Click.

That's the sound of the latest Bush attempt to energize his base for the purpose of saving the Republican Congress.  Iran warmongering?  Click.  Immigration?  Click.  Gay Marriage?  Click.  Today after too little too late complaints from conservatives (Joe Scarborough called it pandering), Bush moved his media event supporting the Constitutional Amendment on gay marriage from the high-profile Rose Garden to the Old Executive Office Building.   And Bush apparently walked off without commenting at all.  Can't wait for that subpoena power.

Wow!  Well put, Jamison, well put!

Not to denigrate Mr. Sensenbrenner's exceedingly large ego and very conservative politics, but I think it'd probably be more accurate to change the line "known as an especially cantakerous conservative" to "known as the biggest jerk on Capitol Hill", especially now that Tom Delay is leaving town.

If history serves as any guide, the President will probably express regret for this incident sometime in January 2009.

An interesting new statistical argument has been rolled out recently to help buttress conservative claims that all is well in Iraq and the violence and death there is actually not as bad as say the statistics from several major American cities.  While not as clever as Brit Hume comparing U.S. casualties in Iraq to homicide rates in California, this argument was first advanced by Rep. Steve King (R-IA), pride of Storm Lake, IA who I'm certain knows more about price supports for corn than foreign policy, and then moved along by Rush Limbaugh and a host other right wing commentators.  The argument goes something like this:

I happened to catch Rep. Steve King, a Republican of Iowa, on C-span last week and he rattled off some startling figures that demonstrate how off-base journalists are when it comes to reporting on the war in Iraq. According to Mr. King, the violent death rate in Iraq is 25.71 per 100,000. That may sound high, but not when you compare it to places like Colombia (61.7), South Africa (49.6), Jamaica (32.4), and Venezuela (31.6). How about the violent death rates in American cities? New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was 53.1. FBI statistics for 2004-05 have Washington at 45.9, Baltimore at 37.7, and Atlanta at 34.9.

You see Rep. King is trying to make the point that the news media is just blowing things out of proportion when they "dwell" on massive suicide bombings, dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis, sectarian violence, or even waves of execution style deaths happening in Iraq, but its interesting how he picks his statistics.  I would think that if you're going to talk about aggregate national violent death statistics (homicides? suicides? what are we talking about?)  it doesn't make sense to compare them to homicide rates in individual major U.S. cities, does it?  Wouldn't you want to compare say the rate of violent deaths per 100,000 of Baghdad to that of Washington D.C. instead of D.C. to the entire country of Iraq so that maybe you were dealing with the same thing or category?  That seems pretty logical but I'm not sure it advances the purposes of Rep. King and others. 

Now what if we do compare Baghdad to D.C.?  I don't have any current death rate statistics for 2006 but if you look at Washington D.C. homicide statistics through April of this year you'll find there were 47 homicides.  Now let's look at numbers from Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The number of violent deaths in Baghdad from January to March 2006 was 3,472 deaths.  Now lets add another 1,091 deaths in April and you have a total of 4,563 violent deaths in Baghdad to 47 in our nation's capital over the same time period.  If we adjust for the fact that Bagdad has 10 times more people and multiply the D.C. numbers by 10 then if D.C. was Baghdad we would see 470 deaths at this point, not 47.  Where does that leave us?  I might be wrong but by my calculations the D.C. violent death rate is roughly 9.4 per 100,000 and Baghdad's is about 91.26 per 100,000 through the month of April.  Seems like a big difference to me?

I'm not sure it gets any better if we compare New Orleans to Haditha or Baltimore to Tikrit but I'll guarantee that if hundreds are killed everyday in bombings in Baltimore or the bodies of fifty people with bound hands, killed execution style, were dumped everyday only blocks away from the White House that 1.) the media would cover it extensively, 2.) most people would move far away from any of those places until that type of extreme violence ended, and 3.) most of the rest of the world would be wondering what the hell is going on in the U.S.?

Laura Rozen asks a good question:  If the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill is so worked up over the FBI raid on Rep. Jefferson's office, why the hell aren't congressional committees going into action threatening both Justice and the FBI with oversight hearings or introducing legislation cutting budgets, etc?  Either they're not as concerned as they've said or they really don't have any idea how Congress works and what their role is in the whole scheme of things and thus don't know how to express Congressional perogatives anymore.  After the past six years of much greater abuses of power by the executive branch its quite amazing to see Bill Frist and Denny Hastert so worked up over this.

Looking for more confirmation that the White House has run out of foreign policy ideas?  Well, look no further: MSNBC is reporting that the new buzzword in Washington foreign policy circles is "containment", but what that means in the real world is anybody's guess.  Whereas it made sense as policy in the post-war bi-polar world of mutually-assured destruction that was the Cold War, in its current usage "containment" seems more an attempt to invoke the purpose, and fear, of the Cold War period for a considerably less dangerous, yet more complicated international environment.  For instance, does drawing all U.S. troops in Iraq into a number of large superbases really "contain" ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq or merely remind one of the ill-fated U.S. Marines sent to Beirut with no mission other than establishing a U.S. presence in the midst of chaos?  Surely, those bases keep Iran in check?  Only if you believe that Iranian tanks are sitting ready on the edge of some Middle Eastern "Fulda Gap" waiting for the word to cross two or three countries to get to Israel...but that would fly in the face of the known fact that Iran's military is considerably weaker than either the U.S. or Israeli armies.  Nope, the Iranians make waves by supporting terrorist groups like Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad.  Missle defense shield over Europe?  Sounds great but twenty years of failed tests and no workable system in the foreseeable future really isn't gonna cut it.  Where were we going with this again?

We had a bit of server trouble, but we have returned.

Its painful to look at the transcript to Homeland Security chief Chertoff's press conference today because its pretty obvious nobody in the White House talked to DHS about the details of the President's new border control strategy or how it should be implemented before he went on TV last night.

 Our double secret correspondent just saw Scooter Libby leave his lawyers at Patton Boggs only a few minutes ago.  Does this mean an indictment for Rove?  Cheney going down?  Only time will tell.

Okay, so we do a crappy job of providing pre and neo-natal care to all Americans and we have the highest infant mortality rate among industrialized nations, but what to do?  While some might suggest reforming the health care system, moving towards universal coverage, or putting more money into programs targeting poor and at-risk pregnant women, the federal government has instead decided to set guidelines saying women need to think about and take care of themselves as if they were always on the verge of being pregnant.....oh, and doctors should always treat all women as if they might get pregnant.  Of course this applies whether the women plan to get pregnant or not, because obviously the problem with high infant mortality rates is all these unplanned pregnancies and not the fact that over 17 million women in this country have no health insurance or put off seeing doctors because they can't afford to.  Christ, these truly are strange times we live in.

This is making the rounds, but enforcing the border with Mexico has been such a priority for this administration, that they proposed adding an additional 10,000 border agents in last year's budget and then decided not to because of "budget constraints".  Extending capital gains and dividend tax cuts to the tune of $70 billion...ah, no problem!

This headline should probably read: Bush to base: "I hear you!"