10 Years Later - Who Was Right, Who Was Wrong

Local edition.

First, we'll start with one guy who was right - Tony Norman:

Last week was the 10th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. With few exceptions, most of the media commentary about its own credulousness was self-serving when it wasn't simply dishonest.

After all, nothing guarantees a trip down the collective memory hole faster than an unambiguous failure like Iraq and the stinging memory of one's own complicity in that failure.

Still, print journalists are compelled to look back on what we've written, if only to figure out how to move forward with some integrity. During the lead-up to the war, those of us who argued that invading Iraq would be a treasury-emptying disaster were vilified as unpatriotic. The letters page of this newspaper was dominated by those who took the Bush administration's word as gospel.

He then goes on to quote large chunks of this column from March, 2003.  It was stuff that turned out to be completely correct.  Stuff like this:

This weekend, an army of peacemakers will converge in Pittsburgh to protest the Bush administration's plan to vanquish the exaggerated threat of Saddam Hussein's fourth-rate military. Such a lopsided war will decimate much more of the country than the Gulf War did, leading to the kind of political and military destabilization in the region that terrifies Iraq's neighbors. Who knows? Perhaps a Greater Kurdistan will be a shining beacon of democracy in the tribal cauldron that is the Near East, but somehow I doubt it.

And so on.  Tony's always worth a good read.

But I want to take a look at who got it wrong ten years ago.

Fellas like Jack Kelly - here he is from December 2002:

Few besides Iraqi functionaries maintain that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction. U.N. weapons inspectors found thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons and their precursors, and a well-funded nuclear development program. At the time they were kicked out in 1998, all the inspectors were convinced that there was more to find. Presumably, Saddam would not have run the risk of war by expelling them if he didn't have something to hide.

Except that in September 2002, the Guardian published this:

[Scott Ritter]: Iraq manufactured three nerve agents: sarin, tabun, and VX. Some people who want war with Iraq describe 20,000 munitions filled with sarin and tabun nerve agents that could be used against Americans. The facts, however, don't support this. Sarin and tabun have a shelf-life of five years. Even if Iraq had somehow managed to hide this vast number of weapons from inspectors, what they are now storing is nothing more than useless, harmless goo.

Chemical weapons were produced in the Muthanna state establishment: a massive chemical weapons factory. It was bombed during the Gulf war, and then weapons inspectors came and completed the task of eliminating the facility. That means Iraq lost its sarin and tabun manufacturing base.

We destroyed thousands of tons of chemical agent. It is not as though we said, "Oh we destroyed a factory, now we are going to wait for everything else to expire." We had an incineration plant operating full-time for years, burning tons of the stuff every day. We went out and blew up bombs, missiles and warheads filled with this agent. We emptied Scud missile warheads filled with this agent. We hunted down this stuff and destroyed it.

[William Rivers Pitt]: Couldn't the Iraqis have hidden some?

R: That's a very real possibility. The problem is that whatever they diverted would have had to have been produced in the Muthanna state establishment, which means that once we blew it up, the Iraqis no longer had the ability to produce new agent, and in five years the sarin and tabun would have degraded and become useless sludge. All this talk about Iraq having chemical weapons is no longer valid.

The discussion of nuclear and biological weapons is the same: eliminated programs with no evidence (and the  evidence would be easily detectable) of any restart.

Also, it turns out after the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction.  (It also turns out that Scott Ritter ran into his own rather disgusting mess - but that doesn't mean he was wrong about the WMD)

Jack Kelly was wrong about that.

Then there's Jack's claim about the linking of Iraq and al-Qaida:

So debunking evidence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaida has become an urgent task for anti-warriors. The New York Times has three times published stories casting doubt on a report that Sept. 11 hijack leader Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague last year, each time to have its debunking debunked by the head of the Czech intelligence service, the Czech interior minister, and the Czech prime minister at the time. All maintain to this day that the meeting took place.

The task of the debunkers is getting more difficult. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, David Rose reports that a special intelligence unit in the Pentagon has found nearly 100 separate examples of Iraq/al-Qaida cooperation going back to 1992.

Jack was wrong about this, too.  There was no meeting between Iraqi Intelligence and Mohammad Atta.  From the Washington Post May 1, 2002 (a few months before Jack published his column, by the way):

There is no evidence that the alleged leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, met in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, a finding that eliminates a once-suggested link between the terrorist attacks and the government of President Saddam Hussein, according to a senior administration official.

And:

But after months of investigation, the Czechs said they were no longer certain that Atta was the person who met al-Ani, saying "he may be different from Atta," the administration official said. More recently, FBI and CIA analysts who went over thousands of travel records concluded that "there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the U.S." at the time he was supposed to be in Prague, the official said.

That determination was first disclosed in Newsweek magazine this week.

"We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said in a speech in San Francisco last month, setting out for the first time the extent of the investigation and its results.

Huh. FBI Director Robert Mueller said that?

Jack was wrong.

Turns out we were right and Jack Kelly and those cheering for invasion in 2003 were wrong.  There were no WMD and there was no operational connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda.  And all of the death and suffering that happened because they insisted they were right and we were wrong was all completely necessary.

Yea, that's not really something to be celebrated, of course.

But it still nice to know that George W Bush has a pleasant hobby.

PodCamp 7 News!

This was just posted at youtube.  It's Sue Kerr's panel at the recent PodCamp Pittsburgh.

 
I was in the audience - it was a very interesting panel.

Tony Norman And Chris Potter Agree!

I know both these guys.  I've had beer with both these guys.  Both were invited to my wedding (though only one had the decency to show - coughyerdeadtomenowpottercough).  And so I think I can say that they agree on many things.

But when both write about the same topic at their respective papers in the same week, something big is happening.

It's Voter ID time!

Another Reason Torture's Immoral

I start today with the P-G's Tony Norman:

Last week, video footage of four U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of three dead Taliban fighters went viral. With the exception of a handful of morally dead ideologues on the right, the reaction to the video was one of revulsion at home and fury abroad.

As Americans, we were reminded that just because we choose not to pay attention to the war in Afghanistan, we share moral complicity for wars fought in our name. The callousness of the four Marines wasn't unprecedented. Relative to the toll on civilian lives in three countries because of American drone attacks, public urination on enemy corpses pales in comparison as a war crime.

In a widely read essay in The Washington Post, war correspondent Sebastian Junger astutely pointed out that a "19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it's OK to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not OK to urinate on a dead one."

While Tony spends more time pointing out this nation's faith-based hypocrisy:

It is a sign of how decadent much of American Christianity has become: A candidate who enthusiastically condones assassination is the same man who 150 "Christian" leaders have decided best exemplifies the Christian values they want to see at work in the White House. Where does Jesus Christ fit in this scenario?

Sebastian Junger, in that essay Tony referenced, touches more on the sociological impacts of two administrations accommodation of torture:

When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 10 years old. As children they heard adults — and political leaders — talk about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions — achieved through torture — will not stand up in court.

For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad — not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living.

From The Geneva Conventions, Chapter 2 Article 15 on the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field:

At all times, and particularly after an engagement, Parties to the conflict shall, without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled.

I'd say pissing on some dead enemy combatants certainly qualifies as "despoiled."

Legality aside (as if that's possible here) I want to emphasize another downside of allowing the Bush-endorsed waterboarding to go unpunished or even unprosecuted (as the Obama Administration is doing): it desensitizes us to all other "paler" war crimes.  War crimes done in our name.  Some with our grudging acquiescence.

To feel like we're protecting our safety, we despoil ourselves.

No longer the city on the hill.  No longer on the high moral ground.  Look at us.  Look at what they make you give.

Go read Tony

Tony Norman on Rick Santorum and "Blah" people:

Strip away the guile and the populist facade, and it won't be long until the pink chewy nougat of intolerance at his center erupts in your face.

LOL!

Go read the whole thing here.

What Tony Wrote.

From Tony Norman's column today:

When the late Gil Scott-Heron said that "the revolution would not be televised," he spoke too soon. There was no way that the performance poet could conceive of the era of the viral video or know that it was just around the corner.

In the event you haven't heard it, here's what Tony was writing about:



And when he wrote:

Last Friday, a cop at the University of California, Davis forgot the cardinal rule every officer should have internalized since the Rodney King debacle -- if there's a camera around, then police brutality will be televised. There are too many witnesses and too many cameras in the environment to ever give another officer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to violence on civilians. We know from painful experience that there are too many liars wearing badges to pretend otherwise.

This is what he was writing about:



(If it looks familiar to you, it's because the OPJ posted the video yesterday)

But UCDavis ain't the only place the pepper's been sprayed.  84 year old Dorli Rainey was sprayed in Seattle:

5 foot tall, 20 year old Elisabeth Nichols was sprayed in Oregon:

And that's just two.

And so when Tony wrote:

Much has been said about the militarization of the police in this country and how the "war on drugs" mentality has trickled down into society and college policing.

It also doesn't help that the Bush administration considered torture and sadism legitimate tools of coercion and social control. The cops at the bottom always take their cues from the cops at the top. When administration and military officials are amoral, then it is too much to expect men and women many levels below their pay grade to respect the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.

The police claim that they're not choosing sides in the dispute but are simply enforcing the law. Former Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a great response to such moral evasiveness: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

I'd always wondered whether the phrase "The revolution will not be televised" had any deeper meaning.  With the lyrics that open with:

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

It points to a revolution that will not be a media event.  But Scott-Heron points to something deeper:




The first change takes place in your mind, he said. He said that it'll be something that can't be captured on film you'll just realize one day you're on the wrong page - that the change has already taken place everywhere around you.

The revolution will be live.

More On Dominionism

I take Tony Norman's column as a start - this specifically:

The first time I ever heard of the Christian Reconstruction movement, now known as Dominionism, I thought it was a gag.

Who in their right mind wanted to live in a world where the Old Testament civil and ceremonial laws would become the template for local and national politics? It was a profoundly dark theology even by the standards of the dour Calvinism I considered reasonable at the time.

According to the tenets of Christian Reconstruction, it was up to Christians to bring the whole world into submission to Jesus Christ. Once that was accomplished (with God's help, of course), the Old Testament laws that guided ancient Israel would be dusted off and applied to civil societies across the globe, including America.

He then goes on to outline some of the scarier parts of this scary stuff and ends not with a whimper but with a bang:

Today, two of the leading Republican presidential candidates, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, reportedly have ties to the Dominionist movement. The press has got to get up to speed on the movement's ideas before either a President Bachmann or a President Perry are in a position to drag Jesus feet first out of heaven, again.

Allow me to do my part.

Michelle Goldberg over at The Daily Beast has more on Dominionism:

Dominionism derives from a small fringe sect called Christian Reconstructionism, founded by a Calvinist theologian named R. J. Rushdoony in the 1960s. Christian Reconstructionism openly advocates replacing American law with the strictures of the Old Testament, replete with the death penalty for homosexuality, abortion, and even apostasy. The appeal of Christian Reconstructionism is, obviously, limited, and mainstream Christian right figures like Ralph Reed have denounced it.

Rushdoony was a piece of work. As Frank Schaefer points out:

Rushdoony (whom I met and talked with several times) believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as "unequal yoking," should be made illegal. He also opposed "enforced integration," referred to Southern slavery as "benevolent," and said that "some people are by nature slaves." Rushdoony was also a Holocaust denier.

And yet his home school materials are a mainstay of the right-wing evangelical home school movement to this day. In Rushdoony's 1973 book, The Institutes of Biblical Law, he says that fundamentalist Christians must "take control of governments and impose strict biblical law" on America and then the world.

Back to Goldberg with more on Michele Bachmann:

For believers in Dominionism, rule by non-Christians is a sort of sacrilege—which explains, in part, the theological fury that has accompanied the election of our last two Democratic presidents. “Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ—to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness,” wrote George Grant, the former executive director of Coral Ridge Ministries, which has since changed its name to Truth in Action Ministries. “But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice ... It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time ... World conquest.”

Bachmann is close to Truth in Action Ministries; last year, she appeared in one of its documentaries, Socialism: A Clear and Present Danger. In it, she espoused the idea, common in Reconstructionist circles, that the government has no right to collect taxes in excess of 10 percent, the amount that believers are called to tithe to the church. On her state-senate-campaign website, she recommended a book co-authored by Grant titled Call of Duty: The Sterling Nobility of Robert E. Lee, which, as Lizza reported, depicted the civil war as a battle between the devout Christian South and the Godless North, and lauded slavery as a benevolent institution. “The unity and companionship that existed between the races in the South prior to the war was the fruit of a common faith,” the book said.

We wrote about the Lee biography here.

Does Goldberg have more on Rick Perry? She certainly does:

In elaborating Bachmann’s Dominionist history, though, it’s important to point out that she is not unique. Perry tends to be regarded as marginally more reasonable than Bachmann, but he is as closely associated with Dominionism as she is, though his links are to a different strain of the ideology.

How? She cites this piece in the Texas Observer by Forrest Wilder. Goldberg continues:

The Christian Reconstructionists tend to be skeptical of Pentecostalism, with its magic, prophesies, speaking in tongues, and wild ecstasies. Certainly, there are overlaps between the traditions—Oral Roberts, where Bachmann studied with Eidsmoe, was a Pentecostal school. But it’s only recently that one group of Pentecostals, the New Apostolic Reformation, has created its own distinct Dominionist movement. And members see Perry as their ticket to power.

“The New Apostles talk about taking dominion over American society in pastoral terms,” wrote Wilder in the Texas Observer. “They refer to the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society: family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, government, education, and business. These are the nerve centers of society that God (or his people) must control.” He quotes a sermon from Tom Schlueter, New Apostolic pastor close to Perry. “We’re going to infiltrate [the government], not run from it. I know why God’s doing what he’s doing ... He’s just simply saying, ‘Tom I’ve given you authority in a governmental authority, and I need you to infiltrate the governmental mountain.”

According to Wilder, members of the New Apostolic Reformation see Perry as their vehicle to claim the “mountain” of government. Some have told Perry that Texas is a “prophet state,” destined, with his leadership, to bring America back to God. The movement was deeply involved in The Response, the massive prayer rally that Perry hosted in Houston earlier this month. “Eight members of The Response ‘leadership team’ are affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation movement,” wrote Wilder. “The long list of The Response’s official endorses—posted on the event’s website—reads like a Who’s Who of the apostolic-prophetic crowd, including movement founder C. Peter Wagner.”

While it's the Republican Party that's otherwise up in arms about Islamic Sharia law taking over the Constitution, isn't it funny (just SOO FUNNY) how they're not so upset about the Christians who want to do the same?

Welcome To The World, Cormac!

From this Early Returns piece from Friday, we read:

And mazel tov to new dad Chris Potter and wife Melanie for the birth today of son Cormac.

Potter's been a good friend and on occasion (but only when he thinks it's warranted, of course) an annoyingly passive-aggressive critic to this blog for a long long time. Except for the stubborn defamation lawsuits that our attorneys assure us have direct links to something Potter suggested to us, his insights are, for the most part, not so damaging as to force us to shut down the blog and move to Toronto to avoid Homeland Security.

Usually.

But I fear I've said too much. I do want to take a moment to congratulate Mr Potter on his great good fortune!

And in his defense, I'd like to point out something to Tim McNulty, P-G writer who included this in his piece:

Pittsburgh City Paper's cover story this week is on the Corey O'Connor/Chris Zurawsky race to replace Doug Shields as the Democrat in council district 5. (We're frankly shocked that Potter* didn't go with a "hair apparent" headline.)

Tim, have you seen Potter's "hair line" these days? It's farther back than mine! If there's a reason he didn't make up some cheap coiffure drollery to describe a full head of hair, it's probably because he is, like me and Tony Norman, unfairly hair-free up top.

Life's hell for the follicularly challenged, you know. Cormac will understand this in about 45 years.

Who Said It?

Tony Norman's got a good column posted today (go read it). It's about Congressman Peter King's upcoming hearings on Radical Islam and there's some broad brush satire of anti-Islamic rhetoric in it.

Satire - look it up.

But I wanted to see how, as satire, it stood up to the real anti-Islamic rhetoric floating in the toilet bowl that's the right wing media.

First, here's Tony:

With their hard-to-pronounce names, aversion to pork ("the other white meat") and inscrutable "foreign" ways, the Muslim presence on these shores makes a mockery of one of our most sacred mantras:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag / of the United States of America / and to the republic for which it stands / one nation / under [a Judeo-Christian] God / indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

How can we be "indivisible" when so many so-called Americans of the Islamic persuasion go out of their way to be different?

Not bad. Just tongue in cheek enough to know he's kidding.

But here's Michelle Malkin:

If it’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, it’s just another day in the life of a true believer in violent jihad.

Yes: Violent jihad. Two words the current occupant of the White House won’t say together and about which he remains in stubborn denial.

Violent jihad. A fundamental tenet of legions and legions of Muslims worldwide — and untold numbers of homegrown and immigrant practitioners of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage here on American soil.

And now Ann Coulter:

The Middle East is on fire again, and crazy Muslims with funny names aren't helping things -- Mahmoud, ElBaradei, al-Banna, Barack...

And Peter King himself:

I would say, you could say that 80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists. Those who are in control. The average Muslim, no, they are loyal, but they don't work, they don't come forward, they don't tell the police … .

That last one's a two-fer as it comes from the World Net Daily.

As good a writer as he is, if the above quotations show anything they show that Tony's satire of teh crazie pales in comparison to the real crazie.

What In The World Is Going On??

Get a gander from this paragraph from the Trib's Op-Ed page:

To Major League Baseball's arbitration process. Pirates right-handed pitcher Ross Ohlendorf was paid $439,000 last year. He was plagued by injuries and posted a record of 1-11. Even with that, the Bucs offered him $1.4 million for this season. Mr. Ohlendorf took the matter to arbitration. On Tuesday, arbiters awarded Ohlendorf $2.025 million. Good work if you can get it, we suppose, but it shows what's wrong with baseball economics.

And then there's this from Tony Norman's column today:

I'm not a baseball fan, but I am an American. This alone gives me some insight into what it means to fail and to be rewarded for it.

This week, arbitrators in Major League Baseball ruled that the annual salary of Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Ross Ohlendorf deserved a bump from $439,000.

Despite one win and 11 losses in 2010, not to mention two stints on the disabled list during what turned out to be yet another miserable Pirates season, Mr. Ohlendorf just knew he was entitled to a large salary hike.

Mr. Ohlendorf, a Princeton University grad who majored in something called Operations Research and Financial Engineering, knows that there is an inverse relationship between reward and failure in this country.

The Pirates made a more-than-generous offer to him of $1.4 million. After researching the salaries of MLB starting pitchers he considered "comparable," Mr. Ohlendorf argued that $1.4 million didn't account for his true value to the Pirates.

After pressing on with the kind of dogged determination the Pirates would love to see on the field for once, Mr. Ohlendorf was awarded a substantial raise to $2,025,000 by the arbitration panel. The panel obviously felt Mr. Ohlendorf's pain and gave him financial parity with his rivals, regardless of whether it represented a fair value to the team.

"I looked at the marketplace the past two years, but more specifically last year, and felt that was a fair number," Mr. Ohlendorf said afterward.

I didn't see PG sportswriter Colin Dunlap's reaction after getting that quote, but knowing him, I'm sure his face registered something akin to bemused resignation.

When Tony and Scaife's braintrust find common ground on something (ANYTHING), something is very very wrong in the universe.

My Dinner With Hitchens

Ok, so it wasn't exactly dinner. It was only lunch.

To bring y'inz up-to-date, we'll have to start with Tony Norman's column. It's all about Hitchens, the well-known atheist, the well-known writer, and now the well-known esophageal cancer sufferer.

In the course of the column, Tony writes:

On a personal level, there are few intellectuals I enjoy more than Christopher Hitchens. When he taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he was kind enough to invite me to a private reception for Salman Rushdie when that writer was under threat from the soulless theocrats of the Iranian regime.

Since then, we've broken bread at the now-defunct Crawford Grill, had a drink at the Warhol and exchanged pleasantries at various book signings.

I was there at the Crawford Grill. I broke bread (well, kinda - you'll understand in a minute) with Christopher Hitchens.

It was April of 2001 and he was in town promoting his Henry Kissinger book. That night, he was to read from the book at the Frick Fine Arts building and Tony, being the all around cool guy that he is, was kind enough to invite me along for lunch.

As I worked in the Frick Building at the time, I knew it would be a half hour walk to the now-closed Crawford Grill and while I can't recall exactly I think Tony gave me a ride to lunch. I do remember walking in with Tony.

I also remember that there was a bar was on the right as we walked in. It was 11:45 (am) Hitchens was already there.

When we walked in, he was sitting facing the bar and we could see his profile. Odd thing though - when we walked in he turned to to his left (we were on his right) to meet us and by...how...slowly...he...turned, I pretty much knew he was already completely plastered by that point.

There were five of us for lunch. Me, Tony, two other people I couldn't possibly remember even if you held a gun to my head, and Christopher Hitchens. We got a table and amid the copius cigarette smoke, the conversation was buzzing along very nicely without me. Film, politics (local and international) and Henry Kissinger were all topics of discussion. The lunch order was taken while we had our drinks. I remember I had a soda of some kind. Hitchens had already switched, I think, from a cocktail to wine.

When the food arrived, guess who's lunch order was lost?

Yea, mine. They ate but I didn't.

So that's why I can't exactly say I "broke bread" with Christopher Hitchens.

Later that night, after his reading from The Trial of Henry Kissinger, I stood in line waiting for him to sign my freshly bought copy. When I got to the head of the line, he looked up, smirked a bit and we chatted about lunch.

When he signed the book, it read "To David. Next time, lunch is on Crawford's."

More On Rand Paul from Tony Norman and TPM

From Today's P-G:

While insisting that discrimination in any form was abhorrent to him, Mr. Paul told [Rachel] Maddow that under the Constitution, the racist owners of private businesses should have the latitude to refuse service to anyone they want. Such brutal logic is based on the arcane theory that Title II of the Civil Rights Act violates individual liberties by denying a bigot his right to free speech and association.

And then:

Thursday, the Paul campaign issued the following statement declaring that its candidate considered the 1964 Civil Rights Act settled law and that he would not support its repeal:

"I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws."

Talkingpointsmemo has a run down of Rand Paul distancing himself from himself:

• Paul on Maddow, circa 9 p.m. Wednesday: I don't agree with the Civil Rights Act, but I don't believe in racism.
• Paul statement, noon Thursday: I wouldn't support repealing the law.
  
• Paul campaign statement, 2 p.m. Thursday: I support the law and the government's power to enforce it.
• Paul on CNN, 5 p.m. Thursday: "I would have voted yes" for the law. "There was a need for federal intervention."

That was fast - but what's this about a Libertarian admitting the need for federal intervention?

When Worlds Collide...

...and The Trib Editorial Board and Tony Norman write about the same thing (and would seem to agree) is a terrible thrill, indeed.

First the Trib:

During last year's presidential election, Reid referred to Barack Obama as a "light-skinned" black man "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

To the first point, Mr. Obama is just that. The second point, Obama is well spoken. And the phrase "Negro dialect" is a linguistic descriptive, not a slur.

The third point is the most debatable but it nonetheless is weak. Do some people adopt an affectatious dialect to suit their audience? Of course. Especially politicians. You hear it all the time and it hardly is race-based. How many white Northern politicians have you heard affecting a white Southern drawl? Plenty.

There are plenty -- PLENTY -- of things to criticize Harry Reid about. But merely stating the obvious facts isn't one of them.

Now I am completely frightened as I am in agreement with that past part, though I suspect the things about Reid I'd criticize are different from the things Scaife's braintrust would criticize.

And now Tony:

Back on the Negro front, the erroneous belief that blacks are hothouse flowers who faint at the first hint of racial generalities continues to dictate coverage of Nevada Sen. Harry Reid's hamfisted "no Negro dialect" comments about Mr. Obama.

Sen. Reid has apologized for saying inelegantly what is undoubtedly true about huge swaths of the American electorate. All things being equal, some types of blacks are more "acceptable" than others. America is a color-conscious nation -- period.

As a product of a generation in which positive relationships across racial lines were rare, it would be a miracle if Harry Reid, a Mormon, didn't say something goofy every now and then. It wasn't his church's official position that blacks had souls until the 1970s. He's come a long way.

When the Trib and Tony don't disagree, it's time to pack your bags and head for high ground.

The President's Lost Another Columnist

The P-G's Tony Norman:

The Rock Obama knows something that Barack Obama seems to have forgotten -- that the Republican strategy for regaining power is predicated upon the defeat of the White House's entire domestic agenda -- period.

To say I'm disappointed with Mr. Obama's passivity in the face of this threat to his presidency and the Democratic majority is putting it mildly. I'm appalled by it.

And:

I'm beginning to believe that Barack Obama would have been better off serving at least one full-term in the U.S. Senate before becoming president.

Had he been Sen. Obama during a Hillary Clinton presidency when comprehensive health care legislation was making the rounds, he would have had a front row seat for Sen. Joe Lieberman's shameful monkey business.

His unwillingness to punish disloyal Democrats or go to war with Republicans has created a leadership vacuum Sen. Lieberman and other opportunists are happy to occupy.

Yea, what Tony said.

Not What You'd Expect

Oh, so here goes.

Tony Norman, award-winning columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, winner of a Knight-Wallace Fellowship, and (most importantly) best man at my wedding, made a few boo-boos in today's column.

Boo-boo numero uno:

I was a sucker for environmental propaganda. When I was a kid, I fell for all of the "Keep America Beautiful" public service announcements. The most memorable of those PSA's featured a Native American paddling a canoe across a lake to a trash-strewn shoreline.

As ads go, it was devastating. The Indian had nobility and empathy to spare. As he paddled past factories belching smoke, a narrator with the deep, biblical voice of Orson Welles intoned: "Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. Some people don't."

Here's the ad:

Sorry, Tony. It was William Conrad NOT Orson Welles who did the voice over for the ad. This post at the Britannica.com says so. Take a look:

This classic television commercial, from the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign of the early 1970s, debuted on the second Earth Day, in 1971, and was one of the most successful public service announcements ever produced, starring actor (actually, Italian-American actor) Iron Eyes Cody as the “crying Indian” with a voice-over by actor William Conrad. [emphasis added]

And there's Tony's boo-boo numero due. Did you see it? Here's what Tony wrote again:

I was a sucker for environmental propaganda. When I was a kid, I fell for all of the "Keep America Beautiful" public service announcements. The most memorable of those PSA's featured a Native American paddling a canoe across a lake to a trash-strewn shoreline.

But the Britannica says Iron Eyes Cody was an Italian-American.

So does Snopes.com:

That "crying Indian," as he would later sometimes be referred to, was Iron Eyes Cody, an actor who throughout his life claimed to be of Cherokee/Cree extraction. Yet his asserted ancestry was just as artificial as the tear that rolled down his cheek in that television spot — the tear was glycerine, and the "Indian" a second-generation Italian-American.

And:

Iron Eyes Cody was born Espera DeCorti on 3 April 1904 in the small town of Kaplan, Louisiana. He was the son of Francesca Salpietra and Antonio DeCorti, she an immigrant from Sicily who had arrived in the USA in 1902, and he another immigrant who had arrived in America not long before her.

AND the tear was glycerine? How else did they lie to us?

See? That proves it: GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!

Pundit Show Tonight!

GO! Should be a fun show!

NetRoots 2009 photos

Johnny Mac, Ace photographer Gab Bonesso and the best man at my wedding, Tony Norman.


A WELL-FOCUSSED photo of Maria (the Other Political Junkie), Spork (who knows absolutely everybody), and Mackenzie Carpenter of the P-G.

Netroots Nation 09 - Photos from Day One

Georgia Berner from http://www.whatifpost.com/ at the Women's Caucus
 
Fadia Halma, Politcal Director, Pennsylvania Democratic Party at the Women's Caucus (in purple)
 
The Other Political Junkie and Post-Gazette's Tony Norman and my camera functioning poorly
 
The Post-Gazette's Mackenzie Carpenter
 
The Post-Gazette's Tim McNulty


As always: What Digby Said (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/)


Braddock Mayor John Fetterman and Celeste Taylor from http://pennsylvaniaequity.org/


PA Rep. Chelsa Wagner talking about redistricting
 
Pam Spaulding from http://www.pamshouseblend.com/ takes one for the blog
 
The crowd waits for The Big Dog
 
Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato running for governor talking about our region
 
Surprisingly this was taken before the heckler. Someone shouted out about Don't Ask Don't Tell. By the time that Clinton finished answering Lane Hudson, Hudson gave Clinton a Standing O.
 
This way to the party at The Warhol


Franco "Dok" Harris outside The Warhol
http://www.harrisforpittsburgh.com .

Tony Gives Credit Where Credit Is Due

In his column today, Tony Norman explains some parts of teh crazie and starts with two sentences I never thought I'd read from him:

Let us now praise Bill O'Reilly. Let's not forget "Sideshow Annie" Coulter while we're at it. Both Ann Coulter and Mr. O'Reilly have done what many conservative elected officials don't have the guts to do: They've either mocked or denounced the so-called "birther" movement as an embarrassment to common sense and a threat to the long-term interests of the Republican Party.

And writes something a local member of Congress should notice:

Earlier this week, a reporter from The Huffington Post tried to get Rep. Tim Murphy, a Republican from Upper St. Clair, on the record about the "birthers." But the pride of the 18th District proved too fleet-footed for the running dogs of the media.

Rep. Murphy reportedly hid in a congressional office supply store for 20 minutes rather than answer the politically sensitive question about whether Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen. How many birthers can there possibly be in the 18th District to take offense?

The video can be found here, in the event you wanted to see it in all its glory. Tony, in three paragraphs, explains teh crazie:

As anyone with a relative with a tinfoil hat knows, the birthers believe Barack Obama is a Kenyan citizen who became president of the United States through trickery. They argue that Mr. Obama's presidency is, thus, constitutionally invalid. Even CNN's Lou Dobbs has given legitimacy to their paranoid ravings by insisting on "more documentation" from the Obama White House on the issue.

Birthers want to inspect the original birth certificate and not the copy issued by the state of Hawaii. They don't believe an original exists and they're critical of the "certificate of live birth" Hawaii distributed to the media to quell the controversy.

Birthers insist that a certificate of live birth and a birth certificate aren't the same animal. They also want to debunk the notion that "six of one" comes anywhere near to being the same thing as "half dozen of the other."

Birthers are crazie.

From Tony, The Norman

In today's P-G:

Perhaps I spoke too soon last week when I described U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's approach to starting a national discussion about race as "ham-fisted." You'll recall that Mr. Holder called us a "nation of cowards" for maintaining social segregation long after the battles for integration had been won.

While I agreed with his overall point, his didactic tone bothered me. It lacked the subtlety needed to get past the defenses of people in denial. There was also something hypocritical about accusing Americans of ducking honest dialogue about race when his own boss made a point of de-emphasizing it during the presidential campaign. We would prefer that Mr. Holder indict Dick Cheney for crimes against the U.S. Constitution, not point fingers at us.

That was last week. This week I'm feeling a lot more sympathetic toward the attorney general's position.

Tony then goes on to illustrate what changed his mind: the mayor in Orange County who had "no idea that there was a racial stereotype about black people having an insatiable lust for watermelons" after e-mailing an image of the White House with a watermelon filled lawn and the drunken kids of Madison County, Arkansas waving the Rebel flag and shouting racial epithets at the black electrical workers who were there to rebuild the area's power grid after a recent ice storm.

Tony ends with:

It isn't that Attorney General Holder went too far in his comments last week. He didn't go far enough.