You'd probably feel a little better about yourself if you spent some time at Wellstone Action.

And this is pretty interesting, too. Focus on the part called "The Politics of Conviction."

The San Francisco Chronicle is an unrepentantly bad newspaper. It was an unrepentant supporter of the mayoral campaign of Gavin Newsom, to the point of allowing their bias to slant their coverage of the race. If you don't believe me, go read the last-second profiles of Gonzales and Newsom before the election -- it was near-hagiography for Newsom.

I know that it's been overused to the point of being familiar, but does anyone else have a problem with this phrase? It's from a profile of Sharpton in today's Chron by unrepentant hack John Wildermuth.

For Sharpton, an unrepentant liberal, that means opposition to the death penalty, the war in Iraq, changes in the welfare program and President Bush's tax cut. It means backing national health insurance, gay marriage, affirmative action and statehood for the District of Columbia.

What a joke. And aside from the obvious, it's such awfully lazy writing.

Someone who still has Lexis/Nexis access (sob) please indulge me and search for these two phrases in the news database:

"unrepentant liberal"
"unrepentant conservative"

You could make it more interesting by comparing total hits for the last year -- and then comparing total hits in prior years.

Local readers might want to look into Wildermuth's past writing...

Beneath everything, Bush is most likely an authentic moron.

Check this interview transcript from PBS's NewsHour:

What you see, though, is a president who clearly does not show his mind the way other presidents did. I think that is indisputable. Meaning that generally presidents, to their senior most advisors, certainly folks at O'Neill's level as secretary of the Treasury, at some point take over debate, they command a room and even with strong-willed and maybe fractious advisors, they say, "Here's what I think and why I think it. Here's how I get to my conclusions." And men, often powerful men and women leave the room, no matter where they stood going in, saying, "I like the way he thinks." That's crucial. And that's what other presidents that O'Neill served have done, and something that this president almost never does, certainly never does in this book and never does by the estimations of many people that I interviewed.

[UPDATE: I know Suskind writes for/wrote for the Wall Street Journal. Is there any evidence that he has an ideological ax to grind?]

It's strange that the latest edition of ABC News' the Note has absolutely no mention of the pathetic smear attempt that everyone and their mother has condemned by now.

I hate when news organizations won't report on their own fuckups.

[UPDATE: There's this:

The New York Times front page (!) on Chris Lehane's black arts--which will be the talk of the Democratic subcommittee of the Gang of 500 this morning.. LINK

But no mention that ABC may have willingly participated in Lehane's tactical buffoonery. Nice.]

Unbelievable. I'll totally be there, unless I see them somewhere else first...

Radiohead, Kraftwerk, and The Pixies are among the headlining acts who have now confirmed appearances at this year's Coachella festival in Indio, CA, according to reports from Billboard and MTV. The May 1, 2004 date marks the first official booking of the reunited Pixies lineup, first reported to MTV by an unnamed source last September, though it is as yet undisclosed if the Coachella show will be the band's first public appearance since disbanding in 1993.

[Update: Please, someone with a clue start writing for Pitchfork. Recoil in horror at this sentence from their review of the new Stereolab record:

Of course, Stereolab never really fell "out of favor," per se, but getting two people to agree on the value of their indie-pop stock is a tall order.

Yuck. On so many levels.]

Hahahahaha.

GOP To Reshuffle Swing States; Plan To Redistrict America

by Tom Burka

Texas, South Carolina Will Decide Election This Year, GOP Congress Declares

In a massive "redistricting" of the country, the Republican-controlled Congress has redrawn the boundaries of the states to favor Republicans.

"There's nothing wrong with it," said Rep. Tom Delay, mastermind of the scheme. "If Democrats were in power, this is what they'd be doing."

The boundaries of New York State now include only the relatively conservative upstate area and Staten Island, which is solidly Republican. Democratic New York City is now part of Rhode Island, which will have four electoral votes in November.

Florida now constitutes only those counties that solidly voted for Bush in 2000 and most of Louisiana, to form "Louisiorida," a "Super State" with, according to Delay, "a zillion" electoral votes.

"You carry Louisiorida, Texas, and South Carolina, you pretty much win the election with 600 electoral votes," said Delay, while Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert knelt beside him, spit-shining Delay's shoes.

Political violence and intolerance in this country is on the rise.

Via Orcinus, one well-written anecdotal account of the consequences of daring to have a Dean sticker on one's car in the South.

[UPDATE: Here's another account. Keep 'em coming.]

Thanking them for hiring Kruggies.

Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.

So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.

That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical -- which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical -- and that Mr. Bush is.

Is anyone as consistently right-on as Krugman in the mainstream press?

Okay. The article says that Howard Dean had, um, a security guard or something that was a wife-beater.

Even without further details, doesn't that seem kind of a stretch?

Read the article and tell me it doesn't emit a fishy stench.

Then go go go go go read Atrios' multiple posts on Chris Vlasto, one of the authors of the "piece."

Why do nominally "straight" news organizations keep people like this in their employ?

Howard Dean is unelectable. He's too loony liberal for the American people, way-too-conservative-for-the-Democratic-base, too unpredictably unscripted and prone to gaffes, too calculated to be another straight-talkin' McCain, too rural Vermont, too privileged WASP-y New Yorker, too terribly negative, too unashamedly optimistic, too open to chance encounters with the press, too disinterested in the names of press members' pets, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

I know that endorsements are just endorsements. But why is it that Dean has gotten every significant endorsement to date? Clark's raising money at a pretty good clip, and his campaign has certainly picked up steam. And who's endorsed him? Madonna.

Let's see. Gore, Bradley, maybe-Carter, Harkin, Braun, and others for Dean. Madonna for Clark (forget about those rumors you've heard). I'm honestly puzzled why Clark wouldn't have gotten a couple of high-profile endorsements somewhere by now.

Someone wanna help me out?

West Virginia is up for auction on Ebay.

Via TBogg:

...or it might just be stupidity.

That may sound like a chore, but Bush would certainly rather be there than here. The early-rising president can get crabby and punchy if he doesn't hit the pillow by 10 or so at night. On Monday, Bush was not scheduled even to arrive at a dinner hosted by Mexican President Vicente Fox until 9:10 p.m. local time (10:10 Eastern).

Bush, who returned to the White House on Tuesday night, sounded tired and bored at the few public appearances during his 28-hour visit. His remarks had unusually long pauses. Cutaway television shots captured Bush glowering into space as other heads of state talked about "economic growth with equity to reduce poverty," "investing in people" and "democratic governance."

Little baby pwesident gets cwabby if he doesn't go seepy ear-wy!
Little baby pwesident gets bored and "glowers" when forced to meet with silly leaders-of-other-countries-in-this-hemisphere!

[Aside: Jenna Bush is looking increasingly hot.]

Man, I am so excited about this.

It's safe to say that I really love Ricky Jay.

Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year's Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron's request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, "Come on, Ricky. Why don't you do something truly amazing?"

Baron recalls that at that moment "the look in Ricky's eyes was, like, `Mort- you have just fucked with the wrong person.' "

Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, "The three of hearts." After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.

"O.K., Mort, what was your card again?"

"The three of hearts."

"Look inside the bottle."

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately.

From his superb New Yorker profile by Mark Singer.

Me and new roommate Ally and Ally's boyfriend Josh are definitely hitting some of these (Josh is a big math nerd).

Via the Butt:

More pictures of the incident described somewhere below (permalinks/archives coming, I know, I know).

In San Francisco in April. I missed a chance to see them a few years ago in New York...

Via Cursor, TomPaine.com on Richard Perle, war profiteer:

And then there are Perle's questionable business deals. As he agitates for war, he advises companies who profit from war. Last year, for instance, he briefed investors on ways to make money from U.S. conflicts with North Korea and Iraq. Such controversies forced him to step down as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. But he didn't resign from the board itself; he can still offer his clients the latest inside scoop.

This kind of a track record would send most armchair generals limping back into private life. But that hasn't happened to Perle. He still has the president's ear. And not one interviewer--not Charlie Rose, not NBC's Matt Lauer, not CNN's Wolf Blitzer--has forced him to fully answer the conflict of interest charges.

[edited because of cut-n-paste weirdness]

In Spain. By not having babies. Who will contribute to social security.

In a homily delivered in Madrid's Almudena cathedral, the head of the country's powerful bishops' conference, Cardinal Rouco Varela, has claimed gay marriages would help bring the country's social security system to its knees.

The problem, Monsenor Rouco suggested, was that gays were incapable of doing the right thing by making babies, whose future social security contributions might help to cover pensions paid to their bereaved partners. He warned of the "dramatic consequences" of allowing gay marriages, or giving unmarried couples of any kind the same rights as married couples, by referring to what he saw as the social and moral disintegration of other, unnamed, European countries.

What about het couples who don't want to have kids?

On a not completely unrelated topic...deep down, don't you hate the boomers? Even if you are one?

Not good.

US military forces in Iraq "appear" to have committed war crimes by detaining relatives of suspected insurgents or wanted former officials, and demolishing their homes, the US-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch has warned.

Have we wholly adopted the Israeli model for suppressing insurgency? Does anyone care?

Read Eric Alterman on the (increasingly tired) pattern of attack the administration uses on its foes (real or imagined).

Anyway, my point here is that the Bush modus operandi is not a coincidence and it oughta be news. It began when John Diullo, back in December 2002, was forced to issue his Stalinesque show-trial recantation.

Remember what he first told Suskind: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you've got is everything-and I mean everything-being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

I wonder what it took toget him to say, "My criticisms were groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. I sincerely apologize and I am deeply remorseful."

These are people who are apparently willing to break the law and blow a CIA agent's cover in an attempt to smear a man telling an uncomfortable truth--by casting aspersions on his wife. Given all that, I think O'Neill deserves a Presidential Medal of Honor...from the next administration.

Calpundit on Paul O'Neill.