Open thread

Long day. Joe is back tomorrow night from Ireland. Read the rest of this post...

Bush rewards Abu Ghraib military lawyer with federal judgeship

Because there is nothing you can do that is a big enough screw-up in the Bush administration that you won't be praised for it. At a time when the Middle East is in flames, rewarding one of the architects of Abu Ghraib is more than a little stupid. Message: Bush doesn't care.

William Haynes II, the Pentagon’s general counsel, has been closely involved in shaping some of the Bush administration’s most legally and morally objectionable policies, notably on the use of torture. The last thing he is suited to be is a federal judge, but that is just what President Bush wants to make him. The Senate has been far too willing to rubber-stamp the president’s extreme judicial nominees. But there is reason to hope that strong opposition to Mr. Haynes, including from the military, may block this thoroughly inappropriate choice.

Read the rest of this post...

House GOP Majority Leader says it's okay for GOP to use 9/11 flag-draped coffins in political ads but not for Dems to use military flag-draped coffins

We wrote about this on Saturday, and now the mainstream media is pushing the House Republican Majority Leader John Boehner about it. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it's still pretty cool. Check out the interview, below - this is what real journalism is about. Dogging a politician repeatedly when he just doesn't make any sense.

Questioned by reporters on what the difference was, Boehner seemed tongue-tied. "These were American citizens killed by terrorists. That is a very different policy issue than American soldiers dying on the battlefield protecting the rights and freedoms of American people."

"How so?" a reporter asked.

"How so? You want me to describe the difference between men and women of the military out there defending the American people, and victims - victims - of terrorist activities?" Boehner asked.

"They were both killed by opponents, right? Terrorists or Islamic insurgents?" a reporter pressed.

An exasperated Boehner said: "The World Trade Center victims were victims of a terrorist act here on our shore and I think all Americans were appalled that this did in fact happen. But I think the differences, in terms of the images, are as clear as night and day."

Some heroes are more equal than others? More from Dkos and the American Prospect. Read the rest of this post...

Ralph Reed: The Indians made me do it

Ralph Reed's latest defense against corruption allegations: The Indians made me do it. His primary election for Lt. Governor of Georgia is tomorrow. More from TPM Muckraker. Read the rest of this post...

DC woman stabbed in chest by purse snatcher near Metro

Don't worry, I won't be writing about DC crime every day. But I will occasionally update folks if it helps focus some attention on the horrendous public safety institutions in this city. Read the rest of this post...

Freedom isn't free

The Bush administration is charging Americans for evacuating them from Lebanon. $300 billion for Bush's war in Iraq, no problem. A much smaller sum to help Americans in need - not so much. Read the rest of this post...

Times of London: "Baghdad is now verging on total collapse"

Jesus Christ.

As I hung up the phone, I wondered if I would ever see my friend Ali alive again. Ali, The Times translator for the past three years, lives in west Baghdad, an area that is now in meltdown as a bitter civil war rages between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. It is, quite simply, out of control.

I returned to Baghdad on Monday after a break of several months, during which I too was guilty of glazing over every time I read another story of Iraqi violence. But two nights on the telephone, listening to my lost and frightened Iraqi staff facing death at any moment, persuaded me that Baghdad is now verging on total collapse.....

A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and wondering how they can get out alive.

My driver and his extended family are now refugees living in The Times offices in central Baghdad.

(Hat tip to reader Dave of the Jungle, who posted this in the comments. In the future, please email these tips too, I don't always read the comments! Thanks.) Read the rest of this post...

Please support AMERICAblog

You can donate quite easily and safely online via this link.

Also, you can use the yellow donor boxes in the left hand column to contribute to AMERICAblog.
- The top box is for a one-time donation
- The bottom box is for a recurring donation where you can pay, say, $5 a month automatically.

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AMERICAblog is now in its third year. We are a liberal political blog devoted to holding George Bush and the Republican party responsible for the mess they've made of our country and the world. We don't pull our punches, and you won't have any doubt where we stand on an issue. All are welcome, both liberal and conservative, so long as they share our goal of having a rational and civil discussion about politics. And while we appreciate our donors, and our critics, we do not and will not pander to anyone.

It's been two months since our last fundraising appeal. I'm trying not to bug folks every month, but AMERICAblog is a full-time 24-hour-a-day 7-days-a-week operation, this is my full-time job, and we have bills to pay. Your support along with the ads are what keep us going (and the ad revenue is down again).

To give you a sense of where your contributions are going:

1. Staff. At AMERICAblog we pay our regular correspondents, and we have several.

- I work the blog the full-time, your contributions and our ad revenue are my income. I live in Washington, DC, life here is not cheap (think New York, but a bit better), and I make nothing close to the salaries of the heads of the top non-profits (e.g., gay advocacy groups) in DC, many of whom have the same, or less, impact than AMERICAblog.
- Joe in DC spends about half his time doing the blog - he's a self-employed consultant, the time he spends on the blog is time he's not earning an income consulting.
- Chris in Paris spends about 20% of his time doing the blog - he's our night-time correspondent who focuses more on international issues from an international perspective. Chris too works for himself as a consultant.
- AJ in DC, our defense expert, only blogs a few times a week because we can't afford to have him blog more regularly. But we still give him a small but reasonable monthly stipend.

2. AMERICAblog 2.0 - we're revamping the blog and launching it on our own dedicated server hopefully in the next few weeks.

Over the past year we've been working on revamping the blog, hosting it on our own server, and adding a lot more functionality for you and for the administrators. We are perhaps a week or so away (knock on wood) from having our beta version done - I'll be inviting a select few of our most-trusted readers to help us work the kinks out of the beta version, then we launch (hopefully in a few weeks, but my guess is probably in a month).

Our contributors have helped us finance: the redesign of the blog; the actual construction of the back-end technology that will run the new blog (we're building it from scratch because the current software out there doesn't offer all the bells and whistles we want); and the monthly bandwidth costs and tech costs (we got a deal on bandwidth, it will "only" cost us around $900 per month, but we will need our tech guy working part-time to fine-tune the relaunch and keep the blog running, at around $1000 to $1500 per month).

And if you think the ongoing technical side of running a blog is easy or cheap, take note that DailyKos had to go offline a few days ago to deal with some technical issues that cropped up. The top blogs get a lot of traffic and lots of tech issues arise all the time - and that costs a good deal of money to fix. Remember, DailyKos has the same traffic as the White House Web site. We get about 1/6 the traffic of DailyKos, but still, on a good day we're talking 100,000 people a day.

3. Conferences.

I attend several conferences during the year to help the blog. The YearlyKos was one example (travel and hotel cost about $1000). I went to another conference this weekend with some of the top techie activists in the country - it was fascinating, and I got lots of great advice for AMERICAblog 2.0. But to attend these conferences costs money.

One final point: A few readers canceled their recurring donations today because they disagreed with my political analysis of the violence taking place right now in the Middle East. One even tried to influence me to change my views by threatening to cancel his donation. We'd like to think that you come to AMERICAblog to read an honest and smart analysis of what we believe is happening in the world, and not to simply have us parrot your beliefs or the beliefs of the highest bidder.

If you like the blog, if you like our reporting, if you like our advocacy, then please support us if you can. Thanks as always for your continued support for AMERICAblog and for independent media in America. Together we will get this country back.

JOHN Read the rest of this post...

Religious right leader James Dobson's rather creepy childhood

Talk about understanding a man better by looking at his parents. Woosh.

Myrtle Dobson was an amiable and social woman, but she didn't hesitate to whack her son [James] with a shoe or belt when she felt it was required. Consequently, Dobson writes, he learned at an early age to stay out of striking distance when he back-talked to his mother. One day he made the mistake of mouthing off when she was only four feet away and heard a 16-pound girdle whistling through the air. "The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles wrapping themselves around my midsection."

Read the rest of this post...

GOP congressman compares Hispanics to drunks

The speech is in the congressional record, but their site doesn't create hard links, so you'll have to search for the link yourselves, sorry.

Steve King R-IA 5th
House of Representative Floor
May 16, 2006

Illegal Immigration

....Also, Mr. Speaker, there is no excuse for producing multi-lingual ballots of any kind here in America. There is a requirement when you are a naturalized citizen that you demonstrate proficiency in English. And so therefore if you come into this country legally and you acquire citizenship, which is a requirement for voting in America, you will have been required to demonstrate proficiency and literacy in English.

That means then that you can go into a voting booth and vote in any voting booth in America on an English language ballot, not another language ballot. And the only other scenario by which one might be sitting in the United States and eligible to vote and not have command of the English language would be if they were born here in the United States, they had birthright citizenship, which I reject that idea, but it is our practice today, someone with birthright citizenship, and by the time they get to be 18 and register to vote, they go into the voting booth and they had not had enough exposure to English to be able to understand a simple ballot, and so we would give someone who was born in America, an American citizen, lived in an ethnic enclave, never learned English, and give them that interpreter in the voting booth so we can find a way to coddle them and be an enabler, just like an enabler for an alcoholic, hand them a bottle of booze so they do not cure themselves....

You too can cure yourself of the disease of being Latino. Read the rest of this post...

Oh yeah, it's only troubling when the left finally has rich people funding it

Uh huh.

An alliance of nearly a hundred of the nation's wealthiest donors is roiling Democratic political circles, directing more than $50 million in the past nine months to liberal think tanks and advocacy groups in what organizers say is the first installment of a long-term campaign to compete more aggressively against conservatives....

But some consider Democracy Alliance's hidden influence troubling, regardless of its ideological orientation. Unlike election campaigns, which must detail contributions and spending, most of the think tanks and not-for-profit groups funded by the alliance are exempt from public disclosure laws.

"It is a huge problem," said Sheila Krumholz, the acting executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. She noted how for decades "all kinds of Democrats and liberals were complaining that corporations and individuals were carrying on these stealth campaigns to fund right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups. Just as it was then, it is a problem today."

Yes, it is a problem that shadowy conservative groups have been carrying on stealth campaigns for decades. And nobody did anything about it. So don't get snippy when we finally hit back in kind. Read the rest of this post...

Bush wants to cut some Medicare payments by 20% to 30%

Right before an election. This is gonna be good. Read the rest of this post...

Monday Morning Open Thread

Okay, it's not morning in Ireland...using my cousin's dial-up.

Lots happening in the world...not much of it's good.... Read the rest of this post...

Tsunami hits Java

Thankfully this one was much smaller compared to the devastating 2004 tsunami but unfortunately a few people were caught up in the wave and killed in this six foot wave. Reports vary so far from 3-5 dead. Read the rest of this post...

Monday even worse day in Iraq

41 killed, 42 wounded in street market attack in town near Baghdad. Read the rest of this post...

Another deadly day in Iraq on Sunday

Another ugly day in Iraq, with 26 Iraqis killed and 22 wounded plus an American soldier and British soldier reported dead.

A suicide bomber detonated explosives Sunday inside a cafe packed with Shiites in northern Iraq, killing 26 people and injuring 22, an Iraqi general said. Gunmen seized a top Oil Ministry official, the second major kidnapping in as many days.

Read the rest of this post...

I was wrong. Israel is really really really bad.

Apparently there's money in my future so long as I tailor what I write to reflect the views of my contributors. Just got the following email.

John,

I am one of your many silent regular readers. I read, but never post. Until the last few days I have highly respected your judgment and analysis, and have contributed to your blog more than once

Your posts on the Israel-Lebanon situation read as if they were written by a strident pro-Israeli.
I fully agree with Gilliard.

Unless you come to your senses, you have lost a contributor, and possibly a reader.

John P.

Not to mention, would there be something wrong if I were pro-Israeli? I didn't realize that was another category of free speech and free thought that we've now Dixie Chicked. Read the rest of this post...

NYT on Ralph Reed and his ethics problems

Another religious right leader shows his true colors. It's funny how these guys claim to be uber-Christians, yet seemingly are more corrupt than the average Christian. Read the rest of this post...