Another Reason to Like John McCain

John McCain again proves he's the Republican who really deserves the "I'm a uniter, not a divider" mantle:

Many, if not most, Americans have reasoned that there is no overriding urgent need to act at this time. And they are right to do so. The legal definition of marriage has always been left to the states to decide, in accordance with the prevailing standards of their neighborhoods and communities. Certainly, that view has prevailed for many years in my party where we adhere to a rather stricter federalism than has always been the case in the prevailing views among our friends in the Democratic Party. Some fear that the decision in Massachusetts will ultimately result in the imposition of different views on marriage in communities where the traditional view of marriage is considered singular and sacred. But there really is insufficient reason presently to fear such a result.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)
 
Maybe McCain should run as an independent. He might be the one politician in the best position to do so.  

Ideas

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. ~John Cage

360° Blogging

Finger Pointing

This--NYT News Analysis: Senate Report Does Little to Still Debate on C.I.A.'s Prewar Data--strikes me as obvious. Did the CIA come to the Bush administration and tell them that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States? I think not. Yet, this "It's the CIA's fault for the faulty WMD data" meme seems likely to take hold in the public consciousness. Let's hope not.

Let's not forget this: the Bush administration went to the CIA looking for reasons to go to war with Iraq. The evidence may've been inaccurate, but it's what they were pushing for. They wanted to justify a pre-emptive attack against Iraq. They wanted to finished a war that should've ended a decade before.

Cappuccino - Iranian Weekly Magazine

Can't hardly read a word of it, but this Iranian blog/online magazine features a simple, elegant design.

(Via Vagrantly, a fine photoblog itself)

Surprise! (Take 1 & 2)

Take 1: Surprise! The Editors at National Review think Edwards a good choice for Veep and advise Republicans not to make too much of Edwards's career as a trial lawyer:

They should not overestimate the extent to which the public at large shares their dislike of trial lawyers. They make their money, after all, by telling sympathetic stories that win over ordinary people.

'Cos, you know, trial lawyers stick it to the man. I'd also advise conservatives not to make too much of Kerry and Edwards's deep pockets. 'Cos, er, Bush and Cheney are both filthy rich.

Take 2: Surprise! Kenneth Starr reviews Clinton's memoir My Life for the Wall Street Journal, but spends most of his review justifying his role in the Whitewater investigations. Ken, Ken, this is how you review a memoir.

Starr makes no specific mention of any passage in the book; neither does he quote a single word from it. Seems he's as bad a book reviewer as he is a prosecutor.

OK, technically, the piece is labeled an "article" and not a review, but still, if you're gonna write a 1031 word piece about a 1008 page book, shouldn't you refer to *something* specific in it?

Imagining Australia

As an expat, I'll hafta keep my eye on this collaborative Aussie blog. It's run by the authors of a new book called Imagining Australia: Ideas for our Future:David Madden, Macgregor Duncan, Andrew Leigh, and Peter Tynan. Looks like Madden's doing all the writing right now, though.

Hitched to Everything Radio Goes Live

Hey, this audioblogger thing really works - and pretty well, too. Now, I can air whatever inane thoughts that come to mind as I tool around in my car.

Rush, Air America - watch out!

Those Unsullied Conservatives

National Review's John Derbyshire got a kick out of the little prank Kerry's team apparently played on the New York Post, but opines that

back of the smile, there is the dull, sad realisation that our people could never be so clever and devious. I get the same feeling about the War on Terror. Not only does the Devil have all the best tunes, he has the best tricks, too.

See, the problem with us conservatives is, we're too nice. Just don't know how to think dirty.

Ri-ight. This from the party of Nixon, Gingrich, and Rove. This from the party of redistricting. From the party whose members placed posters in Baltimore, Maryland telling black voters to vote on the wrong day. The party which excludes former felons--now qualified voter--from the voting. Whose members campaign for Nader to get him on the ballot in states where he wouldn't otherwise have a prayer.

Also today, Derbyshire, a homophobe of some note, highlights the fact that VP candidates are usually prettier than Presidential candidates. It's nice to know he's got an eye for such things. Wonder if he's the first to corner the Pretty Veep fetish?

Fortunately, elsewhere on National Review's The Corner today, Jonah Goldberg raises the discourse by suggesting that John Edwards wouldn't be running as VP if he weren't pretty:

His stump schtick plays well with the populist forces in the Democratic Party and he's pretty (no serious person I know thinks Edward would have ever gotten into politics if he'd been burnt by acid as a teenager).

So all this raises two questions: What is it with these tight-righties and pretty VP candidates? And isn't it a shame that William F. Buckley, the one writer at the National Review with any claim towards an intellect, has recently retired as editor in chief?

Shortly after announcing his retirement, Buckley confessed:

If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would have been in, I would have opposed the war. ... With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein was not the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration a year ago.

Too bad the rest of that lot in the corner aren't capable of the same intellectual honesty.

PDA Blogging

I realized recently that, technically, I can blog via my Sony CLIÉ by creating an email to send to my Blogger account, though I don't synch as often as I could/should, so entries might take a while to go up--and all this tapping is rather laborious!

Anyway, let's see how long it takes for this one to go up - 06/07/04 at 10:55.

(Update: Same-day post - Not too shabby!)

Kerry/Edwards (Duh.)

Kerry picks Edwards. The two Johns. You know Drudge ain't apologizing for pedaling rumors about a Kerry/Clinton ticket either.  And it's interesting to see Andy Sullivan apparently ecstatic at the selection.

Relativity in a Nutshell

"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute - and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." -- Albert Einstein

No Spin?

Behind the scenes at Fox News, Bill O'Reilly doesn't even *pretend* to be fair and balanced. He doesn't have to be, though, because anything which doesn't fit his agenda, as as his tirades, can be edited out. So, believe it or not, you're not seeing the man at his worst.

As the Washington Post reports, late last month, O'Reilly's show accidentally played a quote which said more than the host intended to. Apparently, O'Reilly had only planned to discuss part of the quote by 9/11 commission chairman Thomas Kean--the part which said "there were contacts between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, excuse me, al-Qaeda." Unfortunately, the other half of Kean's quote was played, too:

There is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States -- in other words, on 9/11.

It was played, yes, but the whole quote never made it to air on Fox News because O'Reilly complained that it was the wrong quote and retaped his commentary.

By all appearances, Bill O'Reilly wanted to use Kean's legitmate authority to rag against the New York Times' contention that there were no links between Iraq and al Qaeda, but he didn't want the same quote to be aired by that dignitary if the whole thing undermined the Iraq-was-involved-in-911 meme. So he trashed the soundbite and paraphrased the part of Kean's quote that he wanted to use. He selectively edited the quote to push his thesis.

Later on the show, O'Reilly interviewed Georgetown law professor David Cole who called him on the edit. Since the "The O'Reilly Factor" edited out Cole's confrontation, viewers had no idea that his charge was leveled or how O'Reilly reacted to it. All viewers saw was O'Reilly saying, "We make mistakes because we bring in people who are trying to cause trouble. I thought he was a rational person." So O'Reilly can pretend the segment was edited because of something inappropriate the guest did. And he can sound apologetic about it.

The response no one saw: O'Reilly called the Cole an SOB and kicked him off the show mid-interview and told him he wouldn't be invited back.

Bad guest then? No, just O'Reilly getting called on his own spin. And apparently, one of the rules of O'Reilly's No Spin Zone is never call the host on his own spin.

The Greatest President from Texas Ever?

I'm talking, of course, about Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Civil Rights Act into being 40 years ago today. The bill demanded equal rights in voting, education, public accommodations, union membership, and federally assisted programs, regardless of an individual's race, color, religion or national origin. Suddenly, minorities could no longer be told which bars and clubs and restaurants they could attend, which water fountains they could drink from.  Furthermore, in one fell swoop, the bill Johnson had pushed so hard for gave racial minorities and women the right to apply for any job, effectively ending legal discrimination in employment based on race or gender.

The bill's effects were sweeping. At the time, Roy Wilkins, secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People called it "the Magna Carta of human rights." It's certainly the most significant piece of legislation in our nation's history.

In stark contrast, our current President, also from Texas, would like to be the first President to sign an amendment to the Constitution, which would encourage discrimination against an entire segment of the United States population.

Of course, aside from the fact that they both hail from Texas, Johnson and Bush do have another thing in common: they both lead us into ill-conceived wars during their administrations.

David Leeson

Photo of an exhausted soldier in Iraq by David Leeson of The Dallas Morning News. His site includes striking photos of soliders and civilians alike and two documentaries: "Dust to Dust," his account of being an embedded photojournalist during the invasion of Iraq and "War Stories" which portrays Belo Corporation journalists covering the war in Iraq.