But the undeniable Quote of the Year...

... had to come from the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, in explaining why he met the Dalai Lama in his office despite Chinese pressure for heads of state to shun him:

"I don't know why I would sneak off to a hotel room just to meet the Dalai Lama. You know, he's not a call girl."

As I say, he's a respected international spiritual leader."

I'm a big admirer of the Dalai Lama and mean no disrespect, either, but this makes me laugh very hard every time I hear it. And we thought our president had a way with words.

On that note, happy holidays, everyone!

Ron Paul from "Meet the Press" today: More Good and Bad

first, what I think was a really good answer, re: foreign policy, albeit not one, unfortunately, that a "mainstream" candidate could get away with:

RUSSERT: But it sounds like you think that the problem is Al Qaida -- the problem is the United States, not Al Qaida.

PAUL: No, it's both. It's both. Al Qaida becomes the -- it's sort of like, if you step in a snake pit and you get bit, you know, who caused the trouble, because you stepped in the snake pit or because snakes bite you?

So I think you have to understand both. But why produce the incentive for these violent, vicious thugs to want to come here and kill us?

RUSSERT: Do you think there's an ideological struggle, that Islamic fascists want to take over the world?

PAUL: Oh, I think, some, just like the West is wanting to do that all the time. Look at the way they look at us.

I mean, we're in 130 countries. We have 700 bases. How do you think they propose that to their people and say, "What does America want to do? Are they over here to be nice to us and teach us how to be good democrats?"

but here, defending his sponsorship of earmarks for his district, even though he follows his usual policy and doesn't vote for them, (although he knows everyone else will follow their usual policy and pick up his slack) I didn't find him as convincing:

RUSSERT: When I looked at your record, you talked about big government and how opposed you are to it, but you seem to have a different attitude about your own congressional district.

For example, "Congress decided to send billions of dollars to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Guess how Ron Paul voted.

Quote, "`Is bailing out people that choose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?' he asks."

And you said no. And yet, this: "Paul's current district, which includes Galveston and reaches into the Brazoria County, draws a substantial amount of federal flood insurance payments" -- for your own congressional district.

This is the Houston Chronicle: "Representative Ron Paul has long crusaded against a big central government. But he also represented a congressional district that's consistently among the top in Texas in its reliance on dollars from Washington. In the first nine months of the federal government's 2006 fiscal year, it received more than $4 billion."

And they report, The Wall Street Journal, 65 earmark-targeted projects, $400 million that you have put into congressional bills for your district, which leads us to the Congressional Quarterly. "The Earmark Dossier of Dr. No: There isn't much that Dr. Ron Paul thinks the federal government should do. Apparently, though, earmarks for his district are OK..."

PAUL: (LAUGHTER)

RUSSERT: Paul is the sponsor of no fewer than 10 earmarks in the water resources bill, all benefiting his district: The Gulf Intercoastal Waterway, $32 million; the sunken ship you want to be moved from Freeport Harbor; The Bayou Navigation Channel. They talk about $8 million for shrimp fishermen.

PAUL: You know...

RUSSERT: Why would you load up...

PAUL: You've got it completely wrong. I've never voted for an earmark in my life.

RUSSERT: No, but you put them in the bill.

PAUL: I put them in because I represent people who are asking for some of their money back. But it doesn't cut any spending to vote against an earmark. And the Congress has the responsibility to spend the money.

Why leave the money in the executive branch and let them spend the money?

RUSSERT: Well, that's like saying you voted for it before you voted against it.

PAUL: No -- come on, Tim. That has nothing to do with that.

RUSSERT: You put them in the bill and get the headlights back home...

PAUL: No, I make the request. They're not in the bills.

RUSSERT: ... and then you know it's going to pass Congress and so you don't refuse the money.

PAUL: Well, no, of course not. It's like taking a tax credit. If you have a tax credit -- I'm against the taxes, but I take all my tax credits. I want to get their money back for the people.

RUSSERT: But if you were true to your philosophy, you would say no pork spending in my district.

PAUL: No, no, that's not it. They steal our money. That's like saying that people shouldn't take Social Security money. I don't advocate that.

Bush Scandals: Hugh has made a list.

I don't know who Hugh is, but he's very meticulous; exhaustive, I would say.

Good for Hugh... "because there are just too many scandals to remember."

And someday those historians who are going to vindicate this administration may be interested in looking back, just for exhaustiveness's sake.

And A Very Christopher Hitchens Xmas...

... at Reason Magazine's party last night.

He claimed to my date and I (my date being the Reasonable one, don't worry; I'm still a damn liberal) that no one until us -- I got an adorable photo with him; at least he was adorable, more svelte and charming in person; I always smile like a goofball next to famous people -- mentioned the war. No one mention the war! I may have mentioned it once or twice, but I think I got away with it ;) I think he laughed at my joke. In any case, we ended up with his abandoned final glass of whiskey when no one else would take it. I have the hangover to prove it. A good night.

Another Way of Believing

Some might call this guy a hypocrite or a master of double-think; many more might call him a heretic; and some might just call him someone going to great lengths to avoid a career change.

I've often heard how seminaries produce more atheists than secular programs of study, but skeptical priests and ministers generally keep their lack of belief to themselves. This guy is just putting it out there.

But what intrigues me more are his reasons for believing his (what I would characterize as a humanist, interpersonal) idea of God is something worth discussing and celebrating, not a dirty little secret but something of psychological value. This has always been my personal belief as well, although I've never reached any conclusions as to how it might be worked out. So I'm curious about what this guy has to say, although I guess it will be awhile before his book is translated from the Dutch.
I think it's more than, as Richard Dawkins noted, just a matter of sentimentally preserving the cultural trappings of our Christian history, although I agree that there's nothing wrong with that, either.

Dutch pastor says he can believe in a 'God who doesn't exist.'

And then there's the "F" word.

OK, maybe I'm being too down on the GOP today. And I hate to sound like an apologist for the new Congress, because they've disappointed me, too, but I'm just kinda burned out with hearing what a failure it is, when it's basically operating with its hands tied behind its back.
Yes, they've been cowardly in many ways; the impeachment issue being one, and they've failed their promise to do something about Iraq. But whenever they try something proactive, whether it's to do with Iraq or anything else, it's blocked at every turn. For one, there's Bush treating his veto power like a new toy he hadn't realized could be so much fun until he tried it...
And does anyone remember when "filibuster" was such a dirty word that it made poor Senate Leader Bill Frist break down in teary press conferences, at the mere suggestion the Dems might possibly employ it?
Now it's such an implicit matter of course that "a Senate majority" is commonly defined as 60 votes, the number needed to block a filibuster, rather than 51.
How soon some forget.

Congressman Wexler's Sad Little Press Conference...

... about the quixotic dream of Cheney impeachment hearings.

It consisted of him, the guy who wrote a book on the subject, and maybe two or three other reporters.

But the guy who wrote a book on the subject made a good point on why this is the case.

Where was Kucinich, though? It's not like he's been invited to any debates lately.

DAVE LINDORFF: Let me follow that up. As you may know, I wrote the book, "The Case for Impeachment," with Barbara Olshansky.

REP. ROBERT WEXLER (D-FL): Yes.

LINDORFF: Since we've written it, we've been deluged with people asking us why isn't Congress acting; why is the media not -- you know, for instance, that book never got a single mainstream media review.

(LAUGHTER)

WEXLER: Is that so?

LINDORFF: Yes. And you know, people ask why is this; why is this?

And one of the things that people suggest -- and I wanted to bounce this off you -- is that both the leadership in Congress and the editors and reporters in the mainstream media have a fear that they are so complicit in the various issues that you've raised, you know, the spying, particularly the buildup to war, and even the outing of Valerie Plame, that -- in the case of the media -- that they don't want to see these things exposed the way they would be in impeachment hearings.

What are they putting in Joe Scarborough's "Morning Joe"?

He was acting awful loopy during this interview with John Edwards yesterday... Good thing Mika Brzezinski was there to nervously laugh off his line about Republicans. Maybe it was truth serum. If only Fox News used the same catering people.

BRZEZINSKI: What do you make of what's going on in the Republican Party, with the surge of Governor Huckabee?

And some analysts might say that the Republicans don't know what they want yet, but Huckabee seems to be sticking, at least for now, and is winning heavily in several states...

(RAUCOUS LAUGHTER FROM SCARBOROUGH)

BRZEZINSKI: What?

SCARBOROUGH: Republicans never know what they want.

BRZEZINSKI: Well...

SCARBOROUGH: Other than war. We want war.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, (OFF-MIKE) Don't listen to him.

(LAUGHTER)

What do you make of Governor Huckabee's surge so far?

What do you think voters are responding to here?

EDWARDS: Oh, I have to be honest. I don't spend a lot of time following what's happening on the Republican side...

(LAUGHTER)

BRZEZINSKI: That's smart.

What else do Halliburton and Saudi Arabia have in common?

Justice for rape victims, apparently. In fact, Saudi Arabia is arguably more advanced here, in that they actually tried and sentenced the perpetrators.

ABC story on KBR/Halliburton's cover-up of the gang rape of a female employee in Iraq.

And since rescuing her -- from KBR, who had locked her in a room with no food or water! -- at the request of her congressman, the State Dept. hasn't done a hell of a lot, either, nor has Justice. Maybe they will now that it's on the news.

Quote du Jour: John Boehner

This proves once and for all that Republicans, at least those who've spent any time in Washington, either have no concept of irony, or less powers of recollection than that guy from Memento:

Republicans have been shut out of this process from the beginning. This process that they've employed of private negotiations amongst literally no more than a handful of people is troubling.

-- discussing the House energy bill in a press conference last Thursday.

Useful Timeline: Bill of Rights Under Bush

from MondoGlobo

Biden's take on Bush & the NIE

Biden's grasp of the situation seems pretty solid to me (not so much his grasp of sentence structure, but then Bush has set the bar pretty low in that regard. I've noted however, that Cheney speaks in perfectly grammatical, discrete sound bites, albeit out of the side of his mouth. Even that has failed to endear him to me, however.)

from Hardball with Chris Matthews this week:

MATTHEWS: Well, this propaganda war that's been fought, now, for years now -- their phrases like "weapons of mass destruction" that you and I never heard of growing up, "regime change," all the rest of it, "homeland," all the rest of the new language we've learned from this crowd that came in a few years ago -- around the late '90s, they started pushing this.

If their motive is not to fight weapons of mass destruction, which don't seem to materialize when they're supposed to in either Iraq or the Iranian case, what is the grand motive for war?

Why did we invade Iraq?

Why were we threatening World War III with Iran?

Why did this administration, Cheney and the president, keep pushing the war?

Why do they always want to fight or scare somebody?

What's it about if it's not weapons?

BIDEN: Let me tell you what I think it's about. I can't prove it. I think it's about our ability to try to dominate that region of the world and control oil.

I don't think we went to war because of oil, but I think there was an absolute belief -- the only thing I can fit together with Cheney and his gang is that they went to war -- they're smarter than they are acting. They're smarter than they are acting.

What they do -- they went to war in the hope that they would be able to do two things; one, have a government that sat on a whole bunch of oil, that still exists in the world...

MATTHEWS: Right.

BIDEN: ... that would be indebted to us.

MATTHEWS: Two, have permanent military bases in Iraq to dominate that part of the world, to be able to control oil, not to go steal it for American oil companies but be able to control the pricing, control the access of it -- a very Machiavellian view.

There's nothing idealistic about Cheney. I don't know what President Bush thinks, but I think he's bought, hook, line, and sinker, the Cheney rationale that the only way for us to be able to be dominant in the 21st century is to use our overwhelming power, in the face of the moral disapprobation of the rest of the world, to threaten the rest of the world, and that's how we'd avoid war in the future.

I think these guys are irresponsible. But the thing that angers me the most -- and it angers me, Chris -- is how incomprehensible it is for anyone to think that the president did not know that his intelligence agencies didn't believe what he was saying.

I believe that's why these guys came out with, now, 16 American intelligence agencies uniting, saying, I'm not going to wear the jacket again on this one.

Bush Quote du Jour: "I did it once; I'll do it again."

This enigmatic quote was apparently passed, real-time, to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley during Hadley's White House briefing this afternoon via -- who knows? -- mobile texting, a BlackBerry, cranial implants? Just kidding. It was probably a BlackBerry.
The Huffington Post, having missed the audio, understandably attributed it to Mr. Cheney:

QUESTION: Second question. When did the Vice President get briefed on this? Because he was warning of serious consequences just last month, too.

HADLEY: I've just got a note from him -- I did it once, I'll do it again.

But they printed a correction on being told that it was actually referring to the president's reaction, probably to the line by Hadley, found in this transcript from the News & Observer, that was followed by a question about the vice president which Hadley apparently wasn't paying attention to, as he was busy checking out the prez's text:

HADLEY: So again, as the President says many times, we're asking people to do hard things. We're asking people to put pressure on Iran, and it has consequences for their diplomacy, it has consequences for their companies doing business with Iran. People don't like to do that. So I'm sure some people will try and use this as an excuse or a pretext for flagging on the effort.

Our argument is, actually, it should be just the reverse, because we need to keep the halting of the nuclear weapons program in place; we need to achieve the suspension of the enrichment program; and the only way -- what this NIE says is that the best path to do that is to continue what we've been doing, which is diplomatic isolation, U.N. sanctions and other financial pressure, plus the option for negotiations.

QUESTION: Second question. When did the Vice President get briefed on this? Because he was warning of serious consequences just last month, too.

And of course, the occasion of Hadley's briefing was to react to the newly released NIE that reveals Iran halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003.

I wonder if that halting was possibly due to the very early successes in the Iraq war, such as the removal of Saddam, something they didn't want to see repeated in Iran. If we keep having all this "success" over there that we've been having lately, they might just change their minds again.

Ron Paul: Good News and Bad News.

First the good news: His truly "maverick" (makes John McCain look darn establishment) campaign is now outraising Giuliani (already passed Romney.) But somehow his name will probably continue to be mentioned only in passing in most of the press coverage. And when it comes down to it, the ballots may back up the mainstream news outlets' decision to snub the Internet's favorite son. Still, it would be nice to find out what would have happened if Paul had gotten truly fair and balanced coverage from the outset.

Now, the bad news. Paul doesn't merely tolerate the pro-life vision, harbor a private revulsion to abortion based on his own personal faith or career in obstetrics, or object on principle to federal funding (in line with his general hardline stance against federal funding.)
He sponsored this bill, defining all fertilized zygotes as "persons" under the law. And this proactive step to define a key term in the abortion debate seems all the more glaring to me because of his laissez-faire attitude toward government putting its inflated two cents in.
This seems to be where Paul and many of his Libertarian supporters part ways -- no huge surprise, since he is, after all, a Republican congressman running for the Republican nomination.

Writer's Strike Update P.3: A good summary...

... of why mediocrity abounds in Hollywood despite talented writers, and what those writers can do about it (hold onto their copyrights for dear life, forego those Faustian "up-front fees.")