Posts from — June 2014

The Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, took to the floor of that ‘august’ body to declare that the US is the ‘policeman’ of the world, and must intervene anywhere there is a problem.

That is absurd, insane, and dangerous. That will paint an even bigger and brighter target on Americans everywhere.

From the White House we get word that not only are we sending troops to bolster embassy security, we are also sending 300 military advisors. Instead of MAC-V, we are going to have MAC-I. I’ve seen this movie before and really didn’t like it.

We are witnessing an outbreak of the mnemonic plague™.

Dick ‘Dick’ Cheney slithered out of his crypt to complain that Zero is wrong in handling Iraq.

This is someone who thinks that the ‘proper’ way of conducting foreign policy is to decide what you want to do and then ‘create’ the data and ‘intelligence’ that proves your decision is right. Then you attack anyone who casts doubt on your decision by gathering real intelligence and actual facts. You not only attack the individual, under the Cheney Method, but their family.

Cheney should be in a cell for war crimes, not writing opinion pieces.

The Iraqi government has formally asked for US air support. Zero doesn’t need to get permission from Congress to take military action, because the Congresscritters have refused to repeal the original Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq. They could have reasserted their control over war, but they didn’t do it.

Something that isn’t coming back is the Spanish national football team at the World Cup. After losing to Chile, they will go no further.

So we captured the mastermind behind the attack on the Benghazi consulate and are bringing him back for to the US for trial. US diplomatic sites are US territory, which is why this is legal and appropriate.

The view on the Right, according to ‘talk radio’, is that this was timed to assist Hillary Clinton, and isn’t really about punishing the man responsible for the death of four US diplomatic personnel.

In the Land Down Under the ABC has a useful series of maps that show the ethnic distribution in the country, and the areas of control for the three major groups.

The armchair generals among us can see some obvious moves for pushing ISIS back, but they would require some cooperation and coordination between the Kurds and Shiia, which not a given at this point.

The Iraq War ‘cheerleaders’ may not want to call this a sectarian war, but some of the Sunni governments in the area see it that way. The former Qatari ambassador to the US is on the record as saying that any use of force by the US against ISIS would be considered an attack on Sunni Islam.

Meanwhile Congresscritters are twisting themselves into pretzels over the reality that helping the Maliki government combat ISIS puts the US on the same side as Iran. They want Zero to do something about ISIS, but don’t want to be on the same side as Iran.

The Sunni governments who are our ‘friends’ in the Middle East seem to have been funneling money and arms to ISIS to fight Assad, and are now faced with having to deal with the monster they have created.

There is no way of independently verifying what he says, but McClatchy has a story on how the attack on Mosul unfolded from one of the Iraqi soldiers who fled the city.

I was doing my laundry and other things at my Mother’s house Sunday morning and made a terrible mistake – I turned on the TV to get some news.

What I got was a lot zombies on all of the channels attempting to convince the world that the Iraq War wasn’t really a disaster, and had nothing to do with the current problems in the country.

There was Wolfowitz avoiding questions about his statement that there wouldn’t be sectarian violence if the US deposed Saddam, and Paul Bremer claiming his decision to disband the Iraqi Army wasn’t really the cause of all of the Sunni and Baathists military veterans joining ISIS.

Tony Blair has issued a statement saying that taking Saddam out was the right thing to do and that decision has nothing to do with the current situation.

And the so-called ‘journalists’ let them get away with it.

None of the shows had on anyone who had opposed the Iraq War, and predicted that it would lead to sectarian violence. Being right is not a requirement for being on TV news shows to share your ‘expertise’. That the media disinterred these losers and gave them air time, shows that there really is no point in going to television for news.

John, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and count of Anjou in the meadow which is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June, 1215, signed the Great Charter in the presence of assorted heavily armed peers of the realm, who assured him it was the right thing to do.

The British Library has pictures of the Magna Carta available, and Wikipedia has a nice discussion of the document.

The Magna Carta of 1297 is permanently residing in the US National Archives.

The Avalon Project’s translation of the 1215 version with an index and definitions.

John abided by the charter for several months, before he returned to business as normal, but the principle was established – no one is above the law.

Adopted as the flag of the United States of America by the Flag Resolution of 1777 enacted on 14 June, 1777.

The flag was first flown from Fort Stanwix, on the site of the present city of Rome, New York, on August 3, 1777. It was first under fire three days later in the Battle of Oriskany, August 6, 1777.

An official flag has a rise to run ratio of 1 to 1.9 [the flag should be 1.9 times as long as it is high] with the canton [the dark blue part] that rises over the top seven stripes with a run of 40% of the flag’s run.

The only time you will see a “correct” US Flag is if you see the official colors of a military unit. Most flags are 3’X5′ or 4’X6′ instead of 3’X5.7′ or 4’X7.6′.

Frances Bellamy, the Baptist minister and socialist who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance was from Rome, New York.

A Clean Finish

Slurp …

[Editor: Froggy washing up after dinner.]

Friday Ark

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. [He obviously didn’t have a problem with the number on any day.]

OTOH, this is a rare year when it only occurs once, but there is a full moon …

I’ve progressed from Franz Kafka through Joseph Heller and L. Frank Baum to a world of Lewis Carroll in my attempt check all the boxes, dot all the I’s, and cross all the T’s and return to a somewhat normal existence down here in South Fundistan.

The people who have been in very similar circumstances even a year ago are telling me that this is new, that they had none of these problems. I’m beginning to think that there is a system failure in progress, that so many people who used to do this have retired or been laid off, that those who are left just can’t handle the workload imposed on them.

Regardless, I will locate the snark and dispatch it with a snicker-snack.

The Shrubbery was brain damaged from his dissolute young adulthood, but Cheney and Powell both knew why George H.W. Bush didn’t want Saddam removed from power, and what would happen if he was. Nonetheless they went along for the march into folly that was the Iraq War.

We invade a country without sufficient forces to control huge arms depots or provide security for the population, and then don’t even bother to make the army surrender. The insurgency was guaranteed.

They listened to people who didn’t think there would be any problems between the Sunni and Shiia factions, even though the majority Shiia had been oppressed for decades.

They remove the two factors that had been holding Iran in check for years, the Taliban and Saddam, and are then surprised that Iran begins to expand its influence in the region.

The current ISIS victories in western Iraq were plain to see by anyone watching – ISIS is a Sunni faction, and the Sunnis have no real presence in the current government of Iraq. The Sunni population has no reason to support the Shiia government in Baghdad, and the Iraqi army knows it has no local support. so ISIS rolled in.

Now many of the same morons who backed the Iraq War want the US to do something. We will probably end up providing air support to the Iraqi forces because they can’t handle a brigade-size force with local support. If we don’t do it, Iran will, and Congressional Republicans will hold even more information-free, pointless investigations.

I was updating my laptop at my Mother’s and turned on the TV to see if there had been any more shootings this morning and encountered the ‘bubble-headed bleach blond’ on his show, Hardball. He was talking to other media types about the loss that Cantor suffered in a Republican primary that was shocking all of the ‘cool kids’, because Cantor was the House majority leader and had all kinds of money for advertizing, which is the standard by which the ‘cool kids’ decide who will win. ‘BBB’ opined that Cantor lost because the Republicans hadn’t done anything about the reducing the deficit or much of anything else while in power.

Cantor got a super-safe, overwhelmingly Republican district after the 2010 redistricting because he was a senior House Republican and would be the obvious choice for Speaker if Boehner retires. He has coasted to reelection for years, so he was out campaigning for other people, and wasn’t even in his district for the primary.

A lot of Republican voters in the district seem to have expected that some of their issues would be passed into law after the Republicans gained control of the House, but all the Republicans have done is block things from being accomplished. The government shut-down was not what they wanted, they wanted action, and didn’t get it.

The challenger, a college professor named Brat, based his campaign on the old ‘the immigrants are stealing your jobs’ theme that has been used repeatedly since the early days of of the country. It was one of the issues that spelled the end of the Whig Party and the formation of the Republican Party in the mid-nineteenth century. It is hauled out every time there is an economic down-turn to deflect blame from the speculators who are usually behind most US economic down-turns.

No one I know of actually cares about the deficit except ‘BBB’, who keeps harping on it.

Skippy linked to a story about the Social Security Administration closing all of its local offices by 2025. It won’t work, because their system still requires people to produce documents to cover certain circumstances.

I tried to sign up on line, and couldn’t because I had to provide proof that I was in the military during a specific time period, so I had to take my DD-214s to the local office.

I had to go to the office recently with a death certificate to prove my Mother was dead. Those death certificates are $10 apiece, and they just had to see it, so mailing it to a processing center is not my idea of a good deal. After the ongoing dispute we have with the VA over forms that were sent to them, mailing things to a central location is not something I would recommend.

They think that people will be able to access everything they need by using the Internet or a ‘1-800’ number. The major weakness of the plan is that it assumes that everyone who needs to contact Social Security has Internet access or a telephone.

I am now managing the low-income apartments that my Mother managed, and I can tell you for a fact that only half of the people in the apartments have a telephone, and only one has Internet access. The telecomms have priced their products out of the budgets of minimum wage workers. None of the people with telephones can afford to be put on hold waiting for the ‘next available’ person.

The whole time I was sitting in the waiting room at the local Social Security office their television system was telling me to use the Internet next time, which was really annoying since they directed me to the local office.

The people in Washington don’t seem to understand how limited and expensive Internet access is in this country, or how expensive phone service has become. There is no way they understand that a loaf of bread and half-gallon of milk cost an hour’s wages for too many people.

It started off with a check that can not be negotiated in its current form, followed by another government agency that I am going to have to waste time and money notifying that my Mother is still dead, and ended with an attack of stupidity that has my keys locked in my Mother’s house.

When viewed in the context of a heat index approaching 110° and visible pollen in the air, there are days that you just want to eliminate from the calendar, and this was one of them.

Tomorrow now involves breaking in to my Mother’s house because one of the things I had on the schedule for tomorrow was getting spare keys for the house, a chore I have put off a couple of times already. It’s my own fault, and that is the most annoying part of the whole day.

I’m really feeling the weight of my birthdays today. Yesterday afternoon I did about two hours of yard work and it totally wiped me out. The heat indes was around 100°, but we were working in the shade and had plenty of water.

For years I spent the whole day outside doing things a lot more strenuous, but those days are obviously over. I have some more work to do, but it is going to have to wait for lower temperatures.

I did get my anti-virus software on the new machine and got a clean scan, so that’s one less worry.