Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Not all heroes wear capes.

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

When we show up, we win.

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Archives for April 2008

More Truthiness

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Yesterday in Oregon:

Finally, Clinton is still telling the “woman-turned’away-and-died” hospital story that she has been told is not true, and has been asked not to by Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O’Bleness Health System in Athens, Ohio. Get the facts of the story here.

Ultimately, while I gained some respect for Clinton and her supporters that I did not previously have, what I have confirmed for myself that remains true of Clinton is this type of behavior that anything goes, that she can do or say anything to opponents, that she can tell whatever stories she wants because it is all excused by the chase for power, that its part of the game, and that if you can’t take that, you oughtta not be in politics. That is, she defends old schools biznass as-is. In fact, she excuses too much with the same line (almost verbatim) we’ve been hearing from the current resident of the White House who also subscribes to “Ends justify the means” philosophy. Clinton tells us to “leave it to the history books” to decide right and wrong. But we don’t live in history books. We live here, now. I have to say when I hear Bush and Clinton say “leave it to the history books” it sounds to me a lot like “I can do what I want and maybe one day it will seem honorable, because now it sure doesn’t.” And I’m hard-pressed to think of how this thought ever came to be an acceptable defense for anything.

It just never stops.

Can’t anyone explain to her why lying and embellishing is a bad thing? Has she never heard of the 2000 election and a story about the internet? Does anyone in that campaign think? Or can she just not help herself?

*** Update ***

Apparently the popular vote math we ridiculed yesterday is a theme among Clinton and her supporters:

Hillary Clinton once again tries to pretend that she was more against the Iraq War than Obama was. It turns out that this is true if you ignore the events of 2002, and those of 2003, and those of 2004 and then misportray the events of 2005.

In other news, according to a Bush administration official, if you exclude all of the people who do not have jobs, currently the economy is humming along at full employment.

*** Update #2 ***

Via the comments, this piece (published last night at 5:30) which states that Clinton will stop telling the story as part of her standard speeches.

*** Update #3 ***

Is Hillary getting a raw deal on the health care story:

The Washington Post article said Clinton was told the story during a campaign stop by Meigs County Sheriff’s Deputy Bryan Holman, and identified the Pomeroy woman by name. (The Messenger elected not to use the woman’s name in this article.) The 35-year-old woman died Aug. 15, according to The Washington Post.

Seeing the article, O’Bleness Health Systems reviewed its patient records and found that the woman had been a patient of its affiliates, O’Bleness Memorial Hospital and River Rose Obstetrics and Gynecology, according to a press release it issued Friday.

“We reviewed the medical and patient account records of this patient,” Rick Castrop, CEO of O’Bleness Health Systems, said in the press release. “There is no indication that she was ever denied medical care at any time, for any reason. We clearly reject any perception that we ever denied any care to this young woman.”

Castrop asks in the news release that the Clinton campaign “immediately desist from repeating this story.”

An article about the health system’s allegation that Clinton told this false story without verifying its accuracy was published on The New York Times Web site Friday.

“Hospital administrators (at O’Bleness) said Friday that (name withheld) was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured,” that story said. Anti-Clinton blogs seized on the story, posting it under such banners as “Hillary Clinton caught in another lie” and “Clinton’s make-believe health care horror story.”

However, contacted by The Messenger, Holman claimed the hospital he was referring to when he spoke to Clinton wasn’t O’Bleness, nor an affiliate.

Holman said when he spoke to Clinton, he never mentioned the name of the hospital that allegedly denied the woman care, nor did he mention the woman by name.

More as it comes out.

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Karmic Irony

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Heh.

A year ago, the Mortgage Bankers Association was thrilled to sign a contract to buy a fancy new headquarters building in downtown Washington. Interest rates were low, the group’s revenues were steady and the prospects for quickly renting out part of the structure were strong.

But since then, the association has fallen on tough times as many of the subprime mortgages dispensed by some of its members proved dicey. Borrowers discovered the loans were more costly than they had anticipated. Foreclosures soared, and cheap, inexpensive credit dried up, slowing the economy.

The result: The trade group is about to find it harder than it imagined to pay its own mortgage.

Scheduled to close on the building in the coming weeks, the association will have to pay millions of dollars more than it would have a year ago when it contracted to buy the 160,000-square-foot structure — millions of dollars it is now less able to afford.

The brokers who engineered this mess earned my sympathy like Enron traders who yukked it up about shutting off granny’s electricity. If the association gets foreclosed and faces bankruptcy then an angel somewhere will get its wings.

I can spare a bit more for owners and sunny-day real estate agents because, though their behavior perfectly illustrates the defects among even educated consumers that fed the poisonous bubble (that’s why the NYT Magazine gave 5 pages to a chat in a taco chain), these guys seemed to think that they were doing, well, if not the right thing then at least only risking themselves. Reading them talk about interest-only ARMs the way I talk about an ATM withdrawal is like getting dispatches from another world – I understand that people somewhere think that way, but I’d never seen them in their natural environment before. It’s sad.

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A Thought

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Publius on the counterproductivity of staying in Iraq:

Here, the overriding risk is all-out civil war – whether inter-or-intra ethnic group – or regional war, or both. Our presence mitigates these risks [to the government] – at least in the short term. Thus, Maliki can take risky actions like raiding Basra or openly turning the army into a wing of Badr, knowing that he and his allies won’t be exposed to the full risk of those actions (civil war) because of the American presence. Similarly, other countries (like Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia) feel less urgency to engage diplomatically (which is itself a “risky” omission) because of the American presence.

Question – if we are basically acting like a wing of Maliki’s Badr brigades, and the Badr brigades are so closely tied with Iran that its fighters draw pensions from the IRGC, can we get Iran to pitch in for the mental health care of our troops? After all of the blood that America has shed on Iran’s behalf it seems like the least they could do.

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First Day With The New Tongue?

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Ashcroft has a slip of the tongue:

Ashcroft was talking about the patriot act, which he wrote, when he referred to Senator Barack Obama.. as Osama. He quickly apologized for the error. People interviewed after the speech say they felt he skirted most of the issues brought up.

That sure looks like an innocent mistake to me, the kind I make all the time. I know I have written Osama when I meant Obama and vice versa, and fortunately caught the mistake before posting. He looked mortified the minute he said it, looked like he was really uncomfortable, and then apologized. It would be really unfair to try to use this against Ashcroft.

Somewhat related, I am in the PA ad market, and I am seeing a ton of Obama commercials. The one that I have seen the most includes a line about Obama organizing in conjunction with Christian churches, so it is safe to assume his campaign is still dealing dealing with the Muslim issue (and most likely still will be in his second term, should he win).

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Talking To Bush Didn’t Work

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…so now military leaders are talking to the press.

Army leaders are expressing increased alarm about the mental health of soldiers who would be sent back to the front again and again under plans that call for troop numbers to be sustained at high levels in Iraq for this year and beyond.

Among combat troops sent to Iraq for the third or fourth time, more than one in four show signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey of soldiers’ mental health.

Some days I imagine a world where Serious People on my TV realize that staying in Iraq is (1) unsustainable and (2) as damaging as any of these terrible hypothetical consequences of leaving that I keep hearing about. Then I’m swimming from a shipwreck, and suddenly I’m flying around in gold underwear and fighting bears. I have pretty weird dreams.

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Compare And Contrast

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#1: No doubt because everybody but the Kagans understands now that brutal deployment schedules are ruining the army, punishing 15 month combat tours will be dropped back to 12 months.

The Bush administration plans to announce next week that U.S. soldiers’ combat tours will be reduced from 15 months to 12 months in Iraq and Afghanistan beginning later this summer, The Associated Press has learned.

The decision, expected to get final, formal approval in the days ahead, comes as Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, prepares to deliver a progress report to Congress next week on the improved security situation there. He is also expected to make recommendations for future troop levels.

#2: Bush pledges to boost our force in Afghanistan.

President Bush told a NATO summit that the United States would increase its number of troops in Afghanistan, administration officials said yesterday, even as reports surfaced that the administration would reduce U.S. soldiers’ combat tours from 15 months to 12 months.

#3: The president rules out drawing any more troops out of Iraq.

President George W. Bush will signal next week that he will pull no more troops out of Iraq while he is president, once his troop surge ends in the summer.

His senior Iraq commander General David Petraeus will use his testimony to congress on Tuesday and Wednesday to argue for continuing political support for the tactics of the surge strategy even after a planned drawdown of troops.

#1 will effectively reduce our available forces by 20% at the same time that attrition, particularly among officers, has become an epidemic. #2 would usually pull troops from our reserves, but we don’t have reserves. All of our available forces are deployed. That means that #1, #2 and #3 cannot all be true. Even two out of three seems unlikely.

For a fun exercise, let’s compile all of the times that Bush has formally made a pledge to win some minor advantage then ignored it. I can think of any number of instances when Tony Blair got burned by Bush promises over Iraq, but we all know that the list goes on much longer than a busy blogger wants to compile on a balmy Saturday. Throw out examples that come to your mind, preferably with links, and I will compile them later into a post.

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