Gonzales to resign.
*** Update ***
Best quote so far from the blogosphere- Steve Clemons:
The inevitable certaily does take a long time in this administration.
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
Gonzales to resign.
*** Update ***
Best quote so far from the blogosphere- Steve Clemons:
The inevitable certaily does take a long time in this administration.
by John Cole| 20 Comments
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®
The Intel Dump draws some unpleasant comparisons regarding the latest Allawi/Maliki US-endorsed jockeying.
This post is in: General Stupidity
We are now officially a nation of hysterics:
Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.
The sprinkled powder forced hundreds to evacuate an IKEA furniture store Thursday.
New Haven ophthalmologist Daniel Salchow, 36, and his sister, Dorothee, 31, who is visiting from Hamburg, Germany, were both charged with first-degree breach of peace, a felony.
***Police fielded a call just before 5 p.m. that someone was sprinkling powder on the ground. The store was evacuated and remained closed the rest of the night. The incident prompted a massive response from police in New Haven and surrounding towns.
Daniel Salchow biked back to IKEA when he heard there was a problem and told officers the powder was just harmless flour, which he said he and his sister have sprinkled everywhere from New York to California without incident.
This is the real legacy of the last 7 years- a nation so whipped up into a frenzy over terrorism that you, me, anyone could be charged with a felony as long as some hysterical bedwetter somewhere thought we were committing an act of terrorism in our daily life. The Salchow’s are just lucky they are white. If they had biked back to the scene wearing brown skin and attempted to make their way through the crowd to talk to the cops, they probably would have been shot.
The fact that this sort of shit is happening with increasing regularity just emboldens politicians to make more laws, take more of your rights, and spend more of your hard earned money in the name of security. How many Americans have died due to terrorist attacks in this country in the last ten years?
Two thousand, seven hundred and forty-five. All related to 9/11, save five people that were killed in the anthrax mailings. There simply have been no other attacks- nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. The only other thing I can think of that comes close is the DC Sniper, and I can’t even remember his cause, so I am hesistant to call him a terrorist.
Again. 2745 dead. That is it. What is the US population?
According to the census, 302,703,731.
So 2745 out of 302,703,731 in the past ten years have died in terrorist attacks, and we are getting our knickers in a twist about an arrow made of flour in the IKEA parking lot?
It is absurd. You are safe. I am safe. This nation is safe. Quit being such a damned pussy. All of you.
*** Update ***
An update on 29 August. Long story short- this is a shakedown.
by John Cole| 63 Comments
This post is in: Military, War on Terror aka GSAVE®
Is more “good news”:
Shaping the Bush administration’s message on the Iraq war has taken on new fervor, just as anticipation is building for the September progress report from top military advisers.
For the Pentagon, getting out Iraq information will now include a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Iraq Communications Desk that will pump out data from Baghdad — serving as what could be considered a campaign war room.
According to a memo circulated Thursday and obtained by The Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant defense secretary for public affairs, is looking for personnel for what he called the high-priority effort to distribute Defense Department information on Iraq.
***The Pentagon dismissed suggestions that the communications desk will be a message machine or propaganda tool, and instead said it is being set up to gather and distribute information from eight time zones away in a more efficient and timely manner.
“I would not characterize it as a war room,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said Friday. “It’s far less sinister than that. It’s more like a library.”
I am fully willing to admit there is a chance I am wrong, and that things are going swimmingly in Iraq and that we are just about to turn the corner and peace and love and happiness are going to break out all over. Hell, I hope I am wrong. I hope all of this the past few years has not been a colossal waste, and I have no problem eating heaping helpings of crow if I am wrong. However, this sort of propaganda effort does not inspire confidence. In fact, quite the opposite.
All those reports of bad things going on- they don’t disappear if you pump out lots of good news. The basic statistics regarding life in Iraq do not change if you pump out stories about painted schools and markets that function some of the time (and even those reports are often dubious). No amount of happy fun talk about reclaimed streets due to massive troop deployment matters when the government is falling apart.
The problem is not that the good news is not being reported. The problem is that the bad news outweighs the good.
by John Cole| 14 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
The thing to take away from this post by Jacob Sullum is that the Bush administration’s concession that it classifies information that presents no security risk at all but that would be politically damaging to the president. Actually, it’s worse than that. They think that any information that could be politically damaging to the president by definition is a threat to national security. They’re using the classification of information to hide evidence of wrongdoing in the White House. And that they’ll declassify the same information when doing so would be politically advantageous to the president.
***Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is claiming that the White House Administration Office is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, a claim that would be farcical if it weren’t so flippin’ scary.
It also raises the question: If the adminstration office of the highest position in government–the office through which most White House information passes–is immune from the Freedom of Information Act, exactly what is the Freedom of Information Act for?
Silly Radley. The dhimmocrats are worse!
by John Cole| 11 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Document the stupid.
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
Also wrong. Who would have thunk it?
A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily distanced himself from the president’s remarks Thursday.
“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse.”
***Dower was decidedly unhappy with his 15 minutes of fame. “I have always said as a historian that the use of Japan [in arguing for the likelihood of successfully bringing democracy to Iraq] is a misuse of history,” he said when notified of the Bush quote.
He immediately directed me to a November 2002 New York Times op-ed where he outlined 10 reasons why “most of the factors that contributed to the success of nation-building in occupied Japan would be absent in an Iraq militarily defeated by the United States.”
Helping to rebuild a constitutional representative government (which is what we’re actually talking about) in a place that has already had one is immensely easier than laying a foundation on the sand of a political culture unsuited to such government. The social, political and economic structures of modern Japan made it vastly different from Iraq, c. 2003, and made it much more able to resume its constitutional parliamentary government. Japan’s cultural and ethnic homogeneity, its long history as a unified state, and the unifying symbol of the emperor all combined to make postwar Japan as unlike Iraq as could be imagined. So many of the conditions that explain Japan’s success after the war do not exist in Iraq. It is simple realism to acknowledge that two radically different societies are, in fact, radically different, and the development of democratic institutions in one may be impossible while it is possible in the other.
We are rapidly approaching the point that when the President addresses the nation, the only accurate and honest portion of the speech is when he states ‘Good morning.’ And since he is still in charge of things, even that is debatable.
Enough about Vietnam. What About Bush’s Japan Reference?Post + Comments (27)