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The only real change is that the tax payers of the US are no longer paying for the salary and benefits of one partisan political hack and his access to classified information should cease.  Karl Rove will no longer have a White House office, but anyone who thinks he is no longer in the center of the corruption is fooling themselves.

Karl is looking for the big bucks before his influence and value is at rock bottom.

Susan Landau, a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, lays it out in a Washington Post op-ed: A Gateway for Hackers.

You have to weaken the security of the system to allow it to be tapped. The systems and the people designing them are concentrating on making them secure. One of the reason for using fiber optics is that unlike copper, you can’t listen in without breaking the connection. You can put an inductive sensor on a copper cable and capture the contents with no indication that you have done it.

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In adoring tribute to old style political corruption like Tammany Hall, you have straw polls that are won by the person paying the largest bribes to the largest number of people. The fact that Romney easily wins GOP straw poll in Iowa proves nothing more than he spent more money in Iowa than anyone else to get a media headline. He didn’t win a single delegate to the nominating convention with all of his money. The actual caucuses aren’t for months, and they are just as money oriented.

This is no way to select the leader of anything.

Both Culture Ghost and Paradox have opinions on the fact that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have been convinced to leave a residual force in Iraq after withdrawing the majority of the troops.

The three offered up all kinds of reasons for this that simply demonstrate that neither they nor their advisors really understand the military realities of the situation. I offer them a hint: if we cannot provide reasonable control of the current situation with 150,000 troops, why would you believe that a much smaller force has any reasonable expectation of success?

There is a technical term for the small residual force that they advocate leaving behind – hostages.

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Gephyrophobia: An abnormal and persistent fear of crossing bridges.

What do you do when a phobia becomes common sense?

In his role as a military penguin, Badtux posted War is Hell to start a discussion about William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union Civil War general who Basil Liddell Hart was the first modern general. Much of “Uncle Billy” Sherman’s success was based on his clear understanding of the importance of logistics. If you can’t supply an army, it ceases to exist.

His march through Georgia was predicated on the ability of the route he planned to supply what his army needed and the skills of that army to overcome physical obstacles. His army built roads and bridges as they moved. There was an apocryphal exchange in which someone said that a tunnel had been destroyed and that would stop Sherman. The reply was that Sherman probably carried a tunnel with him.

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Over at First Draft the herder of ponies dispenses some wisdom: a US endorsement of a candidate in an election in a Muslim or Middle Eastern country is the equivalent of a Jane Fonda endorsement in a GOP primary.

Someone needs to remind the Hedgemony that Diebold isn’t supplying the equipment and Clearpoint isn’t scrubbing the voters’ rolls in other countries.

Oh, I would add Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega to the list of anti-victories.

If you think nuclear winter is a good idea. The Russian long range aviation and started flying Tu-95 strategic bomber missions over US bases again, starting with Guam. The Tu-95 Bear fills the same slot as the B-52, a long range strategic nuclear bomber. Very distinctive aircraft, you can’t miss them, or misidentify them.

Speaking of bombing, the Dow closed down 300 points for the day.

My expert on Hedgemony thinking confirms there was no reason to muck about with the FISA laws, although he was initially attracted to the fishy smell.

It isn’t just hot and humid in the eastern US, it is also polluted.

According to Jeff Masters, the current high pressure system that is dominating the weather in the East is generating ozone and trapping particulate matter, some of it from the wildfires out West, in addition to the triple digit heat indexes.

If you don’t have to go out and breathe it, don’t.

Decisions are for the media and party insiders, not common “people.”

CBS’s Kathy Frankovic wastes everyone’s time by looking at what voters want: Scrap The Primary System, Polls Say

For nearly 20 years, seven out of 10 have said the same thing — that it would be better to have one national primary day with all states holding their primaries at the same time.
…

Probably what makes voters want a national primary is, most of all, a sense of fairness — that everyone should have a chance to participate equally. The public takes similar positions when it comes to the general election. They object to the projection of election returns before polls are closed, and have long supported a uniform poll closing: 73 percent across the country told CBS News in December 2000 that they favored setting a single poll closing time on election night, to make all polling places across the country close at the exact same moment. In that same poll, 71 percent supported having a single method of voting so that every polling place in the country would have the same rules and would conduct elections in the same way. Just 25 percent thought that voting process should be determined by states and counties. [Read more →]

The Washington Post reports on the Department of Homeland Security’s latest attempt to take no responsibility for anything and to run out the clock: States feel left out of disaster planning

Bruce Baughman, Ashwood’s predecessor as president of the National Emergency Management Association and a 32-year veteran of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that a draft of the revised plan released to state officials last week marks a step backward because its authors did not set requirements or consult with field operators nationwide who will use it to request federal aid, adjust state and county plans, and train workers.

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It only took a week to finally let these guys do their job: Navy And FBI Join Bridge Collapse Search.

The Navy dive teams are on stand by in case they are needed anywhere in the world. They load their equipment into an airplane and can be on their way in hours, not days. They train to work in ship wrecks, and are familiar with working around jagged metal and debris.

The FBI has apparently brought along a submersible to use in charting some of the more dangerous areas, but the Navy divers train in currents, so they will be able to make rapid progress.

I just don’t understand why it took a week for this to happen.

I don’t see how Rupert Murdock can ever reduce that standards of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page when it already publishes dreck like Propaganda Redux.

The author is one Ion Mihai Pacepa, who is identified by an enterprising headline writer with the phrase: “Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America’s enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.”

First off, the author was a Lieutenant General with the Romanian security apparatus, not the KGB, and the Romanians were not major players during the Cold War. The Romanians were not favored in the Eastern Bloc, not simply because they were non-Slavs, although that played a part to the xenophobic Soviets, it was mostly because they were allied with Hitler and invaded the Soviet Union from the South.

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