Some Political Leaders Are Taking The Pandemic Seriously And Some Are Definitely NOT

Albania was one of the most overtly corrupt cesspools of a country I have ever visited. And I've been to every corrupt cesspool on earth. There is no reason, or almost no reason, to believe their pandemic numbers. They report 868 confirmed cases and 31 COVID-19 deaths. They report that there are just 302 cases per million people. That's one of the mildest pandemics in Europe. Albania has about 2.9 million people, similar to Lithuania and Armenia. Lithuania is reporting 1,479 confirmed cases and 50 deaths (543 cases per million) and Armenia is reporting 3,313 confirmed cases, 45 deaths (1,118 cases per million).

Albanians seemed to me like unruly people with minimal respect for social mores and laws. So maybe the numbers are bullshit. Or... maybe the strong punishment for violating social distancing is working. Reuters reported that Albania amended its penal code... to punish anyone breaking coronavirus quarantine and self-isolation rules and infecting others with up to eight years in jail as it slowly prepares to restart sections of its economy. Critics of the tougher measure said fines were proving effective but Prime Minister Edi Rama defended the new penalty as necessary for successfully relaxing the lockdown. Rama said the government believed about 2,800 people would have died if lockdown rules had not been imposed... Police have fined more than 7,000 people and suspended 1,800 driving licenses. According to the new law, anyone infected with the coronavirus who broke self-isolation or quarantine rules and infected others, wilfully or not, would face from two to eight years in jail if his or her action caused grave harm, including death.

“These measures are being taken because we are going to relax (lockdown rules). We are winning the battle on the health front. And we shall win it on the economy front,” Rama said.

In asking parliamentarians to vote for the tougher law, Rama described quarantine rule-breakers as similar to carrying a bomb, in this case the new coronavirus.

“A bomb does nothing else but kill people,” Rama said.

Poorer than most in Europe, Albania enforced a tough isolation soon after its first case was detected on March 9 in a man coming from Italy, one of the worst-hit countries, because it feared its spread might overwhelm its weak health system.

Since Monday, Albania has enforced a weekday lockdown from 5:30 p.m. until 5 a.m. the next day and allows one person per family to shop for 90 minutes. Some industries keep working.

Until recently, Singapore had kept its rates of infection very low and looked like it had vanquished the pandemic. People in Singapore who do not observe physical distancing rules can be fined up to $6,985 or jailed up to six months, or face both penalties.

For the most part, California had also been having a relatively easy pandemic-- 67,986 confirmed cases, 2,719 deaths and 1,721 cases per million, number that have been steadily creeping up as more and more people have started ignoring the social distancing rules. Yolo County in northern California has only 173 confirmed cases and 20 deaths. Although endorsement has been very lax, on paper "egregious violators face arrest or citation, which carries a punishment of up to 90 days in jail and/or a fine between $50 and $1,000. No one has gone to jail and how many people care about a $50 fine?

“We’re receiving more complaints about people using playground equipment, tennis courts, basketball courts, and not adequately spacing when riding or walking on greenbelts,” creating potential coronavirus breeding grounds, Police Chief Darren Pytel said.

In some cases, people have ripped down yellow caution tape in order to use the blocked-off facilities, while more middle- and high-school aged kids are grouping up in parks.

Between emails and calls to dispatchers, the complaints have numbered a dozen or more per day, with some demanding stronger enforcement action for the rule breakers, Pytel said.

This week’s springlike weather was the likely culprit, and “we know that it will be much more difficult to stay inside,” Pytel said. But with COVID-19 still causing deaths in Yolo County and beyond, “we are asking people to dig deep now, and hopefully we can turn this around much sooner.”

...“Although we have seen substantial compliance with the orders, law enforcement has seen an increase in the number of complaints regarding large gatherings and businesses failing to follow the rules established by the Public Health Officer,” said the Davis police message, blasted out on social media late Friday afternoon.

Complaints also have come in regarding nonessential businesses still trying to operate, with a local massage parlor and a private school that attempted to work with students on campus among the most recent examples, Pytel said.

Pytel said his agency also is seeing an increase in house-party reports, some gatherings having as many as 40 people in relatively close quarters. Even if the festivities are outside, “people are too close, and that’s how this spreads.”

So far, Davis police haven’t had to arrest or cite anyone for flouting the county order, though “we’ve come close a couple of times” at party scenes, Pytel said. Instead, officers issued noise-violation tickets, which carry a $280 fine.

A local paper in Upstate New York reported that Steuben County officials announced enhanced enforcement of social distancing practices prescribed by New York State on PAUSE, under the authority of Public Health Law Section 12-B. First violations will receive a warning, but any further willful violations are an unclassified misdemeanor. Penalties include up to 1 year in jail, a $2,000 fine, or both. There is no exemption in the law for religious gatherings. Most people obey the rules and some flout them. District Attorney Baker: "Our goals here are simple-- to enforce the law and most importantly to keep people safe. My hope is that through written warnings we can educate, eliminate ignorance, and help people keep themselves safe-- and should they refuse, with this law, we have the tools to deal with those who have the arrogance to willfully put others at risk."

Last month Business Insider reported that "Canada has so far avoided the United States' coronavirus fate, and is taking drastic measures to ensure it stays that way. The country... announced that all travelers entering the country would be required to quarantine themselves for 14 days, even if they aren't showing symptoms of COVID-19... The rules are punishable by a fine of up to $750,000 or a month in jail, and the government will be conducting spot checks to ensure compliance."

Yesterday Boris Johnson announced an increase in fines to £3,200 (almost $4,000) for "lockdown flouters. Fines would gradually increase each time someone was caught. Police would issue penalties of £100, £200, £400, £800, £1600 and then finally £3,200 for the sixth offence... People could also be sent to jail if they did not pay."

This isn't the direction much of the U.S. is taking. Osceola County in central Florida has ended the whole idea of serious enforcement. No more fines for people refusing to wear masks, even though masks are still mandatory. Texas politicians, of course, persist in making everything worse-- which helps explain why the caseload has been rising.

Several prominent Texas conservatives on Wednesday rallied to the defense of Shelley Luther, the Dallas salon owner who was fined and sentenced to seven days in jail for intentionally violating an order to shutter her business during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s reopening hair salons on Friday after deeming them nonessential for weeks, said Shelley’s sentence was “excessive,” adding that “jailing Texans for non-compliance with executive orders should always be the last available option.”

“Compliance with executive orders during this pandemic is important to ensure public safety,” said Abbott, a Republican who issued one of the orders defied by Luther. "However, surely there are less restrictive means to achieving that goal than jailing a Texas mother.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, also a Republican, called Luther’s sentence “outrageous” and demanded that she be released from jail, while Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, another Republican, offered to pay Luther’s $7,000 fine or even serve out Luther’s sentence under house arrest.

Those views were echoed by the likes of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, and U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, along with a group of conservative activists who on Wednesday gathered in Dallas to protest Luther’s punishment.

That feedback appeared to do little to deter state District Judge Eric Moyé, the Democrat who sentenced Luther.

He released a letter late Wednesday to Paxton from him and 11 other state district judges serving in Dallas County, accusing the attorney general of “most inappropriate and equally unwelcome” conduct for urging Luther’s release.

“It is contrary to the concept of an independent Judiciary and offends the tradition of separation of powers for any member of the Executive Branch of Texas government to interject itself into the proceedings of the judicial branch,” the judges wrote.

They continued: “For the sake of ALL of the citizens of Texas, please let the Judicial process play out without any further interference."

...Moyé said he would consider levying only a fine if Luther apologized and promised to not reopen her salon until she was permitted to do so. But she declined that offer, explaining that it was a matter of survival to keep open the business.

“Feeding my kids is not selfish,” she said at her hearing, which was broadcast on YouTube. “If you think the law is more important than kids getting fed, then please go ahead with your decision, but I am not going to shut the salon.”

Moyé told Luther he didn’t doubt her sincerity but said the “rule of law cannot and does not operate when individuals take it upon themselves to decide” what they can and cannot do.

Her case had already prompted outrage in some conservative quarters, particularly those pushing for Texas to reopen more quickly. That criticism intensified after she was taken into custody.

“We shouldn’t be coming down with a seven-day jail, no bail sentence for her wanting to keep her hair salon open because she’s wanting to take care of her family,” Roy said Wednesday in a live-streamed interview with the Texas Tribune.

He has been among the most vocal critics, calling Luther’s punishment “terrible” and “straight up wrong."

“This is so insane," Roy wrote on Twitter, encouraging Luther to tell Moyé to “pound sand” and sharing a link to a GoFundMe account that has already raised more than $325,000 by Wednesday afternoon for the salon owner. “I have no words for what is happening to my state and nation.”

Roy, a former federal prosecutor, acknowledged in his interview with The Tribune that Luther has been violating orders issued by Abbott and Jenkins. He added that he has a “strong concern about the rule of law.”

But the first-term congressman defended the owner of Salon à la Mode by saying “she is acting civilly disobedient in the face of the something she thinks is wrong.”

Asked later on Wednesday by the Dallas Morning News what kind of punishment should be issued to those who violate such an edict in order to deter others from also ignoring them, Roy asked, “What’s the appropriate punishment for speeding 68 in a 65 in the middle of nowhere?”

“Good judges and local leaders find ways to not escalate situations when common sense should prevail,” he said in an emailed statement. “7 days in jail with no bail is clearly out of line. She should be allowed to work.”

Cruz offered a similar sentiment.

“7 days in jail for cutting hair??” he wrote on Twitter. “This is NUTS. And government officials don’t get to order citizens to apologize to them for daring to earn a living.”

So did Crenshaw, a freshman Republican in Congress.

“These punishments are NOT just,” he wrote on Twitter. “They are not reasonable. Small-minded “leaders” across the country have become drunk with power. This must end.”

Paxton on Wednesday wrote to Moyé to urge him to reconsider the sentence and to release Luther. He called the decision " outrageous," “out of touch,” a “shameful abuse of judicial discretion” and a “political stunt.”

Patrick, meanwhile, said Moyé “overreached."

“We want people to follow executive orders, but she said, ‘hey, I am going to feed my kids’ and we understand that,” he said, adding that if Moyé “wants to substitute me for her, and sentence me to 7 days of house arrest, so she can go back to work, that’s fine.”

Conservative activists rallied on Wednesday in downtown Dallas in Luther’s defense. Among them was Michael Quinn Sullivan, the CEO of Empower Texans, a group that’s criticized Abbott and others for restrictions they’ve put into place.

Even Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, on Wednesday visited Salon à la Mode to offer support for Luther.

Even! 

Mike Siegel, the progressive taking on Trump ass-kisser Michael McCaul in the gerrymandered congressional district that snakes from north Austin into the suburbs west of Houston, told me this morning that "This is how Jim Crow works in modern-day Texas. These folks can’t be bothered to get an innocent Black man like Rodney Reed off Death Row, but they will make a big show about how their people can operate with impunity." Julie Oliver, like Mike, is a progressive Democrat running in a gerrymandered district that starts in Austin and wiggles through red counties, but up towards Ft. Worth. This morning she noted that "Texas put a Black woman in prison for 5 years when she accidentally voted while on parole, so I don't think these guys are upset about 'prosecutorial discretion.' We should recognize this for what it is-- a political opportunity for career politicians to distract from their failure to adequately prepare for and respond to a pandemic that has killed 80,000 of our fellow Americans and that has crippled our economy." Time to get serious about driving these Republican crackpots out of office? That's what the thermometer on the right is all about. Please click on it and contribute to Mike and Julie what you can.

Cases in Texas are steadily climbing-- 1,248 more conformed cases on Sunday and 1,376 cases per million. My guess is that that will double before the election.

From our You Can't Make This Stuff Up Dept.: If Tom Ridge becomes the next senator from Delmarpenn, who's gonna lobby for Albania?

Click on it to enlarge, and then scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, almost all the way, and . . . there, stop! This is former Pennsylvania governor and "founding" Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's "registration statement" under the "Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended." And who is he representing? Albania, fercripessakes? (I swear I'm not making this up. Heck, you're looking right at it!)

by Ken

So I was reading this DailyKos diary by Jed Lewison about how Tom Ridge "will announce whether or not he's running for Senate within the next two weeks." Now I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Tom Ridge. In fact, the one question about him that interests me is that of his actual existence, as opposed to being, say, some sort of mass hallucination escaped from a particularly wicked Tom Tomorrow cartoon. Doesn't most everyone in a Tom Tomorrow cartoon look (and for that matter talk) like Tom Ridge?

[As always, click to enlarge.]

TWO POSSIBLE PROOFS FOR THE ACTUAL
EXISTENCE OF THE ALLEGED TOM RIDGE

1. The Empirical Proof

Get together a pile of stuff, like gumdrops and twigs and pennies and rotten eggs and tomatoes, and systematically hurl the stuff at the alleged Tom Ridge (note the creepy, dead-on resemblance between the "real" Tom and every character in the Tom Tomorrow cartoon strip above). If the stuff goes right on through, we've proved once and for all that there really is no such thing. However, if the stuff is interrupted in its trajectory by the alleged Tom Ridge, that just proves that there's something there, not that the something is an actual living, breathing person.

2. The Scientific Proof

With a chisel or a hacksaw or something, chop off a chunk of the alleged Tom Ridge and shoot it over to the lab for scientific analysis. (Just to be safe, you might want to break off a chunklet and send it to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. I don't mean to cast aspersions. I'm just saying, better safe than sorry. Am I right?) In theory, the lab should be able to tell us not just whether there is such a thing as Tom Ridge, but what sort of thing it might be. Would plastic sheeting and duct tape be sufficient to protect us against it?

Now, since our Tom has been dragged into the Arlen Specter story, I'll play along -- up to a point, anyways. Here's Jed Lewison's take:

[I]f Ridge does decide to run, he's going to need to figure out in which state, because it turns out he has a claim on running in at least three of them.

In a June, 2008 foreign agent registration filing, Ridge listed Maryland as his residence and said that his firm, Ridge Global LLC, was a Delaware corporation. Ridge was also governor of Pennsylvania, leaving him with at least three 2010 races he could consider:

1. Maryland, where he would challenge Barbara Mikulski

2. Delaware, where he would try to fill Joe Biden's old seat

3. Pennsylvania, where he would challenge Pat Toomey for the GOP nomination, and if he won, whoever wins the Democratic primary

In addition to showing that Ridge lives in Pennsylvania Maryland and incorporated his firm in Delaware, the document also shows that in 2007 Ridge earned nearly a half-million dollars representing the foreign government of Albania.

Perhaps more notably, even though Ridge was paid that money in January and November of 2007, he didn't report it until June 2008.

All the polls say that Ridge could mount a viable campaign in Pennsylvania. But as this document shows, if Ridge does run, his opponents will start out with serious questions to raise with him.

Now the question of which state our Tom is fit to represent doesn't much engage me. Is there any state, short of "torpor" or perhaps "disengagement," he could be imagined to be "fit to represent"? Have we really forgotten the frightening lesson of watching the man take his place as his pal George W. Bush's homeland security czar, coming to Washington with the reputation of being "really smart" and performing as a total buffoon? (Can someone who was set to be replaced by Bernie Kerik be said to have ever really existed?)

Nevertheless, we'll kick our Tom's Senate prospects around a bit, right after this dramatic pause to register astonishment . . .

Hey, what the fuck was that? Ridge earned nearly half a million smackeroos representing the government of Albania?

Albania??? Holy Enver Hoxha, Batman!

No, we have not slipped into some cheesy Mad Magazine parody. As a matter of fact, though, if we were attempting some such cheesy parody, and were trying to make up the most preposterous and most pathetic imaginable foreign "entanglement" for our Tom, I have no doubt that Albania would be near or at the very top of our list of possibilities.

So now we know that for 11 months in 2006-07 our Tom was, um, Tirana's man in D.C. For the benefit of anyone who isn't already convulsed with laughter, here is Besar Likmeta's account (on World Politics Review, Sept. 11, 2006) of what our Tom was hired to do:

The primary function of the former secretary's new job is to make the case for the accession of Albania into NATO in Washington. A government spokesman clarified that Ridge will engage a team of consultants and offer his connections to make known Albania's reforms in the United States, while forging homeland security and good governance strategies. In addition to his security expertise and Washington connections, [Albanian Prime Minister Sali] Berisha is hoping to exploit Ridge's experience as Governor of Pennsylvania. In a country in profound need of structural reforms, Ridge is expected to consult with the government on strategies to reform education, the judiciary, agriculture and information technology.

Let me stress: I am still not making any of this stuff up.

So somebody persuaded Prime Minister Berisha that the man he needed to grease his country's way into NATO was . . . Tom Ridge??? (Do I really need to point out how well that worked out?) And for the asking price of $40K a month, our miracle man was, in addition, going to strategize the reform of Albania's educational system, judiciary, agriculture, and information technology?

Oh, good grief, is there anyone who thinks our Tom even knows how to spell all these words?

I can't help wondering how this contact was made. Are we really supposed to imagine that the prime minister's brain trust, while picking its collective brain, scoured the ranks of "the connected" in D.C. looking for just the right "enabler" -- and came up with Tom Ridge??? Did some genius dash off a fax to Jack Abramoff's talent shop asking for a recommendation?

Or, heaven help us, did our Tom perhaps solicit the gig?

Hello, my name is Thomas ("Tom") Ridge, and I am a 60-year-old boy who by way of "experience" served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania and two years as the very first U.S. secretary of Homeland Security. I would like to offer my services -- at any job you can think of, like mowing your lawn in summer, and maybe running a lemonade stand, and shoveling your driveway in winter. I am a hard worker, a "self-starter," and I am determined someday to make something of myself.

So if that's the pitch, and we're Young Tom, where do we send it? Here's a thought: If we look at the alphabetical list of United Nations members, we find under "A":

Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Andorra
Angola
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan

Given the, er, situation in Afghanistan in the earlier years of this century, wouldn't it be understandable -- as we imagine our enterprising Tom planning to send out his first cold mailing -- if he gave that country a discreet pass? (Perhaps we can find out whether he made contact with folks in Algeria and Andorra?)

Now, however the contact was made, it appears that our Tom and his new Albanian clients reached a meeting of the minds in early September of 2006. And in case you were wondering, it appears that you can sign a contract to represent a foreign government without asking anybody's permission, as our Tom did. However, the rules -- okay, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938, as amended, if you want to be technical -- say that you've got to file the appropriate registration form with the Dept. of Justice "within 10 days of signing the contract and before performing any duties for the client" (as reported by Roll Call).

This is problematic, as Jed Lewison suggests. It appears that Tom of Albania was on Tirana's payroll, at that $40K a month, from Oct. 2006 through Aug. 2007, and duly filed his registration form with the DoJ on, um, let's see, well, again according to Roll Call: "The time stamp on Ridge's registration stamp with the Justice Department is dated June 12, 2008."

Let's take a second to do the math. I don't have the exact date of the contract-signing, but Besar Likmeta wrote in his above-cited Sept. 11, 2006, World Politics Review report:

In a statement made during a joint press conference at the prime minister's office Sept. 4, Berisha announced that Ridge had agreed to join his government's efforts to become part of [NATO], while providing much needed advice in the fight against organized crime and corruption.

So if we figure the contract was signed by Sept. 4, ten days takes us to Sept. 14, 2006. Sure enough the DoJ received our Tom's FARA form right on time on . . . um, June 12, 2008. Okay, that's stretching the 10-day reporting deadline just a tad. By roughly 637 days according to my quick count. (Remember, 2008 was a leap year.)

What's more, the eventual FARA registration form did not appear spontaneously. It seems that to get it, the DoJ -- "after press accounts surfaced noting Ridge's connection to the country," according to Roll Call -- had to rattle our Tom's cage to get the, er, slightly late paperwork produced. (By the way, those "foreign agents" are also subject to periodic subsequent reporting requirements. Of course in this case the association had already been terminated by the time it was reported.)

That's right, the Bush DoJ! Long since converted, under the watchful eye of VP "Big Dick" Cheney, into Your One-Stop Shop for Legalized Republicrookery. How dumb or crooked would a Republican have to have been to fall afoul of the Bush DoJ's enforcers?

Fortunately, our Tom had a simple, logical, understandable explanation when the feds put the screws to him about his Albanian lobbying activities. He didn't know he was supposed to register. Why, that could happen to anybody! Never mind that this is the man who had been, in those angst-ridden years of the first term of the Bush regime, first as President Bush's homeland security adviser and then as our very first secretary of Homeland Security, the point man in the protection of, you know, the security of the homeland.

Okay, so the need for paid agents of foreign governments to register somehow escaped our Tom's notice. At least he understood the color codes for those national-security alerts we got every time the Bush regimistas felt the need to promote panic in the American body politic. Or anyway he knew somebody who understood the color-coding.


"OKAY, OKAY," YOU SAY, "ENOUGH SNARK -- WILL
OUR TOM BE THE GOP'S PA SENATE CANDIDATE?"

There are, it appears, folks who take our Tom more seriously than I do. Just yesterday WashingtonExaminer.com Political Editor Chris Stirewalt wrote of the possibility of Tom's entering the Pennsylvania GOP Sentate jamboree against anti-tax loon Pat Toomey:

Last week, the conservative former congressman was looking at a likely primary win over Specter followed by a possible victory over a lesser-known Democrat in the fall.

Now, Toomey is the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination but is facing a double-digit loss to Specter next November.

Many Republicans are now hoping that Ridge — former mayor of Erie, former congressman from the western part of the state and former popular two-term governor — will jump in the race.

Prominent GOP operatives who know Ridge and Pennsylvania politics tell me that there are two controlling issues for the 63-year-old former Homeland Security boss: his loss of income from giving up his private security consulting firm and his ability to beat Toomey.

Only Ridge and his accountant know the answer to the first question. Would ending a political career on a high note be worth the aggravation of candidacy and giving up his chance to make some big dough?

On the second question, though, there’s some hard data.

Recent polling has shown that Toomey enjoys a 40 percent favorable rating among Pennsylvania Republicans and a 3 percent unfavorable rating. Compare that with a 78 percent favorable and a 5 percent unfavorable rating for Ridge. In other words, if Toomey means to have any chance at winning a primary, he would have to attack Ridge.

“Ridge is still in rock star territory with numbers like those,” one prominent GOP pollster said. “The only way [Toomey] can beat him is to light him up — and that will cap his own favorables.”

National conservatives see Ridge as vulnerable because he is a pro-choice, social moderate. And while that may have disqualified him from being John McCain’s running mate, the Pennsylvania GOP hasn’t changed so much that it would limit his prospects there.

As we are frequently reminded, in eerily identical terms, our Tom was a popular two-term governor of his home state. We may yet find out just how popular he is. I can't help thinking this is one of those deals where maybe he was, and perhaps still is, famous for being popular and popular for being famous, and Pennsylvanians may have been happy enough to pull the lever beside his name because they recognized the name, on account of his being so famously popular and popularly famous -- thereby freeing them from having to think about the whole business too hard. Quite possibly they had more important things on their minds.

On one question there is no serious question. People are making an issue of our Tom's Maryland residency, suggesting that it's somehow inappropriate for him to run for office back home. Never mind that Senate residency requirements are flexible to the point of nonexistence, and people have been known to run in states to which they have infinitely flimsier connections. Our Tom was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and apart from his military (and, later, congressional) service spent roughly the first 56 years of his life as a resident -- up to the point when he was called to full-time federal government service by his pal from their time as fellow governors, George W. Bush. (Now this business of being a pal of George W. Bush, I see no problem with that weighing heavily in his disfavor.)

Of course there is that Maryland residence, so if our Tom wants to have at Senator Mikulski, that's okay by me. For that matter, I'm even okay with the Delaware connection. Better still, why doesn't he run in all three states? On the understanding, of course, that if he winds up representing two or even all three states, he does so at only one salary, and with only one staff, at least in Washington (I suppose there would need to be separate staffs in each of the states), meaning that we would in effect get two or even three empty suits for close to the price of one!

In these economically still-parlous times, how can we resist a deal like that?

#

UPDATE: It Looks Like Ken's Albania Exposé Has Driven Tom R From The Race!

Tirana's man in DC has has bowed out leaving the Republicans stuck with either the hard right unelectable Pat Toomey or the squishy rubber stamp Jim Gerlach, who needs to find a new job since he'd be unlikely to hold his House seat next year (having won with 51% in 2006 and 52% in 2008). Or, if they ask nice, maybe Specter would come back. At this point, maybe the Democrats would even give them a nice dowry to take him off their hands! (Don't forget to vote in the straw poll today!)

BUSH TO ALBANIA-- THE ONLY PLACE ON EARTH THEY ACTUALLY LIKE HIM, OTHER THAN UTAH

The first I ever heard of Albania, when I was just a small kid, was when I was figuring out what to do with a stamp that said Shqipëria. "Where the hell is that?," I wondered. It was between Yugoslavia, Greece and the Adriatic and we call it Albania. At the time it was neither a U.S. nor a Soviet ally, but a Red Chinese ally-- with a Chinese submarine base in Durres. And, on top of that, a Muslim country in Europe! And it was an authoritarian state ruled by a guy named Hoxha right out of Orwell's 1984. For me an interest developed that has, to this day, remained. In 1969 I was wandering around in that part of the world and decided to visit. Visas were hard to come by-- it was as much a Hermit Kingdom as North Korea is today-- and I ambled over to the Albanian Embassy in Belgrade. It was a dark, secretive and suspicious place. Someone opened a tiny window in the door and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted a visa so I could visit his country. He slammed it shut-- and that's the closest I've ever gotten to visiting Albania. (I went to Bulgaria instead and loved it; more recently the NY Times has promoted Albania as a hip, off-the-beaten-path tourist destination and I've been thinking about going.)


Suffering from severe diarrhea after drinking a beer with Tony Blair, George Bush is making a 6 hour visit to Albania tomorrow, the first sitting American president to do so. For historical reasons, Albanians love Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton. They don't understand that the historical anomaly that has illegitimately made Bush president has nothing to do with either. Sometimes you just gotta work with the U.S. president you've got, not the president you wish you had.

Thousands of young Albanians have been named Bill or Hillary thanks to the Clinton administration’s role in rescuing ethnic Albanians from the Kosovo war. After the visit on Sunday, some people expect to see a rash of babies named George.

So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing “American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president.” One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, “Please Occupy Us!”

...While much of the world berates Mr. Bush for warmongering, unilateralism, trampling civil liberties and even turning a blind eye to torture, Albania still loves him without restraint.

Wherever I've wandered in the world in the wake of a trip by Bill and Hill, people were excited, even years later. President Clinton-- and even the less ebullient Hillary-- were the ultimate empathic, curious and interested visitors, eager to drink in as much of the local reality as they could. Bush has never been one for any kind of reality and he doesn't exactly get out among the teeming masses and shake hands the way Clinton always did. But in Albania... no matter. Just showing up goes a long way. And for Bush, it's one of the only pro-American countries left anywhere in the world after 7 years of him and his crew of cutthroats at the helm.

There are a lot of Albanians living in the New York City area and in Massachusetts. Teachers and social workers I know uniformly tell me they are by far the most dysfunctional ethnic group they ever come across. John Belushi was Albanian.

Bush’s visit is a reward for Albania’s unflinching performance as an unquestioning ally. The country was among the first American allies to support Washington’s refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. It was one of the first countries to send troops to Afghanistan and one of the first to join the forces in Iraq. It has soldiers in both places.

“They will continue to be deployed as long as the Americans are there,” Albania’s president, Alfred Moisiu, said proudly in an interview.

Most recently, the country has quietly taken several former detainees from the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, off the Bush administration’s hands when sending them to their home countries was out of the question. There are eight so far, and Mr. Moisiu said he is open to accepting more.

Albanians, where Mafia-like culture is as strong, if not stronger, than in Sicily, is perfect for someone like Bush. They hired one of his cronies, Tom Ridge, as a lobbyist and Bechtel won a no-bid contract-- which was questioned by even the pro-American Albanians-- to oversee Albania’s largest public spending project ever, a contract to build a highway linking Albania and Kosovo. President Moisiu said state prosecutors were now looking at the deal."

In preparation for Mr. Bush’s six-hour visit, Tirana has been draped in American flags and banners that proclaim, “Proud to be Partners.” A portrait of Mr. Bush hangs on the “Pyramid,” a cultural center in the middle of town that was built as a monument to Albania’s Communist strongman, Enver Hoxha. State television is repeatedly playing a slickly produced spot in which Prime Minister Sali Berisha welcomes Mr. Bush in English.

What Mr. Bush will get in return from the visit is the sight of cheering crowds in a predominantly Muslim nation. When asked by an Albanian reporter before leaving Washington what came to mind when he thought of Albania, Mr. Bush replied, “Muslim people who can live at peace.”

Albania is about 70 percent Muslim, with large Orthodox and Catholic populations. To underscore the country’s history of tolerance, President Moisiu will present Mr. Bush with the reproduction of an 18th-century Orthodox icon depicting the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus flanked by two mosques.

“President Bush is safer in Albania than in America,” said Ermin Gjinishti, a Muslim leader in Albania.

Maybe he can move there after 2009 if things don't work out for him in Paraguay.


Today Bush went to Rome and met the Pope, a right-winger like himself, but not as amenable to Bush's insane agenda as the Albanians. He then met with Prime Minister Prodi, who is also unhappy with Bush's disastrous leadership of the western alliance, and with Italy's disgraced ex-prime minister, neo-fascist criminal Silvio Berlusconi, a personal friend. Tomorrow: Albania and Bulgaria.