sisu

This one's for Barak

Newburyport in the early morning light yesterday.  Nothing more delightful for the eye, but try not to think too much about the sound and fury -- signifying nothing? -- of the lives behind those transcendently light-reflecting windows. A walk through the old byways made us more pensive and reflective than we cared to be.

"Can you do me a favor and try it now and tell me if you get the same problem?" emails Barak Berkowitz, head honcho of TypePad, re our recent plague of problems accessing and publishing through our blog host.  Okay, BB.  Let's give it a try.

Update:  Only half bad.  It took fully four minutes for this post to publish, but when it finally did, it brought us back to the original editing window instead of to the "Gateway timeout" that has tormented us of late.

Update II:  And guess what?  The trackback ping to Technorati worked for the first time in days.

"The pig is starting to look worried"

"Here's a snazzy new PorkBusters graphic by Karl Egenberger," writes InstaPundit. "Feel free to use it. Note that the pig is starting to look worried."

"Last week, [Senator Tom] Coburn and six other Senators released an 'offset package' aimed at identifying budget cuts to pay for hurricane relief," writes New Zealand Bear, announcing a shift in PorkBusters' focus from raising awareness of pork to calling attention to specific legislation that actually starts eliminating pork:

The first bill that we are focusing on is sponsored by seven Senators who have styled themselves the "Fiscal Responsibility Team": Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback, Jim DeMint, John Ensign, Lindsey Graham, John McCain [Gak], and John Sununu.

I had the pleasure of being invited to a conference call with Senator Coburn last week [blogged here]. I was impressed by what appeared to me to be his sincere desire to confront the idiocy involved in our current fiscal policies, even if it meant pissing off his fellow Senators.

The key provision in the bill for our purposes is that it would elminate all "offsets" (i.e., pork) in the highway bill --- wiping away a vast chunk of pork in a single stroke.

Here's where we bloggers and our readers come in.

The Porkbusters page at TTLB will now show, state by state, which Senators have signed on in support of this proposal, and which are opposing it. As before, we are encouraging bloggers and blog-readers to contact their Senators to find out their positions and report back to us.

Off to the phones again.  Last time we talked with Will Johnson of Senator Kerry's Main District Office in Boston -- October 20 -- re how his boss would vote on one of Coburn's amendments then about to be voted upon that would have redirected bridge funding from Alaska to New Orleans, the aide told us Senator Kerry "may not have made up his mind yet" on that one, but he, Will Johnson, would be certain to call us as soon as he found out.  We're still waiting for that call. Similar story with Tom Crohan of Senator Kennedy's Main District Office, who promised to call back as soon as he knew his boss's decision. The vote occurred later that day, and Coburn's amendments were overwhelmingly voted down. We're 100% sure how our own Taxachusetts Senators will vote, but let's see if we can get their frontmen to come right out and say so. 'Will update as soon as we get word. All PorkBusting all the time here. We support the Fiscal Watch Team Offset Package!

Technorati tags:  porkbusters, senator coburn, fiscal responsibility team

Update: Senator Kerry still hasn't made up his mind, but when we teased aide Will Johnson during a phone conversation this afternoon that we're pretty sure how his boss will vote, he acknowledged "I think that's going to be the case."  Close enough to put him down as one of the "Opposing Senators" on TTLB's Senate Responses page? We think so.

Update:  We love this man's way with words.

Four steps and seven jeers ago

Susie's enchanting Daisy works her wiles on Tuck at double birthday dinner Saturday night.

"It is time for this Lincoln to give his Gettysburg Address," writes Don Suber in a pre-Alito-SCOTUS-nomination [Bill Kristol is beaming] post that gets it just right:

At Arlington on Nov. 11, the president must in 250 words or less tell the people we are not going to throw away 2,000 lives away like we tossed aside 58,000 lives in Vietnam by walking away like a nation with attention deficit.

We know the president is in good shape because all the lefty newspapers are advising him to go bipartisan, dump Rove and otherwise concede the 2004 election.

Susie's grand old Arthur assumes the shape of his chosen container, in this case a Victoria's Secret birthday box emptied of superflous contents, i.e., birthday presents for our lovely hostess.

Suber continues:

Of course, the media is against him. It opposed Lincoln, FDR and Reagan. The latest is Knight-Ridder, which calls the Scooter indictment a stain on the presidency.

Baloney. California Conservative put it best: "The only reason he (Libby) is being indicted is because the CIA is waging war against the Bush administration."

Bush's comeback is pretty easy to see. He starts with a solid Supco nominee, picks up on the budget-cutting started by Coburn -- real cuts, not showy Alaskan bridges -- and finally, Bush takes the Iraq war to the people.

Shades of Daniel Henninger's Four-Step Program for GW "to get his mojo back," blogged here the other day.  We love Suber's Gettysburg Address image.  Four steps and seven jeers ago . . .

Update:  Furry tricks and treats at a spooky halloween Carnival of the Cats at Watermark.

"All tactics and no strategy"

Unlike Democrats -- "all tactics and no strategy," in Mark Steyn's words -- pussycats always have the big picture in mind. Take Susie's Daisy, for example, shocking and awing the festive, candlelit dinner table last night at a brilliant double-birthday party in Newburyport-by-the-Sea.

"I remember the outrage within the Democratic Party when Republicans rushed to the microphones to accuse the Clintons of 'corruption' over Whitewater, the F.B.I. files, the travel office, campaign finance and so on -- all issues that turned out to be rabbit holes without any findings of guilt, much less indictments," writes former Clinton special counsel Lanny Davis in a NYT op ed that the likes of Roger L. Simon himself is hailing as "a superb column on the Libby affair . . . attacking the infantile partisanship dominating American political life today." While we agree with Roger re "the infantile partisanship dominating American political life" -- today and throughout our nation's history -- we're still gagging at Lanny Davis's scare quotes attempting to gloss over the rampant Clintonian political corruption, from day one of the co-presidency, that was forever swept under the carpet with "I don't recall" and "It depends upon what  your definition of is, is." Our personal favorite was the Clinton aide whose excuse was that he had lied to his diary. Don't we all? Did that work for you, Lanny? Sorry. It didn't work for us unwashed out here. "That said" -- as they say [that particular MSM sentence filler is fingernails on the chalkboard to our ears] -- Lanny makes a lot of sense:

First, each side seems unable to resist applying a double standard, doing and saying exactly what only recently it criticized the other side for doing and saying.

'Reminds us of something we wrote here last year in the heat of the presidential election hysteria:

The issues don't change much from decade to decade, and it's fascinating to watch how arguments pro or con a particular point go back and forth between parties depending upon the current occupant of the White House. One thing that has changed between those halcyon pre-chad, pre-9/11 days and our Fahrenheit 911/527's/MoveOn, campaign-finance-reform-loophole era is the tenor of the debate. C-Span rebroadcast Cheney's and Lieberman's oh-so-civilized and -- in Donald Rumsfeld's term -- helpful debate last night. Low key, measured and rational.

Lanny continues:

President Bush should follow the ultimate rule of White House damage control: the buck stops here. He should admit that this entire mess could have been avoided had the White House, including the vice president, criticized Ambassador Joseph Wilson openly and directly, rather than whispering "on background" into the ears of certain reporters that his wife was responsible for sending him to investigate possible Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger.

'Course it would have been nice if the MSM had ever gotten around to criticizing Joseph Wilson. But no matter.  Lanny concludes:

I often wonder whether those of us in the Clinton White House who attacked the motives of Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater special prosecutor, and tried to demonize him personally would have been better off if we had focused solely on his professional misjudgments and his disproportionate expenditure of time, effort and money.

Hey.  We like that.  Lanny acknowedges that he and Clinton's other frontline practitioners of "the politics of personal destruction" preferred to demonize Kenneth Starr rather than debate the issues. 'Course that's what Democrats do. As Mark Steyn says,  "One reason the Democratic Party is such a bunch of losers is because they're all tactics and no strategy."

"The stature and credibility of the president must be maintained"

"Brewster Jennings & Associates was the cover organization to which CIA spy Valerie Plame Wilson was assigned . . . Its mission was deadly serious: tracking human intelligence on black market transfers of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear materials," according to Pensio Review, which asserts that "One likely scenario is that the revelation tipped black marketers in nuclear materials that they were being monitored, thus helping them to escape scrutiny." WMDs?  What WMDs? How about imminence, your eminence?  We thought it was all about oil. 

"Whenever something like this happened, and [Anthony] Lake was not able to convince the president to accept his counsel, his only recourse was to appeal to Hillary Clinton," wrote Athanasios K. Strigas in an online article that popped up at the end of a convoluted google search that started with a Drudge reference to Brewster Jennings as a front-company name for Plame and ended up with results from "hillary clinton aramco" via a suggestive Plame-related comment on Bush Lied, People Died™ Daily Kos from last July that asserted "Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO." It's not just the entire Bush administration, but every American administration in recent history.  Take the two-for-the-price-of-one Clinton administration:

It was Saturday afternoon on 4 January 1996. Clinton was scheduled to meet the next day with Lake and Lake's assistant Sandy Berger. The topic for discussion was to be the action taken regarding the memo he had issued to Lake concerning operation "Omega" . . . "Provoking" Greece was already U.S. policy, but had not yielded the desired results in the decade of the 80s. Ever since then these "provocations" had continued through the use of Turkey with better results.

The next day, aside from Lake and Berger, those present at the meeting were foreign undersecretary Richard Holbrooke, high-ranking State Department official Strobe Talbot, presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos, David Gergen, Thomas Maclarity (chief of staff), James Carville, Paul Begala and Susan Thomases . . .

You remember Paul "stroke of the pen, law of the land, kinda cool" Begala. Scary to think of such a light-weight, moral-equivalency fellow close to the switch in the control room. Fortunately, Mr. Begala has been gelded and farmed out to the MSM for the next period of time.

Last to speak was Susan Thomases: "It's obvious that you are all in agreement that there must be an armed conflict between these two countries, although not in the immediate future. But at the same time, the stature and credibility of the president must be maintained. Let's not forget that we have elections in November." Finally, the president said: "Then let's do it, but strictly in accordance with operation 'Omega.'" It was obvious to all present that he'd been influenced most by . . . Richard Holbrooke.

. . . Of course the danger for Lake in such situations was that Hillary might misinterpret Lake's concerns as a sign of emotional instability. In this case, however, Lake felt that she would accurately transmit his thoughts to the president, even if she did not agree with them or considered them to be overly exaggerated.

He therefore told Hillary that the president had not concentrated his attention upon the real problem. The real problem was that should there be only the one planned "incident" between Greece and Turkey at the end of January, Clinton would then be able to easily neutralize any criticism against him for not doing something to help Greece by simply imposing a "moratorium." If, however, the planned "incident" escalated into a series of armed clashes in the Aegean that lasted into the autumn of the coming year -- in other words into the campaign and election season -- how could America's inaction in preventing this war between two allies be explained? And all of this because the president was being pushed into this action by the Rockefeller (ARAMCO-N.Y.) petroleum interests who were trying to gain the advantage over their fierce competitors, the "Texans."

Our colleagues on the left side of the aisle are forever bashing us folk on the right with "It's all about oil." 'Could be, but it really depends upon what your definition of "all" is. Who is this fellow Athanasios K. Strigas, you ask?  A precis from a now deleted Free Republic article posted 11/08/98:

Athanasios Strigas, interviewed here, studied Political and Economic Science at the University of Heidelberg. He then took Foreign Relations and International Strategy in the University of Georgetown in Washington D.C. and Propaganda in Patris Lumumba of Moscow. You might be surprised how it relates to the recent events that are baffling many. Unfortunately his books are only available in Greek, but in them he reveals a great deal about the US National Security Agency and the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Club, sometimes far more than anything you can find on the world-wide web.

It's Greek to us. No idea of the credibility, but vast right-wing conspiracies are in the air, and frankly, my dear, we don't trust anyone on either side of the aisle out there.

Liberals see things we don't

It's common knowledge that cats see things we don't, as Tiny demonstrates above.  Perhaps not as well known is the fact that liberals see things we don't.

"To be a liberal you must simply believe things that are not true," explains Paul at Wizbang! in his indispensable "guide to understanding the liberal mindset":

Good vs Evil according to Liberals

Bush telling the truth about Saddam. Bad Bad Bad
Wilson telling a lie about the President. Good Good Good
Telling the truth about Joe Wilson whose lies helped Saddam. Bad Bad Bad

Marcusian inversions -- blogged here early and often -- are their mothers' milk.

His people and his party

Baby's Four-Step Program for getting the mojo out of Tuck's dinner bowl includes sitting around, staring, reaching out with his paw and lunging.

"Most of all, Mr. Bush needs to reforge the broken links to the two sources of his power -- his people and his party," wrote Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal last week.  We saved his essay to the desktop, waiting for events to play out, and now they have. Henninger's "Four-Step Program" for GW to "get his mojo back" is looking pretty good about now:

• Withdraw Harriet, nominate Edith. Harriet Miers is the canary in the Bush mineshaft.

Done. Details to be worked out.

• Go to Baghdad. The Bush Doctrine, presented by Mr. Bush in September 2002, correctly defined the most pressing need of the post-Reagan era as the democratization of nations capable of acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is the only test of the Bush Doctrine . . . There are two crucial missions that only Bush boots on the ground in Iraq can accomplish: Rally America's GIs and rally the Iraqi people--those who have sacrificed most to make the Bush Doctrine succeed.

Interesting idea.  No word yet.

• Nail the Greenspan succession. Next to the Supreme Court, this is the last major appointment of Mr. Bush's presidency.

Done.  Details to be worked out.

• Embrace the sequester. By embracing the across-the-board spending sequester in the House before it disappears, Mr. Bush at a stroke would become the de facto leader of an effort that would sweep away the ill will of a spending record that for now dilutes his legacy.

On its way. Check out PorkBusters update.

As Fred Barnes told Brigitte Quinn of FoxNews this morning, "I think this may be the first step on the road to recovery for the President." Since we know next to nothing about any of it other than what we hear on the cables and read in the MSM and the blogosphere, we're going on gut instinct, and our gut tells us it's going to be okay.

Update:  Animals now boarding the Friday Ark at Modulator.

Update II: "Here's my guess why the President pulled Harriet," writes Henninger in his post-Miers-withdrawal column:

It was past midnight. In the wee a.m. hours Wednesday the President was up past his bedtime. The First Lady was asleep. He had just watched the Astros go down three-zip to the White Sox, and he says to himself: "Bad karma." And he pulled her.

That's all the explanation I need. George Bush's opponents, on the left and on the right, have wanted to shove his presidency into a hole for a long time. Their chance was at hand. He just took it away from them. No matter which of two briefcases Patrick Fitzgerald brings to work today, it's time for this presidency to go back to work.

The currents of chatter will continue to swirl inside the Beltway, but the tide has turned?

"The white house is beginning to feel the heat"

"It's a war of attrition, not a quick hit," writes Glenn Reynolds, hot off "an interesting conference call with Sen. Coburn and several other bloggers":

We discussed a lot of ways to increase transparency in funding bills, and it was clear that (1) the White House is beginning to feel the heat; and (2) this will be going on over the next year.

"One of the suggestions from the bloggers (New Zealand Bear Mark Tapscott -- thanks to Kevin Aylward of Wizbang for the update) was that the Senator use the 'porkbuster' term," adds Wizbang:

It was noted that the word "earmark," while technically accurate, didn't have the same resonance . . . One of the key points discussed is how 'sunshine' is the enemy of pork barrel earmark spending. The process has been deliberately gamed by Congress to provide as little light on last minute changes, congressional earmarks, and other sundry spending tricks. As the "Bridge To Nowhere" episode showed, when pork-filled projects attached onto large appropriation bills are spotlighted, it becomes very uncomfortable for legislators to stand up and fight for boondoggles.

"I took [Sen. Coburn's] message to the blogosphere to be: 'Those of us in the Senate who are serious about cutting spending need the blogosphere's help to make it happen,'" reports John Hawkins of Right Wing News:

So, if you're a blogger looking to hammer away on government spending, hit it hard!

"The Coburn amendments were decisively voted down, but markers were laid down in the process, and millions of Americans were watching closely as senators cast their votes on the proposals," observes Mark of Tapscott's Copy Desk:

As a result, those votes may well have more to do with the future career prospects of a number of senators who opposed Coburn than any of them, or the mainstream media, now realize.

Let's hope so. We're on the case as a fellow PorkBuster trying to put our squealing Taxachusetts troughsmen's trotters to the fire, but beyond what we can do, we're most encouraged by Glenn Reynolds's impression that "the White House is beginning to feel the heat."

Technorati tags:  porkbusters, senator coburn

USA Today was "just doing what kids do"

Years before USA Today used Photoshop -- the tool of choice for manipulating online images -- to turn a picture of Condoleezza Rice into an anti-Bush political statement, we were manipulating photographs of our political enemies with a red pen as in the NYT clipping from our snail files above -- dated January 16, 1997 -- picturing Bubba, Hillary! and Newt on the two-for-the-price-of-one couple's second inauguration day.

"Why do their parents pay for J-school anyway -- can't even turn out convincing manipulators!" writes Teresa of Technicalities  in the comments to our previous post re USAT's being found out in a graphic lie yesterday. Lots of good comments, including this from Scott:

"Really this is nothing more than the electronic equivalent of when I used to deface magazines as a teenager by whiting out people's eyes with an eraser -- the kids at USA Today were just, y'know, doing what kids do."

"By using our proprietary photographic algorithms, we were able to enhance and focus in on the background. (If only Dick Morris knew how to use photoshop)," writes California Conservative re his own version.

Then there's this comment (see above photo) from California Conservative:

We've got the "third photo" that reveals everything.

Reader Paul's comment reminded us of our own "Don't mess with me" pairing of Baby with Condi (above photo) last winter:

Actually I kind of liked the "demon eyes" photo. It said "Mess with me and I'll burn you to a crisp!"

"Alteration of a photograph for political effect has a long pedigree in Stalinist Russia and in the pages of Pravda. It can be quite an effective method of trashing your opponent," notes Kevin F, while Goomp concurs and offers reason for hope:

The Internet and the Bloggers, the last great hope for America to avoid the Commissars predicted by Balint Vazsonyi in "America's 30 Years War."

Maybe it's going to be okay after all.  Harriet Miers has just announced the withdrawal of her indigestible nomination to the Supreme Court, and Fred Barnes is telling Brigitte Quinn of FoxNews "I think this may be the first step on the road to recovery for the President." That sounds like the perfect lead-in to another blogpost.  Gotta go now so we can get right on it.

Technorati tag:  demonizing condi

We got 'em

Tiny frames her window of attack on the superball quarry, just off camera to the right. Quick's a cat can catch a superball or a squirrel, the blogosphere, taking its cue from the ever-alert Michelle Malkin, caught USA Today in a dirty trick -- trying to get away with publishing a photograph of Condoleezza Rice Photoshopped to look like a zombie -- and pounced.

USA Today got religion in record time. Presumably in response to the blogburst led by Michelle Malkin this morning, they have replaced the zombie version of that photo of Condoleezza Rice -- blogged here -- with the original AP photo and attached an "Editor's note":

The photo of Condoleezza Rice that originally accompanied this story was altered in a manner that did not meet USA TODAY's editorial standards. The photo has been replaced by a properly adjusted copy. Photos published online are routinely cropped for size and adjusted for brightness and sharpness to optimize their appearance. In this case, after sharpening the photo for clarity, the editor brightened a portion of Rice's face, giving her eyes an unnatural appearance. This resulted in a distortion of the original not in keeping with our editorial standards.

Holding the media's feet to the fire by confronting them with the errors of their ways: It's one of the things the blogosphere does best. We notice there were 60 trackbacks to Michelle's original post -- most if not all in support of her thesis -- including technical explanations by Photoshop experts as to how the original image may have been doctored. Congratulations to Michelle and her army of seekers of wisdom and truth for not letting 'em get away with it.

Update:  Oh, sweet mystery of life.

Technorati tag:  demonizing condi