Speaking of Reagan, Ron Jr. was on Dateline NBC on Friday night discussing the eulogy he gave for his father and took the opportunity to clear up a few things :

“He is home now, he is free. The idea that all people are created equal was more than mere words on a page, it was how he lived his life. Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man, but he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot, and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God has spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.”

Matthews: “That was in many ways the most remarked upon moment in a very dramatic week.”

Reagan: “Well, what I find interesting about it is that everybody assumes that I must be talking about George W. Bush, which I find fascinating and somewhat telling. If the shoe fits?”

Matthews: “Were you?”

Reagan: “Well, I said many politicians. If he’s lumped in that group then fine, fine. That’s all right. There’s a lot of– I think there’s a lot of false piety floating around Washington.”

Matthews: “Ron, do you feel deeply that the President has used religion to make his case for the war with Iraq?”

Reagan: “I think he’s used religion to make his case for a lot of things, you know.”

Matthews: “Including Iraq?”

Reagan: “Including Iraq.”
. . .
Matthews: “Many of the people in this administration who are most hawkish claim a Reagan mantle here in fighting this war. Should they?”

Reagan: “No. With all due respect, I don’t think they knew my father as well as I did. And another thing I would observe is that my father never felt the need to wrap himself in anybody else’s mantle. He never felt the need to pretend to be anybody else. This is their administration. This is their war. If they can’t stand on their own two feet, well they’re no Ronald Reagan?s, that’s for sure.”

Is it just me, or did we “elect” the wrong junior?

Remember a couple weeks ago when the only thing on the news was Ronald Reagan? At the time, many of us on the left said things like “If they spent a week talking about Clinton they wouldn’t be ignoring ______.” Well, pay attention this week as Clinton is all over the news promoting his new book. Who wants to bet we hear the words “impeachment” and “Lewinsky” more than we hear “balanced budget” or “surplus”?

(via Brian)

Considering all the stuff that’s been happening in Iraq lately, I can’t believe our leaders would have the gall to ask for something like this :

Defying the United States, Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the U.N. Security Council on Thursday to stop shielding American peacekeepers from international prosecution for war crimes.
. . .
“It would be even more unwise on the part of the Security Council to grant it. It would discredit the council and the United Nations that stands for rule of law and the primacy of rule of law,” Annan said. “Blanket exemption is wrong. It is of dubious judicial value, and I don’t think it should be encouraged by the council.”

Besides seeking another year’s exemption from arrest or prosecution of U.S. peacekeepers, Washington has signed bilateral agreements with 89 countries that bar any prosecution of American officials by the court and is seeking more such treaties.

The International Criminal Court can prosecute cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed after it was established on July 1, 2002, but will step in only when countries are unwilling or unable to dispense justice themselves. It is the culmination of a campaign for a permanent war crimes tribunal that began with the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

The court has no jurisdiction over the events in Iraq, first because neither the United States nor Iraq have ratified the Rome Treaty, and second because of the U.N. exemption.

When the court was established, the United States threatened to end its involvement in far-flung peacekeeping operations established or authorized by the United Nations if it didn’t get an exemption for American peacekeepers.

Think about that last part for a moment. Our leaders commitment to peacekeeping and human rights is so weak that they’d take their ball and go home if they aren’t allowed to break the rules?? Somehow these scumbags have found a way to look like thugs and crybabies at the same time.

Like I mentioned in the post below, I’ve got a new email address using Google’s new Gmail service. Since the service is only in beta testing right now, the only way to join is to receive an invitation (I don’t know who gets these invitations or why, so don’t bother asking me to invite you). Since a competing free email service can potentially cut into Yahoo’s business, they’ve set up filters to make it more difficult for Gmail invitations to get to their users (or at least, that’s the way it appears). As far as Yahoo is concerned, Gmail invites are spam.

Since the Gmail invitations come from an email address that ends in @gmail.com, I figured I would send a few emails to myself and see if I can nail down what kind of filtering they’ve got in place. I figured they were just blocking all emails for gmail.com or scanning the subject lines, but it turns out that they’re actually searching for the message body itself.

The amusing thing about this is that any email that contains this in the body of the message will get thrown into the “bulk mail” folder :

———————————————————————–

[blank] has invited you to open a free Google Gmail account. The invitation will expire in three weeks and can only be used to set up one account.

To accept this invitation and register for your account, visit http://gmail.google.com/gmail/

Once you create your account, [blank] will be notified with your new @gmail.com address so you can stay in touch with Gmail!

If you haven’t already heard about Gmail, it’s a new search-based webmail service that offers:

- 1,000 megabytes (one gigabyte) of free storage
- Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want
- Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into “conversations”
- Text ads and related pages that are relevant to the content of your messages

Gmail is still in an early stage of development. If you set up an account, you’ll be able to keep it even after we make Gmail more widely available and as one of the system’s early testers, you will be helping us improve the service through your feedback. We might ask for your comments and suggestions periodically and we appreciate your help in making Gmail even better.

Thanks,

The Gmail Team

To learn more about Gmail before registering, visit: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/benefits.html

(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them into the address bar of your browser).

If you’ve got a Yahoo mail account you can try it for yourself. Copy the text above and email it to yourself using any email address and any subject line (I suggest “Stop censoring my goddamn email!”). Within a few minutes, you’ll see the email you sent has been thrown in with the rest of the spam.

Have there been so many invitations that Yahoo’s anti-spam filters genuinely flag this is spam? Could be, but Yahoo’s recent upgrade of all their mailbox sizes from 6MB to 100MB make it clear that they’re threatened by Google’s new service (whose main attraction is a 1GB mailbox). All I know is that when it comes to free email services, sometimes you get what you pay for.

In case you need another reason to dislike Bush, now he’s using Pentagon money on ostentatious sets :

White House aides advancing President Bush’s Normandy visit ordered the Pentagon to erect a $100,000 platform for his entry into a U.S. military cemetery, well-placed sources told the Daily News.

American taxpayers picked up the six-figure tab for the red carpet, walkway and artificial island hurriedly built over a memorial pool so that Bush and French President Jacques Chirac could walk in style to the dais for last week’s ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
. . .
The red carpet price tag wasn’t anticipated by Pentagon planners, so the $100,000, which has already been paid out to the civilian contractors who did the work, will have to be scrounged from somewhere else.

“That money will have to come out of some account that otherwise would be spent on soldiers,” according to a source familiar with the situation.
. . .
The expensive choreography was a drop in the bucket compared with the overall cost of the U.S. government’s participation in D-Day celebrations in France – estimated at $30 million by knowledgeable officials.

I wonder how King George would explain something like this to all his buddies in Crawford?

The Presidential debate formats and dates have been announced (via Fly Trap):

The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) today announced formats for its 2004 debates. Dates and sites for these debates were announced on November 6, 2003 as follows:

First presidential debate:
Thursday, September, 30, 2004
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL

Vice presidential debate:

Tuesday, October 5, 2004
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH

Second presidential debate:

Friday, October 8, 2004
Washington University
St. Louis, MO

Third presidential debate:

Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ

Format

The candidates will be seated at a table with the moderator in the first and third presidential debates and in the vice presidential debate.

The second presidential debate will use the town meeting format in which undecided voters, selected by the Gallup Organization, will question the candidates.

Each debate will last for ninety minutes, start at 9:00 p.m. ET, and take place before a live audience.

The first presidential debate will focus primarily on domestic policy, and the third presidential debate will focus primarily on foreign policy. The town meeting debate and the vice presidential debate will be open to all topics.

Moderators

Each debate will have a different single moderator to be selected by the CPD. The four moderators will be announced no later than September 10.

The moderators? job in the first and third presidential debates and the vice presidential debate will be to introduce and change topics, to ensure that the participants have equal time, and to encourage some direct exchange among the candidates. The moderators will select all topics and questions.

In the town meeting debate, the town meeting participants will pose their questions to the candidates. The town meeting participants will review their questions with the moderator before the debate for the sole purpose of avoiding duplicate questions.

The moderators will have discretion to ask follow-up questions in all debates.

Based on the 2000 debates, here’s the only followup question the moderators will need : “Mr. Bush, could you please stop babbling and answer the question?”

Okay, this is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. Kristin Thomas writes poetry “using only the subject lines from the hundreds of pieces of SPAM [she] get[s] every day.” Here’s one of my favorites :

American Patriots,
How can we serve you better?

Win a laptop computer?
Win a trip to Florida?
Win a NEW LEXUS?
We give you more of what you want.

American Patriots,
How can we serve you better?
Want free movies?
Want to date a supermodel?
Want a bigger penis and stronger erections?
You will love it!

American Patriots,
How can we serve you better?
We have decided to increase your credit,
Increase your penis size, now
Give you free money.

Just Vote Bush. Your wife will never know.

Speaking of spam, I was just looking through my spam folder on Yahoo mail, and noticed that my Gmail invitation was in there. Interesting…

I was reading the new issue of Harper’s Magazine last night and they had an interesting article about Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address. With the war winding down, FDR took the opportunity to propose what he called an economic bill of rights :

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people–whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth–is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights–among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however–as our industrial economy expanded–these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:a

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Maybe I’m thinking too far into the future, but wouldn’t this make a nice inauguration speech for President Kerry?

This phrase makes me want to drink bleach :

“absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”

I’ve seen this all over the place, but most recently by right-wing bloggers putting a pro-Bush spin on the 9/11 Commission news today. Apparently the talking point is that while they don’t have evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda worked together, we don’t have evidence that they didn’t…or something.

Absence of evidence is absence of evidence. In other words, you don’t have any proof for the claims you’re making. Using some pseudo-philosophical malarkey doesn’t add any validity to your bullshit. If you’re going to claim that Saddam and Osama are best buddies, the burden of proof is on you to support your statements with facts. The best argument they have is something along the lines of “just because I’m not right doesn’t mean I’m wrong”. Ummm…yeah, but it does mean you’re not right.

You’ve all probably seen the “news” today about the lack of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, but did you catch this tidbit?

An official report into the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US said that Pakistan helped the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to give a haven to al-Qaeda in the face of international pressure.

The report from the official investigation into the attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington said that Pakistan broke with the Taliban only after September 11, even though it knew the Afghan militia was hiding al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“The Taliban’s ability to provide bin Laden a haven in the face of international pressure and UN sanctions was significantly facilitated by Pakistani support,” the report said.

“Pakistan benefited from the Taliban-al-Qaeda relationship, as bin Laden’s camps trained and equipped fighters for Pakistan’s ongoing struggle with India over Kashmir.”

I wonder how this is related to the other big Pakistani news today?

President George W Bush has upgraded relations with Pakistan by formally naming it as a major non-Nato ally.
The move was first announced by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, during a visit to Pakistan in March.

This is a reward – Washington’s way of thanking Pakistan for its co-operation in the war against terrorism.

Pakistan now joins the small club of nations to enjoy the status of being what is known as a major non-Nato ally of the US.

Such status means Pakistan is now eligible for a series of benefits in the area of foreign aid and defence co-operation, including priority delivery of defence items.

Should we really be delivering “defence items” [sp] to a country that helped terrorists and leaked nuclear technology??

Here’s Bush from his pep-rally today :

Dozens of political parties are organizing. Hundreds of courts of law are opening across the country. Today in Iraq, more than 170 newspapers are being published, and I saw the other day that they’ve even got talk radio…Our coalition has rehabilitated nearly 2,500 schools, and over 1,200 more should be completed by the end of the year. All of Iraq’s hospitals and most medical clinics are open and are serving the people.

So we’ve got enough time, manpower, and money to count the number of hospitals, schools, and newspapers, but they still refuse to count the number of civilians killed :

The Pentagon said yesterday that it has no plans to determine how many Iraqi civilians may have been killed or injured or suffered property damage as a result of U.S. military operations in Iraq.
. . .
Before its demise, the Iraqi government reported 1,254 civilian deaths as of April 3. The Bush administration has offered no estimates of its own.

“We really don’t know how many civilian deaths there have been, and we don’t know how many of them can be attributed to coalition action, as opposed to action on the part of Iraqi armed forces as they defended themselves,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a BBC interview Sunday.

Historically, the Pentagon has not tried to count civilian casualties and losses resulting from U.S. military action. Military officials have given various reasons for this, citing principally the time and resources involved and the difficulty of separating damage caused by U.S. forces from damage caused by the enemy.

And they wonder why Iraqis don’t trust us….

This is something I blogged about more than a year ago, but it bears repeating. First, take a look at this excerpt from the Bible :

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!”

Fast forward a couple thousand years and take a look at this item for sale at the online store for Pat Roberson’s Christian Broadcasting Network :

Either I’ve missed the part of the Bible about how to keep lady-parts clean, or Pat Robertson and his ilk are scumbags who know they can throw the words “Bible”, “Christian”, and “Jesus” on any product and know some schmuck is gonna buy it. It’s a shame that many people who read the Bible all the time don’t realize that the leaders of their movement are the money changers Jesus was warning them about.

Man, the GOP must be in big trouble if they’re bringing this up (via Political Wire) :

The senate Republican leadership is aiming for a mid-July vote on a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, forcing Democrats to take a stand on the controversial topic just before the party heads to Boston for its presidential nominating convention.

Pardon the clich?, but I say bring it on.

This will be a good test for the senate Leadership, but considering how close this will be to the Dem pep-rally, they shouldn’t have a problem getting everyone (give or take a Zell) on board to oppose this thing. The key to this is that the Democratic party line should be that the Constitution isn’t a rough draft that should be amended to appeal to the whims of the electorate. The last time we tried something like that, it was a complete failure.

The Republicans think they’ll be able to turn this into a “John Kerry loves homos and hates Jesus” issue, but they’re forgetting one little detail : they don’t get to speak at the senate convention. If you thought last week’s Gipperporn was one-sided, wait until the conventions come around and the two major parties get four days of uninterrupted primetime coverage to say whatever the hell they want.

So if the Republicans really wanna go there (another clich?), they better be prepared for the Dems to use their limited bully pulpit to reframe the debate on gay marriage and expose the fact that the GOP’s passion for limited government is eclipsed by their passion for making sure bigotry is enshrined in our government’s most important document.

Okay, here’s part of an interview between a right-wing commentator (RC) and a left-wing politician (LP). See if you can guess who’s who here (via Nathan Newman) :

RC: The U.S. population now?primarily due to immigrants and their children coming in?is estimated to grow to over 400 million by mid-century. Would that have an adverse impact on the environment?

LP: We don?t have the absorptive capacity for that many people. Over 32 million came in, in the ?90s, which is the highest in American history.

RC: What would you do about it?

LP: We have to control our immigration. We have to limit the number of people who come into this country illegally.

RC: What level of legal immigration do you think we should have per year?

LP: First of all, we have to say what is the impact on African-Americans and Hispanic Americans in this country in terms of wages of our present stance on immigration? It is a wage-depressing policy, which is why the Chambers of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, Tyson Foods, and the Wall Street Journal like it. The AFL-CIO has no objection to it because they think they can organize the illegal workers?

RC: They switched.

LP: ?because they have been so inept at organizing other workers.

Figured it out? Check out the extended entry for the answers.
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