July 2003 Archives

An odd story that I've been following with some interest is the Pentagon's plan to create a "Futures Market" in terrorist acts. The Pentagon has backed off, due to a firestorm of negative publicity, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. The program, "FutureMAP," was created by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and it would have lived under the watchful eye of the ever-popular Total Information Awareness program. The basic principal is to allow "investors" to "speculate" on acts of terrorism, based on the logic that markets are much better at individuals at predicting human behavior.

Among the names eager Senators called it were "sick," "stupid," "ridiculous," and "grotesque." Senator Boxer suggested that people responsible for coming up with the idea should be immediately fired. The program was stopped.

Two problems though. First, if you hire people to think "outside the box" and come up with radical new ideas of how to anticipate and prevent terrorist attacks, you probably shouldn't fire them for coming up with a radical new idea of how to anticipate and prevent terrorist attacks. But the much larger problem is, what if it was a really good idea, despite an instinctive "yuck" factor that a two-sentence description of the program evokes?

For some interesting insights, check out Christopher Marquis' article about The Rights and Wrongs of Thinking Outside the Box, the economic analysis of Hal Varian in A Good Idea with Bad Press, and the opinions of Op-Ed columnist Todd G. Buchholz in his piece, All Bets Are Off.

I won't argue that it was a weird idea, but I'm sad to see a potentially innovative idea get so quickly squelched because it sounds unpleasant. I would have at least liked a more thoughtful rejection than "that's sick - fire everyone."

The AP is reporting in its always-substantive entertainment wire that hip-hop performer (though they call him a rapper — but that’s not quite adequate, is it?) Heavy D has lost 135 pounds. I’ll still put him well north of two bucks, and add that I met him once at a movie and he did’t seem that heavy. Now that he’s lost weight, what is he gonna do?

Wasn't there an Ishbadiddle advisory about not posting new topics in the comments? If there was, I disregarded it, and now I'll put it right. After prolonged final status negotiations, Jay and I have decided to get married next summer, joining with the Owlanphys in turning next year into one big Gilbert & Sullivan finale. Here's the whole story.

p.s. Unlike Chris and Emily, we waited a very long time to do this (due to exhaustive pondering of Ennis's question), but we still consider them our cohort and we couldn't have asked for a better one!

It may be rather parochial news when two Ishbadiddlers announce a link-up; but since this is the prime industry journal for all things NYC-blogger-related...

I thought I would let y'all know that yesterday I asked Emily to marry me. Despite being, as you all know, a very sensible woman, she impulsively decided to say yes.

Molanphy and Owens decline to comment on the prospect of launching a joint blog.

Here's how the Bush Administration will be thanking vets who return from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere (as well as those who already did their service). Just passing this along, admittedly without spending the whole weekend fact-checking (hey, aren't we "over" checking facts anyway? froth away, Wapologists).

"MASSIVE CUTS TO MILITARY FAMILY HOUSING: Bush's 2004 budget proposes $1.5 billion in cuts to military family housing. Last year, the government spent $10.7 billion on these priorities, while this year the 2004 Bush budget and GOP bill proposes just under $9.2 billion. This cut affects military housing, barracks, child care centers, schools, hangars and office buildings. House Democrats offered an amendment to reduce the proposed tax cuts to millionaires by $5,000 (they would get $83,000 instead of $88,000) in order to restore $1 billion of these cuts. House Republicans voted it down. [Source]

MASSIVE CUTS TO SCHOOLS FOR MILITARY KIDS: President Bush's 2004 budget proposes to cut $200 million out of Impact Aid - the program that funds schools near military bases. Total funds for the military portion of the program would drop from about $635 million in the current year to about $435 million next year-a cut of more than 30 percent. [Source]

REDUCING PAY TO SOLDIERS IN HARMS WAY: According to the Army Times, "the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones."

IGNORING TAX RELIEF FOR SOLDIERS: According to the Washington Post, "Bush's signature on the latest tax cut, which failed to extend a child tax credit to nearly 200,000 low-income military personnel." [Source]

RAISING PRESCRIPTION DRUG PRICES FOR VETERANS: The House GOP this week passed a White House proposal to charging some veterans enrollment fees of $250 a year and double the amount they now pay for prescription drugs. [Source]

OPPOSING LEGISLATION TO MAKE SURE RESERVISTS HAVE HEALTH CARE: "Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent a letter to House and Senate leaders stating the Bush Administration's opposition to the TRICARE legislation" sponsored by Senator Tom Daschle that would prevent thousands of National Guard reservists from potentially being cut off health insurance 30 days after they are deactivated. The legislation is strongly supported by the National Guard Association, Adjutants General Association, Enlisted Association of the National Guard [Source, Source]

UNDERFUNDING VETERANS MEDICAL CARE: According to a letter sent to the President by the major veterans groups, Bush's 2003 budget "falls $1.5 billion short" of adequately funding veterans care. [Independent Budget, 1/7/02].

CUTTING VETERANS OFF MEDICAL CARE: According to the VA Center in Palo Alto, CA, "On January 17, 2003, Secretary Principi announced VA was suspending enrollment for new Priority Group 8 veterans...VA has been unable to provide all enrolled veterans with timely access to health care services because of the tremendous growth in the number of veterans seeking VA health care...It is estimated this decision will affect approximately 164,000 veterans nationally for the remainder of this fiscal year." [Source]"

[Sources available via this link.]

They're moving! Or are they?

In response to today's question of the day:

According to Newsday, FEMA certified the Indian Point evacuation plans over the objections of county officials, who argued that there's no way we can realistically defend the plant against terrorist attack. 8% of the country's population lives in a 50-mile radius of this nuclear power plant. After 9/11, do we really have a choice but to close the plant, if there's no way to defend it? If the former director of FEMA says that it's not safe, and the county executives actually in charge of evacuation plans say it's not safe, then why should we blithely believe that we're now safe just because FEMA says so? I have potassium iodine for my family. I just pray that I never have to use it.

Cooper Black. Thanks again to Liz for the tip!

This is just too strange, I can't explain it. The secret service takes cartoons as literal threats to the president, even pro-Bush ones ? It's a good thing for this cartoonist that a powerful politician supported him. Can you imagine if this had been an anti-bush cartoon ?

That's the question of the day. My take:

If we're still fighting a war in Iraq (and I believe, "Mission Accomplished" notwithstanding, that we are), then absolutely. We must convince Saddam's loyalists that the new regime is here to stay, and that their efforts to dislodge us are futile.

Is this the equivalent of Achilles dragging the corpse of Hector behind his chariot around the walls of Troy? I don't think so. War's an ugly thing. The photographs aren't gloating -- they're ammunition in the war for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

Well, that's the NYCB/RNN poll question of the day. We've discussed this on the blog before, but in a quotable nutshell, here's my take:

The precedent we compare Bush's statement shouldn't be Clinton's 11 words ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.") Too many on the left are quick to point out the double standard of conservatives who impeached Clinton over that lie, but are willing to defend Bush on L'Affaire Yellow Cake. It's true there's hypocrisy, but so what? The real comparison we should be making is Lyndon Johnson's 26 words to Congress after the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin attack: "Last night I announced to the American people that the North Vietnamese regime had conducted further deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters." We have a history (as most nations do) of using pretexts to justify the start of war. (Remember "Remember the Maine"?) Ultimately, the 16 words matter to me not because Bush lied to the American people, but because it's evidence that the Bush team was so eager to go to war they'd do anything to sell it to us. The war was a forgone conclusion, possibly from the day W took office, definitely since 9/11. (Remember that on 9/11, Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq, whether it was "related or not.") The only reason the 16 words matter is if it raises questions in people's minds about our reasons for going to war in the first place.

Oh, and how long until we get a pop star calling herself Yellowcake?

Clay Shirky has a really interesting article up, the conclusion of which is this: A Group is its Own Worst Enemy. His thesis is that completely unmoderated environments become unwieldy, and that rules limiting individual behaviour allow the group to function more efficiently. Basically, it's a variation of the social contract--the negative corollary of which, according to Colin, is "it takes an idiot to raze a village." Here are some quotes:

Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.

Many other interesting things in here. Will look forward to your comments.

Here's the ACLU's latest mailing concerning the TIA:

Stop the Government Super-Snoop Plan
In a surprise development, the Senate has adopted legislation that would completely block funding for the Pentagon's infamous Terrorism Information Awareness program (formerly known as Total Information Awareness or TIA).

The Senate's ban was adopted as part of the 2004 defense spending bill. To become law and end the program that would indiscriminately track the daily activities of Americans, the ban must survive a joint House-Senate conference committee.

Opposition to the program has been unusually strong from across the political
spectrum. Groups as disparate as the American Conservative Union and the ACLU have advocated against the development of this super-snoop system that would inevitably identify thousands of innocent people as potential terrorists. Yet the Bush Administration is threatening a veto of the defense bill if TIA is defunded.

Click here to get more information and send a free fax to your Members of Congress urging them to support a complete ban on TIA:

From the FT.

"Last week a conservative columnist with close ties to the administration, Robert Novak, revealed that he had been told by two senior administration officials that Mr Wilson's wife was a CIA operative working on curbing weapons of mass destruction and that she had originally suggested that he be sent to Niger.

Under US law, the names of clandestine CIA agents cannot be disclosed; the violation could carry a penalty of up to three years imprisonment. Mr Wilson called the disclosure "a breach of national security", saying it could compromise any operations or programmes in which she had been involved.

Bush administration officials deny that there has been any campaign to smear Mr Wilson, saying the White House would never have approved such an effort."

The question is, what will happen to Novak ? Or will the US soldiers who complained about the war and Rumsfeld be punished while Novak is left alone ?

Today's E News Rundown question is: Should Elderly Drivers Be Retested? (This is in the news, of course, because of the 86 year-old man who plowed his car into a Farmer's Market in California and killed 10 people.) My libertarian friends won't like my answer, but I'd respond by asking: shouldn't we all be retested?

Everyone knows that women's prison is hot, hot, hot (especially the showers!). But still, Mark Brooks is going a little far to get into one:

Mr. Brooks, serving 50 years to life for the 1989 murder of a Hofstra student, has announced that he would henceforth like to be known as "Jessica Lewis," in preparation for becoming a woman. Of course, once he becomes a woman, he wants to be transferred to a women's prison. Oh, and then there is the little matter of money. Turns out that sex-change doctors won't take smokes and hummers in exchange for treatment (well, not the good ones anyway). so Mark is going to need some money. Like $500,000. The good news is, Mark has a great idea for who should pay: You!

Yes, Mr. Brooks is suing the State of New York for a sex-change operation.

The state of New York pointed out, among the many reasons why they were hesitant to shell out a half-million dollars on this murderer's behalf, was the fact that Mr. Brooks only developed this interest three years ago, and while there current policy is to pay for prisoners to continue sex-change therapy that is started prior to incarceration, they are none too eager to start paying for people who get the urge once they enter the big house.

By the way, a five point bonus for naming the Academy Award winning writer/director of the 1974 women-in-prison classic noted in the title of this post (no reference materials, please!).

The post below is our first response to the first poll question in our first foray into television! To better explain, I'll just put in the email we sent out to the NYC Bloggers members (now 2400+!) yesterday:

History may prove that the war with Iraq had positive consequences: the reshaping of the Middle East (into something perhaps more secure), the downfall (if not capture or death) of a cruel tyrant. Surely these are outcomes that are worth fighting for? Yet history will also record that our stated reasons for entering this war were quite different. The reference to a forged document as evidence of Iraq's nuclear program is, in the end, only disturbing because it shows how different were our stated reasons and our real reasons for going to war. Simply put, our real reason -- a remaking of the Middle East strategic balance -- isn't justified under the rule of law. So we had to trump up reasons (an imminent danger, illegal WMDs, a link to the 9/11 attacks) that would be justified. So, will history judge the war as justified? If the WMDs are found, obviously yes. Even if they aren't, historians of the future may agree that the war was the right thing to do. I'm sure, however, that they'll also note Bush's disregard for both the truth and for international law.

But one thing that the daily casualty reports from Iraq are underscoring: despite the banners and the posturing, we are far from "Mission Accomplished."

Jack Nicholson is Everywhere. Thanks, Liz!

Stunning article about a man in Atlanta visited by the FBI because someone saw him reading an article in a coffee shop and reported it as subversive. If you're really feeling like expressing what liberty remains, this is the article he was reading. This completely freaks me out--not least because the Caribou Coffee mentioned is right around the corner from my parents' house in Atlanta. So I wonder--if someone sees you reading this article about being busted for reading, will you then get busted?

The absolute best piece of natural low humor I’ve seen in a month of Sundays comes from 37Signals and an item about an electric company, Italy, and the resulting URI.

Defense labels flashing charge physically impossible. Found on Dead Parrot Society.

Last week I noted Dusty Baker's rather odd observations about how latin baseball players are better suited to withstand the summer heat because of their skin tone. I wonder what he thinks the relationship is between latin baseball fans and their ability to withstand jail time?

Last September, Kansas City Royals first baseman Tom Gamboa was attacked by a father and son during a game against the White Sox at Chicago last September. They blindsided him from behind, and the two of them punched and kicked at the coach repeatedly until torn away by security. The father (William Ligue) pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated battery and his son also pleaded guilty. Mr. Ligue has been arrested on other occassions (domestic abuse), and has been sued for failing to make child support payments. He was unemployed at the time of the incident. He was given probation. He is white.

In April of this year, Umpire Laz Diaz was attacked from behind by a fan at the same ballpark in April. Eric Dybas, 24, has pleaded innocent to one count of felony aggravated battery and one count of misdemeanor criminal trespass in the case, and he free on bail, as his case is still pending. Mr. Dybas has been unemployed since last December and his mother describes him as having "a drinking problem." He is also white.

On May 21st of this year, 26-year old Oscar Villanueva was charged with one count of "unlawful field intrusion." He ran out on the field towards Dodgers left fielder Brian Jordan with one hand extended, as if to shake hands, before being tackled from behind by rookie outfielder Jason Romano. He never reached Jordan, and he never struck anyone.

The wheels of justice turned a little faster and harder for Mr. Villanueva, however. For going on to the field, Mr. Villanueva has been sentenced to 30 days in jail, to be followed by 30 days serving on a Caltrans work crew (which should help him find a new job, since he'll probably be fired from the factory where he is gainfully employed). He will then be enjoined from entering Dodger Stadium for three more years, and is likewise barred from approaching Jordan (a penalty that makes no sense, since Jordan requested no such restraining order observing "I knew he didn't mean any harm," and is, in fact, out for the season with a knee injury).

Mr. Villanueva is not white. But I'm sure that had nothing to do with anything.

So in the past few days, several people have mentioned to me the 404: Weapons of Mass Destruction Not Found site. I've received emails, people have told me about it. It's a pretty funny site, and it was when I blogged about it back in early April. So why is everyone telling me about it now?

Aside from the Dockers and the Jersey plates, they have to contend with self-righteous left-wingers plastering their behemoths with anti-SUV bumper stickers. Well, they're not gonna take it anymore. They've formed SUV Owners of America.

Their first ad, which appears in USA Today, is a play off of the What Would Jesus Drive? campaign. I could only find it reproduced in this NYT article, but it says "What Would Jesús Drive?" and it has a picture of this dude, Jesús Rivera, who drives an SUV.

It's sort of amusing, but the SUVOA aren't addressing the real issues. For example, they have a long series of statistics about how safe SUVs are, based on fatalities of SUV passengers. Yeah, but what if the SUVs kill everybody else? They make no attempt to address accident outcomes for the passengers of ordinary cars that have the misfortune to tangle with SUVs. Then weirder yet, they have a long explanation of how fun SUVs are. Sure, but is the fun worth the damage to the environment?

I guess I shouldn't expect deep conversation about those issues from that crowd--if they cared, they'd've bought hybrids instead. And if they want to have a group to support each other through all the social problems that SUV-owning has caused, I guess that's their watch.

ishbadiddle: today i got on the bus
ishbadiddle: and sat next to Comic Book Guy
ishbadiddle: i swear, he was straight out of the Simpsons
molanphy: "Worst...bus ride...ever..."?
ishbadiddle: he just started talking to me about the Spider-Man novel he was reading
molanphy: So was he portly, goateed and withering in his criticism of pop-culture ephemera?
ishbadiddle: yes, yes, and yes
molanphy: WOW!
molanphy: Not every day you meet the living embodiment of a Springfield resident.
molanphy: scary
ishbadiddle: told me the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wasn't worth watching
molanphy: Well, to be fair, my skinny, un-goateed, uncynical friend Ed told me the same thing.
ishbadiddle: scary thing was, I could talk to him about comic books for at least 10 minutes
ishbadiddle: we reminisced over "Splinter of the Minds' Eye"
molanphy: BTW, among friends, you can refer to the flick as LXG. ;-)
ishbadiddle: yeah, well, I knew the comic book first!
ishbadiddle: thanks to Ennis
molanphy: So you're basically saying that, minus the girth, goatee and heavy cynicism, you are basically part of the CBG brethren?
ishbadiddle: hmmm....
ishbadiddle: more like I can grok their lingo
ishbadiddle: including use of the word "grok"
molanphy: :-D indeed
ishbadiddle: well i was going to blog on the incident, but i may as well just cut and paste this IM, with your permission of course
ishbadiddle: making me a meta-geek or something

Finally, an ergonomic keyboard for pirates.

In her column yesterday, normally steely White House press corps veteran Helen Thomas drops her guard and salutes the departing Ari Fleischer, saying he's been "no slouch as a slugger in defense of Dubya." Say that phrase to yourself a couple of times. It has a lovely music to it, and the music I hear is hiphop. Rap from the mouths of establishment figures has been both a comedy warhorse and a CNN marketing directive, but isn't it great when it just happens?

Sometimes I'm not so into atrios--mostly since he started selling ads and his page stopped loading well in Mozilla--but today, he (actually guest-poster Lambert) is sublime. He cuts right through the BS on Tenet and points out why his taking the fall--and yes, Virginia, that's what it is--is just another lie. Consider this article on MSNBC (from this atrios post):

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other officials asserted this week that the president's statement was justified at the time because the CIA cleared the address in its entirety, including the uranium claim. They said the CIA never told the White House that the claim was suspicious.
But U.S. officials told NBC News' Andrea Mitchell that Tenet himself advised Rice's top deputy, Steven Hadley, to remove a reference to the uranium report from a speech Bush delivered Oct. 7 in Cincinnati, establishing that the nation's top intelligence officials suspected that the allegation was false more than three months before they approved Bush's repeating it in his nationally televised address on Jan. 28.

That's THREE MONTHS before the State of the Union. Are they lying or incompetent? Well, both, probably, but certainly lying their heads off. The article goes on to point out this story in the Washington Post that states

The CIA tried unsuccessfully in early September 2002 to persuade the British government to drop from an official intelligence paper a reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa that President Bush included in his State of the Union address four months later, senior Bush administration officials said yesterday.

So, excuse me, that's FOUR MONTHS with a month-later follow up. This raises some important questions: this atrios entry points to a Newsweek article where those very questions are raised:

Claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from the African country of Niger wasn't a judgment call. By the White House's own admission, it was a fraud, a lie. The envoy sent to investigate the intelligence in February 2002, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, sought out the information and informed the administration. The only question is how high up the food chain his report got. Did it stop at low-level officials as the White House claims, or did it go all the way to the president and vice president?
Wilson is not some wild-eyed lefty. He had experience in Iraq and North Africa, and completely understood his mission. He only revealed his identity a week ago in the face of continued insistence by the White House that it had no idea the documents were forged. CIA director George Tenet sent Wilson to Niger after Vice President Cheney asked for an investigation. Wilson asks why Cheney's office would demand this inquiry and not want to know the result. If Bush really was misled, wouldn't he want to know who embarrassed him? Who made him a liar? In a White House as obsessed with loyalty as this one, the fact that no heads rolled strongly indicates this could go all the way to Cheney, if not to Bush himself. Who knows how much Cheney tells the boss. Bush is not a detail guy. He may not have wanted to know.

For more on this story, check out TPM

This story should be getting much more press than its getting. Turns out that many electronic voting machines will be put into place as a result of the "Help America Vote" legislation, requiring states to update their machines by 2006. Bev Harris has done an analysis of how a Diebold voting machine counts votes--there are 3 databases of vote totals, only one of which counts the votes as they were cast. And the entire database is in Microsoft Access, software that is notoriously vulnerable to security attacks. Here's an exerpt--they couldn't have made a more diabolical system if they tried. Or did they try?

For both optical scans and touch screens operating using Diebold election systems, the voting system works like this:

Voters vote at the precinct, running their ballot through an optical scan, or entering their vote on a touch screen.

After the polls close, poll workers transmit the votes that have been accumulated to the county office. They do this by modem.

At the county office, there is a "host computer" with a program on it called GEMS.

GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger. But then, we found, it makes another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it makes yet a third vote ledger with another copy.

The Elections Supervisor never sees these three sets of books. All she sees is the reports she can run: Election summary (totals, county wide) or a detail report (totals for each precinct). She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden.

And here is what is quite odd: On the programs we tested, the Election summary (totals, county wide) come from the vote ledger 2 instead of vote ledger 1.

Now, think of it like this: You want the report to add up ONLY the ACTUAL votes. But, unbeknownst to the election supervisor, votes can be added and subtracted from vote ledger 2, so that it may or may not match vote ledger 1. Her official report comes from vote ledger 2, which has been disengaged from vote ledger 1.

If she asks for a detailed report for some precincts, though, her report comes from vote ledger 1. Therefore, if you keep the correct votes in vote ledger 1, a spot check of detailed precincts (even if you compare voter-verified paper ballots) will always be correct.

. A quick read of news stories on the subject shows that most coverage is about how "modern" these systems are and how quickly they return results. But is the point of a voting machine to give results quickly, or accurately? And when did we start caring about waiting a little longer when so much is at stake?

For more information on this, check out slashdot's string of comments. And thanks to atrios for the link.

Apparently the "heat of summer" is indeed too much for some baseball players. In the cool clime of Milwaukee, there is a traditional pasttime that takes place between the sixth and seventh innings: Sausage racing.

Yes, each night, four brave men and women don oversized sausage costumes and race around the bases. This has been done for many years, and usually goes off without incident. Until last night. The race was being run as normal, and it was shaping up to be a barn-burner. On the crucial final leg of the race (the stretch between third base and home), the hot dog and the Italian sausage were . . . uh . . . "neck and neck." Suddenly, from the visiting dugout, Pittsburgh Pirates backup third baseman Randall Simon took a two-handed chop at the back of the Italian sausage with a baseball bat. Down went the sausage, followed quickly by the hot dog. The beneficiary? The bratwurst, who won an easy victory.

Why did Simon attack the sausage? And why from behind? And with a bat? Did he have money on the bratwurst? We may never know. Simon was booked on misdemeanor battery (no pun intended, and I'm not making that up). The woman in the sausage suit? She is no wurst for the wear (o.k., so pun intended that time).

Before you ask, I do not know the nature of the fourth sausage. A slim jim perhaps?

Baseball manager Dusty Baker has announced that black and hispanic players hold up better under the heat of summer:

"It's easier for most Latin guys and it's easier for most minority people because most of us come from heat. You don't find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Right?" he said with a chuckle.

"We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn't that history? Weren't we brought over because we could take the heat?"

"Your skin color is more conducive to heat than it is to the lighter-skinned people. I don't see brothers running around burnt," Baker said before the Cubs beat St. Louis at Wrigley. "That's a fact. I'm not making this up. I'm not seeing some brothers walking around with some white stuff on their ears and noses."

Given a chance to "clarify" his statement, he added: "I meant what I said. ... I try to be as honest as possible, and if that's how I feel, then that's how I feel."

Racist? Or a simple honest observation about the genetic/racial differences between blacks, hispanics and whites?

It, of course, brings back memories of Al Campanis (General Manager of the L.A. Dodgers in 1987), when he discussed the lack of black managers at the major league level by explaining, "I don't believe it's prejudice. I truly believe that they (blacks) may not have some of the necessities to be, let's say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager."

As with Baker, the interviewer gave him a chance to retract his statement, but Al continued, "Well, I don't say that all of them, but they certainly are short (in mental ability). How many quarterbacks do you have? How many pitchers do you have that are black?"

We all agree that Campanis was racist. He was drawing a general conclusion about the abilities of an entire racial group based on conclusory statements and on specious "evidence." Baker's case though, is totally different, right? I mean, it is, isn't it? Somebody? Anybody?

Debbie sent this one over the wire:

THANK GOODNESS THE CIA WAS THERE TO PROTECT SANTA CLAUS From the Ottawa Citizen (June 30, 2003):

One of the CIA's deepest and darkest secrets -- a classified report about a plot by the "Ebenezer Scrooge" terrorist group to attack Santa Claus and his reindeer -- has finally been revealed after almost 30 years.

Remember:

The right to keep secrets
Is the right to be free

Lady Liberty has an important message for you -- but you'll need this to read it.

"He loves BBQ. He was raised Baptist." -- Liz

The good folks at Spinsanity show that Ann Coulter has hit a new low:

In short, Ann Coulter has once again revealed herself as one of the most destructive forces in American politics, repeatedly making outrageously irrational arguments and demonstrably false claims. Treason is the culmination of a dismaying trend toward factually misleading and inflammatory books from pundits such as Michael Moore, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. These authors may delight partisans and make their publishers rich, but their work impoverishes our political discourse.

Ed Anger of the Weekly World News makes more sense than Coulter.

ishbadiddle: so did you get the new Liz Phair? I did.
molanphy: U like?
ishbadiddle: so far
ishbadiddle: it's no Whip-Smart, but...
molanphy: And it's DEFINITELY no Exile...
molanphy: I think it sounds sorta "samey"
ishbadiddle: all the songs sound the same?
molanphy: Yeah, kinda.
molanphy: Catherine and I were discussing -- we like the second half better than the first.
ishbadiddle: i think "Little Digger" is v. good divorce song
molanphy: And our fave track might be "H.W.C." :-)
ishbadiddle: But no "Divorce Song"
molanphy: Exactly.
ishbadiddle: oh yeah, HWC is great
ishbadiddle: i think "Favorite" is pretty good too.
molanphy: The one I'm not so crxzy about is the single, "What Can't I," written by the Matrix people (cf. Avril Lavigne). It
molanphy: It's like they re-wrote "Complicated."
ishbadiddle: right
molanphy: U can practically sing the words to "Comp" to the Phair song
ishbadiddle: of course, you can also sing the theme song to Gilligan's Island to "Stairway to Heaven"
molanphy: :-D true
ishbadiddle: so, can I post this chat as a review?
molanphy: Sure! Jeez, maybe I should do more blog reviews this way. Much, much quicker.