That new lib'rul radio network "Air America" goes on the air today...supposedly there'll be a stream available online for those of us who are not in markets to hear it.
My thoughts exactly. Josh Marshall takes a look at why the White House would want Bush & Cheney to meet together with the 9/11 commission instead of separately:
Only three scenarios or explanations make sense to me.The first -- and most generous -- explanation is that this is simply another way to further dilute the Commission's ability to ask questions.
If, say, the meeting lasts three hours, that's three hours to ask questions of both of them rather than three hours to ask questions of each -- as might be the case in separate meetings.
. . . .
Explanation number two would be that this is a fairly elementary -- and, one imagines, pretty effective -- way to keep the two of them from giving contradictory answers to the Commission's questions. It helps them keep their stories straight.
. . . .
The third explanation is that the White House does not trust the president to be alone with the Commission members for any great length of time without getting himself into trouble, either by contradicting what his staff says, or getting some key point wrong, or letting some key fact slip. And Cheney's there to make sure nothing goes wrong.
Had this announcement been made separately, I imagine it would have made quite a stink. However, by tacking it onto the announcement that Condi will be allowed to testify it's been completely drowned out in the media. I can only hope that when it comes time for this session to happen that the awareness level gets raised.
Remember that Bush/Cheney campaign sign generator that was so much fun to play with? Well, there's a memorial. I may be a little behind the curve on this one, but this was my contribution:
Heh, heh...scroll down and read the reviews. [via Cursor]
This is pretty amazing-- it's a photo tour of the area around Chernobyl. Sections of it are really creepy, and reminded me of the scenes in "Planet of the Apes" where Charlton Heston came across remnants of the old human society.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster has an upside, writes Elena: "One can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul. People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods, lakes." (03-29) [Cruel Site of the Day]
From Salon article on Massachusetts gay marriage ruckus:
"I'm just here to support Christ," said Olivia Long, 32, of Boston, a parishioner at New Covenant Christian Church. "We love all people, but we want to keep it like it was in the beginning."
Yes, let's keep it like it was in the beginning, when amoebas were amoebas and a guy could spend all his time hanging out with men eating primordial soup for every meal. Yum, salty.
One of the things I always check in Newsweek is their Conventional Wisdom section. It's kind of the political equivalent of "What's Hot & What's Not" so you can't put a whole lot of stock in it, but I usually find it interesting. Recently, however, I've noticed a tendency for the good folks at Newsweek to be awfully generous to Bush. So this week I take a look, fully expecting a decisive down arrow. After all, Richard Clarke has been all over television ripping the Bush administration apart. This has caused much sound & fury from the Bush gang, but the best they can seem to come up with seems to be the equivalent of, "Yeah, well...his momma's ugly and she dresses him funny." So, down arrow, right? No. Sideways. How anyone can look at what's happened in the past week and decide that overall it's a wash is beyond me. So this week I give Newsweek a down arrow.
Ever hear about someone dying and think, "Huh-- I didn't know he was still alive." Well, I just had one of those moments.
NY Times article on the new James Bond videogame:
Mr. Bonnell said that innovative game developers had pushed the standards of graphics and sound so high that the results can approach Hollywood production values. And this film sensibility is something that gamers are coming to expect, he said.As a result, game play must follow. "We have moved from 50 to 60 hours of low-res graphics and beeping sounds to 15 to 20 hours of very impressive, immersive game play," he said of games like his company's latest car-chase title, Driv3r.
Note that the length of the game is also cut by two-thirds. While I appreciate the cinematic aspects of games and a good storyline, when you lose that much interactive time with a game because you're pumping up graphic and audio fidelity, I can't help but think that you're sacrificing gameplay for the prettiness. In our house, we often zap through cut scenes when given a chance-- especially if we end up having to see them multiple times, which often happens. Even in cases where there's a decent storyline, we often only pay it minimal attention since the overall story doesn't usually help you get through the game. It's just window dressing. More often than not, the story ends up just a distraction from the game itself-- something you zap through to get to the reason you forked out $50 in the first place, which is actually doing something, not sitting and watching a movie.
I thought this was interesting, not so much for what it says about the commission as what it says about me:
Summary: the 9/11 Commission has always been a high risk potential for the Bush Administration, hence the very careful limits put on official cooperation. Hearings this week, "bombshell" book by former WH staffer Richard Clarke, have high risk potential to change attitudes "outside The Beltway".
It had never occurred to me before, but the phrase "inside the Beltway" doesn't necessarily refer to a physical place. Most of the stuff I'm hearing from Clarke isn't really new to me, so I guess in the sense of being informed (on at least this issue) I am in some ways "inside the Beltway." Kind of a weird realization.
Newsweek has an interview with Bruce Schneier about terrorism and security in America. He argues that we may be less safe now than we were:
We have built a geopolitical situation where more people dislike America, more people hate us, and in that respect we have made the world a more dangerous place. Though we have also done a lot of good things to increase our security. We have arrested and neutralized terrorist cells. We have disrupted terrorist funding. Our investigations—both internal in the U.S. and abroad—are much better. We are better able at preventing plots and uncovering them. Nine-11 was a very unfortunate intelligence accident. A lot of those sorts of things tend not to work because they get foiled. We were very unlucky. We are probably better prepared in that we kind of expect these things—local governments, when something like this happens, are going to be more ready because they have thought about it. In terms of the aftermath, we are more prepared. [But] in terms of whether we’ve made the world safer in the past two years, most of the things we’ve done have been irrelevant and some have been harmful.
Some of this bears repeating in fewer words. There are two ways to achieve a safer world:
Doing the second thing makes the first much easier to do. And before anyone accuses me of "appeasement," ask yourself this: did Bill Clinton go around pissing the world off on a regular basis like the Bush Administration does? Has any administration scared the hell out of the rest of the planet like Bush does? I think not.
Turns out we've had a squirrel living in our attic for who-knows-how-long. At first we thought it was a chipmunk, but when I went up to check the trap I saw a distinctively bushy tail dart under the furnace. The trap had been sprung, but to no avail. So...after getting a bigger trap we tried again with a sumptuous treat of peanut butter, corn, and peanuts as bait. This morning I woke to the sound of a frantic rodent trying to get free. Success! I took the little booger in with me to UGA this morning and set her free to run with the other undergraduate squirrels on campus.
Now we just have to get the screen and wood repaired where she chewed her way into the house, not to mention the pipe in the furnace blowing hot air into the attic making an all-too-inviting environment for wildlife.
Inside their ass, that is. Saw this bit in the NY Times talking about the Bush campaign:
Mr. King, who watched Mr. Bush talk to firefighters at a groundbreaking for a 9/11 memorial in Long Island last week, said he told the president on Air Force One on the way back to Washington, "I would have a hard time seeing Kerry comfortable with these guys."
So I think hmm...didn't some small group of firefighters actually endorse Kerry? Oh yeah...
It may seem like ancient history now, but John Kerry hasn't forgotten the solemn late-night phone call he made in November to firefighters union president Harold Schaitberger. His presidential bid floundering as other big unions announced support for Howard Dean, the Massachusetts senator had just fired his campaign manager. And now he had more bad news for Schaitberger, whose International Association of Fire Fighters was the first and only major union to stick its collective neck out and endorse Kerry last September. "I just want to let you know that we've got some really bad numbers coming out tomorrow morning," Kerry said of an about-to-be-released poll showing him more than 30 percentage points behind Dean in New Hampshire. But before Kerry could say another word, Schaitberger cut him off. "I'm sure you've got other supporters to call," the mustachioed, 57-year-old recalls telling Kerry. "Use your time and energy with them, because you don't have to with us. We gave you our word. We'll be the last men standing."
Seriously. (?) Check the report if you don't believe me:
The statement said it supported President Bush (news - web sites) in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites), as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom."In comments addressed to Bush, the group said:
"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization."
"Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."
[Eschaton]
From a Kerry speech today:
If I am President, never again will parents or husbands or wives of soldiers have to send them body armor instead of photographs and care packages. Last month a young newlywed in Virginia who, as her husband was about to ship out to Iraq, gave him a bullet proof vest for Valentine's Day. I can tell you right now: in a Kerry Administration, no one will be getting body armor as a gift from a loved one; it will come from the Armed Forces of the United States of America. We will supply our troops with everything they need -- and we will reimburse each and every family who has had to buy body armor because this Administration made Valentine's Day part of the procurement process.
From Juan Cole:
It is not necessary, in order to criticize the way the Bush administration prosecuted the Iraq War, to deny that the Baath regime was murderous. Murderous regimes need to be dealt with through international law and institutions. If you just grabbed an unconvicted murderer off the street and lynched him, you would be a murderer in your own right. Vigilanteism is not permitted to individuals; it should not be permitted to individual states, either.
Courtesy Pandagon, this excerpt from an article in Time:
Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.
Others have accused the Bush administration of being a photo-op presidency, and this is just more evidence of the truth in the accusation. With any luck, maybe he'll at least refrain from decimating the department after the photo-op(s), as he has been known to do.
Seems like everywhere I look people are asking for money for the Kerry campaign. Now Bill Clinton's popped up & asked for some, too.
Slight tangent-- I would love to see Clinton as Secretary of State in a Kerry administration. It would drive the Fox crowd completely bonkers, but I think he could do a lot to repair relations with the rest of the world...
Should be fun for some "on this day in..." research.
Henry Waxman commissioned a report detailing all of the administrations false and misleading public statements about Iraq. It can be found at this website. [Eschaton]
An Orrill Reports exclusive! We have just received the following statement from Shoreb Arnsvat, leader of Karjakador:
It was I who told Mr. Kerry that he would be better president in America. In our country, George Bush is called "hranklstovitz-schplozt." In english, is-- how you say-- "donkey who crap in water, seem surprised it taste bad." Please accept my apology for such "hullaballoo," as you say.
Now that I'm using NetNewsWire, some news items I never used to see tend to make a regular appearance. This is one of them:
The Department of Defense has identified 561 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It recently confirmed the death of the following Americans:. [NYT: National]
The headline is always simply "Names of the Dead," and I find it jarring every time I see it.
This looks intriguing. Between voice-recognition and EyeToy, maybe there's some hope for the gaming industry yet...
Using a headset microphone and voice-recognition software to control the onscreen action, Konami's Lifeline seeks to increase players' immersion in the game world. It succeeds, but not in the ways you might think. A review by Chris Kohler. [Wired News]
After Episode II came out, I resolved not to spoil Episode III by reading too much about the movie while it was in production. Yeah, right. I'm finding that it's actually more fun to read about the development of the Star Wars flicks than it is to actually watch them. Anyway, they're talking up the new bad guy now. It'll be interesting to see him in action, but so far he doesn't send the chill up my spine that Darth Maul did when I first saw him. Of course, Count Dooku was a little underwhelming as a bad guy so hopefully Grievous will at least be a step up from him.
Well, it's been a year:
The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now, we were told by the Bush administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes.
...or not.
If you've ever been exposed to independent film (not Sundance-approved independent, but the really weird stuff), you'll want to check this out:
Todd Levin's painfully funny interpretation of the program for the New York Underground Film Festival. [GreenCine Daily] [Cinema Minima]
No no no no no no no no!!!!
Isaac Asimov did not write running & jumping stories. What the hell have they done with I, Robot?
An editorial from CBS News (viaCalpundit) takes a look at how the Bush administration hears what it wants to hear. Here's the conclusion:
None of this will come as a great surprise in light of what we now know about how the administration manipulated intelligence about Iraq. But it is chilling to realize that the arrogance and deception that went into the most important action of the Bush presidency also infect their system down to obscure science boards and policies.Certain functions of government, much like the judicial system, are supposed to be insulated to as much as possible from partisanship and politics. This administration seems to have a pervasive and profound scorn for that idea. In its place, it has an abiding confidence in its own righteousness. And in this, President Bush leads by example.
The Poor Man does the story board for the latest Bush ad. [Eschaton]
At the bottom of the storyboards they link to last week's ad, too. Go Battle-Action Bush, go!
From CNN:
A fresh salvo was fired Tuesday in the fight to save the Hubble Space Telescope. Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski accused NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe of making a unilateral decision to let the observatory die prematurely against the wishes of astronomers."I believe that the future of Hubble should not be [decided] by one man in a NASA back room without a transparent process," Mikulski said, adding that she will continue working to bring the "best advice possible" to bear on possibly reversing the decision.
Scientists and officials here at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which operates Hubble for NASA, applauded Mikulski for her support, yet some figure it could take a miracle for Hubble to receive a stay of execution. Still, they have not lost hope.
Meanwhile, Hubble made its own case Tuesday for its unsurpassed ability exploring the universe. STScI Director Stephen Beckwith unveiled the deepest photographs ever taken of the cosmos, the results of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field.
Those pictures, by the way, are freakin' amazing. There are some links to them from the CNN article, so definitely check them out. For whatever it's worth, I've also found a website organizing a petition to save the Hubble...
From tompaine.com:
The outcry over the first series of political commercials for President George W. Bush was swift and heartfelt. Using images of victims of the 9/11 attacks and firefighters responding to the emergency at the World Trade Center, the ads trumpeted President Bush’s “steady” leadership. Families of the victims and representatives of the firefighters charged that the White House is using 9/11 to advance a political agenda. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to deflect this criticism by emphasizing that Bush’s leadership has been steady. But the commercials themselves beg the question: What did President Bush do on 9/11? Giuliani himself framed the Bush question this way: “His leadership on that day is central to his record.”Over the weekend that followed initial broadcast of the Bush campaign commercials both sides took positions on the appropriateness of their content. Democrats protested the imagery. President Bush, who in January 2002, when seeking an extra budget appropriation for his war on terrorism, had told congressional leaders, “I have no ambition whatsoever to use this as a political issue,” backed away from that undertaking. From his Crawford, Texas, ranch on March 6 Bush declared, “I will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our country and my presidency.” Echoing Rudy Giuliani, Bush added, “how this administration handled that day, as well as the war on terror, is worthy of discussion.”
A leader marches to the sound of the guns. George Washington, Robert E. Lee or Napoleon would have done that. Rudy Giuliani did do that. After the first plane struck the Twin Towers, he went immediately to the World Trade Center and helped supervise emergency efforts there. But what exactly did George W. Bush do?
The short answer is, "he stayed the hell away from New York and Washington." My question is, was it because he was physically afraid, or was it because he couldn't handle the sudden responsibility of dealing with something of that magnitude?
For another perspective on that day, check this out.
Looks like Viacom & Dish reached some sort of agreement. For the inconvenience of having lost a day & a half of certain channels, Dish is sweetening the $1 discount for the month with a free pay-per-view movie. Seems fair enough to me.
Folkstreams.net is a new site dedicated to independent films at traditional music. I just looked at "Born for Hard Luck," which was great except for the audio sync problem. I might be grabbing some of these...
From the NY Times:
Negotiations over a new contract between the EchoStar Communications Corporation and Viacom Inc. have failed to produce a new agreement, and early today EchoStar stopped broadcasting the signals of Viacom-owned CBS television stations, including those in New York and Los Angeles.The dispute, reminiscent of a short battle between the Walt Disney Company and Time Warner Inc. a few years ago, once again leaves consumers caught between companies that provide entertainment content and those that distribute it.
In addition to dropping the CBS signals, Echostar, which at the end of the third quarter had 9.1 million subscribers, will stop showing Viacom's cable networks, including MTV and Nickelodeon.
The DishNetwork site seems to be down at the moment, but earlier they had a page up that listed the affected CBS stations. Atlanta wasn't on the list, so I'm guessing that we'll still have CBS, but won't have Comedy Central, MTV, etc. Both companies are appealing to customers (that would be me) to call the other company and complain about the situation. Frankly, in our household we have our hands full protesting the Bush administration's actions, so I don't see us getting involved in this little pissing match. If anyone's going to get a piece of my mind, it's going to be the FCC/FTC for letting these media companies get so freakin' huge that one corporation (Viacom) has enough control to wreak this kind of havoc.
Just learned about this over on Slashdot. Apparently Viacom is threatening to pull its stations from DishNetwork. I had seen the black bars on a recording from Comedy Central last Friday, but didn't know what to make of it. At this point my reaction is pretty much WTF?
UPDATE: More information from Forbes. Apparently the dispute is some combination of rate increases and Viacom demanding that Dish carry a bunch of other networks in exchange for the right to broadcast CBS.
Personally I think they've got it backwards-- I don't care about CBS, but if The Daily Show goes away I'll be pissed.
Some juicy details on the state of Real, from the same guy that wrote the rant a few days ago. Very interesting stuff.
Just turned off comments on all my old postings. There have only been a couple of legitimate comments made here, and the rest are from the usual spam suspects, who I'll thank to kindly go stick it where the sun don't shine. I can't keep them out of my email in box, but I'll be damned if I let the little peckers pollute my blog.
Errors on the part of poll workers prevented some voters from being able to cast ballots in the presidential primary:
At first, Mandy Mastrovita was confused when the voting machine spit out its electronic card before she had a chance to choose a presidential candidate.That confusion quickly turned to anger when she realized she'd voted in the wrong election and couldn't take it back.
Voters across the state - including a few in Athens-Clarke County - found the same problem at the polls Tuesday. They received cards encrypted with the wrong ballot and didn't find out about the mistake until it was too late.
Many of them got special-election ballots that only asked their preference for the state flag, not their choice in the closely contested Democratic primary, in which Sen. John Kerry edged out Sen. John Edwards in Georgia by 33,000 votes.
Some explanation may be in order for any non-Georgians reading this. In the recent primary election, there were three different ballot options. You could select the Democratic primary, the Republican primary, or neither. In the third case, you just voted on the flag referendum.
Now as I recall, the computer does ask you to verify your vote before it accepts it and spits out your card. Based on that, you might be tempted to say "tough noogies" to these people. However, it strikes me that if folks were given a paper ballot, the mistake would have been more immediately apparent. Voters would have noted the missing primary section immediately and asked for the right ballot. However, the way the computer presented the ballot you only saw one section at a time. So what users saw was the flag option, then they were asked to confirm that vote. To them, it looked like they were confirming each option at a time, not that they were confirming the entire ballot. I'm sure they expected that they would then see the primary portion of the ballot.
Yet another reason why computers can (and often do) suck.
I've always compared the experience of using RealPlayer to driving down the Vegas strip, or less charitably, one of those tourist trap towns where every shop is clamoring for attention insisting that you buy tchotchkes from their flea-bitten shack.
Looks like I'm not alone.
Bush's campaign war chest will buy a lot of ammo, but he'll need to be careful how he uses it.
President Bush's re-election campaign on Thursday defended commercials using images from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including wreckage of the World Trade Center, as appropriate for an election about public policy and the war on terror.Some families of the victims of the attacks are angry with Bush for airing the spots, which they called in poor taste and for the president's political gain.
One of the things I threatened to do yesterday was to make a fuss about there being no paper printout of my vote that I could verity. Like my threat to rant about there not being a "Jolly Roger" version of the Georgia flag to vote on, I didn't actually follow through, but that doesn't mean I'm not concerned about what could happen with electronic voting without a proper paper trail. Fortunately, there's something more constructive we can do...
UPDATE: A report by Avi Rubin, who has been critical of electronic voting, and who served as an election judge on Super Tuesday. Very interesting read.
Apparently the Supreme Court is hearing a case on bad ol' Internet porn:
Regulation of Internet pornography is urgently needed, Mr. Olson said, because "it's causing irreparable injury to our most important resource — our children." The materials are "as available to children as a television remote," he said, and turn up when youngsters make the most innocuous searches.He argued that the world of online pornography was exploding, and said that typing the words "free porn" on a search engine produced 6,230,000 sites. "I did this this weekend," he said. When asked whether all of the sites could be considered obscene, he said, "I didn't have enough time to go through all of those sites," drawing laughs from justices and spectators.
Um...how did we get from "innocuous searches" to googling for "free porn"? What are these "innocuous searches" that are supposedly foisting smut on our poor innocent children? Sometimes I think these cases are less about protecting innocents than they are a way for grown men (and it's always men) to get paid for looking at smut. I can just see Ashcroft now: "Yeah, that's pretty nasty, but you should see what I found over here. This'll make your toes curl, Mr. Olson. You can bet she'll be getting a subpoena in the morning...heh heh..."
There's this...
Georgia's headlong rush to block gay marriages through a constitutional amendment has been stalled, for the moment, by an unlikely group of legislators: black members of the House of Representatives, many of them church deacons and ministers who already support the state's laws banning same-sex marriage.
...and this...
The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is refusing to accept strict conditions from the White House for interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and is renewing its request that Mr. Bush's national security adviser testify in public, commission members said Tuesday.
...and on a lighter note, this...
Got a new set of bridge pins and a saddle from GraphTech yesterday, so I got to install those in my guitar. The pins worked great, but the saddle needed some work to fit in my Alvarez. It was both too tall and too thick to fit in the slot, so I pulled out my dremel and ground the excess off. It probably still needs another 1/16 inch shaved off, but I was able to get it in and string the guitar.
The verdict so far? The sound seems crisper, and the guitar projects more than it did (a mixed blessing given the way I play). So far the only bad thing is that the strings are higher off the neck than they were with the old saddle, but next time I change the strings I can work on that. Oh, and the pins no longer threaten to become deadly weapons when I tighten the strings.
I thought this was informative. Beyond really big picture stuff, I don't know jack about Islam, so had no idea that the recent bombings in Iraq might have had any particularly significant timing. Well, guess what...
The Bombings at Kazimiyah and Karbala
The day of Ashura' is the holiest in the calendar of Shiite Islam, commemorating the brutal martyrdom of the Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. In many ways, the tradition of Shiite mourning of this "passion" is similar to that witnessed in Mel Gibson's recent film. For Shiites, Tuesday was analogous to Good Friday. And Karbala and Kazimiyah for them are like Rome and Jerusalem. One can only imagine the psychological impact of, God forbid, a huge truck bombing at the Vatican on Good Friday.
Veteran Middle East correspondent Nick Blanford has immediate reactions from Iraqis in Karbala and elsewhere. The blame is being put on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Tawhid group. Forensic evidence from the 11 persons captured in connection with the coordinated attacks may well settle the identity of the group behind it fairly quickly. Given Zarqawi's plans for a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq. [Juan Cole]
They'll cut gifted programs, cut orchestra and art, cut kindergarten, but do they cut football? Oh, heaven forfend!
It's gotten now so that every time I hear about a school district cutting some program or another, the first things that pops into my head is, "What about sports?" Living around here, I can't recall the last time I heard anyone say anything about eliminating sports programs in an effort to cut costs. Everything else is open for discussion, but not the precious athletics programs. I don't even want to think about what this says about our priorities...
From the NY Times:
Struggling with shrinking revenues and new federal mandates that focus on improving the test scores of the lowest-achieving pupils, Mountain Grove and many other school districts across the country have turned to cutting programs for their most promising students."Rural districts like us, we've been literally bleeding to death," said Gary Tyrrell, assistant superintendent of the Mountain Grove School District, which has 1,550 students. The formula for cutting back in hard times was straightforward, if painful, Mr. Tyrrell said: Satisfy federal and state requirements first. Then, "Do as much as we can for the majority and work on down."
"Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" followed by "Beyond the Sea." Whoda thunkit.
Is anyone really going to buy this?
Mr. Bush was acting under enormous pressure from his evangelical Christian supporters, who had intensified their demands in recent months that the president speak out in defense of traditional marriage. His more moderate supporters, on the other hand, worried that he might look like a gay basher.Mr. Bush's friends say that is hardly the case and that the president is quite comfortable with gays. Laura Bush, when asked in a recent interview by The New York Times if she and her husband had gay friends, easily replied: "Sure, of course. Everyone does."
Stock phrase of bigots who know they're not supposed to think that way: "I don't hate [label] people! Why, some of my best friends are [label]!" Please.
I had been hesitant about watching the Oscars this year, but was just dying to know who would win for sound mixing, so wound up watching them after all. Thanks to the miracle of digital video recording, we were able to pause the broadcast, play some Baldur's Gate, and then come back and zap through all the shout-outs and other assorted boring stuff. I was pleased to see "Lord of the Rings" walk away with so many awards, although I have to say I was disappointed that "Belleville Rendez-vous" didn't win for best song. (and what is it with all those lame ballads, anyway?)
I heard on NPR this morning that the Iraqi Governing Council had come to an agreement on The Fundamental Law. Last I heard they were all still bickering, so the news came as something of a surprise. This bit from Juan Cole shed some light on things:
The Fundamental Law was apparently drafted from notes of Paul Bremer by Salim Chalabi and others (son of corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi)--according to a Feb. 29 LA Times op-ed by Brendan O'Leary.. Its final form was negotiated by the IGC, but there was much dissension on the role of Islam, federalism, women's rights, etc. Why has this dissension been overcome? Not because there is a genuine political compromise. Because not reaching a deal on this temporary law would manifestly delay the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30. No one on the IGC wants the Coalition Provisional Authority to be in power a second longer than necessary. So why should they risk a delay by making an obstinate stand on a law that will anyway be revised a year from now?What has happened is merely that the big fights have been postponed for the constitutional convention next year. At that point there will be no reason to compromise, no urgency, and there will be every reason to poison the well for ideologues who don't get their way.