Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

I just read an article from the Associated Press which read nothing like what I heard from the hosts of this mornings Talk Shows, who — apart from Fox News Sunday’s Tony Snow spoke of how horribly things were going in Iraq. Read the story, linked below.

Here are a few paragraphs from the piece:

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority said Najaf Governor Haider Mehadi asked the FBI to join Iraqi police in the investigation, and that the American investigators would be traveling to Najaf shortly.

And this:

He [Maj. Rick Hall, spokesman for the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines] said U.S. forces had two men in custody that were handed to them by Iraqi authorities. ‘’We are questioning them, but we are leaning toward releasing them,'’ Hall said, adding that the involvement of al-Qaida members in the Friday explosion was ‘’an option we are looking at.'’

Hall denied reports that the Marines would patrol around the mosque, citing Islamic sensitivities to having non-Muslims in or around the country’s holiest Shiite shrine. He said U.S. forces had offered Marine patrols of the area to the interim Governing Council in Baghdad and religious leaders in Najaf. An answer was expected in the next day or two, he said.

And this:

A day before the bombing, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said mobilizing the Iraqi militia rather than bringing in more U.S. or coalition troops to Iraq was the key to stabilizing the security situation in the country.

Our political leaders and military leaders seem to be doing a fine job.

The AP piece is here: Boston.com / Latest News / World / Najaf calls for FBI help in bomb investigation, 300,000 mourners march from Baghdad. It was written by someone named Tarek Al-Issawi, with the assistance of Associated Press correspondents Sameer N. Yacoub and D’Arcy Doran in Baghdad. The Dems looks like their about to run out of traction on this one soon. And when David Kay’s report is released next month, the snaping could become even more cheap, the vitriol screamed in an even higher register.

The unimportant AP story from Sunday, August 31 can be found HERE. It deals with international interest in the California Recall, but it contains these paragraphs:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican front-runner, has dominated the world’s headlines, though the most recent poll shows him far behind the leading Democratic hopeful in the Oct. 7 recall.

The new poll, conducted by the Los Angeles Times, has Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante with 35 percent support among likely voters, compared with 22 percent for Schwarzenegger.

Remember, this story was published today (August 31). This “new” Los Angeles Times poll was released a week ago, on Sunday, August 24. The poll was finished a full ten days ago, on August 21, which is two days before candidate Bill Simon decided he was no longer running.

The results of the week old Times poll were far out of synch with those of every poll taken previous to it, and also with every poll taken since. As reported here and in the RSN, the poll was pulled out of a punctured hat.

This old poll was cited on this morning’s Talk Shows — This Week and Late Edition in particular — as proof positive that Cruz Bustamante was leading Schwarzenegger. “The latest major poll,” it was called. If the Times poll is the only major poll, and it still has merit a week after its release, the Schwarzenegger should have been leading in last week’s Times poll. He was leading a week before that.

Some people love their illusions.

California Governor Joe Davis was brought in to campaign on ABC’s This Week with former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos this morning. It was uneventful, as Davis is not a politically “happenin’ dude,” to use someone’s parlance.

Steph asked Davis if he would be willing to accept any blame for the recall. Of course not. Davis remarked that when things are going well, he receives to much credit — poorly, he takes too much blame. The recall, he said, was on the ballot because the Republicans lost the election last November and wanted to cheat their way into office.

He talked about a vast right wing conspiracy, but he specifically pointed out that most of the Californians who signed the petitions were not parts of that conspiracy. Rather, he said, they were duped by Darrell Issa and his money. “If you spend $3-million, you can get practically anything on the ballot.” (Issa actually spent less that $1.5-million, but Davis is inventive.)

He rejected talk of tax cuts, saying that in good times, excess revenue should be put in an account as a “buffer” for when bad times hit. This is one of the most immoral things a government can do. To confiscate money simply to stash it aside to spend later is criminal. People should be taxed only enough to cover the costs of the legitimate functions of a government. Any more is theft.

He talked of the Indian gamblers I wrote about earlier, and he clarified Gambling tribes would only be advising him. “My whole life, I’ve sought advice.” He reassured that no one from the Gambling tribes would sit on the commission and that “I will make the final judgment.” (Which he might have already made. Google infomrs me that The Final Judgment is a 1997 movie featuring MTV cartoon clowns “Beavis and Butthead.”)

Asked by Steph if he would debate Arnold, Davis said that he was “keeping his options open.” The two are not running against each other, and Schwarzenegger would be a insane to accept the offer. Unless he finds himself trailing Bustamante.

He told Steph: “I’m not going to resign, no.” He credited his wife Karen, who “brought me back to God,” Who has a plan for him. God may also have a plan for Schwarzenegger or for Republican State Senator Tom McClintock, who looks to be the conservative in the race. Unless he looks like he has a chance to win, we might see some California conservatives with clothes-pins on their noses as they leave the booth after voting for Schwarzenegger.

McClintock did assert that he has raised more money over the Internet of late than has Howard Dean.

That’s that, and if you want to read the Rightsided Newsletter, visit the new web site: Rightsided Newsletter.

There was something interesting about the poll use on this morning’s Talk Shows. More on that later.

My listserv usually lets me get away with about 2,000 words in the Rightsided Newsletter, and today’s went to about 2,130 (even leaving out the Davis material which I’ll put in here later). My first attempt was sent back to me with an admonition about sending excessively lengthy material, so I excised the short paragraph from the “THE REST…” potpourri section.

On Fox News Sunday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Dick Lugar (R-Illinois) expressed some additional interesting sentiments. On the House of Saud’s enigmatic relationship with Osama bin Laden, the chairman offered: “The Saudis, in their own pragmatic way, have dealt with it.” Asked if he thought the House of Saud had knowledge of al Qaeda’s ongoing operations, Lugar said: “I believe they do.” On North Korea, he thinks supreme dictator Kim Chong-il might take this to war, but he did qualify: “I don’t think that he will, but I think that he’ll continue his nuclear program.” Later on FNS, former Clinton U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was confident that Kim would not dare move to war. He knows we have too many forces and too much force in on the peninsula and in the region to try anything so stupid. The Bush Administration seems to think the same thing, given the difference in the U.N. treatment of Saddam versus that of North Korea. The North Koreans have a different agenda.

I’ll post from my notes regarding Steph’s chat with Joe Davis later this afternoon.

Good morning. California Governor Gray Davis and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante have received more that $1-million in campaign contributions from Indian-run casino businesses since 1999. Davis, pandering for votes as payback, has proposed to give members of the tribes a key role in selecting members of the California Gambling Control Commision:
Yahoo! News - Gov. Davis Defends Offer to Calif. Tribes

We are looking for good people with regulatory experience,” Davis told reporters Saturday after recording a Labor Day radio address in West Hollywood. “I think it’s perfectly appropriate

Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a written statement:

It puts both the commission and the gaming tribes in a very bad position, creating potential questions of conflict and undermining the vital credibility of the commission itself

The analogy in my headline is flawed, of course. It’s not the drunks who would be running the “liquor control board (lcb)” — California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. It would be the large liquor companies, “Big Booze.”
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I will report back after the Talk Shows.

Mullah Omar, with the title Amir-ul-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful) was the man who presided over the Taliban and Afghanistan while Osama bin Laden and his Qaeda trained to overthrow governments of infidels. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was putting together that evening’s Rightsided Newsletter, reading a story about Clinton speaking in Australia about Afghan refugees washing ashore on their islands. I had just finished a sentence about the “harsh reign of Mullah Omar” when my wife called up telling me to turn on CNN. I turned on Fox.

There was some doubt, within Afghanistan and without, if there really were a Mullah Omar. Few were granted an audience with the man, said to suffer seizures from shrapnel lodged in his brain while fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. The theory went that he was a facade created by the Taliban to frighten the citizenry of tribal Afghanistan.

After the war, the media asked: “Where’s Osama bin Laden, huh?” Few wondered about Mullah Omar, and I thought that maybe, if he really were extant, he crawled off somewhere and died of injuries sustained in the war.

U.S. troops are busy routing the few thousand Taliban who trying to resume power in that gawdforsaken country, and there was a rumor that Mullah Omar was one of them. Here’s this from Reuters in which someone claims that he is somewhere else: Taliban Deny Mullah Omar at Scene of Fighting .

I have a special e-mail address set up at which I receive the e-mails the Dem campaigns send to their Internet audiences, and I noticed a notable bit from the Kucinich campaign today.

Imagine
Imagine the current presidential campaign without candidate Kucinich.
Some might find it pretty depressing. With Howard Dean saying that
universal health coverage is “tilting at windmills.” With Dick
Gephardt and others still supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Thanks to Kucinich, the Democratic debate is broadening. Everywhere he
goes, we see mainstream media headlines like these from recent days:
“Kucinich: Less Soldiers, More Schools”
“Kucinich Campaigns for Universal Health Care”
“Kucinich Says Blackout a Symptom of Problems Caused by Deregulation”

I don’t remember those headlines, or much of anything about Kucinich really, but it is literally a campaign for a social-democrat — if not almost outright socialist — state. He knows he cannot win, so he is not running to the left in hopes thereof. Is he running to pull the party to the Left where he resides? He couldn’t be. Before he began this quixotiic campaign, he stood against partial birth abortions (he skipped the House vote rather than break ranks with the House Dem caucus in 2002) and homosexual marriages. Maybe he likes being Dennis Kucinich and believes everyone else should also be thrilled with that fact.

I will give him this much: both his father and my maternal grandfather were born in Croatia. For what that’s worth.
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Tomorrow afternoon, I send out the free Rightsided Newsletter Sunday Edition. This is the one which covers what was said on the morning’s public affairs Talk Shows — Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday, Face the Nation, This Week, and Late Edition. If you don’t now subscribe, you ought to. Try it out. Click this — RSN-Subscribe@Topica.com — to send a blank e-mail, and you’re set. Better yet, visit the new web site — http://rightsided.tripod.com/. (It’s linked on the right of this page.)

This is from a piece in todays OpinionJournal.com, the Editorial Page of the Wall Street Journal’s web site: Hillary Confesses. Last week, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton stood on the steps of the New York City Hall to blast the Bush Administration over a report from the inspector general of the Environmental Protection agency alleging that the Administration convinced the EPA to issue reports claiming that the air quality in lower Manhatten after September 11 was better than it actually was. Hillary was certain the Administration had covered up the actual air quality.

She said: “What transpired in the White House? I know a little bit about how White Houses work. I know somebody picked up a phone, somebody got on a computer, somebody sent an e-mail, somebody called for a meeting, somebody, probably under instructions from somebody further up the chain, told the EPA, ‘Don’t tell the people of New York the truth,’ and I want to know who that is.”

If you want to see a video stream of Hillary speaking those words, visit THIS PAGE ON THE NY1 WE SITE. The clip is 2:40 long, with Ms. Clinton’s admission beginning at 1:12 and ending at 1:34 of the clip. Warning: She seems pretty upset when accusing the Bush White House of doing what she and her husband did for eight years.

That is how things were handled in the Clinton White House, anyway. She has admitted that they routinely lied to cover up their misdeeds. How many of those phone calls she described did she herself make? Did Vince Foster answer?

From the OpinionJournal piece:

This, of course, comes from the same woman who as First Lady thought it understandable that her long-subpoenaed records could suddenly materialize in a room right next to her White House study. “I think people need to understand that there are millions of pieces of paper in the White House,” she told Barbara Walters at the time, “and for more than two years now people have been diligently searching.”

Recall that she also dismisses the collection of hundreds of FBI files of Bush and Reagan appointees as a “bureaucratic snafu” by innocent newcomers “who did not recognize the mistake.” And who can forget her classic disavowal of any responsibility for the sacking of staffers in the White House Travel Office?

Some people still take this woman seriously as a possible Presidential candidate, in 2004 or 2008. I think she will be fortunate to keep her Senate seat in 2006 against a strong Republican challenger. (Yes, my thinking includes, but is not limited to, Rudy Giuliani.)

The magazine was called Oui, and it was something published by Hugh Hefner, the septuagenarian with the teenagers, the bathrobes, and lifestyle problems. A 29-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger (AS) was interviewed by the magazine as a promotion for the pop documentary Pumping Iron, and he said some ’70s-style things. His current explanation? “I never lived my life to be a politician. I never lived my life to be the governor of California. Obviously, I’ve made statements that were ludicrous and crazy and outrageous and all those things, because that’s the way I always.”

A transcript of the interview, courtesy of SmokingGun.com, can be found by clicking HERE. I do not recommend the interview to anyone, really, as AS us very casual about the whole thing. He’s very matter-of-fact when speaking about the blasé sexual attitudes in his gyms and at his muscle competitions in the 1970s, so it’s a somewhat disturbing interview in that respect, but at least he’s glib.

The Washington Post article concerning it — Schwarzenegger Gave Racy Interview in ‘77: California Candidate Admitted Smoking Marijuana and Engaging in Group Sex — dwells on little parts of the interview, ones that might not strike you as important.

For instance, Post staff writer Rene Sanchez stresses that Schwarzenegger refers to homosexual as “fags.” But AS did not do so in a pejorative way, saying that men “shouldn’t feel like fags just because they want to have nice-looking bodies. … Gay people are fighting the same kind of stereotyping that bodybuilders are: People have certain misconceptions about them just as they do us.” Very matter-of-fact about it.

The part of the interview which struck me as curious was at the end of the first page/beginning of the second. He speaks of being a 15-year-old and having a vision of himself on a stage in a bodybuilding competition, “standing there, posing and winning.” He compared it to a “vision–you know, like when you hear a person say, ‘I saw Jesus and he talked to me, and now I’m so happy with life because I know I’m going to be taken care of,’ and all of a sudden he’s relaxed, he’s not haunted anymore–well, it was like that.” He did not by any means say that Jesus told him that he would on day be “perfectly pumped”; rather, he’s claiming a epiphany, a life-defining moment. Not bad for a fifteen-year-old.

Most of the interview is about bodybuilding and training, with a few quips about “I might as well find somebody and..” He was talking about the world in which he, AS, lived at the time. It wasn’t about marijuana and group sex.

Will this affect the outcome of the race? He’s never claimed to be something that he’s not, or to have been something that he wasn’t. Would it affect my won vote if I had one in this race? No. When it comes to elections and the big picture, I’m a Republican. The best work for conservatives and libertarians, I think, is within the party structure.

BBC NEWS | UK | UK ‘10th on terror target list’

The London-based World Markets Research Centre [sic] is, to hear them tell it, “a leading global provider of business-critical information and is relied on by thousands of executives in hundreds of multinational corporations, financial institutions and governments across the world.” The produced a list of the countries most at resk for terrorist strikes.

Risk assessments for terrorism were carried out in 186 sovereign states and against countries’ overseas interests for the next 12 months.

Countries were given points out of 10 for five risk criteria - the motivation, capabilities and presence of terrorist groups, the potential scale of the damage and the effectiveness of counter-terrorism forces.

The Top 10 were:

1. Colombia
2. Israel
3. Pakistan
4. United States
5. Philippines
6. Afghanistan
7. Indonesia
8. Iraq
9. India
10. UK
10. Sri Lanka

We could argue their rankings, but we’re not a leading global provider of business-critical information which is relied on by thousands of executives, etc.

The BBC reports that US ‘pleased’ at N Korea talks. The six nations — North Korea, South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) — left the Beijing talks with a promise to meet again — somewhere and at some time.

Pyongyang, through its KCNA news service, evoked belligerence after the talks, angrily taking the United States to task for not being nice to them and accepting their “package of solutions” to the crisis. From the BBC:

This reportedly included:

A US-North Korean non-aggression treaty
Diplomatic relations
Inter-regional economic co-operation

In return for:

Not making nuclear weapons and allowing inspections
The dismantling of nuclear facilities
An end to testing and exporting missiles

They screwed us last time, so perhaps they think they can dupe us again. They should by now understand that we, unlike in their dismal system. change leaders.

extortion

1. The act of extorting; the act or practice of wresting anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any undue exercise of power; undue exaction; overcharge.

It’s tragic, in a comic way, how they stomp around now that this no longer achieves their goals.

(Tuesday.) As part of their ongoing effort to be taken seriously, the National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) through their political action committee, Women’s Equality Day, has endorsed the candidacy of former Illinois Senator Carol Mosley Braun for the Democrat Presidential nomination: NOW/PAC Endorses Carol Moseley Braun for President.

To receive NOW/PAC’s endorsement, a candidate must demonstrate an uncompromising commitment to the entire range of women’s rights issues.

If they thought a Democrat were electable, they would back him.

Important to note, though, is that many Democrats — including all considered to be major contenders for the Dem nomination — stayed away from the race in 1992, intimidated by the elder President Bush’s hot ratings in national surveys. That being said, we have a war going on. The dynamic is very, very different this time.

Sky News is an independent television news netork. the British partner of America’s Fox News. They are both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. And this is from their web site this afternoon: Hillary to Run in 2004

The American press hasn’t touched this, not even the Newsmax.com crowd.

Her rethink has been prompted by the sudden drop in support for President George Bush, whose problems in Iraq and with the economy have made him look vulnerable, according to veteran US political commentator Richard Reeves.

Reeves is the lefty Presidential biographer.

Here’s Rush Limbaugh on this: Hillary Mulls Run If Bush Looks Beatable. Limbaugh concludes:

The Clintons are going to come in and take over this race as they’ve taken over their party. You’re going to need caskets to bury all the political careers in Fort Marcy Park before they’re done. These people are - politically speaking, of course, now lighten up - not going to let a Democrat win this election. It’s a no-brainer. If it looks like Bush can be beaten, Hillary is in. I don’t think they’re going to conclude that Bush can lose, but they’re not going to let Howard Dean or John F. Kerry get into the Big Chair if they think that chair is to be had. You heard it here first, folks.

Limbaugh’s take is more realistic, but the Democrat Party is not the Clintons’ club anymore. It hasn’t been for quite some time. The Clintons might like to think so, and it would be a great rallying cry for Republicans. But I am a Republican that is not heartened when some in my party think that they’re still running against the Clintons. Those two miscreants have an image operating in the mythological realm.

Do the rank-and-file Democrats think they can win? Despite the Sky News noise above, the President is solid. They might choose Hillary as a better liberal lout than Howard Dean, but that’s not why she would run. She has to perceive not only that President Bush can be defeated, but also that she can win. Even if she believes the former, she will see that the numbers do not add up for the latter. She’s a certain loser, and she knows it. (Does anyone realistically trust her to fight and win the war on terror? That was a rhetorical question.)

Hillary will not run — in 2004 or 2008.
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NOTE, FROM ABCNEWS.com:

“I am absolutely ruling it out,” Clinton said during a visit to the New York State Fair in Syracuse, N.Y. She had insisted in recent months that she will not consider entering the race for president this year even if that is what some Democrats want.

She’s not going to run, now or in 2008. Get over it.

Some things latch onto my consciousness and refuse to dislodge until I scribble them. It can be considered interesting stuff to some, I suppose.

Arnold on the Issues
California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Scharzenegger was on the phone with Sean Hannity’s radio program, and Hannity took the time to ask him the “How do you feel about…” questions which are good for giving one a general idea of how a candidate purports to feel. The call was simulcast by FNC, and the Fox story can be found HERE

The Republican said he is in favor of legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes, abortion rights, an assault-weapons ban and background checks on gun purchases. He said he is opposed to offshore drilling, gay marriage and granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants

Schwarzenegger described himself to Hannity as “pro-choice” but said he did not support late-stage procedures described as “partial-birth” abortions

Schwarzenegger favors domestic partnerships but not homosexual marriage, parental notifications for abortions unless the State determines that the family has problems, letting illegal immigrants already here stay here but leaving the rest to the federal government.

The site even has vid.

Al Gore’s New Career

Alexander Bolton offers insight into Al Gore’s psyche in a piece in The Hill newspaper: Gore’s new role is old standard. The piece begins:

Former Vice President Al Gore’s New York speech attacking the Bush administration last week is being taken as a signal that he intends to follow in the footsteps of Adlai Stevenson and William Jennings Bryan and become the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party.

By both ruling himself out of contention in the 2004 presidential race — from which he withdrew last December — and at the same time presenting himself as the authoritative voice of opposition, Gore is aggressively reviving a political role that faded out of fashion in the ’60s.

Retrograde Al, working on being the next Stevenson and Bryan. Those two historical footnotes, though, were known for the soaring oratory. Gore sounds like the English-language voice on an audiotape English course for Hungarians.

He wants to be the Democrats’ elder statesmen, and he is a caustic political pipsqueak. If Gore is their accepted elder statesman, listened to by them with respect, the Democrats are the party of division. But that much was clear anyway.

White Males Donate the Political World

This is from Tuesdays USA Today (via Yahoo News): Most Political Donors are White Males.

A growing body of research confirms that political donors are disproportionately white and male and a new law that increases the amounts they can give is expected to magnify their clout.

Later, there’s this:

“White males, particularly those involved in business, have more disposable income to invest in politics and are more likely to see returns from those investments,” says Paul Herrnson, a University of Maryland political scientist. He and a team of colleagues are publishing a book this fall that examines the donor class. The authors predict that the new law governing campaign contributions, which doubles the limit for individual contributors to $2,000 per election, will increase their political influence. Because donors tend to be more conservative and business-oriented than the population as a whole, Republican candidates also are likely to be advantaged, Herrnson says.

They want all federal political campaigns to be publicly funded, a system in which the federal government would give each candidate seeking federal office a sum of money to spend. One can assume that this applies only to Republicans and Democrats, not to Libertarians or Greens.

Socializing the electoral process is sick. Your money will go not to the candidate whom you support, but to the general fund to be given to people who would govern in ways which could be antithetical to your own convictions.

Last June 17, Massachusettes Governor Mitt Romney overhauled his states affirmative action schemes by executive order. According to today’s Boston Globe, however, Romney says he will alter diversity plan.

The June 17 order removed hiring freezes and annyong supervision for departments that don’t meet the State’s arbitrary affirmative action quotas, among other things. It also stopped requring mandatory diversity training programs for workplaces. These regulations, in large part, dated back to the administration of Governor Michael Dukakis, but states tend to cling to such things for fear of incurring the political (and media) wrath of those who bunfairly benefit from them.

Now, after great gobs of name-callng and accusations galore, Massachusetts’s chief human resources officer has insisted that the regs are coming back in revised form after Romney’s 15-member Governor’s Diversity and Equal Opportunity Advisory Council — which, by the June 17 excutive order, replaced the Office of Affirmative Action — meets next month. The article quotes Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner:

“This is a very poor way to go about changing a major policy issue,” Turner said. “If he has a commitment to do good, he should bring back the executive orders that he revoked and make changes within the context of what is already placed there … over the last 30 years, rather than eliminating the framework and adding details as it gets requested. Otherwise, I think it’s double-talk.”

Ruth Bramson the chief human resource officer quoted above, countered:

“We felt it was time to update the order, and the best way to do that was to create a brand new one,” Bramson said. “We [wanted to] make diversity much more of a modernized concept in the state. We didn’t see the executive order as a statement of the policy. It was meant to be a statement of philosophy, and a commitment that would guide us in writing guidelines and policies.”

So, we have one side which favors the status quo, the rules how they had been for two decades. This is regardless of the fact that if those old rules had worked, they would no longer be needed. They were not doing whatever it was their proponents wanted them to do, so the governor took steps to implement something different.

Actually, it seems that the actual goal of those who seek reinstatement of the old rules if not diversity; rather, they want to preserve and institutional racial bias which favors certain, specific minority groups over everyone else. The old rules were achieving that end, and thus they oppose any change. Massachusetts.

Good morning. Soap Opera writers have intrigued me, the way they are able to seamlessly convolute various plot twists in an almost haphazard way, leaving the individual viewer to grasp at her own resources for plausibility. Are these the writers concocting the plotlines for the Ten Commandments case in Alabama?

Here’s a story: Judge who Removed Ten Commandments Display Will Hear Lawsuit to Return It. Next Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson will hear an appeal of the decision to remove Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s 2.5 ton monument because of the extra-Constitutional “wall of seperation between church and state.” In his thick head, he got the judicially popular notion that the display of an item with religious significance on state property equates with an establishment of a religion by the state.

But with Moore’s rhetoric during this controversy, it can be argued that this is about a quasi-establishment of a religion. He wants them there as a state endorsement of Christianity, which frankly is not going to happen. By making the Commandments his crusade in the terms he’s used, he has only hurt his cause — provided his cause is truly to have the Commandments on display outside the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery.

The latest lawsuit is from a pastor and a Christian radio talk show host, who argue that the removal of the plaque constitutes an arbrogation of their Free Exercise rights, also found in the First Amendment.

This lawsuit had been filed and dismissed in Mobile, Alabama, earlier this week, but supporters thought to try again in federal district court. Said Ben Chavez-Ochoa, council for the two who filed the suit: “I’m very encouraged. I think Judge Thompson will allow this lawsuit to proceed to trial.”

Was the Constitution written in a religious vacuum? No, but that is how various interpreters have transfigured the document. It is not a “living Constitution,” some dynamic instrument which bends with social change. Rather, it is a pen-and-paper contract in which we empower the government to do certain things. Certainly it is to be revered in its wisdom and paucity, and it specifically foresees the need for amdendment from time-to-time, but it cannot become whatever a group of judges, through whim or stare decisis, decide it should be.

Halliburton KBR is one of the finest engineering and construction firms in the world, but Halliburton was once run by Vice President Dick Cheney. There is something somehow obscene to some about awarding no-bid contacts to the most capable company if they operate for a profit.

Read the Washpost: Halliburton’s Deals Greater Than Thought (washingtonpost.com).

The size and scope of the government contracts awarded to Halliburton in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than was previously disclosed and demonstrate the U.S. military’s increasing reliance on for-profit corporations to run its logistical operations. Independent experts estimate that as much as one-third of the monthly $3.9 billion cost of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is going to independent contractors.

Reuters had a slightly different take in their piece: Halliburton Iraq Work Booms but Profits Seen Small.

While the dollar amount of the contracts is large, historically the profits (from) them have been very small,” said Jim Carroll, portfolio manager of the Loomis Sayles Value Fund, which owns shares of Halliburton.

“I don’t know what the situation is in this particular contract, but I think investors have a fair amount of skepticism about hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.”

He added Halliburton’s operating profit margins in the engineering and construction division are generally in the low single digits, as opposed to the low double-digit margins of its larger oilfield services business.

“They’ll be damned lucky to earn 5 percent (of the contract values in profit),” Jim Wicklund, an analyst at Banc of America Securities, noted. He has a “buy” rating on the company and does not own any of its shares.

Private, for-profit firms almost always do superior and more effecient work. The incentive is there. Without the profit, nothing is present to coerce efficiency.

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On a side note, I’ve had a busy afternoon. I did manage, however, to completely redo the Rightsided Newsletter web site. It’s much more civil in appearance. Check it out.

The Foreign Minister of France is the poet Dominique DeVillepin. On Friday, he opined: “The eventual [Iraqi security] arrangements cannot just be the enlargement or adjustment of the current occupation forces. We have to install a real international force under a mandate of the United Nations Security Council.” This begs the question, who is the “we” which the poet believes has to install a real international force? France wants in on the action.

Anyway, today’s Rightsided Newsletter went out to the Inboxes late last night. We talked about the President’s speech in St. Louis, fundraising in California, the AFL-CIO’s bosses backing Davis, and more. If you want to see it, please visit the web site. If you want to subscribe FREE — nothing else attached — visit the RSN web site or send a blank e-mail to RSN-subscribe@topica.com. It is delivered three times each week, including the review of the Sunday Morning Talk Shows.

The French want the United States to importune, with face pointed constantly at the ground, for United Nations assistance in Iraq. This from the Voice of America’s VOA News web page: France: Iraq Needs ‘Real International Force’
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This can be best understood if taken at its simplest terms. France is, rightly or wrongly, frightened of United States dominance in a world without a Soviet Union to hold them the U.S. in check. The French have not yet accepted the notion that they are no longer a major world power. Their importance, such as it is, exists on paper, as through their permanent veto on the United Nations security council.

They believe that there must be a world power to compete with the United States, and they envision that power being a United Europe with France (and Germany, to the extent that the French could control them) at its helm. They also believe that the United States must be opposed in its global decisions, thus to a great extent, their opposition to the war against Saddam was for the sake of opposing. They saw a need to oppose the United States, and they filled it.

The United States rebuilding Iraq on its own is a nightmare to France. They see themselves now as possibly holding all the cards, making demands of the United States in exchange for French help.

This is the situation as I see it. France wants the U.S. to plead for help and to surrender authority, “reminding” it that it is weaker than it thinks it is, that it needs French help. And then France can be a part of the world’s power structure. (The Democrats want the Bush Administration to beg the world for help also for political reasons, this time allowing them points in an election season.)

The President has to remember that American troops are to serve under American commanders only. If other nations wish to have authority in Iraq, let it be proportionate to the money, equipment, and manpower they dedicate to the mission. And let it not include command over U.S. combat soldiers.

Good morning. In his nationally syndicated colum this morning — Spineless Senate GOP no match for Kennedy — Robert Novak indicates that the Senate is run by Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy (D-Massachusetts).

He does not write that Senate Republicans should try to build a bridge to the senior Senator from Massachusetts; rather, he concludes:

The problem with the Senate Republicans is that they seem embarrassed to stand up for their principles, to say hate crimes legislation is political demagoguery and another minimum wage increase is bad economics. That’s why they are having such difficulty in the majority, and that’s why it seems more like Ted Kennedy’s Senate than Bill Frist’s.

In that paragraph, it seems he is using Kennedy more as a symbol for Democrats, which he is, rather than the physical manifestation of operating the Senate, but that’s not the sole case he makes in his column. He has Kennedy largely calling the shots from behind the scenes.

He argues that Sebate Republicans lack the unity to fight Kennedy; Democrats, Zell Miller not included, tend to vote as a single borg, while “[u]p to a half-dozen Republicans break party lines on key votes. Senate.” He attributes Kennedy’s power also to the unwillingness of the Senate GOP to oppose bad legislation with well-coded messages, such as “hate crimes.” Also, he points out, Democrats — Kennedy is the example he cites — tend to cause the Republicans to cower by their sheer verbosity in the face of Republican reluctance.

I’ve received e-mail from frustrated fellow Republicans asking why the Republicans do not simply jettison Senators like Lincoln Chafee (R-Rhode Island), Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania), and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). The answer, they understand, is that without these critters, we have no majority. “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

The Senate GOP needs institutional reforums within its caucus. Now that the mission is the future and the freedom of mankind, to borrow a phrase, it is past time for Republicans to become serious about governing, and to realize that the only way to do that is with a healthy unanimity of purpose.

According to Bloomberg.com, Bush Seeks to Limit Federal Employee Pay Raises to 2 Percent.

The President’s plan would limit some 1.8-million federal government employees’ pay increases to 2 percent next year.

Granting federal employees a larger pay increase would be “inappropriate'’ and “interfere with our nation’s ability to pursue the war on terrorism,'’ Bush said in a letter today to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican. A “national emergency'’ after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks now includes military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.

These foot-soldiers of the bureaucracy reveived pay hikes of 4.1 percent this year, and OMB spokesman Trent Duffy said that he considers the 2 percent “to be a considerable raise given most American workers aren’t seeing these kinds of raises.”

President Bush said in a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert that a larger raise would be “inappropriate” as we conduct a war on terrorism.

He seeks a 4.1 percent increase for members of the military.

If he wants to save money, it is possible to de-hire a several hundred thousand of these people. What do they do that could not be done by another of them or, better, by the private sector?

The LA TIMES poll released Sunday — the one which showed half of Californians opposing recall and Bustamante leading Schwarzenegger by 13 points — had a lot of people scratching their heads, as it was so out of line with other polls taken only days before. A new Survey USA poll, however, takes the numbers back to normal. The Times poll was either invalid or an anomoly.

The new poll, released Wednesday afternoon, asked 591 “certain to vote” Californains if they would vote to Recall Governor Davis. Of the “certain voters” surveyed, 65 percent would vote to oust Davis, while 35 percent want to keep the guy around. To replace him, 45% would choose Schwarzenegger, while 29% back Bustamante.

Which kind of Californians did they survey?

As part of his “Road to Boston” series — so named for the site of the 2004 Democratic National Convention — pollster John Zogby surveyed 501 likely Dem voters in New Hampshire. [Zogby release] The poll, with the results released Wednesday, found that 64 percent of Democrats surveyed thought it somewhat (46%) or very (18%) likely that President Bush would be reelected to a second term. When asked whether it was important to have a candidate who stood up for their beliefs rather than one who could possibly defeat President Bush in 2004, nearly 2/3rds of surveyed Dems preferred a take-no-prisoners Dem to one who was electable.

Their choice? Howard Dean, who grabbed the hypothetical votes of 38 percent of those surveyed. John Kerry, once thought almost a lock on the Granite State, trailed with 17 percent. Lieberman and Gephardt were tied with 6 percent, and the candidate I recommend we watch, John Edwards, pulled the ephemeral votes of 4 percent of those surveyed.

In a similar Zogby poll conducted two months ago, Dean and Kerry were within the margin of error.

The Democrats surveyed in New Hampshire have conceded defeat, but they want to go down screaming.

While rereading the text of the President’s St. Louis speech yesterday in preparation for writing tomorrow’s Rightsided Newsletter, a section caught my eye:

We’ve adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war: We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again.

(APPLAUSE)

We will strike them in their camps or caves or wherever they hide, before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens. We will do everything in our power to deny terrorist weapons of mass destruction before they can commit murder on an unimaginable scale.

That is was from the FDCH e-media transcript, applause notation and all.

From the outset, the Doctrine of Preemption involved hitting terrorists before they attacked us. Now, however, the President is talking about not waiting “for known enemies to strike us again.” He declares: “We will strike them in their camps or caves or wherever they hide, before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens.” [emphasis in both instances mine]

Waiting until after the first attack preempts nothing. This is not preemption.

This piece in this morning’s Los Angeles Times — CRUZ BUSTAMANTE — details how a “legal loophole allows him to exceed the limits on campaign contributions. The conduit is his 2002 reelection committee.”

California’s Fair Political Practices Commission created a loophole by which a candidate can have unlimited contributions to his old campaign committee then roll them over to a new one, thus allowing Bustamante to circumvent the law’s $21,200 contribution limit.

Bustamante has been raising money for his 2002 campaign committee all year, collecting $402,275 from March through July from unions, Indian tribes and corporations.

But the pace quickened after the recall qualified for the ballot on July 24. The next day, Gambro Healthcare, a medical technology company based in Aliso Viejo, gave Bustamante $10,000. In just a month, he raised $390,250 for his old committee.

The largest sums have come from tribes with casino interests, which have been frequent contributors to Bustamante’s campaigns. On July 28, the Viejas tribe in Alpine gave $35,000 to his 2002 committee. Last Friday, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, based in El Cajon, contributed $300,000. A spokesman for the tribe told The Times that Bustamante’s campaign instructed them to place the money in the old account.

California’s Proposition 34 — which forbids old campaign committees from continuing to accept contributions — took effect after Bustamante’s 2002 committee was created. He can do as much of this as he wants.

Someone’s going to rant and curse about big money, etc., and demand that something be done. If Ross Perot were still in the ballgame, he would show up one night, uninvited, on Larry King Live to call it a “pig in a poke, Larry.”

Money used for these purposes is political speech. Some people have more money than others. Some people speak better than others. Some people write better than others. Some people design better yard signs than others. Some people’s opinions have more influence with their friends than others. Shall we distort voices, smash fingers, remove paint brushes, and squelch opinions in the name of populist canniptions?

Good morning. There’s this: WorldNetDaily: Hinckley ready to be sprung. John Hickley shot our fortieth President, Ronald Wilson Reagan, on March 30, 1981. The revolution was scarcely underway, as the President barely begun his third month in office.

How do we seperate emotionalism and thoughts of how different things might be when dealing with the attempted assassination of a President of the United States? (This could have happened to any President. Hinckley was not politically motivated, shooting the President because he hated American or tax cuts. He evidently wanted to get the attention of a movie actress,) But to take the words of his shrinks at the St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital in Washington, DC, Hinckley has been cured of his derangement and is no longer a danger to society.

The murder or attempted murder of a head of state is a grave offense, in that it is not merely a human being who is being targetted but, by proxy, an entire people. This subsumes but surpasses John Hinckley and Ronald Reagan the man.

Opinion warning. John Hinckley should be hanged by the neck until dead. May God have mercy on his soul. Proceed.