Posts from — August 2005

Interesting, if true.

Hopefully they will take less time than the earlier group to transfer their party registration so that real Democrats might win a national election or two.

Isn’t that what they’re getting in Iraq?

[Update: Pudentilla at skippy wondered about this earlier today.]

Via Quiddity at Uggabugga: the reDiscovery Institute.

It’s too bad about some of the oldest Christian communities in the world (they speak a form of Aramaic), the Jewish communities in the birthplace of Abraham, and the Yezidi.

What’s a few ancient religions compared to “bringing democracy to the Middle East”?

An anti-war group is running ads on all but one Salt Lake City television station prior to the Shrubbery’s speech at the VFW convention. So who was the hold out? Fox? No. The NBC station owned by the Mormon Church? No.

How about the station owned by Clear Channel? Bingo!

Flashback time: Joan Baez arrives to sing at Camp Casey in Crawford.

Their explanation is that you click on the button to report “inappropriate content” to Blogger. No indication as to what “inappropriate” means, but if you get enough flags they “de-list” your site. It’s still there but they won’t mention its existence. Looks like more corporate CYA.

They have also announced a plug-in to use Blogger inside of MS Word. Given my experience from attempting to copy text from Word into Blogger I don’t think I’ll be using it, but if someone else would like to try it???

I wish they would stop making changes.

When it came to this new revelation about the Able Danger data mining task force I ignored it because it was being pushed by Curt Weldon [R-Fantasyland] who has grown hoarse crying “Wolf!”.

Maybe I was wrong. Now it turns out that the Able Danger warning was suppressed by the Commander of the Special Operations Command who was leery of becoming involved with the FBI. He should have been leery: his last interaction is known as Waco or Branch Davidian. The word is that he didn’t want another disaster associated with his name.

He needn’t have worried, after all, his former Congressman is now the Vice President of the United States, and he got called back from retirement to become the Army Chief of Staff.

Yes, folks, Lt. General William “My G-d is bigger than yours” Boykin’s boss for the Waco adventure was General Peter Schoomaker, who went on to head the Special Operations Command, and is currently the Army’s Chief of Staff.

Maybe they should give Pete a couple of weeks of R&R down at Club Gitmo to see if he can remember anything about this little project.

While on historical things, yesterday was the 59^th birthday of our last elected President: William Jefferson Clinton. You remember those days: the stock market and your paycheck went up faster than gas prices, and the deficit went down.

I opposed the Iraq invasion for a very simple reason: the US and British air forces were a large brick over that cockroach, Saddam. If he moved the wrong way he knew he would be crushed, first by the those air forces, then his neighbors.

During the last election I wanted to get more troops into Iraq to stabilize the area and start the reconstruction. With someone other than the Shrubbery in charge there was a possibility that the US might get some support from the rest of the world to fix what W had broken.

Now there is no reasonable choice but to withdraw according to an announced plan. If the US announces a timetable and sticks to it, the insurgents will probably give it the ceasefire necessary for an orderly retreat.

There is no country or organization left in the world willing to come into this mess. It would require a massive number of infantry divisions to bring order and countries are not willing to sacrifice their soldiers in the disaster that is Iraq. The UN has no credibility in Iraq and no desire to risk more personnel in this lost cause.

For those who don’t get it: the one problem that the majority of Iraqis agree on is that their country is under foreign occupation – changing the foreigners won’t make a difference.

For all of those who claim that withdrawal means Osama wins I would point out that Osama can’t win more than he did when Shrubbery withdrew the troops hunting him in the mountains of Tora Bora to invade Iraq.

Osama escaped because Bush was more interested in attacking Iraq than catching the scum that attacked the United States. Osama’s greatest victory was escaping from the might of the world’s only superpower. That was like Peewee Herman lasting 15 rounds with Mike Tyson and not ending up in intensive care.

[Minor celebrity: No link, but the BBC posted my e-mail in From the editor’s desktop column. It was a response to an e-mail accusing the BBC of various misdeeds, including pandering to advertisers.]

[™ Kevin Drum]

Biting the Hand That Feeds You

Grrr mmrph

[Edit: This is Ringo’s idea of fun. Hopefully more time with Dot will teach her some “cat manners” about claws and biting.]

Friday Ark

After the 48^th Infantry Brigade of the Georgia National Guard lost 11 soldiers in 10 days, Governor Sonny Perdue called for a moment of silence scheduled for today at 1PM [EDT].

When you use the Guard and Reserve in combat operations, you concentrate the effect of losses to small geographic areas.

The Shrubbery is still on vacation, hiding from Mrs. Sheehan.

Some of those from outside may say ‘but she did what they wanted and stopped the recount’ which shows a blindness to the reality of the Religious Reich that controls the Florida GOP. The problem is that she is a she and she wants power.

I won’t bother to go into what’s wrong with Joe Scarborough; he was my congressclown. Yes, he really is as clueless as he looks on television; yes, he really was an apologist for Slobodan Milosovic in the Balkans; and yes, he did not “support the troops” during the Kosovo Campaign; but he has the proper pronoun to be a US Senator for Florida Republicans.

Oh, this is just great news for the United States. I know I’m thrilled with the possibility that instead of two dozen Chinese designed and built single warhead nuclear ICBMs, they could have a hundred Russian designed and built MIRV missiles.

The basic claim is that the Canadian government doesn’t charge timber companies enough for the logs they cut in Canadian government forests, and the US has been collecting a fee to increase the price of Canadian wood products.

The Canadians referred the matter to a NAFTA panel, which keeps ruling in favor of Canada. What’s to negotiate? The matter is settled. Apparently the US thinks it can bully the Canadians into accepting less than they’re owed.

Meanwhile there’s a shortage of plywood and the price is spiking, raising already outrageous building costs.

The US is also dumping water out of Devil’s Lake in North Dakota that will end up in Lake Winnipeg, an important Canadian fishery and water shed.

The Canadians wanted a review by the bi-lateral commission on US-Canadian water issues, but the US just started pumping. The Canadians are worried about pollution and invasive species ending up in their waters.

I could be wrong, but I thought that the US and Canada were friends, at least for the last century [no need to go into that little trek Benedict Arnold and some of my relatives took, or the Maine and Oregon problems]. Why is the US being such jerks? They sell us oil and timber that we don’t have. If they get mad, they can sell those things to Asia.

I don’t want to pick on them but, serving members of the military are required by regulation not to express political opinions. Your career can be ended by saying the wrong thing. People have already lost their jobs by being “outed” as serving members while making less than complimentary statements about the conduct of the Bush administration.

You can support the President all you want in uniform under these people, but be negative and you are gone. It’s not exactly a surprise that families of serving members rarely say negative things about the current crew.

If you look at the news page at Marine Parents, you can see that they have been Bush supporters and frequent media guests. For the spokeswoman to complain about Mrs. Sheehan “going public” is rather hypocritical.

The could have interviewed Military Families Speak Out, about the situation, but that wouldn’t have provided the “balance” they were looking for in this piece.

CNN reports that a veteran has again answered the call.

Fred Mattlage said he hopes the new site will alleviate traffic.

The site is owned by Mattlage’s brother Mark, who gave him permission to offer the land. Mattlage, his two brothers and sister own a 212-acre lot adjacent to the one-acre fenced property.

Mattlage said the family will allow the protesters to park their cars on the larger lot if they provide a gate attendant to ensure cattle do not escape.

Mattlage, who served with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in the 1970s, said he is against the war in Iraq and is concerned the United States “didn’t learn a valuable enough lesson from Vietnam.”

Lieutenant HRH Princess Elizabeth

This is what the daughter of a leader who believes in the war he is fighting looks like.