In the Stars

The weather outside is not good and now my Onion horoscope is saying that it's all my fault: "The increased precipitation in your area continues, thanks largely to that little black storm cloud that follows you everywhere." Bummer.

Bush's Lying Brain

In the past, if you worked in the White House and you lied under oath, big trouble was sure to follow. Well, here's hoping the future is just like the past. As Dana Milbank reports, in a new book about WH Political Director and top Bush advisor Karl Rove (Bush's Brain), Rove is quoted as taking credit for getting Bush interested in the tort reform issue. According to Rove, he even had to talk Bush into the idea of making the issue a centerpiece of his 1994 gubernatorial campaign.

This proves yet again that every policy this White House adopts is motivated solely by politics. But wait, there's more:

Rove's claim of responsibility for the tort reform issue is somewhat at odds with a deposition he gave during the tobacco lawsuit. Asked whether he discussed overhauling civil liability law with then-Gov. Bush, he replied: "I can't say that I did. But I can't say that I didn't. I do not recall. I know that tort reform was a significant part of his legislative agenda but it was not my area."

"Somewhat at odds"? Come on, Dana, call it what it is. Rove lied. He lied under oath. Now, where's Ken Starr when you need him?

Literally Incredible

Sometimes it seems that few people notice Bush's habit of saying one thing and doing another, and that's frustrating. So I took great joy today in reading Paul Krugman's latest column, Threats, Promises and Lies. It seems that a lot of leaders around the world have noticed, and that has a lot to do with the unwillingness to take Bush at face value when he talks about war with Iraq and the aftermath. Case in point:

Consider the astonishing fact that Vicente Fox, president of Mexico, appears unwilling to cast his U.N. Security Council vote in America's favor. Given Mexico's close economic ties to the United States, and Mr. Fox's onetime personal relationship with Mr. Bush, Mexico should have been more or less automatically in America's column. But the Mexican president feels betrayed. He took the politically risky step of aligning himself closely with Mr. Bush — a boost to Republican efforts to woo Hispanic voters — in return for promised reforms that would legalize the status of undocumented immigrants. The administration never acted on those reforms, and Mr. Fox is in no mood to do Mr. Bush any more favors.

So take heart, America. As it turns out, it really is true that you can't fool all the people all the time.

Email Still Broken

To the uncounted tens of people who are trying to send email to my old address, two things:

1. Email is still broken. Hopefully the DNS changes I made today will show up tomorrow.
2. I'm abandoning my old secret address in favor of a new secret address; I'll let those in the know, know.

In the meantime, send your emails glowing with praise to my work account.

Then The Terrorists Have Won…

Anthony Lewis speaks truth to power in his column today, which urges the nation's courts not to abandon the Constitution to hysteria over terrorism. It might come as a surprise to some (and to me) that Lewis praises Israel's judicial system as an example America would do well to follow in the current climate:

Aharon Barak, president of the Israeli Supreme Court, put his conclusions as follows: "The real test of [judicial] independence and impartiality comes in situations of war and terrorism… Precisely in these times, we judges must hold fast to fundamental principles and values; we must embrace our supreme responsibility to protect democracy and the constitution."

Whether Israel actually practices what its Chief Justice preaches is an open question. But given the tendency of the courts to give law enforcement unquestioned — and unquestionable — reign in this troubled time, we should definitely start to practice what Barak preaches.

Date My Sister, Please

This might be old news to some, but check out the Date My Sister Project over at thespark.com, wherein a brother surveils his sister on dates and puts it on the net for all to see. Cruel and embarassing? You'd think so, but it really doesn't turn out that way. And it's a good way to kill an hour at the office.

I'm Back

It was quite a time moving all my computing equipment to my new apartment. On the bright side, I got to set up everything from scratch, avoiding some of the mistakes I made in the past. On the other hand, I got to set up everything from scratch, and I have apparently forgotten a lot of what I once knew when I set it up to begin with. Note to self: you can never have too many crossover cables.

Some stuff is still broken — email, for example. But the intellectual heavy lifting is done for the moment, and this site is now back on the air. Now the physical heavy lifting begins: moving my desk…

Unpatriotic

Anita Ramasastry has written an analysis of a draft of the new "Domestic Security Enhancement Act", aka Patriot II. Not only would this bill make a number of new scary things the law of the land, but it would also make the original Patriot Act scarier as well. If you ever wondered what would happen if a power-hungry AG with little respect for Constitutional guarantees (except for the Second Amendment) were to get his legal wish list, now you know.

Moving Servers

It's about time to move my servers from my old apartment to my new one. This will mean the site will be down for a while in the next couple of days. Don't give up hope — it will be back up ASAP.

Brzezinski's Polemic

When it comes to the question of war in Iraq, the pundits are usually divided up into the hawks who want war, and the doves who don't. But many of the voices we are hearing aren't against the war per se, but against how the Bush administration is pursuing that war. In today's Post, Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that any decision to go to war needs to fit within a sound analysis of US national security priorities, and you can almost hear his dismay and anger at Bush for avoiding that essential context. Brzezinski is no dove, which just goes to show that the appropriate division now is between the super-hawk Bushies and everyone else who wants US foreign policy to be based on real security needs.

Snowed In

Happy President's Day, everyone. Today would normally be a day off anyways, so it seems a shame to have to waste a perfectly good snow day this way, but so it goes.

In case you've been hiding under a rock, DC got over a foot of snow dumped on it this weekend. The snow stopped over 6 hours ago, but even so the roads are still a disaster, metro is running on a very limited schedule, and two of three airports are closed. Bottom line: I'm stuck.

On the upside, I have food, wine, digital cable, and dsl, so I'm set for the day. Tomorrow? We'll see.

Welcome Back, John

My Friend John Griffiths has rejoined the blogosphere after an absence of many months, and starts off by providing detailed instructions on how to break into his apartment. He's got some cool shit, so if anyone reading this decides to give it a try, I get 15% of the gross.

P.S. Permalinks, John, permalinks.

Best Resolution Ever

I've never been a fan of deciding important public issues via referendum. Some referenda are just ways for public officials to pass the buck — they don't want to make the tough call, so they let others make it for them. And most referenda do nothing to improve the quality of debate, but instead just prove that the group with greatest sum of money and demagoguery usually wins. But this morning I read about a citizen initiative in Washington State that seems right on the mark:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, That the citizens of the State of Washington do hereby proclaim that Tim Eyman is a Horse's Ass.

From what I've been able to gather, Tim Eyman is in the citizen referendum business — he starts campaigns, collects signatures, raises money, and pays himself with it. His anti-tax initiatives — designed to make it impossible to raise taxes and fees except by a two-thirds supermajority — only threaten vital public services, and decrease the flexibility of the state government at precisely the time when that flexibility is needed most. Boiled down, he makes money by hurting people, so yeah, I'd call him a horse's ass, and I hope the people of Washington State decide to do the same.

Looking for Work

While the official unemployment rate dropped last Friday to 5.7 percent, Bob Herbert is correct to note that this bit of good news actually camouflages a much more depressing jobs picture as the underemployment rate and the number of workers who have left the labor market continue to grow. And to top it off, Bush appears uninterested in doing anything other than use this bad news to push to policies which in the short run will do nothing, and in the long run make the problem worse.

If the Bush administration has any real plans for dealing with the nation's employment problems, it is keeping them very carefully concealed. The president insists he's concerned and said again on Friday, "We will not be satisfied until this economy grows fast enough to employ every man and woman who seeks a job."

He's got a long way to go, and his only proposed remedy — ever more tax cuts for the wealthy — is not likely to get him there.

The War Against US

E.J. Dionne latest column, Bush's War Budget, points to the worst thing about the Bush's budget — what's bad isn't just what is says it will do, but what it refuses to admit that it will do. I don't know what else to say, except that despite the folksy demeanor, at the core Bush is just calculating and mean.

Churchill recognized that a time of war places a special obligation on the governing classes to those who benefit least from a nation's social and economic arrangements. Bush, on the other hand, is doing all he can to benefit the economic elites and, through stealth, to undercut government's commitments to the least fortunate.

…

The president's program is neither conservative nor compassionate. It is radical in its stealthy way, and it threatens to undermine the federal government's rather modest commitment to helping states and cities assist their poorest residents. Yet by pushing so many of the fiscal problems so far down the road, Bush hopes to insulate himself from the political costs of his choices.

The Art of War

Maureen Dowd: Powell Without Picasso. YA pundit has discovered that Bush's argument for war keeps shifting, as if the hope is that a dozen bad reasons will somehow add up to one good reason, at least in the minds of most of the public.

The administration's argument for war has shifted in a dizzying Cubist cascade over the last months. Last summer, Bush officials warned that Saddam was close to building nuclear bombs. Now, with intelligence on aluminum tubes, once deemed proof of an Iraqi nuclear program, in dispute, the administration's emphasis has tacked back to germ and chemical weapons. With no proof that Saddam has given weapons to terrorists, another once-crucial part of the case for going to war, Mr. Rumsfeld and others now frame their casus belli prospectively: that we must get rid of Saddam because he will soon become the gulf's leading weapons supplier to terrorists.

Moving Day, Part 2

Yesterday went from good, to bad, to kinda good. Today was just bad.

It all started when I did a load of laundry. After about 15 minutes into the wash cycle, I went to check how things were going. When I opened the door to the laundry closet, foul-smelling smoke poured into the apartment. I turned off the washer and called maintenance. While it took a while, I finally got a visit from the buildings maintenance supervisor, who told me they would swap the washer/dryer unit out tomorrow, and until then, opened up a vacant apartment so I could actually wash some clothes. When I finally emptied my washer, I discovered a maybe a hundred screws in the bottom of the washer — most in a plastic bag, but many scattered on the bottom of the drum. Obviously the person who installed the unit "forgot" that he was using my unit as hardware storage. I'm just guessing, but I suspect that might have had something to do with my washer catching on fire.

Worst part, though, was the failure of my second cable guy to come and do the installation. I wasted five hours in an apartment without chairs (that's hard on the legs and ass, by the way), and was forced to miss a Chinese New Year's dinner at a good friends. Plus, no cable. Shit.

Tomorrow is another day. Let's hope it's a better day.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the box of glasses that fell to the ground in the Target parking lot and exploded into a $14.99 pile of shards, but I didn't want to bore you.

Nuclear Politics

Washington Post: N. Korea's Nuclear Plans Were No Secret. According to this shocking (but not surprising) story, the Bush Administration received critical intelligence confirming N. Korea's uranium enrichment program in November 2001, but said nothing, not even to the N. Koreans, for almost a year. Why?

Some critics say the Bush administration kept secret the most worrisome intelligence about a North Korean nuclear plant out of concern that public disclosure would undermine the campaign against Iraq, or interfere with the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his network. Top administration officials have repeatedly denied that they suppressed the intelligence for political reasons.

Given that the Bush White House politicizes every policy decision, this denial rings quite hollow.

Moving Day

Today is the day I started my move from my old crappy apartment to my new, considerably less crappy apartment. The furniture has been transported (what little of it I took with me), the cable arrives tomorrow, and DSL in a week. The rest of my massive stockpile of junk will be going over intermittently in small boxes, as time allows.

The day started out smoothly enough, but quickly turned into a disaster. I was trapped in the new apartment from 3 until 5 waiting for the cable guy, and I soon realized that the building hadn't turned on my heat or hot water. The cable guy never showed, so I made a quick run to Target for some housewarming gifts. Then things started looking up. When I get back, I had heat, I had hot water, and 15 minutes later, I had a cable guy at the door. It turned out that my cable jacks hadn't been connected to anything so I still don't have cable, but as they say in the song, two out of three ain't bad. Cable Guy comes again tomorrow, though, to hook everything up, and as long as I'm online in time to see Alias, it's all good.