It Looks Like This (sorry, no ice cream) 

We Like The Moon

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Nah, you don't need to thank me.

They could always sell crack

There's an article in this morning's Santa Rosa Press Democrat that addresses the difficulties community groups are encountering in replacing the revenue they had gained in previous years from the sale of fireworks, which are now banned in Santa Rosa (a little background - after a grass fire started by the illegal use of legally sold fireworks burned down a home last June, the city council finally (such an event had been foreseen (duh!) for years) voted to ban the sale and use of fireworks in the city. A group, spearheaded by fireworks manufacturers and the various groups that have relied on the sale of fireworks for most of their money, gathered enough signatures to bring the matter to the voters, who affirmed the council decision in the March election.).

The point of the story is that these groups now have to work harder and longer to make as much money as they did in a few days of fireworks sales in the past. Now, I don't doubt that most, if not all of these groups do wonderful things for the community, but I am constantly impressed by the fact that when it comes to fund-raising, so many of them care only about how much they can make how fast, with no consideration to the costs to the community of their fund-raising activities (a disclaimer - many of the groups that lost this particular money stream responded in a positive manner and moved on, with no whining, to other, less destructive means). This is similar to the griping we heard from cheerleader groups in past years when fund-raising car washes were curtailed because they weren't containing the run-off, which flowed into storm drains, creeks, etc., causing environmental damage. The basic plaint then was, I'm sorry about the fish and all, but this is about us. So it has been with the firework ban. If the prime consideration is how much you can make how fast, with no thought to the effect on the community, why not just sell crack? Oh yeah; that's illegal. I wonder though, is that all that's restraining them?

Let the Repubs Hang Themselves

I got an email from the Kerry campaign today asking me to view an ad (I had a link to the ad here, but the link no longer takes you there) for the Bush Campaign, then write to the Bush campaign expressing my outrage. The ad features footage of various Democrats, such as Al Gore, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, and Kerry, raising their voices in anger over the way Bush/Cheney have been running the country, along with a very brief clip from the entry in the MoveOn ad campaign that featured Adolph Hitler.

There are two reasons that I'm not going to do what the Kerry campaign asks of me. One is because that is the kind of chickenshit move Ed Gillespie and the RNC rely on when the Dems run ads that supposedly offend the Republicans. If your opponent runs a classless or offensive ad, let the voters figure that out on their own and react as they see appropriate. Quit insulting our intelligence.

My other reason is because I think it is actually an effective ad for the Democrats. Anybody who isn't outraged by now hasn't been paying attention and I'm happy to see that kind of passion from our side. And although I've never seen the whole Hitler/moveon entry, the snippet used in the ad, with a brief reference to war crimes in the forties, will naturally bring to mind in contemporary voters Abu Ghraib.

I don't see that this ad makes the Republicans look better than the Dems. I think it makes them look weak and passive.

So Glad They've Returned a Civil Tone to the Nation's Capitol

Really no further need for comment:

"Cheney, on a campaign swing through the Midwest battleground states of Iowa and Michigan, hurled the "F-word" at Leahy during a conversation between the two on Tuesday, according to congressional aides.

Asked if he cursed the Vermont senator, Cheney told the Fox News program, the Cavuto Report, "Probably."

But he said "No" when asked whether he regretted it.

"I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it," Cheney said."

The Hidden Costs of War

As Mathey Yglesias points out in TAPPED, one of the hidden and unforseen costs of our war in Iraq is our nation's, and the world's, severly diminished capability to respond to legitimate unfolding humanitarian crises around the world. This was illustrated by the Bush Administation's belated and half-hearted efforts at intervention in Liberia last year. It is less publicly being illustrated by our continuing failure to intervene in the Congo, where estimates of loss of civilian life in a genocidal civil war that has gone on several years now runs to the millions. In western Sudan a similar scenario is unfolding, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced and at least tens of thousands already killed by a lethal combination of drought and government supported militias.

Our State Department it seems would sincerely like to do something to intervene to stop the bloodshed in both countries, but has little at its disposal outside of appeals to the UN and other nations to bring their resources to bear. Our military is overextended in Iraq; we have no option of dropping a significant military force in either of these other countries, not even as part of a multi-national effort. Sadly, due largely to our leaders' arrogance in the run-up to the Iraq war, we have spent whatever moral capital we had built up over the last century, so even our appeals to do what is morally correct are now too easily disregarded by a world that finds it too inconvenient and expensive to try to stave off another Rwanda. Ironically, the significant exception is France, which has expended capital and troops in an effort to bring peace, or at least stanch the bloodshed in Africa.

At the end of the second world war the world said never again when faced with the horrors of the nazis previously inconceivable murder of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and others. The world was reminded just ten years ago how easy it is to let it happen again, and the world, in words, renewed that pledge; never again. It's happening again now. And once again, when faced with a chance to do the right thing, to redeem humanity, the world is failing. And tragically, though I believe the American people would really like to not have this happen again, to stand up and stop the murder, we once again find ourselves on the sideline, doing nothing. This may someday be seen as the greatest and most tragic cost of the war in Iraq.

The Arson Squad Strikes Again

Although the A's don't really have a major league bullpen, Macha and Beane seem to think that by pretending they do they can fool the other major league teams. So far they only seem to be fooling themselves. Today was Mulder's turn to hand a 1-run lead over to the bullpen and watch it blow up.

The World's Dumbest Manager Strikes Again

At 4:30 this afternoon I emailed a friend of mine in Missouri, a Saint Louis Cards fan, "we can't lose again tonight (well, we could...Hudson could take a slim lead into the 8th or 9th and be replaced by Rhodes who could then blow up."

The fact that it ended up being Mecir and not Rhodes who blew the lead doesn't make Macha any less an idiot.

Tortured Logic

A very nice, though depressing, juxtaposition of what our President says and what he wishes for us to do.

Reagan

I was going to try to lay off this one, but I can resist no longer. I had largely resisted reading about Reagan for the last week, primarily because I was there in the eighties, I have my memories about what his presidency meant to me, and I had no desire to revisit that time. Then I read this week's Newsweek, and found myself struck by the disconnect between the sum of what the man did as President and the impression people have of him as a President. The sub heading in the feature story says he became one of our "greatest Presidents," but nothing in the article, or in the other articles accompanying it, and certainly not in my memory, supports that. In fact, reading the article, I find myself amazed that the nation survived being lead by a man with such an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

"He invented stories and then believed them. He thought trees produced pollution, confusing carbon dioxide with carbon monoxide. Welfare was bad because of a mysterious Chicago 'welfare queen' who drove a Cadillac while on relief. And on and on. His fictions were real to him, which was both touching and somewhat terrifying. According to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, Colin Powell, then the national-security adviser, used to cringe when Reagan would trot out his "little green men" theory, the idea being that extraterrestrial life might one day attack us and force the nations of the globe to get along. A fine sentiment, if more than a little disconcerting coming from a president with control of the nuclear codes."

This review, remember, comes in an article describing him as a great president, by a writer clearly in Reagan's thrall. And there's more. Annual deficits hit previously unimagined levels while he was in office and the National debt tripled under Reagan. And he was, at best, indifferent to the poor.

"Though Reagan was a soft touch for individual stories of pain or misfortune, the poor fared badly in the 1980s, and too many Americans of color felt left out. Seemingly oblivious, the president prided himself on his belief that he was without prejudice, often telling an anecdote about how his father would refuse to stay in a hotel that refused to accept Jews or blacks. But that story did not translate into compassion for those left out of the American Dream Reagan so cherished. In truth, he was probably as conflicted as many white Americans on questions of race and generosity. Because he did not hate, he could not see how his ambivalence (about preferences, about spending on the poor, about police misconduct or homelessness) could appear to others as indifference???or, worse, outright hostility. There is no question, however, that it did appear precisely that way to millions of Americans, and Reagan of all people should have known that appearances can be much the same as reality. He should have done better by those on the fringes of his fabled 'shining city on a hill.' For them, stirring words were not enough."

And then there was his foreign policy. People can and will debate forever just how instrumental Reagan was in contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I don't doubt he deserves some credit, but I am unable to give him more credit, as his accolytes are wont to do, than Gorbachev. Even if Reagan deserves all the credit, though, the collapse of the Soviet Union would still rank as his only significant foreign policy success. Let's look at what else happened on his watch.

The bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. If, as many have proclaimed, America had become ripe for a 9/11 type attack because of the impression that we would not fight, our misadventure in Lebanon contributed to this as much as anything other than Vietnam. When our young men died, we cut and ran. Ironically, that probably was the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do was to have been there in the first place, with no clear mission. Hmmm. Got a sense of deja vu there.

Iraq. By now the photos of a younger but no less vile Donald Rumsfeld shaking hand with Saddam (if you know what I mean) have become almost iconic. The stories that George Bush repeatedly has told about Saddam being a mass murderer who has slaughtered thousands of his own people and used chemical weapons on his own people and in combat are true. And much of this happened while Ronald Reagan was president, while George H.W. Bush was Vice-President (most of the rest of such incidents happened when Bush 41 was President), and while Reagan's administration was cozying up to Saddam, with full knowledge of his brutal crimes, because of our animosity toward Iran.

Ah, Iran. Perhaps the single most memorable accomplishment of Reagan's presidency was the "neat" scam whereby we sold arms to Iran to finance the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. I cannot adequately describe the visceral reaction I had when I first heard this. Our relationship with Iran was dicey, to say the least. They were, if not our enemies, as close as you can get to that status. Along with many other Americans I was still sickened by the memories of the hostages held by the Iranians until the eve of Reagan's inauguration. And these were the people we chose to sell arms to in order to finance another illegal venture in Central America.

Central America. In El Salvador and Guatemala we found ourselves backing repressive right wing regimes that were friendly to our business interests and hostile to "leftist" insurgents. This has been our pattern in Latin America for over a century. It's just that while Reagan was President we were particularly busy in a relatively small area. And those we supported ended up, as is so often the case, on the wrong side of history. The governments of those countries, and the militias supporting them relocated, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of people. Four American nuns and Archbishop Romero have come to symbolize the murders in El Salvador, because a government that could slay such people was seen as particularly vile, as the government was. And the Reagan administration unapologetically supported it. There were no such iconic murders in Honduras, but the US supported regime there was no less brutal.

And finally, Nicaragua, the other end of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Soviet backed Sandinistas took power in 1979 and they became one of Reagan's favorite bogeymen. in language that foreshadowed the supposed ability of Saddam to launch a rocket attack against the US, Reagan actually expressed concern that the Sandinistas were less than a day away from the beaches of Texas. Congress, considerably less overwrought than the President about this putative threat, forbade the use of US funds to support the Contra rebels, who were primarily reconstituted Somoza supporters. That's when the scheme to support the Contras though the proceeds of arms sales was hatched. At best, this scheme was designed to skirt the law. At worst, it violated the law and I don't think any honest man doubts that Reagan knew about and authorized it. It was, and should have been pursued as, an impeachable offence.

You get the drift. I am not only unconvinced that he was among our greatest presidents, I am mystified as to why anybody would believe that of him. And I haven't even mentioned AIDS.

That Must be Some Powerful Koolaid

In yesterday's Press Democrat letter section we get this:

Just the beginning

EDITOR: I'm sure the liberals in "la la" land were spitting out their lattes on the steering wheels of their SUVs when they heard that weapons of mass destruction laced with sarin gas were found in Iraq. Drat, now they are going to have to change their "Bush lied" screaming rhetoric. Naw, probably not.

Now I'm sure this desperate bunch will say Bush skipped his daughter's graduation to personally go to Iraq to plant them himself. This is just the beginning of the weapons to be found, but you won't be hearing it from the leftist media. The search will take time and this great United States will prevail.

ROY D. THROOP

Guerneville

So these people, or at least Mr. Throop, are so deeply in Chimpy's thrall that they believe a single shell with traces of sarin, which all credible experts believe is left over from Saddam's pre-Gulf War One stockpile, vindicates the pre-Gulf War Two administration claims about WMD. That is the most pitiful thing I've ever seen. I'm sorry, but what an idiot.