Truth or Consequences?

Future historians will shake their heads in disbelief that the USA spent billions of dollars and accepted (so far) 2,003 deaths and 15,000 wounded in order to hand over on a silver platter a Shia statelet to the fundamentalist Iranian mullahs they so despise.

The irony is excruciatingly painful.

Ms. Parks, we owe you a lot. Rest well. 1913-2005

In a week of Harriet Miers and Scooter Libby, it is a miracle that CNN and Fox pontificators don't have a hernia.

But the real story of the week is Rosa Parks, proof positive that great catalysts of social change can come in very small, sometimes insignificant packages. How things can change. Here is the story from the Associated Press:

DETROIT (AP) — In the city where she died and the city where she sparked the civil rights movement, the front of the bus is reserved for Rosa Parks.

Detroit and Montgomery, Ala., are reserving the first seats of their buses as a tribute to Parks' legacy until her funeral next week.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick placed a black ribbon Thursday morning on the first passenger seat of one of about 200 buses where seats will be reserved.

"We cannot do enough to pay tribute to someone who has so positively impacted the lives of millions across the world," Kilpatrick said in a statement.

In some buses in Montgomery, the first seat was being covered with black fabric and a photograph of Parks was being displayed, according to the Montgomery Area Transit System.

"This gesture, in conjunction with the city of Detroit, is appropriate in the two communities that Mrs. Parks called home," said Montgomery County Judge Lynn Bright.

Officials elsewhere were offering similar tributes.

The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority honored Parks by putting signs above seats in the front of 12 downtown buses that read: "This seat is reserved for no one. RTA honors the woman who took a stand by sitting down. Rosa Parks 1913-2005."

In case you have been living in an alternate universe for the past 50 years, Ms. Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery in 1955, truly one of the most remarkable acts of courage that I have ever heard of in my lifetime. Our current generation tends to pass our courage accolades to anyone or everyone for the smallest of efforts. How many times have you heard George Bush use the "hero" word over the past five years. It boggles the mind.

But if we have 10 jillion billion heroes in America, only one - Rosa Parks -stands above them all.

That seemingly small gesture on a bus changed our nation and the mindset of a people. It launched a period of considerable pain and angst, but in a way, it was our finest moment as a nation. It completed a movement launched by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 to make us a nation of one people. We often forget how important that small bit of courage was for us all - and, admittedly, racism still abides even in the best of us - but without the Rosa Parks of the world, our species would have no more right of claim to greatness than any other primate.

Ms. Parks died Monday (10-24-05) in Detroit at age 92. The catalyst for the modern civil rights movement moved to Detroit in 1957 after encountering threats, harassment and trouble finding work in Montgomery.

Sometimes heroes do not get medals, money and acclaim. Sometimes they just go on with their lives. We are the ones who reap the reward.

Thank you, Ms. Parks. We owe you a lot. Rest well.

Cheney & his Garden of Evil

I never thought that I would ever see an American president or vice president say it was OK to tortune. Perhaps No. 1 and No. 2 in Washington have been watching too much "24." Or, perhaps, there is truth to the rumor that Vice President Cheney is not human at all, but the devil himself. If I believed in the devil, I would give that argument more credence. Instead, I just no that he is the epitome of evil.

I could not say it better than what the Washington Post said today. Cheers to you Post. At least one national paper still has its soul.

Vice President for Torture


Wednesday, October 26, 2005; Page A18
VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.

His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have "disappeared," like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including "waterboarding," or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency's performance.

It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.

The senators ignored Mr. Cheney's threats, and the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate's earlier vote suggests that it will not allow such a betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.

No more blonde cheerleaders as senator

Only in Texas . . .

White House allies of the neofascists Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are quietly circulating talking points. Republicans sympathetic to the administration are trying to make the case that bringing charges like perjury mean the prosecutor does not have a strong case, that indicting them would amount to criminalizing politics. Incredible bullshit.

According to the Washington Post, the "technicality" talking point was first uttered in public Sunday by Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert. This is like a scene on the Daily Show. It is too good to pass up. Just remember, this braindead wench is serving as a senator from a state in our Union.

"SEN. HUTCHISON: I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment . . . that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. So they go to something that trips someone up because they said something in the first grand jury and then maybe they found new information or they forgot something and they tried to correct that in a second grand jury. . . .

"MR. RUSSERT: But the fact is perjury or obstruction of justice is a very serious crime and Republicans certainly thought so when charges were placed against Bill Clinton before the United States Senate. Senator Hutchison.

"SEN. HUTCHISON: Well, there were charges against Bill Clinton besides perjury and obstruction of justice. And I'm not saying that those are not crimes. . . . I think that it is important, of course, that we have a perjury and an obstruction of justice crime, but I also think we are seeing grand juries and U.S. attorneys and district attorneys that go for technicalities, sort of a gotcha mentality in this country."

Gotcha mentality. Un-huh. Let's remind Senator Kay of a couple points in her obviously forgettable career. For the record, there were two articles of impeachment against Clinton: One for perjury, one for obstruction of justice. No other charges.

Senator Kay, like most Senate Republicans, voted "guilty" on both of them. And in a statement, she explained her vote this way:

"If only the President had followed the simple, high moral principle handed to us by our Nation's first leader as a child and had said early in this episode 'I cannot tell a lie,' we would not be here today."

Isn't that sweet. Remember, this is the state that also produced Tom DeLay, George W. Bush and Harriet Miers. Lord save us from further Texas idiots.

Investigative Reporting is not Stenography

So many mysteries. So little time.

The soap opera that is the New York Times continues to amaze me. How did the venerable old gray lady fall so low? Mysteries abound.

1. How did no one at the NYTimes see that Judith Miller had gone over the edge and had become the voicepiece of the Bush Administration's drive to war?
2. How did the NYTimes editors, already extremely nervous about a prior misuses of "unnamed sources," feel comfortable with Miller writing front page articles quoting unnamed sources justifying the alleged presence of WMDs (and at a time when there was considerable evidence to the contrary by sources GOING on record!)?
3. Why when the controversy broke out about Plame did the editors NOT demand to know who Miller's sources were, if indeed not review her notes?
4. And please tell me more about this more than chummy affair Miller has been having with the publisher of the NYTimes. Has no one on the NYTimes not felt compelled to say that perhaps the publisher is taking more than just an interest in this story? And indeed, is he blocking the investigation?

From former Timer David Halberstam:

"I think the paper has taken a terrible hit. I think it is shocking that this young woman who has been a known identified land mine for a long time seems to have guaranteed loyalty to the office of the Vice President of the United States more than to The New York Times."

It's time to let Judith Miller twist slowly in the wind. Show some gumption, NYTimes editors. Fire the bitch.

It's Good They've Outlawed Public Hangings . . .

. . . because I have a number of nominations for one!

This story just steams me. Stupidity doesn't explain it. Callousness doesn't even explain it. There really should be criminal action taken.

From the Washington Post on Friday's hearings:

For 16 critical hours, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, including former director Michael D. Brown, dismissed urgent eyewitness accounts by FEMA's only staffer in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina had broken the city's levee system the morning of Aug. 29 and was causing catastrophic flooding, the staffer told the Senate yesterday.

Marty Bahamonde, sent to New Orleans by Brown, said he alerted Brown's assistant shortly after 11 a.m. that Monday with the "worst possible news" for the city: The Category 4 hurricane had carved a 20-foot breach in the 17th Avenue Canal levee.

Five FEMA aides were e-mailed Bahamonde's report of "water flow 'bad' " from the broken levees designed to hold back Lake Pontchartrain. Bahamonde said he called Brown personally after 7 p.m. to warn that 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater and that he had photographed a 200-foot-wide breach.

"FEMA headquarters knew at 11 o'clock. Mike Brown knew at 7 o'clock. Most of FEMA's operational staff knew by 9 o'clock that evening. I don't know where that information went," said Bahamonde, a 12-year FEMA staffer who has worked full time since 2002 as a public affairs official.

President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Richard B. Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all said they were told that the city's flood walls did not fail until Aug. 30. They said they assumed that the worst was over during a day-long window when operations could have been launched to rush aid to the Louisiana Superdome or rescue more than 50,000 residents and tourists before streets and homes were flooded.

"This disconnect . . . is beyond disturbing. It's shocking," said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), the senior Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is leading the investigation.

Bahamonde said he found it "amazing" that New Orleans officials continued to let thousands gather at the Superdome, even though they knew that the area around it was going to flood. Ten people later died at the Superdome.

"Urgent reports did not appear to prompt an urgent response," said panel Chairman Susan M. Collins (R-Maine). She asked "why the city continued to send people to the Superdome, when it appears they should have evacuated the Superdome?"

As recently as this week, Chertoff told a House Katrina investigation, "The report -- last report I got on Monday [Aug. 29] was that the levees -- there had not been a significant breach in the levees. It appeared that the worst was over."

In contrast, Bahamonde, who was dressed in a dark suit and spoke somberly to senators for nearly three hours, said: "I believed at the time and still do today, that I was confirming the worst-case scenario that everyone had always talked about regarding New Orleans."

In a series of increasingly dire, angry e-mails and phone calls, Bahamonde updated Brown, aides and top spokesmen for FEMA beginning Aug. 28 from the New Orleans emergency operations center and then from the Superdome across the street.

"Issues developing at the Superdome. The medical staff at the dome says they will run out of oxygen in about two hours and are looking for alternative oxygen," Bahamonde wrote to FEMA Region VI spokesman David Passey on Aug. 28.

That night, 25,000 people were inside including 400 people with special medical needs and 45 who required hospitalization. The center was short of toilet paper, water and food, the last of which was adequate through Tuesday only because a Coast Guard helicopter crew found and broke into five abandoned FEMA trailer trucks at Bahamonde's direction, Bahamonde said yesterday.

About 7 p.m. Aug. 29, Bahamonde said, he called Brown and warned him of "massive flooding," that 20,000 people were short of food and water at the Superdome and that thousands of people were standing on roofs or balconies seeking rescue.

Brown replied only: "Thank you. I'm going to call the White House," Bahamonde said.

It is unclear what Brown told his superiors or the president's aides. He has testified to receiving "conflicting information" about 10 a.m. Monday that the levees had broken and at noon or 1 p.m. that "the levees had only been topped. So we knew something was going on between 10 and noon on Monday."

Bahamonde contradicted accounts by Brown that FEMA had positioned 12 staffers in the Superdome before the storm, that Bahamonde's reports Monday were "routine" and that FEMA medical personnel were on hand before Tuesday.

At 11:20 a.m. Aug. 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown, "Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical . . . thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water . . . estimates are many will die within hours."

At 2:27 p.m., however, Brown press secretary Sharon Worthy wrote colleagues to schedule an interview for Brown on MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" and to give him more time to eat dinner because Baton Rouge restaurants were getting busy: "He needs much more that 20 or 30 minutes."

Bahamonde e-mailed a friend to "just tell [Worthy] that I just ate an MRE . . . along with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern."

So, is hanging too good for them?

The Grades are in, and Bush fails again

So much happening. So much to relate. But I don't want this to be overlooked.

Lois Romano writes in The Washington Post: "Reading scores among fourth- and eighth-graders showed little improvement over the past two years, and math gains were slower than in previous years, according to a study released yesterday. The disappointing results came despite a new educational testing law championed by the Bush administration as a way to improve the nation's schools. . . .

" 'No one can be satisfied with these results,' said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Education Trust, an advocacy organization that backed No Child."

Oh yeah?

"This is an encouraging report," Bush said in a hastily arranged media availability with President Bush and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. "It shows there's an achievement gap in America that is closing; that minority students, particularly in fourth grade math and fourth grade reading are beginning to catch up with their Anglo counterparts. And that's positive, and that's important."

Maybe it's time for Democrats to return to yesteryear

Remember Al Gore. Remember when what he said made perfect sense. Remember when the Democrats basically deserted Al after the Florida (win? defeat?) as a loser, eventually rallying around that undefeatable candidate from Massachusetts.

What about Al? Thank you to Patty for finding this for me:

The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals, and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities. Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American people, and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged.

http://www.algore04.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=178&Itemid=150

Without comment

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54

Winning the Hearts and Minds, Part Four

At a time the Bush Administration is claiming victory for the constitution in Iraq (and while the votes are still being counted - sounds familiar doesn't it?), we are out winning over the Iragis with our "precision" bombing.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The U.S. military said Monday that coalition forces launched airstrikes Sunday in and around Ramadi, west of Baghdad, killing "an estimated 70 terrorists."

But an Iraqi doctor who reported 20 people killed -- including six children -- and 25 wounded said all those were civilians.

An Iraqi Ministry of Health official also said one child was killed and two women wounded in the airstrikes.

Military officials said they had no reports of civilians killed.

"We do careful targeting to ensure minimum civilian casualties in the areas that the insurgents are operating," said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, director of the U.S.-led Combined Press Information Center.

In Vietnam, we burned down villages "to save them." In Iraqi, we call everyone we kill "a terrorist," including those who apparently stop to looked at burned out Humvees.

We don't kill civilians, the Bush Administration says. Just like we don't torture prisoners.

These people make me ill, disgusted and embarrassed to be an American.

Lie No. 2 - How does Scott McClellan's family live with this creep?

White House spokesman Scott McClellan repeatedly insisted to the White House Press Corps today that the troops participating in a video conference from Iraq with President Bush yesterday morning hadn't been coached.

But the satellite feed of painstaking rehearsals led by a senior Pentagon official said otherwise. The evidence is there, Scott, but he continued to lie. And then to add to his dilemma, he promptly accused former UPI White House report Helen Thomas, the dead of the press corps, with being soft on terrorism.

I have to admit it: I love watching him be the village idiot.

There are lies, and then there are damnable lies.

From the Associated Press files:

Scott McClellan, a the Oct. 7, 2003 White House Press Corps briefing, speaking of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove:

"They are good individuals. They are important members of our White House team. And that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved. I had no doubt with that in the beginning, but I like to check my information to make sure it's accurate before I report back to you, and that's exactly what I did."

Intelligent Design, shown exclusively by The Lord God

Thank you, Lord, for the New Yorker magazine. Your earth would be such a miserable, bland world without it. Amen.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN
by PAUL RUDNICK
Issue of 2005-09-26
Posted 2005-09-19


Day No. 1:

And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”

“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”

“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.



Day No. 2:
“Today,” the Lord God said, “let’s do land.” And lo, there was land.

“Well, it’s really not just land,” noted Vishnu. “You’ve got mountains and valleys and—is that lava?”

“It’s not a single statement,” said the Lord God. “I want it to say, ‘Yes, this is land, but it’s not afraid to ooze.’ ”

“It’s really a backdrop, a sort of blank canvas,” put in Apollo. “It’s, like, minimalism, only with scale.”

“But—brown?” Buddha asked.

“Brown with infinite variations,” said the Lord God. “Taupe, ochre, burnt umber—they’re called earth tones.”

“I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.”



Day No. 3:
“Just to make everyone happy,” said the Lord God, “today I’m thinking oceans, for contrast.”

“It’s wet, it’s deep, yet it’s frothy; it’s design without dogma,” said Buddha, approvingly.

“Now, there’s movement,” agreed Allah. “It’s not just ‘Hi, I’m a planet—no splashing.’ ”

“But are those ice caps?” inquired Thor. “Is this a coherent vision, or a highball?”

“I can do ice caps if I want to,” sniffed the Lord God.

“It’s about a mood,” said the Angel Moroni, supportively.

“Thank you,” said the Lord God.



Day No. 4:
“One word,” said the Lord God. “Landscaping. But I want it to look natural, as if it all somehow just happened.”

“Do rain forests,” suggested a primitive tribal god, who was known only as a clicking noise.

“Rain forests here,” decreed the Lord God. “And deserts there. For a spa feeling.”

“Which is fresh, but let’s give it glow,” said Buddha. “Polished stones and bamboo, with a soothing trickle of something.”

“I know where you’re going,” said the Lord God. “But why am I seeing scented candles and a signature body wash?”

“Shut up,” said Buddha.

“You shut up,” said the Lord God.

“It’s all about the mix,” Allah declared in a calming voice. “Now let’s look at some swatches.”



Day No. 5:
“I’d like to design some creatures of the sea,” the Lord God said. “Sleek but not slick.”

“Yes, yes, and more yes—it’s a total gills moment,” said Apollo. “But what if you added wings?”

“Fussy,” whispered Buddha to Zeus. “Why not epaulets and a sash?”

“Legs,” said Allah. “Now let’s do legs.”

“Are we already doing dining-room tables?” asked the Lord God, confused.

“No, design some creatures with legs,” said Allah. So the Lord God, nodding, designed an ostrich.

“First draft,” everyone agreed, and so the Lord God designed an alligator.

“There’s gonna be a waiting list,” Zeus murmured appreciatively.

“Now do puppies!” pleaded Vishnu. “And kitties!”

“Ooooo!” all the gods cooed. Then, feeling a bit embarrassed, Zeus ventured, “Design something more practical, like a horse or a mule.”

“What about a koala?” asked the Lord God.

“Much better,” Zeus declared, cuddling the furry little animal. “I’m going to call him Buttons.”



Day No. 6:
“Today I’m really going out there,” said the Lord God. “And I know it won’t be popular at first, and you’re all gonna be saying, ‘Earth to Lord God,’ but in a few million years it’s going to be timeless. I’m going to design a man.”

And everyone looked upon the man that the Lord God designed.

“It has your eyes,” Zeus told the Lord God.

“Does it stack?” inquired Allah.

“It has a naïve, folk-artsy, I-made-it-myself vibe,” said Buddha. The Inca sun god, however, only scoffed. “Been there. Evolution,” he said. “It’s called a shaved monkey.”

“I like it,” protested Buddha. “But it can’t work a strapless dress.” Everyone agreed on this point, so the Lord God announced, “Well, what if I give it nice round breasts and lose the penis?”

“Yes,” the gods said immediately.

“Now it’s intelligent,” said Aphrodite.

“But what if I made it blond?” giggled the Lord God.

“And what if I made you a booming offscreen voice in a lot of bad movies?” asked Aphrodite.



Day No. 7:
“You know, I’m really feeling good about this whole intelligent-design deal,” said the Lord God. “But do you think that I could redo it, keeping the quality but making it at a price point we could all live with?”

“I’m not sure,” said Buddha. “You mean, what if you designed a really basic, no-frills planet? Like, do the man and the woman really need all those toes?”

“Hello!” said the Lord God. “Clean lines, no moving parts, functional but fun. Three bright, happy, wash ’n’ go colors.”

“Swedish meets Japanese, with maybe a Platinum Collector’s Edition for the geeks,” Buddha decided.

“Done,” said the Lord God. “Now let’s start thinking about Pluto. What if everything on Pluto was brushed aluminum?”

“You mean, let’s do Neptune again?” said Buddha.

Psst! Harriett. Gotta minute? Tina has some advice.

And now a word about Harriett from yet another acerbic lady, Tina Brown. But where Maurine found the Miers-gush a little creepy and certainly nauseating, Tina finds it sad.

Read on:

You've Come a Long Way, Ladies

By Tina Brown

Thursday, October 13, 2005; Page C01

The healthiest aspect of the Harriet Miers nomination is that women haven't rallied to her cause. Ten years ago, there would have been a lot of reflexive solidarity about keeping the Sandra Day O'Connor spot on the Supreme Court from reverting to male type. But every female lawyer I've spoken with in the past week skips right past the sisterly support into a rant about Miers's meager qualifications or her abject obeisance to power. The good news is that for women, it seems, Miers's nomination is like the moment for blacks in Hollywood when it was suddenly okay to cast an African American actor as something other than a perfect hero. The Sidney Poitier phase is definitively over.

Nevertheless, there's a feminist- or pre-feminist lesson here. Miers's whole story can be read as a cautionary tale for women on the move. It's about the sacrifices she made, the muzzled nature of her striving. The bleakest detail of Miers's résumé is that her decision to accept Jesus Christ as her savior took place at the office.

You can imagine the scene with painful vividness as the lamp burned late at her tidy desk on the 35th floor of the Republic National Bank tower in downtown Dallas, where she worked at the law firm of Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely. Another night without a date. Another night that would end with her key turning in the lock of a dark apartment, a bag of groceries in one hand, a briefcase bulging with documents in the other. Like Condi Rice, who sacrificed so much of her personal life to become a policy nun and ultimately the high priestess of the Temple of the Two Bushes, Miers had paid a price for her single-minded pursuit of career advancement. She had shattered every glass ceiling of the Texas bar, only to be waiting alone after hours for her old pal Judge Nathan L. Hecht to pad down the corridor from his office with a consoling Bible and the promise of being born again.

Reading the subtext of this story in the New York Times made me feel a twinge of empathy for Harriet Miers. At 60 she is a generation older than the other Bush women and her climb has come at the cost of a swallowed self. After all those years of pleasing and trimming and reassuring, how bewildered she must be to find herself cast as the wicked witch by the rabid Torquemadas of the Republican right.

Women have to be so damn perfect to get to the top. Or think they have to be. Laura Bush opted out of that struggle, preferring as she once said to "read, smoke and admire" from behind those enigmatic cat's eyes. But Condi felt she must not only win every academic prize but also twirl on the ice as a near Olympic-level figure skater and play the piano as well as Vladimir Ashkenazy -- all without activating the emotional antibodies of potentially threatened males. And Karen Hughes learned the trick of being the Big Mom of her boss's dreams, offering him the combination of awestruck admiration and gentle correction that Mother Bush was too acerbic and confrontational to manage. ("George, take your feet off my table," Kitty Kelley quotes Bar telling him in a typical mother/commander in chief exchange at a family get-together at Kennebunkport.)

The president favors women like Rice, Miers and Hughes because he has the kind of combustible male ego that needs to be "handled" -- and they know it, Miers better than most. As Merrie Spaeth, a veteran of the Reagan White House, told the Times, "It's marvelous to watch her in meetings with huge egos where she allows people to think good results are the product of their own ideas."

The difference between Rice and Miers is more than just the 10-year age gap or the psychic distance between Stanford and Dallas. Condi operates with careful deference, but unlike Miers she is more than just the skilled expediter of Bushean business. Condi has always been a peer who was too savvy to behave like one. While Miers stayed in a guest trailer on her visits to Crawford, Rice stayed at the ranch and worked out on the exercise bike next to Bush.

Twenty years or even 10 years ago ABC's "Commander in Chief" would have been a sitcom, not a drama. Now it's Bush who's the sitcom, though the laughs are bitter. He's the biggest reason why female leaders suddenly seem so relevant. He has debased the currency of machismo. From Iraq to New Orleans and back to Washington, his empty posturings, bonehead mistakes and panicky pratfalls have turned testosterone into Kryptonite. The cultural stage is being set for a woman president, even if the current understudies, from Hillary to Condi, end up stumbling over their own props or never come out of the wings.

Germany's Chancellor-elect Angela Merkel, with her lack of traditional female vanity, feels like the clearest harbinger of the future. Merkel didn't need Geena Davis's lips to become her country's commander in chief. Nor did she need the patronage and protection of some powerful male. Dour, forthright and serious, Merkel did it all by herself, with an invisible professor husband who pops out of his cuckoo clock only once a year at a Bavarian opera festival.

It's easy to forget that Margaret Thatcher -- whose "Don't go wobbly on me, George" famously stiffened the spine of Bush One before the Persian Gulf War in 1990 -- was there first, even down to a husband who was not so much invisible as comical. England's Iron Lady celebrates her 80th birthday tonight with a guest list dominated by the adoring circle of powerful male admirers whose loyalty she rewarded with seats in the House of Lords when she was prime minister.

The former chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Lord Palumbo, who lunched with Mrs. T six months ago, told me recently what she said when he asked her if, given the intelligence at the time, she would have made the decision to invade Iraq. "I was a scientist before I was a politician, Peter," she told him carefully. "And as a scientist I know you need facts, evidence and proof -- and then you check, recheck and check again. The fact was that there were no facts, there was no evidence, and there was no proof. As a politician the most serious decision you can take is to commit your armed services to war from which they may not return."

Happy Birthday, Lady T -- and hail to you and all the women who've gone before! You won us the freedom to say that if opting for a Harriet Miers means we risk getting not just a sycophant but a stem-cell-banning, abortion-denying, Bible-thumping presidential sycophant, maybe we'd just as soon have a guy.

Boycott Southwest Airlines! Just another reason . . .

Aside from the fact that they treat their passengers slightly lower than cattle, here is another reason to choose another airline than Southwest Airlines when you make your travel plans.

Give this airline spokesperson a big "F" for assuming the media will not check up on what she said. Lying is never good, Merilee.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Southwest Airlines kicked a woman off one of its flights over a political message on her T-shirt, the airline confirmed Thursday, and published reports say the passenger will sue.

Lorrie Heasley, of Woodland, Wash., was asked to leave her flight from Los Angeles to Portland, Ore., Tuesday for wearing a T-shirt with pictures of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a phrase similar to the popular film title "Meet the Fockers."

A spokesman for Southwest Airlines told CNN that the airline used the "common sense" approach when they decided to escort Heasley from the plane in Reno, Nevada, during a stopover between Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.

The airline felt that the T-shirt was offensive and that other passengers would be outraged by it, the spokeswoman said, adding that the incident is about "decency."

"I have cousins in Iraq and other relatives going to war," Heasley told the Reno Gazette-Journal. "Here we are trying to free another country and I have to get off an airplane in midflight over a T-shirt. That's not freedom."

According to the airline spokeswoman, Heasley was asked to leave after she refused to cover up her T-shirt, an account that conflicts with Heasley's version in the Gazette-Journal.

Heasley told the newspaper that she agreed to cover her shirt with a sweatshirt, but it slipped as she slept. After she was ordered to wear her T-shirt inside-out or leave, she and her husband chose to leave, the paper said.

The 32-year-old lumber saleswoman said in the report that no one from Southwest said anything about the shirt while she waited near the gate at Los Angeles International Airport, nor did anyone mention the shirt as she boarded the aircraft.

Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Marilee McInnis told the Gazette-Journal that the airline's contract with the Federal Aviation Administration contains rules that say the airline will deny boarding to any customer whose conduct is offensive, abusive, disorderly or violent or for clothing that is "lewd, obscene, or patently offensive."

FAA spokesman Donn Walker told the newspaper that no federal rules exist on the subject.

"It's up to the airlines who they want to take and by what rules," he was quoted as saying. "The government just doesn't get into the business of what people wear on an aircraft."

You don't know what he's saying, but you love the way he says it

Harriet Miers. There is one side of me that thinks that Bush could have made a far worse choice. There is another side of me that thinks this is Bush at his worse: picking cronies who kiss his ass at ever turn and tells him HE IS SMART.

And then I find that George Will has a similar opinion. I think. Sometimes Will loves to pontificate so much that he is comical, but this is indeed an interesting column. I love his last line: "and this is why we need a conservative president?"

I think Bush's idiocy is started to grate even his friends.

Can This Nomination Be Justified?

By George F. Will

Wednesday, October 5, 2005; Page A23

Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption -- perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting -- should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due.

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks. The president's "argument" for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.

He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.

In addition, the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution. The forfeiture occurred March 27, 2002, when, in a private act betokening an uneasy conscience, he signed the McCain-Feingold law expanding government regulation of the timing, quantity and content of political speech. The day before the 2000 Iowa caucuses he was asked -- to ensure a considered response from him, he had been told in advance that he would be asked -- whether McCain-Feingold's core purposes are unconstitutional. He unhesitatingly said, "I agree." Asked if he thought presidents have a duty, pursuant to their oath to defend the Constitution, to make an independent judgment about the constitutionality of bills and to veto those he thinks unconstitutional, he briskly said, "I do."

It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.

The wisdom of presumptive opposition to Miers's confirmation flows from the fact that constitutional reasoning is a talent -- a skill acquired, as intellectual skills are, by years of practice sustained by intense interest. It is not usually acquired in the normal course of even a fine lawyer's career. The burden is on Miers to demonstrate such talents, and on senators to compel such a demonstration or reject the nomination.

Under the rubric of "diversity" -- nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses -- the president announced, surely without fathoming the implications, his belief in identity politics and its tawdry corollary, the idea of categorical representation. Identity politics holds that one's essential attributes are genetic, biological, ethnic or chromosomal -- that one's nature and understanding are decisively shaped by race, ethnicity or gender. Categorical representation holds that the interests of a group can be understood, empathized with and represented only by a member of that group.

The crowning absurdity of the president's wallowing in such nonsense is the obvious assumption that the Supreme Court is, like a legislature, an institution of representation. This from a president who, introducing Miers, deplored judges who "legislate from the bench."

Minutes after the president announced the nomination of his friend from Texas, another Texas friend, Robert Jordan, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was on Fox News proclaiming what he and, no doubt, the White House that probably enlisted him for advocacy, considered glad and relevant tidings: Miers, Jordan said, has been a victim. She has been, he said contentedly, "discriminated against" because of her gender.

Her victimization was not so severe that it prevented her from becoming the first female president of a Texas law firm as large as hers, president of the State Bar of Texas and a senior White House official. Still, playing the victim card clarified, as much as anything has so far done, her credentials, which are her chromosomes and their supposedly painful consequences. For this we need a conservative president?

Hello, God Calling. Cancel My Order.

Holy Cow. Heresy in the Catholic Church? From the London Times:

The Times October 05, 2005

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible

By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US.

Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing “intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.

But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be “historical”. At most, they say, they may contain “historical traces”.

The document shows how far the Catholic Church has come since the 17th century, when Galileo was condemned as a heretic for flouting a near-universal belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible by advocating the Copernican view of the solar system. Only a century ago, Pope Pius X condemned Modernist Catholic scholars who adapted historical-critical methods of analysing ancient literature to the Bible.

In the document, the bishops acknowledge their debt to biblical scholars. They say the Bible must be approached in the knowledge that it is “God’s word expressed in human language” and that proper acknowledgement should be given both to the word of God and its human dimensions.

They say the Church must offer the gospel in ways “appropriate to changing times, intelligible and attractive to our contemporaries”.

The Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.”

They go on to condemn fundamentalism for its “intransigent intolerance” and to warn of “significant dangers” involved in a fundamentalist approach.

“Such an approach is dangerous, for example, when people of one nation or group see in the Bible a mandate for their own superiority, and even consider themselves permitted by the Bible to use violence against others.”

Of the notorious anti-Jewish curse in Matthew 27:25, “His blood be on us and on our children”, a passage used to justify centuries of anti-Semitism, the bishops say these and other words must never be used again as a pretext to treat Jewish people with contempt. Describing this passage as an example of dramatic exaggeration, the bishops say they have had “tragic consequences” in encouraging hatred and persecution. “The attitudes and language of first-century quarrels between Jews and Jewish Christians should never again be emulated in relations between Jews and Christians.”

As examples of passages not to be taken literally, the bishops cite the early chapters of Genesis, comparing them with early creation legends from other cultures, especially from the ancient East. The bishops say it is clear that the primary purpose of these chapters was to provide religious teaching and that they could not be described as historical writing.

Similarly, they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which the writer describes the work of the risen Jesus, the death of the Beast and the wedding feast of Christ the Lamb.

The bishops say: “Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally. We should not expect to discover in this book details about the end of the world, about how many will be saved and about when the end will come.”

In their foreword to the teaching document, the two most senior Catholics of the land, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, and Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St Andrew’s and Edinburgh, explain its context.

They say people today are searching for what is worthwhile, what has real value, what can be trusted and what is really true.

The new teaching has been issued as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council document explaining the place of Scripture in revelation. In the past 40 years, Catholics have learnt more than ever before to cherish the Bible. “We have rediscovered the Bible as a precious treasure, both ancient and ever new.”

A Christian charity is sending a film about the Christmas story to every primary school in Britain after hearing of a young boy who asked his teacher why Mary and Joseph had named their baby after a swear word. The Breakout Trust raised £200,000 to make the 30-minute animated film, It’s a Boy. Steve Legg, head of the charity, said: “There are over 12 million children in the UK and only 756,000 of them go to church regularly.

That leaves a staggering number who are probably not receiving basic Christian teaching.”

BELIEVE IT OR NOT

UNTRUE

Genesis ii, 21-22

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man

Genesis iii, 16

God said to the woman [after she was beguiled by the serpent]: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”


Matthew xxvii, 25

The words of the crowd: “His blood be on us and on our children.”


Revelation xix,20

And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshipped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with brimstone.”


TRUE

Exodus iii, 14

God reveals himself to Moses as: “I am who I am.”


Leviticus xxvi,12

“I will be your God, and you shall be my people.”


Exodus xx,1-17

The Ten Commandments

Matthew v,7

The Sermon on the Mount

Mark viii,29

Peter declares Jesus to be the Christ

Luke i

The Virgin Birth

John xx,28

Proof of bodily resurrection

I think my list of untrue would be a little longer, but then this IS a start.