AddieStan

Your blogstress finds herself most indebted to Atrios of that pithy blog, Eschaton , for linking to her piece , A Canterbury Tale , at The American Prospect Online, in which she, once and for all, throws in the towel at the notion of a cohesive religious left. At AmericaBlog , John Aravosis echoes your Webwench's sentiment . Posting in reponse to news of yet another gathering of liberal religious figures, Aravosis writes: I'm not convinced the religious left will ever get its act together. They just don't seem to know politics, or public relations, nor are they angry enough to be inspired enough to make a difference (our guys, silly people that they are, actually buy into all that Biblical stuff about loving thy neighbor - the religious right, on the other hand, has ignored all the love in the Bible).

Speaking of South Asia, did anybody catch Rummy's performance yesterday in his joint press conference with beleaguered Afghan President Hamid Karzai? He actually had the gall to suggest that the fighting in southern Afghanistan between coalition forces and the Taliban doesn't speak to a resurgent Taliban; it just looks that way because the U.S. has gotten better at keeping track of Taliban attacks. Was the U.S. military, until recently, really not keeping track of attacks on its forces by the reportedly routed enemy?

Your blogstress finds it quite amazing that the terrorist bombing of commuter trains in Mumbai -- known to Westerners as Bombay -- are playing in this continent's broadcast media as a B-list story. Nearly 200 people were killed, and at least double that number injured, in those ghastly attacks, carried out during rush hour in India's largest city. Mumbai is to India what New York is to the U.S.: its financial capital, its multicultural Mecca, if you will. (You'll recall that when the London tubes were attacked, the situation was treated almost as if the attack had happened on this side of the pond. But then again, the U.K. is a nation run by white people.) The Indian government has been quick to lay responsibility for the assault (which, as of this writing, no group has claimed) at the feet of the Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Toiba , but your cyberscribe suspects the truth is a bit more complex. Yesterday's bombings bear all the marks of an al Qaeda action: p...

From Simon Romero , writing in today's New York Times : HOUSTON, July 5 — In yet another bizarre twist to the Enron saga, the sudden death of Kenneth L. Lay on Wednesday may have spared his survivors financial ruin. Mr. Lay's death effectively voids the guilty verdict against him, temporarily thwarting the federal government's efforts to seize his remaining real estate and financial assets, legal experts say. CLICK HERE TO READ ROMERO ON THE POTENTIAL DELIVERANCE OF THE FAMILY LAY

CNN is reporting that Enron founder Kenneth Lay, major fundraiser for the presidential campaign of President George W. Bush, has died this morning, perhaps of a massive heart attack. One wonders what he had for breakfast. A little OJ laced with Digitalis , perhaps? (Not that your blogstress doubts the official account or anything.)

Photo: AP/WWP, courtesy U.S. Department of State The very foxy Glenn Kellis, in his most recent post on his Ob:Blog, reveals the secrets of the recent interplay between the markets and and interest-rate woes: What's really going on -- and it has become grossly obvious lately -- is the global stock markets are running purely on artificial liquidity supplied constantly, but unevenly, by the central banks. When there's an injection of cash, the markets rally. When the magic spigot is closed and the liquidity dries up, the markets drop. Most recently, the cash injection from the Bank of Japan (BOJ), Japan's central bank, has been calling the shots. It's no coincidence that when the BOJ announced, in the middle of May, that the it would begin raising rates, the markets tanked.... So, now we know why Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi got that special tour of Graceland , with the U.S. president as his guide. Continues Mr. Kellis: As long as the cash injections keep...

What's the best thing about Independence Day in Our Nation's Capital? C'est facile, mes amis -- the Constitution is momentarily safe from the destructive hands of the country's lawmakers. In recent days, your blogstress has meditated on the recent, by-a-whisker defeat in the Senate of a constitutional amendment that would have banned flag-burning -- at the expense of the First Amendment, which the New Yorker 's ever-eloquent Hendrik Hertzberg describes as "the Constitution's crowning glory." More from Mr. Hertzberg: The flag is not a piece of cloth, any more than the Constitution is a piece of paper; and the flag’s sacredness is not damaged when a piece of cloth representing it is burned or trampled or used as an autograph book, any more than the Constitution can be damaged by the destruction of a printed copy. But the Constitution can and would be damaged, to the nation’s shame, by the addition of something as inimical to its spirit as the flag-des...

And so it was on a fair Saturday evening that your blogstress sauntered toward Union Station, there to board the train that would carry her to the friends with whom she would travel to hear some exquisite jazz at the hands of guitarist and guru Paul Wingo. On Massachusetts Avenue, about to cross D Street, your cybertrix was accosted by a beautiful young man, who handed her a rather handsome paperback book, Ten Commandments, Twice Removed . "This is for you," he said, and quickly flitted away. He had brown skin and thick, curly black hair; despite the heat and humidity, he wore a long-sleeved white button-down shirt and charcoal dress pants held up by black braces. He darted across the street and began frantically approaching cars, passing books to the drivers. For her sartorial part, your Webwench was done up for her Saturday night in a swingy skirt embossed with a design in silver, and a most fetching lace-encrusted silk camisole, exceeded only in delectability by the la...

If you missed today's edition of Meet the Press , your blogstress advises you to view the podcast of the roundtable segment, wherein Bill Bennett, for whom gambling is a virtue, repeated his charge that the Pulitzer Prize won by the Washington Post for Dana Priest's reporting on the secret U.S. prisons overseas was "a disgrace." This time, however, Priest was sitting next to Bennett, cool as a cucumber, ably defending her position. Also present were William Safire and John Harwood, who might as well have stayed home, as Bennett stole the show with his eye-rolling and twitchy demeanor. From the official NBC " target=resource window>transcript : MS. [ANDREA] MITCHELL [(MODERATOR)]: Dana, let me point out that The Washington Post, your newspaper, was behind the others but also did publish this story. And a story you wrote last year disclosing the secret CIA prisons won the Pulitzer Prize, but it also led to William Bennett, sitting here, saying that three re...

Somehow, by the grace of Athena, the Supreme Court yesterday managed to do, for a change, the right thing on the matter of the men being held illegally at a U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba -- at least half a world away from the places from which they were seized. You'll recall, mes amis , that the Bush administration had declared itself immune from the protocols of international and domestic law -- not to mention the Military Code of Justice -- in the matter of trials for the Guantánamo detainees. Because they were swept up as part of the so-called War on Terror -- which is being waged against the United States, according to the White House, not by governments but by individuals -- the administration contended that the rules by which our nation is bound in the conduct of warfare did not apply to those it deemed to be terrorists. Yesterday, the High Court ruled that the show trials of detainees concocted by the administration were not legal, because they did not meet th...

From Tim Golden in today's New York Times : The Defense Department [asserted on Thursday] that the court's sweeping ruling against the tribunals did not undermine the government's argument that it can hold foreign suspects indefinitely and without charge, as "enemy combatants" in its declared war on terror. Privately, though, some administration officials involved in detention policy — along with many critics of that policy — were skeptical that Guantánamo could or would go about its business as before. "It appears to be about as broad a holding as you could imagine," said one administration lawyer, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ruling. "It's very broad, it's very significant, and it's a slam." Golden reports that some administration officials had argued that the government should craft its rules for Guantánamo detentions to conform with Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. However, David Ad...

From today's New York Times : [Today] the House [of Representatives] is expected to take up a Republican resolution supporting the tracking of financial transactions and condemning the publication of the existence of the program and details of how it works. The resolution says Congress "expects the cooperation of all news media organizations in protecting the lives of Americans and the capability of the government to identify, disrupt and capture terrorists by not disclosing classified intelligence programs." Reporter Scott Shane tells us that House Democrats are offering an alternative resolution that expresses support for the bank-record snooping, but says nothing about the media. Most telling, however, is Shane's lead, wherein he reminds readers that President George W. Bush had announced to the world in 2001 that the bank records of terrorists would be surveilled. Given the diminished power of the U.S. Constitution at the hands of the Bush administration, the war...

How do you know when it's an election year? When some yahoo puts up a bill for a constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the American flag. Thankfully, that amendment failed yesterday in the Senate, likely laying it to rest until the next big election year (2008). Now, don't get your blogstress wrong -- she is not a fan of flag-burning. She herself has never desecrated an American flag, or any other sort of flag, or any other sort of symbol, be it prefaced by the words national, religious or sex. Desecration of any sort, she thinks, is an act expressive of such hatred as to visit some mighty bad karma on the desecrator. And karma or not, who wants to live a life animated by a fuel so toxic as rage? Rage is the fossil fuel of the emotional world; it emanates from a primitive origin, pollutes all who come in contact with it, and generally raises the temperature of a given environment to destructive ends. Your Webwench, though admittedly a hybrid, seeks to shift he...

So much of import has taken place since your blogstress left Our Nation's Capital (to which she has thankfully returned) for the wilds of ruburban Massachusetts, to which she traveled for the celebration of the college graduation of her delightfully Webwench-like niece, Megan . Among the week's notable occurrences was the publication by The New York Times , the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post (among others) of reports on the Bush Administration's unprecedented spying on the banking records of thousands of American citizens. This revelation was followed, within hours, by an ostensible foiling of an ostensible terrorist plot, whose ostensible plotters were, conveniently, poor black men with long hair -- just the sort of folks whose mug shots strike fear into the hearts of middle-class white people. graphic: 1010 WINS Yesterday, President George W. Bush and his vice president, Darth Vader Cheney, used their scheduled public appearances to condemn the media -- The...

Another gem from your blogstress's pal, Geoff Harper (a.k.a, The Bassman):

Geoff Harper, the friend your blogstress calls The Bassman (for his groove on the big fiddle -- not on the high seas), smells something fishy in the tale of the disappearance of Washingtonian publisher Philip Merrill, who turned up floating inanimately in Chesapeake Bay due to what the media are calling an apparent suicide. From Thursday's Washington Post : Merrill, 72, was found with a shotgun wound to the head and a small anchor tied around one or both ankles, according to a source familiar with the investigation. Writes Bassman : If I were going to commit suicide, I would take my boat out on the bay, tie an anchor to my foot, and jump overboard as I shoot myself in the head with a shotgun. Yes, I think that must be the best way to do it.

Photo: Der Spiegel /DPA As if we needed any further proof that our commander-in-chief just doesn't get it, President George W. Bush flicked off protests by tens of thousands in Vienna -- where he and his secretary of state are meeting with European Union leaders, in order to make an ill-advised remark on the gender of the U.S. secretary of state and the Austrian foreign minister. While the remark itself wasn't blatantly offensive, one might term it as exhibiting the soft bigotry of low expiation. Herewith, from Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times : [Bush's] visit, aimed at expanding trade and spotlighting unity, was marked by protests and calls within Europe for United States to shut down its detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Hundreds of people marched through the streets of Vienna today carrying banners reading "World's No. 1 Terrorist," a reference to Mr. Bush, whose policies on Iraq remain hugely unpopular here. Stolberg reports that Austri...

What your blogstress won't do for her devotees! For the last two days, mes amis , she has been swimming in a sea of alphabet soup, trolling through the roils of HTML code and Perl, vexing her pretty little head in order to bring the satisfaction of the AddieStan experience to a whole new level for you, her reader. As this work is not yet complete, her posting may be a bit intermittent today and in the coming days, so she begs your patience, mes cheris . Do bear in mind what they say comes to those who wait. (Hint: ask Martha Stewart.)

This week will see the launch of Radio Free AddieStan, a podcast featuring discussion, interviews and the writing, acting, musical and voicing talents of your blogstress's colleagues, Tim Caggiano and Frank Gilligan (who also serves as our brilliant producer). Stay tuned as we fine-tune the technology for your listening pleasure. Radio Free AddieStan is a joint project of Beltway Sewer Productions and Breakaway Radio.

From Neela Banerjee of The New York Times comes this ray of hope and specter of controversy: The Episcopal Church elected Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of Nevada as its presiding bishop on Sunday, making her the first woman to lead a church in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Bishop Jefferts Schori is a controversial choice by the Episcopalians, not just for her gender (pockets of the Anglican union, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, still reject the ordination of women), but for her support of the ordination of Rev. V. Gene Robinson, who is gay, as bishop of the church's diocese of New Hampshire. Addressing the controversy surrounding her selection, her eminence offerred this, according to Banerjee, at a press conference: "Alienation is often a function of not knowing another human being," she said at a news conference after her election. "I have good relations with almost all the other bishops, those who agree and those who don't agree with me. I...