Open Threads

President Bush and his entourage made what is becoming his annual 4th of July pilgrimage to West Virginia yesterday:

It appears President George W. Bush now equates the Fourth of July with democracy, freedom and West Virginia.

Bush made his third Independence Day trip to the Mountain State Monday, addressing a large gathering outside outside West Virginia University’s Woodburn Hall in Morgantown. On July 4, 2002, Bush spoke in Ripley, W.Va., and last year he made his Independence Day speech in Charleston.
“Coming to West Virginia is becoming a Fourth of July tradition for me,” Bush told the crowd in Morgantown. “Every time I come here, I appreciate the beauty of West Virginia – and I appreciate being with decent, hardworking, patriotic Americans who call the Mountain State home.”

Bush spoke about freedom and democracy Monday, and he urged Americans to support those troops currently fighting to bring these values to the Middle East. He reiterated his oft-used quote, “We will bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies.”

“Our enemies in this new war are men who celebrate murder, incite suicide and thirst for absolute power,” Bush said. “They seek to spread their ideology of tyranny and oppression across the world. They seek to turn the Middle East into a haven for terror. They seek to drive America out of the region. These terrorists will not be stopped by negotiations, or concessions, or appeals to reason.

“In this war, there is only one option, and that is victory.”

The U.S. strategy in the Middle East can be summed up this way, Bush added. “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, and then our troops can come home to a proud and grateful nation,” he said.

Bush told the crowd that many West Virginian soldiers were “serving with skill and honor in the war on terrorism.”

While the crowd was, for the most part (I am told), receptive, there was a vocal anti-war contingent:

The shouts of about 200 anti-war protestors a few blocks away could be heard faintly at times during Bush’s 20-minute speech.

It was his third Fourth of July visit to West Virginia in four years. He carried West Virginia in the 2000 and 2004 elections.

“George W. Bush may have entered the White House a Texan, but we have watched our president become a Mountaineer,” said U.S. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., who introduced Bush.

With huge American flags draped from campus buildings as a backdrop, the president spoke outdoors on a grassy plaza between several of WVU’s oldest lecture halls — dating to the 1870s — and near a mast from the USS West Virginia, which was sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the onset of World War II.

Two hundred of anything attending anything other than a WVU football game is a decent number, but the crowd was, for the most part, pro-Bush. I did not make it, because I completely forgot to get a ticket to the event. Not to mention, I don’t fit into the two defined categories, that of Bush-supporter or Bush-hater. If they had a separate section for “Republicans who voted for Bush and support the war in Iraq but who are so pissed off by everything else this administration is doing they don’t want to be perceived as giving blanket support to the President” (John Cole, party of one), I might have gone.

Despite my inability to adhere to rule #1 of the ‘citizen journalist’ credo (‘Show up, moron’), I do have these pictures my friend took:

It appears that a good time was had by all.

Bush In My Back YardPost + Comments (12)

Fabulous:

The effort to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has already become a fundraising magnet for both left and right that promises to rival the 2004 presidential campaign for the rate of cash flow, if not total dollars raised.

The prospect of shifting the Supreme Court to the right has fueled a quest for dollars by conservative and liberal interest groups that will halt only if President Bush does the unexpected and nominates someone acceptable to all sides.

Under the scenario of an ideological battle, participants predict the competition for cash will turn the Senate confirmation into the most expensive nomination fight in the nation’s history, certain to break $50 million and, if the nominee is especially controversial, likely to approach $100 million.

Most of the money raised would not be publicly reported. With the exception of such groups as MoveOn PAC, many organizations active in the fight are tax-exempt and have few, if any, disclosure requirements.

The nomination process will pit two lobbying and interest-group coalitions that have repeatedly gone head to head during the Bush administration over tax cuts, energy legislation, and class-action and bankruptcy measures. While the business-social-conservative coalition has repeatedly defeated the liberal-labor alliance, the outcome of a far more visible nomination fight would be highly unpredictable.

The mayhem following the Swift Vets cost only a couple hundred thousand dollars to generate, just to offer you a comparison. And when a significant portion of the right thinks that this is the key to what the ‘movement’ has been fighting for, and another portion of the left thinks that this nomination is all that keeps us from moving back to the 19th century, well, you get the idea.

I guess what annoys me most is that battle was already fought. Everyone knew what was at stake during the election, and Bush and Republicans won. We should just leave this to Bush and the people in the Senate who represent us. Sure, we all have a right to be free speech- that doesn’t mean we have anything valuable to say. I know I am not going to like every ruling this new Justice issues, but I am willing to live with the results. These pitched battles make it seem like a large part of the population isn’t willing to do so.

Bush is right:

The president appealed to special interest groups running ads and mobilizing supporters for the anticipated fight over the Supreme Court nominee to “tone down the heated rhetoric.”

Bus is going to appoint a conservative judge, and I am a little tired of the ‘no surpises’ stuff- no one has a right to knowing how the next justice is going to rule ahead of time. It appears that is what many of the activists on the right and the left want, and that means they do not want a judge as the next Supreme Court Justice. They want a political operative.

A Taste of What is To ComePost + Comments (55)

Interesting piece on what the future military might look like:

The Pentagon’s most senior planners are challenging the longstanding strategy that requires the armed forces to be prepared to fight two major wars at a time. Instead, they are weighing whether to shape the military to mount one conventional campaign while devoting more resources to defending American territory and antiterrorism efforts.

The consideration of these profound changes are at the center of the current top-to-bottom review of Pentagon strategy, as ordered by Congress every four years, and will determine the future size of the military as well as the fate of hundreds of billions of dollars in new weapons.

The intense debate reflects a growing recognition that the current burden of maintaining forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the other demands of the global campaign against terrorism, may force a change in the assumptions that have been the foundation of all military planning.

The concern that the concentration of troops and weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan was limiting the Pentagon’s ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts was underscored by Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a classified risk assessment to Congress this spring. But the current review is the first by the Pentagon in decades to seriously question the wisdom of the two-war strategy.

The two-war model provides enough people and weapons to mount a major campaign, like the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or the invasion of Iraq in 2003, while maintaining enough reserves to respond in a similar manner elsewhere.

This dovetails nicely with this piece at the Belgravia Dispatch:

The 1993 and 1997 QDRs enshrined over 50% of our combat arms, including artillery, special forces, and other combat support units were in the Reserve and Guard. Still about 60% of Armor and Infantry were active duty, but that means near 40% were part-timers. This is the military inherited in 2001. A conscious decision was made in the 90s to do this. We could not afford to pay those enormous amounts for defense without a public threat. (Where do you think the Clinton economy came from? Not Defense spending. Remember the Peace Dividend talk?)

So blaming stop loss and other shortages on Bush shows ignorance of the facts. It is the public’s and Congress’ fault for believing there was no threat despite the UBL edicts and North Koreans promising to turn LA into a “lake of fire”. (Read your newspapers. The stories were there. I remember them. Everyone else seems to have been reading something else.)

Makes you remember what a tough job the military and the security establishment have- not only trying to predict the future security threats, but what is needed to face those threats.

Changing The Military MissionPost + Comments (23)

Finished Season 7, and I have to say I really liked the season, and met the end with a profound sense of sadness. Plus, they killed one of my favorite characters. At any rate, if I had to rank order the seasons in order of which I liked the most, it would be:

5
2
3
7
1
4
6

I can’t explain how little I liked the whole Riley/Adam story line, even though Hush was masterful. Season 6 was pretty awful, but the last shows saved the whole season for me. At any rate, if you still have not had enough Buffy, I recommend the following:

Buffy World– all things Buffy, including transcripts and season 8 as written by fans.
Slayage– Academic geeks discuss the genre.

And then there is this:

Biological Warfare and the “Buffy Paradigm” (.pdf): a strategic paper from Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

She Saved the World A LotPost + Comments (6)

This one has been bothering me for a while, and I am surprised I forgot to bring it up.

When Buffy died the first time, Faith was spawned, and there were now two slayers. Why was another slayer spawned when Buffy died again, making it three. Because Faith still existed?

And One More QuestionPost + Comments (12)

Halfway through Season #7, which I like a helluva lot more than season 6, and tghere are several questions that have not been addressed adequately by the series:

1.) Other than Warren and those two Germans, why doesn’t someone just shoot Buffy? Or poison her? Or something other than hand-to-hand?

2.) Which also makes me wonder- why do all undead know martial arts?

3.) Has it ever been addressed (other than brief references in seasons 2&3) how the general population of Sunnydale is oblivious. to the mayhem going on around them?

4.) If you walk in a dark alley in Sunnydale, you get attacked. Have they ever considered street lights?

5.) Did Joss Whedon have a series of bad relationships? Why is the ‘love that can not be had’ such a recurring theme in EVERY series he creates?

6.) Why are there never investigations into the thousands of murders that take place? And why, other than Mrs. Summers, are there never any funerals? And why don’t they just cremate people, since they know they are going to come back undead?

I am sure there is more, but that is it for now.

Buffy The Vampire SlayerPost + Comments (14)