Josh Chafetz catches the Kerry campaign sending out a dishonest and stupid email saying Bush is comparing Kerry to Hitler when, in fact, Bush is complaining about being compared to Hitler. (Nod to Instapundit).

If there are any serious Mac geeks out there who can explain why Microsoft word continually quits suddenly and how I can stop it I will be very grateful. I can send the "crash report" it generates whenever this happens (it also happens in AOL too). Just for the sake of maintaining a reasonable email flow, if you don't think you can really and truly help, please don't send guesses and hunches or Mac v PC jabs. I won't be at my computer much today and I would hate to come back to overfilled email box with nothing but "that sounds rough, good luck" emails.

The president of Americans Coming Together, the group which hired the felons to canvas, writes:

"Meanwhile, just today, Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie, The Drudge Report and Fox News have been quick to stir up attention to an Associated Press story about some of our ACT canvassers. It’s the same old tactic—it’s disgusting and so predictable.

I’m writing to respond to these gross misrepresentations of our work, our supporters and, most importantly, our canvassers. And I urge you to stand with me today. "

Um, they really don't respond to the AP story at all -- or even link to it. They're just trying to raise money off it and blame Drudge for linking to a story by that known rightwing organ, The Associated Press.

From an interview with Ted Rall:

Susan Q. Stranahan: You've come under fire for your cartoons and commentary, most recently your remark on your blog about the late President Reagan, specifically, "If there is a hell, this guy is in it." As a result, Fox News' Sean Hannity described you as "thoughtless, mean and hateful." Were you surprised by the reaction?

Ted Rall: It was a comment that was typed up really quickly. I said I'm sure he's turning crispy brown right now. Drudge linked to it and it had a life of its own. All the right-wing subjects -- Fox News, the Washington Times, Andrew Sullivan -- got hold of it and went crazy. I think frankly it was a pretty mild comment. The man was the scum of the earth. We were suffering a case of national amnesia. There was not a single conservative who wrote to me who had a meaningful argument to counter what I had to say. Nobody offered a substantive argument in favor of Reagan. They don't want to out-argue you; they just want to make you shut up. It shows how far we've gone.

A guy who says Reagan's burning in hell is shocked that he didn't elicit thoughtful arguments from people. What at an arrogant buffoon. This was at a time when the web was deluged with thoughtful arguments about Reagan's accomplishments and Rall seems to think the reason he got hate mail was that his arguments were so good there were no legitimate responses and so conservatives had to resort to insults? Rall seems to be saying that he's some sort of hero, a man of substance, taking the high road. Even if he weren't lying about not receiving thoughtful rebuttals -- and he obviously is -- to think he deserved one is preposterous. It's like saying to someone "Your wife's a whore" and then ridiculing the guy for not walking you through the reasons she's not in a calm, rational manner.

Lileks writes:

Today Al Gore upped the ante. He coined a new term for the Internet critics of his positions: digital brownshirts. Yes, yes, it’s over the top. But it’s not the sentiment that raises eyebrows, it’s the position of the person who’s saying it. We don’t expect presidential candidates past or present to indulge in Usenet flame-war lingo. We don’t expect serious party elders to call the other side Nazis, and for good reason: it’s obscene. The brownshirts were evil. The brownshirts kicked the Jews in the streets and made the little kids put their hands on their heads as they stumbled off to the trains. The brownshirts were not interested in refuting arguments. They were interested in killing the people who dared argue at all.

At some point, I fear, the political discourse of 2004 is going to seem horribly irrelevant and misplaced in the face of some loud new wretched horror; it will seem as oddly disconnected from reality as the Condit / Killer-Shark news reports of August 2001. An indolent luxury.

Me: Obviously I agree. But I would an ironic twist. The same day that Gore accused a bunch of GOP flacks who email rebuttals to journalists "brown shirts" it was reported that an activist group working in alliance with John Kerry was dispatching convicted felons -- i.e. real thugs and brutes -- to go door to door in neighborhoods to foment support for their candidate. That was certainly part of the job descripton of the Sturm Abteilung. What they were not told to do, however, was send notes to reporters asking them to be more accurate in their coverage.

Now, I don't think the felons are in fact brownshirts, but only in the topsy-turvy world of Al Gore's Brain and the Democratic Party could one take an objective look at the society today and see the emailers as the ones most like brownshirts.

He drinks because she nags, he thinks
She nags because he drinks, she thinks
While neither will admit what's true
That he's a sot and she's a shrew.
---Ogden Nash

From a reader:

Jonah,

In response to the emailer who said you can't have it both ways.

I would say you can. The difference is that the Vice-President said F-U to Senator Leahy because of what he considered to be unfair attacks regarding ethics and Halliburton. Not the sort of rebuttal I would use, but hey, explitives are a part of the English language.... even though I think they show a complete lack of expressive imagination.

Senator Kerry on the other hand, called a Secret Service agent an SOB for causing him to fall off his snowboard. Smart move from someone who wants to be President, don't you think? You would think that the Secret Service agent in question might have second thoughts if, God forbid, bullets started flying in the general direction of the Senator.

Anyhow, neither instance was much news to me, but I would say that if an FU or SOB comments was merited, I think if someone were questioning my ethics, I would have added a finger.

And..

The e-mail that you excerpted in the Corner is comparing apples to oranges. Cheney said something that perhaps he shouldn't have, but he did it in the heat of a personal confrontation, and he said what he said to the person he was having a conflict with. If memory serves, Kerry said what he said after having time to collect his thoughts, and he did so knowing that he was speaking to reporters.

From a reader:

Jonah,

In response to the emailer who said you can't have it both ways.

I would say you can. The difference is that the Vice-President said F-U to Senator Leahy because of what he considered to be unfair attacks regarding ethics and Halliburton. Not the sort of rebuttal I would use, but hey, explitives are a part of the English language.... even though I think they show a complete lack of expressive imagination.

Senator Kerry on the other hand, called a Secret Service agent an SOB for causing him to fall off his snowboard. Smart move from someone who wants to be President, don't you think? You would think that the Secret Service agent in question might have second thoughts if, God forbid, bullets started flying in the general direction of the Senator.

Anyhow, neither instance was much news to me, but I would say that if an FU or SOB comments was merited, I think if someone were questioning my ethics, I would have added a finger.

Our friend Terry Teachout disputes the notion that McMurtry's "fellatial" (his words) review of the Clinton book is the product of a conspiracy of some kind. Terry knows more -- much more -- about such things than I do and I defer to him for the most part. That said, it doesn't quite wash that the reviews are unrelated in anyway since McMurtry makes pretty much a direct reference to the first Times review in his attempt to debunk the notion that Clinton's book isn't better than Grant's autobiography. Maybe the Times Sunday Book Review supplement editor, Sam Tanenhaus, is off the hook on the conspiracy charge, but McMurtry's review still seems like a rushed rescue mission for a doomed book than an intellectually honest or even serious effort.

This reader makes a fair point, though Drudge and The Washington Post are different institutions:

I do not remember anyone from the corner questioning whether it was appropriate that Drudge and others reported that Kerry ushered an expletive at a secret service agent who ran into him on the ski slopes. If that was news, then surely Dick Cheney swearing at a senator on the floor of the senate would qualify as newsworthy. You cannot have it both ways.

Personally, I can't get too worked-up about Cheney's use of the F-word, though I think it was undignified. Then again, he didn't do it in front of a camera so he had some reasonable expectation that it wouldn't be public and that it wouldn't therefore make him a bad role model etc. After all, we know that politicians curse all of the time, like most any other group of people. But they know they aren't supposed to do it in front of live microphones etc. So the question here is why did the press find it necessary to publicize this instance? I'm sure Clinton's famous "purple rages," for example, were overheard by plenty of people but we didn't get the profanity unfiltered in the press.

I distinctly remember the scene from "All the President's Men" where Ben Bradlee says that he can't publish the word "tit" because the Post is a "family newspaper." So why was tit no good then, but it's okay to drop the f-bomb on kids reading the paper now?

I didn't get a chance to comment on this yesterday, but I think this story is fascinating. Harvard -- like a lot of schools, I'm certain -- is going oversees to get many of its black students. Lani Guinier and Henry Gates find the trend troubling and for not entirely illegitimate reasons. If affirmative action was intended to even the playing field for the descendants of slaves, then importing blacks from Mali or Niger doesn't really do that.

But that's what is so delicious about this story! Folks like Guinier have set up a system of bean counting and quotas so as to get more "blacks" into colleges and elsewhere. Now it turns out that maybe they are the wrong kind of blacks. I should note that it's not just immigrant blacks that are "troubling" but the kids from mixed race marriages are disproportionately getting in as blacks.

Anyway, the problem is that in order to sustain, defend and expand the racial spoils system liberals have had to argue that affirmative action is no longer a "remedy" so much as an educational benefit in itself, i.e. "diversity." So now Lee Bollinger the former President of the University of Michigan whose case was decided in the Supreme Court last year, must now defend diversity as educational tool and not as a remedy. "I don't think it should matter for purposes of admissions in higher education," said Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, who as president of the University of Michigan fiercely defended its use of affirmative action. "The issue is not origin, but social practices," he told the Times. "It matters in American society whether you grow up black or white. It's that differential effect that really is the basis for affirmative action."

But one of the numerous ironies here is that the diversity fixation has created a market for qualified blacks that -- despite the protestations of Guinier & Co -- cannot be satisfied with the domestic supply. So, in the era of globalization there is a flight to quality. I think it's all just really, really interesting.

A bit depressing.

I didn't get to join this conversation yesterday, but let me say I think Will's piece isn't very persuasive at all. Bill Clinton swore in a "60 Minutes" interview that his problems with women were behind him and implying that were it to happen again it would be a major issue (why else insist that they were behind him?). Hillary Clinton said that if the Lewinsky thing were true it would be a major issue, as did much of the press and Congress at first. Bill Clinton ran for office promising "two for the price of one," and made his wife and marriage central components of his presidency -- including giving his signature policy proposal to her. Bill Clinton was in office and hit on an intern which -- when feminists cared about disproportionate power relationships and all that -- was a pretty big deal. Clinton tried to brand Lewinsky as a stalker. Clinton created new executive privileges. He was the chief enforcer of America's federal sexual harassment laws. Meanwhile Ryan was a pig with his wife. Wasn't in office. Isn't married to his wife. Isn't planning on making her an equal partner. Didn't lie under oath. And, as far as I understand it, didn't even lie at all -- he kept secret court records secret.

Now, as I said yesterday I think Ryan should go. But if the hypocrisy card is going to be played, let's play it both ways. Why aren't Democrats defending Ryan if they think the comparison is even remotely apt?

From the NYT:

WASHINGTON, June 24 — Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990's were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq.

American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden's organization, before Al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization. He was based in Sudan from 1992 to 1996, when that country forced him to leave and he took refuge in

An email:

Stop being so bloody obtuse. You're doing it deliberately. We vote for
a president and a vice-president; the Constitution does not permit a
co-President. Laura Bush is wonderful, but I did not and would not have
voted for her husband because she is his wife.

If the wife wants to have some role in the government, let her go
through the hiring and/or confirmation process. Else, let her confine
her influence to pillow talk.

Hillary Clinton had no legal standing with her little health care
committee, and she was abrogating the office of the Health and Social
Services without going through the hoops. As such, she should have kept
her bloody mitts out of government. Advise Slick Willie, yes; a wife is
free to tell her husband anything. Play an active role in government?
Hell, no.

BTW, you're not missing anything. You're being deliberately dense.

My response: I'm accused of pretending to be dense--an act that must bring special pain to someone like my correspondent, who obviously comes by her denseness honestly. She writes that the president and vice president are elected, while the First Lady is not. No kidding. That's why I brought up the example of a Cabinet officer. Cabinet officers aren't elected either; you have to vote for president making assumptions about what kind of people he will select and how much power he will give them. But you have a pretty good idea of who the First Lady will be, and Clinton indeed promised in 1992 that his election would let voters "buy one, get one free." So, again, where's the lack of accountability?

Kathryn, Rich, & Sentient People Everywhere -- Have you actually read this mea culpa review from the Times? Oh my Lord. It is absurd. It is mortifying. It reads like the confession at a show trial but with the intent of a mother trying to console a weeping, needy, child. It is hackery. It is fluff. It is scandalous. I am ashamed for the Times that they would rush a review to the public in such a blatant sprit of atonement for violating liberal pieties.

Some excerpts:

William Jefferson Clinton's "My Life" is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not.

In recent days the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been raised as a stick to beat Clinton with, and why? Snobbery is why. Some people don't want slick Bill Clinton to have written a book that might be as good as dear, dying General Grant's. In their anxiety lest this somehow happen they have not accurately considered either book.

•••

Clinton has the vitality, but with it the inwardly angled gaze of a man who sees too clearly the crack in reality, the difference between what is and what might be, a sense born of all those normal things - the Cardinals, fishing, the Christmas tree and the out-of-state vacation - that somehow were never to occur again.

•••

"During the silly time when Clinton was pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of "is," I often wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits, for whom the meaning of "is" is a matter not lightly resolved."

Okay, I haven't followed the Ryan thing closely. But here are few thoughts. First, he should go. Maybe there's a legitimate privacy issue, maybe it's unfair, maybe this, maybe that. If he's damaged goods and can't win (I don't know if that's the case, but it sounds like it) he should drop out. Second, if all of this stuff is true, he's a pig. But divorce papers are notoriously slanderous so we should keep that in mind. Third, which brings me to something I'm confused about. Jeri Ryan allegedly says that her husband brought her to sex clubs on more than one occasion, right? And she says she was horrified, disgusted and physically ill from what she saw. Fair enough, but why did she go to such clubs on more than one occasion. If I dragged the missus to one of those places once, I sincerely doubt I could get her in the door (or her foot off my throat) a second time. Fourth, where are the privacy zealots? Throughout Clinton week we're being reminded of how terrible it was to pry into Clinton's private life. Andrew Sullivan and others defended Gary Condit and countless others from less outrageous intrusions into their private lives, why is Ryan fair game?

An email: "If the GOP was demanding as a legal requirement that Clinton turn over all the meeting records, etc. from Hillary's meetings, then yes, they were wrong.

"If the GOP was merely demanding that the records be turned over as a way of putting political pressure on the White House, but were not actually pursuing a court order or claiming it was a legal requirement, then that is just hard-ball politics and was fair game.

"I will say, however, that the scope of the two taskforces - energy policy vs. socialized medicine - makes whatever the GOP said back in 1993 much more understandable. Legal requirements aside, if Cheney's taskforce had been coming up with, say, a plan for federalizing and completely redesigning the U.S. education system, then the White House would be harder pressed to justify not releasing most, if not all the records, court order or not."

I read with some dismay recently the remarks of Judge Guido Calabresi. After reading the article, I was wondering how much he was relying on academic arguments that have to do with the constitution and elections. I was honestly hoping that he didn't have that much of a political motivation to make the case that Bush was like Hitler in how he came to power.

Then I was reading on StudentsForAcademicFreedom.org an article having to do with the graduation of Bush's daughter at yale and filmmaker Ken Burns commencement address given that day. Article is from 5/23/04

What struck me was the description of the people who were protesting Bush's low profile visit to his daughters graduation and subsequent private party. This is direct from the article and the important part is highlighted.

About 50 protesters gathered at Levin's home Sunday afternoon. They denounced the president and the war in Iraq, while holding signs saying "Uproot Bush" and "Resist This Endless War."

The crowd was a mix of students and older Yale graduates.

Anne Tyler Calabresi, 69, of Woodbridge, said she was protesting on behalf of herself and her husband, 2nd Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi, a Yale graduate and former dean of the Yale School of Law.

"I'm profoundly worried about the way this country is going," she said. "And I'm furious about the lies George Bush has told to us again and again. He has led us into a war that is destroying our reputation around the world and creating implacable enemies around the world that we didn't have one year ago."

Please mention this if you can. It would shed some more light on why this guy made such an outlandish comparison to begin with.

Thanks

Tyler Perry

A New Haven man has been jailed for six months on a contempt charge after dropping his pants and mooning a judge.

Richard Brown, 38, of New Haven was jailed Wednesday after an outburst in front of Superior Court Judge Patrick Carroll.

Smith shouted insults and obscenities after the judge had told him to address the court as “sir.”

“Sir? Kiss my (expletive), sir!” Brown shouted, dropping the pants of his two-piece prison jumpsuit and pointing his rear end at the judge.

Carroll summarily sentenced Brown to six months in prison for contempt of court.

Brown continued to shout taunts and expletives, including allegations that court officials are “racist” and “devils,” as he was restrained by state marshals and forcibly escorted through the side door of the courtroom to a holding cell.

It started as a joke last year when a group of Republican Senators, led by Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who has the Southern credentials to get away with wearing a seersucker suit, all wore their seersuckers to work on the same Thursday, with saddle shoes and bow ties, of course.

This year, Seersucker Thursday will be held this week.

It was supposed to be held last week, Lott said, but “the ladies of the Senate requested a delay.” He implied that the women in the chamber may be planning a surprise, although he didn’t know what it was. He mentioned Sens. Dianne Feinstein, (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) as likely conspirators.

Indeed, the Senate Seersuckers will come with ruffles this year.

“These have been hard days in the Senate. We are dealing with a lot of big and very difficult issues,” said Feinstein, who is leading the Lady Seersucker effort. “I thought it was time to lighten up a bit and inject some humor. The men of the Senate who wear these suits take great pride in them, and I thought we could surprise, or even upstage them. But it seems someone let the cat out of the bag.”

Its a real shame.

As a legal matter, the US doesn't really need the resolution. The ICC cannot, lawfully, claim authority over the citizens of non-party states because it is, after all, a treaty organization that cannot bind, or derogate from the rights of, states that are not also parties. The claims of some ICC supporters, and the ICC prosecutor, to the contrary are just wrong. If the ICC prosecutor decides to move forward and claim jurisdiction over the US, however, a UN resolution is not likely to stop him. If that happens, the US does not have to submit, and the American Servicemembers protection act authorizes the use of force to protect Americans from the ICC overseas.

In addition, given the astounding success the Pentagon has had in obtaining "Article 98" agreements (more than 90 so far, under which countries agree not to hand Americans over to the ICC), the UN resolution is less and less relevant -- from a practical legal perspective.

However, from the political perspective, the UN resolution was important as an open and undeniable statement that the US would not participate in UN missions unless its rights were respected. I assume they receded because they did not have the votes, and plan to revisit the issue later on. Still, it sticks in the craw a bit.

All week we've been hearing about how Bill Clinton measured the success of his presidency by such things as black home ownership rates. Fair enough. But now that Bush is office we get stories like this one from Reuters bemoaning the high homeownership rates of blacks:

Rising U.S. Homeownership Brings Woes - Study

By Mark Felsenthal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A rise in U.S. urban minority homeownership has been accompanied by an even greater surge in the number of people straining to pay for their homes, the Fannie Mae Foundation said on Wednesday.

"Hundreds of thousands of urban minorities are struggling to sustain homeownership," the study said.

Homeowners stretching to pay for their homes are at greater risk of foreclosure and of spoiling their chances of borrowing in the future, according to the study, "A Tale