Category — Uncategorized

If the point of Rummy’s foray into Harry Turtledove‘s most familiar genre was to annoy people, he definitely succeeded.

Watertiger was the earliest mention I saw, but Steve Bates was only a quarter of hour after her in posting and the swarm has been building ever since. Poputonian notes that The Other Media Ain’t Buyin’ It Either.

Keith Olbermann’s piece, Feeling morally, intellectually confused?, is highlighted, but you would be better off seeing the video at Crooks and Liars, as MSNBC requires using the 6-megaton version of IEb [Incompetently Executed browser].

This is what happens when you try to run government like a business: management believes that everything can be solved by marketing. Maybe the focus groups loved it, but the “clients” aren’t buying it.

There are a few things that most people aren’t aware of when viewing the recent Gulf Coast photo ops of the Shrubbery. They involve conditions and realities that people who don’t live down here have no reason to know about, but which impact on the meaning of what they were being shown on television.

Some may wonder why Biloxi was chosen for the Mississippi photo op: was it the fact that the Presidential Pimpmobile could land at Keesler AFB? That was probably part of it, but the main point was the fact that a chunk of Biloxi has been re-built while most of the Coast is still devastated.

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Over at Facing South R. Neal re-runs his entries from last year. He was filling in for Chris Kromm and started on August 29^th.

Refresh your memories of what it was like and how totally out of touch this administration was with conditions on the ground.

While Mustang Bobby awaits the arrival of Ernesto, I’ll take the time to bid good bye to one of my old alternate landing fields – Wake Island.

The Air Force evacuated Wake Island today in anticipation of the arrival of Super Typhoon Ioke. With 155mph constant winds and 190mph gusts that are generating 50-foot waves, Wake Island is about to be scrubbed clean of just about everything.

The Pacific is experiencing the same kind of typhoon season this year that the Atlantic experienced last year – multiple large destructive storms.

Let’s clear this up for people who don’t understand hurricanes. The winds and storm surge wiped out the Mississippi towns of Lakeshore, Waveland, Bay Saint Louis, Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula, the Alabama towns of Bayou La Batre, Dauphin Island, and Gulf Shores, and the Louisiana parishes of Plaquemines and Saint Bernard. These were the areas that caught the eye and the Eastside of the storm. These places were pretty much leveled by Katrina, as the storm surge was like a tsunami, knocking down everything in its path. [I’m 250 miles East of landfall and we had an 8-foot storm surge.]

There was lesser damage as the storm moved inland because friction from the land slows the wind down.

The buildings in New Orleans sit behind the windbreaks of the levees and floodwalls. Many single story buildings were never subjected to hurricane force winds because of the protection of other buildings. The multistory buildings were the ones that were battered by the winds.

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Colorado authorities asked Emily Litella to tell the media that all charges have been dropped.

Commenting on the Iranian situation Juan Cole notes:

Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei’s pledge of no first strike against any country by Iran with any kind of weapon, and his condemnation of nuclear bombs as un-Islamic and impossible for Iran to possess or use, was completely ignored by the Western press and is never referred to. Indeed, after all that talk of peace and no first strike and no nukes, Khamenei at the very end said that if Iran were attacked, it would defend itself. Karl Vicks of the Washington Post at the time ignored all the rest of the speech and made the headline, ‘Khamenei threatens reprisals against US.” In other words, on Iran, the US public is being spoonfed agitprop, not news.

Although Iran’s protestations of peaceful intentions are greeted cynically in the US and Israel, in fact Iran has not launched a war of aggression in over a century. The US and Israel have launched several during that period of time.

Here’s the problem: I know of several instances of the American and Israeli governments flat-out lying to their people and the world, but I can’t find the same kind of example for Ayatollah Khamenei. I’m opposed at the most basic level to many of the man’s beliefs, but I can’t say that I know him to be a liar.

As I wrote last year: the response was screwed from the beginning.

In the map below, the area in yellow are those parishes included in the 08/27/2005 FEMA emergency declaration:

The area in red are the parishes actually at risk from hurricanes – they got it exactly reversed, which prevented aid from being pre-positioned in northern Louisiana.

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With Tropical Strom Ernesto’s strength and path still up in the air, according to this CBS/AP article New Orleans Told Levees May Not Hold.

If Ernesto becomes a hurricane and strikes near New Orleans all bets are off regarding possible flooding in the city. Until you are sure the levees will hold, you are really taking a chance rebuilding.

I forgot to mention the problem even a tropical storm will cause for those living in FEMA trailers. They should pack all of their personal stuff in heavy duty garbage bags and look for some place else to wait out a storm.

From AP reports on CNN:

Sudan charges Tribune ace with writing ‘false news’ – “A Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune was charged in a Sudanese court Saturday with espionage and other crimes.” “[Paul] Salopek was working on a freelance assignment for National Geographic magazine during his arrest.”

Witnesses: 2 Israeli missiles hit Reuters car.

Someone needs to tell the Sudanese government and Israeli military that this is not the path to good “ink”.

Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on August 26, 1920, guaranteeing the right of the majority of American adults to vote.

Via WTF is it now? a Canadian university uses the Shrubbery in its advertising campaign for new students.

Go and click through, although I don’t think you can register for the prizes.

Update 1: I forgot about Badtux’s post, That Iranian nuclear program… that was supposed to be part of this.

Update 2: The Christian Science Monitor: Study calls Iran ‘biggest beneficiary’ of US war on terror.

Professor Cole vents some spleen about the House Republican report on the lack of intelligence concerning Iran.

The House ?Intelligence? Committee missed a few realities. Dr. Cole directs them to Larry Johnson’s piece, Republican Chutzpah on Iran, which points out that the Republican White House blew the cover on the CIA asset most involved with Iran’s WMD program – Valerie Plame’s network.

I would add that we would certainly know more if our “friends” in Pakistan had allowed us to talk to Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man who sold Iran much of their nuclear research equipment.

Of course, the scorched earth policy of Porter Goss, eliminating many of the experienced people in the CIA who didn’t toe the Republican line on Iraq, certainly didn’t help, nor did saddling a HUMINT agency with a SIGINT spook for a boss.

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So the Israel army chief admits failures, while Olmert tries on “support the government or the terrorists win” from Karl Rove’s playbook.

Just to make everything even more complicated, Syria warns over UN peacekeepers. Syria says if they station UN peacekeepers along the Lebanon-Syria border, they will close the border to everyone. Lebanon gets most of its imports from or through Syria.

While France boosts Lebanon peace force by two battalions and Italy has promised 3,000 troops, Chirac wonders where the massive UN peacekeeping force augmented by 15,000 Lebanese troops are going to stay in the relatively small area that has been pounded to dust by recent combat.

There are few passable roads, fewer bridges, a much reduced number of buildings, cluster munitions and land mines all over, little electricity or drinking water, but they are is now going to have 30,000 “visitors”.