America, Just Like In the Songs

America, America, etc.

Won't Stand on Ceremony
So Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the first game of the season, at the first game EVER for the new, all-baseball stadium in DC.

He got a very, very chilly reception to say the least.

Source: Think Progress

Sign Up
So Firedoglake has filed an FEC complaint against St. John McCain for violating campaign finance regulations, ironically his own, from McCain-Feingold.

Maverick is breaking a law you wrote, I suppose.

Anyway, after Jane Hamsher filed the initial complaint, they asked for cosigners. I signed, along with 32,000 other people, and they delivered the signatures to the FEC.

They're up to 34 and change now. Not that the FEC will do anything, but it's nice to let them know that lots of people are watching.

Source: Youtube/Firedoglake Channel

Can't Shoot Straight
A nice summary of Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, who is a total tool.

In his first months as DNI, McConnell did plenty to undermine that rep. He told Congress that three German terrorism suspects had been arrested due to intercepts made possible by the then-new Protect America Act when in fact they were obtained under the old FISA law. Soon after, McConnell offered a especially misleading account to Congress of a supposed FISA Court ruling that had delayed the U.S. from spying on the kidnappers of U.S. troops in Iraq. And throughout congressional debate on a surveillance law he claimed that the debate itself endangered American lives.

Then earlier this year, he suggested that a questioner at a public event at Johns Hopkins was "disappointed" that the U.S. hadn't suffered additional terrorist attacks. And now McConnell has really let lose, framing the Senate debate on the surveillance bill as being between those who think "we shouldn't have an Intelligence Community" and those who do. That has prompted a letter from Sen. Russ Feingold demanding an apology for those false characterizations of the debate.

Yes, that FISA law, which only governs domestic spying, really is an impediment to wiretaping Iraqis in Iraq... err, wait a second...

Plus of course, even if they were making calls into the US, you can tap and apply for warrants up to 3 days later.

Which they weren't. Because there's no reason to, they're not that stupid, Iraq has a few functional hours of power a day and I doubt their phones work all that well... sigh.

Source: Talking Points Memo

Go Keith
So Wal-Mart has dropped their attempt to squeeze a brain-damaged woman for the money keeping her in care and off the street. Finally.

Wal-Mart is dropping an effort to collect over $400,000 in health care reimbursement from a former employee who is confined to a southeast Missouri nursing home since she suffered brain damage in a traffic accident.

The world's largest retailer said Tuesday in a letter to the family of Deborah Shank it will not seek to collect money the Shanks won in an injury lawsuit against a trucking company for the accident.

Wal-Mart's top executive for human resources, Pat Curran, wrote that Shank's extraordinary situation had made the company re-examine its stance.

Deborah's husband Jim Shank welcomed the news. Family lawyer Maurice Graham of St. Louis said Wal-Mart deserves credit for doing the right thing.

"It's a good day for the Shank family," Jim Shank said in a statement.

Wal-Mart has been roundly criticized in newspaper editorials, on cable news shows and by its union foes for its claim to the funds, which it made in a lawsuit upheld by a federal appeals court.

Insurance experts say it is increasingly common for health plans to seek reimbursement for the medical expenses they paid for someone's treatment if the person also collects damages in an injury suit.

The practice, called "subrogation," has increased since a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that eased it.

Thanks a lot Supreme Court!

Pfft. I'm sick of people saying that politics doesn't affect them. The next Supreme Court justice will determine whether we get more of this nonsense. Keep that in mind.

Source: Raw Story

Clinton SMASH
Eep. I hope nobody angers him on his next stop in B-town.

The Bill Clinton who met privately with California's superdelegates at last weekend's state convention was a far cry from the congenial former president who afterward publicly urged fellow Democrats to "chill out" over the race between his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama.

In fact, before his speech Clinton had one of his famous meltdowns Sunday, blasting away at former presidential contender Bill Richardson for having endorsed Obama, the media and the entire nomination process.

"It was one of the worst political meetings I have ever attended," one superdelegate said.

According to those at the meeting, Clinton - who flew in from Chicago with bags under his eyes - was classic old Bill at first, charming and making small talk with the 15 or so delegates who gathered in a room behind the convention stage.

But as the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how "sorry" she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a "Judas" for backing Obama.

It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade.

"Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that," a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

The former president then went on a tirade that ran from the media's unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama. It ended with him asking delegates to imagine what the reaction would be if Obama was trailing by just 1 percent and people were telling him to drop out.

"It was very, very intense," said one attendee. "Not at all like the Bill of earlier campaigns."

When he finally wound down, Bill was asked what message he wanted the delegates to take away from the meeting.

At that point, a much calmer Clinton outlined his message of party unity.

"It was kind of strange later when he took the stage and told everyone to 'chill out,' " one delegate told us.

"We couldn't help but think he was also talking to himself."

When delegate Binah - still stunned from her encounter with Clinton - got home to Little River (Mendocino County) later in the day - there was a phone message waiting for her from State Party Chairman Art Torres, telling her the former president wanted him to apologize to her on his behalf for what happened.

Some people just can't accept defeat with any sort of grace.

Bill, in a winner take all system, a 1% pluarlity is .9999999999999% more than you need to be the winner. You'd think this would have come up at some point in your long political career.

Source: SFGate.com

Spouses
The Pentagon, surprise surprise, is not exactly a bastion of tolerance.

The Pentagon at first blocked Rep. Tammy Baldwin's domestic partner from traveling on a military plane with a congressional delegation on a trip to Europe but gave in after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intervened.

The Pentagon said it was merely following House rules, which do not define domestic partners as spouses. Pelosi's office countered that the Pentagon has its own rules about who can go on its planes.

Both sides agree that Defense Secretary Robert Gates reversed the decision to keep Baldwin's partner, Lauren Azar, off the plane after getting contacted by Pelosi, D-Calif.

"It's a matter of fairness that spouses should be allowed to go, and she is Ms. Baldwin's spouse," said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly. He said that Baldwin had raised the exclusion with a colleague, who mentioned it to Pelosi. The lawmakers visited France, the Czech Republic and Poland last month.

Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat and openly gay House member, declined to talk about the incident, which was first reported by the political newspaper Politico. Azar, a Madison energy law attorney who serves on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, did not return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

The Pentagon still has in place its "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which bars gays from serving openly in the military. But that had nothing to do with this case, said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell.

"This is strictly about following our statutory guidelines and the House rules," he said.

Morrell said that Pelosi asked Gates to honor her decision to waive House rules to allow Azar to travel and that Gates asked her to put that request in writing.

"She did so, and he — in this one case only — agreed to it," Morrell said. "This is not a precedent by any means. This does not open the doors for life partners to travel on congressional delegations." But Gates has agreed to review future requests on a case-by-case basis, Morrell said.

Daly said that both the Pentagon and Pelosi had to issue waivers.

But gay people don't need the same rights as straights!

Personally I don't think being married should get you a free plane ride any more than living together, or just being good friends. You should get one free jump seat a piece. Anything else is religious/cultural discrimination.

Source: Page One Q

Old Man McCain
Man, could this geezer get any more decrepit?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain believes many Americans are cynical about their country, and their idea of liberty is "the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee."


What these people need, he will argue on Wednesday, is a good dose of public service.

That is one of the messages McCain will give on Wednesday on a visit to his university, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he admittedly bucked authority and slacked off on his studies to the point that he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.

McCain is on a nostalgic tour of places important to developing his character as he fights for media coverage dominated by the extended Democratic battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Old Man McCain is on a NOSTALGIA tour, where he gives speeches about how these whipper snappers today aren't like kids used to be!

Lord.

He comes close to calling some Americans spoiled, saying they are cynical because "the ease which wealth and opportunity have given their lives led them to the mistaken conclusion that America, and the liberties its system of government is intended to protect, just aren't important to the quality of their lives."

Skepticism is healthy, he will say, "But when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee."

Oh yeah. They're cynical because everything is JUST SO GREAT.

We're in a full blown depression, our infrastructure is in ruins, our bridges are falling down, factories are closing like bad broadway shows and McCain's solution is to mock people who aren't just GUSHING.

Keep it up, geezer. Keep it up.

We'll stay off your lawn.

Source: Raw Story

Show Us Your Papers!
The Pentagon is going to defund colleges that honor student requests not to have their personal details handed to military recruiters.

Scum.

The Defense Department has announced a new get-tough policy with colleges and universities that interfere with the work of military recruiters and Reserve Officer Training Corps programs.

Under rules that will take effect April 28, defense officials said they want the exact same access to student directories that is provided to all other prospective employers.

Students can opt out of having their information turned over to the military only if they opt out of having their information provided to all other recruiters, but schools cannot have policies that exclude only the military, defense officials said in a March 28 notice of the new policy in the Federal Register.

The Defense Department “will honor only those student ‘opt-outs’ from the disclosure of directory information that are even-handedly applied to all prospective employers seeking information for recruiting purposes,” the notice says.

Directories are an important recruiting tool because they include the names, birthdates, phone numbers and academic pursuits of college students that can be used to identify people with knowledge and interests that are particularly useful to the military.

So if you want to get any job at all in America now, post-college, you need to take all the harassing phone calls the Army wants to make.

What's next? Mandatory Army exit interviews?

Are we going to start the draft again, or what? Honestly, stop sissying around and do it if you're going to. You'll be surprised at the response. The day after you people try it, there won't be a recruiting center left standing.

Which is of course why they do this backdoor draft to their own people and swindle the poor kids out of their lives.

Federal funding can be cut off if colleges and universities do not give recruiters and ROTC programs campus access. While student financial assistance is not at risk, other federal aid, especially research funding, can disappear if a school does not cooperate.

The Pentagon can declare colleges or universities anti-ROTC if they prohibit or prevent a Senior ROTC program from being established, maintained or efficiently operated.

The new policy is, in part, the result of a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the federal government’s ability to use funding as a means of forcing equal access for military recruiters and ROTC units on campuses.

Thanks again, Supreme Court!

Also, nice how the school can be penalized if THE ARMY PEOPLE don't 'efficiently run' an operation. Also nice that in a country getting its butt kicked by the EU in science and tech, our first response is to SLASH OUR RESEARCH BUDGETS.

Source: The Army Times

Enough Already!
Prostitutes! Everywhere!

WASHINGTON -- Speaking for the first time about her husband's acknowledgment that he paid for sex with an alleged prostitute, U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow told the Free Press this afternoon she's going through a "very difficult and personal" time and will continue to work through it with her family.

The senator from Lansing did not want to talk about whether she and her husband are still together or how she learned of his being stopped by Troy police in February. According to a police report obtained this morning by the Free Press, Tom Athans -- a liberal radio talk-show executive -- told Troy detectives he paid a prostitute he contacted via the Internet $150 for sex at a Residence Inn in the metro Detroit suburb.

What is WRONG with these people? They've got money! If you want a prostitute, by all means, go where it's legal!

This isn't hard folks. People do it all the time for gambling vacations. Just get a ticket to Vegas, Amsterdam, what have you, take a trip, get yourself a legal, regulated prostitute. If you go to Vegas, take in a show too! Amsterdam, you can do shrooms or smoke weed all day and nobody will look twice.

Yeesh.

Source: Detroit Free Press

Not Good Enough
Nice try though, Barack.

Chances for an Al Gore presidency may be all-but-nonexistent at this point in the campaign, but Barack Obama said Wednesday the former vice president might just have a spot in his administration, perhaps even cabinet-level.

A woman at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania asked whether Obama, if elected, would tap Gore for such a position to address global warming issues.

"I would," Obama said. "Not only will I, but I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem."

Obama said Gore is "somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I'm already consulting with him in terms of these issues, but climate change is real."

I'm not sure what the cabinet position would be for climate change. We don't have any agency devoted to such matters.

State is involved with treaties, but I'd put a Climate Change guy in at Energy. We're only going to get out of this long-term with new energy sources and technology, and by spending a lot of money on research.

Source: Raw Story

McCain the Anti-Semite
St. John McCain sure has some less than saintly friends.

It was the last recorded act of official anti-Semitism by the United States government. Boy, was it ever recorded! On Sept. 24, the presidential recordings program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs released transcripts of Nixon White House tapes concerning the unauthorized publication in the New York Times and the Washington Post of the Pentagon Papers. Some of these conversations were previously transcribed by the nonprofit National Security Archive, but many were not. Among the previously untranscribed conversations is President Nixon's historic inquiry into a topic unrelated to Daniel Ellsberg's leak: How many Jews were employed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics?

Loyal readers of this column are aware of my fascination with this repulsive episode. The Miller Center's new transcriptions are accompanied by audio, allowing us not merely to remember this squalid transaction but to relive it. Kenneth J. Hughes, the Miller Center's Nixon tapes editor, has kindly furnished Slate with the memo traffic concerning the Jew count, including a never-before-published memo by White House personnel director Fred Malek confirming the planned transfer of three Jews to less-visible jobs and the effective demotion of a BLS deputy with a Jewish-sounding surname. Malek, today a very wealthy investor, remains active in Republican politics; this past April, he was named national finance co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign. Last year, Malek was edged out by an octogenarian real-estate tycoon to become owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team, despite strong local support. I have my suspicions the Jew-counting episode was a factor in baseball Commissioner Bud Selig's choice, though that isn't the official story.

That's right! McCain's finance bigwig helped Nixon's paranoid attempt to purge the government of Jews!

Boy I'm eager to see a McCain presidency.

Two days later, on July 26, Haldeman sends a memo to Malek. "What's the status of your analysis of the BLS; specifically of the 21 key people?" Haldeman writes. "What is their demographic breakdown?"

Malek answers in a memo the following day. Out of 50 names on the organization chart, Malek has run down the party affiliations of 35. Twenty-five are Democrats, one is a Republican, and nine are either independents, not registered, or of unknown party affiliation. "In addition," Malek writes (someone—presumably either Haldeman or Nixon himself—has underlined this sentence), "13 out of the 35 fit the other demographic criterion that was discussed." Scribbled beneath this (I'm guessing by Haldeman) are the words, "Most of these are at the top." (Malek's method of identifying who was Jewish and who wasn't was to scrutinize surnames, rendering his estimate as unreliable as it was abhorrent.)

So he's not only an anti-semite, he's an idiot.

I'm very much amused by the fact that Jews are supposed to be this evil, supersecret, super devious cabal, but that at the same time they're supposed to be too dumb to change their last names.

Wow. Cognitive dissonance.

Source: Slate

Chemical Cheney
So Cheney is involved in more evil than previously known. Big surprise.

Vice President Dick Cheney opposed the signing ratification of a treaty banning the use chemical weapons, a recently unearthed letter shows.

183 countries pledged never to "develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons, or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone" under the Chemical Weapons Convention, put into effect in 1997.

But in a letter dated April 8, 1997, then Halliburton-CEO Cheney told Sen. Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that it would be a mistake for America to join the Convention. "Those nations most likely to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention are not likely to ever constitute a military threat to the United States. The governments we should be concerned about are likely to cheat on the CWC, even if they do participate," reads the letter, published by the Federation of American Scientists.

The CWC was ratified by the Senate that same month. And since then, Albania, Libya, Russia, the United States, and India have declared over 71,000 metric tons of chemical weapon stockpiles, and destroyed about a third of them. Under the terms of the agreement, the United States and Russia are supposed to eliminate the rest of their supplies of chemical weapons by 2012. But that looks unlikely -- the U.S. government figures it will get the job done by 2017.

Later this month, the 183 countries that have signed onto the CWC will meet in the Hague, to discuss how the Conference can be adapted for the future. An Iranian diplomat told Arms Control Today that Iran would like this so-called "review conference" to describe any violation of the 2012 deadline “as a clear case of serious noncompliance,” which could eventually lead to punitive measures.

Ahh, Iran. I'd say that they're right and we're dragging our feet, but I also know just how hard it is to get rid of the stuff the US made in the cold war.

*shrug* If we wanted to get it done we would. I bet the pace of destruction slowed way down when Darth Cheney took over, at any rate.

Source: Wired (Danger Room)

Basra
So, why did Maliki attack Basra and almost bring about the destruction of his own government?

Well, it turns out, he hates democracy almost as much as his patron Bush.

The campaign was a predictable fiasco, another in a long line of strategic failures for the sickly and divided Iraqi government, which survives largely because it is propped up by the United States. So why did al-Maliki do it? With no obvious immediate crisis in Basra that called for such desperate measures, what could have motivated the decision to attack?

Three main motivations present themselves: control of petroleum smuggling, staying in power (including keeping U.S. troops around to ensure it), and the achievement of a Shiite super-province in the south. A southern super-province would spell a soft partition of the country, benefiting Shiites in the long term while cutting Sunnis out of substantial oil revenues, both licit and illicit. But all of the motivations have to do with something President Bush established as a benchmark in January 2007: upcoming provincial elections.

The Sadr Movement leaders themselves are convinced that the recent setting of a date for provincial elections, on Oct. 1, 2008, and al-Maliki's desire to improve the government's position in advance of the elections, precipitated the prime minister's attack. It is widely thought that the Sadrists might sweep to power in the provinces in free and fair elections, since the electorate is deeply dissatisfied with the performance of the major incumbent party in the southern provinces, the Islamic Supreme Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.


Provincial elections could radically change the political landscape in Iraq. Both the Sunni Arabs and the Sadr Movement sat out the last round, in late January 2005. Thus, governments in the Sunni Arab areas are unrepresentative and in one case a Sunni-majority province, Diyala, is actually ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which Sunnis tend to see as a puppet of Iran.

Likewise in the Shiite south, the ISCI, led by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is largely in power, even though probably a majority of the population favors Sadr. To have a minority in power and the majority feeling disenfranchised is especially dangerous in a violent society such as Iraq. The disjuncture has contributed to endemic fighting in the capital of Qadisiya Province, Diwaniya, for instance, between Sadr's Mahdi army and the paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council, or Badr Corps. In many provinces, ISCI has infiltrated members of its Badr paramilitary into the police and security forces, thus giving them the presumption of legitimacy and allowing the branding of the Mahdi army as violent militiamen with no popular mandate, won at the polls.

That the week's fighting was intended to bolster pro-government forces in preparation for the October provincial elections is at least plausible. During the fighting, the Iraqi army was allied with the Badr Corps paramilitary of the ISCI, which was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. ISCI, the leading Shiite political party in parliament, is now al-Maliki's main backer in the government, along with his own smaller Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party. And U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner told a news conference on Wednesday that the Iraqi army's military operation, which U.S. forces aided, was aimed at improving "security" in the city ahead of provincial elections.

So there you have it. Our Iranian trained allies are trying to kill off all their rivals ahead of an election they cannot hope to win.

Thanks, El Presidente!

Source: Salon.com

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

American Power Abroad

America Has a Foreign Policy?

Torture (Oops!)
So there are still countries that can't stomach torture, and they're backing away from the United States like it's a leper over our admission that we, err, pour waterinto peoples' lungs for sport, or whatever reason they give this weeek.

Copeland said the Canadian government's decision to drop claims about Harkat and Charkaoui that came from the CIA's interrogations of Abu Zubaydah indicates "the government of Canada, or at least the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has concluded that everything that came from Abu Zubaydah was obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

Asked why the statements from Zubaydah had been dropped from the dossiers against Harkat and Charkaoui, Bernard Beckhoff, a spokesman for Canada's public safety ministry, which oversees CSIS, said he could not comment on developments in either case because they are both still before the courts. But he then added, pointedly: "The CSIS director has stated publicly that torture is morally repugnant and not particularly reliable. CSIS does not knowingly use information which has been obtained through torture."

That's right, Canada is throwing out all the evidence we gave them that we got through torturing Zubaydah. Because they still pretend to have souls up there.

Meanwhile, look at all the great evidence they have left after they toss out the stuff we obtained from a guy under duress. Almost makes you wonder if it was all made up, doesn't it?

At least part of the case against the Canadian suspects was derived from the CIA-supplied statements of Zubaydah, the suspected Al Qaeda logistics chief who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and became the first high-value detainee subjected to waterboarding. A Canadian government dossier filed with the courts after Harkat's arrest, for example, stated that "a foreign agency" (an apparent reference to the CIA) "advised the Service [CSIS] in March 2003 that Abu Zubaida [sic] was able to identify the respondent [Harkat] by his physical description, including that he operated a guest house in Peshawar, Pakistan in the mid 1990s for mujahadeen travelling to Chechnya."

But last month, the CSIS filed a revised version of the dossier on Harkat as part of its case to deport the suspect. The new version deleted the detailed information from "the foreign agency" about Abu Zubaydah's identification of Harkat. Instead, in the new dossier, dated Feb. 22, 2008, the CSIS said simply that, "Based on its investigation, the Service concludes that HARKAT [sic] has associated with Abu Zubaydah [sic], one of [Osama] bin Laden's top lieutenants since the early 1990s." A footnote in the dossier attributes this information to news articles from the British press and to a counter terrorism newsletter published by a Chicago think tank.

I've done far better research for 2 page busywork papers for freshman classwork as an undergrad. This is shamefully ridiculous.

Source: Newsweek

Nitpicking
So a Rupert Murdoch propaganda outfit in Australia has been water-carrying for the Aussie government, saying that a man we tortured the crap out of was lying about it. (By 'We' I mean the Bush axis of various puppet states and what's left of America).

Apparently you can get away with it too, by nitpicking the precise details of how a person was abused.

A judge ruled Friday that claims by a former Guantanamo Bay inmate that he was tortured could not be fully believed because his testimony was inconsistent and may have been exaggerated to try to help him win a defamation lawsuit.

But Mamdouh Habib almost certainly was mistreated during his three years of detention without trial in four countries after being arrested in Pakistan in late 2001, during which he suffered extreme stress and trauma, the judge found.

...

Habib told the court he had been beaten and electrocuted by his captors while he was in Pakistan and Egypt, kept drugged and shackled, had his fingers broken, and was sexually molested.

He claimed that Australian officials were present during parts of his ordeal.

Habib said that while at Guantanamo he was regularly beaten before interrogation sessions, kept shackled and often naked, and had his cell sprayed with pepper spray.

In his ruling, McClellan said he could not accept a lot of Habib's evidence because it was inconsistent with previous statements he had made. The judge also found Habib was "prone to exaggerate," and "evasive" when pressed on details.

"I have no difficulty in accepting that the experiences which Mr. Habib suffered were traumatic" and were an "extraordinarily stressful experience," McClellan said.

"I also have little doubt that from time to time he was mistreated," he said, citing electric shocks, kicks and the use of hot and cold water as included in the likely abuse.

Oh, is that all? Water torture and electrocution? Pfft. What a whiner!

Source: Raw Story

Operation Merlin
It seems the CIA has been doing their usual bangup job overseas.

The Bush administration is prolonging the hunting season against journalists. The latest victim is James Risen, The New York Times reporter for national security and intelligence affairs. About three months ago, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena against him, ordering Risen to give evidence in court. A heavy blackout has been imposed on the affair, with the only hint being that it has to do with sensitive matters of "national security."

But conversations with several sources who are familiar with the affair indicate that Risen has been asked to testify as part of an investigation aimed at revealing who leaked apparently confidential information about the planning of secret Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad missions concerning Iran's nuclear program.

Risen included this information in his book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," which was published in 2006. In the book, he discusses a number of ideas which he says were thought up jointly by CIA and Mossad operatives to sabotage Iran's nuclear capabilities.

One of these ideas was to build electromagnetic devices, smuggling them inside Iran to sabotage electricity lines leading to the country's central nuclear sites. According to the plan, the operation was supposed to cause a series of chain reactions which would damage extremely powerful short circuits in the electrical supply that would have led to failures of the super computers of Iran's nuclear sites.

According to the book, the Mossad planners proposed that they would be responsible for getting the electromagnetic facilities into Iran with the aid of their agents in Iran. However, a series of technical problems prevented the plan's execution.

Right, right. Magic EMP bombs will be snuck into Iran!

Nevermind the physics, we can power them with pixie dust!

Naturally, it doesn't stop there.

Another of the book's important revelations, which made the administration's blood boil about James Risen, appeared in a chapter describing what was known as Operation Merlin, the code name for another CIA operation supposed to penetrate the heart of Iran's nuclear activity, collect information about it and eventually disrupt it.

Operation Merlin

The CIA counter proliferation department hired a Soviet nuclear engineer who had previously, in the 1990s, defected to the United States and revealed secrets from the Soviet Union's nuclear program. His speciality was in the field of what is called weaponization, the final stage of assembling a nuclear bomb.

The scientist was equipped with blueprints for assembling a nuclear bomb in which, without his knowledge, false drawings and information blueprints were planted about a nuclear warhead that was supposedly manufactured in the Soviet Union. The plan's details had been fabricated by CIA experts, and so while they appeared authentic, they had no engineering or technological value.

The intention was to fool the scientist and send him to make contact with the Iranians to whom he would offer his services and blueprints. The American plot was aimed at getting the Iranians to invest a great deal of effort in studying the plans and to attempt to assemble a faulty warhead. But when the time came, they would not have a nuclear bomb but rather a dud.

However, Operation Merlin, which was so creative and original, failed because of CIA bungled planning. The false information inserted into the blueprints were too obvious and too easily detected and the Russian engineer discovered them. As planned, he made contact with the Iranian delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and handed over to them, also as planned, the blueprints.

But contrary to the CIA's intention, he added a letter to the blueprints in which he pointed out the mistakes. He did not do this with ill intent or out of a desire to disrupt the operation and harm his operators. On the contrary, he did so out of a deep sense of mission and in order to satisfy his American operators. He hoped that in this way he would simply increase the Iranians' trust in him and encourage them to make contact with him for the good, of course, of his American operators.

The result was disastrous. Not only did the CIA fail to prevent the Iranians in their efforts to enhance their nuclear program, this operation may also have made it possible for them to get their hands on a plan for assembling a nuclear warhead.

So the CIA thought they could fool an ex-Soviet expert on nuclear weapon assembly by fudging the details on some paperwork and sending him overseas without his knowledge. Nevermind that the man risked his life to betray the USSR when the KGB would have moved heaven and earth to rub him out; we can't trust him.

Lolz.

Thank you CIA, for giving Iran the bomb know-how!

Source: Haaretz

Bush Torture
El Presidente sure loves him some depravity.

WASHINGTON — Despite Congressional efforts to force a change in course, President Bush further cemented his legacy of establishing strong executive powers Saturday, giving the Central Intelligence Agency broad latitude to use harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists that are prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies.

Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the agency from using such interrogation methods, which include waterboarding, a technique that suffocates a restrained prisoner and has been the subject of intense criticism at home and abroad.

So *this* is what it feels like to live in a dying empire that will resort to anything no matter how sickening in an attempt, however feeble, to hold onto power for a few more years.

Huh. No wonder the Soviets drank so much.

Source: Firedoglake (from NYTimes)

KBR Brand Poison Water
So the former subsidiary of Halliburtion, KBR, that landed all those juicy no-bid contracts, has been caught screwing over American soldiers.

Again.

WASHINGTON: Dozens of U.S. troops in Iraq fell sick at bases using "unmonitored and potentially unsafe" water supplied by the military and a contractor once owned by Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, the Pentagon's internal watchdog says.

A report obtained by The Associated Press said soldiers experienced skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, diarrhea and other illnesses after using discolored, smelly water for personal hygiene and laundry at five U.S. military sites in Iraq.

The Defense Department's inspector general's report, which could be released as early as Monday, found water quality problems between March 2004 and February 2006 at three sites run by contractor KBR Inc., and between January 2004 and December 2006 at two military-operated locations.

It was impossible to link the dirty water definitively to all the illnesses, according to the report. But it said KBR's water quality "was not maintained in accordance with field water sanitary standards" and the military-run sites "were not performing all required quality control tests."

...

The inspector general's study confirmed AP reports on the contaminated water in early 2006 and provided additional details on the scope of the problem at the Iraq bases. In January that year, interviews and internal company documents disclosed the problems at Ar Ramadi and showed that KBR employees could not get the company to inform base residents.

Halliburton Co., then KBR's parent company, disputed the allegations even though they were made by its own employees and documented in company e-mails. In March 2006, the AP obtained an internal Halliburton report that, in one instance, the company missed contamination that could have caused "mass sickness or death" at Ar Ramadi.

The report said the event at Ar Ramadi could have been prevented if KBR's reverse osmosis units on the site had been assembled, instead of relying on the military's water production facilities.

...

Medical records for troops at Camp Q-West indicated 38 cases of illnesses commonly attributed to problem water. These include skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections and diarrhea. Doctors diagnosed 24 of the cases in January and February 2006, the same period when medical officials warned of a rise in bacterial infections at the base.

In addition, military medical records — tied to no particular base in Iraq — showed 26 cases of food and waterborne diseases, including hepatitis, giardiasis and typhoid fever.

Ahh, Republicans sure know how to support the troops.

I mean, do you know how hard it is to give people typhoid these days?

Source: International Herald Tribune

Aha
Here's that policy statement I was looking for at the start of this entry!

Knew I had it around here somewhere.

Source: Glumbert

Entertainment News

Very Entertaining

Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na BATMAN
So, much as The Animatrix was a collection of anime and anime inspired shorts that bridged the gap between The Matrix and its sequels, Warner Brothers has commissioned the same umbrella group to make a Batman anthology set between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. So far details are scant, but the pedigree is impressive.

As are the early PR stills.

I'm interested to see how the Japanese perspective on Batman will pan out. I already read Child of Dreams, the manga-style graphic novel by Kia Asamiya (most famous for doing Nadeisco, though he apparently also worked on the exquisitely old-school Project A-Ko). http://www.amazon.com/Batman-Child-Dreams-Comics-Paperback/dp/156389906X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A-ko

That was interesting, if a bit shallow. The art was very nice, it just needed a bit more oomph in the story department.

So I'll be waiting to see how the Batman-i-matrix works out.

Source: Animation Magazine

Another Memoir Hoax
So yet another highly improbable memoir has been exposed as a fraud, and an overly credulous publishing industry/reading audience as dupes.

Sigh.

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling "memoir" depicting how, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, her lawyers said Friday.

Misha Defonseca's book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.

Her two Brussels-based lawyers, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II.

Really.

People honestly believed, without evidence, that a small child was adopted by a pack of wolves, who she then convinced to act as her bodyguards on a 1900 mile trip across WWII Europe.

Seriously. They bought this.

Wow. People are so damn dumb.

Source: CNN.com

Well Now.
So Ellen Page, of Juno fame, has dropped out of Sam Rami's next horror movie project, written in the Army of Darkness era, titled "Drag Me to Hell".

Riiight.

Earlier this month we reported that Ellen Page had joined Sam Raimi's upcoming horror flick Drag Me to Hell. Although that was some of the most exciting casting news we've ever heard, Bloody Disgusting has confirmed that Page has dropped out of the film. The reason they were given is that "she didn't like the latest draft of the script", but as they speculate, that just seems like the public statement given in order to cover up the real story. Either way, this is sad news for Raimi's next flick.

So you have one hit indie film and you burn the biggest grossing director in Hollywood today, while passing up what may well be the next Evil Dead.

This does not seem like great decision-making to me.

Source: First Showing

PS: IMDB reminds me that she was Kitty Pryde in the ungodly terrible X-Men: The Last Stand, where, in a movie filled with cardboard cutout protagonists, she still set new records for bland.

Yeah. Raimi's better off.

Taxi to the Oscars
The Oscar-winning filmmaker who did Taxi to the Darkside has his sights set next on Jack Abrmoff and St. John McCain.

The filmmaker who won an Academy Award Sunday night for best documentary is next turning his attention to the Jack Abramoff scandal, including GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s role investigating the affair.

Alex Gibney, who made last year's "Taxi to the Dark Side," about the lethal interrogation of an Afghan taxicab driver by American military forces, told Politico his Abramoff film would be coming out later this year. Its tentative title: "Casino Jack and the United States of Money."

"The film should give viewers a greater understanding, in a blow-by-blow way, of how the political process works, particularly with regards to lobbying," Gibney says. "This movie will have it all: wild international intrigue, money changing hands in unexpected places, etc. It will be fun. As someone said about an earlier picture I made: 'It's a comedy that turns into farce and ends up in horror.'"

McCain "of course" comes up in the film, adds Gibney, who has "put the word out" to the Arizona senator’s presidential campaign for comment. "He certainly plays a role — he ran the [Abramoff] hearings, so he's unavoidably involved in the story. Then the questioning extends. Upon further investigation, one looks at his motives and things like that. I don't want to say much more than that, but he is a character in the story."

Since it's now been reported that McCain sat on emails implicating Abramoff in bribing the Republican governor of Alabama, it's not hard to see where this could be heading.

Poor St. John McCain.

Source: Politico

In The Basement
So it turns out Iran has one of the best and largest collections of modern art in the world, purchased with oil money by the Shah shortly before the Revolution. Who knew?

It's one of the finest collections of modern art anywhere in the world, but you won't find it in New York or Paris.

Dozens of works by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock -- together valued at roughly $3 billion -- are locked in a basement in Tehran.

Only a handful of westerners have had an up-close look at the underground archives in Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art. ABC News was granted exclusive access inside the vault that holds a priceless collection Iranian authorities choose to keep locked away.

What was revealed was astonishing: a series of paintings by Picasso; a wall's worth of pop art by Roy Lichtenstein; Warhol portraits of Jackie Onassis, Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe; a Diego Rivera self portrait; and a painting many consider to be the best Jackson Pollock outside of North America.

...

The collection was supposed to be a gift to the Iranian people. It was assembled by the Shah of Iran and his wife using public funds during the oil boom of the 1970s. Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art was inaugurated in 1977, designed to be one of the world's landmark modern art institutions, with an international collection worthy of that ambition.

But just months later came the Islamic Revolution. The Shah was deposed, Ayatollah Khomeinei was became the country's leader, and in the Revolutionary, anti-American climate the museum's western art was banished to the basement.

Ah well. El Presidente will probably blow the collection to smithereens with a bunker-buster bomb anyway.

Source: ABC News

Space News, Above and Beyond

Spacey

Oops No Longer Topical
I kind of overslept, but hey. NASA decided to beam a Beatles song into deep space today at 7 PM EST. Namely, Across the Universe.

NASA will on 4 February beam Beatles' ditty Across the Universe into deep space to mark the 40th anniversary of the day the Fab Four recorded the song, as well as the launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1 and the 45th birthday of its Deep Space Network (DSN).

According to the press release, the transmission is being directed towards the North Star, Polaris, and will travel at 186,000 miles per second towards its 431 light year-distant target.

Dr Barry Geldzahler, the DSN's program executive at NASA's Washington headquarters, said of "Across The Universe Day": "I've been a Beatles fan for 45 years - as long as the Deep Space Network has been around. What a joy, especially considering that Across the Universe is my personal favorite Beatles song."

Paul McCartney enthused to the agency: "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

Now, Polaris, the star system they aimed it at, is 431 light-years away. It will take over four centuries for those radio waves to reach Polaris, where they will be impossibly attenuated.

But hey. Still sort of neat.

Me, I think they could have gone with other choices. I would have been in favor of Shatner doing 'Rocket Man', or that Leonard Nimoy rendition of 'Good Morning Starshine', just so the aliens know what they're dealing with.

Source: The Register

Telescope Arms Race
For once, huge amounts of money are going to something useful.

A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world. Astronomers are drawing up plans for the biggest, most powerful instruments ever constructed, capable of peering far deeper into the universe — and further back in time — than ever before.


The building boom, which is expected to play out over the next decade and cost billions of dollars, is being driven by technological advances that afford unprecedented clarity and magnification. Some scientists say it will be much like switching from regular TV to high-definition.

...

Just the names of many of the proposed observatories suggest an arms race: the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which was downsized from the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope. Add to those three big ground observatories a new super eye in the sky, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.

Giant telescopes... aghghghg.

This will keep me in a supply of desktop wallpaper for years!

More seriously, the article concerns four giant ground based telescopes and NASA's Super-Hubble, the James Webb thingummy. Yes, thingummy. Basically, adaptive optics, the technology of rapidly adjusting the telescope's vision to compensate for atmospheric distortion, is making big ground telescopes competitive with space ones like Hubble or Webb again. There's also mention of a huge radio telescope, the fourth of the ground-based supereyes they're making, so it's not all visible light astronomy here.

Nice to see money being spent on something other than pouring blood into the Iraqi desert, for a change.

Source: Raw Story

Iran, Iran So Far Away
So Iran has a space center, and they've launched a rocket from it. They're planning to put a lousy little satellite in Low Earth Orbit eventually. Whoopity-do!

Get the spin on this one though:

Amid fears in the West that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, some experts believe Iran's space program is possibly a cover to improve its military ballistic missiles

Yeah... you mean, like OURS WAS?

Pot, kettle. Kettle, Pot.

Source: CNN.com

Tanguska Boomy Boomy
So it looks like the rock that turned a chunk of Siberia into a pancake may have been smaller than originally thought... and thus, that smaller rocks from space pose a bigger threat than previously imagined.

Alan Harris, a planetary scientist at Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said he's been following Boslough's work on Tunguska for several years "and I think the idea that he has there seemed very sound."

"A meteorite or asteroid coming into Earth's atmosphere has a lot of momentum," he said. "The idea that it would push down into the atmosphere seems very plausible."

"The bottom line is it takes a lot less energy, a small explosion, to create ground damage" such as that at Tunguska, said Harris, who studies the frequency of such impacts to assess hazards.

In the future, he said, he'll take Boslough's work into account and revise estimates of damage from impacts by smaller objects.

Oh yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Cold indifferent universe, baby.

Source: CNN.com

Baghdad from Spaaaaaaaace
Baghdad has three sewer treatment plants. One is busted, one barely works, one is backed up and creating a huge lake of... sewage.. that you can apparently see... from Google Earth.

Baghdad is drowning in sewage, thirsty for water and largely powerless, an Iraqi official said in a grim assessment of services in the capital five years after the US-led invasion.

One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth," said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.

I tried, I really did, to find the lake in question. I think it's in the northeast of the city, in a long line of obviously, horribly contaminated spill ponds. But it's hard to say. There are so many algae bloom covered lakes, so many toxic-red bodies of water, the Tigris looks like a bright green snake, which has got to be all the sewer runoff... wow.

Source: MSN
Also, Google Earth

Artificial Heart, Artificial War, Artificial News

Science Run Amok
Well, perhaps not AMOK

Heartbeat
Scientists have for the first time created a beating heart from stem cells.

Seriously. They made a beating heart in a dish.

This obviously represents a big step forward toward custom-made, rejection free organ transplants. The scenario being, you need an organ, they take some of your own stem cells and grow it for you, then replace the old one. Considering the shortage of organs today and the terrible side effects of rejection, and the drugs that control it, having your own tissue to transplant into the body would be enormously advantageous.

Not an easy task, but a lot closer now. Great job guys.

Of course, if people like Bush have their way, we will never see medicine or science derived from stem cell work like this. After all, if some zygote somewhere dies, it's the world's greatest tragedy and we must all weep and mourn for a thousand years. Won't someone please think of the snowflake babies?

Sigh. Anyway...
Source: The Times Online

Ham Radio + Jackass == World War III
Remember the 'threatening' behavior the Iranian navy supposedly displayed toward our ships in the Strait of Hormuz? Complete with supervillainish threats?

It turns out that the threatening voice on the radio may well have been a prank call.

Threatening comments heard at the end of a Pentagon-released audio recording designed to prove harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a local heckler known as the "Filipino Monkey," The Navy Times reported.

...

The Times said Friday the voice in the audio sounded different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small boat in the video released by Iranian authorities.

That is why several Navy experts interviewed by The Times are raising the possibility that a heckler known in the region as the "Filipino Monkey," or an imitator, could be behind the threats.

"Filipino Monkey," who is likely more than one person, listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and vile epithets, the report said.

US Navy women who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment, the paper said.

So not only was the voice not credible, but they've been suffering these pranks for some time now and are well aware of their non-governmental origin... yet they were willing to let the Bush administration push for war with Iran, based on the jerk behavior of some loser with nothing better to do than harass passing ships over the airwaves.

I'll never understand why the military of this country does so much to cover for a man who does so little for them in return.

Source: Raw Story

Strikefest 2008
So the grueling battle over future media revenue streams seems to have killed the last half of this year's tv lineup, and now next year's batch of inanity is about to die stillborn as well.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Four major studios have canceled dozens of writers' contracts in a possible concession that the current television season cannot be saved, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

The move means the two-month old writers strike may also endanger next season's new shows, the Times said.

January is usually the beginning of pilot season, when networks order new scripted shows. But the strike leaves networks without a pool of comedy and drama scripts from which to choose.

At this rate, Americans might actually have to read something to pass the time. Truly it is the end of the world as we know it.

Source: CNNMoney.com

New Media, Old Problems
Maybe The Register wasn't being too hard on them after all..

So it seems that Wikipedia, a registered charity, had running the finances of its parent corporation a convicted theft, larcenist, check kiter and habitual drunk driver. Seriously.

For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon.

When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states - Virginia, Maryland, and Texas - and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run.

Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest.

Haven't these morons ever heard of a background check? At all? Or would that be too anti-democratic?

Source: The Register

Wireless Missile System and Wired Sushi
No, not for the Army -- for your office.

Sadly, without a wireless webcam attached, aiming is going to be tricky. I suppose you could buy your own and put it on the base though. This has definite possibilities.

Source: The Register (Hardware)

This on the other hand is just silly. A USB plug that looks like a piece of sushi.

Hmm, now I want sushi.

Wait though... here's a tomato that looks like the Bat-Signal!

Just like finding Jesus in a slice of toast! Amazing!

Narrow Escapes

We Missed a Bullet Here

Not By a Lot, Though

I blogged a little this week about the revelation that we were lied into the Vietnam War, as the official reports on communications at the time prove, without a doubt, that there was in fact no attack upon American ships, and in turn, that the entire Gulf of Tonkin justification was a shame.

See here.

But it seems that history has a bad habit of repeating itself, or at least, that warmongers aren't terribly creative. This week, our own idiot in chief, Bush, tried to stage his own Gulf of Tonkin. Only something went wrong; or from the perspective of those of us who don't want to see yet another bloody, pointless conflict, something went *right*.

It began with a bizarre story from the Pentagon; Iran sent speedboats to drop mysterious white boxes in front of powerful US naval assets, then sent them a radio call, in unaccented English, threatening to make them 'explode'

The Pentagon's initial account of the Jan. 6 confrontation said the Iranian boats "charged" the US ships, dropped boxes in the water that were thought to be mines and threatened to set up "explosions." An unnamed US Defense Department official told the Associated Press the day after the incident that it was "the most serious provocation of its sort" in the Gulf, although Iranian officials tried to downplay the incident as a simple misunderstanding.

The US released a recording of this 'threat', and immediately, however, suspicions began to be raised by people who, err, knew what they were talking about.

Any Iranian can immediately identify Persian-accented English, particularly if the speaker has had little contact with the West, as is the case with Revolutionary Guardsmen and sailors. Iranians, you see, have difficulty with two consonants such as "p" and "l" next to each other; even Iranians who have lived in America for years will often pronounce "please" as "peh-leeze", or in this case, "explode" as "exp-eh-lode". On the tape, "explode" is pronounced perfectly, albeit as if the speaker was a villain addressing a superhero. Further, it is unimaginable, given what is known about the Revolutionary Guards (and I have met many), that one of its corps would speak in a such a manner, even if the accent were correctly Persian.

That's from Iranian expert Hooman Majd, who has, amongst other things, served as a translator to two Iranian Presidents on their US trips.

So he might, might, just know what he's talking about.
(Source: Huffington Post)

But this is the video age, and audio just won't do. So the US released a tape.

Of course, this IS the video age, so the Iranians had one too. The funny thing... the tapes don't match. Even the US tape doesn't show the actions we'd described, in particular, no funny white boxes.

And then the backpedaling began.

It was not until Thursday, after the Pentagon and Iran had each released videos of the encounter, that the US acknowledged the verbal threats they had associated with the Iranian speedboats from day one could have been broadcast from virtually anywhere.

Well, that's good. Now we've got a complete pantsdowner. Again. Nice job, Bush.

The consequences? We all look like tools. Again. But for now, we avoid war.

Barely.

Aftergood said the information should have been more fully vetted before the White House began warning Iran of "serious consequences" of future showdowns.

"What you hear talking is the child on the schoolyard, not the sober national leader," he said. "And i don't think that serves anyone's interest."

Well put sir. Well put indeed.

Source: Raw Story