Posts from — October 2006

First, it should be absolutely clear that it is extremely unusual for a senior British military officer to speak to the media on any issue that is deemed to be political. The British model is for the Royals, the military, and the permanent civil service to defer political questions to the current government.

This why the Daily Mail article, Sir Richard Dannatt : A very honest General and the BBC follow up, Army chief defends Iraq comments are creating such a stir.

They both follow a leaked report to the Blair government from the military that it was time to pull out of Iraq. It is now assumed that the leak was true, and it was the failure of the government to take any action that led, first to the leaking of the report, and, now, the general speaking out publicly.

A shorter version, without the hype, of what the general said: we need to pull troops out of Iraq where we can’t win, so we can use them in Afghanistan where we can.

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Yes, it’s Friday the 13^th again. The 13^th falls on a Friday more than any other day of the week, so get over it. It’s only valid in in English and Portuguese speaking countries, so go visit a Spanish-speaking neighborhood for the day.

If you want to blame someone, it’s the calendar of Pope Gregory XIII that created this imbalance.

Cat-in-the-Box

This is so trite.

[Editor: Ringo checks off another cat guild requirement, climbing into every available of box.]

Friday Ark

Paul Keil at TPM Muckraker lays out the problems with The Reid transaction story and Terry at Nitpicker covers the legal features of what Reid did.

I worked with people associated with development in California and am very familiar with what Reid did and why it was done the way it was done.

Reid bought a nice piece of property with his available money, but he was limited because he bought the property to sell, not to hold, and if he had mortgaged it, there would have been problems with the sale. The adjoining property was also available and Reid found a friend to buy it. The two of them formed a partnership based solely on the ownership of the land. Because they now technically owned the partnership and the partnership owned the land, the entire parcel could be sold in a single transaction.
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Several people including Shakespeare’s Sister have highlighted this video commercial, which is extremely effective.

It would be more effective down my way if it referenced Exodus chapter 3: to be taken seriously, the bush has to be burning, not sweating.

Y’all are in really deep yogurt right and it’s looking like a real disaster for your chances in the mid-term elections, so what you need is a real October surprise, something that will totally take the nation and the Democrats by surprise and get Mark Foley off the front pages. It has to be a real shocker.

Impeach Bush and blame everything on the White House.

I’m telling you, it’s a winner.

Blogger Status:

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Blogger and Blogspot was down between 5:30 and 7:30 PST this morning due to a network malfunction. We apologize for the inconvenience and the fact that this blog was not updated earlier but since this blog is also server by Blogger updating it was of little use.

Well, you could move Blogger Status to a free WordPress site.

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

Source: Robert McCloskey

Dr. Kevin Barrett, adjunct instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been hired to teach a course, Islam: Religion and Culture, at the university.

Some people are upset, according to CNN: University instructor likens Bush to Hitler

“Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies,” he wrote.

Barrett said Tuesday he was comparing the attacks to the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.

“That’s not comparing them as people, that’s comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that’s an accurate comparison that I would stand by,” he said.

He added: “Hitler had a good 20 to 30 IQ points on Bush, so comparing Bush to Hitler would in many ways be an insult to Hitler.”

That last bit has to sting. Hitler was also a decorated combat veteran [World War I] and an accomplished public speaker, so there is no real basis for a comparison between the two men.

When John McCain claims that the problems with North Korea are Clinton’s fault, it isn’t political hyperbole, it isn’t a misunderstanding, it’s a lie.

Unlike the Shrubbery, Clinton briefed Congress. As a retired Naval Captain, McCain had access to briefings that other members of Congress never get. McCain has the experience and clearances to know exactly what happened, so he is lying now.

McCain would have been briefed on everything in Fred Kaplan’s 2004 Washington Monthly article, Rolling Blunder, [Via Digby], so he, of all people, can’t claim he didn’t know.

Senator, look at Katherine Harris. Look at what they have done to her. I don’t care what they promised you, they don’t keep their promises. Their loyalty is all one way. Stop lying, that’s not what they taught you at Annapolis.

Update: Steve Bates and Josh Marshall both riff on this chord.

The North Korean blew up something underground, but the size of the explosion was not what would normally be expected for a first test of a nuclear device. Now we have to wait to find out if it was truly a nuclear explosion.

South Korea has already obtained a SAUNA [Swedish Automatic Noble Gas Analyser] and there will be upper atmosphere sampling missions with a WB-57 or similar aircraft looking for the traces of the noble gases, usually argon-37 and xenon-133, that indicate a nuclear event.

It could take a couple of months for the confirmation, so for now we have to accept the word of Kim Jong Il that he did it. [You can stop laughing now. Look at how many people believe the Shrubbery.]

The Wikipedia Foley File is continuously updated with the latest on the scandal.

Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) has known Foley for years in and out of Washington, as he helped her in her run for the House with both money and the assistance of the ubiquitous Kirk Fordham.

She told her local paper, the St. Petersburg Times in a piece, House member marks distance, that Foley may have a lot of problems, but alcohol wasn’t one of them. She calls Foley a “cheap date”, having known him to nurse a single glass of wine the entire evening.

The Washington Post ran a story a couple of days ago, Rep. Kolbe saw Foley messages in 2000, indicating that Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) had talked to Foley back in 2000.

Kolbe indicated today that he hadn’t personally seen the messages, but he forwarded them to the Clerk of the House, Jeff Trandahl, and Foley’s office after his office received a complaint about them from a former page.

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Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert announced in a news conference in a cemetery [I’m not kidding, a cemetery] that he would fire any member of his staff who covered up the Mark Foley affair [or outed Valery Plame or killed OJ’s ex-wife].

Not to be nasty, Denny, but at this point I think your staff has looked at the polls and are already filing for unemployment.

This is the latest BBC report on North Korea and world reaction.

I don’t like the government of the DPRK. I appreciated the opportunity to annoy it, and did not need the medal I received for doing it. My Dad received three medals and two unit citations for annoying the DPRK, so it’s sort of part of the “family business.”

I was in POW training when the DPRK seized the USS Pueblo, and flew the same route as the Navy EC-121 they shot down. Many of the people killed or captured did the same job in the Navy that I did in the Air Force and we all worked in NSA. It was personal, and it proved that Nixon couldn’t care less about those of us in reconnaissance.

When Michael posted Боже мой last night, I felt like Swopa expressed in Blowing up the suspended-animation crisis: this was something to have been expected.

Eric Alterman has a solid background piece on how things came to this rather nasty point; the Pensacola Beach Blogger provides more; and Terry explains the $95 million that Anarcho-capitalist and the Taliban’s favorite congressweasel, Dana Rohrabacher was complaining about earlier this morning [my time] on the BBC’s The World Today.

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