The worst toilet in Minneapolis

by Capt Fogg

Frankly I had forgotten about Barney Frank, the Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, until the few remaining Republican apologists willing to attempt the usual accusatory remission of the sins of their fellows, resurrected a twenty year old story about a gay friend of Frank who was found to be running an escort service out of Franks' apartment when he was not home. Upon investigation, the House Ethics Committee found no evidence that Frank had known of or been involved in this activity but he was censured in Congress for having associated with a male prostitute.

Frank is openly gay and usually wins re-election in Massachusetts's fourth congressional district by landslides of various magnitudes, but the comparison with Larry Craig, the man who made a career out of preaching family values, opposing civil rights for gay people and making remarks about "dirty, nasty" Bill Clinton; the man who was caught soliciting gay sex in a men's toilet, just smells worse than any public toilet in any third world country I've ever been in.

It's true that Republicans are tripping over their own wingtips while fleeing Craig's vicinity, but there are holdouts. Glenn McCoy, the political cartoonist whose scurrilous scribblings regularly appear in the New York Times, was quick to reply to the scandal by showing two donkeys, one telling the other, in response to the scandal to "make sure Barney Frank wasn't in the next stall."

Real humor always contains a nucleus of truth, otherwise it's just a smiling villain, ugliness with a foul grin. That's the kind of humor McCoy specializes in; the grotesque, perverted and dishonest humor designed for sewer dwelling troglodytes who would rather dredge something out of a cesspool and smear it on an undeserving victim rather than admit to any failing, any fault, any guilt, any shame or any hypocrisy.

Why the officers really want to stay in Iraq

By Libby

The NYT sheds some light on why some of our military brass might be so keen on keeping the occupation going forever.

An American-owned company operating from Kuwait paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to American contracting officers in efforts to win more than $11 million in contracts, the government says in court documents.

One of the officers, Maj. Gloria D. Davis, a contracting official in Kuwait, shot and killed herself in Baghdad in December 2006. Government officials say the suicide occurred a day after she admitted to an Army investigator that she had accepted at least $225,000 in bribes from the company. ...

The case is now part of a broader investigation in which the Army has a high-level team reviewing 18,000 contracts valued at more than $3 billion that the Kuwait office has awarded over four years.

...The Army has suspended 22 companies and individuals, at least temporarily, from pursuing government work because of contract fraud investigations in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, an Army spokesman said Thursday. A total of 18 companies and individuals are barred for a definite period from government work. Seven more face debarment.

Can you say cash cow? And these are just the ones getting caught. As it is with most crimes, you can probably expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The LEOs never catch everyone who breaks the law. In fact we know corruption is rampant, when you factor in the lower level profiteering in guns and other supplies that has been revealed in recent weeks.

One suspects this is partly due to the military having to lower their standards in order to meet enlistment quotas. When they drop requirements like clean criminal records and no gang affiliations as a prequisite, it's inevitable that a criminal element will emerge to get their piece of the underground economic pie. I suppose the small fry crooks even feel entitled to scam the government, since many were lied to when they enlisted and they witness the corporate corporation going on all around them daily.

Sadly, criminality appears to be the only trickle down effect we've seen from the Bush administration's policies.

Immigration policy adds to widow's woes

By Libby

However you feel about our immigration policies, this is one area that is badly in need of an overhaul.

SAN FRANCISCO - Jacqueline Coats’ husband drowned after he dove into a fierce Pacific Ocean riptide to rescue two boys. Now the immigrant from Kenya might be forced to leave the United States because he died before filing her residency application.

She is among more than 80 foreign-born widows across the nation who face possible deportation because their husbands died before immigration paperwork was approved. Some attorneys want to challenge the government’s policy of rejecting green card requests if an immigrant’s American spouse dies before the application is processed. At least one lawyer plans to file a class-action lawsuit.

In Florida, Pineda’s clients include Dahianna Heard, a Venezuelan woman whose husband was shot last year by insurgents while he worked as a contractor in Iraq. The couple’s son, who is a U.S. citizen, faces an uncertain future if his mother is deported.

It's one thing to crack down on fake marriages entered into for the sole purpose of obtaining green cards but it's beyond the pale that our government would treat widows so heartlessly, especially when their spouses died in the service of our country or in other acts of heroism. But even if the husband's die in less noble circumstances, to break up families over red tape seems particularly inhumane, even for this administration.

We shouldn't need a court battle to change this law, nor should the women be forced to rest their fate on Congressional intervention on a case by case basis. The policy is simply wrong and should be abolished immediately. I can't believe it's even an issue.

One Dem who gets it

By Libby

I guess sometimes it takes a woman to cut through the bullshit. While gullible guys like Baird come home convinced from the Pentagon's dog and pony show, Tauscher cuts to the chase.

I will tell you that when you get in the Green Zone, there is a physiological phenomenon I think called Green Zone fog. … It’s death by powerpoint. … It’s always that their argument is winning.

She added later, “It’s very, very easy to be influenced, from their point of view, that things are better.” She said they will “shape” facts to show gains being made. Meanwhile, the reality in Iraq is that there is a lot of sectarianism in the government, particularly at the Ministry of Interior. “The MOI is basically this sleeper cell organization of Shiite death squads,” she said.

This was Tauscher’s fourth trip to Iraq. She said, “It certainly hasn’t gotten better” since the last time she visited Iraq in 2005. “Because it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten dramatically worse.”

She makes it look so easy to state the obvious. The rest of her party could take a lesson from that before they learn the hard way in 08 that the people aren't buying the pony.

Quote of the day

By Libby

The WaPo has a piece on the Democrat's dilemma. The question is are they strong enough to be our men (and women) in charge or are they going to lie down once again and let Bush walk all over them? Avedon has this covered and extracts the quote of the day.

"We can do this, but you have to keep in mind Republicans care more about catching Democrats than catching terrorists," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "They have spent years taking Roosevelt's notion that we have nothing to fear but fear itself and given us nothing but fear."

As Avedon points out, every one of the Democrats should be saying this three times a day, every day. That's how you counter fake spin. You would think they could figure that out for themselves.

Delusions of Anbar

By Libby

Cernig is on this story so I'll just send you there for his excellent analysis on how the alleged success of Anbar is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, a point made clear by this interview in the UK's Times.

Read his whole post but here's a couple of key points.

Taken in concert with reports that other Sunni insurgent groups, including the 1920 Revolution Brigade, that have turned opportunist US ally for now are carving out lucrative protection rackets in their territories, extorting money from everyone who wants to do business there, and it's clear that the Anbar Awakening is anything but the happy pony that the Right wants everyone to buy.

Especially since the US military has been given these once-and-future-insurgents training and money to but more guns. The truth is that, in their eagerness to acclaim anything at all as "surge success" the panto kiddies on the Right haven't yet figured out that the next panto call is always "look behind you!"

And in the comment section, Carl points us to some historical context. This is a repeat of the same empty rhetoric and false promises of progress the White House made in Fallujah. The pact we made with insurgents there was supposed to turn that corner to victory over three years ago now.

Might be time to trot out the definition of insanity again.

Who is the enemy?

By Libby

It's hard to know where to begin with this, but let's start with Mr. Thomas and veracity, which is what set me off in the first place. Thomas claimed that in-migration of Muslims was out of control and that people were fleeing out of fear. If you poke around at the link to the British government's bureau of statistics that I provided you will see that he cited the figures to early 2006 but failed to note that the numbers have sharply dropped since. Where I come from that's called lying by omission. Further he claimed Brits were fleeing out of fear. The government site clearly stated, according to its census, the majority of out-migration was due to marriage and work. So I would call Thomas's statement an outright lie, no matter what his ideological leanings.

To be clear, I don't deny that the influx of immigrants into Britian and America are changing the face of the countries and I understand why long term residents get upset by that. Most people don't like change. It discomfits them. I get that. I suffered from it myself. I lived in lovely downtown Noho for 12 years. When I got there is was an amazing little city full of cutting edge artists. It was a thriving, vibrant, affordable community. It was very white but diverse nonetheless because of the 5 college population that supported it.

By the time I left the town had been taken over and most of the original residents were forced out by in-migrants. The only difference is Noho was taken over by upscale refugees from NYC and Cambridge. They didn't rob our homes, but they robbed us of our former charming lifestyle.

They drove up the property values by overbidding on asking prices for property and once they established their residences they complained about the street life that gave the town its charm in the first place. Suddenly we had noise ordinances and new rules about street vendors and the street scene died. More slowly the local businesses were forced out for the corporate chains the newcomers preferred. They killed downtown as surely as they had dropped a bomb. The last time I visited, there were so many empty storefronts, where once were independent entrepeneurs -- I wasn't sorry I left anymore.

The point being, this is a population problem, not solely an immigration one. The population grows, the planet doesn't. Just as the upscale invaded Noho due to the population pressure on New York and Boston, so the immigrants arrive on our shores for the same reason. Economic pressure and opportunity. The urbanites came to Noho because they could buy for $300,000 what would cost over a million in their cities and the lifestyle was better. The immigrants come for the same reason, if not on the same economic scale.

I've spent time in Third World countries, living among those who live in poverty. I've slept in their huts, danced at their parties and shared their meager food. If you can look into the eyes of a five year old who follows the food to your mouth like a puppy and not understand why someone would take any chance simply to lift their family out of those circumstances, well, I can. And it's useful to remember that when our ancestors came to this country, there weren't any immigration laws. Who's to say how many would have broken the law, if there was one, for the opportunity to do the same?

Curiously, in the early 90s, there was a large crew of illegal Irish in Noho, who over-stayed their visas and couldn't get green cards. I called them friends, not illegals, and indeed unless they confided in you, you wouldn't know. They didn't wear a sign and to my knowledge none of their workplaces were ever raided to check their green card status. Which brings me to the question, how do you know you've seen an illegal immigrant? On what basis do you judge whether they hold a green card? And that's an honest question, because I just can't tell. What's the defining feature so I can take a head count? There's a lot of foreign nationals, even in this little town.

Which finally brings us to defining the enemy and racial profiling. If we're to toss out the ad hominem argument, how do you define blaming 1.61 billion Muslims for the actions of 20? How is profiling now any different from what happened to the Japanese after Pearl Harbor?

It's easy to say you wouldn't mind when there's no chance you'll be held by the authorities for hours after you rode a ferry and talked to your friends on the ride because some hysterical bystander found it suspicious that you were traveling while fitting the profile. Me, I'm pretty sure I'd be pissed off.

I think it's exactly that sort of profiling that contributes to the radicalization of young Muslims. Call it knee jerk liberalism if you will. I call it a dispassionate, pragmatic analysis tempered with compassion.

Commemorating Pres. Bush's First Visit After Katrina

I just thought that on the anniversary of Katrina's landfall in New Orleans I would share with you my favorite picture of the President's first visit.

Jim Martin

Too much to say

By Libby

As it turns out I don't have time to reply to Jim's posts and the commentary here this morning on immigrants at the moment, but I do have a lot to say in response that I hope I can get to this evening if I get home at some kind of decent hour. For the time being let me just say that what distresses me when I hear people I like and normally consider reasonable thinkers talk like that is I believe it leads to incidents like this.

Rita Zawaideh of the Arab American Community Coalition told me her group's hot line recently got a call about six men who took a ferry Aug. 12 on their way home from a camping trip. The men were met at Colman Dock by a show of law enforcement and questioned for more than an hour. From India, Pakistan and the Middle East, they are in America on work visas.

"They said they were stopped because of 'suspicious behavior,' " Zawaideh said. "For breaking into small groups when they got out of their cars on the ferry."

The FBI and Seattle police had no comment about that incident Monday.

A Seattle police report said after 10 p.m. Aug. 12, a ferry captain did call authorities about "persons of interest" -- possibly including men from the photos -- on board. A ferry spokesman said authorities questioned two carloads of people, examined their cars and let them go. Another Seattle police report -- from an incident earlier Aug. 12 -- said a passenger on another ferry called 911 about a "Middle Eastern man with olive skin" who was "holding a video camera."

When ignorance meets fear and simple actions become freighted with the worst of intentions, that's when it happens: Innocent people become criminals in the minds of those who see only skin-deep.

Or subsititue, religion-deep for those last words to avoid having this debate center on racisim, because I don't believe it's so much about skin color as cultural differences. I see this sort of broadbrushing of Muslims as creating the environment that breeds violence in response. As I said, I'll be revisiting this when I have time but for the moment let me paraphase Robert Jamieson here and just say that fear doesn't seem to lead to rational discourse.

Watch Out For Those Jerking Knees

Libby posted about my entry on the immigrant crisis in Great Britain and took me to task for not checking the veracity of the facts for myself. Well, I looked up the definition to make sure. Sure enough veracity concerns adherence to the truth. I looked up the definition of truth and lo and behold, that's a slippery issue. It's like the definition of what is is. The truth is not exact, it means different things to different people. To Libby the truth about immigrants is linked to some ideal of making a better life as if that's the only reason people leave their home country to move to another.
Here is the key paragraph:

The vast majority of immigrants don't leave their family homes and move to a new country with malevolent intent. It's simple economics. People go where they can make money, not to take over society and although the miscreants get all the press, millions of honest immigrants work hard, contribute to their new countries, and are no threat to security.

Ah yes, this is mostly factual, but there is a downplaying of the role of the "miscreants" and their threat to good order. While most immigrants are harmless there is more at play than a better way of life. In Britain Islamic doctors are among the radicals. I would say that kind of shoots down the role of finances and poverty and puts Islamic fundamentalist fanaticism at the forefront.

I also take issue with the use of the term majority. It doesn't take too many "miscreants" to cause huge problems and most of those do have malevolent intent. They are there to raise money and to avoid prison or worse in their home country. The polls also show that these mullahs and false holy men have a lot of support among the majority. Libby then goes ad hominem:

As for the thousands of immigrants unknown to the British government, one wonders how Mr. Thomas can speak so authoritively on the subject. Has he personally conducted his own census? Since he gives no links to support his contentions, one can only suppose he made this up out of the whole cloth, out of his own distate for brown skinned people.

Well, when it comes to illegals in any modern western country there is no accurate way of counting, but they are there. There is no census in this country on illegals and I haven't taken one, but I know they're here. I see them everyday. The fact that they have brown skin in no way changes the fact that they are law breakers. Whatever their reasons are for being here they are secondary to the fact that they should be deported. The same thing goes in Great Britain.

I think far too many on the left are knee-jerk liberals and immigration is one of those issues that brings out the worst in everyone. To me, it's more about law and order than anything else. I don't care why you came, but if you came here illegally you're breaking the law. I was born here and if I break the law and get caught, I'm going to pay. Why shouldn't that be true for the illegals?

There are lots of fallacies on both side of this, but the idea that they are all just looking for a better life is a generality that ignores the facts. Liberals also want to use their tactic of calling anyone who disagrees with them a racist. That's always a weak argument and it is here as well.

Libby, you told me I could disagree with you anytime I wanted. Here you go.

Respectfully,

Jim Martin

Blaming the immigrants

By Libby
Updated below

I read Jim's post last night and found it so disturbing that I went to bed and didn't blog a bloody thing on any of my five blogs. I'm shocked to see his display of intolerance and his willingness to buy into a neo-con's twisting of statistics without fact checking the veracity for himself.

Indeed, a quick check of Britain's bureau of national statistics shows that the latest trends indicate net in-migration of foreign nationals is dropping, not rising and only 11,000 entries were granted on the basis of asylum. Furthermore, out-migration of British citizens is not a new trend but has been occurring for decades prior to the influx of foreign nationals, the most common reason being for marriage or work-related reasons, so I find the contention that they are fleeing out of fear of lawlessness and terrorism absurd. Indeed, thanks to the Bush doctrine, terrorism is on the rise everywhere and there is no place in the world that is free of those dangers, so it doesn't even make sense.

As for the thousands of immigrants unknown to the British government, one wonders how Mr. Thomas can speak so authoritively on the subject. Has he personally conducted his own census? Since he gives no links to support his contentions, one can only suppose he made this up out of the whole cloth, out of his own distate for brown skinned people.

I don't doubt that England is changing. So is America. So is the world. Internationally, middle class Caucasians procreate less and Third World ethnic groups, who lack the economic means to afford First World health care, procreate more due at least partly to lack of access to birth control. This could be partly be traced to the Bush administration's insistence on doling out foreign aid for absistence-only programs in lieu of birth control technology in Third World countries.

Middle class neighborhoods inevitably change. In America they call it white flight and it happened in our inner cities decades ago, long before immigration became an issue. Then it was black people who were blamed. Now the new scapegoats are Muslims in Europe and Mexicans in America. It's not their fault.

The vast majority of immigrants don't leave their family homes and move to a new country with malevolent intent. It's simple economics. People go where they can make money, not to take over society and although the miscreants get all the press, millions of honest immigrants work hard, contribute to their new countries, and are no threat to security.

I would remind all those who want to blame their fellow human beings for wanting to better their condition, that we are all descended from immigrants. Our own forefathers arrived here to escape from persecution. England thought they were a threat to the status quo too and decried the changes they were making to society. And if assimilation is the criteria, we all should be speaking Native American languages and following their customs to this day. But instead the new Americans forced the Indians to accomodate their culture. Every wave of immigrants since has been vilified by those who already have established their own security and begrudged the new group a place at the table.

The first wave of immigrants rarely assimilate fully. They historically form enclaves where their home language is the primary mode of communication. It's the next generations that meld more seamlessly and so it will be with the new immigrants today. Broadbrushing entire ethinic groups as "the enemy" serves no purpose other than fostering enmity and that is a greater threat to civil society.

I would agree that immigrants should learn the language and customs of their host country but anyone who has tried to learn a new language later in life should realize it's not that easy for older people to do so. Perhaps our governments have gone too far in accomodating the differences and have in effect provided a disincentive to assimilate, but that's a failure of government, not the immigrants. It's human nature to take the path of least resistance.

Frankly, I find this current bashing of immigrants not only intolerant but inhumane and pretty damn arrogant considering the number of American ex-pat communities I've encountered around the world in my travels who have lived in their host countries for years without bothering to learn the language.

Update: And yet more intolerance from a suprising source.

Georgie, You're Doing A Heckuva Job

Irony is defined in Wikipedia as:

Irony is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says and what is generally understood (either at the time, or in the later context of history). Irony may also arise from a discordance between acts and results, especially if it is striking, and seen by an outside audience. Irony is understood as an aesthetic evaluation by an audience, which relies on a sharp discordance between the real and the ideal, and which is variously applied to texts, speech, events, acts, and even fashion. All the different senses of irony revolve around the perceived notion of an incongruity, or a gap between an understanding of reality, or expectation of a reality, and what actually happens.

President Bush is the king of irony, and he probably can't spell it. Today he is in New Orleans marking the second anniversary of Katrina's strike. He is of course down there to toot his own horn and to tell everyone what a great job he and the federal government have done.

Of course, a large portion of New Orleans looks like a war zone with businesses and homes boarded up.

Most Americans will point to Iraq as Bush's great downfall and they would be correct, for nothing shows the gross incompetence of his administration in a brighter light than that. The truth of the matter is that two years ago the war in Iraq could have still been won. Bush was still being given the benefit of the doubt. And then along came Katrina and the people saw Bush lacked the one thing he needed to be president; leadership.

He proved that he was out of touch and worse than that the people saw that the people he appointed to office were toadies and political fund raisers instead of professionals. Michael Brown, the head of FEMA had no experience in disaster management, and it showed. Bush's reaction to the ongoing disaster and his out of touch FEMA director?

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Here is how the Washington Post wrote about Brown shortly after Katrina.

Michael D. Brown has been called the accidental director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, caricatured as the failed head of an Arabian horse sporting group who was plucked from obscurity to become President Bush's point man for the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Amid the swirl of human misery along the Gulf Coast, Brown admitted initially underestimating the impact of Hurricane Katrina, whose winds and water swamped the agency's preparations. As the nation reeled at images of the calamity, he appeared to blame storm victims by noting that the crisis was worsened by New Orleans residents who did not comply with a mandatory evacuation order.

The only talent anyone in his administration has to have is to be loyal. Competence or experience is of no consequence. Of course, you probably shouldn't laugh at the unintentional irony. Just keep thinking this thought:

"Georgie, you're doing a heckuva job."

Jim Martin

A Changing England

At Real Clear Politics Cal Thomas has an article about Great Britain that I agree with in it's totality. I never thought I would say it, but there you go. He bemoans the changing demographic of England that is spurred by the emigration of Britons and the arrival of large numbers of intolerant immigrants, immigrants who have no interest in assimilation or religious tolerance.

The figures, making headlines in London newspapers, tell only part of the story. Between June 2005 and June 2006 nearly 200,000 British citizens chose to leave the country for a new life elsewhere. During the same period, at least 574,000 immigrants came to Britain. This number does not include the people who broke the law to get there, or the thousands unknown to the government. Britain's Office of National Statistics reports that middle-class Britons are beginning to move out of towns in southern England that have become home to large numbers of immigrants, thereby altering the character of neighborhoods that have remained unchanged for generations.

I have friends in Great Britain and they tell the same story.

Britons give many reasons for leaving, but their stories share one commonality: life in Britain has become unbearable for them. They fear lawlessness and the threat of more terrorism from a growing Muslim population and the loss of a sense of Britishness, exacerbated by the growing refusal of public schools to teach the history and culture of the nation to the next generation. What it means to be British has been watered down in a plague of political correctness that has swept the country faster than hoof-and-mouth disease. Officials say they do not wish to "offend" others

Being an Anglophile I am very offended by what is going on. These are the fruits of empire, but you don't have to give up without a fight.

British media have carried stories about an Italian immigrant who murdered a schoolteacher and was sentenced to life in prison. He is about to be released after serving just 12 years. The government wants to deport him to Italy, but a combination of British human rights legislation and European Union law are making it impossible to do so. This does not bode well for deporting Islamic terrorists who call for the overthrow of the government and incite young people to acts of violence.

It's one thing to be defeated by a more powerful enemy, but to be the cause of your own destruction by showing tolerance to the intolerant and charity to the unworthy is a bitter epitaph.

I pray there will always be the England I remember, but they must wake up. We need to set an alarm for ourselves for we also seem to be dozing.

Jim Martin

One Marine In Favor Of The Draft

There is a terrific article in Newsweek magazine written by Marine Corps Cpl. Mark Finelli. He makes his case for re-instituting the draft quite well.

The real failure of this war, the mistake that has led to all the malaise of Operation Iraqi Freedom, was the failure to not reinstitute the draft on Sept. 12, 2001—something I certainly believed would happen after running down 61 flights of the South Tower, dodging the carnage as I made my way to the Hudson River [I worked at the World Trade Center as an investment adviser for Morgan Stanley at the time]. But President Bush was determined to keep the lives of nonuniformed America—the wealthiest Americans, like himself—uninterrupted by the war.

Mr. Bush has tried for years now to say he is a war time president, but it's hard to say you're in a war when only one percent of the population is fighting it.

Consequently, we have a severe talent deficiency in the military, which the draft would remedy immediately. While America’s bravest are in the military, America’s brightest are not. Allow me to build a squad of the five brightest students from MIT and Caltech and promise them patrols on the highways connecting Baghdad and Fallujah, and I’ll bet that in six months they could render IED’s about as effective as a “Just Say No” campaign at a Grateful Dead show.

The soldiers and Marines fighting this war are never going to get the financial resources unless the ruling classes are involved.
It’s not hard to figure out who suffers. The 160,000 servicemen and women in Iraq are the latest generation of Americans to represent their country on the field of battle. And like their predecessors, they are abundantly unrepresented in the halls of power. As a result, they’ve adopted what I find to be a disturbing outlook on their situation: many don’t want the draft because they believe it will ruin the military, which they consider their own blue-collar fraternity.

We don't need a Vietnam type draft either, no future Vice-President should be able to get five deferments.

The draft would even hasten a weaning away from foreign oil, I believe, if more Americans felt the nausea that I do every time I go to the pump and underwrite the people who have nearly killed me five times. This war on the jihadists needs to be more discomforting to the average American than just bad news on the tube. Democracies at war abroad cannot wage a protracted ground operation when the only people who are sacrificing are those who choose to go. This is the greatest lesson of my generation. Young Americans: you may not want to kill jihadists, but they are interested in killing you and your loved ones. Wake up.

Until the sons and daughters of our elected officials are in the field with the offspring of the captains of industry fighting this war for the survival of our way of life then no one is going to take ownership of the success or failure of this misbegotten war, or the next one.

It is time for the effete, superior, pansy bastards running this country to step up and make some sacrifices. To defeat this enemy sacrifices must be demanded of the American people and the only way for the Republicans and Democrats to do that is be willing to make some sacrifices themselves.

Jim Martin

Defective

"It's about your child and it's about your pet and it's about food on the table,"

said Representative Rick Larsen, a Democrat from Washington State.

"You can't get more personal than that for Americans, and so it does need to be addressed."

Larson and Representative Mark Kirk (R-IL) are in China this week as co-chairs of the U.S.-China Working Group. Kirk, who had been pushing hard for more trade with China, recently introduced a bill in congress that would increase fines for defective Chinese products by one hundred times.

China has been cracking down on toy manufacturers, according to China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and to a degree that will likely never be seen in the US where unscrupulous or careless business practices do not earn the death penalty and sometimes result in government appointments. I don't think anyone at Mattel will go to jail.

It's been less than a week since a defective Boeing 737 owned by China Airlines blew up on the tarmac in Okinawa. You can't get more personal than that for the Chinese, I would imagine; considering the discomfort and inconvenience of being burned alive. I'm sure that before long, some heads will roll at Boeing so that China does not have to embargo any more dangerous and shoddy American goods as they do with American beef, or begin to demand massive fines of the US Government for what Boeing does and so that some Lou Dobbs equivalent at the Xinhua News agency doesn't become apoplectic about The Americans trying to kill them all.

Capt. Fogg

For Gay Republicans, Life Is A Bitch

Last week Jules Crittenden had a post titled, "Party of Rage" about Democratic congressmen losing it in airports. I can't wait to hear what he's going to say about Republicans in airport bathrooms. I guess it's a case of one party getting mad about the service and the other being happy at airports and trying to get serviced. Party of_________, I'll let you fill in the blanks.

I think it's fine to be gay and I think you should be proud of it if that is who you are, but for this Idahoan sleezeball to be openly anti-gay and then cruise for sex in public bathrooms is well, so typically republican. You can read the airport officer's statement here.

How many openly gay republican congressmen are there? Well, none, and the ones in the closet like Dreier and Foley voted the party line of hate and discrimination.

I think it ironic that liberals are willing to kick the shit out of people who bug them and republicans want to just _______ _____ _______.

I'll let you fill in the blanks.

Jim Martin

Goodbye Gonzales

By Libby

Well, Gonzales has resigned and of course, everyone is talking about it. I haven't read anything past the headlines and George Bullard, who was pushing Bush's silly meme that poor Fredo was a victim of partisan politics.

I responded briefly but other than that I don't have a whole lot to say about it at the moment. I didn't really expect it and thus find it suspect. I'm still mulling over what tactical advantage the White House hopes to gain from letting him go at this precise time. Clearly he and Rove both skipped out because the investigations into their criminality are getting too close for comfort, but still, this administration makes every move for political gain.

However, the biggest surprise for me by far is my emotional response to the news of both resignations. I'm glad that they're gone for the good of the country but I'm unexpectedly unelated. Somehow I can't shake the vague sense of having been cheated of the righteous indictments they so richly deserved.

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

Bush Accepts Resignation of Consigliere

Now to throw in my two cents. George Bush made this comment about Abu Gonzales:

After months of standing by his top prosecutor and "close friend," Bush spoke briefly in Texas to praise Gonzales, saying the attorney general endured "unfair treatment that has created harmful distraction at the Justice Department."

Maybe the distractions were caused by all the lies he uttered and all the laws he bent or broke. Maybe he couldn't keep all the lies straight.

Bush said it's "sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person" is impeded "from doing important work."

He couldn't be talking about Gonzales, maybe he was referring to the prosecutors who were fired for political purposes.

It's too bad Bush doesn't get irony, it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Jim Martin

Good morning!

by Capt Fogg

I thought there was a reason the sun seemed so bright and the sky so blue this glorious morning. It's not just because I've been invited to post here, but also because Alberto Gonzales finally heard the voice in his head say Arriba! The New York Times reports that Gonzales has tendered his resignation and that the official announcement will occur later this morning.

You Can't Sneak Anything Past An Economist

I've been on a Boy Scout camping trip the last few days and just saw a poll reporting that the credit crisis was a graver threat to the economy than terrorism. Huh? Wow, you can't get anything past a bunch of economists can you.

Bad credit has supplanted terrorism as the gravest immediate risk threatening the economy, a key national research group reported Monday.
NABE, a Washington-based association, said 32 percent of its surveyed members cited loan defaults and excessive debt as their biggest near-term concern.

I'm sorry for being for naive, but wouldn't you say that there are a hundred things more threatening to our economy than Islamic terrorists? I would think that hurricanes pose more of a threat.

I think that the country still suffers from the infusion of fear that George W. Bush injected into the national consciousness after 9/11. He used fear for political gain and leverage to use in the run-up to the Iraqi quagmire.

Things will happen, we will be attacked but the effect on the economy will be in direct proportion to how much people cry and whine and act scared. The nation as a whole acted like cowards after 9/11 and it was a national embarrassment. We have been acting like cowards ever since as we have allowed the republicans to trade freedoms for a false sense of security.

Jim Martin

Coming soon...

By Libby


Big doings at our little blog here. I'm excited to announce that Captain Fogg has agreed to join us as soon as I remember where the invitation widget is on this thing.

Regular readers know how much I adore him. He has a worldy and informed view on the big trends, a great eye for under-reported news and his command of the English language is purely poetic. I'm sure he'll win all your hearts and minds in short order as well.

Media Bytes - War games edition

By Libby
Updated below

No week is complete without a Jon Stewart clip. Jon gives the preznit's speech to the VFW some hysterical historical hysterical prespective.

Feeling nosy? Search this database for political contributions from your town.

Via Steve Clemons in a guest post at Sully's place, a new milblog by a real soldier who miraculously hasn't been shut down by the Pentagon yet, Army of Dude. Steve has some great quotes but here's my favorite.

In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic.

I hope that for him, and for all of us too.

In case you were wondering about the symbolic meaning of Bye Bye Miss American Pie. It's actually quite good if you don't hate the song. Me, I've always loved it. Easy to sing along to in the car.

And in case you missed this one, a reenactment of the toppling of Saddam's statute, conducted in front of Cheney's ranch and using an effigy of the Veep to play the statute.

Update: Our children are our future. Words fail - literally.

Cost plus corruption

By Libby

I almost missed this Rolling Stone piece on corporate crony swindle of our lifetimes. It's long, but a very easy read, however I don't advise you read it if you don't feel like getting pissed off today. On the other hand, if you've already reached outrage, you may as well go for it and here's a couple of grafs to tempt you in.

Thanks to low troop ­levels, all the military repair guys had been pressed into service to fight the war, so Skoug was forced to sit in the military storeroom on the base and study vehicle manuals that, as a civilian, he wasn't allowed to check out of the building. That was how America fought terrorism in Iraq: It hired civilian air-conditioning techs to fix Humvees using the instruction manual while the real Humvee repairmen, earning a third of what the helpless civilians were paid, drove around in circles outside the wire waiting to get blown up by insurgents.

...According to the most reliable ­estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.

Of all the values the Bush administration has destroyed in its six year reign of designed error, honesty and honor and the ones I miss the most. [Via BuzzFlash]

Schakowsky sees through the spin

By Libby

Rep. Jan Schakowsky just returned from a Pentagon sponsored PR trip to Baghdad to sell the surge to Congressional members. As part of bi-partisan delegation, she sat through numerous power point presentations. She took the whirlwind tour of the city, but didn't see much from the helicopter or the convoy rides where her view was blocked by armed soldiers hanging out of the windows. She noted the irony of having to wear body armor to a meeting of Sunni and Shiite leaders to discuss their progress in working together. She wasn't impressed.

"I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy -- just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place," Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, "acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that's what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we'd have to be there nine or 10 years."

She summed her impressions in her notes. "Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time." Unfortunately, she seems to be alone in her clear eyed view of the propaganda.

Schakowsky acknowledged that the military's presentation may have been effective. "If you took the briefings at their face value, without context, without bringing anything to it -- clearly they were trying to present that positive spin, and that's what [other lawmakers] took away from it."

It's hard to believe that grown men and women, whose job it is to monitor the situation in order to make decisions on how to address it on behalf of the American people could swallow such a shallow and blatantly self-serving presentation and come away convinced. The stated purpose of the surge was to allow the Iraq government to reconcile and we were assured there would be political progress in six months.

Maybe the idiot politicians have forgotten that they promised to take meaningful action to end the occupation if that didn't happen. We haven't, and we will remember their politically convenient memory lapse in 08.

DNC takes Florida to the woodshed

By Libby

The DNC took the extreme step of disenfranchising Florida, stripping them of their delegates if they go forward with moving up their primary date. I've already addressed this once at the Detroit News blog in the context of Michigan manuevering to do the same and I continue to believe the time is ripe for a national primary. It seems to me to the best solution to make the process more relevant and give all the states a more equal influence.

However, my compatriot at the Newshoggers, Shamanic, has a less extreme idea that I can embrace. An alternate, and probably more palatable solution, is to have the party create a rotating calendar where every state has an opportunity to be first.

No doubt New Hampshire and Iowa at least would object, having enjoyed their star status for all these many years but technology has improved the candidates ability to communicate their positions and it's time for the states to stop jockeying for their personal power and make some concessions to improve the process.

Needle in the haystack surveillance invites trouble

By Libby

More disturbing news today on how wide net surveillance fails to catch any big fish.

The government's terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list's effectiveness.

A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a "substantial bearing on homeland security," though officials would not be more specific.

Why do I think that means Blackwater?

The government hacks justify the approach by pointing out that they stop a lot of people but don't arrest them. That's a defense of the program? Either they're stopping a lot of innocent people unnecessarily -- which they do, a fact that's well documented -- or they are alerting real terrorists that they're under suspicion but aren't guilty enough to be arrested yet. Do you think that's going to scare them away, or make them more careful?

And people call me paranoid when I say this administration is practically begging for a new 9/11?

Excess Bloggage

By Libby
Updated

I started my day posting at Newshoggers. If you don't read me there, here's what I've talking about.

How Forfeiture rewards cops' criminality. Legalized highway robbery is title of choice on that one in Blogtopia and it really can't be called anything else.

In better news, California is poised to legalize industrial hemp. This would be good on a whole lot of levels.

I amble through the top buzz today and look at message discipline and the price of whistleblowing on government misconduct and criminal misappropriation of tax dollars.

And I've been trying to figure out, who are the people who honestly believe the Bush doctrine has made us safer?

Update: I seem to be on a drug war kick today. I stumbled across an excellent post on how the war on drugs aids terrorists.

Our schools have gone crazy

By Libby

This is what happens when we allow fear to dictate our lives. A junior high school kid is kicked out of school for drawing a gun. No, I don't mean pulling a gun out of his bookbag, I mean literally drawing a gun.

Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates. The boy's parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.

Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was "absolutely considered a threat," and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.

I don't know about you, but as long as I've been alive, boys have been drawing pictures of guns and dead bleeding bodies and car crashes and other horrible scenes of monsters and mayhem without going on killing sprees in their later life. This kid just drew a gun, and it wasn't even a particularly good sketch. One might have thought it was some kind of spaceship if you didn't know what it was ahead of time.

This is part of a disturbing trend in schools where kids are being regularly punished for "thought crimes" that in past generations would have considered a rite of passage. Small wonder kids have no respect for authority when their school officials make such a mockery of the phrase that used to define this country -- land of the free and home of the brave.

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

Media Bytes - God Bless America edition

By Libby

I don't think I've linked to Atrios since the blogroll purge but he unearthed the perfect media byte today so I'm dropping my ban for the greater good. I read the transcript of this recently but the voice inflections give it so much more context that you really have to watch it. This is why we call it a Friedman.

Meanwhile, I'd agree that America to the Rescue is brilliant. Jon Stewart delivers a gut punch in this piece on the historical context of our meddling in the Middle East.

And in case you somehow missed the Cheney video from 1994 that he referenced in the piece, it's at the link. I found it odd to see Cheney looking and sounding like a reasonable human rather than a snarling sociopath. Of course he wasn't the fourth branch of government then.

Who will get the Bush Dogs out?

By Libby

I'll have more to say on this later, but just a quick endorsement of Matt Stoller's Bush Dog campaign. I take back every mean thing I ever said about his being a mere tool of the Democratic machine. This is exactly what the progressives need to do if we're to reclaim the Democratic party and restore it to its former principles.

Clearly, the Dems need the help figuring out what the stand for when they cringe and cower from the latest White House spin on the surge "success." How is it these cowards can't see the repetitive nature of the warhawk's tactics when they are so painfully apparent to most of the country? Did they forget the big talk about the surge's only true metric of success would be its ability to foster political reconcillation. Did they not notice that Maliki's government is on the verge of shattering? Or did they just think that we forgot and they can away with reneging on their promise to rein in our Reckless Leader?

I don't have the time at the moment to fully develop this theme but let it suffice for now to note that if the surge was such a bloody success, then why does the White House GOP operatives feel like they have to spend 15 million on a PR blitz to convince us it's succeeding? Seems to me, real success would have sold itself.

Bull on China shops

By Libby

I'm working today so just a quick post on the BuzzFlash Media Putz of the day, Erin Burnett of CNBC, who had this to say in denfense of the Corporatocracy.

"A lot of people like to say, uh, scaremonger about China, right?" Burnett recently commented on "Hardball." "A lot of politicians, and I know you talk about that issue all the time. I think people should be careful what they wish for on China. You know, if China were to revalue its currency or China is to start making say, toys that don't have lead in them or food that isn't poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now, they're keeping prices low and they're keeping the prices for mortgages low, too."

So she's saying we should quietly allow China to poison our kids and sell us tainted food and slipshod goods because it's good for WalMart's profit margin? How do people like this get paying jobs in the media?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out China is not our friend and could very easily send us down the tubes simply by calling in our loans. Erin's piece would have made some sense if she had advised us to respect our biggest creditor out of fear, but to suggest we should be grateful that the Bush administration put them in a position to destroy us is just silly.

Although, on second thought I suppose we should be grateful they haven't availed themselves of the opportunity to do so -- yet. However, if we continue to insist that they behave responsibly, one fears that restraint may not last forever. A situation almost too horrible to contemplate since there is no obvious solution as China holds all the cards and could trump in any time it suits them.

Everybody lies

By Libby

This is not a new idea. They've been testing rivers and even the air over cities in Europe for some time now but to my knowledge this is the first time they've tested directly at sewage plants.

Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are taking.

One of the early results of the new study showed big differences in methamphetamine use city to city. One urban area with a gambling industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities. Yet methamphetamine levels were virtually nonexistent in some smaller Midwestern locales, said Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental toxicology at Oregon State.

Cities in the experiment ranged from 17,000 to 600,000 in population, but Field declined to identify them, saying that could harm her relationship with the sewage plant operators. She plans to start a survey for drugs in the wastewater of at least 40 Oregon communities.

She said that one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week.

Field said her study suggests that a key tool currently used by drug abuse researchers — self-reported drug questionnaires — underestimates drug use.

Exactly. Everybody lies, for a variety of reasons, but mainly fear of legal reprecussions. That's why it's so ridiculous when the ONDCP and the DEA try to justify their funding by touting successes as measured by self-reported declines in use.

David Murray, chief scientist for U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the idea interests his agency. Two federal agencies have taken samples from U.S. waterways to see if drug testing a whole city is doable, but they haven’t gotten as far as the Oregon researchers.

I'll just bet it interests them as potentially useful data to justify continuing their failed policies. Just as in the Iraq war, the prohibition profiteers play from both sides. If they find widespread drug use, they claim there's an epidemic and they need increased funding and more extreme methods to combat the problem. If the data, by some miracle showed lower use, they would claim it's because their policies are working and they need more funding and ramped up operations in order to completely eliminate the problem.

Either way, they end up spending billions of tax dollars on strategies that have no effect on behaviors that are largely harmless in the first place and the instances where they cause harm to individuals that abuse drugs, the victims would benefit from a public health approach rather than criminalization and incarceration.

As it stands now, drug war policies not only cause more harm than the "danger" they seek to allay, they also cost far more for bogus studies that provide little more than just another avenue to pass out no bid contracts to cronies in order to paint failure as success. Why DHS needs to duplicate the failures of the DEA and ONDCP is beyond me.

Clueless And Loving It

Every once in a while you see a headline and it catches your eye. I saw this headline at Hinesight.com "Clueless In America" and I had to investigate and when I got there I saw this, the first paragraph in an Agence France Presse or AFP.com release:

Two-thirds of US adults admit to being in the dark about political issues outside the United States, and only a third are well-versed in US politics, the results of a poll published Tuesday showed.

Now just a damned minute, no wonder people are confused when they have to read stupid paragraphs like that. Maybe something was lost in translation.

Now, to get back to my point. I think that 1/3 or 2/3 number is way too optimistic. I don't think any more than 10 percent of Americans have a clue or even know where to find one. To think that 1/3 of Americans have any interest in foreign affairs is a staggering number. One source showed a population of 302,000,000 in this country and to think that 100,000,000 could actually find Canada on the map is pushing it. I was going to say Mexico, but I think a very decent portion could probably locate Mexico or remember walking across it.

"Well over half (57 percent) say they do not like learning about political issues in other countries," and 32 percent expressed a lack of interest for homespun politics, the Harris Poll group said.

These numbers still seem to be a little screwy in the report, but most people don't really give a big damn about anything outside of the NFL training camp injury report. Truth be told, I'm a little jealous of these people. I am interested and it just depresses the hell out of me. I think the numbers do add up though and it bothers me that these people go years without studying the issues and then every four years they feel that they have to vote for president. Why don't they just stay at home and leave it to people who really care? You see how this makes me react? Pretty damned sad and I think that to keep my sanity I must become one of them. I would probably be happier if I just watched football, stopped reading and threw this damned computer in the trash.

Jim Martin

Let them eat insurance policies

By Libby

When Bush announced he is the Great Decider, he apparently wasn't just talking about policies that legally and traditionally fall under the purview of the executive branch, he means he's going to make decisions about everything, including mandating policy that should be left to individual state's discretion. And so, in his typical fashion of delivering unpalatable edicts during the August recess, he has decided that the welfare of the private insurance industry is more important than the health of our nation's children.

In a letter sent to the states this week he mandated impossible criteria for states who wish to expand insurance assistance to uninsured children, going as far as to rescind previously authorized standards that have been in existence for years. This new edict not only prevents new enrollees, it will eliminate coverage for children who already depend on the program.

The language of the White House proclamation is telling in that none of the requirements mandated by our "compassionate president" require benchmarks that relate to the health of children. The thresholds instead are predicated on how it affects the insurance industry's bottom line.

Joe Gandelman has his usual link rich post, collecting the various reactions, and expresses his own outrage admirably. Predictably, his comment section has already garnered responses along the lines of, why should we be subsidizing upper middle class kids anyway? And indeed, one can understand how someone living in a place where the median income is in the 40s could be skeptical of NY state's desire to expand coverage up to families making in the 80s. It's difficult for some people to understand the relative nature of the cost of living in different areas of the country.

But the bottom line is, Bush has no right to dictate impossible mandates, against the wishes of the Congress, simply to protect his corporate cronies and however one feels about the program itself, the only certainty is that millions of more children are going to be denied proper medical care by the richest country in the world. That's just a disgrace.

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

Prices Are Dropping At Wal-Mart. So Are Your Dogs

Yesterday, Wal-Mart quietly pulled dog treats from their shelves that are rumored to be making dogs ill and in one reported case, dead.

They made no announcement, no recall, and no warnings to people who may have the treats at home.
A Wal-Mart spokesman came up with the usual corporate lame response:

“When we took it off shelves at the end of July, we pulled it based on the customer feedback so we could do testing prior to announcing anything publicly,” Galberth said. “That’s why did not make a public announcement — it was still going through the testing process.”

Of course Wal-Marts customers, looking for the lowest price, are getting what they are paying for and have already started field "testing" these products.

Philadelphia television station WPVI reported last week that a woman claimed her 2-year-old Chihuahua died after eating Bestro Chicken Jerky Strips. The station reported that an autopsy found the dog died of an infection caused by toxic bacteria.

Wal-Mart once again showed that the well-being of their customers comes in second to profits even if they have to resort to tainted products cheaply produced in lawless China.

When will the American people realize that no one is looking out for them. The government is not. They have cut food inspectors and are hundreds if not thousands of inspectors short of what is needed to protect America's food supply.

It is boggling to me to think that we are producing food, selling it to China and they are processing it with chemicals and other substances and then reselling it to profit mad companies like Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart wraps itself in the flag, buys off republicans and poisons America's pets and does not say a word.

It is time to hold Wal-Mart responsible. When you pay the lowest price and the product comes from some third world cesspool, then you get what you pay for.

Walmart's spokesman finally, yet unintentionally, tells the truth.

“We are diligently testing this product,” she said.

They are testing their product on us.

Jim Martin

Blogger to put Thompson to the test

By Libby

I like this. Blogger Lane Hudson has filed a formal FEC complaint against Fred Thompson for violating the "testing the waters" rule.

Fred's supporters leaped in of course, to defend Fred's grey zone and to mock Lane for trying to regain the "fifteen minutes of fame" he garnered when he exposed Foley's proclivity for young male pages, but it's good move that's long overdue in my mind.

Fred may be operating within the letter of the law, but he is clearly abridging the spirit and intent. We don't need to set a precedent for stretching the ethical limits beyond fairness and honesty based on legal technicalities. If nothing else the FEC will be forced to show its hand and demonstrate whether they are indeed an impartial body who purposes to uphold the people's interest rather than the politician's ambitions.

The danger of course, is that the FEC will provide cover for Fred's dancing around fair elections and in the next cycle it will be even worse. One can only hope the FEC will take the high ground and establish distinct and meaningful limits to the "testing the waters" gambit.

Excess bloggage

I'm off to work for a few hours so here's what I wrote elsewhere that you may have missed.

Hannity fundraises for Guliani. That's okay with me but media figures should disclose their bias or stay off the air.

Nobel prize winner denies discrimination. No she wasn't kicked out of the hotel.

I have a new conspiracy theory. Rove's master plan

Litvinenko liked lap dancers.

Time to revamp farm subsidies.

Time for a national primary.

I'll be back later with new posts.

White House Admits Military Decisions Are Politically Motivated

Today in a stunning move the White House confirmed that troops in Iraq are being used for political reasons.

The report is on abcnews.com with the tag line of

Withdrawal of 'Surge' Troops Might Isolate War Critics, Administration Official Says

President Bush is waiting for the progress report before he makes a decision, even though that is obviously a lie and the decision has been made to reduce force strength. The problem is, the decision is a political one.

That report is to be based largely on recommendations submitted to the president by the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, who told ABC News today that he is "working hard" on it but has not yet submitted it to the White House.

But a consensus has developed to allow the nearly 25,000 "surge" troops to leave as their tours end, an administration official told ABC News on condition of anonymity because the report is not final.

The ABC News report goes on, attributed to an administration source.

By beginning the drawdown, the White House sees the chance to isolate anti-war Democrats and still maintain enough support in Congress to keep a major troop presence in Iraq, the administration official told ABC News.

The Bush administration has always played fast and loose with the truth and the lives of our troops have always been used for political purposes.

The fact is, the Bush Administration has no choice but to drawdown the troops as the Army is straining as it is.

The president, who is vacationing at his Texas ranch, has little alternative to a gradual exit. The Army's chief of staff says the military is straining to maintain current troop levels in Iraq.
"Today's Army is out of balance," Gen. George Casey told reporters at the National Press Club earlier this week. "The demand for forces exceeds the sustainable supply."

This seems to be huge news. They have known all along that the surge could not be maintained, but they are going to use that fact for political motives.

The goal all along has been to keep a large U.S. force in Iraq for years, but not one large enough to make a difference.

Impeachment has always been an option, but it has become imperative that this man is removed from office.

Jim Martin

Privatizing America

By Libby

Brought to you by the party that wants to shrink government until it can be drowned in a bathtub, here's the latest example of the Bush administration's largest entitlement program - back door corporate welfare.

The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency.

Since 2000, the value of federal contracts signed by all agencies each year has more than doubled to reach $412 billion, with the largest growth at the Defense Department, according to a congressional tally in June. Outsourcing particularly accelerated among intelligence agencies after the 2001 terrorist attacks caught many of them unprepared to meet new demands with their existing workforce.

The small government/free market types keep telling me that privatization is more efficient and saves us money. Bah. We pay up to ten times more to corporate cronies for the same work we used to have government employees do and they deliver a shoddy product because there's no mandated oversight or performance metrics in the contracts.

This is same logic that put around 100,000 private contractors into Iraq -- whose over-inflated salaries are somehow not counted in the war costs and whose dead are not tallied. The same scheme that has cost us over a billion in tax dollars and hasn't even approached restoring the Gulf Coast, two years after the devastation of Katrina. The same lame-brained notion that led to the scandal at Walter Reed.

And now they're going to put our privacy in the hands of private contractors? It's not surprising they're overwhelmed with work. All that domestic surveillance and wide-sweep eavesdropping has generated more data than anyone can sift through. I'm not happy with the government doing it but at least we have some small method of demanding accountability from them. Private contractors won't be bound by the same rules of disclosure. I don't consider that an improvement, much less an acceptable alternative.

I am not a Journalist

By Libby

The latest to engage in the new sport of blog bashing, Michael Skube, basically says we are a bunch of loud mouthed amateurs who have no credibility because we don't get get paid and we should get over ourselves. Ironically he then cites four of the few bloggers that actually make something approaching a living from it.

But don't bother him with details and opinions. He's on a roll and we're getting in his way. I especially like his big denouement.

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

The patient sifting of fact? Excuse me while I vomit into my wastebasket. After six years of reading stenographic recitations of White House press releases and other authorized leaks of half-truths and outright lies reported uncritically as fact, with zero historical context that any decent blogger can uncover in 60 seconds or less in a google search, forgive my cynicism.

If the 90% of the so-called professional journalists would get off their lazy butts and start doing some real reporting again, us filthy rabble would be supporting them instead of challenging them. If Mr. Skube wants to be treated with respect for his professionalism, he might start by showing some.

For instance he might try a little more "patient shifting of fact" before he shoots his mouth off. Most of us do not hold pretensions toward being "citizen journalists." If he was paying attention he might have noticed that it was the PJMedia crowd who declared war on the MSM and vowed to supplant them with citizen journalism. That Army of Davids thing - that was Insty, not the lefty bloggers he chose to illustrate his point -- and that's a fact.

Soldiers speak - the surge has failed

By Libby

This piece by a group of soldiers who are just returning from a 15 month deployment in the sandbox is the must read of the day. It stands in stark contrast to the rosy assessments coming from the politicians and "expert class pundits" like O'Hanlon and Pollack and Kristol, who all have seen cheerful improvements in the few day's worth of dog and pony shows arranged personally by the Pentagon to entertain them during their "fact finding" tours.

As they say, read the whole thing but here's a few pertinent quotes.

To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. ...

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. ...we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. ...The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

[I]t would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

John Cole hits on a key point in my reaction.

While these guys are in the 82nd Airborne, you can see that what they write is sure to infuriate the patriots in the 101st Chairborne. I wonder if they are going to have the nerve to ratchet up the smear machine against these guys. They have their names. Do they have the balls? I am betting that since they don’t, they will choose route #2- ignore the op-ed completely.

Cole is spot on with that prediction. Having held off posting on this for a few hours, I see only one of the biggest Beauchamp ragers managed to acknowledge the piece. Hot Air notes, well here's seven guys who don't think we're winning. Yawn. The rest of them are pimping Ledeen's let's bomb Iran piece or desperately honing in on some guy who's trying to sell his book about how 9/11 turned him away from liberalism.

So where's the machismo of the Mighty Rightys today? One lone soldier writing in a low circulation magazine is a federal case worthy of two weeks of maniacal sleuthing and incessant screeching about honor and morale but seven active duty airmen in the newspaper of record who contradict their prevailing meme aren't worthy of their notice?

One is tempted to think our courageous keyboardists are simply afraid to take on opponents with the means to fight back.

Hold your fire

By Libby

Here's another little way the Bush doctrine is endangering our safety at home. Our local police are running out of ammo

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.

An Associated Press review of dozens of police and sheriff's departments found that many are struggling with delays of as long as a year for both handgun and rifle ammunition. And the shortages are resulting in prices as much as double what departments were paying just a year ago.

So they can't train the new recruits in firearm proficiency and it's costing the taxpayer additional local funds to keep their police departments in bullets.

I guess that's one way to ensure that a potential declaration of martial law wouldn't meet any resistance from local law enforcement officers who might still believe in civil liberties. Rather convenient way to disarm the people as well, without the bother of confiscating the firearms. I have to think that individual gun owners are also feeling the same pinch and would likely keep less ammo on hand. Wouldn't be much chance of an armed uprising without bullets.

Just saying.

Blogged elsewhere

By Libby
Updated below

Spreading the posts around today.

Legislate in haste, repent at leisure. Now that the cursed bill is being analysed after the fact, they've discovered they gave Bush and Fredo pretty muchcarte blanche to spy on Americans without oversight.

Who's the abuser? Parents who sold their kids to CBS now want to sue over child abuse. Feh.

Don't worry - it's just a run on the bank. Oh and WalMart's CEO noticed that “[m]any customers are running out of money at the end of the month.”

Denial endangers the planet. Debunking the ridiculous "debunk" the wingers were flogging all week. The charts speak for themselves.

More: Florida County rejects pork. Money. Sometimes you can't even give it away.

I think I might have to stop blogging and devote the rest of my life to arborsculpture.

Gucci, Gucci goo

By Libby
Updated below

Marc Ambinder gives us a probably unintended glimpse into the mind of the average Fred Thompson supporter. He posts a couple of clips from a fairly critical piece by Fox "News" on Fred's visit to the Iowa state fair. Marc doesn't offer much in the way of analysis, but the comment section is most revealing.

Most the comments revolve around the mention of Fred's Gucci loafers. There's much debate on whether the shoes were accurately branded and over a dozen defenses of Fred's right to wear expensive footwear because it's not nearly as bad as paying too much for a haircut. This is why our political debate has deteriorated. The average Jake cares more about the trivia than the substance. Only a couple of commenters mentioned that it would be more useful to know what Fred's positions are on policy.

So question is do the people focus on trivia because that's what the "news" delivers or do the media deliver trivia because that's the only thing the average Jake cares about? I suspect it's a little of both.

For myself, I thought it was much more telling that Fred cruised through the fair in a golf cart, rather than walk around and glad hand the crowd. It suggests an either physical infirmnity that would be troublesome in a president or an aloofness that implies he thinks he's too good to mingle with the little people.

Update: Crooks and Liars has more video and they're right -- Fred looks just awful. Sickly even. No wonder he was riding in a golf cart.

In case you forgot...

By Libby

This is why I love the internets. Some wingnut I didn't recognize basically copied a Wikipedia entry into a post about all the plagiarists that have been caught by Blogtopians. When I saw the list I couldn't help but notice he had only listed those that would be considered leftists in the mighty righty outrage crowd. I figured it was only a matter of time before someone would respond and Gavin M at Sadly, No came through with a sublimely subtle post that shreds the winger's post with such grace and style I'm in awe.

Next lifetime, I want to be that creative and subtle.

As long as they spell your name right....

By Libby

It's been a big week for The Impolitic and the Newshoggers. First the fine folks at Buzz Flash.com linked to my GOP retirement post here, followed closely by a link from their companion site, Buzz Flash.net where the Buzzers picked up Jim's post on Fred Thompson.

Then today, Newshoggers got lampooned by Chris Muir in a Day by Day cartoon. Cernig got the credit in that one, but the panel was about my post, which Cernig kindly acknowledged in a response to the cartoon.

Chris Muir himself showed up in comments there and thanked me for my work, and noted he was actually inspired by my Padilla post, the same post that inspired Jules Crittenden to insult the Newshoggers team.

Newhog indignation here. Should have been terrorist Bush on trial instead of peace-loving American Padilla. Bush torture to blame. This seems to be emerging as the main thread. Padilla was driven so crazy he couldn’t refute his fingerprints on the document and his voice on the tape.

OK, a couple more. Left Field: fear wins out. Yeah, Americans are stupid. LF adds remark about what a failure Bush’s anti-terrorism policies are. There must be a successful terrorist attack on the mainland U.S. in the last six years less one month that I’ve forgotten. Shakespeare’s Sister (really, that might actually be more insulting to Shakespeare than ”Newshogger” is to pigs) sniffs that to wingnuts this will justify everything that was done to Padilla over the last 3 1/2 years. Well … no, not really, that was already OK.

Bleech! But as they say, no such thing as bad press. A big thanks to everyone, even Jules, for the props and the pan.

Meanwhile, since I'm on a linkfest here, I posted a couple more items at Newshoggers yesterday that might be of interest to our cherished readers here. Diebold may well be on the verge of bankruptcy, along with their companion company in fraudulent vote counting, Sequoia and if you're a sci-fi fan and didn't catch this item, a couple of guys broke the speed of light, something which they said could never be done. I love when that happens.

Please remember this...

By Libby

It's not even worth reading Michael Gerson's latest pap. It's the sort of piece one would expect from George Bush's chief speechwriter. A mere piece of fluff in praise of Karl Rove. But the opening paragraph struck me.

When I asked Karl Rove this week to summarize his approach to politics, he quoted from memory a 167-year-old letter by Abraham Lincoln to his Whig campaign committee: "Keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence."

Rather odd isn't it that Karl can't remember what he did with his emails, or who he met with in the last six years or any number of other details that interest the Congress, but he can quote a 167 year old letter by heart. I guess his amnesia only occurs within the White House walls.

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

A little help for a friend

By Libby

If you're looking to get rich, under no circumstances should you start blogging about politics. It gets to be an all-encompassing enterprise. You're glued to the news, you toil away for hours a day and you don't make a living from it. Some of the more tech savvy make beer money on blogads but a mere handful make a pretty good living on big advertisers and donations. In fact, for most of us, we spend our own money to give our work for free.

My own paypal button has been on the sidebar for months and I haven't seen a red cent. But I don't mind. I have a job that pays the bills and I'm happy for your company. I figure most of my readers are about as insolvent as I am and as long as I have a few frozen dinners in the frig, it's all good and so I have never blegged for myself.

However, every once in while a fellow blogger gets in a financial jam and I do ask that people try to help them out. My friend Michael van der Galien is in just such a jam. He's a right wing blogger and I often disagree strongly with his views, but he's a really sweet guy, unfailing polite, and he just got engaged. He needs money for himself and his future bride, so if you can do anything, please click over.

Oh, and while I'm thinking of it, he also just made some changes to his blog. It's now called The Van Der Galiën Gazette and he's planning on adding a few more bloggers to the mix. I probably won't change my blogroll because I tend to list by the blogger's names anyway and the URL didn't change but if you list by blog title, you'll want to update your listing.

Blogged elsewhere

By Libby

I should really do this every day but I often barely have time to post, much less keep track of everything I've posted. But for those who are new readers and don't know where to find me and for regular readers who don't feel like chasing me down, here's a few links to posts I've done at my other blogs.

This one was important with the upcoming Petreaus report looming and the spurious claims that that violence is down in Iraq. The dead tell the tale of the failed surge.

This story was largely overlooked but it's not a good thing when Time Warner dictates USPS policy on delivery rates for magazines.

Big Brother keeps getting bigger and bigger. These are must reads if you're one of the people who think my conspiracy theories on martial law are crazy. They really are watching.

Meanwhile, I'm educating Detroit on propaganda. I remind my readers there that the surge is NOT working and the myths of September will neither be written nor delivered by Petreaus.

Stating the obvious, for those who prefer to avoid uncomfortable realities, I note the Bushenomic bubble bursting.

And in case you missed this takedown on Giuliani's checkered past, I summarize it at the link where you can also access the full article. Man, that guy is scary.