Bush & Co., claiming that Kerry's comments (about either studying hard and being smart or else you get stuck in Iraq) were somehow a comment about the troops is about as desperate as they could get. Talk about grasping at straws: Kerry's comment was obviously a lame attempt at a joke on Bush. The GOP will use their deliberate misinterpretation to fire themselves up, no doubt, but it's probably a good thing: everyone except the people who were already fired up, itching for even a false rallying cry, will see through their disingenuous outrage.
My congressman has apparently just called the vice president a "son of a bitch." Charlie Rangel can be pretty out there, even for New Yorkers, but on this one, I'm with him.
It started (this time around; they have a history of sniping at each other) when Dick Cheney said Charlie Rangel wouldn't continue "a single one" of Bush's tax cuts. Which he has no way of knowing, but lying to win elections is a standard part of the Republican playbook by now.
Last year, Rangel said Cheney had to be mentally ill. That, at least, was the explanation he was hoping for. ""I would like to believe he's sick rather just mean and evil," he said to New York's local 24-hour news channel.
This time around, however, he says he's not revisiting the issue of Cheney's mental health. ""I don't think he's shot anyone in the face lately, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt."
Of course, when you're talking about a sociopath, you've got someone who's sick, mean and evil.
So one of the questions out there is: If the verdict and death sentence come in the Saddam Hussein trial on November 5, as some have predicted, will that be much of a surprise to anyone? Or be a real reason for people who might otherwise stay home to go to the polls two days later? (And how much do you want to bet someone in the West Wing has already polled to see how much it helps the GOP if it happens before the election?)
Cue the apocalypse: the New York Post endorses Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for re-election
Holy frijole. The New York Post today just endorsed Hillary for re-election to the Senate. If you're not familiar with the NY Post, this is like Sean Hannity endorsing Hillary -- which is a pretty close analogy, since both the Post and Fox "News" are part of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
In part of it, they basically admitted that the caricatures they and other right-wing media have been flinging for the past 14 years are woefully out of touch with reality:
As for Mrs. Clinton, well, she's been a pretty good senator -- popular with her colleagues and as productive as a first-term legislator from the minority party probably can be. ... Meanwhile, her positions on numerous issues -- particularly involving national security -- have been much closer to the political center than we would have expected. [Emphasis added.]
Why? Because you had painted her as a humorless, hippy feminazi without actually considering her positions on issues or her actions as either First Lady or on the campaign trail six years ago?
And they even admit that New Yorkers actually could prefer their senators to have national ambitions. Of course, they use that admission to hold their nose about the endorsement -- strongly implying it will only go so far:
...[W]e think she's done such a good job these last six years that she'd do well to serve six more. If not 12.
Re-elect Hillary.
In 2012.
Har har. I'm not saying she's my front-runner for president, but it's nice to see a gun tower of the vast right-wing conspiracy give her her props for once.
Perhaps we should have seen this one coming. Conservative activists at the recent News Corp annual meeting peppered Murdoch with questions about whether or not he was going soft in the war on liberals, and specifically mentioned a recent fundraiser the company had hosted for Sen. Clinton.
According to the Financial Times:
Mr Murdoch called the fundraiser "a courtesy" and praised Ms Clinton as "a very intelligent and smart, charming politician."
The annual rankings by Morgan Quitno Press of America's safest and most dangerous cities just came out, and New York City is ranked right near the middle (but in the upper half) at 145 ... out of 371 cities studied. Rankings came from a combination of murder rates, rape incidents, and auto thefts. Safest was Brick Township, in New Jersey. Least safe was St. Louis -- and formerly least-safe city Camden, NJ, finally moved down to 5th most dangerous.
When looking only at cities with populations over 500,000, however, New York City came in as fourth safest, behind San Jose, Honolulu, and El Paso. Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., were the least safe in this category.
My hometown, Tulsa, is listed as the 37th most dangerous city, putting it in the worst 10 percent, I guess. Even sleepy little Topeka, Kansas, ended up in the bottom half of the list, at 206th safest. Which is kind of surprising, if you've ever visited either of these towns. And it's kind of bizarre that, by leaving there and coming here 19 years ago, I ended up in the safest of the three cities.
No blue state arrogance here, though. Crystal meth seems to be the poison affecting crime rates in communities across the South and Midwest today, but when I moved to New York 19 years ago, crack cocaine was the big problem here. These things go in generational cycles across broad swaths of the country, and there are no quick fixes, regardless of what James Q. Wilson or the concealed-carry movement may think.
A story on NPR's Marketplace yesterday evening, they ran a story about oil leases north of the Arctic Circle. Most of the story was about the conflict at the heart of these leases, which are paid to Eskimo tribes who hold the land as their traditional fishing and whaling grounds, and there's some debate apparently within the Inupiat community about whether they should be leasing that area or not. But the part that hit me as among the most damning (and most ironic) pieces of evidence for human destructiveness was what makes these leases more popular now that the oil's easier to get to:
Oil companies have always drilled on land where spills can mostly be contained. But a fast-retreating ice cap allows oil giants like Shell and Conoco-Phillips to tap enormous underwater reserves for the first time. Right in the middle of the Inupiat Eskimo's fishing and whaling grounds.
That's right: fossil fuels are causing global warming, which is shrinking the ice cap, which makes it easier to drill for...more fossil fuels!
This is a business plan built by the Devil, no doubt about it.
My last post here was made just as a scandal was breaking in Washington involving a Republican member of the House of Representatives who, it was alleged, had engaged in salicious e-mails and IMs with a congressional page.
That story soon grew to include the head of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, the Speaker of the House, the Office of the House Clerk, and an ensuing media maelstrom.
Foley was, apparently, a closeted gay Republican. And now, the only openly gay Republican in Congress -- although he understandably downplayed his sexual orientation -- Jim Kolbe, is being investigated for a camping trip he once took with his sister, National Park rangers, and -- wait for it -- two Congressional pages.
I wanted to write a post here about these scandals, but felt a personal barrier. My site doesn't receive that many visitors, but even among those who've visited, I'm not sure everyone who does knows the whole truth about me.
In this day and age, especially given the media coverage and exposure, it shouldn't be that big a deal.
But even still, some people may be yet shocked with the full background here, so I was reluctant to "come out," so to speak, in the middle of this scandal.
I realize, however, that in order to have any degree of integrity or credibility in talking about this issue, I need to first something reveal about myself, my background, and what I have in common with this developing news story. So -- deep breath -- here it is:
I was a House page, in the summer of 1981.
Now, when I was a page -- "back in my day, you know..." -- there wasn't even a dorm for pages. I lived in a boarding house on East Capitol Street that was owned by a man who worked for the Republican House cloakroom.
I was a Democratic page, because the member of Congress who sponsored me was a Democrat (James R. Jones, 1st District, Oklahoma -- back when Oklahoma elected Democrats). However, I was "on loan" to the Republican cloakroom as a page for my last two weeks. That really never sounded dirty until now.
The job, however, was the same: take an envelope from the floor to some House member's office. Pick up something else in that or a nearby office to go to another office. On occasion, take something over to a Senate office, or to an office in the Capitol building itself -- which only happened a few times a day, as I remember, because most offices are in the Cannon, Longworth, Rayburn House Office Buildings, or their equivalents in the Senate, not inside the U.S. Capitol building itself.
Regardless of which side I was paging for, I never had many encounters with members of Congress. (At the time, I remember a fellow page or intern describing Barney Frank as sounding like Elmer Fudd -- but this was even before he was outed as gay.)
In fact, I can only really remember two encounters with congressmen "up close and personal," compared to seeing them or talking to them in passing in the Capitol Building or one of the office buildings.
In one, I babysat for my own congressman's elementary-aged kids one night while he and his wife went to Tip O'Neill's house for dinner. I remember we went for a walk after their parents left so the older one could pick up some information about joining the local Boy Scout troop. In the other, Congressman Bill Whitehurst (R-Virginia) and his wife, the "incomparable Lady Jane Whitehurst," as he always referred to her, came to the boarding house where I lived with many other pages and interns for casual summer-evening dinner. We made chili, she brought a cobbler for dessert, and they regaled us with very tame gossip about other members of Congress.
I did, however, have one slight connection to that earlier page scandal that broke in 1982 and led to the censure of Reps. Dan Crane and Gerry Studds. That whole scandal actually came about due to false accusations.
Leroy Williams was from Little Rock. He started his pageship that same summer of 1981. Unlike me, though, he stayed on after the summer for a semester of the school year, too.
In March 1982, back in Arkansas, he told CBS News that while a page, he had engaged in sex with three members of Congress and had arranged an appointment with a male prostitute for a Senator.
That, and rumors spread by another former page, were what kicked off an investigation headed up by Joseph Califano, whom the House Ethics Committee had asked to perform the role of special counsel investigating what had become a sex-and-drugs-with-minors scandal. However, in the middle of all this, Leroy Williams failed a lie detector test about the charges that he had made and, later, he admitted making the whole thing up.
By that point, however, there were other pages and people coming forward, and a year later, Crane and Studds were censured in front of the full House of Representatives.
That scandal also led to a major overhaul of the page program. They upped the minimum age for senate pages (which had been as low as 14) and they built a dormitory for all pages, with a curfew -- which was a far, far cry from the wild life we lived as 16- and 17-year-olds in Washington, D.C., with no supervision during our off-hours and a a curiously incurious army of bartenders and waitresses serving drinks to people who barely looked 18, let alone 21, that summer.
I didn't really know Leroy at all, except that he lived in the same boarding house as I did, and so occasionally we would be hanging out with the same crowd. That's him on the far right, me in the dorky glasses on the far left.
On the new, nightly "freeSpeech" segment on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric -- and why does Bob Schieffer get to speak there once a week, anyway? -- Monday's op-ed was by Brian Rohrbaugh, whose son Dan was killed at Columbine at 1999. They asked him speak, to give perspective from a parent's viewpoint following the horrible massacre that occurred in Amish Pennsylvania. Mr. Rohrbaugh chose to blame his son's death (and the death of those girls in Pennsylvania) on the following:
The public school system "expelling God" and replacing him with evolution
Abortion
An apparent rise in acceptability for suicide. (I suppose he's referring to euthanasia?)
Basically, he says the entire Columbine murders, and subsequent such school murders, are the fault of, I guess, liberals. You know, the whole "culture of death" argument.
I could be wrong. I'm not sure how the scientific theory of evolution follows from this argument, anyway, except perhaps as his evidence that God has been "expelled" from school. But he's obviously staking a side in the culture wars, and blaming the other side for his son's death.
I've known grief, and I'm sure it affected my reasoning. And I know he's had the time to think about this, so that his rationale -- necessarily edited down for a network news broadcast, which probably forced a more simplistic statement than he might have otherwise have been able to make -- isn't a casual response to an immediate event.
I have to say, however: he's wrong.
Those may or may not be problems. (I would agree that, if suicide is starting to be regarded as an "acceptable action," as he says, there's a problem.) But they aren't what killed his son. What killed his son was a guy with a gun.
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 fellow students and a teacher, as well as themselves, at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. Why they did it is the source of much speculation. How they did it is pretty clear: two 9mm firearms and two 12-gauge shotguns, which they sawed the barrels and butts off of. All in all, they committed several felony violations of state and federal gun laws even before they'd fired a shot.
And those gun laws did nothing to protect the students of Columbine. Gun laws did nothing to protect those girls in Pennsylvania, either.
But let's not ask the question about how these people were killed. That would threaten some people's interpretation of the Second Amendment -- despite the fact that Harris and Klebold in Colorodo, or Roberts in Pennsylvania, were not members of any kind of well-regulated militia. Instead, let's just ask why it happened, and keep asking, and keep asking ... until the next time there's a school massacre, and we continue to not ask that question.
