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The transcript may say “Democratic”, but the Shrubbery said “Democrat”. The hateful spirit of Joe McCarthy still exists in the language of the Republican Party.

The word is spelled and pronounced “NUCLEAR”.

The accent is on the second syllable in both “IRAQ” and “IRAN” and the initial vowel is short.

Dr. Cole would be happy to explain the relationship of the various Muslim groups in the Middle East, because it is glaringly obvious that no one in the White House has a clue.

Update: Look, you stupid twit, buy a dictionary – McCain’s escalation is a tactic, not a strategy. You don’t have a strategy, which is one of the big problems with your war.

Update 2: Oh, the civilian reserve idea, it’s called the Peace Corps, and it has been around since Kennedy. Look in your government phone book and you can call and ask them about what they do.

While the headline on the BBC article, Ninja kitten band win Coke battle, could be interpreted many ways, the basic story is that Joel Veitch of Rathergood.com has received a settlement from Coca Cola over the unauthorized use of one his band’s songs and associated animation in an ad in South America.

Joel’s work is definitely an acquired taste, but it’s nice to see that he has been compensated for his work and creativity.

While I gave the general English translation of the word in an earlier post, Dr. Cole provides a short lecture on its meaning and derivation and an overview of the Arabic language.

This is the part of the State Of The Union where a President with a popularity of 28% introduces invited people who have actually done something, so that the audience will applaud with real fervor.

While “claptrap” is currently defined as “pretentious but insincere language” it originally described something injected into a performance to guarantee applause, literally a “trap” to capture “claps”. The last six SOTU speeches have been examples of both definitions.

Update: If you care, here are the transcripts of what the Shrubbery read and Senator Webb’s response.

[If you go quickly you will see that in the caption on the picture of Senator Webb says: “Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, whose son is serving in Vietnam, beat Republican George Allen in November’s elections.” I guess CNN has fired all of their fact checkers and editors who know the lad is in Iraq, not Vietnam.]

In the Spocko v. Rodent dust-up, supporters of the Rodent have accused Spocko of attempting to deny the minions of the Rodent their rights of free speech.

To be denied your rights of free speech the government must be involved, as in this Associate Press story, Pa. Man’s Letter Brings Secret Service:

An elderly man who wrote in a letter to the editor about Saddam Hussein’s execution that “they hanged the wrong man” got a visit from Secret Service agents concerned he was threatening President Bush.

The letter by Dan Tilli, 81, was published in Monday’s edition of The Express-Times of Easton, Pa. It ended with the line, “I still believe they hanged the wrong man.”

Tilli said the statement was not a threat. “I didn’t say who _ I could’ve meant (Osama) bin Laden,” he said Friday.

… [snip]

“He said, ‘Keep writing, but just don’t make no threats,'” Tilli said of one of the agents.

See the difference. Spocko didn’t send armed men from the government to the radio station to warn the announcers to watch their language, as happened in the case of Mr. Tilli.

As has been widely reported: Chavez tells U.S. government: ‘Go to hell’. Having won multiple elections by overwhelming majorities, and with a legislature controlled by his supporters, Mr. Chavez doesn’t want to waste time submitting his decisions to that legislature, so he had them pass a law that allows him to rule by decree for 18 months.

The US government has raised all kinds of complaints about Mr. Chavez’s “anti-democratic” actions, without explaining the difference between what he is doing and what the Shrubbery has been doing for 6 years with a Republican Congress and no oversight.

I would note that Mr. Chavez has very high approval ratings, hasn’t invaded anyone, and doesn’t have a huge budget deficit, so there are differences between his presidency and the Shrubbery’s.

The electorate voted against the war. The generals on the ground said McCain’s surge wasn’t necessary. Now, via Bill Scher, we find a Washington Post article, Embattled, Bush Held To Plan to Salvage Iraq, providing us with the view of the Iraqi government:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had a surprise for President Bush when they sat down with their aides in the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Firing up a PowerPoint presentation, Maliki and his national security adviser proposed that U.S. troops withdraw to the outskirts of Baghdad and let Iraqis take over security in the strife-torn capital. Maliki said he did not want any more U.S. troops at all, just more authority.

So, we now know that Kristol, Kagan, McCain, and Lieberman are about the only people who support this incredibly stupid idea.

Scout at First Draft, among others, have noted the report covered in Michael Brown: Politics Played role in federal Katrina Response.

I would like to add my personal knowledge to this. After Katrina, locally, we concentrated on helping Mississippi because we had worked out a route to get there over the roads that were left and they absorbed the fury of the hurricane from the coast to well inland.

I live in a small town of less than 400 but we organized a trailer full of supplies and the truck and drivers to get it there. We were really upset when the governor of Mississippi, Hailey Barbour, would get on television and say that everything was wonderful and FEMA was great and Mississippi would be good as new in no time. The local officials and the drivers who returned said the area was a bomb zone, no supplies were being brought in, FEMA expected people to travel great distances, etc. – exact same conditions that they were complaining about in and around New Orleans.

The sheriff of a rural Mississippi county was charged by the Feds when, fed up with the lack of response, he took some of his people to a FEMA distribution point and “highjacked” a truckload of supplies for his county.

The progress in Mississippi is generally the result of the corporations that own the casinos rebuilding, not any action by the state or FEMA. With a much larger Federal grant for housing than Louisiana, Mississippi is barely moving forward, and the local governments are still dependent on donations from neighboring states for equipment and supplies.

The politics played by Hailey Barbour in talking about the response may have resulted in larger grants, but the rebuilding is just as hampered by the incompetent and inconsistent FEMA administration, and the lack of government resources that affect Louisiana.

Florida is still waiting for FEMA to make up its mind about the 2004 hurricanes so we can finish our recovery, but we aren’t holding our breath.

According to the Associated Press report on the Shrubbery’s latest radio address: Bush proposes tax changes to address health care costs. In the State of the Union address he intends to request tax deductions for medical insurance premiums of $7,500 for individuals and $15,000 for families.

This does absolutely nothing about the cost of health care, and if the tens of millions of Americans without health care could afford to take these deductions, i.e. if they actually made enough money to pay income taxes on sums this large, they could probably afford health insurance, unless, of course, they were sick, and then it isn’t available at any price.

Tax cuts and killing people are the only solutions the kindergarten class in the White House have.

Close on the heels of our valiant effort to rid the world of goat herders in Somalia we have this “victory:” U.S., Iraqi forces arrest top aide to al-Sadr.

I don’t know that I would refer to Tony Snow as a “top aide” to the Shrubbery. According to a number of journalists who work in Baghdad, Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji is the media representative for the al Sadr movement in the city. He should have been easy to find as reporters have him in their rolodex.

And people wonder why the US isn’t winning.

Oh, if you thought that it was a big deal that 400 members of the Mahdi Army were scooped up, forget it. They are people who failed to follow Moqtada al Sadr’s instructions to maintain a low profile, so he doesn’t care and is using the sweeps to get rid of people who don’t follow orders. It’s a win/win for al Sadr: he gets rid of disobedient members of the militia and has another grievance to complain about to “the people.”

Update: Now with doggerel in comments!

So, while everyone is watching Iran, Syria, and North Korea, our good buddies the Chinese have been developing the ability to shoot down our satellites. From CNN: U.S. official: Chinese test missile obliterates satellite.

And what exactly is the Shrubbery going to do about the country that controls such a huge chunk of the American debt that he ran up, if they decide to start knocking our intel and GPS satellites out of the sky?

Update: Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway has an interesting catch with Just Trust Us: the Pentagon “laundered” $1.4 billion through other government agencies to avoid oversight.

Update 2: In The Emily Litella Strategy Karen points to The Bully Presidency by Jack Balkin that makes the same point about the Shrubbery’s kabuki on warrant-less wiretapping, but more completely.

I have spent most of my working life looking for and using patterns. In intelligence you find the patterns that the “enemy” uses to makes decisions to determine what they will do in a given situation. In law enforcement, patterns can tell you where to expect a criminal to strike next. In computing you look for patterns to move among computer hardware and software, and to check your programs for consistent and accurate performance.

When watching the Shrubbery, the patterns fairly scream at you. The consistency is manic. They continue to follow their routine, whether or not it was successful.

They were told to close down Total Information Awareness, but that guaranteed that they wouldn’t. Since I posted on it earlier in the week, more pieces are becoming obvious. Steve Bates has posted on the Talon project in Pentagon Spies On Antiwar Groups, which is more data for TIA, and Crooks and Liars reports that J. Michael McConnell, the man chosen to replace Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence, comes to the job from Booz Allen, the main contractor on the Total Information Awareness program.

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Update: Avedon Carol of The Sideshow turns the tables and asks: Why did anyone support the invasion of Iraq?

Kevin Drum has set off a minor “kafuffle” by attempting to make generalizations and judgments about the correctness of individuals over Bush’s War™. The framing would seem to be that to be correct you had to oppose the war for the correct reason. While George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft fit in that limited category, there were a number of people who opposed the war for a variety of valid reasons that are true and have nothing to do with the lies of this administration or the incompetent manner in which the war and occupation have been conducted.

During the relevant period I was on mail lists discussing the war, and my reasoning was very straightforward: the war was unnecessary and a waste of resources including lives.

It was easy to show that at one point Saddam had WMDs because the Reagan administration helped him get them and the US government had the paperwork on those transactions. The UN inspectors rooted out many of the facilities after the first Gulf War, but so what?

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Melanie notes that according to a report in the Washington Post as of Monday the Shrubbery has spent 365 days at Camp David and 405 days in Crawford.

When you throw in all of his political trips, I’m not sure he makes the cut for full-time employment. We should rent out the White House and try to make some money on it, because the Shrubbery is treating it like a time-share.

With two wars in progress and the so-called Global War on Terrorism™ most Presidents would spend some time at the office.