filings, the federal court should order use of the new districts without waiting what could be months for the U.S. Justice Department to clear the new districts under federal laws on minority voting rights, the coalition’s lawsuit said.

Otherwise, to use a constitutional set of districts, the election could be delayed or even canceled, the lawsuit said.

i’m not sure what to call all this, but “fun” is not one of the words that immediately comes to mind.

i really have to start paying more attention to the Friday news.

[Part 1]

Part 2: Waco in Iraq

Nearly everyone who was alive and aware in the 1990s knows about Waco. But hardly anyone, it seems, has a clear idea what happened there in 1993.

And that, as it happens, affects how we think about what’s happening in Iraq in 2004.

Just as with the Ruby Ridge matter of August 1992, there’s so much mythology that has been built around the fatal assault on the Branch Davidian compound of April 19, 1993, that it’s probably not surprising that the public’s understanding of the real causes of the horrifying deaths of 74 people — including some 20 children — that day is confused at best, and grotesquely misinformed in many cases.
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