For our former congressman, Joe Scarborough and his TV co-host Willie Geist, Obama’s bowling is, however, a big issue. Consider the following comments from today’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC:

“If you get 200, you’re a good bowler … you get 150, you’re a man—or a good woman.”

Gueist: “out of my president, I want a 150, at least.” (Because … why?)

Scarborough, following a video clip of Obama bowling: “Oh, that’s so dainty. Ugh … That is such a dainty release.”

Geist: “Oh, it’s like a children’s birthday party.”

I know, I know, it’s all good humor, a joke, and we’re not supposed to think they’re actually saying anything about Obama’s fitness for the Oval Office.

But jokes about the Democrat male candidates being effeminate, dainty, pretty boys go back at least to the 2000 election, in contrast to virile, manly Republicans, who rarely get mocked in the same way. Just look how much gush we’ve had from the right wing over Bush—a guy who was grounded from flying after two years for blowing off his flight exam—as a rugged, he-man “stud-muffin” jet-fighter pilot and a simple, plainspoken Texas man-of-the-soil farmer (hey, he clears brush! What does a rich oil family, bags of money and a Yale degree matter when we can see him clearing brush, right there in photos!).

To put it another way, I doubt Scarborough’s going to make fun of McCain’s bowling any time soon.

One of the rationales I’ve heard for the guns-in-the-workplace bill is so that workers will have a gun handy if they need it.

Do the people who buy into this know CPR? Do they have a first-aid kit in their car? Do they pack one of those little kits you can use to treat people having allergic reactions to bee stings?

Why is it that being prepared for trouble translates not into “being ready for emergencies” but “being ready to shoot people”?

Okay, that’s not how Mukasey put it in his speech in San Francisco this weekend. In explaining why warrantless surveillance and telecom immunity are vital, he asserted that “(officials) shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that’s the call that we didn’t know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

Is Mukasey saying that prior to 9/11, the administration knew someone was calling from a terrorist safe house in Afghanistan and did nothing? Didn’t apply for a warrant to listen in? Didn’t use the FISA surveillance rule that allows them to apply for a warrant three days after surveillance starts? Why the heck not?

Or is he saying that the 9/11 terrorists were in contact and making phone call to their boss, but we didn’t know it at the time? In which case, that’s more an indictment of our government’s failure to put the picture of the plot together (see the 9/11 Commission’s report for all the ways we stumbled) than a justification for wireless eavesdropping: What good would having the power of warrantless surveillance done if we didn’t know there was a call to eavesdrop on?

Or is his real point (I’m assuming he has a point other than “Comrades should obey Supreme Leader Bush and stop questioning the state.”) that if the CIA and NSA didn’t have to worry about warrants and Fourth Amendment and probable cause, they could just eavesdrop on everyone and that way nobody would escape their gaze? So if we sacrifice all privacy in communications, the government can keep us safe for ever and ever.

Apparently the administration still hasn’t caught on that we’re not scared enough to give up the Bill of Rights yet.

You all remember John Yoo, right? The former Justice Department attorney who argued that in the war on terror, the president, as commander-in-chief, couldn’t be bound by such restrictions as the Geneva Conventions, the Constitution, the law of the land? That torture wasn’t really torture if the torturer didn’t realize how bad the pain was, or if it wasn’t equivalent to the pain of major organ failure? Who believes there’s no legal restriction barring the president from, say, having a child’s testicles crushed in a nut-cracker to force the kid’s father to talk?

In a Wall Street Journal column, Yoo professes himself shocked, shocked and appalled at the Democrats’ “undemocratic” feuding over superdelegates rather than letting the people pick the candidate: “Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature.” Not only that, but to win support from superdelegates, a candidate might (gasp!) make political deals!

Imagine that. Making political deals. Certainly that would never, ever, ever happen in a race without superdelegates.

And in point of fact, we don’t have direct election by the people: If we did, Gore would have been elected in 2000. The Founders considered direct election as an option and decided on the electoral college instead, for better or worse.

And don’t forget, this is the nomination, not the election, and the nominating process has never been as clean and orderly as Yoo seems to think (read a few accounts of past political campaigns and you’ll see what I mean), and certainly not an exercise in pure democracy.

And frankly, if Yoo was that concerned about democracy and American freedom, he should have said something back when he was with Justice. A little late now, even if anything he said was accurate.

Westboro Baptist Church is so tasteless, even Jerry Falwell said their practice of picketing at gay funerals (to the effect the deceased was now burning in Hell and deserved it) was offensive.
Since they began picketing military funerals as well, they’ve gone even further over the cliff: Their protests now run on the theme that God sends IEDs and terrorists to kill our soldiers because America is too gay-tolerant and so we must be punished!!
Unsurprisingly, this has produced assorted state legislation and some proposed federal bills to ban protests at funerals. Happy as I’d be if Westboro and it’s leader, Fred Phelps, vanished into oblivion tomorrow, I still feel the need to support their right to (disgusting) free speech.
The argument from supporters of the bills is that this isn’t about regulating the content of Westboro’s speech, but the time, place and manner. Critics of the legislation say it is indeed about content: Would anyone really shut down a dignified, pro-military protest (”Support our troops! Our soldiers are heroes! Antiwar protestors should shut up!”) using this law, or people silently holding up positive signs rather than ones condemning the deceased?
Other critics concede the need and right of families to have space to grieve, but argue they can do that on private property, such as at the funeral home, or at their church. Silencing protesters on public streets and sidewalks or a public cemetery is too big an infringement on free speech.
And once we start, how many other First Amendment exemptions will be carved out? Westboro has announced plans to picket outside hospitals holding wounded veterans: Will that be next? How about on the street outside veterans events, or physical rehab centers where maimed veterans are restoring themselves?
There’s very little merit to anything Westboro has said, but loathsome as I find them, I still think they have the right to say it. Even at a funeral.

That’s one lesson to be learned from the news that a contractor’s employees were snopping around in Barack Obama’s passport files (and also Clinton’s and McCain’s): The more information government gathers on us, the more potential it gives nosey parkers to snoop around, not as part of some conspiracy but just because they’re curious.

Even if it turns out the passport prying were part of some big scheme, my point doesn’t change, because lots of other cases back it up: A percentage of IRS agents, cops and others with investigative powers have proven willing to use them to satisfy personal curiosity, even though their use of files is illegal.

Anyone really think the NSA, the FBI or any other federal agency is different? That people don’t yield to the urge to dig up dirt on their neighbor, their ex-wife’s boyfriend, their ex-wife? And the less supervision and oversight they have, the more it will happen.

Military contractors raise a whole lot of questions when they’re used as widely as they have been in Iraq.

•Chain of command: Contractors aren’t part of it. If you’re military and you’re told to do something hazardous, you do it or else. The worst that can happen to a contractor who refuses to go into a danger zone—and this has happened—is that they lose their job.

•Fraud: We’ve lost hundreds of millions to fraud and mismanagement (military book-keeping is notoriously bad at keeping track of money), but the administration has very little interest in investigating it. One inspector general following the money trails was fired, and Bush recently made a signing statement saying he wasn’t bound by Congress’ creation of an Executive/Congressional panel to investigate profiteering and fraud.

•Special interests: Maybe it’s no surprise that the administration wouldn’t want to have a committee investigating well-connected corporate interests. Which leads to a further question: When you have corporations playing a role in a major military operation, is there a risk of lobbyists influencing policy?

•Crime: Repeatedly I keep reading cases of contractor employees who’ve committed a crime, or allegedly committed a crime, and nothing can be done: We won’t turn them over to Iraqis, they’re outside the military court system and prosecutors back home can’t touch them.

I think whatever our views on the Iraq war, we can all agree this is a bad thing.

And it can be a lot worse, as in the case of KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones, who says she was gang-raped by coworkers two years ago in the Green Zone.

After Army doctors performed a medical exam which allegedly confirms the rape, the military turned the kit over to KBR. Parts of the kit have now disappeared. Finding Jones had reported the rape, KBR put her in a shipping container without food and water for 24 hours.

The Justice Department hasn’t charged anyone, and ABC News has said they can’t find any government agency even investigating the case.

On the other hand, Mohammad Munaf and Ahmed Omar, two US citizens in Iraq who were accused of working with kidnappers, were taken by the military and held without charge. When their lawyers filed to set them free, they were turned over to the Iraqi courts (our government is trying to convince the Supreme Court that Munaf and Omar should have no standing in US courts because the military in Iraq are part of a US force outside American authority).

So we’re back to the special-interest issue: We can handle crimes committed by US citizens iin Iraq just fine, so long as the alleged criminals aren’t tied to powerful, influential contractors with deep connections to the US government. Go figure.

Sarcasm aside, if we’re going to use contractors, particularly contractors employing military force, there has to be a much clearer law covering what they’re obligated to do and how they’ll be punished if they commit crimes. And a heck of a lot better job at keeping control of the money.

Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the co-chair of Red to Blue, a Democratic congressional group working to expand the number of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Among the targets for the initiative are South Florida Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart.

Schultz, however, says she will not do anything to oppose them because if they were re-elected afterwards, that would be very awkward (this sentiment didn’t stop her from pushing to replace another Florida Republican in the 2006 election).

Why? She’s a Democrat, they’re Republicans, they can’t be that shocked if Schultz favors electing Democrats. If they are, they’re in the wrong business … and if Schultz can’t bring herself to oppose their re-election, she should probably drop out of Red to Blue or be removed.

There’s one thing Dick Cheney said about the Iraq War that I’d agree with: The ’smoking gun’ of another nation having nuclear weapons should never be a mushroom cloud over one of our cities.

In other words, if someone is about to make an imminent attack on the US, no question a pre-emptive action is justified.

In 2002-3, however, that wasn’t the principle we were operating under: Instead, we had Cheney’s 1 percent doctrine where if there was even a 1 percent chance of an enemy attack, we were justified in striking first.

The end result? A war where the American deaths alone have now topped 4,000, against an enemy who was never a threat to us: No ties to al-Qaida, no WMDs to give them if there’d been ties.

And we went in despite warnings that the Iraqi exiles were using us to advance their own agenda, despite more than one defector telling us there were no weapons, despite all the countless demurrals. At best, the Bush administration wilfully and foolishly believed all the facts that supported its case and nothing else; at worst, they lied through their teeth to justify sending in the troops (lied about the case for war, that is; accounts of one of Bush’s pre-war meetings with Blair show Bush had settled on regime change, then spent months assuring the American people he was trying to avoid war).

My point is, Cheney got it backwards: If we’re going to invade a country that hasn’t attacked us, we should be at least 99 percent sure we’re in imminent danger. That’s a 1 percent doctrine I can live with.

To paraphrase the blogger hilzoy, sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes it’s necessary to amputate all four limbs. Neither one should be done casually (would anyone accept “There’s a 3 percent chance you’ll die if we don’t turn you into a quadriplegic” as a rationale for an operation?).

But as we’ve seen, the past few years, it’s easy to come up with “conclusive” proof that there’s deadly danger; even before Bush, there were people in the intelligence community who knew they were better off finding the facts they’re told to find, not what was there.

Can we trust our intelligence services to evaluate the information honestly and accurately next time? Can we trust our elected officials to interpret it without imposing their own wishes on the facts? And when there are doubts and maybes and ambiguities, can we trust our government not to airbrush those out and announce the case for war is a “slam dunk?”

Unfortunately, the answer to all three is no—and that applies to any administration, not just this one. The Gulf of Tonkin incident happened under Johnson; Iraqis supposedly throwing Kuwaiti babies under incubators was the myth for Bush I; and (switching nations for a second), England went into World War One partly because of widly exaggerated stories about German brutality in Belgium.

So is there any way to reliably justify a pre-emptive strike? Or not?

A Washington Post story recounts the plight of Saman Kareem Ahmad, a Kurd who worked as a medal-winning US translator in Iraq for four years, relocated to America and now teaches Arabic to Marines heading to the battle front.

Ahmad applied for his green card, backed up by a sheaf of recommendations from the military, but was turned down as a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party — which Customs and Immigration Services decided qualifies as a terrorist group for trying to overthrow Saddam for years (it’s not officially classed as terrorists, but Immigration has the power to identify “undesignated terrorist groups.”), including anti-Saddam activity during the first and second Gulf War.

Yep, you heard me. Fighting in the same war against the same adversary as the USA has been classified as terrorism.

To add insult to injury, Ahmad’s entire family were wiped out by Saddam’s poison-gas attacks on the Kurds—you know, the ones that have been cited repeatedly over the past eight years as showing why we had to have regime change in Iraq?

At least one other Kurdish translater has been refused a green card on the same grounds.