The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.
Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.
After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.
Got that? Instead of the expected veto of legislation to provide healthcare to children, which passed both the House and the Senate (the latter by a 68-31 vote), Bush has just decided to totally undermine the legislation so that it can't work as intended. Why? Because the worst thing that could happen for people whose political philosophy is dependent on the premise that government can't work is a government-run healthcare program actually working. And it's more important for these corporate fuck-junkies to prove that the government can't do anything better than "the market" than to save kids' lives. Culture of life, my big fat ass.
And once again, they're using the spooooooky specter of parents who will rip off the government ("make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage") to justify their horseshit decision, as if: A) there are actually massive numbers of adults who will abandon their private health insurance for no other reason than to rip off the government; and B) even if there were, that's reason to deny thousands and thousands of kids healthcare coverage. "Sorry, little Timmy—giving you coverage will require oversight to prevent abuse and that costs money, so if you want that kidney transplant, better start selling pencils, son. We've got nation-building to do. In, um, another nation. Oh, yeah—and tax cuts to keep subsidizing."
Conservatives love to babble about how progressives “hate America.” I don’t hate America—but I do hate certain things about America. I hate its promotion of avarice above social conscience, its fascination with wealth, its disdain of compassion for the weak, its delight in ignorance, its xenophobic nationalism, the immutable beliefs among so many of its citizens that the markets solve everything, that this country is the Almighty’s gift to the world, especially when it’s a still a really shitty place to live for lots of struggling people, that those people are always, only, to blame for their troubles, and that there’s something wrong with the rest of us who don’t wrap our hands around the throat of American Dream and wring every last bit of life out of it to our own benefit.
I hate that the idea that some of us could do with a little less so that others could have a little more has become a punchline.
Bush, and his administration, and his most enthusiastic supporters, represent all of it, even though they patently refuse to own up to it, instead calling us America-haters, wrapping themselves in the flag, and declaring themselves the True Patriots, so it’s all but impossible for someone like me to express my abhorrence of them without seemingly attacking America itself, so it’s easier for them to do what they really want to do—turn America into a place I really, genuinely do hate, by ridding it of everything that I love.
Because there are things I love about this country. I love that it is a beautiful mosiac of people and cultures and ideas; I love its landscapes; I love its spirit of adventure and innovation; I love that it produces some of the most generous and unique people on the planet; I love its humor; I love that it really does have the potential to be a land of opporunity for everyone, if we really gave that notion half the chance it deserved.
And those are precisely the things the Bush Brigade endeavors to crush, turning America into a nation where everyone who is not blandly, mindlessly like its self-appointed True Patriots are de facto threatening, where the natural and philsophical resources are raped and destroyed in the acquisition of more wealth, where philanthropy and empathy are relegated to little more than cute, clichéd memories, where the barrel-chested barons of a new Gilded Age stand astride the bodies of those who have been condemned to less fortunate fates, singing the praises of social Darwinism and bellowing about the superfluity of a social safety net. “The government never gave me anything!” they declare, as they deposit their million-dollar checks from their latest no-bid Defense Department contract then head off to Tiffany’s to get The Little Woman a bauble with their fat tax return.
They’re a truly disgusting lot. And the next time one of them has the temerity to accuse me of hating America, I’m going to tell them flat out, “No, I don’t hate America. I hate you.”
Gallant writes about a new study suggesting there may be a viral cause of fat in some people. Gallant reports on the study, mentions previous research that pointed to a similar conclusion, and includes this quote from one of the lead researchers:
"We're not saying that a virus is the only cause of obesity, but this study provides stronger evidence that some obesity cases may involve viral infections," Pasarica says in a news release. "We would ultimately like to identify the underlying factors that predispose some obese people to [the effects of] this virus and eventually find a way to treat it."
Then Gallant steps away from the story, because that's pretty much all there is to it.
Goofus writes about the same study, using bad puns ("the buffet of reasons for why Americans are getting fatter"); barely speaks to the researchers actually involved in it (or chooses not to print anything they may have said, save one tiny quote); and then turns to "outside experts" for quotes like this:
"The cause for obesity in everyone is the same," said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "You eat more calories than you burn up; You can't get away from that basic law of physics."
and this:
"We don't want obese people to feel that it's all their fault because it is not all their fault ... but clearly the buck finally lies with the person," Klein said.
Goofus doesn't ask the good doctor Klein what percentage of fault lies with the person, or what a person might do to atone for getting fat, given the long-term failure rate of deliberate weight loss. Nor does Goofus ask Dr. Klein if he's considered all the variables that might affect the "calories in/calories out" paradigm in a live human being. Goofus is only interested in making the point that fat people should continue to feel guilty about being fat.
Gallant discusses the new scientific research and leaves any opinions about fat people out of it.
Boys and girls, do you want to be like Goofus or Gallant?
This past Friday was the 25th anniversary of the compact disc. Even with downloadable media and iPods, CD's are still around, if nothing more than a way to transfer from one source to another.
I remember how I came across my first CD player when the technology was still quite new. There was a classified ad in the paper selling a black CD player for $85, which was really cheap back then. The reason the guy was selling it was because he was running a pirate radio station and had to get rid of all the equipment. Good day for me. As a bonus, he happened to have Pink Floyd's Meddle CD, technically making that my first compact disc. The next day, I went to Tower Records to purchase Dark Side Of The Moon, totally excited to listen to these pieces of work without any extraneous turntable noises. Nothing but pure silence during the quiet bits.
And so, Shakers, I pose to you: What was the first compact disc you ever listened to / purchased?
During a press conference this afternoon, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced that the White House had still not responded to the committee's subpoena for documents relating to the legal basis for the warrantless surveillance program. "Time is up," Leahy said, "we've waited long enough." He went on to say, however, that he remained open to cooperating with the White House for the production of the documents: "I prefer cooperation to contempt." But if the administration has still not responded to the subpoena by September when Congress returns from recess, he said that he would pursue contempt proceedings in the committee "if that's what it takes."
Leahy notes that the White House is still asserting that the VP is not part of the Executive Branch. ZOMG.
For perspective on how ridiculous the White House is behaving, the subpoena for documents related to the wiretapping program was originally issued June 27th. The White House has requested (and been granted) two extensions for responding.
Giuliani the Fascist Princess hails from the same faraway land as Albi the Racist Dragon. In case you were wondering. However, Guiliani the Fascist Princess is unlikely to have the sort of social awakening Albi did. Just trust me on that one.
Sure, it would cost us $25,000,000 EUR, but look at the bright side. This would be our own Shaker island in Fiji. We would have palm trees, wine cellar entrances, fuel tanks, a hangar and runway. And we could pool our resources.
* Quixote could build a defense system that could detect and endlessly tickle any intruders that we don't like.
* Misty could fire up the Shaker Gourmet and create culinary delights all year round. (YUM!)
* The Heretik could help fund the island by creating amazing pieces of art with his mad photoshopping skillz and selling them.
* Brynn would patrol the shores while on surfboard.
* Melissa would simply be Queen Cunt of Fuck Mountain.
Important Announcement: Space Cowboy and I cannot stop singing Chocolate Rain to one another. When we call each other other, the other answers with "Chocolate Raaaaaaaaain!" We have just had an entire conversation sung to the tune of Chocolate Rain:
"Martial Laaaaaaaaw! Clergy trained to take our guns away! Martial Laaaaaaaaw!"
"Oh mah gawwwwwwwd! Bush will destroy our country through and through! Oh mah gawwwwwwwd!"
Re: the "clergy response teams" about which Bill blogged over the weekend, and I blogged this morning, Shaker Amish451 noted in comments, "I believe the confiscation of fire arms is included in [the DHS program including clergy training] too," to which Wally Whateley replied, "Good luck with that. The GOP has been telling the True Believers for decades that the only amendment they cared about was the second one. Do they really think the GOP base, or anyone else, will just hand those over?"
Well, to add to Bill's rather dire list of fun weekend reading, and my declaration that it must be "Your Worst Tinfoil Fears Come True Day," I figured I'd better share this old video from ABC World News in which the confiscation of legally-owned firearms by our government is detailed. In the aftermath of Katrina, gun-owners were forced—at gunpoint—to hand over their guns, even in areas unaffected by the hurricane.
"No one will be able to be armed. We will take all weapons."
What else can we expect when our government declares martial law? They're going to let people keep their weapons?! Of course they aren't.
The guns were returned months later under pressure from the NRA, although owners claiming a weapon had to produce "either a bill of sale or an affidavit with the weapon's serial number" (right after a devastating hurricane in which many people lost all their records, mind you) and had to submit to a criminal background check.
Now, I don't think it's any secret around here that I'm not a fan of guns, but I'm even less a fan of the government using the excuse of a natural disaster (or a terrorist attack, ahem) to chuck existing civil rights out the window like day-old bread.
There were just so many basic humanitarian issues to worry about in the immediate aftermath of Katrina that stuff like this got lost. And, yeah, the more I read about "clergy response teams" and so forth and so on, the more I'm inclined to believe that the political fallout from that humanitarian crisis was a small price to pay to distract Americans' attention from their government's using the disaster as a dry-run for martial law population management.
I'm going to go ahead and take a wild and crazy guess that I don't really need to spend any time writing commentary on this one.
I will, however, point out that the still-disproportionately male dominated advertising industry sure seems to have a lot less respect for men than I do, even despite my reputation for being a crazed, man-hating feminist.
Which is, of course, to say nothing about their lack of respect for women.
I flippin' love this clip (care of Petulant, natch; transcript below) from yesterday's Dem debate in Iowa. First of all, I just love the question: "My question is to understand each candidate's view of a personal God. Do they believe that, through the power of prayer, disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Minnesota bridge collapse could have been prevented or lessened?" What a brilliant query! I almost can't imagine a finer question to help us choose our next president. I mean, sure—the candidates' positions on, say, getting our troops the fuck out of Iraq are pretty important, but even more important is whether prayer can offset the inevitable fucktastrophes of our underfunded, disregarded, and crumbling infrastructure. Fucking genius!
I also really love how Mike Gravel and Barack Obama were the only ones to pick up on the fact that asking a question about failed levees and a bridge collapse isn't asking about the will of God but about competent fucking governance. Yeesh.
But most of all, I love how this video totally proves all those rightwing paranoid fantasists right: The Democratic Party truly is the soil in which germinates the seeds of radical secularism and godlessness.
* * *
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me move on now. We've got a question -- we've got an e-mail question from Seth Ford of South Jordan, Utah. And he said, "My question is to understand each candidates' view of a personal God. Do they believe that, through the power of prayer, disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Minnesota bridge collapse could have been prevented or lessened?" I'd like each of you to answer it. Let me start with you, Senator Clinton.
…CLINTON: Well, I don't pretend to understand the wisdom and the power of God. I do believe in prayer. And I have relied on prayer consistently throughout my life. You know, I like to say that, if I had not been a praying person before I got to the White House, after having been there for just a few days I would've become one. (LAUGHTER) So I am very dependent on my faith, and prayer is a big part of that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Dodd?
DODD: I agree with what Hillary has just said here. I would not want to try and second-guess the lord's intentions here and to assume that part of his great plan includes some of these actions we see, for a variety of different reasons, here. And the power of prayer I think is important to all of us. I hope it is, recognizing that we don't do anything without His approval.
EDWARDS: I have prayed most of my life; pray daily now. He's enormously important to me. But the answer to the question is: No, I don't -- I prayed before my 16-year-old son died; I prayed before Elizabeth was diagnosed with cancer. I think there are some things that are beyond our control. And I think it is enormously important to look to God -- and, in my case, Christ -- for guidance and for wisdom. But I don't think you can prevent bad things from happening through prayer.
GRAVEL: What I believe in is love. And love implements courage. And courage permits us all to apply the virtues that are important in life. And so you can pray -- I was always persuaded or struck by the fact that many people who pray are the ones who want to go to war, who want to kill fellow human beings. That disturbs me. I think what we need is more love between one human being and another human being. And then we'll find the courage to dispel many of the problems we have in governance. The answer to governance is not up here on the dais. The answer is with the American people and the people of Iowa. That's where the answer is. And I have a proposal, and it's the only one that talks of change. The change is to empower the American people with a national initiative. And my colleagues, with all due respect, don't even understand the principle of the people having the power. (APPLAUSE)
RICHARDSON: I pray. I'm a Roman Catholic. My sense of social justice, I believe, comes from being a Roman Catholic. But, in my judgment, prayer is personal. And how I pray and how any American prays, for what reason, is their own decision. And it should be respected. And so, in my view, I think it's important that we have faith, that we have values, but if I'm president, I'm not going to wear my religion on my sleeve and impose it on anybody.
BIDEN: George, my mom has an expression. She says that, "God sends no cross you're unable to bear." The time to pray is to pray whether or not you're told, as John was and I was, that my wife and daughter are dead, to have the courage to be able to bear the cross. The time to pray is to pray not only before, but pray that you have the courage, pray that God can give you the strength to deal with what everyone is faced with in their life, serious crosses, serious crosses to bear. The answer to the gentleman's question is, no, all the prayer in the world will not stop a hurricane. But prayer will give you the courage to be able to respond to the devastation that's caused in your life and with others to deal with the devastation.
OBAMA: I believe in the power of prayer. And part of what I believe in is that, through prayer, not only can we strengthen ourselves in adversity, but that we can also find the empathy and the compassion and the will to deal with the problems that we do control. Most of the issues that we're debating here today are ones that we have the power to change. We don't have the power to prevent illness in all cases, but we do have the power to make sure that every child gets a regular checkup and isn't going to the emergency room for treatable illnesses like asthma. We may not have the power to prevent a hurricane, but we do have the power to make sure that the levees are properly reinforced and we've got a sound emergency plan. And so, part of what I pray for is the strength and the wisdom to be able to act on those things that I can control. And that's what I think has been lacking sometimes in our government. We've got to express those values through our government, not just through our religious institutions. (APPLAUSE)
KUCINICH: George, I've been standing here for the last 45 minutes praying to God you were going to call on me. And my... (LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE) And I come from a spiritual insight which says that...
STEPHANOPOULOS: You have a direct pipeline, Congressman. (LAUGHTER)
KUCINICH: I come from a spiritual insight which says that we have to have faith but also have good works. So when we think of the scriptures, Isaiah making justice the measuring line; Matthew 25, "whatever you do for the least of our brethren"; where the biblical injunction, "make peace with your brother" -- all of these things relate to my philosophy. Now, the founders meant to have separation of church and state, but they never meant America to be separate from spiritual values. As president, I'll bring strong spiritual values into the White House, and I'll bring values that value peace, social and economic justice, values that remember where I came from. Thank you. (APPLAUSE)
In case Rove's movin' and groovin' on the chat show circuit this weekend wasn't enough for you, there was also an item at Boing Boing sure to charm you, ahem, about Rove's daddy's solid gold cock ring. Right on.
You can read the whole story about Louie Rove here. And see pictures, should you be so inclined.
I kind of get the impression old Louie would have fit in just fine around here, which is certainly not something I could or would say about his hideous son.
Dr. Johnson spoke last Friday at the Veterans for Peace speakout on sexual assault in the military outside the Robert A. Young Federal Building in downtown St. Louis. This was just one of many events and workshops comprising the 22nd annual national convention of VFP. More material relating to the convention will be posted here as soon as I can get to it.
In the video embedded here, Dr. Johnson talks about learning of LaVena's death, his suspicions about how she died, and the family's attempts to get the Army to reopen its investigation. He is introduced by antiwar activist and retired Army colonel Ann Wright.
FOX News Channel bobblehead Sean Hannity is not a journalist, according to his employer. This makes his public shilling for Rudy Giuliani entirely appropriate and aboveboard. Transparency!
Reader Charlie sent me a link to this article in the September 2007 Scientific American, in which professors from the Harvard School of Public Health argue that the idea of fat not being intrinsically unhealthy is "complete nonsense." Specifically, it criticizes a 2005 paper by Katherine Flegal et al, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. People in the fat acceptance community know that paper well: it was the big one that said people in the overweight category have the lowest mortality rate, and suggested that previous estimates of the death toll of obesity were off by, oh, a couple or three hundred thousand a year.
For some reason, Scientific American decided it was time, two years after the study was published, to attack Flegal's research. So they gave the boys at Harvard a jingle.
[Harvard professor Walter] Willett thinks this assertion is simply the latest recycling of the notion that Americans have been somehow duped about the risks of obesity. “About every 10 years this idea comes along that says it’s better to be overweight. And we have to stomp it out,” he says. Willett’s research has identified profound advantages to keeping weight down—even below the so-called healthy levels.
That's the kind of quote that might have caused me to despair if I hadn't remembered Willett's name from Rethinking Thin. See, there's a whole section in Kolata's "The Fat Wars" chapter (pp. 201-209 in the hardcover) about how, after Flegal published that paper, the Harvard School of Public Health went apeshit. They even
held a seminar to refute it, making sure that newspaper reporters were not only invited to the meeting but able to watch it and listen on a Webcast if they could not attend in person. It was an exercise in attack science.
A seminar to refute one paper. Why on earth would they do that?
Well, The Harvard School of Public Health was home to one of the most important previous studies of the health effects of fat, a long-term one done on nurses. The nurses' study showed that being fat carried a substantially increased mortality risk. But Flegal's paper pretty much said, "You did it wrong and you got it wrong."
So that's pretty much what they said back to her in that seminar. And are now saying 2 years later in Scientific American.
The difference between the Scientific American article and Rethinking Thin is, Gina Kolata actually talked to Katherine Flegal and the other researchers with whom she published that 2005 paper. So, for instance, where the SA article just reports the Harvard boys' assertion that Flegal's study was fucked because she didn't exclude smokers or the chronically ill, Kolata adds that A) Flegal deliberately didn't, because she felt that previous studies (like, uh, the Harvard nurses' study) had cherry-picked their subjects, and she wanted a group that was actually representativeof the general population, and B) once she and her co-researchers had all that raw data,
They looked at the results both with and without current or former smokers and people who had chronic diseases. They posted the extensive analysis on the Internet -- journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association allow for only so much additional data -- and the results always came out the same: There was no mortality risk from being overweight and little from being obese, with the exception of the extremely obese, whose death risk was slightly higher.
Here's how Scientific American presented that:
Flegal has acknowledged that she did not exclude the chronically ill from her study but argued in a follow-up report that she had done further analyses that showed it would not have made a difference. The disagreement turns on subtle statistical arguments. What is clear, however, is that Flegal’s paper is one of a handful that contradict many studies that support the conclusion that being overweight is harmful. Flegal is not necessarily wrong, but the preponderance of evidence clearly points in the other direction.
Do you see what just happened there? First, they make it seem as if Flegal acknowledged a mistake and scrambled to compensate for it, as opposed to acknowledging only that she deliberately included those populations and then analyzed the data both with and without them. Then, they bury the fact that she did it on purpose under the real point of this article: a gazillion obesity researchers can't be wrong!
Seriously, that's the entire argument the article makes. "Flegal is not necessarily wrong," but boy, a whole lot of other studies found something else! Um, yeah, that was kind of the point of Flegal's study. Flegal and David Williamson, an epidemiologist at the CDC, looked at previous studies, determined that those had gotten the statistics wrong, and designed a study that made a good faith effort to get the statistics right. Oddly enough, their conclusions turned out vastly different from those of previous studies. And two years later, this article is here to tell us Flegal, Williamson, et al, are wrong because... their conclusions are vastly different from those of previous studies.
Here's Kolata again:
Flegal says she had a real education in the politics of obesity.
"Everyone thinks they already know the answer," she says. "Anything that doesn't fit, they have to explain it away or ignore it. All these people who just know weight loss is good for you. It's just taken for granted regardless of the evidence." She was not naive about her findings, she said. "I expected people would get perturbed, but I really didn't expect the way they did it. All these erroneous so-called fact sheets. And these misinterpretations and making up things we'd said."
Paints a slightly different picture than the Scientific American article, don't it?
And how many people who read that article are going to know off the top of their head that The Harvard School of Public Health A) did one of the studies Flegal and Williamson deemed egregiously flawed before beginning their research, and B) has apparently had a hate-on for them ever since their paper about that was published?
Not many, I'm guessing. But Gina Kolata took the time to look into Flegal and Williamson's side of the story -- like, you know, an actual journalist might -- so I knew it off the top of my head, and now you know it, too. And it changes everything, doesn't it? Knowing that, you can see quite clearly that the SA article isn't actually saying Flegal's wrong -- in fact, the author takes pains not to say that -- it's just saying a whole lot of people in the obesity research community don't agree with her. And I mean, duh. That's worth writing about two years later?
So the Scientific American article did not remotely convince me that Flegal is wrong and fat is bad for you. It did, however, strongly reinforce one thing I've believed to be true for most of my life: reading is good for you.
I guess today is "Your Worst Tinfoil Fears Come True Day" or something, because this story, also No Big Deal of course, is also true:
Law enforcement, emergency response and border control agencies have won greater access to the nation's spy satellites and other sensors to monitor U.S. territory.
The sharing of imagery and data will be especially useful in policing land and sea borders and in disaster planning, Charles Allen, the Homeland Security Department's chief intelligence officer, said Wednesday.
Uh-huh. All just to protect us, naturally. No worries, Shakers. It's in our best interests.
The effort may eventually support domestic law enforcement activities as well, he said, but the legal guidelines for that are being worked out.
…A new agency within DHS, called the National Applications Office, will be the conduit for all domestic requests for spy satellite information. It will be up to the intelligence agencies to determine which requests they can honor.
Oh, great. No potential for abuse there at all. The Department of Homeland Security is in no way shaping up at all to be the sort of Orwellian nightmare that its opponents predicted. Nope. It's a perfect ray of sunlight in the dawn of America 2.0.
"There's the possibility of a recurrence of past abuses -- surveillance used against political opponents as in the Civil Rights era, the McCarthy era," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
"There's also an incidental erosion of personal privacy in which one now has to assume that anywhere you are, you are subject to overhead surveillance by the government. And that is a change in what it means to be an American," Aftergood said.
Hmm. The Federation of American Scientists criticizing the government. Conservative American clergy aligning itself with the government. Does anyone else feel the Ultimate Enlightenment Showdown of Ultimate Destiny breathing down their necks, or is that just me…?
Godwin's Law notwithstanding, Karl Rove invoked the old Nazi defense yesterday while making the rounds on the Sunday talk shows: "I was just following orders, and nothing bad that happened was my fault."
Mr. Rove, who is leaving the White House at the end of the month, didn’t cut an especially heroic or villainous figure. The strategist who looms in the public imagination as a political mastermind and West Wing Svengali used a rare appearance on camera to deliver an exiting White House aide’s most time-honored Washington message: mistakes were not made, and it’s not my fault.
He even denied responsibility for his hip-hop performance as a rapping “M.C. Rove” at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in March.
“They dragged me up there,” he told Mr. Wallace. “I was uncomfortable, and I said, ‘I’ve got a choice. I can be irritated and everybody will see it, or I can play along and try and show them I’m a good sport.’ ” He noted that his black-tie rap routine, shown over and over on television and the Internet, was his “most humiliating moment in Washington, bar none.”
The incident, and a video clip of it, didn’t come up during Mr. Rove’s appearance on “Meet the Press,” perhaps because David Gregory, the NBC White House correspondent who filled in on Sunday for Tim Russert, had also been dancing on stage that night.
Mr. Rove said he was blameless as well for his role in the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. White House officials were accused of seeking to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 2003 questioning the administration’s case for war in Iraq.
Asked by Mr. Gregory if he owed Ms. Wilson an apology, Mr. Rove gave a one-word answer, “No.”
Mr. Gregory asked Mr. Rove if he felt responsible for the downward slide of the Republican Party. “Well, look, everyone who identifies with the Republican Party ought to, ought to, ought to feel some responsibility,” he replied.
The humility act only goes so far, and it usually works to your credit when you're being modest about your successes. However, when you're the president's deputy chief of staff and everybody inside the Beltway knows that you are in charge of everything from where the RNC spends campaign money to how the Iraq war is conducted, it comes across as both craven and cowardly to say that you were just an innocent bystander when the shit hits the fan.
The implicit message is that if it's not Karl Rove's fault, then it has to lie elsewhere, and in his case the shit runs uphill, meaning that the person to blame is President Bush. That may easily be. George W. Bush is the one who hired Karl Rove, he's the one who gave him the job in White House, he's the one who didn't stop him from doing whatever it was that he now says he didn't do. But along the way, Karl Rove should have known that it is his job as a White House deputy to take the bullet for the president. He's the one who steps up when the going gets tough. He's the one, regardless of whether it's true or not, to take the fall when the wheels come off, and it's his job to protect the president at all costs. But here he goes, leaving the White House as if all of the problems are not his responsibility and without a word of regret or conciliation.
That's to be expected, though. If you look at Karl Rove's history of operations as a campaigner and as a White House operative, he makes very sure that he leaves no prints and is careful to have a ready excuse so that when he is finally brought to justice -- if that should ever happen -- he will be able to stand up and invoke the Eichmann defense: "I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from [George W. Bush] or any of my superiors."
And that goes for appearing on Sunday talk shows.
Bob Schieffer, who conducts interviews on “Face the Nation” on CBS as if they were chats over predinner drinks at the Metropolitan Club, asked Mr. Rove why he was subjecting himself to Sunday morning second-guessing.
“Somebody else made the decision for me,” he said. “I’m just doing what I was instructed to do.”
So, Karl, how's the weather in Buenos Aires this time of year?
If you're now asking yourself Did I seriously just see the director of the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security confirming that they are recruiting clergy to help keep the sheep calm in the event of a declaration of martial law in the US? the answer is yes, why yes you did.
I honestly don’t know what to make of this. It seems like complete crockpottery, the real stuff of tinfoil hat legend—but there's a news report out of Louisiana, and a minister, and a DHS official, all confirming it like it's No Big Deal, just some population management training in case of a national emergency that forces our government to send in troops, that's all, ha ha. No big whoop.
Pam points to a World Net Daily (of all places) article about the program, and there's more at AlterNet. Oy.
Today is the birthday of one of my best friends, the oft-mentioned Londoner Andy, who "read[s] read this pinko fag blog but [does]n't comment at it." I wish, onceagain, that I were there to celebrate with him and slurp wonton soup while we machine-gun fire Woody Allen lines at each other until we are drunk with laughter.
In 2001, I was in London for Andy's birthday. I asked him what he wanted to do to celebrate, and he didn't want to do anything special; he'd come meet me at my hotel. We went for terrible pizza nearby, then walked and talked and eventually sat ourselves in Norfolk Square in a light rain, where we had a conversation I can remember as clearly as if it were yesterday—just a meandering tumble from subject to subject—Hitchcock, The Tracey Ullman Show, Bowie, this Scottish bloke I'd just met....
I remember that later that night, I took a shower, and realized only after I was soaking wet, there was no shampoo. I washed my hair with soap, which put it in an awful tangle, and as I sat on the bed slowly combing through it feeling a bit grumpy and lonely and miserable about leaving for home the next morning, the phone rang and I knew it was Andy and I smiled.
Andy's just become an uncle (again), sharing his birthday with a new niece. For her I wish a life rich with the sort of friendship I have with her splendid uncle.
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