Shakesville

Deep Thoughts

The New York Review of Books has compiled thoughts from many of their contributors on “The Election and America’s Future.” A lot of great stuff there, which I hope you will read, and which I will summarize with this efficient little quote from Garry Wills:

Most elections are referendums on the people in place, and that should be the overwhelming criterion this time. What will four more Bush years do to our relations abroad, our armed forces, our environment, our economy, our civil rights, our separation of church and state? Were it not so tragic in its toll of the dead and maimed on both sides of the conflict, our war in Iraq would seem a comedy of endless errors, featuring such Keystone Kops as George (Bring 'Em On) Bush, Karl (Mission Accomplished) Rove, Condi (Mushroom Cloud) Rice, Tony (Forty-Five Minutes) Blair, Dick (Prague Meeting) Cheney, Don (Stuff Happens) Rumsfeld, George (Slam Dunk) Tenet, Paul (Shinseki Is Wild) Wolfowitz, Colin (Mobile Labs) Powell, Ahmed (Iraqis Love Me) Chalabi, Doug (Oil Will Rebuild It) Feith, Ken (Cakewalk) Adelman, Richard (Ahmed Told Me) Perle, and other supporting players. What will the future say of us if we continue to reward this crew?

The Big Dog Speaks

"I asked President Clinton today if 'there's anything you have in common with George W. Bush?' He thought for a moment and he said, 'In eight days and 12 hours, we will both be former presidents.'"

--John Kerry recounting a talk with President Clinton (via Salon)

Sister Loses Her Shit

Slate’s headlines today were as follows:

1. Good Pop, Bad Pop: Why Democrats—not Republicans—are the hard-line parents.
2. Who’s Worse? The French or the Saudis?
3. Are Republicans Nicer Than Democrats?

What the hell is going on over there? All three stories were complete crap, and while I fully intended while reading them to dissect them and point out the obvious flaws and ludicrous assumptions populating each article, I now simply can’t be bothered. In fact, I feel like there are better things to be talking about one week before the election, and frankly, I think Slate should feel the same. I don’t really give a rat’s ass who’s nicer to someone in a t-shirt featuring the opposing party’s candidate, nor do I give a flying fuck who’s a better dad, as long as he knows how to run the friggin’ country.

It’s no wonder we’re about the plunge off the edge of a cliff, with stories like these making headlines 8 days before the most highly contested presidential election in my lifetime. And meanwhile, I see more headlines today about Ashlee Simpsons’s lip-synching mishap than about the 380 tons of explosives in Iraq that are now missing because we chose to guard the Iraqi Oil Ministry instead.

What has HAPPENED to this country? Slate, get it together, and the rest of you media fucks out there, you get it together, too. When there are a hundred thousand people turning out to see John Kerry speak, I don’t want to hear reports that it’s a few hundred, and that they’re still not inspired by Kerry—they just want Anybody But Bush. Fuck that; we want Kerry, you pricks, and by the way, it doesn’t matter whether it’s “ABB” or JFK when whoever it is pulls in people by the truckloads without requiring them to sign loyalty oaths. How about reporting reality for a change? Assholes.

Shakespeare's Slacker

There’s lots to talk about, what with the discovery that Bush & Co. left 380 tons of explosives unguarded to be stolen, thereby as John Aravosis of AMERICAblog so aptly put it, “So, we needed to go to war in order to help give terrorists the very explosives we needed to go to war to stop them getting?” Plus, there’s the story out of Iraq from the weekend detailing the slaughter of Iraqi soldiers, and lots of good poll coverage at Atrios’ Eschaton and DailyKos, too, for those poll-watchers out there. (Links at right.) And you can find in not a few places mentions of Justice Rehnquist’s cancer and what this could mean for the future of the Supreme Court.

I basically fell behind today, and most of what I would have covered is covered elsewhere, so I’ll move on. Two little tidbits:

Check out this picture at Atrios’ Eschaton that was described by Andrea Mitchell as a “few hundred” people who turned out for the Kerry rally today in Philly. Partisan hack much, Andrea?

See here for James Wolcott’s skillful skewering of both Howard Fineman and Adam Nagorney in one neat little post. He also has the best commentary yet on the Ann Coulter pie-by. You can read the whole thing here, but this is my favorite:

Ann Coulter may be a travesty of humanity, as unacceptable a hank of flesh draped on a hanger ever to be foisted upon an ignorant populace hungry for more ignorance. Her racism, her character slurs, her whirlwind talent for rewriting history, her ability to leave a glossy coat of slime on any issue she discusses (when she licks a stamp, it curls up and dies), these are condemnable.
But credit where credit is due. The skank can shift ass on a dime.

Comments Now Allowed (and Encouraged!)

Just a quick note - when I moved Shakespeare's Sister into its new layout, I forgot to enable anonymous comments. The problem has now been rectified, so please feel free to comment away.

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Busy day today, and I know there's lots going on - I will return with my usual plethora of posts ASAP.

Explosive Fury!

What ... the...?

So, 380 tons of explosives are missing from a former Iraqi military facility. Hm, okay. A facility that the U.S. was supposed to be guarding. D'OH!

Furthermore, these weapons have been used on U.S. troops. Condi Rice knew about these a month ago. This is only the latest in a series of ridiculous examples of Bush's mismanagent of the situation in Iraq. A situation he refuses to even acknowledge. And while Kerry is already ripping him a new asshole about it, the media is typically soft on the issue. I've seen more about Ashlee Simpson's lipsynching snafu than this story. This should be in HUGE BOLD ALL-CAPS HEADLINES!

I don't know about you, but if I fucked up this royally at my job, I'd be fired like yesterday! Read all about it here. (On cnn.com, it's the third story down, no biggie.)

Debunking More B.S.

Apparently, there is an email going around regarding the flu vaccine shortage that attempts to pin the shortage not-so-indirectly on VP candidate John Edwards. The body of the email is as follows (via Snopes.com):

Why the shortage: Almost half of the nation's flu vaccine will not be delivered this year. Chiron, a major manufacturer of flu vaccine, will not be distributing any influenza vaccine this flu season. Chiron was to make 46-48 million doses of vaccine for the United States. Chiron is a British company. Recently British health officials stopped Chiron from distributing and making the vaccine when inspectors found unsanitary conditions in the labs. Some lots of the vaccine were recalled and destroyed. Why is our vaccine made in the UK and not the US? The major pharmaceutical companies in the US provided almost 90% of the nations flu vaccine at one time. They did this despite a very low profit margin for the product. Basically, they were doing us a favor. In the late 80's a man from North Carolina who had received the vaccine got the flu. The strain he caught was one of the strains in that years vaccine made by a US company. What did he do? He sued and he won. He was awarded almost $5 million! After that case was appealed and the appeal was lost, most US pharmaceutical companies stopped making the vaccine. The liability outweighed the profit margin. Since UK and Canadian laws prohibit such frivolous law suits, UK and Canadian companies began selling the vaccine in the US. By the way...the lawyer that represented the man in the flu shot law suit was a young ambulance chaser by the name of John Edwards.

Snopes responds:

Two major problems with this political screed, which attempts to attribute a shortage of flu vaccine to a lawsuit handled to Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate:
Chiron,
the corporation mentioned in this piece as an example of a "British company" that has taken over the manufacture of flu vaccine from American companies supposedly driven out of business by liability lawsuits, is not a British company. It is an American company headquartered in Emeryville, California, which last year purchased British vaccine maker Powderject and a flu vaccine plant in Liverpool, England.
American manufacturers did not produce flu vaccine until liability lawsuits made it impossible for them to continue doing so. Most American pharmaceutical companies got out of the flu vaccine market because a variety of factors (not related to lawsuits) make it an unattractive line of business...

Snopes has more detail about the specifics of why flu vaccine manufacturing is an unattractive line of business., including a specific case study on Wyeth. Regarding Edwards, Snopes adds:

Regarding the claim that John Edwards secured a $5 million judgment against a U.S. pharmacutical company on a flu vaccine case, while it is true he had a highly successful legal career representing individuals who had been badly harmed by malfunctioning products or the mistakes of doctors and hospitals, with some even saying he won $175 million for his clients over 12 years, at this point it's not known if he ever litigated a flu vaccine case, or if so, what the outcome of such a trial was.

Switch Hitters

As mentioned earlier, there are a number of prominent Republicans who have endorsed Kerry, and some who have simply stated they will not be voting for Bush. DailyKos has a very handy list here. Forward the link to all your Republican or otherwise on-the-fence friends and let them know that people for fiscal responsibility, civil rights, separation of church and state, and intelligent foreign policy aren't voting for Furious George this year.

Sinclair's Ass Officially Kicked

See the wrap-up at DailyKos here.

Would Jesus be a Republican?

Deborah Caldwell of BeliefNet posts this disturbing report about the Bush administration's continuing interest in weakening the separation between church and state.

The Republican National Committee is employing the services of a Texas-based activist who believes the United States is a “Christian nation” and the separation of church and state is “a myth.”

David Barton, the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders, was hired by the RNC as a political consultant and has been traveling the country for a year--speaking at about 300 RNC-sponsored lunches for local evangelical pastors. [...]

Barton, who is also the vice-chairman of the Texas GOP, told Beliefnet this week that the pastors' meetings have been kept “below the radar.... We work our tails off to stay out of the news.” [...]
Barton’s main contention is that the separation of church and state was never intended by the nation’s founders; he says it was created by the Supreme Court in the 20th Century. [...] Barton is also on the board of advisers of the Providence Foundation, a Christian Reconstructionist group that advocates America as a Christian nation. [...]
The lunches are coordinated by the RNC’s evangelical outreach director, Drew Ryun. “He and I make it very clear we are not partisan per se, we’re biblical,” says Barton. But according to Federal Election Commission filings, Barton has earned $12,000 this year from the RNC for “political consulting.” A spokesman for the RNC, Scott Hoganson, did not respond to questions about Barton.
Barton contends that the IRS allows pastors to endorse candidates from the pulpit as long as they make it clear it’s their own personal opinion and not an official church endorsement. [...]
In an interview with Beliefnet this week, Barton said, “I show them the historical role of pastors being involved in civil government. I show them the Biblical basis for pastors being involved in civil government, and then I show them the issues that are at stake from a biblical point of view and the voting records that pertain to those [issues].” At that point in his presentation, he passes out a June 10 letter from the Internal Revenue Service explaining what ministers are able to say and do, legally, in their churches.
“They’re shocked by what they can do,” says Barton. [...]

Of course, despite claiming to be "biblical" rather than "partisan,"

[i]n the Beliefnet interview, Barton was heavily critical of Americans United for trying to “intimidate” conservative Christian ministers. But Boston said his organization has also reported three black churches to the IRS since August for endorsing Sen. John Kerry from the pulpit.

Huh. Imagine that.

For some reason, I remain unconvinced that there is one person associated with this administration, including the president himself, that has even the remotest understanding of the true tenets of Christianity.

Sigh

More proof that homophobia is, more than anything, childish.

Triumphant

In case you missed Triumph the Insult Comic Dog taking on Spin Alley, you can now see it here.

New Kerry Endorsement

In addition to the slew of Republicans (example here) who have endorsed Kerry recently, the independent and zany Jesse Ventura has decided to cast his lot in with the Democratic candidate.

In other news, Eminem, who will be voting for the first time this year but still hasn't definitely decided for whom to vote, says:

"Bush is definitely not my homie [...] But I'm still undecided. Kerry has been known to say some things that's caught my attention, made a few statements I've liked, but I don't know. Whatever my decision, I would like to see Bush out of office."

If Kerry can manage to wrap up both the WWF and the white rapper vote, I think we can officially declare him the winner.

Sarcasm aside - what has the country come to when Eminem is a voice of reason?

"He's been painted to be this hero and he's got our troops over there dying for no reason," Eminem said in the interview. "He's in a tailspin, running around like a dog chasing his tail. And we got young people over there dyin', kids in their teens, early '20s that should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like Vietnam 2." [...]

"People think their votes don't count, but people need to get out and vote," Eminem said.

Tax Cuts-a-Go-Go

The AP via the NY Times reports:

With no fanfare, President Bush on Friday signed the most sweeping rewrite of corporate tax law in nearly two decades, showering $136 billion in new tax breaks on businesses, farmers and other groups. [...]

The centerpiece is $76.5 billion in new tax relief for the battered manufacturing sector, but manufacturing is broadly defined to include not just factories but also oil and gas producers, engineering, construction and architectural firms and large farming operations.

Your tax dollars at work, folks...and much like you, they're gonna have to start working a lot harder very soon.

The Return of the Man from Hope

The Freepers & Co. are going nutzzz speculating about whether Bill Clinton will be the next secretary-general of the United Nations. As delicious as that prospect is, it's never going to happen, because the secretary-general cannot be from one of the five permanent member nations, of which the US is one.

However, as has been widely reported, Clinton is emerging from his convalescence and joining Kerry on the campaign trail, and so, with any luck, the entire media will satiate their howling Clinton-jones by crawling back up his ass like it's 1998 all over again, thereby leaving Furious George and all his minions shivering outwith the spotlight.

If they get desperate, though, they could always stage a vicious pie-by.

Outside America

Mark Hertsgaard (who has written, among other things, an intensely interesting book called The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, which I highly recommend) has a column in Salon today that addresses the distinction most non-Americans make between America the People and America the Government. He also asks:

But what if Americans give Mr. Bush a second term as president on Nov. 2? Will foreigners still say it's the man in the White House who is the problem, not the voters who put him there?

As Hertsgaard suggests, were this election open to the entire planet, Bush would be voted out by a resounding majority. However, it’s not – and so the rest of the world anxiously turns their eyes toward us to see who we will elect as our next president. They have as much interest in who leads America as we do, because American policies reverberate globally.

Today, people the world over say they like Americans despite our government. But will they still love us tomorrow, if we return that government to power on Nov. 2?

From conversations with friends in Europe, I know that we’ve been a pass of sorts, because Al Gore won the popular vote. They know that a greater number of us really wanted the other guy, but if Bush wins the popular vote this time around, I don’t know if the generosity toward America the People will remain. They don’t understand how, with everything this administration has done, the election could be so close. I have no explanation – I have no idea, either.

Hertsgaard suggests:

If Americans give Bush another four years as president, the popular global backlash could be intense, including not just rhetorical denunciations of American stupidity but perhaps boycotts of American products and worse. And for the first time, overseas anger may come not only from fanatical militants but ordinary citizens, and it may be directed not only at George W. Bush but also toward the ordinary Americans who put him back in office for another four years.

In that unhappy event, we Americans will have no one to blame but ourselves.

And, in truth, in that unhappy event, we on the Left may be faced with a daunting realization—that we are truly outnumbered, and this country isn’t at all the place we imagined it was.

Reality Check

The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland has just released a startling report called “The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters.” The information presented in the report, which can be viewed in its entirety here, suggests that perhaps the reason Bush’s supporters aren’t concerned about the president’s troubled relationship with reality is because they, too, are divorced from the truth.

After a series of nationwide polls, the analysis of the collected data provided the conclusion that Bush’s supporters are much more likely to hold beliefs about the world that are objectively untrue, while Kerry’s supporters are much more likely to be well-informed. Some of the findings include:

75% of Bush supporters believe that Iraq was provided substantial aid to al-Qaida
63% of Bush supporters believe clear evidence of Iraq aid to al-Qaida has been found
82% of Bush supporters believe the Bush administration has reported that Iraq did indeed have WMD or a major WMD program
57% of Bush supporters believe that the majority of people in the world would prefer to see Bush reelected

Additionally:

"Majorities incorrectly assumed that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues -- the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%); 51% incorrectly assumed he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty -- the principal international accord on global warming ... Only 13% of supporters are aware that he opposes labor and environmental standards in trade agreements -- 74% incorrectly believe that he favors including labor and environmental standards in agreements on trade. In all these cases, there is a recurring theme: majorities of Bush supporters favor these positions, and they infer that Bush favors them as well."

In Salon’s War Room coverage of the PIPA report, they concluded, quite aptly:

[W]hile "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters" may be perversely satisfying to Democrats in its confirmation of blue-state prejudices, it carries a pretty disturbing question for all rational Americans: How can arguments based on fact prevail in a nation where so many people know so little?

Disturbing indeed. Upon review of the questionnaire used for the survey, I thought that the resulting report begs a follow-up. Many of the questions were asked about perceptions of what the administration had said/was currently saying. I would be interested to find out, for those who, for example, thought that the administration had claimed discovery of a weapons program in Iraq, where they got the information. Is it a case of listening to particular partisan media presenters, is it a case of these people being simply unable to accurately interpret an objective news report, or something else altogether? Clearly, ignorance of reality is the issue, the difference between ignorance born of poor education and willful ignorance stemming from a resolute ideology is huge, and says two entirely different things about this country.

Note to Pro-Lifers: Bush Ain't Yer Man

Dr. Glen Harold Stassen reports in Sojourners that abortions have actually increased under the Bush administration:

Abortion was decreasing. When President Bush took office, the nation's abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4% decline during the 1990s. This was an average decrease of 1.7% per year, mostly during the latter part of the decade. [...]

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened. [...]

Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

Dr. Stassen includes individual state statistics that will surely be of interest to those who know which states were red in 2000. Additionally, he suggest three factors that may have contributed to the increase in abortions under Bush:

First, two thirds of women who abort say they cannot afford a child (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Web site). In the past three years, unemployment rates increased half again. Not since Hoover had there been a net loss of jobs during a presidency until the current administration. Average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation. With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed.

Second, half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life). Men who are jobless usually do not marry. Only three of the 16 states had more marriages in 2002 than in 2001, and in those states abortion rates decreased. In the 16 states overall, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before, and 7,869 more abortions. As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises.

Third, women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency - with women of childbearing age overrepresented in those 5.2 million - abortion increases.

Were Bush to get a second term and stack the Supreme Court, as he has all but pledged to do, with pro-life justices (ref. the Dred Scott shout-out), abortion will almost certainly be criminalized as a large part of his base desires. This will leave women who find themselves in circumstances as described above with even fewer options, and as his policies continue to wreak havoc in the middle and lower classes, I doubt sincerely that we will see a rise in adoption. It is the belief of this writer that instead we will, sadly, see a rise in abortion-related deaths from illegal and unsafe procedures.

Tentative Conservative Hero Award

I recently asked if there were no Republican heroes left in America, and though still open-minded, I remain unconvinced that some of our better elected officials on the Right (like Senator Richard Lugar) have quite earned any medals yet. Nonetheless, I am bestowing a tentative conservative hero award this evening. It goes to Andrew Sullivan, who blogs today:

I'm guilty as well. I was so intent on winning this war and so keen to see the administration succeed against our enemy that I gave them too many benefits of the doubt.

I reserve the right to revoke this award the next time Andrew says one of the incredibly stupid things I can't believe a thinking person is capable of saying.

Truth in Every Joke

Eric Alterman shares a joke sent to him (the origins of which he doesn’t know):

What's the difference between Vietnam and Iraq?
Bush had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.

It’s bitterly funny.

We know, of course, Bush’s own personal plan for getting out of Vietnam, and the lack of planning for getting out of Iraq was made regrettably clear in a report issued by Knight-Ridder last week, which I only picked up today in a column by Todd Stauffer in the Jackson Free Press:

[W]ar planners met at Shaw Air Force Base days before the war started in 2003 to discuss their plan for invading Iraq. Toward the end of the presentation by a lieutenant colonel, who was briefing leaders on the post-war strategy, the slide he used to discuss the post-war plan had all of three words: “To be provided.”

Only one question then remains: When?