Racist Republicans say the darndest things

CNN's Jack Cafferty has a few words about them. Read the rest of this post...

Alabama Democratic Party disqualifies Patricia Todd --and her opponent

Huh?:

A Democratic Party committee has disqualified an openly gay candidate for the Alabama Legislature and the woman she defeated in the primary runoff.

Committee members ruled tonight that both women violated a party rule that party officials say no other candidate has obeyed since 1988.

The committee voted 5-0 to disqualify Patricia Todd and Gaynell Hendricks. Todd was attempting to become the the state's first openly gay legislator.

As usual, Birmingham Blues has the inside scoop. Kathy went to the hearing today and explains the whole process.

The full Democratic Party state committee will make a decision on Saturday. It's a lot simpler if they do the Democratic thing and decide that the person who got the most votes is the winner.

Keep in mind, this is all happening within the confines of the Democratic Party. It's really embarrassing. Doesn't the DNC even try to prevent this kind of inanity?

UPDATE: The NY Times is now covering this Democratic mess in Alabama. It's a national story now... Read the rest of this post...

Several northeastern Republicans distancing themselves from Bush

Run, children, run. Read the rest of this post...

Any Democrats or liberals using the "Democratic" Internet consulting firm EchoDitto?

What's your opinion on John McCain for president?

Markos has more. Read the rest of this post...

From "the wimp factor" to "the idiot factor"

Sidney Blumenthal in Salon:

Because Bush has told the public that Iraq is central to the war on terror, the worse things go in Iraq, the more the public thinks the war on terror is going badly. Asked at his press conference what invading Iraq had to do with Sept. 11, Bush seemed so dumbfounded that at first he answered directly. "Nothing," he said, before sliding into a falsely aggrieved self-defense -- "except for it's part of -- and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack."

Asked about sectarian violence in Iraq, Bush's voice suddenly went passive. "You know, I hear a lot of talk about civil war." Indeed, he might have heard it from his top generals, John Abizaid and Peter Pace, who testified before the Senate on Aug. 3, seriously off-message from Bush's P.R. campaign of relentlessly stressing "victory." As Abizaid said, "Sectarian violence is probably as bad as I have seen it."

Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Has anyone spotted John Mark Karr in the past 10 minutes?!?!?

Just kidding.

This is neither open nor a thread. Discuss. Read the rest of this post...

Pluto is no longer a planet

[Note: this is actually John's post, but he's indisposed and I can't figure out how to make Blogger post it under his handle. Stupid Blogger. But without further ado:]

Galileo is no longer a heretic.

The mission is no longer accomplished.

My world is falling apart. Read the rest of this post...

Republicans want intel on Iran to be scarier

This is one of the most important and interesting articles I've read in a long time. It's already getting some notice, but given my experience in intelligence, there are a few elements I want to highlight.

The article essentially presents the argument as "intelligence officials downplaying the Iran threat" versus "Republicans mad about this fact." That's a mischaracterization. Iran is simply not an imminent threat, nor is it a threat to vital U.S. interests in ways that would necessitate an aggressive response (supporting anti-U.S. terrorist action, for example). For intelligence analysts to state those facts isn't being "gun shy," as Rep. Holt (D-NJ) unfortunately put it, rather it's a simple reflection of accurate assessments based on the facts available. The House intel committee is right to say that we don't have enough information on Iran, but analysts have to work with what they have, not politicized conjecture. There's a difference between connecting and explaining the dots and creating new ones to reach a preordained conclusion.

Further, despite some assumptions to the contrary, intelligence agencies have a natural (and wholly understandable) predisposition towards warning. Rarely do analysts downplay potential problems because there's generally a much higher price to pay for underestimating a threat than overestimating it. Certainly intelligence agencies got Iraq's WMDs wrong, but the march to war was led by political leadership, not by the agencies and certainly not by analysts. On this note, the Times says,

The criticisms do not appear to be focused on any particular agency, like the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency or the State DepartmentÂ?s intelligence bureau, which sometimes differ in their views.

When CIA, DIA, and INR all agree on something -- which, believe me, is rare -- it's not because they've all decided to become crazy peacenik liberals. I mean, seriously.

And why elected officials are so eager to confront (not engage, but confront) Iran is beyond me. It's backwards decision-making again: the conclusion and then cherry-picking evidence to support it. Good for the analysts for resisting this kind of nonsense.

Several intelligence officials said that American spy agencies had made assessments in recent weeks that despite established ties between Iran and Hezbollah and a well-documented history of Iran arming the organization, there was no credible evidence to suggest either that Iran ordered the Hezbollah raid that touched off the recent fighting or that Iran was directly controlling attacks against Israel.

Of course, if you don't like the analysis, you can always come up with a completely and totally absurd counter-argument:

The consensus of the intelligence agencies is that Iran is still years away from building a nuclear weapon. Such an assessment angers some in Washington, who say that it ignores the prospect that Iran could be aided by current nuclear powers like North Korea. "When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: 'If North Korea were to ship them a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?'" said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. "The intelligence community is dedicated to predicting the least dangerous world possible," he said.

That's ludicrous, of course. There's tons of pressure on analysts to predict every kind of possible threat, due to 9/11, and while that has positives and negatives, believe me, nobody in intel is trying to pretend that the world is safer than it is. Added to the obvious fact that there are plenty of people working on the issue of weapons transfer, which is different from development.

The bottom line is, it's not that analysts are trying to downplay the threat of Iran . . . it's that the threat doesn't meet the THEH SCARY!" threshold that these Republicans are hoping for.

As an aside to my broader point, it's worth noting, for pure hilarity, that the House intel report the article cites, aside from being fairly idiotic overall, has an interesting perspective on Iran's missile launch locations. If you scroll down to page 15, you'll see that the report, written by the House committee responsible for intelligence, appears to have the ranges for Iranian missiles (including one that doesn't exist, natch) originating from . . . wait for it . . . Kuwait! Apparently Iran took over Kuwait and nobody even noticed. Read the rest of this post...

Nader fraud

Seriously, it's time for the Green party to get the hell out of here and stop throwing elections to the Republicans. Read the rest of this post...

FDA eases "Plan B" birth control rules

Kind of. I need to hear from the experts on this one to know what this really means. Read the rest of this post...

AT&T; sues cell phone records thieves

Good. And since AT&T; is suddenly so gung-ho about its customers' privacy, now maybe they can tell us if they let the NSA spy on their own customers. If I were the companies being sued by AT&T;, that would be my argument against them - how do we know the data wasn't released by AT&T; to the government and that's how it leaked out? Read the rest of this post...

A visit to the Musee d'Orsay

(click photo to see enlargement)

Before we get into the news of the day, I thought you might enjoy a few photos. This is a museum made from an old train station. Architecturally, it's phenomenal. And it's also a very interesting museum - lots of sculpture, but also a good deal of impressionist paintings (Renoir, Gauguin, Seurat). Each of the photos come in slightly larger versions if you click on them. Enjoy.



















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Open thread

Good morning. Read the rest of this post...