California proposition recommendations

Post-election, I'm adding the results, in this color. Numbers at the secretary of state's site.

I know everyone in California is just waiting for my opinions on the propositions before filling in their absentee ballots. (Everyone else can skip this post: by California standards it’s a remarkably un-wacky election, so find another state to point at and laugh, go away, nothing to see here).

I'd also recommend checking out the SF Bay Guardian's endorsements. And there's also the LA Weekly.

1A & 65 are both about the fiscal relationship between state and local governments, and are therefore important and very dull. Fortunately, 65 has been abandoned, and rightly so--it looks like a mess. 1A looks ok to me, mostly protecting local gov finances from more raids by the state and from unfunded mandates, but it’s supported by Governor Ahnuuld, so I’m suspicious and reserve the right to change my mind. (Later: and I have changed my mind, for the reasons the Bay Guardian sets out).
No on 1A & 65.
1A easily passed--Arnold supported it, 65 failed.

Proposition 59 — Guarantees the right of access to state and local government information.
Yes.
Easily passed.

Proposition 60A — Requires that the proceeds from the sale of surplus state property be used to pay off bonded indebtedness.
It's bad budgeting practice to dedicate a revenue source to a completely unrelated purpose. No.
Yes.

Proposition 61 — A $750-million bond issue for constructing, expanding and equipping children’s hospitals.
I’m opposed to bonds on philosophical as well as fiscal grounds. They’re an expensive way of funding something, they’re regressive in that they provide their purchasers an undeserved tax deduction, and place tax obligations on future citizens to pay them off--taxation without representation. No.
Yes.

60 & 62 are evil-twin initiatives and have to be considered together. If both pass, the one that passes with fewest votes won’t be enacted. These are yet more attempts to “reform” primaries. Primaries are in an odd position, constitutionally speaking: they’re slightly less official than other elections because you’re voting to fill a position not in government, but in a political party, which is essentially a voluntary association. The party hacks reminded us of this when they refused to accept two previous initiatives in favor of open primaries, but they still wanted the taxpayers to pay for primaries. After the last round of reapportionment, districts in California (and most of the country) are so solidly partisan that the primary is the only election that matters, which favors ideologues rather than centrists, and leaves you with a choice of whack-jobs in November. And choice is not the word, since there isn't a single competitive race for the US House of Reps in all of California this election. Prop. 62 is an answer to that problem, but not the right answer. It would have a non-partisan (yeah, right) primary, with the 2 top vote-getters facing each other in November. In practice you’d still wind up with a D and an R, with rare exceptions--but no Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom. Even if you don’t vote for candidates in those parties, don’t you feel better about the democratic process just knowing they’re there? In my case, I have a little litmus test that I apply to voting for offices (governor, lite governor, attorney general, judges) that might have something to do with death penalty decisions: I am against the death penalty and feel morally obligated not to vote for supporters of it in those positions. I don't consider that unreasonable. In 20 years of voting in this state, I have never been able to vote for a Democrat for any of those offices applying that standard. Without third-party options, I won't vote. A choice of 2 is no choice. There are better ways to deal with the problems 62 addresses: 1) reform the redistricting process to create more competitive races; 2) if the worry is that a third-party candidate will act as a spoiler, change the November elections, adding, for example, an instant-check-off system. 62 pretends to remove political parties from the election process, but as long as candidates require money and lots of it in order to be viable, the parties will always sneak back in. Prop. 60 enshrines the status quo in which all parties make it onto the final ballot; it is a fairly cynical ploy to preserve party power, but (sigh) vote for it, and against 62.
To my surprise and great relief, that's just what happened, even with the governor's meaty finger on the scales.

Proposition 63 — Levies an additional 1% tax on the income of millionaires to finance expanded mental health services.
Ignore what I said re Prop 60A about bad budgeting. Increasing mental health funding is good, increasing progressivity in taxation is good, so what the hell. Yes.
Yes.

Proposition 64 — Limits an individual’s right to sue under unfair business competition laws to situations in which the individual has suffered actual injury or financial loss because of an unfair practice.
There are definitely cases of lawyers using threats of these lawsuits to blackmail small businesses. Reform is needed. This isn’t it. It would leave enforcement of laws against unfair business practices to the government, which can’t be trusted with it (but has nothing to do with environmental laws, public health, etc as the fear-mongers who wrote the no argument claim. I wish someone would enforce a minimum standard of honesty in these arguments; it’s especially annoying when the legitimate arguments are lost behind the alarmist rhetoric). No on 64.
Yes. Everyone hates a lawsuit.

Proposition 66 — Amends the three-strikes law to require that a crime be a violent or serious felony in order to qualify as a strike and imposes more severe penalties for sexual crimes against children.
The Jean Valjean protection initiative. You have to love how they threw in the sexual crimes against children thing as red meat to balance out the part making 3 Strikes more rational (but not actually rational; that would be too...rational). Some of this would be enacted retroactively, but nowhere near as many people would be released as the No people in the pamphlet, or indeed the governor, have been shamelessly claiming. And while the opposition talk about rapists and murderers being released, by definition anybody affected will have served their time for those crimes and only be in prison now for a non-violent crime. Yes on 66.
No, the public fell for the lies. At least we'll be safe from pizza thieves.

Proposition 67 — Adds a 3% surcharge on telephone usage to provide additional money for hospital emergency services and training.
Ignore what I said about ignoring what I said about bad budgeting. Telephone calls have nothing to do with ERs. No.
No.

Proposition 68 — Requires Indian tribes that own casinos to contribute 25% of their slot machine revenue to state and local governments. If they refuse, 11 card rooms and five horse-racing tracks would gain the right to install 30,000 slots and would pay 33%, or roughly $1 billion a year, primarily to local government.
This is a first, I believe: blackmail enshrined in a proposition. Call this the “You sure got a nice casino, it would sure be a shame if something was to happen to it” initiative. No.
No on both gambling initiatives. I can't tell if we hate gambling, or just Indians.

Proposition 69 — Requires felons to provide a sample of their DNA for storage in a law enforcement database, and authorizes local authorities to take such specimens from individuals arrested on suspicion of rape or murder.
Creepy. It’s even retroactive, applies to some non-felons, to juveniles... DNA tells many things about you that you may not want the government to know, and as the human genome is deciphered, the amount of info will increase. No on 69.
Yes.

Proposition 70 — Grants Indian tribes unlimited casino expansion rights on their land. In return, the tribes would pay the state 8.84% of their net profit.
Unlimited? I think not.
No.

Proposition 71 — Establishes a constitutional right to perform stem-cell research. Authorizes a bond issue of up to $3 billion to finance such research.
Gesture politics at its most gesturey. It will be federal legislation that decides this thing. I like a good gesture as much as the next lefty, but there’s that bond thing, not only because I oppose them philosophically, but because medical research should not be funded by this sort of popularity contest. Including for-profit medical research, I might add--the LA Times says venture capitalists have put up $10 million in support of 71. My advice: don’t vote against it, but don’t vote for it either.
Yes, by nearly 60%.

Proposition 72 — Requires employers to provide healthcare insurance for uninsured workers.
Yes, of course.
No, the fear-mongering about jobs leaving the state worked, paid for mostly by Wal-Mart and the restaurant lobby, which are obviously businesses that can't leave the state. The consolation is that Schwarzenegger will not be able to eat in a restaurant without having his food spit in by the staff.

A post with no politics at all

The South Park people are having trouble with their new movie Team America, because the ratings people want to give them an NC-17 because of a scene of explicit sex between two marionettes.

A 72-year old Malaysian man is getting married for the 53rd time, remarrying his first wife. Sheesh.

For science-as-art, check out the Visions of Science awards, photos of scientific stuff, like this picture of a brain aneurism, with a platinum wire inserted to keep it from spreading.

Substance will always trump spin

Britain’s Channel 4 just aired cockpit footage from an American fighter that bombed civilians in Fallujah in April. He asked mission control whether he should “take them out.” The Indy points out: “At no point during the exchange between the pilot and controllers does anyone ask whether the Iraqis are armed or posing a threat.”

Thought you’d like to see the amusing rhetoric in the email sent by the Bush-Cheney campaign to supporters--and my cat:

“Even as one of the nation’s best trial lawyers, Edwards could not explain the inexplicable - the deficiencies of Kerry’s record. Edwards failed as a credible advocate for John Kerry last night and Dick Cheney proved that substance will always trump spin. There’s no evidence that John Kerry has any convictions - despite Edwards’ best attempt at political spin. Every time Edwards had an opportunity to explain John Kerry’s record to the American people, he chose to attack the Vice President, and his low moment came 40 minutes into the debate when a befuddled-looking John Edwards latched onto Halliburton - a political attack proven false by the nonpartisan FactCheck.org.”

Befuddled-looking. Love it. So the argument here is that Edwards, I guess because he was a defense lawyer, was supposed to be “defending” Kerry, and it was simply a dirty trick to question Cheney’s record. The article at FactCheck.org is about Kerry ads overstating the significance of the fact that Cheney continues to receive more per year from Halliburton than his VP salary, an issue Edwards never brought up, so the reference is beside the point. Still, they wouldn’t be Republicans if they didn’t leap to the defense of an evil multinational corporation.

The secret energy task force--how could Edwards not mention Cheney’s secret energy task force?

Veep debate blogging: What’s wrong with a little flip flop from time to time?

Transcript.

I can’t really tell who “won,” I’m not good at judging those things. Edwards seemed a little glib and shallow. Cheney made no effort to make himself likable, seemed defensive to me, but he might have looked quietly authoritative to people (undecided and/or ignorant voters) who don’t know better. A friend said he looked like he spent 90 minutes trying to take a poop. Wouldn’t it be funny if he really has just been constipated all these years? It would explain a lot.

Certainly, like Bush last week, he looked like he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to have to explain himself or answer questions, felt it was beneath him.

Also, Cheney’s head is twice as big as Edwards’s.

They both stuck closely to just one or two themes, probably too closely, since if you don’t buy the argument, for example, that Iraq and 9/11 aren’t linked, the theme of Bush-Cheney being misleading falls flat.

Cheney said Kerry & Edwards have a very limited view of how to use US force. Like that’s a bad thing.

Cheney cited the El Salvador elections of the 1980s as a model.

Edwards says under Kerry, “we’re going to go back to the proud tradition of the United States of America and presidents of the United States of America for the last 50 to 75 years. First, we’re going to actually tell the American people the truth.” There’s a tradition of telling the American people the truth?

Cheney: If they can’t stand up to Howard Dean, how can they stand up to Al Qaida? Yeah, but Howard Dean is scarier (kidding, kidding).

Edwards keeps mentioning Kerry’s name in a question where the rules required him not to. Cheney doesn’t have that problem, and it occurs to me that he doesn’t really respect Bush that much.

Similarly, Edwards was able to refer to Mary Cheney, and the Dickster replied by giving up his turn. I foresee an awkward Thanksgiving.

Gwen Ifill asks, “What’s wrong with a little flip flop from time to time?” Well, as Wonkette would say... no, I won’t go there.

He saw a threat

Dubya is often at his most entertaining not when he’s extemporizing but when he’s on autopilot. Attacking Kerry’s 1991 vote against the first Gulf War, Bush: “In 1991, when my dad was president, he saw a threat, and that was that Saddam Hussein was going to overrun Kuwait.” Gee, what do you think was the first sign of that threat? Oh yeah, when Saddam actually overran Kuwait.

Russian state tv’s (that’s all of them, now) coverage of the Bush-Kerry debate edited out the two candidates’ criticisms of Putin.

The US will give money to something called the Independent Women’s Forum (Lynne Cheney used to be on its board) to train Iraqi women in democratic skills. The IWF’s website says it was “established to combat the women-as-victims, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism.” In the US, that is. The website (iwf.org) seems to be down, but you can use Google’s caches.

Patrick Cockburn points out in a story behind a pay barrier in the Indy that while the US is so gosh-darned proud of capturing Samarra, this is the 3rd time it has done so. Personally I’m assuming that this is just more guerilla warfare stuff, with the insurgents having simply faded away to fight another day. The US conquest of Samarra is thus another “catastrophic success.” Cockburn: “The aim of the bombing is to prove to American voters that their army is on the offensive, but without substantially increasing US casualties.”

“Operation Days of Penitence,” the Israeli invasion of Gaza, launched after two Israeli children were killed by rockets, has so far taken the lives of 22 Palestinian children, because 2 wrongs don’t make a right, but 22 do.

Tippecanoe and Hamid Karzai too

Michael Kostiw will not take the CIA position after all. What he shoplifted turns out not to be lingerie, darn it, but bacon. Maybe he just liked the feel of it when he slipped it down the front of his pants. So the petty theft of a package of delicious bacon now disqualifies someone from a career undermining Latin American democracies, assassinating Fidel Castro and falsifying evidence to support plans to invade Muslim nations.

Speaking of bacon shoved into pants (some segues work better than others), Karzai is still on track to be “elected” president by a country 99.9999% of which he is afraid to set foot on. However today, as a BBC headline puts it, “Karzai Braves Rally Outside Kabul.” In fact, his first campaign event outside Kabul. He bravely travelled 60 miles to Ghazni, bravely accompanied only by a fleet of helicopters, fighter jets, shitloads of soldiers and bodyguards etc. Pretty much like Bush, really.

Out of the business he loved most--bringing about nuclear Armageddon

The pope has beatified the last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Karl I, who approved the use of gas warfare in World War I. Karl I is not to be confused with Austro-Californian Emperor Ahnuuld I, who banned smoking in prisons but likes a good cigar.
(Update: the miracle Karl performed: healed a Brazilian nun’s varicose veins. Almost makes up for the whole poison gas thing. The nun was praying to him in 1960. Why a Brazilian nun was praying to an Austrian emperor, I do not know.)

My cat is on the Bush-Cheney email list. Be warned: they’re recruiting R’s to go door to door on the Oct. 16-17 weekend. So you have plenty of time to dig a mote, fill water balloons, and... I was going to make a joke about showing them your assault rifle, because Republicans love a good assault rifle, but I won’t because neither my cat nor I wish to be visited by the Secret Service.

On CNN, Condi Rice spun Bush’s debate comment that A.Q. Khan had been “brought to justice”: “I think we all know that A.Q. Khan was a particular kind of figure in Pakistani lore, a national hero... A.Q. Khan is out of business and he is out of the business that he loved most. And if you don’t think that his national humiliation is justice for what he did, I think it is. He’s nationally humiliated.” OK, it’s not George-Bush-during-the-debates nationally humiliated, but it’s still nationally humiliated I suppose.

Since the debate, GeeDubya has been going on and on and on about Kerry’s ill-chosen phrase “global test,” a phrase combining the two things Chimpy hates most: tests, and the world.

Does pork really go over that well in Afghanistan?

More on Afghan elections. This will come as a shocker: Karzai’s opponents accuse the US ambassador of acting as his campaign manager. The Times (reprinted here): “In the past week, the US Ambassador has appeared three times at Mr Karzai’s side at the opening of US-funded reconstruction projects, some of which have not even been completed. ...After two years of doling out meagre reconstruction funds, the Bush Administration has pumped in an extra $ 1.76 billion this election year.” The irony is that Karzai was already a favorite, but the landslide Saturday is going to wind up making him look less legitimate because it will be seen as resulting from American meddling.

Under Bush’s faith-based marriage promotion program, the gov is hiring Moonies and funding Moonie programs. Moonie marriages, of course, are mass marriages between strangers, but those unions produce children free of the taint of original sin, so, uh, good deal.

Afghan elections just as silly as ours: let freedom reign

The Sunday Times notes: “Karzai cancelled his last election broadcast because of security concerns although Kabul Radio City, where it was due to be recorded, is less than a mile from the palace and across the road from the headquarters of the Nato led peacekeeping force.” “[T]he 18 candidates include a vodka swilling warlord who likes to crush his enemies with tanks but is running on a human rights platform; a poet returning from exile in Paris; a woman paediatrician and one man who submitted an old black-and-white passport photograph remarkably similar to the only known image of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.” And it’s still a better choice than Bush v. Kerry.

Something called International Foundation for Election Systems is passing out picture-only election literature described thus by the Sunday Times: “a series of pictures begins with a map of Afghanistan with a Kalashnikov at its centre and scenes of devastation. Then pictures of people voting are followed by images of Afghanistan with a sun in the centre radiating out to roads, hospitals, schools and wheat fields.” Yes, by all means encourage magical thinking about the electoral process. And, um, wheat? (If anyone comes across this, or indeed any Afghan election lit., please email me.)

It notes the problems in preventing voter fraud by putting indelible ink on people’s fingers when so many are amputees because of landmines.

All the bad guys all gone now

The level of lying is increasing. The US is claiming that in Samarra, 125 rebels were killed and no civilians. None. Zero. They’re not even bothering to come up with half-plausible lies anymore. Area hospitals of course tell a different story. The Iraqi interior minister also tells a story, a children’s story to judge by the vocabulary: “We cleaned up the city from all the bad guys and terrorists.”

David Avery, running the Afghan presidential elections for the UN, says that there will be many irregularities, but not enough to undercut their legitimacy or affect the outcome. Of course the elections and the irregularities haven’t happened yet, so Avery is obviously prepared to overlook any amount of violence or chicanery.

Yes, I used the word chicanery. Everybody should use the word chicanery once in their lifetime.

When the Germans occupied France, they set up an internment camp. It was kept going secretly until 1949, evidently mostly housing foreigners it would have been embarrassing to release because to do so would be to admit that French guards had collaborated with the Germans. So the French government effectively kept collaborating with Nazis who were no longer there because they had been defeated 4 years before. Shows real dedication to the fine art of collaboration.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza (the 5,934th invasion, I believe) is being called Operation Days of Penitence, which just seems obnoxious to me.

Tim Dunlop is right: the voices that wouldn’t let Bush finish were not in an earpiece, they were the voices in his chimp-like head.

Pictures of cemeteries are not representative of the new Afghanistan

The UN is funding PR advisers to teach the candidates in the Afghan presidential elections the finer points of spin-doctoring.

Gen. Dostum, a whisky-drinking mujahideen leader whose Northern Alliance forces helped defeat the Taliban, had to be dissuaded from posing for a campaign poster among the graves of "martyrs" who died fighting the Taliban.

Tactfully, they pointed out that he might look for a more positive image. “Pictures of cemeteries are not representative of the new Afghanistan,” Mr Marie said. The general eventually agreed to pose at a building site instead.

The UN, according to the Observer, has 115,000 election officials in Afghanistan, with 5,000 satellite phones, 1,150 jeeps and 4 helicopters. Also donkeys: some of the ballot boxes will be sent by donkey. Meanwhile, in Iraq, they have 8 people working on the elections. Not that the 115,000 officials etc aren’t working in the service of a farce, of course. It would help keep everyone’s understanding of this focused if the media used language more carefully. For example, The Observer says that “More than 10 million voters have registered,” but since there are fewer than 10 million eligible voters in the whole country, so that statement is false, disregarding the large and unknown level of fraud.

Badly chosen BBC headline: “Nigeria Spearheads Polio Campaign.” Glad to find that it didn’t involve actual spears. Given the obscurantism in some of the Muslim states, this would not be out of the question. This time President Obasanjo himself personally administered the vaccine to the daughter of the governor of Kano, one of the states that had previously banned the vaccine.

Porter Goss has picked as executive director of the CIA a guy, Michael Kostiw, who was an oil company lobbyist--natch--after he was forced out of the CIA in 1981 for shoplifting. Well, for getting caught shoplifting, anyway. Hopefully the Post won’t stop investigating until it can tell us exactly what he shoplifted, but somehow I think we all know it was women’s underwear.
(Update: pink women’s underwear, no doubt in my mind)

Bush and Kerry agreed that nuclear proliferation was an important issue. In fact, Bush said US spending had gone up by I think he said 30%. Turns out, that includes the cost of getting rid of the US’s own unwanted nuclear materials. This means he came prepared with a fake number, on an issue he claimed to consider really important.

The Spanish government is moving forward with plans to allow gay marriage and gay adoption. The Vatican calls this a “sad step.” Yes, and we should listen because the Catholic Church’s record of social policy in Spain is so good:

Never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant

A 1977 patent for the comb-over (don’t miss the drawings), via the 2004 IgNobel prizes.

Contrariwise, a French Muslim schoolgirl shaved her head to protest the headscarf ban, just as I suggested.

Bush keeps making fun of Kerry’s plan to call a summit on Iraq: “I’ve never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant, or bring a terrorist to justice.” Then open a history book, you ignoramus:

We'll be bombing ya tamarrah, Samarrah

Bill Maher says the FCC is upset about the televising of the debates, because they showed the emperor without clothes.

DO AS WE SAY... : Two BBC website stories: 1) “US pushes to take Iraq rebel town: More than 100 people die as US and Iraqi forces launch a major attack to regain control of the town of Samarra.” 2) “US urges Israel to show restraint: Washington calls on Israel to limit its offensive in the Gaza Strip, as tanks move deep into militant strongholds.”

The Samarra operation’s raison d’être is to allow it to participate in the demonstration elections (a phrase coined by leftists in the 1980s for the hilariously fake elections Reagan ordered be held in El Salvador and Honduras, which I’m happy to see coming back into widespread use) in January. In the debates, Shrub castigated Kerry for allegedly setting a deadline for leaving Iraq, but his Iraq policy is being distorted to pull off a meaningless “election.” The descriptions of the Samarra campaign by American military types suggests not just a counter-insurgency, but a coup: the WaPo quotes an Army spokesmodel: “We recognized some time ago the police chief, the city council and the mayor were ineffective.” By ineffective, he means not enforcing American diktats.

September the 11th been very, very good to me

The debate has brought out the urge of many people to illustrate it or write parodies.

Augusto Pinochet may finally be taken down, not for disappearing hundreds or thousands of members of the opposition, but for not paying his taxes. Well, if it’s good enough for Al Capone...

Putin now also plans to take control of the body that appoints, disciplines and removes judges.

The House Ethics Committee admonished (from the Latin word admonere, meaning to moderately chide someone with no sense of shame) Tom DeLay for having tried to bribe (I’m using the term in its legal sense) Rep. Nick Smith, offering to support his son’s run for Congress if he voted for the Medicare drug bill. DeLay issued a statement noting that the committee hadn’t previously addressed such conduct, so how could he possibly have known that bribery was unethical?

DeLay is also proud of the House vote to overturn the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, because it’s more important for DC residents to have a gun than a vote.

Impertinent

The Official God FAQ.

Responding to the new video of hostage Ken Bigley, Comical Allawi called the kidnapping “impertinent.” That’ll put ‘em in their place. But what he really dislikes is the fact that the Western media air the videos.

Bush: “The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.” Actually, Khan was pardoned after making a confession that he did it all, without anyone in the government knowing anything about it and...and here’s the part everyone always leaves out...he was allowed to keep all the money he made!

Evidently, watching the debate on PBS as I did was the equivalent of listening to the Kennedy-Nixon debate on radio. Where my weak impression (which is why I didn’t declare a winner in the last post) was that Kerry had probably lost the debate, everyone else whose opinion I’ve since read online watched it on C-SPAN, which evidently often ran a split-screen, and they thought Bush looked irritated, the down-market version of Gore’s 2000 debate performance (like Gore, he seems to feel his opponent is beneath him or that he is above having to debate when he is self-evidently superior). The problem is, most of America didn’t watch it on C-SPAN. The other question is how many of the oh-so-important undecided voters watched the whole debate. As I said, Bush came with only 30 minutes of material, and so looked less and less competent as the debate went on.
(Update: Actually, this lovely two-minute clip of Bush squirming and rolling his eyes while Kerry was speaking comes from ABC.)

Bush-Kerry debate blogging: it’s hard work, but I’ll try not to send mexed missages

Kerry: “I’ve never wilted in my life.” I think I’ll leave the response to that line to Wonkette.

Kerry says the biggest danger in the world is nuclear proliferation, and although he makes a good case for it and I don’t disagree, we all know he just wanted to force Bush to try to pronounce the phrase. We know his problems with nukyular, and proliferation is at least two syllables beyond Shrub’s comfort zone (he did try “vociferously” at one point, but he didn’t use it correctly)(to be fair, Kerry early on warned about “radical Islamic Muslims”).

Notably, Bush tried to reshape that issue, as if nuclear proliferation only mattered in terms of terrorists getting their hands on nukes.

The guys controlling the cameras (Fox, actually) did occasionally show reaction shots in violation of the agreement between the campaigns. But not enough. Kerry started one response, “the president just said something extraordinarily revealing.” I’d have loved to see the look on GeeDubya’s face, since saying something revealing was the last thing he wanted to do. The revealing thing was “the enemy attacked us” as an excuse for invading Iraq; Kerry was going after Bush for conflating Al Qaida and Iraq, or, as Kerry phrased it, copying Bush’s annoying tendency to personalize foreign policy, Osama and Saddam. Bush’s response: “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us.” Well, I’m reassured.

Bush came to the 90-minute debate with enough prepared material for 30 minutes. He wasn’t just on message, he was on repeat. No doubt someone is doing a word count, but he kept saying “it’s hard work” about various things [Update: 11 times], presumably to indicate that he doesn’t spend all his time clearing brush in Crawford and leaving the work to other people. It just occurred to me that other people were barely mentioned. Powell was, but shouldn’t Kerry have been pounding on Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc?

Another phrase Bush used over and over and over was “mixed messages” (or mexed missages, in one case). Evidently you can’t lead if you give mixed messages. For someone who speaks as if he has no first language, he places a great deal of faith in the power of words. The suggestion seems to be that other countries, and American troops, are so unsophisticated that any deviation from the script will demoralize. “Not in front of the children” is the message.

Joe Lockhart is spinning that Shrub had an “annoyed smirk,” whatever that might be.

Rich cultural heritages

It was only a matter of time: www.kerryhatersforkerry.com

The trial on sex charges of the majority of adult males on Pitcairn Island, a place so far from anything that no plane can reach it, has begun, and I’m disappointed. I’d always heard that the descendants of the Bounty mutineers spoke with 18th-century accents, but hadn’t heard any actually speak until the BBC news yesterday. The women interviewed had only a mild accent, vaguely Australiany, not at all how I imagined Pitt the Younger and Daniel Defoe speaking. Pitcairn, which already has too few people to be really viable as an economy (or, indeed, a gene-pool, if you catch my drift), will become a ghost island if the men are convicted. They insist that having sex with 11-year old girls is part of their rich cultural heritage.

While the Italian government has been issuing non-denials about paying ransom for 2 women hostages in Iraq. The ransom was reputed to be one million American dollars, so the US has had some cultural influence on Iraq after all. Italian politicians, newspapers and polls have all said, So what? You’d think a country with a rich cultural heritage of kidnappings would know so what.

Uplifting accounts with good news messages

There are times when I despair of this country. The R’s try to sneak a provision into the omnibus intelligence restructuring bill to allow any non-citizen, without trial or hearing, to be turned over to countries that are likely to (or asked to) torture them. And in the House Judiciary Committee, the vote was along party lines. A vote in favor of torture, in favor of violating international laws and American due process, and the vote is determined by no higher principle than partisan freaking politics. And in the new favorite tactic of the right, American courts would be deprived of the ability to overturn the rules governing “rendition.” And just to ensure there isn’t a constitutional protection unviolated, it will apply retroactively. And people could be sent to any country we feel like sending them to, whether they were born there or had ever set foot there in their lives.

WaPo headline: “U.S. Effort Aims to Improve Opinions About Iraq Conflict.” By, among other things, censoring reports about the increasing violence. Congress won’t even get them anymore. I assume the headline is sarcastic, or something. The Pentagon will also pay for Iraqi-Americans and the CPA officials who did such a wonderful job getting Iraq back on its feet, to deliver “uplifting accounts with good news messages” at military bases--here in the US, not in Iraq, they’re not complete idiots--where soldiers will be encouraged to attend “voluntarily” and to refrain from asking, “So if Iraq is so great now, when are you moving back?”

Chain of Command

One of the rules in the 32 pages of rules for tomorrow’s debate is that when one candidate is speaking, the camera will not show the other candidate--looking at his watch like Bush the Elder, sighing like Al Gore, sweating like Nixon. Of course there is no reason for the networks to abide by this agreement between the two candidates.

Seymour Hersh will be on the Daily Show tonight. I finished his book Chain of Command a couple of days ago, but have held off writing about it, because while it is a pretty good if uneven book, it didn’t add that much to what I already knew. Of course I’m a blogger and by definition know everything, and had already read the New Yorker articles that form the basis of much of the book, and that might be the same for many of my readers as well. I also wasn’t thrilled with all the good quotes being anonymous.

Hersh doesn’t go into much detail about the actual torture of prisoners. In fact, given the importance of the pictures in giving this story the traction it has had, it’s interesting that the book has no pictures. Hersh’s main purpose is to demonstrate the culpability of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc in the torture of prisoners from Guantanamo through Abu Ghraib. If you’re not convinced, definitely read the book. He also throws in material, some of it a little cursory, on many of the failures of intelligence and wrong-headed foreign policy of the Bush admin, adding up to a thesis that they tend to see what they want to see. In his last sentences, Hersh wonders whether Bush is actually a big ol’ liar:

“But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there. A more plausible explanation is that words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real. It is a terrifying possibility.”

It was funny to read that, since I’ve been speculating recently myself (in the lead paragraphs of this and this post)
about Bush’s relationship to the words he uses, if any.

Bush’s relationship to logic and evidence is another matter. During the 2000 campaign, those of us who had contempt for the man’s intellectual capacities assumed that he understood how ignorant and incompetent he was. It was really the only reassuring assumption to make, since it meant he would leave the decisions to smarter people. As Colin Powell has found out, this has not been the case, because Bush--this is what we failed to understand--thinks of himself as wise. Facts are secondary to him.

I didn’t really understand this until early in 2002. A month or so after the State of the Union address in which he referred to the “axis of evil,” he was in South Korea. I saw him on television talking about something he’d just heard, which was that in North Korea there was a peace museum in which was displayed an ax with which a NK soldier had killed two American soldiers. In a peace museum, was Bush’s point. “No wonder I think they’re evil,” he said. That sentence involved a reversal of deductive reasoning: he was pleased to be able to show evidence in support of what he already believed. In normal logic, the evidence comes first. But for Bush, facts are, as Ronald Reagan once said, stupid things. A real man derives his understanding of people and events from his “character” rather than his intellect. Bush can, he believes, look into Putin’s eyes and understand his soul.