HorsesAss.Org

I was a bit surprised that the political press didn’t comment more last week on the stunning success of the “Burn Bush” netroots fund drive. $125,000 from over 3,200 donors. 14-months before the election. Over a weekend. In August. Unprecedented.

But with the sudden withdrawal of state Sen. Rodney Tom only seven weeks after he jumped into the race, the pundits are starting to take notice. In a brief post on TIME Magazine’s political blog Real Clear Politics, Reid Wilson describes WA-08 as “a great pickup opportunity for Democrats,” but for “one major problem … a competitive primary.”

Well, it turned out not to be much of a problem for Burner after all, and Wilson puts his finger on one of the reasons why:

One source close to Tom said the decision was made all the easier after President Bush came to the state to raise funds for Reichert. During that time, Burner used her credentials with the netroots to attract 3200 new donors, raising more than $125,000 over three days. A Burner strategist said it was conceivable that she could raise as much — or more — than Reichert did from the Bush visit. Tom raised about $100,000 in a month, though the source admitted Tom couldn’t compete with Burner’s national fundraising potential.

That’s pretty much also the lede from the Associated Press, which credits Burner’s “Internet-fueled” campaign for her “early victory.” And in the Seattle Times, Tom himself puts it quite bluntly:

“You have thousands of people giving twenty, thirty bucks. It’s how campaigns should be run.”

Absolutely.

It may be premature to say that the rules have changed, but there is no doubt they are changing. New technologies now enable progressive candidates with broad netroots support to run a “people-powered” campaign capable of matching a handful of rich folks dollar for dollar. And by so effectively merging the old campaign paradigms with the new, Darcy Burner is fast becoming a model for congressional candidates nationwide.

How did she do it? That’s what a number of bloggers and congressional campaign staffers have asked me after the stunning success of Burner’s virtual town hall and netroots fund drive, and our conversations always seem to devolve into the same question: “Who is handling Burner’s netroots outreach?” But unfortunately for those hoping to quickly replicate formula, the disappointing truth is… nobody. Burner has no “netroots outreach.” The netroots are an integral part of her campaign.

You could almost say that Burner has “gone native,” except that would wrongly imply some sort of personal transformation. In fact Burner has always been smart, driven, progressive, passionate, technically savvy, and well… a bit of a geek who famously installed the phone system herself in her first campaign office. Burner is the netroots, except rather than just blogging about politics and contributing money, Burner decided she could make more of a difference by running for office herself. And had the local and national netroots been as mature two years ago as they are today, I’m pretty damn sure Burner would be running for reelection right now rather than Reichert.

Now, I know there are some, like Democratic state Rep. Deb Eddy, who worry that Burner’s close identity with the netroots might be as much a liability as it is an asset:

Primaries bring out the party faithful, said Eddy, and “Darcy was more left wing than [Tom] is.”

However, the 8th District, which stretches from Duvall to Eatonville, is not as liberal as Burner is, Eddy said, and that could spell trouble in a race against Reichert. While Burner is popular among left-leaning bloggers, that may not translate to the average voter.

“One thing that worries me is she has not naturally gravitated to more nuanced positions,” Eddy said. “Sometimes it’s hard to get perspective or distance from the net roots. They can create a lot of smoke.”

Hmm. The “Burn Bush” campaign generated fire, not smoke; that’s what drove Tom so quickly out of the race. And if Eddy is going to lazily adopt the Republican frame that Burner is somehow out of touch with her district, perhaps she could explain exactly what it is about Burner (and us “left-leaning bloggers”) that is “too liberal”?

Is it “too liberal” to fight for a responsible close to our occupation of Iraq? Is it “too liberal” to support reproductive rights, and the civil rights of all citizens regardless of race, creed, gender and sexual preference? Is it “too liberal” to oppose warrantless wiretapping, torture and suspension of habeas corpus? Is it “too liberal” to offer a quality public education to all our children and affordable health care to all Americans? Is it “too liberal” to consistently oppose drilling in ANWR, to accept the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change, and to reject estate tax repeal?

According to opinion polls and recent initiative tallies, Burner is smack dab in the mainstream of 8th CD voters on these and many other issues, and while I’m sure there must be some issues on which at least a slight majority of district voters side more with Reichert than with Burner, none immediately come to mind. If Burner were so liberal, so out of touch with the needs of her district, she had the perfect opportunity to prove it during a recent live chat on the progressive blog FireDogLake, where she was all but begged to pander to the audience on the issue of H1B visas. She refused. So in the future, when Eddy publicly frets that Burner is “too liberal” for the district, reporters might want to ask Eddy for some specific examples before repeating the claim unsupported. And it is ironic that Eddy would accuse Burner of not gravitating toward more “nuanced positions” when it is not at all clear from her comments that Eddy has studied Burner’s positions at all.

The fact is, it is Reichert who is out of touch with his constituents, who is too conservative for his district on Iraq, on FISA, on children’s health care, on reproductive rights, on Social Security reform, on estate tax repeal and on any number of high profile issues. It is Reichert who refuses to address climate change because the overwhelming scientific consensus somehow threatens his political ideology or religion or both. It is Reichert who only four years ago — in the wake of the invasion of Iraq — was recruited by both parties, yet chose to be a Republican.

Burner’s critics routinely accuse her of being “too liberal,” while never offering a single example to back up their claim, and yet Reichert is demonstrably outside the mainstream of 8th CD voters on issue after issue after issue… not the least of which being his almost sycophantic support of our profoundly unpopular president and his disastrous occupation of Iraq. By comparison to Reichert, Burner may indeed be liberal, but then by that measure, so is the 8th CD.

Last year Karl Rove and the Reichert campaign (with the active cooperation of the Seattle Times editorial board) were somewhat successful at defining Burner, simply by calling her names. This time around it won’t be so easy. Burner is better, smarter, and more experienced than she was two years ago, and so are the netroots who have her back. We’ve already seen everything the other side has to offer, but they clearly have no idea how to parry the growing strength of our people-powered movement. As Burner stated in a recent video, “There are more of us than there are of them.” And in electoral politics, that’s ultimately all that matters.

From The Stranger, who have been putting the screws to city council candidate Tim Burgess over his smarmy guest column in the Seattle Times (printed after the ’04 election):

However, he acknowledges that he would not push his own pastor to perform gay weddings or lobby the leaders of his own denomination to allow them. “I’m just not there yet,” he said, adding: “I’m running for city council, not city theologian.”

To this, “Switzerblog” adds:

Why should he? Same-sex marriage in the church is irrelevant in this conversation; the separation of church and state means that churches can refuse to acknowledge or perform marriages for whoever they want. It’s relevant to the voters what he wants the state to do about the issue – not whether he’ll hassle his pastor.

Right on. I don’t care who churches decide to marry. It doesn’t affect me. What matters is that King County should be able to issue a marriage license to two consenting adults of any sex. Whether a specific church wants to bless the union is all up to them. I’m sure, being that this is Seattle, that there are plenty of “rainbow” churches.

Two items this week have really demonstrated the limitlessness of how inept and clueless those in the traditional media can be.

Lou Dobbs, in his weekly tirade against all things Mexican, says the following [emphasis mine]:

Calderon can’t have it both ways. He cannot fail his citizens at home and then act as the Great Imperialist Protector of his citizens who are driven by poverty and corruption to enter the United States illegally. The United States provides Mexico with an annual surplus of $65 billion in trade, an estimated $25 billion in remittances from Mexican citizens living and working here illegally, and at least another $25 billion generated by the illegal drug trade across our southern border.

Considering that Lou has previously praised Calderon for how he’s gone after Mexico’s drug lords, I know that he has some awareness that the $25 billion he’s talking about there doesn’t go to the Mexican government, but instead to criminals who are fighting the Mexican government. But somehow, he still uses that figure as if its money that the Calderon government is simply wasting. It’s as ridiculous as criticizing Hamid Karzai’s inability to strengthen the Afghan government by pointing out how much money the Taliban makes from poppies. How this man has a TV show is a complete mystery to me.

The second item has been all over the internet already, but it’s a beauty. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, in what appears to have been an attempt at humor, writes the following:

A survey of political bloggers showed that 94 percent of them had never been out of the country or read anything other than a Harry Potter book.

Something tells me that if every Washington Post columnist was blindfolded, put in a van, and driven 2 hours west of Washington DC and dropped off, 94 percent of them would think they were in a foreign country.

21st Century Democrats will release a new poll later today, showing Democrat Darcy Burner with a 44% to 39% lead over Republican incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert in Washington’s highly competitive 8th Congressional District. 17% of voters remain undecided.

The robo-poll of 509 registered voters was commissioned by 21st Century Democrats (who endorsed Burner in July) and was conducted on August 28, the day after President George Bush came to Bellevue, WA to raise money for Reichert. 85% of Democrats support Burner and 82% of Republicans support support Reichert, but independents break decidedly toward Burner by a 40% to 24% margin.

President Bush remains exceedingly unpopular in the district, with only 30% of respondents rating his job performance as good or excellent. 96% of Democrats and 83% of independents rate the president’s job performance as fair or poor, along with a substantial 36% of Republicans.

Yes it’s early, and yes this is an internal poll from a partisan ally. But it shows that Burner’s message of fighting to bring the occupation of Iraq to a responsible close is resonating not only with Democrats, but with unaffiliated voters as well.

UPDATE:
21st Century Democrats has issued a statement:

“Darcy’s Burner’s phenomenal success in using the web to reach voters with her message about ending rather than extending the war is clearly resonating with Democrats and Independents in the district,” said Mark Lotwis, executive director of 21st Century Democrats. “These poll results and Sen. Rodney Tom’s decision yesterday to drop out of the primary race and enthusiastically endorse Burner demonstrate that Burner’s courageous and principled leadership on progressive issues is not just the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.”

Last night was one of my favorite annual events – our fantasy football draft. Our league started out in 1998 with a bunch of recent college grads who relocated here to work for Boeing. Now, we’re starting up our 10th season. More than half of us are now married, and a few have kids, but we still have one night a year where we revert to shameless bachelorhood, talking trash, drinking cheap beer, and picking the players whose successes or failures our hopes will ride on for the next four months.

In the past, I’ve made pretty elaborate NFL predictions at the beginning of the season, only to debate with myself in November whether I can go back and delete the post. Like fellow Philly-native Goldy, I’m a huge Eagles fan, but I’ve also grown to like the local team here, and really enjoy how much the Seahakws’ recent success has brought some excitement to the games at Qwest Field.

As the Saints and Colts get it all started this evening, what do you expect to see this year? Can the Seahawks make it back to the big game? Were the Saints a fluke last year? Can the Colts win it again? Will Donovan McNabb still be healthy when the Seahawks head into Philly in December? Will Joey Harrington make everyone in Atlanta forget about Michael Vick? Can anything possibly happen this season that’s more embarrassing than what happened to my alma mater last Saturday?

Enjoy the games everyone!

In an unusually frank press conference, King County Councilmember Jane Hague finally apologized for driving drunk and berating law enforcement officers…

The arresting officers “did not deserve the rude and abusive behavior. I was very drunk that night,” said Hague, “Stinking drunk. Plastered. Pie-eyed. Totally shit faced. And a mean drunk too… or so I’m told — I really don’t remember. Apparently, I swore a blue streak at the officers, and there is no excuse for that… except for, you know, that I was drunk. Very, very drunk.”

About a week after her arrest, she said, she underwent an evaluation by an alcohol-treatment facility. After several hours of evaluation, she said, “fortunately, there was no problem that was uncovered. Other than the fact that, well… I’m a drunk.“

At least, that was the general spirit of Hague’s apology. I wasn’t taking notes. Or paying much attention. In fact, I may have been a little drunk, for which I’m truly sorry.

From the HA comment threads:

Stefan Sharkansky says:

The Democrat whom you’ll eventually support for Congress in the 8th District, Rodney Tom, also opposes the state death tax.

07/25/2007 at 11:03 am

[…]

Stefan Sharkansky says:

I don’t care who wins the Democrat primary in this race. But I will have a bit of smug satisfaction in fall 2008 when all of you Darcy fans have to eat sh*t and campaign for a formerly nominal Republican turned nominal Democrat who supports photo ID at the polls, opposes the death tax and supports charter schools. tee-hee.

07/25/2007 at 10:11 pm

[…]

Stefan Sharkansky says:

Yes, but you’ll still be supporting disgruntled former Republican legislator Tommy Rod after he cleans Darcy’s clock in next year’s primary

08/24/2007 at 12:06 am

[…]

Goldy says:

Thanks for the prediction, Stefan. I’ll be sure to quote this back at you when Darcy wins the nomination (or perhaps, when Tom withdraws next spring.)

07/25/2007 at 11:17 am

Consider it done.

Rodney Tom announced this morning that he is withdrawing from the race for the Democratic nomination in Washington’s 8th Congressional District, leaving Darcy Burner as the sole declared Democrat.

“Our fundraising was going great, but Darcy Burner’s campaign has been phenomenal”, Tom said. “Darcy has over 3,200 contributors, an incredible statement to her broad base of support. Reichert’s idea of campaign finance reform is having $10,000 dinners. Democracy was never intended to be limited strictly to millionaires. Clearly, he’s out of touch with the common voter.”

“My purpose from the start was to replace the current Congressman with someone whoactually represents the values of the 8th district. Dave Reichert is completely out of step with the values shared in this district. Darcy Burner’s campaign has proven they have the leadership, strength and momentum to win next November.”

Tom will pay off campaign costs from his own pocket, refund all contributors and urge them to contribute to Burner. In Yiddish, we call that being a mensch.

I don’t mean to gloat, especially considering how gracious Tom has been in withdrawing and backing Burner, but you gotta think that our unprecedented $125,000 netroots fundraiser played a significant role in pushing Tom out of the race. And honestly, that was one of our primary objectives.

As I told Tom shortly after he announced, one can make legitimate arguments for why both he and Burner are a good fit for the district, but I didn’t really see his path toward winning a Democrat primary. I also told him that my aggressive support of Burner was nothing personal, and that we would make up after he got out of the race. I guess that reconciliation starts today.

More thoughts and observations later….

UPDATE:
I talked with Tom earlier this afternoon, and thanked him for his graciousness. He is fully behind Burner, and quite impressed with her grassroots appeal. I think there is no question that Burner’s campaign is stronger for Tom having challenged her.

Former WA-08 congresswoman Jennifer Dunn died suddenly this morning of a pulmonary embolism. She was only 66.

My condolences to her family.

The Seattle Times doesn’t much like the rabble calling bullshit on one of their editorials:

Legislators, a local think-tank intellectual and an Internet fulminator all declared we were flat wrong about SB 5498, and that it did not silently transform anything.

By “Internet fulminator” the Times is of course referring to me, and while I wouldn’t mind being derided as an “intellectual” once in a while, if this is the type of fulmination it takes to coax the Times into engaging in a higher level of discourse on complicated issues of tax policy, well then, fulminate I must.

The Times stands by its take on SB 5498, and I stand by mine. At issue is a vaguely worded memo by a midlevel Department of Revenue staffer that seems to interpret one provision of the bill contrary to the stated legislative intent. The Attorney General’s office has been asked to review the DOR memo, and that is the opinion that will ultimately count. But my dismay with the Times original editorial extends far beyond dueling interpretations of a couple paragraphs of obscure legalese.

Coming just days before a handful of crucial levy votes, the Times original editorial was irresponsible in both tone and timing, attempting to speak authoritatively on an issue that was far from settled and on which they apparently lacked much authority. The Times’ efforts to impugn the motives of legislators were unfounded and uncalled for, its discussion of levy lid lifts muddled and contradictory, and its alarmist headline, “Warning: New taxes will be permanent,” was flat out wrong, regardless of the AG’s pending interpretation. A temporary lid lift raises both levy capacity and taxes; even if the new law makes capacity increases permanent — and the legislators who wrote the law continue to maintain that it does not — the tax increase itself would still expire at the end of the levy. District officials (councilmembers, commissioners, etc) could vote to increase regular levies to the limit of the new capacity, but they would be held accountable to voters for any perceived abuse of their taxing authority.

While I applaud the Times for following my lead and presenting a more in-depth discussion of lid lift basics in their new editorial, they still fail to make an adequate distinction between increasing statutory levy capacity and actually raising taxes, and they totally avoid a conversation about permanent versus temporary lid lifts. And perhaps most importantly, they refuse to address the issue that creates the need for frequent lid lifts in the first place, the totally inadequate and arbitrary 1-percent limit on revenue growth… well below inflation let alone growth in demand for government services.

… the law needs to be restored to what it was. In passing Initiative 747, the voters of Washington imposed a 1 percent limit per year on how much a taxing district can increase its gross collections from existing properties.

I-747’s 1-percent limit was vindictive and unsustainable, and a responsible editorial page would point this out instead of sticking to the meme that initiatives to the people, no matter how stupid, are somehow inviolate. The state constitution does indeed grant special status to initiatives, protecting them from being overturned by an act of the Legislature for a period of two years. But once that two years is up an initiative is the same as any other law — and the only thing more irresponsible than a dumb-ass (and possibly unconstitutional) initiative designed to cripple the ability of local governments to function, would be a timid Legislature refusing to address the problems it created out of fear of an editorial backlash.

Danny Westneat is right on with his column about the worst bench in Seattle:

It doesn’t look like much. Just a two-level bench of fiberglass, with legs made from steel plumbing pipes. It was designed to evoke an era when labor halls and working stiffs ruled Seattle’s Belltown. The art bench juts slightly into the sidewalk along Second Avenue, intervening in the right-angle-orderliness of the urban grid. Its goal, says the city’s art Web site, is to “engage passers-by physically and mentally, as well as visually, by providing places to sit and think.”

Yeah, to help passers-by engage with a Mickey’s Big Mouth, maybe.

Even if the art itself isn’t to blame, what irks neighbors is that because it’s art, it can’t be moved without special permission from a city arts panel.

“We’ve been trying to get rid of it for eight years,” Markovich says. “But it’s part of this Belltown art theme, so the city won’t let it go.”

The theory was that art can help design away crime. Make a place interesting and vibrant, it will be safer. Only it turned out drug dealers and pimps appreciate art, too.

The artist, Kurt Kiefer, wrote on the city’s public-art Web site that he placed that bench and other objects on the Belltown sidewalk as a way to “remember the experiments and improvisations that … continue to define the Denny Regrade.”

Corsi says the city must end this art exhibit, or neighbors will do it for them.

“The bench is going to show up one morning on the mayor’s front lawn,” he said.

One day, that bench will disappear. And no one, and I mean no one, will be sorry that it’s gone. I walk by this bench every day, and it’s always a dump. Belltown has other “art” pieces, like the concrete rubble on 1st Avenue, that ought to get the heave-ho. But lets start with that bench.

City Hall needs to stop inflicting crappy public art on the public.

Apparently, car batteries aren’t supposed to last seven years. Who knew?

Half a day and a hundred dollars later, I now know.

Join us tonight for a fun-filled evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

No doubt a hot topic for tonight will be the new GAO report suggesting that the Bush administration is cooking the books on sectarian violence in Iraq. (Perhaps another hot topic will be the shameless way that Republicans have blown off the restless leg syndrome constituency….)

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area this evening, check out McCranium for the local Drinking Liberally. Otherwise, check out the Drinking Liberally web site for the dates and times of a chapter near you.

I’ve been on KEXP-90.3 on Saturday mornings for over a decade, and for the last several years we’ve been running an extremely popular weekly overview of news from Iraq. Since there’s a lot more of it than I have time to run through (and links don’t work well on the radio), for a while now I’ve also been posting the weekly summaries over at Booman Tribune. It occurs to me that it might make sense to post it locally, too. And so, with your indulgence (and hopefully interest), here is the first of a weekly compilation of news you may or may not have seen or read regarding America’s most disastrous war.

Much of the last week, in D.C. and the Green Zone, was spent by various parties trying to pave the way for their spin on the congressionally mandated report on the escalation “surge” due at the end of next week.

That included George Bush making a surprise Labor Day PR visit to Anbar Province — a profile in courage somewhat undermined in that he stayed protected by a 13-mile perimeter and 10,000 troops, not venturing outside the base to see for himself the wonderful progress he has been touting. But more importantly, days previous, Bush hinted that he’s already made up his mind regardless of what Gen. Petraeus has to say, suggesting that he would send still more troops to Iraq after the 15th and announcing that he would ask Congress for yet another $50 billion “emergency” war appropriation.

Meanwhile, the impartial investigative arm of Congress, the General Accountability Office, released a report that flatly contradicted the White House, finding little progress in Iraq during the escalation surge. Specifically, the GAO looked at the 18 benchmarks set by Congress. Unlike a White house report last month that tortured logic and semantics in order to find “progress” in only eight of the 18 benchmarks, the GAO found progress in only three and declared the war effort to be failing on all the most important ones.

Other indicators that things didn’t have the rosy glow insisted upon by Bush and his apologists: a New York Times report that while deaths this summer are down from their peak in Baghdad — perhaps because ethnic cleansing has progressed so far that there are fewer people left for the death squads to kill — nationwide the rate of sectarian deaths is double what it was in 2006. (Even in Baghdad, it’s still higher than 2006, just lower than the cooler months of Spring.) And the Center for American Progress released a study declaring that American troops can be safely withdrawn from Iraq in one year, again undercutting the war hawks’ argument that without all those American soldiers and weapons the violence would get worse.

Oh, and there was also the little-noticed tidbit that Gen. Petraeus intervened to “soften” the language of the recent National Intelligence Estimate to reflect recent “progress.” (Even so, the NIE basically said Baghdad was somewhere around the seventh circle of Hell.) Plus, the U.S. leaned on five leading Shiite and Sunni exile politicians to announce a “deal” on America’s desired give-Iraqi-oil-to-American-oil-companies oil law, prisoners, and a few other concessions. But it was largely for show, and American consumption: the deal didn’t bring Sunnis back into the government, won’t get any of the agreed-upon items through Parliament, and the remaining Iraqi politicians allegedly running the country are mostly returned exiles with no constituency outside the Beltway and no relevance outside the Green Zone.

On the other side of that wall, a far more damning measure of how the escalation surge is going, namely how it’s affecting actual Iraqis, emerged last week. Over 5,000 cholera cases have now been reported in Northern Iraq, primarily among refugees living in shanty towns in areas of the country without much fighting. (The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated last week that 4.2 million Iraqis, one in every six, has been uprooted by the war.) Why is this important? Cholera is a disease of the extremely poor, normally seen only in areas where poverty is extreme and government services nonexistent. In this case, as in much of Iraq, there is no longer clean drinking water and, of course, no public health sector to speak of. The government has no presence, local militias and tribes can only do so much, and many of the doctors and technocrats have fled the country or been killed. That’s what the escalation surge means to the average Iraqi.

Want more? Iraqis are no longer eating fish out of the Tigris or Euphrates Rivers, in part because there are so many dead bodies in the rivers — which the fish nibble on — that Iraqis are afraid of contracting diseases associated with cannibalism.

In the south of Iraq, 52 people died last week in Karbala firefights (widely reported in the US as “riots”) between members of Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Maliki-aligned Badr Organization, both Shiite militias vying for control (and wider imposition of sharia law) as British soldiers complete their withdrawal from southern Iraq. After the fighting, al-Sadr ordered the Mahdi Army to stand down for six months to try to avoid widening the civil war. We’ll see how long it lasts. Prime Minister Maliki, the great American-sponsored statesman, blamed Sunni clerics from Saudi Arabia for somehow provoking the Karbala bloodshed, in an effort to deflect attention from his Badr friends. This is our voice of political reconciliation during the escalation surge.

Another important front was emerging in coverage of Iraq last week: a widening scandal (finally) over corruption and where all that American money and weaponry I mentioned earlier has actually been going for four years. McClatchy newspapers reported that hundreds of thousands of dollar in U.S. rebuilding money went to insurgents (still only a fraction of the billions that went missing overall). The Army accused Lee Dynamics International of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to US officials to get $11 million in contracts. The New York Times reported that several federal agencies are investigating weapons sales, disappearances, fraud, kickbacks, and black market profiteering by US officials. And one investigation involves senior official who worked with a Gen. David Petraeus — yes, that Gen. Petraeus — when he was heading the effort to arms and train Iraqi militias and death squads army and police units in 2004-05. (Heckuva job, Davie.) Also from the Times: US weapons given to the Iraqi army are being found used by criminal gangs in Turkey. (No surprise there — we’ve flooded the black market in arms the world over by handing out AK-47s etc. like candy in Iraq.) And, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Paul Brinkley (another political appointee) was accused last week by a DoD task force of mismanaging government money in Iraq — and also engaging in public drunkenness and sexual harassment.

Big picture: The Project on Government Oversight reported last week that the top 50 Iraq contractors paid over $12 billion in fines and restitution for violating various federal laws over the last 10 years. Being scofflaws not only hasn’t disqualified them from the Iraq feeding trough, but seems to be an entrance requirement.

Finally, in the most unintentionally hilarious incident since Larry Craig got Restless Leg Syndrome, the U.S. military characterized as “regrettable” a Baghdad incident last Tuesday in which eight Iranians, including two diplomats, were released hours after being arrested. In a country awash with guns and where security details are essential for normal travel for VIPs, the eight were singled out because the Iraqi security guys they’d hired had an “unauthorized” AK-47 and two pistols in the trunk of their car. Not entirely coincidentally, President Bush was in Reno that day, telling an American Legion convention that Iranians were arming the insurgency, as part of the steadily increasing PR campaign for a military strike on Iran — which several credible reports this weekend, including this one in the Times of London, say will be massive and imminent. Attacking Iran would not only be illegal and immoral, but politically, militarily, and economically disastrous — the time to mount public opposition to this insanity is now.

So, I kinda missed last week’s “this week”. So even though it’s still kinda sparse, it’s totally two weeks’ worth.

* By now you’ve probably ceased to want to care, but some time long ago, Roger Stone was making the news being a loon. Saying crazy shit about Spitzer. And also, if you want to attack Spitzer, maybe it’s best not to have the quality you ascribe to him in spades.

* Bi-Partisan bullshit: Former Clinton speech writer Michael Cohen is upset about us mean bloggers. But he does acknowledge our right to hate America, so you can see he’s a serious person.

* In case you’re wondering, the fact that Larry Craig tried to have sex in a bathroom proves that it’s the Democrats who are obsessed with sex. Republicans are only obsessed with sex when they can’t see an electoral downside.

* President Bush came to town this week (Did this blog report on that? I just can’t remember.) and he gave a bullshit speech.

Locally, I can only think of two things that are bullshit:

* Phone books.

* and Pudge.

This is another open thread.