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Politics

Sen. Trent Lott: ‘Iraqis Look Like Iraqis And Americans Look Like Americans’

By Faiz Shakir on Oct 3, 2006 at 12:49 pm

Appearing on the Daily Show last night, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) was asked about his recent comments expressing confusion over the ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq. “Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me,” he said previously.

Last night, Lott explained, “Iraqis look like Iraqis and Americans look like Americans.” In Sen. Lott’s view, all Americans apparently look like him. Lott added, “Methodist, Baptists, and Catholics live in my hometown. They all look the same to me, they all look like Americans.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/10/lott.320.240.flv]

Full transcript: Read more

Politics

Tony Perkins: ‘Tolerance And Diversity’ Are To Blame For ‘Congressmen Chasing 16-Year-Olds’

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 3, 2006 at 12:01 pm

Yesterday on CNN, Tony Perkins, President of the conservative Family Research Council, blamed the Foley scandal on America’s belief in “tolerance and diversity.” He also excused the House leadership’s neglect of the issue, saying they may have been “fearful of acting because they would be seen as homophobic or gay bashing.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/10/tonyperkinscnn.320.240.flv]

This scandal has nothing to do with Foley’s sexual orientation. Preying on children — of any gender — is unacceptable.

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Media

“Pedophilia”

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 3, 2006 at 11:32 am

ghostworld.jpg

Not to get too thick in the weeds of apologetics here, but it’s certainly true that use of the term “pedophilia” in the context of the Mark Foley scandal should be resisted. What Foley was up to was sleazy and wrong (and, it seems, possibly illegal) but being attracted to older teens isn’t pedophilia. I think the gay angle clouds people’s thinking about this.

You’ll see on the right a photo of Scarlett Johannssonn in Ghost World. She was born on November 22, 1984 and the film was released in 2001, so it would have been shot was she was sixteen years old. I think it’s rather self-evident that to classify anyone who thinks this is a picture of an attractive woman as a pedophile would be to drain the term of any real meaning. One could fairly subject a much older man actively persuing a sexual relationship with a sixteen year-old to all sorts of criticism, but pedophilia isn’t a plausible candidate.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, it’s possible for something both to be wrong and to not be pedophilia. Lots of things that aren’t pedophilia are wrong. I’m trying to defend the English language here, not Foley’s conduct.

Media

CBS Turns Over News Broadcast To Man Who Blames School Shootings on Teaching Evolution and Abortion

By Judd Legum on Oct 3, 2006 at 10:58 am

Last night, the CBS Evening News turned their broadcast over to a man named Brian Rohrbough, who lost his son during the Columbine massacre. Mr. Rohrbough proceeded to blame recent school shootings on: 1) the teaching of evolution, and 2) abortion. Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/10/columbine.320.240.flv]

Mr. Rohrbough suffered a great loss and is certainly entitled to his opinion. But CBS does not have to broadcast his extreme views to millions of people.

The commentary was an example of CBS News’ new “free speech” segement which has been dominated by conservative voices, according to an analysis by Media Matters.

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Culture

Rising Suns?

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 3, 2006 at 10:53 am

In his insider-only team forecasts, John Hollinger makes a couple of interesting points about the Phoenix Suns beyond the obvious giant question marks surrounding the Amare Stoudemire issue. One, he points out that they slightly underperformed in terms of “expected win-loss” (a formula based on point-differential, designed to factor out luck and contingency), winning 54 games when they “should” have won 55. Dallas, meanwhile, actually won 60 but only had 58 expexted wins so the margin is smaller than it looked. The other is that the injury to Kurt Thomas had a bigger impact than most people talk about, with him “Phoenix had given up 100.2 points per game on 44 percent shooting. Following the injury, Phoenix allowed 107.6 points on 47.8 percent shooting.”

Viewed this way, the Suns could be serious contenders if either Thomas stays healthy or Amare can make valuable contributions and it’s not necessarily the case that everything hinges on Stoudemire. If both of those guys and play, I wonder who starts for Phoenix. Since there’s a bunch of multi-position guys on this squad, you could play a big Thomas-Stoudemire-Marion-Diaw-Nash lineup, but that strikes me as an un-Suns way to play. In a lot of ways, keeping Thomas on the bench and starting Raja Bell at shooting guard seems to make more sense, but not if Thomas is really so crucial to the Phoenix defense. So maybe you use Diaw as an all-purpose sixth man.

Yglesias

Warnings

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 3, 2006 at 10:15 am

Glad we’ve gotten that cleared up. Condoleezza Rice was, in fact, warned of al-Qaeda threats on July 10, 2001 by George Tenet and Tenet’s counterterrorism guy, Cofer Black. Rice’s story is now that she denied any such meeting had taken place because she forgot. Well, let’s just say I don’t find that especially plausible. She got the briefing, blew it off as just another dude whining that his issue is the most important one and deserves more attention, then — bam — two months later thousands of people are dead. Never took the opportunity to look back and reflect? Never had a sleepless night wondering “could I have done more?” Never thought back to that briefing that seemed so trivial at the time?

But maybe she forgot. Maybe this is just a government composed of extraodinarily thoughtless people who never took a minute to look back at their pre-9/11 behavior and see if anything might have gone wrong. Maybe she’s not lying and she’s just incredibly irresponsible. It’s often hard to say with this crew. And lord knows they were helped by a press corps that showed no interest for years in the question of whether or not the occurrence of a massive terrorist attack on Bush’s watch might reflect poorly on the people in office at the time, rather than simply providing a venue to demonstrate Churchillian grandeur.

Media

A Long Time Ago

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 3, 2006 at 9:50 am

Tonight is the season premiere of Veronica Mars on the merger-born new CW network. It’s not the best show on television, but it’s pretty darn close. It’s also, by most accounts, at imminent risk of being canceled. The network only ordered half a season, so if ratings for these early episodes don’t show improvement, it’ll almost certainly get the ax. The good news is that it’s considerably more accessible that, say, The Wire and I’m fairly certain a person could just watch and enjoy tonight’s episode without fully understanding the backstory. I myself just started watching it in the middle of season two before backtracking on DVD to the beginning of season one.

Nominally, the show’s about Veronica Mars, teen detective, and her father, a former sherrif now working as a private eye. More deeply, though, it’s about the class struggle in America — one of the few elements of our popular culture that really deals with class per se.

Security

Intel Officials: Rice’s July 2001 Briefing Described Urgent Threat, ’10 On a Scale of 1 to 10′

By Judd Legum on Oct 3, 2006 at 9:41 am

RiceCondoleezza Rice describes her briefing with CIA officials George Tenet and Cofer Black on July 10, 2001 as relatively unremarkable. Here’s how her spokesman Sean McCormack described it yesterday:

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack [said]… the information Rice got “was not new” and didn’t amount to an urgent warning. “Rather, it was a good summary from the threat-reporting from the previous several weeks,” McCormack said in a statement from Saudi Arabia where Rice is traveling.

Earlier in the day, Rice questioned whether the meeting even happened and said that it was “incomprehensible” the meeting included a warning that U.S. interests faced an imminent threat from al-Qaeda.

Here’s how the briefing was described by the officials who prepared it, according to McClatchy:

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10″ that “connected the dots” in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again…

“The briefing was intended to `connect the dots’ contained in other intelligence reports and paint a very clear picture of the threat posed by bin Laden,” said the official, who described the tone of the report as “scary.”

Rice also considered the August 6 President’s Daily Brief, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike US,” an historical document.

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