Email from a friend who will remain unnamed:

The house goes dem (and maybe the senate - George Allen? Really?), Rummy resigns. What’s next? Do I get my 40 acres?

When a cartoon makes the Joint Chiefs of Staff angry, you know some truth telling is going on.

I am becoming convinced that this administration is just mean-spirited:

From the Washington Post:

Last month’s budget-cutting bill would save $50 billion over five years by imposing new fees on Medicaid recipients, trimming the food stamp rolls, squeezing student lenders and cutting federal child support enforcement.

Let me get this straight…

We don’t want the kid to get child support. If he manages to get it, we are going to make sure that he has a diffuclt time getting fed. If he manages to escape this fate and gets to college, we will try to bankrupt him. And if he lives through all of this, we are going to try to kill him in his golden years, and short of killing him we will make it as painful and expensive as possible.

Judy Rosen gives the lumber to David Brooks over his recent op-ed on French “Gangsta Rap”.

I have been maintaining for quite a while that Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court might have been a politically brilliant move. What if President Bush threw her in to the fire to get people talking about qualifications and cronyism, knowing that she would withdraw and that he could then have a free pass to appoint an associate justice like Judge Luttig or Judge McConnell?

With Democrats having burned their political capital on arguments over qualifications, they could be silenced by the nomination of an appellate judge with overwhelming credentials (but with a judicial philosophy that is antagonistic to everything Democrats believe in - well almost everything).

Times Select be damned. This op-ed is too provacative to stay in the walled garden.

Leading By (Bad) Example
By Thomas L. Friedman
Washington, Oct. 18, 2005

A delegation of Iraqi judges and journalists abruptly left the U.S. today, cutting short its visit to study the workings of American democracy. A delegation spokesman said the Iraqis were ”bewildered” by some of the behavior of the Bush administration and felt it was best to limit their exposure to the U.S. system at this time, when Iraq is taking its first baby steps toward democracy.

The lead Iraqi delegate, Muhammad Mithaqi, a noted secular Sunni judge who had recently survived an assassination attempt by Islamist radicals, said that he was stunned when he heard President Bush telling Republicans that one reason they should support Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court was because of ”her religion.” She is described as a devout evangelical Christian.

Mithaqi said that after two years of being lectured to by U.S. diplomats in Baghdad about the need to separate ”mosque from state” in the new Iraq, he was also floored to read that the former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, now a law school dean, said on the radio show of the conservative James Dobson that Miers deserved support because she was ”a very, very strong Christian [who] should be a source of great comfort and assistance to people in the households of faith around the country.”

”Now let me get this straight,” Judge Mithaqi said. ”You are lecturing us about keeping religion out of politics, and then your own president and conservative legal scholars go and tell your public to endorse Miers as a Supreme Court justice because she is an evangelical Christian.

”How would you feel if you picked up your newspapers next week and read that the president of Iraq justified the appointment of an Iraqi Supreme Court justice by telling Iraqis: ‘Don’t pay attention to his lack of legal expertise. Pay attention to the fact that he is a Muslim fundamentalist and prays at a Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque.’ Is that the Iraq you sent your sons to build and to die for? I don’t think so. We can’t have our people exposed to such talk.”

A fellow delegation member, Abdul Wahab al-Unfi, a Shiite lawyer who walks with a limp today as a result of torture in a Saddam prison, said he did not want to spend another day in Washington after listening to the Bush team defend its right to use torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfi said he was heartened by the fact that the Senate voted 90 to 9 to ban U.S. torture of military prisoners. But he said he was depressed by reports that the White House might veto the bill because of that amendment, which would ban ”cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of P.O.W.’s.

”I survived eight years of torture under Saddam,” Unfi said. ”Virtually every extended family in Iraq has someone who was tortured or killed in a Baathist prison. Yet, already, more than 100 prisoners of war have died in U.S. custody. How is that possible from the greatest democracy in the world? There must be no place for torture in the future Iraq. We are going home now because I don’t want our delegation corrupted by all this American right-to-torture talk.”

Finally, the delegation member Sahaf al-Sahafi, editor of one of Iraq’s new newspapers, said he wanted to go home after watching a televised videoconference last Thursday between soldiers in Iraq and President Bush. The soldiers, 10 Americans and an Iraqi, were coached by a Pentagon aide on how to respond to Mr. Bush.

”I had nightmares watching this,” Sahafi said. ”It was right from the Saddam playbook. I was particularly upset to hear the Iraqi sergeant major, Akeel Shakir Nasser, tell Mr. Bush: ‘Thank you very much for everything. I like you.’ It was exactly the kind of staged encounter that Saddam used to have with his troops.”

Sahafi said he was also floored to see the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that works for Congress, declare that a Bush administration contract that paid Armstrong Williams, a supposedly independent commentator, to promote Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy constituted illegal propaganda — an attempt by the government to buy good press.

”Saddam bought and paid journalists all over the Arab world,” Sahafi said. ”It makes me sick to see even a drop of that in America.”

By coincidence, the Iraqi delegates departed Washington just as the Bush aide Karen Hughes returned from the Middle East. Her trip was aimed at improving America’s image among Muslims by giving them a more accurate view of America and President Bush. She said, ”The more they know about us, the more they will like us.”

(Yes, all of this is a fake news story. I just wish that it weren’t so true.)

Below is an excerpt from an email I just received from MoveOn:

“Ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown taught us that vital national positions must be filled with qualified candidates, not political friends with limited experience. With such a thin public record, how can Americans know Harriet Miers’ approach to critical issues like corporate power, privacy and civil rights?

Right now we urgently need more information, and we need your help to get it. In the next few hours the Internet will fill with facts, anecdotes and rumors about Harriet Miers. We need your help to sort through it all, select the relevant and important details, and let us know what you find—decentralized, grassroots research.”

I think the notion is brilliant. Information on this nominee exists, it is just disaggregated. Everyone has a public record to a certain degree. It is simply a matter of whether you have the resources to gather it. I wonder if anyone has done this type of thing before?

The page where you can upload your findings is here.

From Karen Russel at huffingtonpost.com - The GOP’s African-American Talking Points

From Arrian Huffington herself:

“Delay, Frist, Abramoff, Safavian… Wasn’t this the crowd that was going to “restore honor and integrity” to Washington? If this is what integrity looks like, let’s bring back Oval Office blow jobs.”

According to Bill Bennet criticism of his comments below are “ridiculous, stupid, totally without merit.”

“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” Mr. Bennettsaid in the broadcast. “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”

I was curious to find out what the former Mayor of Cleveland, Michael White, has been up to since he decided not to run for reelecton last time around. I figured he had taken a job at Jones Day, or Squires, Sanders & Dempsey or had landed at a large not for profit like the Cleveland Foundation. I googled him but couldn’t find any useful or timely information regarding his whereabouts.

I finally resorted to emailing my parents, figuring they might have read something in the local papers about his latest gig.

Momma got back to me quickly:

From: Momma
To: Michael Oliver, Pops
Date: May 4, 2005 1:14 PM
Subject: Re: Where in the world is Mike White?

An Alpaca

A quick story about Martin. I moved to Baltimore not knowing a soul. On my first night in town, I strolled the streets looking for a suitable local watering hole. I settled on an Irish Bar about three blocks from my house.

The bar was packed, but I found a solitary seat at the bar. On the stage was a band, fronted by a man in his late 30s. He was wearing a white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and jeans a la The Boss. And he was rocking out on guitar. Impressed, I asked the guy sitting next to me who the band was.

The man leaned over and said, “O’Malley’s March”

“They local?” I asked.

“I guess you could say that…” he smiled.

Then he pointed to the front man and said, “He’s our Mayor.”