Rethug 'leadership'

So first it was scallions (green onions). Then it was the white onions. Now it's the lettuce.

WASHINGTON - Lettuce was the most likely source of an outbreak of E. coli linked to Taco Bell, federal health officials said Wednesday.

Taco Bell had said contaminated green onions were responsible for the cases of food poisoning - 71 confirmed cases of E. coli in five states, primarily New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, as of Wednesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

...

For the people who are supposedly 'keepin' us safer', how is it we can't secure our food supply, let alone figure out exactly how people are being poisioned? Does any government agency do a compentent job anymore? This is what happens when you reward brown-nosing ideologues instead of competent administrators and managers.

I tell ya ...

If I made a video game where you can gun down proseletyzing Jesus freaks when they block your way on the sidewalk or follow you down the street trying to hand you pamphlets, there'd be more screaming and yelling and protesting than you've ever seen.

Personally, I don't like when somebody designates me a target, and they do because the Devil will be wearing an overcoat before I 'come to Jesus'. If you want your ass 'Left Behind' I can arrange that as well. Many years ago, my dad nearly sent two Jehovah's Witnesses forth with his riding lawnmower (funny as hell to watch as he chased them around the yard). I believe in upholding family traditions.

I'm tired of people being able to say and do whatever they want because they're doing it in 'Jesus' name'. Fuck you all and keep your mystical bullshit away from me. And just a note to Wal-Mart, who's hawking this drivel. You refuse stock my books because of the sex scenes, yet you actively promote this bullshit? Even if you suddenly decided to stock 10 copies of each of my books, I'd tell you to go fuck yourselves at this point. After this, I wouldn't want to be associated with you in any way.

Couldn'ta done this ...

Before the election?

Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) has apparently suffered a mild stroke, according to various news sources.

Political Wire's "Insider" blog reports that Johnson "is speaking and is expected to be fine," with more news upcoming.[..] (T)he office did issue the following statement to the press:

...

Listen to me. I might sound cold and shit, but this is far more important than one man. I don't care if they have to shove a pole up his ass and have strings making his lips move, his ass better be on the Senate Floor come Jan 4. Even if he drops dead tomorrow, they'd better pull a Weekend at Bernie's come January. Times are too critical to give the Rethugs an inch and as long as Cheney can cast the tiebraker, I want a majority, slim as it is. Hope he feels better but right now I'm concerned about our nation a little bit more.

Update:

And Wordsmith called me crass in comments? Heh ...

Berra v. Bush

Observations from this New Yorker stuck in traffic. One of the most beloved people in New York is Yankee great Yogi Berra. Yogi can say shit like:

And they give ya cash, which is almost as good as money.

But we know Yogi and deep down we know, Yogi gets it. And then we have our President:

You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you're gone.

And you realize that he doesn't. But then, Yogi never wanted to be President.

Update:

Holden's thinking along the same lines today too.

Lucky woman ...

What Mrs. F was doing while she was away on business.

Legacies ...

Lately, when the Chimp is asked what the debacle in Iraq will do to his legacy, he says that history will remember him well. Not so much:

WASHINGTON - History's view of George W. Bush will be harsh, Americans predict.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, a 54% majority says Bush will be judged as a below-average or poor president, more than double the negative rating given any of his five most recent predecessors.

...

And for the icing on the cake:

...

Rated most highly: Ronald Reagan, seen as outstanding or above average by 64%, below average or poor by 10%.

Bill Clinton ranks second; 45% say he will go down in history as an outstanding or above-average president. He is followed by Jimmy Carter, the elder Bush and Gerald Ford. [my ems]

...

As someone said the other day - sorry but I forget who - the descendants of James K. Polk are grateful to the Chimp. Their forebear is no longer the worst President in U.S. history.

Tip o' the Brain to Maru for the link.

Late ...

The Mrs. got in on a late flight last night and I overslept. Fortunately, we have a furry alarm clock who won't let it get too late before she wakes us. Thanks, Shayna.

Good reading at Digby's, who posits that McCain is praying the Chimp doesn't actually take his advice.

See yas lata ...

Damn right

Wolf Blitzer 2 minutes ago: Is America ready for an African-American or female President?

Me: Ready? We're begging for it. Fuck all these middle-aged white guys.

Bubble Boy

Jonathan Chait

Try to mend Iraq all you want; just don't tell Bush the war was a mistake.

There is a famous "Twilight Zone" episode about a little boy in a small town who has fantastical powers. Through the misuse of his powers, the little boy has ruined the lives of everybody in the town - for instance, teleporting them into a cornfield, or summoning a snowstorm that destroys their crops. Because anyone who thinks an unhappy thought will be banished, the adults around him can do nothing but cheerfully praise his decisions while they try to nudge him in a less destructive direction.

This episode kept popping into my head when I was reading about President Bush and the Baker-Hamilton commission. Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child.

Indeed, everybody seems to understand that if you want to help amend the disaster in Iraq, the No. 1 rule is that you can't acknowledge it's a disaster in Bush's presence. Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the court stenographer of the Bush administration, recently reported that this was a key factor in the hiring of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Now, I would bet every dollar I own that Gates thinks the war was a mistake. But you can't say that to Bush. "Before hiring him," Barnes wrote, "Bush had to make sure Gates didn't think America's intervention in Iraq was a mistake."

Yes, Mr. President, it's good that you turned Iraq into a Hobbesian inferno of Al Qaeda terrorists and Islamist death squads. It's really, really good!

Please let me treat him like a child for a few minutes. He wouldn't be able to do any more damage standing in the corner (or chained to a radiator) with a sore behind.

Alterations to my "lifestyle"....

Ok,I quit smoking. Last night. So,it's been about 10 hours since I had a cigarette.

I have "the patch",and I must say,it's not HELPING. So far this morning I've yelled at my son,threw a slipper at the cats and started crying because there was no hot water in the shower. And it's only 8:30 in the morning. This could get ugly.

I have to quit,I promised my son. And it's effecting my health. I've been smoking for most of the last 30 years. The only times I've quit was during my two pregnancies and a little while after the kids were born.(I know,why I started up after not smoking for at least a year,twice,is just plain stupid)

And just to make it interesting,I've given up coffee and soda too. Because having them triggers my urge to smoke. Coffee and cigs has been one of my food groups for so long I'm not sure what the hell I'm gonna find to replace them.(and please,no mind in the gutter suggestions,my husband has covered that territory already,thank you very much. I then threw my other slipper at him.) I suppose there's plenty of crap around here to do to keep me occupied,but it still sucks.

So,if you've quit smoking and never looked back,share something helpful. Please. I beg of you. Otherwise there could be film of me on CNN taking a chainsaw to my house or something.

Christian soldiers

I am so totally sick of this shit:

A military watchdog group is asking the Defense Department to investigate whether seven Army and Air Force officers violated regulations by appearing in uniform in a promotional video for an evangelical Christian organization.

...

"I found a wonderful opportunity as a director on the joint staff, as I meet the people that come into my directorate," Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack J. Catton Jr. says in the video. "And I tell them right up front who Jack Catton is, and I start with the fact that I'm an old-fashioned American, and my first priority is my faith in God, then my family and then country. I share my faith because it describes who I am."

...

These bible-thumping morons should not be allowed to lead our servicepeople. When some genius says he puts God before country, it means he believes the lives of his troops are expendable and 'God' will see to their souls once their lives are squandered. I don't want Jesus freaks like this being in charge of some of the most dangerous weaponry ever devised by man.

Too many people have gone to war because they believed it was 'God's will'. I'll tell you something, the Nazis thought God was on their side too. I don't want an army of 'christian soldiers' who someday may decide their loyalty to some dusty old holy book is stronger than their loyalty to their commander-in-chief. These guys should be cashiered faster than Gen Shinseki was after he testified before Congress.

Tip o' the Brain to C & L.

Finally...

A good use for the Chimp. Via Cabana Boy at Blondie's.

Explaining Christmas

Atrios has the best one I've ever heard. Stolen fully and completely:

Look, it's very simple. There are two Christmas holidays. One is the secular holiday, decreed by the federal government to be a national holiday, which is celebrated and marked with festive displays of trees, lights, fat guys with beards, and elves, along with lots of shopping and the giving of gifts. The other holiday involves a celebration of the birth of the Messiah, and is celebrated with religious rituals and displays of nativity scenes and other religious imagery.


Public displays of secular Christmas imagery? fine.

Public displays of religious Christmas imagery? less fine.

Christmas trees in airports? fine.
Baby Jesus scenes in airports? less fine.

Short, sweet, and it works for me.

Go ahead and let the door hit ya in the ass on the way out, Junior...

Today's 'must read' by Robert Parry

As U.S. policy in the oil-rich region spins out of control, the stark choice confronting the American people will be whether the country can stand two more years of this or whether it's time for Bush to go.

George W. Bush had a point when he disparaged the Baker-Hamilton commission's plan for gradual troop withdrawals from Iraq by saying "this business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever." It's now obvious that there can be no exit from Iraq -- graceful or otherwise -- as long as Bush remains President.

And, oh yes, the Iraq War was not started by Islamic militants who hate peace but by George W. Bush.

In other words, Bush still insists on living in a world of ideology and made-up facts, not one of reality and pragmatism. Bush has fixed in his mind what his neoconservative advisers sold him on in 2001 -- and he can't break with that.

Bush appears not to have budged one inch from his longstanding hostility toward any questioning of his war judgments. He is determined to keep U.S. troops in Iraq regardless of the will of the American people or anyone else.

So, given Bush's rhetoric and actions, there is little reason to believe that he intends to reverse course. If anything, he will continue toying with notions about expanding the conflict by bombing Iran's nuclear facilities or seeking escalation of political confrontations with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

That means that by 2009, whoever becomes the next President will face a likely conflagration in the Middle East, with the real possibility that Bush will have enflamed Islamic radicalism so much that the region's few pro-U.S. pillars -- such as the Saudi royal family or the Egyptian dictatorship -- will be tottering if not already fallen.

Disruptions of Middle East oil supplies could wreak havoc on the U.S. and world economies. Plus, Bush might end up precipitating just the grim vision that he has long articulated -- an interminable world war pitting the West against large segments of the planet's one billion Muslims.

Faced with this looming catastrophe, the congressional Democrats may have no choice but to reconsider what incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others have ruled "off the table," the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Indeed, Bush's cavalier dismissal of the key Baker-Hamilton recommendations creates a possible framework for a bipartisan impeachment effort.

A less confrontational approach could be Republican and Democratic pressure on Bush and Cheney to agree to sequential resignations, replacing Cheney first with a new Vice President who would then assume the presidency upon Bush's resignation.

As unlikely -- and extreme -- as these scenarios may sound, the future of the American Republic may demand nothing less.

If Bush cannot come to grips with reality -- and adopt a less ideological approach toward the Middle East -- there may be no realistic choice but for the American people and their elected representatives to make clear that it's time for him to go.

If our country is to have any future, it depends on Bush and Cheney departing. The earlier the better. I think it would help our world standing immensely if we chucked 'em out the door and got someone - anyone - who has at least some idea of reality.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Iraqis Near Deal on Distribution of Oil Revenues Among Three Groups
Earnings would be divided equally among ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and Shell.

Descendants of James K. Polk Thank Bush
Because of him, their forebear's no longer considered worst president.

Go see "The War President's Score Card", bottom of Page One.

L'il Bush

Go see "Sociopathic Decider Babies" at Welcome to Pottersville.

The 'L' Word...

Daddy Frank nails it on the Iraq Study Group.

In America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered.

Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990's he famously coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. "The Way Forward" is its apotheosis.

This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we're "not winning" in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush's "absolutely, we're winning" of late October, it's hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq (my em).

That's what Donald Rumsfeld at long last acknowledged, between the lines, as he fled the Pentagon to make way for Mr. Gates. The most revealing passage in his parting memo listing possible options for the war was his suggestion that public expectations for success be downsized so we would "therefore not 'lose.' " By putting the word lose in quotes, Mr. Rumsfeld revealed his hand: the administration must not utter that L word even though lose is exactly what we've done. The illusion of not losing must be preserved no matter what the price in blood (mine).

The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.

The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.

I have nothing to add. Mr. Rich got it dead nuts. Please read the rest.

No queers ...

At a time when, of the 1000 people serving at the American Palace Embassy in Baghdad, only six speak fluent Arabic, it might behoove them to put their 'beliefs' aside and hire back some of the gay folks they threw out:

Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic and six Farsi speakers. Bleu Copas, 30, was a decorated sergeant and Arabic language specialist who was dismissed from the U.S. Army this July for being gay. But he was closeted and was outed by an unidentified email campaign and it was never proven. According to Andrew Sullivan the number of gay discharged Arab language specialists is now 55.

...

At this desperate stage you'd think, regardless of the belief that gays somehow can't serve in the military (I've got news for you, the gays I served with acquitted themselves honorably and with distinction), pragmatism might prevail. But no, we stubbornly hold our ground, even when having some of these folks on the ground might help the situation there (or might have if, instead of purging these people from the ranks a few years back, we'd have used their expertise to actually win some hearts and minds).

You know, I was thinking (a first!) last night. Bush was handed such an opportunity in 2001 to use the tragedy of 9/11 to do some good in the world. Remember back then, when 'everybody was an American'? We could have come so far in five years but instead we've fallen so low. It's this closed-minded thinking, not just on the part of the people in charge but of average Americans, that brought us to this point. It's time we grew up.

Howling at the Moon

Via the one and only Skippy, this snippet from a Newsweek article:

...

That places the president in a distinct minority. According to the NEWSWEEK poll, more than two out of three Americans believe the United States is losing ground in Iraq (68 percent), versus 21 percent who say it is making progress - the most pessimistic assessment the NEWSWEEK poll has ever recorded. A near-record 53 percent believe invading Iraq was a mistake, compared to 39 percent who say it was the right course of action.

In fact, the public goes farther than the Baker-Hamilton report. Sixty-two percent of Americans want the Bush administration to set a timetable for withdrawal. And not in the distant future. Forty-eight percent of Americans want U.S. soldiers and Marines to come home now or within the next year. Add in the 19 percent who say they would support U.S. troops remaining in Iraq one to two years more and 67 percent of Americans say they would support keeping large numbers of U.S. military personnel in Iraq for no more than another year or two. [my ems]

...

The public knows Iraq is lost and no matter what that schmuck McCain says, most of the weasels on Capitol Hill know it too. It's just a matter of getting our guys out in an orderly fashion so they're not running for their lives.

Update:

Commander Huber cuts to the chase as usual:

...

I've got news for Gates and everybody else who has their head cross-threaded up a place that sunshine seldom penetrates: when history's mightiest nation isn't winning a war nearly four years into it, it's losing.

...

Good

See you in Hell:

Pinochet dies peacefully at a ripe old age. The son of a bitch got off easy.

Animusic sampler

I saw this stuff for the first time last night on PBS. I just think it's cool. If you like it, there's dozens of these things at YouTube, or you can go to their site.

animusic

ISG: It's still all about the oil

LATimes

WHILE THE Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence.

Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq's importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder: "It has the world's second-largest known oil reserves." The group then proceeds to give very specific and radical recommendations as to what the United States should do to secure those reserves. If the proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will be commercialized and opened to foreign firms.

The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room: that we are fighting, killing and dying in a war for oil. It states in plain language that the U.S. government should use every tool at its disposal to ensure that American oil interests and those of its corporations are met.

All told, the Iraq Study Group has simply made the case for extending the war until foreign oil companies - presumably American ones - have guaranteed legal access to all of Iraq's oil fields and until they are assured the best legal and financial terms possible.

We can thank the Iraq Study Group for making its case publicly. It is now our turn to decide if we wish to spill more blood for oil.

We knew it all along. Now it's in writing.

Blood for oil: it's the American Way.

The road to Hell ...

Is paved with good intentions.

Hmmm ...

Maybe we were hasty?

...

Ha, I thought at the time, aren't these Republican lawmakers incompetent. These guys are given enormous responsibilities to understand the challenges we face in the Middle East, and they aren't even sure about the basics, such as what faith al Qaeda is. Just wait, I thought, until Dems get in there and show them what competency looks like.

Perhaps I was a little hasty.

Stein sat down with Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), soon to be the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and started asking him some of the same basic questions Republicans got wrong a couple of months ago. It didn't go well.

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

'"Al Qaeda, they have both," Reyes said. "You're talking about predominately?"

"Sure," I said, not knowing what else to say.

"Predominantly - probably Shiite," he ventured.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they'd slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

Asked later about Hezbollah, Reyes said, "Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah... Well, I, uh..."

Now, it's worth noting that Reyes wasn't completely lost. Stein noted that Reyes, unlike the House Republicans he talked to a couple of months ago, "knows that the 1,400-year-old split in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites not only fuels the militias and death squads in Iraq, it drives the competition for supremacy across the Middle East between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia." The GOP didn't even know this much, so Reyes is a little better off.

But in the end, he was still shaky on some pretty basic details. When the typical person on the street doesn't know about al Qaeda's or Hezbollah's beliefs, he or she can be forgiven. When the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee doesn't know, one has to wonder what members of Congress have been doing the last four years.

...

Before I got into blogging, I thought I was pretty well informed about what went on in government. I was under the impression, since most of our elected representatives had much more formal education than I did, that the people we sent to Washington were intelligent, curious people who would do research on subjects they were involved with, subjects they are expected to vote for the good of the nation on.

Shit, I was a babe in the woods.

I think many of the American people share my former misconceptions. Most of the people we put in government are clueless ignorants who couldn't find their ass with both hands tied behind their backs. Let's just hope the incoming bunch is smart enough to listen to real experts instead of ideologues.

How George W. Bush has ruined the family franchise

Our resident Angry Old Broad went off the other day, and rightly so, on 41 boohooin' it up over No. 2 son's loss of the Florida governor's race a number of years back. I touched on this in 'comments' as being in response to No. Wrong son backing into the presidency instead of Jeb. Well, Elinor Clift, obviously a regular reader of the Brain, expanded on my riff:

On the eve of a report that repudiates his son's leadership, former president George H.W. Bush broke down crying when he recalled how his other son, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, lost an election a dozen years ago and then came back to serve two successful terms. The elder Bush has always been a softie, but this display of emotion was so over the top that it had to be about something other than Jeb's long-ago loss.

That election turned out to be pivotal because it disrupted the plan Papa Bush had for his sons, which may be why he was crying, and why the country cries with him. The family's grand design had the No. 2 son, Jeb, by far the brighter and more responsible, ascend to the presidency while George, the partying frat-boy type, settled for second best in Texas. The plan went awry when Jeb, contrary to conventional wisdom, lost in Florida, and George unexpectedly defeated Ann Richards in Texas. With the favored heir on the sidelines, the family calculus shifted. They'd go for the presidency with the son that won and not the one they wished had won.

The son who was wrongly launched has made such a mess of things that he has ruined the family franchise. Without getting too Oedipal, it's fair to say that so many mistakes George W. Bush made are the result of his need to distinguish himself from his father and show that he's smarter and tougher. His need to outdo his father and at the same time vindicate his father's failure to get re-elected makes for a complicated stew of emotions. The irony is that the senior Bush, dismissed by Junior's crowd as a country-club patrician, looks like a giant among presidents compared to his son. Junior told author Bob Woodward, for his book "Plan of Attack," that he didn't consult his father in planning the invasion of Iraq but consulted a higher authority, pointing, presumably, to the heavens.

Bush was asked during the campaign in 2000 what would happen if he lost. He said he'd go back to Texas, watch a lot of baseball and have a great life with Laura and the girls. He's an accidental president, a man who was vaulted into a job he wasn't prepared for, and who treated war like a lark. Bush's father observed between sobs in his Florida speech, "A true measure of a man is how you handle victory and how you handle defeat." He was talking about Jeb, but surely it's his first-born who triggers the tears.

No shit.

Besides spawning an accidental president, I wonder if 41 has ever mentally chastised himself for not making that trip to the drug store back in '46 that could have prevented the worst accident of all.

Readiness ...

Huh ... what?

Dec. 8, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- Whatever its ultimate fate, the Iraq Study Group report released Wednesday should have destroyed the spurious notion that flooding Iraq with more U.S. troops might win the war. As the report makes clear, a major influx of U.S. combat brigades into Iraq is somewhere between totally unrealistic and completely impossible.

In interviews with Salon, experts who served on the study group's "working groups" explained why: The military is running out of troops and equipment. The cold, hard facts about military readiness and a 1.4 million-strong active-duty force rule out a big increase in the size of the U.S. footprint in Iraq. "We don't have enough is the short answer," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University who served on the military and security working group of the bipartisan commission headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton. Advocating a big increase in troop levels now is just political theater, Hoffman argued. "This is the beginning of the who-lost-Iraq debate," he explained. "No one wants to be a charter member of the club." [my em]

...

Didja hear that, Mr. McCain, Mr. Lieberman you bleedin' fools?

I joined the military just after the Vietnam era and it was in sad shape. Looks like we're heading for that honor again, sooner rather than later.

Hat tip to Nicole at C & L.

What I'm trying to do ...

I started this a few months ago and haven't really done anything with it because ... well ... I been crazy. But I've had this idea to get a buncha bloggers together, not just the crew here, and have them post original content, or cross-posts from their own blogs, and tie the blogs together in a loose ring identified by this button:



Details here. I really don't care the direction it takes and I'd like it if it moves away from political or veterans' issues.

If you and your blog would like to become part of AltBrainNet, just email me and I'll send you an invite and the AltBrainNet blogroll code for your blog.

As always, no rules, no censorship.

Shorter ISG

From Empire Burlesque:

...

The Iraq Study Group's report simply confirms, yet again, the bedrock truth of the war: the American Establishment has no intention of leaving Iraq, ever, and no intention of having anything but a pliant, cowed, bullied puppet government in Baghdad to carry out whatever the Establishment decides is in its best interests on any given day. Iraq was invaded because large swathes of the American elite thought they could make hay of it one way or another (financially, politically, ideologically or even psychologically, for those pathetic souls who get their sense of manhood or personal validation from their identification with a big, swaggering, domineering empire). And U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, indefinitely, at some level, because the American elite think they can make hay of the situation one way or another. The war is all about -- is only about -- what the American elite feel is in their own best interest, how it aggrandizes their fortunes, flatters their prejudices, serves their needs. That's it. The rest is just bullshit and murder.

...

There should be no 'American elite'.

Tip o' the Brain to Hugo Zoom.

So ...

Whaddaya think about Congressional term limits; 3 terms for senators, 5 for representatives or something of that sort. Froggy suggested it in comments on AOB's post and I think it's a pretty good idea.

Originally, elected officials were only supposed to serve a couple of terms and then get back to running their estates. The Founding Fathers never intended for someone to sit in the Senate for 36 or more years and in the House for twenty or thirty years...

Maritime art

Since Gord brought up the subject of crusing, it reminded me of a book I bought while aboard MS Noordam a couple months back. It is a compendium of the works, and the stories behind them in the words of the artist, of maritime artist Stephen Card, commissioned by Holland America Line. You can only buy it through Holland America but I figured I'd introduce you to his stuff. If you're into maritime art, you know Mr. Card already. If you're not, go visit his gallery.

MS Rijndam entering the Upper New York Bay in 1953.

No more Bush

My good friend Indian sent me this via email. Heh ... (yes, ladies, I know it's sophomoric male bullshit.) NOT work or child safe.

If it's Saturday ...

I must be whoring another chapter of my novel The Captains at The Practical Press.

On the homefront ...

Seems the extended deployment of Guard and Reserve troops is having an effect* on more people than just their immediate families:

WASHINGTON - The deployment of thousands of police officers to Iraq, Afghanistan and other military reserve posts is costing local law enforcement agencies up to $1.2 billion per year, according to a new analysis of Justice Department data.

The review, prepared for a law enforcement trade journal by Justice Department statistician Matthew Hickman, found that the number of military call-ups is outstripping the pace of new hires at a time when agencies are struggling to find new recruits, and as crime is ticking upward after several years of historically low crime rates.

...

I did 2 years Active Reserve duty once my active-duty hitch was over and I know the part the Guard and Reserves play in their local communities. As you see with the cops, this hurts people who have no direct connection to the military and the war.

...

The problem is particularly acute in small police agencies, which often have struggled to fill gaps in patrol coverage left by cops who have been called to military duty, according to Hickman's analysis, just published in Police Chief magazine.

...

It's also tough on employers* who are obligated to keep a Reservist's job for them while on active duty. While I support the law, it does cause hardship when the Guard and Reserve are used interchangably with active duty troops.

WASHINGTON - The number of reservists and National Guard members who say they have been reassigned, lost benefits or been fired from civilian jobs after returning from duty has increased by more than 70% over the past six years.

...

Retired Marine lieutenant general Dennis McCarthy, executive director of the Reserve Officers Association, a private advocacy group, acknowledged the deployments can be difficult for employers, particularly small companies. "That burden is an acceptable cost when it's compared to the value of reserve service to our country," he said.

What will happen, is Guardsmen and Reservists will be denied employment in the future because of their military commitment and obligation. I can't run a business if I know one or more of my people will be gone for up to 18 months, come home for 6, and then leave for another year and a half.

This is what you get when you put incompetents, amateurs, and morons in charge of the world's strongest military. I dare anyone to tell me our military isn't broken. Like the underreporting of the violence in Iraq, I'll bet you anything they're hiding the fact our Army and Marine Corps are worse off than any of us expect.

*Great thanks to the lovely Pam Spaulding for the links.

Prolific

I was up this morning, hoping to do the switch to the new Blogger software. Then I find we'll have to wait a little longer because they're not ready for the bigger blogs yet. By bigger, I mean the amount of content on a particular blog.

Blew my mind when I realized, over the past 2 1/2 years, we've put close to 7000 posts up. This is #6649. Seems my cohorts and I have a lot* to say. Good ... heh.


*(It may not all be intelligent, thought-out punditry but you're getting the unvarnished truth as it affects real people who have to deal with the consequences of decisions made by the folks living in the fantasyland inside the Beltway. I hope our readers will appreciate what the people assembled here have been trying to do with the little bit of power this blog offers; the opportunity to add their voices to the din of those who want to help this nation reach its potential. To be the nation we all know it can be. ~ Fixer)

ThreatCon

Watch your asses, comrades:

NEW YORK A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that the rise in Internet journalism has fueled an increase in the number of journalists imprisoned around the world. According to the group's new census, 134 journalists are now in prison worldwide, and one in three jailed journalists is now a blogger, online editor or Web-based reporter. [my em]

...

Great thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein for the link.

GOP senator criticizes Iraq war

CNN

In an emotional speech on the Senate floor Thursday night, Sen Gordon Smith, a moderate Republican from Oregon who has been a supporter of the war in Iraq, said the U.S. military's "tactics have failed" and he "cannot support that anymore."

Smith said he is at, "the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up the same bombs, day after day.

"That is absurd," he said. "It may even be criminal."

Smith said he has tried to quietly support President Bush during the course of the war -- and doesn't believe the president intentionally lied to get the U.S. into the war -- but now recognizes, "we have paid a price in blood and treasure that is beyond calculation" for a war waged due to bad intelligence.

Moved this week by the findings of the Iraq Study Group, Smith said he needed to "speak from my heart.

"I, for one, am tired of paying the price of 10 or more of our troops dying a day. So let's cut and run or cut and walk, but let us fight the way on terror more intelligently that we have because we have fought this war in a very lamentable way," he said.

One more R sees the light.

Buh bye

Today is the LAST DAY of the 109th Congress. We're doing the Dance of Joy here in the Fixer household!

As we say at the shop: Take your shit and get out!

SS Gypsy Queen

After reading all about the Fixers' recent cruise, I kinda got the bug. I surfed the shit outta the internets and finally found one I can afford:



Now I gotta save up for some mosquito repellent and a snake-bite kit and I'll be all set...

The neocons have finished what the Vietcong started

The Guardian

Vietnam traumatised the US but left its power intact; Iraq, however, will be far more serious for the superpower

What is true regionally is also the case globally. We are reminded of how even the most powerful and, indeed, the most knowledgeable can get things profoundly wrong. It is worthwhile recalling the longer-term global context of the American defeat in Vietnam. It did not signal any serious upturn in the fortunes of the Soviet Union; this was already in a state of economic stagnation and growing political paralysis that was to become terminal in the 80s, leaving the US as the sole superpower. It was this that encouraged the neoconservatives to utterly misread the historical runes at the end of the 90s. They believed that the world was ripe for a huge expansion of American power and influence.

A few years later we can see the full absurdity of this position. Far from the US being in the ascendant, deeper trends have moved in the opposite direction. The US might enjoy overwhelming military advantage, but its relative economic power, which in the long run is almost invariably decisive, is in decline. The interregnum after the cold war, far from being the prelude to a new American age, was bearing the signs of what is now very visible: the emergence of a multipolar world. By misreading global trends, the Bush administration's embrace of unilateralism not only provoked the Iraq disaster but also hastened American decline.

Them Limeys have a way with words. Please read this one.

How can we miss you if you don't go away?

Raw Story

Concern that soldiers and Pentagon civilians might appear to be celebrating outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's last day has caused the date of a Pentagon Christmas party to be changed, according to an item in today's Washington Post.

A segment of Al Kamen's "Inside the Loop" column reports that the offices supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon planned to celebrate the holiday season next Friday, December 15th. But an order came down from the office of General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to change the date of the party.

According to Kamen, someone in Pace's office "had fretted that it might look as if all the hootin' and hollerin' that would be spilling out into the hallways was in celebration of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's departure that same day."

I think Rumsfeld deserves a nation-wide 'going away' party. The day after he leaves.

GOP Hypocrite of the Year

Guess who. From BuzzFlash:

Look, when your daddy engineers a perennial milquetoast D.C. commission to haul your butt out of the frying pan, you should already feel like you're back in nursery school.

But when the group of status quo insiders, including your father's consigliere, concludes that you've crapped in your pants, killed all the livestock and burnt the house down -- and you sit there and basically say "thanks, but I've got more important things to do," then you are beyond being a hypocrite; you're a dangerous moron.

Bush is no longer content with achieving the oil grab, he wants U.S. GIs to continue to die so that he isn't "embarrassed' by withdrawing them from the most dangerous areas and appearing to "lose" the war.

That's criminal behavior and misconduct in office to sacrifice lives for a man's ego.

But BuzzFlash can't indict or impeach Bush, we can just declare him the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of 2006.

They're too kind. He may very well be the biggest hypocrite - and many other negatives as well - in the GOP since its inception. In a party full of 'em, that's quite a distinction.

Explains a lot ...

I got about 8 sets of Man Magic in my toolbox ... tha's right ... heh ...

Ladies and Gentlemen ...

The President of the United States:

...

I thought we would succeed quicker than we did.

God, it's so embarrassing to travel out of the country.

They were warned ...

Brother Lurch has a piece up showing that the Chimp was briefed on the deteriorating situation in Iraq over two years ago. The briefers described the current scenario accurately and warned of the consequences if the flawed policy in Iraq was pursued.

...

And so now we are come upon the dark days of 2006, (and 2007, and 2008) when the world sits on the sidelines watching, waiting for the Quarterback of the Free World to be blitzed and dumped 75 yards behind the scrimmage line as he desperately flounders back and forth trying to find someone anyone that he can lateral off to in order to make the lost ball someone else's fault. His line still struggles to hold off the opposing players, some of whom have gotten into the backfield and are pursuing him. Some of his own running backs, far downfield are waving their arms trying to signal their open position as Mr Bu$h scrambles, but h[e] doesn't see them because the game has always been about him, rather than moving the ball and scoring a touchdown.

...

Unless the Chimp and Cheney are impeached or arrested, or Congress pulls the purse strings shut, our brothers and sisters will continue to die in Iraq until 2009.

The World Has Had Enough!

Heh ... deuddersun. And yes, we could do a better job.

Come on and Cry Me a River,Cry Me a River....

I cried a river over you.....

Poor Pathetic Poppy.

When I first saw this I almost felt bad for Poppy. He sounds old,tired and frail. And I do have respect for my Elders. But this man isn't sorry for the hell his oldest son has unleashed on this planet. Nope. He's sorry because the "Bush Family Legacy" is forever tied to W and his demented,delusional and delirious douchebaggery. GOOD.

America,this crime family is precisely WHY political dynasties of any stripe are a very.BAD.IDEA. I don't give a damn what party they're from. I hope there are investigations of the Bush family all the way back to Nazi Germany. I want their ugly,nasty,filthy laundry aired on the public square. They're criminals,thieves and liars. Now they can add murderer and genocidal maniac to their "legacy".

And this guy can kiss my ass.

Tell you what buddy,tell that shit to our troops in that big fucking clusterfuck of a sandbox. I'd bet most of those folks would love to work 3 fucking days a week and then get to spend 4 days with their families you useless piece of crap. Not to mention that your "job" Representative Kingston,doesn't involve getting shot at or RPG'd. You prick,you make 165K a year,paid by the American Taxpayer(not counting your perks and"other income"). And you worked what? 100 days and some change this year? Fuck You. If We the People need you to work 24/7/365 then by god you should do it,with a smile. If that's too much for you,FIND ANOTHER JOB. Quit you little weasel. Read my lips,you are a Public Servant. So serve or get the fuck out of the way. And you had the BALLS to vote against raising the minimum wage how many times?

Or whine to my husband who already this week has clocked about 60 hours of work. And he will be going in to work to put in a 15 hour day tommorrow. You Sir are not fit to shine my husband's shoes. Tell ya what you whiner,trade jobs with my husband for a year. You'll get a taste of what it means to work,and the people of Georgia would have a man in office who gave a damn about working families and poor people. It's a win/win. But,you wouldn't last a week in my hubby's job because a)you'd have to have some actual skills and b)you'd have to get dirty and be outside in the cold.

I'm so sick of grown people who think they are entitled to everything just because they've decided they're better than everyone else. Suck it up and do what everyone else has to. Work and stop your whining.

Bring back lead poisoning

Think Progress

"The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments," the AP reports. "Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits."

Lead is dirt cheap, and from an engine's standpoint is actually better than reformulated cleaner-emissions gasoline in terms of lubrication and anti-knock qualities.

When I worked in the Standard Oil refinery in El Segundo "Where The Sewer Meets The Sea" CA many years ago, we had tetraethyl lead gas additive by the tank-car load. It was one of the most dangerous substances in a dangerous environment. One drop could kill you.

Engines don't have that problem. Neither do batteries and paint, just people, but people's health isn't seen as contributing to the lead-using industries' bottom line, only as unwanted, unnecessary overhead, possibly capable of being overcome by greasing Repuglican palms.

We got the lead out of gasoline and paint, most fishing sinkers and shotgun shells, and nearly everything else except automotive batteries, which could do it if they wanted to.

Leave the lead out. If I want heavy-metal poisoning, I'll eat some albacore.

7 December

Today might be a good day to remember about a nation, in an attempt to maintain and expand an empire built on a desire for hegemony and access to natural resources in a large part of the world, but couched in terms of 'liberation', which pre-emptively criminally attacked another.

I think it would also be good to remember that the nation that was attacked eventually won the conflict and hanged a whole lot of the aggressors by the neck until they were dead.

Archeological find

An archeological team, digging in Washington DC , has uncovered 10,000 year old bones and fossil remains of what is believed to be the first Politician.

"Let my river flow..."

Following up on yesterday's post, here is an article and video on the opening of the gates to restore the Lower Owens River. Los Angeles' Mayor Villaraigosa makes a humorous, or perhaps ironic, freudian slip in his address to the assembled throng. Made 'em laugh. Maybe a little nervously. Go see.

LATimes

The largest river habitat restoration effort ever attempted in the West was jump-started at 12:15 p.m., when Villaraigosa turned a control knob to open a new clamshell-shaped steel gate at a diversion dam that has been directing the waters that have flowed into the Los Angeles Aqueduct since 1913.

The event marked a brief detente in historic water wars that have boiled in the Owens Valley since the early 1900s, when Los Angeles city agents posed as ranchers and farmers to buy land and water rights in the valley. Their goal was to build an aqueduct that would help transform Los Angeles into a metropolis.

The stealth and deception became grist for books and movies that portrayed the dark underbelly of Los Angeles' formative years.

The most notable movie is Chinatown directed by Roman Polanski and starring Jack Nicholson.

This is a good thing, but besides the obvious benefits of riparian restoration, I hope at some point they let some water flow into Owens Lake. Just enough to cover it to hold down the clouds of alkali dust ("Keeler fog") stirred up when the wind blows, which is pretty often.

One thing at a time.

McCain on the ISG

For all those who think McCain would make a good President:

...

The sharpest break with the [Iraq Study Group] report's recommendations came from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has criticized the Bush administration's war strategy and called for boosting U.S. troop strength in Iraq. He called "tenuous at best" the report's linkage between the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict and the violence in Iraq, and objected to any "limited timeframe" on the U.S. military presence.

"Only by cracking down on independent militias, reducing criminal and terrorist activity, and protecting the population and key infrastructure - none of which can be accomplished without more troops - can a political settlement begin to take hold," McCain said in a statement.

...

I don't know what the fuck they did to him in Hanoi, but he seems to have a case of Delayed Onset Stupidity. Did he learn anything from Vietnam? Did he forget how many GIs (58,000) were not as fortunate as he was (he actually got to go home)? Did he forget they all died (let alone the maimed and those who came home with demons) in an unjust, optional war and were also victims of the 'let's throw more troops at a failed situation' mindset in Washington at the time? Did he forget his stay at the Hanoi Hilton was a direct result of the policy he's advocating today?

Yes, Senator, let's just send more young men and women into that meat grinder. Two years from now we'll realize we're in the same place we are today, except more of our nation's sons and daughters will have died. It's time to get out now, not send more troops in hopes of salvaging something that will never come close to the objectives stated when we embarked on this folly. This supposed 'future President' is advocating proven failure: more troops and don't talk to our enemies:

...

McCain, who is expected to seek the presidency in 2008, was also skeptical of the recommendation to involve Syria and Iran: "You have to understand that the Iranians and the Syrians do not have common interests with us."

...

Is there any difference between him and the Chimp? Not so much it seems. We have to talk to everyone who might be able to help us get out and has influence with the people carrying AKs and RPGs on the ground. James Baker said as much yesterday:

...

"For 40 years we talked to the Soviet Union during a time when they were committed to wiping us off the face of the Earth," Mr. Baker said. "So you talk to your enemies, not just your friends."

...

As I said the other day, it is in Iran and Syria's best interest not to have anarchy prevail so close to their territory:

...

It's time to get out and let the Iraqis sort out what works for them. Diplomatically, we should enlist Iran and Syria's aid to prevent a failed state existing between them, as Chuck Hagel said yesterday.

...

And for a man who wants to be President to think this does not stem from the Arab - Israeli conflict is either in the pocket of the Israel lobby or totally out of touch with what's actually going on in the world. Every source of conflict in that part of the world is derivative of the Arab - Israeli conflict and our unconditional support for everything Israel does.

It's time to dispel the myth that John McCain is some sort of Patton or MacArthur, anointed by both Right and Left to lead us into the Great Enlightened Dawn. He's just a self-serving piece of shit who will do or say anything to get into the White House.

Alternate Brainfart

This appears in our left sidebar:

"You gotta stop thinking with the alternate brain, Sarge." - Col. William 'Stonewall' Bryant to Sgt. Fixer after freeing him from the custody of the London Metropolitan Police.

One wonders how much those Bobbies raised when they took up a collection to bribe Col. Bryant to take him back...

Goodness Gracious! The Truth!

Maureen Dowd on Gates and Rumsfeld:

First Junior took over the house with grandiose plans to remodel it and make it the envy of the neighborhood. But then he played with matches and set the house on fire. So now he's frantically trying to stop the flames from torching the whole block.

Mr. Gates asserted that if America left Iraq in chaos, Iran and Syria could encroach more, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia might jump in to stop the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis by Shiites. "We're already seeing Hezbollah involved in training fighters for Iraq," he said. "I think all of that could spread fairly dramatically."

It was the sort of realistic assessment that never came from Rummy, except when he privately admitted in a classified Nov. 6 memo that their Iraq strategy was "not working well enough or fast enough," offering a silly hodgepodge of wildly tardy or dubious options, like telling the Iraqis to "pull up their socks."

So with the Pentagon deciding whether to Go Big, Go Long or Go Home, Rummy urged the White House to Go Minimalist and simply streamline the spin.

Junior took the advice to manage perceptions by minimizing Rummy two days after he sent the memo. [...]

The old criticisms of whether Mr. Gates massaged intelligence were forgotten; the senators would have embraced an ax-murderer if he had seemed sensible about Iraq.

There was no blathering yesterday about "known unknowns" or "Henny Penny" pessimists. The soft-spoken, vanilla Mr. Gates offered a sharp contrast from the finger-wagging, flavorful Rummy. In a remarkable shift from the mindless bellicosity and jingoism of the last few years, Mr. Gates said he did not favor military action against Iran or Syria.

After lunch the nominee clarified his remarks, saying he had not meant to criticize the troops, that the reversals in Iraq were not their fault. They don't lose battles in Iraq because there are no battles. There's just a counterinsurgency that they can't see and that they weren't prepared or equipped to fight.

Gates hasn't even sat in his office chair yet, and already he's light-years ahead of Rumsfeld, in perception at least.

It remains to be seen, of course, what he can and/or will do, or more correctly, what he will be allowed to do.

A little good news...

As regular readers of the Brain will know, the Owens Valley in Eastern California is one of my favorite places. Thanks to the end of a long court process, the valley is going to get some long overdue environmental relief today. From the LATimes with photos and videos:

INDEPENDENCE, Calif -- Hundreds of spectators led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are expected to gather today to watch the 62-mile-long Lower Owens River ripple anew with its first surge of High Sierra water in nearly a century.

The largest river habitat restoration effort ever attempted in the West (my em) will launch with Villaraigosa's push of a button, opening a steel gate at a dam that has been diverting the Lower Owens' water into the Los Angeles Aqueduct since 1913.

If all goes according to plan, within five years nature will transform the revived river's lazy loops into a lush serpentine oasis of willows and cottonwood trees, wetlands for waterfowl and shorebirds and warm water fisheries for bass, catfish, frogs and crayfish.

Please read the rest and watch the videos.

Suggested reading :

Rivers in the Desert by Margaret Leslie Davis

Water and the California Dream by David Carle

As Mark Twain once said, and California has taken to heart, "Whisky's fer drinkin'. Water's fer fightin' over."

Update:

Passerby left us this comment:

Man, we caught so many trout out of the Owens River one day that we nearly got nauseous cleaning 'em all in the bathtub of our hotel...

Rainbows and browns till our arms were tired. Never seen anything like it.

Not sure those hotel maids ever saw anything like that, either.

Next time, PB, check for this feature, common amongst the better accommodations in the area:



Just look for a lotta cats hangin' around!

Been there ...

The one and only Paul Rieckhoff, citing a story on NPR, via Blondie:

Soldier Tyler Jennings says that when he came home from Iraq last year, he felt so depressed and desperate that he decided to kill himself. Late one night in the middle of May, his wife was out of town, and he felt more scared than he'd felt in gunfights in Iraq. Jennings says he opened the window, tied a noose around his neck and started drinking, "trying to get drunk enough to either slip or just make that decision."

...

In my case, I was sitting in my van with a pistol to my head.

...

Five months before, Jennings had gone to the medical center at Ft. Carson, where a staff member typed up his symptoms: "Crying spells... hopelessness... helplessness... worthlessness." Jennings says that when the sergeants who ran his platoon found out he was having a breakdown and taking drugs, they started to haze him. He decided to attempt suicide when they said that they would eject him from the Army. [my em]

...

Fortunately, when I began to deal with these symptoms (instead of snorting coke and drinking myself into oblivion daily), I was already out of the military and married to an understanding woman who helped me through it. This treatment is downright unconscionable and obscene.

...

It's time for the military to step up. Just last week, they finally released new guidelines for troops suffering from mental health problems in theatre. It's a good start, but just issuing another memo isn't going to make difference.

...

Memos won't do it. Prosecution and jail for officers and NCOs who harass their people when they need serious help will.

Hebeas Corpus

In the truest sense of the term. My pal Lambert reminds me that he and the guys and girls at CorrenteWire have been chasing the 'Bush Gulag' story for over a year. Yesterday I directed you to a post over there about the camp at Stare Kiejkuty, Poland. Today, Lambert follows up with one on the wherabouts of the 7,000 - 35,000 'detainees from the War on Terra' that were presumably interned at the '21st Century Gulag Archipelago':

Let's do some arithmetic on how many prisoners Bush is holding in his gulags.

  1. We know that there are thousands of prisoners (estimates range from 7,000 to 35,000).

  2. Gitmo holds only 500

  3. So, where are the missing thousands? The only alternatives I can think of:

    a. They've been released

    b. They're still in jail

    c. They've been disappeared.

Barring divine intervention, the bodies of the missing thousands occupy time and space in this world. Where are they?

...

Hitler, Stalin, Bush, birds of a feather.

The Army you have ...

ANNISTON, Ala. -- Field upon field of more than 1,000 battered M1 tanks, howitzers and other armored vehicles sit amid weeds here at the 15,000-acre Anniston Army Depot -- the idle, hulking formations symbolic of an Army that is wearing out faster than it is being rebuilt.

...

Equipment shipped back from Iraq is stacking up at all the Army depots: More than 530 M1 tanks, 220 M88 wreckers and 160 M113 armored personnel carriers are sitting at Anniston. The Red River Army Depot in Texas has 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 450 heavy and medium-weight trucks, while more than 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.

Despite the work piling up, the Army's depots have been operating at about half their capacity because of a lack of funding for repairs. In the spring, a funding gap caused Anniston and other depots to lose about a month's worth of work, said Brig. Gen. Robert Radin, deputy chief of staff for operations at the Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir. [my ems]

...

They're gonna be hitchhiking from the airport to the Green Zone soon. Didn't the idiots in the White House think this shit would break? Good God.

Big tip o' the Brain to Montag for the link.

And you people thought I was crazy ...

When I said we should give Saddam the keys back and say, 'never mind' ...

Gates Says U.S. Is Not Winning Iraq War

Think Progress

Incoming Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin's (D-MI) first question to Defense Secretary nominee Robert Gates: "Mr. Gates, do you believe that we're currently winning in Iraq?"

Gates' answer: "No, sir." Watch it:

I can't believe Faux News showed that!

Whatever is in Gates' past, or his present motivation, at least he gave the right answer.

Mutiny at the White House

Steve Young at HuffPo:

I don't want to go Woodward and Bernstein all over you, but last week, just after Air Force 1 lifted off towards a meeting with Iraq's Prime Minister al-Maliki, someone in the administration who had had enough of the President's insistence that he knows what he's doing, sent a message that everyone seems to have missed: an administration mutiny is in the offing.

The coup d'état warning came in the form of a leaked memorandum that national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, had sent Bush three weeks ago describing, as the New York Times editorial put it, "how Iraq was being pulled apart by sectarian hatreds and warning that Mr. Maliki was either 'ignorant of what is going on' or unwilling or unable to stop it."

Some say the President may actually heed the memo and his public pronouncements of Rumsfeldian praise ("Maliki is the right man for the job") prior to dismissal is just the Bush M.O. at work. That Maliki's Medal of Freedom is already in the smelter.

Which gives further indication the warning shot was not aimed towards Maliki, but just above the President himself; a notice to POTUS that if he continues to ignore the reality of his failed strategy in Iraq that the whistleblower(s) just might keep leaking to the American public that what Bush maintains as a victory or nothing policy, is far worse than nothing, That it is, in fact, so disastrous, an administration intimate is willing to jeopardize his position to out the boss.

That White House 'insider' must have realized that the future of the nation, not to mention his own soul, demands the collapse of this administration, and he's helping by outing its seedy machinations by any means possible.

It doesn't matter much if Bush gets the message or not, just that someone does who can take him down. Or get him committed.

Update:

Drips in the White House

The famous discipline of the Bush administration has completely broken down. This level of leaking suggests administration aides no longer feel the sense of cohesion and teamwork - or the fear of retribution - that kept them from leaking in the past. A leaker may go to the papers to make himself or his agency look good, or because the president, or those close to him, aren't listening. But in any case, the public venting of private information suggests factionalism and infighting that can't be peacefully controlled or contained. Even if these were authorized leaks - meant to influence the debate without official fingerprints - it suggests that the Bush administration has so little credibility left that the press and public won't listen unless we think we're eavesdropping.

Even before last week, administration leaking had grown to a steady drip. Senior officials at the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA had already learned to fight their battles by leaking inside stuff and offering anonymous opinions to the papers. (It was an interagency spat of this kind that produced Valerie Plame's outing.) Other leaks have appeared in the many books to be found in the "Finger-Pointing and Recriminations" section at Barnes & Noble.

[...] Perhaps this is the message the struggling administration now wants to send out about Iraq. OK, the president's a liar. But he's not as clueless as he looks.

Clueless or not, he's still a liar.

In the spirit of mutiny, I volunteer to pull Bush's rope when we keelhaul him. I hope the bottom of the ship hasn't been de-barnacled recently, too.

Leahy: Bush Should be "Terrified"

In the Green Mountain Daily, Odum writes about Senator Leahy's address at the post-election party sponsored by the Vermont Democratic party.

And finally there was our Senior Senator, Patrick Leahy. For those who've heard Senator Leahy speak, you know that his delivery can vary quite a bit. It can be easy to tell when he's tired, physically or mentally - so Leahy on the stump doesn't necessarily mean the same thing twice. But Leahy of late has had a fire in his belly, the likes of which we haven't seen in a while. His sadness at the loss of comity and the discarding of basic Constitutional values under the Bush GOP has turned into outrage, and he has been consistently riveting in front of a crowd in recent months.

But since the election, that outrage has turned into inspiration, and it's an inspiration he passed on to the crowd tonight. Like the speakers before him, Leahy was funny, thankful, exuberant... but there was an edge that was very serious. He related a conversation where he was recently asked if President Bush should be "worried" that he was now to be Chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. The crowd started cheering.

"No, no" he said, calming the crowd, as if to be prepared for a softening of his rhetoric.

"No, he shouldn't be worried. He should be terrified."

And the room exploded.

Ba da bing!

Two of a kind ...

Will the name Stare Kiejkuty become synonymous with Auschwitz?

Iraq Study Group

Brother Jo Fish echoes my sentiments toward the Baker-Hamilton Report that will be released soon:

Know what? Not interested. I don't think it's going to offer anything more than cover for an idiot president, and the enablers in Congress and his administration who should have been monitoring and overseeing this mess from it's misbegotten inception to it's unseemly demise.

...

This was just a play for time and nothing will happen beyond that. The Chimp ain't gonna take their recommendations and Congress won't force him to unless they defund the mission in Iraq. That ain't gonna happen neither.

...

So all the spin and other hype aside, there will be no good outcome from the whole thing. Yet another 'plan' consigned to the trash heap of history by the Decider and his sycophantic minions. After all, accepting the premise of the report is admitting that the whole Excellent Adventure has been a colosally mis-managed fuck-up...

Stealing Krugman's quote from Gord's post yesterday:

How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a bully's ego?

Insurance ... revisited

More on NOLA from our pal Scout Prime:

That's right, the Corps of Engineers is taking a "strategic pause" between essentially completing repair work to broken levees and "strengthening flood protection in New Orleans" according to the NYT

...

Seems the money's tight for the Corps of Engineers (no shit, it's all going to Iraq) and they estimate the city to be at risk until 2010. I posit that if they drag their feet so long, there won't be a NOLA by then. Scout gets to the crux of the biscuit:

... How many more will follow Travelers Ins. out of the area? ...

We'll know in the next few weeks. The big boys will follow Travelers first, once their legal departments determine they won't be answering lawsuits for the next 10 years. "Exposure" is the operative word in the insurance industry and the lowest exposure is what's best for the bottom line. Premiums collected vs. claims paid and all that. Expect the auto insurers to jump also, when they get finished tallying up their claims for all the vehicles destroyed and adjust their reserves. My gut feeling is the government will have to put a federal insurance system in place resembling the 'flood insurance' program they already have. That won't happen until next summer at the earliest.

An all around shitty situation down there. Great thanks to Scout for keeping this in the forefront.

Quote of the Day deux

Paul Krugman

Well, here's a question for those who might be tempted, yet again, to shy away from a confrontation with Mr. Bush over Iraq: How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a bully's ego?

Quote of the Day

The Chief:

... I guess they take us for fools, Honor means nothing to some of these feather merchant sons of bitches ...

If the people who made the mess ...

Are tasked with cleaning it up, odds are you'll have a bigger mess.

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The people writing the lessons learned on the Iraq disaster are the very people who created it, and who have a vital stake in rewriting history before anybody figures out they're the ones responsible for one of history's most profound fiascos.

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These are the geniouses who are now calling for more troops.

Hel-lo, McFly?

These are the same geniouses who called General Shinseki a traitor when he advised Congress of the need for 250,000 troops or more before the balloon went up. These are the same people who believed it would be over in six months. These are the same people who refused to learn the lessons of Gulf 1, when we needed a half-million boots to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, analogous to liberating Rhode Island. Iraq is 20 times the size of Kuwait with 10 times as many people, who don't like us, and serious sectarian divisions.

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Insurgent forces, especially successful ones like the ones we face in Iraq, don't engage in decisive battles with superior, conventional military units. That's Asymmetric Warfare 101 stuff. It doesn't surprise me that Kristol doesn't know that, but why anybody still listens to Kristol or any of his cronies in the Big Brother Broadcast Network is a mystery mini-series to me.

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You could put a half-million troops on the ground now but all they will be are targets for both sides. Those of you old enough to remember Vietnam will recognize the strategy all too well. We had 500,000 under arms in that toilet and look what it got us. That's where we should have learned our lessons.

It's time to get out and let the Iraqis sort out what works for them. Diplomatically, we should enlist Iran and Syria's aid to prevent a failed state existing between them, as Chuck Hagel said yesterday.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Chimp is ready to make that act of contrition.

The last honest Republican

That would be Chuck Hagel:

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No, that's not the point. Of course the Iranians and Syrians are not going to come to our assistance. Of course not. But they are going to respond in their own self-interest. All nations respond in their own self-interests. Tallyrand once said that nations don't have friends. They have interests. He was right. Ahh, it's not in the interest of Syria or Jordan or Iran to have a failed state that would be a complete mess for the middle east.

Why did the Iranians help us in Afghanistan? Why did they cooperate with us in Afghanistan on intelligence matters and other issues? Because they didn't want a failed state next to them which comes with all the problems. They didn't want heroin moving into their borders. What we're not getting here, is we're not getting a full and comprehensive wide-lens appreciation of interests. And the other fact is that there will be no peace in the middle east which we haven't talked about

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And he calls Holy Joe on his stupid, Bush-sucking, warmongering, bullshit. Hagel's the only Rethug I have any respect for.

Insurance

My good pal Scout Prime was on my ass about this first thing this morning (as well as a whole bunch of other bloggers I see ... heh ... she's a pit bull).

St. Paul Travelers Cos. Inc., Louisiana's largest commercial insurance provider, plans to cancel all its commercial property policies in the New Orleans area next year, sparking fears that other insurers will follow and slow the region's economic recovery.

While the St. Paul, Minn., company refused to say how many commercial policies will be affected or specify where the cuts will be in South Louisiana, two insurance brokers who were briefed by the company this week say Travelers will not renew any property insurance for businesses in Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and eastern St. Tammany parishes. Cuts will also affect individual businesses in other parts of South Louisiana, including St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes.

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I showed this to Mrs. F, an executive in Japan's largest insurance company, and she agrees that other insurers will most likely follow suit. Any excuse to limit exposure. The insurance companies will all jump on this statement by the insurance commissioner:

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"They cited the state of the rebuilding of our levee system as the primary reason for their decision," [State Insurance Commissioner Jim] Donelon said.

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The one to blame for this is your Commander-in-Chief and what he's done to FEMA and the entire emergency management infrastructure of the federal government. Don't expect anything to happen in NOLA until the Corps of Engineers rebuilds the levees to withstand Cat 4 and 5 storms. The insurers won't risk their bottom line to underwrite properties that can be washed away as easily as they were during Katrina. Let's hope something can be done before too much time passes and NOLA becomes nothing but a fond memory.

And just an observation. I give Mrs. F the willies when I can speak of combat, death, and destruction in a cool and detached manner. She does the same thing to me when she can talk about the value of a human life or property in purely clinical, actuarial, bottom line terms.

Heroes vs. Whores

A little from the lovely Eleanor Clift:

...Webb could have asked how the Bush girls are doing, partying their way across Argentina. He could have told Bush he was worried about his son; the vehicle next to him was blown up recently, killing three Marines. Given the contrast between their respective offspring, Webb showed restraint.

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I still say Webb shoulda put the Coward-in-Chief on his ass. Goes to show, in both cases, the peanut doesn't fall far from the tree. Good article.

Update:

Jo Fish:

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It would be nice if the one George was more careful and intellectually honest than the other, but apparently that's not to be. Interesting how we get two fools named George in one city and both are so full of themselves that they can never be wrong, isn't it?

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Housekeeping

As you'll notice, thanks to FeedBurner, you can now get the Brain on any newsreader or even your cellphone or Blackberry (or via email, just fill out the form). Just see the 'Feeds' section in the left sidebar and click on the service you use.

Quote of the Day

Driftglass:

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To be sure, on November 7th, the Right certainly got their collective noses bloodied and asses sawed off and served to them on the good china.

This happened when a majority of the voting public finally showed its contempt for a clique that had literally done nothing with its One Party Rule but endlessly hector everyone else on morality, while happily giving aid, shelter and comfort to a menagerie of Pious, Jebus-luvin' liars, traitors, briber takers, bribe makers, war profiteers, war criminals, looters, child sex predators and, just for goofs, gay-hooker-frequenting, meth smoking preachers ... so long as they puked up the correct slogans or voted the right way.


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Weekly blogwhore

Chapter 8 of my novel The Captains is up at The Practical Press.

Saturday Night Out West

I was goin' through some old (!) photos and found one of me'n Mrs. G out on the town.

Wildwood Weed

This is an old country song by Jim Stafford:

The name of this song is 'The Wildwood Flower'
Now 'The Wildwood Flower' is an old country classic
It gained a whole new popularity
The song isn't any more popular
But the flower is doin' real good

The wildwood flower grew wild on the farm
And we never knowed what it was called
Some said it was a flower and some said it was weed
I didn't gave it much thought...
One day I was out there talking to my brother
Reached down for a weed to chew on
Things got fuzzy and things got blurry
And then everything was gone
I Didn't know what happened
But I knew it beat the hell out of sniffin' burlap

I come to and my brother was there
And he said, 'What's wrong with your eyes?'
I said, 'I don't know, I was chewing on a weed'
He said, 'Let me give it a try'
We spent the rest of that day and most of that night
Trying to find my brother, Bill
Caught up with him 'bout six o'clock the next mornin'
Naked, swinging on the windmill
He said he flew up there
I had to fly up and get him down
He was about half crazy

The very next day we picked a bunch of them weeds
And put 'em in the sun to dry
Then we mashed 'em up and we cleaned 'em all
And put 'em in the corncob pipe
Smokin' them wildwood flowers got to be a habit
We didn't see no harm
We thought it was kind of handy
Take a trip and never leave the farm

A big ol' puff on the wildwood weed
Next thing you know
We's just wandering behind the little animals
All good things gotta come to an end
And it's the same with the wildwood weed

One day this feller from Washington come by
And he spied us and he turned white as a sheet
And he dug and he burned
And he burned and he dug
And he killed all our cute little weeds
Then he drove away
We just smiled and waved
Sittin' there on that sack of seeds

Y'all come back now, ya hear

Best Christmas Lights Ever

I found this at Maru's:



Excellent creativity but if this guy lived across the street from me, I'd burn the place down after the second night.

Bah Freaking Humbug

I've decided I hate the holidays.

When my kids were little,I enjoyed this time of year. Putting up the tree,buying presents and hiding them,those middle of the night gift wrapping sessions,even cooking the big ass dinner.

Nowadays,not so much.

I'm not the "typical" female as in I HATE shopping(the only exception to this is the bookstore,my only shopping weakness). This time of year is THE worst time to do it. People are mean,in a hurry,and there's always at least one spoiled brat(an adult one)who has to be an asshole because his/her gift choice isn't there. The parking lots are crowded,and full of people who don't give a fuck if they run you over. The stores are a trainwreck by 10 AM,with shit strewn everywhere. And why is it a store will have 50 damned cash registers but never more than 10 open?

Maybe it's all those years I spent working retail,maybe I'm getting cranky in my old age,or maybe I'm sick of working my ass off making the Holidays nice and pretty for everyone else. Maybe it's that my birth family has nothing more to do with me or my kids,and my inlaws don't travel for Christmas so it's just me,the kiddo and the hubby here on Dec 25th. Maybe it's a combo of all the above. But whatever it is,I just can't get all worked up about Christmas anymore.

Personally,I'd rather get gifts for no special reason at all,rather than get them because someone deemed the day a must give situation. And no jewelry,I never wear it,and if I do,I end up losing it. I'm not a blingy type of gal,never have been. Hell,my wedding ring is a tattoo for gods sake,so is the Hubby's.

Next year,I want a vacation for Christmas(or from Christmas). Go somewhere that has snow and a roaring fireplace where the meals are served to me for a change. Someplace I can ride a horse and hear hooves crunching in the snow. Where there's mountains and clean air. Where I can lie in the snow and make snow angels or get into a snowball fight. Short of that,I'd settle for Peace on Earth,Goodwill and all that stuff (hahahahaha,like that's gonna happen).

Sure,I'll buy all the kids in my life gifts,that's really who the season is for anyhoo. But really,I could do without all the rest of it and not miss it in the least.

And you just try keeping two rambunctious cats out of a Christmas tree,go ahead. Last year we had no tree,they literally had it tipped over 10 minutes after I got it wrestled into the tree stand. I ended up dragging it out on the back porch and decorating it with stuff the birds and squirrels would eat. I decorated my son's room instead,with a little fake tree and all the lights I could find.

And guys,much as I love ya all,it's a well known fact that without the women in many of your families,Christmas wouldn't happen. You would not believe the amount of pressure there is in some families to have a Martha Stewart style holiday. You also wouldn't believe how fucking neurotic that makes some women. I know,I used to be one of them. It's incredibly liberating once you get over yourself in this regard. And for some incredible reason,it's also alot cheaper. I know some people who don't get the previous Christmas paid off before the current year's holidays come 'round again. Fuck that.

Oh,and if you spend more than a dollar or two on a roll of wrapping paper,you're an idiot. And bows? Who needs 'em? Why in the hell would you spend money on something that gets ripped up and thrown in the trash in 5 seconds? That's why God gave us Dollar Stores. And gift bags. My grandma,god love her,used to carefully unwrap gifts and try to save the paper and bows. But she never re-used the damned stuff,so I have no idea why she even bothered.

Yes,I know,I'm such a buzz kill. But I quit. Why should I spend 6 hours cooking for a meal that lasts 20 minutes and then takes another hour to clean up after? And decorating,just so I can spend a few more hours taking it all down after a week or two and store it for another year?

This year,the meal is being cooked by the Honeybaked Ham store. The gifts will be shipped to me via online stores. The only thing I'll have to do is wrap and ship to family far away. And no more stupid card sending either.

A very merry UN-Christmas to all,and to all a.....oh hell,I don't know.

Quote of the Day

Pudentilla, good to hear that name again, blogging at Skippy's about George Will's whiny diatribe in the WaPo:

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And then, in a somewhat embarrassed tone, the advertiser will gently explain to the crack WaPo publishing team, that the comments prove that the overwhelming majority of WaPo readers think that its highest social utility ranks somewhere between birdcage liner and fishwrap. So could they please lower the rates?

Am I the only one ...

Who's had enough of Rachael Ray? We just came back from the grocery store and her face is plastered on everything. I see her on TV, on billboards, and on the side of city buses. Enough already.