Two for two

Afghanistan is being run just like Iraq*:

The most senior British military commander in Afghanistan today described the situation in the country as "close to anarchy" with feuding foreign agencies and unethical private security companies compounding problems caused by local corruption.

The stark warning came from Lieutenant General David Richards, head of Nato's international security force in Afghanistan, who warned that western forces there were short of equipment and were "running out of time" if they were going to meet the expectations of the Afghan people. [my em]

...

And don't forget the opium farmers are harvesting a bumper crop as we speak. I'm waiting for the Chimp to start blaming the troops for this. Couldn't be the leadership, could it?

Update:

Let's make it three for three. Wolcott** on the price we'll have to pay for Lebanon. This one has must-read status.

*Link via BuzzFlash.
**Link via Watertiger.

Pay attention, Lugnut ...

This is the beginning of the end ...

Quote of the Day

From commenter Susan on this post at Kevin Drum's:

Shorter Dershowitz:
for all rules, Israel is always the exception.
for most of the others, America can claim exception too - as long as it conforms to what Israel wants.

for all the rest of those brown people out there.....not so much.

Partitioning

I advanced the suggestion over a year and a half ago (here and here). Today, Michael Stickings says they're actually considering it.

...

The partition of post-Saddam Iraq may be inevitable, just as the partition of post-Tito Yugoslavia was, but what we're talking about here is the partition of a single city (and the country's most important city), a city "close to anarchy". It might seem as if partition could reduce the sectarian violence, given the recent "dramatic rise in the number of killings and lawlessness" -- what other viable options are there? -- but look how partition worked out for Northern Ireland, Cyprus, India/Pakistan, etc.

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Warning:This post contains video which is not suitable for children or sane people.You have been warned.

Before I give you a painful illustration link,I'd like to address something.I am no scholar,and heaven knows that there's half a trillion books I've never read,papers I've never written or colleges I didn't attend.But what is the DEAL with people who dig Ayn Rand?

Every person I've met who embraces a Randian view of the world is either completely insane,or has suffered some sort of traumatic event fairly early on in life that has made them angry, just plain cold,cruel and not just a little vicious.And then there are the spectacular creatures who are little of both.

Enter The Pammy. (don't worry,it's not a direct link to her,I wouldn't give her the blog hits.And besides Fixer would take away my Brain keys and chase me outta here.And rightfully so. See also this link from TBogg.Put down the beverages and food and get sharp objects out of your reach before clicking over.Wolcott's even taken Pam on a few times,it's rather like watching a bad accident for James I think.He doesn't wanna pay attention,but he just-can't-not-do-it sometimes,poor guy)

If you don't know Pam,she's the poor man's Michelle Malkin/Ann Coulter hybrid She-Beast on the internets. The Little Green Fascists love her,which pretty much speaks for itself.The company you keep and that sort of thing.Just to give you an idea if you aren't familiar.

Aside from the thought that Pammy and Carmella Soprano might share an interior decorator(yes,I notice stuff like that because if I had a"real"job outside motherhood,I'd be an interior designer,it's my niche), what in the hell does this woman have to be so violently snottily angry about?Something went terribly,horribly wrong somewhere.To be that high maintainence takes some dough,which means she's not living a deprived life,far as I can tell.She's also got kids,so surely there's some love and joy in that,right? She seems to have many male wingnutty admirers,so it can't be a lack there(assuming there's no current Mr.Pammy,I never hear mention of one).Her blog gets linkage from the bigger right wing players,so she's got her audience,so what gives? It also appears she doesn't have an actual outside the home job,so I assume she's fairly well off,financially.So there's not really a job stress thing happening here to blame it on. So again,what the hell is her problem? The answer has to be a personal life that's shredded,I can't think of anything else.

I think what we're seeing is a nervous breakdown in progress documented via webcam. Healthy,happy,normal,well adjusted people aren't this nasty.

But here's the thing that wierds me out...She's got an audience of people who agree with her. And dare I say,some of them actually find her attractive.

Suck my ass

Now that things have completely gone to shit for the Repubs, they're beginning to embrace reality. The so-called moderates are starting to see the more radical wingnuts turning on them. Don't come looking to me for absolution now that you get it.

...

It's very hard, after more than three years of anticipating, dreading and now watching the catastrophe blossoming in Iraq, to tolerate the pathetic whimpering of former hawks who've finally managed to drag themselves into the searing light of reality -- and feel ill used because they must suffer the slings and arrows of the deluded goons who still refuse to leave the cave of winds. Welcome to the camp, guys. Ivan over there will show you around.

Back in days of the real gulags, the Stalinists used to talk about "useful idiots" -- well-meaning but hopelessly naive Western politicans and intellectuals (i.e. parlor pinks) who could be used to advance the proletarian cause, even though their reward in the event of an actual revolution would have been a one-way ticket to Siberia. For the comrades of the modern authoritarian right, guys like Sullivan and Djerejian served a very similar purpose. But now they're not so useful any more, in fact they've been revealed as deviationists -- which means they must be struggled against, lest they infect the party cadres with their counterrevolutionary poison.

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An excellent piece by Billmon.

Tip o' the Brain to Atrios.

The right stuff ...

If you want to get out of a war zone you need money and status. From our pal Scout Prime:

...

Among those enrolled in the summer Arabic program at the American University of Beirut, students told ABC News, those from Harvard, Yale and Princeton were in the first group evacuated - by high-end private security firms. Students from other American schools were left behind, waiting it out for days while the U.S. embassy formulated its plan.

...

And if you're a Lebanese-American and speak accented English, you can bet your ass will be the last one on the chopper.

Blastocyst-Americans

I've been meaning to write about the Chimp's stem cell bill veto and his exploitation of the 'snowflake babies' (Why does the movie The Stepford Wives [the 1975 Katharine Ross version] begin playing in my head when I see that?) but 42 said it better than I could in the appropriately snarky manner. Stolen completely:

I can't find a pic right this second, but Preznit's post-veto photo-op yesterday with a pile of gurgling white babies (I'm pretty sure they were all white) conceived in vitro was about the most idiotic thing we've yet to see from this know-nothing celebrant of ignorance. Maybe someone forgot to tell him that for every one of those pwecious widdle white wug-wats a bunch of embryos were grown, harvested, then discarded after one of them won the Womb Prize.

Embryos that are destroyed to produce gurgling white drool monsters for infertile assholes who refuse to adopt is celebrating life. Taking those otherwise-discarded embryos and using them to research treatments for our most dreaded diseases and injuries is a culture of death.

Someone please help me distinguish between the two, because I sure as shit can't on my own as I am not very smart, but I can lift heavy things.

Oh hey, here's a pic. Yeah, they're all white.

Update:

This is the topic of most of the Saturday Cartoons today.

Update:

Eleanor Clift* quoting Arlen Sphincter**:

...

There are 400,000 embryos languishing in storage tanks at fertility clinics; only a very small number are candidates for adoption. "Even with federal funding available to encourage adoption, the number [of pregnancies from these embryos] is 128, which makes it conclusive that these 400,000 embryos will either be used for scientific research or thrown away,"

...

Yup, they're really kicking the doors in to get them zygotes.

*Link via memeorandum.
**Thanks to Lambert.

The Ballad of Dumb George

By William Rivers Pitt

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid.

- "The Ultimate Flame," author unknown

George W. Bush is a good man, word has it. He's plain-spoken, they say. A regular fella. A good guy to have a beer with, except he supposedly doesn't drink anymore.

I wish, more than anything, that he were drinking. I wish he were drinking all the time. I wish, oh how I wish, that he were stand-up-fall-down-ralphing-down-his-shirt loaded every minute of every day. It would be a comfort, simply because it would explain a great many things. Having a drunk for a president is, after all, a fixable situation. Put him to bed at Camp David for a few weeks and surround him with Secret Service agents. Let his body clean itself out. Problem solved, and really, would anyone actually notice his absence?

I don't believe Bush has gotten off the sauce, if truth be told. I know more than a few boozers who, like George, periodically show up with odd wounds on their faces they got from falling over or running into walls. The injuries that appear on George's mien from time to time can perhaps be explained away - maybe Dick Cheney is stalking the halls with a shotgun loaded with rock salt and blasting anyone, even the boss, who gets in his way - but if "George still drinks" were up on the big board at the MGM Grand sports book, I'd take the bet no matter what the oddsmakers had to say.

Having a drunk for a president is manageable. Having a stone bozo for a president, on the other hand, is a calamity of global proportions.

Then, Mr. Pitt starts in on his boorish, obnoxious behavior over the last few days. Fun stuff.

What's next? Will George go to the United Nations, sit on Kofi Annan's head, and fart like some bratty brother tormenting a sibling? Will the cameras catch him playing penny hockey during Middle East peace negotiations? You can't say it'll never happen. It reminds me of the scene from "Caddyshack" where the golfers are hiding in the bushes and betting on whether the Smails kid picks his nose. It is not too farfetched a concept to believe that the other G-8 leaders were doing something very similar while watching Bush.

There were, by my count, no less than twenty different moments in the last few days where George brought shame and disgrace upon this country. He did not do this by being too tough, or too soft, or too strident. He did this simply by being himself. His head is an echo chamber where very stupid bats roost. He has the intellect of a bag of rocks. Maybe it's impolite to say this, but it has to be said.

And yeah, Mr. Uygur, it is really, really scary. I wish the man were a drunk. I'd sleep better, and so would the world.

True, as long as the Secret Service keeps him from pushing any red buttons.

Quote of the Day*

Watertiger:

... You know, what the world needs now is not love, sweet love, but a motherfucking tribunal removing this goddamned sociopathic, End Times-lovin', cracker nutjob from the allegedly most powerful public office in the world ...

*More regular than not lately.

Here we go...with Bush's head in the sand

Cursor

[Although U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell warns that insurgents are streaming in for "an all-out assault against the Baghdad area," Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte is reportedly blocking an update of the National Intelligence Estimate that would describe the situation in Iraq as "civil war."]

God help our troops and Iraqi civilians. This is gonna get ugly - and all because Bush doesn't want to know about it.

Stem cell research gets $150mil in CA. Fuck Bush.

LATimes

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday ordered a loan of up to $150 million to the state's voter-approved stem cell research institute, catapulting California into the lead as the nation's top public funder of the divisive research.

The governor's action, a day after President Bush vetoed expanded federal support for embryonic stem cell science, is expected to kick-start the state's long-delayed program to pay for cutting-edge research projects.

Of course, this is for the good of mankind. Did I mention that this is a gubernatorial election year?

The Republican governor's move could also help him win over moderate voters by drawing a sharp distinction with the president, who is unpopular in California. The action drew derision from the governor's opponent in the November election, Democrat Phil Angelides, who called it a "smokescreen to cloud the memory of California voters that it was Arnold Schwarzenegger who campaigned for President Bush in Ohio and helped put him back into office.

"For the past year, while I was fighting for immediate funding for the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the governor failed to lift a finger to stand up to the anti-research activists," Angelides said in a statement.

Ironically, Hall noted, Bush's first-ever veto - based on his opposition to the destruction of embryos in some forms of embryonic stem cell research - served California well. "I think with one stroke, the president energized [the institute's] program," he said.

Connecticut, Maryland, Illinois and New Jersey have approved some state funding for the work. And on Thursday, the governor of Illinois announced that he was diverting $5 million from the state budget for stem cell research - also in response to the Bush veto.

Schwarzenegger's $150 million loan dwarfs those efforts.

It is also about quadruple the budget for embryonic stem cell research at the federal government's National Institutes of Health, which is strictly limited by the Bush administration to select stem cell lines created before 2001.

Another watchdog group that has worked to ensure that the institute is accountable to taxpayers cautiously applauded the loan.

It's "better than going hat-in-hand to fat cats with a potential vested interest in the outcome, begging for money," said John Simpson of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, who criticized a recent private gala held by the institute to raise funds to keep it afloat.

Among stem cell scientists Thursday, the mood was good.

All Bush did with his veto was show conclusively that his moral compass spun its needle off long ago, if he ever had one to begin with, which I doubt. His previous limitation on funding to only use old stem cell lines is somewhat akin to limiting research on gas mileage to carbureted pushrod engines: irrelevant to reality and a hindrance to scientific progress, not to mention blatant pandering to a few christowhackos. Big surprise, huh?

It also shows that he's lost control over Congress. This is good. They won't automatically do what he wants them to do anymore, so he has to veto them to stifle the will of the majority. Look for more of this as he gets weaker.

To sum up Bush's attitude, I shamelessly paraphrase Robert Goodloe Harper: "Millions for armaments and pork, not a penny to help sick people!"

Kudos to the states who are funding stem cell research. By the way, there is plenty of government funding for this work. In China and India.

At the moment, I personally have no need for the benefits of said research, unless they come up with a cure for CRS*. Time will tell. Or maybe it already has...

*Can't Remember Shit

"...a genuine threat to the foundations of the system."

David Sirota on the possible democratic implications of the Lamont/Lieberman race.

That's what's really got the pundits, the political operatives and the insiders frightened: the simple fact that ordinary citizens have the nerve to challenge a Senator who purports to represent the "center" but is way, way out of touch with mainstream America. Put another way, the Establishment is in a rage that voters have the gall to demand a seat at the political table. This is a political table the Establishment has gotten used to seeing as its own exclusive property, and goddammit, they are pissed that regular Americans would dare to raise their voices and say enough is enough.

Please go read the rest. You'll like it.

Honk! Gotcha!

Will Durst comments on the Chimp's embarrassing performance at the G-8:

Bush, as bored with the whole concept of diplomacy as a five year old stuck in the quantum physics section of a Jamaican library, and obviously distressed at not finding Premier Putin to gaze soul searchingly into the eyes of, wandered around the big conference table finally lighting upon German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Distractedly, he began to give her a backrub prompting a typical Tuetonic reaction, in which Ms. Merkel tensed up tighter than a retaining wire on the mast of a sailing ship in a force five gale. She hunched her shoulders, grimaced, and threw up her hands in an apparent plea for the World Court to augment Bush's future war crimes trial with a sexual harassment charge.

What did he expect? For her to turn around and whisper seductively, "I'll give you a week to cut that out?" She's German, for crum's sake. East German. Everyone knows the East Germans are as cuddly as a stainless steel teddy bear. I imagine we should consider ourselves lucky he didn't grab her butt and make "honk-honk" noises. Or pulled a "gotcha" where he pokes her in the chest and then tweaks her nose after she looks down. And you know the cupped hand under the armpit thing is definitely in his arsenal.

Can you imagine Roosevelt giving the Reichs Fuhrer a back rub? Well, actually, I guess Neville Chamberlain kind of did, but that's not the point. Instead of grandstanding for its election year base, it is incumbent upon Congress to save our nation further embarrassments by passing a law immediately prohibiting all of the members of the Bush family from any televised meeting with a foreign leader where food is being served. And mittens. They should be required to wear mittens.

I got nuthin' to add to that!

Crickets ...

I didn't hear this on the news. I wonder why?

Jul 20, 2006 - SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A federal judge declined motions on Thursday to dismiss a lawsuit against AT&T alleging the firm illegally allowed the U.S. government to monitor phone conversations and e-mail communications.

AT&T asked the court in late April to dismiss the case, and two weeks later the U.S. government also asked the federal judge to dismiss it because of the secrecy of the issue.

...

I wonder what we'll learn from discovery in this trial. I wouldn't be surprised if the eavesdropping is more widespread and more detailed than we ever imagined.

Link via a dispatch from The Palace.

How come?

How come the Voting Rights Act isn't a permanent law of the land? Why must the Congress re-ratify it every so often? Shouldn't it just be understood, in this great nation (supposedly), that everyone has free and unfettered access to the polls? Will there be a time in the future where we might consider repealing these rights for a portion of our population? WTF?

And to the NAACP: Why the fuck, after all this time, did you even let the Chimp address the organization? Does it mean that much to you? And if it does, after the disrespect he's shown to you since he's been in office, what does that say about your leadership? It seems, to me anyway, that your priorities are a bit misguided.

Quote of the Day*

*With preamble, by Froggy:

...

So another opportunity came and went and the worst president in the history of the United States continues to pour bag after bag of cement on his legacy, hardening it into a record by which failures in the future will be judged. Ten, twenty, one hundred, maybe two hundred years from now, if our nation is fortunate enough to survive that long, presidents will be comforting themselves with this thought, "Well, I may be a complete screw-up, but at least I'm not George Bush." [my em]

I call bullshit

It's just not enough for the citizens of Rightwingnuttia that they have pretty cushy lives,oh no. I don't know what it is about these folks,but I am sick to death of them being in charge of some pretty crucial stuff when they have no clue at all about themselves,let alone anyone else.

I don't know when it happened,and I doubt it is only one thing that made it happen,but somewhere along the line,we pretty much seem to have lost a collective national understanding about Cause and Effect,AND that there are consequences to actions,both long and short term.

The little kids of today are going to grow up to be complete idiots,Generation Loser,if someone doesn't intervene and make it stop.

Look,I know history has an element of spin to it,that's why there are SO many books on the subject.Everyone has their own perspective,historians sometimes do bring their biases and the like with them.They're human.As it is, schools make history boring on purpose and barely focuses on any one event and rarely relates things to the present day to make it relevant.Kids learn names and dates and places and a couple of sentences to describe them,and it's on to the next thing.

So I have to ask why the law? What the hell is Jeb up to?

Good-Fucking-God

Why the Katrina-like response to rescuing our people from Lebanon? Blah3 via Maru:

A reliable source tells me that the reason the United States has been so slow in evacuating its citizens from Lebanon is that the public diplomacy (i.e., P.R.) issues raised by evacuating under Israeli assault are so complicated. Individuals within the State Department, I am told, have been reluctant to create an impression that the Israeli assault on Lebanon is as bad as it is or that civilian U.S. citizens are being threatened by U.S. ally Israel. If a conflict this severe had broken out in, say, Indonesia, the American embassy would have been shut down the next day and its personnel and families rapidly brought to safety. That's how things normally work. In this case, however, the diplomatic message sent by shutting down the U.S. embassy in the face of Israeli bombing would have contradicted the U.S. government message of support for the Israeli mission against Hezbollah terrorists, which, when added to the general concern within lower-level diplomatic circles about ever creating a Fall of Saigon-style visual for the news media, have led the Americans to be slower than they could have been about getting U.S. citizens out of harm's way. [my ems]

I'm hardly ever speechless.

Type or I'll shoot...

Sort of in the same vein as my previous post, but from an unexpected source. I am now pointing a revolver at my finger to get it to link to an article in the The American Conservative about how the hardly-ever-right wing is reacting to the Noo Yawk Times disclosure of warrantless spying.

But the notion that the program was "carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties" was a leap of faith - and conservatives used to assume the opposite: that liberty needed to be guarded against government. There was no judicial approval of these searches and no congressional oversight of the program, but the side of the aisle once distrustful of federal schemes nodded blind assent.

Was it so long ago that prominent conservatives vigorously opposed Bill Clinton's power grabs and his trampling of due process? Or was there a hidden asterisk noting that government power should only be limited when Democrats occupy the White House? Now security trumps - or, in reality, political promises of security. Or perhaps, like the prior proclamations of fidelity to limited government, the fixation on safety is simply another ruse to smear liberals and spur donations.

The Bush administration simplified the issue: freedom of the press kills. Snow warned that "the New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether the public's right to know, in some cases, might overwrite somebody's right to live." Treasury Secretary John Snow, in a letter to Bill Keller, denounced the Times article as "irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide." "Freedom-loving people" thus becomes a trump card against the First Amendment. And "freedom of the press" threatens to become the single biggest obstacle to the U.S. government forcibly imposing freedom on the rest of the world.

Survival of the Republican congressional majority may hinge on suppressing criticism of administration policies, and this storm of media-bashing may be crafted to keep the lid on news about other government surveillance systems. Over a period of barely six months, leaks resulted in Americans learning that the feds were conducting thousands of warrantless phone taps in the U.S., that they had arm-twisted telephone companies to turn over the calling records of tens of millions of Americans, and that our government has been sifting through international banking records to its heart's content. National Journal recently revealed that the Bush administration is continuing to pursue Total Information Awareness, even though Congress compelled the formal abandonment of that program in 2003. The endless threats of treason prosecutions against whistleblowers, reporters, and editors may be a last ditch attempt to prevent Americans from learning about secret presidential orders that would make the NSA wiretapping look like kids' stuff (my em).

Just because much of the media is biased does not mean that the Bush administration is trustworthy. Perhaps it is naive to expect commentators to be more honest than politicians. But the "treason" stampede among right-wing talking heads indicates just how much conservatism has changed. And the Right's knee-jerk defense of every Bush power grab has so decimated their credibility that prominent conservatives will have as much standing to gripe about Leviathan during a reign of someone like Hillary Clinton as her husband has to complain that American culture no longer respects chastity.

I do agree with the author that the media is biased, insofar as it hasn't let truth interfere too awfully much with its blowing Bush until very recently, but I don't think he meant it that way. Heh.

It seems as if the real Conservatives, with whom I mostly disagree except on Big Government and some of their fiscal policy, are finally noticing that their party has been highjacked by neocons, wingnuts, and christo- as well as regular old fascists. And leave us not forget plain ol' morons. Reveille, motherfuckers!

Granted, the author seems to be against said coup mostly from the standpoint that the Repubs may lose their majority because of it, but he says it like it's a bad thing. The congresscritters are more concerned with the security of their seats than with national security. Then there's that jail thing...

I hate it when I have to agree with a Republican, but, hey, he's right about a lot of stuff here, even if he's right for the wrong reasons.