Joseph Wilson is the man who exposed the Bush administration’s Niger-yellowcake lie. In return, a “senior administration official” has outed Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative, according to right-wing columnist Robert Novak. This has sparked a lot of discussion.
And now a British weapons advisor, apparently the man behind the whole yellowcake story, has turned up dead.
I had never heard “brights” used to describe anything other than high-beam headlights until Sunday, when I ran across a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and the topic came up. Apparently brights has been co-opted as a catch-all term to describe agnostics, atheists, etc. It sounds a little too airy-fairy for my tastes–and indeed, following the model of “gay” for homosexual, it was coined to put a cheery word to a ghettoized social group.
In June, Richard Dawkins, who has never been shy about describing himself as an atheist, used the term. More recently, Daniel Dennet came out. Interestingly, the term has stirred up some ire among those it might describe.
“I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.”
Ari Fleischer
You’ve got to love this stuff. It’s like a verbal Möbius strip.
Bill Frist is proposing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I figured we’d see plenty of “defense of marriage” bills. But a constitutional amendment? That’s cutting to the chase, alright.
Frist’s logic is comically confused. “And I’m thinking of, whether it’s prostitution or illegal commercial drug activity in the home, and to have the courts come in, in this zone of privacy, and begin to define it gives me some concern.” What he’s putatively concerned about is the removal of legal oversight, not the creation of it (but that’s really just a straw man). At least he doesn’t embarrass himself quite as much as Scalia, who fretted in his dissent that removing sodomy laws would pave the way for legalized bestiality, pederasty, and (whisper it) masturbation.
Frist continues that sodomy laws should be handled at the state level: “That’s where those decisions, with the local norms, the local mores, are being able to have their input in reflected.” But not marriage: that’s a matter for the whole country, uniformly.
MoveOn.org has published the results of a virtual primary. It is, of course, not binding, and arguably doesn’t really mean anything: although MoveOn did go to some trouble to avoid ballot-box stuffing, there’s always that risk. MoveOn had already made nice noises about Howard Dean, and the voters would probably be sympathetic to MoveOn. MoveOn only gave three of the candidates an opportunity to address the voters in advance–it defined those three as the “front runners,” but those three are Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich (??), which is unrealistic. And sure enough, those three easily outpolled the others. Dean got over 40% of the vote. Kucinich, inexplicably, got over 20%.
The others got the dregs, and there wasn’t much for them to fight over. Carol Moseley-Braun outpolled Joe Lieberman, which strikes me as unrepresentative. Wesley Clark–who wasn’t even on the ballot–outpolled Al Sharpton. This is interesting: Sharpton doesn’t even have much cred among the dedicated left, and a recently retired general, who has made only vague noises about running, does. But I’m not sure what it signifies: has the left moved to the right? Does Clark appeal to a certain subset? Is he perceived as more viable today because of his military background?
When I’m president, we’ll have executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day
Representative and Dem presidential candidate Dick Gephardt. Makes G.W. sound like a frigging constitutional scholar and defender of democracy.
While I’ve felt that Howard Dean has been the only really interesting Dem running for the White House, I’m pleased to see John Edwards taking a stand.
Only time will tell, but I have a feeling we should be paying more attention to the protests in Iran.
John Dean, who should know a thing or two about such matters, has written that if it turns out there are no WMDs in Iraq, then G.W. is guilty of “the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison.” Interestingly, he follows the format, sort of, laid down in the noted blog-post by billmon.
Coincidentally, a Pentagon report from September 2002 has made its way into public view, and it uses much more equivocal language about the existence of WMDs in Iraq than the administration. Never mind reports that the intelligence on WMDs was cooked.
Given the current makeup of Congress, it isn’t likely that anything G.W. does would result in impeachment proceedings. But it’s still interesting to hear his perspective.