SharedThought

Here are excerpts from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s interview in Vanity Fair:

Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.

Wolfowitz, while part of the administration’s duplicitous spin machine during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, seems to have slipped up and spoken a rare truth about the use of WMD as a basis for the invasion.

In another article about WMD, the New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof reported yesterday about how the US intelligence community was used to provide the needed cover for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“The American people were manipulated,” bluntly declares one person from the Defense Intelligence Agency who says he was privy to all the intelligence there on Iraq. These people are coming forward because they are fiercely proud of the deepest ethic in the intelligence world — that such work should be nonpolitical — and are disgusted at efforts to turn them into propagandists.

“The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.,” notes Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things.”

Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, deserves credit for his apparent turn-around on the international treaty to restrict tobacco marketing. Just last month the administration was working to torpedo the treaty by insisting on language that would have rendered it unenforceable. The Washington Post has an article here about the administration’s latest position. Although it isn’t clear from this Post account, it appears that there is still an opportunity for the United States to wriggle out of ratifying the treaty.

You can check out the latest draft of the treaty here.

I recently had a chance to visit the High Museum in Atlanta and visit their exhibit of French masterpieces from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

The exhibition surveys three centuries of French art, beginning with masterpieces by seventeenth-century artists Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, progressing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and concluding with early modern works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Of the 76 masterworks on view, 52 are being shown in the United States for the first time. This was a nice show. The High Museum has a pretty plain permanent collection and relies on traveling exhibits, such as this one, to bring in visitors.
I saw the exhibit on Mother’s Day, so it was pretty crowded. As usual, the exhibit’s first rooms were bunched up. By the last room however, there was almost nobody around. The show covered a pretty wide range of time so there wasn’t much depth in any particular period. The fact that the exhibit was arranged chronologically worked out well for me. The earlier rooms devoted to French classicist works were crowded while the later rooms devoted to Impressionists and Modernists (my favorites) were not.

I came across an artist that I had not seen before. His name was Eugene Carriere. His painting called “Mother’s Kiss” was especially moving. Unfortunately, I can’t find any images of it to share.

Update! Here’s the painting:

I got it from the website of another Pushkin exhibit viewer who liked Carriere’s painting.

See the Atlanta Journal Constitution review of the show here. For a discussion of art check out this page before taking in your next exhibit.

It’s getting close to the time that the next Harry Potter book is due to be released (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). The links in this post will take to Amazon UK where you can preorder the next book in advance of its June 21, 2003 release.

If you’re interested in checking out the other books in the series to see how the UK books are different from their American counterparts you can buy a boxed set of the novels here.

If you’re feeling silly about reading these books because you’re not in junior high anymore, read this dialog from Slate. You might feel better afterwards.

President Bush has spent the week campaining for the 2004 election. Oops, I meant to say that he has spent the week stumping for a government give away to the rich. Or, as he put it “an economic stimulus plan big enough to help people who are looking for work, a plan big enough to encourage economic growth.” I’m not sure how a dividend tax cut will put people back to work, but hey, he was on a role. Check out the full speech here. Organized labor has not been impressed. Here is what the United Steel Workers of America say about the president’s tax cuts:

“Since President Bush signed his so-called ‘job creating’ tax cut in June 2001, the economy has lost 1.8 million jobs. Yet the debate in Washington today is not about freezing the tax cuts that are adding to the damage, it’s about how much more to cut them. The precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs is undermining public revenues at precisely the same time that they’re being undermined by the Administration’s tax-cutting obsession. At this rate, we’ll have the first president since Herbert Hoover to rack up a net loss of jobs over the course of his entire term.”

As the Washington Post notes, the beneficiaries of the tax-cut are the wealthiest Americans:

“[T]he president’s original $726 billion tax cut plan — and the smaller versions that passed the House and are under consideration in the Senate — clearly do favor the affluent.

Under Bush’s original proposal, households with $40,000 to $50,000 in taxable income would receive an average tax cut of $482 and a boost of 1.2 percent to their total after-tax income. For households earning more than $1 million, the average tax cut would be more than $89,500, with an increase in their after-tax income of 4.2 percent, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The $550 billion version that passed the House last week is even more skewed. Those same middle-income households would receive a tax cut of $452 and an income boost of 1.1 percent, while millionaires would receive a cut of $93,537, enough to increase their after-tax income by 4.4 percent. The more modest $350 billion tax cut that passed the Senate Finance Committee last week would trim the average millionaire’s tax cut a bit, to $64,431. But it would also trim the middle class cut to $415.”

Any criticism of this give-away to the rich has been labeled “class warfare” by the administration. Good politics for now. Bad politics when people realize that while the wealthy are getting tax cuts, unemployment is at 6 percent and Bush will be the first president since Hoover to preside over a job-losing economy.

The Da Vinci Code is the latest from Dan Brown. A real-time thriller that takes place over the course of about 12 hours (Brown’s specialty. Check out Angels & Demons and Deception Point for others by Brown). This book is moving up the bestseller lists, but I think the earlier Angels & Demons is a better read.

Forever: A Novel by Pete Hamill is the opposite of Dan Brown’s real-time thrillers. This novel takes place mostly in New York City, but over the span of several centuries. The book follows the life of a man granted eternal life — as long as he stays on the island of Manhattan. This is a great idea for a story, but I mainly felt unsatisfied when I finished. It’s hard to fault Hamill, however. How can anyone pull this off in a single volume novel. There’s too much history to cover without leaving important events out.

John Irving is my favorite writer, and with this book I’ve finished reading everything (in book form) that he’s written. The Imaginary Girlfriend covers similar autobiographical ground to the recently published Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The first amendment in the Bill of Rights states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This statement expressing a separation of church and state is a fundamental precept of our government. Or should I say was. That is until President Bush decided that our federal government had gone too far in “discriminating” against religion, and should — as part of his Faith Based Initiative — embrace it instead. As the President has said “For too long, for too long, some in government believed there was no room for faith in the public square.” In light of the President’s own statements and actions respecting religion, I found it hard to believe that I saw this item in the Washington Times. “As the president talked about “a strong nationalism” in Iraq that led him to believe that there would be “a separation of church and state” in the new government. What? Since when did President Bush start channeling Thomas Jefferson?

A little bit of background on where Bush’s quote came from. On Air Force One, press secretary Ari Fleischer briefed the press about the upcoming roundtable in Dearborn Michigan. You can read the whitehouse version here or the more interesting snippet from Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post here. Basically, Ari Fleischer had decided that only Arab or Middle-Eastern reporters were going to be allowed to cover the roundtable in Dearborn. After a couple of reporters protested, Fleischer relented and allowed one pool reporter to cover the roundtable. Richard Stevenson of the New York Times was tabbed as the pool guy and filed this dispatch.