Verbosities

Now, after reading this interview he gave today to the New York Times, how could anyone ever mention "Churchill" and "Giuliani" in the same sentence again:

“Neither one of these two wars – the one in Afghanstan/Pakistan or the one in Iraq – was nearly at the level of the planning we had done for the two wars we would have to fight at once,” he said. “Both of them would be considered small wars in comparison to that. So it would seem to me that we should have organized ourselves so that we could accomplish in Iraq what we had to accomplish without taking anything away from accomplishing in Afghanistan and Pakistan what we had to accomplish.”

First of all...we fought a war in Pakistan?! How did I manage to miss that. Maybe it was the week that the Eagles were in the Super Bowl, since I don't remember reading about it in my newspaper. If Giuliani were president when he made an offhand comment like that, it could spark the proverbial "international incident."

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Ars Technica says that a bill to give the FCC power over even"fleeting" swear words has passed a Senate committee and now moves on to the full Senate.

What's a "fleeting" swear word? Well, say Bono says, "Hey this is f*cking great!" on live TV, or a girl wears a shirt that says, "F*ck" a certain sports team and they show her on TV. A recent court decision said that the network could not be fined if they let it slip by accidentally.

Now this new bill is aimed at closing this "loophole."

The bill, called the "Protecting Children From Indecent Programming Act," seeks to assert that even "a single word or image may be considered indecent."

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You could pick anything from the (Sears) catalog, mail in your order with a check, and in a few days/weeks you'd get it. If you didn't like it, for any reason, Sears had a "satisfaction guaranteed" policy that you could return it at anytime for a full refund.

Now pay attention, because here's where it gets good.

In 1931, Sears starts an insurance company - Allstate. It buys financial investment firm Dean Witter and real estate broker Coldwell Banker in 1981. In 1984 it starts a joint venture with IBM called Prodigy, an online computer service, sort of a prototype AOL. In 1985, Sears launches a new major credit card, the Discover card. For the next eight years, the only credit card you can use at Sears is Discover.

At this time, the early 80's Sears is the largest retailer in the U.S...

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Former House speaker and possible presidential contender Newt Gingrich, speaking Thursday night at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, conjured up images of an Islamic dictatorship in the United States as the consequence of failure in Iraq.

''It isn't about Israel. It isn't about us being in Iraq,'' Gingrich told about 500 people gathered at the Impact '07 leadership conference at Stabler Arena. ''They want to impose their dictatorship on us.''

In grim terms, Gingrich described the most severe consequences for women, who he said would not have been allowed to attend the Lehigh conference.

''If you want to be able to drive, to have a job, to have a checkbook; if you don't want to have to wear a veil; if you want to be able to appear in public without a man, you'd better hope our team wins,'' Gingrich said

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You see, Edelman is kind of a poor man's Dougie Feith.

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Mr Berezovsky, who is being tried in absentia in Moscow for theft because Britain has refused to extradite him to Russia to face trial, said he has had many death threats in recent years.

“All of these threats bear the hallmarks of Russian security service activity and of course President Putin changed the law last year to empower agents to commit murder overseas,” he said.

“So I am not surprised that they tried to kill me.”

Speaking to BBC television on Wednesday, the multi-millionaire said the warning from London police echoed a similar one from a source in Russia about three months ago.

In recent years, Berezovsky has gone into business with Neil Bush, the younger brother of U.S. President George W. Bush. Berezovsky has been an investor in Bush's Ignite! Learning, an educational software corporation, since at least 2003. [1] In 2005, Neil Bush met with Berezovsky in Latvia, causing tension with Russia due to Berezovsky's fugitive status. [2] Neil Bush has also been seen in Berezovsky's box at the Emirates Stadium, the home of British soccer club Arsenal F.C., for a game. [3] There has been speculation in the English language Moscow Times that the relationship may cause tension in Russo-American bilateral relations, "especially since Putin has taken pains to build a personal relationship with the U.S. president."[4]

(Go to the wiki page if you wanna see those four citation links)

He swabs the device and runs it through the calorimeter. Again, no residue.

I ask why it can't be taken on the plane and he said, "Because it looks like an IED." Now, I agree it looks suspicious, but the machine found no traces of explosives, and the device wasn't big enough to do any damage.

“Our strategy of clear, hold and build, combined with an energized governmental and tribal engagement, is beginning to bear fruit,” Marine Maj. Gen. Walt Gaskin told reporters at the Pentagon via satellite.

"The morgue receives an average of four or five bodies everyday," Nima Jima'a, a morgue official, told IPS. "Many more are dropped in rivers and farms -- or it is sometimes the case they are buried by their killers for other reasons. The number we record here is only a fraction of those killed."

Ambulances, now able to move again after weeks of restrictions, have been removing bodies of victims from the current fighting. But they have also found skulls and bones, evidence of other killings long ago.

Dealing with these remains is becoming difficult. Like the rest of the city, the morgue suffers from continuing lack of electricity. Over the last two weeks, two of its refrigerators have been shut down. The smell of decomposing bodies hits visitors 100 metres away.

(Posted by Dean Barnett) The Republican portion of the Senate desperately needs someone to put the war into its proper strategic and intellectual context. Pardon me for being a cynic, but I don’t think Trent Lott is going to be the guy. And while John McCain has been heroically stalwart on the war, he still (publicly at least) clings to the outdated notion that we’re battling a numerically tiny band of Islamist nutjobs. This toxic piece of political correctness, born literally in the hours after 9/11, has hamstrung the war effort ever since.

Right now the painful fact is 2008 will be a very tough year for Republicans unless something seismic happens between now and November ‘08. Rather than trying to nibble away at the war effort, something that will be ruinous to the country and do nothing for their political prospects, Republican Senators would be much better served trying to make seismic things (like victory in Iraq and a decisive engagement with Iran) happen.

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Stocked full of “administration cronies,” the Pentagon’s public affairs division under assistant secretary of defense for public affairs Dorrance Smith, has set up a rapid-response project that “seeks to bypass the traditional media and work directly with talk radio and bloggers, mostly those with a heavily conservative tilt.”

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At this point in Bush's Presidency three things matter above all others. They motivate this final round of constitutional hardball: The first is keeping secret what the President and his advisers have done. The second is running out the clock to prevent any significant dismantling of his policies until his term ends. The third is doing whatever he can proactively to ensure that later governments do not hold him or his associates accountable for any acts of constitutional hardball or other illegalities practiced during his term in office.

If the NSA program and the Torture Memos were examples of the second round of constitutional hardball, the Libby commutation and Harriet Meiers' refusal to testify before Congress are examples of the third round. Although his Presidency now seems to be a failure, Bush's third round of constitutional hardball may be every bit as important as the first two. That is because if Bush is never held accountable for what he did in office, future presidents will be greatly tempted to adopt features of his practices. If they temper his innovations and his excesses only slightly, they will still seem quite admirable and restrained in comparison to Bush. As a result, if Congress and the public do not decisively reject Bush's policies and practices, some particularly unsavory features of his Presidency will survive in future Administrations.

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After we leave Iraq, as we inevitably will, we need to do three things to fight the "war on terror" effectively. First, we need to ratchet down our apocalyptic and moralistic rhetoric and recognize the jihadist enemy's true, relatively modest dimensions. This ain't no Soviet Union we're fighting here -- it's a bunch of guys in caves. Second, we need to use military force as a last resort. As Iraq has shown, occupation and war create more jihadis than they capture or kill. Instead, we need to use intelligence and police forces to break up jihadist terror networks. Finally, we need to address both the Arab/Muslim world's self-created pathologies and its legitimate grievances, both of which contribute to jihadism. War supporters make much of the pathologies, but have almost nothing to say about the grievances -- chief among them the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the greatest source of Arab/Muslim rage against America.

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"Impeachment is not a constitutional crisis; it is the cure for a constitutional crisis." Both were very clear that Impeachment is Congress' duty under our system of government when things get to this point. It is Congress' job, and they are falling down on the job. They must initiate impeachment proceedings or we are in real danger of losing our form of government. This is not hyperbole. Towards the end of the program Fein notes that if just one Committee Chairman had spoken to Bush/Cheney in a stern, adult voice and said "You cannot do that. This is the United Stataes of America. You are violating the law and violating the Constitution. You were not elected King for four years; in our system no man is above the law" things might have been different. Instead we get John Conyers' mumbling and Patrick Leahy's earnest dismay. We get Nancy Pelosi's desire to end the war, but not to do what is needed to stop the Bsuh/Cheney juggernaut.

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Republicans, as Krugman has observed, are a revolutionary power. They do not accept the legitimacy of the bipartisan non-parliamentary form of government that ruled the US for most of the post-war period. They do not accept that all three branches of government are co-equal. They do not believe that everyone has to obey the law. They are in Washington to get what they want, and if they can’t get it they will bring the entire machine to a shreeking halt.

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