Doves

Okay, all you increasingly wobbly Israel supporters out there - get straight. This Lebanon incursion is not only supported by American psycho neocons, it's supported by over 90% of the Israeli public including all the major Doves.

You read that right. Go check out the article.

Here's the thing: if somebody was throwing rocks at your house from next door, you'd do something about it, wouldn't you? What if they were throwing at your kids in the yard. You'd call the cops. But every time the cops came around nothing happened. And it just went on and on.

There's no cops for Israel to call, and Hezbullah is not throwing rocks - they're firing rocket munitions filled with explosives and ball bearings that shoot out like bullets when they explode.

It's pretty clear that Israel is justified in having a response. A strong response with weapons and soldiers.

I covered this before, but when Hezbullah uses the locals as human shields while firing 1400+ missiles at Israel, what choice is there?

Once again, progressives have been trapped by George W. Opposing his evil and disastrous regime is job one. And if the Bush Junta is in favor of this, progressives must oppose it.

Which is a lot of crap. Bush is mis-managing this crisis terribly from the American side. That doesn't make Israel wrong. The Bush Junta has no foreign policy. It doesn't exist. They lurch from crisis to crisis and trust their extremist ideology to tell them what to do. That's not a policy.

And, as usual, criticism of Israel allows cover for anti-Semites to start marching. No, critics of Israel are not automatically anti-Semitic, but they are automatically in the company of anti-Semites.

So don't oppose Israel to oppose the Junta. It's needless. And don't go wobbly on Israel just because the European anti-Semitic left does.

What to do?

A simple question for everyone choking on their oatmeal over Israel's incursion into Lebanon: what would you have them do?

The question was raised on TPM today - and it's a good one. If you think Israel is being 'disproportionate' or in some other sense going farther than provocation would lead, or that they're deliberately targeting civilians, the question is to you: what should they do?

Any decent world citizen knows that Hezbollah is a terror organization. Nobody denies that they kill Israelis, citizen and soldier alike. We know that their mission is to remove Israel from the map in the most permanent and bloody way possible.

So how long is Israel supposed to sit still and catch rockets? Right.

Or, if you think they were justified in a military response - but are killing innocent people - the question remains: what can they do?

The terrorists use the population as human shields. That is an indisputed fact. They store weapons in civilian apartment buildings and houses. Also indisputed.

So when you say Israel can't go after the hiding places of people and weapons because they are behind a human shield, what are you asking of Israel? That they do not attack at all?

But that brings us back to square one. Israel can't act to stop deadly attacks from Hezbullah because Hezbullah hides behind a human shield.

So how long is Israel supposed to sit and catch rockets?

They've been dropping pamphlets before hitting residential areas. What do you say to people ho won't leave when they know the bombers are coming?

Israel does not want to shed innocent blood - even if you don't believe in their altruism, you can at least believe their self-interest. It hurts their interests when civilians die, and helps Hezbullah's claims against them.

The real villain here is, as usual, the Junta. Their Middle East policy has been non-existent. I do not think they should be blamed for the war (not his one, anyway), but for having wasted America's diplomatic capital to uselessly that now nobody will listen to them on anything.

By waging an unjust and ill-conceived war in Iraq, America has become just another sliver of interest among many. By allowing the neocons to lead us in selfish self-aggrandizement, nobody in the world thinks if us as anything but purely self-interested.

So now, under Georgie and Condo and Bolton, when the US wants something, everyone else says "what's the angle?" we've not honest brokers anymore because we're not honest.

Like the huckster war profiteers that they support, the administration is just in it for a buck. 'Peace' as a concept holds no value to them. Everything is dealt or stolen - nothing is given.

Which leads back to the fundamental truth behind the headlines: if you want to destroy a national entity utterly, just let conservatives run it for a few years.

Helleooowww?

Yes, I'm still here. I'm having the most brutal week and it's only gettin wose. Yes, please pity me immediately.

I hope to start my annual NFL predictions as soon as my head clears out of my ass, but those of you who know me know that it's only rare and special days that see sunshine on my dome.

Lieberman/Lamont

I want to start getting to football soon (maybe later today), but first a quick word about the primary challenge to Joe Lieberman in Connecticut by political first-timer Ned Lamont. It's a race that's been making the papers, and has been stirring up a hornet's nest among bloggers.

So why not try out my stinger?

My first reaction was: "why are we focusing on this?" With so many genuinely fetid and downright evil Repub's out there to worry about, why spend Democratic time and money on an effort to oust one of our own?

Sure, Joe's been a fellow traveler with the Junta since he lost the VP spot in 2000. But he's still a Democrat, no matter how flaccid.

But these things take on a life of their own, and often for their own reasons that only become clear later. And I'm starting to think that Joe is being burned because he represents what Democrats see as their fundamental weakness in the face of Repub Party strength.

The Repubs have taken over Washington because they've stood together. They don't criticize each other, and they speak as one on policy. They've been able to inflict lasting and fundamental damage on the nation and drop the Constitution into the blue shredding bin because of it.

Democrats have stood by, and worse, helped. And nobody has helped more than Lieberman.

It's as though Democrats recognize that Repubs are going to lie and cheat and screw them because it is, finally, a fight. So when the Outsiders go to rumble, they can't have Pony Boy sit it out or fight with the other guys.

And so it is with Joe. On key votes, he's sided with the Repubs. The rightist media machine is trying to paint the Lamont challenge as entirely Iraq-based, but it isn't. Sure, Iraq is a huge issue, but Hillary is also an Iraq hawk and it's not going to effect her standing in New York.

Joe's problem is the rest of his votes, and what he represents to Democrats. Remember, Joe voted for the heinous bankruptcy bill. He gave cover to Gonzo and Rummy on countless occasions. He rubber-stamped "Heckuvajob Brownie."

The vote that really got me was his nod for cloture on the Alito filibuster, and then his vote against Alito. The only way to stop Alito and his vampire-like pro-dictatorship presence on the Supreme Court was to filibuster. The real vote was to stop the filibuster. The vote on Alito was a foregone conclusion. Thanks, Joe.

So see this for what it is. It's about the lack of liberal votes by Joe, but I think it's also about a Democratic Party - the grassroots - rejecting accommodation with the right.

The Junta has done nothing but fight fight fight for six years. It's well past time to fight back.

Bad Idea

This is great. Never let go of a bad idea. Never ever ever. And when the bad idea blows up into some sort of Bliblically devastating pox on all possible houses, back up an inch. But never more than and inch.

I think it was Josh Marshall writing recently that Democrats don't understand that even when they suffer a clear loss, the Republican fall-back is an inch behind the line, and the next one is an inch behind that. There is no possibility of an overall 'we were wrong' statement from Rightists.

And here's why.

Modern conservatism is faith-based and results-oriented. That means that once a result is decided upon, everything else falls into place behind it. Take the tax cuts for instance. The Rightists want them as a result because they and their constituency (corporations and the affluent) wants them. Therefore, every policy and every circumstance that arises becomes a reason to cut taxes. When the Junta came to power, tax cuts were a way to give the surplus back to taxpayers. When the surplus quickly disappeared, tax cuts morphed into a way to grow the economy and jobs.

Since the economy has grown without jobs, tax cuts are cast as the thing that prevented the situation from getting worse. Like, things are bad but without the tax cuts we'd be eating switch grass for breakfast.

Which is an infinitely unprovable assertion. It's faith-based. They want something to happen, they lie and cheat and steal to make it happen, but everything's okay because we have faith in the means and result.

Liberals live in the real world. For a liberal, when a proposed policy doesn't work, it needs to be re-thought. The outcome is what it is. It's an outlook based on the scientific method. If the evidence says your approach is wrong, than the approach is wrong - not the evidence.

Perhaps that's because the goal are transparent - and worthy. When Bubba wanted to reduce the deficit, he set policies to do that. If the policy didn't work, he tried something else. He did research into best methods and approaches. How can government expenditure be curtailed? What is a real fix that really works?

In contrast, the goal that Georgie talked about was not really his goal at all. He talked about boosting the economy when he really meant enriching the rich. So whatever else happened did so by accident - but the rich getting richer has been no accident.

And since everything else was entirely accidental - who cares? The Junta hates 'policy.' They don't do 'research.' They have faith in methods and they've predetermined what their results will be called - no matter what the results really are.

That's why Katrina was such a revealing moment for them. Everything else they do is shrouded in secrecy. Even the Medicare drug plan was ushered through Congress in the dark of night, with key information kept from lawmakers. Everything about Iraq and the 'War on Terra' is an ultra-secret.

By keeping it secret, they can say anything they want to about it - like that things are going well. Sure. If there's no other information out there, who's to say what's a lie? So their labels become reality.

That's why they've bought and stolen the media. If their lies aren't maintained in the media, they can't use their own labels. Reality labels get applied.

But when people on the Gulf Coast died on TV and the government failed utterly and in the most callous possible way, people saw that the label 'success' was meaningless coming from these guys. "Heckuvajob Brownie" was a huge failure.

My point in all this (and I did actually set out to make a point) is that to admit a broad failure for Reactionaries is to self-repudiate their faith. To say that the Iraq war was a gigantic systematic debacle by liars and war profiteers is to repudiate their beliefs to a core level.

For a liberal mistake, like their health care proposal, saying that the Clinton 1993 plan was a bad on does not tear down a belief system. If you peel away the layers of that mess you get to an err in approach and an inadequate response to health industry money that beat it. You do not get down to "we shouldn't have universal health care."

But start peeling away the layers of conservative mistakes, and you go someplace different. Start peeling away at the tax cut and you see that they are regressive, unfair, and disastrous to the nation. If you go there, you can't be a conservative. So you can never go there.

Peel back the layers from the Katrina disaster. You get down to the conservative belief that government should not provide people that sort of support. But reality clearly shows that only government can provide primary disaster relief. If you follow the reasoning, you can't stay conservative. So you never go there. You blame Heckuvajob Brownie, but you never solve the fundamental problem - which will lead to another disaster.

Peel back the Iraq attack, and there's nothing left but a neocon pipe dream of regional transformation. That dream, which required the jettisoning of reality and all rational thought and plans - has brought us to a Vietnam in the desert with even broader repercussions for the country. You can't follow reason, or else you leave the conservatives behind.

That's why every retreat is an inch. Okay, Iraq is a disaster but I'd still vote for it. Iraq is a disaster but it's somebody else's fault. Iraq is a disaster because the Junta didn't follow real conservatives rules.

The inch-back fall-back is in full swing now. Nothing is actually being re-thunk by these guys. They're just adjusting their faith to wrap a few undeniable realities around it.

They will never accept that they were wrong about anything, because to do so repudiates all their beliefs right down to the core. The dangerous ones are those - like Karl Rove - who understand that everything they believe is wrong but keep pushing it for the wealth and power.

Fight in Israel

You know what's going on between Israel and Lebanon right now, so I won't go into the details. Let me offer a couple of quick opinions.

First, PM Ehud Olmert is making his bones. He's not an accomplished former general like more Israeli leaders have been, so he needs to show that he can bring the heat. Done.

Also, Olmert wants to re-cast the relationship between Israel and the Hamas/Hezbullah terrorists. While it's true that Sharon and others traded prisoners in the past, Olmert is making a strong point that those days are over.

Hezbullah has tried to have it both ways, acting as a terror/paramilitary group but also trying to win international hearts and minds as a relief organization. That doesn't work (outside of Europe).

The shaky Lenanese government has only recently succeeded in expelling Syrian troops and now has a shot at disarming Hezbullah. Israel needs to play it carefully here, pressing hard enough to deactivate Hezbullah, but not hitting so hard that they topple the government.

Canadian PM Steven Harper and Georgie are both supporting Israel, which is good but not great. Georgie, in particular, throws a lot of weight the opposite way because he is reviled around the world and respected nowhere.

Harper is a Georgie in waiting - a hidden neocon just timing it out to get a parliamentary majority he can use to dismantle Canada's civil society the way Georgie has done so effectively with the US.

The Iraq debacle has taken the reins off all the regional players. Nothing is out of bounds now. For the Arabs, no act is too barbaric to beat what's going on in Iraq. For Israel, they'd have to go a long way to be compared to the US. The rules have changed for all the players, and a period of violent shifting of positions is to be expected.

More later - on football.

Read This

Too lazy to post - please go read this - you will not regret it.

Dumb

This will be another of our ongoing and endless series on why and how conservatives are completely dumb. Stupid. Lacking intelligence. Not at all smart.

Note, fist, that they love being called idiots. That way, they can perpetuate their unbelievable sense of victim-hood that propels them, even while controlling the entire federal government. "Liberals call us dumb - they think they're superior!"

Yes, well. Conservatives have proven over and over again that their warped demi-ideology is good for two things, and nothing else:

1) Telling lies and smearing to win elections.
2) Looting the national treasury.

Other than that, they're lost. But the beautiful thing about what passes as their political thought is that it instructs them to be dumb on purpose. So you can't, supposedly, accuse them of being ill-prepared for Katrina or Iraq because their whole 'philosophy' is to not prepare.

That's keen of them, but it still makes them dumb.

Dumb is clinging to a belief in tax cuts as an economic panacea when any rational measurement shows them to be a budget-busting failure. But the people making trillions of dollars from the scheme press them to maintain it. They are, in every sense, useful idiots.

Dumb is refusing to plan for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. Lots of smart people were banging down the door to tell them what a murderous quagmire it would be if they didn't have a plan, but their answer was: "we don't plan!"

Dumb is allowing the levees to fail in NOLA (by diverting the money to Iraq) and not planning for the ensuing human tragedy. James Lee Witt had FEMA purring like a kitten under Bubba, making it a disaster-relief organization recognized as one of the bes t in the world. Georgie took over and gave the job to campaign operators who ran it into the ground. And people died.

Dumb.

The theme of the dumbness is that it's always stupidity in the service of the rich. Sure, tax cuts bankrupt the place, but the rich love them and so do corporations. Iraq is a bummer, but look at all the defense industry dough being spent!

Dumb is wrecking the environment. We only have one of those, and conservatives have made it their mission to wipe it out and extract money from it in the stupidest way possible.

What's particularly dumb about all of it is that the conservatives grandkids and great-grandkids, etc, will have to live with the bad air and bad water. They'll have to deal with the unprecedented debt and the hostile world. Don't these people at least care about their kids?

My answer is this: dumb. But also, I think these people expect that they will always be rich, and will therefore have some sort of bubble-life to protect them from the environmental harm they've done. Similarly, I think they expect to be rich and multi-national enough to avoid the economic disaster they've created.

Also they're dumb and self-delusional enough to believe that they're not doing wrong things constantly.

I think there must be a smart bunch of neo-cons somewhere who have decided to just take all they can take wile they have Georgie in office, knowing that a clean-up crew will fix it all afterward. Or else they can just keep installing Deibold machines and entrench their one-party state.

But the rest of them, the ones who actually are convinced to support all this, are not only dumb but suicidal. The average Repub voter won't ever see the riches that he's voted to give corporations. He's buying tax cuts to get $50 and the dream of a stronger economy. What he gets is a ruined federal government and historic debt - and billions to the rich.

It's all so dumb. It's the politics those kids in school who couldn't do math but were militant about it. "Math is dumb!" "History id dumb!" "English is dumb!" "Civics is dumb!"

No sir: you are dumb.

More Failure

I was going to write about - surprise! - the Junta and its utter failure to stop terrorism, and indeed its success in actually growing and increasing it. But screw that. It's much too nice a day to contemplate such ugly things.

Things like today's WaPo front page news analysis (they do love them their front page news analysis - it's as though somehow they though their opinion was more important than the actual news!): "Rethinking Embattled Tactics in Terror War." Seemingly, Congress and allies and other normally powerless parties are ganging up on the poor Junta and telling them to stop the awful, awful things they're doing in our name.

Funny, huh?

And so they might actually start to think: "nothing is working. Better try something else." No, obviously I'm kidding here. These guys have never changed tactics and never will. They think: "nothing is working. It must be somebody else's fault. Better do more of the same."

Whatever. They're just going to dig the hole deeper until we get them out of there - if we ever do get them out of there. Thank you, Diebold!

No, I'm here today to discuss football. I'm getting ready to start my uncanny prediction machine for 2006-07, and it occurs to me just how deeply the Patriots have been dissed (yes, I said "dissed." Do you believe that I lack street "cred?" How dare you!) by the league. That is, the first weekend of the year goes on without any prominent role for Belichick's boys.

The first weekend has become something of a celebration of the sport. Prominent teams battle it out in much-anticipated early showdowns. The Super Bowl champ often plays the team they defeated in the conference championship game (as the Pats beat the Colts in 2003 and again opening day 2004).

The Monday nighter and Sunday nighter are also games of interest and bring in a large audience after so many months without football.

But this year, the three-time champions start the year at Buffalo - a team that only the most die-hard fans would give a chance at being a .500 team. And not even them.

My theory is that the league's darlings, the Colts, have been foiled too often by the team-first Patriots. Where the Colts constantly talk and say amusing, media-friendly quotes, the Pats plays rarely talk and only then in the sort of vanilla "we respect our opponents" stuff that the league and the media hate.

The Colts are a me-first bunch of personalities you can profile. The Patriots are short on personalities - even Tom Brady seems a reluctant superstar, while Peyton Manning does his best to get on every cereal box.

And the coaches could not be any more different. Tony Dungy is a Black man who has succeeded more than any other Black coach in the sport's history. He has an opinion on everything. Belechick is a drab 40-something white guy who does only has opinions on football (that he shares with the world) and then even not so much.

I've done the Colts-Pats thing before, but I bring it up again as my little conspiracy theory about the NFL keeping the Pats down. The Pats beat the 16-1 Steelers two years ago to keep them out of the Super Bowl. They beat all the darlings and set a record with a 21-game winning streak, knocking out all those endorsement dollars along the way.

The Patriots are all about the business of winning football games, and nothing else. They are epitomized by QB Brady, who realizes he has his whole life to do Lite Beer commercials, and only a few years to win more trophies.

As he quoted his old equipment manager at Michigan: "what's my favorite championship? The next one."

Mine, too.

Commish

Peter F_King wrote a bit on what he'd do if he were commissioner for a day. And it made me wonder what I would change if I could control the NFL. First, here's Peter's list:

1. Expand the regular season to 18 games (and cut two preseason games) - agreed.
2. Pass a bylaw prohibiting playoff expansion - sure, but what if you expand the league? Whatever.
3. Make long field goals more valuable (4 points for a 50+ yarder). This is dumb, because you'd have teams trying to back up at the end of games, and you don't want that. No need to mess with the scoring.
4. Take NFL Sunday Ticket off the dish and put it on digital cable - absolutely.
5. Stop the love affair with Los Angeles. Okay, but it's the biggest TV market in the US. Why in the world would you leave it empty? There are some good ideas out there, like using it as a Super Bowl site or a revolving Monday Night Football venue. But to just walk away from that kind of money seems like idiocy.
6. Put more mikes on players and officials, and put the game on a seven-second delay - mics, yes. Delay, no. It's needless - just choose which feed to broadcast, and tell the guys to watch it.
7. Let players wear the numbers of their choice -- with an asterisk - charity, blah blah. Sure. Whatever.
8. Prohibit the moving of the Saints for five years. Why only five year? Mandate that the city and state have right of first refusal on any sale. Give them an open ended chance to keep the team.
9. Put two computer chips in the football, and make the goal line, in essence, capable of sending a signal when the football touches the plane of the goal line- why not.
10. Make the Super Bowl the best two out of three - hah! A humorous joke! Oh, Peter. What a card.

So what would I do? I'd fix the officiating problem. Right now, the referees are absolutely ruining football.

The solution is not to make them full-time. I would do that, certainly, and have them pass monthly fitness tests. They are far too old and slow for today's game, and spending the rest of the week as CEO of a dildo company does nothing to help their on-field judgment.

And full-timers in other leagues are just as bad. The NBA refs have complex agendas and morality plays that they enact in every game. Try figuring out the strike zone in any baseball game - it changes pitch by pitch.

So, making them full-time is necessary but not sufficient. What we need to do is rip up the rule book.

Tear it up and burn it. It's far, far to complicated. Consider that they don't even publish the thing. You can't buy the official rule book. It's secret.

Ex-players and coaches commenting on the game are often wrong about calls. Refs have to huddle during games to decide not on what happened as much as to decide what their interpretation should be.

And they blow it. All the time.

The Super Bowl was decided entirely by bad officiating calls. The Super Bowl. The game's ultimate showcase with a billion people watching, and they couldn't get it right.

Nobody on or off the field knows what's going on. So I would stop it.

I would simplify the rules to the point where fans, jocks, and refs all knew exactly what was happening. Here's a sample:

1. A runner is up until tackled or touched down.
2. Two feet in for a catch.
3. Blocking - only face-up. No blocks at all unless face-on.
4. All calls must be considered to have an effect on the play. Any violation having no effect on the outcome of the play will not be called.
5. Motion - blah blah. Keep it.
6. Holding - too hard to call. Allow it. That would be more honest than constantly calling it wrong or not calling it when it's happening all over the place. The line, in particular, is too chaotic. Defenders will have to learn to deal with it.
7. Two-hand touch on the QB. It's too hard to keep them healthy, and the game totally depends on them. I know - it's "a dress," but it's necessary.
8. Tuck rule and fumbles - up to the ref. If the ref thinks it's a fumble, it's a fumble. He can still watch it on replay and change his mind, but make it clearly a judgment call, not a rules interpretation.
9. Forward passes are incomplete, laterals are live balls.
10. Pass interference - another one that's absolutely mangled by refs. Here's the rule: do what you want to any receiver inside the first down marker, but no touching after the marker. That means neither the receiver or the defender can touch the other guy at all past the first down marker. Inside that line, anything goes.
11. Dirty play - a judgment call. Any play the ref considers unnecessary or has an intent to harm can cause a flag or ejection.
12. The overriding rule is that if the offense was not obvious enough for a casual fan to notice, it should not be called. No ticky-tack calls will be made.

That's it. Make it simple and only call the obvious stuff.

7-7

It's July Seventh - one year after four Islamists killed 52 and wounded over 700. Writing that, I'm wondering if the four suicide murderers are included among the 52. Put simply, their lives don't count.

There are certain things people can choose to do to make their lives less than worthless. They can choose to participate in murder, rape, or torture. Theft is borderline on this scale. It's difficult to steal enough to get yourself kicked out of the human race, but a guy like the late and unlamented Ken Lay had cracked it. By looting the retirement savings of millions and creating the deadly and bankrupting California energy crisis, Lay opted out of the species.

On this anniversary of a despicable and cowardly mass murder, we must ask what the proper response is to these animals. On one extreme, it's tempting to consider banning them, evicting them, rejecting them out of the social body like disgorging germs with a sneeze.

When you read the hate speech that passes for internet chat with even Mississauga Muslims, you wonder why they are allowed to stay. They enjoy the peace and prosperity that the Western world provides, while murderously despising the open society that generated the wealth. If they hate it so much, send them back.

Of course, sneezing rarely cures a cold. And it would be a resounding defeat to all our ideals if we were to abandon them at exactly the same time that we need to be defending them. You cannot defend freedom by eliminating it. And you can't claim to allow 'free speech' when you expel or jail people for expressing political opinion (short of actual threats and plots).

Two of the 7-7 mass murderers were out playing cricket with friends 12 hours before their attack. They weren't known to be particularly religious, either. Terrorists defy profiling in that way - they're both rich and poor, immigrant and later generation.

What's the other solution? To make them more comfortable in society? To somehow create a more welcoming space for them so they don't feel so alien?

I think there's something there, both in the West and in the Middle East. Our outreach to their cultures is beyond pathetic. The stone-dumb political appointees Georgie sends over there are an embarrassment. We can make a real effort, using smart people, to bridge the gap.

But as we build toward them, we must understand that they will not build back toward us. In most Middle Eastern countries they live under a strict law that says: "hate Christians and Jews." It's a religious-political system straight from the middle ages. The "law" they practice - sharia - is as cruel as it is unjust.

And it's perpetuated by our oil money. These tin pot dictatorships would be a distant memory by now if they weren't propped up by Western oil gluttony. Money and hate keep them going - who's going to make them stop using either one?

Certainly their list of grievances has grown since 9-11. The terminally venal and block-headed Bush administration took that attack as an excuse to go medieval themselves. The first thing they did was douse the Bill of Rights in kerosene and spark it.

Then they started a regime of illegal spying, indefinite detention, torture, bombing, and unperformed invasion. All against Muslims.

So, yeah, they're pissed.

But no amount of provocation can justify atrocities like the 7-7 bombings. Nothing.

So no answers today. You can't please them, no matter what you do. And you can't crush them without betraying your own democratic values - as the Junta has tried to do.

I think it's going to be a very long contest of wills, but eventually freedom will win out.

If we can keep it alive here in the face of a dictatorial president.

Ten Times

Boy, the WaPo does like to give you their front-page analysis. It's like they can't wait to tell you what they think. It's somewhere between an editorial ("The Democrats are Fucked for Life") and a summary ("Recent News Not Good for Fucked Democrats"). Either way, it's their opinion and they're more or less sticking to it until they get a reaction from hite House spin masters.

Today, it's "A Driven President Faces a World of Crises." And what a world of crises it is. North Korea, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, and, of course, Iraq. Plus, a bunch of pissed-off former allies. Not a good situation for our beleaguered teen president. Of course, he still has people who are paid good money to sound feisty for him:

[NSC honcho Stephen J.] Hadley agreed that there are "a lot of issues in motion right now" on the international front. "In some sense, it was destined to be, because we have a president that wants to take on the big issues and see if he could solve them on his watch."

Actually, we have a president who wants to create big issues on 'his watch' and then sit back in early retirement and sip fruit drinks while somebody else tries to fix them.

Here's the thing: nothing that he's done has been anything short of a complete disaster. All of the 'burning issues' of the day are only 'burning issues' because a bunch of flat-earth mamalukes keep trying to 'fix' them and making them ten times worse.

It's sort of a Republican "Ten Times Rule." No problem exists that they can't make Ten Time Worse.

Take any problem - let's start with the WaPo list. North Korea? When Georgie took over, the crazy NK's had no nuclear weapons. They had UN inspections of their reactors. They had UN cameras inside their reactor sites. They had meduim range missiles and a big army. They were engaged in multi-lateral negotiations. They were nuts, but they were still conventional nuts.

Six years later: they have removed the cameras and kicked out the inspectors. They are known to have at least a dozen nuclear warheads (and when you're that insane, one is enough). Not only are they not engaged in any negotiations, they are testing long range missiles (that don't work, but still). And they still have the huge army.

That's ten times worse, don't you think?

Iraq - sorry, that's under the "100,000 Times Worse" rule.

Al Qaeda - was a decentralized nuisance under Clinton. They hatched a 'Millennium Plot' to blow up LAX - but Bubba caught and convicted them for it. There was an open kill order for Osama and a watch on for al Qaeda activities. The VP held cabinet-level meetings on stopping terrorists.

Six years later: after dismantling all of Clinton preventive bulwarks, Georgie allowed Osama to strike on 9-11. Afterward, trillions have been wasted on no-bid contracts to connected corporations, but there is still no security at the ports and Osama sleeps safer than ever now that Clinton's CIA anti-Osama group has been dismantled. Al Qaeda is stronger than ever with the many recruits generated by the American invasion of Iraq and their torture and murder of terror subjects.

They used to hate us for our freedoms and our prosperity. Now they hate us for our unjust acts of indiscriminate illegal imprisonment, torture, murder, and plunder.

And on it goes - the deficit, racial justice (any kind of justice), disaster management - everything is at least ten times worse.

Superman Returns

I saw the new Superman movie on the weekend, so I'll offer a brief review in the Siskel/Ebert/Roeper format of "thumbs up/thumbs down" (and get well soon Roger - Mr. Ebert is in serious condition after an emergency surgery due to his salivary gland cancer).

Brandon Routh plays the Man of Steel in this long (154 minutes) and often uneven portrayal of the Jewish Canadian icon of Truth Justice and the American Way. Routh seems to channel the definitive Superman - the late Christopher Reeve. He is built with more of Reeve's balletic grace than the earlier, more muscle-bound portrayals of George Reeves and others.

The film is quite satisfying in it's plot progression, taking its time in generating a truly threatening scenario that plausibly endangers Superman's life (not an easy life to endanger, that). Kevin Spacey is terrific Lex Luthor, playing the arch-villain with a glaring menace and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He takes over an hour of film time to deliver on his plan, but it's time well spent, allowing Superman time to reintegrate his life in Metropolis.

It seems as though director Bryan Singer never decided on the story's pacing - or perhaps decided that it should be paced to ebb and flow erratically. There are scenes that move like the chick-iest chick movie, and others that are as erratic and visually noisy as seizure-inducing Japanamation.

The effects are drop-dead. Absolutely stunning (I saw it in Imax 3d). Not only the flying-strength scenes, but the surrounding weather and all the surrounding area. The bar is set quite high for CGI these days, and this movie really delivers.

What I liked in particular was the serene sense of control in Superman's actions. He floats effortlessly. You feel as though he is totally in control of his actions. Where previous generations - even Chris Reeve's fairly recent efforts - saw the power of the character in the bullet-like power of his motions, the new Superman shows his power through control. In the scen where he is putting down a car, he does it gently, even stopping to pose exactly as in Superman's first comic book (Action Comics #1).

The film asks the question: 'is Superman a savior?' After a five-year absence, even Lois Lane has given up on him. The world, seemingly, does just as well without him.

Which is a notion that is never disproved. Sure, there are great dangers and catastrophic events, but all of them are directly linked to the Man of Steel himself. It's through the power of Krypton that Luthor gets the mojo to make his big move. Without the Superman planet's largesse, Luthor is stuck with the terrestrial weapons that have gotten him exactly nowhere in the past. Even in the much-publicized scene where he saves the aircraft, one must recall that the cause of the plane's misfortune is the Kryptonian technology that would not be an issue if not for Superman himself.

He creates the disasters he rescues us from.

The plot of the recent Fantastic Four movie had the same hole - if they didn't exist there wouldn't be a problem for them to solve. The superior Spider Man movies don't have that issue. The Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus would be a far greater danger if the title character wasn't there to stop them. Spidey himself is an unambiguous good.

But whereas the FF problem is clearly due to sloppy writing, one suspects that Superman's question is a real one. Is he a savior? Do we need a Superman?

This is a somewhat more mature question for a somewhat more mature hero. Even the Lois Lane in this film is a mom with a child and a grown-up live-in relationship. Her guy (Richard White, editor Perry's nephew) is a grown-up guy who is never made to seem ridiculous or superfluous (if you'll excuse the pun). He's clearly the competition for Lois' interest, but the film never takes a cheap shot at him - he isn't a gambler or philanderer and has no characters flaws that would cheapen him in our eyes.

This is no Lois &Clark or Smallville where you wonder whether they'll kiss. You don't quietly root for Lois to see the Superman in Clark and unify the Kent-Lane-Superman triangle. It's a Superman that's grown up the way Superman has in the comics. Pick up a recent issue - it may surprise you.

Perhaps emblematic of this attitude in the film is the image of Lois Lane smoking. In one scene, she takes out her cigarettes and tries to light one. Her lighter goes out a few times, until we see Superman floating off to the side, blowing out the flame. That's cute - but later we see her take out the cigarettes again, and make the decision not to smoke.

Nobody could quit for her. Not even Superman.

Result: thumbs up.

Independence

It's a sad, cold July 4 here in the 21st century. Our great nation faces it's biggest challenge since the Civil War. There is a Napoleon in the White House; a man who is trying to crown himself king - and a cabal of power-brokers who will do anything to help him.

At the heart of this coup d'etat is the contention that the president is above the law, and has special wartime powers to ignore treaties and the laws of congress. As demonstrated, an executive with these 'emergency' powers can quite easily perpetuate an 'emergency' for many years. Certainly, an 'emergency' can be maintained until the populace forgets what true liberty is like.

So 230 years after some brave proto-Americans decided that the ideal of democracy and universal liberty was worth their lives, we have a political party in power willing to trade liberty for safety. To create the illusion of safety, that is, and keep a frightened populace just scared enough to vote for them, no matter how disgracefully they behave.

And the people have bought the ticket. They've been convinced to be fearful. The repeated failures on the part of those entrusted with their safety only add to the fear that keeps the failing party in power.

I've had enough.