St. Patrick's Day News

Ridding Your Country of Non-Existent Snakes Since.... Whenever

Catholic News
First up, we have the Pope irritating me.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI says an immortality pill might not be such a good thing.

During a homily in a church near St. Peter's Square on Sunday, the pontiff was reflecting on the goals of science and wondering whether a pill against death would be a good discovery.

In the view of the pope, the world would be full of old people and there would be no more space for the young. The 80-year-old pontiff says it's better not to hope for biological life that can be made to last forever.

Look, Benny, just because YOU couldn't get your job until someone was old enough to die of natural, or pillow-over-the-face-almost-natural causes, that doesn't mean the rest of us are so eager to live in a death-based society.

If people want to develop longevity medications, you can just, you know, not take them. Don't be such a jerk.

Source: USA Today

On a related note, the Church listed new sins recently. Sadly, forcing other people to die because of your religion isn't on there.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of "new" sins such as causing environmental blight.

The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican's number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

Asked what he believed were today's "new sins," he told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

"(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control," he said.

The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.

Ahh, here we are.

Not only must people die, they should die of horrible genetic disorders, because, err, somewhere an embryo that was going to be tossed out anyway was used to find the cure.

SHOCKING

Give it a rest. Why must we put up with these luddite attitudes?

Oh, but, pollution and environmental damage are on the list too! Which would do a lot of good, if, err, most of the pollution and eco-damage didn't come from overpopulation, which the Church is opposed to preventing.

Darn.

Source: Reuters

Sick Political News
Namely, the stories I missed out on mocking while I was so sick.

Really, it was a bang-up week for idiocy. First you had the Spitzer thing, where the famed anti-corruption prosecutor was, in fact, a long-time patron of illegal prostitution, a crime he had sent others to jail for.

New York governor Eliot Spitzer has spent as much as $80,000 on sex with prostitutes over the past ten years, according to a late-night report in the New York Post Tuesday.

...

The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports Wednesday that federal authorities have identified at least eight different instances where Spitzer engaged the Emperor's Club prostitution ring.

Spitzer also "traveled as far as Florida" for call-girl trysts, the NY Post said.

Ooops!

Source: Raw Story

Now, without getting, err, into the story too much, it's worth noting that there has been a lot of hand-wringing on the Left online, about how Spitzer was caught, whether his suspicious financial transactions were only looked at because he was a Democrat, etc.

The best analysis I've seen suggests that banks are really, really eager not to be the next source of financing for another WTC attack, so anything the SLIGHTEST bit flaky, they report.

This overreaction leads to a lot of people who do semi-suspicious things being flagged. From there, with his big political profile on a shady list, the Justice Department seems to have handed it off to their political integrity people, thinking perhaps he was bribing someone.

Regardless of whether they went digging on Spitzer because he's Spitzer, or because of random occurrences, he deserved to be caught. He was a hypocrite, a liar, and worse, stupid. He'd prosecuted just this sort of crime himself, he knew how risky these wire transfers were, and he did it anyway.

We have enough stupid people in power, thanks.

Speaking of Stupid, we had Geraldine 'Who? Oh, that Woman Who Sorta Almost Kinda Became Vice-President of Bizarro World USA' Ferraro shooting her racist mouth off about Barack Obama this week.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she continued. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

"I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he's going to be able to put an end to partisanship," Ferraro said, clearly annoyed. "Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship - that's the way our country is."

See, why couldn't she have stuck with the second bit? That part's absolutely true. There's no such thing as post-partisan politics in America, not yet anyway. Obama needs to grow up if he thinks he can unify the two parties.

But, err.... yeah. She had already kind of hung out her white linens to dry, hadn't she, by that point. Of course, she cleared up any misconceptions that she had spoken poorly later.

Ferraro, who was Walter Mondale's vice presidential running mate, said Wednesday that her remarks were not racist and had been taken out of context.

"I was talking about historic candidacies and what I started off by saying (was that) if you go back to 1984 and look at my historic candidacy, which I had just talked about all these things, in 1984 if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would have never been chosen as a vice presidential candidate," Ferraro said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "It had nothing to do with my qualification."

Ferraro said she has a 40-year history of opposing discrimination of all kinds, including race, and that she was outraged at criticism of her remarks by David Axelrod, Obama's chief media strategist, because he knows her and her record.

"David Axelrod, his campaign manager, has chose to spin this as a racist comment because every time anybody makes a comment about race who is white — he did it with Bill Clinton, he was successful; he did it with (Pennsylvania governor and Clinton supporter) Ed Rendell, he was less successful; and he is certainly not going to be successful with me," Ferraro told CBS' "The Early Show." "He should have called me up ... He knows I'm not racist."

See, she's not racist, because, although she meant precisely what she said, it doesn't count, because Obama's campaign manager has, err, said that she said exactly what... she said.

Yeah.

Then of course, she has a history of this sort of thing.

April 15, 1988, Washington Post:

And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that because of his "radical" views, "if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."

Asked about this at a campaign stop in Buffalo, Jackson at first seemed ready to pounce fiercely on his critics. But then he stopped, took a breath, and said quietly, "Millions of Americans have a point of view different from" Ferraro's.

Discussing the same point in Washington, Jackson said, "We campaigned across the South . . . without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got North to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan and then Mrs. Ferraro . . . . Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history."

Jesse Jackson handled that with serious class. Talk about composure.

Ferraro, on the other hand, is a jerk. Let us all be glad we're rid of her.

Sources: The Daily Breeze
Yahoo News
The Daily Kos

Gay Teen Faces Death Sentence
I'm honestly not sure what the UK is thinking here.

A gay teenager who claims he faces the death penalty in Iran after his boyfriend was executed there two years ago has spoken of his anger and disappointment at losing his legal battle against deportation.

Mehdi Kazemi, 19, who sought sanctuary in Britain in 2005 when he discovered that his partner had been hanged in Tehran for engaging in homosexual acts, is expected to be returned to Iran in the next few weeks.

Mr Kazemi fled to Holland from Britain last year after the Home Office rejected his claim for asylum. But yesterday, a Dutch court ruled that he should be sent back to Britain after refusing to consider his claim for asylum.

Speaking from an immigration detention centre in Rotterdam, Mr Kazemi told his uncle, a British citizen, that he was "very, very angry" at the decision, which will see him returned to Britain within 72 hours.

He believed he would have had a much better chance of protection from deportation to Iran in Holland, according to his uncle. But yesterday, Holland's highest administrative court rejected his lawyers' arguments that the UK asylum and immigration system did not take proper account of international conventions that uphold the rights of refugees.

Mr Kazemi arrived in London as a student in 2004, after which his boyfriend was arrested by Iranian police, charged with sodomy and hanged. In a telephone conversation with his father in Tehran, Mr Kazemi was told that, before the execution in April 2006, his boyfriend had been questioned about sexual relations he had with other men and under interrogation had named Mr Kazemi as his partner.

In what world does this not constitute a serious asylum claim? They murdered his boyfriend for being gay, after a no doubt prolonged torture session. If you send him back after his public asylum hearing, where he repeatedly admitted to what are, in Iran, capital crimes, THEY WILL KILL HIM.

Duh.

Honestly. This is just shameful.

Mr Kazemi's father has also told him that if the state doesn't kill him, he will. "His father is very angry but his mother still loves him. She is extremely worried for him but she is in a very difficult position. In Iran, mothers don't stop loving their children because they are gay."

Mr Kazemi's only hope now is that the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will exercise her discretion and intervene in his case, or that either the European Court of Human Rights or the European Court of Justice agree to consider the wider implications of gay Iranian asylum-seekers. Mr Kazemi's case is be debated by the European Parliament tomorrow.

Last night, his case was taken up by Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, who wrote to Ms Smith to urge the Government to end the return of all gay asylum-seekers to Iran. "It seems absolutely clear that any gay or lesbian person sent back to Iran is at risk of their lives," he said. "Such returns must be stopped."

Jean Lambert, a Green Party MEP for London, who has signed an appeal to the European Commission and the prime ministers of the UK and the Netherlands regarding the Kazemi case, said: "The law is clear that no one should be returned to a country where their life would be in danger and it seems that Mr Kazemi has a very strong case for asylum."

Omar Kuddus of Gay Asylum UK added: "This is a bitter defeat and the deportation back to Iran must be stopped at any cost."

If they send him back, he'll be killed, and then what? Are we really, as Westerners, so terrified of immigrants that we'd rather they be killed than live down the street?

Yeesh.

Source: The Independent

That Wacky Putin
Always up to mischief.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday came up with a novel -- and old -- solution to corrupt officials, news agencies reported: chop off their hands.

"It would be good to cut off the hand, as they used to in the Middle Ages," Putin was quoted as saying by ITAR-TASS and other national news agencies during a meeting with parliamentary leaders.

...

According to the Russian prosecutor's office, bribes amount to 240 billion dollars (156 billion euros) a year in Russia.

Putin, of course, is the man who hands all the important jobs to his friends and is rumored to have billions hidden away in Switzerland, embezzled from public works.

Pot, kettle, missing hand.

Source: Raw Story

Isn't a Religious President Great?
Who needs reality, when you have Bush?

Speaking Tuesday to the National Religious Broadcasters' convention, President Bush declared the decision to "remove" Saddam Hussein in 2003 the "right decision at this point in my presidency, and it will forever be the right decision.”

...

“The effects of a free Iraq and a free Afghanistan will reach beyond the borders of those two countries,” Bush said. “It will show others what’s possible. And we undertake this work because we believe that every human being bears the image of our maker. That’s why we’re doing this. No one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.”

He lauded the broadcasters for "standing up" for "our values," and pledged to veto the "fairness doctrine," which would enjoin radio stations to give even time to opposing views.

Because requiring people who use the PUBLIC AIRWAVES to demonstrate basic honesty would be, you know, horrible.

People seem to conflate the Fairness Doctrine with losing the First Amendment; it's not the same thing. Radio stations, and tv, and so forth, use the public airwaves, the spectrum that belongs to all of us collectively. They enjoy this privilege because they're supposed to be providing us a service. Why can't we require them to not be propaganda mills or hotbeds of lies and deceit in exchange? If you want to peddle crap to idiots, you're free to print books, make speeches, etc. But the radio spectrum doesn't belong to any one individual; it's a public good and should be allocated accordingly.

Back to the story, though, I love how we have a delusional man-child in office who will never admit a mistake, let alone learn from it.

Thank goodness!

Source: Raw Story

More Religious Values
Here's another example of where the much vaunted Compassionate Conservatism gets you.

The White House has indicated it will not remove a loophole quietly inserted into a budget rule which allows contractors abroad to keep silent if they observe fraud or abuse on US government contracts.

The proposed rule, put forth by the White House Office of Management and Budget last year, exempts all companies who do work overseas from a new regulation requiring US contractors to report waste, fraud or abuse they encounter while doing work for the government.

More than $100 billion in contracts have been awarded for work in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last five years.

"This sends the message that if you're going to do waste, fraud and abuse, don't do it at home, do it abroad," Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) told the Washington Post in Thursday's papers. "This was slipped in at the last minute. . . . It's obviously something you can't justify in any way, and there's no answer to why you'd allow this to occur abroad any more than you'd allow it to occur domestically. There is a question as to how and why the change was made, and we don't know the answer."

That's right, Bush's OMB slipped in a new rule that will make it legal for KBR and Halliburton to steal from your pockets as long as it happens in Iraq.

Nifty!

Even the Bush Justice Department opposes the exemption, which was slipped into the proposed rule last November. No one has come forward to admit the insertion.

"The exemption has riled the Justice Department, which opposes limiting the rule to domestic contracts," the Post wrote. "And the loophole has led members of Congress to call for an investigation amid concerns that someone inserted the exemption as a favor to the contracting lobby that has major interests because of the ongoing wars."

Nah, no one in the Bush administration could be corrupt.

It's unheard of.

Source: Raw Story

Getting Our Money's Worth
Not to fear though, because at least we're getting our stolen money's worth in Iraq.

Right?

Proconsul Petraeus, Who We Must Never Question, on the Bush/McCain Surge:

Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

Did you get that? Failed.

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

Wow. Failure. What a surprise.

Just as a reminder, here's Bush 14 months ago:

I've made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people -- and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act.

Since that speech, 1034 Americans have been killed in Iraq.

Enough said.

Source: Firedoglake

At Least He Cares, Right?
I mean, surely he realizes what he's asking of the military and what's left of the American public spirit, right?

If further proof were needed that President Bush resides in a dream world, he settled the issue on Thursday definitively.

Speaking by videoconference with U.S. military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan about the challenges posed by war, corruption, and the poppy trade, the president unleashed this comment:

I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks.

This sequence is starting to depress even me.

The sad thing is, I could go on like this all day.

Source: Slate

And So I Will
Ok, just for one more article. This time, it's a big NYTimes piece on how the momentous and horrible decision to disband the Iraqi army was made. This is the single biggest mistake of the whole war; it put 300k or so armed men on the street with technical know-how, explosives stolen from their bases and a big chip on their collective shoulders.

Gee, I wonder what could have gone wrong.

BAGHDAD — When President Bush convened a meeting of his National Security Council on May 22, 2003, his special envoy in Iraq made a statement that caught many of the participants by surprise. In a video presentation from Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III informed the president and his aides that he was about to issue an order formally dissolving Iraq’s Army.

The decree was issued the next day.

The broad outlines of the decision are now widely known, defended by proponents as necessary to ensure that Saddam Hussein’s influence did not outlive his ouster from power.

But with the fifth anniversary of the start of the war approaching, some participants have provided in interviews their first detailed, on-the-record accounts of a decision that is widely seen as one of the most momentous and contentious of the war, assailed by critics as all but ensuring that American forces would face a growing insurgency led by embittered Sunnis who led much of the army.

The account that emerges from those interviews, and from access to previously unpublished documents, makes clear that Mr. Bremer’s decree reversed an earlier plan — one that would have relied on the Iraqi military to help secure and rebuild the country, and had been approved at a White House meeting that Mr. Bush convened just 10 weeks earlier.

Yes, that's right. Bremer overrode the existing plans to use the Iraqi army to secure the country and rebuild it, so our troops wouldn't have to.

But, you ask, why? Why would you do such a thing?

God only knows.

The interviews show that while Mr. Bush endorsed Mr. Bremer’s plan in the May 22 meeting, the decision was made without thorough consultations within government, and without the counsel of the secretary of state or the senior American commander in Iraq, said the commander, Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan. The decree by Mr. Bremer, who is known as Jerry, prompted bitter infighting within the government and the military, with recriminations continuing to this day.

Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.

Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.

“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”

So the NSC didn't know, the State Department didn't know, the military on the ground in Iraq -- didn't know.

Oh but it gets better.

When Mr. Bush convened his top national security aides before the March 2003 invasion, he was presented with a clear American plan on what to do with the Iraqi armed forces. American commanders and Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who served as the first American administrator in Iraq, planned to use the Iraqi military to help protect the country and as a national reconstruction force.

The plan was outlined in a PowerPoint presentation that Douglas J. Feith, a senior aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, gave at a National Security Council meeting that Mr. Bush convened on March 12, eight days before the invasion began. Republican Guard units, the forces deemed most loyal to Mr. Hussein, were to be disarmed, detained and dismantled.

But the rest of the army would be retained. Three to five of the divisions would be used to form the “nucleus” of a new Iraqi Army, according to a copy of the PowerPoint slide, which was obtained by The New York Times. Other Iraqi troops would be used as a reconstruction force to rebuild the nation.

The presentation also carried a caution about the risks of dismissing the army in the early months of an American occupation in a nation racked by high unemployment: “Cannot immediately demobilize 250K-300K personnel and put on the street.”

No kidding you can't.

So there was a far better plan in place, and Bremer decided to overrule it on his own initiative. Probably thought he'd come out looking really, really good at his job.

Not so much though.

Though Mr. Bremer was the senior civilian official in Iraq, General McKiernan, the senior American military commander at the time, had a very different view on how to raise a new Iraqi military.

American commanders had hoped that Iraqi units would stay in their deployment areas and surrender en masse instead of running away. While Mr. Bremer argued that desertions meant that the Iraqi Army had disbanded, General McKiernan believed it could be re-established by recalling the soldiers as well as some generals and senior officers who commanded them.

“We knew they had either gone home or come out of uniform,” said General McKiernan, who was in charge of the land forces during the invasion and was recently chosen to lead the NATO force in Afghanistan. “The idea was to bring in the Iraqi soldiers and their officers, put them on a roster and sort out the bad guys as we went.”

At the Central Command, Lt. Gen. John P. Abizaid, who served as the deputy commander, had a similar view. He told associates that Arab armies were traditionally large to keep angry young men off the street and under the supervision of the government. For General Abizaid, a three-division force was a good starting point, but he wanted to expand the force to as close to 10 divisions as possible.

Bremer argues to this day that, because the Iraqi army fled rather than standing still in the desert, that he just HAD to dismantle the whole thing and, err, leave the country in anarchy.

He didn't even try to establish order using Iraqi forces; I guess it would have been less profitable for Halliburton or something.

So of course, now we're at the Blame Game phase of any Bush screwup. This time, the Blame is supposed to fall, again, on the military, for not implementing Dear Leader's plans well enough

As Mr. Bremer and Mr. Slocombe began to prepare their decree, one important question raised by the Pentagon was whether General McKiernan was on board. Mr. Slocombe assigned the task of determining General McKiernan’s position to Col. Greg Gardner, an Army officer on his staff who has since retired from the military.

Mr. Bremer’s headquarters was in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, while General McKiernan’s was at a base near the Baghdad airport several miles away. Colonel Gardner said that there were problems with telephone communications but that he finally reached a member of General McKiernan’s staff who told him that the general accepted the decree.

“I got the impression that Lieutenant General McKiernan was not all that keen about the course of action,” Colonel Gardner said, “but was clearly told that he did endorse the draft.” Colonel Gardner added that he could not recall the name of the staff officer he spoke with.

General McKiernan, however, asserted that he neither reviewed nor backed the decree. “I never saw that order and never concurred,” he said. “That is absolutely false.”

Lt. Gen. J. D. Thurman, who serves as the Army’s chief operations officer and was the top operations officer for General McKiernan at the time, had a similar recollection. “We did not get a chance to make a comment,” he said in an e-mail message. “Not sure they wanted to hear what we had to say.”

You or anyone else, General.

Finally, from within the military, we see a sensible reaction to this mess.

The May 23 decree did not put an end to the behind-the-scenes debate. Several weeks later, in a meeting with Mr. Bremer and Colonel Agoglia, Mr. Slocombe outlined a plan to methodically build a new Iraqi military. There would be three divisions over two years — some 40,000 troops. The force would be focused on external threats. No officers who had served at the rank of colonel and above in the former army would be recruited.

Colonel Agoglia, who was serving in Baghdad as a representative for the Central Command, recalled in an interview that he was taken aback by the small scale of the force. The American military was facing an array of security problems in Iraq, and Central Command planners, he said, wanted to recall three divisions every 90 days until the force reached a projected strength of 9 or 10 divisions.

“Does General Franks know this?” Colonel Agoglia said he demanded. Mr. Slocombe responded that the approach he had presented had been approved by the secretary of defense, according to Colonel Agoglia. Colonel Agoglia said he uttered an expletive and was asked by Mr. Bremer to leave the room. He promptly called General Abizaid’s office to complain that the civilians’ plan would produce too little, too late.

Expletive indeed.

Source: The New York Times