Billmon has the definitive view of Chief Justice Roberts, in my eyes. More coy than Bill Bennett’s morally indefensible tongue, but still dancing at the same prom.

we were having lunch with a good friend of ours yesterday, and were happy to be the ones to break the news to him about delay’s indictment.

this lead to conversation about all things political, and eventually we voiced a theory that we had been formulating as of late.

the corrupt toadies that run this administration are doomed to fail, for a very simple reason. they don’t do what they do for love of the country or conviction of ideals. if they did, they would be unstoppable.

if they truly believed that eradicating science in favor of religion was a path to god, we would be hiding in the basement, because there is no arguing with that kind of mad commitment, as any veteran of world war ii can tell you.

Read the rest of this entry »

After sitting in jail for 85 days, NY Times reporter Judith Miller let herself out. While the Times execs contacted the Vatican to seek her sainthood for refusing to reveal her confidential source, her sources indicated she had previously been told they’d waived their confidentiality.

Asked to explain that discrepancy, Miller refused to respond, indicating she couldn’t say anything without a signed release from herself.

A confidential source indicated that Miller went to jail because a Private Radar O’Reilly - who she’d been embedded with - told her the topic matter was top-secret, and she’d always been a sucker for uniformed liars.

Update: according to a source at the Brooklyn jail, Ms. Miller spent all 85 days forcing herself to make a pyramid of herself, while masturbating and wearing a leash.

[I posted this at my other site a few minutes ago, but as only four people read it, I thought it might do some good here. Have fun, conspiracy theorists!]

I’ll probably regret this, but the theories are so rich and lustrous that I can’t avoid a full briefing on them. Today’s version will be about the grand conspiracy to out Valerie Plame, as seen through the lens of yesterday’s juicy news that Judy Miller is out of jail. If the names Miller and Plame rattle off your pate like summer rain, you may want to cut your losses. If, however, they inspire grassy-knoll like delight, read on. At the end of the post, I’ll include a thumbnail sketch of the issues for those of you wishing to disappear down the rabbit hole.

Okay, to yesterday’s news: Judith Miller was released from the slammer, freed by the source she was protecting, one Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who apparently gave her permission to reveal his name a year ago. So why did Judy sit in jail for three months? Let us first turn to the ur-source, Tom Maguire, who suspects that she’s protecting her own arse, having inadvertently slipped Scooter the news that began the whole affair. (This may exonerate the White House, which conservatives like, but also doom Miller, which liberals will applaud.)

Needlenose is not convinced. Swopa sees a noose tightening around Scooter’s neck that Miller can’t loosen: “By admitting (through his lawyer the Post’s anonymous source) that he was trying to get information from the CIA — and then passing details to Schmidt — he’s provided all the circumstantial evidence needed to convict himself of leaking classified information.”

If the NY Times is trying to polish their reporter’s incarceration with Bernsteinian sheen, the WaPo is not. Froomkin shares my skeptisicm: “The least charitable explanation is that going to jail was Miller’s way of transforming herself from a journalistic outcast (based on her gullible pre-war reporting) into a much-celebrated hero of press freedom.” Froomkin follows it up with a nice rundown of the relevant MSM commentary and news.

Arianna Huffington has taken a keen interest in the Plame affair, and predictably weighs in this morning. It’s a bit of a broadside, but there is this interesting question: “And so we don’t forget what this story is really about, and given that the aluminum tubes crap that Miller put on the front page of the New York Times was being heavily promoted by Cheney, how much of that bogus information came to Miller via Libby?”

David Corn weighs in with his own thoughts at the Nation, at length, and I find no sentence pithy enough to quote. You’re on your own.

Finally, Liberal Oasis steps back for a bigger picture look, and concludes on this note: “It is indisputable that both Karl Rove and Scooter Libby have violated their national security clearance agreements. They have yet to be punished by their boss.”

And there you have it.

We will apparently know more soon. Miller is scheduled to testify this morning on the case. Having given you the main courses, I now alert you to the table scraps, should you wish to keep sifting. In no particular order: John Friedman | Laura Rozen | Middle Earth Journal | Murray Waas | Media Nation | Left Coaster

______________________
A Primer on the Plame Affair
In the lead-up to the war, the administration was sifting through a variety of dubious leads about the existence of Iraqi WMD. The most dubious was a document that appeared to show Iraqi efforts to buy low-grade uranium from Niger. Dick Cheney sent a former Gabon ambassador, Joe Wilson, to Africa to find out what the story was. With little effort, Wilson exposed the document as a forgery, found no evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium, and reported back to the administration on this point. The case might have been closed there, except that the evidence re-emerged in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, claiming the Niger link. Wilson, appalled at the lie, wrote an Op-Ed in the NY Times disputing the evidence cited in the SotU.

Everything’s clear to this point, right? Now comes the cloak-and-dagger bit. In apparent retribution, someone at the White House started leaking the identity of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, to the press. She was a covert CIA operative at the time, and “outing” her constituted a felony. The WH spoke to several journalists, including Robert Novak, who wrote about Plame. Following the leak, the Deputy Attorney General appointed a independent counsel, who began an investigation. As a part of that investigation, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, subpeonaed various journalists, and two refused to appear before a grand jury. One, Matthew Cooper, was released by his source and revealed him: Karl Rove. The other, Judith Miller, did not, and ended up in jail. All of which takes us to yesterday, when she was released.

And she should be proud of it, despite the assclownsmisogynists that think that she should be “protected” from her own icky/nasty/obscenity.

It’s as if just telling a girl that she even has a vagina is going to turn her into a slut, a whore, a (gulp) sexual creature. Really, it’s best to just keep that thing hidden and unknown until such time as The Man Who Will Be Your Master wishes to use you to create his heir.

Read the rest of this entry »

ASSOCIATED PRESS — The Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors are investigating Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s sale of stock in HCA Inc., the hospital operating company founded by his family. In a statement, the Nashville, Tenn.-based company said federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York issued a subpoena for documents that HCA thinks are related to the senator’s sale of its stock. Reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission showed insiders sold about 2.3 million shares, worth about $112 million, from January through June.

Global demand for oil is visible in charts of two stock market indexes, the OIX and SOX. In the OIX, for example, from 1996 to mid 2001, it grew from 190 to 350. Recession and the 9-11 attacks drove it down to 235 by early 2003.

But from there, a new trajectory took place, a steeper rate of increase, beginning in March of 2003. That no longer solely reflected rising global demand. It coincided exactly with our invasion of Iraq. It had risen 160 points in 5 years, but in the first 20 months of war, it rose 185 points. From there, the increase grew even steeper, coinciding with the first Iraq elections in January of this year. In the past nine months, it’s grown 200 points more.

In other words, it grew 87% in 5 years from global oil demand. It grew 144% in half that time during the 30 months of the Iraq war. Had the rate remained the same as the last half of the Nineties, it would have grown 44%, not 144%.

On top of the $200 or $300 billion Iraq has cost us - and our descendants - directly, the cost of oil and gas and natural gas is a massive war tax we’ve paid since. If we were to assume the average annual mileage of American drivers is 12,000 per year and the average miles-per-gallon we’ve gotten is an optimistic 30 MPG, that’s at least 400 gallons of gas purchased for each car each year. Using a median in that 30 months of war, we’ve paid a buck a gallon more, so we’re spending approximately $400 a year per car, because we invaded Iraq.

Two years ago, it was reported that American households owned 204 million registered vehicles, with the average household possessing 1.9 cars. That would mean each household has spent roughly $750/yr more for gasoline alone since we went to war. One third of that could be due to rising global demand, so about $500 per year per household is the direct war ‘tax’ we’re paying. With 107 million households, that’s $53.5 billion, on top of the $200 billion-plus directly spent on the cost of the war to date.

Roughly half of America’s households gained less from the Bush tax cuts than they’ve spent on gasoline alone.

And that doesn’t even count the interest on the money the US government has borrowed to fund this war. Nor does it calculate our increased heating costs, increased electricity costs or the increased transportation costs of all the goods we buy.

We also spend an average of about $82 billion/year on the direct cost of the war, which is about $273/yr per US citizen. Combine the cost of the war and the cost of gasoline, and it exceeds the tax cuts that roughly 2/3rds of US households got.

That’s an awful lot to spend on our government’s mistakes.

There’s no way to assess what Katrina would have cost us if the government entities involved had responded efficiently. But with a $200 billion to $300 billion price tag estimate, there’s little doubt that at least tens of billions were added because of government mistakes.

Together, these mistakes have slowed the growth of the economy, another loss if we’re unemployed, underemployed or our wages don’t match inflation rates. But remember, for the two thirds of Americans feeling this pinch and absorbing these costs of government incompetence, the good news is that someone in that other third has profited handsomely from our fiscal pain.

Consider the all time charts of XOM and CVX and HAL and the annual oil revenues of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia, and maybe that’ll make you feel warm and fuzzy all over, despite your losses.

And the final paragraph here should provide an indication of the cumulative impact of all that incompetence.

readers of this space know that the skippy’s are big fans of netflix. and skippy has had the weather-themed disaster flick the day after tomorrow on his netflix queue for some time.

but in light of the recent twin hurricane calamities, skippy moved the dennis quad-jake gyllenhaal vehicle up to the top of his netflix viewing list.

we would suggest everyone do the same. the similarities to reality are beyond eerie and enter into frightening. (anyone remember the china syndrome landing in theaters a month before three mile island?)

for example:

early on in tdat , the vice president (veteran character actor kenneth welsh, looking like a slimmed-down cheney) ignores advice from scientist quaid that weather disasters are approaching, due to global warming.

quaid then remarks that his son knows more science than the vice president. just like reality! eerie.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a microcompassionate bowl well-greased, recycle possibly the only two Nixon appointees to escape indictment.

Add a dash of cronyism.

Screw it. Add the whole damn keg.

Set aside.

Stir in a separate bowl two war criminals. Clarified.

Ignore all the ingredients and go on vacation.

Wait. Forget about that. Let’s go back to the original recipe.

Strain out excess liberties.

Declare the dish cooked and ready to serve.

Heat for 29 months, sprinkling heavily with meat. Garnish with democracy-enhanced meat.

Beat often.

Whip up a faux reporter in a sauce of lap-poodle. Strained through a faux-Christian moral filter composed of fine hairs of homophobia.

In a separate bowl, make a sour mash from a well-rotted hypocrite.

Add a quart of political patronage to the keg of cronyism. Allow time to rise. And rise. And rise. And rise.

Add a few more kegs of cronyism (hic!) Knead and let rise again.

Add a cup of Eau de Cheat.

Fuck it. Throw the whole refrigerator in.

Send every penny you and your children will ever make to pay for the dinner party.

Serves all the rich.

Guaranteed to be free of all nutrients for those on a non-success diet.

From Monga Bay:

Different influenza strains spread around the world annually. Every so often a strain tough enough to kill millions emerges, and experts believe the world is overdue for another pandemic. Unraveling what made the 1918 flu so vicious could help doctors better react if a similar strain returns.

All flu viruses are thought to have originated in birds. But scientists also have long thought that to cause human epidemics, the viruses first had to jump from birds to pigs, where genetic changes that allow the strains to better spread in mammals occur.

Flu strains that are more birdlike are more dangerous to people because their immune systems haven’t been exposed to them before.

Flu in birds, pigs and people Asia’s current bird flu, a strain known as H5N1, clearly can jump directly from poultry to people — at least 15 people have died of it this winter. Most cases have been traced directly to contact with sick birds, although human-to- human transmission has not been ruled out in one instance.

In the new research, scientists reconstructed the three-dimensional structure of the hemagglutinin protein, a protein on the surface of the flu virus that allows it to attach to and penetrate lung cells.

Hemagglutinin from human and bird flu viruses interact with different cell receptors, which is why birds infecting people is rare.

Part of the reason that twenty to forty million people succumbed to the 1918 flu - so virulent it could kill within a few hours - was because scientists didn’t even discover the flu virus till 1933.

Today’s H5N1 virus, the lethal avian influenza that first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997, has a kill rate of 70%, but research indicates a vaccine could prevent a devastating pandemic. If someone creates one.

But until they unlock the probable mutation path that may make it so easily spread between humans, all current vaccines remain incomplete guesses. In 1976, the similarity of the swine flu to the 1918 virus created such a scare that a mass national vaccination campaign that backfired. The flu proved to be pretty benign and no epidemic occurred. But more than 1000 people developed Guillain-Barre syndrome (generalised muscle weakness) from the vaccination, and nearly 50 died from the misplaced defense.

But there’s a few positive notes, like this, which was announced August 25th:

Novavax, Inc. (NVAX) , a specialty biopharmaceutical company, today reported preclinical results on the Company’s novel Virus-Like Particle (VLP) influenza vaccine. Novavax’s biological group led by Dr. Gale Smith, together with Dr. Tumpey and Dr. Bu from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published the detailed results in the August 15 online edition of the journal Vaccine. The study demonstrates that a H9N2 influenza virus (avian flu) vaccine produced with the Company’s proprietary VLP technology is effective in protecting animals when challenged with live H9N2 influenza virus.

“Our VLP technology, based on a scalable process with short production lead times, offers an attractive alternative to the existing egg-dependent and the newer cell-based methods for the manufacture of influenza vaccine and other urgently needed vaccines. These advantages address the challenge of producing large quantities of a pandemic flu vaccine within a short timeframe,” said Rahul Singhvi, President and CEO of Novavax. “This publication demonstrates the value of Novavax’s VLP vaccine pipeline. Our plan is to advance our VLP technology into clinical trials with both pandemic and seasonal versions of influenza VLP vaccines.”

The gist of the trials indicates that a fast way to produce mass quantities of vaccine may exist, if subsequent trials prove as positive. But for a virus that can kill in a very few hours, such production speed - which may save millions of lives - may not be fast enough to prevent millions of deaths still.

But it’s a start. It would also be useful if more people knew the facts about how fast the avian flu could mutate into such a pandemic-causing form. It will take public pressure on elected officials to fund the research and fast-track the trials so - if we’re lucky - we might head this one off.

Avian flu, after all, poses the deadliest threat known to humans, short of a nuclear holocaust. And have you heard our leaders discussing it? I haven’t. Which means our leaders aren’t leading.

Related Links:

The Georgetown Voice

Plutonium Page at Daily Kos

Melanie Mattson

Because, beginning Sunday, is Pandemic Flu Awareness Week.

Five months for what’s at least involuntary manslaughter.

Shoving water down the throat of a detainee is so-o-o-o neocon. Only they shove ‘democracy’ down the throats of innocent Iraqis and cause tens of thousands to die.

From Afghanistan, to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, we present the picture of American democracy at work to one billion Muslims. And our leaders can’t understand why some resist.

Here’s a clue: no matter how high your spinners pile it, Muslims (and Christians and Jews and Buddhists, et al) maintain an uncanny talent for detecting what’s shit.

Why can’t we get a judge like this nominated to the Supreme Court?

The lawsuit charges that, solely because of their race, religion or national origin, the two men were physically abused and deprived of due process while being detained for more than eight months in the harsh maximum-security unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The men, who eventually pleaded guilty to minor criminal charges unrelated to terrorism and were deported, charged that they were repeatedly slammed into walls and dragged across the floor while shackled and manacled.

They said they were kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as “terrorists” and “Muslim bastards,” and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one in which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby’s rectum, making him bleed.

“Our nation’s unique and complex law enforcement and security challenges in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do not warrant the elimination of remedies for the constitutional violations alleged here,” Judge Gleeson wrote in his decision.

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the United States Attorney’s office, said the ruling was under review. “The government has made no determination yet as to what the government’s next step will be,” he said.

Clearly, the government can make a compelling case that the case must be blocked because the inside of Mr. Elmaghraby’s rectum would reveal national security secrets.

Like: “Pssst! Hey buddy, didja know the House Majority Leader’s a Mafioso stooge, the Senate Majority Leader likes to pretend he’s Martha Stewart, Karl Rove would snitch out every secret agent in the CIA to make his boss look pure as snow, and his boss is an all-new microcompassionate doofus turning tricks for the throbbing derricks of Saudi princes.”

You know how treacherous Muslim assholes can be. They have to be stopped before they make Dick Cheney cry.

Consider the guy replacing the indicted House majority leader:

As majority whip, Blunt, even more than DeLay before him, has created a formal alliance with K Street lobbyists, empowering corporate representatives and trade association executives to assist the House leadership in counting votes and negotiating amendments to bring holdouts into the fold.

Last year, when the House leadership faced apparently insurmountable odds in passing legislation eliminating a $50 billion export tax break, the lobbying community stepped in to add billions of new tax breaks for major corporations with facilities in nearly every district — General Electric, Boeing, Caterpillar, United Technologies, Honeywell and Emerson. The support built up majority backing for the measure.

Blunt’s best-known special-interest intervention was a 2003 late-night attempt — unsuccessful, as it turned out — to add an amendment sought by Philip Morris. Blunt’s son then was a lobbyist for Philip Morris in Missouri; Blunt himself was dating a Philip Morris lobbyist whom he later married, and he had received more than $150,000 in contributions from the company and subsidiaries.

It’s the cronyism, stupid. The neo-conservative revolution has become the biggest, cheatin’est welfare ho in world history. They are a disgrace to conservativism and a tragedy to the country.

They oughta be tagged as neoconpedophiles, because the way they’ve run up the national debt, they’re screwing our children and grandchildren permanently.

I’m watching the PBS program Get Up, Stand Up: The Story of Pop and Protest, which is a look at American protest songs and the artists who sang them. It started with the pro-worker songs of Joe Hill, who is the father of protest music. His quote, “A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over again,” is the pull quote for the show’s website. One of the songs that got a few seconds of air time was “Marching to Pretoria,” which I remember singing over and over again in elementary school. I can sing it straight through today. When I heard it, I remembered all the great protest songs we sang in school: “This Land is Your Land,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “We Shall Overcome,” “John Henry,” “If I Had a Hammer” Those are just the ones I clearly remember singing. I’m sure we sang others.

My kids don’t sing protest songs in school. They open every school day singing a “patriotic” song like “Grand Old Flag,” “Oh, Beautiful” or “The Star Spangled Banner.” Don’t get me wrong. We sang songs like that too. I remember singing “My Country ’tis of Thee” every other day. But we had Woody Guthrie in there too.

Anyway, the PBS show is good, even if it falls apart a little bit in the nineties. Unions, Vietnam, Bangladesh, African famine, Farm Aid, Tibet, AIDS, Punk, Apartheid. Remember when Stevie Wonder got arrested for demonstrating too close to the South African embassy in D.C.? There’s some of that happening today.

There is no shortage of post-march analysis in blogtopia (thanks, skippy). The consensus on the anti-march side is that A.N.S.W.E.R. is an impossibly unpopular group that hijacked the good intentions of everyone who showed up on Saturday. They’re an easy target for the corporate media’s derision. In fact, the only thing that saved the peace movement from being tarred with the anti-A.N.S.W.E.R. brush was Hurricane Rita. The consensus on the pro-march side is that if you build it, we will come. A.N.S.W.E.R., in conjunction with United for Peace and Justice, are building it.

But enough about the blog chatter. We didn’t march on Saturday to impress the blogging community or the corporate media. That’s a fool’s errand. Three hundred thousand of us came from all over the country not only to publicly express our opposition to the BushCo agenda, particularly his War in Iraq, but also to re-energize and to connect. We came to remember that no matter what the corporate media and both miserable political parties do to discourage us, we are not alone in wanting an end to BushCo’s War. And this year - please remember that we have been marching against this war reliably since it began - we also came to celebrate the fact that the voice of peace is finally an official majority voice in our country. We’ve won the battle, there’s no question about it. Undeniably A.N.S.W.E.R. was part of that victory because they were part of the fight. The question now becomes how to win the war.

One thing the anti-march crowd is right about is that mass mobilizations don’t end wars. This is especially true with the Right Wing Noise Machine setting the corporate media’s agenda. But even if the march had been covered adequately and reported accurately, the march is a two-day story at best and the bottom line really is “you had to be there.” What ends wars are local, persistant highly visible actions that turn voters against warmongers. The march on Saturday will only be a success if the people who showed up take the enthusiasm of the day back home and do something with it.

If you’re looking for something to do on that score, dKos diarists smintheus and Meteor Blades have some ideas.

The Washington Post just reported:

A Texas grand jury on Wednesday charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, an indictment that could force him to step down as House majority leader.

DeLay attorney Steve Brittain said DeLay was accused of a criminal conspiracy along with two associates, John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads DeLay’s national political committee.

What about DeLay’s House Majority Leader gig? The plan is for DeLay to “temporarily” relinquish the post. DeLay gets to keep his seat in Congress, though.

More stuff from WaPo:

DeLay, 58, also is the center of an ethics swirl in Washington. The 11-term congressman was admonished last year by the House ethics committee on three separate issues and is the center of a political storm this year over lobbyists paying his and other lawmakers’ tabs for expensive travel abroad.

Wednesday’s indictment stems from a plan DeLay helped set in motion in 2001 to help Republicans win control of the Texas House in the 2002 elections for the first time since Reconstruction.

A state political action committee he created, Texans for a Republican Majority, was indicted earlier this month on charges of accepting corporate contributions for use in state legislative races. Texas law prohibits corporate money from being used to advocate the election or defeat of candidates; it is allowed only for administrative expenses.

With GOP control of the Texas legislature, DeLay then engineered a redistricting plan that enabled the GOP take six Texas seats in the U.S. House away from Democrats _ including one lawmaker switching parties _ in 2004 and build its majority in Congress.

Let’s hope this is just the warmup …

The Solicitor for the Growth on the North Side of the Tree First Encounters His Client
(with apologies to Leigh Hunt).

Katey bussed me on the cheek,
Squeezing ‘tween the bars of her cell,
As if unfed this whole week,
Keeping model weight to still sell.
Call me fixer, call me whore,
Say no guiltless one would trust me.
Add this to my legal score:
Katey bussed me.

The interesting thing about the different judicial philosophies is that none can claim logical superiority or better applicability than any other. One doesn’t choose a judicial philosophy, one recognizes the arguments that support one’s own convictions.

Hopefully the philosophy has a marketable name.

When one judges judicial philosophies, one cannot depend on individual cases. Most are so unambiguous that judicial philosophy has no impact. The statistical outliers are exactly the type of extreme cases that make bad law. You can’t even go only by the explanations of people who claim to subscribe to the philosophy, as (and I’m speaking as a Black American now) people in this country are wont to lie about their motivations and hide their true reasoning behind flowery phrases.

Intent isn’t enough. You need to judge by intent and impact. If the intent tends in one direction and the impact tends in another, either

• the intent is misrepresented or
• the logic of the judicial philosophy, though internally consistent, is incompatible with the substantial world or
• it is the impact, and the ready availability of formal support for a process that creates said impact, that attracts

In the end, the best judicial philosophy for a nation is one that does neither obstructs the expression of its ideals nor acts as a drag on its progress. So which you choose depends on who you see as members of your nation.

Also on Monday, an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency confirmed that the agency had hired Michael D. Brown, the former agency director who resigned under fire on Sept. 12, as a contractor to aid in his successor’s transition. The FEMA official said the contracting arrangement had been in place from the time that Mr. Brown announced his resignation and would last two more weeks.

[NY Times link]

How reassuring to know that we can expect his successor to be trained to uphold the same level of incompetence we’ve grown used to. Especially when a greater witt was available.

But the larger issue here, and the point of the story, is whether it’s wise to revise the Posse Comitatus act.

Let’s see… in 202 years of disaster management, the federal government did okay most of the time. Then an inept President appoints an inept administrator, right after the most successful administrator FEMA ever had. And we get a complete disaster.

So sure, let’s give this president more power. Let’s make the military our cops. Maybe we can even quarter them in our homes again, like another ruling George used to do.

In the emergency of 9-11, the Patriot Act got passed, granting broad powers to the police that have yet to be proven necessary. It was like a wishlist for those least concerned with our civil rights and our freedom’s been eroded as a result. When good intelligence well-coordinated, and wise decisions by our leaders, were all that we really needed.

Bush verbally took responsibility for the Katrina botch, but now our leaders are trying to fix what isn’t broken. FEMA is broken and can be fixed. let’s start there and leave our military to handle national defense, instead of eroding our freedoms further just to cover the weaknesses of incompetent leaders.

Here’s a scary thought: the most articulate foreign policy voice in the Democratic Party is … a grieving mother. (Okay, that’s not entirely true–Russ Feingold seems to have given the question some thought.) There’s a serious problem with any party that fails to craft a coherent foreign policy. It’s unforgivable during wartime. Yet that’s what’s happening.

There seem to be three schools of thought among Democrats: 1) support the neocon invade-first position and then transition quickly to domestic issues; 2) ridicule Bush for incompetence and lies and then transition quickly to domestice issues; 3) just stick with domestic issues. The problem is that ignoring foreign policy hasn’t won Dems many elections lately. Shifting to domestic issues puts candidates on firmer ground, but it doesn’t hide the fact that they don’t have a coherent foreign policy plan. Oh, and then there’s this: we need a foreign policy. We’re in a war and we’ve got lunatics trying to bomb our cities. While it’s true that Bush has bungled Iraq, that observation doesn’t actually do us any good.

As Joan Vennochi points out in today’s Globe:

[O]n Iraq, a big disconnect exists between what registered Democrats believe about the war and what elected Democratic officials and alleged party leaders like Howard Dean are willing to do. Only two Democratic officeholders — Representatives John Conyers of Michigan and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia — planned to be anywhere near the antiwar rally scheduled this weekend in Washington. Forget about standing up alongside Michael Moore. Merely speaking up against the war in Iraq continues to terrify Democrats.

If I had to diagnose the Democratic fugue state, I’d say it stems from accepting the GOP frame: either you’re for war or you’re for the terrorists. America has exactly flip-flopped from its early 20th-century reluctance to enter foreign wars. Where Roosevelt was pulling out his hair trying to get Americans to understand the danger of a Nazi romp in Europe, all Bush has to do is declare a country “evil.” Where the pro-war stance was political death in the first world wars (Wilson famously won as the “antiwar” candidate), now pacifism is. It is American to kick ass, and no Democrat wants to look weak or unAmerican.

Well, maybe it’s time to challenge the frame. If war is not the answer–and every Democrat should now be on record as saying the Iraq war was not–what is? Bush wants to hold the line because he sees no other alternative. But do Dems really lack other ideas? This is the perfect moment for a coordinated challenge to the failed ruling foreign policy–it is early enough to affect the midterms, and would lay the groundwork for Americans accepting a completely new frame by 2008 (which would, incidently, free us from the useless hot air of national leaders like Joe Biden–whom I actually love–who offer something like “responsible neoconservatism”).

I have a few ideas, but I’m wondering if others in the blogosphere do, too. If you were to start from scratch and craft a new foreign policy, what would it look like? (Maybe the Dems, apparently bereft of their own ideas, will listen.)

[And of course, a weekly plug for the new blog, Low on the Hog, which Atrios called “an incandescent new blog–absolutely stunning!” (Yes, that’s a lie.)]

I began this post in late June and it’s time I finished it.

The Editors at the newly redesigned The Poorman mention a referral to a hosting package at GoDaddy. That was my referral, but as noted, the Chief Executive spoiled the reference by weighing in on Guantanamo, torture, et al. Not only did they lose The Editors as a customer, but likely lost others due to the negative publicity. Of course, it’s likely that some gungho yellowphants will also drive some buying of their services, just to show support for showing them dirty Ay-rabs how tough we are.

Which is pretty silly when you think of it. I presume most Iraqis and other Middle East Muslims have far more serious concerns right now, like when the book written by the runaway bride will hit the bookstores and whether the nefarious Michael Schiavo called 911 too slowly as part of his devious plot to make the GOP look like a nattering flock of twits.

But it dose pose a moral question to me. Should I switch from GoDaddy’s hosting because its Big Kahuna blogged his opinion?

I explained my thoughts to Bob Parsons at his blog with these comments:

Bob, I thought you should know that one very popular website was on the verge of buying a virtual dedicated server hosting package upon my recommendation when he noticed your front page link to your Gitmo post. Now you’ve lost him and probably many others who will shy away out of disagreement with your expressed opinions.

From reading your revised blog post and the comments that follow, I must express a few points worthy of your consideration.

1) I think it’s perfectly okay for you to express your opinion in your blog. You have every right to your opinion and that alone would not dissuade me from using your company’s services. I do, however, think it’s bad form to delete the original statements and publish a revision. It’s okay to say your views have been changed after considering further input, but I think the original post should have remained, to display what they’ve changed from. However, since you have been open to describing the change, it’s not like you’re concealing your tracks completely, but in the future, I hope you’ll not unpublish the original content. Complete forthrightness should be paramount.

2) By saying your opinion should not reflect on the company because it has no political view, you’re being disingenuous. Of course corporations have a principal intent of making profits, but the sentiments of corporate officers and business owners certainly should be weighed by potential and current customers if they wish. Voting with one’s wallet is a time-honored and principled approach. Your opinion does matter to consumers, and I support their right to express themselves in support or opposition to what you’ve expressed. If that impacts your business, that’s just as it should be.

3) Yet in comments you included, you’ve raised some points that I don’t think hold up on inspection. For starters, you stated “Let’s not forget that the reason that our intelligence assets (ie CIA) are as weak as they are now is due to the efforts of the Church Committee which in effect neutered the CIA — by using a “this is how we would like the world to work” mentality, as opposed to “this is how it actually works.”

After reviewing what the Church Committee investigated here and here and here, I think they had every right to be concerned about the excesses committed by the CIA. For one thing, in Chile, while pursuing the supposed national interests of the US, they aided the brutal Pinochet, much like they used to aid Saddam.

But here’s the bottom line, above and beyond politics, your Godaddy hosting services are the worst I’ve experienced. Moving from a cheap account elsewhere to a far more expensive Virtual dedicated server at Godaddy, I’ve experienced slower loading times continually and the site goes down about 5 times a week. Our traffic has fallen by 35% as a result, annoying readers, bloggers and advertisers alike.

You’re the fifth host I’ve used in the past 6 years and the inferior ones look great compared to what your company’s delivered.

Yesterday, when I asked for a refund, your customer service guys told me how to kill the account. But they made no mention of a refund for the time remaining. Which is what I’ve come to expect: incomplete answers.

My recourse now is simply to warn away our thousands of readers. Godaddy may do domain names well, but their hosting sets the standard for the worst. I can’t move the site till monetary outlooks improve a bit and I apologize to all our readers and all my teammates for the problems they’ve encountered.

I don’t know if all redneck neocon supporters, like the John Birchers that preceded them, are always so bad in their treatment of customers. But I know that the one I have experienced would be more useful to society writing Nigerian scam letters and marrying Paris Hilton so she can never breed.