Posts from — August 2007

He left to spend more time with his chickens, but nothing has changed and no one is going to clean up the mess he made. If he hadn’t died, the Shrubbery would have appointed William Mitchell to fill out the end of Gonzo’s term, to complete the re-hiring of the Watergate hacks.

The real problem with the sentiment “my country right or wrong” is that it has been so damn long since the US has done anything right.

I saw this on the CNN Ticker – Obama invokes Bible in NOLA.

I thought I’d check it out and learned:

“Getting ready to talk to you today, I recall what Jesus said at the end of the Sermon on the Mount,” Obama said at New Orleans’ First Emmanuel Baptist Church.

So, Barak Obama speaks at a Sunday service at a Baptist church and “invokes the Bible” and CNN thinks this is “news?” As Terry Pratchett wrote, this is “olds.” If Senator Obama had “invoked Satan,” that would be “news.” [I’m not even going to bother with the abuse of “invokes.]

What’s next – Jimmy Carter discusses the Bible in his Sunday school classes?

The people wrote this are actually being paid. They are receiving money to do this.

Two years ago Katrina had already made landfall in South Florida and was on its way to the Gulf where it would become a monster.

In the aftermath I have noticed a lot of people who are complaining about actions of the state and local governments without understanding anything about disaster funding. There is one point I’d like to address because it is often used to disparage governments and is totally unfair.

[Read more →]

A lot of places have featured the Associated Press article, Iraq Whistleblowers Vilified, Demoted, about what happened to people who complained about waste and contracting fraud in Iraq, but a more complete run down on the entire mess is available [via Seeing The Forest] in the Rolling Stone article, The Great Iraq Swindle.

Everything the Hedgemony has done is geared towards giving the US Treasury to GOP donors. While a big splash was made about the two sisters who charged the Pentagon a million bucks for a couple of washers; that was chump change to an outfit like KBR, who ripped off more than that on their laundry and catering every week.

Billions of dollars are unaccounted for. This is in addition to the billions the contractors were ripping off, I talking about billions of dollars that don’t show up anywhere. You cannot trust the GOP with government money. They have no budgeting or financial management skills. Every time you vote for them the US ends up with a huge budget deficit.

The Hedgemony is full marketing and PR mode to protect its “uninterruptible money supply” from the sheep in Congress. They are busy shoveling the agitprop into the catapults to rain down on the gullible.

Lurch of Main and Central found a prime of example of preemptive propaganda for the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected [MRAP] vehicles at a Pentagon dog-and-pony show.

IRAQSlogger has the pictures of the megabuck 4WD vehicles: MRAPs Show Force Through Mud, Not IEDs, but the real purpose of the event is made clear in David Axe’s article, MRAPs = “Symbolic Targets”:

[Read more →]

Rook at Rook’s Rant has finally managed to overcome the problems and sort of upgraded to Movable Type 4, while sacrificing easy access to his archives. In any case he’s back to blogging but you have to register to comment.

Maru has really changed the style of WTF is it now?. It’s almost conservative.

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

By now you should have read the report: More U.S. women dying in childbirth. The report notes: “The rate was 12 per 100,000 live births in 2003 — the first time the maternal death rate rose above 10 since 1977.”

We are heading in the wrong direction in health care. In the US the maternal mortality rate rose to 13 deaths per 100,000 live births and the infant mortality rate was 679 per 100,000 live births in 2004. The Canadian rates, with their “terrible socialized system” were 8 and 475, and the Canadians are alarmed that the numbers are so high. Where’s the alarm in the US?

When people talk about rationing and waiting for service, remember there are 45 million Americans who are barred from the system because they don’t have insurance.

Michael of Musing’s musings is checking on the price of gopher wood and pondering the real question: “How long can you tread water?” as the rain continues to fall and the rivers continue to rise in his area of the Midwest.

But Fallenmonk reports that although the state is experiencing drought and a record number of days above 100°, a majority Repub committee of the Georgia House reports “No Worries” as Global Warming is not real.

Well, I know how much credence I put in a GOP judgment on reality…well, actually we don’t yet have an instrument to measure levels that small, but better electron microscopes are being built every year.

Update: If you never seen or heard the routine, here’s Noah on Youtube.

Bovine excrement increases greenhouse gases and exacerbates global climate change, so I really wish these people would stop.

DNI “Mike” McConnell spent a quarter century in military intelligence and served as DirNSA [Director of the National Security Agency] so he took the same course I did on the Fourth Amendment do’s and don’t’s. I couldn’t believe what I read in the earlier article, so I found the original piece.

In the El Paso Times article, Transcript: Debate on the foreign intelligence surveillance act, he makes the following response:

[Read more →]

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow cuts to the chase on Vietnam, and by implication Iraq, and asks the real question:

It would be nice if we could somehow force them into a real debate in which we get to ask them just what exactly it is they think we lost in ‘Nam, and what we would have won if we’d stayed. What prize would have been worth thousands more names added to that wall?

[Read more →]

I Want To Be Alone.

Go away!

[Editor: Dot is hiding in a place where the teenage cats and their psycho mother can’t get to her. I would like to join her.]

Kevin Drum, patron of Friday Cat Blogging, celebrated his fifth blogiversary™ on Wednesday.

Friday Ark

When I saw the report about the Shrubbery’s VFW speech I knew I had to comment. I hopped over irony, skipped passed parody, jumped beyond satire, sidestepped sarcasm and went directly into Number 7 mode. This was so wrong I knew I had to go with it. I figured that some would perceive this as a stainless steel colander™ moment and a hyperbolic exercise in hate of the Hedgemony. So be it, it was too good to miss and I got to haul out some terrifically bad moves by the very annoying people who thought they knew what was best for “the people¹.”

Imagine my dismay when this morning I stopped by Dr. Cole’s place and read: Military Coup Planned for Iraq?

[Read more →]

It is possible that the Shrubbery thought that Alden Pyle was Gomer Pyle’s brother, and he had probably missed the episode about Alden in Saigon after getting on the wrong airplane in Atlanta while headed to Mayberry for a visit.