Office of the Independent Blogger

We need to export entertainment to win the hearts and minds of the world! says Candy Spellings, and it’s fine in principle but ridiculous when looked at seriously.

Look, Ms. Spellings. The Muslim World that hates us hates us because they hate Israel and support a Caliphate; not all Muslims do, but the ones that do do it for that. Sorry to be the one to tell you.

As for the rest of the world? I’ve heard that everyday Americans are generally treated with respect and courtesy in most places but I don’t know. I certainly don’t think that the answer is to export Paris Hilton or American Idol. And “marketing America”? Sounds like propaganda. That doesn’t work in one country from another.

If I became President tomorrow, the first thing I’d do besides receive a briefing from the CIA and pray for help from Harry Truman’s ghost would be to appoint a few bureaucracy-busters to each Cabinet department and have them try and weed out some of the longer and sillier bits of red tape because things like this are ridiculous.

As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidante Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassadors worldwide. Titled “Echo-Chamber Message” — a public relations term for talking points designed to be repeated again and again — the Sept. 7, 2005, directive was unmistakable: Assure the scores of countries that had pledged or donated aid at the height of the disaster that their largesse had provided Americans “practical help and moral support” and “highlight the concrete benefits hurricane victims are receiving.”

Many of the U.S. diplomats who received the message, however, were beginning to witness a more embarrassing reality. They knew the U.S. government was turning down many allies’ offers of manpower, supplies and expertise worth untold millions of dollars. Eventually the United States also would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina’s victims.

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent. In addition, valuable supplies and services — such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships — were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them. In some cases, supplies were wasted.

Bureaucracy is inevitable with any government but there are certain departments whose bureacratic nonsense should be reduced heavily because they affect us all. The USDA, health and human services, FEMA — these are all prime examples of offices that need to be quick and efficient more than, say, the FCC.

Briefly: This is interesting but nothing new or particularly important. I just hope 20/20’s report on it May fourth doesn’t lead to a huge firestorm that takes away from all the things that really matter, but it will.

There are plenty of reasons to arrest Hollywood actors and actresses. Poor films, attention whoring, political crusaders — and I still want to get back at Tom Cruise for Eyes Wide Shut! But this is a travesty of a joke.

An Indian court issued arrest warrants for Hollywood actor Richard Gere and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, saying their kiss at a public function violated the country’s strict public obscenity laws, media reports said. Judge Dinesh Gupta issued the warrants Thursday in the northwestern city of Jaipur after a local citizen filed a complaint charging that the public display of affection offended local sensibilities, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

Gupta earlier viewed television footage of the event, which he called “highly sexually erotic,” saying the pair violated India’s strict public obscenity laws. Gere and Shetty “transgressed all limits of vulgarity and have the tendency to corrupt the society,” PTI quoted the judge as saying. Such cases against celebrities — often filed by publicity seekers — are common in conservative India. They add to a backlog of legal cases that has nearly crippled the country’s judicial system.

I guess what marijuana cases are to America’s legal system, publicity-seeking moralists are to India’s.

Justice shouldn’t operate like this anywhere, ever. It ties up the system and corrupts it. Shame.

I’m not going to buy George Tenet’s book. I will check it out from a library and never return it, though. Haven’t you heard? It’s coming out and he’s ripping the Bush Administration in it, contending that the Administration didn’t seriously consider the War in Iraq and that they twisted his words to justify their actions post-mortem.

Funny. I argued that on April twentieth, 2005.

John Edwards, you’re no political virgin, so don’t act like one. Don’t spend 400$ on haircuts and if you do, don’t pay for it with campaign cash. Use your own money so that no one will ever know. That’s the kind of thing that kills candidates, John — not that it’s right, but you should know that by now. I’m happy to see that you, at least, didn’t call anyone’s lesbian daughter out at today’s Democratic Presidential debate.

Nothing special about it, though. Everybody talked about ending the Iraq War, which is the big item in the news these days as the Democrats have passed a bill that demands troop withdrawal. Bush will veto it, however, and nothing will come of it until Bush is gone in 2009 and I doubt that any Democrat takes over and ends the War immediately unless Kucinich takes over, which he won’t.

That’s politics.

I like the thought of beating a budding politician to death. Here’s why.

Shocking news out of Florida! Nearly nine months after Rep. Robert Wexler (D) said that cocaine and prostitutes are fun things to do, someone wants to take the lawmaker’s job. Imagine that! No one in the political world has forgotten Wexler’s comments to Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert last summer, especially Democrat Ben Graber, who announced last week he is challenging the sixth-term incumbent in the 2008 primary.

Graber, an OB/GYN doctor who has held political offices in Florida, told Under the Dome yesterday that the comments were not themselves the reason why he got into the race. But will he be using the Wexler-Colbert interview as political ammo on the campaign trail? Oh, yeah. Graber, who is apparently not the kind of guy to let a gag go unpunished, suggested Wexler may not have been joking when, egged on by Colbert, he looked into the camera and said he enjoys cocaine and prostitutes “because it’s a fun thing to do.” “There are many ways to look at it,” Graber said. “Maybe he was shocked and the truth came out.”

If he wins, I’ll kill myself. No primary electorate can be that stupid, can they? I’d say no, but I’d have guessed that a clear joke like Wexler’s would never become a campaign issue. The irony of it all is through the challenger’s brain!

I’m with you.

Newt Gingrich is back to his old tricks. In the 1990s, he blamed various crimes — like a woman drowning her child — on “Liberalism” and now, by God, now that he’s trying to run for President, he’s back in business, declaring Liberalism at fault for the shooting at Virginia Tech.

That idiot.

Let’s talk about something else for a moment. Presidential debates, namely, which are a sham, completely and absolutely, and now — now they’re even more of a sham.

The 2008 presidential contenders may soon be slugging it out in cyberspace, with pioneering online-only debates being planned for early next fall, a new media partnership says. The political blog Huffington Post, online portal Yahoo and Slate Magazine will host the debates one for Democratic candidates, one for Republicans sometime after Labor Day, with PBS host Charlie Rose serving as moderator, the sponsors planned to announce Monday. Voters will be invited to submit questions, and can blog in real time to share their opinions on the candidates’ answers.

Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, said the idea for online debates was hatched earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which bloggers and citizen journalists had been invited to cover. “It was clear to me, the 2008 campaign was going to be dominated by what’s happening on line new technologies, new media like never before,” Huffington said. She then contacted Rose and Slate editor Jacob Weisberg to form a partnership to produce the forums.

It just seems like a stupid idea, a cheap publicity stunt that cheapens our national dialogue even more. Listen: it’s bad enough that the Presidential debates are hokey and choreographed with greater attention to detail than a Broadway musical. But now it’s going to be a musical on the Internet, with people typing in their jump!jump!jump! commands by keyboard?

Besides, who could think that Arianna “a Republican until a Republican is President because being ‘opposition’ is chic and makes more money!” Huffington is worthy of partnering in such an endeavor?

Maybe the only news worth smiling over is the announcement that South Korea will resume sending rice to North Korea. Good news, I say, for all the poor and starving and suffering in the North.

George McGovern is alive! and he’s angry at Dick Cheney alleging that the Vice President misfired when he took aim at him!

Hey, if he can end his first paragraph with a bad pun, so can I!

And hey, what do you know — my bad pun is back! and it’s investigating King Karl Rove.

Most of the time, an obscure federal investigative unit known as the Office of Special Counsel confines itself to monitoring the activities of relatively low-level government employees, stepping in with reprimands and other routine administrative actions for such offenses as discriminating against military personnel or engaging in prohibited political activities. But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House. First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part. “We will take the evidence where it leads us,” Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. “We will not leave any stone unturned.” Bloch declined to comment on who his investigators would interview, but he said the probe would be independent and uncoordinated with any other agency or government entity. The decision by Bloch’s office is the latest evidence that Rove’s once-vaunted operations inside the government, which helped the GOP hold the White House and Congress for six years, now threaten to mire the administration in investigations.

I am thrilled to hear this. The way I figure, it has two benefits: 1. We might see these crooks and liars resign yet! and 2. It’ll keep them busy with investigations and keep them away from public policy.

They’ve done enough damage.

Sheryl Crow and Karl Rove got into a fight last night and Crow’s recap is available here. It’s kind of funny to read about her lecturing Rove, and I agree that he doesn’t care about reality, but the last paragraph is what I’d like to speak about.

Ultimately, we were left wondering what on Earth Mr. Rove was talking about when he said “the American people.” If more than 60% of American voters, the Supreme Court, over 400 cities, the US National Academy of Sciences, numerous major US corporations, and others don’t constitute the American people, then what does? The truth is, if this administration cared one iota about the American people, they would have addressed this problem long ago, and the sad reality is that this problem has been left to us, all of us, since the current administration has abandoned this issue entirely. In the absence of true leadership, we must guide ourselves. We can solve this, but we had better act fast.

The people guiding themselves? That’s why we’re a Democracy, man, because the people can’t guide themselves. It’s a shame, though, when the people pick someone who can’t guide them, either.

Thank God.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Sunday that he has ordered a halt to the construction of a barrier that would separate a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad, saying there are other ways to protect the neighborhood. The U.S. military announced last week that it was building a large concrete wall in the northern Azamiyah section of Baghdad in an effort to protect the minority Sunnis from attacks by Shiites living nearby. The decision drew sharp criticism from residents and Sunni leaders who complained it would isolate their community. In his first public comments on the issue, al-Maliki said he had ordered the construction to stop.

Glad to hear that someone has common sense. That was completely ridiculous.

Bad news.

A senior Sunni politician has condemned a US military project to build a concrete wall around a Sunni enclave in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. US forces say the wall, which will separate Adhamiya from nearby Shia districts, aims to prevent sectarian violence between the two communities. But Adnan al-Dulaimi, who heads the biggest Sunni bloc in parliament, says it will breed yet more strife.

Some Adhamiya residents have said the wall will make their district a prison.

“The Americans will provoke more trouble with this,” one resident, Arkan Saeed, told the BBC. “They’re telling us the wall is to protect us from the Shia militia and they’re telling the Shia they’re protecting them from us. “But it’s the Americans who started all the sectarian violence in the first place.”

re: the bold — shut up, Arkan Saeed! You Shias and Shiites have been dying to stir the shiit for decades and centuries. We didn’t start it — some disagreement between people from your respective tribes started it thousands of years ago and you guys won’t let it go.

Besides that, you’re absolutely right, Arkan Saeed! The wall is ridiculous. It’ll foster tensions and get blown to hell putting us back to square one and adding a big old debt under the charge of “stupid ass idea.”

Dear States: more of this, please.

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire signed into law Saturday a measure to create domestic partnerships, giving gay and lesbian couples some of the same rights that come with marriage. The law creates a domestic partnership registry and provides enhanced rights for same-sex couples, including hospital visitation rights, the ability to authorize autopsies and organ donations and inheritance rights when there is no will.

“It offers the hope that one day, all lesbian and gay families will be treated truly equal under the law,” said state Sen. Ed Murray, who is one of five openly gay lawmakers in the Legislature. To be registered, couples have to share a home, not be married or in a domestic relationship with someone else and be at least 18.

I’m glad to see a state take a sensible approach to homosexual relationships. All states should, and someday will.

This is about as bad as it gets when it comes to police brutality and corruption. I can’t even fathom how anybody can defend the police department there. The only way I could see such behavior becoming acceptable is if a crooked politician were to take over ethics classes across the country. Which is happening, which explains how such a thing becomes acceptable.

Remember James McGreevey, the New Jersey Governor who cheated on his wife and had a variety of ethical lapses that he covered up by resigning his Governorship and declaring himself a “gay American”? Guess what he’s up to. If you guessed teaching, you’re right! But teaching what? Ethics!

God bless America where a policeman can demonstrably lie about shooting someone in the face at point-blank rage without anything resembling a justification and find himself work along with a Governor who crooked himself right out of office being a sleaze.

I heard that Alberto Gonzalez got roughed up today by a bunch of Republican Senators.
I can’t believe he hasn’t resigned yet. Bush must be having trouble finding someone willing to take orders from him at the DOJ. You know what that means?

It’s Harriet Miers time!

John McCain sang today. He sang, Bomb bomb bomb Iran!

Problem is, he’s lower in the polls than Sanjaya Malakar!

Maybe McCain should grow an afro and stop being himself? That’d be best for everyone involved.