Who knew?

Hillary Clinton has a Flickr account. Check out the most recent "debate watching party."

Is it me or is Bill Clinton still hot? Oops, did I say that out loud?

Five years.

It's been five years since Congress authorized the use of force in Iraq. To mark this anniversary, a bunch of soldiers weigh in on state of affairs in Iraq. No, not phony soldiers. 12 former army captains. Their message: reinstitute the draft to bolster our presence, or pull out "immediately." They're not the only members of the military criticizing the Administration's handling of Iraq.

How many more lives must be sacrificed in the name of this futile effort?

Say What?, Part I

Mattel apologizes to China for toy recalls.

Debrowski [Mattel's executive vice president of worldwide operations says] said he realized the damage that had been done to the reputation of Chinese goods, adding the company was committed to manufacturing in China and was also investing $30 million in a Barbie store in Shanghai.

Oh, China's reputation is damaged. Boo fucking hoo. Nice to see where Mattel's loyalty lies.

Moms can be aggressive war mongers too.

At the Emmy Awards, Sally Fields concluded her Emmy acceptance speech with: “If mothers ruled the, ruled the world, there would be no god-damned wars in the first place.”

Michelle Malkin fires off an angry response:

Contrary to tongue-tied Sally’s incoherent Primetime Emmy Awards diatribe, childbearing, and childrearing experiences do not bond all women in a universal sorority of non-confrontation...

On the playground of life, Sally Field is the mom who looks the other way when the brat on the elementary-school slide pushes your son to the ground or throws dirt in your daughter’s face. She’s the mom who holds her tongue at the mall when thugs spew profanities and make crude gestures in front of her brood. She’s the mom who tells her child never to point out when a teacher gets her facts wrong. She’s the mom who buys her teenager beer, condoms, and a hotel room on prom night, because she’d rather give in than assert her parental authority
and do battle.

Got that? If you're a mother and you voice reasonable dissent against war, your child is going to be a wuss. Or promiscuous. Or both.

No f'ing way.

Bush will likely nominate Michael Chertoff to succeed Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. This is the dude who recklessly warned we'd be attacked by terrorists this summer, based on his "gut instinct". And the dude who memorably referred to Louisiana as a "city".

Gawker snarks:

It's a pretty good move, sure, but if the President is really intent on taking the Constitution, cutting a hole out of it, and fucking it six ways to Sunday, why just settle for partison incompetence? Why not go for outright criminality? Dude should tap Scooter Libby.

Kudos to Gawker. If you can't laugh in times like this, you cry.

Update: CNN has since downgraded Chertoff's prospects from "Bush will likely nominate" to "Bush may nominate." You can still find "will likely" in Google cache. With any luck, by tomorrow, this may be downgraded to "will not." A girl can hope.

Update #2: CNN is now reporting that Chertoff will not be nominated. Sanity prevails.

Lead fallout.

Momsrising has been lobbying the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to police the lead issue. Any such effort will be fruitless because the CPSC is, essentially, a joke - a safety organization in name only.

...the CPSC is not taken seriously, with a dearth of money, staffing, enforcement authority and leadership. Its budget is $63 million -- less than half of its original 1974 budget, if one corrects for inflation. (With inflation the budget should be $149 million, he says.) In 1980, the CPSC had a staff of 978. Now its staff is less than 400.

...Congressional investigators recently visited the CPSC's laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland, and according to Mierzwinski found it "like a bad high school lab."

Edwards is calling on the Administration and democratic leaders in Congress:

"As one father to another" -- to "take immediate action to stop the growing crisis of dangerous toys being imported from China." Specifically Edwards called for "mandatory, independent third party testing" of toys.

Given the current state of the CPSC, a legislative fix appears to be the only answer.

Enjoy summer while you can.

Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, thinks we're going to be under attack. Based on what intell? None. It's just a "gut feeling." Well my gut is saying, "Chertoff is a douchebag." And at least my gut feeling is supported by fact.

Daddy's little [fill in the blank].

A Yale researcher found that congressmen with daughters are more likely to favor women's rights, including reproductive choice. Wow that's nice, I think. I infer that daughters may inspire the congressmen-fathers to respect female autonomy, or maybe having a daughter causes the fathers to empathize with women.

Conservative commentator, Debbie Schlussel, has a different opinion:

Congressmen who are liberal are more likely to have slutty daughters. And therefore, they are more likely to support abortion for selfish, personal reasons.

Okay then. But how do we explain the Bush twins versus Chelsea Clinton? Oh forget it. The excerpt is so patently biassed and dumb, it doesn't deserve a reply.

On a different note, I'm struck by Schlussel's website. Specifically, her picture. Nice glamour shot! Did she get that done at the mall? Some one wants to be a conservababe. Where's the dignity in this, and why do smart women care so much about babe status? Rachel Marsden (formerly, of Fox's Red Eye) is another example. See link. (Scroll to the middle for the picture from her now-defunct web lounge.) Not to mention the mother of all conservababes, Ann Coulter. It's worth noting that the websites of their liberal female peers are not similarly littered with glamour shots. And male commentators from both ends of the political spectrum seem to be above this type of marketing as well.

What's the deal, ladies? You're bright women (albeit, with batshit crazy political leanings). You don't need to market yourselves as cheesecake. And, specifically, with respect to Schlussel, isn't it ironic that some one with such repressed views about sexuality (woman who has premarital sex = slut), appears to be trying to appeal to the male basic instinct?

Awful buzzword of the day: "planful"

E.g., planful employees would not be adversely impacted by Guiliani's health care reform proposal. Says Guiliani:

“Health insurance should become like homeowners insurance or like car insurance: You don’t cover everything in your homeowners policy. If you have a slight accident in your house, if you need to refill your oil in your car, you don’t cover that with insurance. But that is covered in many of the insurance policies because they’re government dominated and they’re employer dominated.”

Here's to being planful and to Rudy's proposal. Carving out things like quality-of-life drugs (e.g. expensive allergy and GI pills) from the system will bring costs down. There's an inverse relation between cost and access. As cost decreases, access increases. Hence, his proposal would have the effect of increasing access to health insurance. Seems like common sense to me.