Random Links

I've had the urge to blog over the last few weeks, but never quite got around to it. Therefore, under the heading of, "things I found interesting," I offer a handful of links. (No time for proofreading, sorry.)

The Most Disappointing President from April 22.

To accompany that one, I offer The GOP's Ideas Deficit.

Achenbach is uncharacteristically serious in The Next Big Scandal from April 21. To accompany it, you might want to take a look at In Sadr City, Basic Services Are Faltering and the happy news that War costs could be under $170 bln: Pentagon. (If you're interested in a bit more background on the failure in Iraq, you might try How Much Did Rumsfeld Know?)

Afghanistan, the forgotten country, may be back on the radar. On May 9, I read that the Pentagon Is Open to Moving More Marines to Afghanistan.

They should never have left before the job was done, but don't let me bore you by repeating myself on that subject for the five thousandth time.

There's plenty of history to tell us what not to do. I can't help but wonder if any of our so-called 'leaders' know any of it.

I can't really say I'm at all sorry to read that one 'legacy' Bush is leaving to posterity is record-breaking disapproval numbers.

I've always said he was dangerously crazy (not really the point at this moment, but I'm having trouble getting past it) and a liar. Like with that Texas Two-Step he's dancing around what he's calling "appeasement"* when he's really just in a snit because someone said he was wrong, wrong, wrong, and public opinion is agreeing with them.

And it's not just Bush. Hypocrisy abounds. Check out Hypocrisy on Hamas, just to emphasize the point that more than one of today's prominent Republicans is as devoid of principles as he is of rational plans for the welfare of this country. (You know what's sad? What's sad is that in today's climate, he very well might manage to sell himself as a "moderate." I mean, I still remember the days when "I'm not psychotic" wasn't actually enough to get you elected in this country.)

On another site, I didn't even have to read the article. I read the headline and knew everything I need to know about McCain. McCain: Victory in Iraq by 2013 the article said.

I see it now. Entirely ignoring reality and common sense, he's declaring that if we elect him, he'll get us almost there by the end of his term, but we'll need to re-elect him in order to get us all the way to the finish line. It's as callous a piece of calculated manipulation as I've seen in this primary season.

Anyhow. I clicked through to see if my expectations were going to be met and found out that the real story was both better and worse than I had anticipated. No flat statement of actual success, but a hope that in another five years, "most" of our servicemen and servicewomen would be home. Most. Not all. He admits there will still be violence in Iraq and that the effects of the region's entire history and culture won't magically be erased. From what I gather, he's picturing some voodoo-based, magically healing version of democracy that will inexplicably grow out of our illegal and unwarranted (unless you believe we're trying to make up for having installed Hussein in office in the first place) invasion.

Eyeballing his predictions from a distance, what I see is an unstable society, divided and prone to outbursts of mass violence, with a frightened and divided population made up of factions that neither trust nor like each other.

You know, that reminds me of something...what is it?

Oh. Yeah. The whole Palestine-Israel situation.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but somewhere online I read that War Is A Racket would make good reading for those of us worried about what's called the "military-industrial complex."

More amusingly, I offer this little gem. I make no statement concerning the factual truth of the story and I certainly don't accuse Shrub of neo-Nazism*, but I do suggest that if you look at his behavior, especially in the last 8 years, there's a long string of events that paints a plausible picture of someone who would doesn't have much trouble imagining himself ruling over a chastened mass of obedient consumer-laborers.

The scary thing about Bush, is that his family had the money to whitewash him into the White House. He doesn't have what it takes (for reference, see everywhere) and everything he's done has been a catastrophe (ditto) but he's going to be living in an ex-presidential bubble for the rest of his life, so I doubt that he'll ever be forced to really face the consequences of his actions or to understand how very wrong he was on almost every point. Money can buy protection from that kind of reality.

I swear, the only thing that's saved him from impeachment is that the failures are coming so thick and fast--botched invasions, illegal wars, massive corporate frauds as the result of government indulgence, skyrocketing unemployment numbers, disintegrating housing market, collapsing infrastructure, natural disasters both national and international, and massive inflation--the failures are coming so thick and fast that there's just no time to work up a case around any one issue.**

Now all we can do is to try to keep the pieces wired together for a few more months until we have (one certainly hopes) a saner leadership in place to start fixing the damage.

Drat. I swore to myself I wasn't going to go on a rant, and I just had to spend ten minutes removing a lot of gratuitous insults from the last three paragraphs. Time to stop blogging.

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* Although I'm sure he'd fancy himself in jackbooks. (And now I have to go rinse my brain out with bleach.)

* * Also, as I'm sorry to say, as I'm always sorry to have to say, being extremely stupid and criminally short-sighted isn't illegal in this country. Doing the wrong things in the wrong way for the wrong reasons might be morally indefensible, but you don't pay for them in a court of law.

Wingnuts on the home front.

Yeah, we got trouble, right here in Denver these days. (Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with "B" and that stands for Bruce!)

Bruce told to leave podium over remark about Mexican workers*

He's always been a jewel in the Rightwingnut crown, but.... (And, by the way, about that kicking story? I note that the photographer in question had an ethnically Puerto Rican name. Maybe Bruce just has a problem with people whose skins are brown?)

And, while I'm making note of idiotic Colorado wingnut politicians, here's another one for your reading pleasure.

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* Story comments elsewhere are interesting. It's fascinating to see the number of people who anxious to stand up and affirm their own stupidity.

Stupid

In a passing political note, let me say how happy I am that I did not watch the debates this week. From the comments and coverage I've read, they were even more devoid of content they were when I first decided (several years ago) that watching them live was a waste of time.

In other political "news"?

You know times are tough when the American president and the British prime minister start talking about the good ol' days of the Blitz.

It's been forever since I've been able to hear Bush talk without wanting to kill myself, but I feel justified in my contempt for the man when I read things like this little jewel, presented in response to a suggestion that maybe, just maybe, our "special" relationship with the UK isn't quite as special as it used to be.

"False!" Bush argued before the questioner finished. "We've got a great relationship. . . . Our special relationship has been forged in common values . . . And so our relationship is very special . . . There's just such a uniqueness in the relationship."

So very special.

Things seem to have gone downhill from there:

No matter: The two men had far bigger problems to discuss. Indeed, listening to Brown and "Boosh," as the Scotsman called his counterpart, gave a powerful sense of just how grim the times have become. They spoke of violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, problems with Iran and Zimbabwe, AIDS in Africa, the credit crunch, the housing crisis, soaring fuel prices, and even, as Brown described it, "food riots in many countries, the lowest supply of food for 30 years."

Times are so bad, in fact, that Brown flew to America on a plane provided by the discount charter company Titan Airways. The stature of the two leaders had shrunk so much that there were empty seats in the Rose Garden yesterday, and only Fox News bothered to have its correspondent do a live report from the event.

So very sad for this country.

Search and Find!

One of the things that's fun about the new job is spending some time poking around online and finding various unexpected and interesting sites. Some finds, of course, are better than others.

This one, Pretrieve, looked promising, It advertises itself as a "search engine designed to make finding information about business from free public record sites faster and easier, providing categorized links that deliever[sic] users directly to their search results" but a few sample searches brought up nothing but a page full of phone number sites, no matter how well-known the company name I was searching on.

Quick March advertises itself as the "Source for searching anything on the internet." IMO? Dogpile does it better.

Even more promising was Research Connect. "An Integrated research database connecting the media and investors with leading independent financial, business, economic, political, technical, legal, medical, scientific, and social research." Fascinating. I wish I could afford to subscribe. Or even that I had a use for that information.

I mean, look at the excerpt I found from one report (September 28, 2005):

Global War on Terrorism: DOD Should Consider All Funds Requested for the War When Determining Needs and Covering Expenses

To assist the Congress in its oversight role, GAO is undertaking a series of reviews on the costs of operations in support of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). In related work, GAO is raising concerns about the reliability of the Department of Defense's (DOD) reported cost data and therefore is unable to ensure that DOD's reported obligations for GWOT are complete, reliable, and accurate.

Authored by Susan Becker, Acting Director, Government Accountability Office (GAO)

The excerpt goes on to discuss how the various branches of the DoD are either incompetent to handle their own basic accounting and reporting or are dancing to hide where they're actually spending the billions they're being given. (There might be a slight editorial bias in that sentence.)

(The rest of the excerpt is here, for those who'd like to read the part that's accessible to non-subscribers of the service.)

It's only $$$,$$$,$$$,$$$

Views on Money for Iraq War, and What Else Could Be Done With It

Sometimes I think the NYTimes really misses the boat in their headlines. In an article about what people think we should have spent/be spending the money we're using to take over Iraq, I found this little gem:

Mr. Bush said in his speech on Thursday that the Defense Department budget today represented slightly more than 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with more than 6 percent in some years of the Reagan administration and as much as 13 percent in 1952-3, when the United States was engaged in the war in Korea.

But the war in Iraq is largely being paid for off the books, with emergency and supplemental spending rather than from the Pentagon’s operating budget, so Mr. Bush’s figures are a low estimate of the relative cost of the war, analysts have observed. And growing entitlement costs today make such comparisons with previous eras questionable.

I could have made an entire article out of that alone. Comparing what they said then with what we now know they knew then, and what they've been saying at intervals along the way.

Except with, you know, the inclusion of actual facts that show how they're shading and distorting the truth.

Sometimes I really do wonder if the major news organs are going to remember their shame-faced admissions, years too late, that their 'journalism' was insufficiently 'investigative' about the Bush Administration's pre-war assertions. And if they're really going to do it any differently the next time.