Me: Frank Lynch

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That's right, the whole point is because we like to complain. It's surprising sad how much influence Glenn Reynolds has over his unthinking flock of readers. Here's his post on stinginess:

JOSH TREVINO RESPONDS TO CLAIMS OF "STINGINESS" -- but face it, there's no pleasing people whose chief desire in life is to bitch.

That's right, we don't care a whit about humanity or whether we're doing as much as we can, or how what we spend on humanitarian concerns compares to what we spend on Iraq war operations, inaugurations, or tax breaks to the already very well-off. It's all because we like to complain. Cheeses.
Link 6:16 PM Home

But there's still too much spin over our aid. I think Andrew Natsios is a mixed bag so far: he was one of the first to decry the problems in Darfur, yet he boldly projected reconstruction costs in Iraq would be only $1.7 billion. ...so I think it makes sense to be cautious regarding all that he says about how much we're doing for tsunami relief. For instance, you would think that putting the aid dollars in terms of a percentage of GNP would be a reasonable approach (all concepts of "tithing" are handled that way, aren't they?) Last night on PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer, he steadfastly avoided that context. Instead, he preferred to consider aid per capita compared to Europe (he pointed out that we've promised more in an absolute sense than Europe has, in spite of their being more people in Europe). But here are the per capita income figures for the U.S. and Europe, according to the CIA World Factbook (GDP per capita, "purchasing power parity":

1. $37,800 United States
2. $37,800 Norway
3. $31,100 Denmark
4. $30,900 Iceland
5. $29,600 Ireland
6. $29,100 Belgium
7. $28,600 the Netherlands
8. $27,700 United Kingdom
9. $27,600 France
10. $27,600 Germany
11. $26,800 Sweden
12. $26,700 Italy
13. $25,700 European Union
14. $22,000 Spain
15. $20,000 Greece
16. $18,000 Portugal
17. $15,700 Czech Republic
18. $11,100 Poland

Natsios' even avoided comparing the outlays to population, at first:

What counts is what the requirement is in the field. How many people are at risk and how much food and how much medical assistance do they need?

That's what we design our budgets to do: To respond to people in the field. The Americans are not at risk. And how much we give should not be based on how many people live in America or in Europe.

It's how many people are at risk and how much do they need for us to assist them. Sixty percent of all the food given in humanitarian assistance around the world comes from the United States - 60 percent.

That's a traditional figure for a number of years. We're the largest donor to UNICEF, the largest donor to the International Committee for the Red Cross, the largest donor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

I mean, there are more Europeans than there are Americans. So we are very generous, and we have been for a long time. And we're leaders in international relief --

But there's an inherent problem with Natsios' "we give more than anyone else" argument. There's nothing magic about 60%. (And at another point he was citing a figure of 40% of "all government assistance for international humanitarian aid for all countries in the world.") At the end of the day, other countries could still be giving more per capita GDP than we are (perhaps our 60%, or 40%, should be higher), and it is on that basis that we should think of ourselves as generous or stingy. So far, Natsios has avoided talking in those terms.
Link 11:18 AM Home

How to mishandle public relations. The Bush administration has now made it clear that the $35 million in promised aid for tsunami relief is only the beginning, and that eventually our aid could be over a billion. The Pentagon has pointed out that in addition to the $35 million, it's re- routed ships to get to the afflicted areas; Andrew Natsios of USAID has stressed that we're only talking about a concrete $35 million so far because Congress needs to be approached for more, and it will be. That makes me feel better. But the way they handled this one — from Bush's silence for three days to Colin Powell's initial reference to a mere $15 million — is another demonstration of how the Administration lets issues fester rather than dealing with them up front.

It is true that actions speak louder than words, but there's nothing wrong with accompanying action with words, is there?

Let's consider the following:

• Bush has not gone to any soldiers' funerals.
   
• As a commenter to another post reminded, Bush was certainly caught in the headlights on 9/11 at Booker Elementary School, reading with the children.
   
• When the Valerie Plame scandal was unfolding, Bush never took the bull by the horns. Rather than immediately express his intolerance of a possible threat to our national security, he let the press carry the ball when he could have called everyone into the office and insisted on the truth. He was silent for too many days. (To remind international readers, Valerie Plame was the covert CIA operative whose identity was revealed by someone in the White House, in apparent retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson's going public with the flimsiness of stories that Saddam Hussein's regime had tried to buy yellow cake from Nigeria.)

In each of these cases, Bush's lethargy has hurt him. He didn't need to be stone-faced for three days over the tsunamis, and all he did was create rancor. He didn't even need to have every i dotted and t crossed before going public, either: he does that all the time in his State of the Union address, what with talking about the hydrogen cars and international AIDS relief. So why the silence here?

And by the way, I don't accept any ideas they tried to plant about the shallowness of Clinton's immediate responses. (This suggestion was made here.) There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying "I feel your pain," a failure would be to merely feel and do nothing about it. And why would they point fingers at Clinton, anyway? Is it my imagination, or don't all Presidents come out with immediate statements in such cases? Why would a President who was so comfortable giving a press conference less than a week before the tragedy occurred be suddenly unable to talk to the press or get before a mike the same day the tsunamis occurred?
Link 10:29 AM Home

Planning your New Year's Eve party, or family get-together? Over at two-muses, Lynn has a wonderful idea (read below the very nice picture).
Link 9:41 AM Home

A re-vote in Washington state? Yeah, right. Republican gubernatorial contender Dino Rossi (and hairline loser) has suggested a revote for the governor's office...

"The uncertainty surrounding this election process isn't just bad for you and me - it is bad for the entire state," Rossi said, reading from a letter he said he sent to Democrat Christine Gregoire. "People need to know for sure that the next governor actually won the election."

Oh, how many ways could I tie this back to Florida 2000: not just Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot, which screamed about an inability to determine voter intent, but the aborted recounts, where voter intent could have been inferred but was stopped. (To remind, if the recount had gone as far as Bush had suggested, Gore would have won the state and the election.)

Has Rossi just said that questions surrounding the legitimacy of Bush's first term were, er, legitimate?
Link 11:07 PM Home

72 hours and 70,000 lives later, the President responds. What a cold man, to remain silent for so long. If he watched "A Christmas Carol" this week, he should have recognized the depths to which Scrooge had sunk, what with the surplus population and all that. I'm not saying Bush is as bad as that — and maybe that's the problem, that if we have Scrooge as our only guide we sink into complacency — but Bush should have said something on Sunday, at least.

As for the $35 million in aid promised so far, Bush seemed to think it's creditable:

Mentioning the $35 million in already-pledged U.S. aid, Bush said the United States is a "very generous, kind-hearted nation, and, you know, what you're beginning to see is a typical response from America."

I'm sorry, but we're the richest country in the world. We have to do far more before the word "generous" gets used. (Japan has already pledged $30 million, for instance.)
Link 11:44 AM Home

Cold, cold heart. Our President, who once referred to his wife as "the lump in my bed," is showing similar ineptness with respect the tens of thousands who have died from tsunamis. Unlike Clinton, Bush prefers to not display emotion:

Earlier yesterday, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president was confident he could monitor events effectively without returning to Washington or making public statements in Crawford, where he spent part of the day clearing brush and bicycling. Explaining the about-face, a White House official said: "The president wanted to be fully briefed on our efforts. He didn't want to make a symbolic statement about 'We feel your pain.' "

Many Bush aides believe Clinton was too quick to head for the cameras to hold forth on tragedies with his trademark empathy. "Actions speak louder than words," a top Bush aide said, describing the president's view of his appropriate role.

Some foreign policy specialists said Bush's actions and words both communicated a lack of urgency about an event that will loom as large in the collective memories of several countries as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do in the United States. "When that many human beings die -- at the hands of terrorists or nature -- you've got to show that this matters to you, that you care," said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Let's start by reminding that the $35 million in promised aid is still less than what's being planned for the inauguration. And over at Wampum, MB Williams points out (in a post which hasn't been updated to consider the $20 million which the US recently added to the pot) that a single day's operations in Iraq costs us $177 million.

And having said that, I have to say also, this "actions speak louder than words" claim reminds me of Senator Bob Kerrey's question to Condoleezza Rice during 9/11 testimony:

KERREY: You've used the phrase a number of times, and I'm hoping with my question to disabuse you of using it in the future.

You said the president was tired of swatting flies.

KERREY: Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to Al Qaida prior to 9/11?

RICE: I think what the president was speaking to was...

KERREY: No, no. What fly had he swatted?

RICE: Well, the disruptions abroad was what he was really focusing on...

KERREY: No, no...

RICE: ... when the CIA would go after Abu Zubaydah...

KERREY: He hadn't swatted...

RICE: ... or go after this guy...

KERREY: Dr. Rice, we didn't...

RICE: That was what was meant.

KERREY: We only swatted a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We didn't swat any flies afterwards. How the hell could he be tired?

Seems to me that before you can take pride in a statement like "actions speak louder than words," you've actually got to have taken some action, right? Again, Bush has confused policy with genuine action.
Link 10:16 AM Home

It's about time. Daimler-Chrysler is finally bringing its Smart car to the U.S. Granted, it won't be until 2006, but it's welcome news nonetheless. I feel disgust every time I see an SUV go down a Brooklyn street, the most unnecessary vehicle on a city street ever made. But a Smart, now that's different. These babies (and maybe "babies" is apt) get great mileage and are very easy to park. They're perfect for an office car or childless couples. Seriously, it's long overdue. I hope it does well.
Link 10:48 PM Home

Good news and bad news on U.S. tsunami aid. The good news is that the initial allotment of $15 million is being increased by another $20 million. The bad news is that this $35 million dollars is still less than the $40 million planned for Bush's second inauguration. (Actually, that's just the amount the Republicans plan to raise for the inauguration; the 2001 inauguration cost $40 million, and 2005's will exceed that.) Don't ever let anyone tell you that Bush doesn't understand the meaning of "Compassionate Conservatism." Now we know why they call it the Republican Party. Simply put, our government should be ashamed of itself, no matter how Powell bristles over the suggestion that we're stingy.

Bull Moose has been calling for a cancellation of the inaugural festivities long before the tsunamis, merely because we are a nation with huge war expenses, and austerity is more appropriate. How much more appropriate is it now, or is the need to repay all the operatives really so great?
Link 6:10 PM Home

Bush is learning from Clinton. Or maybe it's Rove who's doing the learning, but you may recall how much momentum Clinton lost early in his first term by pursuing too much at once? Well, the Bushies are postponing tax overhauls in order to better concentrate on privatizing Social Security and a budget with huge non-military cuts. Fine with me: last I heard, only a minority of Republicans in the House supported Social Security changes, meaning Bush will have to work really hard (it's hard work!) to get even that baby through. For the Democrats, it should be winnable, and if it disrupts Bush's perceptions of his man-date, it might even undercut his mo on tax changes. So start writing your Senators and Representatives about Social Security now, and remind them that there is no crisis, promises must be kept, privatizing misdirects too much money to Wall Street, and so on.
Link 11:41 AM Home

Try as I do, I can't find an appropriate context to understand the scale of the devastation from Sunday's tsunamis. Reports currently put the loss of lives at over 40,000, and that figure is sure to rise. Obviously, it's worse than anything we suffered on September 11, even though our losses remain unique because they were caused by deliberate human action. But the scale as it is already makes it larger than many U.S. cities, and when put into context of the total populations of the nations which suffered the damage, the scope is magnified. For instance, Sri Lanka has only about 20 million people, yet they report over 18,700 deaths (a little less than 1% of their 19.9 million people). Had the U.S. suffered a similar loss, percentage wise, we'd be talking about over 2 million lives. I'm not sure if that's a relevant comparison, because I don't know how many people really go around with a concept of "our people are X million" in their heads, a concept against which they might measure the total loss.

But no matter how you measure it, the loss of life is immense. I'm neither a divine nor a philosopher, and so won't presume to talk about the "whys" of a catastrophe like this. But I have wept, and I have the feeling I'll do so again, it's just so unimaginable. The pictures of weeping parents and other survivors have magnified it, and I can't help but wonder why the U.S. isn't doing more than promising $15 million in relief aid. How much did we give back to the rich in tax cuts? And how much do they need that, versus the destitute?
Link 10:58 AM Home

A little darkness must fall. Tonight we mourned Reesa, Zoë's faithful guinea pig for over three years, and loving mother of a litter of three. Alive this morning, found dead at 7 PM. Naturally, much sadness in the house, consoled only by our having one of her daughters from the litter still here. Sorely missed. Sail on, little pilot. Or something.
Link 9:44 PM Home

Unsurpassed idiocy. Horsefeathers' Stephen Rittenberg read Tom Friedman's latest column and decided that Friedman's arguments — that U.S. priorities are messed up — couldn't be dealt with coherently. So Dr. Rittenberg punted, and wrote as if Friedman were blaming yesterday's tsunamis on Bush:

Instead of tax cuts for the rich, why not raise taxes and give it to those who understand the reasons why Nature's wrath is so great? After all, the original state of nature, before profit seeking oil companies despoiled it was kind, loving, full of happily singing, harmonious creatures. According to Friedman and the New York Times, all that stands between us and universal happiness is higher tax revenues. The record speaks for itself; there were no 9.0 Richter scale earthquakes during the Clinton years--and Mrs. Friedman never sulked.

Friedman of course said nothing in his column about the tsunamis; the addendum which Horsefeathers imagines is an unjustified flight of fancy. In the meantime, over 20,000 people have died, and Rittenberg callously chose to use their deaths to distract from Friedman's legitimate points. Absolutely disgusting.

I don't care if you think it's just satire, he didn't need the tsunamis to make his point.

(In case you've forgotten, Horsefeathers is the extremist blog which published this .)
Link 10:44 AM Home

Bush's appointment mistakes, continued. You'll recall that in his second debate with Kerry, Bush suggested that his mistakes were in "appointing people," not policy. Well, Bush will certainly want to consider Maj. Isaiah Wilson III as an appointment to regret, whether he was responsible for it or whether someone else chose him. Why, because Wilson, who "who served as an official historian of the [Iraq] campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq," according to Thomas E. Ricks in an article yesterday in the Washington Post, has been critical of the short term nature of the war plans, insofar as the planning calendar stopped far short of genuine resolution, as if the US never planned beyond the toppling of a statue.

Wilson has been giving speeches around the country discussing our failure to maintain our momentum, and the resulting turning of the tide. Think about it: we have the most dominant military in the world, and our plans never really went far enough down the time horizon to consider whether or not the planning to that point was correct. (It's like the overconfidence which Knight-Ridder wrote about plans which, instead of being complete, included slides where the total content was "to be provided" — and the details were never provided.) From the Washington Post:

Army commanders still misunderstand the strategic problem they face and therefore are still pursuing a flawed approach, writes Wilson, who is scheduled to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point next year. "Plainly stated, the 'western coalition' failed, and continues to fail, to see Operation Iraqi Freedom in its fullness," he asserts.

"Reluctance in even defining the situation . . . is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissidence on part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it," he comments.

Because of this failure, Wilson concludes, the U.S. military remains "perhaps in peril of losing the 'war,' even after supposedly winning it."

Overall, he grades the U.S. military performance in Iraq as "mediocre."

Wilson's essay amounts to an indictment of the education and performance of senior U.S. officials involved in the war. "U.S. war planners, practitioners and the civilian leadership conceived of the war far too narrowly" and tended to think of operations after the invasion "as someone else's mission," he says. In fact, Wilson says, those later operations were critical because they were needed to win the war rather than just decapitate Saddam Hussein's government.

And here's the other image that occurs... That cartoon where two scientists are gazing at a blackboard full of two very complex formulas, derivations, and so on, linked by the significant sentence, "then, a miracle occurs..."

Surely the mistake is with Wilson and his appointment, not with Bush.
Link 5:37 PM Home

Charges of US abuse at Guantanamo keep coming, taking no break for the holidays. This morning's Washington Post reports that the documents which the ACLU pried out this week have given credence to prisoner claims that were previously discounted.

Even some of the detainees' attorneys acknowledged that they were initially skeptical, mainly because there has been little evidence that captors at Guantanamo Bay engaged in the kind of abuse discovered at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. But last Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union released FBI memos, which it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, in which agents described witnessing or learning of serious mistreatment of detainees.

...

Brent Mickum, a Washington attorney for one of the detainees, said that "now there's no question these guys have been tortured. When we first got involved in this case, I wondered whether this could all be true. But every allegation that I've heard has now come to pass and been confirmed by the government's own papers."

How many Oval Office holders sang "Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men" last night?
Link 10:52 AM Home

All I want for Christmas is Colin Powell for Secretary of Defense. This report, that he told Bush and Blair that we need more troops in Iraq, shows he has a better sense of the need to be dominant than Rumsfeld and Franks ever had, but if this past November was the first time Powell raised the idea, that's certainly regrettable. If Bush never asked Powell his opinion before, it shows how much Bush screwed up by not taking full advantage of the diversity and talents in his cabinet. But then again, while we wish the President a merry Christmas, we recognize that he has an opportunity when it comes to making his New Year's resolutions.
Link 4:37 PM Home

OK, I've had it up to here with Right Wing divisiveness during the holiday season. I'd like to know what idiot thinks the twelfth month of the year is really called "Christmas": why else should one object to the inclusiveness implied by a wish of "Happy Holidays"? To insist on a wish of "Merry Christmas" when a wish of "Happy Holidays" is a wish of good tidings to all is, at its base, selfish. And I really don't think that selfishness is what Christmas is about, is it? Mary and Joseph were confronted by exclusion, according to the Bible, not welcoming arms. (And of course, scholars such as Raymond Brown have pointed out the weakness of claims that there was really a census at the time, so take it with a grain of salt.)

In the efforts to be divisive and inflate a sense of siege, we not only have Bill O'Reilly sounding a call, but also GOPUSA.com giving bytes to some fool group calling itself RightMarch.com, decrying a series of court efforts without any sense of the time spans they've culled from, to make it feel as if it's a full blitzkrieg. GOPUSA.com even put the ACLU in its headline for better effect -- "White House Decries ACLU Assault on Christmas." Apparently on the basis of a question to Scott McClellan mentioning the ACLU and a response to the issue but not to the ACLU:

Q I'm going to follow up on Connie's question with specifics. The ACLU has gone to court to prevent a 5th grade class in Oklahoma from singing Christmas carols during a holiday program. Also, this is happening in New Jersey. In Seattle, a city building, they had to take the Christmas tree down because the city was being threatened by a lawsuit from the ACLU, and Americans for the Separation of Church and State.

These are very important symbols to people of faith, not only Christians, but members of other faiths. We know that the President is a man of faith, and I'm sure that the faithful who believe they're being persecuted would appreciate some strong support and encouragement from the President.

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the President has made it very clear that people ought to be able to freely worship as they choose. And in terms of schools, he's talked about those issues, as well. He has been a strong supporter of voluntary efforts like voluntary student prayer. And so I think his views are very clear on these issues.

So while McClellan commented on the issue, he didn't really say anything about the ACLU. (I can't find any solid reporting on this supposed Seattle incident, either... Can you?) And a Washington Post article points out that the ACLU claims "it has not filed a single case blocking Christmas displays this year and cites half a dozen instances over the past year in which it has fought on the side of more religious expression."

"This is the winter equivalent of those summer stories about shark attacks being on the increase," says Barry Lynn, who heads the liberal group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. The conservative groups, he said, "think they can make Christians feel like a besieged majority. It creates a Christian solidarity against all those who would oppress them: secularists in this season, gay and lesbians next month, abortion the next month."

...

ACLU President Nadine Strossen, similarly, said the conservative complaints are "like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling." She adds that while there are "occasional violations in either direction" on church-state separation, "if anything, since 1985, the Supreme Court has become more supportive of government-sponsored religious exercises."

The conservative groups agree there have been no recent legal cases limiting religious expression. Liberty Counsel's Stanley said threats to Christmas have not jumped this year. "I think the response to those threats are increasing," he said.

Got that? It's a wedge issue, a way of making religious conservatives feel hated and defensive, in an effort to rally them to be more vocal about other issues at the same time. They are being manipulated.
Link 11:21 AM Home

Something here doesn't fit... 23 people in the Honduras are killed in an attack on a bus... And the terrorists claim to be members of a group opposed to the death penalty.
Link 10:57 AM Home

So The Donald — Rumsfeld, that is — has paid a surprise visit to Mosul, site of Tuesday's deadly suicide bombing in the mess tent. Good PR, perhaps, but elements about it are bad PR: such as the need for secrecy, the surprise nature of it, its following in the shadows of his stupid answers in that Q&A in Kuwait — these kinds of fly-ins seem more sincere when they seem unprovoked by need. Just think about the differences in goodwill you elicit from your wife with a bouquet of flowers when it's from out of nowhere versus when you've been in the dog house.

It's all reminiscent of someone else's surprise Thanksgiving trip, ain't it?
Link 10:47 AM Home

That liberal media again. Tom Delay was on CNN's Inside Politics today, and as happens so often, not only was there no one to balance out what he said, but correspondent Ed Henry left everything Delay said go unchallenged.

• Right off the bat, Delay said "we delivered" the 9/11 Intelligence bill, with no mention made that it had been held up ridiculously long by a group of Republicans. "We delivered," he said, with nary a peep from Henry.
   
• Regarding Social Security, Delay claimed...

  The American people know that Social Security in the future won't be around for our young people. Everybody knows that. Or we are either going to have to cut benefits or raise taxes. We -- everybody knows that we need to do something to fix the Social Security system so that people will have retirement security in the future. Certainly our young people have something to look forward to in their old age. So, everybody but the minority Democrats know that something needs to be done and are looking forward to doing something.

  What's Delay's basis for saying something so preposterous as this? Democrats want to keep Social Security healthy, they really do, but doing so without understanding the true nature of the problem (and how big a problem it is) leads to over-reaction. Delay seems to prefer act now, think later. But again, no questions from Henry regarding the validity of Delay's assertions.

• Regarding the "Delay rule" (the effort to insulate Delay from losing his leadership when being prosecuted, renouncing rules put in place by the Republicans themselves), Delay brushed off potential prosecutions as "The Democrats have a strategy of personal destruction," as if Delay somehow missed the way Clinton was treated. And then, when he dismissed a Texas prosecutor as "a partisan district attorney in Austin," no mention was made by Henry of how that DA had actually prosecuted more Democrats than Republicans.

I really think that if a news organization wants to retain its viewers, it's going to have to step up to the plate more often and prevent politicians and their spokespeople from having unfiltered access to the viewers. The news market continues to fragment, and thinking members of the audience will get pulled away by an outlet that won't let this happen. To let this kind of BS go through without any comment is just child-like.
Link 6:33 PM Home

The Founding Fathers foresaw partisan minorities, and wrote the Constitution anyway. Go figure: Bush has had trouble with a small proportion of his judicial nominees, and when something like a fillibuster occurs he blames it on a "partisan minority" rather than his own extremism. (It must be that "uniter, not a divider" thing he's soo good at.) He might as well blame the founding fathers, I guess; seems like Bush has never really been happy with the Constitution, given all the amendments he's recommended so far. (Why does he hate our system so much, that he feels like he constantly needs to revise its basic precepts? Is there any document more fundamental in defining America than our Constitution?)

Anyway, Bush has apparently decided he won't take no for an answer again, and plans to renominate 20 judges he's already failed with, taking advantage of the stronger majority for Republicans in the Senate. Apparently he still thinks he's got some damned mandate, and has forgotten, first, that he represents all the people, not just those who voted for him, second, that his margin of victory was less than 2.5%, and third, his approval ratings suck. But don't try telling that to the Boy King, he probably still knows Bernie Kerik's cell phone number.
Link 5:54 PM Home

Lawyers and their clients. What kind of a lawyer's client would President Bush be? And will Alberto Gonzalez be the kind of lawyer who would tell him that the law puts certain constraints on delivering what he wants? Well, from the time in Texas and those nice memos about the quaint practices of the Geneva Convention, we already have an idea. But over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick discusses it from a lawyer's perspective.

In some senses, the clemency memos are a more egregious example of the dangers of yes-man, plumber-style lawyering than the torture memos. When Gov. Bush was charged with making last-minute determinations about sparing the lives of those sentenced to death, he was acting as de facto judge. He ought never to have been in an adversarial position with regard to the accused in the first place. His job, and therefore Gonzales' job as his adviser, was to weigh all the mitigating evidence and determine whether there was any basis on which to spare a human life. By failing to meet even minimal standards of legal objectivity, Gonzales offered substandard legal advice.

No real news, just a valuable perspective.
Link 11:26 AM Home

Officially moving into holiday mode. Expect lighter posting, is all. Hopefully really lighter. I hope you have a Merry Christmas, if you're observing it, and if not, I hope you have a nice next few days.
Link 11:08 AM Home

No, I'm NOT going to talk about Bernie Kerik.
Link 11:04 AM Home

Let's all watch Dennis Hastert very carefully. Hastert, Speaker of the House, has been criticized for refusing to allow the House to vote on bills which are not supported by the majority of his party, feeling he represents his party and not the House itself.

That seemed to be the rationale behind his obstructing the bills which tried to reform U.S. intelligence agencies' organization. Bush now wants to privatize Social Security, but according to this AP article support among Republicans is far from solid:

"To be crassly political, there's nothing in it for members of Congress," said Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., predicting that supportive lawmakers would face television ads accusing them of gutting Social Security when they run for re-election. "It will be a very, very tough sell for the president."

LaHood, a moderate who coasted to re-election in November, is not alone. Of the 232 Republicans who will serve in the House next year, at least 125 to 150 will need "a lot of hand-holding," said Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., who said he supports Bush's push.

These include lawmakers from districts with many elderly voters, those facing tight re-election races and those who have yet to closely examine the issue, Foley said.

Do the math: those needing "hand holding" are more than half of the Republicans. If a majority of Democrats supported privatization (they do not), Hastert could bring it to a vote and get passage for the President without the majority of Republicans. But without that majority of Republicans or Democrats, a vote would be an embarrassment to Bush.

Will Hastert squash the attempts to reform, or will he work to twist Republican arms? Too soon to say, as he hasn't been a reliable sycophant for Bush.
Link 9:47 PM Home

They actually get paid to write this stuff! From today's New York Times, an article opens...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - The deadly attack on a United States military base in northern Iraq on Tuesday scrambled the Bush administration's hopes of showing progress toward stability there, while making clear that the war is creating a nasty array of problems for President Bush as he gears up for an ambitious second term.

That's right, if it weren't for Tuesday's deadly attack on the mess tent, you might have believed that progress is being made in Iraq. You'd have ignored the President's own disparaging comments about the Iraqi security forces just the day before; the images of the daylight executions of the Iraqi elections workers, caught by an AP photographer, wouldn't even have crossed your mind; and the car bomb which killed over 60 on Sunday would have struck you as some kind of lie, if it hadn't been for that gol danged attack on the mess tent. Get rid of the attack, and you'd have thought progress was being made.

Are the Times editors out of their minds to let a point of view like that lead an analysis? Some liberal media!
Link 3:25 PM Home

Here's what you can do with your Man of the Year Award, says the mother of a fallen soldier in a letter to Time Magazine. (Via MyDD.)
Link 3:08 PM Home

I'd say this was consistent with his governorship practice of executing so many. We all know that as governor of Texas, Bush signed off on his share of executions, and that he mocked Carla Faye Tucker's likely pleas for mercy. So why should we be surprised that he has no interest in genuinely deploying his presidential pardon powers? "These four grants are collectively so banal and inconsequential as to demonstrate once again President Bush's disdain for his own pardon power."
Link 2:13 PM Home

Extremist skeptics. Some conservative bloggers just cannot believe that the AP photographer who took pictures of election workers being executed in Iraq wasn't somehow involved in order to get the shocking photos. They insist there must have been complicity, and are demanding explanations.

Yeah, well, who the hell are these impudent curs that they demand anything? If they think they know better about how news is discovered and produced, why don't they go to Iraq themselves and see how it's done? If an amateur can have the fortune to be there with a video camera when Rodney King got beaten, why is it so difficult to believe that a photographer in Iraq — a country the size of California, with a higher crime rate — could encounter such an event naturally? The astonishing thing isn't that it happened, but that it doesn't happen more often. These idiots have gone off to milk the bull.
Link 11:22 AM Home

Late to the party. The White House says the latest reports of prisoner abuse need to be fully investigated. "Need to"? Has the White House not noticed that some of these memos which the ACLU freed are dated in 2003? Why haven't they been investigated already — one from this June was sent to the head of the FBI.

Word like this just gathers dust until someone like the ACLU pries it loose and it becomes an issue; the willful ignorance this administration continues to inhabit is just mind boggling.
Link 10:59 AM Home

Yeah, and your husband likes the news from Fox. Lynne Cheney on blogs:

Cheney: I do research on the Internet all the time, and I love reading the bloggers.

Brown: Well I was going to ask you about that. What do you make of the evolution of the blogs?

Cheney: I think it is quite wonderful. It is a real democratization of information so that people don't have to rely on one or two sources. They've got multiple sources. You know, I can tell in about two minutes, on a blog, whether this is someone whose opinion I value or not. You know. You know, in a conversation when you are talking with someone who is bright and well-informed, and I can do that same thing when I am looking at blogs on the Internet.

Brown: You have got to have a favorite?

Cheney: I have a lot of blogs that I read.

Brown: What are they?

Cheney: Oh I love Hugh Hewitt, I think he's terrific. I love Powerline. I read Instapundit, and, I don't know, does RealClearPolitics constitute a blog? I certainly looked at it a lot during the campaign. It was a wonderful source and remains a wonderful source of articles that are being written in many places.

So there you have it: diversity in action.
Link 9:38 AM Home

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