Cyphering

What'll I Do?

2006-08-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

Confession: I had a little crush on Mike Douglas. Handsome, funny, kind, great voice. Yeah, I know he was a square, but I was surrounded by people like that in my Eastern Washington hometown. He was one of us! Only cooler.

Where Merv's set was dark and sparse, Mike's set was bright and cheerful (love those asterisk shapes!). Merv had the erudite Arthur Treacher, but Mike changed his co-hosts every week. My only regret? He gave a job to the venemous Roger Ailes. If only he had known...

Here's a great obit at the New York Times.

And now go to YouTube, search "Mike Douglas" and find lots of clips with such rare creatures as Shirley Bassey, John Lennon, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, and Gene Simmons in full KISS regalia.

Mike...you were awesome. Sleep well you sweet Irish tenor.

I'm Tupper-Crazy!

2006-04-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

It's been brewing for a couple of months now, but I have decided to become a Tupperware Lady!

The main reason is to get rid of some credit card debt, but also because
Who Doesn't Love Tupperware?

I have an emotional connection to Tupperware that I can't completely explain. Throughout my childhood, my mom collected so many pieces, there's not a page in the latest catalog that doesn't remind me of a family experience. There's the hamburger patty maker we used to prepare for potluck barbecues. I used the marinating dish until I accidentally melted the lid on a hot burner. My sister-in-law covered up my big yellow bowl with wrapping paper because she thought it looked too tacky on her table. And my brother and I drank so much Kool-Aid from the plastic tumblers, I'm surprised we didn't contract diabetes by the age of 10.

But most importantly, Tupperware has symbolized empowerment for women that was hard to find when it started in the 1950s. Like the GI bill for men, Tupperware became the female ticket to the middle class. So, I'm excited to join the ranks of all those who have gone before and strive to meet some financial goals myself.

I also think that Tupperware can change the world, but you'll have to check out my website to find out why. I'm ready to party!

My Tupperware Website
Tupperware! The PBS "American Experience" Episode
Super Saleswoman Dixie Longate's website

Happy Birthday to Me!

2006-04-15T14:51:00.000-07:00

Tax Day has always had special meaning for me -- it's the proud day of my birth, making me a bossy, outspoken Aries.

For the past 20 years, I have enjoyed my own tradition for the big day:

I dress in grey and pink (in honor of Miss Audrey Hepburn's performance as Susie the blind woman in the classic thriller, "Wait Until Dark" when she wore a chic grey skirt and pink turtleneck while battling evil drug smugglers). Then, sometime during the day, I eat pizza and watch "Breakfast at Tiffany's." I just assumed everyone knew about this movie, but last year I watched it with some younger friends and I realized "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was more than 40 years old! Most of them had never even heard of it, which did not bring joy to my enlarging middle-aged bones.

This year has been especially fun. My beloved brought a new pair of eyes to my birthday ritual. He noticed the set design, imagery, color palette...it was wonderful to see what I had never noticed before. Truly, I never gave Blake Edwards that much credit -- and I should have.

So this year's birthday brings something that everyone should have as they enter middle age: a fresh vision of our most familiar and precious experiences and a wonderful person to share it with.

Mazel Tov!

Hollywood Nation

2006-03-06T23:48:00.000-08:00

"...the 'Hollywood doesn't reflect mainstream America' argument is one of the oldest and phoniest in the playbook."
Read a great piece by James Wolcott

A Real Man

2006-03-06T23:22:00.000-08:00

And finally, I would say that, you know, we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it's probably a good thing.

We're the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects. This Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I'm proud to be a part of this Academy. Proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch. And I thank you so much for this.

A Real Woman

2006-03-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

And I want to say that, my grandmother was one of the biggest inspirations in my life. She taught me how to be a real woman, to have strength and self respect, and to never give those things away. And those are a lot of qualities I saw in June Carter.

People used to ask June how she was doing, and she used to say -- "I'm just trying to matter." And I know what she means. You know, I'm just trying to matter, and live a good life and make work that means something to somebody. And you have all made me feel that I might have accomplished that tonight. So thank you so much for this honor.

Huh?

2006-03-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

Those tasteful arbiters of Oscar style -- Joan and Melissa Rivers -- told Al Roker this morning on "The Today Show" that everyone at Sunday's Academy Awards looked "too perfect."

"The stylists have taken all the fun out of the Oscars," Joan said.

Huh?

Did they SEE Helena Bonham Carter? Or does she get a pass because she looks WAAAAY better than her husband, Tim Burton?

And what kind of "fun" are they missing? They don't get to make hysterical fun of anyone who looks LESS than perfect?

Bummer.

You might have to find a new hobby, ladies.

My Oscar Stuff

2006-03-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

Awesome set.
Jon Stewart was good -- not great, but good.
LOVED the "gay cowboy" clips!
"Campaign ads" were hilarious.
Ben Stiller in green unitard? Priceless!
Reese Witherspoon? For "Election" maybe. Felicity Huffman was robbed.
"Crash"? Are you serious?
Kudos to Philip Seymour Hoffman honoring his mom.
Make-up gag with Steve Carell & Will Ferrell was too funny!
George Clooney -- so damned handsome. Great speech. He's bringing a social conscience back to his little corner of Hollywood.
Montage this! Sheesh! If this years' show was intended to demonstrate the greatness of film shown in its original glory of theatrical release (rather than a personal DVD player, a Blackberry, or cell phone), it failed. But it probably convinced viewers how boring those fucking montages can be!
Best dresses: Charlize Theron, Michelle Williams, Salma Hayek, Jennifer Lopez, Reese Witherspoon, Uma Thurman.
Second Oscar for Costumer Colleen Atwood! Woo Hoo! She's just a girl from Quincy, Washington for God's sake! How cool is that?
What's the whole Jessica Alba thing about?
My beloved compared the Academy's recognition of "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" to them finally honoring rock 'n' roll in the early 1980s. Ooooh... cutting edge.
Where the hell were Don Knotts and Darren McGavin in the "In Memorian" roll call?
Sharon Stone is on her way to becoming the Sally Kirkland of her generation

Grab the Crown

2006-03-05T19:19:00.000-08:00

Oscar nominee Terrence Howard made an enlightening appearance on "Sunday Morning Shootout" with the two Peters (Guber and Bart). First, he made eight films in 2004 and he was paid a whopping 12 grand to play the role of a pimp in "Hustle and Flow." For "Crash," he flew himself out to L.A. and paid for his own hotel room during the audition process. And he only got a shot at it after Forest Whitaker and Don Cheadle passed.

When he said it was a "happy accident" that he got the role, Peter Guber said there are no accidents, only "coincidences that are meant to be." He told Howard that his diligence and preparation made it possible for him to play the role. "Put yourself in a place to say 'I deserve this'. It's your birthright," Guber told Howard, who quickly agreed.

Turns out Howard studied biology and engineering and while in school, it occurred to him that being born is an accomplishment in itself: a half a billion sperm race toward one egg in a blind marathon; the boys have only 24 hours to get there and the girls have 72. Whoever wins the initial competition should be considered a champion. "If we can just get to life, then everything else is just kudos. This is what we deserve," he said.

"Like Oprah says," Howard continued, "The crown is there, you just have to bend down, grab the crown, and put it on your head. It's waiting there for you. You've done it. You've done it."

No matter who won the Oscar, Terrence, you grabbed the crown. Long live the King.

Is it Gonna Kill Ya?

2006-03-03T19:30:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, I got incensed about how a letter to the newspaper editor rebuked a buddy of mine. So, I looked up the writer's number and called him to tell him what I thought of his frigging letter.

But before I could call, I had to ask myself a question: "What's the worst thing that can happen here? Can he kill me?" Not unless he can find my house. "OK...so...I can survive anything short of that." I took a deep breath and made the call.

I think I was shaking all the way through the conversation, but he didn't know that. I don't think I was brilliant and I probably didn't make much sense, but the bottom line was, when I got off the phone, I felt great.

And I didn't die.

It's kind of amazing how small our world can get. Picture a bull's eye. This is your life. Now, envision a really wide center circle. That's where we spend most of our time doing routine, predictable stuff with a bit of room to try some new stuff while stakes are low.

There's a thinner outer circle on your bull's eye and that's your "risk" area. We don't go there very much. This would be like learning how to ski, sky diving, changing careers, falling in love, starting a business, going back to school, etc. It takes energy and courage but no real physical harm can come to you. And the remaining edges are "death" where we truly can lose everything (I'm thinkin' bungee jumping).

Notice a couple of things about the circle:

First, the rings are next to one another and although it appears that we can easily slip from one zone to the next, most of the time, the chasm feels impossible to cross. Risk is hard, scary, and usually comes with a cost. It's so much easier to turn on the Home Shopping Network and light up a fattie. Or...stay in the marriage for appearance's sake and get so busy you don't notice how unhappy you are.

Second, we may have no idea which ring we are in at a given time. Twice a day, I get on the freeway for a commute and, in theory, I am risking my life, but it seems routine to me. What might actually be "living on the edge" feels predictable. So, the whole concept of risk being separate from our daily routine might be an illusion. It might be closer than we think.

When the challenge looks scary, I have two good strategies that seem to work. The first is to breathe my way through it ("in" through the nose and "out" through the mouth). The second is the "can it kill me?" question. 99.9% of the time, I figure I'm not gonna die if I do it. When it's over, I feel brave and every time I do something scary, I become more convinced that I can depend on me. Hot dog!

It might all be in my head, but it beats getting stuck in the middle of the bulls eye forever.

Put Away the Mortarboard

2006-03-02T21:36:00.000-08:00

Here's what I'm learning about teachers. We REALLY like to be smart. This makes sense, I guess. We chose teaching because we liked school, right? Surprisingly, many of us were TERRIBLE students. And some of us are trying to take another crack at the whole thing by going back to teach. One of my former "nightmare" students came back to teach at his old high school and became a talented, enthusiastic colleague.

But for the most part, we all have experience being smart, having answers, coming up with the right quip. And here's the unfortunate part of that. Since we tend to be learn-ed, we go into most situations wanting to share that knowledge...to TEACH, not to LEARN. But when we are trying to connect with people and strengthen relationships, it's best to LISTEN and LEARN. By staying in teaching mode, we ensure that the other person knows how SMART we are, but that doesn't mean they want to spend time with us.

Ever since I figured this out, I've become painfully aware of those times when I share absolutely RIVETING factoids like why cashews never have shells or what the Teapot Dome scandal was all about...How could anyone NOT want to know those things? And wouldn't they think I'm GREAT for sharing?

I think we see information as our currency and we like to show it off. When we can't, we can become paralyzed. It's tough for teachers to risk being ignorant or appear "stupid." Yet that's when people love us the most -- when we share our vulnerabilities and risk failure.

More than a decade ago at a teacher's union convention, I was walking down the long, long lobby of the New Orleans Convention Center and it seemed that everyone I saw was overweight. REALLY overweight. Stress. A sedentary lifestyle. No time for self-care. I know there are a lot of reasons for teachers to be overweight. But I came away with the feeling that their extra pounds were also a form of armor, protecting them from pain, risk, and, unfortunately, other people.

Hey! I've been there. As a fat kid, I used my intelligence and humor to fend off attacks and, later, teaching gave me an outlet for my passion for learning. It also gave me a sense of control, responsibility, and authority. Not bad ingredients for a career, but useless for building relationships.

Genuine connection means taking off the armor, getting close, being open, humble, and even foolish. That's no easy lesson to master.

What's Your Set-up?

2006-02-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

So, this guy wrote a book about happiness called "The Happiness Hypothesis" and he says you shouldn't mistake pleasure for happiness.

Pleasure comes in things like candy, shiny Christmas lights, sex, reading a book, skiing, etc. But true happiness comes from setting up your life in a way that brings you balance and fulfillment. To put it another way, you can't go out and "find" happiness, you have to discover it within your life.

First step? Surprise! Find out what kind of "creature" you are. OK...that's already too much to ask for a lot of people. Most of us avoid that kind of self-examination but to make things more complicated, we actually possess a lot of "selves" which interact with our home, family, work, and society. What do each of them need?

Your job then (if you choose to accept it) is to create the conditions that help you find that purpose and balance. Can you set up a life that is coherent and integrates all your "selves" successfully? In other words, can you create a life for yourself that makes you comfortable and satisfied with your home, family, work, and society? If so...Eureka! You might have found the formula!

You + love + work + connection to something bigger = Happiness
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Why a Meaningful Life is Closer Than You Think by Jonathan Haidt

Off-Center

2006-02-27T17:45:00.000-08:00

OK...so here's the deal.

I knew I was moving away from who I was several years before the divorce. I had established a fairly firm core before I got married and early on, things were good. I didn't particularly LIKE being married at first, but I got used to it. Mostly, it was a process of surrendering. When I told my colleagues that I felt like a wimp for "selling out" and getting married. One of them looked me right in the eye and said, "But that's the human condition!." She was telling me that it is perfectly natural to want to partner with someone and that I wasn't being weak.

So, I dug in and we established a warm place to be together. For a while. But, as my OTHER wise colleague told me: "Stuff just happens between people." And instead of using some badly needed relationship floss to clean out the gunk, it just kept building up until eventually even a power washer couldn't get rid of it all: the resentment, anger, disappointment, unreasonable expectations, lack of communication.

I scrambled for ways to ignore the gunk. I got REALLY busy with my career and my hobbies. I joined him in HIS interests. I even moved away from home for awhile to pursue a degree. And all of this running moved me even further away from the core I had worked so hard to find. Moving back to center meant shifting my whole world. I'd have to let go of the house, the status, some friends...

My self discovery had been deliberate and hard-won. After years of spinning my wheels in dead-end jobs and dead-end boyfriends, I finally found some mo-jo and I became determined to move forward. Back in school and studying for a teaching certificate, I had a lot of time to ponder: who am I, how did I get this way, how can I not be this way anymore, what do I really want to be, how would I act if I were that person. A total reinvention. And the best thing I ever did.

By the time I got married, I knew exactly what I wanted and who I wanted to be. Ten years later, I was just trying to be civil and holding my life together with paper clips and twine. If my self-hood were one of those carpenter's levels, the bubble of me wouldn't even be visible.

Since then: separation, crying, other relationships, crying, more getting ridiculously busy, crying, new job, crying, new city, crying, eating waaaaay too much, crying, going out too much, putting up with stupid men, crying, new apartment, crying, divorce, new relationship, more crying, ex getting married, therapy, long hot baths, fighting guilt, crying, days spent in pajamas, reading good books, turning off the phone, learning to say "no."

And out of all that...something cool is starting to happen. I'm catching glimpses of the core again. The bubble is moving closer to the black line. I'm making fewer moves out of desperation. I'm feeling sensible again.My beloved and I are weaving our own relationship floss and boy, does that stuff work! I'm starting to see myself again. Not the old me, but a new vision enriched by all the aforementioned events.

It's not a perfect picture, but it's moving closer to center.

The Incredible Mr. Knotts

2006-02-26T19:42:00.000-08:00

I love this picture of Don Knotts.

Believe it or not, he was ALWAYS successful with women. Which is more than I can say about Sylvester Stallone or Jeff Conaway or....Robert Blake.

Five years on "The Andy Griffith Show," 5 Emmy nomination, 5 wins. A helluva record.

He was RARELY out of work and when he was, he called his friends. The best call was to Andy Griffith when he asked him, "Do you need a deputy?"

Andy Griffith told Larry King that he was bereft when Don left his show for a movie deal at Universal. He said it might sound odd for a man to say about another man, but Andy missed Don every day. They were best friends.

When I was 10, I went to see "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken." I was so scared, I had to go sit in the lobby until the scary organ music stopped.

Miss ya', Barn.

Links: NYT Obit
USA Today Obit

A Full Life

2006-02-21T20:07:00.000-08:00

"There's a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza..."

Every time I hear the word "bucket," I think of that summer campfire song. It starts out as a silly ditty, but if you are a Type A personality like me, it turns into a nightmare as the hapless Henry can't seem to fix the bucket, water keeps running out, and I'm sure Liza has better things to do than tell Henry how to fix the damn bucket! In the meantime, there's no water! Whew!

But the metaphor of a leaky bucket has captivated me because until recently, mine had gone bone dry. I don't know if there was a hole in my bucket or if it was just evaporation, but the water has slowly disappeared over the past few years as I forgot all about keeping it full and focused instead on, well, I guess, how shiny my bucket appeared to everyone else.

It's something that can happen at any time, not just to busy adults who try to climb the corporate ladder while struggling with with mortgages and shuttling kids to soccer practice. I mourn for the empty buckets of those kids who run from soccer practice to music lessons to SAT prep class with a cell phone in one hand and a bag of fast food in the other. Adolescent hours spent in my room, playing the guitar, writing in my diary, listening to records, and basically staying away from my brother filled my bucket UP. And my most interesting friends did the same thing, only with comic books. All that time alone to ponder, reflect, and refresh kept our batteries charged and powered our imaginations to pursue some far-flung interests that created a rich, interesting youth-hood.

Since then, I've gone from drought to tsunami, depending on the status of my employment and relationships. The more time I have to myself, the fuller my bucket. The more I try to please everyone else, the more it is drained.

Here's how it happens:

Take a long hot bath with a good magazine = Add one quart to the bucket
Entertain a house full of uninvited, unexpected guests = Drain one half gallon
Pursue your favorite hobby = Add one cup for every hour spent
Late hours at the office to impress your boss = Drain one pint per evening
Go to the beach with your family = Add a gallon per day
Create a delicious, interesting meal = Add a quart
Go out with friends to avoid hurting their feelings = Drain a quart
Go to bed early with your favorite book = Add a pint
Take 10 minutes to call someone because you feel guilty = Drain a pint
Take 10 minutes to check in on a friend in need = Add a cup

And so on...

There is nothing LESS fun to be around than someone with a drained bucket. And it's even worse BEING that person. Eventually, if you don't want to keep running on empty, you gotta build yourself a very sensitive water meter that you trust to tell you the truth. When the meter says "full," you can operate at optimum performance and even do a little more -- for others, for the boss, for the kids. But when the meter starts to drop (you can't afford for it to go completely dry), you MUST listen and take the time to refill. Even if it means saying "no," turning off the phone, risking criticism, or appearing selfish (gasp!).

And if there's a hole that refuses to be patched and keeps on draining, get yourself a new bucket -- one that's big enough to hold your passions, your joy, and your heart's desire.

And let it overflow.

Dis Bum Was Robbed

2006-02-15T23:47:00.000-08:00

My beloved and I enjoyed a divine evening a few weeks back when we watched "Cinderella Man." Go figure.

Our expectations could NOT have been lower. I kept my finger on the stop button for the first ten minutes and slowly put the remote away completely. Eventually, we looked at each other in disbelief and shook our heads at how wrong we had been in our judgement of the film.

What happened?

Close on the heels of another amazing boxing picture, "Million Dollar Baby," "Cinderella Man" opened in early 2005 to low box office numbers. Throughout the year, producer Brian Grazer kept trying to sell the movie to a resistant public. First with money back guarantees and later by re-releasing it to find a new audience. Felt like whipping a dead horse to us.

But try as Grazer might, he couldn't get us into the theater. The trailer made it seem like a million other "underdog" movies and every clip we saw on the talk show circuit looked even worse -- predictable! So...it dropped off our radar screen completely.

It was a quiet winter night when we selected it from our "On Demand" cable menu last month. For some reason, we painfully decided to fork over the $3.99 and risk disappointment.

What we saw was FAR from what had been marketed to us. It was NOT predictable, it was NOT full of cliches. It was an inspiring, engaging story rich in history with an original take on the Depression, boxing, and redemption. Even though we knew what was ultimately going to happen, we had NOT seen this film before. It was a refreshing experience. Too bad it was so ignored.

A worse shame is that between last January and now, Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger were forgotten by acting award voters. This might be partly due to their (dark) days in the sun last year: Russell and his unfortunate "cell phone incident" and Renee's marriage and divorce from Kenny Chesney. And the picture didn't sell. That's a formula for being overlooked. They were lovely together and should NOT have been ignored. Paul Giamatti's performance has received kudos (this could be pay-back for his losing the big awards last year as the star of "Sideways" but he deserves this years' accolades even so). Giamatti did a very hard thing: he made me believe boxing is something you can actually get passionate about.

But YOU should get passionate about seeing this movie if you haven't already. It's a gem that deserved more than it got. You won't be sorry.

Big Girls DO Cry

2006-02-14T18:02:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: This blog entry is NO comment on Valentine's Day. I hope you have have a lovely one, now matter WHAT your relationship status may be. Have chocolate if you can. And champagne.

This is getting to be pet peeve of mine: people who are ashamed of crying or see it as a sign of weakness. Now, I'm not talking about crying at work or school to get attention or because you just lose it. I'm talking about the really good, therapeutic, multi-hanky, boo-hoo, sometimes gulping, purge-your-soul crying.

I know, crying sometimes feels like when you are sick and you know you'll feel a lot better if you just barf. But you don't want to barf cuz that feels yucky. That's what therapeutic crying is like: you just have to give yourself over to it and you will feel a LOT better after. What's the worst that can happen? You have to re-apply your make-up and buy more Kleenex? Big whoop!

It may seem strange to give yourself permission to revisit some pain or yearning that still calls out for attention. Letting the tears flow and is precious to your well-being. Especially if you ask yourself "What am I feeling right now?" You may not like the answer, but that's not the point. The point is you ARE FEELING it. Most of us eat, smoke, drink, sleep or stay busy, ANYTHING to keep from feeling those feelings. Afraid they might hurt us or kill us. But they won't. And once you learn that you are stronger than your feelings and you CAN bear them, your personal power becomes unlimited.

I once heard a guy on "Oprah" say if he cries, that means the villain won. Let's be real about this. Crying takes courage. Hell, it takes balls! The world tells you not to do it, so to FEEL something and be able to express it. That's brave.

I think I cried for three years straight when I went through divorce. But I figure, hey, that must mean it was a significant event to let go of. Life is like a sponge and the older you get or the deeper the connection, the bigger your sponge. It can take a while to wring out a really big sponge and it's worth every drop if it means you can move on. Otherwise, you're just adding up more miles on your emotional treadmill.

Nowadays, if something hits me hard, I just let the tears go, no matter where I am. And it's sometimes at the strangest places and times when they come. Rarely is there someone there to stop me or tell me not to cry. I think people get it that we all have pain and we all have to let it go sometimes. If they don't, that's THEIR issue, not yours.

So turn on the waterworks every once in awhile. A few tears never hurt anybody.

B.F.N!

2006-02-13T20:52:00.000-08:00

Cher's voice fades in...
"I'm standing on the edge of nowhere...
There's only one way up."
The message on the screen reads: "There's more than one woman who thinks she's the fattest woman in the room." The pretty, plus-size woman in the ad is wearing a BEAUTIFUL black beaded halter dress and the only unattractive thing about her is her frown.

Yes, it's this season's Weight Watchers commercial, sung to the tune of "Song for the Lonely" -- nice message to overweight people. Makes me want to grab my wallet and run for a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Because I'm fat, I'm lonely, huh?

During New Year's week, Katie Couric walked up to Richard Simmons, stuck a microphone in his face, and asked him why Americans are getting so fat.

Richard's face became deadly serious and his voice dripped with sincerity. "Self worth," he intoned,"People just feel worthless." No mention of increasingly sedentary lifestyles, less and less time to cook and take care of ourselves...

One of the current spokespersons for the L.A. Weight Loss Clinic extolls how different her life is now that she has lost weight. Why, she's even met the perfect man and they're getting married! Frankly, I prefer the other spokeswoman who is simply thrilled about wearing a belt. At least she's not promising a flawless future without fat.

Make a list of 20 things that will make your life fabulous if only you were (fill in the blank -- married, thin, smarter). Then, go find someone who IS what you want to be and ask them how many of those 20 things are in THEIR life. My guess? They have the same number of frustrations. Just ask my step-sister the New York model who appeared to have everything -- money, fame, looks. But she never had a decent man in her life and never found a decent career after modelling was over. She ended up killing herself. Must be nice to have it all, huh?

Getting thin DOES remove the old familiar excuse of "when I get thin, I will..." and that's too much for some people to bear. How do I cope with not getting that job if I can't blame it on being too fat? You mean he didn't like me for who I am? Shit! It was a lot easier to blame my hips!

And focusing on dieting certainly keeps your mind active, blocking out anything WORTH thinking about, like, how to improve your community, what kind of hobby you would enjoy, or the plot of a book you've always wanted to read. Or maybe where you can find a dress that makes you LOOK as cute as you FEEL when no one else is looking at your butt.

So...here's what I want to SCREAM at that woman in the cute black dress on the Weight Watchers commercial (right after I find out where she bought that dress):

Don't Wait!
Be Fabulous Now!

I swear, if she did, she would NOT be going home alone like in that commercial. A little confidence, some well-choreographed eye contact, touching, a smile and she could get LAID in a heartbeat!

As the wise author Jessica Weiner says, life for someone with a dieter's mentality always starts on Monday morning. But the subtitle of her new book accurately notes: "Life doesn't begin five pounds from now." These days we can re-name the Beckett play (where no one shows up) "Waiting For Monday Morning." Same result.

I'm not advising that you throw in the towel by not taking care of yourself. Yes, you should get enough sleep; yes, you should try to move around a little; and yes, you should eat healthy food. Get to work on time, take care of your kids, etc.

But no matter how much stuff you have to do, DON'T wait to be FABULOUS.

Fabulous just needs you to own it. Look in the mirror and claim it. Shake your head and declare yourself to be fabulous as you walk out the door. Anyone who disagrees should just "mind their own beeswax" (see previous blog entry).

Fabulous is waiting for you to grab it NOW.

B.F.N.

Be Fabulous Now!

My Hare-Brained Theory

2006-02-12T21:34:00.000-08:00

I remember the moment I decided to change my life.

I was taking a sick day from my waitressing job, wrapped up in a quilt on my parents' couch. Two years out of college, I had grown disappointed at my job opportunities and even more bummed about my ability to find interesting work that might lead to a career.

In the mid 1980s, the ABC line-up of soap operas was IT on a STICK. Remember Luke & Laura on "General Hospital?" and the Phoebe Wallingford/Erica Kane wars on "All My Children?" Well, when the rich ranching Buchanan boys rolled into Llanville, Pennsylvania on "One Life to Live," things definitely perked up and got REALLY complicated. Domineering and rich patriarch Asa brought his two handsome sons: Clint & Beau. Woof!

The grande dame of "OLTL" has been -- as long as I can remember -- Victoria Lord, played exquisitely by Erica Slezak (daughter of the famous actor Walter Slezak). Ms. Slezak seems to look younger every frigging year and she has NO apparent evidence of a face lift, which is more than I can say for Barry Manilow and Lynne Cheney. YIKES!

By the time the Buchanans moseyed into town: Viki had been through a lot: molestation as a teenager, a domineering father, four marriages, two rapes, and a split personality (the bad girl part of her is named Niki) and much much more. When Clint Buchanan came to work at her family's newspaper, The Banner, they eventually fell in love and ran the paper together (that was the high speed version of the story).

Anyhoo, as I lay on the couch and watched Viki and Clint running the paper as a team, I noticed Viki was wearing the GREATEST suit. And I realized: I want a job where I wear a suit to work. I don't want to be a waitress for the rest of my life. I want to become a professional...ummm...SOMETHING. And the gravy on the potatoes would be a man like Clint Buchanan who would share my passion for the truth and integrity. Yeah, that's it...THAT's what I want!

And then I came up with my hare-brained theory about why soap operas are important in society: they offer role models for people who may never see any other kind of success in their lives. Quickly, let me clarify a couple of things: first, my parents were fine role models and second, I realize there is a lot NOT to admire on soap operas (see my earlier blog entry about minding your own beeswax, for one example).

But what "OLTL" did for me that day wasopen up my imagination to something I hadn't considered for myself even WITH a college degree: me in a job, wearing a suit, in a marriage with a responsible grown-up (very different than the hopeless alcoholic I was involved with at the time).

And trust me, I've seen enough wasted potential to know that we can use all the inspiration we can get. Each of us knows too many people with talent who chose to hole up in their home, stayed planted in front of the television, or stockpiled booze or prescription drugs to numb their lives even more. On a recent Dr. Phil episode, an entire family described how they were slowly circling the drain as both parents and children sought escape in pornography.

Is life really all that hard?

And wouldn't we be more miserable if we didn't try to squeeze a little juice out of it before we die?

Those of us who are out there trying to DO something should pat ourselves on the back for our efforts. Apparently, it's not as easy as it seems. And grab your inspiration where you can.

Better Than Xanax or Chocolate Covered Cherries

2006-02-10T23:15:00.000-08:00

Let's face it, Valentine's Day is RARELY what it's cut out to be. And for some of us, it can be a cold winter night. While TV commercials hawk overpriced diamond necklaces and local drugstores overflow with boxes of chocolate, the reality of the "Big V" is a general lack of imagination and expensive, overbooked restaurants. And worse, this year the best day for sex falls on a week night. Can you say "past my bedtime?"

But there's hope. this year, the Big Red Holiday overlaps with one of the coolest annual events: the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Oh man . . . NEVER has more fun and love been packed into two nights on the USA Network. Big dogs, little dogs, fluffy dogs, and nearly naked dogs. Every breed you could ever dream up will be there. I DARE you -- single or married -- NOT to fall in love with at least one of these tantalizing canine Casanovas. Those lips, those eyes, that FUR! RRRRROOOOWRR!

To prepare yourself for the big event, you can rent the movie "Best in Show" over the weekend. It's a hilarious spoof directed by Christopher Guest (and his usual cast members from "Waiting for Guffman" and "A Mighty Wind"). FUNNY!

Then, grab yourself TWO boxes of bon bons (one for each night), put on your favorite jammies (this is a great excuse to buy those cute pink flannel PJ bottoms covered with red hearts or the blue ones with the puppies on them), and smile, smile, smile.

Don't worry that you don't know anything about dog competitions. The perky voice of the show's long-time host will tell you EVERYTHING you could imagine including "little known facts" about the breeds. Never will you see dogs so focused. The announcers will make you think they LOVE to show off, but the truth is, they're dogs and they like food and their trainers have little pieces of sausage or chicken in their hands. If you've ever seen the deadly stare of a dog near the dinner table, you understand where they get that determination. Dogs are no fools. It's a good thing, too, because the contestants NEED to be distracted by something when the judges examine their teeth and what's under their perfectly poised tails (having your heinie checked out by strangers on national TV has gotta be rough). These dogs are true professionals.

But be prepared to have your heart broken. You can never predict the winner no matter which dog you most admire. I'm still bitter about how the (way over-poofed) Standard Poodle stole, yes STOLE the title from the adorable Cairn Terrier three years ago. But justice returned to the universe the following year when Josh, the enormous black fluffier-than-everyone Newfoundland, savored a well-deserved victory during his gallumphing vicotory lap around the ring (he could have cared less about the trophy).

As awesome as this show is, though, it could use a few "tweaks" that might boost ratings, the most obvious being that the female handlers really need stylists. There's at least ONE woman every year who feels compelled to wear white flats with dark hose and that just looks gross. C'mon ladies, working with dogs does not have to mean "dowdy." Oh My God! I just had a thought. What if we could do a crossover show with next year's "Project Runway" desigers? They're always looking for a tricky challenge. And the potential for matching doggie outfits! Oh my GA-AWD!

But the very BEST part of the dog show is that you don't need a man OR a woman to enjoy it with. You've got a Madison Square Garden FULL of "man's" and "woman"s" best friends to keep you company. And like they say, there's nothing better than a warm dog on a cold February night. Isn't it romantic?

Mind Your Own Beeswax

2006-02-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

Had a bit of an epiphany recently that has changed my world view. Frankly, I wish someone had told me this sooner -- or that I would have listened better when they did.

I was sitting at a reading by Jessica Weiner of her new book, "Do I Look Fat in This?" and a very brave audience member asked the following:

"I get up every morning and sometimes I hate myself and sometimes I don't. But what I really struggle with is the anxiety I feel when I think people are looking at my big butt or whatever. What should I do?"

And the very wise Ms. Weiner responded:

"Well, I'd like to talk about how you hate yourself sometimes, but here's what I think about other people's judgements and I suggest you use it: My body is none of your business."

A) How many times do I wish I had said that to people who thought I was entitled to their opinion of my appearance?

B) How many times should I have refrained from passing judgement on someone else's?

And most importantly, what bigger ideas in the world were there for me to ponder than A & B?

In the time I have spent either fretting about my weight or fretting about someone else's, I KNOW I could have earned a couple more Master's Degrees or maybe trained for the friggin' Olympics (Winter AND Summer!).

So "mind your own business" has become a bit of a mantra for me lately and it's powerful. Like Bill Clinton said, sometimes you just "don't have a dog in that fight." Was that Clinton? Anyway, sometimes you don't and it's just best to stay out of it. I mean, nobody likes the office "prairie dog" who's always popping up over your cubicle to offer an unwanted opinion. And unless they ask for it, your relatives don't want to hear from you either. It's been a major life lesson for me to learn that the world really does not need my opinion about everything. Go figure.

And something cool happens when you mind your own business -- you stop judging yourself so harshly. I mean, if the ground rules are that everybody minds their own business, you don't have to be self-conscious anymore and you can relax. Judgement becomes THEIR problem. THEY'RE the ones who are out of line. THEY are behaving badly and you have nothing to be embarassed about. Your ownership of yourself rests completely in your hands. Damn! That Jessica is on to something.

Here's a blog entry from Jessica during her book tour with a little more of her thinking.
This is my suggestion for a comeback line if you find someone telling you about your body - applying a label to you (whether thin, fat, ugly, pretty) if you do not wish to engage you can simply say "My body is none of your business". Of course with a comeback line like that you have to believe it is true and say it with conviction - but it really does sum it up - doesn't it. It really isn't any of our business to comment on race, sexuality, or appearance. The first two we are more aware of in this world (and def. should be!) but the latter is a hard one. Everyone thinks they can comment on another person's body. Perhaps because we see our bodies as fair game in the media, on reality tv shows, and in advertising. Perhaps because our families have commented on them ad nauseum and we don't have any good boundaries around us. But they are our bodies. And you must treat them with respect and demand that others do the same. We will never be able to control what others think, feel, or say about us. But we can control how we use our voice in those uncomfortable situations.

"My body is none of your business."

Enough said!

Safe Harbor

2006-02-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return."
Nature Boy by Eden Ahbez
Dr. Phil calls it your "soft place to fall." Home. Family. A relationship. The place in your life that is the emotional equivalent of a thick down comforter. No sharp edges. No sharp tongues. No judgement. Just love. Acceptance. Peace. And maybe hope.

It's so easy to turn up your cynical dial when this kind of conversation starts. More than once, I have rolled my eyes when I have heard Nature Boy performed at a jazz club. I mean, come on..."the greatest thing you'll ever learn?" Not Einstein's Theory of Relativity? Not Quantum Physics? Not a Mozart Concerto? Not an Emily Dickinson poem?

That's in my head. But my heart needs something else.

Growing up feels like a long walk through the desert, dodging prickly bushes that threaten to deflate your ego and puncture your spirit: harsh critics, nasty peers, jealous strangers. Frankly, I'm amazed that any of us make it out alive. We're not supposed to complain, right? I mean, we had a warm bed, a roof over our heads, food in our stomachs. What in the world do we have to complain about? Huh? What?

So...we spend the rest of our lives with our wounds, healing some, accepting others, and ignoring the ones too painful to consider. Launching ourselves onto the waters, we try our best to steer a sensible course. Lao Tzu says the best way to live is by letting the waves take you and to avoid forcing your way to either shore. But we usually ignore Lao Tzu and spend years grappling with a combination of our goals, fate, dreams, and ego.

If we're lucky -- or if we are wise -- we reach safe harbor. Where there are no more eggshells to walk on, land mines to avoid, emotional booby traps to dodge. Just a comfy spot where you don't have to wait for the other shoe to drop. It's OK to be. Just be. Ridin' the waves with Lao Tzu.

But even in safe harbor comes a little pain -- yearning for that idyllic childhood that you missed but you're not supposed to complain about. It's easier to see what might have been when you're in paradise. And so you try your best to accept it all and eventually stop mourning and revel in all that was (and is) good.

And that's what the Nature Boy meant. And he's right. It is the greatest thing. Ever.

Freedom From Fear

2006-02-06T14:28:00.000-08:00

"The feelings we refuse to feel rule our lives."
-- Rhonda Britten

"When we run from our feelings, they follow us. Everywhere."
-- Martha Beck in O magazine
"A great deal of talent is lost in this world for want of a little courage."
-- a quote I saved in my wallet from an old copy of Glamour magazine
The other day a friend said he was glad to see my blog back after a month's vacation. I was flattered until he added, "I hope you put a little meat back into it."

Hmmm...

When last we saw my blog, I was becoming, quite frankly, a blog whore. After enjoying some HUGE spikes in readership around the time of Hurricane Katrina, I started checking the number of blog hits several times a day. When things slowed down, I posted a Maureen Dowd column -- she has a HUGE readership. In the end, my blog stopped being about my perceptions as I posted more and more NYT columnists. Lest you think I was a total slut, let me remind you that I NEVER posted Thomas Friedman! I do have SOME standards.

But here's the deal. The new year brought a new focus. We kicked it off with wishes for the best of luck for everyone we know. We ate pork, black-eyed peas, collard greens, almond cake, drank champagne. EVERY possible good luck consumable I could think of. Our friends received "blessings bracelets" and as the fireworks exploded on the Space Needle, we kissed 2005 GOODBYE and GOOD RIDDANCE and high hopes for 2006.

So far, the new focus is bringing good things. My beloved has enough work to keep him out of trouble (not out of the bars, just out of trouble) for a few months and my therapy seems to be finally kicking in. I'd still like to know where the hell this extra 60 pounds came from, but that's for another blog entry (and maybe another year).

The point is, I'm trying to focus my time and energy on making this the best year EVER and the blog is gonna have to work WITH the process, not IN ADDITION to it, regardless of the hits I get. Nobody needs me to remind them one more time that the Bushies are corrupt evil faschists. I'm going to do my bit for the 2006 and 2008 elections, but in the meantime, I gotta get my own house in order.

So for now, I'm writing about stuff that may seem meatless to some, but nourishes me. No more fear about whether anyone's going to read my blog or think it's stupid.

And speaking of fear, (you can tell by this smooth segue-way that I used to work in radio, can't you?) I have become convinced that the most dangerous force holding us back -- even worse than the Bushies -- is fear.

Fear of what people think about us keeps us from speaking out.
Fear of what people might say about us keeps us from doing what's right.
Fear of change depletes us.
Fear of scarcity keeps us from being generous and tolerant.
Fear of losing our house or job keeps us from asking for justice.

No matter how scary the terrorists might be, we can't be brave until we are ready to fight for own lives. Martha Beck wrote an amazing article about how we let fear shrinkwrap our worlds in this month's O magazine. It starts with this line:

"Becky's life was shrinking like a cheap blouse
in an overheated dryer."
Come on. An opening sentence like that deserves a read!

Something else to check out: The Best Year of Your Life website

A Few Precious Words From Harper Lee

2006-02-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

She never gives interviews, even with her recent portrayal in the film, "Capote." But the New York Times caught up with reclusive Alabaman Harper Lee. She's a hoot! I'd like to meet her 94-year-old sister who's still practicing law!

No Wonder We're Messed Up!

2006-02-02T02:52:00.000-08:00

The cover of this month's Family Circle magazine perfectly captures why women verge on insanity when it comes to food and body issues.

The largest headline says WALK IT OFF: NEW WAYS TO LOSE WEIGHT FAST perched just above an unbelievably delicious-looking chocolate cake that fills most of the cover. The icing is in such clear focus, you can almost dip a finger in for a lick. YUM! A smaller headline says something like THE MOST DELICIOUS CHOCOLATE CAKE YOU'VE EVER TASTED.

WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THAT?
Here's what goes through a woman's mind when she sees a cover like that. No doubt staring at it while waiting in the grocery line, she becomes mezmerized by the chocolate cake, but also predictably sucked in by the promise of fast weight loss. She is convinced that any other woman who looks at that cover has more control over her desires and feels nothing while looking at the cake. No...those other women don't care a whit about desserts. They are checking out the weight loss/walking article instead. They have discipline. They have no trouble being thin. They are better than her. She feels weak, ashamed, and hungrier than ever. That cake...she can hear Homer Simpson moaning in her head: AUGHHHHAUGGGGHAUGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

That's a complex mini-drama playing itself out in just a few minutes in the grocery line. And it is CRAZY MAKING!

In a PBS Frontline entitled "Diet Wars," one doctor declared amazement that anyone in this country (where eating is ALWAYS socially acceptable and life gets more and more sedentary) can EVER maintain a healthy weight. And this was a show without the plethora of food commercials that inhabit the average television show. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? About 6 years ago, I videotaped a bunch of children's commercials on Saturday morning to examine gender roles portrayed in kids' advertising. Lots of great comparisons between Hot Wheels and Barbie, toy dogs and light-up weapons. Just one year later however, the same effort was almost impossible. There WERE no toy ads. Commercials had become a repetetive blur of sugary juices, candy, and fast food. Eventually, I figured, our kids wouldn't have any gender traits at all. They'd all just turn into big puffed-up blobs that look alike, sitting and eating, sitting and eating.

So, if I were a subscriber to Family Circle, here's what I would do. I would sink my teeth into some of that cake. And then I'd probably go out for a walk. God knows I'd need the air to clear my head.

Fighting For Her Life

2006-02-01T14:59:00.000-08:00

On my favorite reality show/soap opera, Starting Over, housemate Jill has been making the case for her life.

Several months back Jill's life coach -- the amazing Iyanla Van Zant -- recently arranged for Jill to be "indicted" for leading an unfulfilled life. Ever since, Jill has been building a case to take before the judge and yesterday was the trial. Jill went before the Honorable Della Reese (another proud black woman) and pled her case. She told Judge Reese that she had learned to stick to her commitments and to stand for herself "even when no one is watching and no one cares but me."

Here's what else Jill said:

"The purpose of my life is to live my entire life in harmony so that I may put action in my words so that I may make my dreams come true; forgiving the pain and knowing that without judgement, there is no need for forgiveness."

She continued:

"My life coach has taught me to keep it simple. That I am the only one who can make my life difficult and that thinking is hazardous to my healing, but my heart will never lead me wrong."

Jill concluded by saying:

"I want to honor God and be as magnificent as all of his creatures. My vision for my life is to be BIG and LOVE IT and love myself just as I am RIGHT NOW."

I was moved to tears listening to Jill's eloquent plea. She has a few more roadblocks to move past before she graduates from the SO House, but I think her speech before the judge should serve as a model for every one of us who resolves NOT to leave this planet before we do all we can with what we've got.

After the judge's ruling, a gospel choir rose and sang a beautiful version of "I Walk in the Love of God" and Jill added, "This was the first time in my life I didn't want to take a shortcut. I wanted to walk through it and feel all of it and be a better person."

Amen, Jill.

You can find out more about Jill and the other housemates at www.startingovertv.com.

Signing Off Until February

2005-12-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

Hey guys...
I need to take a break for a few months. Thanks so much for reading. There may be an intermittent entry, but nothing regular, so if you need some inspiration, read some past entries and check out the blogs and sites listed on the sidebar.

Also...don't miss
Crooks and Liars
The Frame Shop
Happy Holidays! Get out there and enjoy the season. I'll try to be back in time for Valentine's Day.

Is Intelligent Design Because We Are So Dumb?

2005-12-06T00:05:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
December 6, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Hubris of the Humanities
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The best argument against "intelligent design" has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is, we're an argument at best for "mediocre design."

But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.

One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

The problem isn't just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you.

What do I mean by that? In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity - making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 - but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people.

"The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had," C. P. Snow wrote in his classic essay, "The Two Cultures."

The counterargument is that we can always hire technicians in Bangalore, while it's Shakespeare and Goethe who teach us the values we need to harness science for humanity. There's something to that. If President Bush were about to attack Iraq all over again, he would be better off reading Sophocles - to appreciate the dangers of hubris - than studying the science of explosives.

But don't pin too much faith on the civilizing influence of a liberal education: the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe. And similar arguments were used in past centuries to assert that all a student needed was Greek, Latin and familiarity with the Bible - or, in China, to argue that all the elites needed were the Confucian classics.

Without some fluency in science and math, we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines.

A year ago, I wanted to ornament a column with a complex equation, so, as a math ninny myself, I looked around the Times newsroom for anyone who could verify that it was correct. Now, you can't turn around in the Times newsroom without bumping into polyglots who come and go talking of Michelangelo. But it took forever to turn up someone confident in his calculus - in the science section.

So Pogo was right.

This disregard for science already hurts us. The U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn't realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be. And we're risking our planet's future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of climate change.

In this century, one of the most complex choices we will make will be what tinkering to allow with human genes, to "improve" the human species. How can our leaders decide that issue if they barely know what DNA is?

Intellectuals have focused on the challenge from the right, which has led to a drop in the public acceptance of evolution in the U.S. over the last 20 years, to 40 percent from 45 percent. Jon Miller, a professor at the Northwestern University medical school who has tracked attitudes toward evolution in 34 countries, says Turkey is the only one with less support for evolution than the U.S.

It's true that antagonism to science seems peculiarly American. The European right, for example, frets about taxes and immigration, but not about evolution.

But there's an even larger challenge than anti-intellectualism. And that's the skewed intellectualism of those who believe that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes. That's the hubris of the humanities.

If Things Are So Good, Why Do We Feel So Bad?

2005-12-05T22:14:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
December 5, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Joyless Economy
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Falling gasoline prices have led to some improvement in consumer confidence over the past few weeks. But the public remains deeply unhappy about the state of the economy. According to the latest Gallup poll, 63 percent of Americans rate the economy as only fair or poor, and by 58 to 36 percent people say economic conditions are getting worse, not better.

Yet by some measures, the economy is doing reasonably well. In particular, gross domestic product is rising at a pretty fast clip. So why aren't people pleased with the economy's performance?

Like everything these days, this is a political as well as factual question. The Bush administration seems genuinely puzzled that it isn't getting more credit for what it thinks is a booming economy. So let me be helpful here and explain what's going on.

I could point out that the economic numbers, especially the job numbers, aren't as good as the Bush people imagine. President Bush made an appearance in the Rose Garden to hail the latest jobs report, yet a gain of 215,000 jobs would have been considered nothing special - in fact, a bit subpar - during the Clinton years. And because the average workweek shrank a bit, the total number of hours worked actually fell last month.

But the main explanation for economic discontent is that it's hard to convince people that the economy is booming when they themselves have yet to see any benefits from the supposed boom. Over the last few years G.D.P. growth has been reasonably good, and corporate profits have soared. But that growth has failed to trickle down to most Americans.

Back in August the Census bureau released family income data for 2004. The report, which was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina, showed a remarkable disconnect between overall economic growth and the economic fortunes of most American families.

It should have been a good year for American families: the economy grew 4.2 percent, its best performance since 1999. Yet most families actually lost economic ground. Real median household income - the income of households in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation - fell for the fifth year in a row. And one key source of economic insecurity got worse, as the number of Americans without health insurance continued to rise.

We don't have comparable data for 2005 yet, but it's pretty clear that the results will be similar. G.D.P. growth has remained solid, but most families are probably losing ground as their earnings fail to keep up with inflation.

Behind the disconnect between economic growth and family incomes lies the extremely lopsided nature of the economic recovery that officially began in late 2001. The growth in corporate profits has, as I said, been spectacular. Even after adjusting for inflation, profits have risen more than 50 percent since the last quarter of 2001. But real wage and salary income is up less than 7 percent.

There are some wealthy Americans who derive a large share of their income from dividends and capital gains on stocks, and therefore benefit more or less directly from soaring profits. But these people constitute a small minority. For everyone else the sluggish growth in wages is the real story. And much of the wage and salary growth that did take place happened at the high end, in the form of rising payments to executives and other elite employees. Average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, are lower now than when the recovery began.

So there you have it. Americans don't feel good about the economy because it hasn't been good for them. Never mind the G.D.P. numbers: most people are falling behind.

It's much harder to explain why. The disconnect between G.D.P. growth and the economic fortunes of most American families can't be dismissed as a normal occurrence. Wages and median family income often lag behind profits in the early stages of an economic expansion, but not this far behind, and not for so long. Nor, I should say, is there any easy way to place more than a small fraction of the blame on Bush administration policies. At this point the joylessness of the economic expansion for most Americans is a mystery.

What's clear, however, is that advisers who believe that Mr. Bush can repair his political standing by making speeches telling the public how well the economy is doing have misunderstood the situation. The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

The Media in Love With Itself

2005-12-04T22:09:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
December 4, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
All the President's Flacks
By FRANK RICH

WHEN "all of the facts come out in this case," Bob Woodward told Terry Gross on NPR in July, "it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great."

Who's laughing now?

Why Mr. Woodward took more than two years to tell his editor that he had his own personal Deep Throat in the Wilson affair is a mystery best tackled by combatants in the Washington Post newsroom. (Been there, done that here at The Times.) Mr. Woodward says he wanted to avoid a subpoena, but he first learned that Joseph Wilson's wife was in the C.I.A. in mid-June 2003, more than six months before Patrick Fitzgerald or subpoenas entered the picture. Never mind. Far more disturbing is Mr. Woodward's utter failure to recognize the import of the story that fell into his lap so long ago.

The reporter who with Carl Bernstein turned a "third-rate burglary" into a key for unlocking the true character of the Nixon White House still can't quite believe that a Washington leak story unworthy of his attention has somehow become the drip-drip-drip exposing the debacle of Iraq. "I don't know how this is about the buildup to the war, the Valerie Plame Wilson issue," he said on "Larry King Live" on the eve of the Scooter Libby indictment. Everyone else does. Largely because of the revelations prompted by the marathon Fitzgerald investigation, a majority of Americans now believe that the Bush administration deliberately misled the country into war. The case's consequences for journalism have been nearly as traumatic, and not just because of the subpoenas. The Wilson story has ruthlessly exposed the credulousness with which most (though not all) of the press bought and disseminated the White House line that any delay in invading Iraq would bring nuclear Armageddon.

"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," Judy Miller said, with no exaggeration, before leaving The Times. The Woodward affair, for all its superficial similarities to the Miller drama, offers an even wider window onto the White House flimflams and the press's role in enabling them. Mr. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the fullest for its own propagandistic ends.

Mr. Woodward, to his credit, is not guilty of hyping Saddam's W.M.D.'s. And his books did contain valuable news: of the Wolfowitz axis' early push to take on Iraq, of the president's messianic view of himself as God's chosen warrior, of the Powell-Rumsfeld conflicts that led to the war's catastrophic execution. Yet to reread these Woodward books today, especially the second, the 2004 "Plan of Attack," is to understand just how slickly his lofty sources deflected him from the big picture, of which the Wilson case is just one small, if illuminating, piece.

In her famous takedown of Mr. Woodward for The New York Review of Books in 1996, Joan Didion wrote that what he "chooses to leave unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many ways more instructive than what he commits to paper." She was referring to his account of Hillary Clinton's health care fiasco in his book "The Agenda," but her words also fit his account of the path to war in Iraq. This time, however, there is much more at stake than there was in Hillarycare.

What remains unrecorded in "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward's own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.

Near the book's end, Mr. Woodward writes of some "troubling" tips from three sources "that the intelligence on W.M.D. was not as conclusive as the C.I.A. and the administration had suggested" and of how he helped push a Pincus story saying much the same into print just before the invasion. (It appeared on Page 17.) But Mr. Woodward never seriously investigates others' suspicions that the White House might have deliberately suppressed or ignored evidence that would contradict George Tenet's "slam-dunk" case for Saddam's W.M.D.'s. "Plan of Attack" gives greatest weight instead to the White House spin that any hyped intelligence was an innocent error or solely the result of the ineptitude of Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A.

Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby are omnipresent in the narrative, and Mr. Woodward says now that his notes show he had questions for them back then about "yellowcake" uranium and "Joe Wilson's wife." But the leak case - indeed Valerie Wilson herself - is never mentioned in the 400-plus pages, even though it had exploded more than six months before he completed the book. That's the most damning omission of all and suggests the real motive for his failure to share what he did know about this case with either his editor or his readers. If you assume, as Mr. Woodward apparently did against mounting evidence to the contrary, that the White House acted in good faith when purveying its claims of imminent doomsday and pre-9/11 Qaeda-Saddam collaborations, then there's no White House wrongdoing that needs to be covered up. So why would anyone in the administration try to do something nasty to silence a whistle-blower like Joseph Wilson? The West Wing was merely gossiping idly about the guy, Mr. Woodward now says, in perhaps an unconscious echo of the Karl Rove defense strategy.

Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who helped shape WHIG's war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an extraordinary job" and that "it's in the White House's interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she's read Didion as well as Machiavelli.

In an analysis of Mr. Woodward written for The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron likens him to Theodore H. White, who invented the modern "inside" Washington book with "The Making of the President 1960." White eventually became such an insider himself that in "The Making of the President 1972," he missed Watergate, the story broken under his (and much of the press's) nose by Woodward and Bernstein. "They were outsiders," Ms. Ephron writes of those then-lowly beat reporters, "and their lack of top-level access was probably their greatest asset."

INDEED it's reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the new book "Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11," Kristina Borjesson interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, who heard early on from a low-level source that "the vice president is lying" and produced a story headlined "Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials" on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page Times story about Saddam's aluminum tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent reportorial collaborator with Mr. Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Ms. Borjesson, "The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or questioning the administration's case for war."

Such critical stories - including those at The Post and The Times that were too often relegated to Page 17 - did not get traction until the failure to find W.M.D.'s and the Wilson affair made America take a second look. Now that the country has awakened to that history, it will take more to shock it than the latest revelation that the Defense Department has been paying Iraqi newspapers to print its propaganda. Thanks in large part to the case Mr. Woodward found so inconsequential, everyone knows that much of the American press did just the same before the war - and, unlike those Iraqi newspapers or, say, Armstrong Williams, did so gratis.

Livin' in A Dream World

2005-12-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

The old adage is right: the rich aren't like the rest of us.

The New York Times
December 3, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
W.'s Head in the Sand
By MAUREEN DOWD

In the Christmas spirit, the time has come for the reality-based community to reach out to the White House.

The Bush warriors are so deluded, they're even faking their fakery.

This week, the president presented a plan-like plan for "victory" in Iraq, which Scott McClellan rather pompously called the unclassified version of their supersecret master plan. But there would be no way to achieve victory from this plan even if it were a real plan. If this is what they're telling themselves in the Sit Room, we're in bigger trouble than we thought.

Talk about your unknown unknowns, as Rummy would say.

The National Strategy for Victory must have come from the same P.R. genius who gave President Top Gun the "Mission Accomplished" banner about 48 hours before the first counterinsurgency war of the 21st century broke out in Iraq.

It's not a military strategy - classified or unclassified. It's political talking points - and not even good ones. Are we really supposed to believe that anybody, even the most deeply delusional Bush sycophant, believes the phrase "Our strategy is working"?

The president talked about three neatly definable groups of insurrectionists. But as Dexter Filkins reported in yesterday's New York Times, there are dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred, groups fighting the U.S. Army in Iraq, and they have little, if anything, in common.

Mr. Bush's presentation claimed that the U.S. was actually making progress in Iraq. But outside the Bush-Cheney-Rummy bubble, 10 more marines were killed by a roadside bomb outside Falluja, for a total of 2,125 U.S. military deaths so far.

The administration must realize it needs a real exit strategy, because it's advertising for one. The U.S. Agency for International Development is offering more than $1 billion for anyone - anyone at all - who can come up with a plan to pacify and rebuild 10 Iraqi cities seen as vital in the war.

Maybe the White House should apply - Usaid's proffer says the "invitation is open to any type of entity."

When Bush officials weren't telling us fairy tales about the big, bad W.M.D. in Iraq, they were assuring us that the unprovoked war would be a kindness for Iraq, giving it democracy. But they are not just failing to bring democracy to Iraq as they help Iranian-backed mullahs install an Islamic republic with Saddamist torture chambers. They are also degrading democracy in America.

They've tarnished American moral leadership with illegal detentions, torture, secret C.I.A. prisons in countries only recently liberated from the Soviet gulag, and Soviet-style propaganda both at home and in Iraq.

Guess the Bush administration didn't learn anything this fall when federal auditors said it had violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of its education polices. Bush officials got right back into the fake news business, paying to plant propaganda in the Iraqi press. They outsourced this disinformation campaign to something called the Lincoln Group - have they no shame?

You have to admire Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman. He kept a straight face when he called the U.S. "a leader when it comes to promoting and advocating a free and independent media around the world." He added, "We've made our views very clear when it comes to freedom of the press."

Exceedingly clear. The Bushies don't believe in it. They disdain the whole democratic system of checks and balances.

At the Naval Academy, President Bush talked about how well the Iraqi security forces were fighting. He claimed that 40 Iraqi battalions were taking the lead in the fight against insurgents, and that in the battle of Tal Afar this year, "the assault was primarily led by Iraqi security forces - 11 Iraqi battalions backed by 5 coalition battalions providing support."

Anderson Cooper of CNN swiftly produced Time magazine's Baghdad bureau chief, Michael Ware, who was embedded with the U.S. military during the entire Tal Afar battle. "With the greatest respect to the president, that's completely wrong," Mr. Ware said, adding: "I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with Al Qaeda. They were not leading."

He also told Mr. Cooper: "I have had a very senior officer here in Baghdad say to me that there's never going to be a point where these guys will be able to stand up against the insurgency on their own."

Mr. Ware recalled that in a battle two weeks ago, he saw an Iraqi security officer put down his weapon and curl up into a ball when he was under attack. "I have seen that on - on many, many occasions," he said.

Curling up in a ball. Good National Strategy for Victory.

Did You See South Park This Week?

2005-12-02T01:04:00.000-08:00

The episode entitled "Free Willzyx" had a "real life" photo of what the boys might actually look like. You have to see this.

Breaking News: Oprah World

2005-12-02T00:03:00.000-08:00

Oprah was great on David Letterman last night. Paul even hired a timpani player. And where did she get that dress? With the purple sash and the purple ruffle???

"The Color Purple" looks like a Broadway hit!

Oh my God...it's Oprah's world and we're all just living in it!

Krugman: Bullets Over Baghdad

2005-12-01T23:56:00.000-08:00

I'm so glad Paul Krugman is back from vacation.

The New York Times
December 2, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bullet Points Over Baghdad
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was supposed to provide the world with a demonstration of American power. It didn't work out that way. But the Bush administration has come up with the next best thing: a demonstration of American PowerPoint. Bullets haven't subdued the insurgents in Iraq, but the administration hopes that bullet points will subdue the critics at home.

The National Security Council document released this week under the grandiose title "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is neither an analytical report nor a policy statement. It's simply the same old talking points - "victory in Iraq is a vital U.S. interest"; "failure is not an option" - repackaged in the style of a slide presentation for a business meeting.

It's an embarrassing piece of work. Yet it's also an important test for the news media. The Bush administration has lost none of its confidence that it can get away with fuzzy math and fuzzy facts - that it won't be called to account for obvious efforts to mislead the public. It's up to journalists to prove that confidence wrong.

Here's an example of how the White House attempts to mislead: the new document assures us that Iraq's economy is doing really well. "Oil production increased from an average of 1.58 million barrels per day in 2003, to an average of 2.25 million barrels per day in 2004." The document goes on to concede a "slight decrease" in production since then.

We're not expected to realize that the daily average for 2003 includes the months just before, during and just after the invasion of Iraq, when its oil industry was basically shut down. As a result, we're not supposed to understand that the real story of Iraq's oil industry is one of unexpected failure: instead of achieving the surge predicted by some of the war's advocates, Iraqi production has rarely matched its prewar level, and has been on a downward trend for the past year.

What about the security situation? During much of 2004, the document tells us: "Fallujah, Najaf, and Samara were under enemy control. Today, these cities are under Iraqi government control."

Najaf was never controlled by the "enemy," if that means the people we're currently fighting. It was briefly controlled by Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. The United States once vowed to destroy that militia, but these days it's as strong as ever. And according to The New York Times, Mr. Sadr has now become a "kingmaker in Iraqi politics." So what sort of victory did we win, exactly, in Najaf?

Moreover, in what sense is Najaf now under government control? According to The Christian Science Monitor, "Sadr supporters and many Najaf residents say an armed Badr Brigade" - the militia of a Shiite group that opposes Mr. Sadr and his supporters - "still exists as the Najaf police force."

Meanwhile, this is the third time that coalition forces have driven the insurgents out of Samara. On the two previous occasions, the insurgents came back after the Americans left. And there, too, it's stretching things to say that the city is under Iraqi government control: according to The Associated Press, only 100 of the city's 700 policemen show up for work on most days.

There's a lot more like that in the document. Refuting some of the upbeat assertions about Iraq requires specialized knowledge, but many of them can be quickly debunked by anyone with an Internet connection.

The point isn't just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It's the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

So Mr. Bush's new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren't true? Or has the worm finally turned?

There have been encouraging signs, notably a thorough front-page fact-checking article - which even included charts showing the stagnation of oil production and electricity generation! - in USA Today. But the next few days will tell.

Another Blog Worth Loving

2005-12-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

I only have one thing to say about "Frameshop":
IT IS RIVETING!
Jeffrey Feldman is bound and determined that the Democrats figure a better way to talk to the American people -- to re-frame their ideas (that's why "the frame shop is open." His analysis is entertaining and insightful. Just yesterday, he crowned Russ Feingold the new leader of the Democratic party -- and for very good reason.

Bookmark it!

How to Get Good Publicity

2005-12-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

I spent several years working for non-profit organizations trying to get space in newspapers, on TV shows, on radio programs, etc. the OLD FASHIONED WAY...by having a news peg to hang something on.

When you are the U.S. government, you don't wait for something as silly as that...you hire the Lincoln Group* to BUY the news for you. You gotta admire them...they don't wait for stuff to happen, they rely on faux reporters and fake news reports to spread the word. The facts do NOT get in their way.

The New York Times has a story of how the U.S. bought news coverage in Iraqi newspapers to inform readers how well things are going. Is there anyone the Bushies WON'T pay off?

Forget being a defense contractor, you can make a POT of money in public relations these days if you can just get a government contract!

*A Strategic and Public Relations Firm Providing Insight and Influence in Challenging and Hostile Environments (think "Wag the Dog")

Good Stuff and Getting Better

2005-12-01T14:37:00.000-08:00

I am LOVING "Raw Story" -- a blog that is truly ON TOP of the good stories. Their contributors are adding increasingly provocative essays and the reporting is solid.

Today, they are reporting on lying oil corporate chairs, lying lobbyists, and lying Ralph Reed.

And I thought December was going to be a boring political news month. HAH!

Go there and check it out.

Herbert Says Bush is Just A Broken Record

2005-11-30T20:34:00.000-08:00

I was thinking the same thing as Bob Herbert this morning. Every time we see the President lately, he's telling us how much safer from terrorists we are by fighting in Iraq. I guess we should thank ourselves for getting rid of all those WMDs, too, huh?

December 1, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bush Hits Rewind
By BOB HERBERT

It's weird. It's like watching a computerized model of a president. Somebody programs George W. Bush, carefully embedding the information to be dispensed over the next several hours, and then he goes out and addresses the nation - as a computerized bundle of administration talking points.

"We will never back down," said Mr. Bush in his speech at the U.S. Naval Academy yesterday. "We will never give in. And we will never accept anything less than complete victory."

I don't think there were many people who believed him. Members of Mr. Bush's own party are nervously eyeing next year's Congressional elections. They would abandon Iraq in a heartbeat if it meant the difference between getting re-elected or having to hunt for a real job.

This war (which has already cost the lives of more than 2,100 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis) was cynically launched (it was never about Sept. 11) and incompetently fought (we have never sent enough troops or sufficient equipment), and will be brought to a close by people obsessed not with the security of the United States and the welfare of the troops, but with the political calendar.

"I will settle for nothing less than complete victory," said Mr. Bush. He then dutifully defined victory as follows:

"Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation."

Those were some of yesterday's talking points. Here's today's reality: the $6-billion-a-month U.S. military mission in Iraq is unsustainable, as is the political support for the war. There is now a virtual consensus that a significant American troop withdrawal will get under way in 2006.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces are ill equipped, understaffed and widely infiltrated by private militia members and insurgents. In many ways, it's an amateurish operation.

As Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who served in the 82nd Airborne, told reporters this week:

"Without an effective ministry that can keep track of soldiers and police, pay those soldiers and police, apply those soldiers and police and essentially provide the foundation, then you're going to have some tactically trained units, but they're not going to be a coherent or effective force."

Despite the rosy scenarios offered by President Bush, American-style democracy is nowhere in sight in Iraq. Among other things, the evidence of horrific human rights abuses by Iraqi forces allied with us - including kidnappings, torture and murders - is increasing.

In short, the picture in Iraq is not a pretty one, and there is no indication that substantial improvements are coming soon.

If the president gets any of this, you couldn't tell it by his appearance yesterday. He stuck to his talking points. "To all who wear the uniform," he said, "I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander in chief."

We may not cut and run in Iraq, but with the G.O.P. sweating out next year's elections, the plans are already under way for American forces by the tens of thousands to cut and speed-walk toward the exits. Mr. Bush could have been honest about this yesterday, but he chose not to be.

If the administration does not address this inevitable pullout, or pullback, seriously, it will be conducted as incompetently as the post-invasion operation.

The inevitable drawdown of U.S. forces is hardly a secret. In addition to the political pressures coming from the G.O.P., there's the fact that we don't have enough people in the military - and can't entice enough people into the military - to back up the president's blithe promises.

Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said in an op-ed article in The Washington Post that it was likely that 50,000 troops would be redeployed out of Iraq by the end of next year and "a significant number" of the remainder in 2007.

A president who's little more than a bundle of talking points cannot possibly maintain the long-term trust and confidence of the public. There's a disturbing remoteness to President Bush that seems especially odd in a politician who was selected by his party because of his supposed ability to project warmth and the kind of fundamental authenticity that his Democratic opponents lacked.

Bad News From Black Rock

2005-11-30T20:11:00.000-08:00

I don't usually think about "60 Minutes" very often, but I have been haunted by a story that ran on Sunday night about how the process to approve the "Plan B" pill is being fucked with. I realize this is just a cynical ploy by the Bushies to manipulate the Evangelicals, but it's being done in the name of opressing women and Americans ought to be outraged by it (at the very least). No matter how much we may want to, we need to keep our noses out of other people's business. Sheesh! Isn't that something we learn when we're 10?

More good news: If Mr. Alito mounts the bench, he's got a lot of history that shows his true colors. (NYT article). Here's an excerpt from today's NYT story.

"As a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, the Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. played an integral role in devising legal strategy to pare back the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade, documents disclosed Wednesday show.

Judge Alito argued in a 1985 memorandum to the Reagan administration's solicitor general that two pending Supreme Court cases were an "opportunity to advance the goals of overruling Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects."

Ladies...hide your uteruses! (uterii?)

Shenon Ain't No Judith Miller

2005-11-30T19:42:00.000-08:00

Jack Abramoff listening to his lawyer

Terry Gross is pissing me off. It's too damned cold outside to sit in the car and wait for one of her fabulous interviews to end so I can come in the house. But I couldn't peel myself away tonight as I heard her and NYT reporter Phillip Shenon struggle to unravel the issues that have woven Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist into a corrupt and tangled web.

This whole thing is going to make a helluva book. Abramoff's e-mail alone will be better than the Starr report.

You can listen to the "Fresh Air" interview on NRP with Terry Gross here

And, since the NYT is so dang stingey with their content, here's the latest Shenon article about this whole scam-booty.

NEW YORK TIMES
Former Top Aide to DeLay Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy
By PHILIP SHENON
Published: November 22, 2005

Michael Scanlon, a former business partner of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a former top aide to Representative Tom DeLay, pleaded guilty on Monday to conspiring to bribe a member of Congress and other public officials.

Mr. Scanlon also agreed to repay $19.6 million to his former Indian tribe lobbying clients.

He acknowledged in a plea agreement that he and Mr. Abramoff, identified in the court papers as ''Lobbyist A,'' agreed to make lavish gifts to public officials, including all-expense-paid trips to Europe and the Super Bowl, in exchange for official actions.

Federal law enforcement officials portrayed the plea bargain, under which Mr. Scanlon faces up to five years in prison, as an important development in the larger criminal investigation of Mr. Abramoff, who has been under scrutiny by a grand jury here for more than a year.

The investigation, which initially centered on accusations that Mr. Abramoff had defrauded tribal casinos of tens of millions of dollars in lobbying fees, has created alarm on Capitol Hill, where the lobbyist and his junior partner, Mr. Scanlon, claimed friendships among the Republican leaders of Congress.

Prosecutors have not named any of the public officials who were the targets of Mr. Scanlon's scheme.

But court papers in the case filed Monday and last week singled out one member of Congress -- ''Representative No. 1'' -- as a focus of Mr. Scanlon's illegal lobbying, asserting that the lawmaker accepted gifts, including a 2002 golf trip to Scotland and regular meals at Mr. Abramoff's restaurant, ''in exchange for a series of official acts and influence.''

Representative Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican and chairman of the House Administration Committee, has acknowledged that he is the lawmaker, while saying there was no quid pro quo with Mr. Abramoff or Mr. Scanlon. Mr. Ney, who was subpoenaed this month by the grand jury investigating Mr. Abramoff, has said he was ''duped'' by the lobbyists.

Brian J. Walsh, the lawmaker's spokesman, said, ''All this plea agreement shows is that Mr. Scanlon had a deliberate, secret and well-concealed scheme to defraud many people, and it appears, unfortunately, that Representative Ney was one of the many people defrauded.''

Mr. Scanlon, 35, a longtime Republican operative in the capital, said little during the hearing Monday in Federal District Court here.

''Guilty, Your Honor,'' he replied calmly when asked by Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle for his plea.

Under the agreement with the Justice Department, Mr. Scanlon pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate a series of criminal laws, including those against bribery, and pledged to cooperate with the Justice Department's investigation of Mr. Abramoff and others.

At a news conference after the hearing, Mr. Scanlon's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, stood alongside his client and said Mr. Scanlon was ''obviously regretful'' about the fraud committed against the Indians, who paid Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon more than $80 million in fees.

Asked if he expected the investigation to bring many members of Congress under scrutiny, Mr. Cacheris replied, ''I would rather not comment on that.''

Asked if Mr. Scanlon had information that would bring Mr. DeLay under investigation, the lawyer replied, ''You'll have to ask his lawyers.''

Mr. Scanlon, tanned and grinning, referred questions to his lawyer. Asked why he appeared so relaxed and why he was smiling so broadly, he replied, ''I always smile.''

There was no suggestion in the Justice Department's paperwork that the $19.6 million in restitution, reflecting Mr. Scanlon's profits from four of the Indian tribes he defrauded, would leave him destitute.

His lawyers said Monday that Mr. Scanlon now lived in Rehoboth Beach, Del., a resort town on the Atlantic coast, and continued to work as a consultant, sometimes traveling abroad on business. Judge Huvelle did not seize Mr. Scanlon's passport, instead ordering him to provide prosecutors with two weeks' notice of any foreign travel.

Before turning to lobbying in 2000, Mr. Scanlon was press secretary to Mr. DeLay, the former House majority leader, who is under indictment in Texas on unrelated charges of violating state election laws.

The plea agreement released Monday offered new details of many of the accusations against Mr. Scanlon.

It said that beginning in January 2000, Mr. Scanlon and Mr. Abramoff conspired to begin offering a ''stream of things of value to public officials in exchange for a series of official acts and influence and agreements to provide official action and influence.''

''Those things of value included, but are not limited to, travel, golf fees, frequent meals, entertainment, election support for candidates for government office, employment for officials and relatives of officials and campaign contributions,'' it said.

For Mr. Ney and his staff, the agreement said, the gifts included ''all-expense-paid trips, including a trip to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in 2000, a trip to the Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., in 2001, and a golf trip to Scotland in 2002.''

Mr. Ney and his staff also took ''numerous tickets for entertainment, including concerts and sporting events in the Washington, D.C., area,'' and were given ''box suites and food at various sport and concert venues and at a restaurant in the Washington, D.C., area.''

The restaurant was Signatures, which Mr. Abramoff once owned and which he had long used as a second office, wining and dining members of Congress. The plea agreement said Mr. Ney and his staff received ''regular meals and drinks'' at the restaurant.

As a result of what prosecutors described as Mr. Scanlon's ''course of conduct,'' Mr. Ney and his House staff offered ''their official positions and influence'' to help Mr. Scanlon, Mr. Abramoff and their lobbying clients, including directing a House contract for wireless telephones to one of Mr. Abramoff's lobbying clients.

Mr. Walsh, Mr. Ney's spokesman, said in a statement that the plea bargain was wrong in many of its details. ''Whenever Representative Ney took official action -- actions similar to those taken by elected representatives every day as part of the normal, appropriate government process -- he did so based on his best understanding of what was right and not based on any improper influence,'' the statement said.

MO DO IS BACK!

2005-11-29T23:04:00.000-08:00

I couldn't resist including her new photo from the NYT website.

The New York Times
November 30, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Autumn of the Patriarchy
By MAUREEN DOWD

In the vice president's new, more fortified bunker, inside his old undisclosed secure location within the larger bunker that used to be called the West Wing of the White House, Dick Cheney was muttering and sputtering.

He wasn't talking to the pictures on the wall, as Nixon did when he finally cracked. Vice doesn't trust those portraits anyway. The walls have ears. He was talking to the only reliable man in a city of dimwits, cowards, traitors and fools: himself.

He hurled a sheaf of news reports with such force it knocked over the picture of Ahmad Chalabi that he keeps next to the picture of Churchill. Winston Chalabi, he likes to call him.

Vice is fed up with all the whining and carping - and that's just inside the White House. The only negativity in Washington is supposed to be his own. He's the only one allowed to scowl and grumble and conspire.

The impertinent Tom DeFrank reported in New York's Daily News that embattled White House aides felt "President Bush must take the reins personally" to save his presidency.

Let him try, Cheney said with a sneer. Things are nowhere near dire enough for that. Even if Junior somehow managed to grab the reins to his presidency, Vice holds Junior's reins. So he just needs to get all these sniveling, poll-driven wimps and losers back on board with the master plan.

Things had been going so smoothly. The global torture franchise was up and running. Halliburton contracts were flowing. Tax cuts were sailing through. Oil companies were raking it in. Alaska drilling was thrillingly close. The courts were defending his executive privilege on energy policy, and people were still buying all that smoke about Saddam's being responsible for 9/11, and that drivel about how we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here. Everything was groovy.

But not anymore. Cheney could not believe that Karl had made him go out and call that loudmouth Jack Murtha a patriot. He was sure the Pentagon generals had put the congressman up to calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. Is the military brass getting in touch with its pacifist side? In Wyoming, Vice shoots doves.

How dare Murtha suggest that Cheney dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged the draft? Murtha thinks he knows about war just because he served in one and was a marine for 37 years? Vice started his own war. Now that's a credential!

It always goes this way with the cut-and-run crowd. First they start nitpicking the war, complaining about little things like the lack of armor for the troops. Then they complain that there aren't enough troops. Well, that would just require more armor that we don't have. Then they kvetch about using incendiary weapons in a city like Falluja. Vice likes the smell of white phosphorus in the morning.

What really enrages him is all the Republicans in the Senate making noises about timetables. Before you know it, it's going to be helicopters on the rooftop at the Baghdad embassy.

Just because Junior's approval ratings are in the 30's, people around here are going all wobbly. Vice was 10 points lower and he wasn't worried. Numbers are for sissies.

Why do Harry Reid and his Democratic turncoats think they can call the White House on the carpet? Do they think Vice would fear to lie about lying about the rationale for going to war? A real liar never stops lying.

He didn't want to have to tell the rest of the senators to go do to themselves what he had told Patrick Leahy to go do to himself.

Now all these idiots are getting caught, even Scooter. DeLay's on the ropes and the Dukester is a total embarrassment, spending bribes on antique commodes and a Rolls-Royce. Vice should never have let an amateur get involved with defense contracts.

Republican moderates are running scared in the House, worried about re-election. Even senators seem to have forgotten which side their bread is oiled on. Ted Stevens let oil company executives get caught lying about the energy task force meeting, while Vice can't even get a little thing like torture chambers through the Senate. What's so wrong with a little torture?

And now John Warner wants Junior to use fireside chats to explain his plan for Iraq. When did everybody get the un-American idea that the president is answerable to America?

Vice is fed up with the whining of squirrelly surrogates like Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson on behalf of peaceniks like George Senior and Colin Powell. If Poppy's upset about his kid's mentor, he should be man enough to come slug it out.

Poppy isn't getting Junior back, Vice vowed, muttering: "He's my son. It's my war. It's my country."

(And the bad news is: this man is our vice president.)

I Want My $100 Million Back!

2005-11-28T23:13:00.000-08:00

How the hell do we recover up to $100 million the Defense Department paid to The Rendon Group to set the stage for, build support for, spread misinformation about, and promote the Iraq War? Rolling Stone has a terrific story about how Americans were "sold" this war just like a brand new I-Pod model. Judging from last weekend's Wal-Mart mob scene, being sold something might be the best thing we do!

Related Links: Village Voice: "If Old Journalism Dies..." Sidney Schanberg

Transcript of Interview with author James Bamford and Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

Al Franken: "Tired of Being Lied To? Modern History You Can't Afford to Ignore"

Kristof Asks "How Much Genocide is Too Much?"

2005-11-27T00:50:00.000-08:00

Nick Kristof is beating the drum as loud as he can for us to hear the dire messages coming out of Darfur. Condi has given it lip service. Is anyone going to say, "If not now, when? If not me, who?"

If not soon, Darfur might make Rwanda look like a dress rehearsal.

The New York Times
November 27, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
A Tolerable Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

NYALA, Sudan

Who would have thought that a genocide could become worse? But after two years of heartbreaking slaughter, rape and mayhem, the situation in Darfur is now spiraling downward.

More villages are again being attacked and burned - over the last week thatch-roof huts have been burning near the town of Gereida and far to the northwest near Jebel Mun.

Aid workers have been stripped, beaten and robbed. A few more attacks on aid workers, and agencies may pull out - leaving the hapless people of Darfur with no buffer between themselves and the butchers.

The international community has delegated security to the African Union, but its 7,000 troops can't even defend themselves, let alone protect civilians. One group of 18 peacekeepers was kidnapped last month, and then 20 soldiers sent to rescue them were kidnapped as well; four other soldiers and two contractors were killed in a separate incident.

What will happen if the situation continues to deteriorate sharply and aid groups pull out? The U.N. has estimated that the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.

The turmoil has also infected neighboring Chad, which is inhabited by some of the same tribes as Sudan. Diplomats and U.N. officials are increasingly worried that Chad could tumble back into its own horrific civil war as well.

This downward spiral has happened because for more than two years, the international community has treated this as a tolerable genocide. In my next column, my last from Darfur, I'll outline the steps we need to take. But the essential starting point is outrage: a recognition that countering genocide must be a global priority.

It's true that a few hundred thousand deaths in Darfur - a good guess of the toll so far - might not amount to much in a world where two million a year die of malaria. But there is something special about genocide. When humans deliberately wipe out others because of their tribe or skin color, when babies succumb not to diarrhea but to bayonets and bonfires, that is not just one more tragedy. It is a monstrosity that demands a response from other humans. We demean our own humanity, and that of the victims, when we avert our eyes.

Already, large swaths of Darfur are so unsafe that they are "no go" areas for humanitarian organizations - meaning that we don't know what horrors are occurring in those areas. But we have some clues.

There are widespread reports that the janjaweed, the government-backed Arab marauders who have been slaughtering members of several African tribes, sometimes find it convenient not to kill or expel every last African but to leave a few alive to grow vegetables and run markets. So they let some live in exchange for protection money or slave labor.

One Western aid worker in Darfur told me that she had visited an area controlled by janjaweed. In public, everyone insisted - meekly and fearfully - that everything was fine.

Then she spoke privately to two sisters, both of the Fur tribe. They said that the local Fur were being enslaved by the janjaweed, forced to work in the fields and even to pay protection money every month just to be allowed to live. The two sisters said that they were forced to cook for the janjaweed troops and to accept being raped by them.

Finally, they said, their terrified father had summoned the courage to beg the janjaweed commander to let his daughters go. That's when the commander beheaded the father in front of his daughters.

"They told me they just wanted to die," the aid worker remembered in frustration. "They're living like slaves, in complete and utter fear. And we can't do anything about it."

That aid worker has found her own voice, by starting a blog called "Sleepless in Sudan" in which she describes what she sees around her. It sears at http://sleeplessinsudan.blogspot.com, without the self-censorship that aid groups routinely accept as the price for being permitted to save lives in Darfur.

Our leaders still haven't found their voices, though. Congress has even facilitated the genocide by lately cutting all funds for the African Union peacekeepers in Darfur; we urgently need to persuade Congress to restore that money.

So what will it take? Will President Bush and other leaders discover some backbone if the killing spreads to Chad and the death toll reaches 500,000? One million? God forbid, two million?

How much genocide is too much?

What Goes Around Comes Around

2005-11-27T00:45:00.000-08:00

Frank Rich explains how W's lies are coming back to bite him in the ass, no matter how hard he and his cronies try to cover up the mess. Note: the Rolling Stone Article Rich cites is chilling.

Read Frank's book.

The New York Times
November 27, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By FRANK RICH

GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

Smoke 'Em While You Can

2005-11-26T09:51:00.001-08:00

That's the motto posted above one of our favorite neighborhood "dives." It's only a matter of days until Washington smokers get the boot from all bars and restaurants. Not only do they have to leave the premises, they have to be 25 feet away! Sheesh! In the words of that famous cultural critic Stephen Sondheim, "When did the whole world become one big operating room?"

So, it seems fitting to post this piece from Marjane Satrapi as a last gasp (so to speak) celebration of smoking featured this week in the New York Times.

As my boyfriend says about smokers: "We had a good run."

Brownie's New Job

2005-11-25T13:16:00.000-08:00

Now that former FEMA Director Michael Brown has set a shining example of turning "chicken shit" into "chicken salad" by becoming a Disaster Relief consultant, I have decided to become a mathematician.

Wish me luck!

Most Americans Say Bush Lies. DU-UH!

2005-11-25T00:42:00.000-08:00

A majority of U.S. adults believe the Bush administration generally misleads the public on current issues, while fewer than a third of Americans believe the information provided by the administration is generally accurate, the latest Harris Interactive poll finds.

Via Crooks and Liars and The Moderate Voice

He's B-a-a-a-ck!

2005-11-24T22:08:00.000-08:00

Syracuse Post Standard reporter Hart Seely is back from Iraq. If you want to know what it's like in Iraq, you should check out his blog and his news coverage.

It IS a Bit of a Miracle

2005-11-24T21:36:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, my LEAST favorite holiday movie was Miracle on 34th Street. Well, this year, that all changed.

First, I melted into tears when the little Dutch girl got on Santa's lap and he could sing the Christmas song with her. That's one of the sweetest scenes ever.

And Thelma Ritter is priceless. She has a gem of a scene where she is amazed at Macy's new policy of referring customers to other stores for the best deals. I LOVE her! She's even better in Rear Window.

The rest of the movie pokes fun at psychology, commerce, government, the courts, and the conflict between practicality and idealism. But my favorite semi-profound scene is:

The new Macy's store Santa Claus -- he calls himself Kris Kringle -- has undergone a mental evaluation by the company's intelligence tester who has determined that Kris is insane with violent tendencies.

Desperate to keep Kris at Macy's because of his popularity, the Assistant Store Manager speculates that Kris may not be so bad after all:

"Maybe he's just a little insane. Like composers. Or painters. Or some of those men in Washington."

Krugman on GM's Crash

2005-11-24T21:16:00.000-08:00

This commentary is very timely -- we had this same discussion at our house recently. As debilitating as the cost of health care seems to be for U.S. corporations, I'm surprised it hasn't been solved by now. Corporations seems to be pulling all the political strings and W might as well be President Coolidge whose mantra was "The business of America is business." Unfortunately, America's business seems to center around consumption rather than production.

For the system to change, severe "torque" must be placed on it. Isn't 30,000 more jobless souls in the country enough "torque" to move us closer to a national health care system?

The New York Times
November 25, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bad for the Country
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"What was good for our country," a former president of General Motors once declared, "was good for General Motors, and vice versa." G.M., which has been losing billions, has announced that it will eliminate 30,000 jobs. Is what's bad for General Motors bad for America?

In this case, yes.

Most commentary about G.M.'s troubles is resigned: pundits may regret the decline of a once-dominant company, but they don't think anything can or should be done about it. And commentary from some conservatives has an unmistakable tone of satisfaction, a sense that uppity workers who joined a union and made demands are getting what they deserve.

We shouldn't be so complacent. I won't defend the many bad decisions of G.M.'s management, or every demand made by the United Automobile Workers. But job losses at General Motors are part of the broader weakness of U.S. manufacturing, especially the part of U.S. manufacturing that offers workers decent wages and benefits. And some of that weakness reflects two big distortions in our economy: a dysfunctional health care system and an unsustainable trade deficit.

According to A. T. Kearney, last year General Motors spent $1,500 per vehicle on health care. By contrast, Toyota spent only $201 per vehicle in North America, and $97 in Japan. If the United States had national health insurance, G.M. would be in much better shape than it is.

Wouldn't taxpayer-financed health insurance amount to a subsidy to the auto industry? Not really. Because most Americans believe that their fellow citizens are entitled to health care, and because our political system acts, however imperfectly, on that belief, tying health insurance to employment distorts the economy: it systematically discourages the creation of good jobs, the type of jobs that come with good benefits. And somebody ends up paying for health care anyway.

In fact, many of the health care expenses G.M. will save by slashing employment will simply be pushed off onto taxpayers. Some former G.M. families will end up receiving Medicaid. Others will receive uncompensated care - for example, at emergency rooms - which ends up being paid for either by taxpayers or by those with insurance.

Moreover, G.M.'s health care costs are so high in part because of the inefficiency of America's fragmented health care system. We spend far more per person on medical care than countries with national health insurance, while getting worse results.

About the trade deficit: These days the United States imports far more than it exports. Last year the trade deficit exceeded $600 billion. The flip side of the trade deficit is a reorientation of our economy away from industries that export or compete with imports, especially manufacturing, to industries that are insulated from foreign competition, such as housing. Since 2000, we've lost about three million jobs in manufacturing, while membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 50 percent.

The trade deficit isn't sustainable. We can run huge deficits for the time being, because foreigners - in particular, foreign governments - are willing to lend us huge sums. But one of these days the easy credit will come to an end, and the United States will have to start paying its way in the world economy.

To do that, we'll have to reorient our economy back toward producing things we can export or use to replace imports. And that will mean pulling a lot of workers back into manufacturing. So the rapid downsizing of manufacturing since 2000 - of which G.M.'s job cuts are a symptom - amounts to dismantling a sector we'll just have to rebuild a few years from now.

I don't want to attribute all of G.M.'s problems to our distorted economy. One of the plants G.M. plans to close is in Canada, which has national health insurance and ran a trade surplus last year. But the distortions in our economy clearly make G.M.'s problems worse.

Dealing with our trade deficit is a tricky issue I'll have to address another time. But G.M.'s woes are yet another reminder of the urgent need to fix our health care system. It's long past time to move to a national system that would reduce cost, diminish the burden on employers who try to do the right thing and relieve working American families from the fear of lost coverage. Fixing health care would be good for General Motors, and good for the country.

Those Lips, Those Eyes...

2005-11-23T21:52:00.000-08:00

W pardons the annual Thanksgiving turkey.

WRITE YOUR OWN CAPTION HERE

Celebrate With a Toast

2005-11-23T21:26:00.000-08:00

Here's the recipe for Oprah's favorite drink: a Pomegranate Martini! This would go so well with some turkey and stuffing. Toast and enjoy!

1 1/2 cups pomegranate juice
2 oz. Absolute Citron vodka OR white tequila
1 oz. Cointreau liquor
Cup of ice
Optional: Splash of sparkling water
Optional: Squeeze of lemon

Shake ingredients in a shaker and put in chilled martini glasses. Put pomegranate fruit into glass as garnish.

Something To Be Thankful For

2005-11-23T00:34:00.000-08:00

We are most grateful that Syracuse Post-Standard reporter Hart Seely will home for turkey and stuffing after spending a month reporting and blogging from Iraq.

Welcome Home, Hart!

If you haven't read his blog, do it.

She's More Than Mean...Jean's a Liar

2005-11-22T21:46:00.000-08:00

The Marine Jean Schmidt quoted on the House floor last week now denies the quote she attributed to him. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Jean...Paul Hackett's gaining on you.

Read more at Crooks and Liars.

What's FOX Afraid Of?

2005-11-22T21:35:00.000-08:00

FOX was certainly happy to take money from the Swift Boat assholes in 2004, but an anti-Alito ad? No Way! Thanks for showing your true colors, you faux newsies! Don't try to tell us it's a factual problem...otherwise, you'd be returning a WHOLE lot of money.

Here's the story on Crooks and Liars.

Thank You, Ted

2005-11-22T01:02:00.000-08:00

Tonight is Ted Koppel's last appearance on "Nightline," the news magazine he helped to start nearly three decades ago.

In college, I rarely watched television, but I always wandered down to the dorm's TV room to watch Ted and to see if the Iranian hostages were ever going to be released. Eventually, "Nightline" became my intellectual option to late-night viewing. Sometimes I'm in the mood for it, and sometimes I prefer Letterman. But I know that Koppel (and the show) will always be interesting.

The show is not dead. Check TV Newser for constant updates on hosts, format, etc. But Ted is going away and I will miss him.

He was always smart, frequently aggressive, and viciously funny (off the air). Between Koppel and Peter Jennings, ABC cornered the market on great news guys.

You can hear his farewell interview with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air". Reuters has an interview and so does the New York Times. He's going out with a tribute to Morrie (as in "Tuesdays With...").

Without Ted, there's one less person on TV who talks to us like we have a brain. Damn.

The Truth About "Mean Jean"

2005-11-21T19:44:00.000-08:00

If you live in a glass house...

Turns out "Mean Jean" might have a few skeletons in her own closet -- and so does the "Marine" she used as her alibi in her tirade on the floor. Read about it at Talking Points Memo.

And...if you missed the video of her pitiful display of nastiness, Crooks and Liars has it.

Before You Read Tomorrow's New York Times...

2005-11-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

According to Daily Kos, the NYT is still printing crap. Two stories set to run tomorrow need to be fact-checked. One about SCOTUS nominee Alito's rulings on religious freedom and another about Senators McCain, Graham, and Warner who appear to be "defying" Bush. Read more about it.

Via Eschaton

C & L Deserves Our Support

2005-11-21T15:39:00.000-08:00

You MUST read Crooks and Liars! Just today, it's RICH with great stuff like:

Rumseld now says he was never asked to give advice invading Iraq (no lie!)
Bill O'Reilly says Ted Kennedy should be hanged (again, no lie!)
President Bush can't get through the door in China
Dick Cheney has a 19% approval rating

And much more... It's not just fun and enlightening. It's important.

Go there. Read. Donate.

Bob Graham Explains...

2005-11-21T15:28:00.000-08:00

The White House keeps talking about how the Democrats are revising history by criticizing the intelligence that (supposedly) drove us into war. Here's a testimonial from someone who was there -- Senator Robert Graham of Florida -- and his explanation of why he voted NO.

Op-Ed Washington Post

Better Than Heroin

2005-11-21T01:00:00.000-08:00

I realize it's the season of turkey and mashed potatoes, but you are going to be READY for something different this week, too. Instead of pizza, do this in 30 minutes.

Grab a few ingredients and make this pasta dish. I swear to God it is more addictive than Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. Although that would be good for dessert.

Shrimp (any size)
Frozen peas
Red Bell Pepper
Whipping Cream
Garlic
Olive oil
Pasta (spaghetti, linguini, or angel hair)

Cook the pasta.

While the pasta is cooking, saute the olive oil, garlic, and red bell pepper for about 5 minutes.

Keep the pan on the burner and top with the frozen shrimp, frozen peas, and noodles. Cover with the whipping cream. Add salt and pepper and let it sit until cream starts to bubble. Salt and pepper to taste.

Once the mixture starts to bubble, stir occasionally. Cook until the whole dish thickens (grab a spoonful of the liquid -- it should barely be dripping off the spoon).

Eat up.

You can substitute any vegetable or protein but the peas make it INCREDIBLE!

Krugman: Murtha's the Man

2005-11-21T00:24:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
November 21, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Time to Leave
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Not long ago wise heads offered some advice to those of us who had argued since 2003 that the Iraq war was sold on false pretenses: give it up. The 2004 election, they said, showed that we would never convince the American people. They suggested that we stop talking about how we got into Iraq and focus instead on what to do next.

It turns out that the wise heads were wrong. A solid majority of Americans now believe that we were misled into war. And it is only now, when the public has realized the truth about the past, that serious discussions about where we are and where we're going are able to get a hearing.

Representative John Murtha's speech calling for a quick departure from Iraq was full of passion, but it was also serious and specific in a way rarely seen on the other side of the debate. President Bush and his apologists speak in vague generalities about staying the course and finishing the job. But Mr. Murtha spoke of mounting casualties and lagging recruiting, the rising frequency of insurgent attacks, stagnant oil production and lack of clean water.

Mr. Murtha - a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America's fighting men and women - argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. And that's why he wants us out as soon as possible.

I'd add that the war is also destroying America's moral authority. When Mr. Bush speaks of human rights, the world thinks of Abu Ghraib. (In his speech, Mr. Murtha pointed out the obvious: torture at Abu Ghraib helped fuel the insurgency.) When administration officials talk of spreading freedom, the world thinks about the reality that much of Iraq is now ruled by theocrats and their militias.

Some administration officials accused Mr. Murtha of undermining the troops and giving comfort to the enemy. But that sort of thing no longer works, now that the administration has lost the public's trust.

Instead, defenders of our current policy have had to make a substantive argument: we can't leave Iraq now, because a civil war will break out after we're gone. One is tempted to say that they should have thought about that possibility back when they were cheerleading us into this war. But the real question is this: When, exactly, would be a good time to leave Iraq?

The fact is that we're not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, whatever that means in this context. At most, we'll stay until the American military can take no more.

Mr. Bush never asked the nation for the sacrifices - higher taxes, a bigger military and, possibly, a revived draft - that might have made a long-term commitment to Iraq possible. Instead, the war has been fought on borrowed money and borrowed time. And time is running out. With some military units on their third tour of duty in Iraq, the superb volunteer army that Mr. Bush inherited is in increasing danger of facing a collapse in quality and morale similar to the collapse of the officer corps in the early 1970's.

So the question isn't whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will. The question, instead, is whether it makes sense to keep the war going for another year or two, which is all the time we realistically have.

Pessimists think that Iraq will fall into chaos whenever we leave. If so, we're better off leaving sooner rather than later. As a Marine officer quoted by James Fallows in the current Atlantic Monthly puts it, "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our Army, or we can just lose."

And there's a good case to be made that our departure will actually improve matters. As Mr. Murtha pointed out in his speech, the insurgency derives much of its support from the perception that it's resisting a foreign occupier. Once we're gone, the odds are that Iraqis, who don't have a tradition of religious extremism, will turn on fanatical foreigners like Zarqawi.

The only way to justify staying in Iraq is to make the case that stretching the U.S. army to its breaking point will buy time for something good to happen. I don't think you can make that case convincingly. So Mr. Murtha is right: it's time to leave.

Beware of Brownies

2005-11-20T12:48:00.000-08:00

Lesbians.

Devil Worshippers.

Baby Killers.

Be Afraid.

Be Very Afraid.

Check out SuperFrankenstein

While the Republicans Fiddle...

2005-11-20T12:10:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Kristof reminds us that while our congressional leaders pick their collective noses, there IS suffering out there in the world.

The New York Times
November 20, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Never Again, Again?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

TAMA, Sudan

So who killed 2-year-old Zahra Abdullah for belonging to the Fur tribe?

At one level, the answer is simple: The murderers were members of the janjaweed militia that stormed into this mud-brick village in the South Darfur region at dawn four weeks ago on horses, camels and trucks. Zahra's mother, Fatima Omar Adam, woke to gunfire and smoke and knew at once what was happening.

She jumped up from her sleeping mat and put Zahra on her back, then grabbed the hands of her two older children and raced out of her thatch-roof hut with her husband.

Some of the marauders were right outside. They yanked Zahra from Ms. Fatima's back and began bludgeoning her on the ground in front of her shrieking mother and sister. Then the men began beating Ms. Fatima and the other two children, so she grabbed them and fled - and the men returned to beating the life out of Zahra.

At another level, responsibility belongs to the Sudanese government, which armed the janjaweed and gave them license to slaughter and rape members of several African tribes, including the Fur.

Then some responsibility attaches to the rebels in Darfur. They claim to be representing the tribes being ethnically cleansed, but they have been fighting each other instead of negotiating a peace with the government that would end the bloodbath.

And finally, responsibility belongs to the international community - to you and me - for acquiescing in yet another genocide.

Tama is just the latest of many hundreds of villages that have been methodically destroyed in the killing fields of Darfur over the last two years. Ms. Fatima sat on the ground and told me her story - which was confirmed by other eyewitnesses - in a dull, choked monotone, as she described her guilt at leaving her child to die.

"Zahra was on the ground, and they were beating her with sticks, but I ran away," she said. Her 4-year-old son, Adam, was also beaten badly but survived. A 9-year-old daughter, Khadija, has only minor injuries but she told me that she had constant nightmares about the janjaweed.

At least Ms. Fatima knows what happened to her daughter. A neighbor, Aisha Yagoub Abdurahman, is beside herself because she says she saw her 10-year-old son Adil carried off by the janjaweed. He is still missing, and everyone knows that the janjaweed regularly enslave children like him, using them as servants or sexual playthings. In all, 37 people were killed in Tama, and another 12 are missing.

The survivors fled five miles to another village that had been abandoned after being attacked by the janjaweed a year earlier. Now the survivors are terrified, and they surrounded me to ask for advice about how to stay alive.

None of them dared accompany me back to Tama, which is an eerie ghost town, doors hanging off hinges and pots and sandals strewn about. The only inhabitants I saw in Tama were camels, which are now using the village as a pasture - and which the villagers say belong to the janjaweed. On the road back, I saw a group of six janjaweed, one displaying his rifle.

Darfur is just the latest chapter in a sorry history of repeated inaction in the face of genocide, from that of Armenians, through the Holocaust, to the slaughter of Cambodians, Bosnians and Rwandans. If we had acted more resolutely last year, then Zahra would probably still be alive.

Attacks on villages like Tama occur regularly. Over the last week, one tribe called the Falata, backed and armed by the Sudanese government, has burned villages belonging to the Masalit tribe south of here. Dozens of bodies are said to be lying unclaimed on the ground.

President Bush, where are you? You emphasize your willingness to speak bluntly about evil, but you barely let the word Darfur pass your lips. The central lesson of the history of genocide is that the essential starting point of any response is to bellow moral outrage - but instead, Mr. President, you're whispering.

In a later column, I'll talk more specifically about actions we should take, and it's true that this is a complex mess without easy solutions. But for starters we need a dose of moral clarity. For all the myriad complexities of Darfur, what history will remember is that this is where little girls were bashed to death in front of their parents because of their tribe - and because the world couldn't be bothered to notice.

I Heart Frank Rich

2005-11-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

I love Frank Rich. Here's today's brilliant take on the exchange of fluids between the "War on Terrorism" and the Iraq war.

Buy his book, Ghost Light

The New York Times
November 20, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
One War Lost, Another to Go
By FRANK RICH

IF anyone needs further proof that we are racing for the exits in Iraq, just follow the bouncing ball that is Rick Santorum. A Republican leader in the Senate and a true-blue (or red) Iraq hawk, he has long slobbered over President Bush, much as Ed McMahon did over Johnny Carson. But when Mr. Bush went to Mr. Santorum's home state of Pennsylvania to give his Veterans Day speech smearing the war's critics as unpatriotic, the senator was M.I.A.

Mr. Santorum preferred to honor a previous engagement more than 100 miles away. There he told reporters for the first time that "maybe some blame" for the war's "less than optimal" progress belonged to the White House. This change of heart had nothing to do with looming revelations of how the new Iraqi "democracy" had instituted Saddam-style torture chambers. Or with the spiraling investigations into the whereabouts of nearly $9 billion in unaccounted-for taxpayers' money from the American occupation authority. Or with the latest spike in casualties. Mr. Santorum was instead contemplating his own incipient political obituary written the day before: a poll showing him 16 points down in his re-election race. No sooner did he stiff Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania than he did so again in Washington, voting with a 79-to-19 majority on a Senate resolution begging for an Iraq exit strategy. He was joined by all but one (Jon Kyl) of the 13 other Republican senators running for re-election next year. They desperately want to be able to tell their constituents that they were against the war after they were for it.

They know the voters have decided the war is over, no matter what symbolic resolutions are passed or defeated in Congress nor how many Republicans try to Swift-boat Representative John Murtha, the marine hero who wants the troops out. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey last week found that the percentage (52) of Americans who want to get out of Iraq fast, in 12 months or less, is even larger than the percentage (48) that favored a quick withdrawal from Vietnam when that war's casualty toll neared 54,000 in the apocalyptic year of 1970. The Ohio State political scientist John Mueller, writing in Foreign Affairs, found that "if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline." He observed that Mr. Bush was trying to channel L. B. J. by making "countless speeches explaining what the effort in Iraq is about, urging patience and asserting that progress is being made. But as was also evident during Woodrow Wilson's campaign to sell the League of Nations to the American public, the efficacy of the bully pulpit is much overrated."

Mr. Bush may disdain timetables for our pullout, but, hello, there already is one, set by the Santorums of his own party: the expiration date for a sizable American presence in Iraq is Election Day 2006. As Mr. Mueller says, the decline in support for the war won't reverse itself. The public knows progress is not being made, no matter how many times it is told that Iraqis will soon stand up so we can stand down.

On the same day the Senate passed the resolution rebuking Mr. Bush on the war, Martha Raddatz of ABC News reported that "only about 700 Iraqi troops" could operate independently of the U.S. military, 27,000 more could take a lead role in combat "only with strong support" from our forces and the rest of the 200,000-odd trainees suffered from a variety of problems, from equipment shortages to an inability "to wake up when told" or follow orders.

But while the war is lost both as a political matter at home and a practical matter in Iraq, the exit strategy being haggled over in Washington will hardly mark the end of our woes. Few Americans will cry over the collapse of the administration's vainglorious mission to make Iraq a model of neocon nation-building. But, as some may dimly recall, there is another war going on as well - against Osama bin Laden and company.

One hideous consequence of the White House's Big Lie - fusing the war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that the public, having rejected one, automatically rejects the other. That's already happening. The percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll. Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush catastrophe: the administration has at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America's will and resources to confront that expanded threat.

We have arrived at "the worst of all possible worlds," in the words of Daniel Benjamin, Richard Clarke's former counterterrorism colleague, with whom I talked last week. No one speaks more eloquently to this point than Mr. Benjamin and Steven Simon, his fellow National Security Council alum. They saw the Qaeda threat coming before most others did in the 1990's, and their riveting new book, "The Next Attack," is the best argued and most thoroughly reported account of why, in their opening words, "we are losing" the war against the bin Laden progeny now.

"The Next Attack" is prescient to a scary degree. "If bin Laden is the Robin Hood of jihad," the authors write, then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi "has been its Horatio Alger, and Iraq his field of dreams." The proof arrived spectacularly this month with the Zarqawi-engineered suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman. That attack, Mr. Benjamin wrote in Slate, "could soon be remembered as the day that the spillover of violence from Iraq became a major affliction for the Middle East." But not remembered in America. Thanks to the confusion sown by the Bush administration, the implications for us in this attack, like those in London and Madrid, are quickly forgotten, if they were noticed in the first place. What happened in Amman is just another numbing bit of bad news that we mentally delete along with all the other disasters we now label "Iraq."

Only since his speech about "Islamo-fascism" in early October has Mr. Bush started trying to make distinctions between the "evildoers" of Saddam's regime and the Islamic radicals who did and do directly threaten us. But even if anyone was still listening to this president, it would be too little and too late. The only hope for getting Americans to focus on the war we can't escape is to clear the decks by telling the truth about the war of choice in Iraq: that it is making us less safe, not more, and that we have to learn from its mistakes and calculate the damage it has caused as we reboot and move on.

Mr. Bush is incapable of such candor. In the speech Mr. Santorum skipped on Veterans Day, the president lashed out at his critics for trying "to rewrite the history" of how the war began. Then he rewrote the history of the war, both then and now. He boasted of America's "broad and coordinated homeland defense" even as the members of the bipartisan 9/11 commission were preparing to chastise the administration's inadequate efforts to prevent actual nuclear W.M.D.'s, as opposed to Saddam's fictional ones, from finding their way to terrorists. Mr. Bush preened about how "we're standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes" even as we were hearing new reports of how we outsource detainees to such regimes to be tortured.

And once again he bragged about the growing readiness of Iraqi troops, citing "nearly 90 Iraqi army battalions fighting the terrorists alongside our forces." But as James Fallows confirms in his exhaustive report on "Why Iraq Has No Army" in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, America would have to commit to remaining in Iraq for many years to "bring an Iraqi army to maturity." If we're not going to do that, Mr. Fallows concludes, America's only alternative is to "face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly."

THAT'S the alternative that has already been chosen, brought on not just by the public's irreversible rejection of the war, but also by the depleted state of our own broken military forces; they are falling short of recruitment goals across the board by as much as two-thirds, the Government Accountability Office reported last week. We must prepare accordingly for what's to come. To do so we need leaders, whatever the political party, who can look beyond our nonorderly withdrawal from Iraq next year to the mess that will remain once we're on our way out. Whether it's countering the havoc inflicted on American interests internationally by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo or overhauling and redeploying our military, intelligence and homeland security operations to confront the enemy we actually face, there's an enormous job to be done.

The arguments about how we got into Mr. Bush's war and exactly how we'll get out are also important. But the damage from this fiasco will be even greater if those debates obscure the urgency of the other war we are losing, one that will be with us long after we've left the quagmire in Iraq.

Tom Cruise Believes THIS Shit?

2005-11-18T17:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I really appreciate Larry Flynt for the publisher he is/was. He was always prepared to tell a story -- no matter how sordid it might be.

Here's a Penthouse interview from 1983 with L. Ron Hubbard Jr. that makes you wonder why Scientologists:

A) Buy into all this shit
B) Admire an asshole like L. Ron Hubbard
C) Pay so damn much money to these idiots
D) Wear military uniforms at their formal events
E) Ever got tax-exempt status as a religion
Via Konolia

Oh, Yeah, This Privatization Thing is Terrific

2005-11-18T08:47:00.000-08:00

Ronald Reagan hated government so much he...ran for President! And then he proceeded to dismantle it and offer it up to the highest bidder. As the old right-wing talk radio bromide goes, "Government can't do anything as well as private industry can."

Several problems with that...no private enterprises ever offered my elderly grandmother a clean, spacious, safe apartment at an affordable rent so she could live her 80s and 90s in dignity. And could any of them run the Medicare program with a 2% overhead? Role models like Enron and WorldCom really do inspire the rest of us to be the best, don't they?

Yes, privatization has brought us so many good things, like Halliburton and now the prescription drug benefit. Here's Paul Krugman:

The New York Times
November 18, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
A Private Obsession
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"Lots of things in life are complicated." So declared Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, in response to the mass confusion as registration for the new Medicare drug benefit began. But the complexity of the program - which has reduced some retirees to tears as they try to make what may be life-or-death decisions - is far greater than necessary.

One reason the drug benefit is so confusing is that older Americans can't simply sign up with Medicare as they can for other benefits. They must, instead, choose from a baffling array of plans offered by private middlemen. Why?

Here's a parallel. Earlier this year Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill that would have forced the National Weather Service to limit the weather information directly available to the public. Although he didn't say so explicitly, he wanted the service to funnel that information through private forecasters instead.

Mr. Santorum's bill didn't go anywhere. But it was a classic attempt to force gratuitous privatization: involving private corporations in the delivery of public services even when those corporations have no useful role to play.

The Medicare drug benefit is an example of gratuitous privatization on a grand scale.

Here's some background: the elderly have long been offered a choice between standard Medicare, in which the government pays medical bills directly, and plans in which the government pays a middleman, like an H.M.O., to deliver health care. The theory was that the private sector would find innovative ways to lower costs while providing better care.

The theory was wrong. A number of studies have found that managed-care plans, which have much higher administrative costs than government-managed Medicare, end up costing the system money, not saving it.

But privatization, once promoted as a way to save money, has become a goal in itself. The 2003 bill that established the prescription drug benefit also locked in large subsidies for managed care.

And on drug coverage, the 2003 bill went even further: rather than merely subsidizing private plans, it made them mandatory. To receive the drug benefit, one must sign up with a plan offered by a private company. As people are discovering, the result is a deeply confusing system because the competing private plans differ in ways that are very hard to assess.

The peculiar structure of the drug benefit, with its huge gap in coverage - the famous "doughnut hole" I wrote about last week - adds to the confusion. Many better-off retirees have relied on Medigap policies to cover gaps in traditional Medicare, including prescription drugs. But that straightforward approach, which would make it relatively easy to compare drug plans, can't be used to fill the doughnut hole because Medigap policies are no longer allowed to cover drugs.

The only way to get some coverage in the gap is as part of a package in which you pay extra - a lot extra - to one of the private drug plans delivering the basic benefit. And because this coverage is bundled with other aspects of the plans, it's very difficult to figure out which plans offer the best deal.

But confusion isn't the only, or even the main, reason why the privatization of drug benefits is bad for America. The real problem is that we'll end up spending too much and getting too little.

Everything we know about health economics indicates that private drug plans will have much higher administrative costs than would have been incurred if Medicare had administered the benefit directly.

It's also clear that the private plans will spend large sums on marketing rather than on medicine. I have nothing against Don Shula, the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, who is promoting a drug plan offered by Humana. But do we really want people choosing drug plans based on which one hires the most persuasive celebrity?

Last but not least, competing private drug plans will have less clout in negotiating lower drug prices than Medicare as a whole would have. And the law explicitly forbids Medicare from intervening to help the private plans negotiate better deals.

Last week I explained that the Medicare drug bill was devised by people who don't believe in a positive role for government. An insistence on gratuitous privatization is a byproduct of the same ideology. And the result of that ideology is a piece of legislation so bad it's almost surreal.

Anderson, What the Hell?

2005-11-18T03:21:00.000-08:00

Anderson Cooper is pissing me off.
Although he's not my cup of tea for an evening anchor (Reporter? Yes. Co-anchor? Yes. Morning host? Probably. Evening sole anchor? NOT!), I was willing to give him a shot. Sure, I was pissed that he displaced Aaron Brown, but I understand how the news business is. Aaron's a grown-up. We'll go on.

But, Jesus!

Anderson's CNN Show (360) is so goddamned over-produced, it's hard to watch. Talking heads are framed by moving graphics that make a viewer queasy and the announcer's voice is downright oily (they have an ANNOUNCER!).

But here are the final stakes in the heart of Anderson the newsman:

On election night (when Democrats made some nice gains across the country, thank you -- that's news, isn't it?), what story did Anderson lead with? That's right...the effects of divorce on children. Eleven fucking minutes of a lead story about divorce. On ELECTION night! Hell, even Wolf Blitzer scooped the pants off Anderson with election results. So much for Cooper's "nose for news."

And last night -- I still can't believe this -- Anderson let his producers air a feature story on Anderson himself being listed in People Magazine's sexiest people issue. I AM NOT LYING! Shit, even Dan Rather would have balked at that much self-promotion. I mean, CNN has 22 OTHER hours to run a story like that.

What the hell happened to the reporter part of Anderson Cooper? Looks like he misplaced it behind his new cheesy-ass anchor desk.

He's One Baaaad Murtha

2005-11-18T00:06:00.000-08:00

He looks like Clarence the Angel in "It's A Wonderful Life" but in reality Rep. John Murtha has served three decades in Congress on behalf of Pennsylvania's 12th district. He served in two wars (one of the first Vietnam vets elected to Congress) and has always been strong on American defense and now. . . he's being called unpatriotic?

Take a look at his speech urging the U.S. to get the hell out of Iraq and you can make your own decision. Crooks and Liars has both the video and text of yesterday's speech.

Go Jo-ohn! Go Jo-ohn!

More coverage:

USA Today Story
NY Times Article

Don't Miss This!

2005-11-17T22:36:00.000-08:00

If you didn't catch "South Park" last night, it was a brilliant attack on Scientology and, at the end, an open invitation for the church to sue the creators. For most of the show, Tom Cruise was urged to "come out of the closet" and R. Kelly kept bringing out his gun and singing "Trapped in the Closet." All of the credits were listed as "John Smith" and "Jane Smith" (underlining the dangers of Scientology's litigiousness) and there is a hilarious summary of Scientology's credo (it's harder to follow than one of L. Ron's sci-fi books!)

Check here for more viewing times

I Think I Enjoy Being a Girl

2005-11-16T21:19:00.000-08:00

I don't really know how to talk about this.

I have hated my body since I became aware I was fat -- I think I was 10 and I was riding my bike when the back seam of my red-checked bell bottom pants split wide open. But for about a decade, I wrestled the demon and maintained a "normal weight." Mostly out of the fear of rejection. But, to be fair, I didn't give my friends and family much credit for unconditional acceptance.

Now, middle age sedentary life has set in and the pounds have drizzled on. My body is larger than ever. It is not something I really recognize and I'm having a hard time getting used to it. Frankly, it's overflowing with female-ness and it scares me a little. But I also kinda like it.

OK, don't start in on the whole diet thing. Like I haven't thought of that? You don't think that every day since this weight began to creep into my life I didn't wake up determined to start a new, healthier eating plan? Or to start working out? Get real!

But eventually the painful redundancy of that daily punishment became intolerable and I just wanted it to stop. For God's sake, how much imagination does it take to want to lose weight? Oooh...there's an innovative concept! NO-body wants to do THAT!

So I recently decided to ditch the self-criticism and just be THIS person in THIS body AND still be fantastic. I'm not waiting for permission (which would apparently come after losing 70 pounds) to be magically interesting. I'm just going to be that NOW. One thing I have learned: if you wait for permission, it ain't never gonna come. I mean, let's say I DID lose the weight. Is there gonna be someone there with a "golden ticket" that gets me into the land of my wildest dreams? Uh-uh. I gotta get there myself and there's no reason to wait.

Another thing I have learned. If you wanna be wonderful, you can't really carry it off unless you are REALLY wonderful. Just GO THERE and BE THAT. Half-assed only makes you look half-assed.

I ran across a photo of myself during the "lean years" and I mistook myself for a guy. Before I recognized myself, I was admiring the jeans, the sweater, the short hair, and then I realized it was ME! I truly looked like a boy. What was THAT about? As thin as I was, I covered myself in tailored clothes or baggy sweaters. Anything tight was painful to wear -- in more ways than one.

What was I doing? Was I trying to maintain my personal power by holding on to masculinity? Or by rejecting my femininity?

Now, showing off my curves and wearing bright colors is kinda fun. And I've realized that being a girl takes courage. You have to be willing to show yourself off. You have to risk looking like you are TRYING to be pretty and that makes you a little vulnerable. Your curves go on display. Your skin (and the accompanying flesh) shows. Not everyone can carry it off.

But when you go through life convinced that you are WONDERFUL, it feels great.

Which Way Out of This Quagmire?

2005-11-15T21:16:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Kristof has a dream:

The New York Times
November 15, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Iraq in the Rear-View Mirror
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

As we puzzle over how to end our nightmare in Iraq, the central question is the one raised by The Times on Aug. 7: "How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for?"

Not this Times, though. It was The Times of London on Aug. 7, 1920, as a ferocious insurgency threatened the British occupation of Iraq.

The British had also started out thinking that they were liberators, only to find that they had catastrophically underestimated Iraqi nationalism. They ended up being sucked into what Lawrence of Arabia described as "a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor." Yet, ultimately, the British did manage to extricate themselves, providing lessons for us.

In my last column, I looked at two options for Iraq and found both wanting. Immediate withdrawal would risk abandoning the country to civil war and chaos. But President Bush's approach - grimly staying the course indefinitely - inflames nationalistic resentment and feeds the insurgency.

So what should we do?

My vote is to set target dates for withdrawing our troops. I suggest that we announce that we intend to pull out at least half our troops by the end of 2006 - and the very last soldier by the end of 2007. We should also pledge not to keep any military bases in Iraq.

Democrats are beginning to rally behind this strategy, mostly, however, on more hurried timetables than mine. Senator Russell Feingold was among the first to call for a timetable, and Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy have since signed on to this approach, as has former Senator Tom Daschle.

Will this work? I'm not sure. We could invest tens of billions of dollars more in Iraq, and hundreds more lives, and still see the country fall apart. Moreover, I have to acknowledge that the big disadvantage of target dates is that they can encourage insurgents to think, "We just need to hang on for one more year, and then Iraq will be ours for the taking."

That's a legitimate concern, but a tentative timetable does avoid the worse pitfalls of the other two approaches. And target dates and a renunciation of bases at least show some sensitivity to the resentment of our presence, while giving the Iraqi political system and Army more time to coalesce.

I met last month with three visiting Iraqi journalists, all of them anti-insurgency and pro-constitution. All three favored a target date for withdrawal.

"I would like the American troops to get out of Iraq because I don't want my country occupied," said Muna Muhsin Muhammad from Radio Baghdad (the only one who dared to be named).

Another groused that American troops stole gold and money when they raided houses, opened fire when they got nervous, and blocked roads in ways that created incredible inconveniences. Driving from Baghdad to Mosul used to take four hours; now it can take 20.

"The Americans said that they came to overthrow Saddam Hussein," she said. "They did so and Saddam Hussein is gone, and they are still there. So they are there for their own reasons" - she was apparently alluding to stealing oil and setting up bases.

The insurgents have traction only because many ordinary Iraqis (particularly Sunnis) share this hostility to American troops. If we can make it clear that we're headed for the exits, that'll make it harder for the insurgents to portray themselves as nationalist heroes.

A target date would also light a fire under all Iraqis to work out a modus vivendi. Time and again, deadlines have proved the only way to get Iraqi politicians to do anything.

The British finally calmed the insurgency of 1920 by installing King Feisal, who created enough trouble that he didn't come across as a puppet. Afterward, the British managed to muddle through their mess, and Iraq found greater stability than the pessimists had expected.

Likewise, our exit strategy needs to focus on healing nationalist resentments, not inflaming them by settling our troops in for a long haul.

President Bush said last month that "we're making good, steady progress" in Iraq. That sounds delusional because we may be in the early stages of civil war.

All the Iraq options are bad. But this is the least bad.

FINALLY! A Springsteen Fan!

2005-11-14T20:30:00.000-08:00

Back in 2001, the goofy red-haired guy on "Sunday Morning" chronicled the tragic passing of a man in his New Jersey community. A loving father, Little League coach, and successful business man, he was truly beloved by his fellow townfolk who were shocked at his death in the attack on the World Trade Center.

At his funeral, his lovely wife played his favorite music: Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road." Oh, brother, I thought. How long was this guy gonna hang on to his youth? I mean, hasn't he listened to anything since the 1970s?

Well, "Sunday Morning" (and later, Terry Gross on "Fresh Air") brought me to my senses. Both shows featured interviews with Springsteen on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the release of "Born to Run," which is being re-packaged and re-released with a lot of extra cool stuff.

I was sitting in my office, alone, when the Terry Gross interview aired and... OH. MY. GOD. When "Thunder Road" came on, my heart clenched, my stomach flipped and instantly my thoughts stretched back to teenage summer nights, driving around late at night, looking for something but not sure what. Springsteen's teenagers are yearning -- he describes this as "pull your pants down" but for me, they shared my longing to get out of this dinky little town and escape to something thrilling somewhere, anywhere, else.

Whatever it is, Springsteen achieved his goal. He wanted to eternally preserve that era for all of us. Frankly, you gotta be a little brave when you listen to "Thunder Road" -- in middle age, past longing and deep emotion can be too much.

But the New Jersey man who died on 9/11 was courageous enough to remind himself of all that and still dive into his present and future with his whole self. Adults and children alike mourned his passing. He wasn't trying to re-live his past. He embraced it and used it to enliven his future. Like Springsteen, he was a very wise man indeed.

Born to Run Reborn 30 Years Later: NY Times

Freedom of Speech Starts Early

2005-11-13T19:12:00.000-08:00

My buddy from Wenatchee just keeps amassing awards and recognition for his work in student journalism. That's certainly something to be proud of, but for their journalism program, it's nothing new. But his story about the recent censorship of the student newspaper at a high school in Everett, Washington definitely deserves your attention.

Two very bright young female editors are fighting the good fight. Read about it here.

Today's Frank Rich: To Torture or to Lie about Torture

2005-11-13T18:57:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
November 13, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
By FRANK RICH

IF it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the world, "We do not torture." Even as he spoke, the administration's flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper.

The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons two years ago, was uncovering new "black sites" in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a spending bill amendment, written by John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners.

So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, "We do not torture" - a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib - you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore.

The fallout from the Scooter Libby indictment reveals that the administration's credibility, having passed the tipping point with Katrina, is flat-lining. For two weeks, the White House's talking-point monkeys in the press and Congress had been dismissing Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation as much ado about nothing except politics and as an exoneration of everyone except Mr. Libby. Now the American people have rendered their verdict: they're not buying it. Last week two major polls came up with the identical finding, that roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter. One of the polls (The Wall Street Journal/NBC News) also found that 57 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country into war in Iraq and that only 33 percent now find him "honest and straightforward," down from 50 percent in January.

The Bush loyalists' push to discredit the Libby indictment failed because Americans don't see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the petri dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes more visible every day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in his latest stay-the-course speech - that Democrats, too, endorsed dead-wrong W.M.D. intelligence - is more of the same. Sure, many Democrats (and others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal before the war, but only the White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq's supposed W.M.D.'s, to whip up public fears of an imminent doomsday.

There was also an entire other set of lies in the administration's prewar propaganda blitzkrieg that had nothing to do with W.M.D.'s, African uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its finite resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein rather than keep its focus on the war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White House had to cook up not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack us, but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11. Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who last weekend released a previously classified intelligence document, we now have conclusive evidence that the administration's disinformation campaign implying a link connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous and manipulative than its relentless flogging of nuclear Armageddon.

Senator Levin's smoking gun is a widely circulated Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 that was probably seen by the National Security Council. It warned that a captured Qaeda terrorist in American custody was in all likelihood "intentionally misleading" interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had trained Qaeda members to use illicit weapons. The report also made the point that an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration was absurd on its face: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements." But just like any other evidence that disputed the administration's fictional story lines, this intelligence was promptly disregarded.

So much so that eight months later - in October 2002, as the White House was officially rolling out its new war and Congress was on the eve of authorizing it - Mr. Bush gave a major address in Cincinnati intermingling the usual mushroom clouds with information from that discredited, "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant. "We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," he said. It was the most important, if hardly the only, example of repeated semantic sleights of hand that the administration used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq. Dick Cheney was fond of brandishing a nonexistent April 2001 "meeting" between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague long after Czech and American intelligence analysts had dismissed it.

The power of these lies was considerable. In a CBS News/New York Times poll released on Sept. 25, 2001, 60 percent of Americans thought Osama bin Laden had been the culprit in the attacks of two weeks earlier, either alone or in league with unnamed "others" or with the Taliban; only 6 percent thought bin Laden had collaborated with Saddam; and only 2 percent thought Saddam had been the sole instigator. By the time we invaded Iraq in 2003, however, CBS News found that 53 percent believed Saddam had been "personally involved" in 9/11; other polls showed that a similar percentage of Americans had even convinced themselves that the hijackers were Iraqis.

There is still much more to learn about our government's duplicity in the run-up to the war, just as there is much more to learn about what has gone on since, whether with torture or billions of Iraq reconstruction dollars. That is why the White House and its allies, having failed to discredit the Fitzgerald investigation, are now so desperate to slow or block every other inquiry. Exhibit A is the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, is proving a major farceur with his efforts to sidestep any serious investigation of White House prewar subterfuge. Last Sunday, the same day that newspapers reported Carl Levin's revelation about the "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant, Senator Roberts could be found on "Face the Nation" saying he had found no evidence of "political manipulation or pressure" in the use of prewar intelligence.

His brazenness is not anomalous. After more than two years of looking into the forged documents used by the White House to help support its bogus claims of Saddam's Niger uranium, the F.B.I. ended its investigation without resolving the identity of the forgers. Last week, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported that an investigation into the November 2003 death of an Abu Ghraib detainee, labeled a homicide by the U.S. government, has been, in the words of a lawyer familiar with the case, "lying kind of fallow." The Wall Street Journal similarly reported that 17 months after Condoleezza Rice promised a full investigation into Ahmad Chalabi's alleged leaking of American intelligence to Iran, F.B.I. investigators had yet to interview Mr. Chalabi - who was being welcomed in Washington last week as an honored guest by none other than Ms. Rice.

The Times, meanwhile, discovered that Mr. Libby had set up a legal defense fund to be underwritten by donors who don't have to be publicly disclosed but who may well have a vested interest in the direction of his defense. It's all too eerily reminiscent of the secret fund set up by Richard Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, to pay the legal fees of Watergate defendants.

THERE'S so much to stonewall at the White House that last week Scott McClellan was reduced to beating up on the octogenarian Helen Thomas. "You don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen," he said, "and I'm going to tell them the facts." Coming from the press secretary who vowed that neither Mr. Libby nor Karl Rove had any involvement in the C.I.A. leak, this scene was almost as funny as his boss's "We do not torture" charade.

Not that it matters now. The facts the American people are listening to at this point come not from an administration that they no longer find credible, but from the far more reality-based theater of war. The Qaeda suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman on 11/9, like the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London before them, speak louder than anything else of the price we are paying for the lies that diverted us from the war against the suicide bombers of 9/11 to the war in Iraq.

Slate on Silverman

2005-11-12T12:11:00.000-08:00

Slate has gone a bit crazy about Sarah Silverman lately and have featured three more articles about her in the past week.

Here's David Edelstein's review of her new movie, "Jesus is Magic"

A profile by Pamela Paul

And...Sam Anderson's sharp critique of her brand of comedy

Here's more from this blog about Sarah

What Hath Bush Wrought?

2005-11-11T20:24:00.000-08:00

Remember the old days when we hoped our troops would help to make Iraq a safe bastion of democracy? Even if W hauled our asses in there with a great big fib, at least something good might come out of it, right?

Three years later, Baghdad sounds like the WORST place in the world to live. Our friend Hart Seely describes a desolate city piled with garbage and sewers that don't work.

And God help you if you want to date, let alone just go out on the street at night for a walk. Between the military, the insurgents, and the fundamentalists, romance barely stands a chance.

As a result of W's video-game war, the real-life residents of Baghdad have a long way to go before life is anything close to normal. No wonder E.L. Doctorow was recently moved to write a novel about Sherman's March -- our own Middle Eastern version has been going on for years.

Will They Make it to Veteran's Day?

2005-11-11T00:02:00.000-08:00

Here's Bob Herbert's take on the current anxiety ridden state of our military. Officials should be worried. "Fragging" might not be far behind.

The New York Times
November 10, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
An Army Ready to Snap
By BOB HERBERT

Have you heard what's been happening to the military?

Most people have heard that more than 2,000 American G.I.'s have been killed in the nonstop meat grinder of Iraq. There was a flurry of stories about that grim milestone in the last week of October. (Since then the official number of American deaths has jumped to at least 2,055, and it continues to climb steadily.)

More than 15,000 have been wounded in action.

But the problems of the military go far beyond the casualty figures coming out of the war zone. The Army, for example, has been stretched so taut since the Sept. 11 attacks, especially by the fiasco in Iraq, that it's become like a rubber band that may snap at any moment.

President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld convinced themselves that they could win the war in Iraq on the cheap. They never sent enough troops to do the job. Now the burden of trying to fight a long and bitter war with too few troops is taking a terrible toll on the men and women in uniform.

Last December, the top general in the Army Reserve warned that his organization was "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force" because of the Pentagon's "dysfunctional" policies and demands placed on the Reserve by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

As one of my colleagues at The Times, David Unger of the editorial board, wrote, "The Army's commitments have dangerously and rapidly expanded, while recruitment has plunged."

Soldiers are being sent into the crucible of Iraq for three and even four tours, a form of Russian roulette that is unconscionable.

"They feel like they're the only ones sacrificing," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former Army lieutenant who served in Iraq and is now the executive director of Operation Truth, an advocacy group for service members and veterans.

"They're starting to look around and say, 'You know, it's me and my buddies over and over again, and everybody else is living life uninterrupted.' "

When I asked Mr. Rieckhoff what he thought was happening with the Army, he replied, "The wheels are coming off."

The Washington Post, in a lengthy article last week, noted:

"As sustained combat in Iraq makes it harder than ever to fill the ranks of the all-volunteer force, newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed, rural areas where youths' need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war."

For those already in the Army, the price being paid - apart from the physical toll of the killed and wounded - is high indeed.

Divorce rates have gone way up, nearly doubling over the past four years. Long deployments - and, especially, repeated deployments - can take a vicious toll on personal relationships.

Chaplains, psychologists and others have long been aware of the many dangerous factors that accompany wartime deployment: loneliness, financial problems, drug or alcohol abuse, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, the problems faced by the parent left at home to care for children, the enormous problem of adjusting to the devastation of wartime injuries, and so on.

The Army is not just fighting a ruthless insurgency in Iraq. It's fighting a rear-guard action against these noncombat, guerrilla-like conditions that threaten its own viability.

There are reasons why parents all across America are telling their children to run the other way when military recruiters come to call. There are reasons why so many lieutenants and captains, fine young men and women, are heading toward the exit doors at the first opportunity.

A captain who is on active duty, and therefore asked not to be identified by name, told me yesterday:

"The only reason I stayed in the Army was because one colonel convinced me to do it. Other than that, I would have walked. Basically, these guys who are leaving have their high-powered educations. Some are from West Point. They've done their five years. Why should they stay and go back to Iraq and die in a war that's just going to keep on going?"

Beyond that, he said, "Guys are not going to stay in the Army when their wives are leaving them."

From the perspective of the troops, he said, the situation in Iraq is perverse.

He could find no upside. "You go to war," he said, "and you could lose your heart, your mind, your arms, your legs - but you cannot win. The soldiers don't win."

Note to Bureaucrats: America, Love It or Leave It

2005-11-10T23:19:00.000-08:00

I've always thought that if you have a uteris, you don't get to say what I do with mine. Similarly, Paul Krugman says if you don't like government, you shouldn't be designing its programs. Nor, I might add, can you fill it with your cronies and idiots who want to pillage the treasury in every way possible.

The New York Times
November 11, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Deadly Doughnut
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Registration for Medicare's new prescription drug benefit starts next week. Soon millions of Americans will learn that doughnuts are bad for your health. And if we're lucky, Americans will also learn a bigger lesson: politicians who don't believe in a positive role for government shouldn't be allowed to design new government programs.

Before we turn to the larger issue, let's look at how the Medicare drug benefit will work over the course of next year.

At first, the benefit will look like a normal insurance plan, with a deductible and co-payments.

But if your cumulative drug expenses reach $2,250, a very strange thing will happen: you'll suddenly be on your own. The Medicare benefit won't kick in again unless your costs reach $5,100. This gap in coverage has come to be known as the "doughnut hole." (Did you think I was talking about Krispy Kremes?)

One way to see the bizarre effect of this hole is to notice that if you are a retiree and spend $2,000 on drugs next year, Medicare will cover 66 percent of your expenses. But if you spend $5,000 - which means that you're much more likely to need help paying those expenses - Medicare will cover only 30 percent of your bills.

A study in the July/August issue of Health Affairs points out that this will place many retirees on a financial "roller coaster."

People with high drug costs will have relatively low out-of-pocket expenses for part of the year - say, until next summer. Then, suddenly, they'll enter the doughnut hole, and their personal expenses will soar. And because the same people tend to have high drug costs year after year, the roller-coaster ride will repeat in 2007.

How will people respond when their out-of-pocket costs surge? The Health Affairs article argues, based on experience from H.M.O. plans with caps on drug benefits, that it's likely "some beneficiaries will cut back even essential medications while in the doughnut hole." In other words, this doughnut will make some people sick, and for some people it will be deadly.

The smart thing to do, for those who could afford it, would be to buy supplemental insurance that would cover the doughnut hole. But guess what: the bill that established the drug benefit specifically prohibits you from buying insurance to cover the gap. That's why many retirees who already have prescription drug insurance are being advised not to sign up for the Medicare benefit.

If all of this makes the drug bill sound like a disaster, bear in mind that I've touched on only one of the bill's awful features. There are many others, like the clause that prohibits Medicare from using its clout to negotiate lower drug prices. Why is this bill so bad?

The probable answer is that the Republican Congressional leaders who rammed the bill through in 2003 weren't actually trying to protect retired Americans against the risk of high drug expenses. In fact, they're fundamentally hostile to the idea of social insurance, of public programs that reduce private risk.

Their purpose was purely political: to be able to say that President Bush had honored his 2000 campaign promise to provide prescription drug coverage by passing a drug bill, any drug bill.

Once you recognize that the drug benefit is a purely political exercise that wasn't supposed to serve its ostensible purpose, the absurdities in the program make sense. For example, the bill offers generous coverage to people with low drug costs, who have the least need for help, so lots of people will get small checks in the mail and think they're being treated well.

Meanwhile, the people who are actually likely to need a lot of help paying their drug expenses were deliberately offered a very poor benefit. According to a report issued along with the final version of the bill, people are prohibited from buying supplemental insurance to cover the doughnut hole to keep beneficiaries from becoming "insensitive to costs" - that is, buying too much medicine because they don't pay the price.

A more likely motive is that Congressional leaders didn't want a drug bill that really worked for middle-class retirees.

Can the drug bill be fixed? Yes, but not by current management. It's hard to believe that either the current Congressional leadership or the Mayberry Machiavellis in the White House would do any better on a second pass. We won't have a drug benefit that works until we have politicians who want it to work.

Nixon Redux

2005-11-09T20:15:00.000-08:00

Looks like the Bush White House is carrying on the Nixonian practice of maintaining an enemies list number up to 10,000 names!

Seems to be a part of Karl Rove's political strategy of "don't screw us or we'll screw you even worse" and explains why the attack on the Wilsons was so well choreographed so quickly.

Give the crooks enough room and history repeats itself.

[Via Blogebrity]

Leaving The Convent

2005-11-09T19:21:00.000-08:00

Judith Miller strikes me as crazy. That huge grating smile she flashed on her way into and out of jail just seems wrong. More about the attention than about her freedom.

Well, the nun is flying the NYT coop and it took two weeks to pry her fingers off the door. This, despite what she calls a myriad of offers elsewhere.

She says she's glad to be "free" of the Times and the "convent of The New York Times, a convent with its own theology and its own catechism." You mean, like, "be fair, be honest, use reliable sources," that kind of catechism?

God speed, Sister.

Here's more

Sarah Silverman: She's Got a Pair

2005-11-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

She's gorgeous. She's funny. And she doesn't seem to be afraid of ANYTHING! Sarah Silverman was HILARIOUS in "The Aristocrats" movie this summer and her accusation that Joe Franklin took advantage of her. She's got a new concert movie coming up called "Jesus is Magic."

She's the "IT" girl in the media lately. The only thing I can't get you right now is the Radar Magazine interview. But here's plenty more to keep you busy.

NPR "Fresh Air" interview
New Yorker profile: "Quiet Depravity"
Nothing is Off Limits for Edgy Sarah Silverman -- LA Times
The Believer Magazine

Dowd & Gross: A Breath of "Fresh Air"

2005-11-09T18:55:00.000-08:00

You gotta hear Maureen Dowd's interview on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross.

One Year? Already?

2005-11-08T21:24:00.000-08:00

SuperFrankenstein celebrates his one-year anniversary with a list of his greatest hits. Go check him out. It'll make him happy. Then I'll be happy. We'll ALL be happy.

Happy, happy, happy!

Scary as Hell

2005-11-08T21:14:00.000-08:00

This sounds like Orwell's 1984 on steroids...

The Washington Post reports that the government has issued about 30,000 letters seeking information about U.S. citizens who have done nothing wrong.

Wanna find out what's in the letter? Tough. You can't. Nor can your boss tell you what has been requested...he/she could go to prison if they do.

Apparently this is an effort to make up for screwing up on capturing the terrorists who flew the planes into the towers.

But...tell me if I'm crazy here...those men attracted attention when they went to flight school and didn't want to learn to land. Some folks even filed memos expressing their concern about their behavior.

What if the intelligence community just listens to its own employees rather than picking on the rest of us who are minding our own business?

You need to read this excellent report from Barton Gellman.

Dinner's Ready!

2005-11-08T20:22:00.000-08:00

Dinner tonight was a pint of Ben and Jerry's. At the mini-mart tonight, it looked like Chocolate Fudge Brownie Ice Cream was a hot seller (had to reach almost to the back of the case). So, I got curious...

TOP TEN BEN & JERRY's FLAVORS

1. Cherry Garcia® Ice Cream
2. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream
3. Chunky Monkey® Ice Cream
4. Chocolate Fudge Brownie™ Ice Cream
5. Half Baked™ Ice Cream
6. New York Super Fudge Chunk® Ice Cream
7. Cherry Garcia® Low Fat Frozen Yogurt
8. Phish Food® Ice Cream
9. Coffee Heath Bar Crunch® Ice Cream
10. Peanut Butter Cup™ Ice Cream

Any company that gives Michael Moore his own flavor is worth our support. I'm doing my part!

An Awesome Story From Nicholas Kristof

2005-11-07T22:45:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
November 8, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Rosa Parks for the 21st Century
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

She may be the bravest woman in the world, but Mukhtaran Bibi was finally looking intimidated.

Mukhtaran is the Pakistani peasant woman who was gang-raped on the order of a local council, and then forced to walk home nearly naked before a jeering crowd. Instead of killing herself, as rape victims routinely do in such places, she prosecuted her attackers and became a women's rights leader in Pakistan.

But last week, she was confronted by something she found pretty scary: Midtown Manhattan.

Glamour magazine is honoring Mukhtaran as a "woman of the year." It flew her from Pakistan - first-class - to the U.S., where she met senior officials in the White House, the State Department and Congress.

At the Glamour banquet at Lincoln Center, Brooke Shields introduced Mukhtaran as a woman who "showed the world the real meaning of the word honor." Mukhtaran (who also goes by the name Mukhtar Mai) seemed a little stunned to receive two standing ovations from a huge crowd of whooping Americans.

Mukhtaran is, of course, an unlikely star of Glamour. She's a peasant living in a remote village who doesn't know her age (her mom says she was born in the winter, but no one knows what year). She is a devout Muslim who wears a head scarf, and while her photos adorn Glamour's December issue, her clothing-to-skin ratio may set an all-time high for the magazine.

While Mukhtaran is being feted here, it's easy to think that her problems are over. But they aren't. President Pervez Musharraf allowed her to make this visit, after blocking a trip by her in June and then kidnapping her when she protested, but Pakistani intelligence agents still follow her everywhere. Agents open or confiscate her mail and spread lies about her in the Pakistani press, and she is reported to be on a death list. At some point, her luck may run out - and her fame won't stop a knife or a bullet.

"I'm still very scared," she said. "I feel threatened."

Yet what sets Mukhtaran apart is not her suffering, but her effectiveness in bringing hope, education and new attitudes to rural Pakistan. Laura Bush got it just right in an eloquent video tribute to Mukhtaran at the banquet: "Please don't assume that it's only a tale of heartbreak. Mukhtaran ... proves that one woman really can change the world."

After prosecuting the rapists, Mukhtaran used the compensation money of $8,300 to start schools in her village because she thinks that education is the best way to overcome feudal attitudes. Girls from surrounding areas hike up to two hours each way to attend the school.

When I first met Mukhtaran, in her village, she was running out of money to keep the schools operating, her enemies were biding their time to murder her, and she was lonely and frightened - and unwavering.

Times readers responded with a torrent of contributions, more than $130,000, and Mukhtaran has used the money to improve the schools and "endow" them by buying cows, which will generate income to pay expenses. She has also bought an ambulance for the area and built a police station that provides security, and now she's preparing to build the first high school in the area, along with a clinic and a women's shelter. (If you want to help, please don't send money to me; contributions can be sent to either of these Web sites: www.4anaa.org and www.mercycorps.org.)

Not surprisingly, filmmakers are jostling to make a movie of her story. Mukhtaran turned a tale of gang rape into something that is actually inspiring.

The world lost Rosa Parks last month, but Mukhtaran is a Rosa Parks for the new century: a woman simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, who transcended her role and started a broad movement for justice. The most pressing moral challenge today is to overcome the brutality and inequality faced by women and girls in the developing world, and Mukhtaran has become a leader of that struggle. I hope that we'll follow her, and that the U.S. will align itself with real Pakistani leaders like her.

Mukhtaran was in the fourth grade in her own school when I met her. So on this visit I asked her over pizza on West 43rd Street what grade she's in now.

"I've been too busy to go to school much," she said, embarrassed. "So I'm still in the same grade. ... But I do hope that eventually I'll get to high school."

Never mind. This is one fourth grader who can be a teacher for us all.

TIVO THIS!,

2005-11-07T00:45:00.000-08:00

Whatever you are doing Tuesday night, set your DVR, VCR, or whatever to Frontline on PBS.

They are running an important documentary entitled "The Last Abortion Clinic" about the decline in the number of abortion clinics across the country, creating de-facto restrictions on women who want to exercise their legal right to end their pregnancies in a safe manner.

In Washington state, if you don't live near Seattle or Spokane, you may have have to drive up to 300 miles to find a facility. Does this sound like a "right to privacy" to you?

Here's the link to PBS for more information and a trailer.

Who Needs Fraudulent Voting Machines?

2005-11-07T00:30:00.000-08:00

...Seattle has the Republican Party!

Read how the local GOP is hijacking the right to vote for thousands of voters -- and the election is Tuesday!

This oughtta make a lot of friends for the Republicans.

It's like that old saying: if you wait long enough, your enemies will organize your people for you.

[Via The Stranger]

Do SOMETHING Interesting!

2005-11-07T00:23:00.000-08:00

Jamie Foxx said something provocative on "The View" last week. His version of Ray Charles' "I Got A Woman" is featured in Kanye West's new hit, "Golddigger" and the ladies asked him if he ever dated a gold-digger. He replied, "Well, I gotta give credit to gold-diggers. At least they have a goal."

I envisioned all the hangers-on and partiers who no-doubt inhabit Foxx's celebrity world and how easy it would be for him to take up with the one with the biggest rack or the nicest bootie. Instead, he's looking for a woman who wants more than just to wake up next to an Oscar winner. God bless him.

I guess it's possible to live a boring life in this great big world, but I am not about to figure out how. My mom called me last week -- she's helping my uncle recuperate from surgery -- and she says all he does is play on-line poker and buy gems on the cable jewelry channel. When his wife comes home, they bicker and take care of their dogs.

And they all lived happily ever after.

My chest constricted as she described this to me. My beautiful blonde uncle was so handsome. Senior year he played the lead in the school musical and he had one of the most beautiful voices you've ever heard. When he sold cars, he was the top salesman two years in a row. And now he's 52 with two major heart surgeries under his belt (still smoking) and life seems like something he has to slog through -- with the help of the internet and TV. Is it really that hard? When I visit the city where he lives, I have a helluva time getting to all the FREE jazz offerings around town in a single week. And the theater, yarns shops, parks, museums, view of the river. OYE!

A buddy came to our neck-of-the-woods this weekend -- one of many trips he makes over mountain passes which can get perilous depending on the season. He teaches in a small town but can't live without cultural stimulation so he comes to the big city to see the small, artful movies that will never be shown in his local multi-plex. He's insatiable, always trying new restaurants, reading new books, attending live theater. The product of a tiny cow town, comic books and the rodeo were his childhood passions. He survived near-poverty conditions and neither of his parents went to college. So, how come he didn't end up like my uncle?

How do you get so bored with life that you only end up floating near the tip of the iceberg while an enormous glacier lies below, waiting for you to discover it? I realize some folks are compensating for past pain by lying low or hiding out. My ex, after spending his childhood in an alcoholic family, craved comfort. Luckily, he made it out alive and very creative, but his sights settled for the images of middle class security: the right car, the right house, the right girl with the right chest size... And really, after so much pain and chaos, can you blame him? He's an avid reader, an incredible musician, and perfectly happy staying right where he is -- emotionally and physically. I can sympathize.

But the people I meet don't respond much to boring. When I first started dating again in my 40s (that can cause a gripping pain of its own) I was amazed at how relatively easy it was for me. And then I figured it out: there must be a lot of boring-ass women out there. I admit, for a natural recluse, I can be pretty goddamned charming and I do have a natural curiosity about people, what they do, think, enjoy, and I don't hide my enthusiasm. And since I'm always looking for good concerts, movies, plays, books, etc., I have a lot to talk about. During my dating period, I got the feeling that I was unusual and I gotta say, I went out a LOT more than I ever expected to. I mean, I read TIME magazine. I know what my over-40 mating chances are!

I'm not a pin-up or centerfold by any means, but I think men don't mind a bit when someone is interested in them -- or is just plain interesting. Like Jamie Foxx, they want someone who's got a goal, a hobby, a dream, ANYTHING. The first thing those "get in the dating game" books tell you is to "be fascinating, or if you aren't, at least act like you ARE." What puzzles me is how in this world of unlimited choices, some people just can't.

Look, it won't be long before we'll have to while away a century-long life span on this planet, so we might as well make it entertaining. No matter HOW much you like this blog, I hope we don't spend all of our time on the internet or watching TV. Hell, even a NASCAR race once in a while is better than that!

My mother is not in the habit of quoting musical theater to share wisdom about life. If she were, I would hope she would offer my uncle the same advice Stephen Sondheim's characters give to the main character, Bobby, who frantically seeks happiness but can't commit to anything. "Want something, Robert. Want SOMETHING.

Herbert is Hanging On

2005-11-06T22:17:00.000-08:00

If it weren't for Bob Herbert, we might not think about the war at all. While our focus is drawn to missing blondes in Aruba or Scientologists having babies or lying bureaucrats, Bob won't let this go and we should all thank him.

Sometimes this war feels like it was concocted by anti-social males in search of a real-life video game that featured the best in blood, gore, violence, and Monopoly. So, while the army guys fight, the fat cats get richer.

Thanks for keeping this on YOUR rader screen, Bob. You are good man.

The New York Times
November 7, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
And the War Goes On
By BOB HERBERT

The coalition of the clueless that launched the tragically misguided war in Iraq is in complete disarray.

Dick Cheney is simultaneously running from questions about his role in the Valerie Wilson affair and fighting like mad to block any measure that would outlaw torture by the C.I.A. His former top aide, Scooter Libby, one of the original Iraq war zealots, is now an accused felon who is seldom seen in public unaccompanied by defense counsel.

Donald Rumsfeld, the high-strutting, high-profile defense secretary who was supposed to win this war in a walk, is suddenly on the down-low. There are people in the witness protection program who are easier to find than Rummy.

As for the president, he went all the way to South America to get away from the Washington heat. But even within the luxurious confines of Air Force One, Mr. Bush found that he couldn't escape the increasingly corrosive effect of the fiascos plaguing his administration.

The ominous news of the president's plummeting approval ratings followed him like a dark cloud. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found that Mr. Bush has never been less popular with the public. On nearly every important measure of character and performance, he was given lower marks than ever before. For the first time, according to the poll, a majority of Americans even questioned the president's integrity. And fully 55 percent of respondents to a new USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll said they believe the Bush administration has been a failure.

The fact that Mr. Bush is struggling in his own political purgatory (for the sin of incompetence) is bad news for the soldiers in Iraq, where the suffering and dying continues unabated. The administration that was so anxious to throw scores of thousands of healthy young Americans into the flames of war now has no idea how to get them out.

Troops are being sent into Iraq for two, three, even four combat tours by an administration in which clowns like Scooter Libby and Karl Rove were playing games with the identity of a C.I.A. agent, and the vice president has been obsessed with his twisted protect-the-torturers campaign.

Now the Bush crew, which should be focused like a laser on what to do about the war, is consumed with damage control - pumping up the poll numbers, defending its handling of prewar intelligence, fending off further indictments and staying out of prison.

The war? There's no plan for the war. The architects of this war had no idea what they were getting into, and they are just as clueless now. The war just goes on and on, which is not just tragic - it's criminal.

Opposition to the war may be mounting. But the reality of the war, especially the toll of American dead and wounded, fades in and out of the public's consciousness.

There was a rush of articles a couple of weeks ago when the number of deaths of Americans serving in Iraq reached 2,000. But those stories were quickly superseded by Harriet Miers's withdrawal of her nomination to the Supreme Court; President Bush's selection of Samuel Alito to take her place; the indictment of Mr. Libby; the president's address to the nation on the possibility of a bird flu pandemic and so on.

The killing of G.I.'s in Iraq once again took its place as a relatively minor story, meriting in most cases just a brief mention on the inside pages of the major newspapers, and the most cursory coverage on television newscasts.

The death toll has now reached at least 2,035 and, of course, it is climbing. More than 15,000 G.I.'s have been wounded in action. Limbs have been lost. Men and women have been permanently paralyzed, horribly burned, or blinded. Thousands more have been injured in nonhostile incidents, such as accidents, and many have fallen ill.

If the American public could see the carnage in Iraq the way television viewers saw the agony of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this war would be over. A solution would be found. Imagine watching a couple of soldiers in flames, screaming, as they attempt to escape the burning wreckage of a vehicle hit by a roadside bomb or a rocket-propelled grenade.

For all the talk, neither the administration nor the public has taken the reality of this war seriously enough to do something about it. If the sons and daughters of the privileged were fighting it, we'd be out of Iraq soon enough. But they're not fighting it.

So the war goes on and on.

Common Sense About Health Care

2005-11-06T22:00:00.000-08:00

It's beyond me how Thomas Friedman can work for (and supposedly read) the same newspaper where Paul Krugman writes and still author such pedantic crap. Perhaps if the old adage "writing is thinking" is correct, then Friedman will always be operating at a disadvantage.

Tom -- read and learn...

The New York Times
November 7, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Pride, Prejudice, Insurance
By PAUL KRUGMAN

General Motors is reducing retirees' medical benefits. Delphi has declared bankruptcy, and will probably reduce workers' benefits as well as their wages. An internal Wal-Mart memo describes plans to cut health costs by hiring temporary workers, who aren't entitled to health insurance, and screening out employees likely to have high medical bills.

These aren't isolated anecdotes. Employment-based health insurance is the only serious source of coverage for Americans too young to receive Medicare and insufficiently destitute to receive Medicaid, but it's an institution in decline. Between 2000 and 2004 the number of Americans under 65 rose by 10 million. Yet the number of nonelderly Americans covered by employment-based insurance fell by 4.9 million.

The funny thing is that the solution - national health insurance, available to everyone - is obvious. But to see the obvious we'll have to overcome pride - the unwarranted belief that America has nothing to learn from other countries - and prejudice - the equally unwarranted belief, driven by ideology, that private insurance is more efficient than public insurance.

Let's start with the fact that America's health care system spends more, for worse results, than that of any other advanced country.

In 2002 the United States spent $5,267 per person on health care. Canada spent $2,931; Germany spent $2,817; Britain spent only $2,160. Yet the United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than any of these countries.

But don't people in other countries sometimes find it hard to get medical treatment? Yes, sometimes - but so do Americans. No, Virginia, many Americans can't count on ready access to high-quality medical care.

The journal Health Affairs recently published the results of a survey of the medical experience of "sicker adults" in six countries, including Canada, Britain, Germany and the United States. The responses don't support claims about superior service from the U.S. system. It's true that Americans generally have shorter waits for elective surgery than Canadians or Britons, although German waits are even shorter. But Americans do worse by some important measures: we find it harder than citizens of other advanced countries to see a doctor when we need one, and our system is more, not less, rife with medical errors.

Above all, Americans are far more likely than others to forgo treatment because they can't afford it. Forty percent of the Americans surveyed failed to fill a prescription because of cost. A third were deterred by cost from seeing a doctor when sick or from getting recommended tests or follow-up.

Why does American medicine cost so much yet achieve so little? Unlike other advanced countries, we treat access to health care as a privilege rather than a right. And this attitude turns out to be inefficient as well as cruel.

The U.S. system is much more bureaucratic, with much higher administrative costs, than those of other countries, because private insurers and other players work hard at trying not to pay for medical care. And our fragmented system is unable to bargain with drug companies and other suppliers for lower prices.

Taiwan, which moved 10 years ago from a U.S.-style system to a Canadian-style single-payer system, offers an object lesson in the economic advantages of universal coverage. In 1995 less than 60 percent of Taiwan's residents had health insurance; by 2001 the number was 97 percent. Yet according to a careful study published in Health Affairs two years ago, this huge expansion in coverage came virtually free: it led to little if any increase in overall health care spending beyond normal growth due to rising population and incomes.

Before you dismiss Taiwan as a faraway place of which we know nothing, remember Chile-mania: just a few months ago, during the Bush administration's failed attempt to privatize Social Security, commentators across the country - independent thinkers all, I'm sure - joined in a chorus of ill-informed praise for Chile's private retirement accounts. (It turns out that Chile's system has a lot of problems.) Taiwan has more people and a much bigger economy than Chile, and its experience is a lot more relevant to America's real problems.

The economic and moral case for health care reform in America, reform that would make us less different from other advanced countries, is overwhelming. One of these days we'll realize that our semiprivatized system isn't just unfair, it's far less efficient than a straightforward system of guaranteed health insurance.

Q & A With Maureen Dowd

2005-11-05T10:47:00.000-08:00

By popular request...

The New York Times
November 4, 2005
Questions for . . . Maureen Dowd

Following an essay by Maureen Dowd in The Times Magazine, which was adapted from her new book, "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide," the author and Op-Ed columnist answers reader questions on the past and future of feminism.

Q. I was fortunate, at quite a young age — 23— to marry a man who was rather liberated and we stumbled along, figuring out the money, power, housework, jobs, sex, parenting and family stuff together. Our daughter is in college now, and the boys she meets seem terrified of the strong, opinionated and funny young woman she has become. She is discouraged and worries that she won't be able to secure a relationship like ours. After reading your article on modern relationships, I don't know whether to advise her to hold out for the last liberated guy. Or tell her that she may need to settle for less, and tone down her style a bit, too. And it would break my heart to do that. What would you recommend?
— Deborah Frandsen, Missoula, Mont.

A. I think when you settle for less than you deserve, you get less than you settled for. Your daughter clearly has high standards because she's had remarkable role models in you and your husband, and you've clearly created someone enchanting. She should not tone anything down. She should look for guys who celebrate and appreciate who she is, and not waste a lot of time on guys who don't. Just because a lot of men seem to prefer women who are awed by them, rather than ones who provide snap and crackle, doesn't mean there aren't plenty of men who like the snap and crackle, too. You just have to hunt for them.

Q. Doesn't it seem curious that this resurgence of the girlie girl and sex kitten seems to be running parallel to the great religious and political conservative movement engulfing us today? What are we doing wrong in letting the lessons some of us learned in that period go quietly by? Whether by folklore, story-telling, or by virtue of your upcoming book, shouldn't more be done to show the risky effects of insular dependence on the man in your life?
— Barbara P. Hageman, Brewster, Mass.

A. I recommend reading Ariel Levy's new book, "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." It has a lot of interesting material linking the red state surge and the self-actualized sex kitten surge.

In my book, I make the point that we live in a society that is so derangingly sexualized, it's not a sexy society. You can't think about sex clearly if all you're thinking about is sex, whether it's an obsession over celibacy or nymphomania. America has always been conflicted about sex, its puritanical side clashing with its prurient side. But now, with the ascendance of the prudish religious right and the numbing oversexualization of commerce and culture, America seems positively bipolar about sex.

As Amazon.com began selling sex toys, a public radio station in Kentucky briefly canceled the venerable Garrison Keillor's show "The Writer's Almanac" a few months ago because he read a poem with the word "breast" in it. An art dealer in New York captured the schizoid insanity of the moment perfectly, confiding that he gets calls from wealthy private collectors in places like Texas saying that they don't want Rubens or Monet nudes because they have small children at home. They'd rather stick with impressionist landscapes and old Dutch masters. I agree that young women, like the Ivy Leaguers interviewed in a recent front-page story, may correctly assess that it was a grind for baby boomer women trying to have it all. But they seem oblivious to the perils of insular dependence on a man.

Q. Are the problems you describe more about the shallowness of the culture and its immature, narcissistic elements, and less about the role of men and women?
— Norman Chaleff, West Orange, N.J.

A. I would say both. I think baby boomers were a very narcissistic bunch compared to the self-deprecating and not so self-regarding Greatest Generation. And I think narcissism has trumped feminism. But I also think that men and women at the start of the sexual revolution envisioned a lot easier road, and more utopian world of equality, than this world of ours. Relations between the sexes are more muddled than ever.

Q. Do women ever marry down much?
— William G. O'Connell, Minneapolis

A. A lot of high-powered, high-earning women end up with men who put less focus on earning and ambition, and that makes for a happier, alpha-beta balance. But it's harder for women to duplicate the "staff siren" syndrome I write about, where men like to get involved with the young girls who are paid to revolve around them and make their lives easier. I've had fantastically smart and cute young male assistants, but never entertained any notion of marrying them.

Q. At the close of your piece, you imagine a 2030 where all of today's young women who've opted for hearth and home will wake up and find themselves deserted by husbands for younger babes. Is your opinion of men really this jaundiced? Have you not run across any men in your world devoted to their wives and their marriages? Have you ever considered the possibility that just maybe you're traveling in the wrong circles and hanging out with the wrong people? I'm not writing from a farm in the Midwest. I grew up in New York City and married a professional woman I look forward to being married to for the rest of my life.
— Peter McFadden, Cold Spring, N.Y.

A. Yes, all the men in my family are devoted to their strong, professional wives and happily married, and many of my male friends. I was merely speculating on the possible perils for a pampered class of young women who yearn to go back to total economic and emotional dependence on men. It was just a nightmare fantasy of what could happen if women someday boomerang so far away from feminism, that they start totally revolving around men again, and give up all their own independence. A Philip K. Dick scenario.

Q. Why blame feminism for the fact that ignorant men prefer women who aren't as smart and successful? Why not blame the ignorant men? And why perpetuate this sad stereotype of single women waiting passively — and desperately — for men to pay attention to them?
— Ajitha Reddy, Chicago

A. You have to read the whole book. I don't think men who prefer women who aren't smart and successful are ignorant. A lot of men think it works better to hook up with women who want to revolve around them, and I can't argue with that. It's probably easier in many ways. I know plenty of single women who are having a great time.

Q. When your wife renounces books for catalogues, when she begins to idolize Blanche Dubois and starts going to Mass again . . . when your grad-school daughter says her mother is letting her mind go to waste, what is a husband to do? You build a modest career by avoiding the twin pitfalls of being boss and being bossed, then one day you look in the mirror and see Mike Doonesbury. Are we going back to the future or forward to the past?
Chandler Thompson, Las Cruces, N.M.

A. That is my question exactly! I love your e-mail. Please read the whole book and get back to me with your thoughts.

Q. There are women in African countries who risk HIV/AIDS on a daily basis because they HAVE to have sex with their husbands, or else. There are women in Eastern Europe who see their tickets outta there on a train to work in a brothel in the West. And there are women in India who are burned to death in kitchen fires for letting down the in-laws. The point is, these women have still not gone through our 60's — they have not had a wave of feminism which would allow them to claim some very basic rights, much less the right to be C.E.O.

Maybe women in North America are moving on, and back to a place we aren't very comfortable with. But while that happens, from our positions of comfort, I think we owe women in other countries a voice.

Christine McNab, Geneva, Switzerland

A. I agree.

Q. Who would you identify as positive role models today for women looking to stand on the shoulders of our feminist foremothers and build from that place rather than reject it? In other words, if you had your way, who would you like to see on the cover of magazines instead of Jessica Simpson?
Amy Selwyn, London

A. I introduced Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and former U.N. commissioner for human rights, the other night at a Glamour Magazine Awards dinner. She was very impressive. She got 90 percent approval ratings in Ireland and led with moral authority in a country dominated by men, reflecting feminine grace and macho tenacity, always trying to unite society and heal divisions, reaching out to her political rivals, and reaching out to help the poor and suffering, and working for women's legal and reproductive rights. Mrs. Robinson is now running an international organization called Realizing Rights, trying to end extreme poverty and to move women's health to the top of the international agenda, to try to stop the gap between rich and poor, powerless and powerful, from getting bigger. It's fine to have beautiful women on the covers of magazines, but there are many ways to be beautiful, and I worry that America has lost a sense of that. Women used to demand equality; now they just demand Botox.

We need more covers like the Time Persons of the Year in 2002, featuring a trio of brave truthtellers — Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on the creeps at Enron; Coleen Rowley, who blew the whistle at the F.B.I. incompetence; and Cynthia Cooper, who blew the whistle on the Worldcom n'er do wells. Three grown-up Nancy Drews with guts.

Q. How hopeful are you that America will be an example of innovation and forward-thinking once again?
Steven Henry, Miami, Fla.

A. We're in a dark ages now, with the government pulling science backward, and suffocating research on stem cells, and encouraging the idea that Intelligent Design is a legitimate alternative to evolution studies. This is a long way from JFK's New Frontier attitude. But I think most Americans like to be on the cutting edge of culture and science, and will want that reflected, sooner or later, in our leaders.

Related Link

Dowd: Men Are In Over Their Heads

2005-11-05T00:35:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
November 5, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Fashioning Deadly Fiascos
By MAUREEN DOWD

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Men are simply not biologically suited to hold higher office. The Bush administration has proved that once and for all.

These guys can't be bothered to run the country. They are too obsessed with frivolous stuff, like fashion and whether they look fat. They are catty, sometimes even sabotaging their closest friends. They are deceitful minxes and malicious gossips.

And heaven knows they're bad at math. Otherwise, W. would realize that a 60 percent disapproval rating, or worse, means that most Americans would like some fresh blood in the administration. It's appalling to see ringleaders of the incompetent, mendacious crew who rushed into Iraq but not New Orleans getting big promotions and posh consulting jobs.

Let's first consider the astonishing new cache of Brownie e-mail released by the Congressional panel investigating the heartbreaking Katrina non-response.

Batting away the frantic warnings of death and doom in New Orleans, bubbleheaded Brownie boasted of his style sense, replying to a staffer who told him his outfit looked "fabulous" on TV: "I got it at Nordstrom."

In another e-mail to staffers, he preened: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god."

Brownie had other things on his mind besides managing the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history: restaurants and dog sitters, and marshaling spin for stories about his past management gaffes at the International Arabian Horse Association.

By Sept. 4, with disaster apartheid in full view, Brownie was getting e-mail advice from his press secretary: "You just need to look more hardworking," Sharon Worthy wrote the FEMA Fashionista. "ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!"

It may seem unfathomable that W. has kept Brownie, one of the biggest boobs in U.S. history, on the federal payroll as a $148,000-a-year consultant.

But President Bush may be empathetic to Brownie's concerns about looking good. Obsessed with losing the seven pounds he'd gained around his waist, W. was so focused on getting back his hourglass figure that his staff had to compile an emergency DVD of Katrina news stories before he could be dragged away from biking.

Unless it's some catty attempt to undermine someone you're pretending to like, how to explain the Mean Girls cabal headed by Dick Cheney, Rummy and the Rummy aide Douglas Feith? These hawkish Heathers lured W. into war with hyped intelligence and then clawed out Colin Powell's eyes to take charge of the occupation, only to bollix up the whole thing beyond belief and send the president's ratings cratering.

The former Powell chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who often verbalizes what Mr. Powell does not say because the ex-secretary of state does not want to be in a public catfight with the cabal, charged on NPR that the cabal issued directives that led to the abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It was clear to me," he said, "that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms - I'll give you that - that to a soldier in the field meant two things: we're not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence - and, oh, by the way, here's some ways you probably can get it."

Colonel Wilkerson called David Addington, the shadowy Cheney counsel who has been promoted to Scooter's chief of staff job, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."

Heathers have their own rules. Having ignored the warnings that an invasion would cause an insurgency, the Vice squad stepped up the torture to try to stop an insurgency born amid the arrogant, incompetent occupation.

The colonel also described how Vice shaped war policy. Mr. Cheney's fiercely ideological staff monitored the National Security Council staff in such Big Brother fashion that some of the N.S.C. staff "quit using e-mails for substantive conversations because they knew the vice president's alternate national security staff was reading their e-mails now."

Colonel Wilkerson said that there was an N.S.C. memo that made a compelling argument for a large number of troops being necessary in Iraq, "and to this day, I don't know whether that memorandum ever got to the president of the United States."

Women are affected by hormones only at times. Vice's hormones rage every day.

Alternative Columns

2005-11-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

I can't bring myself to run Paul Krugman's column today -- it's just dumb. And David Brooks' column earlier this week (portraying Harry Reid as a crackpot writing messages in crayon) is hopeless.

I promise to run Maureen Dowd tomorrow, but today, try some Mollie Ivins.

Right Wing Porn

2005-11-03T23:54:00.000-08:00

Some of America's staunchest arbiters of morality have done their share of spreading the filth. Here are their literary contributions to our culture.

Scooter Libby's "The Apprentice" features young girls being trained as prostitutes who won't fall in love with their future clients. How romantic.
Here's a quote:

He asked if they should fuck the deer.

There's more from The New Yorker: Scooter's Sex Shocker

Lynne Cheney (wife of the Big Dick) wrote a novel entitled "Sisters" which features a lesbian relationship on the Great Plains along with rape, prostitution, and much more! Here's an excerpt:

Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

[Via: www.torr.blog.com]

Bill O'Reilly's novel "Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder" includes 15-year-old crack whores, sex in the shower with a guy named Tommy O'Malley (sound familiar? Is there a falafel?) who is at "full attention", and other stuff that Bill O'Reilly enjoys. Here's an excerpt:

"Say baby, put that [crack] pipe down and get my pipe up."

I LOVE This Guy

2005-11-03T18:33:00.000-08:00

My morning commute had been converted from fear and trepidation about the day ahead into a crash course in progressive politics, especially the crimes of corporate America. All thanks to the very smart and interesting Thom Harmann, who is featured on my local Air America Radio affiliate. Thom manages to teach me stuff without making me want to pass notes to my classmates or fake a trip to the bathroom. He seems to know something about everything, but you would still invite him to your dinner party.

Here's a cool interview with Thom on Buzzflash.

Is That All There Is?

2005-11-02T21:02:00.000-08:00

It didn't take much to get a strong reaction from the Republicans. A closed session? Ooooooohhhhh....scary......

That's all it took to get fully grown (white) males to whine and feel sorry for themselves on national television.

Here's what I think: the Republicans are a paper tiger, comprised only of hostility and talking points. A couple more big gusts of progressive hot air and they might just fly away. Sort of a Dylan-esque ending.

Gosh, too bad Karl Rove isn't around to sweep up the debris.

U.S. News: Senate Maneuver sends Frist, GOP into apoplexy

How Can We Live With Ourselves?

2005-11-02T20:46:00.000-08:00

We stood by while George Bush led us off to war, we tolerate all the prisoners in Guantanamo, we allow corporations to pillage our pensions and payrolls, and we don't say much about the 2,032 dead in Iraq.

Bob Herbert's column reveals atrocities that make us look like the complicit Germans who saw the smoke coming from the stacks and said nothing.

How much is it gonna take for us to snap out of it?

The New York Times
November 3, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Secrets and Shame
By BOB HERBERT

Ultimately the whole truth will come out and historians will have their say, and Americans will look in the mirror and be ashamed.

Abraham Lincoln spoke of the "better angels" of our nature. George W. Bush will have none of that. He's set his sights much, much lower.

The latest story from the Dante-esque depths of this administration was front-page news in The Washington Post yesterday. The reporter, Dana Priest, gave us the best glimpse yet of the extent of the secret network of prisons in which the C.I.A. has been hiding and interrogating terror suspects. The network includes a facility at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.

"The hidden global internment network is a central element in the C.I.A.'s unconventional war on terrorism," wrote Ms. Priest. "It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the C.I.A.'s covert actions."

The individuals held in these prisons have been deprived of all rights. They don't even have the basic minimum safeguards of prisoners of war. If they are being tortured or otherwise abused, there is no way for the outside world to know about it. If some mistake has been made and they are, in fact, innocent of wrongdoing - too bad.

As Ms. Priest wrote, "Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long."

This is the border along which democracy bleeds into tyranny.

Some of the prisoners being held by the C.I.A. are no doubt murderous individuals who, given the opportunity, would do tremendous harm. There are others, however, whose links to terrorist activities are dubious at best, and perhaps nonexistent.

The C.I.A.'s original plan was to hide and interrogate maybe two or three dozen top leaders of Al Qaeda who were directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks or were believed to pose an imminent threat. It turned out that many more people were corralled by the C.I.A. for one reason or another. Their terror ties and intelligence value were less certain. But they were thrown into the secret prisons, nevertheless.

A number of current and former officials told The Washington Post that "the original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored."

The secret C.I.A. prisons are just one link in the long chain of abominations that the Bush administration has unrolled in its so-called fight against terrorism. Rendition, the outsourcing of torture to places like Egypt, Jordan and Syria, is another. And then there are the thousands upon thousands of detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. There is little, if any, legal oversight of these detainees, or effective monitoring of the conditions in which they are being held.

Terrible instances of torture and other forms of abuse of detainees have come to light. The Pentagon has listed the deaths of at least 27 prisoners in American custody as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides.

None of this has given the administration pause. It continues to go out of its way to block a legislative effort by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, to ban the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

I had a conversation yesterday with Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First, about the secret C.I.A. prisons. "We're a nation founded on laws and rules that say you treat people humanely," he said, "and among the safeguards is that people in detention should be formally recognized; they should have access, at a minimum, to the Red Cross; and somebody should be accountable for their treatment.

"What we've done is essentially to throw away the rule book and say that there are some people who are beyond the law, beyond scrutiny, and that the people doing the detentions and interrogations are totally unaccountable. It's a secret process that almost inevitably leads to abuse."

Worse stories are still to come - stories of murder, torture and abuse. We'll watch them unfold the way people watch the aftermath of terrible accidents. And then we'll ask, "How could this have happened?"

Mocking Justice

2005-11-02T20:25:00.000-08:00

When I saw this picture of Tom DeLay laughing in the courtroom as if taunting the justice system...
I was reminded of the famous photo of two Neshoba County cops who were responsible for the deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, on trial in 1967. I always thought their disdain for justice was a portrait of pure evil.
Exonerated by a local all-white male jury, the federal government prosecuted and the two men served some jail time. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price later returned to his job and continued to serve as a law enforcement officer until his retirement.

Let's hope DeLay's trial has a better ending