Posts from — January 2007

According to the Associated Press report on the Shrubbery’s latest radio address: Bush proposes tax changes to address health care costs. In the State of the Union address he intends to request tax deductions for medical insurance premiums of $7,500 for individuals and $15,000 for families.

This does absolutely nothing about the cost of health care, and if the tens of millions of Americans without health care could afford to take these deductions, i.e. if they actually made enough money to pay income taxes on sums this large, they could probably afford health insurance, unless, of course, they were sick, and then it isn’t available at any price.

Tax cuts and killing people are the only solutions the kindergarten class in the White House have.

Close on the heels of our valiant effort to rid the world of goat herders in Somalia we have this “victory:” U.S., Iraqi forces arrest top aide to al-Sadr.

I don’t know that I would refer to Tony Snow as a “top aide” to the Shrubbery. According to a number of journalists who work in Baghdad, Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji is the media representative for the al Sadr movement in the city. He should have been easy to find as reporters have him in their rolodex.

And people wonder why the US isn’t winning.

Oh, if you thought that it was a big deal that 400 members of the Mahdi Army were scooped up, forget it. They are people who failed to follow Moqtada al Sadr’s instructions to maintain a low profile, so he doesn’t care and is using the sweeps to get rid of people who don’t follow orders. It’s a win/win for al Sadr: he gets rid of disobedient members of the militia and has another grievance to complain about to “the people.”

Update: Now with doggerel in comments!

My Shelf Runneth Over

You need a bigger pad.

[Editor: Sox has decided to flop down on the keyboard to get my attention if I don’t scratch his ears quickly enough.]

Friday Ark

So, while everyone is watching Iran, Syria, and North Korea, our good buddies the Chinese have been developing the ability to shoot down our satellites. From CNN: U.S. official: Chinese test missile obliterates satellite.

And what exactly is the Shrubbery going to do about the country that controls such a huge chunk of the American debt that he ran up, if they decide to start knocking our intel and GPS satellites out of the sky?

Update: Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway has an interesting catch with Just Trust Us: the Pentagon “laundered” $1.4 billion through other government agencies to avoid oversight.

Update 2: In The Emily Litella Strategy Karen points to The Bully Presidency by Jack Balkin that makes the same point about the Shrubbery’s kabuki on warrant-less wiretapping, but more completely.

I have spent most of my working life looking for and using patterns. In intelligence you find the patterns that the “enemy” uses to makes decisions to determine what they will do in a given situation. In law enforcement, patterns can tell you where to expect a criminal to strike next. In computing you look for patterns to move among computer hardware and software, and to check your programs for consistent and accurate performance.

When watching the Shrubbery, the patterns fairly scream at you. The consistency is manic. They continue to follow their routine, whether or not it was successful.

They were told to close down Total Information Awareness, but that guaranteed that they wouldn’t. Since I posted on it earlier in the week, more pieces are becoming obvious. Steve Bates has posted on the Talon project in Pentagon Spies On Antiwar Groups, which is more data for TIA, and Crooks and Liars reports that J. Michael McConnell, the man chosen to replace Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence, comes to the job from Booz Allen, the main contractor on the Total Information Awareness program.

[Read more →]

Update: Avedon Carol of The Sideshow turns the tables and asks: Why did anyone support the invasion of Iraq?

Kevin Drum has set off a minor “kafuffle” by attempting to make generalizations and judgments about the correctness of individuals over Bush’s War™. The framing would seem to be that to be correct you had to oppose the war for the correct reason. While George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft fit in that limited category, there were a number of people who opposed the war for a variety of valid reasons that are true and have nothing to do with the lies of this administration or the incompetent manner in which the war and occupation have been conducted.

During the relevant period I was on mail lists discussing the war, and my reasoning was very straightforward: the war was unnecessary and a waste of resources including lives.

It was easy to show that at one point Saddam had WMDs because the Reagan administration helped him get them and the US government had the paperwork on those transactions. The UN inspectors rooted out many of the facilities after the first Gulf War, but so what?

[Read more →]

I am having a spam attack which is really annoying. You won’t see it, but it is using space and bandwidth on the server that I have to pay for. While it isn’t a lot of money, it is still annoying.

HaloScan’s host did some server upgrades over the weekend and things are still flaky. This is normal and not a disaster. Software has to be reloaded after a server upgrade and there will always be a few settings that get changed in the process and have to be reset. It is a pain when you are attempting to make your killer, pithy comments, but chill, things will get better. The system accidentally hit a database limit and has been generating silly error messages. The comment is usually posted, but the counter won’t be incremented. There will also be periods when the system just refuses to cooperate as processes are stopped to do work. Experience tells me this is a temporary glitch.

Melanie notes that according to a report in the Washington Post as of Monday the Shrubbery has spent 365 days at Camp David and 405 days in Crawford.

When you throw in all of his political trips, I’m not sure he makes the cut for full-time employment. We should rent out the White House and try to make some money on it, because the Shrubbery is treating it like a time-share.

With two wars in progress and the so-called Global War on Terrorism™ most Presidents would spend some time at the office.

On this, the anniversary of the start of the first Gulf War, Pierre Tristam notes Peter Arnett’s Prophesies. It took Arnett less than two weeks to figure Bush’s War was off the rails and the Iraqis weren’t going to play by the expected rules.

Except…the Iraqis did exactly what should have been expected with a senior officer corps trained in Soviet doctrine. Apparently all of the “Cold Warriors” forgot about the basic strategy of the Russian/Soviet military since it proved so successful against Napoleon and the Wehrmacht: when the homeland is invaded by a superior force, draw them into the country to extend supply lines and then fight a war of attrition. When the Iraqi army refused to give battle in large unit engagements, it should have been obvious that this was going to be an extended guerrilla war. Napoleon didn’t win when he seized Moscow, and the Germans didn’t win when they lay siege to Stalingrad. They were stretched too thin and couldn’t control the land they had taken.

Of course Arnett had to be fired. You can’t have people running around speaking truth when the “Leader” doesn’t want to hear it.

Perhaps it’s just to annoy people, but the BBC has a tendency to interview Frank J. Gaffney Jr. of the Center for Security Policy, a neocon think tank, about Iraq.

The man is an ignorant fool who has not made a minimal effort to understand the major players in Iraq. He made constant references to Moqtada al Sadr and Iran, at one point calling him “a puppet of Iran.”

Al Sadr is an Iraqi nationalist, and may be the only major player who wants all foreigners, not just the Americans out of Iraq. He has his own forms of madness, but working with the Iranians isn’t one of them.

Gaffney probably approved of the Shrubbery’s outreach to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI] and associated with the Badr Organization militia. The SCIRI backed Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. They spent much of the Saddam years living in Iran. They have unquestioned ties to Iran and the Revolutionary Guard. They want a theocratic government, just like Iran.

Gaffney et al. may have a problem finding the Madhi army, because, as Swopa notes, Nobody here but us death squads. They are hanging loose waiting for their official Iraqi government uniforms, just like the ones the Badr Organization already has.

I like Monty Python as much as the next guy, but the BBC shouldn’t do these improv versions during the news.

What, you thought they shut this program down because Congress told them to? How naïve can some people be? Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra was in charge of the program. For those who have forgotten, Iran-Contra was a scheme to fund a program that Congress told the executive to shut down, and refused to fund.

Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat writes about military credit searches and wiretaps, and people wonder what’s going on?

Charles at the Fulcrum thinks that the Shrubbery may be stealing because $5.6 billion for the deployment of 21,500 troops is totally out of line. Consider the fact that most of this increase is achieved by extending deployments and deploying people early, not with troops from outside the system. Most of these costs should already be accounted for in the current appropriations.
They are still gathering information and plugging it into their TIA project. Since Congress refused to fund it and told them to stop it, I think for some time the Pentagon has been moving money out of other accounts to pay for it.

Congress funded body and vehicle armor, but it never showed up. Congress funded the utility bills of military bases, but the bases haven’t paid them. We have depots filled with vehicles that need to be fixed, but there is no money to do it.

I don’t have the slightest doubt that a real audit of any of the current departments of this administration would reveal multiple sets of books, or no recognizable accounting system in place. None of their budget numbers have any significance or meaning.

A number of people have said they are running the government like a business – Enron. We should be so lucky. Enron was creative, but there were books that you could use to figure out what they were doing. I don’t think these people actually know where their money is, or where it is going.

Six years of Republican Congresses have been involved in one of the biggest frauds in history, and it doesn’t make much difference if it was caused by criminal intent or incompetence.

The next President needs Eliot Spitzer for Attorney General. He knows how to prosecute these cases and could get some of our money back.

If the Iraqi “Justice” ministry is going to insist on being medieval in their sentences they might avoid a lot of world condemnation if they would just go out to the ‘Net and look at the the Wikipedia article on Hanging which includes a link to the Official Table of Drops prepared by the UK Home Office.

I’m sure people thought I was just being sarcastic when I said there was a manual on how to do this sort of thing, but torturer and executioner have been civil service positions since the very beginnings of the system in China. Wherever you have civil servants, you have rules and regulations.

First Draft has a new home at TypePad: first-draft-blog.typepad.com.

Their old host blames First Draft for the outages that they have been experiencing, where as a competent tech would have noticed the recent surge in spam clogging the “tubes.” There were “irreconcilable differences”, hence the move.

A hint to hosting companies – you sell bandwidth, so it behooves you to have a supply available. If you don’t have the resources and expertise to operate your business become an American Enterprise Institute fellow, because everyone else expects you to actually be able to do your job.

Hosting blogs can be a lucrative business if they don’t take off and become popular.  If you host them, you need to read them and spot the ones that getting popular.  Your server software provides the statistics to spot the trends, so you shouldn’t be blind-sided.

I already covered this back in November. Pierre Tristam’s post, You Mean It’s Not Apartheid?, went over it in mid-December.

Now James Wolcott comments on it in the second part of Serial Comma Killer, Qu’est-ce que C’est?, Pat Lang mentions it in his post, War Against the Boogey Men, Juan Cole covers it in Attempts at Marginalizing Carter Intensify, and OhDave at Candide’s Notebooks looks at the “controversy” in Jimmy Carter’s Holy Land.

Essentially you have people screaming because Jimmy Carter isn’t rabidly pro-Israel. If you notice that Israel is not following the rules you are an anti-Semite and want Israel wiped from the face of the planet. Get a grip. Jimmy Carter has been at this longer than any of the current leaders in Israel and Palestine. He knows what deals were proposed, and what the conditions are on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza. He also reads all of the newspapers in Israel and knows that significant number of Israelis oppose some of the policies of their current government.

I’m a good deal more interested in the national interests of the US than Israel. Blindly supporting Israel is not in the US interest.