BartBlog

Cragg Hines, The Houston Chronicle, May 15, 2007

If you liked Don Imus, you’re going to love Leslie Southwick.

Fortunately, Imus has not been nominated to a seat on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But Southwick has been.

Southwick is yet another example of President Bush’s determined effort to give a seat on this important legal fulcrum to a person with a troubling record on civil rights.

The 5th Circuit is made up of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. According to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, it is the federal judicial circuit with the highest percentage of minority residents.

So it seems axiomatic that the 5th Circuit does not need a judge who appeared untroubled when a white government employe referred to an African-American co-worker as “a good ole nigger.”

As a member of the Mississippi Court of Appeals, Southwick was in the 5-4 majority that voted to uphold the reinstatement of the white worker.

That was such an egregious decision that it was overturned unanimously — repeat, unanimously — by the Mississippi Supreme Court — repeat, Mississippi.

It’s interesting to note that the state hearing officer in the reinstatement case contended that the patently offensive phrase was used by the white employee as an equivalent of “teacher’s pet.”

Huh?

Read More Here

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 17, 2007

PARIS – The French can be very, well, French when it comes to the personal lives of their leaders. They take affairs, illegitimate children and tumultuous marriages in stride. But they suddenly turn traditional when it comes to the role of the first lady. They do not like the idea of Nicolas Sarkozy entertaining world leaders alone at the Élysée Palace. It is not comme il faut.

Maybe that’s why this country is so mesmerized with the question of whether the beautiful Cécilia Sarkozy, a former Schiaparelli model who was for years her husband’s influential political adviser, is going to serve as the chatelaine of the Élysée, or run off again with a lover. No one seems sure if she will bolt, leaving the entertaining duties to Sarko’s mother, an elegant lawyer, or agree to play a limited role at the palace.

“We have a hard time imagining an intermittent first lady at the Élysée,” sniffed Le Temps, a daily newspaper, online.

Cécilia was missing in action during the final weeks of her husband’s campaign.

“I don’t see myself as first lady,” the 49-year-old said. “That bores me.”

Bound by strict privacy laws, and cozy with the elite ruling class, the French press shies away from printing the skinny on relationships, even though the skinny French public loves gossiping on the subject.

Trying to fathom what is going on with power couples here is like watching a French movie — scenes brimming with emotion and ambiguity.

Read More Here

Christopher Hitchens, Slate Magazine, May 16, 2007

Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post, May 14, 2007

Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) is never going to win any popularity contests among his party’s liberal base — a fact he seems decidedly unconcerned about despite his 2006 Democratic primary loss to Ned Lamont.

Not only has Lieberman endorsed Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.) — one of Democrats’ biggest targets in the 2008 cycle — but he’s planning to co-host a fundraiser for her on June 21 in Washington, D.C.

The event, which will be held in a Capitol Hill location still to be determined, will feature Lieberman and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) — a very rare bipartisan fundraiser. Attendees are being asked to raise $3,000; $2,000 would come in the form of a political action committee donation while the other $1,000 would be a personal contribution, according to an electronic invite for the fundraiser obtained today by The Fix.

“Let’s try to make this a bi-partisan tour de force,” reads the invite.

“Senator Specter approached Senator Collins with the idea of doing a joint fundraising event with Senator Lieberman,” said Collins spokeswoman Jen Burita. “Both senators are colleagues with whom she works well and good friends, so we thought it was a great idea.”

Lieberman’s willingness to work openly for Collins’s reelection will surely not sit well with Democratic strategists who want Rep. Tom Allen (D) to oust the two-term incumbent. For Lieberman, his support of Collins is payback. She was one of a handful of senators who campaigned for him in the general election following his loss in the Democratic primary to Lamont. (He ran for and won reelection as an independent.) Lieberman and Collins also serve together as the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the Senate.

Read More Here

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, May 14, 2007

Nothing divides Democrats like international trade policy. That became clear last week, when the announcement of a deal on trade between Democratic leaders and the Bush administration caused many party activists to accuse the leadership of selling out.

The furor subsided a bit as details about the deal emerged: the Democrats got significant concessions from the Bushies, while effectively giving a go-ahead to only two minor free trade agreements (Peru and Panama). But the Democrats remain sharply divided between those who believe that globalization is driving down the wages of many U.S. workers, and those who believe that making and honoring international trade agreements is an essential part of governing responsibly.

What makes this divide so agonizing is that both sides are right.

Fears that low-wage competition is driving down U.S. wages have a real basis in both theory and fact. When we import labor-intensive manufactured goods from the third world instead of making them here, the result is reduced demand for less-educated American workers, which leads in turn to lower wages for these workers. And no, cheap consumer goods at Wal-Mart aren’t adequate compensation.

So imports from the third world, although they make the United States as a whole richer, make tens of millions of Americans poorer. How much poorer? In the mid-1990s a number of economists, myself included, crunched the numbers and concluded that the depressing effects of imports on the wages of less-educated Americans were modest, not more than a few percent.

But that may have changed. We’re buying a lot more from third-world countries today than we did a dozen years ago, and the largest increases have come in imports from Mexico, where wages are only about 11 percent of the U.S. level, and China, where wages are only 3 percent of the U.S. level. Trade still isn’t the main source of rising economic inequality, but it’s a bigger factor than it was.

So there is a dark side to globalization. The question, however, is what to do about it.

Read More Here

I recently skimmed the writing of a few far left libbies on the net. They snapped and snarled, verbally dragging republicans through muck and mire, accusing them, among other things, of being Nazis.
They missed the target.
The Nazis in this country work for the IRS. These people are above the law: they can seize property and freeze assets without due process, bring citizens to a special “tax court” where the tax payer must prove his innocence or pay large sums in lieu of jail time, and, if they want to, show up in the middle of the night and throw people out of their homes. I want most fervently to see the IRS gone and its people out looking for honest work.
Interested? Are you interested in getting the IRS out of your life; no more 1040’s? Would you like to receive your whole paycheck with no taxes taken out? Would you like to see April 15 become just another beautiful spring day? Silly questions, eh?
The answer to the IRS bureaucracy, and their taking money out of your paycheck before you even see it, is the national sales tax initiative, also called the national consumption tax and the FairTax. With the FairTax in place, the IRS will be out of your life. If you have ever had problems with the IRS Nazis, you will find this very exciting stuff.
Go to www.FairTax.org and enjoy.

Grimmy

Alarmeorgasmique.wmv (2.3MB)

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 13, 2007

LONDON – Gordon Brown’s smile does not look at home on his face. It sits there uneasily, like an uninvited guest at a party, until his features can resume their comfortably dour grooves.

The brooding Scot ended his decade-long run as a hefty Heathcliff to Tony Blair’s chatty Cathy, stepping out of the shadows Friday with visible relief to begin a campaign for prime minister that he has already won.

Grumpy Gordon is an enigma compared with Captain Showbiz, as the glib Mr. Blair is called by a morning TV host here. The 56-year-old son of a Presbyterian minister, with hooded eyes and frugal charm, will be hard pressed to compete on the European stage with Iron Frau Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, dubbed “Thatcher without petticoats.”

Mr. Brown’s school friends came on TV to say he was more fun than he looked. “He enjoys a good glass of wine,” said his pal Bill Campbell.

The chancellor has been striving to move beyond his reputation as a man so obsessed with the budget that he wouldn’t even share the details in advance with Tony Blair. He traded the green eyeshade for pastel ties. He told a women’s magazine that he liked the rock band Arctic Monkeys, but later couldn’t name any of their songs.

Mr. Brown was considered the uncool half of the Cool Britannia team that swept into power on a wave of Champagne, celebrities and Cherie Blair’s New Age guru. But thanks to his role as W.’s interlocutor and translator, Tony Blair is uncool, too.

The first boomer prime minister got a blazing start in trying to make Britain more modern and tolerant. But he fell in with an American crowd of bullies who were turning back the clock on modernity and tolerance, and Tony abused Britons’ trust.

Read More Here

The New York Times, May 13, 2007

Of course you didn’t watch the first Republican presidential debate on MSNBC. Even the party’s most loyal base didn’t abandon Fox News, where Bill O’Reilly, interviewing the already overexposed George Tenet, drew far more viewers. Yet the few telling video scraps that entered the 24/7 mediasphere did turn the event into an instant “Saturday Night Live” parody without “SNL” having to lift a finger. The row of 10 middle-aged white candidates, David Letterman said, looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

Since then, panicked Republicans have been either blaming the “Let’s Make a Deal” debate format or praying for salvation-by-celebrity in the form of another middle-aged white guy who might enter the race, Fred Thompson. They don’t seem to get that there is not another major brand in the country — not Wal-Mart, not G.E., not even Denny’s nowadays — that would try to sell a mass product with such a demographically homogeneous sales force. And that’s only half the problem. The other half is that the Republicans don’t have a product to sell. Aside from tax cuts and a wall on the Mexican border, the only issue that energized the presidential contenders was Ronald Reagan. The debate’s most animated moments by far came as they clamored to lip-sync his “optimism,” his “morning in America,” his “shining city on the hill” and even, in a bizarre John McCain moment out of a Chucky movie, his grin.

The candidates mentioned Reagan’s name 19 times, the current White House occupant’s once. Much as the Republicans hope that the Gipper can still be a panacea for all their political ills, so they want to believe that if only President Bush would just go away and take his rock-bottom approval rating and equally unpopular war with him, all of their problems would be solved. But it could be argued that the Iraq fiasco, disastrous to American interests as it is, actually masks the magnitude of the destruction this presidency has visited both on the country in general and the G.O.P. in particular.

By my rough, conservative calculation — feel free to add — there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously — an all-time record.

Wrongdoing of this magnitude does not happen by accident, but it is not necessarily instigated by a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy. When corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing philosophy. That’s the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it.

Read More Here

Mary Ann Akers, The Washington Post, May 10, 2007

Here in the nation’s capital, irony sometimes takes a heaping spoonful of steroids and facts become stranger than fiction.

The latest example? Take a guess at who’s headlining an upcoming political training seminar offering “explicit discussions of ethics.”

The answer is Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader who resigned last year after being indicted on campaign finance abuses in Texas and who remains under federal scrutiny in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

DeLay, a.k.a. “the Hammer,” is set to kick off a May 31 Campaigns & Elections seminar, where he will hawk his book, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” and talk political strategy … and, who knows, maybe even ethics. (After all, Michael Scanlon, a former top DeLay aide who pleaded guilty in the Abramoff lobbying investigation, delivered his graduate thesis on congressional ethics last year; so why shouldn’t the Hammer be able to join in the absurdity of it all?)

A witty, lampoony e-mail invitation from Campaigns & Elections reads: “Due to strong language (e.g. going negative, oppo, scandal) and adult situations (e.g. networking, politics, education) the Campaigns & Elections political training seminar is not intended for everyone. Some programming will include former Congressman and DCCC Chairman Vic Fazio, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, political strategist Joe Trippi and gratuitous depictions of successful campaigns, explicit discussions of ethics and an extreme passion for politics.”

Read More Here

Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin, The Examiner, May 11, 2007

“All the stars are aligned against the Republicans in 2008,” Bob Novak told the assembled masses at the Americans for Tax Reform’s Wednesday meeting, causing a subtle gasp to leak out of the conservative faithful.

“You’re breaking our rule on being cheerful, Bob,” ATR’s Grover Norquist responded.

“Well, I am the Prince of Darkness,” Novak said, jokingly.

And Novak is embracing his nickname: His latest book, due out in July, is titled, “The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Reporting in Washington.”

Novak also weighed in on several potential ’08 candidates:

Read More Here

Oh No! Not Chocolate!
 

Have you looked at the cost of chocolate lately? The 14 oz bag of chocolate chips no longer exists. It is now an 11.5 oz bag. This is essentially an 18% jump in price.

Why?

Sudden demand created by wild-eyed American women stuffing chips into their mouths with both hands?

No.

A gaggle of South American dictators tired of being ignored and so leveling vast coca plantations in preparation for nuclear power plants?

Nope.

Look around you at the store. It’s not just chocolate. Everything is going up in price (or being put in smaller packages – same thing).

Why?

It’s called inflation, children.

Our federal government is still growing and needs more money to finance itself, this without raising taxes, so it’s printing more dollars. And the more dollars there are, the less each dollar is worth. This causes chocolate to go up in price.

Attention women of America! This has gotten serious – you are now going to have to pay more for your chocolate!

Something must be done!

The answer? Simple. Tie the income of the federal government directly to the economy.

This way, when the economy suffers, bureaucrats and elected officials will feel pain, and when people prosper, they prosper.

“All well and good”, you may say, “but exactly how does one directly tie the federal government to the economy?” Again, simple. Get rid of the income taxes and nstitute a consumption tax so that people pay taxes when they spend money, not when they earn it.

If government gets its income from individual expenditures rather than from money torn out of paychecks, Washington D.C. will overnight become very interested in folks doing well.

A federal government tied directly to consumers will automatically begin to cut waste and reduce spending so that people will have more money to spend.

As the fortunes of individuals and families improve, the health of the federal government will improve in direct proportion. Our representatives will suddenly be wide awake and will push to kill inflation, stop deficit spending, and prevent recession.

Something must be done. The cost of chocolate and the emotional health of those who love it are at stake!

Please actively spread the word about the consumption tax (also called the FairTax) as this will stop inflation, make for a small, efficient, transparent federal government, and, most importantly, stabilize the chocolate markets.

Grimgold

Wayne Madsen Report, May 10, 2007

WMR has received a third well-placed confirmation that Vice President Dick Cheney, while CEO of Halliburton, was a client of the escort service of DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey. In addition, one of Cheney’s closest military advisers and friends was also a client of the DC Madam’s Pamela Martin & Associates escort service. Cheney used the escort service while he was a part time resident of the posh Ballantrae section of McLean, Virginia.

After intense pressure from the White House and Disney executives, ABC News killed the DC Madam client story after having been given exclusive access to Palfrey’s ten years’ of phone call records.

Cheney made an unscheduled visit to Iraq during his tour of the Middle East.

Read More Here

Phyllis Schlafly, The Eagle Forum, May 9, 2007

What was the motive behind 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui’s killing of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech? Why was he consumed with hate, resentment and bitterness?

Cho was an English Department major and senior. As a frequent lecturer on college campuses, I have discovered that the English Departments are often the weirdest and/or the most leftwing.

A look at the websites of Virginia Tech’s English Department and of its professors reveals their mindset. We don’t yet know which courses Cho took, but it could have been any of these.

Did he take Professor Bernice L. Hausman’s English 5454 called “Studies in Theory: Representing Female Bodies”? The titles of the assigned readings include “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” “The Comparative Anatomy of Hottentot Women in Europe, 1815-1817,” “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace,” “The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture,” and “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.”

One of the assignments in this course (worth 10 percent of the total grade) is to “choose one day in which they dress and comport themselves in a manner either more masculine or more feminine than they would normally.”

Is this really a course taught by the English Department? It sounds like just the thing to confuse an already mixed-up kid.

Read More Here