Category — Uncategorized

You can forget the military or administration doing anything significant in September. The Federal fiscal year starts 1 October and Harry Reid has put the Defense appropriations bill to the side for the time being. If there is less than stellar progress in Iraq, the Defense budget will be affected.

They are going to delay any report until after the appropriations bill is passed, count on it. When they specified September they forgot about the budget. If they can’t stall and report little or no progress, the Repubs are in a bind.

The military is already trying to shift the date to November because they realized the error before the Hedgemony did.

CNN reports : Rocket launcher tube found on lawn, which is vaguely correct, in a way, if you don’t know what you are talking about.

(CNN) — Police and FBI agents are investigating the discovery of an empty rocket launcher tube on the front lawn of a Jersey City, New Jersey, home, FBI spokesman Sean Quinn said.

They also hauled in the the Army’s 754th Ordnance Company and Joint Terrorism Task Force. Too bad they couldn’t understand this part of their article:

According to the Web site Globalsecurity.org, a loaded M136 AT4 anti-tank weapon has a 40-inch-long fiberglass-wrapped tube and weighs just 4 pounds. Its 84 millimeter shaped-charge missile can penetrate 14 inches of armor from a maximum of 985 feet. It is used once and discarded.

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The Washington Post thought it was important that people know that a Hummer Owner Gets Angry Message.

The guy bought a used Hummer and parked it on the street because it was too big to fit in the garage and two masked men slashed the tires, broke the windows, and scratched an environmental message in the paint.

I don’t know what the charge is in DC, but in the law I enforced, Penal Law of the State of New York the guys would be charged with violating:

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McClatchy has a nice little piece: Coffee grounds brewed trouble for Israeli fortuneteller

This year, Kuma became one of the few people ever to be charged in Israel with practicing magic, a unique crime punishable by up to five years in jail.

In short, Kuma was the target of a modern-day witchhunt.

…

Kuma’s transgression is something known to its practitioners as tasseography. Put more simply, it is the ancient art of overturning a coffee cup — usually a demitasse used for Turkish coffee — and looking for answers in the patterns left behind by the grounds.

And that, under Israeli law, can be grounds to charge someone with illegally practicing magic.

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Día de la Independencia
República de Colombia

¡Viva Colombia!

Pierre Tristam reports on the important items being dealt with by the Flagler County Board of Education. With all of the pressures that schools are under these days from “No Child Left Behind,” the changes in the tax laws, the inconsistent funding from the state of Florida, the requirements of the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test, the A-Plus Schools program, and all of the rest, it is nice to see that these people have focused in on the real problem in their school – what students wear.

They have decided that students in Flagler County need to wear uniforms. Now I can understand that, I spent twenty years in uniforms, so I thought I’d help them out. See, the thing about uniforms is that they really need to be uniform – you can’t have uniformity if the girls wear one thing and the boys another.

After due consideration I have two suggestions:

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Knowing that Louisiana Senator Vitter will need to have a “resurrection” tour to make amends with his constituents, I thought I’d find him an appropriate theme song.

Maybe his wife could find him an autographed picture of Lorena Bobbitt for his office.

Mad Kane favors us with another wonderful piece: The Full-a-Bluster Song.

Kevin Drum of Political Animal has another episode of why you can’t trust the telecoms: Telephone Kvetching.

Lurch at Main and Central has two pieces: Irony Lives On, in which the Hedgemony tries to find a new marketing slogan for Messopotamia, and Supporting the Troops, in which the White House details all of the terrible things the Congress is doing to hurt the troops, like giving them pay raises and not increasing medical insurance co-pays.

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CNN parrots the MAC-V MNF-I report: U.S.: Senior al Qaeda in Iraq leader held. It was a patriotic capture on the the Fourth of July of the Media Director of Al Qaeda in Iraq who supposedly coordinates with AQ-HQ on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

What do they have against press secretaries? They arrested al Sadr’s press secretary in January with much fanfare. I guess it’s critical that AQ-I’s websites will no longer be up-to-date.

The situation is simple: the Hedgemony screwed up and pulled people away from the real counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan to attack Iraq for no reason. As a result, the original franchise is still going strong in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan, and an opportunist in Iraq opened shop after the occupation was botched.

The foreign fighters in Iraq are coming from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and most of the attacks are carried out by Baathist elements, but these idiots are blaming Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

We have to impeach these people to get someone in power who at a minimum understands that you will never hit a target if you don’t aim at it.

Before you risk vertigo on what will follow get mellow with the Byrds.

So the folks at Danger Room earn their money by reading things so you don’t have to, like the latest de-classified National Intelligence Estimate that is carried on CBS as U.S. Warns Of “Evolving” Terror Threat, which is every bit as creative as the pirouetting pachyderms in Fantasia and it should read “Revolving,” because it keeps turning up when useful for the Hedgemony.

Sharon Weinberger presents Homeland Security Advisor: U.S. Fighting a “Single Determined Enemy” in which Frances “Whirlpool” Townsend fails to inform us exactly when it will be “determined” who, what, and/or where this enemy is, and how he, she, it, or they will be dealt with, only that we have to believe, or something bad will happen to someone, somewhere, at some time.

Noah Shachtman looks at it and pronounces the Intelligence Estimate: Snoozeville. Not only that, he locates other people who just don’t care if Tinkerbell or Frances Townsend fade away waiting for “a success that hasn’t occurred yet”.

You may have seen the news about the shooting at the office of the governor of Colorado:

… a man in a dark suit some described as a tuxedo appeared outside the offices of Gov. Bill Ritter. He refused to drop a handgun, and was shot and killed by a patrolman on the governor’s security detail.

The man said before he was shot, “I am the emperor and I’m here to take over state government,” said Evan Dreyer, the governor’s spokesman.

No one besides the gunman was injured.

Now they are talking about new security measures and the need to install metal detectors at the entrances.

What part of “No one besides the gunman was injured” don’t these people understand. The system in place worked. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Before banning sippy cups, snack packs, or “cremains” how about taking a minute to thank the people who did their job in a competent manner, and not question their worth by adding a lot of expensive equipment.

Michael at Musing’s musings makes an important point in Trying to do the right thing: what do you do after you’ve done all you can on your own?

Back when I was living in California I conserved water from the start. I was used to it from the military and living in a city where water was relatively expensive. I put the jug in the toilet tank, turned off water when it wasn’t necessary, watered plants with the dish water, etc. I did these things before there were any “real problems” in San Diego because it was a desert, and you don’t waste water in a desert.

Then they had a drought and instituted water restrictions. Fine, reasonable thing to do except they did it by mandating a 10% cut in water usage by everyone. Now the people who had never done anything could achieve such a cut without bothering to do everything I had always done. How was I expected to cut usage?

The problem with such blunt action is that it encourages people to over-consume so that when the restrictions come, they won’t be inconvenienced. It’s time for some leadership and clearly defined goals to deal with the problem. The goals shouldn’t just be for the nation, or the state, but for the individual, so we have some way of knowing we are doing good.

Okay, so the actual headline is U.S. Air Force Builds Up Presence In Iraq, and the story starts:

(CBS/AP) Away from the headlines and debate over the “surge” in U.S. ground troops, the Air Force has quietly built up its hardware inside Iraq, sharply stepped up bombing and laid a foundation for a sustained air campaign in support of American and Iraqi forces.

Squadrons of attack planes have been added to the in-country fleet. The air reconnaissance arm has almost doubled since last year. The powerful B1-B bomber has been recalled to action over Iraq.

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From the fine folks at McClatchy in DC we learn that State orders flak jackets in Baghdad’s Green Zone

BAGHDAD – The dress code at the Blue Star restaurant inside Baghdad’s Green Zone now calls for vest and hat.

Flak vest and Kevlar helmet, to be precise. And it’s a good thing.

At least four mortar rounds hit inside the Green Zone about 1:30 p.m. Saturday, killing two Iraqi civilians, according to a U.S. soldier who could not speak for attribution because he’s not authorized to talk to reporters.

Meanwhile, a State Department official, after initially denying that State had ordered its 1,000 Baghdad personnel to wear protective gear, said that a copy of the order obtained by McClatchy was an undiscussable security breach.

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