Attempting to ridicule the whole Plame/Wilson Affair has now become a full time job for the Princess of Printers Ink. As she keeps asking, in post after post, "what was her real job" and saying "I just don't get it". Seems that the lass has taken the Mays Position, which if I understand it correctly, only requires that you be stupid enough to stand out in the rain and willingly pay big dollars for truck-stop couture, i.e. being oblivous to the obvious; you'll get wet while looking stupid in a cheap mesh cap and torn clothing. If Sully were a doctor ( a truly scary thought) and someone walked into his ER with a gunshot wound, would he treat them for a head cold...since he misses the obvious sooo well?

If it were any more obvious that the Plame affair were a scandal, we'd hire a skywriter to put it in the air over P-Town "they broke the law". Unfortunately, unless the pilot were a republican and the plane made only right turns while writing, I don't think Sully could read it. I guess that this doesn't rise to the level of oral sex, presumably a subject that she is an expert on, unlike say...journalism or even punditry?

Or maybe our lassie has just misunderestimated his hero, and this is the denial phase....nah.

If this snowball turns into an avalanche, it might be 'one and done' for ol' Commander Codpiece.

Americans are equally divided over President Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq, according to a Newsweek poll released Saturday. When asked whether they approved of Bush's stewardship in Iraq, 47 percent of respondents said "yes" and 46 percent "no." And 56 percent said the United States was spending too much money for operations in post-war Iraq, compared with 31 percent who said the spending was about right.

Seventy Million to investigate a stained dress, the meaning of "is" and a blowjob. How much will the 1600 Crew and Congress spend to find out who blew Valerie Plame's cover?

Right now, not a plugged nickel apparently.

So, here it is Monday morning and I'm sitting in the local bagel shop on the way to work enjoying a cuppa and a bagel (I'm pretty sure the guy who applied the shmear was sure that extra cream cheese was coming out of his paycheck...it's a BushEconomy Thing), when I see this story about Diploma Mills. Great way to make a living...if you run the Mill. So I read it and see that Sen. Susan Collins (who should really be a Democrat), is busting on them. Big Time. Well, that's pretty boring stuff...congresscritter, easy target...like shooting [something] in a barrel. Right. Oh no, it's waaay better. Seems that some over-paid under-qualified(?) Depity Departmint Hed at the Department of Homeland Security might be a certified Grad-U-Ate of a Diploma Mill (well, they're investigating, but given that it's on the list of Diploma Mills, I'd say her chances of vindications are, well, slim?)...and the Office of Personnel Management sees this whole situation as a problem (reeealy?).

Concerns about phony credentials have been mounting since June, when questions were first raised about the academic record of the Homeland Security Department's deputy chief information officer, Laura Callahan. She's on paid leave while the department investigates whether her degrees, including a Ph.D. from Hamilton University of Wyoming (which is not affiliated with Hamilton College in New York or similarly named colleges and universities), came from diploma mills.
...
Patients trusted Gregory Caplinger, who told them he was going to market a drug to treat AIDS and cancer. Investors trusted him, too, and gave him money for his venture. But while Caplinger claimed he had a medical degree from Metropolitan Collegiate Institute in Great Britain, an expert witness for the government testified that a medical degree from MCI could be bought for $100 with no study required, according to court documents. He said he was nominated for a Nobel Prize in medicine by a British hospital, which court documents say was merely a mail drop. The North Carolina man was convicted of six counts of wire fraud and two counts of money laundering, and was ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution as part of his 2001 sentencing.

One couple gave him $30,000 and sought his advice about cancer treatments for family members. An actress who was HIV positive was treated at his clinic.

Isn't that what CEO (gag me) presidents do, surround themselves with really smart people? Well, there ya go!

Hey! Who checked out Instahacks J.D.? Just asking....

I sent this one out to the site too soon...so I Google Laura Callahan and DHS and come up with this:

Callahan will be the senior director of an office that will be in charge of management, policy and enterprise initiatives such as disaster management and Project SafeCom, a communications network linking first responders, Homeland Security Department CIO Steve Cooper told Federal Computer Week.
...
Callahan is the latest in a series of information technology executives to join the new department's CIO shop.

I feel more secure already...is the DHS Depity Director of guns'n'ammo just hired from a Pizza Delivery position?

Two Words: Fareed Zakaria. Interesting. These numbers are amazing and his premise is on the money...literally.

By Rumsfeld’s logic, America’s light hand and quick exit from Haiti should have created a vibrant democracy. The opposite happened.
...
As proof of this, Rumsfeld points out that “four years after the war, the United Nations still runs Kosovo by executive fiat, issues postage stamps, passports and driver’s licenses.” This is shockingly ill-informed. ...
...
It is not U.N. bureaucracy that has kept Kosovo in limbo, but a political dilemma that Washington has not resolved.
...
Rumsfeld should get out more. ...
...
Rumsfeld’s problem, it would seem, is not with international organizations, but with global capitalism.
...
One can see this phenomenon vividly in one country these days—Iraq. A senior international administrator—that is, a high-ranking civilian in the Coalition Provisional Authority or a one-star American general—makes around $10,000 a month, including housing allowances. The Pentagon estimates that doctors in Iraq made $20 a month last year. To be fair, local wages have risen now, but a university professor in Baghdad today makes at most $200 to $300 a month. In other words, a Coalition official is probably earning 50 times the salary of a local professor.

Is it any wonder that every president since Reagan tossed the Neocon proposals for invading Iraq into the shit-can until George the Weak-minded showed up? Don't you just picture him like the dog in that cat-centric comic...tongue hanging out, stupid smile on his face, always getting out-smarted by a lasagna-eating feline and everyone else? Wait...that's reality.

What's Eighty-Seven Billion dollars when every business deal you have ever touched has gone to hell in a handbasket? Never mind that President Goes AWOL but kills Soldiers can't balance his own checkbook, now he's looking to increase the debt my great-great-great granchildren will be paying off. Thanks, loser. But wait, seems that some republicans with a bit more common sense not to mention fiscal discipline are interested in trying to keep the Economy from doing the Titanic thing...

In what could be a major embarrassment for Bush and the GOP, some Republicans say there could be a close vote on an amendment by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., paying the bill's costs by canceling some scheduled income tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans.

Bush and GOP leaders have refused to reconsider any tax reductions, arguing they are a pivotal part of the administration's plan to spark the economy.
...
Even if they lose, Democrats will be happy to get Republicans on record refusing to pay the bill's massive $87 billion price tag by rolling back tax cuts on people earning at least $360,000 annually.

Hmmmm...looks like we're all a bunch of nervous nellys about he potential for fraud in the balloting process. Everything will be OK, just trust the man behind the curtain; he'll deliver (oops) count your state's ballots as they are cast.

Among newer systems being implemented in California and elsewhere are touch-screen computer voting machines. But the computerized balloting that election officials long have touted as the wave of the future is under attack from scientists and computer experts who worry that computerized voting systems are vulnerable to tampering and manipulation that could easily go undetected.

"This could be something that compromises democracy," said David Dill, a Stanford University professor of computer science who researches security issues.

On the other side of the debate are election officials who see the worry as a natural, if exaggerated, reaction to change. They say tampering would require a huge, sophisticated plan and that there are plenty of safeguards to detect and protect against intrusions.
...
Apprehension about computerized voting has simmered for years, arising early on among the Internet fringe that feasts on conspiracy and paranoia. That current of distrust has drifted closer to the mainstream in recent months.

There's no hurry to bring a bad system on-line, except the perception that "old" is "bad". Perhaps. Except in the case of counting ballots. Or do we want to give up our democracy to rich guys who "guarantee Ohio" for President Bunnypants?

Well here's another success for the 1600 Crew to trumpet, another Tax Cut. Yes, that's right Americans are making less money now than ever before, which of course translates into...(drum roll) Lower Taxes!

Americans' average household incomes continued to decline in 2002, powering skeptics who believe the economic recovery isn't hitting home fast enough.

The nation's median household income, adjusted for inflation, declined 1.1 percent, to $42,409 in 2002, the Census Bureau reported Friday. Georgia's median household income dropped about 0.9 percent to $43,096 -- a $408 dip.

Why did we have to waste all those years having all that nasty prosperity stuff? That Bastard Clinton, he just strung us along...sumbitch.

The ranks of the "all-volunteer" army and guard are doing pretty well, thank you in terms of recruiting today. But could this be a sign of what's to come? After all, as folks start to wonder about the reasons for real war in Iraq, and it's mounting and unexplainable casualty counts and the 1600 Crews metaphorical War on Terra™ without real sacrifice (other than the occaisional son or daughter thrown in to the Maw of the Metaphor), we're all just doing ok. Okay?

Brian Moody signs up more soldiers for the Army National Guard than just about any other recruiter in Indiana. Across kitchen tables around the state, he has usually had an easy time convincing young people and their families that the military offers them what they want.

Until he met Jeff Fayette's mom.

"I came out of that house, and the dad had not said anything, and the mom said: `The people at work tell me you're trained to lie to me. My son is not fighting for anybody in Iraq. He's going to stay right here and he's going to be my baby,' " Moody said. "That's the kind of feeling we're up against now. I tell you, it's real easy to get depressed.
...
" `Aren't there enough older people, grown men, to send over to Iraq? You have to go after 17-year-olds?' " Couch recalled asking Moody. "We are a very patriotic family. But I'm not going to sign what I felt like might be my son's death warrant."
...
Military officials acknowledge that the retention numbers are somewhat deceiving. Straining to ensure it has enough troops to handle its commitments in Iraq and elsewhere, the Pentagon issued orders this year preventing tens of thousands of soldiers who are serving in Iraq, or have served there recently, from leaving military service until further notice. Now, the part-time soldiers are being asked to do more. This month the Army announced that about 20,000 reservists and National Guard troops stationed in Iraq would have to serve a full year from the time they arrived, extending their tours in some cases for as long as 11 months.

Note: re-edited for knuckleheaded writing. haste makes waste

When the Joseph Wislon/Valerie Plame affair broke, I half-jokingly suggested that Mark Kleiman, who had many detaiils of the story not only right (as time has begun to prove), he didn't even start out as a true believer. Mark was skeptical until events coalesced around only one reasonable solution... but was out there first and has continued to update the story in both a meaningful and web-centric way...meaning you don't get bored reading his work and it's to the point. To his crediit, Mark does attribute his first knowledge of the story to Kevin Drum at Calpundit, and while that may be true, Kevin has not kept up the level of detail that Mark has on a regular basis.

Here is a link to the Pulitzer Web Site and their award for Public Service. Get this one out and start sending in Nominations. Everything can be done electronically, including the forms and submisstions materials.

A Pulitzer for a Blogger? Maybe not this year (but we could hope), it sure would change the opinions of some MW's if they truly knew that a well written blog with no axe to grind, was willing to publish a truth they wanted to bury in exchange for a nickname or a ride on AF One.

This guy, Papa Pilgrim hates governments, bureaucrats, and non-Biblical injunctions. Oh, except for that $23,115 in Tax-Free dollars from the Alaska Dividend Fund. Bet he has a whole cabin full of NRA-loving, mini-republicans up there with him. Best quote from a Washington Lobbyist paying for this guys legal aide...

"This is a good family that simply does not know how to deal with bureaucracy," said Cushman, whose group is helping Pilgrim pay for a lawyer and is publicizing his legal problems on its Web site. "They did not knowingly break the law. You have to look into people's hearts."

Seems that some of Sullys readers are even less intelligent than I gave them credit for. Our Boy actually had to put instructions in his blog on how to change the screen colors from the default white-on-blue to black-and-white. Well, I guess it's true...Andrew Sullivan rots your brain and robs you of the ability to read and comprehend simple instructions printed in [blue] and white.

Charles Krauthammer wrote an ode to Kennedy (and all us war-hating libruls) in the Friday Post. Quiddity distills the Krauthammer piece down to nine words and phrases used by the mad doctor..so I decided I would see if I could use all nine in a post in the style (sort of) of CK...here goes:

It is absurd to believe that Krauthammer could write anything so disgraceful as to suggest that Ted Kennedy is bordering on derangement. I would not suggest that Dr. Frankenhammer is becoming unhinged from reality by suggesting that our Fearless Leader used the situation in Iraq for political advantage for it might strike some as being guilty of blinding Bush-hatred, a regional prejudice found now not just in blue states. The blustering sentiments shown by Krauthammer shows that he never saw the movie "Wag the Dog" or is too naive to believe that politicians are likely to do absurd things for their own ends. Like starting wars, just because. Surely the good doctor is becoming unhinged, losing it because he can't go participate in the Neocon Orgy of the wholesale slaughter of Iraqis, he really, really wanted to go and is now losing it every day since being rejected for a job killing in the name of his hero. Or he has become a traveler on the passage to pathology a subject he slept through in med school and now really wants to experience first-hand.

Why does the Post even publish that loon? Oh yeah, they are going for their Beobachter/Fox News Credentials, one column(ist) at a time...

Please, repeat that ten times...then go toss your cookies. Seems that they need to read that in Baghdad and the surrounding environs very, very carefully before making application for any helpful shit from the offices of Viceroy Jerry & Co.™

When grease-stained technicians at the Baghdad South power plant needed spare parts recently, they first submitted a written request to Bechtel Corp., the engineering firm given more than $1 billion in U.S. government contracts to fix Iraq’s decrepit infrastructure.
THEN THEY WENT to the junkyard.

They scoured piles of industrial detritus for abandoned items that could be jury-rigged into the geriatric plant, such as the hydraulic pump from a bulldozer that was used to restart a broken water condenser.

“Of course we’d like new parts,” sighed Ahmed Ali Shihab, the senior operations engineer. But he said repeated appeals to Bechtel and the U.S. military had not yielded any significant new equipment. “All we have received from them are promises,” he said.
...
“Restoring Iraq’s electricity is vital to our mission here,” said L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator of Iraq.
       “It’s hard to exaggerate the impact of three decades of crippling under-investment by Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s infrastructure,” Bremer said in a recent interview. “He spent his nation’s money building palaces and weapons and his army, not funding the things people need to survive.”
...
... Yet the Bush administration’s initial reconstruction plan called for devoting just $230 million of a $680 million Bechtel contract to electricity system repairs. “The telltale signs were there,” said the American electrical engineer. “But either because of sheer carelessness or because the [U.S.] government didn’t want to reveal how expensive it would be, there was massive under-planning.”

It's no wonder that the rose-petal suppliers are having such a hard time keeping up with demand...they all love us! When the lights are not off.

Well, it was only a matter of time...The Poodle is about to get his butt handed to him after the Brits get done smacking it. Seems that the Brits are a little less willing to believe that their leaders are infalliable. Blair is apparently refusing to take the fact that there might have been a little boo-boo committed in the name of the British people in and around the area of Ancient Mesopotamia.

A Defiant Tony Blair will this week refuse to apologise for his government’s most controversial policies - including the Iraq war - and accuse unions and dissident MPs of blocking progress towards a fairer society.

The embattled Prime Minister will face down his growing army of critics at the Labour conference in Bournemouth with a bold declaration that he has no regrets.
...

A new crop of opinion polls last night cast further gloom over the Labour conference.

They showed that Labour’s popularity rating has slumped to its lowest levels since Blair became Labour leader in 1994, with one poll putting the party three points behind the Tories.
...
A Guardian survey of 108 of the 409 Labour MPs found that almost a quarter wanted him to go, and that more than two-thirds were strongly opposed to tuition fees.

A Mori poll suggested that half the nation wanted Blair to step down and an ICM poll for the News of the World suggested 64% of voters no longer trusted Blair.

When the Asia Times can figure out your weaknesses, and do everything but call you "stupid" to your face, it's time to rethink your strategery. No, really.

One of Rumsfeld's pet concerns is that the transformed US military must (and can) do more with less...
...
Then there is added concern about what happens if the Korean conflict flares up. Even though the chances of such an eruption are minimal at this time, the contingency planners of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon and the Pacific Command (PACOM) are required by the very nature of their job to be ready for it. The question, then, becomes: What kind of pressure would a Korean contingency put on the already highly stretched US forces all over the globe?.
...
...But this option may not be valid for too long in the wake of a study issued by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. That study states, "If the Pentagon stuck to its plan of rotating active-duty army troops out of Iraq after a year, it would be able to sustain a force of only 67,000 to 106,000 active duty and reserve army and Marine forces." It went on to add, "A large force would put at risk the military's operations elsewhere around the globe."
...
Bush is aware that any sharing of authority with the UN or with other nations is likely to jeopardize his own vision of what the post-Saddam Iraq should look like. The element of realism among the Europeans - and I also include the United Kingdom on this point - is such that they will have no objection in seeing the establishment of a moderate Islamic democracy in Iraq. However, there is little doubt that the Bush administration will have a difficult time accepting that proposition, since such an acceptance would come into serious conflict with its other major foreign objective - transformation of Muslim Middle East.

I think that the Asia Times analysis hits one point straight on... the 1600 Crew obsession with transforming the Middle East towards some as-yet-to-be announced ends. I think that the "end-of-times" folks like DeLay and his ilk are as much or more a part of this as the Neocons. It doesn't take much to influence the weak mind of President Does it For a Buck'n'change...just an expensive suit and a sincere line of bullshit. And he's in.

Wasn't the Debacle In Iraq supposed to be about freedom, peace, liberty, Jeffersonian Democracy etc? How many warbloggers with teeny brains out there declared solemnly that we were bringing an end to the imminent threat posed by the 45-minute threat to world peace that was Saddam Hussein? How much of the slowly declining fresh air in the world was, and still is being wasted by the 1600 Crew and it's apologists who want us to be believe their circular logic for invasion and conquest? Well, here's a little story about the Rooskies and Vlad the KGB Impaler, and well, Roosian oil...

Mr. Alekperov wanted American consumers to understand that they need Russian oil and that companies like his are ready to provide it. For the last two years, oil has become an increasingly powerful bond between the United States, the world's largest consumer, and Russia, among the largest producers.
...
People close to Mr. Putin and Mr. Alekperov said that they expected Mr. Putin to raise the question of protecting the Russian oil contracts with President Bush during their weekend meeting at Camp David.
...
There is a great deal of speculation in Moscow these days that Russia would agree to send troops to help the American-led coalition in Iraq if the Bush administration moved to protect Russian oil interests in that country, according to Russian businessmen. But a person with Mr. Putin's delegation who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Mr. Putin would likely abide by what he has said all along: that Russia would only send troops if the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing such a step.

Mr. Alekperov said that he knew of no such quid pro quo of oil for Russian military help, but did not discount the possibility of Russian troops going to Iraq at some point. Sending troops, he said, "is a political question. But if oil contracts go through quickly, we would have lots of Russian oil specialists on the ground, and every country should be able to protect its own people."

Mr. Aleperov may not admit to knowing of such a 'quid pro quo' because that's more latin than President Murders Everyone for Oil actually knows, however he probably told Pootie-Poot: "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch mine".

In what's sure to bring the truth is stranger than fiction saying to the minds of the non-kool-aid drinking population, this has to be the strangest thing I have seen yet. Seems a distillery in Scotland was under surveillance for (get ready) Weapons of Mass Destruction. That's right folks, don't touch that dial...

A distillery manager has told of his amazement after learning that US spies hunting weapons of mass destruction had been monitoring his whisky plant.
...
"They said they had been monitoring our webcams because the process of making something very innocuous and pleasant is close to making weapons of mass destruction, apparently.

"We just think it is the funniest thing we have ever heard."
...
An agency spokesman was reported as saying the distillery's webcams were of "no official interest".

• The local spy brigade in the UK got really bored and was looking for the days that free tours are given;
• Someone at the agency in Fort Belvoir has way too much time on their hands and needs a real job; or
• This feed actually goes to the Bush Twins college dorm rooms, to let them watch a real-life version of "Follow that Booze" (apologies to FoodTV and Gordon Elliot).

Light posting tomorrow, the real world collides with fun...work calls, for a possible all-nighter adding a DS3 for the home office, if the ISP is ready.

On another note, I just noticed that I posted my 1000th entry (since I set up shop) yesterday, and had my 1000th comment since opening on my site here. I want to say Thanks to everyone who has stopped by, commented (or not) and been supportive. I appreciate the e-mails with articles/leads and look forward to the next X,XXX posts. Blogging been berry berry fun for me...and it keeps me from yelling at the TV wingnuts and scaring the dog.

Thanks again, EVERYONE.

See the post below, about Microsoft, then read this. Now that's pretty scary stuff. Wow.

The woman in Africa who was sentenced to stoning for alleged infidelity has been freed by the Shariah Apellate Court in that country. Amina Lawal's coviction was tossed because she was already pregnant at the time she was convicted.

The Shariah Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday that Amina Lawal's conviction was invalid because she was already pregnant when harsh Islamic Shariah law was implemented in her home province.
...
"It is the view of this court that the judgment of the Upper Shariah Court, Funtua, was very wrong and the appeal of Amina Lawal is hereby discharged and acquitted," judge Ibrahim Maiangwa said.

No one really wanted to know or remember that Ah-nold had done an interview with that bastion of journalistic integrity, Oui. Non. We really did not need to remember that once upon a time, Ah-nold was probably the pin-up boy in bathhouses world-wide. We never really cared. Still don't. But thanks to Darrell, we now remember more about the Sperminator than we ever really wanted to. To think, since Mappelthorpe passed away no one cared about pictures of Ah-nold. Now:

The reporter who uncovered the Monica Lewinski scandal claims a new scoop: full nude erotic photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger taken by renowned gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Matt Drudge, on his Drudge Report, says that "voters have never seen an elected official in such detail."

Although copies of a benign nude photo of the bodybuilder-actor-politician that appeared in the 1970s publican After Dark have been circulating for months on the internet, the Mapplethorpe photos are reportedly "shocking".

In a world exclusive, Drudge reports that pictures so steamy they have been kept under lock at the New York Estate of Mapplethorpe who died in 1989.

Operatives with the Schwarzenegger campaign are reportedly rushing to ensure that pictures are not published.

For a million six, Darrell ought to at least get a set of autographed prints...ya think?

Almost Shorter Andrew Sullivan: I hate Saddam. He was a bad evil man. Now that his regime is over, tell me why we were wrong to get rid of him? Bother me not with facts about WMD's and alleged administration lies. Saddam was a bad evil man. I cannot use too many words to express loathing of Saddam and the anti-war liberals. Wesley Clark is a liar. Nine-Eleven.

Not really a post designed to elict big response, but this was several places around the Web today...

That headline almost says it all. Ease of use is a wonderful thing, designing something so flawed that script-kiddies with little conscience and a lot of spare time can bring down servers and send millions into panic-mode is not the best of things. I seem to have read somewhere that Mac servers/workstations and Novell servers have little-to-no problem with these viruses...

"The nature of the platform that dominates every desktop everywhere is such that its dominance, coupled with its insecurity, cannot be ignored and is a matter of corporate and national policy," said Dan Geer, a security consultant and chief technology officer of @Stake, a computer security company.

The article is interesting and makes a good point, both about the over-reliance on a single-source provider like Microsoft and how it has become a National Security issue by default.

If there were ever another reason to loathe President Babble-On, here it is: Shutting off funding for Women's Health Clinics because they provide reproductive rights/care information/services...or in Christo-FascistSpeak, Abortion Counselng and Services. Yes, that's right folks, your Presdential Pander Bear is on his knees, sucking up to the likes of Jerry, Pat and Franklin and all thier ilk, because, well his poll numbers suck (YAY!!!) and he needs to feel the love.

President Bush anti-abortion policy has forced family planning clinics in poor countries to close, leaving some communities without any healthcare, according to a report issued Wednesday.

Even faith-based clinics that promote abstinence -- in line with White House policy -- have had to close, according to organizers.
...
"You cannot separate HIV/AIDS, reproductive health and abortion," said Hillary Fyfe, who heads the Family Life Movement of Zambia, a faith-based group working with adolescents on sex education.

While her group does not promote abortion or even condom use, it does talk about the possibility, and that was enough to lose U.S. funding, Fyfe said. Three clinics in Lusaka closed this year.

"We taught natural family planning and abstinence until marriage," Fyfe said in an interview. Now her group will be unable to holds its workshops unless they can find alternative funding, Fyfe said.

The Hairy Thunderer is watching and is not amused...once again Genocide is being committed in the name of one of his relatives and that always makes him a bit cranky, I'm told...When y'all go to that big re-ward in the sky I heard that the light is really a TeeVee playing endless loops of "The Devil and Miss Jones". Enjoy.

In a stunning-only-to-the-1600 Crew session, the delegates to the UN did everything but openly heckle the Potomac Napolean today as he boldly went a-begging.

President Bush's appeal for greater financial and military support for the reconstruction of Iraq failed to elicit fresh pledges today as members of the United Nations demanded that the United States yield greater power to the U.N. and the Iraqis.
...
"Let us not place greater trust on military might than on the institutions we created with the light of reason and the vision of history," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil said in a speech to the 191-member body moments before Bush delivered his remarks. "A war can perhaps be won single-handedly, but peace, lasting peace, cannot be secured without the support of all."
...
One U.S. official said the administration hoped that Bush's speech would at least persuade governments to provide more money for Iraq's reconstruction at a donors' conference to be held in Madrid next month. "The expectation is that we are not going to get a great number of troops to participate," the official said. "But we want them to provide funds at the donor conference and we will try to make that happen."

Oh, and if you need to leave an anonymous donation of a billion or so you happen to have laying around, just send it in a plain brown envelope to the following address:

Misapplication of Foreign Policy Divsion
c/o The Department of Hubris Department
1600 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington, DC

It's not tax-deductable though. Sorry.

Well it is, isn't it? A correspondant to the Queen of Mass asks him how come he is such a shill for the 1600 Crew, "such an apologist" for the "wannbe-dictator". A fair question, asked and not answered...directly. Instead in a subsequent post Sully wastes bandwidth congratulating three more Chickenhawks, Instahack, Hitchens and of course Tom Friedman, on their support for the war, and their 'brave' stands in the silencing of dissent.

Hats off to Glenn for helping bring critical mass to the obvious truth that the reports coming out of Iraq are too one-sided, too patently political, and far too gloomy.
...
That's not to say we shouldn't hear the bad news. It's just that it needs perspective. Tom Friedman has been splendid, I think, in getting exactly the right mix of optimism and concern.
...
Finally some perspective on those almost daily troop deaths which every media outlet plasters on the front-page. Things are slowly improving!

Let's see what "obvious truth" President Completely Incoherent trotted out today:

"Obviously, I think they're going badly for the soldiers who lost their lives, and I weep for that person and their family. But no, I think we're making good progress, he said.

Virgin Ben! We have found a new calling for you! A new teen 'mag' formatted bible has found a new niche to target...teenage girls. Okay, stop laughing. These are godly little lasses, who want their religion spoon-fed to them by a glossy magazine-cum-bible. No lung-irritating fire and brimstone of that nasty King James, that's like sooo 16th Century or what-ever...

It's called "Revolve: The Complete New Testament" and it's apparently racing up the Amazon.com sales charts -- whatever that means -- as it sucks up all the accoutrements of a teen fashion rag and rams them through the cute Christian grinder of humorlessness and sexual rigidity and homophobia, and regurgitates them as kicky dumbed-down slightly numb virginal tidbits of advice and admonition and, yes, Biblical storytelling.

Because apparently girls don't already have enough hollow dogma out there telling them what to do. Apparently they don't already face a large enough mountain of misinfo and scorn and sexual mixed messages, and not a single one of them telling them how to really tune into themselves, listen to their own unique voices, find their own sex and their own power and their own divine potency.

Nope. Instead they get this, a sweetly uptight, revisionist Bible cross-bred with a bad fashion magazine, full of Top-10 lists and quizzes and Q&As, telling them to "pray for a person of influence" every day and check the "godly" quotient of the boys they date, and that Jesus doesn't really like it when they wear, you know, thongs and sexy bras and low-slung jeans. Yep, that should clear things right up.

On the other hand, they might give the Virgin Ben an embedded column for counterpoint, for the sake of the Christo-Fascist Big Tent inclusiveness, writing missives from the Torah, if he can get that hip, Barbie-does-the-Bible riff down pat.

I think Kevin Smith needs to make Dogma II. But that's just me.

Somebody out there has been adding a smidgen of speed or something to wake up the SCLM boys and girls, or else the polish is finally starting to come off the turd...either way, I'm pretty happy. CBS does a little story on how the mysterious 'bidding' process for Iraqi post-war reconstruction contracts (the extent of the 1600 Crew's plannig for post-war Iraq apparently) somehow managed to land with firms who had friends in high places...

The U.S. will spend approximately $25 billion to repair Iraq by the end of next year - and billions will be needed after that.
...
Given all the taxpayer money involved, you might think the process for awarding those contracts would be open and competitive.
...
But, as 60 Minutes reported last spring, the earliest contracts were given to a few favored companies. And some of the biggest winners in the sweepstakes to rebuild Iraq have one thing in common: lots of very close friends in very high places.

Even before the first shots were fired in Iraq, the Pentagon had secretly awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root a two-year, no-bid contract to put out oil well fires and to handle other unspecified duties involving war damage to the country’s petroleum industry. It is worth up to $7 billion.

But Robert Andersen, chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers, says that oil field damage was much less than anticipated and Halliburton will end up collecting only a small fraction of that $7 billion. But he can't say how small a fraction or exactly what the contract covers because the mission and the contract are considered classified information.

But is political influence not unknown in the process? In this particular case, Anderson says, it was legally justified and prudent.

But not everyone thought it was prudent. Bob Grace is president of GSM Consulting, a small company in Amarillo, Texas, that has fought oil well fires all over the world. Grace worked for the Kuwait government after the first Gulf War and was in charge of firefighting strategy for the huge Bergan Oil Field, which had more than 300 fires. Last September, when it looked like there might be another Gulf war and more oil well fires, he and a lot of his friends in the industry began contacting the Pentagon and their congressmen.

“All we were trying to find out was, who do we present our credentials to,” says Grace. “We just want to be able to go to somebody and say, ‘Hey, here's who we are, and here's what we've done, and here's what we do.’”

“They basically told us that there wasn't going to be any oil well fires.”

Both Halliburton and the Pentagon believe Lewis is insulting not only the vice president but thousands of professional civil servants who evaluate and award defense contracts based strictly on merit.

But does the fact that Cheney used to run Halliburton have any effect at all on the company getting government contracts?

“Zero,” says Dominy. “I will guarantee you that. Absolutely zero impact.”

Sometimes I wish Buffy had not finished her last season...there are a few evil republicans out there who might need her tender ministrations, or at least be checked out for signs of incipient Vamprisim. One of those being Ralph Reed, former head of the Christo-Fascist Coalition, Reed now operates a "political consulting" bidness in Atlanta. I once flew on a United Flight from VA Beach to National, and sat right across the aisle from him and one of his little butt-boys. They had a newsmagazine open to an article on the Clintons and were guffawing over Hillary's outfit and shoes. Interesting. If I knew that I would not have gotten arrested and fired, I would most likely reached across the aisle and smacked the little worm. Anyhow, here's a little Ralph Reed info...

Everything Republicans have gained in the past decade is on the line next year, said Ralph Reed, southeastern regional chairman for President Bush 2004 re-election campaign.

"We are going to be in for the fight of our lives," Reed told the National Federation of Republican Women's convention Sunday. "This is going to be a national effort. We are going to have to go wherever and whenever to do what we have to do."
...
"In a country that is more evenly divided than we have ever seen, there are two things that get voters across the ballot line: a quality candidate and grass roots," he said. "Let's rearrange our lives to knock on another door, give up another Saturday, man another phone bank."

Keeping the football metaphor alive (it is Monday night, after all) we get to see the goal posts getting shifted as our boy moves on down field, in one piece he zigs and zags through the awful Rubin and Sperling loving lefties who just want a better economy and (say) they don't care how it happens, as long as President Jobless Recovery isn't in charge. As he adriotly manuvers, always to the right (which might account for his record number of sacks) he finds that once again the goal posts have been moved...Wolfie, Yes Wolfie von Wolfowitz is moving the goal post for him, by contradicting his hero, "

"Iraq did have contacts with Al Qaeda," Mr. Wolfowitz insisted, momentarily silencing the audience with an accusation even President Bush now says is unsubstantiated. He added, "We don't know how clear they were."

So how many Fundie Neocons does it take to move a goal post, Yer Royal Highness? And don't you ever get tired running from sideline to sideline and never gettng any closer to scoring? I think all your GLBT friends have it right, after all, how many of them would suffer the fate of former Rep. Steven May, also a gay, conservative who was fired by the Club for Growth, just for being who he is? At the behest of "right-thinking Christo-Fascist morons" no less. I think he was even an Army Officer (Reservist or NG) booted under 'don't ask, don't tell'. Whoops, there go the goal posts again...so how do you keep your head from expolding again? Exactly?

In a rotten economy there will always be a pretty fair number of folks who will look to the military for a job, when they might not have otherwise considered it. Military service is not a bad thing, and I see the folks who are considering it as people who will eventually learn that there is a greater world beyond the borders of their hometown. The service can ultimately be a great equalizer.

The services are set to meet their goals for this fiscal year. Which given the situation in Iraq may or may not be a good thing for the Army and the National Guard. But right now all the service chiefs are trumpeting thier respective goal-filling success, and it all looks wonderful 'til you read this:

...Next month it (the Army -JF) is rolling out a 15-month enlistment option (the current minimum length for a tour is two years) aimed at college students, an increasingly important target group.
...
Under a program started two months ago, the Army has raised its age limit for new recruits to 40 years old from 34, ...

Emmy Awards. Tonight? Guess so. Found the results on Yahoo. Who Cares? But I have to wonder about two things: When did they come out with a category for Reality Shows and how in the hell does another awards show get to be an Emmy-worthy nominee, much less a winner (Tony Awards).

I guess that all the awards show are pretty much a self-fulfilling trivialization and self-parody. I just never realized how bad it's gotten.

We now return to meaningful (?) blogging, and your regularly scheduled rantings.

So when the Crawford Village Idiot does go the UN on Tuesday, there really is only one benchmark for all the other countries to judge him by...his own words.

In an exclusive interview with Fox News' Brit Hume, Bush said he will declare in his speech Tuesday at the U.N. General Assembly that he "made the right decision and the others that joined us made the right decision" to invade Iraq.
...
Asked if he was willing for the United Nations to play a larger role in the political developments in Iraq to get a new resolution, Bush responded, "I'm not so sure we have to, for starters."

But he said he did think it would be helpful to get U.N. help in writing a constitution for Iraq.

"I mean, they're good at that," he said. "Or, perhaps when an election starts, they'll oversee the election. That would be deemed a larger role." (emphasis added)
...
The United States argues that U.N. resolution 1441, passed unanimously in November, provided sufficient authority for the U.S.-led war. That resolution threatened Baghdad with "serious consequences" if it failed to show it had handed over or destroyed its weapons of mass destruction.

"That's the resolution that said if you don't disarm there will be serious consequences," he said. "At least somebody (the United States) stood up and said this is a definition of serious consequences."

So, here I am wondering if the 1600 Crew can be further humiliated. Yup, hope so. As Commander Codpiece heads off to the UN on Tuesday (that's up North, Dorky) to beg where he once boasted, I sure think it would be funny if say the Ambassadors for the International Confectionary Alliance sent their administrative assistants and chauffers to sit in their seats in the big hall, and they all went to the Tavern on the Green for lunch...

President Bush stood before the United Nations General Assembly a year ago and pledged to unite the world against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Six months ago he went to war, almost alone, having failed in months of diplomacy to win explicit U.N. support.

Tuesday, he returns to the U.N. -- short of cash, short of troops and looking for help.

The question is how much he is likely to get from countries that opposed the Iraq venture from the start and that remain resentful of alleged American arrogance since.

I have to wonder if the world is going to look different from his knees, not that being there will do him much good...republicans are opposed to that on principle, remember?

Not my first source for (reliable) news, but this has been rumored for some time now. From Drudge:

FCC POWELL SETS STAGE FOR EXIT IN INTERVIEW: 'I HAVE A TIRED FAMILY, TIRED CHILDREN AND A TIRED SPOUSE'
-Michael Powell, America's Icon to Nepotism in Action

Good Riddance to bad Rubbish.

Been a little while since the Snake-Handling Prude got to go on the TeeVee and let us all know about the latest "threat" to America he's sent to the Navy Brig in Charleston SC. Seems this time, they have sent an Army Captain, who hmmmm, to no one's surprise is a Muslim and had been ministering to the prisoners on GITMO. This one takes the cake even for the 1600 Crew, and their usual paranoia. Captain Yee, the Chaplain is a 1990 West Point Graduate and a convert to Islam. He has been cited for the work he has done ministering to Muslim soldiers.

An Islamic chaplain in the United States Army who ministered to detainees at the camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the military holds captured militants and suspected terrorists is now himself under arrest while the Army investigates his activities, military and law enforcement officials said today.
...
Military officials declined to say why Captain Yee, a 1990 graduate of West Point who converted to Islam, was being investigated. But a civilian law enforcement official said that the investigation was aimed at suspicions of espionage, improperly assisting the prisoners or some other breach of military duties.
...
Investigators are looking into the possibility that he was sympathetic to prisoners there and was preparing to aid them in some undetermined way.

"That's the fear and the suspicion that the Army is pursuing," the second law enforcement official said.
...
Captain Yee was raised in Springfield, N.J. After graduating from West Point, he served on active duty as an air defense artillery officer, a military spokesman told The Associated Press. He left the Army in the mid-1990's and moved to Syria, the spokesman said. He returned to the United States and re-entered the Army as an Islamic chaplain.

So what's the deal with Captain Yee. Theoretically he has lots of rights, especially the military's 120-day speedy-trial thing. If a military court (should it get that far) doesn't find him guilty of anything, what's Asscrack going to do lock him up in perpetuity like Padilla and Hamdi? That's the style and the substance. It's a shame that the US Army, which is fighting so hard and valiantly to not make horses-asses out of themselves with moderate Muslims just managed to shoot themselves in the foot and provide rhetoric for anti-Muslim bigots and those who would follw the advice of Ann-Thrax.

The 30% of us who knew that the 1600 Crew was lying about everything can't say "I told you so" to the 70% who "knew" that the Chimp was "telling the truth" about the Iraq-al Qaida-9/11 connections. We don't want them to feel like we're being all superior. We just have to keep telling the truth, and hope that more stories in the media let the 70-percenters become disenchanted with the non-stop lying by the 1600 Crew 24/7/365.

Smile when you call the Chimp a Chump (or some other more "respectable"and less inflammatory name)...perhaps you'll convert one or two of the 70-percenters per try...just getting a few on board means less votes for the 1600 Crew Fascist State Creation Machine next November...and that's just a little bit of alright!

Apparently one of the members of the Chalabi Governing Council, who coincidentally was a woman was shot by (reportedly) six males in a pickup truck. Now it would be interesting to know if they were shooting at her for her gender and the perceived power she'll have as a council member, or simply because of her gender and the prevalent Islamic Fundamentalist view of women and their place in society.

Six gunmen firing assault weapons from a Toyota pickup truck chased a member of Iraq’s Governing Council in her car and seriously wounded her in the first assassination attempt targeting the U.S.-created leadership body. The brazen, daytime attack was against Aquila al-Hashimi, one of three women on the council, a Shiite Muslim and a strong candidate to become Iraq’s representative at the United Nations.
...
Ahmad Chalabi, the president of the Governing Council for September, said al-Hashimi’s attackers “were remnants of the Baathist regime and Saddam’s assassins,” referring to Saddam’s former ruling Baath party.

“The members of the Governing Council and ministers will not be intimidated by the terrorists,” Chalabi said in a statement. “They will continue to do their patriotic duty to move Iraq towards freedom, democracy and sovereignty.” He said al-Hashimi had received threats recently.

Humpf. It seems that having a criminal record, or even being close to indictment is a pretty good recommendation for employment by the 1600 Crew. Chalabi, I believe has been convicted in at least one country and is probably "wanted" in more...so hey, let's turn multi-billion dollar operation over to him. He was only convicted of: Embezzeling.

Nope, not in the dictionary, couldn't find it anywhere...the word qWagmire. Maybe I misspelled it. But I think this might be part of the definition:

Sheikh Khaled Saleh, a fiery Iraqi Sunni Muslim cleric, says the young angry men battling U.S. troops in the violent town of Falluja are holy warriors who look to Osama bin Laden as their mentor.

"Although unorganized and without leadership, the Iraqi resistance is a ball of fire in America's face that will bring its end in Iraq," said the 53-year-old cleric, whose sermons draw thousands in the main Badawi mosque, one of over 70 mosques in the center of Falluja.
...
Residents of the conservative tribal region insist the fighters are driven by a thirst for revenge against heavy-handed tactics by American troops.

Here's where the rally will be:

Location:
THE CHARLES STAGE
2501 N. Ontario St.
Burbank, CA 91504
818.640.6642 Allison
818.557.6370 fax
Thomas Guide pg. 533 D5

Someone once said, "I don't know how you can read Sullivan, he rots my brain". At the time, I laughed...it was a funny comment about a parenthetically silly man who is so full of himself that, well he reminds me of a gay Commander Codpiece; Fabulously Fervant, Fundamentalist, and Fanatical all rolled into one happy package. So I like to watch him make a complete ass of himself every day, reversing his positions like a broken-field runner as he heads toward a goal post his republican heroes keep moving. Funny stuff. But today...today he managed to sack himself.

Doing what he probably thinks of as a highly-literate deconstruction of an article Wesley Clark wrote for Washington Monthly, our boy gets it wrong from word one to the end. I am guessing that maybe the P-town Prevaricator must have read the braille version of the article with his fingers in band-aids or something, it certainly wasn't the same one I read. Sullivan's piece must have been written to both trash Clark (is Mellon-Scaife paying bonuses for that?) and to please his neocon masters in DC.

Clark, to his credit believes in a system of allies and discussion. Sully believes in a system of big sticks, no carrots and thinks Clark a fool for not sharing that belief. Sully somehow misinterprets Clarks cautioned, reasoned approach to that last refuge of the incompetant, violence, as weakness and something to be scoffed at. Well, Sully you sure got me there, I guess that the 300+ dead soldiers, not to mention the dead Iraqis and a destroyed country are empirical proof of the wisdom of your statemanly insights (and those of the 1600 Crew). What a manly man you truly are.

Ah, a newsflash my beagle-loving vapor-locked swooning neocon-wannbe, the world somehow mananged to survive before this schlub who wants to be king showed up. Even his daddy understood the value and use of a multilateralism. It's pretty much a documented fact that the Chimpster is both too stupid to find Baghdad on a map and really doesn't care where it is anyhow, and that you are too blinded by adoration to believe that. The world and my country will survive after his removal from office next year, but as David Gergen once said "...it will take at least 50 years to repair our international relations".

That's the value of talking to 19 other countries before you do something dumb...it's easier to say you're sorry, if you have to say it at all. It's funny how Wesley Clark gets that and you don't, Testoserella.

Remember the other little conflict that gets mentioned here from time-to-time? In that country that pounded the Soviets into submission? Afghanistan? The war we never finished...now the Taliban is claiming the capture of four prisoners, all Americans.

Pakistani as well as the Taliban sources on Wednesday claimed that four US soldiers had been captured by the pro-Taliban elements in Paktia province of Afghanistan on Tuesday night in an attack on a convoy in the mountainous region.

"Our fighters have captured at least four American soldiers in Birmal area of Paktia province on Tuesday night," claimed a pro-Taliban source asking not to be named. Birmal district shares borders with two tribal agencies of Pakistan, North and South Waziristan agencies.

And the 1600 Crew is making noises about Syria and Iran? A half-assed job in Afghanistan, who really knows WTF in Iraq; four POW's (and I'm betting on no "saving Private Lynch" SF "rescue"). Nope, my blast-fax sez: No Quagmires on the Horizon...excuse me while I head over to the 'fridge to get some more kool-aid.

Think that the Talibs would let us trade Bolton, Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz for the four brave Americans in captivity?

What are we, five or so months into the Mesopotamian Misadventure and the troops are already referring to the Iraqi Nationals as "haji's"? Great. All we need to hear is that they are wearing black pj's and coolie hats...oh, burqa's don't count. Good thing, I guess...Now we find out about this.

The commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq said in an interview published Wednesday that U.S. forces, already under pressure from a guerrilla-style resistance, now face revenge attacks from ordinary Iraqis angered by the occupation.
...
``We have seen that when we have an incident in the conduct of our operations, when we killed an innocent civilian, based on their ethic, their values, their culture, they would seek revenge,'' Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez was quoted as telling The Times newspaper in London.

Coalition forces were seeking ``to ensure that when a mistake has been made and when we have inadvertently wound up killing someone that we go and do the right thing culturally to take care of those families.'' The Times' report did not elaborate on those steps.

I hope that one of my favorite John Prine songs doesn't apply to anyone who comes home from that madness...

Sam Stone came home,
To the wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served,
Had shattered all his nerves,
And left a little shrapnel in his knees.
But the morhpine eased the pain,
And the grass grew round his brain,
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back.

There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes,
Jesus Christ died for nothin I suppose.
Little pitchers have big ears,
Don't stop to count the years,
Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.
...
chorus
...
Sam Stone was alone
When he popped his last balloon,
Climbing walls while sitting in a chair.
Well, he played his last request,
While the room smelled just like death,
With an overdose hovering in the air.
But life had lost it's fun,
There was nothing to be done,
But trade his house that he bought on the GI bill,
For a flag-draped casket on a local hero's hill.
...
chorus

Remember the troops, pray, meditate, whatever you do for no one to suffer the fate of a Sam Stone who comes back from that madness.

Snake-Handler Johnny has been ridiculing folks who think he might abuse the only legal abortion he approves of, the PATRIOT Act. Seems that we silly Americans are just too concerned that he might actually use the provisions and powers granted to the Justice Department under that piece of shit to prosecute and even persecute US Citizens...and he wants more. Some kind of wonderful is ol' Johnny...

Ashcroft's comments came after the release yesterday of a memo he wrote disclosing that the Justice Department has never used a controversial section of the Patriot Act that allows authorities in terrorism investigations to obtain records from libraries, bookstores and other businesses without notifying the subject of the probe.
...
The Justice Department did not disclose how many times investigators have used a similar tool, national security letters, to obtain business records. Sources have said that scores of such letters have been used since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Oh, and by the way how does locking up Tommy Chong help you catch Osama bin Laden? Just asking.

This has to be some of the more interesting reporting out of the Washington Post in quite awhile. Seems President No-Jobs screwed up by implementing a decision made by his Political Advisors. No one since Capitan Reynaud is more shocked than me...except maybe, John D'Iulio.

In a decision largely driven by his political advisers, President Bush set aside his free-trade principles last year and imposed heavy tariffs on imported steel to help out struggling mills in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, two states crucial for his reelection.

Eighteen months later, key administration officials have concluded that Bush's order has turned into a debacle. Some economists say the tariffs may have cost more jobs than they saved, by driving up costs for automakers and other steel users. Politically, the strategy failed to produce union endorsements and appears to have hurt Bush with workers in Michigan and Tennessee -- also states at the heart of his 2004 strategy.

My personal guess: our own Short-Bus rider used the same dart board to make this decision that he uses for foreign policy and national security. How does the 1600 Crew explain to the unemployed workers affected by this coldly calculated policy that they just got the ultimate "Lucky Duck" tax-cut...the kind you get when you have no income. I'm sure they appreciate it, you Four-Flusher.

Just like the real soldiers who are fighting the War on Terra™ for your oil buddies at CheneyBurton, these are real people dumped out of work by your cold calculus of power, in the bid for your permanent fascist state...perhaps the darkness is breaking before the date set by your masters, Karl Rove and Tom Delay*.

*apologies to Tolkein

Seems that someone has picked up on the smell of fear wafting off our dear old Auntie, like a flattened skunk on a dark, hot road. All is not well in Iraq, and he wants out...

"It's clear now that Rumsfeld is not interested in 'remaking Iraq'," said Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy analyst at the Washington, DC, office of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. "He wants to get the hell out of there.

I hear Robert McNamara is offering SecDEF interventions...maybe it's time to consider one, eh Donnie? Perhaps just glance at this, take a look, you can buy it there too.

Anyhow, it's planned for Saturday. Drop Mark a line for details...he's a great guy and ready to get into the fray for Clark.

Regime Change in 2004...starts now!

Since when are the French obligated to help us? Granted, you and all your ilk have long maintained the cheese-eating-surrender-monkey theme as a tool for beating up a faithful ally, but now it's gone a bit far. The joke is over. The unilateralist foreign policy of the 1600 Crew has managed to make enemies of the staunchest of allies, and turned the rest into opportunistic "Mouse that Roared" allies. No soveriegn nation "owes" us anything when we behave as arrogant, spoiled children, and yet you seem to believe we have some divine right to their assistance, in any case and for any reason. (a bleg? From Friedman...sorry you didn't write it?)

If France were serious, it would be using its influence within the European Union to assemble an army of 25,000 Eurotroops, and a $5 billion reconstruction package, and then saying to the Bush team: Here, we're sincere about helping to rebuild Iraq, but now we want a real seat at the management table. Instead, the French have put out an ill-conceived proposal, just to show that they can be different, without any promise that even if America said yes Paris would make a meaningful contribution.

One would tend to believe that as someone who is always complaining about being "marginalized" for your personal choices you would understand this. But I guess it's more fun to complain than learn...sorry Sully, you're still a fool, just on a global scale now.

The pay and benefits of the soldiers on the fontlines of the War on Terra™ are still hanging in the balance. All the members of Congress who give lip service to the men and women in the middle-east are showing that they are as full of it as a Christmas Goose...the scheduled "pay cuts" are still slated to go into effect on the First of October (the first day of the new Federal Fiscal Year).

Then there's the loss of income many face because the military doesn't pay as much as the soldiers made in their regular jobs back home. There's uncertainty about how long the soldiers will be gone, and constant fear that a husband or wife will be harmed in the line of duty.

And now, unless Congress renews stipend increases approved in April for soldiers sent away from their families and into a war zone, many are facing a pay cut on Oct. 1.
...
In April, "hostile fire" pay for soldiers in a combat zone rose from $150 to $225 per month, and "separation pay," for soldiers away from families jumped from $100 to $250 a month. Those increases are set to expire Sept. 30.
...
The potential pay cut would represent about one-eighth of the income -- equal to a car payment -- for Emert, the mother of two small children whose husband, Ray, worked as an emergency medical technician for a Springfield hospital before his call-up.

Wesley Clark has announced his candidacy for President. I have to admit I like the guy. If for no other reason than he is scaring the shit out of the Freepers and True Believers who are invested in the current regime...right or wrong. They are trotting out stories of The General's aloofness; his actions at Pristina Airport (where they want us all to believe he wanted to start WW3rd with the Russians); I have seem stories that he is "shallow" (oh, and the moron at Fortress 1600 is what, a blending of Kafka and Socrates incarnate?)

The other theme running wild right now is that Clark has no political experience, and it will handicap him. I would argue that neither did Eisenhower...but he successfully prosecuted a war and was a leader who made the presidency work for him. Granted that the partisan rancor that exists today might not have been as obvious back then, but hey all the end-of-times republicans seem to want to return to the 50's. Elect Clark...a great first step.

It's going to be interesting...the only thing I regret is Clark making his announcement at the same time as Edwards...but it's not like Edwards hasn't been "running" since early this year. Maybe he did it to start building a Clark-Edwards ticket...

I'm getting my popcorn ready and opening my checkbook soon...let's see where the first one goes. Definately to the candidate who seems to be the least influenced by the DLC who's not a republican.

Seriously, what are Short-Bus George and The Dick doing selling different brands of manure in public? The other day the Littlest Dick went on Timmy Russerts show and all but made it clear that Saddam was the primary sponsor of Terrorism in the world and always had been. President Stoned on Camera has numerous times tied that mean old man Saddam to 9-11 by oblique reference and tortured innuendo that must have kept his speechwriters up all night. Little Dick:

Cheney said that "we don't know" if there is a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. He's right only in the sense that "we don't know" if the sun will come up tomorrow. But all the evidence available says it will -- and that Iraq was not involved in Sept. 11.
...
Cheney also cited a supposed meeting in Prague between hijacker Mohamed Atta and a senior Iraqi intelligence officer -- but the FBI concluded that Atta was in Florida at the time of the supposed meeting.

"We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11," Bush told reporters as he met members of Congress on energy legislation.

Wow, do we get to watch them actually eat their young next? It might make a great show on Fox: "When Bad Republican Politicians Eat Their Young". I'd watch, but I think it's already on C-Span.

The Queen of the Dunes has yet another "Award" to pass out for something, oh yeah, it's the "Dowd Award" for (Sully's interpretation of) mangling the facts, something HRH should be pretty fair at spotting, since she practices that art-form continuously. Here's the offending quote:

... $20 billion to be spent on Iraqi infrastructure in the next year amounts to one half of that country's GNP. The scale of generosity boggles the mind - especially since the lion's share of the damage was done by Saddam Hussein, not by the war.

MAT BRIDGE, Iraq - Beneath a bombed-out highway overpass in Iraq's western desert, Ibrahim Jassem is doing his best to head off the next invasion.

If you could always get away with telling the same set of lies over and over and over again...it would be pretty sweet. Pick a lie and keep repeating it...my favorite is "I'm a Uniter not a Divider", but I think maybe that moron at the State Department might have topped it today.

In testimony prepared for a House hearing on Tuesday, John R. Bolton, under secretary of state for arms control, says the administration is also concerned about what it sees as Syria's continuing support for terrorist groups like Hamas, and he reiterated accusations that Syria has an ambitious program to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Sometime tonight Democratic Veteran will pass 40,000 visitors. Thanks to everyone out there for stopping by and taking a few minutes from your day to read and sometimes comment on the posts. I like to read comments from both sides of the aisle, so Thanks!

Again, I'd have never gotten this far without some serious encouragement and having other bloggers recognize Democratic Veteran. To single out a few, Sullywatch (who keeps me honest...thanx SW); TBogg...master of the Snark Universe; Quiddity at Uggabugga...one of the best sources for quick but in-depth reporting and analysis in Left Blogistan and of course everyones favorite Bush Kangaroo...Skippy.

On that note, may I present some new bloggers who I found from sitemeter hits on my site (and via other means...like insomnia surfing); they are now in the Fish Pond. They're pretty new to blogging, but have some great stuff and are worth bookmarking and reading every day. If you need a smile, go checkout Tom Burka's Opinions You Should have...funny, snarky and timely. Tom is not really in the Pond..he's in Fish Humor, but you don't need me to tell you since you'll be bookmarking these folks...right? So, without further ado, here they are:

Naked Furniture
Bolo Boffin
The Eye of the Storm
Opinions You Should Have

I like them all, and am proud to welcome them aboard!

Thanks again, EVERYONE!!!

Thank goodness for Matt Stoller and his blog, "To The Point" (great name, eh?)...he has a piece citing Paul Krugman...and why Krugman maintains it's a power-at-any-cost game for the 1600 Crew.

1) This administration has done really bad and in some cases illegal things and used 9/11 to justify them.

2) Many people will go to jail if Bush loses in 2004.

3) These people will do ANYTHING to see that not happen.

Oh yeah, can I be there when they drag them off in chains, please please please?

Seems that the 1600 Crew wants another list of terrorists and suspected terrorists to be used at Visa Offices, Border Crossings and Airports (internally?...hmmm. Sounds kinda...Soviet to me).

Amid steady criticism of the government's failure to share information both before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration unveiled plans today for a master database of known and suspected terrorists that would be used for background checks at visa offices, border crossings and airports.
...
"We need proper safeguards against abuse for any government database that is proposed," Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "Our greatest concern is that innocent people might be wrongly labeled as terrorists, with little or no recourse to clear their names.

So, if they are really going to have a list, let me nominate some folks who belong on any list of unsavory characters... to "prime the pump", Join in if you want....

• George W. Bush
• George H.W. Bush
• Donald Rumsfeld
• Paul Wolfowitz
• Richard Perle
• John Bolton
• Douglas Feith

Add at your convenience. Last time we did the Blame the Clenis™ list we got some good stuff.

Auntie Donnie is a liar! I can just hear Gomer Pyle in my head...surprahse, surprahse, surprahse!

Perhaps at his announcement tomorrow, the newest candidate (?) will mention that Auntie Donnie just said today:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he has no reason to link Saddam Hussein to the September Eleventh terror attacks.

He was asked about a recent Washington Post poll that found 69 percent believe the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved.

Rumsfeld says he has no indication of that.

Now, we just need to work on the 69 or so percent of the sheeple who still believe that ... you might want to mention that Mr. Clark. A word from you would be worth 10,000 from me.

At 1PM tomorrow, the 17th, Wesley Clark will make his announcement concerning his presidential bid. MSGOP and others have been predicting that he will announce that he is running...remember one thing. the major media once upon a time had Dewey beating Truman. So forgive me a bit of Yogi Berra, "it ain't over 'til it's over", so "I think I'm going to observe a lot by watching"...

It will become more interesting pretty quickly tomorrow. I am sorry that Edwards chose this week to announce, it can't help him. I wonder if this will put some of the short-ball hitters out of the campaign...(don't want to mention names...JL).

Anyhow, just had to get the table o'snarkery up there...can't wait for the first Clark-Smirk debate. You have to know that Unka Karl is shit-faced and sweating tonight...or at least just sweating. Wesley Clark has to be his worst nightmare from the Democratic Party...

A Missouri State Senator Jon Dolan (R), is also a Major in the Army National Guard, and was sent on deployment to GITMO. The good major is a Public Affairs Officer, and should have been a bit more circumspect before this little incident.

Seems that a week or so into his tour in GITMO he was needed back in Missouri to vote on the floor of the senate, to override a veto on a concealed-carry bill, an all-time republican favorite. So the good major got himself a "special leave" to go back and was the vote that broke the veto. Interesting.

State Sen. Jon Dolan, a Republican and a major in the Army National Guard, had been serving at Guantanamo Bay for only two weeks, and military regulations say a newly deployed soldier must be on duty at least two months before getting a leave.
...
"I did my duty and I would do it again," Dolan said. "If my career ends, that's fine. This is simply political retribution."

Dolan received approval for leave from his boss, Lt. Col. Pamela Hart. Burfeind said his leave was granted on a special exception, which is not uncommon.

I wonder how many soldiers in Iraq would like a "special leave" right about now...bet it's more than one. Bet there aren't many granted and I'll bet it's harder than hell to get one. Unless you're Senator/Major/Whatever Jon Dolan.

VP De-Fib makes the talk-show circuit. Says many things. Quiddity has the best chart.

Cheney used the Sunday talk-show circuit to deliver a point-by-point defense of administration policy. He said the rising death toll in Iraq and the rising cost of the war should be balanced against the progress U.S. troops have made in transforming the country into a stable democracy.

"The price that we've had to pay is not out of line, and certainly wouldn't lead me to suggest or think that the strategy is flawed or needs to be corrected," he said on NBC.
...
Cheney's vigorous defense of administration policy was in keeping with his role during the buildup to war, when he was a persistent advocate for ousting Saddam.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us," he said in August 2002, when others were advocating more U.N. weapons inspections.

Note to self, get no medical treatment in the State of Texas...the sheeple voters there just passed a Governor Goodhair led Amendment to their constitution protecting incompetant doctors and donating to insurance companies bottom lines.

The measure, Proposition 12 — one of 22 amendments on the ballot, all of which won voter approval — was supported by the Texas Medical Association and other health care interests, large corporations and the Republican state leadership. Supporters said it would lower medical costs and halt a flight of physicians from Texas.

Insurance companies that made bad investments in the late '90s and the last couple of years have perfect targets in Doctors...they have a pool of folks who have to carry insurance, who work in a perceived "high-risk" profession (gee, Mrs. McGillicudy I did not mean to leave that scapel in there, or "oops, wrong test...missed the cancer, sorry"). Most in fact probably more than 98% of MD's would not make those mistakes...and if they did, then they deserve what they get; they are trained to know better, and to at least be minimally competant (but don't we want more than minimal/marginal competance from our health-care providers?).

The single most cause of rising medical malpractice insurance rates over the last few years has been the insurance companies investing medical insurance premiums in the stock market over the last decade and not in a secure pool to cover medical insurance pay-outs (which have been only about $30,000 per claim, according to a 2001 study by the Consumer Federation of America).

The economy has soured, leading to investment losses and lower porfits for malpractice insurers. To fill the financial void, insurers raised liability premiums for many insurance lines, including big hikes for doctors. In reaction to the steep increases, doctors and insurers have falsely blamed higher premiums on injured patients who exercise their right to seek remedy in the courtroom.

Proponents of this measure somehow claim that it will bring more "affordable" health care to Texas and Texans. Any idiot who voted for this, drop me a line in a year and let me know if the costs associated with medical care decreased as a direct result of this amendment. I'll buy the first Lone Star if you have paid less, or if your Doc has either...

note: I don't even really have a beef with the insurance companies. It's the corruption of the debate by politicians like Perry et al. that have made this possible. What the insurance companies do, they do in their own self-interest like any other business...what the politicians do is screw everyone for their personal self-interest, power and ability to abuse everyone at will. I don't think that any insurance company is even quite as bad as the least corrupt politician (except companies who steal from their customers)...management at any company can change. Corrupt Politicians are, for the most part almost always buttheads and never change.

Seems that the 1600 Crew Commander wants two things from out here in the Rust Belt, money and votes. One he gets by having those famous $2K/head fundraisers and the votes he hopes to get by spewing forth as many pre-scripted lies in sound bites about how he cares about the working man, the environment...awww, isn't that sweet? Well in Michigan today the Chimp went on the warpath against the environment, because, well, the big donors told him to. No surprise.

President Bush defended his proposal to ease industrial pollution rules Monday, saying the regulations would fight dirty air while keeping electricity flowing and Americans working.

The proposed rules would make it easier for thousands of older power plants, refineries, factories, chemical plants and paper mills to make major upgrades without installing costly new anti-pollution controls.

The old rules ``created too many hurdles, and that hurts the working people,''
...
``I'm interested in job creation and clean air, and I believe we can do both,'' he said.

Then he would truly be a bush...

The man who would be emperor, was a "C" student at Yale and proud of it, could not make it past 1st Lieutenant in the Air National Guard (and tree moss can be promotable to Captain, if it doesn't run away); must have paid someone off to do his MBA work at Harvard since no record of exemplars exists prior, and failed at every business opportunity that was not supported by family friends and retainers...pretty accurate biography, eh?

So is this at all surprising for President Dumber-than-Dogshit?

President Bush is stressing that the United States has a clear mission in Iraq to fight terrorists and foster democracy there, yet a new poll shows that fewer than half of Americans share his belief.
...
"We are following a clear strategy with three objectives: destroy the terrorists, enlist international support for a free Iraq and quickly transfer authority to the Iraqi people," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.

• destroy the terroists, no sign that's going at all well. Seems the terrorists are no only striking at will, and getting stronger, but we seem to be helping out their recruiting drive with our outstanding treatment of the Iraqis.
• enlist international support, nope another non-starter Dumbo...seems the International Confectionary Alliance and now the Japanese are still a bit 'worried' about putting their troops into harms way for your war. Imagine that, governments with actual, responsible, adults in charge.
• quickly transfer authority to the Iraqi People, yeah sure. As long as they are not Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and have the last name of Chalabi. If US forces left today, the Iraqis would probably rip that little shit limb-from-limb within 24 hours. Nothing like a marionette with out it's master...you know how that feels everytime you're away from Unka Karl and Unka Dick, right?

Pretty much have to hand out another failing grade. But when your life is one long, sad song in the key of "F", I guess you get pretty inured to the concept.

Seems that not all the civilian masters were signed on for the full invasion package...British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw had offered a "contingency plan" to keep Brit troops on the sidelines and offer only "moral and political support" for the invasion of Iraq. Seems that the Poodle War Cabal is now pooh-poohing Mr. Straw, which in terms of the Brits probably means it's all substantially true.

JACK Straw drew up an 11th-hour plan to keep British troops out of the war in Iraq, it was disclosed yesterday.

The revelation produced panic at the heart of government last night, as senior aides sought to kill off damaging claims that the Foreign Secretary had developed cold feet on the eve of battle.

A source close to Mr Straw said his caution to Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was delivered as a contingency plan and had not been an attempt to undermine Mr Blair’s authority or his stark determination to deal with Saddam Hussein by force.
...
In the correspondence, disclosed in Blair’s Wars, a book by John Kampfner, the political editor of the New Statesman, Mr Straw was said to have pleaded with the Prime Minister to call off the war.

It was claimed he urged Mr Blair to tell George Bush, the United States president, that Britain would offer moral and political support to the US, but no combat troops.

I'm guessing that there were some very high-level threats made here. If our only "ally" in the invasion had gotten cold feet at the last minute, I'm guessing that might have been all she wrote for Swaggering George and he had to get his war on. After all what's a coward without a war? A scared little shit who needs his mommy, that's all. Hugged any mothers yet?

Our Fearless Leader who did his Guard Service on the "Sign and Avoid" Plan, courtesy of Daddy and the good ol' boys. How disgusting, now men and women who can't desert to a friendly senate campaign are still fighting and dying for no reason. He loves war, but he just couldn't be bothered to participate when his number was up.

David Corn of The Nation strikes again (he wrote a particulary nice piece after the Abe Lincoln landing). Corn takes President Crotch-Fruit to task for his lies and more lies (in fact he has a book coming out The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers), in a couple of weeks...note to publisher-type guys...I will not be influenced by free copies!

Bush is in a fix. He's stuck in his Iraqmire. He did not prepare the country for a long drawn-out endeavor in Iraq, which keeps on claiming the lives of Americans. In fact, before the war, some Bush aides claimed that this would be a no-fuss occupation. Now Bush has little choice but to resort to the usual rah-rah about resolve. He points fingers at the international community and the Iraqis, failing, of course, to acknowledge his own miscalculations. And he's looking a tad desperate. Don't expect a Showtime sequel covering Bush's days as an occupier.

Remember when Sally Field said "you love me, you really love me!" it's a good thing she wasn't a veteran who served in the recent past, because she'd get to say "you hate me, you really hate me!" and it would be true...

A Republican proposal on Capitol Hill amounts to "a declaration of war" against disabled military veterans, U.S. Senate Democratic leaders charged in a letter to President Bush on Friday.

The measure, still under review, would limit disability benefits in the future to those who suffer injuries while in the performance of official military duties, aides said.

A congressional Republican aide said, "We're trying to find a common-sense, middle ground to help those hurt in performance of their duties as opposed to those whose injuries were not service-related."

Bush spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the White House had made no proposal on concurrent receipt, but would examine any congressional plan.

"The president is committed to America's service men and women and has taken a lot of actions to help veterans," Buchan said.

Sometimes I get all warm and fuzzy inside when the SCLM says nice things like this:

It was the "stupid" economy that turned Bush the Elder into a one-term president. The country was slogging through an ugly recession at the same point in his administration as in Bush the Younger's right now. Economists were forecasting an upturn, but the electorate was losing patience.

"It's very similar in a lot of ways," said Jay Mueller, economist for Strong Capital Management.

"It's the economy, stupid," became the explanation in 1992 for the president's withering popularity after a successful war in Iraq. Similarly, recent polls are showing the economy is an Achilles heel for the otherwise currently popular president.

The little town of Cambria, California settled with mega-gigantic-humungously-enormous Energy Conglomerate ChevronTexaco for about 10 minutes interest on their in-house petty cash fund (9.1 million bucks) for polluting Cambria's water supply.

ChevronTexaco Corp. has agreed to pay $9.1 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a small California town that accused the petroleum giant of contaminating its water supply with a suspected carcinogen, town officials said on Friday.

After a three-year dispute over the contaminated wells, officials in Cambria, a coastal tourist town of 6,400 about 160 miles north of Los Angeles, approved the settlement on Friday, a spokeswoman for the Cambria Community Service District said.
...
Spaulding said Chevron would continue state-monitored remediation efforts begun in Cambria in 2000 after an underground storage tank at a service station leaked methyl-tertiary-butyl ether into two of the five wells that supply the town with water.

Attorney Steven Williams, who represented the town in the lawsuit filed in May 2001, said the MTBE settlement was one of the largest in the nation on a per capita basis.
...
Cambria officials said the contamination forced them to place a moratorium on water permits in November of 2001, stalling the homebuilding plans of 600 families.

The city has begun plans for a water desalinization plant as a permanent solution for the contaminated wells, which may never reopen, a city spokeswoman said.

Oh, and if you live in Cambria, there's no correlation between that small hike in Gas Prices and this settlement...really really. Move on, nothing to see here.

If it were not for Automantic Transmissions in cars, cell phone users would either have to give it up while driving, or get headsets. How is that law working out in NY? Here in Ohio, which I am convinced has some of the worst drivers in America, the stupid people all seem to drive with their cell phones glued to their faces and try to commit the unnatural act (for them) of driving too. If they had to shift (like I do) they would see the value of a headset, pay attention to the road and not be such putzes simultaneously.

All this was brought on by a particularly stupid driver who faiiled to merge properly onto an interstate from a ramp and ended up getting on at 30 MPH, cell phone attached to head, looking into a personal organizer and driving all at the same time, and being oblivious to cars that were braking, swerving and missing her and each other. Certainly not the only example, but one of the most egregious...with a standard transmission, she would have had to pay attention to her driving more, I think...but I could be wrong.

There ought to be a law.

Browsing through the days news when there's not a lot going on, and the dog wakes you up early it's always fun to find things like this. I am sure that there are at least one or two attorneys who are wishing that they were members of the Egyptian Bar to get in on this as co-counsel.

An Egyptian lawyer said Wednesday he was planning to sue the world's Jews for "plundering" gold during the Exodus from Pharaonic Egypt thousands of years ago, based on information in the Bible.
...
"This is serious, and should not be misread as being political against any race. We are just investigating if a debt is owed," Hilmi told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The relevant passage from the Bible, Exodus 12 verses 35 to 36 reads: "The Israelites had done as Moses told them; they had asked the Egyptians for jewelry of silver and gold, and for clothing. ... And so they plundered the Egyptians." This translation is in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Some Jewish commentators say that while the Biblical passage may be fact, the Hebrews were enslaved by the Egyptians and therefore had a right to claim compensation for wages.
...
Hilmi gave no details of which court he planned to file the case in or whether he thought such a case would be exempt from the sort of statute of limitations that in many countries rules out legal cases after a certain period of time.

He also declined to put a value on the goods "plundered."

And would the defendants be every Jew, everywhere in the world? Or just Egyptian Jews, who obviously never left, so how could they be responsible or have they secereted the treasures of the Pharohs for all these millenia in bus-station lockers or somthing? ba-dee be-dee badee, Thats All Folks....

I guess that not only does Testosterella, Queen of the Dunes have a platinum Blast-Fax subscription, she has also been drinking the Kool-Aid by the pitcherful. In what has to be one of the most egregious 'rewrites' of history according to St. Andrew, or perhaps revisionism would be a better word, she brings up a letter quoted in email written by a young RAF pilot during WWII (that's important context, but Sully seems to think not). The writer of the letter quoted is having a conversation with another pilot about fighting the war against the Third Reich and it went like this:

I would say that I was fighting the war to rid the world of fear - of the fear of fear is perhaps what I mean. If the Germans win this war, nobody except little Hitlers will dare do anything... All courage will die out of the world - the courage to love, to create, to take risks, whether physical or intellectual or moral. Men will hesitate to carry out the promptings of their heart or brain because, having acted, they will live in fear that their action may be discovered and themselves cruelly punished. Thus all love, all spontaneity, will die out of the world. Emotion will have atrophied. Thought will have petrified. The oxygen breathed by the soul, so to speak, will vanish, and mankind will wither.' Peter Pease was killed in action.
Richard Hillary returned to the RAF and was killed in a plane crash during night training. He was 23.

The current theme running around the internet is that republicans just make this shit up. They do, and it starts with Primo Media Whores like Sullivan...a huge megaphone; a teeny brain. Sounds right. I wonder if he's looking for Black Shirts to match his new political views...

Well there's a quote for you. From an Army Colonel stationed in Afghanistan. Wonder who he could be talking about...could it be....SATAN? Close, I suppose.

A videotape broadcast on Al Jazeera television Wednesday apparently shows bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, walking up and down a rocky hill--the type of terrain that could lie on either side of the rugged border area.

But U.S. troops don't have the right to cross the border into Pakistan, and these days the name of bin Laden is rarely mentioned in connection with U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

"I'm not looking for him. I don't believe he's in Afghanistan and I don't believe he's in Paktika province," said Col. Michael Howard, who is in charge of Orgun-E and of two other, smaller bases in the province.

from the Chicago Trib on-line, login gorevidal/gorevidal

If Osama bin Laden had been selling Bongs on the internet, Snake-Handler Johnny would have had his ass locked up now.

If Osama bin Laden were a pornographer, making hard-core adult films, he'd be facing prosecution right now.

If Osama bin Laden had been an corporate officer of Enron, he would either have cut a sweetheart plea-bargin, or still be free waiting for that ex-post facto legislation to pass that would make all his Enron crimes legal, or the statute of limitations will run on them

If Osama bin Laden had erected a granite memorial to the Koran in a state building, but was a republican leaning-fundamentalist, he'd have people protesting on his behalf, when the courts ordered it removed.

All those folks in real life are either getting zealously prosecuted (or have been), or are geting a pass from the 1600 Crew. ObL is none of those things, he's only the worst mass-murderer in the history of America, and he gets a pass for it. Is it because he's a bin Laden and a FOB? (Friend of Bush) or is it because it's no fun to hunt for someone when they really, really don't want to be caught and you don't want to catch them?

Is the flame flickering in Arlington tonight? Jack Kennedy's sister, Eunice just endorsed her son-in-law for Governor. I am pretty sure that there's a lot of corpse-twirling going on in cemetaries around the US tonight. A Kennedy endorses a republican...cats and dogs living together....

A Kennedy has finally found a Republican to vote for. President John F. Kennedy's sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, came out on Wednesday to back her son-in-law, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as California governor -- even though her famous Democratic family has long battled Republicans.

"I think he'd be a very good governor. He's been committed to people all his life, since the day he first arrived here, he's been a success with people," Shriver, 82, told reporters before Schwarzenegger met with experts on education policy.

I just can't get my mind around this. There has to be either a breaking point or a stopping point. If the SCLM will not explain the lack of connection between Iraq and 9-11, I don't know who will. But for the average Iraqi, I don't think it can happen soon enough. Imagine yourself as this Iraqi:

Dr. Talib Abdul Jabar Al Sayeed was asleep at home with 11 relatives, he said, when U.S. troops surrounded his house, stormed his gate and began firing.
At least three dozen American soldiers blazed away for more than 60 minutes in the early morning hours of July 31, the British-trained physician recounted recently, pointing to the hundreds of bullet holes that still mark his stately home.
...
Eventually, Al Sayeed said, the commanding officer told him he was sorry: They had raided the wrong house. But not before a soldier burst in and struck Al Sayeed with a rifle butt, knocking him down. The soldier kicked him in the ribs - an X-ray later showed they were cracked - and others bound his hands with plastic cuffs as his wife and young nieces cowered in the next room. They also took his three grown sons in for questioning, and they remain in a military jail in the south of Iraq.
...
Military officials acknowledge that there have been mistakes, but say that raids, arrests and accidental deaths of civilians, while regrettable, are the harsh realities of guerrilla war.

Asked about the issue at a recent news conference, L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, said, "The loss of life is a tragedy for anyone involved, but the numbers are really very low." (empahsis added)

When questioned about the basis for that assertion, Bremer acknowledged that he couldn't say how many civilians coalition troops had killed.

Gee, General Sanchez sir, I wonder why. It's obvious that you better give up plans for that second career in Rocket Science. Right Now.

When do we roll out "Operation Phoenix - Iraq 2003" again?

Terry over at Nitpicker has been having a dust-up with the Editorial folks at the Washington Post over a small inaccuracy. Go read his story and drop the droids at the Post a note...I know, they publish Howie the Whore, but maybe once they'll be F&B too.

Write Early, Write Often.

Nothing like a journalist doing their job. Here's a link (via Buzzflash) to an article written by a Pulitizer Prize winner, delineating the Prevarications of Powell (not like he has never lied before, right?). The whole article is here, but enjoy this:

ALUMINUM TUBES: Powell said "most United States experts" believed aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were intended for use as centrifuge cylinders for enriching uranium for nuclear bombs.
Energy Department experts and Powell's own State Department intelligence bureau had already dissented from this CIA view... No centrifuge program has been reported found.

---

REVIVED NUCLEAR PROGRAM: "We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program," Powell said.
On July 24, Foreign Minister Ana Palacio of Spain, a U.S. ally on Iraq, said there was "no evidence, no proof" of a nuclear bomb program before the war. No such evidence has been reported found since the invasion.

---

ANTHRAX: Powell noted Iraq had declared it produced 8,500 liters of the biological agent anthrax before 1991. None has been "verifiably accounted for," he said.
No anthrax has been reported found, post-invasion. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in a confidential report last September (five months before the Powell speech) said that although it believed Iraq had biological weapons it didn't know their nature, amounts, or condition.

---

UNMANNED AIRCRAFT: Powell showed video of an Iraqi F-1 Mirage jet spraying "simulated anthrax." He said four such spray tanks were unaccounted for, and Iraq was building small unmanned aircraft "well suited for dispensing chemical and biological weapons."
According to U.N. inspectors' reports, the video predated the 1991 Gulf War, when the Mirage was said to have been destroyed, and three of the four spray tanks were destroyed in the 1990s. No small drones or other planes with chemical-biological capability have been reported found in Iraq since the invasion.

Sully has it in for Fred Kaplan's generally correct assesment that the 1600 Crew's unilateralist World View has cost us dearly, both in terms of our long-standing alliances, but even in terms of support from those who were not 'our friends' but were sympathetic and even trying to be helpful after 9-11.

If there's one truly pathetic anti-war line being peddled right now, it is that the Bush administration tragically "blew" the world-wide sympathy for Americans in the wake of 9/11. How did they DO this? By allegedly refusing allied support in Afghanistan and Iraq, sidelining the U.N., acting all "unilateral," and ... well, you've probably listened to enough NPR to finish the sentence. Fred Kaplan in Slate lays it on with a trowel this week.

Well the republicans are back at it again, questioning the Patriotism of the dissenters, in the little circus on the Hill yesterday here's John Cornyn (R-Really Stupid Texan) berating Teddy Kennedy, every brain-dead republicans favorite target:

“The American people understand that we are engaged already in the presidential election and that there are those who criticize the president’s handling of the war in Iraq in order to gain political advantage,” Cornyn said. “I find something unsavory about comments of those who seek political advantage in questioning our commitment to our troops.”

While Cornyn named no names, he may have had in mind Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who had charged earlier in the hearing that it was “unforgivable” that Pentagon planners had not figured out how to prevent attacks on American soldiers.

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy... But before we get deeper embroiled into this Balkan quagmire, I think that an assessment has to be made of the Kosovo policy so far. President Clinton has never explained to the American people why he was involving the U.S. military in a civil war in a sovereign nation, other than to say it is for humanitarian reasons, a new military/foreign policy precedent."

Tom Delay -- Congressional Record, "Removal of United States Armed Forces from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," 4/28/99

Election year politics be damned...it's STFU or else (again). Don't they ever get tired of looking like Unka Karls Ass-Monkeys?

I guess that even the republicans don't seem to remember one of the immutable laws of nature: what goes up, must come down.

Assume the positon of amazed-face, everyone because...Enron Execs Were Greedy!

A Justice Department task force is preparing a critical new phase of its criminal investigation of Enron Corp., focusing on whether former executives of the Houston energy trader manipulated its profits to inflate the company's stock price and deceive investors, according to people close to the case.
...
In its indictments of Glisan and former Enron chief financial officer Andrew S. Fastow, the government contended that personal greed was a driving motive in the secretive off-the-books deals they created. In other cases, prosecutors charged that executives who led the company's failed Internet broadband venture distorted its performance to win bigger bonuses.

Simply amazing. When do we get the dirt on Kenny-boy? Right before the election next year? He'll probably use the Clenis™ made-me-do-it defense.

Driving home today, I was thinking about the scene from Python's "Life of Brian" where Brian is caught writing on a wall by a centurion. Sure enough, if your Google it, you come up with the scene "Romanes Eunt Domus"...the link will take you there to read the whole thing. Baghdad, anyone?

CENTURION:What's this, then? 'Romanes Eunt Domus'? 'People called Romanes they go the house'?
BRIAN:It-- it says, 'Romans, go home'.
CENTURION: No, it doesn't. What's Latin for 'Roman'? Come on!
BRIAN: Aah!
CENTURION:Come on!
BRIAN: 'R-- Romanus'?
CENTURION:Goes like...?
BRIAN: 'Annus'?
CENTURION: Vocative plural of 'annus' is...?
BRIAN: Eh. 'Anni'?
CENTURION: 'Romani'. 'Eunt'? What is 'eunt'?
BRIAN: 'Go'. Let--
CENTURION: Conjugate the verb 'to go'.
BRIAN: Uh. 'Ire'. Uh, 'eo'. 'Is'. 'It'. 'Imus'. 'Itis'. 'Eunt'.
CENTURION: So 'eunt' is...?
BRIAN: Ah, huh, third person plural, uh, present indicative. Uh, 'they go'.
CENTURION: But 'Romans, go home' is an order, so you must use the...?
BRIAN: The... imperative!
CENTURION: Which is...?
BRIAN: Umm! Oh. Oh. Um, 'i'. 'I'!
CENTURION: How many Romans?
BRIAN: Ah! 'I'-- Plural. Plural. 'Ite'. 'Ite'.
CENTURION: 'Ite'.
BRIAN: Ah. Eh.
CENTURION: 'Domus'?
BRIAN:Eh.
CENTURION: Nominative?
BRIAN: Oh.
CENTURION: 'Go home'? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
BRIAN: Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the... accusative! Accusative! Ah! 'Domum', sir! 'Ad domum'! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
CENTURION: Except that 'domus' takes the...?
BRIAN: The locative, sir!
CENTURION: Which is...?!
BRIAN: 'Domum'.
CENTURION: 'Domum'.
BRIAN: Aaah! Ah.
CENTURION: 'Um'. Understand?
BRIAN: Yes, sir.
CENTURION: Now, write it out a hundred times.
BRIAN: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
CENTURION: Hail Caesar. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
BRIAN: Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar and everything, sir! Oh. Mmm!

Finished! ROMAN SOLDIER STIG:
Right. Now don't do it again.

Congress. Today. Wolfowitz & Co. make an appearance. Here's a statement that Wolfie made:

... Mr. Wolfowitz urged lawmakers to give the Pentagon the authority to transfer to civilian or contract workers as many as 300,000 administrative positions now performed by military personnel.

This technique shall henceforth be known as the back-door bullshit method of getting what you want. No more troops, until you pass out more money to our defense contractor buddies, and then we get to hold the purse strings, not you you silly congressional ka-nig-its. We, the PNAC fart in your general direction (with our trained and tamed General Direction).

If this plan works, it might mean a shift in the way that we do business, along with that new Army plan, to copy the Marines "every man is a Rifleman" thing (hey, it convinced me that Quantico was not for me, Fly Navy Baby...I was lucky to qualify with an M-16 and a .45), on paper they could completely achieve manpower levels imaginable only in the most fevered moments of the Reagan Presidency (you remember that, right? The 600 ship Navy was my introduction to credit-card conservatism, don't know what the Army's version was...I think the AF had B-2's and "SDI").

Andrew Sullivan is a disgusting, stupid m*****f*****. Is that plain enough or do I need to be any more graphic? This is not a family blog, so no apologies, the adults out there will all figure out the word...Now why is the Queen of The Dunes that word? Because in his Sunday Times piece he actually explains why he believes in the "flypaper" theory of Iraq, why it was a good thing that President Mission-not-Accomplished said "bring 'em on" and tries to give it credibility by sourcing as someone "close to the inner circles of the Bush administration". Right. How about we name our sources, Andy? I'd be thrilled to know which genius at the 1600 Crew let the cat out of the bag to you in advance of the rest of us. Obviously. you have a greater need-to-know than the rest of the population in general, I guess.

But as the weeks and months have gone by, that conversation has stuck by me. It wasn't a retroactive justification of the mixture of progress and chaos we now see in the Sunni regions of Iraq - so I couldn't dismiss it as desperate post-hoc spin. If it wasn't a central part of the strategy from the beginning, it was surely a Plan B. And from statements from key Bush officials in the past couple of months, it's clear that it's now very close to Plan A.
...
The extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel. A key objective of the current U.S. strategy is to show that Israel is not the fundamental cause of instability and mayhem in the Middle East - but a victim of the same kind of pathological religious extremism that has destroyed Iran, brutalized Afghanistan and blackmailed Saudi Arabia. Before the Iraq war, the U.S. could do little to counter these maniacs directly. Now they have a theater of war - and it isn't the West Bank.

If it were not for Sully's admitted sexual orientation, and his HIV status, I would suggest that he might enjoy spending a year or so in the deserts of Iraq, anyone with his obvious connections could probably get an age waiver to become an infantryman...I feel certain there are about 130,000 or so men and women who would be happy to give Sully their billet and head for the world. Unfortunately he has self-selelcted himself out of the candidate pool, and can only urge death and destruction from the sidelines. As we get Vietnam II from Dear Unelected Leader, I guess we can thank fools (and tools) like Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew Sullivan, failed cub reporter. Feeding his delusions, one lie at a time.

From the Washinton Post online:

First, I have to hope to the Hairy Thunderer that the "nearby countries" are not Syria or Iran.

Second, now that picture that was circulating around the internet with the truck that had the sign on it that said "one weekend a month, two weeks a year, my ass" can't be more true (not to mention prescient) than anyone knew.

Third, I can't help but think that the 1600 Crew isn't revving-up their Capitol Hill liason folks to get the Selective Service system out of mothballs and start getting the word "conscript" (draft for the dictionary-impaired out there) back in to the lexicon of lies that spews forth already.

Wow. So, an Army of One...Year.

A couple of my commentors seem to think that naivete runs rampant here in The Pond, despite the obvious intelligence and sophistication shown by the denizens of the deep who stop by here from time to time...so I just wanted to assure them that yes, Short-Bus George has in fact lied. Here are a couple of references, you can Google for more, since I have a blog to naively run...

3. "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." And, "[Saddam Hussein is] a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda." These two Bush remarks go hand in hand, even though the first was said on March 17, 2003, two days before Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, and the other came during a November 7, 2002, press conference. Together they represented his argument for war: Hussein possessed actual weapons of mass destruction and at any moment could hand them to his supposed partners in al Qaeda. That is why Hussein was an immediate threat to the United States and had to be taken out quickly. But neither of these assertions were truthful. There has been much media debate over all this. But the postwar statements of Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, provide the most compelling proof. He has been conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, and he has told reporters that the intelligence on Hussein’s WMDs was full of caveats and qualifiers and based mostly on inferential or circumstantial evidence. In other words, it was not no-doubt material. He also has said that prewar intelligence reports did not contain evidence of links between Hussein and al Qaeda. The best information to date indicates that the prewar intelligence did not leave "no doubt" about WMDs and did not support Bush’s claim that Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda. Bush’s primary reason for war was founded on falsehoods

2. "We found the weapons of mass destruction." Bush issued this triumphant remark in late May 2003, while being interviewed by a Polish television reporter. He was referring to two tractor-trailers obtained by U.S. forces in Iraq. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded these vehicles were mobile bio-weapons plants. Yet they had found not a trace of biological agents on either. (And no bio-weapon facility could be scrubbed completely clean.) In subsequent weeks, it turned out that State Department analysts and even DIA engineering experts—as well as outside experts—did not accept the CIA and DIA conclusion, and some of these doubters believed the explanation of Iraqis who claimed the trucks were built to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. Whichever side might be ultimately right about the trailers, this all-important piece of evidence was hotly contested. It was hardly solid enough to support Bush’s we-found-them declaration or to justify a war.

It would be most boring world if it were all Wonder Bread at the Mega-Mart, wouldn't it?

I have always been one to hold that as long as this stupid doctrine of preemption exists, the individual soldiers in Iraq are not to blame for the dishonor brought on them by the criminal 1600 Crew, The PNAC and those who have foisted this war off on everyone, and I say everyone, because it's going to be a more global problem than anyone wants to admit before the year is out (you read that here first...ok?)

All that being said, here are two more pointless deaths to lay at the doorstep of the 1600 Crew. Somehow, I don't think that anyone at Fortress 1600 will lose any sleep over it, but they should. Vietnam Anyone?

Farah Fadhil was only 18 when she was killed. An American soldier threw a grenade through the window of her apartment. Her death, early last Monday, was slow and agonising. Her legs had been shredded, her hands burnt and punctured by splinters of metal, suggesting that the bright high-school student had covered her face to shield it from the explosion.

She had been walking to the window to try to calm an escalating situation; to use her smattering of English to plead with the soldiers who were spraying her apartment building with bullets.

But then a grenade was thrown and Farah died. So did Marwan Hassan who, according to neighbours, was caught in the crossfire as he went looking for his brother when the shooting began.

When the Americans arrived, say neighbours, the residents of this cluster of blocks liked the young GIs. They say there were no problems and that their children played with the troops, while residents would give them food as the patrols passed by.

But all that came to a sudden bloody end at 12.30am last Monday, when soldiers arrived outside the apartment block where Farah and her family lived. What happened in a few minutes, and in the chaos of the hours that followed, is written across its walls. The bullet marks that pock the walls are spread in arcs right across the front of the apartment house, so widely spaced in places that the only conclusion you can draw is that a line of men stood here and sprayed the building wildly.
...
This is what the residents, and local police, told us had happened. Inside the apartment with Farah were her mother and a brother, Haroon, 13. As the soldiers started smashing doors, they began to kick in Farah's door with no warning. Panicking, and thinking that thieves were breaking into the apartment, Haroon grabbed a gun owned by his father and fired some shots to scare them off. The soldiers outside responded by shooting up the building and throwing grenades into Farah's apartment.

I can't blame the soldiers who certainly expected no return fire, but how many of folks out there would expect to have their houses broken into in the middle of the night by armed men? The NR-freaking-A would have fits if anyone in this country would try and "disarm" families who owned guns, or even make the suggestion, and probably for just this reason...home "protection". Gee, how ironic. Despite all the rationalizations in this country by conviction-hungry prosecutors, I have a really hard time blaming a scared 13 year-old.

There has to be someone responsible for this, and it's the 1600 Crew. We have no business there, if we were not there, these two would both be enjoying the same sunrise we will tomorrow. But for a pack of lies, they will see only darkness.

So during the "speech", if I had heard the Ass Whistle one more time that there was a connection between Terra™ and Iraq, I was pretty sure I was going to engage in some serious projectile vomiting...not a pretty picture, but dead-on accurate. I told Mrs. Fish I'd give her $10 if I heard the name Osama bin Laden, guess I get to have my lunch money this week. Among the little gems

``Our strategy in Iraq has three objectives: destroying the terrorists, enlisting the support of other nations for a free Iraq and helping Iraqis assume responsibility for their own defense and their own future,'' Mr. Bush said.

The president said he would ask the United Nations for additional international troops for Iraq, a recognition that the administration cannot unilaterally maintain its current level of 181,000 American troops in both Iraq and neighboring Kuwait.

``From the outset, I have expressed confidence in the ability of the Iraqi people to govern themselves,'' Mr. Bush said. ``Now they must rise to the responsibilities of a free people, and secure the blessings of their own liberty.''

It's hard to believe that there are still people out there who can marginally connect the former Iraqi regime to present day al-Qaeda. But the Wurlitzer is pumping mighty hard to make it so...

We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia. It's becoming more true by the day.

The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:

2+2=5

87 Billion for what?

Despite te obvious complications of sending members of the First Family into "harms way", (does that count for the Commander in Chief...always wondered?) there's this:

"Two years ago, I told the Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front. Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there, and there they must be defeated. This will take time, and require sacrifice. Yet we will do whatever is necessary, we will spend what is necessary, to achieve this essential victory in the war on terror, to promote freedom, and to make our Nation more secure."

Even out at Twenty-Nine Palms.

Sacrifice my ass, this Psycho President is only worried about sacrifice if it means losing money (again) on a bidness deal, or having to give up being President next year. I think he's just started to seal his fate as a one-termer...

Is the weather getting a little too warm in republican-land? The cheerleaders insufficiently happy? Perhaps. Here's a little something that's kind of telling...

A veteran Republican senator said privately that he fears Democrats will turn Ronald Reagan's question -- Are you better off now than you were four years ago? -- against Bush by asking Americans if they feel safer now than they did four years ago.

Bush's own words could come back to haunt him. He vowed to get bin Laden "dead or alive" and taunted Saddam Hussein's followers in Iraq by saying, "Bring 'em on."

Whistle-Ass goes on TV tonight in fact and in fiction...at 8:30 he's going to read us the cue-cards prepared by Unka Karl and the committee to re-elect him, explaining why he's really a good guy and should be trusted to take our country forward, and why it might have been a mistake to dis all our allies (you know, the International Confectioners Alliance).

Analysts called the address an attempt by Bush to take command at a time when his justification for the war has proved factually flawed, his planning for the occupation is being criticized as inadequate, and Iraq is beset by rising sectarianism, sabotage and chaos.
...
"This is typical Bush: 'I know what's right, here is what's right, you have to do what I tell you to do,'" Daalder said. "They think they can fix this with a speech instead of doing the hard work of traveling to these countries and convincing them that we're willing to listen to their point of view and figure out what they need for us to do in order for us to do this together."

Meanwhile the mythical Runaway-Rabbit will be portrayed on Showtime, you know the one who wanted to let the "Tin-Horn Terrorists" come a get him at home. This is the same guy who has had all the National Airspace rules changed to make prohibited area around him bigger and more onerous for everyone, since he's a little coward. "...I'll just be waiting for the bastard". What a crock.

On one channel tonight, we can watch the iconic side of the Bush presidency. In the risibly revisionist Showtime movie "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," George W. Bush is Vin Diesel-tough as he battles terrorists. "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come get me," the fictional president fictionally snaps on Air Force One after the 9/ll attacks. "I'll just be waiting for the bastard."

Whistle Ass promised tons of money to fight AIDS in Africa...but recently reneged, because they "don't have the infrastructure" or some such bullshit. Now he promises money to Afghanistan to help them rebuild

President Bush is planning soon to announce a doubling of this year's aid to Afghanistan in an effort to make visible improvements in the lives of the Afghan people before the country's first elections, scheduled for June.
...
U.S. officials acknowledge that aid efforts in Afghanistan leveled off while the United States was preoccupied with the war in Iraq. But they reiterate that the United States will not repeat the mistake it made by abandoning Afghanistan to chaos after the Soviet Union ended its occupation in 1989.

Never let it be said that the resident evil in the beltway will miss an opportunity to lie, cheat and steal from the US taxpayers at an exponentially increasing rate when able. Blah3 points us to a story that is enough to make you think, "Oh, big-ass error, but go fix the problem all will be well", until you realize soldiers lives are involved and The Carlyle Group (hence the Whistle Ass Family) makes money off this no matter what...check this out:

The Bush administration’s military predicament in Iraq has suddenly gotten worse.
...
JUST A MONTH before the next U.S. Army unit is due to deploy in Iraq to relieve the hard-pressed forces already there, the military is confessing to a potential showstopper. The deploying unit’s new armored vehicles may have faulty armor which would leave them vulnerable to machine-gun fire and to the rocket-propelled grenades that are the Iraq insurgents’ favorite weapon.
...
Unlike the massively thick steel that tanks are made from, the 19-ton Stryker has a light steel and aluminum structure. But this is clad in 130 ceramic tiles, supposedly tough enough stop heavy machine-gun fire and deflect the blast of incoming RPGs. More than 600 Strykers have been built by General Dynamics, which has a $4 billion contract to produce 2,100 in all. But the ceramic armor tiles are produced for GD by a German subcontractor. The problem arose when the German firm apparently changed the mix of ingredients in the tiles. (The firm could not be reached for comment.)

Who loses? The Soldiers unlucky enough to be stuck like spam-in-a-can in one of these things; and we do as taxpayers (again).

Who wins? General Dynamics, who I'm sure will self-righteously accuse the German subs of malfeasance then ask for more money to fix this. Bet we can take that to the bank.

Here's Dan Rather behaving almost like a journalist (he was one once, before he sold his soul to the drivel)...he's interviewing our favorite Auntie, let's see what Donnie has to say:

Rather: I want to read you something said by Retired General Anthony Zinny, whom you know well.

Rumsfeld: I don't know him well.

Rather: He said, "My contemporaries and sensitivities were forged on the battle fields of Vietnam where we saw the garbage and the lies and we saw the sacrifice." And I ask you, is it happening again?

Rumsfeld: Of course not. There were a lot of people who were affected by Vietnam and see everything through that prism. I think that would be a misunderstanding.

Rather: Now William Kristol, no one accuses him of not being a supporter of President Bush. I want to give you a chance to answer his criticism and there's no other way to describe it.

Rumsfeld: Hey you're really reaching in the duffle bag Dan.

Rather: Well it's not in the duffle bag it's in the newspapers. Bill Kristol, him you do know?

Rumsfeld: I do know him.

Rather: He says, "Rumsfeld lost credibility with the White House because he screwed up post-war planning." His words not mine. "He wanted to do the post-war with fewer troops than many people advised and that turned out to be a mistake." Now Mr. Secretary, you know I don't have any joy in putting that quote in front of you, but what are the American people to make of that?

Rumsfeld: I don't know. (long pause) I guess what I would say is the Combatant Commander Tommy Franks, succeeded by general John Abizaid and General Sanchez here with the responsibility for this particular country of Iraq all have indicated that the level of troops are exactly what they believe is appropriate, what they requested. And I therefore would suggest that the individual you are quoting will prove to have been wrong.

If you ever needed more evidence that there need to be incarcerated republicans, just follow the bouncing ball...they are burying themselves, one dead and wounded soldier at a time...all that needs to happen is for the election to go south on them next year, and we can watch all these criminals get frog-marched off to Leavenworth, where they belong.

Sidenote: this particular crime family does have a history of Pardoning their Secretarys of Defense...so Auntie Donnie might be sending postcards to all his PNAC buddies in stir.

It's too bad that whilst you were out sunning yourself on the beaches and porches of P-town, hunting down with that inimitable newshawk nose of yours the other four Chimp supporters in town (c'mon, there really were none, you're just making that up to be more....fair and balanced, right?). You missed the little events over in the land of your birth, you know Gilligans Island.

As good as you are at denial, it's tough to get by a couple of facts. Alastair Campbell cut and ran, performing a George Tenet, except the Poodle met him at the front door of No. 10 Downing with a cardboard box, a kiss on the cheek and a swift kick in the ass...miss that one?

The inquiry has heard a host of evidence shedding light on the key role Mr Campbell has played at the heart of Tony Blair's government.

He not only chaired meetings in the run-up to the publication of the controversial Iraq weapons dossier, but was also involved as Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence debated how to proceed once Dr David Kelly came forward to admit to speaking to BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.

I think you can apply for Alastair Campbell's job, not sure if they'd let you telecommute from P-town, but the vacation benefits are pretty good, the Poodle just did a month in Barbados...I think they'd quarantine the beagle, though.

Previously Noted: Auntie Donnie went to Baghdad, a-riding in a C-17. Dropped in to chat up Jerry at the Palace, get a quick chukka of Polo, with the good Viceroy; I am sure that the locals just flooded the grounds to see the demi-emeperor astride the magnificent Arabians sent over by that well-known Arab family, the bin Ladens.

American Service Personnel were not invited to the little tete-a-tete however. Speaking out of the range of their minders, they had comments like this for the demi-emperor:

"I don't give a damn about Rumsfeld. All I give a damn about is going home," Specialist Rue Gretton said, humping packs of water bottles on his shoulders from a truck.

"The only thing his visit meant for us was we had to clean up a lot of mess to make the place look pretty. And he didn't even look at it anyway," Gretton said after soldiers swept the dusty streets around the complex of lakes and mansions.
...
Rumsfeld has been criticized for sending too few troops to Iraq leaving them stretched thin on extended deployments trying to help rebuild the country and fight a guerrilla war. He has urged allies to supply some 15,000 additional troops and hopes training Iraqi forces will ease the burden on U.S. troops.

When the Armed Forces Network showed earlier footage of Rumsfeld saying that fresh U.S. troops were unnecessary in Iraq, soldiers at the base threw their hands in the air and shouted "No way" at the television.

"I ain't happy. No way am I happy seeing that," said Specialist Devon Pierce, whose wife was due to give birth to his first son in two weeks. "This tour is hard, real hard. It's too much. It should be six months."

Other soldiers said they could not complain openly about their long deployment for fear of being disciplined. ...

Seriously, this asshole drops into Iraq for a day, determines everything is 'okey-dokey' and heads out? I heard he went and visited a field hospital and took a night helicopter ride over Baghdad and declared that it looked like Chicago at night. Which night, the one that Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over the lantern?

Found this interview, off of CNBC(?) with President Questionable Smarts and some idiot named Ron Insana, whose talent must be on loan from Faux News. He asks Chimpy a whole bunch of softball questions (preapproved by Unka Karl, I'm sure) then he hits this one:

Insana: Just one more question about the deficit. In your State of the Union Address in 2002 you suggested that deficits would be short-term and small.

Bush: Yeah.

Insana: Is it entirely Congress's fault that they have gotten as big as they have been and are projected to last for maybe a few years longer than people had anticipated?

Bush: No, it's nobody's fault, in the sense that half the deficit was caused by a recession. In other words, when you have a recession, there's less revenues coming into the Treasury. You know that.

And about half of the projected deficits were caused by the recession. Half, a quarter of the deficit was caused by the fact that I requested, and Congress spent, enough money to win the war on terror. And my attitude is, if we're going to put people in harm's way, then, we need to spend the money necessary for them to succeed. We're at war. We're at war against some pretty tough characters who hate America, and therefore we need to put the money up in order to win this war, in order to make sure America is more secure. I will not forget the lessons of September the 11th, 2001.

And then about a quarter of the deficit was caused by the tax relief, and the tax relief was necessary to get the economy up and running. Now, some have said, "Well, we didn't need tax relief. We should have let the recession run its course." In other words, a steep recession would have meant a quicker rebound.

The problem with that argument is that the additional million or so people that would have been laid off would have hurt, and I care about those people, and therefore I was happy and pleased the recession was shallow. I mean, when you talk recession, you can't, I don't think in clinical terms. I think of it in terms about whether or not a person can put food on their table for their family. And so the tax cuts were necessary to not only shallow out the recession but to provide the necessary moment for economic growth. There's other things that have to happen, but, no, we did the right thing, absolutely did the right thing.

Now Insana wants to know about Al-Qaeda:

Insana: I mean, with respect to that, how do you feel about the current risks at a time where we are coming up on with September 11th anniversary, and the end of summer seems to be sometimes a more dangerous period than others?

Bush: It is, yeah. Listen, we're at risk. I can't quantify the risk, but we're still at war and that's why I say we're at risk. There are elements of al Qaeda still moving around. We've done a pretty darn good job of dismantling a lot of the al Qaeda network. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Bakar, Abu Zubaydah, these were all mid-level operators. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is a little bigger than mid-level. I mean, they're, it's like the executive vice presidents of corporate America are being detained.

You know, we're doing a good job of bringing them in, and to this day we're on the hunt. We're on the hunt for al Qaeda in parts of Afghanistan. We're in the hunt for al Qaeda in Iraq. We're in a hunt for al Qaeda in other parts of the world, and we're bringing them in one-by-one. And that's the kind of war we're in.

And so, so long as there's an enemy out there moving around, there's risk. I can't quantify the risk.

But the planners, those who want to spend capital, need to know this administration will provide our military and our intelligence-gatherers with the tools necessary to win the war, and we'll stay on the offensive. I mean, the way to win this war is not to, you know, hope that the terrorists change their attitude.

The way to win the war is to find them before they hit us, and that's exactly what we're going to do, so long as I'm holding the office of president.

Notice that not once, did the name Osama bin Laden pop into that soliliquy. Let's all do this poor schmuck a favor and remove him from worrying about the bad men, as he says he'll keep on screwing this up as long as he's president...

Regime Change in 2004

What a concept...

Iraq, our own Northern Ireland.

Three gunmen opened fire Friday at a Sunni mosque in Baghdad as worshippers were leaving after morning prayers, wounding three people, one critically, according to Iraqi police and witnesses

So it was only a semi-circular firing squad. At least they all managed to trash the Deserter-in-Chief for something, mostly "safe" subjects like the economy, and not keeping too many of his promises on domestic issues. Reading the account of the first Democratic Debate is less than inspiring...to borrow from a movie title: sounds like a bunch a white guys (and Ms. Moseley-Braun...now there's a vanity run for office, if there every was one) sittin' 'round and talkin'. Bob Graham. to his credit seems no worse for the wear for his non-support of the resolution allowing the qWagmire to proceed at flank speed, he pledged to support the pending request for $70,000,000,000 (is that the correct number of zeros for Seventy Billion?) Just checking, had to see it.

If Wesley Clark would just get the hell off the coy and shy routine, this might actually turn into a race...Rhodes Scholar, Impeccable Credentials, and The Man on National Security (supposedly our biggest failing, we Dems don't love America enough, you know).

When there are so many candidates that the average disinterested voter can't name one in the "instant on" age of information, sheeple need it simple and easily explainable...you know sort of fair and balanced.... it's not a good thing. There will be only one annointed republican candidate next year and you can believe that even the most disinterested and disengaged moron has heard his name...he's not quite Voldemort, but we still don't speak it here needlessly.

Hmmmm...Chimp = Voldemort...nah, Voldemort's smarter.

So I have a new name for our beloved second-generation Wholly-Owned 1600 Crew Secretary of State...Me Lie? Powell. Comes from this, which if you have never seen it, it's a troubling indicator of his future truth-telling abilities. Although we now now how good those are...

But a test soon confronted Maj. Powell. A letter had been written by a young specialist fourth class named Tom Glen, who had served in an Americal mortar platoon and was nearing the end of his Army tour. In a letter to Gen. Creighton Abrams, the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, Glen accused the Americal division of routine brutality against civilians. Glen's letter was forwarded to the Americal headquarters at Chu Lai where it landed on Maj. Powell's desk.
...
The letter's troubling allegations were not well received at Americal headquarters. Maj. Powell undertook the assignment to review Glen's letter, but did so without questioning Glen or assigning anyone else to talk with him. Powell simply accepted a claim from Glen's superior officer that Glen was not close enough to the front lines to know what he was writing about, an assertion Glen denies.
After that cursory investigation, Powell drafted a response on Dec. 13, 1968. He admitted to no pattern of wrongdoing. Powell claimed that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were taught to treat Vietnamese courteously and respectfully. The Americal troops also had gone through an hour-long course on how to treat prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, Powell noted.
...
Powell reported back exactly what his superiors wanted to hear. "In direct refutation of this [Glen's] portrayal," Powell concluded, "is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent."
Powell's findings, of course, were false. But it would take another Americal hero, an infantryman named Ron Ridenhour, to piece together the truth about the atrocity at My Lai. After returning to the United States, Ridenhour interviewed Americal comrades who had participated in the massacre.
On his own, Ridenhour compiled this shocking information into a report and forwarded it to the Army inspector general. The IG's office conducted an aggressive official investigation and the Army finally faced the horrible truth. Courts martial were held against officers and enlisted men implicated in the murder of the My Lai civilians.

So there you go. Now you know. Me Lie? Powell, wholly owned and operated for over 12 years now...

Guess who went to Iraq today? Why it's Auntie Donnie...and what's he doing there? Playing Kindly Overlord for the Iraqis of course...but wait, Cap'n Old Europe has a new party line:

Amid concerns that American forces are stretched too thin in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States wants to quickly add former Iraqi soldiers to the nation’s new security forces. But while Rumsfeld — who arrived in Baghdad on Thursday to meet military and civilian leaders — downplayed the need for more international troops...(emphasis added)

Our Dear old Auntie goes on to say

U.S. officials are considering allowing enlisted soldiers and junior officers from the former Iraqi military to join the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, Rumsfeld said.

“This is their country. They are going to have to provide security...

Reuters via MSNBC

No, it's really this big, just ask Me Lie? Powell back there, he's seen it!

Bet it'll get bigger if I get to see Britney's Boobs! I hear she wants to visit the Oval Office...'cause she trusts me!

I have been invited, and honored to join the new Meta-Blog, OpenSource Politics...and I have been a bit remiss in getting my first deadlines met...oh the shame....I plan to be posting in the WorldView Section to see how I stack up against the like of Tim LaHaye and Tom DeLay...wow, their names are almost anagrams, and their WorldViews. Also, I thought that since I am a knowledge worker, some techo-rants would be good...if they're too boring we can dance to them...

Suggestions from my gentle readers are always solicited, but I draw the line at anatomically impossible feats (and feet in general). So feel free to drop me a line. I was thinking of doing a column as a Freeper for a day...just to see how long I could last before being detected or having to go to Detox...mgiht be a two man assignment, and I could be running into Bill Janklow on a deserted country road late one night if I said the wrong thing.

Ah, to be young, free and Grover Norquist. Oh, to preside over the Wednesday Morning Club and the decline and fall of our country. It must make Mr. Norquist just so proud to get up in the morning and see that his Tax Cuts are slowly strangling the Federal Gubbmint right out of bidness.

A $20 million budget shortfall is forcing cuts at U.S. ports of entry that could impact security, MSNBC.com has learned. The deficit has led officials to make a series of security compromises that include replacing INS inspectors with their less-qualified, lower-paid Customs counterparts on heavily trafficked Sundays and holidays. U.S. officials, who announced Tuesday a plan to merge these inspector jobs into a single position, denied that the current cost-saving measures weaken security in any way.
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THE BUDGET PROBLEM is national in scope and “it goes without saying that the implications are serious for every port of entry in the country,” says a Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by MSNBC.com. The memo pegs overtime paid to INS inspectors as “one of the most critical issues” the new department has had to face. Port directors are told they “will have to become creative” in finding ways to slash costs.
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“Why in God’s name is Customs and Border Protection doing this? Especially now, we’re coming up to the anniversary to 9/11,” wonders a senior Customs inspector who works out of a major eastern airport. “It’s not a secret that anniversaries mean something to the loonies that want to reach violent ends.”

In some cases, INS inspectors are simply removed from all overtime work and the port operates short-staffed. In other instances, Customs inspectors are used to fill the jobs typically done by INS personnel.
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The view of Customs inspectors about the current cross-staffing practices isn’t any kinder. “This is homeland security on the cheap,” says a 20-year senior Customs inspector at a major East coast airport. Currently Customs inspectors cross-training to perform a legacy INS inspector job are given eight hours of training and a couple of interactive CDs, and “then thrown into the breach,” and expected to perform up the standards of veteran INS inspectors, said the senior Customs inspector. “My guys are horrified they’ll miss something.”

In theory, INS and Customs inspectors are now “cross-designated now for each agency’s primary mission,” Morrissey said.
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Customs inspectors still don’t have access the same databases that INS inspectors use to weed out potential terrorists and criminal elements, despite being asked to perform the same tasks.

The 1600 Crew and Grover. He must be sooo proud. TAX CUTS! TAX CUTS! TAX CUTS! -boom- Ooops.

Sometimes irony is delicious. Tonight it's chocolate-flavored and it comes to us courtesy of the non-thinking Washington denizen, Richard Boucher (he thinking one, Rick Boucher, is a Democratic Representative from SW Virginia). Anyhow, Mr. Boucher (R-really stupid) apparently referred to a mini-summit on EU security as a meeting of "chocolate makers".

The United States on Tuesday sneered at plans by four European countries to create an autonomous European military command headquarters near Brussels separate from Nato, referring to the idea's proponents as "chocolate makers".

In unusually blunt language that drew surprised gasps from reporters, State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher scoffed at Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg for continuing to support the proposal that they first introduced at a mini-summit in April.

He described the April meeting as one between "four countries that got together and had a little bitty summit" and then referred to them collectively as "the chocolate makers".

My guess is that the French will be oh-so-polite in that delightfully French way as they veto the hell out of anything Powell brings up, or even when he opens his mouth...after all, what do they have to lose? The undying respect and admiration of Auntie Donnie and the Dancing Neocons? I guess, maybe.

Oh, and the absolute best map of the world, according to the 1600 Crew is at UggaBugga. Quiddity, you are truly a genius. I haven't stopped chortling yet...

There's one thing about the Chimpster Family you can give them credit for: Consistency. I don't think there's a single member of that family that can say they've never met an Executioner they didn't like. Despite calls from family members of the victims (so what about these "victim's rights"?), the Florida Division of the 1600 Crew executed a former minister-turned-felonious-bastard murderer, who bravely shot two living, breathing men down in cold blood to "save unborn babies", but really because he disagreed with their politics. I can't quite get how the lethal injection of the murderous minister makes the two men he killed come back.

The whole capital punishment dance between "law and order" types, and those of us who would rather let the miserable idiots rot in jail will never be resolved (I believe) until the courts finally take the decision out of the hands of stupid people...meaning legislators and pandering prosecutors. But that's an argument for another time.

The miserable murderous bastard should have been locked up in solitary confinement, fed once a day through a slot under the door, taken out thrice weekly in irons for excercise and a hose-down for 20 minutes and returned to his cell, with not a word spoken to him.

The man executed today is destined to do whatever corporeal bodies do. Rot. Decay. Turn into worm-food. I would rather he have been left alive for all the long years of his life; alone, unknown and eventually forgotten. Even Gary Gilmore didn't want that.

I shed no tears for that corpse, but is a debate over what is a reproductive rights issue, a choice made by an individual woman and perhaps a spouse/significant other worth three more lives? Are shotguns now to be used to settle all political debate? I would hope not, but it seems that this man wanted that to be his legacy...how sick.

Remember Pakistan? That bulwark of South Asian Democracy? Seems that the Asscrack Justice Department has been over there in the guise of the FBI, busting ISI and Pak Army officers who are ... suspected terrorists ... or who have terrorist connections. Interestng, and a worthwhile endeavor if true. Apparently, we have been allowed to set up surveillance on Army Officers who might have, shall we say "conflicting loyalties". They are then "disappeared" by the Musaharraf regime, and it's done very quietly.

Two possible explanations here; they really are damming up the headwaters of the terrorist movements by taking these guys out; or they are helping Musharraf stabilize his government by removing potential opposition to him and his policies. Some of the "disappeared" officers made their reputations under the late President Zia ul-Haq, a Secular Muslim of some repute, who rewarded piety with promotions.

A more interesting (an unexplored) passage in the article:

It is an open secret in Washington now that a delegation of senior Pakistani army officers, sent to Afghanistan prior to the US invasion ostensibly to convince the Taliban to step down, actually spent their time instructing the Taliban on how to protect their weapons from the impending US aerial bombing.

The FBI seems to pretty much have a greenlight to go for it in Pakistan, whether that is a good thing or not remains to be seen. It's also got to be of interest to Pakistans near and dear neighbor, India. I'll bet the Indian Government would be thrilled to get these intercepts.

Initially, the FBI was allowed to set up small cells in the operations offices of the ISI, and ISI officials were attached to these cells. However, the FBI was able to decide on its own targets, and it delegated specific assignments to ISI officials, but under FBI surveillance.

Lately, the FBI has been given separate premises all over the country, and its own separate teams of officers, who, with the best bugging devices in the world, now have maximum access to Pakistan's telecommunications system.

This kind of access means that the FBI is now privy to much of the information that the Pakistan army has, which has led to the Americans being able to nip in the bud a number of attempts by the ISI to re-establish its presence in Afghanistan through local commanders of the Hezb-I-Islami of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, now a key player in the Afghan resistance movement.

A good base of intelligence may finally be getting built up, and it's the best defense we can have in the war on Terra™. My only concern is are we dancing with the devil (yet again) by dancing with Musharraf, or is he actually trying to bring democracy to Pakistan on a full-time basis?

By the latest reports from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), we can't sustain a force of 150,000 (current manning levels) in Iraq long-term. Gee, there's a word that the neocons forgot...long-term. With no choice, will President Bunny Pants ask the UN for help? And if he does, will they tell him to go piss up a rope?

The Bush administration may have to cut U.S. troops in Iraq by more than half to keep enough forces to face other threats, a congressional agency said on Tuesday in a report that fueled calls for more international help for peacekeeping in Iraq.
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Byrd, one of Bush's harshest critics on Iraq, also said it showed the administration must formally ask for help in peacekeeping from the United Nations and NATO.

"Every day frittered away by the administration is another day that our troops will bear the staggering burdens of the dangers of occupation alone," he said.

Bush on Tuesday directed Secretary of State Colin Powell to open negotiations at the U.N. Security Council on a resolution aimed at getting international support for U.S. efforts in Iraq, a senior U.S. official said.
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Under existing policies, the CBO said, the Army could sustain a long-term occupation force there of 38,000 to 64,000 after the winter of 2004-2005.

The CBO also offered alternative scenarios if the Pentagon made more use of National Guard, reserves, Marines and civilian personnel in Iraq.

Will they be renaming French Toast yet again on AF One? I'll bet they just got the Freedom Toast menus back from the printers...damn, hate when that happens.

On a more sobering note, is this a warning of the end of the all-volunteer military? If we have to sustain these operations with the Deserter-in-Chief still in office, how will they keep anyone in? Will retention and recruitng take a larger hit than anticipated? Something to watch.

Norbizness is grouchy and crotchety today. But snarky and newsworthy as usual. Go show him some love...

He is a parsimonious bastard, not even recognizing DemVet...

Jeebus.

Bush couldn't find Oil in a Gas Station, how did he expect to win a war?

Just asking.

omigod, she's baaaack. The question now is Sully as Bi-Polar as his American Idol, President Crotch-Fruit? Seems so. In a series of somewhat disjointed essays our hero has pointed out that summer is wonderful in P-town, drag queens wear polka-dots, and that the Unelected One may not be the man of his dreams after all. Gee whiz.

AUGUSTITIS
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This was the month in which it became official that the Bush administration is not interested in restraining the size of the federal government, but in expanding it to serve its own ends.
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And when the president can say, as he did yesterday, that "when somebody hurts, government's got to move," you begin to see why therapeutic liberalism is thriving in this White House. Nixon II? The other aspect of Bush's domestic policy that is now undeniable is insolvency.

And then there's the war. I could forgive this administration almost anything if it got the war right. But, after a great start, it's getting hard to believe the White House is in control of events any more.

Well, we're getting used to the phrase "Shock and Awe." Herewith an invitation to readers to send in examples of how anti-war writers, poobahs, activists, bloggers, et al are trying to spin the liberation of Iraq into something that proves them to have been right all along.

Actually, in some ways, this mass lunacy has some potential. If this war continues as well as it has been, won't the anti-war left not merely be defeated but beyond humiliated? And won't that leave an impression on at least some of them? The younger ones, perhaps? You've got to keep hoping.

All we are missing is a confession of his decision to become a lapsed Catholic, leave the republican party and decide to go straight. And become a Baptist. Looks like our boy had himself quite an August August. If they bury his ashes on Cape Cod does that require an Environmental Impact Study? Toxic republican syndrome or something?

Oh, and WTF is "Theraputic Liberalism"?

We can all find the places out there to get the numbers of KIA in Iraq. The number is growing incrementally...how long until they have the standing to ask for and get their monument on the Capitol Mall? At the current rate, not very much longer...

But what about the soldiers who are wounded in Iraq. Their care and treatment is likely better than any time in our nation's history from the moment they are wounded, until they are in the unparalled care of a magnificent Army, Air Force or Navy Doc. Their evacuation times are probably less than if they were in a traffic accident here stateside, and that's a good thing. But what's up with the numbers?

I was under the impression that there were no more combat or major combat operations on-going. The mission was accomplished and the Iraqis were tossing rose petals at the feet of our victorious troops. Yeah, in Perlowitz's dreams...and the cocaine-addled Brain of President Lying Continuosly.

U.S. battlefield casualties in Iraq are increasing dramatically in the face of continued attacks by remnants of Saddam Hussein's military and other forces, with almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared "wounded in action."

The number of those wounded in action, which totals 1,124 since the war began in March, has grown so large, and attacks have become so commonplace, that U.S. Central Command usually issues press releases listing injuries only when the attacks kill one or more troops. The result is that many injuries go unreported.
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Fifty-five Americans were wounded in action last week alone, pushing the number of troops wounded in action since May 1 beyond the number wounded during peak fighting. From March 19 to April 30, 550 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq. Since May 1, the number totals 574. The number of troops killed in Iraq since the beginning of May already has surpassed the total killed during the height of the war.
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Although Central Command keeps a running total of the wounded, it releases the number only when asked -- making the combat injuries of U.S. troops in Iraq one of the untold stories of the war.

I guess until then, we'll have to live with our soldiers having RPG's "thrown" at them instead of Rose Petals.

edited to reword a badly written phrase...the docs in the service really are pretty awesome for the most part and do good medicine. My best friend is an ex-Navy surgeon, so believe me, I was not "slamming" the Medical Corps. Thanks for the catch Evan.

The Texans from their "Lege" as they so lovingly call it, who have moved to New Mexico where the government is friendly, the air has to be cleaner and there is more rationality in a pre-school class than in a room full of republicans, have now broken another quorum and thoroughly pissed off their republican counterparts. Their Chimp-0-Matic Lt. Governor David Dewhurst made this statement...

"Texas redistricting is purely and simply a Texas matter," he said. "A majority of Texans support President George W. Bush and his policies, while a majority of our Congressional delegation does not. There's no movement other than a Texas concern for fairness, that our Congressional delegation reflect the voters and the trends here in the state. We would be addressing fair redistricting whether or not Tom DeLay was in Congress."

Oh silly me, I forgot that's not in the lie, cheat and steal republican plan for a better Democracy Fascist Totalitarian State. It's only valid if blessed by a mondo republican like Delay or Rove and approved by President Select-me-or-I'll-send-Ashcroft. A sad day for democracy indeed. I hope they hold out against these petty gop thugs and governor goodhair and all his Delay-Driven Perrymandering.

Go Killer D's, Go!

Happy Labor Day, especially if you are getting up tomorrow and heading for work, an interview or some meaningful way to make money and provide for yourself and your family...if you aren't well, the 1600 Crew only cares if you ... well they don't really care at all. See, enough of their Cheap-Labor Conservative buddies will kick in the bucks to buy TV ads, to get votes from non-thinking drone voters who hear words like "Saddam" and "Terrorism" and "Security". They will pin their hopes on the fears of these folks and ignore the real fears and economic devastation that they have wrought over the last three years...or blame it on the Clenis™.

President Couldn't-find-Ohio-without-Air Force One was here in Richfield, which is north of Columbus...towards Cleveland, I think. An affluent republican-leaning burb I'm told, so it's no surprise that Chimpy went there, after all, he doesn't understand how poor people think, and it would be a bad time to start the education process now...especially in the rain! But he came here to talk about jobs and stuff...so let's see what he said

Bush said the nation has lost "thousands of jobs in manufacturing." In fact, the losses have soared into the millions: Of the 2.7 million jobs the U.S. economy has lost since the recession began in early 2001, 2.4 million were in manufacturing. The downturn has eliminated more than one in 10 of the nation's factory jobs.

The president attributed the erosion to productivity gains and to jobs flowing to cheaper labor markets overseas. He suggested that jobs moving to foreign shores was his primary reason for creating the new manufacturing czar.
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Bush spent most of his speech expressing empathy for anxious workers, and wiping rain from his head, which became thoroughly drenched despite his union hat.

"I want you to understand that I understand that Ohio manufacturers are hurting, that there's a problem with the manufacturing sector," Bush said. "I understand that for a full recovery, to make sure people can find work, that manufacturing must do better," Bush said.
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The White House chose politically friendly territory for the event. Although surrounding communities tilt Democrat, Richfield leans Republican. Bush's motorcade route took him along stately homes in an affluent neighborhood, and clusters of supporters waved signs backing the president.

His crowd applauded when Bush argued that two rounds of tax cuts had kept the recession shallow and had helped spur factory jobs.

A little bit north in Michigan, where there's a bit of a different outlook, here's what some folks are saying on Labor Day...

After filing for unemployment benefits last week, veteran salesman John Kavalick reflected on what it means to be out of work this Labor Day.

"This has been a very tough year," said Kavalick of Warren. "Up to this point, I've been reasonably successful. I'm 56 years old. Many of my friends have the same problem. We've had two or three jobs this year."

Though out of work, Kavalick at least won't be lonely on the unemployment line. The State of Michigan reported last month that the state's unemployment rate in July rose to 7.4 percent -- its highest point since 1993.
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What's especially troublesome to many observers of the labor market is the duration of this hiring slump. Economists say the recession officially ended in November 2001, or nearly two years ago, yet the unemployment rate keeps climbing.

New hiring typically lags behind other economic indicators, because employers want to make sure the recovery is real before they spend on new staff. But a recovery in the labor markets is taking longer than usual this time, and many economists are calling this a jobless recovery because of persistent unemployment.
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AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said last week, "After watching the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, union members are ready to take on the challenge of electing a working-people's president."

But Paul Kersey, a labor research associate with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank based in Midland, said the solution for Michigan workers is to weaken the grasp of unions in the state.

"We have some of the strongest unions in the country, and employers are leery about going into the kind of heavily unionized environment we have in Michigan," he said.

Do the folks in Michigan believe that a "manufacturing czar" will answer all their problems? And how are President Halfwit's fellow conservatives going to react to the notion of manufacturing being "controlled" or regulated by a Czar?

Jeebus, it's starting to sound more like the Soviet Union all the time...if Chimpy ever says KGB good, USA bad, I'm moving to Tahiti or something.

Unless my memory has been totally decimated by space aliens or something, I seem to remember that a couple of the Washington Press Corps Kool Kidz, like Ceci Connally, Cokie Roberts and Eleanor Clift were among those who spent a good part of the 2000 election assisting the Chimp-for-President campaign by extending and even orginating some of the memes that made the Gore Campaign more difficult. Now it seems that one of the Kool Kidz, Eleanor Clift may be realizng that perhaps Americans bought a "pig in a poke" to use an old Southern term...and she's unhappy about it. Gee, Ellie were you sleeping while the 2000 Employ Chimpy-cause-no-one-else-will campaign was happening?

Here’s a suggestion: what if Bush had suspended the cut on the estate tax, calling on both workers and the wealthy to kick in their share? That would be a bit more credible. With the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reporting this week that the federal budget deficit is approaching a record $500 billion, lawmakers are furious about the way the administration has played them for fools when it comes to paying for Iraq. “The Iraqis ask, ‘Why can’t you turn on the lights?’ We have a George C. Marshall plan with a Grover Norquist budget,” says a Senate Republican.
        Norquist is known as “Mr. Tax Cut.” He’s president of Americans for Tax Reform and the grinch who steers the GOP’s antitax movement. Cutting taxes is the holy grail for the Republican right, but draining the treasury runs counter to national security. There isn’t enough money to properly fund homeland security or pick up the pace of reconstruction in Iraq, though the administration will be back for a war “supplemental” when Congress returns next week. That’s Washington-speak for billing the taxpayers, who pay for the war with reduced government services at home.
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The main mission of American troops now is self-protection. They aren’t handing out candy to children or joining in impromptu soccer games. They are hunkered down hoping only to survive. “You can walk around the streets in central Baghdad and not see a single serviceman,” says the former ambassador. “We don’t look like we’re occupying anything.”
        The good news for Bush is that Democrats believe that Iraq requires more money, so Bush will get additional funds. The bad news is that the added cost aggravates the fiscal situation. Still, military spending is pump-priming the economy, and that will help him in getting reelected.

Ms. Clift is engaging in a very interesting thing here, behaving as if she had no involvement in the selection of the moron leading the 1600 Crew, and thus the country down a dark and dangerous and underfunded path to ruin. It's sad to see that the 1600 Crew cares more about the opinions of Grovel Nosetwist than the American People and the conquered Iraqi populace, sad, but not surprising.

1. ssssh...don't tell, she was a...spy
   
2. Can we keep this momentum going?
   
3. Investigating Minds want to know...
   
4. Mis-under-educated
   
5. Oh Auntie Donnie...read this
   
6. Fiscal Responsibilty? Way-Right Republicans? Nah...
   
7. E-Voting...this ballot's not for you!
   
8. Hey, here's another Tax-Cut!
   
9. Another eye, as often as you can spare it
   
10. How to get a Pulitzer...