My MT is just getting more and more unstable. I am afraid this site might just melt down this week. Time to do the upgrade, I guess.
A Taste of What is To Come
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.
Changing The Military Mission
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.
Rino Sightings
The new RINO sightings is up and can be found here.
This is Great
You gotta love Drudge- where else would you find stuff like this:
NASA’s mission that sent a space probe smashing into a comet raised more than cosmic dust – it also brought a lawsuit from a Russian astrologer.
Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday “ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe,” the newspaper Izvestia reported Tuesday. A Moscow court has postponed hearings on the case until late July, the paper said.
The probe’s comet crash sent up a cloud of debris that scientists hope to examine to learn how the solar system was formed.
Bai is seeking damages totaling 8.7 billion rubles ($300 million) – the approximate equivalent of the mission’s cost – for her “moral sufferings,” Izvestia said, citing her lawyer Alexander Molokhov. She earlier told the paper that the experiment would “deform her horoscope.”
What are the normal punitive damage rewards for ‘deformed horoscopes?’
Hyperventilating About Rove
If you doubted me when I wrote the other day that the left is going to implode on their own hyperbole if Rove is found to have not done anything wrong, I would direct you to this:
Shit! Shit! Shit! Lawrence O’Donnell poopyman!! Everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you! Like glue! Hahahaha!!! I know you are but what am I?? Does your train of thought have a caboose?? Oh, that was a good one, Karl.
Damn! Damn! Think, Karl, think… You can get outta this.
Let’s see. I could bug someone’s office. No, they’d be expecting that. I could play the 9/11 card. Shit, no—I let George play it last week. Fuck! I know…I’ll leak a story to that homo in the press room…Guckert? Gannon?? Aw, crap on a Christmas tree, he’s gone. And Terry Moran’s grown a spine so I can’t use him. McClellan…Scottie old boy…he’ll be my missile defense shield. Spins shit out of thin air. Amazing talent. Good kid.
Calm…calm…calm. Inhale red, exhale blue..
Again, what made the pathological hatred of Clinton so much fiercer was that every time the right thought they had him nailed, he just got away with whatever the sin du jour was. The same here.
And I realize that this post has already set the necessary conditions for the “Aren’t you upset about Bush lying to start an illegal war” flame thread, so instead I would ask you to participate in the following unfinished flame war.
She Saved the World A Lot
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.