Draftier still, the rules

Stole this whole thing from Kos:

The President said: "Forget all this talk about the DRAFT". Here's why you shouldn't. On October 4, Tom Delay attempted to defuse fears about a Bush Draft by calling for a vote on Democrat Charlie Rangel's protest legislation to 1) expand the draft from men 18-25, to women and men 18-34 and 2)reinstate the draft immediately. Not only was the legislation defeated by a vote of 402-2, Rangel voted against his own bill--a House first. The Republicans are saying that since the Rangel legislation has been defeated, no one need worry about a re-instatement of the draft if President Bush is re-elected.

The truth is that any President can go to Congress under the Military Selective Service Act, the current registration law, and ask for re-authorization of the Combat Draft. All Congress need do is pass a 1-page "trigger resolution" and the Combat Draft for men 18-25 is back. At the same time, the Medical Draft is automatically activated for men and women, 18-44, with no deferments for health reasons.

The main worry for young people is that beyond Iraq, Bush and Cheney are following the neo-con plan that would involve the invasion of still more countries, such as Syria and Iran. In fact, Wes Clark charges in his book Winning Modern Wars, that a senior Pentagon official told him in 2001 that there was a 5-year plan to topple 7 countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Somalia. Assuming Libya is now off the list, that still leaves five countries.

So Bush can reinstate the draft with just a wink and a nod from Congress. And being that EVERYTHING is Repub controlled, they could do this overnight if they wanted.

Wolcott On The Debate

James Wolcott, for an uptown Manhattanian, is almost as genteel as the Fixer. This post blisters Dubya's and the pundits' ass. Scroll down to "Empty Volcano". Only about an inch, don't get lazy and miss this one.

For much of last night's debate George Bush looked like a blister about to pop.

Bush reminded me most of Pat Buchanan last night, not perhaps the best model to imitate if you're courting independents and women.

As Pauline Kael used to say after reading the reviews of certain movie critics, "It's hard to believe they were actually looking at the screen." Fortunately, the cable-news spinmeisters seem to matter less and less in the framing of the debate reaction--they've insulted the viewers' sense of reality too many times.

You know, for a guy with a ten-million-dollar pad on the 600th floor, this fella ain't too bad.

A coupla posts farther down, he comes up with this line about Dubya's rumored earpiece:

He doesn't need the assistance of an electronic feed to hear voices in his head.

I like this guy. He will be on 'Topic A with Tina Brown' tonight on CNN.

LBC On Child-rearing

The Worthwhile Christians at Landover Baptist Church have more advice on child rearing:

As a Christian parent, to find yourself raising a boy who expresses no interest in sports is not only embarrassing to you and your family, but also an insult to the Creator (God) and a public humiliation to members of your Baptist community. If you are in a position where a son you were once proud of, turns out to be a little sissy by asking you if he can quit playing sports, we pray that the helpful tips below will assist you in getting your limp-wristed little Nancy-boy back on the road to masculinity.

For even more advice on how to make your child into a Good Christian, see their massive archives on a subject near and dear to everybody's heart.

Only In California

Steve Harvey's column in today's LATimes:

Don't know if you've heard, but officials at Cal State Hayward up north want to change the school's name to Cal State East Bay, Hayward being either too obscure or too drab for their taste.

A trend could be developing in the Cal State system.

When Camarillo was chosen for another branch a couple of years ago, the school was named Cal State Channel Islands, even though the campus is not on one of those rocky little islands.

What's next? Cal State Long Beach becoming Cal State Queen Mary? Cal State Fullerton becoming Cal State Disneyland?

How about Cal State Northridge becoming Cal State Fault Line?

Afghanistan Votes

Editorial in Washington Post:

AFTER ENDURING Soviet occupation, civil war and rule by a medieval-minded Islamic militia, millions of Afghans lined up at polling stations yesterday for the first free election in their country's history. This was an extraordinary event, the more so because it happened in spite of concerted efforts by the Taliban militia and its al Qaeda allies to prevent it. Thanks in part to U.S., NATO and Afghan forces and in part to the remarkable determination of Afghan citizens to launch their democracy, the enemy campaign failed. The turnout percentage for the presidential vote may rival that of the U.S. presidential election.

Not surprisingly, polls show that Mr. Karzai is supported by most Afghans -- and so is the United States. In a poll sponsored by the Asia Foundation earlier this year, U.S. troops received a favorable rating from 67 percent of the population. A more recent survey by an Afghan human rights coalition showed that 75 percent of voters said they felt free to choose any can- didate in the elections, more than 90 percent said all women should vote and 85 percent believed the election will bring positive change to Afghanistan.

Sounds good. I believe our election will bring positive change to the United States, too. If Karzai was running against Dubya, he'd have my votes.

Lynne 'n Dickie, Sittin' In A Tree......

If you feel that you haven't thrown up enough yet on this fine day, go read this. Gag me with a fork lift.

I'm Glad She's Not Mad At Me.....

My favorite Irish redhead sounds off about Dubya. If the guy journalists had as much cojones as she does, we'd all be better off. Maureen Dowd in today's NYTimes.

We face a choice now between a president who rolled us on Iraq and a senator who got rolled by the president on Iraq.

George Bush is not giving an inch on Iraq. He's toughing out the cascade of confirmation and criticism from his own people about the hyperpower hyperbole that led to an unnecessary war and an unruly occupation. His advisers say it's better for the president to appear out of touch than apologetic. He'd rather seem delusional than deluded.

He can't admit what the Duelfer report says, that Saddam was no threat to the U.S. or any other country. The mushroom cloud was a Fig Newton of Dick Cheney's feverish imagination. That would mean W. didn't fix his father's screw-up, but he screwed up his father's fix. A big Oedipal oops.

The president may not have gotten his money's worth with the report of Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector. After all, in a vain retroactive attempt to justify his hokum about W.M.D., he had 1,200 people working for 15 months - stretching our scarce supply of Arab linguists - to produce 918 pages at a cost of about a billion dollars just to find out that Saddam would have liked to have had weapons if he could have, but he couldn't, so he didn't.

But at least for his billion, the president got some earnest Introduction to American Literature analysis of the Iraqi dictator and his taste for some Western culture, noting that Saddam felt a kinship with Hemingway's protagonist Santiago, the poor Cuban fisherman (even though the rich Saddam liked to grenade-fish - toss a grenade in the water and then send in scuba divers to fetch the dead fish).

She says that like a it's a bad thing. The old DuPont lure. Saves time. Hey. whattya gonna do, fish, or fuck around?

Mr. Bush tried to pretend the devastating Duelfer report backed him up, noting after the report came out that Saddam "retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and could have passed this knowledge to our terrorist enemies."

W. should have followed his father's policy on hypotheticals. As Poppy Bush would say, when someone asked him to be speculative: "If a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its tail on the ground."

That gal is hotter than a country boy pissin' on an electric fence!

More from Abu Ghraib

Newly released documents at Intel Dump.

Balls and character

Two things that are missing from our mainstream media. You know, I have to admit I never really liked Mark Halperin of ABC News. He always seemed a bit effete and wishy-washy to me. But I have a whole new respect for him because he says what none have the balls to do.

Below is the content of his memo. I stole it from that moron Drudge.

It goes without saying that the stakes are getting very high for the country and the campaigns - and our responsibilities become quite grave

I do not want to set off (sp?) and endless colloquy that none of us have time for today - nor do I want to stifle one. Please respond if you feel you can advance the discussion.

The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.

Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that.

I'm sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.

It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.

In this era of media intimidation by the Right, Halperin is a breath of fresh air. A man who stands on principle. I definitely have to reassess my opinion of him. Way to go, Mark.

Update: 12:30:

Jesse at Pandagon has more to say.

The spooks too

A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.

The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.

[. . .]

John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented bluntly: "When the President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation faces dire consequences." [my emphasis]

Relations between the White House and the agency are widely regarded as being at their lowest ebb since the hopelessly botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-sponsored exiles under President John F Kennedy in 1961.

There is anger within the CIA that it has taken all the blame for the failings of pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes.

[. . .]

In the latest clash, a senior former CIA agent revealed that Mr Cheney "blew up" when a report into links between the Saddam regime and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist behind the kidnappings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq, including the Briton Kenneth Bigley, proved inconclusive.

Other recent leaks have included the contents of classified reports drawn up by CIA analysts before the invasion of Iraq, warning the White House about the dangers of post-war instability. Specifically, the reports said that rogue Ba'athist elements might team up with terrorist groups to wage a guerrilla war.[From the Telegraph via Kos.]

[. . .]

So, let's see. The grunts are pissed, the Agency is pissed, and I'm sure there are others waiting to go public as well. It looks like Bush's plans are unraveling. If this were some Third World toilet, I'd tell you to prepare for a coup. In our case, prepare for other government employees to come forward, telling stories of how Bush & Co balled up their departments too, afraid that another 4 years of this will completely FUBAR this country.

Jarhead wisdom

I always kid the Marines that they're not too smart. I'm ex-Air Force, what do you want? But maybe they're not as dumb as they look.

"Sometimes I see no reason why we're here," Perez said. "First of all, you cannot engage as many times as we want to. Second of all, we're looking for an enemy that's not there. The only way to do it is go house to house until we get out of here."

That's from a 20 year old grunt.

"I feel we're going to be here for years and years and years," said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. "I don't think anything is going to get better; I think it's going to get a lot worse. It's going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We're going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . . We're always going to be here. We're never going to leave." [my emphasis]

Just think about what's going on in the Holy Land, what has gone on there over the last 40 years. Do we want to keep sending our kids into that meat grinder? Read Gordon's post from the other day for more on Bush losing the Jarheads. My partner is one of the smarter Marines I've known, by the way. He'd make good Air Force material. Ha!

Link to WaPo via Corrente.

Michael Moore Stirs It Up At UNR

Michael Moore is scheduled to appear at the University of Nevada at Reno on October 13. His visit has stirred up controversy (You don't say?) amongst top business people. These guys are pretty blatant about wanting to stop him from appearing. Read the whole article at The Reno News and Review, Reno's alternative weekly.

An overweight, unshaven man in a baseball cap seems to be frightening some of the city's leading business people.

Reno businessmen Rob Winkel (Barker Coleman real estate), Len Savage (Savage and Sons plumbing supply), Rick Reviglio (Western Nevada Supply), John Madole (Associated General Contractors), and Larry Sankovich (Sankovich and Simkin accountants) spoke at a Sept. 23 Associated Students of the University of Nevada senate meeting, referring to "the likes of Michael Moore" (Sankovich) and the "naïve and misled" students (Madole) and later even offered money to the young officials to alter the event (Reviglio).

Trust me, these people are used to getting their own way. Big fish in a small pond.

Champagne said that whatever prospect of success the alumni and businesspeople had of convincing the students to cancel the event was probably eliminated by the tone they used.

"And so they came in to oppose the event, and the Senate didn't respond too well because basically they came in with an 'angry parent'-type attitude and really kind of talked down to the senators."

Kudos to those students for holdin' their mud.

Later, Reviglio told the students he went over their heads to university administrators to try to get the Moore visit cancelled and was rebuffed. That step deepened the feeling among students that the businesspeople felt they were dealing with children instead of adults.

Nevada legislative lobbyist Greg Ferraro says that when he was a student at UNR, there was an effort to cancel an appearance by Rolling Stone writer Hunter S. Thompson, but it failed. And then, Ferraro says, Thompson was so drunk that he barely completed his speech.

That quote was just for fun. I LIKE Hunter S. Thompson, drunk or sober, like that could happen!

Read our previous post about Moore's scheduled appearance in September at CSU

Free speech

From Pandagon:

So far as I know, this is wholly without precedent. For Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose stations penetrate almost 25% of the nation's homes, to demand that its stations preempt their programming in order to run a Moonie-made, SwiftVet inspired attack piece on John Kerry right before the election is a stunning foray into partisanship, particularly for such a powerful member of the "liberal media" (and a big fuck you to the conservatives who aren't vocally shitting their pants over such obvious media bias). After all, it was Sinclair who recently made news for refusing to air the Nightline special that recited the names of solders killed in Iraq. And it's Sinclair executives who, during the 2004 political cycle, have made $68,000 in political contributions, 97% of them to Republicans. And in that figure lies the Kerry campaign's great opportunity:

[. . .]

So, we all agree this is outrageous, right? But Xan at Corrente looks at it a little differently:

[. . .]

First off, given the topic, I don't think viewership is going to be all that great. People did the great Vietnam Rehashing back during the Swiftie Liars thing and those who could be persuaded to that view already were.

Second, look at the qualifications of the filmmaker here. I will defer to John Gorenfeld, expert in all things Moonie, if I'm wrong, but my bet is that this film will be so godawful as to be laughable. So over-the-top that it will boost Kerry votes in the areas where it's seen rather than the reverse Sinclair is counting on.

Thirdly--hey, remember the rules. We are lefties, we are in favor of free speech. The solution to bad speech is more speech. We don't cut off that with which we disagree, we outshout it.

Now is the time to deploy some of that Soros money. Find a competing station in every market Sinclair operates in and buy the time to run Going Upriver* in prime time as close to Oct. 30 as can be arranged.

[. . .]

What we should do with the Soros money (sorry for spending your shit, George) is put out ads highlighting the Sinclair move and tie it to the Bush administration better than we did with the Swift Boat Liars.

Short Takes

Just a "quicky" about the debate before the Mrs. and I go shopping. From AlterNet:

Bush still cannot admit a single mistake. His most outrageous spin (aka "lie") was attempting to argue that the new Duelfer Report, showing that Iraq was disarmed, that the Iraqis were not a grave and gathering threat, and that they had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or 9/11, proved he did right going to war. No shame.

There's more where that came from.

And one more thing

[. . .]

KERRY: The goal of the sanctions was not to remove Saddam Hussein, it was to remove the weapons of mass destruction. And, Mr. President, just yesterday the Duelfer report told you and the whole world they worked. He didn't have weapons of mass destruction, Mr. President. That was the objective. [my emphasis]

[. . .]

I was just rereading the transcript and this struck me. Kerry should hammer this more. The sanctions aginast Saddam (begun by Bush I, BTW) did work. There was no need for the war, as most of us here on the left know. But I think Kerry should use more quotes from Bush 41 against Dubya. The Dem spinmeisters should make the point that Dubya is suffering from feelings of inadequacy toward his dad. Like a child, he refused to consider his father's position on Iraq and does just the opposite to prove his independence. Both Freud and Jung would have a ball with this and the DNC and Kerry campaign should as well.

Bush went to war in Iraq to get even with his dad. Do you want a President who acts like a petulant teenager?

From now until 2 Nov., the Dems should do their best to make Bush look unstable. Shouldn't be hard, Dubya has given us enough examples.

Dubya = Little Man, Little Dick, Napoleon Complex

Debate impressions

I watched parts of it, flipping back and forth to the Yankee game (Does that make me a flip-flopper?) before I fell asleep. Gordon summed it up best in his post-debate wrap-up.

For an in depth, quote-by-quote review, check out World O'Crap's take.

And here's the transcript if you want it.

Our example

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's first direct presidential election was thrust into turmoil hours after it began Saturday, when the 15 candidates challenging interim leader Hamid Karzai said they would boycott the results, alleging fraud over the ink meant to ensure people voted only once.

[. . .]

The opposition candidates, meeting at the house of Uzbek candidate Abdul Satar Sirat, signed a petition saying they would not recognize the results of the vote, saying mix-ups with the ink used to mark voters' thumbs opened the way for widespread fraud.

"Today's election is not a legitimate election. It should be stopped and we don't recognize the results," said Sirat, who is an ex-aide to Afghanistan's last king.

[. . .]

Full story.

Yup, Bush says he's spreading democracy. Yes he is, and using Florida 2000 as an example. Did anyone really think these Afghan elections would come off without a hitch? And you know we'll have more of the same when they try it in Iraq. Not to mention our own elections in November. Think Diebold.

Thanks to Kevin Hayden at The American Street for the link.

Got Wood?

The debate tonight was a lot closer than the first one. Bush looked better than in that one, but that surely couldn't have been very hard to pull off.

Kerry "won". He didn't do the gran baile del sombrero that I requested, though. Maybe a Lambada.

I hate to admit this, but I thought Dubya got off the best line of the event.

Kerry was explaining what constitutes a "small business" under this administration. Just about anybody with non-wage income. The example he used was, "President Bush got eighty-four dollars from a lumber company he owns and that makes him a small business."

Bush got up and, with his smirk more good-natured than usual, said,"I've got a lumber company? Somebody should tell me these things."

He then looked at the audience and said, "Anybody need some wood?"

We're still gonna do the giant Busby Berkeley production number on him, though.

Tonight, Tonight......

Please, Big John, please, do a Mexican hat dance on Dubya's grille tonight in St. Looey.

If you do, the rest of us can do a Busby Berkeley number on him on November 2.

One More Reason Not To Say "I Do".....

Yesterday South Knox Bubba had a post with a link to an audio/visual clip of an air strike in Iraq. I wonder if this is the same deal?