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If you go here, you can ask the White House (well, someone working there) a question. If you're really lucky, your question will be answered.
My question was "I heard recently that President Bush raises no crops or livestock on his ranch. That doesn't seem possible. How can something be a ranch if you don't raise anything on it. The same person told me that the President doesn't ride horses on his ranch because he is afraid of them. I can't believe that's true either. What does the President raise on his ranch? Is he really afraid of horses?'
Think I'll get an answer?
Other people's questions and the answers they got can be found here.
Vladimir Putin's new initiative to restructure Russia's government, though advertized as an anti-terrorism necessity, is nothing less than a naked anti-democray power grab. Under his proposal, regional governors, who are now popularly elected, would be nominated by the president and approved by regional parliaments. Putatively to create a single organization better capable of combatting terrorism, the plan would have the effect of making the leaders of the regional governments accountable to the central government, specifically the president himself, rather than to those they currently are selected by and serve. It's difficult to believe that in any other time or context such a move wouldn't be decried by an American administration as the move away from democracy that it is.
Though Colin Powell has spoken out against this plan, President Bush himself has remained mute. A large part of his after-the-fact justification for the invasion of Iraq was to bring democracy to that country and use it as a springboard to spread democracy throughout the middle east. The Bush administration repeatedly points proudly to the number of citizens registered to vote in Afghanistans upcoming elections (while ignoring that the number of registered voters exceeds by one or two million the number of eligible voters) as further evidence of its commitment to spreading democracy. The problem with pointing to Afghanistan and Iraq as its only successes, aside from the fact that democracy has yet to arrive in either nation, is that whatever successes, real or imagined, that have been achieved in those countries has been at the point of a gun. Pakistan, one of our "allies" in the war against terrorism, is no closer to democracy today than it was five years ago when Musharraf took power in a coup. The latest word is that he is now reneging on an earlier promise to relinquish his role as chief of the army. There is not even a discussion of democratization of Saudi Arabia.
We can expect nothing more from the President regarding Putin's power grab than we have already got from Powell. As with so many things, Bush's commitment to spreading democracy throughout the world consists of pretty words. His actions in this area have been primarily aimed at other goals and justified only later as democratization efforts.
Perhaps Hugo Chavez could share his thoughts on Bush's commitment to democracy.
Sorry the posting's been light. I've not been home the last couple of nights and it's been too busy at work to take a lunch, much less blog at lunch.
We've been having a beautiful Indian summer here in the bay area. The evenings have been warm enough to stay outside, the air's been pretty clear. Life's good. I went with a friend last night to Ben Lomond, to see a show at Henflings. We had a drink first at Ciao Bella, a short walk down the road. While we were there, the owner/bartender and two of his waitresses did a number on the small stage, a nicely choreographed dance, only mildly lewd. I'll have to go back for dinner some time and catch more of the show. The performance at Henfling's was disappointing, a singer accompanying himself on acoustic guitar with no trace of charisma or showmanship. It was a good night to be out with friends, though, so it was only mildly disappointing.
Tomorrow, back to the business this blog is about.
Sometimes, life resembles a Seinfeld episode.
Jerry: Well, I'll tell you what you've got here.
George: What?
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
After the 9/11 Commission issued its final report, there was a lot of analysis on the air, in print, and here in the blogosphere which seemed to largely reach the conclusion that the responsibility for our country not being better prepared to prevent or respond to such an attach fit about equally on the shoulders of the Bush and Clinton administrations. And I suppose that's a fair conclusion if you ignore a couple of things, notably the efforts of the Clinton administration in its last couple of years to develop intelligence on the whereabouts and plans of Osama and Al-Qaeda and devise a plan for dealing with them, the efforts of the outgoing Clinton administration to share what it had learned about Bin-Laden and why they believed he and Al Qaeda presented perhaps the greatest threat to our country's security, and the Bush Administration's all but total disregard for all they were told.
It's not that the Bushies didn't know about the threat; they didn't want to know. Infamously, the National Security briefing Condi Rice was prepared to give on 9/11 emphasized the threat to this nation from ballistic missiles and made no mention of Al-Qaeda. Infamously, the noted August briefing outlining the immediate threat posed by Al-Qaeda on our shores with hijacked planes apparently never reached the President's attention.
It is particularly worth noting these things in light of the VP's remarks last week about the risk we run if we vote wrong. I don't know why these people keep running on 9/11. It happened on their watch. It was their failure. It should be their shame. But instead of resigning in disgrace as they should have, they are asking for us to keep them in office, in recognition of their fine job.
Via Atrios, look here for a summary of the report's conclusions and its import.
This story from Alternet nicely summarizes both the contrast between Kerry's and Bush's images as a flip-flopper and a steadfast leader, respectively, and the truth about both, as well as exploring the roll the media had played in cementing those images.
If you've read this blog for awhile, you know my feelings about the competence of the media. When they run stories about Kerry flip-flopping or Bush being resolute I don't feel it betrays a media bias as much as a media laziness. In an interview on "The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart" a couple months back, Wolf Blitzer admitted that the media, in the run-up to the Irag war, got caught up in "group-think." There's nothing I've seen of media behavior to believe there was anything unusual about that situation, other than the stakes for the US and the world. That was the big test for the news media. They failed. They fail similar, smaller tests daily and, as the coverage of campaign 2004 has demonstrated so far, they fail more often than not.
It's apparently too hard for a journalist to look at something a candidate says and analyze it for truthfulness. It's too hard for a journalist to listen to Bush and Cheney and their ilk repeat day after day that Kerry's a flip-flopper because he "voted for the appropriations bill before he voted against it" and put what they're saying in context. It's apparently too nuanced and sophisticated an issue for most reporters to understand and pass on to the public the extra bit of information that Bush theatened to veto the bill before he signed it.
Sometimes the press comes through. After Zell Miller went alien at the RNC, several news organizations were happy to point out that Miller was critisizing Kerry for saying the same thing Bush had, that our troops in Iraq are an occupying force. But then they pat themselves on the back and smiling their smug grins, having done the right thing for once, go back to their hackish lazy ways.
It's not a liberal or conservative media bias we have to fear. It's a media that's too lazy to do more than read press releases and pass them off, without verification, as news.
I guess the guy pulling the hair in this picture would be a "manly-man" to the governator.
Addressing abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said "Has it been harmful to our country? Yes. Is it something that has to be corrected? Yes. Does it rank up there with chopping off someone's head off (sic) on television? It doesn't. It doesn't."
Well, yes and no. If you're the person getting your head lopped off, whether on television or not, I suppose a little abuse, hell, even a lot of abuse, might be a preferred alternative. So, from the victim's perspective, compared to things that really aren't relevant to the abuse, the abuse really ain't so bad.
Let's look at it another way, though, okay? On the one hand, you have terrorists, whose stated aim is to create terror, without any real regard for their standing in world opinion, doing terrible things. On the other hand you have the most powerful nation on earth, trying to portray itself as the bringer of morality and other good things to the backward middle east, abusing prisoners. Oh yeah, don't forget that one of the good things we were bringing to Iraq (justification for the war version 4.1) was to provide the Iraqis with relief from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers.
In that perspective, to whose reputation and credibility has more harm been done?
That was attention grabbing, wasn't it?
This story in the Washington Post describes a suggestion passed by a representative of the Taliban regime to the State Department in 1998 that, in the wake of US missile strikes in Afghanistan, US credibility in the Islamic world would improve if Congress could force Clinton to resign. Now, you may recall that at about that time there was a move afoot in Congress to do just that. Congress went so far as to impeach Big Bill, over something like lying under oath about having an affair, but come on, how plausible is that? A nation as powerful and a people as sophisticated as ours would impeach a president over stains on a blue dress? Yeah, right. We don't even impeach Presidents for lying to Congress and the American people about the reason for going to war, for lying to Congress and the American people about the cost of Medicare "reform" bills. A little sex scandal? It is to laugh.
No, clearly what was at play here was a Republican-Taliban-Al Qaeda plot to force Clinton out, weakening the Democrats to the point where a Republican candidate would win the Presidential election and ignore Al Qaeda until it could carry out a devastating attack on America's psyche, whereupon the President would pretend to try to capture Osama Bin Laden, just long enough to set up a war in Iraq for the enrichment of US oil companies and to create a wonderful cash cow for Halliburton. The Taliban government would have to be ousted, but that would just be for a little while. Once the US invaded Iraq we could go back to ignoring Afghanistan and the Taliban could creep back into power.
The impeachment plot failed, so it took a rigged Supreme Court decision to put a Republican in office instead, but the result was the same.
Did this really happen? Well, I just made most of it up, so probably not. Does that make any difference? What do you think? How's that Al-Qaeda-9/11-Saddam Hussein link developing? Is any of this any less plausible than that a young college graduate would enlist in the Navy so he could get sent to Vietnam so he could get some combat decorations which would enable him thirty some years later to run for president as a war hero?
If you find yourself in Healdsburg (a charming town in the north end of Sonoma County) stop by Sandra Erickson Fine Art Gallery at 324 Healdsburg Avenue. The art ranges from whimsical to sublime and Ms. Erickson is an incredibly gracious and knowledgeable proprietor.
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