Horses, fiddles, and historical truths: From Cronaca comes word that, contrary to modern supposition, Caligula did indeed usurp the place of Castor and Pollux (the mythical founders of Rome) by overmastering their temple with his palace, thereby destroying "any distinction between the house of god and the house of the emperor."

 
Fragwatch: Signs of military disenchantment with the Administration.

Harsh words from a lately-retired Army officer (from the office of the USDP/NESA and SP) who calls the current Administration's military policy "aberrant ... and contrary to good order and discipline:"

I suggested to my boss that if [DoD planning for the reconstruction of Iraq] was as good as it got, some folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes tribunals.

Via left-leaning Altercation, this submission from a New Mexican entertainment reporter who stumbled into a much larger story:

Last fall, [while writing] a series of stories in the [Albuquerque] Journal North ... I met many veterans who kept telling me there were way better stories about incompetence and corruption at the NM Veterans Service Commission.

Although I was leery of getting involved with “hard news,” I wrote three articles about the VSC last December in the Journal North, two of which made the front page. ...

In January, I began work on a story about a vet who’d been declared incompetent, thus having his finances taken away from him. He showed up at the VSC complaining of abuse by his caregiver (a cousin of the Fiduciary Division’s head). He was given money for a hotel, and sent away. Two days later, he was found dead in a state park with the caregiver present. No police investigation, no autopsy by the medical examiner, case closed.

I worked on this story for five weeks ... [after which, the editor] pushed me for an initial draft of the story, which I gave him. At that point, he told me that the Journal would not publish the story, and that he had received complaints about me from the Veterans Administration, the Veterans Service Commission, and the Attorney General’s Office. I should just go back to doing my “nice” little stories.

I spoke about this to a local meeting of the AmVets, who promptly took out an ad in the rival Santa Fe New Mexican, denouncing the Journal. I was fired the same day.

 
Stop me if you've heard this one, too: Newsday has a story on secret meetings between civilian Pentagon officials and Manucher Ghorbanifar in Paris.

According to the story, the unofficial channel was apparently (re)opened by the fellow who got the last round of secret Parisian meetings with the notorious arms dealer going, Iran-Contra figure Michael Ledeen. (Those first meetings, for those who don't recall, were key in the arms-for-hostages swap which gave Iran both hundreds of TOW missiles and spare parts for the Hawk anti-air missile systems.)

 
Preferred perusals pending parlous periods for pontifical parliments: Just in time for the ECUSA chaos we are blessed with a new Religion in the News, a new First Things (don't miss Neuhaus' assault on "sexual libertine" Andrew Sullivan, who recently appeared on NPR's "Diane Rehm" (audio link) on the issue of the day), and just to complete the hat trick, you might wish to visit the Religion News, impartial with the ecumenicism of disinterested disbelief.

 
It couldn't have been that slow a news day: From a month-old "Open Secrets" column I somehow skipped over:

The 2003 hurricane season is here, and that means a whole new list of names such as Larry, Sam and Wanda ready to make tropical-storm history.

Although Spanish and French names are included in this year’s lineup, among them Juan and Claudette, which struck Texas last week, popular African American names, like Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn, are nowhere to be found.

Some black lawmakers don’t seem to mind, but Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) does. “All racial groups should be represented,” said Lee. ...

Lee said she hoped in the future the weather establishment “would try to be inclusive of African American names.”

One can only hope that the Congresswoman was making an idle joke, since the Congressional Black Caucus had actual work to do involving American peacekeeping support to Liberia, but you quite literally never know with the almost preternaturally leftist Jackson Lee.

(Originally posted at Bill Maher, link to Maher provided by Stephen Karlson, who got it from something called Balloon Juice, and so the wheels of the blogonomy continue to smoothly turn in an eternal and perfect clearing of intellectual markets.)

 
Ch-ch-ch-changes: To improve readability, I've added a background with 50% transparency to the posts. Unfortunately, this doesn't work properly in Internet Explorer, which seems to have serious trouble with PNG image files. You'll either see posts at 50% alpha (including text), or giant white boxes obscuring the background. Not great, but I'm working on a better cross-platform appearance. For now, I'll take readable over attractive.

 
The land of cotton: For a state that only a year or two went through a bruising referendum on the Confederate flag and even more recently had to deal with a racist encomium by one of its Senators, the Mississippi governor's race is shaping up to be an interesting view into how the major parties will deal with race. The Republican candidate, former GOP chair Haley Barbour, has made one goal clear: he wants to get the largest percentage of the black vote any Republican candidate has gotten in a contested Mississippi election. (Actually, I don't think he can make that goal any clearer.)

Of course, Barbour has already had to deal with a serious slip of the tongue in his praise of Head Start, but that's also managed to inoculate himself somewhat against some future charges of racism or lack of support for that educational program.

Keep an eye on this one, folks -- it's a telescopic view of how GOP elections will be conducted five or ten years down the road. More detail available at the excellent Magnolia Report.

 
A rocky road to Lambeth: Tumult in the Episcopal Church continued as the House of Bishops decided to go ahead with a vote on confirming Rev. V. Gene Robinson as the first openly gay Bishop in the Church's history. The vote will occur after the results of a preliminary investigation into recent charges against Robinson are presented.

The latter of the two charges have been largely dismissed by the Church hierarchy; the rather well-named David Virtue, a conservative Anglican activist, brought to the hierarchy's attention a website for an organization, Outright, that had links to a site that has links to a site that contains pornographic images. Since Robinson hasn't been affiliated with Outright for some years now, the charges seem spurious, not to say politically-motivated.

The other set of charges are more important and yet more nebulous. Made by David Lewis, a lay minister from Manchester, Vt., they accuse Robinson of putting "his hands on me inappropriately every time I engaged him in conversation" at a church conference two years ago, although Lewis gave no specific details in the e-mail to his bishop, leaving the definition of "inappropriate" to the discretion of the reader. (The text of the e-mail is here.)

Lewis does not seem to be a politically-motivated accuser; an arts reviewer for his local newspaper and an Actors Equity member active in his local theatre community, Lewis appears to be politically left-of-center (in one letter reviewing Agatha Christie's "Appointment with Death," he mentions "the festering resentment felt by the native people of the Middle East for patronization by Westerners who cling to belief in imperialist entitlement") as well as deeply engaged with the evangelical Zion Episcopal Church, also home to famed author Frederick Buechner. No matter how fuzzy his charges, they must be treated with the utmost care and seriousness, coming as they do in an already superheated atmosphere, and on the edge of schism.

In a time when churches -- Catholic and Protestant alike -- are coming under scrutiny for sexual abuses by clergy and laity, it is critical that the Episcopal hierarchy make clear and public the modes and results of their investigations. To do otherwise is to irrevocably taint the bishopry with scandal and the hint of political machinations.

 
"Slam, Bam, Goodbye Saddam:" Left-leaning Salon has an interesting interview with Col. David Hackworth (U.S. Army, Ret.), longtime defense critic whose sites hackworth.com and Soldiers for the Truth criticize the failings of a military he says was crippled under Clinton and sent forward to fail under Bush.

I recently spoke with an Army lieutenant colonel who had done combat turns in Panama and the first Gulf War, later returning to the area as a senior planner on Kuwaiti defense. When I asked him about Army feelings on the nomination of Navy officer and Air Force Secretary James Roche to the position of Secretary of the Army, he simply shook his head. The tension on the base he was stationed at, he said, could be "cut with a knife." The Army was being defunded for ideological reasons by civilian leaders "who want to occupy a country with helicopters and airstrikes," even as the soldiers in the field were caught in a logistical system still in shambles. If you wanted to know the state of Army morale, "look at re-enlistments," he said with a tight smile. "There aren't any."

 
These boots weren't made for walking -- yet: Labor negotiations continued at Verizon New York, past the deadline previously set for a walkout. Meanwhile, Verizon continues to implement its contingency plan, as company employees from "right-to-work" states have confirmed to us that they are being sent to New York to act as strikebreakers in the call centers and in various technical capacities.

 
More news of the world: Liberian strongman Charles Taylor says he will step down August 11 ...

Hizballah member Ali Hussein Saleh was killed by a car bomb in Beirut on the heels of renewed shelling of Israel by Hizballah terrorists. Hizballah has charged Israel with the attack; Israel has refused to comment ...

In Venezuela, opposition forces took to the street in Caracas to denounce leftist President Hugo Chavez. Opposition leader Sergio Omar Calderon, former governor of Tachira, was kidnapped on July 25 by Bolivarian revolutionary forces ("Bolivarian" as a political philosophy, not as in Bolivia the state) believed to be linked with Chavez, touching off sustained protests ...

The Political State Report says that California recall leader Darrell Issa's claim that he earned Inc. Magazine's "Entrepreneur of the Year" award in 1994 is a lie ...

Reports say that the Iraqi WMD hunt led by former U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay, tapped in June to lead the post-war investigation, is beginning to bear fruit, not in the form of weapons, but in detailed reports and timetables on WMD development and counter-inspection deceptions ...

Vietnam is increasing incentives to Japanese businesses in hopes of luring them ashore ...

In Slovakia, revelations that police and intelligence agencies have been tapping reporters' phones has sparked outrage, while environmental NGOs have charged that French company Peugeot may have conspired with the Slovak government to gain special environmental and labor provisions.