Via Atrios (who draws from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and who provides an entertaining comments section), comes this little tidbit on President Bush, who threw out the first pitch on Opening Day for the St. Louis Cardinals:

BACK AT BUSCH: A somewhat hostile crowd complained mightily about the problems the presidential motorcade caused with regular fans trying to get into the park. A Cards employee tipped moi that the team was so concerned about Bush being booed that they piped in fake applause when he strode out to the mound. [Cardinals president Mark] Lamping flatly denied it. ...

Okay, so let's just say we believe Lamping that such fake applause was not pumped into Busch Stadium. The fact that anybody could think this is, itself, a desecration of the Great American Pastime.

Baseball fans can be among the most brutally honest in the world. Then again, honesty is not exactly a valued commodity in the world of politics, unless the honest feelings of the fans suit the politician's purposes.

When Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, back on October 30, 2001, he received what has been rightly described as a"thunderous cheer." That's because New Yorkers, who had been shattered by the experiences of September 11th, were still expressing their support for a man who, three days after that tragedy, had stood on the rubble of the Twin Towers to tell the world that"the people who knocked these buildings down are going to hear from all of us soon." That"King Arthur Moment," as Chris Matthews has described it, left an indelible mark in the minds of many. (Little did we know that, as Richard Clarke and others have testified, Bush, at that time, was already obsessing over Iraq, hoping to use 9/11 as a pretext for invading that country.)

The point is that baseball fans will cheer you when you deliver. But if you don't, they won't. And they'll boo you for the most mundane reasons. So, if your motorcade knots up traffic around the stadium, be prepared to be booed by honest"regular fans." It doesn't matter if your President or Pope. Even life-long Yankees fan Rudy Giuliani got used to the boos he received when he visited New York Mets' territory. Those boos turned to cheers in tribute to his humanity and leadership during a time of unimaginable horror. But Rudy actually valued the fans' honesty. Post-9/11, he remarked:"Things will be back to normal when I hear boos at Shea Stadium."

Whether we're talking about fake applause or fake turkey props for photo ops, the propaganda continues to amaze. It's pure Bush League.

"In Baghdad, anxiety over the turn of events was matched by unease over dozens of casualties in Baghdad's poor Shiite neighborhoods. In Sadr City, a slum of 2 million named for Sadr's father, hundreds gathered before Sadr's office, waving flags and chanting his name. Two U.S. tanks were parked a few hundred yards away, their barrels trained on the crowds. Residents reported clashes overnight, and an Arabic television station said fighting had renewed Tuesday evening."

In the best of circumstances, regime change most often goes astray due to unintended consequences, popular resistance and the almost inevitable tension between the installed regime and the regime-makers. In a foreign and complex culture, forced regime change seems to be a formula for disaster no matter what the underlying intentions.

Interestingly, Hannity has been one of the only commentators to ask why Ted Kennedy is making comparisons to Vietnam when his own brother was the author of that particular infamy. Hannity has gone so far as to raise the question of Mary Jo Kophechne. I say to fellow-FOX commentator..."That's water under the bridge!" Ouch. On that note of bad taste...

For more commentary, please see McBlog

Sadr saw his newspaper (his voice) suppressed, his right-hand man arrested, andhis own arrest imminent. Then, on Sunday, the Coalition appointed a list of Iraqi ministers to whom they clearly intended to hand over the previously mentioned faux authority. No Sadrists were included. At that point, Sadr had nothing political to lose and, perhaps, little time to make a move. Never one to despise violence, he called for a de facto jihad against the American occupiers and violence erupted in at least six cities. Sadr himself is holed up in one of Iraqi's holiest mosques in one of its holiest cities, Kufa, surrounded by hundreds of his armed zealots. It remains to be seen whether the US military will be arrogant enough to assault the mosque in order to serve an arrest warrant. But the US has to do something. Sadr is a clear challenge to their authority and every other group in Iraq is watching. The US has painted itself into an interesting corner: by referring to Sadr as a murder suspect and issuing a warrant for his arrest, they have left themselves no room to negotiate with him. They have utterly cut off even the possibility of political or diplomatic options.

Bush warns that violence will grow. It seems clear that more US troops will be sent in to relieve the overstressed and overextended military there. (BTW, the Sadrist revolt came at a time when US troops were undergoing a massive rotation out of the area -- a rotation home that may well be cancelled now. I've seen no confirmation of this latter possibility, however.) The latest news I've read comes from the New York Times,"On Monday evening, American troops appeared to be moving into the area around Kufa, where Mr. Sadr's followers have seized control and the cleric has taken refuge in a heavily guarded mosque. Mr. Sadr shot back a defiant message, saying he would"welcome" a showdown with the American forces he has pledged to drive out of Iraq.

For more commentary, please see McBlog

By Nancy Benac

WASHINGTON -- The Treasury Department analyzes Sen. John Kerry's tax proposals and the numbers soon find their way to the Republican National Committee.

The Health and Human Services Department spends millions on ads promoting President George W. Bush's prescription drug plan. The House Resources Committee posts a diatribe against Kerry's"absurd" energy ideas on its government-funded Web site.

In the time-honored tradition of presidents past, Bush is using the resources of the federal government to promote his re-election. Some critics say the president is going beyond his predecessors in using government means to accomplish political ends.

"What this administration has done is taken trends from the past and then projected them into the stratosphere," said Allan Lichtman, a presidential scholar at American University."We've never seen a political operation like this White House does, and that includes the maximum use of government resources."

For more commentary, please see McBlog

They are being taken for a ride.

The argument for contracting out is that jobs are done better when they are awarded competitively. There is lots of truth to this, and if this were all that was at stake, the case for contracting out would be powerful indeed. But there is another dimension as well.

As government employment grew, particularly under the New Deal, Congress required civil service status for the new employees. The reasons were complex, but one important purpose was to prevent the rise of a national political machine. Political machines in American cities used control over taxpayer financed jobs to get cheap campaign workers, who could be relied on the get out the vote for the boss in order to keep their jobs. City machines were corrupt and violent, but limited in their arbitrariness by their being subordinated to the Constitution and courts they did not control. Even so, one community college student of mine some years ago, while a high school student in Chicago, reprted the machine there hired him to break house and car windows of political opponents.

A national machine would not face either of these legal constraints, so the possibility of one being formed is very worrisome. Windows would not be all that are at stake.

The Bush administration is contracting out jobs, removing them from the civil service and shifting them to the corporate world. The companies getting these jobs know that the re-election of Bush will help them keep these lucrative goodies, and it is no surprise that campaign contributions to Bushg dwarf those to earlier republican preisdents. Part of the purpose of Civil dervice has been undermined.

From a classical liberal and libertarian perspective the rhetoric of contracting out has been empoyed to adopt a strategy that DEPENDS on big government. the bigger the governent, the more contarcting out that can be done, and the greater the camapaign contributions that follow.

How do I know that my interpretation makes more sense than the usual classical liberal/conservative one favoring limited governent? The best evidence beside the size of the campaign contributions flowing to Bush and the zooming level of spending are first, that many of the contracts are cost plus and no bid, so the market oriented logic of contracting out is undermined, and second, that even companies that have ripped off the government (meaning us) in the past are still getting these contracts, such as Halliburton.

No libertarian or classical liberal in his or her right mind would vote Republican in the next election.

The difference, Roderick, between Abraham and Mrs. Laney is the difference between day and night.

The difference between Abraham and Laney is that Abraham's action, whether true, myth or allegory, to remove Issac from the alter and replace him with the offering of a ram was THE decisive moment in the development of Judaism, and indirectly of Christianity, even taking into account the Christ mythology created by Paul and others.

First, and foremost, is that, unlike Laney, who killed her two sons, Abraham did NOT kill his son, Issac, but instead made a Covenant with Yahweh. Tit for tat, monotheistic worship and rewards as a Chosen people, in exchange for no more human sacrifice. The idea of the Covenant, of course, is central not only to Judaism but to much of Christianity as well. My favorite among comments on the idea, are those of Mark Twain in his insightful essay on anti-Semitism written after a trip in both Austria and Germany late in the nineteenth century.

It is important to understand that the Jews were on the periphery of several civilizations which stressed human sacrifice, especially Canaanite civilization which encompassed both Phoenicia and later Carthage. The Jews were constantly falling back into involvement with the corruption of this urban civilization, of which Delilah's hold on Samson was one illustration.

Archeologists have found the remains of perhaps 20,000 first-born males of the Carthaginian aristocracy, burnt to assuage the blood lust of Moloch-Baal, the most blood thirsty of all of the Gods of the Ancient World. It is thought the offerings were also meant to blunt the envy of the lower class masses in that commercial civilization, often called the first Capitalist one.

On a related point, Geneticists have long pointed out, as C.D. Darlington phrased it,"that people who don't eat together, don't sleep together." And, going back to earliest times, woman's control over what might be called"the power of the pot," has meant that the wife is simply NOT going to cook two separate meals, one for herself and another for her husband. The point is to develop a breeding group that has separated itself from others with cultural traits deemed harmful.

Diets, the more restrictive the better, therefore, become key factors in separating one group for another. Jewish dietary laws were meant for this purpose, to contrast with those of the Canaanites, not because of some sanitary purpose. If the fear was because the shellfish, pork, etc., might spoil, then the injunction would have been to eat it within an early timeframe. This is the real reason for such diets today among groups such as the Jews, Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists.

The important thing, ultimately, was to do everything to separate the Jews from the blood lust Moloch-Baal worshiping Canaanites.

To compare the significance of the important story of Abraham and Issac to that of the poor Mrs. Laney's murder of her two children, whatever her motivation, is, well, just plain silly!

PS:

The dietary laws have some interesting economic aspects as well as the in-group genetic ones.

Since the Mormons believe each Stake should have a year's supply of food stored up, they tend to buy in bulk with great savings. I ate better than most on my graduate fellowship because a Mormon friend allowed me to buy food at their prices.

The Jews, of course, have done well peddling Kosher foods, not only for themselves but to others. In high school I worked on a wholesale milk truck and used to take the old stamp with the rabbi's seal on it and stamp the heck out of cartons of cottage cheese as needed.

The Adventists, pound for pound, have done best with their health food thrust even into medicine where, ironically, for Fundamentalists, some of the most advanced work is done in their hospitals. Going back to Kellogg's, the companies they control have done very well, especially discovering uses and patenting of the soy bean long before the government became aware of its qualities. They have more medical people per capita than any group, and with tithing, for example, give several times more than other Christian sects.

Looks more and more like national security has very little to with what gets classified. Instead, information that backs or backed the administration's case for war is deemed okay, where information that might hurt the White House is censored for alleged national security reasons. The most obvious example is Richard Clarke's original testimony to a House committe investigating 9/11 that was critical of the White House. That testimony was once determined to be too sensitive for release. Now that the White House sees an advantage in releasing it -- namely, discrediting Clarke by revealing reported discprencies in his two testimonies -- his original testimony is suddenly hunky-dorey for public consumption.

There are other examples, too:

To make its case for war at the United Nations, the White House also released recent audiotapes of intercepted conversations -- usually among its most highly guarded secrets -- between Iraqi military officers...

... A 25-page version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was released in October 2002. It made clear-cut statements about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capabilities in two pages of"Key Judgments."

"Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons. . . . [I]t will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade," the section said, adding that"most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."

When a fuller, eight-page version of the key judgments section was released after the war, it contained lengthy, well-marked dissents by some in the intelligence community.

On the question of whether certain aluminum tubes were imported to Iraq for use in nuclear weapons programs, the first document said:"Most intelligence specialists assess this to be their intended use, but some believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs."

The second document included a dissent by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research (INR), which said it did not believe there was"a compelling case" that Iraq was working to acquire nuclear weapons. And INR and the Department of Energy questioned whether the tubes were well-suited for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

The second declassification, said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a group devoted to declassifying secrets, showed the administration was not"protecting sources and methods. They were creating a document for public consumption that argued for the war."

Something tells me the White House will define"national security" broadly enough to include"anything that might hurt Bush's chances for reelection."