January, 2007 archive

Whack!

Three pregnant teens living in a group home whacked the director in the head with a frying pan, tied her up and then fled in a stolen minivan, police said.

Last week, I took my Defensive Driving refresher course (that insurance discount is worth three hours every three years!).

None of these facts were covered in it.

’nuff said

A fire that started in a man’s pants pocket, critically injuring him and destroying his hotel room, was not ignited by a cell phone as authorities suspected, phone technicians said.

In my view, history will show that this president never seriously prosecuted this war, never took his responsibility seriously, never provided sufficient resources, never even gave it his full attention. That became clear to me in 2003. I didn’t get it beforehand because I just assumed that any American president would understand the gravity of the decisions he was taking and would ensure that he took all means to guarantee victory. But this president didn’t. He ran this war like a distracted frat boy, irritated by the distractions it required, and outsourced its execution to two unhinged aides. In other words: he wimped out. Bill Kristol has the gall to call critics of the surge “boneless wonders.’ But there is only one truly boneless wonder these past four years, and he is still sitting in the White House.

Boneless. Boneheaded. Six of one, half-dozen of another.

I grew up in a Ford family.

I believe that real cars don’t wear bowties.

But I know that the next Ford I buy, if I buy one, will undoubtedly crash:

Microsoft is to work with Ford to supply voice-activated software that will allow drivers to make mobile calls or play songs stored on digital music players without taking their hands off the wheel.

Then there will be only one course of action.

The interregnum is over.

This week, I started my new gig as a contractor developing documentation for a fairly significant documentation consulting firm.

As I started working regular hours again this week, I had only one thought:

“Where the hell did I ever find enough time to go to work?”

From El Reg:

A Melbourne man was today accused of using a tiny video camera embedded in the toe of his shoe to look up womens’ skirts on the city’s buses, trains and trams – and admitted doing so for the last four years, local police claimed.

Story here and here.

Answer here:

It either doesn’t understand “competence,” or, more likely, it fears competence.

Why does the Current Federal Administrator relish breaking the law?

Phillybits pulls it all together.

You belong to George:

The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to get banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage in the United States, The New York Times said on its Web site on Saturday.

Citing intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the newspaper said the investigations, part of an expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering, also included CIA issuance of what are called national security letters to get access to financial records from U.S. companies.

And from all this, there has not yet been one–one–successful prosecution on United States shores of anyone for anything connected with terrorism since the initial World Trade Center bombing, which did not occur, was not investigated, and was not prosecuted under the Current Federal Administration. And note that the convictions that resulted in that case resulted without attempts to abrogate anyone’s civil liberties.

So what’s it all about?

Tyranny. Just because they want to.

Why is the United States poised to try Jose Padilla as a dangerous terrorist, long after it has become clear that he was just the wrong Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day?

Why is Washington still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, long after years of interrogation and abuse have established that few, if any, of them are the deadly terrorists they have been held out to be?

And why is President Bush still issuing grandiose and provocative signing statements, the latest of which claims that the executive branch has the power to open mail when it sees fit?

I once believed that the common thread here is presidential blindness — an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the chief executive to believe that these futile measures are integral to combating terrorism; a self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is a chump and Guantanamo Bay is just a holding pen for a jumble of innocent or half-guilty wretches.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these efforts isn’t to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo Bay or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terrorism. The object is a larger one: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

What part of “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” are they so incapable of understandiing?

And how can members of the Current Federal Administration sleep at night?

With apologies to Jesus’ General.

Here.

. . . supposedly followed the Big Bang.

Here’s more evidence.

Good-bye KDE.

Hello XFCE (the Low Cholesterol Desktop).

Faster, lighter, smaller. And runs KDE services.

Listen. Especially to the end.

With a tip to Jesus’ General.

famously said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

He had nothing on the Current Federal Administration.

When is an escalation not an escalation.

When it’s a surge.

When is a surge not a surge. When it’s an augmentation (funny, I get emails about augmentation all the time).

At least in Decider circles, surge is out and augmentation is in. This battle over words may seem trivial, but it is not. Language is powerful. Whoever captures the language has the power to frame an issue. Which is why the Bush camp has now unveiled augmentation, a word that sounds more benign than escalation, which still carries the stench of a certain lost war in the jungle.

The Bush administration has long understood the importance of word play, which is why, among many examples, it has long sought to redefine the privatization of Social Security as a push for “personal accounts” (because the word personal has a more positive connotation). Similarly, the urge to push the friendlier word surge (a burst of electrical power) stemmed from a war council desire to cushion the blow of a new troop hike.

Orwell, the British journalist/commentator/novelist, understood this impulse more than six decades ago. In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” he argued that because our leaders often have little interest in candor, “political language has to consist largely of euphemism.” He also wrote: “Politics otself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred….When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

When out and out lies won’t work, obsfuscate.

Translated.

Here.

With a tip to TBogg.

As I drove to Paoli this morning, I was musing on how to address just this issue.

I come home to find that Andrew Sullivan beat me to it:

The premise of the speech, and of the strategy, is that there is a national democratic government in Baghdad, defending itself against Jihadist attacks. The task, in the president’s mind, is therefore to send more troops to defend such a government. But the reality facing us each day is a starkly different one from the scenario assumed by the president. The government of which Bush speaks, to put it bluntly, does not exist. The reality illumined by the lynching of Saddam is that the Maliki government is a front for Shiite factions and dependent for its future on Shiite death squads. U.S. support for the government is not, therefore, a defense of democracy in a unified country, whatever our intentions. It is putting the lives of American soldiers in defense of the Shiite side in an increasingly brutal civil war.

References to the Iraqi government in much of the discussion of what to do seems to assume that Iraq is an independent nation that petitioned the United States for assistance. Witness this discussion on Here and Now. (The portion involving Richard Perle is particulary interesting.)

Yet, the Iraqi government is the creation–an unruly creation, perhaps, and obviously an impotent one–of the Current Federal Administration.

And, frankly, the Current Federal Administration blew it.

Big time.

And keeps looking for some way to get out of the quicksand without admitting that it ever stepped in quicksand to begin with, let alone charged into it full tilt with guns a-blazin’ even as by-standers shouted out warnings.

Meanwhile, Professor Cole weighs in on the merits of the Bushite plan:

The answer to “al-Qaeda’s” occupation of neighborhoods in Baghdad and the cities of al-Anbar is then, Bush says, to send in more US troops to “clear and hold” these neighborhoods.

But is that really the big problem in Iraq? Bush is thinking in terms of a conventional war, where armies fight to hold territory. But if a nimble guerrilla group can come out at night and set off a bomb at the base of a large tenement building in a Shiite neighborhood, they can keep the sectarian civil war going. They work by provoking reprisals. They like to hold territory if they can. But as we saw with Fallujah and Tal Afar, if they cannot they just scatter and blow things up elsewhere.

And the main problem is not “al-Qaeda,” which is small and probably not that important, and anyway is not really Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. They are just Salafi jihadis who appropriated the name. When their leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed, it didn’t cause the insurgency to miss a beat. Conclusion: “al-Qaeda” is not central to the struggle. Izzat Ibrahim Duri and the Baath Party are probably the center of gravity of the resistance.

How many more lives get sacrified to delusion?

Dick Polman thinks he has the answer

By announcing to his dwindling Republican base that he is sending 20,000 more troops to help shore up what he persists in calling the “young democracy” – indeed, the Republican base was his intended TV audience, since relatively few others support him on Iraq anymore – Bush signaled that the expenditure of American blood and money will continue until the day that he packs up and moves out.

In other words, lots more will die for a lie.

Where do you stand?

You can find me here:

Go here to find yourself.

With a tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew Sullivan’s blog.