Here.

Lieberman, who has generally been upbeat about Iraq, told three dozen veterans at his event, that violence in Iraq “is at a terrible level … and shows no signs of abating soon.” He said the patience of the Iraqi people “is wearing thin” and “life in Iraq is still extremely difficult and dangerous for millions of Iraqis.”

But as problematic as this is, the senator said “we don’t have the luxury of playing ‘what if’ games with the past.” He then quoted former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill when his supporters wanted to investigate his predecessor. “If the present tries to sit in judgment of the past, it will lose the future,” Lieberman quoted.

Story here. See, Joe, the problem is, Churchill was referring to Chamberlain. You’re using this quote in reference to yourself, to avoid accountability for your own bad decisions. See the difference?

Imagine this standard as applied by an errant spouse: “Yes, honey, I had a threesome with your sister and your best friend, but you need to let bygones be bygones! Why, it’s just like Winston Churchill said…”

Here’s a short Google video clip from a reading of Prisoner of Trebekistan I did for the Mensa World Gathering in Orlando last month.

(I’m not a member of Mensa, btw, although they treated me kindly as if I were. And why was Mensa meeting in Florida in the hottest days of August? As I’ve noted before: because they are geniuses.)

If you’re from the midwest, you’ve probably shopped at one of these stores in a neighborhood like the one I came from. I’m not sure how many of these places even exist anymore. I hope this brings back a few happy memories. After today’s news, this might be a nice way to relax for a minute.

The above is from pages 65-66 of Trebekistan. More as time allows.

This is a few days old, but it just seems to fit the rest of today’s news so well:

The editor of Glamour magazine has apologised after a reporter issued an appeal for “photogenic” modern war widows.

There was a time when I made a good living just coming with snarky comments about the excesses of the media and politicians and so on. Maybe I’m getting old, or maybe the stories are just getting more horrible, or both. But I may have to start a whole separate blog called “Words Fail” someday. Just for entries like this, for which I cannot summon any useful words.

Larry Johnson, formerly of the CIA and the State Dept.’s Office of Counter Terrorism, posts on the NIE over at the Booman Tribune:

Although the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) regarding Iraq and terrorism is still classified (UPDATE: The Key Judgments are now declassified and can be found at this link), the data behind the findings is not and has been publicly available for three years…

2004 marked the single, largest increase in terrorist activity ever recorded since the CIA started keeping records dating back to 1968.

The four-fold increase in significant terrorist incidents (attacks in which people were killed and wounded) was a direct consequence of the war in Iraq. All you have to do is look at the attacks recorded and the people killed and wounded in those attacks…

Ray Close, formerly the top CIA official in Saudi Arabia, has this to add in the same post:

If key members of Congress (like Majority Leader Bill Frist, who claimed ignorance of this report), and neither the House nor the Senate intelligence committees, have seen the document since it was produced in April, then we have to ask ourselves whether the White House and Congress take any serious interest in the most important products of America’s enormous (and extremely expensive) intelligence empire. Are we to conclude that the “brains” of the United States Government (presumably those who formulate and carry out national policy) are simply not interested in making use of the best information and advice available to them?

Well, um… yeah. Seems inescapable. Tragic as it is.

PDF here. This is the key paragraph:

The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

In other words Iraq has become, in the common phrase, a breeding ground for terrorists. The right is going to latch on to the last part of that paragraph as proof that the NIE says we need to stay the course, but they’ll have to ignore the first part to do so. “Fewer fighters” means “fewer than currently exist” not “fewer than existed pre-Iraq-war”.

Put it this way: let’s say there were ten jihadists before we invaded Iraq, and now there are one hundred. If they perceive themselves to have failed and the number decreases down to fifty, there are still more jihadists as a result of the Iraq war.

It’s over for “The Boondocks” comic strip, at least for now. After six years — a remarkably short run for a strip that found its way into 300-plus newspapers, including The Washington Post — Universal Press Syndicate told subscribers yesterday they should start looking for someone to replace political/social satirist Aaron McGruder.

McGruder, a Columbia native who in his twenties became the Garry Trudeau of the hip-hop generation, took a sabbatical six months ago to recharge. The syndicate kept checking with him, reminding him that its newspaper clients needed several weeks in order to prepare for his return or his departure.

Apparently, the mind behind young black radicals Huey and Riley Freeman has gone Hollywood, or at least has further hopes of doing so, and has decided he can’t devote himself to the grind of a daily strip. His late-night animated show, “The Boondocks,” on the Cartoon Network was recently renewed for another season, the first-season DVD is out, and a film is reportedly in the works.

Perhaps for McGruder, whose broad and sometimes outrageous characterizations forced readers to confront racial stereotypes and caused cartoon editors to blanch, the future of the funny papers is in pixels rather than picas.

Story here. I can tell you from personal experience, this comic strip racket is indeed a grind. And I’m on a much more human schedule, doing only one a week — though the the very fact that I only have one spot a week means that I spend a hell of a lot of time researching and writing and obsessing over each cartoon, hoping to hit that moment of perfect pitch that resonates so well that the cartoon takes on a life of its own. A cartoon that works, especially when you’re trying to do work that’s about more than just delivering a joke, is a delicate balance of words, images, timing and information, and you can beat your head bloody against the wall trying to get there. It takes time, even if you’ve got somebody else drawing it for you, as MacGruder reportedly did. And every time you finish, you’ve got another deadline staring you down. It’s an endless exhausting cycle, and I don’t know how somebody does it on a daily basis, especially if they’re working on television and movie projects. And at least those projects have some recuperative time factored in, unlike the comic strip grind. At your job, whatever you do, chances are you get time off for holidays, vacations, and so on. The work load probably eases, or someone else picks up the slack for you, or else there’s just a tacit understanding that the work will wait until you get back. Newspaper cartoonists don’t have that luxury. If a cartoonist wants to do something crazy like, say, spend a week with the family at Christmastime, he or she has to do an extra week’s work beforehand to cover the week off. And if they get sick, well, that gets pretty complicated too. And this is just how it always goes. To a certain extent, I have an astonishing degree of autonomy — I don’t have to be at work at nine a.m. sharp every morning (though as it turns out, I usually am), and if my work is done for the week, I can take a day off if I want (though in reality that rarely happens). But I am also destined to go through life chained to the reality of relentless deadlines. (And as for taking a break, giving the muse a chance to rest and regenerate, forget about it. You want to know what happens to an altweekly cartoonist who takes six months off? He gets replaced.)

Don’t get me wrong, there aren’t many jobs I’d rather have, or would be better suited for. And I’m well aware that I’ve got a job that plenty of people would like to have. But burnout is nonetheless an occupational hazard, constantly hovering at the edge of awareness. I have nothing but sympathy for MacGruder. I can imagine all too well the sense of dread he must have felt as the end of his sabbatical drew near.

(Edited — I thought the Post made a mistake about Bill Watterson’s sabbatical, but as it turns out, the error was mine.)

Hadn’t realized the damn thing was back.

Via Skippy.

Atrios has some good advice for the group Faithful Democrats (and other such organizations) :

If I had a somewhat insidery new organization for religious Democrats and was thinking about an issue which would be true to both (what I imagine to be) religious principles and liberal principles, and where the debate could perhaps be shaped (for better or for worse) by religious argument and language, I’d think about jumping on it.

So, how about a little torture talk, guys.

Lemme second that one. Maybe they can take their cues from the faithful non-Democrats at Christianity Today.

Every inch of the human body and every aspect of the human spirit comes from God and bears witness to his handiwork. We are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28). Human dignity, value, and worth come as a permanent and ineradicable endowment of the Creator to every person.

Christians, at least, should be trained to see in every person the imprint of God’s grandeur. This should create in us a sense of reverence. Here, we say—and we say it even of detainees in the war on terror—is a human being sacred in God’s sight, made in God’s image, someone for whom Christ died. No one is ever “subhuman” or “human debris,” as Rush Limbaugh has described some of our adversaries in Iraq.

Because they are human, people have rights to many things, including the right not to be tortured. Christians sometimes question the legitimacy of “rights talk,” correctly so. Just because someone claims a right does not mean that it really is a right. But among the most widely recognized rights in both legal and moral theory is the right to bodily integrity; that is, the right not to have intentional physical and psychological harm inflicted upon oneself by others. The ban on torture is one expression of this right.
. . .
In the Scriptures, God’s understanding of justice tilts toward the vulnerable. “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt. Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry” (Ex. 22:21-23). Primary forms of injustice include violent abuse and domination of the powerless.

One reason our legal system has so many layers of protection for the accused and imprisoned is their powerlessness. This is important in any legal system that has the power to deprive people of their liberty and even their lives. The 83,000 people who have been detained by our government and military in the last four years are, as prisoners, vulnerable to injustice. Those who have been tortured are victims of injustice.
. . .
Given human sinfulness, not only must people be told not to torture, we must also strengthen the structures of due process, accountability, and transparency that buttress those standards and make them less likely to be violated. This is what is so dangerous about the discovery of secret CIA prisons in Europe and “ghost detainees” who are located no one knows where. As Manfred Nowak, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said at the time the cia’s secret prisons were revealed, “Every secret place of detention is a higher risk for ill treatment; that’s the danger of secrecy.” It is not enough for U.S. government officials to say they can be trusted to act “in keeping with our values”—not without due process, accountability, and transparency. No government is so virtuous as to overcome the laws of human nature, or to be beyond the need for democratic checks and balances.
. . .
It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.

Conservatives everywhere take pride in George Bush for his outward expressions of his faith, but if the fear of another terrorist attack has caused them to compromise their moral framework then they’re nothing more than unrepentant sinners and gutless cowards. Throwing away your values isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of weakness.

On the partisan front, it’s especially pathetic to see the Democratic leadership cede the moral high ground to the Republican “rebels” and Christianity Today. You’d think showing strong opposition to an unpopular president would be second nature at this point, but instead the Democrats are once again sitting on the sidelines with their fingers crossed. Keep up the wait-and-see act, guys. It’s worked great so far.

Billmon is going to be on the radio tonight:

I’m supposed to be on a program called Open Source Radio this evening talking about one of my personal heroes — the late, great independent journalist I.F. (”Izzy”) Stone…

Open Source’s host, Chris Lyndon, tells me tonight’s guests will include former Washington Post reporter Myra MacPherson, who just published a biography of Izzy, and former Washington Post national editor (and Stone intern) Peter Osnos, who’s edited a new compilation of Izzy’s articles, The Best of I.F. Stone…

MacPherson and Osnos are supposed to discuss Izzy’s life and times, then I’ll come on for a few minutes and bloviate about Izzy and the blogisphere — i.e. are bloggers the true and legitimate heirs to Stone’s stubborn independence, or just a feral pack of blogfascists in search of a few cheap thrills?…

Anyway, if you want to listen in, here’s a list of public radio stations that carry the program. The podcast link is on the same page (itunes required).

I’m genuinely curious to hear what Billmon sounds like. What I think would be great is if everyone listens and it’s clear he’s actually Joe Lieberman, filling an anonymous blog with all the razor-sharp progressive political analysis his handlers won’t let him say out loud.

Dear White House reporters,

Here’s a question you might ask Tony Snow at one of those little get-togethers you have:

Tony, as you know, Dan Bartlett said back in July, 2003 that President Bush didn’t read all of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq before he took the country to war.

In the five months since it’s been completed, has the president read all of the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism?

Let me know if you find out the answer.

your friend,
Jon