April 26, 2004:

Tooting my own horn time. I wrote here, seven months ago:

Further thoughts on Dick Cheney on Meet The Press. I think we'd all agree that the implications of Dick Cheney having mentioned evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons was significant. But if it was only a misstatement, as Cheney said on Sunday, why did it take so long for the Administration to clarify it? The original interview took place on March 16. The Washington Post wrote about this statement back in March, when it was made. No one in the White House reads the Washington Post? No one in the White House wanted to set the record straight? Of course not: the White House was clearly content to leave us with a mistaken impression. Anyone care to find me a White House clarification on this? Looking at White House briefings for the two days following the original interview, no reporter seems to have raised a question (Cheney's name doesn't appear in the transcripts), and Ari Fleischer didn't clarify the point.

Yesterday, Josh Marshall wrote:

Now, what would happen if in some major forum -- a press conference or a major speech -- the president were to go before the public and say: "Before the invasion, we believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. We made the best guess based on the intelligence we had. But, now, having looked at all the evidence, it's clear we were wrong. He didn't have them."

Clearly, here we're setting aside questions of bad-faith and willful deception. But let's give him the best foot to put forward.

A week after that speech, or that comment in a press conference, how much do you think those numbers (55%) would change? I suspect they'd change quite a bit.

And what that tells me is that, to a great degree, the portion of the public that is is misinformed on this issue is misinformed because the president continues to deceive them, even if in a passive manner.

And why does he do so? Because it is in his political interest that they remain deceived.

What both these posts point to, of course, is a failure to correct the record until it's convenient.

Oh, there's plenty that Josh Marshall points out that I need pointed out to me... Just nice to pre-date him by seven months this time.
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Regarding Roman Catholic bishops who single out abortion-supporting Catholic politicians for shame and fail to do similarly for those who support capital punishment or the war in Iraq (see my post from Friday), the inconsistency has been noticed by others, too. Through Atrios, I saw an article in today's Washington Post on this; the Washington Post represents major exposure, but there have also been discussions in Associated Press articles published in the Winston-Salem Journal, New York's Newsday. In the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Bruce Nolan wrote suggested that a politicians failure to hue to the Catholic line shouldn't be a problem for most Catholic voters:

According to a ABC News-Washington Post poll released in October, 88 percent of Catholics are not persuaded by church teachings against artificial birth control; 67 percent see premarital sex as morally acceptable and 62 percent feel the same about the death penalty.

All of those views closely track those of the general population.

Partly for that reason, there is no shortage of Catholic politicians that groups like the American Life League target as "non-Catholic." By last fall, they numbered more than 470 at the state and federal level, including U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

Landrieu has voted for several resolutions expressing support for Roe v. Wade and has voted to permit abortions on military bases, where they currently are barred in most cases.

New York Times columnist David Brooks sees little impact. On PBS "Newshour with Jim Lehrer" he was in this exchange:

RAY SUAREZ: And quickly, David.

DAVID BROOKS: I guess I think the Catholic Church has a right to issue instructions on the Church teachings. I don't think it will affect politics one way or the other.

RAY SUAREZ: You don't see this as the thin edge of the wedge for the rest of this campaign season?

DAVID BROOKS: No, I really think John Kerry's Catholicism will not be a major issue.

Now, if only some prominent Republican would come out and say "religion is not an issue." Think that will ever happen, with all the pro-life supporters who rally around Bush on the issue?
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Blogs will NOT replace traditional media. (Not sure that anyone has said they would?) Blogs thrive and suffer from their individual perspective, which has inherent biases. And in focusing on any small aspect, the larger picture is lost (as Johnson wrote, "such is the limitation of the human powers that, by attention to trifles, we must let things of importance pass unobserved; when we examine a mite with a glass, we see nothing but a mite.") We may get a superior understanding of the issues surrounding gay marriage by reading Andrew Sullivan, and Instapundit will highlight the finer points of the UN scandal on Iraqi oil kickbacks; but when they focus their attention on these issues, they divert it from others. And just like they can't provide comprehensive coverage of everything, no traditional media outlet could cover every issue with the same depth that these blogs provide. Many important issues are barely a blip on these blogs; should any outlet complain that the others priorities don't align with theirs? I really don't think so. Rather, they should celebrate the differences they all bring to the picture.
Link 11:24 PM Home

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Small still is beautiful. I go to Costco (a big warehouse store), and it's not easy for me to do it. I have to take a subway in an indirect route (closer to Manhattan, then change trains to go deeper into Brooklyn), and I have to call a car service to get home with what I've bought. It's so inconvenient that I'm careful to not buy as much as I can there, reserving some of my trade for the grocery store around the corner. Why? Because I need the convenience of the local grocery store, and it's worth paying a premium to support them. (I don't mean to feel patrician — I have different motivations than the moral obligations Gordon Wood attributed to colonists who supported their tradesmen.) But my local store supplied me with batteries when we had our blackout last summer (and it lasted 27 hours in my neighborhood), and the quality of the neighborhood would plummet without them. I'm glad to see that my grocery store combats big stores like Costco by providing products I can't get from Costco (more interesting cheeses, for instance, as well as Atkins shakes my wife likes); it provides additional value beyond convenience.

But we all have to understand, when we buy something, whether or not there are added costs, and try to figure those in to the price we pay at purchase. Wal-Mart, it has been said, provides few benefits to its employees, who wind up being a greater burden to public health care systems (for example), resulting in hidden costs to you... And Robert Kennedy Jr. has spoken about the environmental costs of factory farms, saying that once you add in the environmental costs, the mass produced pork chop is just as expensive as the pork chop from the farm that lets the pigs play in the yard.

I guess this is a carry-over from Earth Day. Expect more.
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Best wishes to the newlyweds! Padma Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie.
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Running a sale on conspiracy theories. Has a definitive, quality link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda been found yet? That is, one which argues for a genuine relationship, and not just a couple hours of heavy petting? Will one ever be found? From Josh Marshall:

One point that is seldom noted, or too quietly if at all, is that while the neocons and their press defenders endlessly charge their critics with peddling 'conspiracy theories' about them, they themselves hold tenaciously to a series of crackpot theories that make the more wild-eyed interpretations of the Kennedy assassination sound cautious, judicious and restrained by comparison.

Conservatives frequently point to a memo from Douglas Feith, which supposedly 'proves' an Iraqi-Al Qaeda partnership — but its contents are so far down the data->information->knowledge->wisdom chain, and positioned as such even by the Pentagon, that the memo proves nothing, and only serves as a starting point for discussions. Given enough monkeys at enough typewriters, and eventually Saddam Hussein will be at the grassy knoll.
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April 24, 2004:

Republicans are fond of pointing out that they are the party of Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln of course). Lincoln was a fine President, the type that a party would be wise to associate itself with. What needs remembering is that during the Civil War Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus — basically the right to be tried, or released if you can't come up with some charges. Bush, of course, is a Republican. And Jose Padilla seems, to my uneducated mind, like an American who has had his rights of habeas corpus suspended. The New York Times has an excellent article profiling Padilla and how he wound up on the fightin' side of the government.
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No. REALLY? Tonight I watched "What A Girl Wants" with my daughter, that Amanda Bynes movie where she goes to England to meet her father, who is running for Parliament, and she refuses to conform to expectations in the "coming out" process, preferring to be herself. In the credits I saw it was based on a play, and IMDB said the play was written in 1958. Shocking! I mean, such original elements as a kid wanting to be herself and how it disrupts the debutante process, and it was written in 1958? Not 1912?

It was fun to watch it with my daughter, but seriously, it was far more predictable than I'm used to, even for movies written for her age group. My feelings of anticipation were not eased in the final scene, when I recognized Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately?" in the opening bars without anyone even singing.
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Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the stoop sales is? Well, we did ours today. We did everything we could to make items move, pricing things low, but not ridiculously so. We rid ourselves of the remaining pieces from a set of stone ware (85-90% complete) we'd been storing in the basement for years, a child's bicycle, french language education tapes, and many many old books. We also wanted to sell a pair of Polk Monitor 7 loud speakers, priced fairly at $100, but we probably needed more passers by in order to get that (they go for about $50 more on eBay). Not selling the Polks wasn't a huge surprise, but we also couldn't unload a VCR for $20, even though we had the remote and the manual. Failure to sell that item says a lot about how well DVD players have penetrated the market, I suppose (or, that everyone has all the VCR players they figure they need).
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