Category — Uncategorized

The Republan leadership in the Florida legislature thinks that it would be a wonderful idea to eliminate all property taxes in the state and replace them with an increase in the state sales tax from 6% to 8%. [Florida Public Radio Capitol Report]

For some reason local governments have not jumped on this bandwagon.

Via Maya at Suburban Guerrilla, The Guardian reports the shocking news that US Iran intelligence ‘is incorrect’.

For some reason the IAEA is unable to find any of the installations or activities in Iran that the US claims are there. It’s eerily like the chicken farms that the weapons inspectors in Iraq kept finding that the US “intelligence” said were WMD sites.

Next someone will report that a law professor at a border state university has been advocating the murder of civilians based on these faulty reports.

In response to the seemingly annual rumors that the Vatican is about to modify its stand on the use of condoms to combat the spread of AIDS, the BBC decided to ask a couple of Catholics to comment. [BBC World Service radio]

Supporting the wider use of condoms was Brian Haill, President of Australian AIDS Fund, a former Church-sponsored outreach initiative, and on the other side was the noted victim of anti-Catholic bigotry, William “DonoWho”.

In response to DonoWho’s claims about the success of the abstinence only program in Uganda and the permeability of condoms to the AIDS virus, a “Haill” storm erupted. It was a terrible thing to hear, even though no “naughty” words were used.

You did get the feeling that Mr. Haill would not have objected to someone pulling a condom over DonoWho’s head to prove that not even air could get through, not that I’m advocating doing that. I’m not a law professor.

I guess the BBC and Australian Catholics are now anti-Catholic bigots.

First is was some small-minded librarians having fits because an author of the latest Newbery Medal winner used the word scrotum and now, Dog Store Sign Angers Seattle Residents, because the store uses the proper term for a female dog.

A little advice, it isn’t the word, it’s the mind of those who object to the word. I know they didn’t watch the recent Westminster Dog Show, because they use the word frequently.

Next they’ll faint when someone says “male puppy”.

US supplies are primarily coming by road from Kuwait. Southern Iraq is where the UK troops are based.

Over at Sic Semper Tyrannis Wayne White wants people to consider the implications for the US supply line of A Phased UK Withdrawal.

Steve Gilliard of News Blog has talked about the US supply line problems if there is an attack on Iran for months, and now the force that has been protecting a major portion of that line is leaving.

This is how it’s done.

According to the BBC: Harry Iraq deployment no surprise

And so, just as the prime minister announces the start of Britain’s phased withdrawal from Iraq, Second Lieutenant Harry Wales of the Household Cavalry, is preparing for a tour of duty in that country.

[snip]

But Second Lieutenant Harry Wales will be there, doing his duty with the rest of his regiment, while his father, elder brother and grandmother will – with several thousand other British families – suddenly have a very personal stake in the progress of this particular campaign, and an insight into the stresses that it can provoke.

They may even find themselves reflecting that not a single senior member of this government, the ministers of the Crown who committed Britain to the Iraqi intervention, has had an equivalent experience.

Strange how the real supporters of this mess can’t seem to find the time to serve. It doesn’t take much courage when you are risking the life and limbs of strangers. Lieutenant Wales is going because it’s his job, his duty, not because he thinks it’s a good idea.

From Keith Olbermann’s The News Hole a wonderful bit of information on the War on Terror™ as practiced by the Shrubbery in KEEPING THE WORLD SAFE FROM SHAM MARRIAGES:

Federal prosecutors counted immigration violations, marriage fraud and drug trafficking among anti-terror cases in the four years after 9/11 even though no evidence linked them to terror activity, a Justice Department audit said Tuesday.

Overall, nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics on investigations, referrals and cases examined by department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine were either diminished or inflated. Only two of 26 sets of department data reported between 2001 and 2005 were accurate, the audit found.

Can we just stop pretending they care?

Melissa wonders Why the government allowed the situation to deteriorate so badly at Walter Reed, and Colonel Lang calls it Bureaucracy’s Cost as he notes that head should roll.

People may remember that Rumsfeld put Walter Reed on the the base closing list. I objected at the time because it would be stupid to close a military hospital during a war with casualties being flown in daily.

Apparently buildings that weren’t being used daily were allowed to deteriorate to save what funds that were available to be used for those buildings that were in steady use. Mold, mildew, mice and cockroaches can readily overtake an unoccupied, unheated building near bodies of water. It takes a lot less time than most people would believe. The money in the Pentagon budget for maintaining military bases is being plundered for other projects.

Be that as it may, as Colonel Lang points out, people must be held responsible, I would point out that this has been going on for a very long time, and was first reported by people stationed at Fort Stewart¹ years ago. The current resident at the White House and his minions just don’t give a damn.

1. Transcript of Kris Osborn reporting on Fort Stewart for the Lou Dobbs Tonight show 10/21/2003 on CNN.

I have spent three hours on the telephone having an individual repeat a three-letter sequence that I had given to him to type in. During the last half-hour I was beset by three cats inside and a dozen cats outside wondering where dinner was.

Then this individual asks “what does LTP mean?” I responded that I didn’t have the faintest idea, and wondered why he had asked. He responded: “if you don’t know, why do you want me to type it in?” To which I responded: “excuse me, but I have been telling you to type in LPT which is an abbreviation for line printer, which is, after all, what we are attempting to get to work.”

Ten minutes later the cats were being fed.

[Read more →]

There hasn’t been a single Department of Defense funding request that hasn’t been approved by Congress during the Shrubbery’s residency and yet the Department of Defense doesn’t have the money to pay it’s electric bills or to repair equipment that has been damaged.

Given the way they have repeatedly tried to cut benefits, I’m sorry to say that Lurch’s post, Abusing Veterans, that provides links the recent Washington Post series, doesn’t surprise me in the least. This didn’t just happen, these people have been ignoring the people and infrastructure since they came into office.

As Scout highlights, they hire people like Michael J. Wagner, until recently Chairman of the Military Veteran and Family Assistance Foundation, who was working on his own private Phoenix Foundation while accepting a government paycheck. These people don’t care about the “vulgar peasants” who fight wars.

On All Things Considered Mara Liasson did a report on the John McCain campaign, McCain Back to Square One: South Carolina, and during a gathering at Spartanburg a woman got up and essentially accused Congressional Democrats of wanting to cut off the troops’ paychecks while they were fighting in Iraq. It isn’t the Democrats who are asking people to pay for the body armor that was cut off during their evacuation from the battlefield, or to pay for their meals in the hospital, or to repay allowances that weren’t stopped when they were evacuated state-side, or who failed to pay the National Guard and Reservists in war zones for months, that was the Republans in charge of this disaster. That’s how the Republans support the troops.

Everyone needs to understand that these people have no problem forgiving KBR for billions in overcharges, but a corporal who lost limbs is supposed to come up with thousands that the government claims it overpaid him while he was in the hospital. In case you are wondering, they don’t pay interest when they underpay you.

The only reason this administration can’t have an escalation of 20,000 people and follow the rules that Jack Murtha is proposing is because they have mismanaged the Department of Defense since they came into office. While you go to “war with the army you have”, if you are competent you immediately begin building the army you need.

[Updated to extract an “ic” for an “ic”. If you listen, McCain has the same pronunciation problem as the Shrubbery.]

Sam Gardiner at Left Coaster has a post on the Iranian show and tell, Iranians Reveal Evidence, which demonstrates that they can organize a dog and pony show.

Their stuff looks realistic if you didn’t know that those generic 20-round boxes of 7.62 ammo for an AK-47 were likely available any day of the week on the Iraqi black market, as is the rest of the stuff. I don’t doubt that some of came from the US, but that doesn’t prove anything. A relative of Chalabi got the contract for supplying that sort of thing, so I wouldn’t bet my life on it working, only that it was over-priced.

When you see boxes like that at gun shows you find that its re-loaded, usually with Soviet bloc casings. As long as you’re just wasting your money punching paper, it’s not bad, but you can expect dud rounds and need to pay extra attention to cleaning your weapon after you use it.

I don’t doubt the US is supporting the MEK, or that the MEK are continuing to cause trouble in Iran, but it’s frankly not a serious attempt at anything, and the Iranians have been dealing with them for decades. The only problem would be if anyone were using the MEK as a source of intelligence. That’s not what they do.

Quiddity makes an interesting catch in Lieberman walks – Joe comes to the Senate during the Sabbath, something he never does, to vote against cloture.

The Senate rules on cloture require that you get 60 votes, so not voting is the same as voting no. The only reason for making a special effort would be to vote yes, and yet, Joe makes this exceptional trip.

I can’t believe that Joe doesn’t know the rules, but it’s possible that he thought the rule was 60% of those present.

If you believe in elitism and aristocracy, you view the vulgar as bad, because you have taken the word and used it to express your disgust for the majority of people.

If you look at a dictionary you will note the earlier meanings of vulgar:

Spoken by or expressed in language spoken by the common people; vernacular;

Of or associated with the great masses of people; common.

Interesting that these people object to the common people in a representative democracy. They seem to believe that the majority of people need to lead by a small elite, rather than making their own decisions.

Ellroon’s post, The vulgarity of common bloggers, deals with the horror of the elite over the presumption of bloggers who believe they should have a voice in their country.

I realize it isn’t very comfortable for the elite when the vulgar bloggers delve into the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to express their displeasure at the fact that the elite have benefited from the policies of the Shrubbery: the commoners are watching their own die and become disabled in a war the elite started.

I have no forgiveness for the politicians or the media who went along with the war in Iraq. As the elite, they are the ones with the access to knowledge that the government was lying. It was there if you were paying attention. You cretins didn’t simply embrace the excrement pouring out from the White House, you spread it over the truth. The mainstream media is certainly not vulgar, it is obscene.

We’ve all heard it – the country has never faced a bigger problem than the War on Terror™.

Digby covers part of it in: No, We’re The Greatest Generation, which deals with nostalgia for the Cold War as a simpler time.

I wrote about this last May, and it was bit disconcerting when the Baader-Meinhof gang made it back into the news, as in Meinhof gang killer to be freed: “A German court ruled that Brigitte Mohnhaupt, 57, qualifies for early release after serving a minimum proportion of her five life sentences.”

Now I have no way of knowing if Brigitte was in the dark blue Bimmer that went flying by on the right on the Autobahn, to be followed shortly by a green Polizei Porsche passing us on the left, but you have a tendency not to forget trying to duck as automatic weapons fire is taking place while you are driving at 120 KPH. You have to clean the upholstery after something like that.

Baader-Meinhof [Red Army Faction] had a tendency to make a trip to a bank or a drive to a shopping district an adventure during the 1970s, but I’m asked to believe that al Qaeda is a bigger threat to me. My brief in the military was the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces – I know about threats. Just because the Shrubbery is terrified, doesn’t mean I have to be.

[Update: Link fixed thanks to Alice in Comments.]

Representative John Murtha is going to introduce a radical plan to military funding: the Pentagon must follow its own rules. That is the sum and substance of what Rep, Murtha is proposing to write into law. Deployments limited to one year with a two-year break for the Army, and seven months in theater followed by fourteen months at their home base for the Marines. No more “Stop-Loss” orders, when your enlistment is up, you get to leave. You will be fully trained and equipped before being deployed to the combat zone.

Jack Murtha is going to force the government to abide by the contract and rules they agreed to when people enlisted. The government must keep its half of the bargain and stop screwing the troops.

The Republicans are going to have to explain what is so radical about requiring the government to abide by a contract, because that is all Murtha is proposing.

Why do Americans insist on electing people to Congress who can’t conceive of the concept of linear time, i.e. things could only be used or owned after they had been invented?

How long is it going to be before Congress understands that you need to weigh your words before making them part of the Congressional record?

Via Bark Bark Woof Woof you can see the latest Doonesbury cartoon, which is reason enough to visit, but below the cartoon is the “Say What?” feature that today is this gem:

“Could you picture Davy Crockett at the Alamo looking at his BlackBerry, getting a message from Congress? ‘Davy Crockett, we support you. The only thing is we are not going to send any troops.’ I am sure that would really be impressive to Davy Crockett.”

Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo.

David Crockett of Tennessee resigned in a snit after not being assured of re-election to Congress and with a group of 12 friends rode to the Mexican province of Texas to participate in a revolution. A group of 12 constitutes a squad in military terms, which would make Crockett a corporal, sergeant at most. He went to San Antonio where Lieutenant Colonel Travis was ignoring the order of his commander, Sam Houston, to destroy the fortifications of the Alamo. Houston knew he didn’t have the men or materiel to defend the site and was attempting to mass his forces for a major battle.

The Congress may have supported Crockett’s action, but as they were taking place in foreign country, the Congress was not about to send troops the US did not have to become involved in a battle that wasn’t supposed to happen.

While I will assume that Congressman Akin was aware that Blackberries didn’t exist at the time, it may come as a shock that Congress is not in the habit of sending messages to junior non-commissioned-officers in other people’s armies.