More sad news this afternoon. Governor Frank O'Bannon died this morning as a result of the storke he suffered Monday. Governor O'Bannon dedicated his life to public service, and Planet Swank joins his friends, family, colleagues and constituents in mourning his loss. Our thoughts remain with his wife Judy and his family through this difficult time.
Movie: Wild Side,a truly bizarre 1995 erotic thriller starring Anne Heche, Steve Bauer, Academy Award nominee -- not for this movie, of course -- Joan Chen and Christopher Walken, who leaves no piece of scenery unchewed. I got the DVD with some freelance money back in August. It's mesmerizing in part because of Walken's performance and in part because director Donald Cammell evidently attempted to make a real movie but was thwarted at every turn by his prodcers, who wanted something trashier. The result is a bizarre mix -- a trashy movie with occasional glimpses at the decent movie struggling to get out. Sadly, Cammell committed suicide the year after the movie was released.
Book: Anything by Mickey Spillane
I encourage my readers (both of them) to leave their own guilty pleasures in the comment thread here.
The other day, we were taking a walk down the block. As we approached a house that has a notoriously noisy canine chained up on the front porch, Cecilia told me that that house had a "barkative dog."
With his disingenuous frothing at the mouth, Rumsfeld again goes abroad speaking, in great Nixonese, about opponents (read enemies) of Washington (read President Bush and himself) helping the enemy. Hmm, interesting thought there. Who created the enemy in the first place? Sure, Al Qaeda is the enemy for its attack in New York, but there are now many more because of Herr Rumsfeld (and I use that analogy since national security advisor Condoleezza Rice brought up the Iraq/Germany comparison) and his bull-in-a-china-shop approach to things.
Just give it up, Rummy. You're wrong, Bush is wrong, Rice is wrong, Karl Rove is wrong, and doubling the lie and sinking us into the most incredible, lame-brained debt doesn't make you right.
The punch line:
I can't wait, as a free-willed Republican, to vote against you and your ilk.
I've been utterly remiss in commenting on the case of Jesus Castillo, who in 2000 was convicted of obscenity for selling an adult comic to an adult undercover officer from a clearly marked "adults only" section. The prosecutor in the case claimed that comics "are for kids." Fortunately, Jim Henley and Jaquandor provide fine commentary. Ampersand weighs in with a dissenting opinion.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden says "I’m not going to call you a sucker for voting for [Bush]. I’m telling you that he thinks you’re a sucker. That’s when he thinks about you at all, which isn’t often."
RonK at Daily Kos notes that "Cheney is now 0-for-4 in federal court versus private sector litigants" in his efforts to conceal energy company's influence on his energy policy task force.
Here's a Reuters article on director Robert Rodriguez' upcoming sequel to El Mariachi and Desperado. We recently bought the latter on DVD, along with The Mask of Zorro. It worked out pretty fairly for my lovely wife and myself, eye-candy-wise; Desperado features Antronio Banderas and Salma Hayek, while Zorro stars Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Remember Bush's staggering US$87 billion supplemental budget request for Iraq? That amount still isn't enough, the Administration admits (registration required).
Michael Kinsley opines that Bush might accomplish more if he would apologize for his errors, his arrogance, and his mendacity. "Lack of scruples can't explain it: Denying the obvious isn't even good unscrupulous politics. For that reason, it is beyond spin. If spinning involves an indifference to truth, what's going on here looks more like a preference for falsehood. The truth would be better politics, and the administration is fanning out to the talk shows to lie anyway." Kinsley's on to something here...
The WaPo's Courtland Milloy says that Bush's declining to attend the funeral of a 21-year-old D.C. National Guard soldier killed in Iraq was an insult. "[H]e could have attended Dent's funeral as a simple gesture of sorrow over the death of a neighbor who also happened to be a soldier under his command.
Of course, that would not have been as stylish as, say, staging a landing on an aircraft carrier. And being seen at a soldier's funeral probably wouldn't make it look like the war was over, as Bush declared on the flight deck of that ship. "
Busy, Busy, Busy catches Fox News in some particularly odious prevarication.
Timothy Noah calls for repealing all of Bush's tax cuts to pay for Iraq. "Think of it this way: A $567 billion deficit represents a fiscal emergency no less urgent than the military emergency in Iraq."
Dr Naidu said: "One of the reasons for marital break-ups today is physical inadequacy. Couples are so stressed out that there's no time for foreplay, so essential to get the juices flowing. A smart machine can bridge that gap in no time."
The Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility robot (ASIMO) is being produced by Honda, and scientists are working to improve it further before it is marketed to "gadget loving" Indians.
Dr Prasada Raju of Department of Science and Technology, GOI, syas ASIMO was initially designed "to perform unusual tasks beyond normal human capability".
But he added: "What we have actually achieved goes far beyond that. Saving young couples from breaking apart could be another un-looked for bonus."
On the basis of their recent pronouncements, the position of the Democratic Party seems to be that Saddam Hussein did not hit us on 9-11, but Halliburton did.
That's right -- Saddam.
I won't link to Coulter, but Atrios did, if you want to confirm for yourself that she indeed spewed such a reprehensible lie. But is there really any doubt?
By the way, Nathan Newman identifies Michelle Malkin as an up-and-coming heir to Coulter's mantle.
Update: Jaquandor nails it: "It's an amazing thing when a person can perpetuate an old lie and start a new one, and in a sentence of only 28 words, to boot."
Based on your answers, you are most likely a realist. Read below to learn more about each foreign policy perspective.
Realists…
Are guided more by practical considerations than ideological vision
Believe US power is crucial to successful diplomacy - and vice versa
Don't want US policy options unduly limited by world opinion or ethical considerations
Believe strong alliances are important to US interests
Weigh the political costs of foreign action
Believe foreign intervention must be dictated by compelling national
interest
Historical realist: President Dwight D. Eisenhower Modern realist: Secretary of State Colin Powell
This quiz is absolutely fascinating in that the choices are complicated and nuanced. For example, I strongly considered in many cases answers I'm sure would have pegged me as a liberal. In fact, changing just three of my 10 answers tipped me over into the Liberal category.
Bush's $87 billion figure is the largest emergency spending request since the opening months of World War II, according to Pat Towell, a defense fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The emergency spending act that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the launching of the war in Afghanistan totaled $20 billion.
To put it in perspective, Bush hopes to spend more in Iraq and Afghanistan than all 50 states say they need -- $78 billion -- to finance the budget shortfalls they anticipate for 2004.
The request is higher than the $74 billion the Defense Department plans to spend on all new weapons purchases next year, and higher than the $29.5 billion the Education Department hopes to spend on elementary and secondary education plus the $41.3 billion the administration plans to spend to defend the homeland.
With $166 billion spent or requested, Bush's war spending in 2003 and 2004 already exceeds the inflation-adjusted costs of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the Persian Gulf War combined, according to a study by Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus. The Iraq war approaches the $191 billion inflation-adjusted cost of World War I.
Many lawmakers say Bush's 2004 request is only the starting point. Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, predicted the administration will seek still more money once this installment is secured.
Britain's intelligence chiefs warned Prime Minister Tony Blair a month before the invasion of Iraq that military action would increase the risk of terrorists obtaining weapons of mass destruction, according to a parliamentary report released today.
The report said a Feb. 10 assessment by the top-secret Joint Intelligence Committee -- a cabinet-level body that includes the chiefs of Britain's main intelligence agencies -- concluded that the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government "would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists."
As of last February, the report said, the Joint Intelligence Committee had uncovered no evidence that Iraq had provided chemical or biological materials to al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's terror network.
The report did not spell out why intelligence agencies believed military action might allow terrorists to obtain such weapons. But it said that "in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material, whether or not as a deliberate Iraqi regime policy."
The joint committee also concluded that "al Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq," according to the report issued today by the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee.
Blair, who was President Bush's closest foreign ally in the U.S.-led campaign, has argued repeatedly that disarming Iraq was necessary to prevent terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Both the British and U.S. governments have come under heavy criticism because no such weapons have been found.
That argument -- which meshes with a prewar assessment by the CIA -- was, of course, raised by many war skeptics, including myself. At this point, we need to hope the notable failure to discover Iraq-s so-called weapons means they didn't exist; if they did, Bush's coveted war may well have given terrorists the opportunity to obtain the weapons they desired.
But the fact remains that Bush and Blair both ginned up support for the war with ominous assertions and implications about Iraq that, in many cases, directly contradicted what their intelligence services were trying to tell them. Nefarious.
Paul Krugman's column today analyzes Bush's exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy, and notes that the tone seems to be changing.
The press has become a lot less shy about pointing out the administration's exploitation of 9/11, partly because that exploitation has become so crushingly obvious. As The Washington Post pointed out yesterday, in the past six weeks President Bush has invoked 9/11 not just to defend Iraq policy and argue for oil drilling in the Arctic, but in response to questions about tax cuts, unemployment, budget deficits and even campaign finance. Meanwhile, the crudity of the administration's recent propaganda efforts, from dressing the president up in a flight suit to orchestrating the ludicrously glamorized TV movie about Mr. Bush on 9/11, have set even supporters' teeth on edge.
And some stunts no longer seem feasible. Maybe it was the pressure of other commitments that kept Mr. Bush from visiting New York yesterday; but one suspects that his aides no longer think of the Big Apple as a politically safe place to visit.
Yet it's almost certainly wrong to think that the political exploitation of 9/11 and, more broadly, the administration's campaign to label critics as unpatriotic are past their peak. It may be harder for the administration to wrap itself in the flag, but it has more incentive to do so now than ever before. Where once the administration was motivated by greed, now it's driven by fear.
In the first months after 9/11, the administration's ruthless exploitation of the atrocity was a choice, not a necessity. The natural instinct of the nation to rally around its leader in times of crisis had pushed Mr. Bush into the polling stratosphere, and his re-election seemed secure. He could have governed as the uniter he claimed to be, and would probably still be wildly popular.
But Mr. Bush's advisers were greedy; they saw 9/11 as an opportunity to get everything they wanted, from another round of tax cuts, to a major weakening of the Clean Air Act, to an invasion of Iraq. And so they wrapped as much as they could in the flag.
Now it has all gone wrong. The deficit is about to go above half a trillion dollars, the economy is still losing jobs, the triumph in Iraq has turned to dust and ashes, and Mr. Bush's poll numbers are at or below their pre-9/11 levels.
Nor can the members of this administration simply lose like gentlemen. For one thing, that's not how they operate. Furthermore, everything suggests that there are major scandals - involving energy policy, environmental policy, Iraq contracts and cooked intelligence - that would burst into the light of day if the current management lost its grip on power. So these people must win, at any cost.
The result, clearly, will be an ugly, bitter campaign - probably the nastiest of modern American history. Four months ago it seemed that the 2004 campaign would be all slow-mo films of Mr. Bush in his flight suit. But at this point, it's likely to be pictures of Howard Dean or Wesley Clark that morph into Saddam Hussein. And Donald Rumsfeld has already rolled out the stab-in-the-back argument: if you criticize the administration, you're lending aid and comfort to the enemy.
This political ugliness will take its toll on policy, too. The administration's infallibility complex - its inability to admit ever making a mistake - will get even worse. And I disagree with those who think the administration can claim infallibility even while practicing policy flexibility: on major issues, such as taxes or Iraq, any sensible policy would too obviously be an implicit admission that previous policies had failed.
In other words, if you thought the last two years were bad, just wait: it's about to get worse. A lot worse.
Frankly, after the 2002 Congressional race -- in which, infamously, war hero Max Cleland was linked with Saddam -- I knew the 2004 Presidential race would be ugly. That's why I absolutely believe the Democrats need to run a candidate who's willing to fight the lies and distortions the GOP spin machine will inevitably spew. And while I welcome the press becoming "less shy" about questioning some of the more obvious whoppers, the media will absolutely need to be vigilant during the runup to the election, and I'm less than confident it's comepetent to do so.
The Washington Post article Krugman references is here.
There isn't much new with the O'Bannon situation. The governor is still in critical condition and breathing with assistance. Fortunately, a CAT scan shows the swelling in his brain appears to be diminishing.
As we now seem to be in a protracted wait-and-see situation, I doubt I'll continue the daily updates. I will, of course, mention noteworthy events as they occur. The local paper's special coverage is here.
Musashi was good enough to answer the five questions I sent him; they're posted on his blog. It's fascinating stuff! Particularly interesting is his suggestion that blogging might be considered the spiritual heir to punk...despite my own punk roots, I'd never thought of it, but I think he's on to something there.
My own responses to Jaquandor's five questions are here. If anyone else would ike to take a crack at the "five questions" concept, please let me know!
Very sad news this morning. Country music legend Johnny Cashhas died of complications from diabetes at 71. And actor John Ritter collapsed on the set of his new sitcom and died later at a hospital of heart trouble. Ritter was 54. Planet Swank extends its sorrow and condolences to the family and friends of these entertainers.
