not watching television

Oh, please let this go somewhere!

Liberal Oasis has an excerpt from the story in The Nation about former Christain Coalition director Ralph Reed's ties to Native American casinos, which include laundering his fees to disguise his support of gambling interests.

Since The Nation's article is available only by subscription, Liberal Oasis asks readers to spread its excerpts around. So . . .

Ralph Reed: Gambling Man

The latest issue of The Nation has a big scoop about the famed Christian Right leader Ralph Reed, now one of Bush's campaign chairs.

But it has received little attention, probably because the weblink is subscriber-only. (Though Janeane Garofalo noted it on Air America last night.)

Here it is. Spread the word:

When Ralph Reed was the boyish director of the Christian Coalition, he made opposition to gambling a major plank in his "family values" agenda, calling gambling "a cancer on the American body politic" that was "stealing food from the mouths of children."

But now, a broad federal investigation into lobbying abuses connected to gambling on Indian reservations has unearthed evidence that Reed has been surreptitiously working for an Indian tribe with a large casino it sought to protect--and that Reed was paid with funds laundered through two firms to try to keep his lucrative involvement secret…

…[A casino lobbyist] says, "He wanted to be able to deny it. Or if it came out, he wanted to be able to claim he was against the Jena casino, without anybody knowing he was getting paid by a bigger tribe with a bigger gambling operation."

Is this the real reason Bremer ska-daddled out of Iraq?

The word is out that Saddam will be arraigned in court tomorrow -- well today actually, June 30th, which was supposed to be the day that Bremer handed ersatz sovereignty over to Iraq's appointed intermim government.

Am I the only one who thinks the early hand-off and Bremer's gotta-go-gotta-go-right-now flight from Baghdad may have been more about a need to flood the media with Saddam-in-the-docket coverage than concerns about insurgents mucking up the big Iraq Independence Day event?

And if so, why? Could it have something to do with the Plame investigation? Those Niger yellowcake claims? Halliburton deals? Some combo of three or more of this adminstrations many festering scandals?

Hell if I know, but Josh Marshall and Laura Rozen sound like they're privy to a clue or two.

Honoring the minstrel

Bob Dylan accepted an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Scotland's University of St. Andrews last week. It seems odd me that a writer for the New Scotsman would have to wonder why he agreed to such a thing. The Scottish ballad traditions are woven throughout Dylan's musical tapestry . . .

Plotting torture . . .

Two posts by Michael Froomkin at Discourse.net help sort out what Hellblazer describes as the oozing sore of the Dubya Rex torture policies.

First read his analysis of Dana Priest's article in today's Washington Post which, Froomkin points out, contains a number of scoops concerning the who, what, when, where and why of the memos chronology.

And then, if, like I was, you're still confused, Froomkin also posted a link to this timeline guide to the torture memos from the NYTimes.

From the perspective of my own experience, the memo timeline is particularly useful. In the past I've written a couple of posts about having attended a program like this one, where a retired CIA agent talked the audience in to supporting torture, assassination and various tactics that put innocent lives at risk, as legitimate tools in the so-called "war on terror". (Go here to read the most recent of these earlier posts; and here to read the earliest one, but you'll have to scroll down to find "More News From the Playground" because for some reason the permalink for this Aug. 2003 post doesn't work.)

Now, in those earlier posts I never mentioned when I heard this CIA guy speak, because I couldn't quite remember. But after reports of torture as a royal policy began dripping out, I started asking others who attended the talk to help me pinpoint when it occurred.

I still haven't come up with the exact day of his visit, but I do know now it was sometime between January and March 2002. And, lo-n'-behold, that's right around when Bush's White House began turning out memos about whether or not the Geneva Conventions applied in Afghanistan and Bush issued a directive calling for "new thinking in the law of war."

So my question is, do we have another one of those dots everyone talks about filling in, one a bit to the side of the overall dot pattern of those memos? I mean, it sure seems to me that while the White House was gettin' on that new-laws-of-war thing, the CIA was firin' up a torture pr campaign.

Oh yeah, and while the intelligence folks had their traveling salesman out on the road, it appears they were already testing out the the product. Last week Newsweek reported that by early 2002 the FBI and CIA were already in a turf war over how to handle interrogations with suspected terrorists. And as The Stakeholder points out, this week's edition of the same magazine carries a story about a captured al Qaeda commander who served as a source for some of those still-claimed Iraq-al Qaeda links. The problem is, when questioned again after further evidence contradicted his claims, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi* recanted. There's some suspicion that under duress, so to speak, al-Libi may have told earlier interrogators what they wanted to hear . . .

Getting to know the candidate . . .

I picked up this report this morning over in the comments section at Eschaton. It's about how John Kerry saved a US senator's life by performing the Heimlich maneuver on him back in 1988.

According to former Nevada Senator Chic Hecht, a Republican, Kerry came upon him passed out in a hallway after choking on a piece of apple. While others thought Hecht was having a heart attack, Kerry sized up the situation immediately and repeatedly performed the Heimlich maneuver on the senator until he was able to breath again.

This story tells us something about Kerry's ability to react calmly, intelligently, skillfully, and yes, heroically in a crisis, in sharp contrast to Mr. Bush's dithering in a Florida classroom after receiving the whispered news that the US was under attack. So I suppose the Bushites will try to keep the account from surfacing in the mainstream press, or spin it madly as some sort of grandstanding on Kerry's part if it does.

Good luck with that. Senator Hecht says he and his wife call Kerry every year on their anniversary to recount the highlights of their previous year together and thank him again for making them possible. Chic Hecht says his vote is between himself and his god, but both his daughters are backing Kerry and his wife, Gail, plans to travel to California to voice her support for the man who saved her husband's life.

Peacock president

Atrios links to "Bush's Monica Moment" by Jack Beatty, a piece published in the online version of The Atlantic under the rubric Politics & Prose. Here's Beatty commenting on the scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 that records Bush's reaction at an Florida elementary school upon hearing the country was under attack:

That moment exposes Bush's character. It reveals what his press conferences proclaim: his incapacity. If he were George W. Smith, what job would he be qualified for? Bush's presidency can be seen as one long cover-up of the most obvious thing about him. A life of upward failure, of being his father's son, left him without "sand," my nineteenth century-born father's word for the residue of strength acquired by "standing on your own two feet" and "taking your medicine." Bush never stood on his own feet, never took his medicine—and he has never been his own man. He's the only president to be related to the Queen of England, and his biography is that of a "royal." Prince Charles would make a sorry prime minister. Like Bush, though, he'd give good strut.

Prose meets politics, indeed.

Has Big Time Dick been reading the Big Dog's Book?

So, unless you've been in Outer Mongolia you probably know that Dick Cheney told Pat Leahy to go fuck himself on the floor of the Senate the other day. Personally, I think it was a set up job to "inspire" comments like this one in the NYTimes:

"It tells me Cheney is very human," said Dennis Lumphrey, a hospital worker from Moville, Iowa, who was in the crowd. "It also tells me he's not going to get pushed around. He'll fight back. A lot of people around the world want to tell America what to do. We need to have our own direction and priorities."

Or then again, maybe Cheney has been burnin' the midnight oil reading Bill Clinton's book. After all, the Big Dog spends a lot of time talking about getting in touch with anger, and Big Time Dick says he felt better after he got that FU off his chest.

Question: Does anyone out there really believe Dick Cheney when he says, "Ordinarily I don't express myself in strong terms. . ." Cuz if you do, I have a couple of fixer-uppers to sell you in Falluja, site of another wasted F-bombing or two.

(Tweaked 6.25.04 11:07 pm: Typo)

Notes from the playground

I had a college professor one time who told me that a central tenet of magic was the ability to hold two opposing thoughts or ideas simultaneous without tension -- sort of the opposite of the old dialectical dualism we Westerners know so well; the difference between both/and nad either/or . . .

Want to experience a magical moment? Go here and watch the latest video posted at the Bush/Cheny04 website. Experience apoplectic rage and laugh your ass off at the same time . . .

Really, Republicans spent weeks harping because someone who entered the MoveOn.org video contest compared Bush to Hitler. Now they're doin' it. This entire administration has a serious case of arrested development, lost forever in the playground days of "I'm rubber, you're glue . . ."

War! Oh that's what it's good for!

Great pulp art by Bruce Yurgil of Bartcop fame, picked off by me via The Ruth Group blog

Another reason why War is not the answer

Read and reflect on this provactive interview this Dr. Saad al-Faqih, leader of the Saudi opposition group, MIRA, and an acknowledged expert on al Qaeda's history and strategy the so-called "war on terror."