• President Bush speaks to the nation tonight on Iraq. Here's my question. Here's a man who has never admitted a mistake in office, a man who has not withdrawn a single nominee even in the face of significant opposition, a man who doesn't have the guts to let anyone who disagrees with him into one of his town meetings -- so what are the odds there will be anything fresh in tonight's speech? Why should I even watch?

 • Wondering why President Bush hasn't said anything about the Chinese company bidding to buy Unocal? From CNN I learned that this Chinese company hired the same PR firm that handled George Bush's 2004 campaign, and that their American-based PR guy used to flak for a company called Enron.

 • From the Washington Post: What do the CEOs of MCI, Gannett, Primus, Radio One and Broadwing all have in common? Their pay went up while their company stock went down.

 • While I'm at it: Considering the average CEO now makes 348 times the average wage of their worker, and considering CEOs of the top 2,000 corporations average about $5 million a year in compensation, why do they need lavish pension benefits? I mean, at $5 million a year, can't they put away a few dollars for retirement?

 • And finally, this off-color example of the unexpected-twist school of humor just slays me. From the Onion edition of 6-22-2056. "We need a fourth law of robotics. Stop fingering my wife."

Whenever you see outraged reaction from TV talking heads about the U.S. Supreme Court, remember it's the court that upheld slavery. It's the court that took the 14th Amendment, designed to protect black Americans during Reconstruction, and used it to expand the rights of corporations.

Remember it's the court that upheld World War I era laws that made it illegal to criticize the government, it's the court that upheld the World War II deportation of innocent Japanese-Americans to internment camps, and it's the court that ruled in the '70s that there was nothing wrong with basing education on property taxes, despite the obvious fact that rich neighborhoods would have better schools than poor neighborhoods.

Much of today's spin-meistering concerns the rulings on the display of the Ten Commandments, and once again someone was standing on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court talking about some alleged war against Christianity. As Jon Stewart pointed out recently, some war -- there's only been 43 straight Christian presidents.

If you believe the premise in Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" -- namely, that there's an Establishment elite that protects itself above all else and offers outlets to disenfranchised people only when a pressure-release valve is needed to avoid a greater calamity -- recent Supreme Court rulings on seizing private property and striking down file-sharing software are no surprise.

Logic need not apply here. Lethal products such as cigarettes and guns are legal for sale; tape and video recorders are allowed because they can be used for both legal and illegal purposes. File-sharing can be used for both illegal and legal purposes, too, but why make such a distinction when huge corporations are faced with losing money because they are clinging to an outdated business model? It's easier to kill Napster.

If anyone -- including the Christian Right -- believes the Supreme Court is going to promote the will of the people over the power of the elites, they should study some history.

Always remember the landmark suit over Microsoft ripping off the Apple graphic interface was decided by a judge who didn't use a computer. It's not hard to grasp that the Supreme Court didn't appreciate peer-to-peer networks. I can make a movie and want to distribute it copyright-free, you know.

The most interesting thing, to me anyway, in today's Supreme Court news was what they did not do -- protect two reporters who are facing jail time for protecting their sources.

Now the court generally sticks to matters of law (well, unless there's a presidential election on the line) so it's not surprising that the court would not want to get involved in a contempt case.

Seems to me, however, that there was a matter of law to address here -- Judith Miller of the New York Times is going to jail over a story she never published, while the man who did the outing, Robert Novak, is walking around free. Any legal statutes that can produce such a result are in need of a remedy.

Equal justice under the law, indeed.

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 • Sunday New York Times: the delay in armoring Humvees in Iraq stems from an Ohio company hanging on to its competitive advantage in the marketplace. Even though people are dying.

 • Sunday New York Times: the last 13 National Security Advisors have either worked directly under Henry Kissinger or directly under someone who directly worked under Kissinger.

 • Sunday New York Times: a major impetus in booming tourism in Alaska is the fact that people want to see it before it melts. Glaciers are retreating at a rapid rate, and the people in Alaska do not see global warming as a theory. Are you listening Mr. Bush and Mr. Limbaugh? Naw, probably not; it's easier to criticize the paper for being liberal instead of paying attention to the troublesome facts it brings to light.

 • From Lawrence.com: Want to call Karl Rove and give him a hard time about his dividing the country for narrow political gain? Here's his number: 202-456-2369.

 • From Drudge: want to see just how fragile the U.S. economy is to oil shocks? Read about some recent strategy / war-gaming sessions here. If you're too lazy to click, just be scared. Be sure to thank Detroit for pumping out high-profit gas guzzlers when gas hits $3 a gallon.

 • And finally, from CNN, my favorite quote in quite some time. "Many a young conservative comes to Washington thinking it's a cesspool and they find out it's a hot tub." Morton Blackwell.

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Having a bad day?

The scene is an emergency room. There's a hefty family surrounding an emaciated family member; she's tried to commit suicide and they won't let her wander near the door. She mostly keeps her head down, crying.

There's a restaurant worker, still wearing her apron, who has cut off a big chunk of her finger.

There's a guy in a neck collar, a couple of sick crying children, an old man who has to help his elderly wife go to the bathroom. A cleaning lady waits patiently outside the door.

I'd been thinking I was having a pretty crummy day; the First Dumpling having her fifth surgery within a year, then hours later her son breaking his arm while skateboarding.

And so I'm in a hospital waiting room, pretending to thumb through an old issue of Vogue while using my old reporter instincts of 20/20 eavesdropping.

And gaining some perspective.

For all those reading, please remember you are blessed and you are living on a wonderful planet. I'm sure you've heard the old bromide -- be happy, things could be worse.

Just remember that it's true.

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As an unabashed defender of the New York Times, and as someone who politely tries to explain to people why good journalism is important and why Fox News is not journalism, I had to bite my tongue over today's Sunday magazine cover story.

The story concerned gay marriage and why the overwhelming majority of gay marriage opponents are actually opposed to being gay, period, and why almost all of them base their opposition on Biblical teachings. The opponents quoted Leviticus, where homosexuality is an abomination, and, as they say, That Was That.

Actually, singing it's right because the Bible tells me so is hardly an answer. It's the modern-day political equivalent of a parent telling a child "because I said so."

And I am not a child.

Taking at face value the idea that what is said in the Bible must be followed, then you can kill your children for cursing you, you can kill someone for working on the Sabbath, you can own slaves, and adulterers should be stoned to death. Try using those as a defense in court sometime.

I could go on and on -- the Old Testament is rife with atrocities and the God-tyrant of that book scarcely resembles God Version 2.0 in the New Testament -- but there's no point in doing so. Logic doesn't matter when blind faith is what's at hand.

Now the New York Times could not bring up such obvious Biblical contradictions in its story without seeming combative, impolite or worse. It's a standard limitation of journalism -- you have to come up with a presentable version of the truth. The real blood and gore of Iraq must be implied, not graphically depicted, or the impact on the consumer is revulsion, not insight. So this God-sanctioned gay bashing gets by essentially unchallenged.

The highest irony of all in this gay marriage issue is that the Religious Right refuses to see same-sex marriage (or covenants or civil unions or whatever the euphemism of the day) in terms of a civil rights issue. Ironic because in legal test after legal test in recent years, issues such as prayer in school and the 10 Commandments have been cast in civil rights terms, most notably, the constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of religion.

Make no mistake -- the Bible is used when it's convenient and glossed over when it's not. This should not come as a surprise. A lot of people in power seem to have the exact same attitude when it comes to the U.S. Constitution.

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Caught this item by way of the always insightful Dan Gillmor -- if you wind up getting a bird flu that doesn't respond to antibiotics, you can thank the Chinese who have been giving antibiotics meant for humans to chickens.

The idea that a number of deadly diseases have started in chickens and moved to humans who live in too close of proximity is not disputed. The idea that scientists all across the world, most particularly in Asia, where these things generally incubate, are worried about a global pandemic is not disputed.

The new wrinkle here is that the next disease to make a jump might be a super bug resistant to antibiotics, and that's because the disease-carrying microbe has already been exposed to, and adapted to, the antibiotic.

As scary as this is, there's something scarier at play. Here's something in real life, real time, that's evolving, yet to President Bush, the Kansas Board of Education and millions of people, evolution is an unproven theory. I wonder how many of these people have had the flu over the last 25 years, and if they realize that flu strain has evolved five or six different ways in just that short amount of time.

Religion, specifically Christian beliefs, are behind much of what's at play here, and it's worth noting how many of these same religious people praised the late Pope John Paul upon his passing. I wonder how many of them know that the Pope declared this argument dead, that he called evolution a fact back in the 90s.

Tom Toles had a brilliant satirical cartoon on this recently. It showed a teacher in front of a map of the United States, and the teacher was stating that the United States was made in six days and that George Washington was only a theory.

It would have been even funnier if it hadn't been so true.

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Tautologies

Was up til 4 a.m. the other morning drinking beer and arguing the Iraq war with a good buddy of mine. He's a great person with whom to discuss things; he's a conservative but not a knee-jerk one, and he respects the idea that I can swing from radical right to radical left depending on the issue. Like I always say, somewhere between the ACLU and John Ashcroft, the truth can usually be found. It's not accidental that my reading list ranges from The Nation to the National Review.

He calls me a Progressive. I can accept that. It's better than Marxist-Pinko-America-hater.

Two years ago I made a $1,000 bet with him that the people of Iraq would be no better off in five years than under Saddam. It's worth noting here the $1,000, as I don't think either of us have ever made a bet, poker or otherwise, for more than $20 in our lives.

His essential point is that even if mistakes were made in getting there, the U.S. has to stay there until the job is done. My essential point is that it doesn't matter how long the U.S. is there because 18 months after the pullout it'll be civil war anyway. There are only two things left under absolute U.S. control -- how much money will be wasted and how many lives will be lost between now and then.

The current themes from the President is that withdrawal is not an option, that any pullout means the terrorists win and the U.S. looks weak, and that setting a date for leaving will mean the jihadists will only have to wait us out.

To which I reply hogwash, nonsense and total bullshit -- especially when the lessons of history were clear.

First, withdrawal better be an option because currently the jihadists are building up their forces faster than the U.S., and Americans should start considering the possibility of the unthinkable -- flat-out defeat instead of stalemate.

Secondly, this notion that the U.S. must outlast the jihadists or look weak is just ridiculous. You don't outlast a home country; the U.S. outlasted the British in our own revolution, the Vietnamese outlasted both the French and the Americans, and the Iraqis outlasted the British in the 20s and 30s.

Finally, the idea that America never cuts and runs is pure farce. We pulled out of Lebanon after getting hit and we pulled out of Somalia, too.

This was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time; if the U.S. wanted to engage in some nation building, why didn't it start with Palestine, the real source of the problem?

The Bush Administration started this drive to war with false arguments about imminent threats and weapons of mass destruction. It refused to discuss the true cost and it refused to discuss timelines (especially notable since the average civil war lasts eight years and W's chances of getting people to sign on for an eight-year war were pretty slim).

Next up were appeals based on democracy-instilling rhetoric stolen from Wilson and Churchill. Now, with poll numbers slipping, it has moved from arguments to tautologies that get repeated endlessly by the Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world.

Merely saying the U.S. must stay in Iraq until it wins is not a policy. Especially when history says winning wasn't a realistic expectation in the first place.

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Someday I'll publish the Marshall Manifesto, an homage of sorts to Karl Marx and his Communist Manifesto. The idea would be to work off all Marx's excellent observations on capitalism while deleting all his wacky ideas that ran counter to human nature, did not work, and led to brutal dictatorships under the premise of establishing a worker's paradise.

My perspective in bringing this up -- in 25 years since leaving college I have managed to work my way from nowhere to nowhere. I've been downsized, right-sized, laid off; I've been part of a union that had to vote to accept pay cuts to keep a company alive. My employers have gone merger crazy and bankrupt, technologically outdated and bankrupt, and just plain bankrupt. I've received exactly three bonuses in 25 years and haven't seen time and a half overtime since the early 90s. I haven't felt anything near job security since the '80s.

In the meantime, out in the rest of the world, folks with money have made lots more money. Folks in the middle have been stuck in the middle, and folks at the bottom have fallen even further.

Now no one ever picks journalism as a career if they are motivated by money, and considering desire is the root of all misery, I don't mean to sound whiny here. I bring it up because my life illustrates the great divide among the Left and the Right; that is, whether all history is a story of class struggle, or whether the important thing is the opportunity to advance.

Americans have overwhelmingly bought into opportunity versus socialism, and while one can argue if we are worse off for it, this country is not the only place where such issues are at play. The drive for European unity, recently slightly derailed by votes in France and the Netherlands, includes the question of American-style capitalism, as advocated by the British, or what's known as Rhineland capitalism, where it's still free enterprise but government adds a lot of protection for workers.

Listen to right-wing radio and you'll hear that England's economy is booming while France and Germany, the two countries most known for government-regulated capitalism, are stagnant. You'll hear a lot about how taxes are too high in those countries, and how low-tax countries like the U.S. have the edge.

Well, remember this.

In France and Germany, their taxes are higher but their health care is included and their retirements are secure. Our low-tax mantra has led to a health care availability crisis, a retirement crisis, and a budget deficit that's so bad America's economic future is now based on the kindness of the Chinese to buy our bonds.

When it comes to the U.S. economy, answer me one thing -- how is a tax cut a tax cut if the money for the cut has to be borrowed? Sounds to me like the goverment is giving me a loan when I didn't ask for one because I don't want a loan I have to repay.Try getting a tax-cutting, stay-on-message Republican to admit that sometime. Especially when the tax cuts keep helping the rich more than the middle class or the poor.

Things are more simple than we are led to believe.

And it begins with not believing the leaders.

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Mr. Marshall is a reporter turned Web editor who lives three blocks away from the Chesapeake Bay.