"And We’ll Have Fun, Fun, Fun …"

In this recent post, I took issue with columnist Nicholas Kristof’s analysis of what the Democrats should do to get back on the winning track. Kristof’s essay was one of many in a collection published right after the November election and entitled, What We Do Now.One of those other essays was written by Cass Sunstein. As much as I wish it weren't so, Sunstein’s final suggestion makes a lot of sense. This suggestion carries a headline that isn’t quite what you’re expecting from a distinguished law school professor from the...

In Case You Missed It

I posted this earlier in the Daily Darfur but it has sort of been buried under an avalanche of posts today, so I am re-posting it because I think it is important I strongly encourage you all to check out this short video from Aegis Trust - Not On My Watch (it takes a little while to load, but it is worth it.)...

Sexual Psychoanalysis

Writer and "sexpert" Susie Bright has a insightful essay on Jeff/James "Bulldog" Guckert/Gannon and how self-loathing, GOP queers function and gain access to the halls of power. She addresses what most news stories danced around-- Guckert/Gannon was a successful prostitute-- and nails the frustration that so many of us feel about the underwhelming coverage of the Guckert/Gannon story in addition to the mystery of how people like Gannon/Guckert live with themselves.I know he isn’t a household name yet, but one day Mehlman and...

Bush, Darfur, and the ICC

Mark Leon Goldberg has a good post over at TAPPED regarding reports that the Bush administration is now poised to accept, or at least refrain from vetoing, a Security Council referral to the International Criminal Court. This article lays out the concessions sought by the Bush administration in order for the resolution to be acceptable to the US The first would exempt foreign forces in any peacekeeping mission for Sudan from ICC jurisdiction and would allow them to be tried only by their national authorities, something the...

Columbia Report

As I've blogged on this controversy a few times in the past, I thought I'd alert our legion of readers to the fact that Columbia University today published the report of the ad hoc committee investigating claims of anti-Semitism and intimidation of students expressing pro-Israel views by faculty. A related New York Times article is here.As does the Times reporter, I read the report on an initial skim as being most critical of the university's procedures (or lack thereof) for investigating students' complaints about faculty misconduct....

The Bully Pulpit

We all know about Bush signing the Texas bill in 1999 and Tom DeLay's family "pulling the plug" on his father 1988. Sidney Blumenthal highlights some of the lesser-known examples, revealing the surreal, naked hypocrisy running rampant among the "right-to-life" players in the Schiavo case.Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, M.D....had as a doctor pulled the plug on a "regular basis," his staff acknowledged. And in 1989, Frist published a book, "Transplant," in which he stated that anencephalic infants, suffering the same condition...

Schiavo Has Died, But the Right's Rage Lives On

On the website of the conservative publication Human Events, Adam Rickel has written an article about the case of now-deceased Terri Schiavo that carries this completely over-the-top, hysterical headline: "Judge Greer, Would You Have Killed My Brother Too?"From the information that Rickel shares, it appears that he is using his own family trauma to launch an invective against Judge Greer. But from what Rickel has written, the analogy seems weak. Rickel lays out the case of his brother who, he says, had so much in common with...

A Real Race for Repulsive Rick?

I was glad to learn that Pennsylvania State Treasurer Bob Casey had announced his candidacy to oppose incumbent Senator Rick Santorum, whose views are more akin to Trent Lott's than Arlen Specter's.And I was particularly pleased to see this recent poll that shows Casey leading Santorum by 7 percentage points.The good news? Casey is running +4 among white voters and +14 among seniors. (The latter margin is critical in Pennsylvania -- Florida is the only state east of the Mississippi River with a larger share of 65-and-over...

The Sound of the Other Shoe Dropping

About a month ago, I wrote about the pending case in which the Massachusetts SJC will decide on the constitutionality of the state's ban on marriages between out-of-staters if the marriages would be void in the state where the couple actually resides. The case is being brought by non-Massachusetts residents who want to get married and county clerks who want to issue marriage licenses to them. But in a comment to my own post, I mentioned the kind of factual situation in which the rubber will really meet the road:At some point...

Missing the Story

There's burying the lede, and then there's missing it completely. I'm sure other news sources won't make the same mistake the AP did in its story on the former Boy Scout national program director who pleaded guilty to child pornography charges.Here's what the AP said: Douglas Sovereign Smith Jr., 61, was accused of receiving images over the Internet of children engaging in sex acts.Here's what the stipulated facts admitted by Smith and signed by Smith and his lawyer said: A forensic analysis was performed on the defendant's...

Keep These Men Away From My House

Sen. Charles Grassley appeared with President Bush at one of his Social Security propaganda rallies in Iowa yesterday. Speaking on the need for reform, Grassley had this to say "The president and I are like a builder and an architect, and we agree on a blueprint," Grassley said. "The blueprint is we need to do something to guarantee Social Security for our children and grandchildren. Doing nothing is not an option." Um, I hate to break it to you Chuck, but merely recognizing the need to do something does not qualify as a...

My Very Last Post...

on Terri Schiavo. She's finally gone. May she and her family find peace. Does this mean that all the pols will stop using her as a political football?One can only hope.(One caveat-- I do reserve the right to talk about it in the greater political contex...

The Religious Banishment Myth, Take 73

On Sunday, I came across a commentary piece in the Newark Star-Ledger, written by New Jersey ex-attorney general John Farmer, Jr. At one point in his lengthy article, Farmer complains about what he calls “the banishment of religious discussion from our public discourse ...”The banishment of religious discussion? Somebody pinch me. Hasn’t the hottest news story over the past week been the Terri Schiavo case — a story that has been rife with references to religion, the Almighty and theological doctrines?And did Farmer miss the...

Daily Darfur

The Daily Darfur post is up on the coalition blog - the US has reportedly dropped its opposition to attempts to refer the crimes in Darfur to the International Criminal Court. On a semi-related note, I strongly encourage you all to check out this short film from Aegis Trust - Not On My Watch (it takes a little while to load, but it is worth it.)Also, there is this extremely hopeful news A Rwandan Hutu militia group on Thursday denounced the Hutu-orchestrated 1994 genocide in the African country and announced it was stopping...

And Speaking of Juan Cole

I found his public humiliation of Jonah Goldberg amusing, and it shows that he can certainly hold his own in a one-on-one fight with purveyors of nonsense. But don't miss Cole's important post from earlier this week about a new variation on the VRWC's strategy of turning misstatements, oversimplifications, and lies about political opponents into "facts" that "everyone knows." I find some of Cole's counterarguments tendentious, particularly his saying that "much of the Arab world" has peace treaties with Israel on the basis...

Reality Continues to Be Complicated

I'm not the only person frustrated by the Bush Administration's insistence on seeing everything in extremely simple terms. Of course, there are the political/ideological oversimplificiations--you're with us or you're with the terrorists, if you oppose the war it means you support Saddam, etc.--but ordinary factual matters are oversimplified as well. This is a human tendency, as there's only so much information and nuance we can handle, and it's exacerbated by numerous aspects of the way the press covers news in the U.S. (some...

The Brits Are So Cute

For some reason, Tony Blair's Government continues to believe, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that the U.S. will treat the U.K. favorably as a reward for Blair's obedience to Dubya.The Security Council members are feverishly trying to negotiate a compromise that will stop the U.S. from vetoing a resolution referring Darfur crimes to the International Criminal Court (maybe we'll deign not to veto if the rest of the Council agrees to grant American nationals an even broader exemption from I.C.C. jurisdiction than...

The Name Game in Berkeley

The federal budget deficit continues to grow, some 43 million Americans live their lives without health insurance, and the misery continues in Darfur, but a group of parents and teachers at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif., have focused their attention on a major issue right in their community.The major issue isn't the difficulty of attracting certified teachers to urban, high-poverty communities like Berkeley. It isn't the number of children who reach 3rd grade reading well below grade level. And it isn't...

Weak Analysis by Kristof

Soon after the November election, Melville Publishing produced a book entitled “What We Do Now” — a collection of essays by various progressive writers and columnists. I finally managed to get through it a week or so ago.I don’t know whether the book was widely read, but I can’t say I was overwhelmed with the advice therein.New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was among the essayists, and he tried to make the case that Dems need a "centrist" makeover. (It's an argument he repeated a few weeks ago.) Here are excerpts of...

Shaking Hands With the Devil

Texas Governor Rick Perry is attempting to fight off a possible challenge from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson and is doing so by releasing a videotape showing .... get this ... Hutchinson and Sen. Hillary Clinton being friendly at some museum opening. The horror!Now, I understand that there are few people more hated by Republicans than Bill and Hillary Clinton and I understand that Perry is trying to damage Hutchinson by linking her to them. But check this out Perry said campaigns routinely film the speeches of their opponents,...

You Say Tomato ...

The Hill reports that several conservative groups are rallying to defend The World's Biggest Asshole. Conservative leaders who spoke to The Hill said these groups’ criticisms of DeLay was an attack on conservatism itself.“I think that conservative groups ought to be concerned,” said Donald Hodel, who recently retired as head of Focus on the Family, “If conservative politicians are singled out for attacks by groups that have allegiance to a different worldview, if [conservatives] leave attacks to the liberal groups, they’re not...

Daily Darfur

Today's Daily Darfur is posted on the coalition blog.And here is this week's Coalition for Darfur post Never Again: Again and AgainIn her 2001 article "Bystanders to Genocide," Pulitzer Prize winning author Samantha Power recounts how President Clinton was shocked and outraged by an article written by Philip Gourevitch recounting the horrors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, prompting him to send the article to his national security advisor Sandy Berger with a note scrawled in the margin reading "Is what he's saying true? How...

I'll Never Complain About Taking the Triboro Bridge to JFK Again

A taxi driver was literally caught with his pants down on Saturday. The driver started masturbating in front of a 23-year-old female passenger, from Heemstede, who subsequently called police. The 39-year-old Amsterdam man was arrested at the Leidsevaart in Haarlem. His pants were still unbuttoned at the time of his arrest. Apparently, there are limits to Dutch tolerance of self-indulgent (not to say self-abusive) behavi...

"Those Damned Activist, Conservative Judges"

You've never heard that phrase from conservatives, have you?But one can only guess how frustrated the Christian Right must feel to have learned that the Florida circuit court judge who issued the key rulings in the Terri Schiavo case was described this weekend by the Associated Press as “a conservative Christian and longtime Republican.”The Schiavo case helps to shed additional light on the sort of Christianity that prevails in the land of Red States. As the AP reported:… (Pinellas County Circuit Court Judge George Greer) has...

Vote For Me, You Traitorous Dogs!

Last week, Arnold linked to this article in the Economist regarding the sure-to-be-stolen upcoming election in Zimbabwe. If you were holding out hope that maybe the Economist was wrong, you can stop President Robert Mugabe branded supporters of the country's main opposition Movement for Democratic Change party as traitors in comments broadcast repeatedly on state radio Tuesday, raising fears of new political violence two days ahead of parliamentary elections. "All those who will vote for the MDC are traitors," state radio...

Daily Darfur

Today's Daily Darfur is up on the coalition blog.On an unrelated note, a quick Factiva search reveals that, in the last month, there have been 6179 media reports mentioning Terri Schiavo.There have been 942 mentioning Darfur. For every one article mentioning Darfur, there are been 6.5 mentioning Schiavo despite the fact that her death is just 1/10,000th the number of deaths occuring every month in Darf...

Selling Terri Schiavo

Geez, guys, if you are going to do something as callous as this you could at least work a little harder at keeping a lid on it.List of Schiavo Donors Will Be Sold by Direct-Marketing FirmThe parents of Terri Schiavo have authorized a conservative direct-mailing firm to sell a list of their financial supporters, making it likely that thousands of strangers moved by her plight will receive a steady stream of solicitations from anti-abortion and conservative groups. ...Privacy experts said the sale of the list was legal and even...

Vote Republican or This Man Will Kill Your Son

I think the GOP picked the wrong victim with Terri Schiavo. Much as they vilified Michael Schiavo, it is undisputed that he is male.Zoe's post on Maryland's pending legislation on partners' rights regarding medical treatment made me realize that DeLay could have really energized the base, and maybe gotten less of a political backlash, if he'd waited for a case where the courts had permitted a same-sex partner to make...

Two Questions

Apparently, the right-wing bloggers are in a tizzy over charges that the memo talking about what great politics the Schiavo bill would be for the Republicans was in fact a forgery. Maybe that's overstating the situation, since I don't have the stomach to troll the seriously wingnut blogs, so I have to go on the hearsay of others who do. But it looks like at least some of the usual suspects have run with this theory. There doesn't seem to be any significant evidence of a forgery, but the wingnuts seem to think the memo should...

Trade, Not Aid

I always found that slogan annoying. Partly it was because the phrase was deployed by a commercial entity in search of profit, and partly because it made people feel like they were doing some noble deed by buying expensive cosmetics. But, mainly, it annoyed me because the reality of poverty and development is much, much more complicated than the slogan lets on. It takes us (citizens of rich countries) off the hook, reassuring us that all we have to do is consume what we want and the world's poor will magically stop doing conscience-troubling...

Insipid and Punctual

Jon Stewart's sweet mug graces the cover of this month's American Spectator, the #1 magazine among snide conservative douchebags. Whaaaaa? Why is Jon on their cover? Well, the knee-jerk folks over at the magazine have proclaimed Jon's book America the "WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR."I'm sure they're hoping that no one notices that they're making their meaningless "worst of 2004" announcement three months after the year end...

A Discussion that Needs to be Had

This is what blogging is all about!Norbizness and Pandagon are discussing when exactly "The Simpsons" became one of the worst shows on television. Everyone has their views, but I think the show jumped the shark with "Lisa the Skeptic." That episode was part of Season 9, and I think we can all agree with Norbizness when he says that it was "the first season where the bad significantly outweighed the good." It has been seven years since then and the show just continues to get worse. But for some reason, I keep watching. ...

The End is Coming!

Hey, how'd they slip this one by the anti-gay right? Guess they were all too busy obsessing over the medical battle in Florida to notice this sign of the coming apocalypse-- the Maryland state senate passed the Medical Decision Making Act of 2005 with a strong majority last Friday.After a lively debate that included alternate charges of "promoting the radical homosexual agenda" and being "homophobic," the Senate passed a bill yesterday to give medical decision-making rights to all unmarried couples who sign onto a domestic registry.The...

Adam, Where Are All of Those "Critics"?

What is in the water that Adam Nagourney has been drinking lately? A few weeks ago, I wrote this post about a New York Times article that Nagourney co-wrote – an article that included this overblown assertion:Four months after Mr. Bush won a solid re-election over Senator John Kerry, 63 percent of (poll) respondents say the president has different priorities on domestic issues than most Americans.Nagourney was guilty of another indefensible assertion on Friday when he wrote:Gov. Jeb Bush's last-minute intervention in the case...

Who Wrote This?

By now you have surely read about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ethics troubles. Probably, too, you aren't entirely clear as to what those troubles are -- something to do with questionable junkets, Indian casino money, funny business on the House Ethics Committee, stuff down in Texas. In Beltway-speak, what this means is that Mr. DeLay has an "odor": nothing too incriminating, nothing actually criminal, just an unsavory whiff that could have GOP loyalists reaching for the political Glade if it gets any worse.The Beltway...

The Congo's Final Four

Confused about the complex on-going war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that, over the last several years, has taken an estimated 4 million lives? Well, the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) has reprinted this handy guide to the various military organizations currently operating in the Congo Government Forces FARDC (Armed Forces of the DRC): The official armed forces, totaling perhaps 300,000 troops. Most are poorly equipped and poorly trained, with corrupt officers, etc. It includes...

Daily Darfur

Today's Daily Darfur is now up over at the coalition blog, along with several other recent posts. I must apologize for my lack of posts over here at Demagogue in recent days. The fact is that I have become (even more) obsessed with Darfur and I am finding it difficult to pay attention to most anything else. Initially, I resisted the idea of creating a blog solely dedicated to Darfur because I figured that once I did, my obsession with the issue would consume me and I'd be unable to focus on anything else. And that is exactly...

Tom DeLay & the Right-to-Die

If you haven't read this elsewhere already, in 1988 Tom DeLay and his family stopped medical treatment and allowed Charles DeLay, Tom's father, to die after a freak accident that caused him severe brain damage. The DeLay case and the Schiavo case are not mirror images of one another, but there are plenty of similarities, all of which are especially relevant when considering Tom DeLay's character assassination of Michael Schiavo. Unfortunately, DeLay knows what it is like to be in a painful situation with an incapacitated family...

Screwed Twice

I'd like to introduce the brothers Bush to my friends, rock and hard place.Gov. Bush Cancels Appearance at Good Friday Service for Fear of Facing Schiavo SupportersTALLAHASSEE, Fl., March 25 /Christian Wire Service/ -- Governor Jeb Bush was scheduled to attend and participate in an outdoor Good Friday service at 12:30 pm, at Florida State University. According to event organizers, the Governor canceled at the last minute.As part of this event Jeb Bush would have publicly read from a printed program that includes the following...

Bush's Culture of Life*

Poor Dubya. He just can't seem to do anything right lately. His poll numbers are at the lowest ever and now there's his insult to Native Americans, exposing the dizzying hypocrisy of his "culture of life" rhetoric.Native Americans across the country -- including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members -- voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence...."From all over the world we are getting letters of condolence,...

It Should Be Over Now...

The Supremes say 'no way, leave us out of this' to the Schindlers, as expected. It appears that the Schindler's legal options are pretty much exhausted. So, what next? One thing I've really been wondering-- how will this all end? What other measures are Dubya/Jeb/DeLay/Frist/Hastert prepared to take, will they really just shrug and say "sorry, that's all we can do"? After all this? Not only is it anti-climactic, which is fine by me, but it won't be very satisfactory conclusion for the audience that they've all been performing...

In Such Bad Taste, Tears Rolled Down My Face

Freakin' fun...

Still Shocking, But Still--True?

I promised to keep tabs on the bizarre court proceedings in California stemming from an ex-prosecutor's contention that, at the instigation of a judge, the prosecutor excluded Jews from a jury because the judge believed Jews would never vote for a death sentence.The ex-prosecutor's day on the stand finally arrived yesterday, and there seem to have been some moderately exciting moments in the cross-examination.What seems weirdest to me about this weird case is that the judge was himself Jewish (I believe; I can't find the article...

Mikhaela on the Culture of Life

My favorite young cartoonist does it aga...

Strange Bedfellows

This gives me some hope that the fearmongers and end-timers haven't taken over completely. I mean, really: Bob Barr? I think the big-government conservatives of the Bush administration may really, finally, be scaring off some of the libertarians of the rig...

"I Pray that Mugabe Should Die"

A reminder of yet another African tragedy dragging on out of sight of the American press.God forbid they spare any air time from the latest rumors of a secret wedding between Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo, or whatever it is they're covering these da...

Speaking of Nazi-Like Behavior...

I read this article on government-forced sterilization programs yesterday and was amazed at one of two things (I'm not sure which yet):1. How ignorant I am with even the most important historical happenings2. How pathetic it is that historical happenings like this are completely unknown to even people who think they are good at paying attention to the world around them.Until as late as the mid 1970s, "[m]ore than 30 other states had eugenics programs" and that these programs were ruled constitutional in Buck v. Bell, a 1924...

Connecting the Hot Buttons

Could Terri Schiavo end up as an unknowing heroine of the marriage equality movement?It's starting to become conventional wisdom that GOP politicians (most notably Tom DeLay) and the "Christian" right have overreached in the Schiavo case. It turns out that a smallish majority of Americans apparently think that removing the feeding tube is the right decision--but a larger majority are seriously unhappy about having people like Tom DeLay meddle with a family's private tragedy.I'm not saying that folks will go to bed saying, "I...

I May Not be an Expert, But I am a Celebrity

Patricia Heaton, the woman who played the bitchy wife on "Everybody Loves Raymond," apparently sees herself as something on an expert on the Terri Schiavo case. And to show just how serious Heaton is about the situation, she granted an exclusive interview to Entertainment Tonight to discuss it. And thank god she did Patricia, who is a mother of four boys, says she has thought about this a lot. "As an actor, I visualize these situations when I'm doing a role and in this situation, I've thought about, day in and day out in...