Category — Uncategorized

Billmon regarding the “lumpy junky” and his comments on the Michael J. Fox ad – Expert Testimony:

I don’t know where Limbaugh got the idea that telling scurrilous lies about one of America’s favorite celebrities — and someone who enjoys a huge amount of public sympathy to boot — was a shrewd political move. But the Dems should be damned glad he did. Considering how razor-close the Missouri race appears to be, Rush may have just single-handedly booted away a Republican Senate seat.

Fox isn’t an addict or a criminal and has played roles that endeared him to millions of people. Now he is sick with a debilitating disease and he has been attacked. In the science of politics this is known as a no-no.

Maru at WTF is it now? has a post [scroll up to see it] about Clay Shaw [R-FL-22] running radio ads touting his experience working with the Big Dog.

Apparently Mark Foley’s neighbor in Florida [adjoining districts] and Washington [they live in the same neighborhood] would rather be associated with William Jefferson Clinton than George Walker Bush in the minds of local voters.

[Politics makes strange bedfellows – what did you think I was implying? You people have dirty minds.]

Today is the 61^st anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

It would be a good day for someone to explain to the current administration that the purpose of the UN is not to ratify every crazy concept that occurs to the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Dr. Cole wonders why Mulla Omar is still able to threaten US and allied troops in Afghanistan. He was supposed to have been part of the package when we went after Osama.

Osama is now making personal appearances in Republican campaign commercials reminding people that 1862 days after the Shrubbery said he would get him “dead or alive”, Osama still has a thriving career in the video market.

[Update: Keith Olbermann has a special comment on the Republican TV ad.]

People might have thought that having harbored al Qaeda, Afghanistan would have been on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, but you can’t get on the list unless the US recognizes the government, and the US never gave official recognition to the Taliban government.

Okay, so the Taliban must be on the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations? Not a chance. That’s for the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanese political parties, not for armed groups actively at war with US troops.

You might think that this whole War on Terror™ is FUBAR…and you would be right.

Early this morning the BBC had an interview with Dr. Sergei Khrushchev [Сергей Никитич Хрущёв] the son of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev [Никита Сергеевич Хрущёв], about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Dr. Khrushchev said that one of the main issues in his father’s mind when he made the decision to send tanks into Hungary was the Second Hungarian Army, which served with the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad.

Khrushchev was a political officer on the Southern Front during World War II and saw the fighting around Stalingrad personally. He wasn’t prepared to show the Hungarians any more mercy than he felt they showed the Soviet Army on the Southern Front. He personally felt the Hungarians were as bad or worse than the Germans.

While Dr. Khrushchev didn’t mentioned it, having denounced Stalin at the 20^th Congress of the CPSU [КПСС] only eight months earlier, his father could not afford to look weak to the Central Committee.

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The BBC has a nice interactive site, Timeline: Hungarian Revolution, for more details and Jams O’Donnell of Poor Mouth has a piece on the effect it had on the Communist Party in Britain.

Unfortunately, while the Hungarians were trying to get rid of their Communist government, Israel, Britain, and France went to war with Egypt over the Suez Crisis. While world attention was focused on the Middle East, Russia sent in a tank army and crushed the revolution.

American troops had to sit in place on the border and watch because the expected order to provide assistance to the Hungarians never came.

As Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory, among others, has noted the Shrubbery keeps claiming that protection from threats is the President’s most important job, and justification for anything he wants to do.

If you read the preamble to the Constitution, it is obviously not the case:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Defense comes in at number 4, not number 1.

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DARPA has announced that because of the wording in the latest Defense spending bill, the DOD won’t award cash in the next robot race.

We can spend billions on the missile defense system that has given us no indication that it will ever work, but cannot award a $2 million dollar prize to a group that actually accomplishes a stated goal that will lead to robotic vehicles for use in combat.

Understand that this is the latest in a series of races, and if no one accomplishes the task, as has happened, no prize is awarded. The DoD is forbidden to reward competence, but can give billions to people who fail to fulfill their contracts? I guess you need an MBA from Harvard to understand this reasoning.

CBS News is reporting that the senior UN envoy in Sudan has been declared persona non grata by the government for his comments in his personal blog.

Sudan Evicts U.N. Envoy For Blogging:

The Sudanese government Sunday ordered the chief U.N. envoy to leave the country within three days after he wrote that the Sudanese army had suffered serious losses in fighting with rebels in northern Darfur.

The official Sudan News Agency said the order was issued against the envoy, Jan Pronk of the Netherlands, because he had demonstrated “enmity to the Sudanese government and the armed forces” and was involved in unspecified activities “that are incompatible with his mission.”

Telling the truth with get you in trouble every time. He should have blogged in Dutch.

1. For those who are unfamiliar with the term: dooced

Digby has a fine piece, Primed For McCain, that covers the delusional thinking that passes for gravitas these days.

First of all, even if they could be found, and extra 100,000 troops in Iraq are too few at this point to even provide security, much less achieve anything that looks like a victory. If they had been there at the beginning to provide security for the people and prevent the looting of the ammo dumps, things might have worked out, but at this point they would just provide more targets.

While McCain, and other veterans in Congress, have been watching, Rumsfeld has been transforming the US military into a force that can win every battle, but is totally incapable of winning a war.

By paring the military down to units that only have one function, combat, and outsourcing all of the support functions, he has created a force that cannot sustain itself in the field for any extended period of time, and is totally incapable of security and peacekeeping missions.

Rumsfeld demanded planning for the Iraq invasion that was predicated on beating the Iraqi army, but did not even plan for a surrender, much less an occupation.

The current US military is all tactics and no strategy. It is the equivalent of a criminal justice system consisting of only SWAT teams: they can catch the criminals, but have no plan to deal with them after the capture.

The Department of Defense [DoD] was created by National Security Act of 1947 by combining the War Department and the Department of the Navy. It was originally called the National Military Establishment [NME], but the name was changed after someone said the initials aloud. Under Rumsfeld and the Shrubbery, it might be a good idea to revert to the original name.

Jillian of skippy the bush kangaroo reported on the The San Diego Union-Tribune story about the food distribution on San Diego county military bases. The story mentioned the families of Marine Lance Corporals and Corporals, which are military pay grades E-3 and E-4 respectively.

I thought I would give you the numbers so you have some real idea of how we pay our military. These numbers are for a Corporal [E-4] with three years of service stationed in Iraq, who has a spouse and two pre-school children.

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Both Watertiger and Julia have excellent rants today. Don’t miss them.

On January 14, 2000 the Dow-Jones Industrial Average closed the day at 11,722.98. That meant it would cost you $11,722.98 to buy the stocks listed in the DJIA group. Recently the DJIA has surpassed 12,000, but that’s 12,000 year-2006-dollars. To have the same value as the 11,722.98 year-2000-dollars, the DJIA would have to be at 13,715.89.

The stock market is still running behind inflation.

Fun unemployment fact: if you add new jobs, but the unemployment rate stays the same, there are more unemployed people.

Consider: if you have 100,000,000 people in the work force with a 5% unemployment rate, you have 5,000,000 unemployed people.

If you add 95,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate stays at 5%, there are 5,000 more people on the unemployment rolls, because there must have been an additional 100,000 people looking for work in the period. If the “new” jobs aren’t decreasing the unemployment rate, the actual number of unemployed people has to be increasing.

While not up to the standard of Keith Olbermann, Jack Cafferty is not afraid to speak his mind, and tonight at 7PM ET on CNN he starts a new six-part series, Broken Government.

CNN hosting a series about governmental problems just before an election – will wonders never cease?

By-the-by, the thought that the Shrubbery’s last trip on Air Force One could be to Guantanamo is mildly diverting. I thank Keith for that image.