El Presidente Roundup

America Likes the Boomy-Boomy

The Bush Administration's Approach to Governance Involves High Explosives and Very Few Questions

Bush Says We Should Have Bombed Auschwitz
Rice does a good job spinning it though.

Bush: US should have bombed Auschwitz

Bush Visits Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial; Says US Should Have Bombed Auschwitz

...

"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

...

"We were talking about the often-discussed 'Could the United States have done more by bombing the train tracks?'" Rice told reporters later aboard Air Force One. "And so we were just talking about the various explanations that had been given about why that might not have been done."

Yes, I'm sure that Bush was really into those wonky, difficult moral policy questions from over half a century ago. Then he wrote a thesis on high energy particle physics before putting in a couple of hours experimentation on neurobiology.

Riiiight.

I admit, I skimmed the headline and didn't go down to Rice's explanation at first, which makes it sound a lot better, but do you believe her? This is the same White House that claims Chimpy is a genius who reads several books a day. You've seen the man; do you believe that?

Of course not.

As to whether the US should have bombed the train tracks leading to the death camps, that's a much harder dilemma. Would it have helped? Or would the Nazis have shrugged their shoulders and just shot the Jews wherever they were currently stuck, and the war ground on a bit longer without that aerial support hitting their cities and industry?

Ending the war ended the Holocaust. Anything else would have only slowed it. I'm not sure you can condemn either course of action... it's not like we can turn back time and try out alternate scenarios.

Personally I think Bush meant it literally; he thinks that you can save anyone, liberate anyone, by blowing the crap out of them. He has a fundamental misunderstanding of how bombs work; he thinks they give off magical freedom rays and candy, not fire, shrapnel and concussive death.

Idiot.

Source: Raw Story

IU Student Finds TSA Website Screws You Twice
So the TSA set up a website to protest your being on the no-fly list.

They set this site up in a highly insecure fashion, so you could phish the names of the people who wanted off the list to abuse however you saw fit.

Coincidence? Or pouring salt in the wounds of people they already didn't like?

Perhaps just usual Bush corruption:

The report, posted Friday on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Web site, also found that TSA awarded a no-bid contract to a small Virginia-based company to run the program.

Investigators found one of the senior program managers at TSA who oversaw the launch of the redress site is a former employee of Desyne Web Services — the company that received the $48,816 contract to develop the site and continues to do business with TSA today. The employee is also a high school friend of the company's owner, according to the report.

Wow, nobody could have forseen that going badly.

A graduate student in Indiana discovered the site's security vulnerabilities last February while researching a paper on boarding pass security. Chris Soghoian — who is getting his doctorate in information security at Indiana University — noticed that the redress site was not secure, yet it asked for names, Social Security numbers and birth dates. Soghoian said when he sees a site like this "alarm bells go off in my head."

Good on you, Chris.

Source: Raw Story

Oh, Is That All?
Bush says we could be in Iraq 'easily' another ten years.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush said on Friday the United States would have a long-term presence in Iraq that could "easily" last a decade, but that it would be at the invitation of the Iraqi government.

Source: Reuters (duh)

Jimmy Carter Responds
Courtesy of The Onion.

Blah

I've been negligent in cleaning out my PVR, so it automagically decided to delete an Olbermann and a Daily Show/Colbert that I wanted.

Curses.

I really need to get some housekeeping done on this stuff.

News from the Other War

On the other side of the world, we're losing a second war simultaneously.

We've been at war in Afghanistan, or the direct cause of war in Afghanistan, since at least the 1980s, when we took to arming and training the Muhjahadeen fighters who would later form both the opposing sides in the ongoing civil war there today. Al-Queda is a direct result of our ill-considered plan to help push the Soviet army out of a worthless patch of dirt that they could never have held for any length of time either way. It was stupid, naive, and the consequences have been devastating for the entire world.

There is a Tom Hanks movie coming out on the subject called 'Charlie Wilson's War', about the otherwise do-nothing Congressman who singlehandedly was responsible for much of the push to train and arm these men, who now form the core of the Al-Queda terror network that we are supposedly fighting. From the trailers it looks to be a feel-good, 'rollicking' story of how one person can make a difference, even in politics.

It'd be worth noting what difference Wilson's plan ultimately made. But I don't expect Hollywood to put a downer ending on the movie. Me, I'd close it with a shot of the WTC going down in flames, and the screams of people running down the streets of New York in terror. *shrug*

All this leads to the situation today, where we continue to deal with the fallout from the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Taliban and Al-Queda forces wage a continuous low level war in Afghanistan, operating out of a semi-autonomous region across the border in our so-called ally, Pakistan. Pakistan is run by a corrupt military dictator by the name of Musharraf. Yes I know he supposedly stepped down as head of the army. If you believe that he's not in control, however, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I'm eager to offload.

That brings us up to today, where we are throwing money, weapons and training at Pakistan in the hopes of cleaning up the mess where we threw money, weapons and training at Afghanistan twenty years ago...

Waste in the Wasteland
As you might suspect, writing blank checks to a military dictator is a rather inefficent way of fighting an enemy. Case in point: Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. The strategy to improve the Pakistani military, they said, needs to be completely revamped.

Five billion dollars seems like chump change compared to Iraq, but it's worth remembering that spending money badly can be worse than spending no money at all.

Civilian opponents of President Pervez Musharraf say he used the reimbursements to prop up his government. One European diplomat in Islamabad said the United States should have been more cautious with its aid.

“I wonder if the Americans have not been taken for a ride,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Case in point. The money we've spent has done wonders -- for President Musharraf. We've succeeded in propping up an incompetent dictator whose interests run counter to ours. Bravo.

After Six Years, a Plan

Early last week, six years after President Bush first began pouring billions of dollars into Pakistan’s military after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon completed a review that produced a classified plan to help the Pakistani military build an effective counterinsurgency force.

Nice that we thought this one through in advance. By 'in advance', I actually mean, 'not at all', of course. Think of it as Newspeak for the Bush administration.

“I was astounded,” said the officer, who would not speak for attribution because he now holds another senior military post. “On one side of the border we were paying a billion to get very little done. On the other side of the border — the Afghan side — we were scrambling to find the funds to train an army that actually wanted to get something done.”

I could do this all day, but you should probably just read the article for the full details on our colossal pants-downer in Pakistan. It's a national disgrace, but with any luck for our esteemed defense contractors, we'll still be there, doling out cash and guns, in another 20 years.

Source: The New York Times

With Friends Like These
The Brits have been stabbing us, the Afghan people, and Democracy in general in the back with a dull knife, apparently conducting negotiations with the Taliban in secret.

Despite Gordon Brown denying this from the floor of Parliament.

Source: The Telegraph

Like Rats from a Sinking Ship
Meanwhile, it turns out, the UN and the EU have been up to much the same tricks, with their representatives also meeting with the Taliban despite the direct opposition of the governor of the region in which these meetings took place. They have since been thrown out of the country.

Source: BBC News

So, to recap. The United States is spending billion of dollars to prop up the Pakistani government, which has no intention of actually arming its own troops properly or fighting the radicals in its own territory, but would love to take our cash to keep itself in power and to build weapons to fight the Indian government.

The British have been directly undermining us by conducting secret negotiations with the people who directly supported the WTC attacks.

And now the Afghan government has had to expel representatives from the EU and the UN for conspiring to meet with Taliban officials.

This war is going SO WELL.

Tuesday News...Day...

Read away.

H2 drivers are really lame
But their suped up little SUV is even lamer.

Honestly, these morons think that because they take a standard SUV frame and put a big, boxy set of body panels on it that it has suddenly become a military asset. They deserve to be fleeced. It's just a pity that they get to ruin our atmosphere by actually driving the damn things afterward.

Never Let Reason Get in the Way of Your Superstition
Caste discrimination continues in India. Truly ugly stuff. Even the local government is siding with the bigots who want to drive an 'untouchable' out of her job because she cooks food for their kids.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Nothing good ever comes from any interaction between religion and government. Ever.

Source: The Independent

Hooray for Compact Fluorescents
Looks like the big Energy bill that's about to be passed will contain a provision to phase out traditional incandescent light bulbs in favor of CFs. This is definitely a step in the right direction, albeit a small one.

To all those who are worried about mercury emissions from CF bulbs, remember two things. One: the mercury in a CF is sealed inside the glass. It's not going to jump out and bite you. Two: Most power in the United States is generated by coal. Burning coal releases enormous amounts of mercury directly into the air and water supply. Even if CF bulbs aren't recycled, merely by reducing the amount of energy that has to be generated by coal, they force a net reduction in the amount of mercury in the water we all have to drink.

Here, have a chart.

So, yeah. Still better off.

Eta Carinae Has a New Rival for My Affection

NASA has released a swath of images showing one galaxy blasting the living daylights out of another using radiation from its supermassive black hole core. Very nice.

Any Earth-like planets in the path would be quickly rendered sterile and uninhabitable by living things, unless they're very deep underground. Again, very nice.

Source: Space.com

Shawshank Reenactment Society, First Chapter
So two inmates actually pulled off an escape from a 'high-security' prison by using the trick from The Shawshank Redemption and covering the hole they had made in the wall with girly pictures.

Seriously. Not making this up.

Source: CNN.com

Huckabee is Very, Very Creepy
So is his family. Apparently his demented son and a friend, when at a Scout retreat, strung up a stray dog and tortured it to death. Huckabee then used his position as governor to keep them out of jail.

He even canned a guy for not looking the other way strenuously enough.

Source: Correntwire

The CIA Is a Real Piece of Work
Thanks to various lawsuits, information has emerged on exactly how the CIA tortures people we illegally spirit away in the dead of night, around the world, in violation of common sense and international law.

It's an ugly story indeed, showing that we've learned a lot from our various client states in Latin America and further afield about how to inflict inhuman suffering. Everything's here, from sleep deprivation to temporal disorientation, isolation, confinement, plus we've got the new tricks where we use medical professionals to prevent the inmates from killing themselves, starving themselves, and once they've been completely snapped like twigs, we use psychotropic drugs to force them back to sanity for another round of torture!

Thanks a lot, various American doctors, for going along with this scheme.

Source: Salon.com

These People Need to Get Out More
Honestly, when you start talking about the future like it's going to come out of a Cory Doctorow novel, you really need to touch base with reality. Computers and virtual spaces are all well and good, but as long as you can't actually plug into the Matrix, there are limits to how much they're going to change society. And no matter how much you might want your information-drenched, 'everything at your fingertips' society to work perfectly, nothing ever does. A world where you're never lost because you have your own personal HUD is a world where you're never alone because someone is watching your feed, even if that 'someone' is just an NSA spybot program. A world where you can find any service you want, from pizza to a lawyer, is a world where you'll be bombarded ceaselessly with advertisements FOR pizza, for lawyers. And a world where everybody can produce their own goods from their own energy is a world ready made for religious extremists and bombmakers, a paradise for your Montana wingnut crowd who can finally make their very own brand of Semtex.

So please, enough with the blue-sky blagospheric world-view. It's more than a little exhausting.

Source: Firedoglake

Ways NOT to Make a Christmoween Snowman

1. Try to use unpackable fine powder snow, drier than the Sahara
2. Come up with 'ingenious' method to harden said snow using water
3. Fail to spot-test fake blood on snow to see if in fact it will resemble blood, or merely turn into a viscous goo upon contact
4. Continue meddling even as ingenious snow shatters upon every slight touch.
5. Go to bed instead of committing ritual suicide, as honor demands

So, yeah.  A bit down this morning.  If it even survives the harsh light of dawn, I might take pictures of my Ozymandian disaster out there, just for posterity.

But don't count on it.