A reader writes:
Whoa there, Andrew. To quote another great libertarian, Dave Barry, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and in this case, yours is wrong." I think by "whiny, lesbian complaint-rock", you meant "staggeringly brilliant contemporary rock fueled by searing individualistic rage." I’m sure you’ll correct this minor wording error expediently.
Actually, I’m too busy watching ’80s videos. I hope to get the results up by early next week.
A sign that he isn’t completely immune to the bleeding obvious:
TIME: Mr. Vice President, if you had to take back any one thing you’d said about Iraq, what would it be?
CHENEY: I expressed the sentiment some time ago that I thought we were over the hump in terms of violence, I think that was premature. I thought the elections would have created that environment. And it hasn’t happened yet.
"I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle," – Zeyad, from the Healing Iraq blog.
I know how he feels. Other Iraqi bloggers are venting in an unprecedented way about the anarchy and violence that is now consuming their country. Check it out.
The former House clerk who oversaw the page program on the Hill testified before the House Ethics Committee for four hours today, according to ABC News. His testimony? Trandahl testified that
a top aide to House Speaker Dennis Hastert was informed of "all issues dealing with the page program," according to a Republican familiar with the investigation.
The Republican source said Trandahl planned to name Ted Van Der Meid, the speaker’s counsel and floor manager, as the person who was briefed on a regular basis about any issue that arose in the page program, including a "problem group of members and staff who spent too much time socializing with pages outside of official duties." One of whom was Mark Foley.
Trandahl’s testimony before the House Ethics Committee could provide additional evidence that key members of the speaker’s staff were aware of problems involving the page program for years.
Full disclosure: Trandahl has long been a friend of mine. I haven’t spoken to him since this Foley affair surfaced. But the signs are clear. Both he and Kirk Fordham have testified that Hastert’s office knew very well for a long time what predators like Mark Foley were up to. If the committee finds Fordham and Trandahl credible before the election, Hastert will have to quit. He would have caused less damage to the GOP had he quit already. This thing, in other words, is not over. And it could detonate at a very precarious time.
We don’t know is the only real answer. But the number of people prepared to tell interviewers they are gay has gone up a great deal in the past few years. And the number of self-identifying same-sex couples has leapt in the last decade as well – across the entire country. Marc Fisher has the stats and a link to the PDF report from UCLA’s law school. The five gayest cities in America? San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Portland and then Washington, D.C.
Now imagine how the stingrays feel.
"What David Kuo is saying about the President and his efforts is nothing more than a cynical attempt to sell books and line his pockets with 30 pieces of silver," – David Contreras, Texas director of the Council on Faith in Action. So that makes Bush … Jesus?
When Dick Cheney says that the new Iraqi government is doing "remarkably well," he is not only ignoring reality; in many ways, he is being callous in the face of extraordinary suffering that the Iraq invasion has unleashed. After a long silence, Iraq’s Riverbend blogger has just vented about the debate over the numbers of civilian casualties since the invasion. Are they 400,000 or 600,000? Money quote:
For American politicians and military personnel, playing dumb and talking about numbers of bodies in morgues and official statistics, etc, seems to be the latest tactic. But as any Iraqi knows, not every death is being reported… So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this [600,000] number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.
The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?
We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?
There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.
Let’s pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al.
How to disagree? She is living this nightmare. We are merely watching it unfold.
(Photo: Wisam Sami/AFP/Getty.)
This reader makes a good point:
The perfect parallel to the Kuo and Christianism post is the Democrats’ treatment of blacks the past 30 years. I’m sure senior staff in the Clinton administration would roll their eyes at the antics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and call them ‘the nuts’. But when election time rolled around play ‘race card’ and poverty pimp games to gin up African-American turnout.
Gays too. But neither gays nor African-Americans believe that their various issues are all God’s will, in the way Christianists do. What you have with Christianism is the worst of liberal special interest group politics with the worst of Republican intolerance and rigidity.
You cannot even put a Dave Barry quote on your office door at Marquette university? Perhaps it has something to do with the message:
"As Americans, we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government."
That’s "patently offensive"? It’s funny and too often true.
The Dish 
