Monday, June 7, 2004:

I can't say too many nice things about Ronald Reagan. I have a lot of misgivings about those years, and have trouble saying positive things about him at all, so I won't be saying too many nice things. Honest. But I think one personality trait which separates him from so many other Presidents was his desire for a simpler world and a simpler understanding of it. Many times that's a positive — a Thoreau-like retreat that cuts through the unnecessary to boil an issue down to its essence. You could see that in the recourse he often took in religion and faith; you could see it in his characterization of the Soviet Union as an evil empire. He represented a return to what he considered fundamental American values, and when he went off to chop wood it was as if he were emulating Lincoln.

He was a stark contrast to so many other presidents of the last 40 years.

• Nixon, we know, was a schemer and political strategist of incredible complexity;
• Carter, it's said by some, could get mired in the details of decisions, and suffer analysis paralysis;
• Bush I, we now know, made a principled decision to not pursue Saddam Hussein to the end because he knew that the coalition he'd built hadn't given him that mandate;
• and Clinton was (is) a voracious reader who had ready command of all the relevant facts and understood the interrelationships of what he was dealing with.

When I hear conservatives complain in response to nuanced arguments, I can't help but think that it's a longing to return to the Reagan years, which were often played out as being so much simpler.

Yet there were times when I felt Reagan took his desires for parsimony too far. And when he did so, it was almost as an anti-intellectual cudgel. For example, in May of 1982 Reagan gave a speech where he argued against focusing on seasonally-adjusted employment figures. Reagan said:

The rise in the unemployment rate from 9 to 9.4 percent is in what are called the seasonally adjusted figures. Now, I'm not sure that we live in a seasonally adjusted world. Every month, the Bureau also publishes the unadjusted figures. I feel these latter figures should not be buried or ignored by the press. If they weren't of some importance, the Bureau wouldn't release them along with the seasonally adjusted.

Now, what's this all about? Well, the adjusted figures are given for what should be the rate of unemployment and employment for each month, based on the figures for previous years. Now, I know I'm running the risk of oversimplifying, but I'm also running out of time. The unadjusted figures are simply the actual count of how many are employed and how many are unemployed in a certain month.

Under the seasonally adjusted figures, unemployment, as we know, went up to 9.4 percent in April, higher than the March figure of 9 percent. And that, of course, is bad news. But according to the unadjusted figures, there were 400,000 more people actually working in April than in March and 300,000 fewer unemployed. Likewise, when the figures were announced a month ago, unemployment increased from March over February, according to the adjusted figures. And yet by the actual count, there were 525,000 more people working in March than February and 88,000 fewer unemployed.

Now, I'm sure that next month when 750,000 or more young people are suddenly out of school, the adjusted figures might look better than the unadjusted. But shouldn't we be allowed to see both?

When Reagan was arguing that we may not "live in a seasonally adjusted world," and recommended refocusing on figures that had no seasonal adjustments, he was basically suggesting we look at a simpler figure, without nuance. Yet in this case the nuance of seasonal adjustments actually helps us understand trends better. Without seasonally adjusting, the impact of economic trends are obscured by factors such as changes in the weather. There is less demand for snow shovels in May than in January, and that's been seen year after year; there's been greater demand for t-shirts in May. To not weigh the effects if season would be silly. Yet that's what Reagan proposed.

Often, simplicity is a good goal. But I think Reagan has hurt us somewhat in this respect because he's decreased our patience with complexity. You can hear it when two alternative choices are proposed which hide a myriad set of choices which could considered; and you can hear it when people try to force a simple reconciliation of two facts which might be only superficially conflicting.
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While America seems caught in nostalgia for an era of brown suits and jelly beans, it's nice to read that all is not a return to Puritanism. The New York Times is reporting that legislative responses to indecency, originally fueled by Janet Jackson's Super Bowl performance, are losing their momentum.

In the Senate, a measure approved by the Commerce Committee in March has yet to be scheduled for discussion by the full body. The delay in bringing the Senate bill to the floor is tied partly to the broader politics of the Senate, where Republicans, who hold a slim 51-seat majority, have had difficulty passing major bills. But for the senators themselves, there is also the peril of investing too much political capital in a divisive issue, which has pitted some social conservatives and child-advocacy groups against big broadcasters and civil rights advocates.

...

"This looks like a cheap date to me," said Charles Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan political newsletter. "You come out for motherhood, apple pie and 'decency,' and you know it's not going anywhere."

The unfortunate thing is that just by making noise, they get support from their constituents. An opponent who asks for action risks getting it.
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The vast right wing conspiracy can't defend itself? From Newsweek's interview with documentary maker Harry Thomason on his film The Hunting of the President:

We run a large list of names at the end of the most recent version of the film. There were 137 people on the right who, to a person—with the exception of Jerry Falwell—refused to talk to us. It was really hard to get people on the right to talk. And a lot of news people didn't want to talk to us.

That speaks volumes, doesn't it? They knew what they were doing, and tried to bring down a Presidency. They sucked the air out of a progressive administration in an effort to avoid reforms and programs they disagreed with. Some times elections aren't enough for democracy, I guess.
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The shirt... I've been asked about the shirt below, and I can tell you its full headline is "Conceived in Liberty," coming from the Gettysburg Address. (The shirt's mine.) They seem to have been discontinued, but some sites claim they have limited quantities available.
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Reagan Suck-Up Watch. Back in 1993, when Andrew Sullivan was its editor, the "liberal" New Republic monitored media coverage of the newly inaugurated President Clinton. When a news item was seen (this was back in the days of print, no web) which seemed unusually high in its praise or contemplative of Clinton qualities mortals might not see, it was featured in a special section called "Clinton Suck-Up Watch." Remember this? It was kind of like a precursor to all those awards Sullivan regularly nominates journalists for now. I bring this up because we can see a lot of coverage of Reagan now which is obviously over the top. For instance, the BBC has an article showing the human side of reporting and how one of its reporters heard the news about Reagan's death. We care about this? Go have your special experience, but don't feel like you need to write about it: Reagan is the story, not you.
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During this period of national mourning over Reagan's death, one would do well to remember this line of Samuel Johnson's: "In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath." Our press should have higher standards, and will, but remember that while they may not be inclined to lie, you have to figure that there are many blind eyes at a time like this. Don't base your opinion of his legacy on what you read this week, is all I'm saying.
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Call me crazy, but every once in a while it makes sense to go beyond the flood of books which are critical of Bush, and into genuine history books. I just took a look at my stack of books to be read (having now finished Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, Joe Conason's Big Lies, Alterman & Green's The Book on Bush, and Woodward's Plan of Attack — whew!) and here's what I see I've bought, waiting to be read:

• An Imperfect God: George Washington, his Slaves, and the Creation of America, by Henry Wiencek
• Crowded With Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, by James Buchan
• Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828, by Walter McDougall
• The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, by Gordon Wood

...so it looks like I'm pretty grounded in the 18th century this summer. But this is not to suggest for a single blink of a moment that relevance is limited. Relevance screams out. Many are uncomfortable about the extent to which religion seems to play a role in George Bush's presidency; others, comfortable that he shares their faith, say there's no need to worry. Yet in McDougall's book we read this passage about the English civil war (page 72):

The Parliamentary cause triumphed, but far from upholding Common Law and the rights of Englishmen, the victorious general Oliver Cromwell trod them underfoot in the name of natural law as ordained by a Puritan God. A king captured and executed for treason; Parliament purged of all but Erastian Presbyterians; freedom of conscience extinguished for all but a handful of acceptable sects; heresy and adultery made capital crimes; Scotland and Ireland brutally crushed; England divided into eleven military governments: such were the fruits of millenarian revolution. (Emphasis mine.)

It's in a passage like this that we're reminded why we put up barriers between Church and State and demanded reasons beyond faith for our laws.

Those who would reject religious arguments that the war in Iraq was not a just war are welcome to, so long as they base their decisions on reason, and this includes decisions in other matters such as abortion. One cannot turn to faith for support in one area while rejecting it in another; we do not shape God as we choose.
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"People take pictures of each other, to prove that they really existed." At least, that's how the Kinks sang it back on The Village Green Preservation Society (a desert island album if there ever was one). Today I was part of a gathering of photographers who calmly protested a proposed ban of photography in the subways.

I thought there were about a hundred people (maybe I'm wrong) going down the Lexington Avenue line, crosstown on the L, and uptown on the A/C/E. No real fracases or confrontation, just a bunch of good-hearted people enjoying the benefits of living in a free society. So far as I can tell there were no terrorists among us, and any who had been planning to map out the vulnerable parts of the subways were probably intimidated by all the cameras.

(And by the way, no one started singing "If I had a camera, I'd shoot it in the morning...")
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Saturday, June 5, 2004:

The long list of areas where I disagreed with Ronald Reagan's policies and actions can be set aside for a moment. Any good wishes from me might be superfluous — his destination in the afterlife was set in less than the blink of an eye — but I still wish him well on his latest journey, and hope that he rests in peace. May God have mercy on his soul.
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We are a prime target for terrorists in NYC. And we're not getting enough attention. Says the Mayor:

"This is a time for Tom Ridge to stand up and say, 'Enough of this craziness,' " the mayor said. "He has got to be out there screaming. If we are going to protect this country, we've got to send the money where the threat is, and I don't think there's any question that the No. 1 targets for anybody overseas would be New York and, arguably, Washington."

Why isn't there enough money? Can you say "Iraq"?
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The text of the proposal to ban subway photography is now online. (Seen via The Bigger Apple.) This is a great example of why public comment requirements for laws are a great idea (discussed in the post immediately below this one), even when there are downsides. The text for the proposed ban of subway photography reads:

No photograph, film or video recording shall be made or taken on or in any conveyance or facility by any person, except members of the press holding valid press identification cards issued by the New York City Police Department or by others duly authorized in writing to engage in such activity by the authority.

Any problems?

• Well, for one thing, its protection is inadequate. Look at the prepositions "on" and "in." Because only these prepositions are used, this law is silent on whether or not you can take pictures of conveyances and facilities from the outside. There are plenty of elevated subway trains in the city. A genuine terrorist could take all the pictures he/she wants of subway overpasses, trusses, and so on, and not fall under the jurisdiction of this law.

  It is possible that some other city law prohibits such photography, but that is not clear from this. And because no reference is made to any other laws here, the impact of changes in other possible laws wouldn't be realized here. So don't ride elevated trains, I guess is the message.

• As written, the law clearly outlaws innocent photography such as tourists might take. The mayor and others have told us not to worry about tourists' taking pictures of their families on their first subway ride, police will use discretion. But why not write the criteria for that discretion into the bill, so it can be enforced uniformly? Discretion is dangerous. If the point is to prohibit photography of specific types of equipment (such as the mayor used in an on-radio example), build those into the law.
   
• The criteria for obtaining permits — the written authorization — is not specific, and will allow for capricious and/or non-systematic application.
   
• Last, but certainly not least, this all boils down to a need to be careful about how we curtail our freedom of expression. A number of photobloggers are concerned because they consider subways an important aspect of city life worth recording. (There is a protest tomorrow, if you're interested.) But you shouldn't need a photoblog to care; some people take pictures just for their own enjoyment without ever publishing them. Subways are a slice of life, the normal everyday life which makes up the mass of humanity here in NYC. They are an important part of the mundane existence, and we should be free to take pictures of them.

Yeah, I will fill out the comment form at the MTA's web site.
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The environmental costs of bureaucratic sloppiness on the part of New York State. Yesterday, a judge threw out some pending environmental regulations which would have forced power companies to clean up some of their old plants — some are over 50 years old, and cited as major sources of pollution. The reason? Because NY State didn't publish the regulations properly, to allow a sufficient public comment period. Public comment on laws is incredibly important; I'm not angry at the judge, but I'm really angry at the state, for screwing up on a basic procedural task. The impact? "It will mean that more people will die, more people will get sick and more children will have asthma attacks because the air will be dirtier for longer," according to the director of environmental health for the American Lung Association of New York State. Stupid stupid stupid. (If you can't do a government job correctly, what job can you do correctly?)
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Friday, June 4, 2004:

I'm not the first to shriek at this, but you'll have to excuse my late discovery: I don't get paid to read books like Bob Woodward's, and I can learn about things more slowly as a result. Remember the recent press conference where Bush said he couldn't come up with a mistake he'd made since 9/11? A lot of people, myself included, said this showed an amazing lack on his part. Well, I'm finishing Woodward's book today, and in the epilogue, page 420, I read this (Woodward is retelling a December 2003 interview he had with Bush):

We turned to the question of doubts. I quoted what Tony Blair recently had said at his party's annual conference: "I do not at all disrespect anyone who disagrees with me." Blair had also said he had received letters from those who had lost sons in the war who wrote that they hated him for what he did. I quoted Blair, "And don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that they don't suffer any doubt."

"Yeah," President Bush replied. "I haven't suffered doubt."

"Is that right?" I asked. "Not at all?"

"No. And I'm able to convey that to the people." To those who had lost sons or daughters, he said, "I hope I'm able to convey that in a humble way."

Yeah, this is shocking, and it's so consistent with someone who doesn't know humility, whose imagination is so limited that it doesn't entertain the possibility of him making mistakes. It's also a bit surprising that this wasn't brought up when Woodward was on CBS 60 Minutes back in April. I think this is more telling than items like his failure to consult with Colin Powell or his dad. (Actually, I now see that the 60 Minutes program was about six weeks ago, April 18. I think I've been timely in reading this...)
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Lovely! (Faking the sources.) How bad was the WMD intelligence? How slanted was the interpretation? Try this, from a Senate report:

The report also calls attention to what one official called "slipshod work" and "factual errors" by C.I.A. analysts and operations officials, including cases in which single sources of intelligence were identified as multiple sources, and in which at least one warning that identified a source of intelligence as a fabricator was ignored. The information provided by the fabricator that Iraq possessed mobile biological laboratories found its way into Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation in February 2003 to the United Nations Security Council making the administration's case for war. (Emphasis mine.)

I have three independently corroborated opinions that this is not how it should be: they come from me, myself, and I.
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A new virus to watch out for, one that could be taking your credit card and online banking data. Details are here. If you have it, they're saying close your accounts.
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There's no room to crow about the 248,000 jobs added in May. Why? The unemployment rate remained at 5.6%. This is not growth.
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Any Catholics who will be considering John Kerry's position on abortion and how it might conflict with their religious beliefs should take note of Bush's visit with the Pope today. Yes, the Pope praised Bush for his high valuation of life. But lest you forget...

[The Pope] reiterated the Vatican's opposition to the war in Iraq and said everyone wanted the situation to be normalised as quickly as possible "with the active participation of the international community and in particular the United Nations".

He added: "In the past few weeks other deplorable events have come to light which have troubled the civic and religious conscience of all, and made more difficult a serene and resolute commitment to shared human values: in the absence of such a commitment neither war nor terrorism will ever be overcome."

No, Bush isn't Catholic, but Catholic voters should be careful about how flexibly they listen to the Pope.
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At least 300,000 people will die of starvation in the Sudan, according to USAid head Andrew Natsios. And that's if we can get them help: without help, "it could be a million." This is just horrible.
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I had no idea... I was just watching a DVD of Beethoven's 7th Symphony (Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Claudio Abbado), and in the 2nd movement, during a pizzicato section, one of the bassists is playing a five string bass. You learn something new everyday.
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Thursday, June 3, 2004:

I'm sure there will be many theories as to why Tenet resigned (was fired?), but over at Newsweek the speculation basically runs that Tenet decided to cut bait before some anticipated, critical reports will be released:

The CIA had at first bitterly challenged some of the findings in the still-secret Senate report on Iraqi WMD and insisted that the committee hadn't heard the full story. But in recent days, sources tell NEWSWEEK, agency officials told congressional investigators that they were resigned to the report's findings and would no longer contest them. Tenet who according to Bob Woodward's recent book, "Plan of Attack," once called the agency's case for Saddam's WMD a "slam dunk" knew that his leadership of the CIA was about to be strongly criticized. "He didn't want to go through this," said one congressional source familiar with the panel's findings. "There was nowhere for [agency officials] to go and [Tenet] was in charge of the whole mess."

Elsewhere? The LA Times sees upsides and downsides:

Tenet's departure could create an opening for an overhaul of the nation's intelligence work, which is carried out by both the CIA and several Defense Department agencies.

It also could give Bush a jump on any personnel shakeup he may want to undertake as a result of the report from the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.

On the other hand, his leaving could create the impression that senior aides were bailing out or that it is now open season for political sniping aimed at pushing out other members of the president's national security team.

One of the themes being pursued over at Fox is that the resignation of Tenet is not enough to absolve the administration, in the eyes of its opponents:

But some of those same lawmakers said Tenet's resignation should not be seen as the end of the line in terms of repercussions against a Bush administration that has erred on a number of critical issues.

"I do not believe that the resignation of George Tenet should be the only response to those failures," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Pelosi added that Tenet had made "significant contributions to the work of the intelligence community."

"I have known George Tenet for many years, and I wish him the very best. He has worked extremely hard on behalf of our nation, and we are grateful for his effort," said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

"There is no question, however, that there have been significant intelligence failures, and the administration has to accept responsibility for those failures," Kerry said, adding that perhaps now is the time to create a post of "director of national intelligence" who can be responsible for oversight of the entire intelligence community.

More to be written still, I'm sure.
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Of COURSE Tenet was fired. It doesn't take a magnifying glass to uncover a more reasonable hypothesis than "personal reasons." But because Bush didn't take any credit (he could have said something like "I decided we needed fresh blood," or something like that), and said it was for personal reasons, Bush is still liable to charges that he's a bad president. Think about it: in this nudge nudge wink wink world, the only thing that pushed Tenet out the door was wanting to spend more time with his family. Maybe Bush actually dodged a bullet by not impugning Tenet; maybe there's a deal that Tenet won't write a book before November. Merely speculation on my part.
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Just how liberal is the media? Over at Ishbadiddle, Ennis has another example of an astonishing quote which is not getting coverage... And if the media were liberal, it would be getting a lot of play. Go read...
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LOTS of reasons to hold my tongue about George Tenet's resignation — chief among them that my opinion shouldn't matter much, given that I only know what I read from the same sources you read — but I will say this: the "for personal reasons" is a nice touch. That means it can't be talked about as due to any managerial/presidential qualities of the administration. Had it not been for unknown personal reasons, Tenet would still be there, and all the complaints about intelligence handling and falling for "slam dunk" guarantees are still pertinent.
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Wednesday, June 2, 2004:

And they set him free? Perhaps there's something wrong with how the FBI ranks its terrorist suspects, but Nabil al-Marabh was number 27 on the list. And the prosecution thought it made more sense to deport him to Syria (where it was thought he couldn't do harm) than prosecute him and be forced to reveal sensitive intelligence in the process. It's very curious...

Al-Marabh "intended to martyr himself in an attack against the United States," an FBI agent wrote in a December 2002 report obtained by The Associated Press. A footnote in al-Marabh's deportation ruling last year added, "The FBI has been unable to rule out the possibility that al-Marabh has engaged in terrorist activity or will do so if he is not removed from the United States."

One FBI report summarized a high-level debriefing of a Jordanian informant named Ahmed Y. Ashwas that was personally conducted by the U.S. attorney in Chicago, signifying its importance. The informant alleged al-Marabh told him of specific terrorist plans during their time in prison.

Even the judge who accepted al-Marabh's plea agreement on minor immigration charges in 2002 balked. "Something about this case just makes me feel uncomfortable," Judge Richard Arcara said in court. The Justice Department assured the judge that al-Marabh did not have terrorist ties.

A second judge who ultimately ordered al-Marabh's deportation sided with FBI agents, federal prosecutors and Customs agents in the field who believed al-Marabh was tied to terrorism.

"The court finds applicant does present a danger to national security,'' U.S. Immigration Judge Robert D. Newberry ruled, concluding al-Marabh was "credibly linked to elements of terrorism" and had a "propensity to lie."

We need really good legal scholars to comment on this, not just people like Senator Charles Schumer. Our legal system demands visibility. I do hope we've got a thousand tails on this guy, over in Syria...
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Just covering his bases, President Bush has met with an attorney to obtain private legal counsel in the Valerie Plame case.
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Where is Cheney's fury? It's interesting how some people want to learn from the past, while others don't. In one of John Barth's novels (I think it was Tidewater Tales), his narrator describes watching a terrarium in Germany, where a boa constrictor lives with a few chickens. When the snake gets hungry and picks out his prey, all the hens are aflutter with panic, going berserk. Yet, once the constrictor has fully taken the prey in his body, and the bird is no longer visible to the others, the hens are all calm as can be. Like nothing happened, and nothing will.

I mention this because Colin Powell is asking the CIA what went wrong with the intelligence on Iraqi WMDs. Dick Cheney is not.

After the American invasion last year, the White House and the C.I.A. initially said that suspicious semitrailers found in Iraq were the mobile biological weapons facilities that the sources had described, and a May 2003 C.I.A. white paper making that case is still posted on the agency's Web site. As recently as January, Vice President Dick Cheney cited the trailers, saying if they turned out to be what he and others long suspected, he "would deem that conclusive evidence" that Mr. Hussein had such programs.

A spokesman for Mr. Cheney declined to say whether Mr. Cheney had asked for the updated intelligence on the mobile labs question.

"It's an issue that Powell is intensely interested in," said one senior administration official. "If Cheney is still interested, he isn't saying."

Post mortems are not the Administration's strengths. (You'll recall how much resistance they showed to setting up commissions to learn from 9/11 mistakes and WMD intelligence mistakes; it's also said that Bush won't ever review a decision that's been made; a third example is how Bush couldn't come up with a mistake since 9/11 in a recent press conference. They just don't like to learn.)

The creepy thing here is that an incurious attitude is uncomfortably reminiscent of something which Ahmed Chalabi said in February:

"As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants." (Emphasis mine.)

Now, Chalabi was probably closer to the truth than Cheney ever was... When Chalabi says something like that, it's akin to "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." But Powell and Cheney should be closer to Dorothy and her traveling companions, they should be furious that we've been hoodwinked. Where is Cheney's fury?
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The danger of obessions. Samuel Johnson once said, "I wish there were some cure, like the lover's leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession." The New York Times is reporting that Ahmed Chalabi, friend to the neocon hawks, told Iran that the US had broken its codes, "betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials."

American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East.

According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken code. That encrypted cable, intercepted and read by the United States, tipped off American officials to the fact that Mr. Chalabi had betrayed the code-breaking operation, the American officials said.

American officials reported that in the cable to Tehran, the Iranian official recounted how Mr. Chalabi had said that one of "them" a reference to an American had revealed the code-breaking operation, the officials said. The Iranian reported that Mr. Chalabi said the American was drunk.

Three weeks ago, of course, is before Chalabi's house was raided, and it provides context to that raid.

Now, I don't think for a moment that anyone in the White House or the Pentagon made a conscious decision to betray our country — something which might have happened when covert CIA operator Valerie Plame was outed for the purposes of political leverage. But it does indicate that the Bush administration was overly interested in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, to the point of blessing Chalabi. He was a favorite for so long, even to the point of sitting behind the First Lady at Bush's 2004 State of the Union Address.

It's not as if there weren't suspicions about Chalabi prior to the embrace. Back in the 1980s he was considered disreputable:

[Jordan] is where Chalabi built and lost a banking empire in the 1980s, before he was forced to flee and convicted in absentia of fraud and embezzlement. [...] A NEWSWEEK investigation, with which Chalabi cooperated, shows that his own and his family's financial institutions were shut down by authorities in Switzerland, Lebanon and Jordan because of questionable practices and unsecured loans. The cost to investors and depositors was tens of millions of dollars.

Why were we so obsessed that we got in bed with this guy? Books will be written, I'm sure.
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Tuesday, June 1, 2004:

It boggles the mind... I walked through Green-Wood Cemetery today, and learned that there are almost 600,000 people buried there. How to put that in perspective? Well, if they were all alive, it would be among the top 20 cities in the country in terms of population. There are more people buried in Green-Wood than living in the city of Boston (the city itself, not including outlying suburbs).
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A walk down memory lane. Or, a cake walk maybe? From Ken Adelman, February 2002:

I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps.

Like a lot of hawks, though, Ken Adelman forgot that the process only began with the invasion. There's no discussion in Adelman's op-ed piece about the future. Didn't anyone remember what we had to do in Europe after World War II? How long will it be before the official record of failure to plan for the post war is made public?
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What a headline! The UK's Independent, on today's events in the formation of the new Iraq government: "The day the stooges bit back."

Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, was left humiliated as his favoured candidate, Adnan al-Pachachi, rejected his invitation to become Iraq's first president since Saddam Hussein, forcing the US to install the man it had tried hard to avoid, Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar.

As the political horse-trading was underway, insurgents delivered their own verdict, with a car bomb killing 25 people at the headquarters of a Kurdish party in Baghdad. No sooner had that exploded, than a mortar landed inside the US headquarters in the capital, the so-called Green Zone, sending a huge cloud of black smoke over the city. And, north of the city, 11 more were to die in yet another car bomb.

Aside from the worsening security situation, a tour of the city underlines the magnitude of the tasks facing Iyad Allawi, the Prime Minister-elect, when he takes over on 30 June.

Always good to get a perspective from outside the US...
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John McCain pretty much hands Inhofe's head to him. Remember the Abu Ghraib hearings, where Inhofe talked sarcastically about the "do gooders," and McCain, the former POW, walked out? McCain responds over at Opinion Journal, the online branch of the Wall Street Journal...

In recent days, some have labeled Red Cross personnel as "humanitarian do-gooders" whose presence in coalition-run detention centers is inappropriate while American soldiers are fighting and dying. Others have warned that the ICRC is on the path toward becoming a left-wing advocacy group and portrayed the Geneva Conventions as a hindrance to our ability to extract intelligence from prisoners that might save U.S. lives.

It is critical to realize that the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions do not endanger American soldiers, they protect them. Our soldiers enter battle with the knowledge that should they be taken prisoner, there are laws intended to protect them and impartial international observers to inquire after them.

America's observance of the Geneva Conventions and our support for the ICRC in part determine the willingness of other nations to do the same. While our intelligence personnel in Abu Ghraib may have believed that they were protecting U.S. lives by roughing up detainees to extract information, they have had the opposite effect. Their actions have increased the danger to American soldiers, in this conflict and in future wars.

McCain knows what he talks about. Inhofe doesn't.
Link 8:19 PM Home

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The kind of fame you can do without. Remember the rumors that Kerry had had an affair with an intern? The woman's name is Alexandra Polier, and she's written an article about how she was smeared. Some of this is really disgusting.

The media needed a photo of me, and I wasn't going to give it to them, though an enterprising soul from the New York Post persuaded my old high school he was doing a story on a "small-town girl who makes it big" and snatched my yearbook photo.

...

Unfortunately, my silence only fueled the intrigue, and as I refused to emerge for a photo, the price got higher. One British tabloid offered an ex-boyfriend $50,000 for a recent picture. He declined. So, to his credit, did a local photographer friend, whose agent said he could make two years' salary selling one photo of me that he'd taken at a Thanksgiving party. For that kind of money, I was tempted to send in a photo myself.

More alarmingly, my Hotmail account had been broken into, and I couldn't access my e-mail. Random people in my in-box whom I hadn't spoken to in months suddenly started getting calls from reporters. My father called to tell me someone had tried the same thing with his account, but that his security software had intercepted them and tracked them back to a rogue computer address in Washington, D.C. When I finally got back into my account, assuming the hacker was a Republican, I changed my password to "Bushsucksdick."

There's a lot here to get creeped out by. Not just the fervor, but what the fervor was for, a potentially lurid tale which might bring a candidate down.
Link 1:42 PM Home

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In contrast to Bush's negative campaigning (see post below), the Kerry campaign is launching a new ad they call "Optimism." You can view it through these links:

• Real Video - High Speed Connections
• Real Video - Slower connections
• Windows Media - High Speed
• Windows Media - Slower Speed

I think it's quite good. It addresses some of the positive notes I talked about here.
Link 12:57 PM Home

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In other words, he's a chicken.

The White House strongly opposed a reimportation bill that passed the House last year. But Snowe said she didn't believe the president would veto a measure that has picked up broad support. "It has the dynamic and the momentum to pass this year," Snowe said. "It's the one area of social policy we can really get done."

Word has it there may be enough votes in the Senate to allow reimportation of drugs from Canada, if it can come up for a vote.
Link 10:29 AM Home

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