What we need is more opinion pieces like this one from the New York Times [login may be required], which clearly notes the fact that Iraq has failed beyond repair, and that failure does not lie in the future, but instead lies in the past with Bush’s massive failures:

“President Bush told Americans last night that failure in Iraq would be a disaster. The disaster is Mr. Bush’s war, and he has already failed. Last night was his chance to stop offering more fog and be honest with the nation, and he did not take it.

Americans needed to hear a clear plan to extricate United States troops from the disaster that Mr. Bush created. What they got was more gauzy talk of victory in the war on terrorism and of creating a “young democracy” in Iraq. In other words, a way for this president to run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one.

Mr. Bush did acknowledge that some of his previous tactics had failed. But even then, the president sounded as if he were an accidental tourist in Iraq. He described the failure of last year’s effort to pacify Baghdad as if the White House and the Pentagon bore no responsibility. …

This war has reached the point that merely prolonging it could make a bad ending even worse. Without a real plan to bring it to a close, there is no point in talking about jobs programs and military offensives. There is nothing ahead but even greater disaster in Iraq.”

This is what the American people are beginning to realize. It is an issue that is beyond simple disapproval of Bush’s performance. It involves realizing that failure has already occurred, the the situation in Iraq has gone beyond salvage, and no amount of wishful thinking will change that. This is not something that is hard to see if you look at the situation objectively. More than two years ago, I wrote:

And now more and more analysts are beginning to come out and say it outright: we are losing the war in Iraq. Or, more specifically, Bush is losing the war in Iraq. The soldiers fight on, doing their best, but all a soldier can do is just that–their best. If their commander-in-chief chooses the wrong battle or mishandles his strategy, then there’s little that any soldier can do.

Before the war started, the Arab league predicted that if Bush invaded, it would “open the gates of hell in the Middle East,” and now they’re saying that the gates of hell are indeed open; some analysts see the was as already lost; and this writer [broken link] notes that the correspondence between Bush’s rosy assessments and the reality on the ground are becoming more and more dissonant.

Less than a year after that, about 16 months ago, I also noted:

Bush has lost the war in Iraq. He no longer expects there to be a democracy, but instead an Islamic republic probably driven by extremists. He can’t defeat the insurgents. He can’t get Iraq to be even as safe or prosperous as it was under Saddam Hussein (when you’re a worse leader than Hussein, that’s really pathetic).

This was back when Bush was “significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq,” apparently either floating some test balloons for a troop pullout without admitting defeat, or at least preemptively trying to lower the bar, to stem the political damage from a loss that even they could see. But my point here is that it was clear by that time that the war was lost, and it was clear a year before that that the war was being lost.

It has just taken a long time, far too long, for this to sink in with most Americans. Understandably so–we do not wish to fail, and nobody wants to think that we have sacrificed so much for a lost cause. And so long as the White House and the many conservative spinmasters could make even the weakest believable case that success could still be had or even that things were not so bad in Iraq, many Americans held on to hope, despite the inevitabilities of reality.

But now, it’s becoming pretty much evident to a majority of Americans that there is no more hope in Iraq. Now the issue is more of how we can extract ourselves while salvaging as much as possible in Iraq–a feat that is being marred by Bush’s continuing inability to admit to the truth, and even more importantly, accepting true responsibility for his massive failures. As long as he denies that he lost the war, as long as he pretends that he can still win it, he will continue to damage the situation even more irrevocably.

In a strategy to avoid oversight and Democratic as well as Republican opposition, Bush has already begun his “Surge” in Iraq, even before his official announcement today. Clearly he does not want this to be subject to Congressional approval. He will send the troops in first, so that if Congress doesn’t allow the money, Bush will claim that Democrats are taking money away from troops already in the field.

One of the problems in dealing with public perception of the Iraq War is not so much the distance time puts between people and past events, but more the constant stream of disinformation and spin from supporters of the war, most notably from within the administration–the constant drumbeat of false hope of victory, and the savage attacks against protesters, characterizing them as cut-and-run cowards who will “lose” the war. With the razzle-dazzle of White House PR, it’s easy to lose sight of what is really going on and what really matters.

But perhaps more than anything else, the inability to internalize what is happening keeps people from seeing the obviously correct path. War casualties are just statistics which pale in the shadow of buzzwords and hype; responsibility for past errors and the knowledge that they will likely happen again fade quickly in the noise of current events. Since it is hard to keep all of what has happened in focus and perspective, I thought it would be helpful to create a situational analogy for what has happened, what is happening, and what will probably happen.

Imagine that you and your spouse have four children, and want to go out for the night. The only person available to housesit and babysit for the evening is a local guy named George. He’s a rich kid, well-connected, and known to be less than perfect, to put it lightly, but you and your harried spouse really want to get away for an evening, and the only way you can do that is to use George. So against your better judgment, you leave him in charge and go for a night out. You even call George a few times from the restaurant, and he insists that everything is just fine, there’s nothing to worry about. Wanting to believe that, you accept what he says and leave things in his hands.

A few hours later, as you are returning home, you see flames rising into the sky. You pull into view of your house, and see that it is in the process of burning to the ground. Fire pours out the broken windows, and it is clear that even if the fire department arrived immediately with all hands, it would be too late. You cannot see your children at first, but George is standing out there on the front lawn with a bullhorn. You dash out of your car, run up to George, and ask him what happened.

“Damned cockroaches were in the kitchen,” he replies.

“What?”

“Yeah,” he replies casually, pointing at the house. “At least I thought they were. I heard something in there. So I tried to flame them out. You know, can of hair spray and a lighter, aim under the fridge, scare ’em out. Didn’t work, and then the place somehow caught on fire.”

You are almost too shocked to wonder at his stupidity. “Where’s the fire department?”

“Oh, I didn’t call them,” George retorts scornfully. “They’re irrelevant. A buncha pussies, y’know. And they probably woulda’ just taken credit for everything.”

Suddenly you go cold inside. “George… Where are the children?!?”

George points to something near the doorway, a smoking heap. Recognizing the clothing, you realize to your horror that it was your youngest child. The George raises the bullhorn to his mouth and shouts, “Hey! It’s worse in the living room! Get in there!” Your horror intensifies when you see movement inside the house, and realize that George left all three of your other kids in the house to fight the fire, using nothing more than small fire extinguishers and glasses of water to throw on the spreading flames. You can tell that the kids are doing their best to fight the fire.

“You’re using our kids to fight the fire?!?”

George shrugs. “Hey, you fight the fire with the kids that ya’ got.”

“Get them out of there!!” you scream.

George looks at you disdainfully. “What are you talking about?” he snaps back. “The house will burn down! You want to let that happen? Especially when he’s just arriving?” George motions to a reporter who has just reached the scene.

“Our youngest is dead, you asshole!!”

“And you want his death to mean nothing? You want to make ‘im die in vain? Your other kids have got to finish the job! After all, I don’t want to look like a failure here.”

“Those are our kids inside!!”

George snorts derisively. Just then, two of your neighbors’ kids run up–and you realize that they are carrying a few pails of sand.

“Great!” George says, “Now get in there! If you guys go in, we’re sure to beat this thing!” George then looks back at the reporter, and with a smirk, drawls, “I call this a ‘Surge’!”

There’s really no question about what you should do. You stop the neighbors’ kids, grab the bullhorn, and yell for your kids to get out. They do; and although one of your kids miraculously got through the ordeal without harm, the two others who survived suffer from various degrees of burns and smoke inhalation. The house continues to burn. As you get them out on the lawn, you see that George is busily talking up the reporter, telling his own version of events. You hear snippets: “They put me in charge, approved everything… I had this thing beat… They didn’t have the guts to see it through, they just let it burn… I had a plan, and they had nothing better instead.”

And you realize that you do bear responsibility. You did leave things in his hands, allowing the pressure of the moment to persuade you to do something you knew was irresponsible and wrong. You were absent when your judgment was needed most, and you took action too late.

All of this, of course, does not absolve George; he was a callously stubborn idiot who burned down the house, killed your child and endangered the others with foolish abandon while he stood safely aside.

Even worse, you know that because of his connections, and because the reporter works for a friend of his daddy’s, George is not only going to get off scot free, but most of the town will believe his bullshit about how he was the hero and you made the house burn down. They’ll probably even give him a medal of freedom or something. And though many of your neighbors will know who burned the house down, they’ll still hold against you what they rightfully should–that you left him in charge and let things get out of control.

Still, when you realized your mistake, even though it was far too late, you did the right thing. Not that there was much of a choice, really.

---

That, I feel, is pretty much where we stand as a nation. Because of Bush’s catastrophic mismanagement, Iraq is burning out of control and there is no helping it. You can feel badly about having given Bush the chance to do what he did, and you can spend all day going over the facts of Bush’s responsibility for each failure, even though you know the media will not play it that way, not with Bush and his allies feeding their constant spin and lies.

But all of that is of lesser importance. What is important is that our kids are out there, bravely fighting a fire that can no longer be put out, and they will keep fighting with all they’ve got until you have the guts to call them back, even though you will likely suffer in a different way for it.

There really is no choice. You can ether pull them out and salvage their lives and well-being though the house burns down, or you can stand there and watch them fight until the house burns down around them anyway. The worst thing you could do, however, is to listen to the asshole with a bullhorn.

While the Senate has yet to act on any of this, the new Democratic-controlled House has just passed the second big First-100-Hours measure, a raise in the minimum wage. And like the passing of the 9/11 Commission recommendations yesterday, the minimum wage hike also passed with a veto-proof majority–this time with 82 Republicans joining all 233 Democrats, with 116 Republicans standing to deny minimum-wage workers their first raise in a very long, long time. 68 Republicans voted with Democrats on the 9/11 Commission recommendations, with 128 trying to block it.

The House Dems are living up to their pledge pretty well so far, and are bringing a surprising number of renegade Republicans with them.

Sean has an excellent piece spelling out what’s fantastic about the new iPhone; go check it out. And while we’re at it, maybe we can start a petition to get Cingular to start servicing his town again.

When your name is George W. Bush and even Oliver North comes out against you, you ought to know that your support is weak and even your buzzwords and scaremongering won’t fly this time.

---

Bush is reportedly going to acknowledge that “mistakes were made” in Iraq, though only as a means of forwarding his new agenda so he can make all new mistakes.

---

100 Hours News: the House passes a bill to finally implement the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations, more than two years after the report was published and Republicans kept the recommendations from being implemented. The bill passed the House with a veto-proof majority. One on its way, a lot more to go.

---

Who’da thunk: from left field (with the assistance of a right-fielder), a Network Neutrality bill is making its way through in the first 100 hours. Pelosi is a strong supporter of Net Neutrality, so this might actually get through. It seems to cover all the bases of Net Neutrality, a many-faceted issue, although I don’t know if it would make the policy permanent. Only Olympia Snowe amongst the Republicans has come out to support it so far; she is the sole Republican co-sponsor.

---

Coming up in the 100 Hours: Negotiating Drug Prices for Medicare. Introduced today.

---

See what they talked about in the House and Senate today.

I mentioned a rather glaring omission from the keynote last night/this morning, which was Leopard, and upon review, the keynote also did not talk about iLife, nor did it talk about iWork and the anticipated new spreadsheet software.

In fact, the keynote made no mention of software at all. Nor did it mention any upgrades to computer lines. Just the iTV and iPhone.

That’s something. It is doubtful that Apple has nothing to present along software and PC hardware lines. Which means that Apple probably has a new announcement waiting to be made at some point. After all, when are we going to find out about those “top secret” points about OS X?

One interesting detail about the iPhone that was not mentioned by the keynote bloggers was the screen resolution: 320 by 480 pixels. The 3.5-inch screen beats Zune’s “big” 3-inch screen, and has a better resolution–double, in fact–than the Zune’s or previous iPod’s 320 x 240 pixels.

Question: what will happen to existing iPod lines? Will there be no widescreen, touch-controlled iPod without a telephone? That would seem foolish. Will it include WiFi and/or Bluetooth? Will it have all the features of iPhone, but without the phone?

No time to go on about this–gotta get ready for work. More questions and speculation later…

I have to get to bed as soon as I can (it’s after 2 am here in Tokyo), so I might actually miss out on the last part of the keynote… but for me, it won’t matter too much, as I’ll just wake up and see it then. But so far, the MacWorld Expo Keynote is showing good news. And Wall Street seems to expect good news–even before the keynote started, Apple stock was up more than $2, and it’s still rising moment by moment. I wonder what it’ll do when the Apple phone is announced.

The news so far: contrary to a prior “study”, iTunes Store sales are not slowing down. They have gone up, rather sharply in fact, with more than 2 billion total tracks sold, 5 million more sold each day. 50 million TV shows sold. That’s not too shabby at all. And finally Steve announced a new studio signing on for movie sales–that would be Paramount–although many expected more studios to be signing on as well.

Then there’s less-than-stellar news, about the Apple TV (formerly “iTV”), with the expected WiFi-n superfast streaming from up to 5 computers in the house. TV shows, movies, music, pictures can all be streamed through to your TV and stereo system, temporarily residing on the Apple TV’s 40 GB hard drive. But that’s it. The ability to stream wirelessly from computers to your entertainment system. No rental-movie scheme. I don’t get it. Why spend $300 on that?

Apple stock just dropped $2! They must agree with me that the iTV is a bust.

But now Steve has dropped a bombshell: he announced the widescreen, touch-controlled iPod, the iPhone, and a third “Internet communications device” all in one swoop! Edit: it looks like they are all the same machine.

First, the iPhone (yes, “iPhone”): it uses an intelligent, next-generation touch-screen interface. It runs OS X. The screen displays 160 pixels per inch, 11/16ths of an inch thick, proximity sensor (to tell if it is near your face), orientation sensor to tell if it is held in portrait or landscape mode, 2 MP camera built in. And an iPod, of course–as well as just about everything else on OS X. Beautiful interface.

Photos shamelessly ripped off from Engadget.

Apple stock just jumped $2.50. And rising.

The iPhone is a “quad-band GSM + EDGE phone,” whatever that means. It has both WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0 (eat that, Zune!).

And yes! It has a keyboard interface that makes sense! No more hitting a numeric key seven times to produce a single letter! I am getting one of these babies!

The Zune is now officially dead. No way it can overcome this.

The iPhone uses Safari (excellent web surfing, with zoom feature), widgets, Google Maps (including satellite images), POP3 and IMAP email, WiFi and “EDGE” networking (EDGE gets up to 384 Kbps Internet connection). Photo gallery, all sorts of software… this is like a mini-computer.

[Holy crap–unless someone’s playing a gag on me, John Varley just left a comment in a past entry. What a night!]

Apple’s stock is flying–up $4.12 for the day so far, rose $2 in the past ten minutes–after Steve checked it on the iPhone and it was at $2.43.

A month ago, when Kevin Rose speculated that the iPhone would sell for $250 (4GB) and $450 (8GB), I wrote: “Frankly, I don’t know about paying $450 for a cell phone; it’d have to be pretty goddamned spectacular.”

Well, it’s pretty goddamned spectacular. And I would drop the cash for one right now.

More: Bluetooth means you can use Bluetooth accessories, like wireless headset. 16 hours battery life for audio, 5 hours using the video screen/phone.

And here’s the price: more than expected, it’s $500 for 4GB, $600 for 8GB. Still well worth it.

The first bad news: due to FCC and other regulatory roadblocks, it won’t come out until June. I was just about to type that I know what I’m gonna get for my birthday… when I saw that it won’t be out in Asia until 2008. Damn!!!

This will be one device I will know the most about and anticipate more than anything else… and still will have to wait a year or more before I can get one. Argh.

I just realized that the 2 hours are nearly up and Leopard hasn’t even been mentioned yet.

If there’s more, it’ll have to wait. I gotta get to bed. Good night.

Saw this photo floating around the Internet and loved it. Don’t know its original source–can’t even make out the web site imprint at the top, even if that were the originating site. But whoever made it had a great scientific sense of humor.

This comes in a close second as the funniest quantum physics joke I’ve heard of. Number one, of course, is from Futurama, where Professor Farnsworth’s horse comes in second in a “quantum finish”; Farnsworth exclaims, “No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!” (sound file via Got Futurama.)

This from CNN, via Media Matters; CNN correspondent Elaine Quijano spoke on the naming of Bush’s new policy:

Democrats are seeking to cast a surge as an escalation of the unpopular Iraq war.

That from within a piece that is otherwise balanced–but this characterization near the beginning of the piece shows either bias or incredibly poor reporting. A reporter should be as unbiased as possible, casting the events reported on in as neutral and objective a light as possible.

With this story, both the words “escalation” and “surge” are political buzzwords; in both cases, politicians are “casting” the proposed policy in a way that sounds favorable to their agenda. But Quijano states the issue in such a way that makes Bush’s buzzword sound like the accepted neutral term, while it is the Democrats who are playing politics with language–when in fact, Bush was the first to inject politics into the wording.

An objective reporter would have said this:

Both Republicans and Democrats are seeking to cast the president’s new approach to the unpopular Iraq war in ways that suit their interests. President Bush and some Republicans are calling the troop increase a “surge”; Democrats responded by calling it an “escalation.”

The thing is, wording like Quijano’s very much colors people’s perception of who is right and who is wrong, who is serious, and who is playing politics. Since most of the piece is balanced and the bias is subtle enough to slide under most people’s radar, it has an even stronger ability to sway opinions than an editorial piece, which many people automatically discount for bias.

Quijano’s example of media bias, however, is the kind of thing that goes on all the time. If it were simply a matter of chance, it would favor liberal and conservative interests equally. The thing is, it seems to be quite lopsided in favor of conservative interests–though who knows, maye that’s my own bias speaking. But whatever the direction of the tilt, all of us should be alert to and aware of such subtle bias, and be ready to discount for that bias in straight reporting as well as in editorial speech–a boundary, by the way, which is becoming increasingly blurred in today’s “news” media.

Yargh. I related last week about how, when I got back from my trip to the U.S., I could no longer send email, though I could receive it OK. My entry focused on how the tech support people for the ISP (KDDI Dion) insisted that I do all of this stupid stuff to “fix” the problem, all based upon the assumption that they were not at fault for the malfunction–this after they did a quick and cursory “check” to confirm that they were not the culprits here–despite the fact that I had all kinds of evidence showing that it was them.

One thing I specifically asked about was whether they had made any changes to their system. They said no; I pressed them on it, and they swore that not a single change had been made to their service. They even went so far as to claim that Google and my two separate web hosts had all changed their outgoing email protocols within a 12-hour period.

What’s more, to probe the problem further, they promised to set up my Dion email account again so I could test out their email service; if it worked, they claimed, then the problem would not be with them, but with someone else. Since it contained a password, they would have to send it by regular mail.

This was 6 days ago. I have still not received the promised package.

But it turns out that this is unnecessary. Today I figured out what the problem was. It was the ISP, like I suspected all along.

Turns out they did change their system. They switched on a security feature which requires all outgoing email to go through their SMTP servers. So all I did was change the SMTP servers to Dion’s, and it all works smoothly now.

Not only that, but had they set me up with the email account that never arrived, it would have worked–and they would have claimed that this proved they had not changed anything, when they actually had.

I called up the same support line and got the same person. Before telling them what happened, I asked them to confirm that they had assured me last week that KDDI Dion had changed nothing; they agreed that this was the case. Then I laid out what I had found, and got the expected reply: oh, they had told me all about changing the SMTP servers the week before, didn’t I hear them say that? Of course, it was easy to demonstrate that such was untrue, at which point they switched to telling me about how some setting had been changed at KDDI, but still the main fault was somehow my email providers. And then finally, after I’d pinned them down for causing me a week’s email outage for no good reason, they resorted to saying that this was all just stuff they were relating to me from the Japanese tech support people. They ended by having me specify what I had done to fix the problem, expressing surprise that such was the way to fix things.

Swell.

Wanting to check out a story recently, I went to CNN’s transcript page, and found a preview of news from 4,200 years in the future (date circled in red). Man, that Michael Richards is going to hang around for a long time–and after more than four millennia, you’d think that he’d learn not to rant anymore.

Israel is planning to use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s own nuclear weapons program. That should settle things down in the Middle East.

---

Demonstrating their desire to be responsible and accountable, the White House shifted recording of White House visitors from the Secret Service logs to the presidential records, so as to hide them from Freedom-of-Information-Act filings. Such information requests were used by Republicans to help uncover the Monica Lewinsky visits to the White House–precisely the scandal Bush claimed he would avoid to “restore honor and dignity to the White House.” Yes, it is true that no scandals about Bush getting a blow job have been unearthed, but a host of other scandals have instead. I suppose that hiding such scandals could be considered more “dignified” than being caught committing them, but how it is more “honorable” is beyond me.

---

Dammit, I did it again–listened to CNN for more than a few minutes. This time what sent me over the edge was picture painted of Washington D.C., where Bush was represented as “bipartisan” and “conciliatory,” trying hard to “work with” Democrats, while the Democrats “couldn’t resist” going partisan, while at the same time having no hope of getting their “first 100 hours” achieved, as they have no ability to actually do anything, while Bush has an “arsenal” that includes the veto, Republican filibusters, conservative Democrats, etc. Damned liberal media.

---

On the non-political side of things, Hitachi is going to release a 3.5″ 1 TB drive (as opposed to the multi-drive versions that have been on sale for some time), breaking the Terabyte barrier–and it’ll sell for less than $400. And here I was, thinking I got a deal on a $240 500 GB drive….

---

Meanwhile, Apple is gearing up for the Big Event–the MacWorld Expo, where The Steve will present The Keynote. That’ll be on January 9th at 9 am Pacific time–or 2 am on the 10th for here in Japan, as usual. Suspected announcements: 8-core Desktop Macs and maybe other CPU upgrades, the iPhone, iTV, a possible full-screen touch-controlled iPod, and a full unveiling of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, including iLife ’07 and iWork ’07, the latter including a new spreadsheet app which should round out the productivity suite. Engadget had the best reporting at the last Apple event, followed by MacRumors and TUAW.

Oops. The RIAA may have made a little tactical error. They did not account for the possibility that some people would not knuckle under to their “legal” extortion and actually fight back in court. But that’s what some people are doing, and it is beginning to expose some of the recording industry’s trade secrets.

In UMG v. Lindor, the defendants are challenging the RIAA’s supposition that when someone pirates a single piece of music on the Internet, the music labels lose $750 and should be compensated accordingly. The legal representatives of Marie Lindor make the counter-argument that “in a proper case, a court may extend its current due process jurisprudence prohibiting grossly excessive punitive jury awards to prohibit the award of statutory damages mandated under the Copyright Act if they are grossly in excess of the actual damages suffered.” Seeing as how the RIAA’s bottom-level figure of $750 per song is roughly 1000 times the actual maximum loss a music label would suffer in such a case, they argue that $2.80 to $7.00 per song (4 to 10 times the real value, supposing that the defendant would have purchased the song in the first place) is slightly more reasonable. Such punitive damages are far more in line with reality.

However, the big fish that the defendants are after is information on what pricing structure the labels use–how much they make per song, and more revealingly, how they collude to fix prices in the marketplace:

The pricing data really may not be all that secret. Late in 2005, former New York Attorney General (and current Governor) Eliot Spitzer launched an investigation into price fixing by the record labels, alleging collusion between the major labels in their dealings with the online music industry. Gabriel believes that making the pricing information public would “implicate [sic] very real antitrust concerns” as the labels are not supposed to share contract information with one another. …

[Defense counsel Ray] Beckerman argues in a letter to the judge that the only reason the labels want to keep this information confidential is to “serve their strategic objectives for other cases,” which he says does not rise to the legal threshold necessary for a protective order. The proposed order would force the labels to turn over contracts with their 12 largest customers. Most details—such as the identities of the parties—would be kept confidential, but pricing information and volume would not.

That’s how to hurt the industry back–show that if they want to extort money from grandfathers and 12-year-old honor students, they risk having their illegal market strategies exposed. The Inquirer puts it a bit more clearly:

This would reveal to the world if any price shenanigans were going on between the RIAA members and could cause them more problems with regulators than it would like.

Already investigations into industry pricing have revealed a Byzantine system of backscratching between record labels and distributors and the last thing the RIAA wants is to have details of this information made public.

If Lindor wins then the most the RIAA would ever be able to charge a pirate in the US will be between $2.80 and $7.00 per song. However the RIAA might also find itself up in front of a Senate inquiry.

Ah, it would be such sweet justice if the RIAA’s reign of courtroom terror would end up with them being stuck with punitive damages so reasonable that it would not be worth their while to sue anyone, while at the same time having their own corruption exposed in such a way to get them into real trouble.

I know, it probably won’t happen. But in a just world, it would.

John McCain ain’t what he used to be. He used to be palatable to most people, an alluring face in the scary crowd of right-wingers. Back when he rode the Straight Talk Express, he was the kind of dream candidate we often imagined–willing to talk for as long as necessary, speaking freely even on controversial issues. Not hiding and creating a plastic facade, like Bush did, not giving the usual practiced political sound-bite double-talk-and-run-off garbage. He was the Republican candidate that most Democrats would have been comfortable with, a true uniter-not-a-divider.

But that John McCain died when Bush smeared him all the way to South Carolina and back, in particular pushing the suggestion that McCain’s adopted daughter (a Bangladeshi girl from Mother Teresa’s orphanage) was his own illegitimate black child. Other rumors spread by Bush and his far-right and fundie allies included that McCain was gay and his wife a drug addict, and that McCain was insane even possibly a traitor.

Since then, John McCain learned a valuable lesson: don’t cross the extremists in the Republican Party. And he has been practicing that wisdom in his ongoing-though-unofficial campaign, no longer allowing for straight talk, and paying obeisance to the religious extremists he once criticized, and has reversed himself on a number of issues he gained political capital for opposing in 2000. The message he is sending is, “I learned my lesson and I’ll be a good boy now.”

Although McCain is hoping to hang on to some of the appeal he gained back in 2000–and indeed, many on the left still feel more comfortable with him because they remember those days–it is about as clear as it can get that McCain has shifted remarkably to the right, chumming up to Bush and the religious right, and backing that up with his voting record, suggesting that he would still stay bought by the right-wing extremists even after he would be elected president. And it certainly doesn’t help with many on the left that McCain is new best buds with Joe Lieberman, with some even saying McCain might even consider Lieberman as a VP candidate.

There is no more Straight Talk Express, no more centrist McCain, just a compromised, politicized shell. Mind you, he would still be ten times better than Bush, and there is still the hope that enough of the old McCain remains to make a difference in office. But the old McCain is gone, and what remains is too Bushified to be all that appealing.

Addenda: then there is also McCain’s latest weasel: McCain was the first to come up with the idea of escalation in Iraq, back in October. At the time, he said that 20,000 troops would be sufficient, though he did say for “long term” deployment. When Bush first came out with the “Surge™” plan, McCain did not object–not for quite some time; even a day ago, he said he was not sure what numbers would do the job.

But now, he is now coming out and distancing himself from the whole idea–saying, in effect, that his idea was for 30,000 troops to be “sustained,” not 20,000 troops for a season or two. This is pretty clearly a weasel, not just because McCain previously said that 20,000 troops would be enough, but because it was clear what Bush has been thinking for a week, maybe two, but McCain only now is saying his plan was different–only after pretty nearly universal opposition to Bush’s plan has made itself evident, with no one believing that it will make a difference, except to possibly escalate the violence. And certainly, McCain has brought forth no evidence as to how an extra ten thousand or so troops for a few more seasons could achieve that would make the difference.

But McCain is still trying to have it both ways: though he has made it clear that “his” surge would need more troops for longer, and therefore if Bush’s surge doesn’t work it’s not a “McCain” surge–he still is supporting Bush’s surge. Probably for the same reason he came out for an escalation in the first place: because he wants to look like Bush wants to look, like he could do the job, but without the responsibility or the liability if the plan doesn’t work.

So it’s hard to see his new stance being anything but a weasel.

I got a pleasant surprise when I went in to get measured for new slacks today: I lost more inches than I had thought. I used to have to get 100 cm trousers, and though they have been fairly loose for some time now, I thought I would only go down to 97’s. But when I got measured at the store, I was told to try some 94’s–which meant I had to go down two floors, as their oversized department (97 cm and higher, in Japan) didn’t have any. I was even worried that the 94’s would be too tight, but they weren’t. Huh. Go figure.

Bush has now decided, unilaterally and in imperial fashion, that he has the power to open your mail and read it any time he feels the desire, without need for a warrant. He did so in another infamous “signing statement,” the kind he has used to invalidate all kinds of laws; this statement not only invalidated standing law as well as the Constitution, it even invalidated the very law he used to sign it with.

First it was listening in on your phone calls without a warrant, now it’s opening your mail.

So, exactly how long will it take before even conservatives–who, historically, have not enjoyed the government nosing into their business–to rebel against this incessant whittling away of civil rights and personal privacy? How long before Americans decide, enough of this crap, and stop simply sitting back and saying “oh well, what are you going to do?” every time Bush burns down yet another civil liberty and takes us one more step toward fascism? Because you certainly cannot count on the Supreme Court to slap down this president, after he has stacked it the way he has.

So what are you going to do?

Is it just me, or is there in fact a palpable wave of anti-Islamic bigotry among conservatives? From CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck confronting newly-elected Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies,” to Right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel painting Barack Obama as a Muslim “when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam,” to Congressman Virgil Goode of Virginia melting down over Ellison’s election as if Muslims are within an inch of taking over the country… and so on and so on.

Republicans often seem content these days to brand the entire religion of Islam to be an evil enemy which must be eradicated–or, as right-wing queen Ann Coulter said, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Her views seem to be coming into the right-wing mainstream these days.

Am I wrong on this?

Just when you think that Republican lawmakers can’t become any more like whiny, hypocritical, infantile brats than they already are:

The ranking Republicans on two committees complained to the incoming Democratic chairmen Tuesday that the plans for the first 100 hours restrict their ability to participate. Several more Republicans are planning a news conference today to introduce a “minority bill of rights” they say is based directly on a plan that Pelosi proposed in 2004 while Democratic minority leader.

Not only are Republicans, who virtually shut out Democrats from making any laws over the past six years, whining now that they will be shut out for four days, they are demanding that the Democratic leadership pass a “minority bill of rights” which Republicans refused to pass when they were in the majority.

The depths to which they plumb are so breathtaking as to leave me speechless.

He’s at it again, and so is the media:

…President George Bush and his Cabinet members assembled to answer questions regarding his administrations plans for 2007, though the President made a point of calling for bipartisanship amongst lawmakers on the eve of the 110th Congress’ first meeting tomorrow.

Bush opened by saying, “The Congress has changed; our obligations to the country haven’t changed.”

Emphasizing the need for Democrats and Republicans alike to cooperate, Bush said, “It’s time to set aside politics and focus on the future.”

It’s amazing how he is able to make announcements like this one and not have everyone in the media–who know full well how Republicans and especially Bush have abused Democrats over the past six years, even relative to normal political standards–break out laughing.

Let’s remember that just two months ago, right after the elections, Bush said the exact same thing: challenged the Democrats to be bipartisan, as if that’s exactly how Bush and the Republicans had been for the six years prior. Then Bush instantly turned around–and by instantly, I mean the same day he met with Democratic leaders–and pushed for an incredibly partisan lame-duck congressional agenda that he hoped to get passed before Democrats could take charge.

Bush admonished Democrats to be bipartisan and then immediately pushed for the most extreme partisan agenda imaginable, including oil drilling, the Bolton nomination, warrantless surveillance authorization–and then he even tried to get his most outrageously extreme judicial nominees re-nominated.

But now, just a few months later, Bush is doing the exact same thing–and no one I can see in the media is bringing up what Bush did before, nor are they calling him out very much on what he’s doing now.

Because Bush is doing it again: at the exact same time he is “challenging” Democrats to be bipartisan–again, as if the GOP had been the shining example of bipartisanship–Bush also pushed an incredibly partisan piece of budgetary legerdemain, one which keeps all of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich while cutting Democratic wishes:

President Bush on Wednesday challenged Democrats taking over Congress to join him in balancing the budget within five years and urged them to cut thousands of pet projects from future spending bills.

Top Democrats reacted cautiously — or not at all — to Bush’s plan, which assumes Congress will renew tax rate cuts passed in 2001 and maintain tax cuts on investments, inheritances and many other items.

Asked why all the tax cuts for the rich should stay in place, a Bush official responded, “We face a spending problem, not a revenue problem. We’re not undertaxed right now.” As if “we” includes the middle class and the super-rich in one boat.

Not to mention that Bush is acting as if budget-balancing has been his idea all along–as if he did not explode spending nor did he fail to stem the historic pork-barrel orgy the Republican Party orchestrated over the past several years.

Naturally, what Bush is trying to do (aside from erasing the past six years from memory) is move the goal posts from the Democrat’s end zone to his own 20-yard-line, trying to make the extreme agenda he’s been setting since the election seem like an equal starting point which is the very picture of bipartisan cooperation.

Don’t expect the media to call him on it, though.

Update: Think Progress has a good article showing how Bush, who admonishes Democrats not to “play politics,” has done virtually nothing but throughout the last term of Congress. (Not to say he hasn’t before then as well.)