The Dish

If I have any message for the students of today, it is this: you cannot trust the word of this president or anyone in this administration. They have either lied or told you things that turned out not to be true. Finally, someone says it on the floor of the House – Democrat Tim Ryan. He’s wrong, alas. Bush will never impose a draft, even if we needed one. It would mean admitting he was wrong. He will torture and lie but he will not concede error.

A conservative challenges the theocons.

Commonweal magazine asks someone who knows the Pope – president of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome – what on earth Benedict was driving at in his address on Islam.

A November 2004 Atlantic article shows that Frank Rich still can’t get his facts right. Money quote:

Everyone knows about the looting of Iraq’s museums during last year’s war. What almost no one knows is that most of the museums’ holdings had been stolen and sold years before ‚Äî and not by mobs of Iraqis off the street.

For the record, I tracked down my initial comments on the looting of the Iraq museum. Frank Rich claimed the following:

Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld’s critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq.

My post of April 22, 2003, says:

I remain an optimist about the Iraqi future – and America’s critical role in it. Yes, there have been some obvious screw-ups – the failure to protect Baghdad’s museums strikes me as damn-near indefensible. But the direction is clear.

It seems to me that a blogger who wrote about the looting of the museum as "damn-near indefensible," does not deserve the moniker "cheerleader" of Rumsfeld’s acquiescence to looting. I got a lot of things wrong. But it’s not fair to blame me for saying something I didn’t.

"As we face the issues that we are facing today, I don’t think there’s anything more important out there than the marriage issue," – Marilyn Musgrave, seeking re-election in Colorado.

Fairmont, West Virginia, 1 pm.

Not so much, it seems.

Signs of progress.

The GOP are ramping up government spending by a whopping 9 percent in 2006 – despite pledges by Bush of fiscal responsibility. Well, we know what his word is worth. Now they’re up to it again for 2007. Money quote from Heritage:

the Senate is preparing to bust fiscal year (FY) 2007 discretionary spending caps by at least $32 billion to:

1. Reimburse the Pentagon for the $9 billion raided from its budget earlier this year and given to domestic programs, as well as fund additional defense and border security programs ($26.8 billion in total);

2. Fund another massive farm subsidy bailout despite high subsidy levels and a booming farm economy ($4.2 billion); and

3. Reimburse NASA for funds that lawmakers had diverted into parochial pork projects ($1.0 billion).

And in addition, lawmakers have promised $2 billion to $3 billion more for the labor, health, and education programs.

If that doesn’t make conservatives stay home or vote Democrat in protest this fall, what will?

A Chicago reader writes:

Just a quick note concerning your item on the "Liberals Hate It" billboard for a Chicago Radio Station. I suspect that this billboard is a direct response to several billboards for a rival radio station all featuring Al Franken’s photograph and the message "Liberals Love Us." I doubt that these signs reflect an increasing polarization as good healthy capitalism.

Or both.