I don’t have a cameraphone so you’re gonna have to take my word for it, but I’m blogging to you live from The Radio City Music Hall at the 2006 NFL draft. The big story in the crowd is Houston passing up Reggie Bush. There’s an overrepresentitive amount of Jets fans begging to draft him.
Archive for April, 2006
Oh yes, I’m a fan (my team doesn’t even pick in the first round!)
I think it’s seriously screwy to suggest that the anthem of our country is somehow robbed of its authenticity if its in another language. The only important issue is - do the concepts remain the same, do the values hold true? That’s all that matters. You could translate the national anthem into Klingon, if it still says that the flag was still there? Mission accomplished.
By the way, I recommend that all Americans once in their live experience Fourth of July along the Charles River in Boston. The Star Spangled Banner punctuated with actual cannons is not a sight to be missed.
Factcheck has a checklist of what to watch out for should an indictment come for Karl Rove.
The problem starts with the commander-in-chief
Terrorists killed more than 14,500 people in 11,000 attacks across the globe last year, the U.S. State Department said in its annual report on terrorism.
Fifty-six of those killed were Americans, the report said. Three thousand of the deaths were attributable to 360 suicide bombings. There were 25,000 people wounded and 35,000 people kidnapped, the report said.
More Americans have died as a result of terrorism under George W. Bush than any other President in American history.
I was also taken down by the denial of service attack that took out Instapundit and a bunch of other blogs…
I keep seeing the press, pulling for their man Bush as public opinion pulls him down further into the morass (the supposedly odious Bill Clinton never had sub-40 second term approval numbers like Bush does) and seriously wondering if appointing a new chief of staff and press secretary will do the task of rejuvenating a failed presidency.
Are they serious?
The Bush mistake is a product not of meaningless staffing, but of policy failure. The war of choice that has kiled over 2,400 of our people and let a terrorist killer of 3,000 run free, the negligent response to a natural disaster that killed 1,200, the decision to privatize one of the strongest and most worthwhile social programs our nation has, cutting taxes for oil tycoons who bring home millions while the rest of the unwashed masses pays through the nose at the pump while the next generation is given massive deficits to pay.
It is such a clear sign that the Beltway press corpse is a dumb, dumb beast that they think giving Tony Snow a job can change any of that.
Of course, in no time if this pans out, we’ll hear how Rove was simply not in the inner circle, not a major player in the White House, just not a figure of consequence…
Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, is expected to decide in the next two to three weeks whether to bring perjury charges against Karl Rove, the powerful adviser to President Bush, lawyers involved in the case said Thursday.
With the completion of Mr. Rove’s fifth appearance before the grand jury on Wednesday, Mr. Fitzgerald is now believed to have assembled all of the facts necessary to determine whether to seek an indictment of Mr. Rove or drop the case.
I’m no expert on any of the whole Plame thing, but five times in front of a grand jury having to clarify your story and go over stories again and again… it sure doesn’t sound good. My guess: perjury, obstruction of justice. Who knows, though?
White teens accused of brutal racist attack
Two white teenagers severely beat and sodomized a 16-year-old Hispanic boy who they believed had tried to kiss a 12-year-old white girl at a party, authorities said.
The attackers forced the boy out of the house party, beat him and sodomized him with a metal pipe, shouting epithets “associated with being Hispanic,” said Lt. John Martin with the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.
They then poured bleach over the boy, apparently to destroy DNA evidence and left him for dead, authorities said. He wasn’t discovered until Sunday, a day after the attack.
The facts on the Matt Drudge initiated blogger book pissing match
As of this morning, for Reynolds An Army of Davids (February 2006), Bookscan reports 1716 retail sales and 2609 discount sales, for a total of 4325.
As of this morning, for Armstrong and Kos s Crashing the Gate (March 2006), Bookscan reports 2598 retail sales and 1804 discount sales, for a total of 4402.
In other words, despite the fact that it s been available for four fewer weeks, Kos and Armstrong s book has now clocked Bookscan sales in excess of Reynolds . Notably, several hundred more full-price sales. This is leaving aside the fact that Kos and Armstrong s book is currently at #40 on Amazon, whereas Reynolds is at #801.
And Glenn Greenwald’s book is currently #1 on Amazon.
How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok
He just can’t bring himself to condemn the right-wing base’s hate of Hispanics (case in point, Michelle Malkin).
President Bush generally favors plans to give millions of illegal immigrants a chance at U.S. citizenship without leaving the country, but does not want to be more publicly supportive because of opposition among conservative House Republicans, according to senators who attended a recent White House meeting.
Who have the right flank of the RNC locked arms with?
Extremists Declare ‘Open Season’ on Immigrants: Hispanics Target of Incitement and Violence takes a detailed look at how white supremacists, racist skinheads and others identifying with far-right extremist groups are using the national debate over immigration reform as a means to encourage likeminded racists to speak out, or even commit violent acts against immigrants. The full report was issued today at a special session at the ADL Shana Amy Glass National Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C.
“It is time to shine the spotlight on those who have seized upon the immigration debate as an opportunity to advance their agenda of hate, bigotry and white supremacy,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “This report reminds us that there is a direct connection between the national policy debate and the atmosphere surrounding the daily lives of immigrants. Extremist groups are seeking to exploit the flow of foreign workers into this country to spread a message of xenophobia, to promote hateful stereotypes and to incite bigotry and violence against Hispanics, regardless of their status as citizens.”
The extreme fringe of the anti-immigration movement includes white supremacist groups, anti-Hispanic hate groups masquerading as immigration reform groups, and vigilante border patrol groups who have conducted armed patrols along the borders of the United States.
I just started reading Eric Boehlert’s “Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush” (sent to me by the publisher), which comes at an interesting time as Tony Snow makes the lateral shift from Fox News over to the White House. The overwhelming thought is that Snow is there to “fight back” against the press somehow, but in fact I think the danger is in Snow basically chatting it up with his friends. It was bad enough the way that the odiously lying Scott McClellan was called “honest” by members of the press corps (John Roberts of CNN and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post), what now when it’s one of them up there? Carl Cameron will always be a joke, but they’re going to have add whipped cream to his softballs now that his former Fox pal Snow is up at the podium.
Lapdogs : How the Press Rolled Over for BushAlan Colmes confronted Michael Steele about his made up story of having Oreo cookies thrown at him. It’s been downgraded from pelting to a cookie or two on the ground. What a joke.
Karl Rove met with his lawyer and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald this morning, according to CNN…
UPDATE: Rove is going in front of the grand jury for the fifth time.
Of course, it’s Monopoly: Superman Returns Edition.
Donald Rumsfeld makes a trip to the scene of the crime.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to show U.S. support for Iraq’s new leadership on Wednesday, making a surprise visit to Baghdad just days after Shi’ite politician Jawad al-Maliki was chosen as prime minister.
Rumsfeld swooped into the capital aboard a military cargo plane for his first visit to Iraq in 2006.
Wonder if he went in to personally supervise any torture sessions?
Is apparently going so well that Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have enough leisure time while “on the run” to record audio and video tapes.
While at the same time whipping up fear about — I kid you not — “sex based cults”. Yet another perversion of our Food and Drug Administration.
From the new Wired
Al Gore? Five and a half years after leaving the political stage, only the fourth man in US history to win the popular vote for president without being inaugurated, Gore has deftly remade himself from an object of pity into a fearless environmental crusader. The new Gore is bent on fixing what he calls the “climate crisis” through a combination of public awareness, federal action, and good old-fashioned capitalism. He’s traveling the globe, delivering a slide show that, by his own estimate, he’s given more than a thousand times over the years. His one-man campaign is chronicled in a new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which made Gore the unlikely darling of the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will be released on May 26 by Paramount Classics. He has also written a forthcoming companion volume of the same name, his first book on the subject since the 1992 campaign tome Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.
Along the way, Gore has become a neo-green entrepreneur, taking his messianic faith in the power of technology to stop global warming and applying it to an ecofriendly investment firm. The company, Generation Investment Management, which he cofounded nearly two years ago, puts money into businesses that are positioned to capitalize on the carbon-constrained economy Gore and his partners see coming in the near future.
A clear justification for improved US-China relations.
Jason Zengerle, one of The New Republic’s bloggers and the magazine’s “senior editor”, writes this unfortunate reply to my post from yesterday
I understand that Atrios and Willis are angry at TNR simply for the fact that we chose to run a piece by Ponnuru, but that, to me at least, *is* crazy.
I agree that the title of Ponnuru’s new book is regrettable, but unless the book (which I haven’t yet read) is a complete departure from his previous work, I seriously doubt it will bear any resemblance to something by Coulter.
Mattwilshire is right (at least I hope he’s right) that we wouldn’t run a piece by Coulter, but Ponnuru’s no Coulter. He is a serious guy, and the article we ran by him was a serious piece. What’s more, his article was an explicit critique of TNR’s own line on Roe and Republicans. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons we ran it.
I realize that sort of thing–affording space to an ideological opponent to make his case–is an alien concept to some of these bloggers, but that’s part of the problem I have with them.
Way to be clueless. It isn’t that I’m upset that TNR is running something from an idealogical opponent in their publication, in fact I’m all in favor of contrarianism in order to make your argument stronger. The issue at hand here is that TNR didn’t just pick a conservative to write a column in their publication. They’ve picked Ponnuru, who explicitly labels the Democratic Party as “The Party Of Death”. He says “too many of today s Democrats have become part of a ‘party of death’”. The blurb from Regnery on the book talks about “How the party of death a coalition of special interests ranging from Planned Parenthood to Hollywood came to own the Democratic Party”, “How liberals use animal rights to displace human rights”, “Ponnuru s shocking exposé shows just how extreme the Party of Death has become as they seek to destroy every inconvenient life, demand fealty to their radical agenda, and punish anyone who defies them.”
That isn’t reasoned political discourse. It isn’t contrarian political thought. It’s an out and out smear of the Democratic Party, it’s members, and its ideals. A publication like The New Republic out to be hanging this kind of thinking out to dry.
Instead, they gave him a column.
Zengerle also wonders why so much attention is put on TNR for a publication bleeding subscribers. Well, I personally get much more policy and idealogical insight from The Prospect, but its writers just don’t seem to get as much push in the establishment media as representative of liberalism as TNR does (see FAIR’s study of TNR’s outsized influence).
(Perhaps not surprisingly, Zengerle has written about the challenge to Joe Lieberman. The article’s title? “Lamonsters”.)
Also, Democrats coming to take your baby if the dingoes don’t get there first.
