I don't understand how anyone with any shred of self respect can continue to be seen with Ann Coulter. Let's face it, she offers nothing of any substance to any debate. These days, the only way she seems to know to get attention is to say things so far out of line that they're really not appropriate for polite company. Her latest is a "joke" about murdering a Supreme Court justice.

This is the face of modern conservatism? I think not. This is the pathetic drivel of a vapid clown who's far past the point of irrelevance. The proper response from the so-called conservative community should be to run her out on a rail. How do they expect to be taken seriously when they continue to allow themselves to be seen with her? And where are our law-and-order conservatives with respect to 18 U.S.C. Section 115?

Coulter's excuse, of course, is that her statement was "...just a joke, for you in the media." Well, I suppose I'm not "in the media" (really, how silly) but I certainly don't think it's a very funny joke. I do, though, think it says a lot about Ms. Coulter's character.

via - salon

Salon has a great piece on why all this talk of lobbying reform is just smoke and mirrors.

The Imperial Presidency at Work

What do you call a man who makes promises that he has no intention of keeping, and looks his friends in the eye and tells them something when he knows it isn't true? I mean, besides, of course, "Mr. President".

Is this what they meant by "restoring dignity to the White House"?

Roy Blunt is claiming to have more than enough support to take over as Republican Majority Leader following DeLay's stepping-down due to criminal indictments and other assorted ethical problems. This while the GOP is claiming to be ready to introduce ethical reforms in Congress. But will Blunt be any different from DeLay? Think Progress believes Blunt may be squarely on the side of the status quo.

Rumours also came out this weekend that Bob Ney may be out as Chairman of the House Administration Committee amidst concerns that he, too, may soon be facing criminal indictment

Ney, identified as "Representative A" in Abramoff's indictment, is accused of exchanging "official acts" for gifts and contributions from the lobbyist (see box), and Republican leaders said they would not be surprised if he was indicted.

via - Time Magazine

For a political party that always campaigns on cleaning up government and reducing pork-barrel spending, they sure seem to have a difficult time finding a leader who doesn't seem to be up to his neck in graft. At this point, I'm not sure we can afford much more Republican reform.

Sites like Fact Check and FAIR are in the business of checking on the accuracy of news reports. But this is not really new, and news sources have for decades been self-correcting. In most news media there is the regular feature: corrections. Of course, who has time to read all these corrections? Turns out, his name is Craig Silverman.

Check out Regret the Error to see an impressive aggregate of news corrections from across the media spectrum.

Congressman Roy Blunt wants to be the new Republican Majority Leader. But, at a time when the GOP is desperate to change its image from one of a party of graft and corruption, is Blunt really the man to take charge?

Larry Margasak writes today for the AP,

Texas prosecutors recently subpoenaed records of a series of financial transactions in 2000 between DeLay and Blunt that were highlighted in a recent AP story.

DeLay raised more money than he needed to throw parties at the 2000 Republican National Convention and sent some of the excess to Blunt through a series of donations that benefited the causes of both men.

After transfers between political organizations, some of the money went to the campaign of Blunt's son, Matt, in his successful 2000 campaign for secretary of state. Now the Republican governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt eventually received more than $160,000 in 2000.

Hotline has this flowchart that is allegedly making its way around the hill.

Chuck Todd at National Journal thinks that a Blunt win could have widespread consequences.

Rich Lowry over at National Review nails it in his analysis of the Abramoff scandal

Republicans trumpet every Democratic connection to Abramoff in the hope that something resonates. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), took more than $60,000 from Abramoff clients! North Dakota Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan used Abramoff's skybox! It is true that any Washington influence peddler is going to spread cash and favors as widely as possible, and 210 members of Congress have received Abramoff-connected dollars. But this is, in its essence, a Republican scandal, and any attempt to portray it otherwise is a misdirection.

Abramoff is a Republican who worked closely with two of the country's most prominent conservative activists, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Top aides to the most important Republican in Congress, Tom DeLay (R., Tex.) were party to his sleazy schemes. The only people referred to directly in Abramoff's recent plea agreement are a Republican congressmen and two former Republican congressional aides. The GOP members can make a case that the scandal reflects more the way Washington works than the unique perfidy of their party, but even this is self-defeating, since Republicans run Washington.

The Republican Party of today is not the party of Lincoln, nor the party of Goldwater, nor the party of anyone with principles other than "get rich quick and do whatever it takes to stay in power."

This is evident not only in the DeLay and Abramoff scandals, but the crass exploitation of religion in order to solidify and maintain power. Why else would racist sympathizers set up shop in a black church?

Today, conservatives excoriate the Supreme Court for banning school-sponsored Bible reading and prayer. But the high court first earned right-wing ire by declaring segregation unconstitutional in 1954's Brown v. Board of Education. Responding to Brown, conservatives then fulminated about "judicial tyranny" and launched campaigns to have Warren impeached. Southern white religious leaders denounced the civil rights movement; in 1958, Falwell delivered a sermon titled "Segregation and Integration: Which?" He argued that the latter would lead to the destruction of the white race.

And yet there was Falwell at the pulpit of a predominantly black church, speaking of Supreme Court reconstruction as the common project of Christians of all races. With only a few hundred people in the packed house, Greater Exodus Baptist Church is smaller and more modest than the sprawling suburban megachurches that hosted the previous two Justice Sundays, but it served as a grander backdrop, imbuing the proceedings with a soulful authenticity meant to negate criticisms of Judge Sam Alito's civil rights record.

Never mind that host Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council and Justice Sunday III's host, once paid Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. Or that, in the early 1990s, David Barton spoke to at least two major Christian Identity gatherings -- Christian Identity being a white supremacist sect that believes blacks to be "mud people" and Jews the spawn of Satan. (Today, Barton is vice president of the Texas Republican Party and one of the most important purveyors of the revisionist notion that America was founded as a Christian nation, only to be subverted by God-hating secularists peddling the false doctrine of church-state separation. He was featured in several video segments at Justice Sunday III, and Falwell referenced his arguments.)

The Republican Party controls the American government with little to no effective opposition. And what have they given us? Graft, nepotism, cheating, bloated government, fiscal irresponsibility, pork-barrel spending, lies, misinformation, and a failed attempt at nation-building that has cost thousands of American lives.

That the Republican Party needs to clean up their act, clean out their ranks, and re-assess their core values is apparent even to partisans as strict as Rich Lowry. That they should not be in control of the world's most powerful nation while they're doing so should go without saying.

While living in Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim country experiencing real problems with Islamic extremism, I saw first hand the propaganda from radical Islamicists. Not only do you hear the perverted stories and scriptural interpretations repeated by people who don't know any better, you see the madrassa students riding around in rickshaw-vans peddling CDR's and DVD's of extremist Imams spewing hatred and lies.

That this kind of extremist propaganda is a problem is no secret. How to counter it is widely discussed not only at the Council on Foreign Relations and the CIA, but also in the press and the parliaments of countries suffering from Islamic extremism.

But Muslim countries like Bangladesh, Iraq, and Iran are not the only places where extremist propaganda threatens to mislead and incite religious violence, and Islam is not the only religion with loud-mouthed crackpots.

Pat Robertson, American televangelist and far-right political activist, said today of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's current health problems

"He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'"

...

"God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone.'"

This isn't the first time that Pat has decided to weigh in on affairs with a torrent of vitriol. Media Matters for America has an extensive dossier on Robertson's on-air lies, distortions, and incendiary statements.

Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network is no small operation, either - it's one that reaches into millions of homes across the world. So why so little real criticism of Robertson here at home? We hear condemnations (and rightly so) of radical Islamicists like Warith Deen Umar,or Mullah Omar - but why do network news agencies and non-partisan talking-heads treat Pat Robertson like their crazy uncle - embarrassing, but essentially harmless (and kind of funny)?

If we're going to win the information war against religious extremism, we're going to have to face the fact that we've got our own radical Ayatollahs here at home. And if you turn on programs like The 700 Club, you may be staring them right in the face.

More on the men behind the news...

On Christmas Eve, The Times, published an article titled Godalming geek made millions running the Pentagon's propaganda war in Iraq about 30-year-old Christian Bailey aka Christian Jozefowicz, the Executive Vice President of The Lincoln Group - a Washington, DC based communications firm that has been under contract with the Pentagon to plant stories in the Iraqi press.

This month it was revealed that Mr Bailey’s US company, the Lincoln Group, was the recipient of a Pentagon contract to help to fight the information war in Iraq. It then emerged that the company was paying Iraqi journalists to plant optimistic news “stories” in Iraqi papers that had been written by the US military.

Interference with the press touches a raw nerve in America. The fake stories revelation provoked a furore among Republicans and Democrats. President Bush said he was “very troubled” by it. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, has promised a Pentagon investigation. Congress plans hearings into the scandal.

For more on Christian whatever-his-name-is-today and other weirdos who are responsible for churning out what you might think is real news, check out Source Watch.

The huge importance of the royal libraries found at Nineveh by Layard and Rassam first became widely known in 1872 when, sorting through the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum, the brilliant George Smith came across what remains of the most famous of Gilgamesh tablets, the best-preserved manuscript of the story of the Deluge. His reaction is described by E. A. Wallis Budge in his history of cuneiform studies, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology: 'Smith took the tablet and began to read over the lines which Ready [the conservator who had cleaned the tablet] had brought to light; and when he saw that they contained the portion of the legend he had hoped to find there, he said, "I am the first man to read that after two thousand years of oblivion." Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself!'

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Introduction. By Andrew George, 1999.

Sarah recently wrote a short post about hartal - the general strike used as a means of political protest/pressure in parts of South Asia, particularly Bangladesh. Sarah is correct that the Slate author she cites gets it wrong.

During a hartal, leaving one's house is certainly not forbidden. I left the house during every hartal while I was there. Things are quieter during hartal, but that's just because no one is working or going to school. Tea stalls are usually still filled, and it's pretty easy to find a sand-lot cricket game or two. During most hartals, the buses won't run, but one can usually still get a rickshaw around town.

For a much better look at the nature of hartal, I recommend reading this post by Joe Coyle.

Most of the people that I spoke to - ordinary working people - hate hartals. Why? Because they're incredibly disruptive and they don't do any good. The best description of the political situation in Bangladesh, I think, is one I heard while I was there: "Bangladesh experiences democracy one day every few years. After the election is over, it goes back to being an oligarchy."

Regardless of which parties are in power, the opposition parties immediately refuse to participate in the political process claiming that there's no point in dealing with the corrupt practices of the party in power. The opposition then takes to street politics and attempts at undermining anything that the party in power does with the hopes of causing a political breakdown and a new election.

Granted, the party in power is corrupt - but that goes for whichever party is in power. They're all incredibly corrupt. And therein lies the heart of the problem.

The original hartal was used during the Indian independence movement and so has a long history as a means for the people to take back their country from illegitimate rule. But these practices were long ago co-opted by the corrupt political parties and have been turned into means for political control rather than resistance.

Those who suffer most from the hartals are the ordinary Bangladeshi citizens, and they will gladly tell you this. Their kids miss school, their businesses lose money, they can't reliably plan travel - nothing can get done because the crime families...er...political parties that run the government (from National Assembly to Union Parishad) disrupt their lives at least once a month.

Strikes are extreme options. The people who suffer most are not the wealthy and powerful, but the workers and little people. There may be times when a strike is necessary, when ordinary people have to sacrifice in order to show their will to resistance. But the hartal is no longer such an action - it is a crass manipulation of historical memory and an attempt to coerce the population into transferring power from one corrupt party to another.

In order for Bangladesh to break the decades long cycle of political instability, the people are going to need to learn that there are options other than hartal, which has become the default response to any bad act. The people need to learn that they have other means of expressing social and political discontent, and they need to be supported in those expressions by free people the world over.