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The Shrubbery keeps saying that “all options are on the table” and some Democrats are parroting that phrase. It’s a lie, and everyone should know it. The only “options” the Shrubbery is interested in is killing more people and blowing things up. The option that never seems to appear on his table is real diplomacy – talking to people.

Telling people you won’t talk to them until they agree with you is not diplomacy. It shows no respect for your adversary. Setting pre-conditions for talks defeats the purpose of talking. It’s like having a debate where both sides must agree to the proposition before the debate would be held.

The US has not, in point of fact, agreed to talk to Syria and Iran. The US, at most, is agreeing to attend a multi-party conference to which Syria and Iran have also been invited.

The recent agreement with North Korea has told Iran and Syria that they must possess nuclear weapons before the US will talk to them. That is the message. The US didn’t talk to North Korea until North Korea conducted a nuclear test. That is not a good message to send.

The weather has been nasty all day, as a front is moving through. The tornadoes that have devastated communities inland are forming over the Gulf and getting sucked to the northeast. The power keeps going out as transformers arc in the cloudbursts. We have been under tornado watches or warnings all day, and the thunder is really getting on my nerves.

The radar looks like it may finally passing us, so we can get some sleep tonight.

My problems are nothing to compared to Enterprise, Alabama. Schools are used for shelters down here, and most are not up to the task. The area will be a long time healing, because almost everyone in town would have known one of the people who died.

From the article below we learned that Congress knew:

In 2004, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and his wife stopped visiting the wounded at Walter Reed out of frustration. Young said he voiced concerns to commanders over troubling incidents he witnessed but was rebuffed or ignored. “When Bev or I would bring problems to the attention of authorities of Walter Reed, we were made to feel very uncomfortable,” said Young, who began visiting the wounded recuperating at other facilities.

Beverly Young said she complained to Kiley several times. She once visited a soldier who was lying in urine on his mattress pad in the hospital. When a nurse ignored her, Young said, “I went flying down to Kevin Kiley’s office again, and got nowhere. He has skirted this stuff for five years and blamed everyone else.”

So, who is Congressman C.W. Bill Young? Wikipedia tells us that Charles William “Bill” Young:

… is currently the most senior Republican member of the House of Representatives. From 1999 to 2005, he was the Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations; he gave up the position because of Republican-set term limits. He is currently ranking minority member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.

He was chairman of the House Appropriations committee when this happened. Not a penny gets spent that doesn’t go through that committee, and the chairman sets the agenda. He could have held up the entire defense budget to get improvements, but he chose to go to other facilities because he and his wife “were made to feel very uncomfortable.” I doubt they were as uncomfortable as the wounded.

Update: Steve Soto of the Left Coaster noticed this last night.

Update: NPR is reporting that the commander of Walter Reed, presumably Major General George W. Weightman, has been replaced.  He is late to the show.  The current Army surgeon general, Lieutenant General Kevin C. Kiley, was the commander during most of the current Gulf War.  He was in charge when the deterioration started.

Anne Hull and Dana Priest of the Washington Post are not going to let the brass bury the problem: Top officials knew of neglect at Walter Reed.

They detail that the complaints go back years and were coming from soldiers, their families, people in Congress, and medical professionals. There was nothing surprising about what was going on, beyond the fact that it was allowed to continue.

The military is now attempting to cut off sources from the media, but that isn’t going to work. GIs complain; it’s grafted onto your soul in basic training. They will complain to each other over small things, but this is affecting their lives in a very basic way, so they are going to complain to the media.

The Army Times was reporting on the personnel changes and the order not to talk to the media almost as soon as it was sent out from headquarters. That was an incredibly stupid idea that is going to cost someone. Everyone in the chain of command can forget about future promotions, because there is no way the Senate will confirm them, just ask the guys at the infamous Tailhook convention.

I would say that the reporters know they have a great story, and they are not going to forget about it. I would bet that they have an archive of information that is going to be mined for a while.

The only way this is going to go away is if the Army actually fixes the problem.

Via skippy the bush kangaroo, Cap’n Dyke reports on a squirrel highjacking an airplane.

They are attempting to gain an air force!

Hmm?

Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (Florida-20) is “good people”. Even though she represented the other end of Florida in the Florida House and Senate, and now the US Congress, I’ve corresponded with her on several issues that really annoyed me, and she responded. She was under no obligation, as I couldn’t vote for her, but she is interested in government, her degrees are in political science.

She doesn’t sound like a Floridian because she was born in Queens, and raised on Long Island, but she has lived in Florida since she started college at the University of Florida.

She has opinions, and you are kidding yourself if you think she’s going to alter them. She was one of the most vocal opponents of the special law in the Terri Schiavo case, and earlier opposed the Republican plan for the state legislature to create its own slate of presidential electors during the Florida 2000 election.

John Amato at wrote about her today, as did Matt Stoller at MyDD.

If she decides to run for the Senate, she has my vote and support. While she’s barely into her forties, she has paid her dues. She has also paid other people’s dues as she was the third highest money raiser among Democrats in Congress, and she spread it around.

Learn more at Congresspedia and/or Wikipedia.

Via All Hat and No Cattle, in a piece in The Guardian from Terence Hunt, AP White House correspondent, the absurdity of “unnamed sourcing”: Mystery Official Briefs Press on Cheney.

Who knew pronouns were a bunch of al Qaeda terrorists.

Check out Fresh Air from WHYY, February 27, 2007: Seymour Hersh on U.S. Policy Toward Iran

Rumsfeld and company have been squirreling away funds to pay for the discontinued Total Information Awareness program, and apparently have a “trust fund” to finance an attack on Iran without Congressional approval.

Enough is enough. The House needs to draw up an impeachment charges against the entire crowd and make it known that if Iran is attacked by the US or Israel without a declaration of war, impeachment will begin immediately.

It is past time for a thorough audit of the Defense Department. The money was allocated to buy armor, pay utility bills, house soldiers, and it obviously is not being spent for those purposes. It is time for Congress to demand to know where the money went. We might be able to balance the budget with Rumsfeld’s slush fund.

These people are insane, but without some information you can’t judge how insane.

Let’s start with a definition from Wikipedia: Wahhabism “is an Islamic movement, named after Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab (1703-1792). It is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”

The Saudis don’t like people using the term “Wahhabi”, preferring the more general “Salafi”, because the Sauds came to power by allying with the Wahhabi followers, and people might remember that these religious fundamentalists are a keystone of the Saud regime.

The Taliban are not Wahhabi, but they, like the Muslim Brotherhood are Salafi, ultra-conservative Sunnis. We are talking about the same level of differences that exist among Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson.

There are ultra-orthodox Shi’ia, with the main difference being the belief that the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, will return and bring “justice” to the world. The belief is similar to “the Second Coming of Christ” among some Christian groups.

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The BBC, as well as the rest of the media, is reporting: Jesus tomb found, says film-maker; let the bad reporting begin.

First there weren’t coffins in the cave there were ossuaries. In the “old days” you didn’t stay in the ground after being buried. After the worms and microbes had done their thing, the bones were disinterred so the grave could be reused. The bones were put in boxes, ossuaries, for storage elsewhere. The Catacombs under Rome are bone storage areas.

The Israelis have strict laws regarding human remains, so the bones that were in the boxes that were discovered in the cave were given a proper “burial,” and are not available for testing. The most available for any tests would be fragments.

Any who as read Pharyngula more than a couple of times should know that P.Z Myers is an atheist and rather hard-core, but he is a biologist and is extremely skeptical of claims made about DNA tests from the ossuaries. If you were able to conduct tests, the most you could show would be that the people were relatives and Middle Eastern.

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I was thinking over a post at Sic Semper Tyrannis by Jim Schmidt, Blame, an effort to understand the thinking behind what the Shrubbery has been doing for the past six years. He wonders if it isn’t tied to the philosophy that led to Rudyard Kipling writing The White Man’s Burden, to encourage the American government to colonize the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.

While I don’t disagree with the conclusions that it is a matter of a form of conservative philosophy, it doesn’t evince any consistency in execution.

‘Noz of Rubber Hose points to the source of my disquiet in his post, crescent crazed. The US was attacked by Sunni fundamentalists on 9/11/2001. Without capturing those responsible, we turned our attention and military might on the most secular state in the region, and are now being belligerent towards a Shi’ia country. By doing this we have allowed our attackers to recover and rebuild their organization after the initial damage caused by the war in Afghanistan.

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This is what CNN thought was breaking news at 6:53PM EST today – a group of entertainers about to receive trophies were entering the hall where the trophies were to be handed out.

And the MSM wonders why people are losing interest in their product.

The joys of just clicking around on sites:

BBC Washington correspondent Matt Frei talking about US media: Washington diary: Martians and celebs. It’s nice to know that other people share my opinion of the “feel good, short attention span” of the American media scene.

About those “ignorant towel heads” in the Middle East, the BBC has a report, Advanced geometry of Islamic art, that tells us: “Researchers in the US have found 15th Century examples that use the concept of quasicrystalline geometry.” If you are not familiar with “quasicrystalline geometry”, it’s probably because the West didn’t “discover” it until the end of the 20th Century.

Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway noticed Dana Millbank’s follow-up of the Walter Reed story in the Washington Post: Painting Over the Problems at Walter Reed’s Building 18.

Living in Florida I have a lot experience with roaches and the other problems, and I do house rehabilitations. I know what it takes to do the job, and what is described in the article won’t cut it.

First you need to get all of the people out of the building because you have to fumigate, but you don’t waste any time or money on that until you remove the carpets, curtains, furniture and, especially, mattresses. You can sort the furniture and mattresses and treat them separately, but they can’t be reused for an extended period.

Next you check and make sure you don’t have any roof leaks or plumbing leaks. Both roaches and mice need water, so if there is no available source inside, they will go outside. Water is also the culprit in most deterioration of buildings. There is no point in going further until you stop the leaks.

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