This is why I didn't report on those protests against Iran's supposed torture and murder of gays

Correction: I earlier wrote that the story of Zach, the kid who was forced into the ex-gay camp, was not true. Zach's story is true - I accidentally mixed that story up with the story of the kid who claimed he was expelled for making a gay movie in high school - that last story is the one that wasn't totally true.

Because it ain't necessarily true. (This article is written by the director of Human Rights Watch's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Project.) You just can't jump on things because they scare and infuriate you IF TRUE. You need to establish some level of certainty before you go off and do the public relations equivalent of invading another country searching for Murder of Mass Homosexuals. As we found out last year with that supposed kid being kicked out of school for making the 'gay movie,' it was a great story, but just not true. Yes he made the movie, but he was never expelled. Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

Clearly, we have a lot to discuss....so have at it. Read the rest of this post...

Top 12 Dems in Congress to Bush: start Iraq withdrawal by end of year

Iraq is a nightmare. And, a unified, rational approach for withdrawing troops from Iraq by the Democrats (which is supported by the American people) is a political nightmare for Bush and the GOP:

Twelve Democratic leaders of the House and Senate have urged President Bush in a strongly worded letter to begin withdrawing the 130,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by year's end, a sign that Democrats may be uniting on a key election-year issue that has divided the party.

"U.S. troops and taxpayers continue to pay a high price as your Administration searches for a policy" in Iraq, said the letter, signed by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), and 10 other party leaders.

Americans know that Bush doesn't have a plan for Iraq. The GOP was hoping that the Democrats wouldn't offer a plan either. Looks like they were wrong.

Quick update....can't overlook Kenny weighing in for the Repubs:

Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said in a statement early this evening that the Democrats' withdrawal strategy will "embolden the enemy, encourage more terrorism, and make America less secure."

Um, Ken, Bush has already emboldened the enemy, encouraged more terrorism and made America less secure. Mission Accomplished. Read the rest of this post...

Iraq gunmen attack Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce, take 26 hostage

Is this really worth dying for? Read the rest of this post...

Arianna calls on Hollywood to stand up to Mel Gibson's atrocious Jew-hatred

Arianna nails it. From HuffPost:

Gibson's no-longer-deniable brand of bigotry has led to the extermination of millions -- and continues to fuel much of the strife and suffering in the world today. Which is why Hollywood cannot sit this one out and wait for the reviews to come in....

Bob Iger at Disney needs to pull the plug on two Gibson projects that are in the works. The company is slated to distribute Gibson's latest directorial project, Apocalypto, opening on December 8. They should refuse to do so. And ABC, which is owned by Disney, should, without delay, scrap its head-scratching plan to develop a miniseries about the Holocaust with Gibson's company (yep, you read that right).

Question for ABC: Do you really need to see a script to know that the idea of having a Holocaust-set miniseries produced by a guy who thinks "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" is a god-awful one?

....For starters, the town's power players need to step up and publicly condemn Gibson's vile comments (in effect, saying in public what they are already saying in private conversations I and many others have had). I mean, it shouldn't be so hard to publicly denounce someone -- even an Oscar-winner -- for being a raging anti-Semite.

But that's not happening. From this morning's Los Angeles Times:

Although many of the town's senior executives are Jewish and Hollywood has a long history of supporting Israel and Jewish causes, there was no widespread public condemnation of Gibson's comments over the weekend. Although some high-level executives privately expressed dismay at the statements attributed to Gibson after his arrest, none of those contacted would speak on the record.

Talk about lacking the courage of their convictions. Which makes Ari Emanuel's no-holds-barred post all the more praise-worthy. But is Ari the only high-profile figure willing to publicly draw a line in the Malibu sand? How disgusting and disappointing is that?

PS Remember, he's a raging homophobe too:

Heartthrob actor Mel Gibson, asked by one of Spain's leading magazines what he thinks of homosexuals, launched into a tirade against gay men.

"They take it up the ass," Gibson told El Pais as he got out of his chair, bent over and pointed to his butt. "This is only for taking a shit," he said.

Reminded by the interviewer, Koro Castellano, that he worked with gays while studying at the School of Dramatic Arts, Gibson added: "They were good people, kind, I like them. But their thing is not my thing."

Castellano said, "But you were obsessed with the thought that if you were an actor, people would confuse you with one of them."

"Yes," Gibson admitted, "but I did it. I became an actor despite that. But with this look, who's going to think I'm gay? It would be hard to take me for someone like that.

"Do I sound like a homosexual?" he asked. "Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?

Read the rest of this post...

Bush to kill successful suicide prevention line

And why? Because he wants to recreate it WITHIN the federal government so they can get the list of names of every American who calls. How's that for creepy? And guess what that will do? It will stop people, especially kids, from calling the suicide prevention line, so many of them will kill themselves.

Is this what you Republicans voted for? Read the rest of this post...

Appeals Court hears DeLay's ballot status case

Reports from Texas seem to indicate that the Court isn't inclined to rule in DeLay's favor:

A federal appeals panel indicated today that the ability of Republicans to replace former U.S. Rep. Tom Delay on the ballot rests on whether there was "conclusive" evidence that he had moved to Virginia.

The three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals did not indicate when it would rule. But questions from the panel seemed to favor the Democrats' position that Republican officials could not declare DeLay ineligible for office based on residency prior to election day.

Of course, nothing matters until they issue their decision, but it doesn't look good for the GOP. Basically, the only evidence that the Court has that DeLay has moved is DeLay saying he's moved. That means taking DeLay's word. And, what good is Tom DeLay's word these days? The Court clearly wants more evidence that that.

If the Appeals Court panel, which includes the notorious Edith Clement, rules against DeLay, he'll stay on the ballot. DeLay is still running for Congress as a Republican...and it seems more likely that won't change. The GOP is running out of tricks. So, we still do have Tom DeLay to kick around. Read the rest of this post...

The more things change . . .

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been interested in the "why" of stories rather than just the "what." It's hard to understand any event or process without knowledge of how it came about, and the why is often what makes things interesting.

Sometimes, if you pay attention, you can see the causes of events before they even happen. For instance, the continued failure to appropriately reform the intelligence community portends continued failures of the community itself. There are both structural and analytical problems with U.S. intelligence, but many of them are eminently fixable with the right leadership . . . which we so sorely lack. Most of the issues are the same ones that we all found out about nearly five years ago, after the most massive intelligence failure in the history of our nation.

The report also criticized continued lack of communication between spy agencies and a cumbersome bureaucracy that governed security clearances. Noting that information sharing within the community is one of the most critical tenets of intelligence reform, it stated that progress on that front was limited to understanding the task at hand.

So progress in sharing within the IC is limited to . . . understanding the task at hand? WHAT?? I mean, I'm happy that all elements of the IC now recognize the common task of, y'know, protecting the country, but maybe communicating better on the actual issues and information might further that common goal.

There's also this fun little nugget, which is the "why" of future articles about how the FBI has become the U.S. version of MI-5. I'm not totally opposed to the idea of a domestic spy agency, but isn't it at least worth a public debate about whether we want to turn our federal police force into an intelligence unit?

The changes at the Federal Bureau of Investigation were also noted in the House report, which concluded that the transformation of the F.B.I. to an intelligence agency with law enforcement power is starting to take root.

These kinds of things happen just beneath the surface of public consciousness, and then everybody is shocked when the detrimental effects are felt down the road. Read the rest of this post...

All politics is local: Chapter 8,346

Israeli leadership thinks it has to react strongly to provocations to show it's still tough even though it withdrew from Gaza, lest Netanyahu convince the country that only Likud can keep Israel safe. Hezbollah knows that if it can provoke widespread violence, anti-Israeli sentiment will turn into pro-Hezbollah political support. "Moderate" Arab governments, despite their fear of their own internal extremist groups, can't ignore overwhelming public sentiment against Israel and the U.S., which the governments themselves help stoke to take the focus off their own failings, so they join their populations in denouncing Israel. Meanwhile, the realities of war (angry populations, fear of losing, and lots and lots of pictures of corpses) mean that positions get increasingly hardened.

The Bush administration pursues despicable and heartless ideology like "constructive chaos" and "birth pangs of a new Middle East" because that Middle East policy is one of the few ways to shore up support from both the religious right and neoconservatives. And in Iraq, where we're actually adding troops despite all those supposed plans to reduce forces in the fall, the Shia population is furious at Israel, the U.S., and its Iraqi leadership it sees as too acquiescent to both of the former.

Cue denunciation of Israel and the U.S. by Iraqi leadership, both political and religious, in an effort to retain popularity with the population and not be outflanked by the most radical voices (Sadr et al). As I've said before, if the Shia expand their violence from anti-Sunni to anti-Coalition, the U.S. position in Iraq will worsen considerably. And of course, all of this is intertwined, the elements continuously feeding off each other. Read the rest of this post...

Heat wave in America, heat wave in Europe, but don't tell Bush and the Republicans that this is global warming

The midwest.

And Europe.

But seriously, trust the Republicans - they say it's nothing. Just like they say that condoms don't work, that the earth is really 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs lived alongside modern men. Oh yeah, they also told us that we'd be greeted like liberators in Iraq and that the war would be over in a matter of weeks, was it?

Note from Joe: Washington is under an "excessive heat watch." I've never heard of such a thing before. Neither has John. Read the rest of this post...

Since Disney/ABC has Jew-hater Mel Gibson directing a mini-series about the Holocaust, I was wondering what other mini-series they might consider...

Disney/ABC present...

Black Like Me, by David Duke.

The Harvey Milk Story, by Jesse Helms.

The American Presidents, by Squeekey Fromme.

A Brief History of Time, by George W. Bush.

The Laramie Project, by the Rev. Fred Phelps.

I'm Just a Bill, by Joe McCarthy.

The Wonderful Field of Nursing, by Richard Speck.

Kids Say the Darndest Things, by John Wayne Gacy

And of course...

The Naked Chef, by Jeffrey Dahmer.

Yours? Read the rest of this post...

Iraqi Interior Ministry may be replaced because things are so bad

Everything is falling apart in Iraq. Bush would call this an opportunity. Read the rest of this post...

The war in Iraq really is still happening -- and Americans are really still dying

Frank Rich has a brilliant column today about how the US news media is basically ignoring the war in Iraq:

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a “shame on you” e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC’s “World News.” The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki’s short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war’s progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike “Law & Order” episodes, don’t hold up on a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality..

He's right, of course. And even though Americans aren't paying attention to the war in Iraq, those American soldiers everyone talks about supporting are still dying in Iraq:

The Marines, from Regimental Combat Team 7, died Saturday in Anbar province, the heavily Sunni Arab region west of Baghdad that includes such flashpoints as Ramadi and Haditha, a U.S. statement said without further details.

So far this month, 44 U.S. service members have died in Iraq -- including 10 in Anbar province during the past week. That underscores the threat to U.S. troops from Sunni insurgents, despite the attention paid to recent sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Baghdad.

Iraq is a real bummer for those soldiers and their families. Read the rest of this post...

Round up of the morning papers

• At least 23 killed in ambush near Baghdad, Wash Post.
• More corruption from GOP House Appropriations chair, Jerry Lewis, Wash Post.
• Millions of American men are turning down jobs that they think are beneath them. Give me a break, NYT.
• GOP Governor Mitt Romney talks about "tar babies." Romney/Gibson '08? Boston Globe.
• Rave reviews for Dixie Chicks concert tour, Boston Globe.
• Baghdad gunmen kidnap 25 people. BBC.
• Karl Rove talks about the "corrosive role" journalists play in politics, then screams "psyche!" NYT.
  
• Disney and ABC plan to go ahead and let Mel Gibson make a TV miniseries about the Holocaust. Working title: "The fucking Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." LA Times.

Read the rest of this post...

Let's start the morning right

The view from my friend Joe's place last night. Click the picture to see it large. Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Checking the morning papers nows Read the rest of this post...