AddieStan

Meanwhile, in answer to Hans Johnson's missive on the defeat of Ralph Reed in the Georgia GOP primary for lieutenant governor, one of your blogstress's favorite writers reached out with this eruption: Only the most delusional liberal could see Ralph Reed’s glorious defeat as anything other than Republicans cutting their losses. These people will chew off a foot to avoid losing the Senate or House in November, and they don’t need another high-profile grifter in the mix, even if he’s not running for Congress himself. The GOP threw Reed in front of the train, not the progressives. --Yellowboat Okay, Y, but what do you really think?

When your blogstress wrote, for The American Prospect Online, an essay in which she threw up her hands at the notion of a cohesive, politically effective religious left, she knew not what she had done. Somehow, she managed to anger religious people on both the left and the right, and places in between. Your écrivaine based her conclusion on the latest turmoil in the Episcopal Church over the place of lesbians and gay people in church life, deducing that while all the mainline Protestant churches in the US remain engaged in similar internal battles, there is no hope for producing a religious left movement that is up to doing full-scale battle with the forces of the religious right. It is your cyberscribe's description of the Episcopalians' travails that rankled the Rev. Glynn C. Harper of Christ Church in San Augustine, Texas, who writes: Dear Ms. Stan: I am writing to tell you that I have seldom read as misinformed and misleading an article on any subject as your article ...

Earlier this week, mes amis , Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was taken to task by Senator Patrick Leahy , ranking Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, for the administration's thwarting of an inquiry, undertaken by DoJ Office of Professional Responsibility Director H. Marshall Jarrett , into the role of Justice Department officials in signing off on the administration's domestic spying program, which is being conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Jarrett's inquiry was undertaken at the request of members of Congress, but was quashed by none other than President George W. Bush himself, according to Gonzales. The indefatiguable Murray Waas has led the reporting on this constitution-crushing executive branch gambit. Herewith you will find the attorney general's response to the committee regarding the stymied investigation and, more importantly, three memos penned by Jarrett expressing his frustration that his investigators were denied t...

Your blogstress's good friend (and certified hottie -- see photo #5) Hans Johnson, president of the data and strategy firm Progressive Victory , writes to remind us of a little-celebrated victory enjoyed by progressives this week: the defeat of GOP strategist and former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed in his primary race for his once-certain spot on the ballot as the Republican candidate for the office of lieutenant governor of the great State of Georgia. Seems that progressives were able to leverage the unravelling story of Reed's role in the Jack Abramoff scandal to liberal advantage. Herewith, Mr. Johnson's missive: It is with relief and some reflection that we can all celebrate the defeat of Ralph Reed , purveyor of prejudice and candidate for Lt. Gov. in Georgia, in yesterday's GOP state primary. His trouncing by a nearly 4-3 margin statewide in a primary vote -- where a late poll showed him running neck and neck with his opponent -- is testi...

At today's White House press briefing, still in progress as your blogstress writes, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow answered a question about the prospect for diplomatic success in the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict this way: How on earth do you define "success" in the Middle East? He then mumbled something about "thousands of years." Snow also said that the White House does not consider the current conflict to be a war.

On MSNBC, Fox News refugee Rita Cosby -- whose reporting forte is more murdered co-eds than war dead -- just referred to Nazareth as "the holy city" that is "the birthplace of Jesus Christ." Nazareth, an Israeli town with a largely Arab population, had just been hit by Hezbollah rockets. First of all, given Cosby's "objective" reportage of Nazareth as a place universally regarded as a holy city, one would hope she knew her New Testament a bit better -- or at least a few Christmas carols. The Gospels tell us , as even non-Christians know, that Bethlehem was the birthplace of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. (There is much dispute whether or not this claim is accurate, or simply an attempt by Gospel writers to fulfill Hebrew scripture regarding the birth of a messiah, such as that found in Micah .) But worse than that is Cosby's reference to "Jesus Christ." Christ was not the guy's last name; it is a Greek word th...

With his assertion that the Middle East is ablaze with the flames of World War III , former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has successfully raised the hackles of your blogstress's many friends on the left. Your cybertrix, however, takes some pride in having suggested just that , days before Gingrich made his declaration. The difference between your Webwench and Newt (other than, presumably, the bustier ) is that election strategy did not enter into your écrivaine 's calculation, as it did into Newt's. (See Matt Stoller .) A word to her progressive friends: The problem with Newt is that he's occasionally right -- and not in that broken-clock-twice-a-day way. To dismiss out of hand everything he says just because he says it never gets one very far. The trick with Newt to pay very close attention, as Mr. Stoller did. Look not only for the ruthlessness, but also for the inherent contradictions in the whole of his body of orally disseminated work. He's so often off ...

As she reads this morning of Israel's ground invasion of Lebanon, your blogstress finds her heart sinking ever deeper as the Middle East War intensifies. One can't help but feel this thing deeply as the names of ancient cities on both sides of the border appear on the role call of towns bombed and attacked by missiles. Yesterday, your écrivaine flinched as the town of Tyre appeared on the list; this is the place from whence Hiram, the architect and builder of Solomon's temple hailed. Last night, as she watched the BBC News, your cyberscribe meditated on the graphic that accompanied the report: the flags of Israel and Lebanon, shown side by side. The former, of course, is adorned with the ancient symbol of the Jewish faith, the Star of David. At the center of the latter is a great cedar tree -- the wood used to frame the temple. I do not argue that Israel has no right to defend itself; of course it does. But accusations of collective punishment do tend to ring true when...

From a reader and believer in Southern California, your blogstress received this missive regarding her essay at The American Prospect Online , "A Canterbury Tale." I have a slight disagreement with your excellent article in TAP about the religious left. You wrote this: "In seeking to create a counterpart to the religious right, we tried to force our values through a narrow hole. In essence, we bought into the religious authoritarianism of the right, inferring that moral authority proceeds only from religion. In this, we have sold ourselves short." I don't see it that way. The religious left isn't making the argument you suggest, not even implicitly. We are trying to do two things: 1. Convince religious people that leftist politics is a valid option for religious people. When the right has a monopoly on religion, religious people who otherwise might be sympathetic are given the false choice of being liberal or being against God. That may not seem important ...

A reader named Matthew asks your blogstress to consider the words of Senator Barack Obama , delivered last week to the "Call to Renewal" conference convened by the Rev. Jim Wallis, a liberal evangelical. The left is quite abuzz about Obama's speech, in which he urges outreach by Democrats to evangelical Christians, ordinarily presumed to be acolytes of the right: For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't. Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesti...

Your blogstress just returned from a briefing at the National Press Club at which Valerie Plame Wilson, and her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, made short statements about the lawsuit they have filed against, among others, the vice president of the United States for the disclosure to reporters of Ms. Wilson's identity as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Though called a news conference , no news appeared to have been broken there, with the exception of the announcement that today's briefing would be the last time that the Wilsons would make themselves available to the news media on the subject of their lawsuit until the matter was resolved (which could take years). Neither of the Wilsons took questions. Their lawyer, however, did. He just didn't really answer many of them.

Your blogstress wonders if any of her devotees are as tired as she of the Arlen Specter act, which features the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee pretending to take on the Bush administration over its routine desecration of Constitution, only to kick up some dust and pretend to do something about it. The latest from Chairman Specter is a hard-won agreement for a one-time review of the administration's illegal domestic spying program. Herewith from Charles Babington and Peter Baker of the Washington Post : Bush agreed voluntarily to submit his program to the court named for the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, contingent on Congress passing legislation drafted by Specter and administration lawyers. The legislation would allow the Justice Department unlimited attempts to revise the program to meet the court's approval and would allow it to appeal adverse court rulings. It would also give the NSA in emergency situations a week rather than the current...

Walter Pincus writes in today's Washington Post of a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that condemns Rummy's office, and the Pentagon at large, for marking "classified" all manner of documents containing only unclassified information : The GAO reviewed only a "nonprobability sample" of 111 classified Defense Department documents from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. To understand how minute the sample is, the GAO reported that in the five fiscal years between 2000 and 2004, the Pentagon was responsible for 66.8 million new classified records. That is about 13.4 million a year. [...] In a broader administrative criticism, the GAO found that 92 of the 111 documents had some marking error, such as failure to include declassification instructions or the source of the classification as required.

With Israel's bombing of the Beirut Airport, your blogstress thinks it's safe to say that there's a war going on in the Middle East. Duh, you say? Well, mes amis , the experts will tell you that what's going on between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the Israelis and the Lebanese does not constitute a war, but rather represents two high-intensity conflicts, or some other sort of euphemism. For example, the following, from today's comprehensive report by Anthony Shadid, Scott Wilson and Debbi Wilgoren of the Washington Post Foreign Service : "We are not at war, but we are in a very high-volume crisis, and we have an intention to put an end to the situation here along the northern border," said Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, according to the wire service reports. For its part, the Bush administration, which has set the standard for military responses to terrorist attacks, appears to be trying to make a distinctio...

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...