Freedom on the march in New Orleans

The Bush Administration today strongly denied reports of devastation along the Gulf Coast and flooding in New Orleans, and insisted that the situation is already improving.

"Sure, there are pockets where dead-enders and other small puddles of water are trying to reconstitute," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "But the the forces of dryness are making good progress. Whatever minor impacts we are seeing from the axis of wetness represents tghe last efforts of a dying cause." Rumsfeld also insisted that he knew exactly where the breaches in the levys around the low-lying city of New Orleans were, informing reporters that the breaches were "in the area around New Orleans and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Vice President Dick Cheney was equally adamant. "We are seeing the last throes of insurgent wetness throughout the Gulf Coast area," Cheney maintained.

Finally, President Bush annouced that although the war for terra firma was "hard work," "progress was being made," and said that the lessons of 9/11 would not be forgotten. "We will send all 12 National Guardsmen remaining in Louisiana and Mississipi to Iraq immediately so that we can protect all freedom-loving people against this kind of assault," said the President.

In an unrelated story, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that all male survivors found in the areas under martial law who could not either (a)produce voter records proving they voted for George Bush or (b) prove they belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans would be temporarily housed in a shelter located in Gauntanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Department of Defense also revealed that it had awarded Halliburton, Inc. a $12 billion no-bid contract to furnish each affected resident with a lunchbox containing an expired MRE and a bottle of Lake Pontchartrain water. The lunchboxes could be ready for distribution as early as November.

From Zero to Nero

Dubya plays:


President Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country Singer Mark Wills, right, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bush visited the base to deliver remarks on V-J Commemoration Day.


While America floods:


Gotta love that compassionate conservatism. And do you think he has broken out his personal copy of My Pet Goat for old time's sake?

Sometimes a hurricane is just a hurricane

Dr. Bloor commented earlier on the pathetic right wing attempts at humor/blame placement for the devastation on the Gulf. I am waiting for the mainstream to say the obvious: that many local National Guard units (which, after all, are maintained largely for exactly this eventuality) can't offer desperately needed help because they are busy in the Quagmire Formerly Known As Iraq; and that money that should have gone to shoring up levees and other programs was diverted to inadequately armored Hummers and inadequately supervised Halliburton 365-days-of-Christmas giveaways.

And yet, curiously, I have heard nothing about how Katrina is God's punishment for Red State support of Bush, Iraquagmire, etc. (Remember: Pat Robertson has steered hurricanes away from God-fearing folk before.) At some point we can expect to hear the equivalent of Freud's lame "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" attempt to escape the tentacles of his own theories.

On the other hand, if you want to move past the "God's will" theory, you might want read this. If I were God, that would be more than enough to make me wrathful.

Update: better yet, look here: RFK, Jr. connects the dots.

The war is over; time to blame the liberals

New piece up @ Raw Story.

Commenting to a comment to another blog

The Cunning Realist is a rare bird: a sane, well-argued conservative. In this post he admits the the utter clusterfuckness of our Iraq policy, and castigates the usual players for the failures. But he says he supported the original decision to invade Iraq, and does not say anything that would indicate that he now thinks that was the wrong decision. In other words, good idea, bad execution. (Kinda like our own milquetoast Democratic politicans.) A commenter (who identifies himself as a "true Wyoming Republican") takes him down beautifully on that score:

When will we get an unequivocal admission that the decision to invade Iraq was extremely unwise/short-sighted/ stupid (take your pick). Even if there had been a weapons program discovered and it was subsequently dismantled/destroyed, would the current situation on the ground be any different? Would the Kurds, Shites and Sunnis now be getting along, with no Sunni insurgency?? Would the U.S. not now be facing a long term commitment of money and troops? No, no and no. There is no way, by any reasonable standard, that Iraq (or the U.S.) is “better” off now without Sadadam. (and please don’t start talking about the 300,000 [?] Kurds that Saddam killed, and buried in mass graves. How many Kurds have been killed by the Turks?? Should we invade Turkey next?) And what about comments (from Sullivan) that “there's still a reasonable chance of a pretty depressingly illiberal constitution” What constitution? Illiberal or otherwise! As it stands now, it takes 2/3 of the voters, from just 3 provinces to vote down (reject) any “constitution” when it goes to a vote in October (that’s assuming that they can even come up with a “constitution”). Constitution my ass. Iraq will end up being run, the way it has always been run. The only difference is, the person with the most power will have a name other than Saddam Hussein. And for this outcome, the U.S. has spent (will have spent) the better part of a half a trillion dollars and lost (to date) close to 2,000 servicemen and women, as well as tens of thousands of seriously wounded.
When will people face this reality?

I think this is an important point: would the current situation be any better or more "worth it" if there had been biological or chemical weapons? If there had been some stumbling, inchoate, decades-from-completion nuke program?

Heh

The Arizona Daily Star is getting a makeover:

More words. More letters. No more Ann Coulter.
...
Today, we unveil some visible changes to your Opinion pages. More changes will come here and throughout the paper over the coming weeks and months.
...
Finally, we've decided that syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has worn out her welcome. Many readers find her shrill, bombastic and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives.

Heh.

Science Monday: Transparent Aluminum

Any techno-geeks out there remember in how in Star Trek IV the whole crew travels back in time and Scotty gives some guy in the 20th Century the formula for transparent aluminum?

Science has now caught up with science fiction: Behold transparent aluminum:



Now where's my light saber, damn it?

Monday Notcat Blogging

It has come to Mr. Bluememe's attention that there are those who suspect that he is a stuffed shirt, and unmoved by warm and fuzzy things like smelly, dander-shedding sharp-clawed violin-strings-on-the-hoof.

Nonsense. Mr. Bluememe enjoys time away from politics relaxing with cuties like:



and he has always had thought this was kind of cuddly:


but here is what really warms his heart:


Can we get back to fomenting insurrection now?

The warm-up to the Rove pardon

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - Governor Ernie Fletcher says he will pardon current and former members of his administration charged in an ongoing grand jury investigation.

Fletcher says he is granting blanket amnesty to any member of his administration who might be charged with breaking state merit system laws. But Fletcher says he will not pardon himself.

Nine members of his administration have been charged with misdemeanor violations of state hiring laws. He compared those charges to minor violations of fishing laws.

One member of the administration, Dan Druen, is also facing several felony charges. Fletcher used a televised address to accuse Attorney General Greg Stumbo of wasting time on the investigation while ignoring other priorities. Stumbo has called a news conference for Monday night to respond.

Fletcher also said that he will appear before the grand jury tomorrow in Frankfort. But he said he will decline to testify.

Note to MSM: save this story; you will be able to replace "Fletcher" with "Bush" and "Dan Druen" with "Karl Rove," and run it otherwise verbatim when Patrick Fitzgerald goes public in a few months.

Atrios is right

This is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

But hey, if Dennis Rodman and Kenny Rodgers are your idea of an argument for intelligent design, you go girl.

I am beginning to get a sense of why I labor in relative obscurity here -- I'm obviously too obtuse to get a gig at a major newspaper.

Reverse Engineering

Army Contract Official Critical of Halliburton Pact Is Demoted - New York Times

A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.

The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq.
...
Ms. Greenhouse's lawyer, Michael Kohn, called the action an "obvious reprisal" for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq.
...
"She is being demoted because of her strict adherence to procurement requirements and the Army's preference to sidestep them when it suits their needs," Mr. Kohn said Sunday in an interview. He also said the Army had violated a commitment to delay Ms. Greenhouse's dismissal until the completion of an inquiry by the Pentagon's inspector general.
...
Known as a stickler for the rules on competition, Ms. Greenhouse initially received stellar performance ratings, Mr. Kohn said. But her reviews became negative at roughly the time she began objecting to decisions she saw as improperly favoring Kellogg Brown & Root, he said. Often she hand-wrote her concerns on the contract documents, a practice that corps leaders called unprofessional and confusing.

In October 2004, General Strock, citing two consecutive performance reviews that called Ms. Greenhouse an uncooperative manager, informed her that she would be demoted.

Ms. Greenhouse fought the demotion through official channels, and publicly described her clashes with Corps of Engineers leaders over a five-year, $7 billion oil-repair contract awarded to Kellogg Brown & Root. She had argued that if urgency required a no-bid contract, its duration should be brief.

Ms. Greenhouse had also fought the granting of a waiver to Kellogg Brown & Root in December 2003, approving the high prices it had paid for fuel imports for Iraq, and had objected to extending its five-year contract for logistical support in the Balkans for 11 months and $165 million without competitive bidding. In late June, ignoring warnings from her superiors, Ms. Greenhouse appeared before a Congressional panel, calling the Kellogg Brown & Root oil contract "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career." She also said the defense secretary's office had improperly interfered in the awarding of the contract.

I am a believer in the power of reverse engineering. Make whatever claims you want about yourself and about your motives; I'll come to my own conclusions from examination of what you actually do. And based on what the managers of our military-industrial establishment do, it is obvious that the their goal is to transfer as much wealth as possible to Halliburton and other cronies of the Republican machine. Greenhouse was serious about the job the rest of us think she was supposed to, which runs 180 degrees counter to the job her masters expected her to do. So of course they judged her performance to be poor.

MSM does FSM!

Incredibly, from the Wichita Eagle - Evolution debate spawns a saucy monster

Move over, Darwin. Stand aside, Intelligent Design.

The idea that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world is demanding equal time in Kansas biology classrooms.

In his corner are three moderate state school board members and a prominent Topeka attorney. They say this concept makes about as much sense as proposed science standards, favored by the board's religious conservative majority, that encourage schools to criticize evolution while they teach it.

Bobby Henderson of Corvallis, Ore., created the tongue-in-cheek deity and an accompanying mythology on the origin of mankind to satirize the Kansas Board of Education's ongoing flap over evolutionary theory.

Since June, when the spaghetti monster made his Internet debut, the parody religion has grown into a full-fledged Internet phenomenon.

Henderson said his Web site -- www.venganza.org -- has had 19 million visits, including 4 million in two days last week.

A search for "Flying Spaghetti Monster" on the Google search engine turns up 96,000 hits. Yahoo offers 171,000 Web pages on the topic.
...
Pedro Irigonegaray, a Topeka lawyer who defended evolution at board hearings in May, hasn't been touched by the noodly appendage.

But, he said, "I have made myself available to the spaghetti monster as counsel of record, at no charge."

Why?

"When I was in the hearings, I really felt like I was back in the 16th century," he said. "Why not allow every ridiculous notion to be taught in science classes?"
...
Conservative state school board member Kathy Martin of Clay Center said the spaghetti monster is only funny at first glance. "So they really think... serious criticism of evolution is a joke," she said.

"I think probably someone who is very creative doesn't have enough to do," she added. "I think I'll continue to eat my spaghetti and not believe in it."

Martin said she's received probably "dozens" of e-mails about the spaghetti monster. But, she added, "I don't consider it a legitimate movement at all."

"I don't mind the e-mails; I can just delete those," she said.

But when she got a phone message at her home from a man who politely urged her to support the teaching of spaghetti monster theory in the schools, she made a harassment complaint and turned the name and number he left on her machine over to the sheriff's department.
...
while the spaghetti monster dominates the message traffic, a growing segment is advocating "intelligent falling," a creation of The Onion, a satirical newspaper.

Intelligent falling spoofs Intelligent Design by contending that gravity is an unproved theory and students should be taught the possibility that objects fall because a higher being is pushing them down.

I dunno if we win by turning the whole ID affair into a Monty Python sketch. But there is only one way to find out.

Borrowing his way out of debt

Margaret Colson has a strong piece up on Bloomberg.com:

President George W. Bush finally responded to the protesters camped outside his Texas ranch.

He did it a thousand miles away, before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City. On a stop en route to a vacation within a vacation in Idaho, Bush broke his near silence about the country's almost 2,000 war dead.

``Each of these men and women left grieving families and loved ones back home,'' Bush said. ``We owe them something. We will finish the task that they gave their lives for.''

Reading Bush's empty, bankrupt rhetoric for the umpteenth time, it hit me what the latest rationale for the continued insanity in Iraq really boils down to: Bush is finally acknowledging the mountain of debt he has incurred, in lives and human suffering. And he wants to borrow his way out of it.

Well, folks, as anyone who lived through the leveraged buyout frenzy of the '80s knows, you can't borrow your way out of debt. Bush can play the game with OPM (which he now redefines as Other Peoples' Mothers), but in the end, he is going to walk away with the debt unpaid, leaving others to suffer uncompensated.

Every time he talks about the debt, we need to repeat: you can't borrow your way out of debt. The grief of the mother of the next dead American soldier does not salve the pain of the thousands of Cindy Sheehans, it magnifies it. And the debt just grows larger.

New Category: the Meta-LATEOTT

Bush Predicts Cooperation in Iraq

CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush predicted Sunday that the Iraqi people will work together toward a new constitution, despite the failure to complete a draft that has the backing of all the country's ethnic and political groups.

"Of course there is disagreement," Bush told reporters. "We are watching a political process unfold."

"Some Sunnis have expressed reservations about various provisions in the constitution and that's their right as free individuals in a free society," the president said.

Despite the problems, Bush said the Iraqi people "have once again demonstrated to the world that they are up to the historic challenges before them.

He called the draft constitution "a document of which the Iraqis and the rest of the world can be proud."

Just as we talked of retiring George Bush from the LATEOTT competition to give others a fair shot at the title, ol' Dubya releases a statement so brazenly at odds with reality that he single-handledly creates a whole new category of self-delusion. We therefore create in Mr. Bush's honor a new award -- the Double Down Award, for statements that simultaneously acknowledge that the last 'light at the end of the tunnel' was a train and in the same breath express optimism that the next light will surely bring good news.

Congratulations, Sir. You have elevated self-delusion to a level unimaginable before you blessed us with your verbal derring-do.

One more LATEOTT nominee for August

Bush Confident Iraq Constitution Will Reflect Values, Traditions

We bring you another nominee in the ongoing General William Westmoreland Light At The End Of The Tunnel Award competition for the most egregiously self-deluded pronouncement about the "progress" we are making in the Quagmire Formerly Known as Iraq. Today's nominee: none other than George Walker Bush, speaking August 22 in Salt Lake City to the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention:

Now Iraq's leaders are once again defying the terrorists and pessimists by completing work on a democratic constitution. The establishment of a democratic constitution will be a landmark event in the history of Iraq and the history of the Middle East. All of Iraq's main ethnic and religious groups are working together on this vital project. All made the courageous choice to join the political process, and together they will produce a constitution that reflects the values and traditions of the Iraqi people.

A few more entries like that, and the judges will be forced to decalre Mr. Bush ineligible in order to allow someone new to win the award.

The other shoe falls

The creationist assault on science has now reached the level of insanity many of us expected:

A group representing religious schools in the state is suing the University of California admissions officials for allegedly discriminating against high schools that teach creationism and other conservative Christian viewpoints.

The Association of Christian Schools International, which represents more than 800 schools, filed a lawsuit Thursday in federal court claiming UC officials have refused to certify high school science courses that use textbooks challenging Darwin's theory of evolution.

The suit said the Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, a co-plaintiff, was told its courses were rejected because they use textbooks printed by two Christian publishers, Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Books.

Wendell E. Bird, an Atlanta attorney who represents the association, said UC policy is violating of the rights of students and religious schools.

"A threat to one religion is a threat to all," he said.

UC spokeswoman Ravi Poorsina said she could not comment, because the university had not been served with the suit. Still, she said the university has a right to set course requirements.

"These requirements were established after careful study by faculty and staff to ensure that students who come here are fully prepared with broad knowledge and the critical thinking skills necessary to succeed," Poorsina.

The suit, which seeks an injunction against UC's practices, accuses the university system of employing a double standard by approving courses taught through the viewpoints of other religions, such as Islam, Judaism and Buddhism.

Sure -- now it is about religion. I thought you were trying to tell us ID was science?

And it won't stop here, either. It isn't enough that they stupidify their own spawn -- they will not rest until Darwin has been tainted as bad religion and banished from the public square.

Admitting futility, one mistake at a time

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Saturday it had freed 1,000 detainees from Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison at the Baghdad government's request, in the largest release to date.

It was not clear if the decision was linked to a demand by Arab Sunnis opposed to a draft constitution that authorities release Sunni prisoners so they can participate in a referendum on the text and elections later this year.
...
Whether or not the releases were part of negotiations on the charter, they are likely to ease concerns over the estimated 10,000 Iraqi prisoners held in U.S. detention centers in the country.
...
The plight of prisoners in the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib, once one of Saddam Hussein's most feared prisons, has been one the most emotional issues for Iraqis since a U.S.-led invasion toppled the former Iraqi president in 2003.

A scandal broke in the facility west of Baghdad last year when leaked photographs of U.S. military guards abusing prisoners and forcing them to simulate sexual acts provoked an international outcry.

"This major release, the largest to date, marks a significant event in Iraq's progress toward democratic governance and the rule of law," said a U.S. military statement.

U.S. military officials say detainees sent to Abu Ghraib typically spend six months to a year in custody before a decision is made in Iraqi courts on whether to prosecute them.

U.S. military lawyers in Baghdad estimate that 80 to 85 percent of those arrested by U.S. forces are released without being convicted.

Leaders of the Sunni community, the seat of the insurgency, have complained that lengthy detentions without charge, during which prisoners have no access to lawyers or family, are unfair.

The military said the released prisoners were not guilty of serious crimes such as bombings, murder, torture or kidnapping and had renounced violence.

WTF? So these thousands of Iraqis who we have held incommunicado, without anything resembling due process, can be released now? Yesterday, they were the lethal "dead-enders" Rumsfeld instructed our Private Englunds to abuse -- terrorists so dangerous we couldn't release their names. Today, their release "marks a significant event in Iraq's progress toward democratic governance and the rule of law." Got that? Undoing what we did -- not Saddam's handiwork -- advances the rule of law.

How is that we go seamlessly from "Groundhog Day," where we screw up the same way, day after day, to a "Brave New World" in which we completely invert policy -- turn black to white -- without ever acknowledging yesterday's version of reality?

And if we can so easily reverse course and end stupid, ineffective policies, why not bring our troops home? How is it that bringing our troops home makes the deaths of 1800-plus American soldiers meaningless, but releasing these thousands of once-dangerous men (and women and kids) is not admitting the pointlessness of holding them in the first place?

WWFSMD?

In case the immediate news isn't depressing enough

Paul Craig Roberts: the American Economy is Destroying Itself

The historian who chronicles America's decline will lay the blame on free market ideology.
...
In an interview with Manufacturing & Technology News (August 8), the study's project leader, Jack Spencer, sees protectionism as the only threat to American innovation, which he otherwise takes for granted:

"Our belief is that subjected to the free market, the United States is still going to produce most things because our comparative advantages are innovation and new technology. If liberated from protectionism, we can compete and that is where we will always emerge as winners."

This belief is simply untrue. As this belief is the basis for the study, the study has done nothing but confirm a preordained belief.

The US has no God-given comparative advantage in innovation and new technology. We were leaders in these fields, because we were leaders in manufacturing.

We were leaders in manufacturing, because Europe and Japan destroyed themselves in wars, and the rest of the world destroyed themselves in various forms of socialism and cronyism.
...
American university enrollments in science and engineering are declining because there are no jobs for graduates. It is pointless to invest money, sweat and toil in an education that has no payoff. Markets do work. Markets are working to shrink the demand for, and supply of, American engineers and scientists.

The next impact is going to be on project manager jobs, practically the sole remaining source of career related employment for many engineers and technical people. Project management jobs require people experienced with the technology of the job. The loss of technical and engineering jobs empties the pipeline of people who have the experience to assume management positions. Far from being able to innovate, the US will even lack the human resources to manage technical and scientific projects.

Many uninformed people believe the problem is that America doesn't produce enough scientists and engineers. Manufacturing & Technology News reports that "a group of 15 US business organizations has launched a national campaign aimed at doubling within 10 years the number of bachelor's degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

What is the point of this when there is a huge supply of unemployed engineers and technical people who have been displaced by offshore outsourcing and by H-1b and L-1 work visas for foreigners?
...
In a word, American capitalism is destroying itself by dismantling the ladders of upward mobility that have made large income inequalities acceptable. By rewarding themselves for destroying American jobs and manufacturing, engineering and scientific capabilities, US executives are sowing a whirlwind. American political stability will not survive the turning of an American university degree into a worthless sheet of paper. Libertarians and free market ideologues who rejoice in freedom should open their eyes to freedom's destruction.

Have a great weekend!

I know what is at stake, damn it

Top U.S. officer faults leaders on terrorism war stakes - Yahoo! News

(Reuters) - The top U.S. military officer faulted U.S. political leaders on Friday for failing to get across what he portrayed as the huge stakes in Iraq and elsewhere in the U.S.-declared global war on terrorism.

"The most important thing we have ... right now in this kind of conflict is our will and our resolve," Gen. Richard Myers, outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon, adding the U.S. public does not get the stakes.
...
He contrasted the national mood with World War II, when Americans planted "victory gardens" of vegetables and took part in scrap metal and paper collection drives to boost the military effort.
...

"This military can do anything as long as they have the will and resolve of the American people," said the general.

You could not be more wrong, General. First, I know what is at stake here. I know that the largely irrational grievances of a few extremists have been sown, fertilized and cultivated into a widespread, virulent movement by George Bush's Oedipal, oil-soaked crusade. I know that we are going to reap a long-term harvest of horrors from what arrogance and stupidity have planted. I know that the options in Iraq have narrowed to (a) total civil war, (b) Islamic theocracy, and (c) both of the above. I know that there is nothing our military can do now to stop the entropy, but that we compound the agony with our "will and resolve." And I know that nothing is accomplished, and nothing is gained, when the next soldier needlessly dies "honoring" the prior needless deaths.

I also know, General, that "will and resolve" are not the most important thing. Limitless reserves of will and resolve are not enough to make pigs fly, or make the world conform to the magical vision of the neocons. The most important thing is to understand the world before trying to act upon it. All of our will and resolve cannot transubstantiate the unwinnable clusterfuck they have wrought into anything good or safe or just.

And finally, General, I know that our children's children will suffer for the crimes in which you have been complicit. What else, exactly, would you like me to sacrifice at the altar of your folly?

Sanctified

After lo these many years of wandering in the desert, I am saved. I have found religion at last.

Behold: The Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster.

It is a well-formed and documented faith, complete with sightings and endorsements from academics. And, most important of all, its leading disciple is pressuring the Kansas School Board to make space for the FSM version of Intelligent Design. Brother Bobby writes:

Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.

I’m sure you now realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory. It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.

The light of goodness now shines from me like fresh clam sauce.

How Time chose our President

Salon.com - War Room
The LA Times did a long, mostly repetitive piece on Plamegate. One of the questions they chew on is how it could have happened that Rove and Libby were able to keep their roles quiet until after the election.

The answer, at least in part: Their roles remained secret because some members of the mainstream press helped to keep them secret. According to the Times' report, Time magazine's Matthew Cooper chose not to ask for a waiver of confidentiality from Rove until this summer -- in part because his attorney advised against it, and in part because "Time editors were concerned about becoming part of such an explosive story in an election year." As a result, the Times says, "Cooper's testimony was delayed nearly a year, well after Bush's reelection."

Translated, as John Aravosis explains at AMERICAblog today, that means that Time's editors didn't want Cooper to reveal information that could be damaging to Bush's re-elections hopes until after the election was over. "It's one thing for Time to do its job and ignore the effects of its reporting and overall work on US elections," Aravosis writes. "It's quite another for Time to make decisions based on whether they'll influence US elections."

In a way, it may be even worse than that. By not seeking a waiver from Rove -- by not reporting what its reporter knew to be true -- Time allowed Americans to go the polls believing that which the magazine knew to be false. Until Time turned over Matthew Cooper's email messages to Patrick Fitzgerald this July, the White House was free to proclaim -- as it did, repeatedly and vociferously -- that Karl Rove had nothing whatsoever to do with the outing of Valerie Plame. That's the false story Americans had been told when they cast their votes for the presidency in November. Time knew better but didn't say.

In our frenzy to vilify the Queen of Iraq (not that there is anything wrong with that) we may have let similar evil go unremarked. What Time did, if it was not deliberate (and thus an utterly heinous abuse of their role and status), must be viewed as one of the most spectacular acts of cowardice in decades by a major media outlet -- an act that, sadly, is being echoed in the failure of its competitors to use Time's utter dereliction as an excuse to feed on their entrails.

One reason Bush likes Iraq: Bullseyes on reporters

We all know the high esteem with which President Malaprop views the press. If he had his druthers, failing to echo the party line would be a capital offense for all in the Fourth Estate.

And that's a big part of the appeal of the Quagmire Formerly Known as Iraq. Fourteen journalists have been killed there just in 2005 (48 in all) -- at least some of whom were killed by US forces. I expect few tears were shed in the White House on their behalf.

But we do have other ways of dealing with the press there: remember Abu Ghraib?

Groups Demand Release of Reuters Cameraman in Iraq

Media rights groups demanded on Thursday that U.S. forces immediately release a Reuters journalist held in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq unless they could explain why he is being held without charge.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organisation that campaigns to protect journalists detained or threatened because of their work, said it had written to top U.S. Middle East commander General John Abizaid to demand the release of 36-year-old Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani.

It also accused U.S. forces of carrying out summary arrests of journalists in Iraq without providing any justification.

Which must sound like a little slice of heaven to the Rove machine right about now.

A conservative who actually believes in conserving

www.AndrewSullivan actually gets it about SUV stupidity:

A simple one-third increase in the mileage of new vehicles would have a remarkably beneficial impact on the United States-Persian Gulf relationship, and quickly.

Here's the math. About 17 million new cars and "light trucks" (SUVs, pickups, and minivans) are sold in the United States each year and driven, on average, about 12,000 miles annually. If the fuel efficiency of 17 million vehicles driven 12,000 miles annually rose by one-third, from a real-world 17 MPG to a real-world 23 MPG, that would save about 200 gallons of gasoline annually per vehicle, or about 3.4 billion gallons of gasoline. Since a barrel of petroleum yields 20 gallons of gasoline, about 170 million barrels of oil would be saved.

Perhaps you think, Aha! With U.S. petroleum demand at 20 million barrels daily, this MPG initiative has saved just about one week's worth of oil. Yes--in the first year, the MPG increase would have little effect, in much the same way that, in their first year, few investments yield much return. But remember the miracle of compounding! In the second year, with two model-years' worth of vehicles at the higher MPG, 340 million barrels of oil are saved. The next year, the savings is 510 million barrels, the next year 680 million, and so on. In just the fifth year of this initiative, we would need to purchase about 850 million fewer barrels of petroleum--approximately the amount the United States imports each year from the Persian Gulf states.

More Robertson flip-floppery

The Cunning Realist points out a whole 'nother way in which the Right Reverend hoists himself on his own petard:

(citing the WaPo and CBS in 2003) Charles Taylor, the Liberian president who has been indicted by an international court for crimes against humanity, has few remaining supporters in the United States. But one prominent American who has stuck with the West African leader is religious broadcaster and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

In recent broadcasts of his cable TV show "The 700 Club," watched by an estimated 1 million households, Robertson has defended Taylor as a fellow Baptist and Liberia's "freely elected" leader. The "horrible bloodbath" taking place in Liberia, he has repeatedly said, is the fault of the State Department.

What Robertson, 73, has not discussed in these broadcasts is his financial interest in Liberia. In an interview yesterday, he said he has "written off in my own mind" an $8 million investment in a gold mining venture that he made four years ago under an agreement with Taylor's government.
...
A few more quotes as reported by CBS News at the same time:
"How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down,'" Robertson said Monday on "The 700 Club," broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network.

"It's one thing to say, we will give you money if you step down and we will give you troops if you step down, but just to order him to step down? He doesn't work for us."

Golden Palace "inks" another deal

Sparks woman sporting new tattoo after selling head in online auction

Some might call it creative advertizing, while others call it flat out insane.

You may have seen it before, it's a new trend in advertising, selling ad space on bodies. It's been on boxers in prize fights, and even on a pregnant womans belly. Now, a Sparks' woman is going great lengths to presue her dreams.

Molly Demers is a pretty normal 20 year old. After completing culinary school, she decided she wanted to go to Europe to hone her trade, but going to abroad costs money. So, she got an idea off the top of her head.

"I went to culinary school and my parents were very supportive, and paid for that, then I came to them with this idea, and they were like 'pay for stuff yourself, you're older now.' So, boom, I got the eBay idea."

The idea was to sell her head as ad space to the highest bidder. She offered to shave her head and have logo tattooed on the back and top of her head. The agreement is good for one year. After that time, she can grow her hair back, or get the tattoo removed.

The highest bidder, Golden Palace Poker dot com, paid an astonishing $18,000.

Before you question Ms. Demer's judgement, consider Kari Smith, who sold more prominent real estate:

-- and only got $10 grand. Shrewd. Very shrewd.

Who Will Say 'No More'?

Gary Hart has a superb, eloquent piece up @ WaPo.

My generation of Democrats jumped on the hot stove of Vietnam and now, with its members in positions of responsibility, it is afraid of jumping on any political stove. In their leaders, the American people look for strength, determination and self-confidence, but they also look for courage, wisdom, judgment and, in times of moral crisis, the willingness to say: "I was wrong."

To stay silent during such a crisis, and particularly to harbor the thought that the administration's misfortune is the Democrats' fortune, is cowardly. In 2008 I want a leader who is willing now to say: "I made a mistake, and for my mistake I am going to Iraq and accompanying the next planeload of flag-draped coffins back to Dover Air Force Base. And I am going to ask forgiveness for my mistake from every parent who will talk to me."

Further, this leader should say: "I am now going to give a series of speeches across the country documenting how the administration did not tell the American people the truth, why this war is making our country more vulnerable and less secure, how we can drive a wedge between Iraqi insurgents and outside jihadists and leave Iraq for the Iraqis to govern, how we can repair the damage done to our military, what we and our allies can do to dry up the jihadists' swamp, and what dramatic steps we must take to become energy-secure and prevent Gulf Wars III, IV and so on."

At stake is not just the leadership of the Democratic Party and the nation but our nation's honor, our nobility and our principles. Franklin D. Roosevelt established a national community based on social justice. Harry Truman created international networks that repaired the damage of World War II and defeated communism. John F. Kennedy recaptured the ideal of the republic and the sense of civic duty. To expect to enter this pantheon, the next Democratic leader must now undertake all three tasks.

But this cannot be done while the water is rising in the Big Muddy of the Middle East. No Democrat, especially one now silent, should expect election by default. The public trust must be earned, and speaking clearly, candidly and forcefully now about the mess in Iraq is the place to begin.

The real defeatists today are not those protesting the war. The real defeatists are those in power and their silent supporters in the opposition party who are reduced to repeating "Stay the course" even when the course, whatever it now is, is light years away from the one originally undertaken. The truth is we're way off course. We've stumbled into a hornet's nest. We've weakened ourselves at home and in the world. We are less secure today than before this war began.

Who now has the courage to say this?

My guess -- nobody.

This Week in God

Just in case you felt that Newsweek was not devoting enough attention to religion lately, the current cover story is Spirituality in America. (Subtitle: Move over, politics. Americans are looking for personal, ecstatic experiences of God, and, according to our poll, they don't much care what the neighbors are doing.)

So today's riddle: What is the difference between this:


and this:
?

Beats the crap out of me. If you know, please fill me in.

Care to walk that one back, Vic?

A lot of word sandwiches, word omelettes and word salads are going to be eaten by the pro-war wingnuts in coming months. So you might wonder if leading light Victor Davis Hanson might want some fries with this:

(April 22, 2003 interview, first appearing @ rightwingnews.com):

By any standard, it has been a success -- destroying an enemy 7000 miles away in less than 6 weeks, while disrupting and scattering a sophisticated terrorist network worldwide. More importantly, there is a new sophistication in our thinking about a great many Arab autocracies whose conduct has been quite duplicitous, along with a new awareness about Europe. All this shows a growing sense that the administration has now sized up the nature of the conflict, who our friends are in the trial ahead, who are enemies, and who are on the sidelines waiting to jump in when they see a clear cut winner. I might have gone more quickly into Iraq after the successes against the Taliban; but I don't think such hesitation will ultimately matter much.

You might think that subsequent events since then would cause the erudite Mr. Hanson to reassess. But in his second RWN interview (undated, but as best as I can tell from context, from the Spring of this year), Hanson stuck to his guns:

I think that if we look at it in the longer historical expanse from the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime and not concentrate on any two to three week period, then the idea that a year and a half after the regime was over with --- we’d have elections pretty well under way and we would have over 2/3’s of the country pacified --- then I know it’s a tragedy that we’ve lost that many men, that was not unexpected --- but given history’s harsh judgment of other military operations and --- we’re doing pretty well. ... So the very fact that we did use military force in Afghanistan and we can press through and finish the project in Iraq, that’s going to give us some deterrence and will make the diplomatic moves at least have a longer shelf life.

A lot more seasoning in the form of qualifiers and such (and look here for a bit of reality on the "2/3rds pacified" nonsense), but no meaningful retreat there. If the events of recent weeks have led to a change in Mr. Hanson's thinking, I have not seen evidence of it.

So c'mon, Right Wing News -- aren't you going to offer Mr. Hanson another chance to dine?

By the way, the slogan @ RWN is "We dont drink the Kool-Aid, we make it." They deserve real credit for being far more accurate in that sense than the Time's woefully quaint "All the news that's fit to print."

The Poor Man Institute

Humor with the ring of truth? Truth with a hint of humor?

My application for Senior Recidivist at The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony will be filed forthwith.

Christian News Network

If you have made the rounds in the last few days, you know about Pat Robertson's explicit advocacy of murder in order to rid America of its greatest enemy... Hugo Chavez. I see no need to add my voice to the expressions of outrage about what Roberts said. But I was utterly dumbstruck by CNN's spin this morning. Daran Kagan ran a long clip containing Roberts' outburst, introduced by Ms. Kagan calling him "controversial."

And what did they do with this tee-up? Did they mention the Ten Commandments (you know, "thou shalt not kill"), or Jesus's riff about turning the other cheek? Did they bring on other religious leaders to talk about how unthinkably sacrilegous it is for a "man of God" to be advocating assassination -- because it is cheaper than war?

Right.

Their counterpoint was to show lots of footage of Chavez with Fidel Castro -- clearly intended to cement Chavez's status as approved bullet-catcher in the small minds of those still fighting the war against communism. Not a single discouraging word about Robertson's ravings was heard. I guess there are only two sides to an issue if the Right is trying to shout down inconvenient truths, like evolution. When wingnuts head off into the wild blue yonder, no balance is needed.

Perhaps Rush will be so pleased he will share his Vicodin stash with you tonight, Daran.

Recycling, Bush style

from the newsobserver.com:

CHERRY POINT MARINE CORPS AIR STATION -- Earlier this month, a pair of hulking transport planes touched down and disgorged the newest additions to the Marine Corps helicopter fleet: three MH-53E Sea Dragons that had been sitting in an aircraft "boneyard" in the Arizona desert for about a decade.

The civilian maintenance workers at Cherry Point's Naval Air Depot will clean, strip and transform the worn-out helicopters into the Marine version of the aircraft, the Super Stallion, a process that could take 20 months. This is the first time that retired choppers such as these have been resuscitated, and the challenges are unique: Not only have the helicopters been outside about 10 years, but the Super Stallion has evolved with continuous major upgrades.

Restoring the helicopters, which have been out of production since 1999, is an extraordinary step; but the Marines have little choice: They're running out of big choppers.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are taking a bite out of their deteriorating helicopter fleet, not just in aircraft lost -- six Super Stallions have been destroyed in crashes since 2001 -- but also in hours that the helicopters are flying.

"They're coasting on legacy fleets," said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group, an aerospace and defense consulting company in Fairfax, Va. "They planned to coast indefinitely ... and it would have worked just fine if it hadn't been for Afghanistan and Iraq."

The Super Stallion is the Corps' only heavy lift helicopter, and its workhorse. It moves large amounts of cargo and troops long distances and performs rescue missions. It can carry up to 55 Marines and can use slings to transport heavy equipment such as Humvees or even small armored vehicles.

The Marines' fleet of 150 is working hard.

The two wars have pushed helicopters into a bigger military role than at any time since the Vietnam era. In Iraq, choppers are vital not only for the usual reasons -- because they can quickly move troops, supplies and equipment between points without runways -- but also because roadside bombs have become the insurgents' deadliest weapon. In Afghanistan, roads are few, and broad swaths of rugged territory are impassable by ground vehicles.

A replacement helicopter, designated the CH-53X, is in the works; but it is not far along. The Marines hope to sign a contract this fall to begin development, said John Milliman, a helicopter acquisition programs spokesman at Patuxent River Marine Air Station in Maryland.

It will probably be at least 2015 before the replacement choppers are deployed, he said. But the service life of a Super Stallion is 6,120 hours in operation, and current estimates are that the Corps will have to start parking about 15 copters a year in 2010.

That leaves five years in which the Marines' fleet of heavy lift helicopters will dwindle before replacements start coming into service.

The Bush Administration's two-quagmire strategy is causing problems in all sorts of unexpected areas. But it is nice to see that the resourceful military is finding creative and environmentally aware ways of dealing. After all, re-use is just about the greenest virtue.

With that in mind, a few suggestions for additional re-cycling from past conflicts:

Body armor:


Urban assault vehicles:


And, while you're at it, war criminals:

Iran: A Bridge too Far?

My response to Commander Codpiece's posturing at Iran has generally been "You... and what Army?" Recruiting shortfalls that are the inevitable consequence of the clusterfuck we expect people to volunteer for. And so I was focused on the manpower problem as the key reason even folks as wiggy as the neocons would not dare start another war.

Then I heard Mark Gaffney read this essay on the radio.

Oh. My. God.

The combination of the geography/topography of the Gulf and their advanced weaponry give Iran an absolute, non-debatable advantage in the Persian Gulf. All of our Navy ships (and all oil tanker traffic) there are sitting ducks, and no known defensive technology or strategy will change that. If we attack Iran, they will kick our sorry asses unless and until we use nukes. Which will please the rapture monkeys, but should scare the rest of us shitless.

Read it. Twice. Good luck sleeping tonight.

There goes the neighborhood

from AfterDowningStreet.org:

We had an incredible evening yesterday up at the new Camp Casey site. Now, as you read the rest of this post, keep in mind that the new site is literally within spitting distance of Bush's ranch-- though we wouldn't actually spit, as we're trying to behave ourselves. And besides, why stoop to vulgar behavior when we have a sound system so loud the words "No more war!" can surely be heard in the man's bedroom?!? Other statements that boomed over the loudspeaker tonight, besieging Mr. Bush and his pro-war agenda...

Justin Frank's "Bush on the Couch" points out an amazing number of serious pathologies holding permanent resident status inside Dubya's impermiable cranium. One of the interesting things I learned from that book is that Bush's obsessive control of his routine is part of a desperately needed coping mechanism.

If the protesters are able to screw up his sleep patterns, I could easily imagine the resulting stress being enough to push his fragile pysche past the point where his handlers will be able to hide the grinding of gears. Sure, they will be able to stop him from ordering silence via aerial bombardment. But unless they keep him from making any public appearances at all, sooner or later somebody is going to push his buttons too hard, and the resulting meltdown will immediately signal to millions of slow learners that maybe they didn't want to have a beer with ol' Dubya after all. And that could help bring his 30's approval rating down into the 20's.

Where's Colin's Medal?

Atrios is among the many who seemed to like last night's CNN special on the CIA/path to war thing a lot better than I did. Personally, I thought it was a bit less jingoistic than their normal propaganda, but still well short of a fair elocution of the willful cooking of the books by the Office of Special Plans, Doug Feith, etc.

But the thing that jumped out at me in watching Tenet get his hush medal is, why hasn't Powell gotten one? Is it because they know he is too loyal to be worried about him telling all wihtout a bribe? Is it because he was too slow to snap to attention whenever Rove walked by?

Slowdown

Interesting take on science -- a counter-intuitive but plausible take on the rate of progress in both pure and applied science @Daily Kos: The End of... Everything. Long, but really worth a read. In essence, it suggests that we are running out of things to discover and invent. It reminds me of the statment attributed (perhaps falsely) to the head of the Patent Office in 1899: "Everything that can be invented has been invented," but there is some evidence presented to back it up.

Soldier recommends superiors for Medals of Freedom

Soldier 'instructed' to abuse Abu Ghraib prisoners. 21/08/2005. ABC News Online

One of the US soldiers convicted of mistreating prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison says his superiors made it clear those incarcerated were to be abused.

Sergeant Javal Davis was sentenced to six months in jail after admitting to having deliberately stepped on the hands and feet of handcuffed prisoners.

In an interview aired on Channel 7, Sgt Davis said he was instructed to make life as unpleasant as possible for those he was guarding.

"I was left with an open door to pretty much almost do whatever I want, you know like 'hey, make sure this guy has a bad night you know' or 'make sure this guy gets the treatment'," he said.

Sgt Davis says he found some of the things he was asked to do distressing.

"For example, the nakedness, the hooding, the handcuffing of the detainees in compromising positions, like handcuffed behind their back in an uncomfortable way or handcuffed to the bar door door or something," he said.

Team Tinkerbell phones it in

Bush Begins 5-Day Push to Defend Iraq War - Yahoo! News

With anti-war protesters continuing their vigil outside President Bush's ranch, the commander in chief began a five-day push Saturday to tell Americans why he thinks U.S. troops must continue the fight in Iraq.

In his weekly radio address, Bush argued that the war in Iraq will keep Americans safe for generations to come. He'll try to drive the point home with speeches in upcoming days in Utah and Idaho.

"Our troops know that they're fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy," the president said in the recorded broadcast.

"They know that if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets, and they know that the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war, and they know we will prevail."

It has been obvious for a long time that these folks never alter their thinking based on most kinds of facts, but in the past, they have been fairly savvy in reacting to polls. But the flypaper theory went belly up in London, the "finite terrorist supply" should have died at the same time, yet they still don't seem to have found replacements. The same tired, discredited arguments don't add up to a very enthusiastic or effective campaign. And look at the cocoons our Bubble Boy is visiting -- Utah and Idaho being among the handlful of states that have not begun to awake from their slumber (witness the refusal of a SLC station to air an anti-war ad featuring Sheehan). As long as the devastating power of the Cindytron threatens him, he is likely to avoid blue states as if a TANG flight physical was required to enter them.

The Onion nails it: 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

I tried to take on this nonsense myself a ways back with this. Kudos to the Onion for doing it a lot better.

Medal of Freedom? Ambassadorship?

Texas man admits taking kickbacks from Iraqi company

A former employee of a Halliburton Co. subsidiary pleaded guilty Friday to accepting more than $100,000 in kickbacks from an Iraqi company in exchange for securing it a U.S. military construction contract, prosecutors said.

Nothing is too good for such heroes.

Politics of ice cream

New piece up on Raw Story.

Small heroics

Refusing to give up your seat on the bus. Standing out in a field in Texas. Small things that become big things. They usually come from unknowns, unconcerned with image or career killers like principles. Which is why this small gesture from Bob Costas impresses me:

Broadcaster Bob Costas refused to anchor CNN's Larry King Live on Thursday night because of the tabloid subject matter.

The show discussed the situation of Natalee Holloway, a teenager that went missing earlier this year in Aruba, and the case of so-called "BTK" serial killer Dennis Rader. Costas, who announced on Monday that he would be covering for Larry King all week, was replaced by an Atlanta-based defence attorney, Chris Pixley.

"I didn't think the subject matter of Thursday's show was the kind of broadcast that I should be doing," Costas told TVNewser in a statement. "I suggested some alternatives but the producers preferred the topics they had chosen. I was fine with that, and respectfully declined to participate. There were no hard feelings at all. It's not a big deal. I'm sure there are countless topics that will be mutually acceptable in the future."

Costas is not the only broadcaster at CNN unhappy with the increasingly tabloid-style output. Also on Thursday, Jack Cafferty from The Situation Room said on CNN's own air that coverage of the "BTK" killer amounted to a "a ghoulish exercise on the part of the news media," adding that "if ratings are the reason... we ought to be ashamed of ourselves."

Costas' decision and Cafferty's comments come at a time when many American news outlets, primarily the cable news channels, are being accused of "dumbing-down" their output to feature stories of a more tabloid nature - the case of Natalee Holloway is held up as an example of this. The missing-persons case is given roadblock-style coverage on programmes airing on CNN Headline News, MSNBC, and the first-placed Fox News Channel.

You go, Bob.

Broad spectrum stupidity

Lest you think that otherwise rational folks have an anomalous wiggy place where they put the Great Sky Fairy hypothesis:

The good news is that the latest polls confirm that roughly half of all Americans believe extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction think some of it is visiting Earth.

My gut instinct is that many of the folks who think the Genesis fable is literally true are the same people who think that the earth is some sort of intergallactic Grand Central Station. The same kind of magical thinking is required for both, despite (or maybe because of) their seeming incompatibility. (There has to be some overlap, based on the numbers.) If you understand to even a small degree the mind-boggling vastness of the universe, neither of these is likely pass the smell test. But if your mind lives enough time zones from rationality, you can hold these two seemingly incompatible views, because cognitive dissonance just doesn't affect the intellectually tone deaf. How the Big Guy created both vastly superior little green men and humans in his own image is a conundrum that troubles them not in the slightest.

Whip Iraq Now Buttons?

Never let it be said that the Republicans are not solidly grounded in reality, or that they are not sensitive to the pyschological aspects of difficult problems. When Gerald Ford's administration faced rampant inflation due to the unwillingness of the US government to finance the Vietnam War with tax increases (hold that thought), they responded with surgical precision with the "Whip Inflation Now" campaign, and stirring buttons like these:

The Reagan team, perhaps guided by Nancy's astrologer, took on the complex problem of drug use by adopting campaigns to tell kids "Just Say No," and "DARE" (which I though stood for "Drugs Are Really Excellent," but I must have been wrong.)


Well, boys and girls, that kind of out-of-the-box thinking is back:

The Pentagon, looking for innovative ways to thwart deadly roadside bombs in Iraq, has launched an $11 million program using robots, body armor and a "first-ever advertising campaign aimed at the Iraqi" people, the weekly Inside the Army reports.

An Army-led joint task force, called the Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force, will spend $7.7 million to have an Iraqi ad agency produce "a series of media products . . . designed to influence Iraqi target audiences to support efforts to eliminate the IED threat," the Pentagon said last month.

The effort against improvised explosive devices will include video, audio and print campaigns. "The task force is looking at solutions across a wide spectrum, really," a spokesman told Inside the Army. "It's not just technology, it's not just jammers, it's not just armor. It's a holistic approach to solve the problem."

Also on the media front, the Pentagon in June said the U.S. Special Operations Command put out contracts worth up to $300 million to three U.S. companies for "media approach planning," producing and distributing media "products" and analyzing effectiveness.

"Whip IEDs Now" buttons? "Just Say" bumper stickers for your Hummer? How can we not win their hearts and minds with slogans like these?

Be sure to get yours soon, and display it with pride.

Another way we can lose

THE BRAD BLOG: "CENSORING AGAIN: Comcast Blocks Emails Linking to Cindy Sheehan Website! Cox Cable Joins Nation's Largest Net Provider in Keeping Citizens in the Dark!"

Brad reports that Comcast and others are blocking emails on the basis of content.

An old saying goes that freedom of the press is for whoever owns one. The Internet is seen as a great decentralized, democratizing counterweight. But what happens when Big Brother starts filtering political content? From a technology standpoint it looks awfully easy. And with a few keystrokes, all we have built online can be nullified.

Fixing a watch with a mallet

One of my favorite sayings is "To the man with a hammer, all the world looks like a nail." I think it applies perfectly to the way the wingnuts are going after Cindy Sheehan.

Their well-oiled smear machine knows how to take down its enemies: insult, belittle, lie, obfuscate, etc. It works well when taking on politicians, who are rarely viewed with any sympathy. Character assassination is seen as the lingua franca of politics, so they get away with it no matter how outlandish the charges. If you can't take the heat and all.

So it should come as no surprise that hate-mongers like Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin would follow standard operating procedures when Cindy Sheehan's protest made waves. (Posting her divorce papers? Classy.) Sheehan isn't a politician, so when Americans see her, many see themselves, and they don't take kindly to the vicousness and vitriol. The backlash doubled her visibility, and drew others to her cause.

But the right wing goon squad has no other arrows in its quiver. When the foam-at-the-mouth crowd goes after a sympathetic adversary, and the public reacts with revulsion at the empty, fearful amorality their savagery reveals, they are simply unable to adapt. Instead they grab bigger hammers.

Exhibit A -- Ann Coulter on Cindy Sheehan:

To expiate the pain of losing her firstborn son in the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan decided to cheer herself up by engaging in Stalinist agitprop outside President Bush's Crawford ranch. It's the strangest method of grieving I've seen since Paul Wellstone's funeral. Someone needs to teach these liberals how to mourn.

Call me old-fashioned, but a grief-stricken war mother shouldn't have her own full-time PR flack. After your third profile on "Entertainment Tonight," you're no longer a grieving mom; you're a C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show.

Like the other 1800-plus soldiers who died trying to help Dubya work out his Oedipal struggle, Casey Sheehan was in a sense a martyr. By doing their one-size-fits-all nasty bit to his mother, they are making her another, but with far greater visibility. Part of Sheehan's power is that she seems to know that the harder the right whacks her, the more effective she becomes.

Now they have swung the ugliest hammer in their toolkit. It will be interesting to see what sledgehammer they reach for next.

The Murkun Way

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — Gas stations advertising record-high prices are all around him, but fuel efficiency was the furthest thing from Dave Pongratz's mind as he picked up his new Hummer H3 in this Detroit suburb on Wednesday.
Pongratz, 54, was getting the sport utility vehicle as a surprise for his wife, Sandy, an avid camper and kayaker who wants a safe vehicle with good towing capacity. The H3's gas mileage — about 19 miles per gallon in the city — wasn't an issue for Pongratz, who said he'd rather go to fewer restaurants than buy a vehicle with higher fuel economy.

"Everybody decides, 'What do I want to trade for what I want to do?'" said Pongratz, a plant foreman for General Motors Corp., which makes the Hummer.

Gas prices soared to a record $2.55 per gallon nationwide last week. But automakers and industry watchers say the price spike isn't yet affecting consumers' car buying habits.

Transferring billions to rich Arabs? OK, worth it.
Runaway Global warming? But my boat needs towing.
SUV safety an illusion? Lalalalalala -- my reptilian brain can't hear you.

Oh, and Ms. Can't-be-bothered-to-get-the-facts Reporter? The EPA Highway rating on GM's 4700-pound Penis-Extender 3 is 19 mpg -- the city number is 16. Do you know anyone who actually gets the EPA highway number in any vehicle? Me neither. And the only reason this barn-shaped Suddenly Upside-down Vehicle does that well is that it is dangerously underpowered -- my compact sedan has roughly the same power and nearly a ton less weight to drag around.

And last but not least, if you are going to write shill-for-the-domestics crap like this, can't you find an SUV buyer who doesn't work for the manufacturer of said SUV to pose as your man-in-the-street buyer?

Yup. Inaccurate, slanted propaganda shilling for wholesale stupidity. The Murkun way.

The Noble Cause?

Worries Raised on Handling of Funds in Iraq

Perhaps this is what Casey Sheehan and his 1800 brethren died for:

It weighed 28 tons and took up as much room as 74 washing machines. It was $2.4 billion in $100 bills, and Baghdad needed it ASAP.
...
It was the largest one-time cash transfer in the history of the New York Fed.
...
Both Republicans and Democrats appeared taken aback by the volume of cash sent to Iraq: nearly $12 billion over the course of the U.S. occupation from March 2003 to June 2004, said a report by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who had reviewed e-mails and documents subpoenaed from the bank.
...
Rep. Christopher Shays ( R-Conn.), chairman of the House national security subcommittee, criticized the Pentagon's handling of the money known as the Development Fund for Iraq.
...
"I can't believe that all this cash just floating around all went perfectly to the right place."

Those concerns were echoed by Democrats on the panel, who criticized Halliburton Co., the oil services firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Democrats repeatedly have questioned the use of the Iraqi funds to pay Halliburton, pointing to Pentagon audits that found the company might have overcharged as much as $200 million for fuel and other purchases.
...
There was "hardly any accountability," Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) said.

"In effect, we were handing out $100 bills on contracts like candy."

From the standpoint of the pigs at the trough once known as Congress, which are quite accustomed to $100 bills being handed out like confetti, it all makes sense: we were exporting an American way of life - theirs.

Faster than expected

via Calculated Risk: The "Rising tide of abandoned residential properties"

Yesterday I put up the "Mr. Housing Bubble" t-shirt and said it would be funny for another couple of months.

Turns out the joke has already gone stale in parts of the heartland.

If Dayton is our canary in the coal mine, we are in for a major shitstorm.

Paging Sandy Berger....

Library Missing Roberts File

A file folder containing papers from Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.'s work on affirmative action more than 20 years ago disappeared from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library after its review by two lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department in July, according to officials at the library and the National Archives and Records Administration.

Or perhaps Rosemary Wood erased them with her outstretched foot....

The other Douchebag of Liberty

With Novakula on ice, somebody else had to step up as Acting DOL. Michelle Malkin made an impressive bid, but experience wins out over youthful enthusiasm this time. Media Matters documents this malodorous emanation from Monday's diatribe:

I mean, Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real, including the mainstream media's glomming onto it. It's not real. It's nothing more than an attempt. It's the latest effort made by the coordinated left.

I guess that'll teach her not have the effrontery to have a son blown up in Iraq. Next time, have a kid with a pilonidal cyst, dearie. Then he can stay safe at home and do the Yellow Elephant dance with the rest of us, and we won't have to freak out over your uncomfortable questions and inconvenient facts.

What's just below educable/trainable?

Billmon points out what a self-inflicted wound the Sheehan vigil is for Geedubya.

[I]f Cindy really is a front woman for the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, as the wing nuts now claim, then you'd almost have to conclude that Bush was in on the planning, too. Hauling the entire White House press corps down to Bumfuck, Texas, so they can spend the better part of August playing cowchip bingo, was a move that seems, in hindsight, almost custom-designed to generate massive media coverage of Cindy's protest. In Washington, she'd be just another face in Lafayette Square (the designated "free speech zone" in front of the White House.) In Crawford, she's the only thing making news within a 500-mile radius. That seems like an awfully high political price to pay to move Bush and his imperial retinue from one volcanic pit of heat and humidity to another for five weeks.

I've got to believe that somebody on the team is smart enought to realize that even if Bush is too candy-assed to defuse the situation by confronting Sheehan, heading back to Washington to face the business of the nation would have much the same effect. It isn't the fact that Sheehan is protesting, but the contrast of her in a ditch outside his dude ranch (sans horses) that gives her protest its power. But trying to get George to do the smart thing must play out about like this:

"George.... George... look at me, George. We don't stick paper clips into AC receptacles, George. It is bad for you."

"George? Are you listening?"

"George! We don't--"

BZZZZZZTTTZAP!

And so Presidential stupidity must be portrayed as "stay the course" resolve.

Why the wheels will fall off, part 8

Lawrence Korb is the real deal -- an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration who was willing to say that our Codpiece in Chief was AWOL way back when. In this NY Daily News OpEd, he explains the cold hard facts that will make the military creak to a halt soon:

Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for President Lyndon Johnson, said that while we sent the Army to Vietnam to save Vietnam, we had to withdraw to save the Army. This is where we are today.

If Iraq were a war of necessity, the U.S. would simply send sufficient ground forces there for the duration. But, since it is a war of choice, fought by volunteers, the active-duty soldiers spend a year in Iraq and at least a year at home before going back.

And the Army does not want to order a soldier to be sent back a third time. By the end of this year, nearly every active-duty soldier will have spent at least two tours in Iraq.

Moreover, since the active-duty Army was too small to implement effectively Bush's preventive war in Iraq, the administration has had to rely unduly on the National Guard and Reserves. Part-time soldiers make up about 40% of the troops in Iraq. In order to keep so many reservists there, the Pentagon has had to violate its norm of not mobilizing reservists for more than one year out of five.

Sending soldiers back for a third time will ruin the Army's retention rate, which so far has held up. Staying in Iraq through 2006 will completely undermine the Army's recruiting, which despite massive increases in enlistment bonuses is already a disaster. Keeping 50,000 reservists in Iraq throughout 2006 will force the administration to ask Congress to repeal the law that forbids reservists from serving on the active duty for more than two years.

Boy, I'll bet the Iranians just shiver in their sandals when Bubble Boy rattles his sabre about opening another Wars R Us franchise in their neighborhood.

Et tu, Henry?

Kissinger finds parallels to Vietnam in Iraq

An architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam more than 30 years ago said Sunday that he has "a very uneasy feeling" that some of the same factors that damaged support for the conflict there are re-emerging in the 2-year-old war in Iraq.

"For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made," former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

Support for the war has dropped in recent polls, and criticism of President Bush's handling of the conflict has grown. The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, taken Aug. 5-7, found that 54 percent of those surveyed thought the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake.

Kissinger said the United States faces a battle to halt the spread of radical Islam in Iraq, and it would be "a catastrophe for the whole world" if it fails.

Kissinger, who served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, said the United States should remove any troops that are not necessary to the American goal of stabilizing Iraq -- "But we cannot begin with an exit without having first defined what the objective is."

There is the inevitable bad imitiation of Stanley Kowalski's Brando's "coulda been a contenda" speech, of course -- trying to revise history on Vietnam must be a nearly full-time job for him. And the fast walk past the fact that Iraq was the Arab country least hospitable to radical Islam until we hung the "welcome" sign for them.

But what is really significant here is the way Henry the K is joining the Republican exodus from Team Tinkerbell: he no longer believes, and he is trash-talking the Administration's absurd "hope-is-a-strategy" strategy. Accusing the President of waging a war without an objective is about as nasty a charge as a former Secretary of State can level.

Even if he felt this way a year ago, he couldn't have said it then. But the White House is now caught in a vicous spiral: they have too many problems to be able to punish apostates, and the emboldened lapsed believers just keep creating more problems.

Will the last one out the door please turn off the war?

Update: a reader points out that I had the wrong Brando character -- In "On the Waterfront," he played Terry Malloy. Kowalski was his character in "Streetcar." Mea culpa.

A Senatorial Sadie Hawkins Day

In book due out next week, Lott says he was betrayed by Frist - Tuesday, 08/16/05

Sen. Trent Lott accuses Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of betraying him during a GOP revolt in a new, tell-all biography that expresses little remorse for the racially tinged remarks that led to Lott's loss of power and Frist's ascension.

In Herding Cats: A Life in Politics, available in bookstores Aug. 23, the Mississippi Republican blames the media and a handful of his GOP colleagues for the loss of his Senate leadership job in December 2002.

Frist, a Tennessee Republican who replaced Lott as the GOP leader, comes off as traitorous. The book generally divides other Republicans into either heroes or villains, depending on whether Lott saw them as allies or enemies during his downfall.

"I consider Frist's power grab a personal betrayal," the book says. "When he entered the Senate in 1995, I had taken him under my wing. ... He was my protege and I helped him get plum assignments and committee positions."

One senior senator trashing another, party elders trashing the administration... Did they all wake up Democrats?

Funny

For another couple of months, anyway.

After that...not so funny.

Rosa Parks: Un-American flip-flopper

In the wake of the storm of controversy surround the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a bus to white man last week, numerous media commentators have weighed in harshly.

Bill O'Reilly said that Parks' behavior "bordered on the treasonous, and that she had "thrown in with the most radical elements in this country." Others focused on what they asserted were inconsistencies in her position. "Ms. Parks understood the rules and accepted her role in society for years," said commentator Michelle Malkin. "Now all of sudden she does a 180 and refuses to accept the natural order of things. Her story hasn't checked out. And I'm sure all the other black folks, especially those I've never met or talked to, would agree with me."

Conservative commentators called Parks a "traitor" and a "crackpot."

A distant cousin of Ms. Parks claimed to speak for the rest of her family, and accused Parks of promoting her personal agenda at the expense of the family's reputation. A senior White House official, speaking off the record, said that if Parks fails to give up her seat again she will be seen as a threat to national security, and will be arrested.

President Weeble

Bush will `go on with life'

President Bush, noting that lots of people want to talk to the president and "it's also important for me to go on with my life," on Saturday defended his decision not to meet with the grieving mom of a soldier killed in Iraq.

Bush said he is aware of the anti-war sentiments of Cindy Sheehan and others who have joined her protest near the Bush ranch.

"But whether it be here or in Washington or anywhere else, there's somebody who has got something to say to the president, that's part of the job," Bush said on the ranch. "And I think it's important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say."

"But," he added, "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life."

The comments came prior to a bike ride on the ranch with journalists and aides. ... In addition to the two-hour bike ride, Bush's Saturday schedule included an evening Little League Baseball playoff game, a lunch meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a nap, some fishing and some reading. "I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy," he said when asked about bike riding while a grieving mom wanted to speak with him. "And part of my being is to be outside exercising."

I think it is very important for the average Joe to lead a balanced, healthy life. Exercise and rest are critical to long-term viability. But I don't want my President -- especially a second-term President -- holding anything back. I want every last drop of energy left on the Oval Office floor when he checks out. The Presidency of the United States is like the Indy 500 -- the cars need to last 500 miles, and if they shatter into dust a mile later, no one will complain.

And most important of all, I expect the President of the United States to put the interests of the country above his own. This President has just given us a dramatic demonstration of what a narcissistic, selfish bastard he is.

There are so many other aspects of Bush's life that are manifestly unbalanced -- emotional, physical (he seems to have considerable difficulty keeping his two-wheelers greasy side down) and spiritual. His work-play balance is already far softer than any government employee should ever have. He has some serious stones rationalizing his endless summer as in OUR best interest.

Digby on the "Sheehan, pawn of the left" meme

Digby deflates both the Rebuplican canard and the power it pretends the left has:

...I'm pretty sure that Cindy Sheehan hasn't been guided or exploited by anyone in her quest. "The left," if you're talking about organizations, can't get it up to do anything that effective. Believe me, the Democrats would have peed their pants at the idea of sending a woman to Crawford to demand to see the president. It's so awfully unseemly you know. Someone might get upset. Besides it isn't manly and we want ever so much to be super-duper manly.

In fact, last year at this time, if you'll recall, Max Cleland went down to Crawford and wheeled his chair right up to the gate. The Democrats got all nervous that it was too ... undignified. Max was getting a little bit shrill, you see, and looked like he might be getting ready to force the secret service to push him off the property in his wheelchair. How indelicate.

No, this was a grassroots move started by one individual who felt strongly enough to put herself on the line. No leftwing group could have ever orchestrated anything this successful.

To the right, inflating left wing power is like the inflation of Soviet military strength that kept defense constractors in clover for 40 years. To us, it is a form of painful and counterproductive nostalgia.

But what the hell difference does it make if Sheehan is coached? The guilt-by-association tactics of the wingnuts here remind me of the huge amount of energy being spent by the Republicans to argue that Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by his wife.

So?

Joe Wilson saw what he saw and said what he said. The White House backed off the "sixteen words" regardless. Cindy Sheehan is exposing the cowardice of the codpiece-in-chief, and is not diminshed by these attacks, but is elevated by them.

Shrinking the circle of Neverland

Lots of folks are talking about the incredible story in WaPo tomorrow in which a bunch of administration types admit how completely we've screwed the pooch in Iraq. Digby points out that

We broke it, we bought it and now we are throwing it in the trashcan.

Yes, very noble.

We're winners.

In case anyone's wondering, aside from the hideous loss of life for no good reason, we have also spent so far 187 billion dollars to depose Saddam and turn the country into an Islamic theocracy and send it into anarchy. Excellent. Very noble. Worth every penny and every life.
...
Maybe it's all trial balloons, but this has a whiff of panic about it. I sense some very serious disarray within the administration. They are all over the place. I'm wondering if a palace coup isn't taking place before our eyes.

What is interesting to note in all this is the way the circle of the deluded seems to be shrinking. Were Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Condi previously surrounded by a large cadre of true believers, or was it just that the troops were bound by fear and the code of omerta? I dunno, but whichever it was, the spell is obviously wearing off. You might now be able to count the number of kids believing in Tinkerbell without having to take your socks off.

I'd wager there are many, many people these thugs have stepped on over the last five years who are just itching to get their licks in. There are scores of scores to settle, and enough scandals, illegality and plain old fuck-ups in need of daylight to allow the victims of every last one of them a measure of payback.

A year ago, they were all too scared to speak up. But Bush's aura of omnipotence has been nullified. There are too many leaks and too much heat for the Godfather to enforce the code anymore. A positive feedback loop is now feeding on itself -- leaks beget more leaks, disloyalty embodens further disloyalty. The worse it gets, the worse it will get, and the pace will accelerate.

Sound familiar?

Exposing the Plame case mistake - Los Angeles Times
The voice of authority, yesterday:

Pundits right, left and center have reached a rare unanimous verdict about one aspect of the grand jury investigation into the Valerie Plame leak: They've decided that no charges can be brought under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 because it imposes an impossibly high standard. Christopher Hitchens, for instance, described the 1982 act as a "silly law" that requires that "you knowingly wish to expose the cover of a CIA officer who you understand may be harmed as a result." Numerous other columnists have nodded their heads smugly in agreement.

Shocking as it may seem, however, the pundits are wrong, and their casual summaries of the requirements of the 1982 statute betray a fundamental misunderstanding regarding proof of criminal intent.

The voice of some punk, almost a month ago:

First, the statute by its terms applies to “Whoever.. intentionally discloses.” The key to interpreting this statute is to understand that the adverb “intentionally” modifies only the verb “discloses,” not the rest of the sentence. In other words, in order to satisfy the intent requirement of the statute, the prosecutor need only prove that the disclosure – the act of disclosing – was intentional. Fitzgerald will not need to prove that Rove intended that ruination of the CIA, or that Rove intended treason. He will only have to prove that Rove intended to disclose.

Remember, you heard it here first.