[Cross posted at the Institute for International Mediation and Conflict Resolution, an excellent organization that has been lending me their blog space. Seriously, check out their work with students and others to promote a deeper and more empathetic understanding of international affairs. Some pretty strong voices are on their board, including Seymour Hersh.] Most media attention to the Middle East of late has been focused on Iraq, but in the meanwhile, the precarious and fractious relations involving its neighbor and fellow "Axis of Evil" charter member, Iran, grow more and more alarming. The latest saber-rattling has come yet again courtesy of Iran's hard-line, populist President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the reactions from Israel and others to the perfect storm created by in combination with ongoing negotiations over the Islamic Republic's nuclear energy program.

Well, while its not clear just how much DavidNYC's earlier idea of a "counter-SOTU" prebuttal on Wednesday afternoon will jibe with the pre-scheduled remarks by Pelosi and Reid at the national press club, it is looking like they are going to be pulling out all the stops to get a good frame on it regardless. Right now, the #3 story on Yahoo! Political News is a preview focused on the fact that Reid (who will focus on foreign policy while Pelosi does domestic stuff and hones in on Social Security) is set to demand that Bush lay out an "exit strategy" on the heels of today's Iraqi elections:

I've pretty deliberately been staying out of the battle over the next DNC Chair up to now, because while I certainly had my preferred candidate and think it is vitally important that whomever gets the nod embarks on some serious/reformist long-term infrastructure and message building, the level of importance akin to the presidential primaries being assigned to it by "insiders," the blogosphere, and thus political reporters/gossips (same difference these days, sadly) has gone way out of proportion both in importance and rhetoric. Frankly, investing myself in any concern beyond those general parameters seemed just not worth it overall, so long as we get a party leader who is aggressive and focused in the short and long term.

I've gotta hand it to my old co-workers at DCCC Online Ops-- they've been on a roll lately with the Fire Rumsfeld petition and the follow-up "Rumsfeld Wire" (speaking of the latter of which, Kos, why don't you have that up?), but now have outdone themselves with the forthcoming "Republican Survivor" online Flash-animation series. The actual "webisodes" will premiere June 3, but follow the link for now to sign up and participate in the voting off process, and to view a HILLARIOUS trailer that caught the eye of the Washington Post today.

Amidst all of this (rightful) gloom about Iraq, I am glad to bear good news from the Rhode Island battle for marriage equality, wherein today, rival groups of clergy released statements favoring and opposing same-sex unions. It is heartening and inspiring to say the least that the "pro" side had nearly twice as many advocates, and one story is particularly worth singling out:

I don't know if anyone has caught this, but at the bottom of CNN.com's writeup of Rumsfeld's testimony (which has evolved over the course of the day from a straight and favorable writeup of what he said, to heavy focus on conflict and the anticipation of even more graphic photos and videos) is a very interesting tidibt about just whom will serve on the "independent panel" being appointed to oversee all of the Pentagon's investigations into the abuse/torture issue:

While I still think that the egomaniacal third-party candidate is in need of some serious redemption, I do have to give credit where credit is due and perhaps even use it to suggest a means of aforementioned redemption. Although St. Ralph is best known for his inveighing against corporate malfeasance, pollution, and corruption of government, few people know (and I myself wasn't aware until I read legendary NY sportswriter Mike Lupica's 1996 masterpiece, Mad As Hell: How Sports Got Away from the Fans and How We Get It Back) that he is also a passionate sports nut and advocate for ordinary fans pissed off at the burgeoning, commercialized excesses of our national pasttimes. And while I thought that perhaps he had moved onto bigger (but certainly not better) concerns like punishing America for not listening to him with four years of Dubya, his timely and powerful statement decrying Major League Baseball's placement of corporate logos on players' Opening Day uniforms is right on the mark:

Perhaps the most galling part of the revelation that city and town clerks in Massachusetts have long ignored residency requirements in handing out marriage licenses, for some reason or another not wanting to hassle over enforcing an arcane 1913 law aimed at stopping what they used to call the "mongrelization of the races," is the official gubernatorial justification for why the law must now be strictly enforced:

A lot of people around here have mused (rightly) about the hypocrisy of the focus on Kerry re: the Church sanctioning pro-choice CAtholic politicians, particularly compared to high-profile GOPers like the Governator, Tom Ridge, George Pataki, and of course Rudy Giuliani. I'd also like to know what the former mayor, known for his quick temper when his personal values and integrity are called into question, thinks of Karen Hughes' comments invoking 9/11 to promote Bush's anti-choice stance against the backdrop of the March for Women's Lives. After all, Rudy's 9/11 hero status was cashed in by the Bush folks when they put him up to defending the use of images in campaign ads, yet now he has been implicitly put in the same category as myself and the other million-plus people who marched Sunday of not valuing "every life" just like al Qaeda.

Call me crazy, but I think that if Gloria Feldt were to follow-up the apology demand she has written to Hughes with a letter to prominent pro-choice GOPers, we might see some interesting results. In Giuliani's case in particular, an uncharacteristic failure to speak out definitely helps to destroy a lot of credibility back in NY for future statewide runs that he might be anticipating (forget about Pataki-- he has already destroyed any legitimacy he might have enjoyed with the electorate via just about everything he has done since getting re-elected)...

Last summer, the Bush administration's new top man in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, made a number of sweeping moves that shifted dramatically from the intentions of his predecessor, Jay Garner (who, for his many faults in handling things and ideology, was at least trying to react to circumstances on the ground and get Iraqis as empowered as possible in a quick period of time). One of Bremer's first moves was to ban ALL former Ba'ath Party members from playing a substantive role in the new government, military, and reconstruction, and simultaneously to dismiss the ENTIRE Iraqi army and start anew. A lot of smart people fretted that he was unnecessarily depriving an important skill base and alienating the previously-dominant Sunni minority, and with the Army move in particular was loosing a lot of angry, newly-unemployed men who knew how to use guns into a populace that was already becoming unsafe and restless. At the time, the neocon ideologues and administration talking heads told us not to fret, that Bremer (who many saw as taking cues from Ahmad Chalabi and other influential, corrupt figures now on the Iraqi Governing Council) was right to start afresh and find people we could trust.

Aside from the fact that radio sucks otherwise and is about to gain an entre from the NRA, film critic Roger Ebert, of all people, gives a rousing explanation of what is at stake in a column dubbed "Stern belongs on radio just as much as Rush:"

While CNN and the rest are focused on new Spanish PM Zapatero's announcement today that his country's troops will be pulling out of Iraq post haste given the unlikelihood that Bush will be handing things over to the UN anytime soon (I'm with Joe Lieberman on that one-- at the least, he can still help things by sending them to Afghanistan), flying under the radar is the simultaneous announcement that he'll be introducing legislation to legalize same-sex marriages. This is ridiculously huge-- I just can't overstate the significance of a country so historically associated with the Catholic Church taking this kind of step (not to mention the tidbit that Franco flat-out made homosexuality illegal), and its mere implications for demonstrating the overall inevitability of the institution's acceptance in Western-style liberal democracies.

There is also of course the lovely irony that if the wingnuts currently fuming over both the Iraq pullout and the general issue of gay marriage are so right-- that is, if the Spanish elections were an out-and-out act of electoral appeasement and represented a victory for Osama bin Laden-- then the world's most fundamentalist and dangerous opponent of gay rights will have inadvertently accelerated the acceptance thereof. If anything, given the fact that the Madrid bombings' merely happenning did impact the Spanish elections in at least some form, we can all smile at what that bastard will be thinking in his cave when he finds out about Zapatero's other intentions...well, that is, those of us who don't possess reactionary social values more in touch with Osama than with the progression of international civil/human rights...

As I sit here in my cozy dorm room, it's difficult not to feel incredibly helpless and guilty as events continue to unfold in Iraq. Just to update everyone else doing a better job of focusing on work than I at the moment, we've now seen at least 32 American soldiers killed since Sunday (one of them, according to a rare CNN tidbit that actually gave someone a name and face, a 21-year-old from nearby North Providence), as well as up to 200 Iraqis (40 or so of those coming today when we fired missiles at a mosque in Fallujah believed to be the base for snipers attacking Marines). Dissident Sunnis and Sadr supporters in Baghdad might be joining forces; fighting has also spread to Ramadi, Kut (which Ukranian forces have basically abandoned), Nasiriyah and Karbala, while Sadr himself remains holed up in Najaf (which the coalition forces dare not enter); and speaking of the coalition, our allies are starting to freak out. I could sit here endlessly fuming at Donald Rumsfeld for insisting that everything is under control and spinning this all as a sign of desperation, but no matter how energized for the long-term solution of ensuring a John Kerry victory this fall that gets me, I still keep coming back to our troops-- guys my own age who are in the middle of this situation RIGHT NOW while we all sit comfortably and react/debate their life and death situation.

On top of this, earlier this afternoon I found myself watching a CNN segment on Fran Martinez, a very young-looking military wife at Camp Pendelton who is caring for a toddler and an 18-month-old while her husband is on his second (!) tour of duty in Iraq. She freaks out every time she hears about any kind of violence, because she knows that even if her husband is OK someone else's loved one isn't, and she ended the piece by telling the reporter that the one thing she'd most appreciate right now would be a simple phone call from her husband. Shortly thereafter, I came across this post by national College Dems blogmaster Seth Tanner providing a number of mechanisms for actually putting meaning behind the phrase "support our troops." It's pretty easy to simply identify with those words on a broader level, or to write off those who participate in efforts geared at that as overly-nationalistic cheerleaders and politicians looking to profit electorally off their patriotism, or even both simultaneously, but trust me-- having just actually for once followed up on one of those efforts and donated $25 to Operation Uplink, a Veterans of Foreign Wars effort to provide soldiers with calling cards to communicate with loved ones, I can testify to the feeling of usefulness amidst this chaos that it can provides. Sure, it doesn't get rid of the feeling of helplessness nor should it self-aggrandizingly do so, but at least it is making some effort at being constructive here in the near-term. Just the mere knowledge that money I might have otherwise spent on beer is going to help people like Fran Martinez-- or eventually, my own uncle should my cousin Sarah be deployed to Iraq upon her high school graduation this June as I expect at this rate-- talk to their loved ones and find emotional solace therein is a pretty damn good feeling, and I genuinely hope that everyone reading this will put their money where their mouth is and tell others to do so as well.

(the below is cross-posted from my blog)

As the 9/11 commission does its work and prepares to hear from Condi Rice on Thursday (while inexplicably failing to even contact the man whose commission warned her of all of this on top of Richard Clarke, former Sen. Gary Hart), President Bush has finally seen it fit to speak out on this topic publicly (much in the way that Rice, who has been silent since it was decided that she'd testify, was yammerring about when she thought her testimony would only be private and not under oath like Bush's). Of course, he's not saying much of depth, and what he is saying is pretty slippery:

"Let me just be very clear about this," he said. "Had we had the information that was necessary to stop an attack, I'd have stopped the attack. ... If we'd have known that the enemy was going to fly airplanes into our buildings, we would have done everything in our power to stop it."

Note that not once there or in the past has he bothered to add, "And I'm sorry that I didn't have that information at the time, and that the processes weren't in place to get that information synthesized at the lower levels and made a priority on my national agenda." No, that would require some actual self-reflection, and remember, Dubya doesn't do that well-- just all self-assuredness, because we need steady leadership, even if its wrong and unwilling to be flexible.

I hope everyone who was criticizing the former congressman earlier is eating their words right about now. After Fred Fielding did a particularly bad job of trying to undercut Clarke based on the work of the congressional joint inquiry into intelligence, Roemer cut in and said that as the only member of the 9/11 commission who was also on THAT panel, he can say that a lot of the confusion and differring info is because Condi Rice refused to testify before that panel as well as this one, and that Hadley went in her stead and basically BSed them.  

As someone who used to work for the guy commented earlier, Roemer (and the other Dems for that matter) isn't "being soft," but simply being tough all around and independent-minded-- in other words, exactly what an INDEPENDENT COMMISSION is supposed to do! In the overall picture, this scenario (with partisan digs like the one I just talked about above gotten in whenever relevant) is a lot better for our side than if they were trying to simply be an echo chamber for Clarke. In contrast, witness the GOP members pretty much trying to trip him up with a nicer-phrased version of White House talking points-- you could tell thaT Lehman and Fielding were squirming at having to try and undercut their old pal, and failing badly (the way in which each of their questioning periods ended was pretty damn abrupt, it really made Clarke look good and authoratative).

It looks like the blogosphere-dubbed "Muhammad Horton" ad is only the opening salvo in what I am honestly starting to think might become the most vicious (and long!) presidential campaign in a while. It's not that I didn't previously realize that this was a distinct possibility, but I definitely became convinced a few minutes ago when I read Eric Boehlert's Salon article profiling the man who created it, Alex Castellanos.

Castellanos, for those of you who don't recognize his smug face from his many appearrances on "Crossfire," is the scumbag responsible for some of the all-time lows of campaign advertising, including several flat-out lies and the infamous "White Hands" ad whose race-baiting was sadly key in assuring Jesse Helms' narrow 1990 re-election (more on all of that in the article). That someone with his history is in on the latest from Bush-Cheney '04 should absolutely erase all doubts that they are full of a certain four-letter word when it comes to feigning innocence about trying to capitalize on Arabs-as-potential-terrorists fears.

This has only started to get ugly. And as much as I am absolutely primed for the fight and the opportunity to expose these kinds of tactics for what they are, I really do fear that the now-in-tune American people might eventually get so disgusted as to simply start ignoring the campaign down the line. Which might be the GOP strategy in the long run anyway-- try to destroy Kerry early on in lieu of his strong post-primary position, then hope that even if that doesn't help Bush, people will just see the whole race as sickening, leaving room for the wingnut base to carry the day. It's sick and anti-democratic in spirit, but hey, what else can you really expect from people who have already found a way to win even while getting less votes than the other guy?

At first, having just read the text and not seen the ad itself with all its sickening imagery, I thought this was a sure loser just because it is not only so blatantly cartoonish in its language and exaggeration, but I'm firmly convinced that the Patriot Act is a losing issue for Bush (after all, some prominent conservative Republicans are among its biggest critics).

But after reading about and seeing it via sources like DKos, I think that anyone with half a brain has to concede can only be meant to appear as an Arab man is prominently featured above those words. And I am pretty firmly convinced that even still, they have no real way of defending it or ultimately risking electorally harm.

Because lets face it-- whether or not the actor used is in fact Arab-American or only appears for a few seconds is beside the point-- the implication is crystal clear. Advertising is inherently about playing on stereotypes and instant emotions, and if the folks who put this ad together weren't aware of what this could be construed as (or even actively planning on it), then they aren't exactly too advanced in their field-- and thus, having no clue what they were doing, would have no business being hired for a presidential campaign in the first place. I somehow doubt that. And just as and Dukakis' prison furlough program was a legitimate issue, so is Kerry's stance on anti-terrorist measures and civil liberties; yet just as the late Lee Atwater deliberately chose the image of a scary black man who had raped a white woman, his protege Karl Rove has decided to play on the racial component of our fear of Middle Eastern terrorists. The sad (and telling) difference is that Bush-Quayle '88 didn't get this desperate until the summer, while Rove has now defined this as the way he will play the game right out of the box.

Just when you might have thought that the right-wing had learned its lessen about the futility of demonizing a Democratic presidential candidate's (gasp!) outspoken and active wife, it would seem that some of the conservative groups responsible for some of the Clinton years' most disgusting campaign ads targeting Hillary are gearing up to attack Teresa Heinz-Kerry on the basis of her philanthropy.

The line of attack, it seems, goes something like this: the Heinz Foundation has given money to environmental causes in Western Pennsylvania (the late Sen. John Heinz's home region) that aren't big enough to qualify for its grants via the medium of the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation is affiliated with the Tides Center, which allegedly works with "radical" environmental, legal, and gay-rights groups working to undermine America and aid our enemies. Therefore, it is within reason to claim that the Heinz Foundation really used Tides to secretly funnel money to said radical causes, and that this means that John Kerry is sleeping with a crazy Portugese leftist!