As the American public becomes more and more aware of just how colossal a mistake the invasion and occupation was, the neo-conservative architects of Operation Iraqi Cluster-fuck are beginning to bail out on the administration. They are never going to admit that it was a bad idea to begin with, so the most common excuse is that it was a good plan, poorly executed. As they pile on Rumsfeld to try to distance themselves from the mess, the war is becoming dubya's alone. It is going to define his presidency even more than the first Gulf War defined his father's, and I find that very fitting. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Iraq and tax cuts were pretty much all that was on dubya's mind when he came into office. He was otherwise disengaged on all domestic issues. That's how people like heckuva job Brownie ended up running our government. And since ending every speech with "Tax Cuts Good!" is how you get elected as a Republican, it's probably more of a reflex than an agenda. That means the only thing he was really focused on from the beginning was regime change in Iraq and he still won't let go of it. Here's a question. At what point does steely resolve become obtuse stubbornness?

I sometimes wonder why he clutches so tightly to this particular failed gambit. I'm pretty sure he's not motivated by the America as Empire theme the PNAC boys promulgate. He's just not that deep of a thinker. I suppose it could be that he likes to picture himself in the tough guy, wartime preznit role, but in the back of my mind I believe it's possible he's doing something that he feels his father should have done. Possible that it really could be as simple as just wanting to show up daddy.

The preznit is spending a lot of time abroad lately. I'm thinking maybe Laura accidentally left the whole newspaper in the presidential potty room instead of just the funnies and he discovered his approval rating at home is threatening to drop into the twenties. The only people left supporting him are the bloodthirsty and the religiously insane. Pretty much the American version of the Usama bin Laden fan base. He didn't notice on his trip to Vietnam and Indonesia that the rest of the world likes him even less than we do. Now he's off trying to wow them in the former Soviet bloc countries, but I doubt he'll have any better luck there. Those people know a fascist when they see one.
According to this CNN story, dubya is still mostly giving the same old stay the course speeches. We can't pull out until the mission is complete. We will accept nothing less than victory. It's not a civil war. It's all al-Qaida's fault. Terra, terra, war on terra, etc. But one statement really caught my attention:

The president traced an increase in violence to the February bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad, saying: "We've been in this phase for a while."

It's not so much what the preznit said, he's just vapidly flapping his gums as usual. It's the fact that just a few paragraphs later in the same CNN story, his National Security Advisor, who's riding on the same fucking plane with him, directly contradicted that statement. Stephen Hadley said this:

"We're clearly in a new phase characterized by an increase in sectarian violence that requires us to adapt to that new phase,"

And as far as I can tell, not one reporter had the balls to call them on it and ask a followup question. Liberal media, my ass. Lapdog media is more like it. Apparently the only skill needed for White House reporters is the ability to write down what administration officials say and print it without any analysis whatsoever. Arrgh!

A few nights ago I was listening to my local NPR station and I caught part of a series of interviews with various celebrities commemorating the 80th (I think) anniversary of The New Yorker magazine. One of the interviews I heard was with John Stewart of The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Stewart is a very perceptive critic of our mainstream media and he said a couple of things that really gave me pause. I've been searching the intertoobz this morning for a transcript, but I haven't had any luck, so I'll just paraphrase.
The first thing that got my attention was Stewart's statement that in our media, there exists clarity and noise. When asked where CNN and Fox News belonged in those categories, he said they were both noise, the difference between them being that the noise generated by Fox is purposeful. They have intentionally set out to correct what they perceive to be a left-leaning bias in our nation's news coverage. This struck me as a very simple truth. Fox News exists for the sole purpose of muddying the waters of our national discourse and they've been so successful at it that CNN has sacrificed clarity and journalistic integrity in order to compete for viewers who prefer titillation and scandal over intelligence and truth.
The other thing Stewart said (and this just blew me away) was that dubya is actually a very smart man who just pretends to be a backward rube from Texas. To back up this claim, Stewart noted that dubya has degrees from both Yale and Harvard, and he pointed out how the preznit, when speaking to the American people, always speaks in very simple terms, as if he's talking to a child. Now I admit I'm a little biased when it comes to this president. I don't like him or his policies, but having said that, I sure thought I had a handle on him as far as his overall intelligence. I've listened to a lot of dubya's speechifying over the last 5 plus years, and it's always been a train wreck. More than once I've yelled at my television, "It's nuclear, not nucular, you fucking moron!" I've always been a poor public speaker myself, so I could understand his inability to string three sentences together without a lot of stumbling and bumbling and re-starting, but I always assumed the complete lack of depth in the content of his speeches was a reflection of his own shallowness. It never once occurred to me that he might be talking down to his audience because he thinks they are stupid. Wow. Just, wow.

CNN is reporting 144 dead in Sadr city today. It looks like the Sunnis and Shias in Iraq are celebrating turkey day by bombing and mortaring each other's neighborhoods and churches. I'm not sure what the official Bush administration talking point regarding civil war is right now. The last one I remember is the one where it's not a civil war yet, but there is a potential for the situation to dissolve into a civil war. October topped September for the bloodiest month since the invasion and November is looking like a contender for the title. They're killing each other by the hundreds every day. Last week General John P. Abizaid estimated we have 6 months or less to get control of the security situation in Iraq. I think the General needs to put down the crack pipe.
There is no longer any security in Iraq. One hundred thousand families have already fled the country and you have to figure those that are leaving are the ones with the means to do so, i.e. the wealthy, the educated, the moderate. As time goes by there is less and less of the old Iraq to secure. The country is being restructured along ethnic lines via mass murder and intimidation. All that's going to be left in some of those neighborhoods are the poor and the crazy. Not a lot of hope there.

Surfing the web is like panning for gold, a lot of time and effort with very little payoff. I stay with it mostly for the pleasure of the work itself, just collecting those shiny little flakes of knowledge and squirreling them away. Occasionally I stumble upon a nugget of genuine wisdom. I mined this one from the comments section over at Sadly, No.


If you look at history with a view unfogged by nationalistic just-so stories, you make an amazing discovery. Modern wars have no winners. In fact, modern wars are all, and will all be unwinnable. This became obvious in 1953, but no one seems to be willing to acknowledge it even 53 years later. Name one war that has had a clear winner since the “truce” on the Korean peninsula shouted out to the world “wars may end, but there is no winner”! Wars used to be declared, fought between fairly equally constituted armies until one was conquered and/or surrendered. Then came Korea, with the global geopolitical considerations, and there simply was no way to win. Followed by Algeria, Suez, Dien Bien Phu, The Six Day war, Vietnam, Afghanistan I, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, The Balkans, Rwanda, GW I, etc. The interesting thing is the asymmetrical nature of these conflicts. Invariably, one side is a powerful traditional military and the other side is a more populist guerrilla force, typically supported by another powerful nation. There are no big decisive battles, no truly occupied territory (in vietnam we frequently said we only owned the ground we were standing on). Given a supply of money and weapons, the guerrillas can just keep bleeding the traditional military until the homefront support collapses and the fighting slows, then stops. At least for a while.
We will not see an old-fashion war ever again. There’s just no way two powerful nations will slug it out. Oh, if America doesn’t learn her lesson, there may come a war with China at some point, but it will be brief, because very quickly escalation will threaten the world’s survival. So it would be important for Pentagon officials to begin to understand that while it’s easy to start a war, it’s almost impossible to end one. And it’s certainly impossible to win one. The world has changed - why haven’t they noticed?
mikey


Mikey, who has his own blog, but doesn't post much lately, really nailed something for me there. Reading through this list reminded me of how the administration and it's supporters have used comparisons to WW II in selling the War on Terra. Things like Usama bin Laden, then Saddam Hussein, being portrayed as the next Hitler and our enemies labeled as Fascist even though the term doesn't remotely apply. I realized that they have to go back that far to get the happy ending they are selling. The one where the US emerges as the benevolent superpower beacon of democracy on the hill. It was the last time the US faced a genuine existential threat, our last truly necessary war. But as mikey says, the world has changed. That happy ending is a fiction now. Modern war is not fought to save a country or to gain one. It's always about one (larger/stronger) country trying to force it's will on the populace of another (smaller/weaker) one. And since guerilla tactics are indefensible short of genocide, it just doesn't work. We, as the largest/strongest country need to learn this lesson in the worst way before we end up like Israel writ large, spending decades flailing about in the desert. Terrorism should be treated as crime. Declaring it a war gives the perpetrators more credence than they deserve. We empower them merely by getting in the ring with them.

Last week General John P. Abizaid, supreme commander of the emperor's forces in the middle East, told Congress that we needed more troops in Iraq, but he said the troops we need are Iraqi troops. Today's Washington Post has this article which suggests to me that the Joint Chiefs of Staff don't watch C-SPAN.

Most recently, a closely guarded military review being done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff laid out three options for Iraq. It appears to be favoring a version of one option called "Go Long" that would temporarily boost the U.S. troop level -- currently about 140,000 -- but over time would cut combat presence in favor of training and advising. The training effort could take five to 10 years.

Wait a minute. The American people have turned against the invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation. The commander-in-chief responds by expanding the war effort. Meanwhile, the preznit has been visiting Vietnam for the past few days. That crash you heard was irony grabbing it's chest and falling over dead. I hate it when I'm right about what dubya will do next, but I smelled this one coming. Note the 5 to 10 year projection. That pushes the resolution of these plans off on subsequent presidents. As far as he's concerned, it's war without end, amen. This guy is going to stay the course right up until noon on January 20th, 2009. Then he's going to haul ass for Crawford, Texas to cry about his legacy and spend a lot of time taking shots at whatever the adults in the next administration decide to do to clean up the mess.
The WaPo article has some good info on some of the major problems we've been having with the training of Iraqi forces. Things like insurgent infiltration, supply problems and a serious shortage of qualified interpreters. We've been training for 3 and a half years with substandard interpreters. I bet that's not very effective. I wonder how that could be allowed to happen?

Despite its central role in Iraq, the training and advisory program is not well understood outside narrow military circles. Congress has hardly examined it, and training efforts lie outside the purview of the special inspector general on Iraq reconstruction. The Army has done some studies but has not released them. Even basic information, such as how many of the 5,000 U.S. military personnel involved are from the National Guard and Reserves, is unusually difficult to obtain.

And there it is. If you don't know what you're doing, keep it secret. With Republican control of both houses of Congress, there has been virtually no oversight of this administration. They have been allowed to do pretty much as they pleased for the duration of this war. Hopefully that's about to change. When the Dems take over in January, if they have any balls, I should get to see a lot of hearings with a lot of senior officials getting called on the carpet. They've been able to hide their lack of progress behind bogus security classifications and flag-waving false patriotism for too long. I'm betting that when it all comes to light, the layers of corruption and incompetence will be staggering.

I'm still learning how to build the site. I have updated my old welcome page and I'm learning some basic html code to add some links to it. I've also added a Contact Me page and a slogan which may or may not stay. I'm trying out the Urban theme, and any comments on that would be welcome. There are several different themes to choose from and with this RapidWeaver software all it takes is one click to change from one to another. I may wind up just rotating through the ones I like. This is the part of having the site that bores me so it's slow going. Thankfully I'm almost done setting it up and I can just leave it alone and go back to pounding on dubya.

Go over to the general's place and check out the latest Republican Jesus cartoon. I found it to be hilarious, but I'm a little drunk right now. I almost spewed beer on my pretty white computer.

Want to listen to some good, mostly new music online? Check out The Bridge. It's an NPR station out of Kansas City that plays music most of the time and since it's a public station there's no commercials. I've discovered some good tunes to download to my ipod there. I'm doing one as we speak, and you know why I can do that? Because it's a Mac, that's why. I've got one browser window open to The Bridge so I can get the name of the artist when I like a song. I've got Window's media player actually getting the music and another browser window open to my website to make sure my thoughts are actually leaving the building. I've got i-tunes downloading tunes to my ipod and I'm using Rapid Weaver to make this post. I'm switching back and forth between all of them like a guy who's had 8 beers and just popped the 9th. Any PC I've ever spent much time on would have fucked up one of these tasks by now. I've been doing this for the two months I've had this Mac and I haven't even had to reboot it. They are right when they say "it just works."

I'm really just sitting here listening to some tunes, getting fucked up, waiting for the wifey to come home. I plan to jump her. She had a gig with the local chapter of the hell's angels tonight. I hope she comes home soon. I'm already not gonna be any good for her....hee-hee

Lawmakers here in Misery and couple other states that I can't be arsed to look up right now are considering legislation to make robo-calls illegal. Sounds good to me, but I'm not holding my breath. I bet they make a lot of noise and "consider legislation" long enough for the public to lose interest and then do nothing. They must have some kind of data showing those calls are effective or they wouldn't keep spending millions making more and more of them. I got a shitload of them the last few days before this last election. I even got one from Laura Bush. I saw somewhere that she recently turned 60. Maybe it's just television but she seems to be holding up alright for 60. There's something about that wide-eyed, slightly vacant gaze that I find sexy. Couple more beers, I might.....

In other news, the preznit has ventured abroad. He finally found the courage to go to Vietnam and immediately started talking shit. He stood in the Vietnamese capital and stated that pretty much the only thing he learned from the Vietnam conflict was that if you never quit, you never lose. I guess if he'd have been in charge we'd still be fighting in southeast Asia. He does have a point, though. You can't lose a war that never ends.

Having examined the evidence available on the intertoobz in the form of blog comments, innuendo and accusations, I have concluded that the reason Nancy Pelosi backed the old school crook Murtha for House Majority Leader is because she told him she would back when he first came out vocally against dubya's adventure in Iraq. It was payback for having the guts to step up on the House floor and start turning the ship of public opinion in the other direction, absolutely knowing the right wing was gonna go fucking nuts coming up with creative ways to call him a coward. That's where the cut and run meme came from. He didn't back down though, and other lawmakers soon followed him in questioning the war. He did a damn good thing for America there, but he should have known better than to go for majority leader. Talk about skeletons in your closet. If it hadn't been for the fact that he was one of Tip O'Neill's go-to guys back when the Dems owned Congress and Tip ran it like the mafia, he would probably have spent a little time behind bars.

James Inhofe, the Republican (naturally) senator from Oklahoma was on Faux News this morning brandishing his mighty intellect. You can see the video and/or read the transcript at ThinkProgress. He claims that global warming is all a big hoax perpetrated by left-wing extremists. You see it can't be global warming, because only the northern hemisphere is warming, not the whole globe. And even if the northern hemisphere is warming, it's not caused by man-made greenhouse gases, see. It has to be natural, 'cause god is still up there. That's right, if the northern hemisphere is warming it must be because the invisible cloud-daddy wants it to be warmer. I guess he just got tired of looking at all those damn glaciers.
Let me just clarify his position. Senator Inhofe believes the warming of the northern hemisphere, where the vast majority of human population and industrialization resides, cannot be caused by human activities because the southern hemisphere, where population and industry are a great deal lower, is not experiencing warming. Uhh, buhh, wuhh? Nobody is that fucking stupid, are they?
Inhofe ends by announcing that it was discovered just a few weeks ago that the warming is caused by the sun. No shit, he said that. This guy is the chairman (until January) of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and he only just learned that the sun is the source of the earth's warmth. Fire HOT. I thought even plants knew that. It's not the source of the heat that is the problem, moron. It's the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere preventing that heat from radiating back into space. Fuck me running! When Congress is in session, the average IQ for Washington D.C. must drop 20 points.

All the wonks in Washington are anxiously awaiting a report from the Iraq Study Group headed up by James Baker. He's a former Secretary of State under the elder, smarter George Bush. There have been lots of rumors floating around about what that report will say. One of the most plausible ideas that I have heard involves getting Iraq's most influential neighbors actively involved in the security situation. I say it's a plausible idea, but I don't think it's very likely to happen. That would mean sitting down with Iran and Syria and asking them for help. Diplomacy was never dubya's strong suit to begin with(he prefers to bluster and bully), so I can't see him trying it now, especially with a couple of countries that in his simplistic world view are just plain bad.
I was over at Talking Points Memo and they've got a post up about a couple of other options for US policy going forward in Iraq. They are calling them "the tilt" and "the last big push." The tilt involves our moving from our current impartial referee position between the Shias and Sunnis to a position of actively supporting the majority Shia population. It is thought that this might be the quickest route to some semblance of peace. I guess the idea here is that the killing will stop when the Shia run out of Sunnis to kill. The problem I see here is that it would really piss off the surrounding Sunni countries, which would give a serious boost to al Qaida recruiting and create a possibility for destabilizing the entire region. Can you say $4.00 per gallon?
The last big push scenario is what I'm predicting dubya will pursue. It entails our actually increasing the number of troops we have in the region in one last big attempt to achieve victory militarily. I think he really believes that if we just kill enough of them, they will start to like us, and peace and democracy will break out. Our preznit just can't grasp the fact that the moment we went into Iraq, we became the problem, and the only solution is to get out. Hopefully in an orderly way, leaving some kind of regional international force(for which we provide the funding) to put what we broke back together. He doesn't get it and he never will. He wants to be able to say he won and any recommendations from the Iraq Study Group that don't allow for that will be rejected. Sigh.

All my life I have imagined being a writer, but I just never could make it happen. Over the years, I have filled several notebooks with unfinished bits and pieces of what would surely have been great masterpieces had I not lost interest and moved on to something else after the initial burst of creative energy wore off. I never could settle into the laborious part of writing, the work of editing and re-writing and just plain finishing the story. An old literature teacher of mine frequently told me that a writer writes, every day. It was not so much an observation as a polite way of calling me lazy.
I started this blog mostly as a way to force myself to sit down and write something on a more frequent basis. This format allows me to spend a relatively small amount of time on a post and still have the satisfaction of actually completing it. It's still work, but I'm settling into it a little and enjoying it a lot. I especially enjoy the anonymity of it. I just write it and fling it out onto the intertoobz like a booger and see if it sticks to anything. It's really the first time I have made my efforts available for others to read. As I am writing it, I can imagine my audience to be as large as the entire web or as small as a single person.
I have, however, noticed that blogging seriously cuts into the available time for my first love, reading. Books have always been a huge part of my life, and are probably the reason I wanted to write myself. They are certainly the reason I am my own worst critic. I've read so much great stuff that when I go back and re-read some of my unfinished work, it seems like such total rubbish that I end up just throwing it away.
And now I've found an article in the December issue of Discover magazine listing the 25 all-time greatest books about science. I've only read 3 and a partial of them. That's completely unacceptable for a science geek like myself. It's going to be to be a long winter. My wife has already taken notice of the amount of time I've been spending down here in the bunker.

In a document that was passed at the annual Fall meeting of Roman Catholic Bishops, the Archbishop of St. Louis inserted language addressing the issue of Catholic politicians who support abortion rights and receive Holy Communion. This is a direct attempt to influence the laws and politics of this country by placing pressure on Catholic legislators. How can the Catholic church get away with something this blatant and remain a tax-exempt organization? This is the kind of stuff that really pisses me off. The separation of church and state is the basis for their tax-exempt status, yet they (and various other invisible cloud-daddy worshipping groups) routinely try to erode it or go around it or simply ignore it with no consequences whatsoever. I want to see the IRS going around the country making assessments to all those palatial Catholic churches. I bet if that happened, the guys with the big pointy hats would back right the fuck off our politicians. Self-preservation is the real defining principle behind any mythology.
In other, better news, the US Marine Reserve's Toys for Tots charity turned down the offer of 4,000 free talking Jesus dolls from the company that made them.

Toys are donated to kids based on financial need and "we don't know anything about their background, their religious affiliations," said Bill Grein, vice president of Marine Toys for Tots Foundation, in Quantico, Virginia.
As a government entity, Marines "don't profess one religion over another," Grein said Tuesday. "We can't take a chance on sending a talking Jesus doll to a Jewish family or a Muslim family."

Now that's more like it. A government entity is refusing to let an evangelical company use them as a proxy to shove their beliefs down the throats of the needy. That's some righteous rational thinking right there. Here's the quote of the day for me:

Grein questioned whether children would welcome a gift designed for religious instruction.
"Kids want a gift for the holiday season that is fun," he said.

Hee-hee. That's good stuff. My guess is they won't take no for an answer, though. They'll probably do something spiteful like file a massive lawsuit that will bankrupt the charity.

I've loaded the software. I've poked and prodded and clicked around on it a little. I've watched 3 tutorials and I still feel like I don't know jack shit, but I'm going to top off the fuel and light this baby off. Stand back, 'cause if it blows up there'll be pieces of blog and my fragile psyche all over the place. First I'm just going to try uploading this entry. If that works I'll try bringing the archives over.

Update: Success! It looks like we are up and running. I even got the old stuff over here. I'm so proud of myself. It's a whole new world now.

Housekeeping: The archives are grouped by week in the sidebar on the right. The text of all the old stuff will be in a slightly different color. There will be more thingies to click upon as soon as I learn a little more about the new software. So far I am digging it. My offer still stands to publish any original item of yours you would like to see on the intertoobz. Send it to me via the Contact Me link at the bottom of the page.

I’m getting ready to change the site again. The software I’ve been using for this blog came already installed on my Mac when I bought it, and it seems to work well, but it has one problem that I can’t get past. Every time I write a new entry and publish it to the website, it insists on publishing the entire site rather than just the changes/additions I have made. As a result, it’s taking longer and longer to upload every time. So I finally coughed up $39.95 for some software with a little more capability. I think it’s going to be adequate for what I’m doing here (basically compositional masturbation) and also give me the ability to do more stuff with photos, music and video if I want. The really good software was $400, but I couldn’t justify it to the finance minister. She’s really stingy lately with a certain superstition-based gift-giving holiday approaching.
Anyway, I’m currently figuring out how to use the new stuff, so the Mark 1 Mod 3 version of Abandon Mythology will be coming on line here in the next few days. Hopefully I won’t fuck up the transition and lose everything like I did last time. Whenever it happens, I would appreciate hearing any opinions on the new look.

In 1886 the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights under the Constitution as people, in effect granting them citizenship.
In 1975 the Supreme Court ruled that money is equivalent to speech in election campaigns and therefore the amount candidates can spend is unlimited.
These two decisions have combined to steal democracy away from the average citizen. Ideally, in a democracy, your vote is your voice, but that ideal is based on the presumption of a fully informed voter. The average American voter today is woefully uninformed because, let’s face it, if it’s not on the tee-vee then most Americans have never heard of it. But commercials cost money. Lots and lots of it. So we end up locked into a two-party system of government not because there are only two parties, but because there are only two parties with with scads of cash. Corporate cash.
The messages of the numerous other political parties out there aren’t getting out. Some of these parties have some good ideas (of course some are batshit crazy), but they can’t afford to share those ideas with the masses because they can’t get on the corporate teat.
Simply put, if your money equals your speech then your wallet is your voice and whoever has the largest wallet has the loudest voice. Joe Sixpack can still donate to the candidate or organization of his choice, but since his wallet is so small, his voice is largely unheard. Since these corporate citizens have by far the largest wallets, they own the election process (and of course the re-election process). This gives them a great deal of power in our legislative process, and they have used that power to completely alter the way our government collects it’s revenue.
In the 1950s corporate taxes accounted for 28% of federal revenue. Today that figure is down to 7% and there are literally thousands of lobbyists in Washington working to make that number go even lower. That shift in revenue has fallen onto the backs of wage-earners. Our government is giving tax breaks to the oil industry even as they post record profits. It seems that every time a politician opens his mouth any more he talks about giving still more tax subsidies to American corporations to “stimulate the economy.”
Any government needs a solid revenue stream in order to carry out it’s functions. Everything from road maintenance to military readiness to public education has a dollar figure attached to it. It costs money to run a country and that means taxation. To a good corporate citizen, it should just be part of the cost of doing business in a country that provides a solid infrastructure to support that business. If a corporation is going to be a citizen, then there need to be laws written specifically to ensure that they are responsible citizens. The problem is that the people who would presumably write such laws are the same people addicted to that corporate cash.
I don’t know how to fix the problem. I’m just here to bitch about it. I do know that Mussolini said Fascism could more accurately be called “corporate governance” and that scares the shit out of me.

If Smirk and Snarl’s excellent adventures in Iraq have proven anything at all, it is that a country without a strong, capable central government will descend into chaos. Our troops are dealing with that chaos right now and there currently appears to be no end in sight. Dubya says we’ll stand down when they stand up, but what exactly does that mean? What does a government need in order order for that government to control the country and actually govern?
The first requirement, I think, is the support of the people being governed. If not active support, at least passive. By that I mean the populace must not be actively engaging in activities counter-productive to the government’s goals. The so-called winning of the hearts and minds. So far we are failing miserably on this one. The Iraqis are killing each other by the hundreds and blowing shit up on a daily basis. I heard an Iraqi official on the radio say that the biggest problem with the sewer system in Baghdad is that it’s always clogged with dead bodies. Think about that for a moment. The largest city in Iraq can’t keep their shitters flowing properly because of dead citizens in the pipes. And just the other day dubya was saying he was pleased with our progress in Iraq. It just blows my mind to think that our preznit is so completely out of touch with reality that he thinks we’re making progress.
I believe another requirement for a sound government is a certain degree of altruism and honesty in the leaders of that government, particularly in it’s executive branch. When trying to secure peace, a corrupt police force is worse than none at all. A large part of the killings, especially of Sunnis, are being carried out by the (mostly Shia) police themselves. Entire neighborhoods are being ethnically cleansed through a campaign of murder and forced evacuation. The country is being divided along religious lines and our government appears to have decided to let that happen. The really odd thing is we seem to be backing the Shias, who are closely aligned with Iran. Remember Iran? Axis of evil? Next on the list to invade? What the hell is going on here? Dubya keeps saying that the only way we lose is if we leave before the job is done, but we appear to be going backward here. I really believe that the Bush administration has decided to just coast for the next two years and dump this problem on the next president. Then they can sit back and accuse the next administration of cutting and running etc. It’s either that or dubya has some kind of double-super-secret genius plan that can’t yet be shared with the Amurkin people, but it’s going to create peace in the Middle East any minute now if lefties like me would just stop emboldening the terrorists by badmouthing our government. Yeah, that’s probably it.

My dream is that the Democrats take their newly-recaptured congressional majority and do something with it. First things first, they have to force preznit dumber-than-dirt to start moving our troops out of harm’s way and ultimately bring them home. Then they can go to work on reducing the deficit, shoring up social security, limiting executive power, restoring the constitution and repairing our international reputation.
As much as I hate to say it, tax increases are a must. Over the past 6 years, dubya and his backers have deliberately inflicted tremendous damage on our federal government and it’s ability to provide essential programs and services to the American people. They basically gave away the largest revenue surplus in history and the only way I can see to begin repairing the government is to recoup some of that revenue.
But the real dream, my own personal wet dream, is to see some investigations into, and punitive action against, the neo-con assholes at PNAC who got us into Iraq in the first place. I want to see newly-minted Speaker of the House Pelosi marching down Pennsylvania Avenue with a fistful of subpoenas. I want to see some people go to jail for lying us into a war of choice for no real reason other than securing corporate economic gain. I want every lie from every right-wing ideologue exposed for the ignorant, selfish arrogance that it is. I want a very public airing of everything that led up to the invasion so the American public can see it and own it and learn from it and hopefully make sure it never happens again.
Oh, and the guy who said “Every now and then the US needs to take some shitty little country and throw it up against the wall just to show we mean business.” I want to kick that guy in the nuts so bad....

Are all the worst gay-bashers secretly gay themselves? It sure seems that way to me. The latest hypocrite to come crashing to earth is the right reverend Ted Haggard.


The president of the National Association of Evangelicals resigned Thursday after denying an accusation by a male prostitute that the pastor paid him for sex over three years.
The Rev. Ted Haggard said he is also temporarily stepping aside from the pulpit of his church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, pending an internal investigation by the church.

He denies the accusations, says he’s faithful to his wife etc... and then quits both his jobs and goes into seclusion. Not the actions I would expect from an innocent man. He’ll probably be checking into the same rehab facility as Mark Foley soon. Well at least James Dobson is still behind him.

Amid the furor over the allegations, Haggard received support from another prominent religious conservative leader, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. It also is based in Colorado Springs.
"It is unconscionable that the legitimate news media would report a rumor like this based on nothing but one man's accusation," Dobson said in a written statement issued before Haggard's leave was announced.
"Ted Haggard is a friend of mine, and it appears someone is trying to damage his reputation as a way of influencing the outcome of Tuesday's election -- especially the vote on Colorado's marriage-protection amendment, which Ted strongly supports," Dobson said.

Yep, James Dobson is standing firmly behind him. hee hee

Okay, not really, but the ice is melting. Sure, it’s happening very, very slowly, but the rate of melt is steadily increasing. Those of us alive today won’t see the end results, but it doesn’t take much imagination to understand that it won’t be pretty. I’ve got a good-sized map of the world on the wall above my duty station here in the bunker and as I look at all the island nations and the thousands of coastal cities, I wonder where all the inhabitants of those places will go over the next century or two. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet alone is expected to raise sea levels by 20 feet.
The government of Great Britain (island nation) has issued a report detailing the expected economic devastation of global warming. Many other nations are making efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but as long as the US refuses to get on board, these efforts are fruitless.
The reason dubya and presidents before him have kept their heads firmly planted in the sand on this one is there’s no glory to be had from doing anything about it. To really pull this off and (literally) save the world as we know it will require drastic cuts in the amount of fossil fuels we burn. The sheer wastefulness that is the American way of life will have to cease. Everything from the way we travel and move goods around the country to the way we build our homes and communities will have to be re-thought. It will be a belt-tightening like never before and the public won’t enter into it willingly.
Corporate America will fight it every step of the way. To them, any problem that doesn’t immediately impact profits is not a problem. In fact, they see opportunity here. With the Arctic ice sheet going fast, the shipping industry is already preparing to use the fabled Northwest Passage to get from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean by going around North America to the north. Some ships are already sailing the Arctic ocean in the summer. And now the oil industry is making plans to build offshore oil platforms further north than ever before.
Dubya’s stated reason for pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol was to protect our economic interests. Once again greed trumps rationality. Sooner or later, our government’s decisions have to stop being based on short-term financial outlook and start being about the long-term health of the people. Isn’t that really what government is for?