Month: October 2005

The religious right group, Concerned Women for America, is Very Concerned about Harriet Miers.

I wonder how prevalent this feeling is out there in the heart of RedStateland:

I think the odds that she will overturn Roe or Affirmative Action are zero-to-way-the-fuck-less-than-zero. And I stand by my prediction that this will be near-catastrophic for the Republican Party. As you have pointed out they have lost the fiscal high ground. They have governed ineffectively. Democrats, OTOH, balanced the budget and cut welfare. They are looking pretty good right about now, aren’t they?
I grew up with, was marinated in, and for some reason continue to live deeply among, the ‘Southern conservative base’. I’ve been to the conservative churches, parties, PTA meetings, gatherings, etc. They will ABSOLUTELY sit on their hands in ’06 and ’08. I think that aspect of this has been way under-explored. If Harry turns out to be a centrist or left-of-center, Republicans are dead meat.
REMEMBER: we only need about 4% of conservatives to sit out, much less vote Democratic, to totally screw up the party. And I think it’ll be more like 20% here in the South. Over the Supreme Court alone.
This is a ticking time bomb, and anyone, including Bush, including Miss Laura, that thinks otherwise, is living in a dream world.

For fiscal conservatives like me, the betrayal has already been about as deep and vast as it could be. For neocons like me, the bungling of Iraq has been, to say the least, distressing. But if you’re a theocon or religious righter who doesn’t really care that much about spending or Iraq but whose fundamental goal is to wrench the country back to a pre-Griswold Eden, the shit has only just hit the fan. So Bush destroys another base of support. Who’s left?

BRASSO! Another tactic in the iPod nano-scratch debate.

The Bush explosion of government spending needs more exploration. Heritage has put together a PDF document you can find here with all the relevant facts – from the government’s own records. Some data: Washington now spends a record $22,000 a year per household. Defense and 9/11-related spending accounted for less than half the growth in spending between 2001 and 2003. Overall federal spending is accelerating in Bush’s second term, not declining as he promised. Entitlement spending is set to explode in the next decade or so – requiring massive spending cuts, huge tax hikes, or real entitlement reform. Bush has made the entitlement problem far worse rather than better in his first five years. Under the post-1994 Republican Congress, pork barrel spending has gone from around $10 billion to $25 billion today. The number of “earmarks” under today’s Republicans has gone from 1,439 in 1995 to 13,999 this year so far. The feds cannot account for $24.5 billion spent in 2003. This is what big government conservatism does for you. Happy now?

Zawahiri is banking on the analogy to bring victory to the Islamo-fascists. Former secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, has other ideas about how to win long-term in the region. I’m with Laird. He’s also candid about the Bush administration’s horrifying embrace of detainee abuse:

For me, the alleged prison scandals reported to have occurred in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay have been a disturbing reminder of the mistreatment of our own POWs by North Vietnam … The minute we begin to deport prisoners to other nations where they can legally be tortured, when we hold people without charges or trial, when we move prisoners around to avoid the prying inspections of the Red Cross, when prisoners die inexplicably on our watch, we are on a slippery slope toward the inhumanity that we deplore.

Amen.

“The email you posted re: Gonzales’s qualification is ridiculous. Whether or not he’s qualified in some absolute sense — a point I don’t wish to engage with — I think it’s hard to say that his record is qualitatively different from Miers’s. Your emailer, of course, tries to dismiss the fact that he had a stronger education and that he was a Texas Supreme Court judge. “Token year,” indeed. But rather than trying to ignore his qualifications, let’s lay them out:

– Attorney General
– Texas Supreme Court judge
– Adjunct law professor
– Secretary of State of Texas
– Rice, Harvard Law graduate

So let’s line those up:
– while Miers was White House Counsel, Gonzales was AG
– while Miers was a staff secretary, Gonzales was White House Counsel
– while Miers was heading up the Texas State lotto, Gonzales was a Texas Supreme Court judge and Texas Secretary of State
– both of them were in private practice roughly comparable times; my understanding is that Vinson & Elkins, Gonzales’s firm, may have been slightly more prestigious, but let’s call this a wash, or in Miers’s favor, since she headed up the firm while Gonzales was merely a partner; both received numerous accolades, etc.; Miers may win out slightly here
– while Miers was at SMU Law, Gonzales was at Harvard Law
– while Miers was at SMU, Gonzales was at Rice

Now, I don’t want to weigh in on the absolute qualifications of either candidate, and I don’t know how much you can say about how good a justice someone will make from his c.v. But Gonzales has judicial experience, high-level policy-making experience (for what it’s worth), and experience dealing with the very best legal minds (whether when collaborating with other Texas Supreme Court judges, when heading up the Justice Departmnet, or when studying under Harvard Law professors).

I think it does an extreme disservice to the concept of (paper) merit to equate these two records. Maybe your emailer thinks Gonzales has been a slouch in his jobs, while Miers has been an ace. But he suggests that we should look only at their paper experience, and that from that they are roughly equivalent. That argument is flat out wrong.”

The latest canard being peddled by the religious right against allowing gay couples to marry is that equal marriage rights have already led to legalized polygamy in Holland. It’s completely bogus. Evan Wolfson explains here.

The desperation of the White House is intensifying. It seems to me that the personal religious faith of a nominee to the Supreme Court is completely irrelevant to the job in question. Interpreting a secular constitution requires no religious faith or affiliation. If the president really does believe that faith is an actual qualification for the court, then once again he has stepped over a line between church and state. Religion should neither qualify nor disqualify someone from SCOTUS. Isn’t that a no-brainer? Is there an evangelical take on the fourteenth amendment? It’s also just plain amusing to hear that, according to the White House, a) no men were considered for the post and that b) opposition to Miers is possibly a function of sexism. Did we elect Hillary Clinton last November?

“The real reason her nomination sticks in the craw is the brass-and-leather whiff of the Praetorian Guard house. The ancient Praetorian Guard was an elite military unit that guarded Rome’s emperors and sometimes murdered them. The modern Praetorian Guard is the penumbra of family and cronies that, under the American imperial Presidency, is accorded unseemly attention and respect. Some Presidents look to it for actual officeholders. Bill Clinton put his wife in charge of health-care policy. John Kennedy put his brother in charge of the Justice Department. Mr. Bush seems to find the Praetorian Guard especially seductive. There were the Texas League Texans he sent to FEMA – Joe Allbaugh, Michael Brown. There was the way his running mate emerged from a search committee headed by – Dick Cheney. Look no further! Harriet Miers emerged in the same way, helping to vet judicial nominees. At least she tapped John Roberts before herself; gentlemen first. This is an elitism far more restrictive than anything Ms. Miers’ critics are charged with. Beltway/Ivy League elitism embraces anyone who works in the federal government, or who graduated from one of seven old colleges. The President’s elitism embraces anyone who works down the hall.” – Richard Brookhiser, arguably the smartest and most eloquent conservative writer around.

An emailer writes:

The only reason I see some credibility to the sexism charges is the reaction to Gonzalez. Save a token year on the Texas Supreme Court and a fancier law school, his credentials are similar to hers (some might say her district court clerkship gives her a leg up). And yet among the myriad charges levelled against Gonzalez, no one ever suggested, to my knowledge, that he was underqualified. I have a hard time explaining that double standard away.

Actually, I think that if Gonzales had been nominated, that question would have come up – along with his enmeshment with legalizing torture and expediting people to the death chamber with the efficiency and care of your average spammer. My guess is that Rove talked Bush out of Gonzales and, almost in a fit of pique, Bush picked Miers instead. But that’s a guess. I have no idea what the president’s motivations were in this odd pick. Neither, it appears, do his most die-hard supporters.

Yesterday, some 27 Iraqi civilans were murdered by insurgents in Tal Afar. Today, at least another 20 were. It’s worth recalling that Tal Afar was the object of U.S. military action only a month ago. The campaign was regarded as a success as far as it went, but as the New York Times explained, Rumsfeld’s refusal to commit enough troops to keep the peace in Iraq means that any victory was bound to be short-lived:

But as with previous battles, like those in Falluja and Qaim, a western city near Syria, a large number of insurgents also escaped the fight. That makes the battle, at least in some measure, the latest example of one of the most nettlesome problems faced in the war, what one marine in Anbar Province recently described as “punching a balloon”: American forces attack with overwhelming firepower only to have some insurgents leave and then return, or move on to fight elsewhere.

One year ago, Tal Afar was the scene of a major offensive to oust entrenched insurgents. After the battle, American commanders said the city was safe. But the military, stretched thin by demand for troops elsewhere, left fewer than 500 soldiers in Tal Afar and a surrounding area twice the size of Connecticut. Predictably, American officers said, the insurgents returned in force and were largely undisturbed until May, when Colonel McMaster’s unit, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, was reassigned from south of Baghdad to take back the region from insurgents.

And so it goes. What’s important to understand is that this is a deliberate policy. Although we were morally responsible for security in a country we invaded, we chose not to provide it. The argument was that it would look too much like an occupation, that we would infantilize the population, that our forces would intensify the insurgency, rather than impede it, and so on. The argument against was that rampant and tolerated disorder would only increase Iraqi paranoia about America’s true intentions, and provide more of an opening for the violent to seize power in a lawless country. What we are watching today are the consequences of the Rumsfeld decision. The question is whether a critical mass of Iraqis can rescue their own country from the chaos the occupation provoked and appears incapable of suppressing. When observers call George W. Bush a gambler, they aren’t kidding.

NANO-SKINS: A possible fix for that scratchy plastic on the surface of your iPod nano.

HIV AND THE BRAIN: The virus lurks in the brain, which is protected by a blood barrier that is more resistant to medication than much of the rest of the body. (Your balls are similarly protected.) The good news is that we now have much better understanding of how HIV slowly damages motor coordination and some language and reasoning skills. We can monitor the virus’s effects more accurately. The bad news is that I’ll now get more than one email a day saying I have AIDS dementia. Oh well.