March, 2007 archive

The Republican Party, under its current leadership, is doomed.

So is Hilary Clinton,

This poll says so:

For all the policy blueprints churned out by presidential campaigns, there is this indisputable fact: People care less about issues than they do about a candidate’s character.

A new Associated Press-Ipsos poll says 55 percent of those surveyed consider honesty, integrity and other values of character the most important qualities they look for in a presidential candidate.

Just one-third look first to candidates’ stances on issues; even fewer focus foremost on leadership traits, experience or intelligence.

Those of us who care about the Bill of Rights saw this coming (emphasis added):

Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda’s — 52,000 — and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.

The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board.

Face it, the Current Federal Administrator doesn’t give a damn about the Rule of Law.

It’s somewhat ironic that those who claim to oppose big government seem to be those who unleash its worst aspects.

Balloon Juice weighs in:

In all seriousness, the problem is not that there were abuses and mistakes made under this system- that is to be expected. There will always be mistakes and errors in every human endeavor. The real problem lies in the expansion of the program post 9/11.

Getting worked up about the ‘mistakes’ is misguided. The bigger problem is that this program exists in its current form, period.

I found an email in my spam box this morning that said

You have just received a virtual postcard from a family member!
.
You can pick up your postcard at the following web address:
.
http://www2.postcards.org/?d21-sea-sunset
.
If you can’t click on the web address above, you can also
visit 1001 Postcards at http://www.postcards.org/postcards/
and enter your pickup code, which is: d21-sea-sunset.

When I clicked the link, it opened the “download file” dialog box.

Yeah. Right. Post cards don’t download stuff. They just sort of lie there.

Since *.exe files are meaningless to Linux, I downloaded it and scanned it with F-Prot. F-Prot reports that it is infected as follows:

picture.exe->script.ini Infection: IRC/Zapchast.AK@bd
picture.exe->sup.reg Infection: REG/Zapchast.A

which, according to Sophos, is a “Trojan which sets up jobs to delete system files.

“The Trojan creates a Scheduled Task to delete the contents of the hard drive at 11:15pm on the next Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday (whichever is next).”

A little analysis revealed that it originated from an Outlook mail client in the Dominican Republic:

inetnum: 66.98.64/19
status: allocated
owner: VERIZON DOMINICANA
ownerid: DO-CODE-LACNIC
responsible: Indhira Medina
address: Av. Abraham Lincoln, 1101,
address: 1377 – Santo Domingo – DN
country: DO
phone: +1 809 220-2000 []
owner-c: ABT
tech-c: ABT
inetrev: 66.98.64/19
nserver: NS1.CODETEL.NET.DO
nsstat: 20070306 AA
nslastaa: 20070306
nserver: NS2.CODETEL.NET.DO
nsstat: 20070306 AA
nslastaa: 20070306
created: 20010406
changed: 20060911

nic-hdl: ABT
person: Abuse Team
e-mail: Abuse@VERIZON.NET.DO
address: Av. Abraham Lincoln, 1101,
address: 1377 – Santo Domingo – DN
country: DO
phone: +1 809 2202000 []
created: 20021127
changed: 20040309

Abuse@VERIZON.NET.DO has been notified.

And all last week the temperatures were in the teens.

TBogg.

. . . but I don’t think she’s going to end up at Park Place:

A woman apparently mistook the (Atlantic–ed.) city’s wooden way for a roadway Wednesday night.

Capt. Bill McKnight was driving his patrol car on the Boardwalk near Resorts Atlantic City, when a vehicle sped by him just before 7 p.m.

“At first I thought it was a snowplow, and I was going to yell at them for going so fast,” he said. “Then she just goes right by me like she’s on Pacific Avenue.”

He turned on his lights and siren to follow the car, but when the woman got to Connecticut Avenue, about five blocks away, she made a U-turn and was heading right at McKnight.

She was eventually apprehended.

He recommends the soothing solace of nature:

Scooter Libby may be a fall guy but he will probably go to jail in the summer. It is winter now. Out West, where Vice President Cheney vacations, the aspens are all bare. In the summer they will start blooming and then in the fall they will turn again. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. But there is one aspen standing tall all alone. I don’t think the Vice President will have to worry about that aspen turning and revealing the connecting roots. See how soothing nature can be?

No, it doesn’t save energy.

The upcoming shift in the Daylight Savings Time change is designed to help retailers — and is a substitute for a genuine energy policy, says author Michael Downing. Congress moved the time shift up this year. Melissa Block talks with Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time.

What Happened at Walter Reed?

Bush.

The guy who was going to restore integrity to the Oval Office.

Oh, yeah, and Halliburton.

Dick Polman sums it up (emphasis added):

But now that leaders of the governing party have been outed for allowing ex-soldiers to live in squalor; for trying to do treatment on the cheap even while the Iraq caseload was expanding; for privatizing Walter Reed support services by awarding a contract to (surprise) a former Halliburton official, thus trimming the support personnel staff from 300 to 50…now that all this has happened, with more to come (such as a broader probe of Veterans Affairs secretary Jim Nicholson, an ex-Republican national chairman with no previous experience advocating for vets), it would appear that the GOP’s traditional “support the troops” rhetoric has proved to be about as flimsy as a yellow ribbon tied to a tree.

Some commentators have equated this scandal, which victimizes vets, with the Katrina debacle that victimized the poor of New Orleans. But that strikes me as a facile comparison – because, in some ways, the Walter Reed scandal is worse. Notwithstanding all the Bush administration incompetence that was exposed in the wake of Katrina (incompetence that was heavily documented by House Republican investigators, to their credit), a hurricane is still an act of nature. Whereas Walter Reed is an act of man – or, more accurately, it is the product of man’s inaction.

(snippage)

. . . Thanks to cost-cutting measures initiated by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, coupled with Bush’s “competitive sourcing” program, private companies were being tapped to handle facilities management, patient care, and guard duty. As a result, many skilled government workers decided to leave. Yet, while all this was happening, the caseload expanded, courtesy of the wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq.

Profanity fails me.

More here from TBogg.

Addendum, 3/9/2007:

Paul Krugman:

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: a moment when the administration’s misgovernment has become obvious to everyone.

The problem starts with money. The administration uses carefully cooked numbers to pretend it has been generous to veterans, but the historical data contained in its own budget for fiscal 2008 tell the true story. The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.

To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. For example, Salon reported in 2005 that some Walter Reed patients were forced to pay hundreds of dollars each month for their meals.

More important, the administration has broken long-standing promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq, the VHA, which previously had offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions on who was entitled to enroll in its health-care system. As the agency’s Web site helpfully explains, veterans whose income exceeds as little as $27,790 a year, and who lack “special eligibilities such as a compensable service-connected condition or recent combat service,” will be turned away.

Phillybits has written a gem.

I don’t care whether you agree with it or not.

It’s just a gem of a piece of satirical writing.

No, obviously not that Fox.

This one, that I mentioned several months ago. The three dog alarm system alerted me that he was cruising the neighborhood in the snow this morning:

That’s a concept I mentioned in the previous post.

This pretty much illustrates the rhetorical tactics of the “let’s keep everything clouded” crowd:

Phillybits caught it.

The hook is that he was found not guilty of lying to the FBI (one count). He was found guilty of the other four counts: two counts of perjury, one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice.

You know, or you will in a second, I don’t watch much television news, mostly because there’s no depth to the coverage. And I stopped listening to the local all news station when the family that owned it sold it to Clear Channel; Clear Channel dropped CBS and brought in Fox, and the program manager, a man with a long and distinguished career as a radio journalist, and a gracious and gentlemanly person, left for a competitor.

But, boy, there are an awful lot of examples of Fox just plain out lying about stuff.

Kinda like Bush.

———–

Of course Scooter was the fall guy. But I’m sure the poor schnook is surprised that he’s actually having to take the fall.

I feel sorry for Scooter. He did what he was asked to do. The real culprits are those who asked him to do it. But one can forget accountability, except perhaps in Robert Gates’s DOD, just as one can forget truth, as far as the current Federal Administration is concerned.

I would emphasize that this has nothing to do with “conservative” or “liberal.” Wherever one might fall along the political continuum, one should be able to tell–and hear–the truth.

One of the things that concerns me about the NeoConservative movement and some of its supporters is this: Like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, some of its leaders seem to think that their followers can’t handle the truth. Much as we saw here, they cower and run from open debate and clear skies.

I conclude that, in a free marketplace of ideas, that fear can mean only one thing: They fear the truth will not sell, that it will undermine, rather than build, their followers’ allegiance.

Therefore, they lie to keep their supporters.

How sad for a want-to-be leader to have to build his or her movement on lies.

And how morally reprehensible, how bankrupt, how morally and spiritually empty.

It must be a sad and lonely thing to be a NeoCon.

Censorship must be the American Way (emphasis added):

A former White House official who ordered three activists expelled from a 2005 Denver public forum with President Bush says it was White House policy to exclude potentially disruptive guests from Bush’s appearances nationwide.

The former official, Steve Atkiss, revealed the policy Friday in an interview after two volunteer bouncers identified him and a current White House staffer, Jamie O’Keefe, as the officials who ordered the so-called Denver Three activists sent away from the event.

The activists had done nothing to disrupt the forum, and two of them sued over the incident.

Clearly, it is important to have bouncers thought police at political functions. After all, the market place of ideas must be reduced to a monopoly small selection of one or someone might have a dissident competing original competent thought.

And we can’t have that, can we?

With a tip to Dan Froomkin.

Imprisoning nine-year old terrorists.

Read it and weep for the United States of America.

via HuffPost:

Senator Trent Lott appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos to discuss the controversy surrounding military hospital Walter Reed, among other topics. While discussing the shocking conditions at the military hospital, Lott tried to defend some of the negligence, asserting that Walter Reed “was on the base closure list…to be closed.

My son is one of those troops.

I trust he will never end up in a hell hole like that Walter Reed dormitory.

How the hell anyone can defend what happened there, regardless of which side of the aisle he or she sits on, escapes my ken.

When will people stop defending the indefensible, simply because their guy is in the Big White House?

It’s interesting: those he talks to disavow their words, hide their lapel pins, and run away.

They have the courage of their convictions–until questioned about them.

With a tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Dick Polman puts his finger on it: Clinton fatigue.

Back at the dawn of their excellent adventure, Hillary would tell voters that she and her husband were a package deal, two for the price of one. And when they found themselves under attack – thanks to his military draft avoidance and bimbo eruptions – they hunkered in their bunker (“the war room,” as Hillary dubbed it) and toughed it out together.

(snip)

But I sense that many Democrats aren’t necessarily sold on the idea of extending the war-room ethos into 2016, and that creates a potential opening for a rival (perhaps Sen. Barack Obama) savvy enough to suggest, without getting personal, that Clinton fatigue should remain a malady of the late ’90s.

However capable either or both Clintons are (and, in tems of competence, either or both run rings around the Current Federal Administrator, who thinks talk is not just a substitute for action, but is, indeed, action, and who thinks things are true just because he wants them to be true), they are together and singly just too damned exhausting.