Me: Frank Lynch. Bio These are my daily rants, mostly political. For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes), perhaps your best online resource for insight into his thinking.
KEY IRAQ SPEECHES/REMARKS: Bush: 9/19/02, on the vote to authorize force 10/7/02, Cincinnati 1/28/03 State of the Union 3/16/03 Bush, Blair, and Salazar 3/21/03 statement of goals 5/1/03 Ship speech, "Mission Accomplished" 7/2/03, Bring 'em on 10/21/03, WH veto threat on troop support 10/27/03, Bush on threat to veto troop support Cheney: 8/26/02, "Simply stated, there is no doubt..." Kerry: 9/6/02,New York Times' op-ed piece. 10/9/02, on the authorization of force 7/29/04, DNC convention speech 9/20/04, at NYU Powell: 2/5/03, U.N. speech Rumsfeld: 3/30/03, "We know where they are... Tikrit..." Wolfowitz: 1/23/03, on disarmament Debates: 9/30/04,
Bush-Kerry 10/5/04,
Cheney-Edwards 10/8/04,
Bush-Kerry 10/13/04, Bush-Kerry
It must have made for an interesting field trip. One of the motifs running through Pierce's Idiot America is the rejection of Darwin, as manifested in Ben Stein comparing Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler (yes), as well as the Creation Museum in Kentucky, with its animatronix dinosaurs wearing saddles. Well, some paleontologists were in town for a convention, and decided to pop by. "This bothers me as a scientist and as a Christian, because it's just as much a distortion and misrepresentation of Christianity as it is of science," said one.
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1:20 PM
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
New Jersey has our fireworks, and I want them back. Normally Macy's launches its fireworks display in the East River, which makes sense if the goal is to be NYC-centric. But this year they're in the Hudson, on the "other" side of Manhattan, and I'm not thrilled. Normally we just go up the stairs and watch from the roof, but now we'd have to get to Manhattan's West side. Not happening.
There are a number of things I'd be happy to let NJ keep. The Boss. The Nets, too, if we could turn back the clock on Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards development. But I would like the fireworks back. All in all, I guess it's like the Giants and the Jets moving to the Meadowlands: you shall be known by where you play, and I guess this means that Macy's really isn't so NYC-centric. They're just a business, and we know where a business's loyalties lay.
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9:45 PM
Governor Mark Sanford in lockdown mode? To prove no financial improprieties regarding state funds and his mistress, he had promised the press a look at his finances, but is now backing off that pledge.
Even though he's still going to share the records with official investigators, this doesn't seem like a very good way to quash suspicion. Presumably he's learned it's not a good idea to both profess you're working on you marriage and refer to your mistress as your "soulmate," but a sudden about face on the promised openness makes it seems that suspicions arent as risky as the truth.
I don't know who's giving him advice, but if "clam up" is the advice it's late.
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7:39 PM
Glenn Beck is too funny. Says we bought Alaska in the 1950's and hints it was for oil. Try 1867 and other reasons, Glenn. (This is how you become a popular pundit, by making stuff up that appeals to people's "Gut," as Pierce writes.
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7:56 AM
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Congratulations to the people of Minnesota, who will no longer be denied their full representation in the United States Senate. And to a lesser extent, congratulations to Al Franken, who will have the honor of serving them. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled on the election today, in favor of Franken, and Norm Coleman has acquiesced to their decision.
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8:14 PM
Nothing worse than activist judges. Remember when Senator John Cornyn tried to lay death threats against judges to judicial activism? It kind of amounted to a warning from Cornyn:
"It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions," he said. Sometimes, he said, "the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policymaker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people."
Cornyn continued: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have."
But he seemed to like the SCOTUS Ricci decision yesterday:
Texas Sen. John Cornyn today lauded the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling 18 firefighters in New Haven were unfairly denied promotions because of their race. Cornyn, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the high court's opinion in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano "a victory for evenhanded application of the law."
Why is that a curious contradiction? Well, because it's been noted that the SCOTUS had to invent new standards for the law:
The vote in the Supreme Court was 5 to 4, which is one indication that the case was a hard one. Another is that even the majority admitted that it had to create a new standard to decide the case. What should happen when an employer discriminates in one way to avoid discriminating in another is a question that existing law simply did not answer.
It's not just some former SCOTUS clerk (above) noticing that, but also NBC's Chuck Todd. There go those activist judges again!
It couldn't be clearer but that "judicial activism," for many conservatives, is a classic case of missing the plank in your own eye while calling out the splinter in your brother's.
In his book Idiot America, Charles Pierce writes about a case where a Religious Right organization picked on a small Pennsylvania town to wedge Intelligent Design into the classrooms. The case was officiated by Judge John E. Jones III, a Republican recommended by Tom Ridge and appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush. Seeing the case eventually discussed in a book by Ann Coulter, Jones said, (quoted by Pierce on page 153)...
"An 'activist judge.' That term is so misused... It's misused to the extent that it's become useless. You know what it means? It means a judge that you disagree with. It doesn't mean anything besides that, If I don't agree with a judge's decision, then he's an activist judge. It's ludicrous."
The Ricci decision and Sotomayor. Today, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court reversed an appeals court decision of SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Does this mean she's not fit to serve on the SCOTUS? No, it doesn't, not in the least, no more than it means the 4 justices in the dissenting minority aren't fit. No more than it means that Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito aren't fit when they're in the minority on a decision.
Fact is, some of these issues aren't easy to decide. That's why the SCOTUS is a panel, not one person. There are disagreements, and a majority decides the disagreements.
But the right wing? Some kind of new math is going on: a 5-4 decision somehow is getting twisted into 9-0, claiming that each SCOTUS justices found something to complain about in the appeals court decision. But by this warped logic, the only real Republicans are those who find nothing to complain about in the GOP platform. The truth is, of course, that decisions are complex and weigh a variety of factors. Finding something to complain about hardly amounts to voting to reverse the appeals court. Of course, it takes a politician to twist it this way, or some controversy-selling radio host. Of course, when radio hosts start using Twitter to express these points they can always beg off that the character limit prevented them from being sensible.
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9:04 PM
KANSAS CITY, MO -- Never shy about bantering with reporters, former Kansas City area Ku Klux Klan leader Dennis Mahon always seemed to be on the public relations side of the white supremacy movement -- a virulent talker, but not a violent doer.
That changed Friday when federal prosecutors in Arizona announced that Mahon, 58, and his twin brother, Daniel, had been indicted in the 2004 mail bombing of a Scottsdale city office that promoted racial and cultural diversity.
...
Domestic terrorism experts said they have seen a recent spike in extremist rhetoric and violence, and attribute some of it to the election of President Barack Obama.
Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said some anti-government groups that aren't necessarily racist -- such as sovereign-citizen activists and tax protesters -- now are finding common cause with white supremacists.
"These two things have dovetailed due to the election of the first black president," said Beirich. "The anti-government movement is more racialized."
Sad, really: democracy and equality seem to have a very exclusive meaning to some people.
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9:13 AM
What if Governor Sanford's girlfriend had been a spy? I'm not suggesting this as more than a hypothetical question to explore the potential risks in such a situation; I'm not trying to suggest she actually was or is a spy. But McClatchy is running a story that Sanford was a loose cannon in making trade visits to Argentina, in contradiction to US policy. Does anyone think Sanford has some special ability to differentiate between spies and innocents? Does anyone, having read his emails, think he was alert to the security risks?
Of course, had he asked for a background check on her in order to feel more carefree, that would have amounted to the use of government resources.
It starts to feel like a novel from Arthur Hailey, where the compromised official has to confront a conflict of interest, blackmail, and so on. And sometimes the stooge in these scenarios may never arrive at the confrontation; they may pass on valuable information ignorantly, between the pillows.
Espionage can occur for all sorts of reasons, it can occur purely for economic advantage. And I don't think Sanford was in any position to know.
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7:08 AM
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Andy McCarthy is a putz. Here's how he weighed in on the New York Times' web coverage of Governor Mark Sanford this morning:
Just Like Their Clinton-Lewinsky Coverage . . . NOT
I see on the New York Timeshomepage this morning that the first five stories are about Mark Sanford. I guess there's no other news fit to print.
I know you don't always click through the links, but that's the total post, and his "homepage" link (which I have not changed) only goes to the NYT web site, not a screen shot of what he actually saw. We all know that news web sites shift during the day, and a link to the Times web site instead of a screen shot isn't very useful. So much for Mr. Former Prosecutor preserving the evidence.
Let's continue. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke in late January, 1998, and McCarthy wants us to think that the online Times home page coverage of that event wasn't as intense.
Well, DUH. I don't know what kind of World Wide Web McCarthy was on back in early 1998, but with so much of the world surfing with dial-up connections and screen resolutions of 640x180 versus today's typical 1280x1024, home page "real estate" was too precious to link to five articles on ANYthing. JFK could have risen from the dead and reunited the Beatles (resurrecting John at the same time), and there wouldn't have been room for two stories.
If you don't remember what it was like, the Internet Wayback Machine (archive.org) has an example of a 1998 NYT home page here (although some of the images weren't stored); for the full effect you could degrade your monitor resolution.
Here's the part I really don't get: Andy McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor. Seriously. And he's supposed to know how to make a case, you would think.
Another way in which McCarthy betrays his ignorance is by comparing more-informed 2009 web design to his recollections of 1998 (assuming he even bothered to try to remember). If you've got five links on a topic, it makes sense to cluster their links together on a given area of the screen. McCarthy didn't share a screenshot, but I know they way the Times typically organizes its pages, and it's more likely that they had a headline with a link, a lede, and probably some links to related stories after that. But Mr. Prosecutor didn't preserve any evidence.
(And lest you think I harp needlessly, this is not the first time McCarthy has gone after the New York Times without bullets in his gun. More on that here.)
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7:18 PM
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Aside from Governor Sanford...At least 69 dead and over 130 injured in a bombing in Baghdad. Petraeus was right to avoid thumping his chest over the improvements there; the problems the Republicans had was that you couldn't simultaneously claim success while saying we needed to stay there.
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7:02 PM
South Carolina's pea-brained governor. I really don't think having an extramarital affair has anything to do with your ability to serve as governor. The problem is that he serves as a Republican, and keeping clean is basically a job requirement for that party; the supercilious "Holier Than The Democrats" posture has been their bread and butter for so long, the party is intolerant of any dissonance on this point. So Governor Mark Sanford betrayed his wife and four sons not just as their father, but also as their provider, putting his livelihood at stake.
I doubt it will happen any time soon, but it would be great if the GOP actually learned some tolerance here and judged politicians on their merits rather than their indiscretions. God forbid they'd have another statesman of Lincoln's stature in their midst and banish him over something unimportant. (And, if it's unimportant then, it's unimportant.)
So I guess it comes down to this: would you forgive Lincoln? And if so, why not Sanford?
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6:38 PM
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The latest troop news from Mosul, Iraq won't be in Stars and Stripes.
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8:53 PM
Welcome to the hoi polloi in your airport. It seems some cherry-picking business plans don't succeed. "Clear," that premium service which was supposed to pre-approve you through airline security, for an annual fee of $199, was recalled to the airport. There were a quarter million people who had signed up for the service. Want to bet how many of them were tax subsidized, writing it off as a business expense? Think about the corpate tax rates, and how we were all subsidizing a significant chunk of this program.
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8:38 PM
Saturday, June 20, 2009
This is what a steady hand at the tiller looks like. The oppressed Republicans (who this past week were comparing their minority difficulties to the genuine plight of the ignored Iranian opposition) have, as you know, been complaining that Obama hasn't been vocal enough in condemning the seeming fraud of last week's Iranian elections.
During the Presidential campaign, John McCain swore that he would provide a "steady hand on the tiller." Admittedly, this is something the nation sorely needs after eight years of Bush/Cheney overreactions to 9/11. It certainly wasn't a committee of level headed people that seized on a national crisis to invade a country that nothing to do with 9/11. So even if McCain had won, had he been able to deliver on that steady hand claim, it would have been a welcome improvement over Bush.
Problem is, in all likelihood McCain wouldn't have been able to; not unless you think the world of campaigning is so completely different from the world of governing that you think someone who frequently went off like a firecracker while running would have suddenly become sedate and deliberate in the Oval Office.
I'm not talking just about his total wig-out a couple days before the first debate with Obama, where he claimed he had to rush back to Washington so that "he" could cap the economic volcano our nation faced — that he, alone, had that capability. He claimed he would suspend all campaign advertising during the crisis (he didn't even have the power to do that apparently, as time slots had already been bought and ads were set to run) and insisted that the debates couldn't occur on schedule. The debates of course did occur on schedule, and the nation felt no different as a result, seeing as how neither Obama nor McCain were in any kind of economic oversight role as it was.
No, I think his reactions to Russia's so-called invasion of Georgia are a better indicator of McCain's potential for overreaction; you'll recall that McCain's first reaction was to warn off Russia, talking about "Russian aggression." Since McCain has been "belligerent towards Russia for years" one could be forgiven for referring to this as a "knee jerk reaction" more than a "steady hand on the tiller." As it turned out, Georgian claims of Russian aggression deserved greater skepticism than McCain had the patience to give them. React, react, react; that was what McCain was about.
The Bush Administration's "sieze the day" attitude was one of the things which OBL loved about Bush: "[T]he policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations -- whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction -- has helped al-Qa'ida to achieve those enormous results."
Obama, however, has an awareness of the history of American intervention in Iraq that goes beyond 1979, back to 1953, when the Shah was installed. (Hell, I bet Obama's even seen the movie "Lawrence of Arabia," and has a recollection of earlier international meddling.) The U.S. can't intervene and tip the scales, and no matter what happens, in the morning, the government of Iran will still be ugly. Mousavi is not Tony Blair, and we will still have to carry our foreign policy forward. The Republicans, however, seem to want to provoke a war and screw us up in the region, not yet having had their fill.
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12:22 PM
Friday, June 19, 2009
Obama's approval ratings. Oh, man, it's dropped to 58%, according to Gallup. Guess what: Gallup had Bush's approval ratings at 50% in June of 2001 (scroll to bottom). Bush's approval ratings skyrocketed, of course, a few months later (immediately after 9/11). No one wants Obama's to rise under the same circumstances, but it's a pretty safe bet that Bush's wouldn't have flown so high had the nation been aware of the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief and Bush's inaction in response. Obama, of course, won't be so foolish as to ignore such a thing. Such are the rewards of opinion polls, especially when the pubilc forgets that economies don't turn on a dime.
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8:57 PM
Thomas Bailey. Used to see him playing for change and selling his CD's around Union Square. Seeing him again would make for a lucky day.
