Rain Storm -- an online journal of opinion and culture

Judging by the current list of invited speakers, the GOP must be planning to carry the HRC and Planned Parenthood vote, all the while ignoring those who support traditional marriage and pro-life views - the very constituency that makes up the heart and soul of the Republican Party (emphasis added).

The party seems poised to keep some of its most articulate spokesmen such as Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum and Representatives Henry Hyde and Mike Pence and other leaders on life and family issues behind the scenes. By keeping them on the sidelines they have missed a chance to emphasize the real heart of the party and the sharp contrast between the Republican Party and Democratic Party. By treating the vast majority of the GOP faithful like "fly over" country, the convention organizers douse the enthusiasm of pro-family voters - meanwhile they may show up to vote, they may not bring two or three friends along with them to the polls. Note to Republican Party organizers: Find a primetime spot for a speaker who the pro-family community knows and trusts and who will speak to the issues that have driven so many voters to pull the lever for the GOP in the past.

The former Vermont governor has pledged to support Kerry and made good on the promise, savaging Nader as the debate got underway. "Ralph, I think you are being disingenuous about your candidacy this year," he began, and listed examples showing that Nader is drawing money and support from groups with agendas the consumer advocate repudiates. In Oregon and Michigan, groups loyal to Bush have organized efforts to get Nader on the ballot, in the expectation that his presence will hurt Kerry. Access to the ballots and the presidential debates are Nader's most daunting challenges -- and his principal goals.

Indiana and Oklahoma are already lost to Nader. Last week, his campaign received a setback in Arizona, and Nader accused Democrats of dirty tricks to keep him off the ballot.

Dean said Nader had benefited from support from the conservative Oregon Family Council. "This campaign of yours is hardly pure," Dean said. He added, "The way to change the country is not to get in bed with right-wing, anti-gay groups."

There is no bright line separating the administration's hyping of the threat and manipulation of the evidence and the CIA's own misreading of the evidence and its institutional decision to service the president's needs.

The aim of the administration's defenders -- Senator Roberts, et al. -- is to draw such a bright line (I'm tempted to say 'forge' but let's say 'draw'), thus suggesting the reasoning that because the CIA is guilty, that the White House must be innocent. But that's not true. It is itself yet another deception. They're both guilty -- only of different things.

The CIA is guilty: of aiding and abetting.

In what some military experts see as another sign of how the Army's commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan have strained it, the service for the first time will soon begin aggressively recruiting thousands of sailors and airmen who are otherwise scheduled to leave the Navy and Air Force because of cutbacks.

Under a new program called Operation Blue to Green, the Army plans to offer bonuses of up to $10,000, in some cases, and four weeks of extra training to airmen and sailors willing to trade in their dress-blue uniforms for Army green fatigues. The Army is especially interested in men and women who have jobs that are readily transferable to Army positions, like mechanics and logisticians.

[...]

On Capitol Hill, senior House and Senate leaders, including Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, endorse the plan. Representative John M. McHugh, a New York Republican who heads the House Armed Services total force subcommittee, said the concept kept valuable service members in the armed forces, although in a different branch.

"Is it wise to just let those folks go with those kind of skills just because they are caught up in downsizing?" Mr. McHugh said in a telephone interview. "This is common sense."

But some military personnel experts said the move was yet another last resort by the Army to fill its ranks. In recent weeks, the Army has said it will call up 5,600 members of the Individual Ready Reserve, former soldiers who have left the Army and not joined the Reserves. The Pentagon has extended the tours of thousands of soldiers bound for Iraq or Afghanistan who had been scheduled to retire or leave the service. And, for the first time, the military deploying combat troops to Iraq from South Korea.

"It's further evidence of the strain the Army is undergoing," said Richard I. Stark Jr., a retired Army colonel who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There is a short-term manpower crunch in the Department of Defense, especially in the Army."

You stand in front of a crowd of celebrating couples, some with children, some who have been together their entire lives and bothered no one, some who sang the Star Spangled Banner on the steps of the Boston courthouse, and the only thing you could say in repsonse is that those people were damned to hell? If you really wanted to suit up and do battle against gay marriage, you had to realize you were putting on a pretty ugly uniform.

Michigan Republicans are helping gather signatures to place independent Ralph Nader on the presidential ballot in the battleground state, irritating Democrats who accuse the GOP of trying to pull votes away from candidate John Kerry.

"It's another example of state Republicans willing to try every unethical trick in the book to hold power," Democratic Executive Chairman Mark Brewer said Thursday. "This clearly shows that a vote for Ralph Nader is a vote to re-elect George Bush. The Republicans know that, and that's why they are desperate to have Nader on the Michigan ballot."

Greg McNeilly of the state Republican Party said the GOP is doing nothing wrong and hopes Nader will draw votes from the Democratic candidate. Republicans will make sure Nader has more than the 30,000 valid signatures he needs by July 15 to qualify for the Michigan ballot, McNeilly said.

First, in anticipation of Scott McClellan's responses, let me make it clear that I am NOT objecting to hunting down Osama or any other "high value" al Qaeda targets. There's nothing wrong with the Bush administration's attempts to get them. They should be trying to get them. That's not the issue. The issue is the requested timing of the arrests. And what's significant about the timing is that it symbolizes (perfectly) the central, most fundamental flaw with the Bush regime -- the willingness to put politics above absolutely EVERYTHING. This really wouldn't be such a big issue if it weren't part of a much larger pattern of behavior that has happened again and again.

So, as you might expect, the fight over this most controversial bill will be brutal. And one of the weapons in the arsenal of those desperately demanding equality for all is pretty controversial itself. That's right: Outing may be making a comeback.

Personally, I am no fan of outing. A person's sexual orientation is that person's own business. Being gay, bisexual, or transgender is not a bad thing; to me, it is something worthy of the same celebration as heterosexuality -- but every individual should have the right, if they choose, to protect their privacy and hide in the closet. While I recommend being out and open, I can't pass judgment on someone who opts to remain silent so as not to lose his or her job, home, and/or family. Even in 2004, being out carries huge risks for many people.

But there are times when outing becomes a duty. When a secretly queer person in a public position does harm to GLBT people (which, I believe, does harm to all humankind) for his or her own benefit, that person's hypocrisy needs to be unmasked and made visible for the world to see.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood sought Tuesday to ease concerns that thousands of voters identified as "potential felons" could be barred from voting this year, but she conceded there are unexplained glitches in a list that is drawing legal fire from civil-rights groups.

Advocates fear the state is again conducting a flawed purge of voters, as it did before Florida's contested presidential election in 2000. Recent newspaper checks have found thousands of names apparently listed by mistake among the potential felons.

Like the French soldiers of the late eighteenth century, we saw ourselves as the champions of "a cause the was destined to triumph." So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.

The discovery that the men we had scorned as peasant guerillas were, in fact, a lethal, determined enemy and the casualty lists that lengthened each week with nothing to show for the blood being spilled broke our early confidence. By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival.

Writing about this kind of warfare is not a simple task. Repeatedly, I have found myself wishing that I had been the veteran of a conventional war, with dramatic campaigns and historic battles for subject matter instead of monotonous succession of ambushes and fire-fights. But there were no Normandies or Gettysburgs for us, no epic clashes that decide the fates of armies or nations. The war was mostly a matter of enduring weeks of expectant waiting and, at random intervals, of conducting vicious manhunts through jungles and swamps where snipers harassed us constantly and booby traps cut us down one by one.

-- Philip Caputo from A Rumor of War

I've read over and over from military analysts of various sorts that we could have won in Vietnam. The basic principles of counterinsurgency are well known, they say, and we were beginning to apply them successfully when Nixon made the decision to pull out. If he had stayed the course, we could have won.

Maybe. But if those principles are so well known, why do we never seem to learn them? Instead, three decades after Vietnam, I keep reading stuff like this:

U.S. jets dropped six bombs Monday on a residence believed to be a safehouse used by terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the U.S. military said. At least 10 people and possibly as many as 15 were killed, witnesses and doctors said.

Four 500-pound bombs and two 1,000-pound bombs were dropped in an operation designed to underscore the resolve of coalition and Iraqi forces....

This just scares the shit out of me. My greatest fear in Iraq is that it turns into the West Bank writ large, an endless, slow motion slaughter that demonstrates undoubted resolve but sucks the soul out of both sides in the process.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry selected former rival John Edwards to be his running mate, telling supporters he couldn't wait to see the freshman North Carolina senator going "toe-to-toe with Dick Cheney."

While the Senate panel has concluded that C.I.A. analysts and other intelligence officials overstated the case that Iraq had illicit weapons, the committee has not found any evidence that the analysts changed their reports as a result of political pressure from the White House, according to officials familiar with the report.

The spooks seem to believe that outgoing CIA Director George Tenet was strong-armed by Cheney and Rumsfeld into overassessing Iraq's WMD capacity.

One of the members of the team was a JAG officer, a lawyer from down there (Guantanamo). And I said to her — she was a lieutenant colonel, I believe — and I said to her, "You know, we're having problems with releasing some of these prisoners. What are you doing?" And she said, "Oh, we're not releasing anybody." And I said, "What's going to be the end state?" And she said, "Most of these prisoners will never leave Guantanamo Bay. They'll spend the rest of their lives in detention." (emphaisis added) And I said, "How do they get visits from home?" She said, "These are terrorists, ma'am. They're not entitled to visitors from home."

I was stunned. I thought, we'll never get out of Iraq at this rate.

The truckers, who haul hazardous material across 48 states, explained how easy it is to spot "Islamics" on the road: just look for their turbans. Quite a few of them are truck drivers, says William Westfall of Van Buren, Ark. "I'll be honest. They know they're not welcome at truck stops. There's still a lot of animosity toward Islamics." Eddie Dean of Fort Smith, Ark., also has little doubt about his ability to identify Muslims: "You can tell where they're from. You can hear their accents. They're not real clean people."

That kind of prejudice is hard to undo, but it's a shame Beatty's slide show did not mention that in the U.S., it's almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims. Last year a Sikh truck driver who was wearing a turban was shot twice while standing near his tractor trailer in Phoenix, Ariz. He survived the attack, which police are investigating as a hate crime.

I've always thought it was interesting that the mass murder of September 11 was allegedly committed by a multi-millionaire. We always say it was committed by a "terrorist" or by an Islamic fundamentalist or an "Arab," but we never define Osama by his rightful title: multi-millionaire. Why have we never read a headline saying, "3,000 Killed by Multi-Millionaire"? It would be a correct headline, would it not? No part of it is untrue - Osama bin Laden has assets totaling at least $30 million; he is a multi-millionaire. So why isn't that the way we see this person, as a rich fuck who kills people? Why didn't that become the reason for profiling potential terrorists? Instead of rounding up suspicious Arabs, why don't we say, "Oh my God, a multi-millionaire killed 3,000 people! Round up the multi-millionaires! Throw them all in jail! No charges! No trials! Deport the millionaires!"

Conservative distrust of liberal social science -- sometimes justified -- has metastasized in the past few decades into a distrust of any fact-based research program that reaches non-favored conclusions. Thus the distrust of the CIA when it initially resisted neocon beliefs about Saddam's WMD and the contempt for Arabists and State Department experts who warned that occupying Iraq required real planning and real knowledge.

The disaster this has caused is obvious and immediate. Less immediate, but no less disastrous, is the administration's refusal to acknowledge the CBO's economic projections or the scientific establishment's consensus on global warming. In this administration, if the facts don't fit their agenda, all the worse for the facts.