Month: June 2007

David Boaz gets it right:

In a way, Cheney’s story is the story of the Bush administration: Where they pushed bad policies, policies that dramatically expand the power of the federal government and infringe on our liberties, they have had much success. When Cheney and occasionally Bush backed good policies, policies that would constrain government, they failed miserably. Indeed, if Vice President Cheney is indeed a "small-government conservative" who used his unprecedented power to "hold the line" for "conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters," he has been a failure of Carteresque proportions.

At least Carter didn’t pretend to be a conservative. And back then, Americans were smart enough not to re-elect total incompetents.

Why does no one ever mention the heatwave? It made Katrina seem like a model of government effectiveness:

The new estimate comes a day after the French Parliament released a harshly worded report blaming the deaths on a complex health system, widespread failure among agencies and health services to coordinate efforts, and chronically insufficient care for the elderly.

Aaron spotted this Muppet classic this morning. We haven’t laughed as hard in a while. No reason for posting today particularly. But it sure beats reading about beheadings. Apologies to all my Irish relatives:

He once strapped the poor thing to a crate on the top of his car for a twelve-hour drive. At one point, the dog had to take a dump in his crate while the car was moving. I’m with this blogger:

Dogs are very reluctant to shit where they live, so to speak, which is why crate training can make housebreaking a lot easier: you’re taking advantage of the dog’s natural inclination to avoid relieving itself in its own space. That the poor guy let go in the crate suggests fear or extreme need, either one of which makes the owner a serious prick. It’s not the biggest issue in the world, but still, it gives me the creeps.

I’m not sure there’s anything about Romney that doesn’t give me the creeps.

Three former leaders of the biggest ex-gay groups have apologized for the pain and harm their activities have caused. Money quote:

"Some who heard our message were compelled to try to change an integral part of themselves, bringing harm to themselves and their families," the three, including former Exodus co-founder Michael Bussee, said in a joint written statement presented at the news conference. "Although we acted in good faith, we have since witnessed the isolation, shame, fear and loss of faith that this message creates."

You can see three video testimonies from the three former ex-gay leaders here. I wonder when Bill Kristol will apologize. He gave these groups critical credibility in his war on gay people in the late 1990s. And he didn’t even do it for sincere religious reasons. He did it because he thought he could exploit the pain of many tormented gay people to advance his own political agenda.

What I have to look forward to:

Brink Lindsey’s book excerpt about how the religious right and the hippie left combined to remake American culture and politics in the last quarter century is now online. I enthused about its thesis here.

Just one more night south of Baghdad. The night before, another twenty bodies were discovered in the streets. Today, a massive bomb targeting Shiites also went off killing at least two score people. According to the WaPo,

Violence dipped for a while after extra troops started arriving in February, but recent data shows that some kinds of attacks and killings are back to January’s pre-surge levels.

Without any coherent government, without sectarian reconciliation, this kind of thing will continue in the power vacuum. The U.S. military is doing everything it can, but it cannot perform miracles. In a country where there is no effective central government, and where the Iraqi security forces are captive to various sectarian impulses and restrained only by the patina of American force, bombings and mass murders will continue. We could stay there twenty years and, without a political solution from within, they would continue. The problem in Iraq is not that Washington somehow wants to pull out prematurely. It is that there is no credible scenario for improving matters if we continue to plow on. No time-table can ignore this reality. Without sectarian division, you can have some success. Look at the Kurdish north. With it, you can send young Americans to die in someone else’s civil war for decades.

"There’s racism in this debate. Nobody likes to talk about it, but a very small percentage of people involved in this debate really have racial and bigoted remarks. The tone that we create around these debates, whether it be rhetoric in a union hall or rhetoric on talk radio, it can take people who are on the fence and push them over emotionally," – Senator Lindsey Graham, on the immigration bill.

Howard Dean’s web-based 70,000 donors was described as a watershed in Internet campagning. So what would that make Obama’s 250,000 unique donors – and almost 350,000 individual donations? In the polls, Obama has staled for a while, up against the Clinton machine and her massive name recognition among the party faithful. But America’s Cory Aquino must be somewhat rattled by the breadth of Obama’s support, especially given Clinton’s own sky-high negative ratings and Obama’s much lower name-recognition. If he’s doing this well despite being unknown in any detail by many, how much better will he be doing by the fall?

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)