Kos has a lively debate on John Kerry's above average service record which you should check out.
But after looking at some of the docs, I have to wonder why they're bringing this up. Kerry volunteered for combat duty on Swift boats, which he didn't have to do, and almost got killed. The right wants to debate if he got wounded the first time, but since he was treated for it, he got his medal.
My only thought is that the Bushies are trying to do to Kerry what they did to McCain and Clelland, slander their service and question their patriotism by dragging out right-wing cranks who have an axe to grind.
The only problem here is that Bush's own service record is so deficient that they need to avoid the whole issue. Kerry had completed a tour on a destroyer. He didn't have to seek combat duty, and he did and pretty much did as well as one can do without some major disaster befalling them. There is nothing but praise for Kerry in his records and his crew still stands by him. Unlike Clelland and McCain, Kerry's got witnesses to his acts of bravery. He's got a real live Green Beret officer who he saved while wounded.
The simple fact was that John Kerry was a fearless officer who showed total disregard for his personal safety.
Someone suggested that the Rove plan is to attack him for his anti-war activism. Which would be even dumber.Bush used his connections to be assigned to a fighter squadron with obsolete aircraft, refused an overseas assignment and was taken off flight status. Does he really want to answer questions about his support of the war? If he opposed it, how can he attack Kerry for his very public stand, which got him noticed by the White House. If he supported it, why wasn't he flying an F-4 over Vietnam? Kerry, coming from exactly the same background, fought in Vietnam, then opposed the war.
This is a stupid argument which will harm Bush. Raising it was even dumber. They had to know his service record was good. The glowing words describing his conduct cut into Bush's less than glowing service like a hot knife through butter.
If they want to debate patriotism, John Kerry is the perfect vehicle for it. I don't think they'll ambush him like McCain and Clelland. a few eyewitness stories will shut them down cold.
WHAT is great sushi? Of course, said Seki, the chef and owner of Sushi Seki on First Avenue, great sushi needs great fish. But, he continued, great fish is not enough.
"Sushi is so simple that each element must be perfect, and all the elements must be balanced," he said. "Like pizza."
Like pizza, sushi can be downed as a quick lunch or dwelt upon obsessively for a lifetime. Once your sushi consciousness has been raised, it becomes a pleasure to appreciate its subtle distinctions: the rice should be warm, so that the chilled fish begins to approach body temperature before the piece goes into your mouth; nori, seaweed sheets used for rolling maki, should be thin and crisp, instead of tough and leathery; the wasabi and gari (pickled ginger) should be freshly made.
In Japan, aficionados judge a sushi chef by more than the quality of his fish. ("His" because there are almost no women who are sushi chefs in Japan: legend has it that women's hands are too warm to make sushi.) The proportion of rice to fish is carefully considered. Even the arc described by a piece of sushi fish as it rests on top of the rice has a prescribed shape.
"It should have the same curve as the pages of a book, when you open it and place it on a table" said Gen Mizoguchi, the sushi chef at the new Megu in TriBeCa. Traditional sushi chefs arrange the pieces in rows to mimic the appearance of a school of fish swimming.
Despite this cultural and culinary baggage, it is worth noting that sushi began not as an elegant way to eat raw fish but as a way to preserve it. Packed between layers of cooked rice, whole raw fish fermented slowly instead of rotting, becoming lightly pickled. That pickled flavor is still a faint but essential element in sushi. It is why sushi rice is sprinkled with vinegar.
I came late to eating sushi, in my mid-30's. The sublime nature of raw fish had escaped me well past the time it should have. I liked cooked Japanese food, but sushi had always seemed, well, icky, to me.
I was at a party when raw salmon was served in sashimi style. I took a piece and ate it, and liked it. There were no women to pick up, I was already drunk, so, I had nothing to lose.
Sushi is one of those things you have to try and once you do, it is the perfect dinner. Why? Because it is great for a date, shows you're sophisticated, and is relatively cheap. New York's East Village is filled with both Japanese expats and a ton of sushi restaurants. Jen loves sushi and celebrated her last two birthdays over sushi. In fact, because I was recovering when her birthday came, I owe her a sushi dinner. Which is fine by me, because sushi, like single malt scotch, is an aquired taste I didn't mind aquiring.
I know we talk a lot about home cooking here, but sushi is one of the things I have no interest in learning how to cook. Given that a sushi chef is so skilled, I would rather just have them make it and revel in his skill rather than make some half-baked version at home. Japanese food is not hard to cook, but sushi is as much art as food. There is something refreshing in the effort placed in seeing a skilled artisan at work.
Sushi, oddly enough, is one of the most subtle foods I have ever eaten. It doesn't have strong flavors, unlike most western seafood. The polar opposite of sushi and sashimi is Maryland crab. Old Bay seasoning is as unsubtle a flavor as one can have on food. I find it a bit too salty for my taste, but it smacks you in the face.
With seafood, subtle flavors are best, unless you want to cover the food with something so outstanding that it stands up and salutes. Most seafood doesn't need it. Crab, is of course, the exception. Even mussels do better with a simple garlic and butter sauce. Not crabs. If you don't come with big flavor, don't come at all. A little butter and lemon won't do. It's not a lobster or clams.
Now, I grew up in a seafood loving family. Crabs were our delicacy where others would save that for barbecue or roast meat. We would boil crabs when there was any chance, especially in mid-summer. Shrimp was nice, but crabs was the special meal. Not that we would have it with anything, nope, not even hot sauce. Crab was always special on its own. Old Bay Seasoning wasn't even an issue. A beer boil was a post-adulthood innovation. No squeamishness about boiling live crabs. Just toss them in a large pot and boil them.
The thing about sushi, which I came to later on, is that it is the most sophisticated meal you can have and not have it soaked in buttery sauces and have to dress up for. Good sushi, which can be as expensive as any meal in Manhattan, is subtle, not because of the ingredients, which are pretty much the same, but because of the skill of the chef, the use of the knife, the way he handles the fish, the way he displays it. That's the thing which you don't notice, but marks his skill as clearly as a flag.
Sushi is a simple food, but it is often simple food where the most skill is required to execute it successfully.
US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy
George Monbiot
Tuesday April 20, 2004
The Guardian
To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.
The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters: homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns" should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences. Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7,000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that the "screaming and near fist fights" began.
I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was "watered down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism. Good to see that the extremists didn't prevail then.
But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.
In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.
What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.
The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.
The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast.
This nonsense about the Rapture makes for a good movie, but the reality is that millenial movements are nothing new. Hell, Calvinism had pre-ordination as a major tenant of faith. If these people want to spend their money on badly written novels, who am I to complain. After all, I have a few Tom Clancy's around.
But the scary part is that these people are expecting to be lifted off out of their lives, because they are saved and the Jews will get the rest of their final solution and the Muslims will join them. Which is nonsense. When I'm asked about religion, far from my favorite topic, I say I'm a Methodist, which I am. A nice, safe, liberal faith which doesn't hate gays andn won't embarass themselves like the Episcopalians.
I don't expect God to murder all non-born again people, since that's most of the earth, nor do I think bringing about Armageddon is a smart move. There was already a battle of Meggidio, in 1918 and the world didn't end.
While I believe in God and good works, these people use religion as a cudgel. They pervert the concept of being saved into some kind of supernatural cloak. They can be bigoted, small minded and cruel and whip out Jesus as a shield.
At it's most extreme, they use religion as a cynical tool, like Judge Roy Moore. The dingbats who thought God's word had to be represented by some sculpture profaned the word of God. If you believe in the Ten Commandments, they should be in your heart, not tossed in someone's face.
And the idea that all other faiths must fall before Jesus, is well, deeply offensive. If there is a God, then He must lead us to find our own ways to him.
This sort of religious thuggery has gotten people killed in Iraq. For some reason, people were offended by Christian prostelization. As if they didn't have their own faith.
This drive to denigrate other religions on the part of the born agains comes from a profound ignorance of the world. They think their little patch of Dogpatch was ordained by God and anyone else who doesn't share in a love of BBQ and Nascar needs to be brought to Jesus. Yet, it never occurs to them that they might not like Imams trying to convert them to Islam, to bring them to the true light of Allah.
These millenialists think End Times are here. I might be more impressed if this didn't happen every 1000 years or so. These people, with their blather about the Rapture are nothing new. At the end of every century someone thinks Jesus is going to come back and take them with him, and of course, they are disappointed.
The support these wackos give to Israeli is really a kinder, gentler version of the Final Solution. Sure, they don't compare them to vermins and rats, but they clearly want to exterminate the Jews as much as Himmler. But instead of gassing them and turning them to fertilizer, they want to bring them to Jesus, preferably as Southern Babtists or Pentacostals. They have nothing but disdain for Judaism and would like to eliminate it.
The Israelis know this and game them for support. But like with all cynical alliances, the bill will come due one day and these folks will expect their climatic battle, which will kill lots of Jews and Muslims while they, a distinct worldwide minority, gets to see the bloodbath at the hand of God.
Which is insane, but amusing. South Park once had heaven populated by Mormons while everyone else went to hell. The only problem was that while Hell sucked, and you got to watch Saddam bugger the devil, Heaven sucked even worse. What do these people think heaven is, some kind of Super Texas, where there is only those who think like them and everyone else gets screwed?
It's a truly American version of religious triumphalism. The only problem is that the current dry drunk in the White House latched on to Jesus as warrior prince. I have no idea if he's as wacky as his fellow Texan Babtists, but his crutchlike reliance on God is as pathetic as is scary. God, I don't think, is encouraging Bush in his bloody war in Iraq. Any more than he turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. Humans were given free will and God rarely intervenes, at least to me. The same God which watched Hitler rise, watched the US Army defeat him and hang his henchmen. Man is responsible for man's good and man's evil.
Belief is a good thing. Using that belief as a weapon to insult or harm others, much less thinking you get a box seat before you go to heaven profanes God's word and thought.
The Seattle Times ran a picture of flag-draped coffins in a transportplane a few days ago. The row of coffins went on for a while, and the picture was quite pretty, until you realized that each flag represented a dead American, mostly teenagers. It was a heartbreaking reminder of the cost of war, any war.
Every death is a tragedy. Every one. We forget that sitting in our homes, watching TV or arguing about Bush. But for those who die, there is a gap which will never be filled. The teenagers who roam Iraq today will never forget their dead friends, not at 25, 50 or 80. Those deaths will remained ingrained in their lives no matter where they go or what they do. It will define and haunt them for as long as they live.
I was watching Band of Brothers on the History Channel, and the two things which struck me was that every death of a friend was a tragedy, even to combat paratroopers, and the love they had for each other was amazingly deep and profound and lasted long after their lives had moved on from the Army and war. It was as if time had no barrier and to hear these now elderly men recount their war, it was as if they had not left the 1940's.
One day, our great grandchildren will hear similiar stories from Iraq war veterans, and 2004 will be the most important time of their lives.
The Newshour did a profile of a Marine who died in Ramadi a couple of weeks ago. He came from a small town in Wyoming, and the entire town came out to his funeral, which had to be held in the school gym. His family so desperately wanted to believe that he died defending America, that his death was not in vain. They so wanted to find a meaning in his death, and their sacrifice that it was truly heartbreaking. They had lost their 19 year old son, one of eight locals serving in Iraq.
His best friend, who had joined the Marines with him, was, like a 19 year old who had no idea of what he wanted, eager to get to Iraq.
The Marine, who was motivated by 9/11, was eager to serve his country. A truly noble and decent sentiment. The tragedy was that he was misused by Bush and his cabal to fight a war we cannot win.
At the same time this family was burying their son in the foothills of the Rockies, a memo from CPA headquarters was making the rounds. In it, allegations of a vast and ongoing corruption was made. The CPA was filled with desk-bound warriors who were being stolen from and could do little to prevent it.
When the Marine's father said that it was better that he die fighting terrorists over in Iraq than in the US, I don't imagine that I would have had the heart to tell him how wrong he was. Terrorists don't defend their homes, they don't have to stay in Iraq, they can go anywhere and do anything. That his son died fighting the demobilized Iraqi Army fighting for their homes and families. That would be too cruel to say, and only time can reveal the truth.
There is a reason no candidate for President, not Dean, not Kerry, could tell people the truth about Iraq, that we cannot fix it, we cannot make it better with more troops. People wouldn't accept it, they wouldn't believe that we could engage in such folly. Americans want to believe in their government, regardless of politics. They do not want to believe that the President could be so foolhardy, so indifferent to American lives.
The CPA memo represents the rotten heart of the occupation. This won't remain an American stories, Iraqis will read it and see how flawed the American attempt to run their country is. If anything justifies the resistance, it is finding out that the people trying to run your country are little better than Mafia dons.
Every death is a tragedy, every loss of a friend, a brother, a son, irreplacable. All we can ask, no matter how painful it is, that their loss means something. We may never accept their loss, but to know that their death meant something was a small comfort. But to read the CPA memo, and the sordid world of graft and corruption it depicts, is to know our folly in Iraq is a terrible mistake. One can only hope as this becomes more clear that the families can take comfort in the fact that their children died serving their country. Because without that, the loss becomes truly horrid and unbearable.
Yet the memo is gloomy in most other respects, portraying a country mired in dysfunction and corruption, overseen by a CPA that "handle(s) an issue like six-year-olds play soccer: Someone kicks the ball and one hundred people chase after it hoping to be noticed, without a care as to what happens on the field." But it is particularly pointed on the subject of cronyism and corruption within the Governing Council, the provisional Iraqi government subordinate to the CPA whose responsibilities include re-staffing Iraq's government departments. "In retrospect," the memo asserts, "both for political and organizational reasons, the decision to allow the Governing Council to pick 25 ministers did the greatest damage. Not only did we endorse nepotism, with men choosing their sons and brothers-in-law; but we also failed to use our prerogative to shape a system that would work ... our failure to promote accountability has hurt us."
In the broadest sense, according to the memo's author, the CPA's bunker-in-Baghdad mentality has contributed to the potential for civil war all over the country. "[CPA Administrator L. Paul] Bremer has encouraged re-centralization in Iraq because it is easier to control a Governing Council less than a kilometer away from the Palace, rather than 18 different provincial councils who would otherwise have budgetary authority," he says. The net effect, he continues, has been a "desperation to dominate Baghdad, and an absolutism born of regional isolation." The memo also describes the CPA as "handicapped by [its] security bubble," and derides the US government for spending "millions importing sport utility vehicles which are used exclusively to drive the kilometer and a half" between CPA and Governing Council headquarters when "we would have been much better off with a small fleet of used cars and a bicycle for every Green Zone resident."
While the memo upbraids CPA officials—an apparent majority—who stay inside the Green Zone in the name of personal safety, it also maintains that the Green Zone itself is "less than secure," both for Westerners and Iraqis. According to the author, "screening for Iranian agents and followers of Muqtada al Sadr is inconsistent at best," and anti-CPA elements can easily gather basic intelligence, since no one is there to "prevent people from entering the parking lot outside the checkpoint to note license plate numbers of 'collaborators.'"
Ordinary Iraqis also "fear that some of the custodial staff note who comes and goes," according to the memo, causing a "segment of Iraqi society to avoid meeting Americans because they fear the Green Zone." It also derides the use of heavily armed personal-security details (PSDs) for CPA personnel, saying the practice inspires reticence among ordinary Iraqis. "It is ingrained in the Iraqi psyche to keep a close hold on their own thoughts when surrounded by people with guns," the memo notes. "Even those willing to talk to Americans think twice, since American officials create a spectacle of themselves, with convoys, flak jackets, fancy SUVs."
While the memo offers an encouraging and appealing picture of thriving businesses and patrons on the streets of a free Baghdad, it notes that "the progress evident happens despite us rather than because of us," and reports that "frequent explosions, many of which are not reported in the mainstream media, are a constant reminder of uncertainty."
Indeed, while boosters of the Iraqi invasion delight in the phrase "25 million free Iraqis," if the CPA memo is any indication, this newfound liberty does not include freedom from fear. "Baghdadis have an uneasy sense that they are heading towards civil war," it says. "Sunnis, Shias, and Kurd professionals say that they themselves, friends, and associates are buying weapons fearing for the future." The memo also notes that while Iraqi police "remain too fearful to enforce regulations," they are making a pretty penny as small arms dealers, with the CPA as an unwitting partner. "CPA is ironically driving the weapons market," it reveals. "Iraqi police sell their U.S.-supplied weapons on the black market; they are promptly re-supplied. Interior ministry weapons buy-backs keep the price of arms high."
The memo goes on to argue that "the trigger for a civil war" is not likely to be an isolated incident of violence, but the result of "deeper conflicts that revolve around patronage and absolutism" reaching a flashpoint.
Iraq is deeply, deeply screwed up. The memo says little that outside observers haven't been saying for months. The lack of security crippled the CPA's ability to actually run the country. The exiles simply took over Saddam's rackets in government while wholesale theft was turned into private industry. It is difficult to overstate how unsafe Iraqis feel in the current environment. Corruption, ineptitude and instability has made civil life in Iraqi difficult.
This internal CPA memo predicts civil war as the result of misguided CPA policies. That's a pretty drastic outcome because of bad policies.
Americans have done the worst possible job in trying to actually led Iraqis into taking responsibility for the reconstruction. They hide behind SUV's and bunkers and then expect Iraqis to work with them. Risk adverse is the word. Only soldiers and mercenaries are actually willing to die for Iraq, The CPA values their own safety over anything else, especially Iraqis. Which is why they're holed up in one of Saddam's palaces instead of an office building.
In the desperate rush to establish a US friendly president, we have turned our backs on massive graft, something Iraqis notice and resist with weapons. Our indifference drives the resistance and contempt for the IGC. By ignoring that our Iraqis are not only crooks, but makes the clerics look like honest brokers, we defeat our own policy goals.
April 20 (Bloomberg) -- A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. secretary who earned less than 2,000 pounds a month was found guilty of stealing 4.4 million pounds ($8 million) from her bosses to fund a spending spree that included a villa in Cyprus.
Joyti De-Laurey, 35, faces six to 14 years in prison after a jury of six men and six women at Southwark Crown Court in London convicted her on 20 counts of stealing from retired Goldman managing directors E. Scott Mead, Ron Beller and his wife Jennifer Moses from February 2001 to April 2002.
De-Laurey had claimed Beller gave her 1.1 million pounds ``as a reward for me being me.'' Mead, who led the team advising Vodafone Group Plc on its record 154 billion-euro ($184 billion) takeover of Mannesmann AG in 2000, gave her 3.3 million pounds for concealing his extra-marital affair, she said. The men rejected her claims.
The trial attracted attention because it provided a glimpse into the lifestyles of senior staff at the third-biggest U.S. securities firm, who took 20 months to notice the money was missing. De-Laurey, motivated by jealousy, spent their cash as if she were an investment banker and often told people she was one, prosecutors said.
How did she think she was going to steal $8m and get away with it. Not only that, her life went from working class to posh overnight. Hello, people are going to notice. No one is going to pay a secretary a bribe of $3.3 million to avoid a divorce. Besides, the claims were ludicrous. These are investment bankers. This is millions of dollars. Even a divorce would have been cheaper.
What always amazes me about these people, besides the self-justifications that they use for their crimes, is how they expect to remain free. Uh, million dollar villas attract attention. Shopping at Cartier attracts attention. If their bosses don't notice, the tax man will. But since these folks are so twisted internally, they usually give themselves away. They let resentment and jealousy drive them, then they wind up in jail, broke.
It was the driving force behind the Apprentice. A lot of the candidates thought they deserved to be rich. It doesn't work that way. Unless you're born to money, you pretty much have to work hard for it. I mean, everyone who was fired was fired for cause. I don't know how that woman Omorosa fed herself, but she was as crazy as a bedbug. She would give the guys at the VA psych ward a run for their money. Being an untrustworthy, lazy drama queen is no way to inspire confidence. And lying on camera is even worse.
Then you had the relentlessly creepy and game playing Amy. Oh, she forgot to make a good impression during the interview? Ooops. Notice Trump fired her and her little boyfriend, and kept the two slickest guys, including a Harvard MBA. Why? Well, unless you're an Enron exec or George Bush, a Harvard MBA will open a lot of doors. Most of them said they wanted to work hard, but they did things which astonished me as a reporter, forget someone with a business degree, which I don't have.
What I noticed about the show was that the producers hired people who then made fundamental mistakes in business and should have been canned. My favorite moment in the entire show was when they lost money from some task they were doing. In the real world, people get fired for that. Quickly. Crazy people make for great TV, but in the real world, they usually go to jail. Because their craziness usually wins out. It takes a great deal of character to admit mistakes. As I was told as a 14 year old Boy Scout. It takes even more charcter to do your job and not lie or steal your bosses money because you resent them.
What nausiated me about both the Apprtentice and this crazy woman is accountability. Blaming other people for your mistakes. I know it's in vogue in Washington at the moment, but it's a shitty way to live. You can work your ass off, but if people cannot trust you to keep your word, you will never be successful.
People have been carping at Kerry for not being aggressive enough, but given the last six weeks, only a fool gets in the way of self-destruction. The Kerry Campaign has been smart to lay back and pick their punches. The last thing they need to do is to become the issue.
First, Dick Clarke made the Bush White House act like thugs. Then the debate shifted to whether Condi Rice would reveal what she told her husband the President. Now, it's about whether Bush cooked up a deal with the Saudis.
With little effort, Kerry stands poised to reap the bounty of an incredible string of bad luck. Hell, the Bushies couldn't get anything. Bremer's replacement is best known for his role in the losing Contra war.
What many people forget is the US lost the Contra War. It was a failed policy. The Sandinista Army had superior tactics pulled from the US Army's campaign in Burma in 1944. They formed long range patrols which spent their time in the jungle and chased the Contras down. Very simple, very effective.
Now, John Negroponte, who at a minimum, stood by silently while the Hondurans murdered nuns and priests, is going to Iraq to solve our pronlems there. Except he won't have any death squads to work with unless he hires them at $1000 a day per man. And the fact that his Arabic is nonexistent shouldn't hurt, right?
With management like this, Kerry has to just lay low and pick his spots on when and where to attack. There hasn't been any reason for him to jump in and go hard after Bush. Even on TV, the 527's have done his heavy lifting. As long as Kerry shores up his base and reacts when Bush screws up, he's doing fine.
Bush's numbers are horrible. He's under 50 percent in most polls, which is death for an incumbent, and if Nader wasn't in the way, Bush would be losing in most of them.
Kerry has money, time and Karl Rove working for him. As long as he waits until he's ready to launch his campaign, his way, watching Bush crumble is the smartest of moves.
Some group has sponsored "Turn off your TV week" which is some silly liberal bullshit about how evil TV is. I read the same shit online, about how I'ven stopped watching TV. Yeah, yeah, and you never take an unfair deduction either. People get so self-rightious and pompous about the subject, it pisses me off. It's either self-serving bullshit or out and out bullshit.
But after seeing a second episode of Fox's The Swan, I'm convinced Hitler didn't die in 1945, but is working as a Fox programming executive. He's sitting over on 6th Avenue, chortling at the abusive nature of this show, which is akin to hunting foals with an Uzi, claymores and hand grenades. Only an SS officer could feel comfortable with a show where breaking down humans, encouraging their insecurities, and then carving them up like a turkey is the primary attraction. It's sadism on TV.
I've written about this show before, and commented on the sick souls who need the surgery. However, Howard Stern summed that up. "They're still ugly and they dress them like whores."
They had one woman on this week who shaved. She fucking shaved, and I'm talking about her face. She had a classic Mexican Indian nose and it seemed her Anglo schoolmates said she looked like a witch. Hell, even the doctor was brutal in his assesment. Uh, hello, most of Mexico looks like her. There's nothing wrong with her nose.
The other victim was this 40 year old woman who had her brother burn alive in a car accident and then had her husband leave her for someone else. For some reason, her depression focused on her looks and how her life would be better if she changed them.
I would like to know the person who would approach these women with this deal and ask them if the Office of Special Investigation was looking for anyone in their family. Had they ever visited anyone in Argentina?Was April 30 a special day in their household? Did dad get all misty eyed when the Odessa File came on TV. When they asked dad if he served in WWII, he kept talking about how cold Russia was.
Because only a war criminal or their spawn could think this TV show was anything but evil.
This show is evil beyond the surgery in the way Iraq is beyond screwed up. The whole concept is evil. It doesn't have small evil attached to it, but the kind of evil which will condemn you to hell where you get to watch Saddam Hussein bugger the Devil. That kind of hell. One even Dante would pass on.
Of course, like watching a car crash, it's impossible to not watch and sneer at the same time. I found myself wondering exactly how evil these people were, and they ran off the fucking scale. Past Mao evil, even past Stalin. I was trying to decide if Hitler had risen from the dead or if Pol Pot had faked his death and gotten a job at Fox. I went with Hitler, because only he could think of evil on this vast a scale and disguise it as entertainment. I know the executives at Fox have no shame, but The Swan is the kind of thing where someone should seriously consider jailing these people and torturing them, kind of like the mercs who used to work for the SADF or the Chiliean DINA.
Atrios is running a quote about a slip Condi Rice made at a dinner party filled with Timesmen and women.
Political Conversation: Condi’s Slip A pressing issue of dinner-party etiquette is vexing Washington, according to a story now making the D.C. rounds: How should you react when your guest, in this case national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, makes a poignant faux pas? At a recent dinner party hosted by New York Times D.C. bureau chief Philip Taubman and his wife, Times reporter Felicity Barringer, and attended by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Maureen Dowd, Steven Weisman, and Elisabeth Bumiller, Rice was reportedly overheard saying, “As I was telling my husb—” and then stopping herself abruptly, before saying, “As I was telling President Bush.” Jaws dropped, but a guest says the slip by the unmarried politician, who spends weekends with the president and his wife, seemed more psychologically telling than incriminating. Nobody thinks Bush and Rice are actually an item. A National Security Council spokesman laughed and said, “No comment.”
Poignant? Maybe if you're Laura Bush. If I was her, I'd stay out of light aircraft for the next decade or so. If her husband ever suggests it, she needs to remember Paul Wellstone. While I don't think he was assasinated, the risks of light aircraft are pretty high.
You could call it a freudian slip if you want, but let's get real. Bush has kept Rice's incompetent ass around past any normal justification. Given the Bush history of fidelity (pops hired his mistress as White House chief of protocol), it is far from impossible that GW is tapping Rice or at least thinking really hard about who his second wife will be.
I mean, unless she secretely married someone, Rice has some very strong feelings for her boss, and I don't think they stop at the like/respect line. If Laura Bush gave a damn about more than her smokes, Xanax, Charodnnay, and her trollope daughters, she might not like her husband's closest advisor calling him her husband. Unlike the married and able to leave Karen Hughes, who was probably smart enough to cultivate Laura to keep her off her back, Condi seems to have had a different goal from day one. While being First Lady is impossible, being the next Mrs. George Bush is not.
After all, like a good born-again Christian, dumping your wife is par for the course. After a couple of years on the pig farm, some brown sugar might be all too sppealing. And does anyone get the feeling that Condi wouldn't love to replace Laura?
I mean Clinton, who was stupid in tapping a 25 year old for blowjobs, at least was treating Lewinsky like the disposable office ho. He went a bit far in stringing her along, but his behavior was at least recognizable, if despicable. It wasn't like he expected her to replace Hillary, except in his most maudlin moments.
Bush, otoh, would clearly be looking for a full replacement. Hillary could at least blame her husband's dick. If Laura got dumped, it would be an act of comission. Condi is more accomplished than his wife by degrees. And given how sympathetic Barbara Bush is, she'd be living in a Houston condo faster than you can say mistress, chugging down booze, popping Xanax and wondering what happened as she kept her mouth shut.
I can see this whole thing, the stolen kisses (never more than that, plausable fildelity here), the lingering looks. It would be romantic if it wasn't creepy and disgusting. You don't think during Bush's Prince Hal days that he kept the trouser snake in a cage, do you? Dad reportly used hookers for some parties, why not GW?
Seriously, time is the greatest aide to romance. The more time you spend with someone, the easier it is to be attracted to them. And given that Rice is single and pushing 50 and has a neglible social life, it is natural that she feel some attraction to her boss. The creepy part is that you get the feeling that Bush is not immune to her charms. While he keeps his wife around, you just get the feeling that he might be looking for a upgrade.
If you think that's impossible, I have one name for you: Newt Gingrich. Dumped his first wife while she had cancer. Dumped his second wife over the phone and took up with a 25 year old Hill Rat. And given the rumors about Jeb, Neil's messy divorce and dad's cheating, being surprised that Condi may well wind up being Condi Rice-Bush, is naive to say the least.
his article was reported by David Barstow, James Glanz, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Kate Zernike and was written by Mr. Barstow.
They have come from all corners of the world. Former Navy Seal commandos from North Carolina. Gurkas from Nepal. Soldiers from South Africa's old apartheid government. They have come by the thousands, drawn to the dozens of private security companies that have set up shop in Baghdad. The most prized were plucked from the world's elite special forces units. Others may have been recruited from the local SWAT team.
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But they are there, racing about Iraq in armored cars, many outfitted with the latest in high-end combat weapons. Some security companies have formed their own "Quick Reaction Forces," and their own intelligence units that produce daily intelligence briefs with grid maps of "hot zones." One company has its own helicopters, and several have even forged diplomatic alliances with local clans.
Far more than in any other conflict in United States history, the Pentagon is relying on private security companies to perform crucial jobs once entrusted to the military. In addition to guarding innumerable reconstruction projects, private companies are being asked to provide security for the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer III, and other senior officials; to escort supply convoys through hostile territory; and to defend key locations, including 15 regional authority headquarters and even the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, the center of American power in Iraq.
With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias — by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000 on top of an American military presence of 130,000.
"I refer to them as our silent partner in this struggle," Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican and Armed Services Committee chairman, said in an interview.
The price of this partnership is soaring. By some recent government estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 percent of the $18 billion budgeted for reconstruction, a huge and mostly unanticipated expense that could delay or force the cancellation of billions of dollars worth of projects to rebuild schools, water treatment plants, electric lines and oil refineries.
In Washington, defense experts and some leading Democrats are raising alarms over security companies' growing role in Iraq.
"Security in a hostile fire area is a classic military mission," Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a member of the Armed Service committee, wrote last week in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed by 12 other Democratic senators. "Delegating this mission to private contractors raises serious questions."
The extent and strategic importance of the alliance between the Pentagon and the private security industry has been all the more visible with each surge of violence. In recent weeks, commandos from private security companies fought to defend coalition authority employees and buildings from major assaults in Kut and Najaf, two cities south of Baghdad. To the north, in Mosul, a third security company repelled a direct assault on its headquarters. In the most publicized attack, four private security contractors were killed in an ambush of a supply convoy in Fallujah.
The Bush administration's growing dependence on private security companies is partly by design. Determined to transform the military into a leaner but more lethal fighting force, Mr. Rumsfeld has pushed aggressively to outsource tasks not deemed essential to war-making. But many Pentagon and authority officials now concede that the companies' expanding role is also a result of the administration's misplaced optimism about how Iraqis would greet American reconstruction efforts.
The authority initially estimated that security costs would eat up about 10 percent of the $18 billion in reconstruction money approved by Congress, said Capt. Bruce A. Cole of the Navy, a spokesman for the authority's program management office.
But after months of sabotage and insurgency, some officials now say a much higher percentage will go to security companies that unblushingly charge $500 to $1,500 a day for their most skilled operators.
"I believe that it was expected that coalition forces would provide adequate internal security and thus obviate the need for contractors to hire their own security," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the new inspector general of the authority. "But the current threat situation now requires that an unexpected, substantial percentage of contractor dollars be allocated to private security."
"The numbers I've heard range up to 25 percent," Mr. Bowen said in a telephone interview from Baghdad. Mark J. Lumer, the Pentagon official responsible for overseeing Army procurement contracts in Iraq, said he had seen similar estimates.
But Captain Cole said that the costs were unlikely to reach that level and that the progress of reconstruction would eventually alleviate the current security problems.
The American Foreign Legion is a highly paid mercenary force draining the regular Army of needed special operators. We have 10,000 mercenaries under only nominal US control and with the full expectation that privates making $1300 a month will come to their rescue. We have no idea what kind of deals they're making, what triggered an attack, or how they behave with Iraqis. Yet, some kid feeding his family off food stamps will be expected to die for these people who make in a day what he makes in a month.
No wonder professional soldiers are not running to save their mercenary buddies. They well could be walking into a blind trap caused by mercenaries violating law and common sense.
The failure of Iraq policy has been clearly ennunciated by the reliance on this foreign legion of ex-soldiers and SWAT team members. And in some cases, ex-torturers have been enlisted. A few members of the old SADF, the Chilean Army have been called to Iraq. What are they doing to the Iraqis who fall in their hands? Who is responsible for anything they do? The US, private companies? What if they hook some electrodes to the testicles of an unwilling Iraqi? Who is ultimately responsible? Who are they ultimately loyal to.
They aren't soldiers, they can quit at any time and go home.
While outsourcing repair functions and other tasks is one thing, buying the services of private soldiers is highly risky and filled with downsides.
I know the idea of a private army may appeal to some on the right, the risks to our policy and soldiers is just too high.
The Spanish are leaving Iraq "as soon as possible". They smell the disaster coming and they're not hanging around. While the new PM, Zapatero claims he's just fulfilling a promise, he's not moving his military alone. His commanders told him, quickly, that the world is going to explode and if he left the troops there, well, it would explode around them as well as the Americans.
This is the start of the exodus from Iraq. The British commander said point blank that the day the Shia want us to leave, we're gone. While Tony Blair may want to hang on to the bitter end, Gordon Brown, his likely successor, will not.
Now, the NY Times is reporting that Bremer is losing patience and wants a military solution to end these revolts. Which is sad and insane, but the talk of an armchair general misled by his miliatry commanders. We are being told, in fluent English, invading Najaf would trigger a Shia uprising. Yet, Viceroy Jerry wants this wrapped up.
What has amazed me is the way the media can't state the obvious: the guerrilla forces are winning. Maybe I'm stupid, but the Marines are stalemated outside Fallujah and the Army is letting Sadr's militia grow by the day. Then of course, the roads are blocked. Good luck in feeding Baghdad like that.
If someone was told this was the situation, they would see a disaster. But bercause so much is invested in it, including national self-image, we can't see the obvious. We expect things to change, to get better. That the Iraqis will see that we're right. Which is quite unlikely to happen. Unless the Iraqis suffer a convincing defeat, something US forces cannot deliver with their numbers, we will lose.
No one says the simple fact that the Iraqis are amazingly well armed for guerrillas. Which allows them to stand against US troops.
The only hope to save lives is for the US to admit their tactics failed and political goals will not be met. Anything short of this, much less trying to attack Najaf, can only lead to disaster.
It's nice to know that we've found the source of all our problems for 9/11. I mean, after all, Tom DeLay said so.
If you listened to right-wing radio, you'd think this evil traitorous bitch's memo was the cause of the murder of 3,000 people. For this crime, she needs to die. The heroes who have been calling her house, threatening her life, have been the finest kinds of Americans. They see a traitor and they threaten to kill her and her family.
I mean, why not? Let's slt her and her family's throats and burn down her house. Isn't that what Rush and his buddies want? She wrote a memo backed by law and custom since 1979 and somehow she's a traitor who should die slowly and painfully. It's all her fault. Not Bush's or Rice. Let's all blame the assistant attorney general who left office in 1997.
This is ridiculous in the extreme. The cowards who would threaten her are not joined by the 9/11 families who had to shame Bush into allowing Rice to testify under oath. They aren't bitching about a memo when so many other flaws are responsible for what happened. No, only the small dicked cowards who feel pumped up by talk radio make death threats.
If Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft were men, they would denounce this behavior. But since Ashcroft's main role is to cover his ass first and foremost, he won't say a word.
What is wrong with these radio bundists? Everytime they get a chance, the death threats flow. They're not running to Iraq, they're not enlisting, but they feel pumped up by the modern day Father Coughlins. What would murdiering Jamie Gorelick solve? Would it make America stronger? Capture one terrorist? Or make some basement-dwelling coward feel good?
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 17 — The United States military command on Saturday closed down long stretches of two strategic highways leading to Baghdad, as American troops labored against insurgent attacks that have severely reduced the flow of food, fuel and other supplies into the capital.
The closings appeared to confirm the effect of two weeks of heightened violence in Iraq. American soldiers, stretched thin, have already been deployed in large numbers to contain serious and unresolved uprisings in the cities of Falluja and Najaf. Now they have been sent to face the growing problem of keeping crucial sections of highway open for the passage of critically needed convoys reaching the Iraqi heartland from Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait.
The American command's hope appears to be that by keeping all civilian traffic off the roads on the approaches to Baghdad, it will be more difficult for insurgents to mount ambushes against the trucks and convoys in the most dangerous sections of the highways.
On Saturday, travelers heading north to Baghdad on the main highway from Kuwait saw at least three highway bridges destroyed in a 60-mile section immediately south of the capital. Munadel Abdul Ellah, 44, a Hilla resident who drove to Baghdad on Saturday, said large numbers of American helicopters flew overhead and hundreds of troops patrolled the roads.
"It's a very bad situation," said Mr. Ellah, who spent nearly eight hours making a round trip that usually takes only two hours. "There were so many troops on the highway. It was like when they first came to occupy the airport last year during the war."
American forces had already effectively lost control of long sections of the 375-mile highway leading west from Baghdad to Jordan. The road runs through the battle zone around Falluja, 35 miles west of the capital. Ambushes near Falluja and the adjacent city of Abu Ghraib have destroyed numerous convoys carrying fuel and other supplies for American troops in the past two weeks.
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The announcement on Saturday of the the closing of the highways running north to Turkey and south to Kuwait was accompanied by an American military statement saying that the routes "are damaged and too dangerous for civilian travel," and that anybody driving on the closed sections could be subject to attack. "If civilians drive on the closed sections of the highways, they may be engaged with deadly force," the statement read.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for the military command, was dismissive when asked if the closings had been forced by threats from insurgent groups to enter Baghdad in force and attack Western targets. "If the fighters would like to take the fight to Baghdad, they'll have the First Cavalry Division waiting for them," he told reporters here in the capital.
Still, American officials here and in Washington have been frank about the disruption in supplies reaching Baghdad.
On Friday, General Kimmitt said American commanders believed that there was "a concerted effort on the part of the enemy to try to interfere with our lines of communication, our main supply routes," but said the main effect would be on ordinary Iraqis, who would eventually pay higher prices in the capital's shops and markets.
The general said American military supplies were less of a problem because there were "alternative methods" of delivering ammunition, food and fuel, presumably by air. But even at the bases, commanders have been rationing use of critical stockpiles and urging decisive action to ensure that road convoys get through.
But a senior American official said Saturday that the cutoff in supplies reaching the American occupation authority's headquarters in Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace in central Baghdad were approaching a critical point. Canteens feeding 2,000 people, civilians as well as military personnel, may soon be forced to serve combat rations in plastic sleeves, known as meals ready to eat.
The guerillas are winning.
They have cut the supply lines and US forces are unable to get what they need. Sure, they can airlift critical supplies, and dodge SAM's, but cutting the highway is a major deal and will limit combat operations.
We are on the verge of a disaster, a Chosin Resevior-like disaster, in Iraq. The US should be able to keep supply lines open with their forces. Now that they can't, we may have to fight our way out. This is a very serious, extremely serious, development.
Logistics is the way armies operate. Forget the tactics, if you can't eat and change uniforms, you can't fight effectively. If the guerillas have blocked the main supply lines from Kuwait, they have achieved a victory which is 200 times more important than their stand in Fallujah.
The generals behind the guerrillas have figured out that we can't do two things: fight the guerillas on their turf and feed ourselves. We're going to have to choose. Which is why going after Sadr was so incredibly bone stupid. Alienating the Shia means every mile of our supply lines could face attack.
Once again, CENTCOM says stupid things, while the facts say something else. The NVA never cut the supply lines to MACV. The insurgents are threatening to starve Baghdad or at least make food resupplies difficult. That's a massive deal, it's probably the most important development of the war to date.
This is why we needed 400,000 troops. You could have put the Pakistanis to clear the highways while the US went after the guerrillas. Now, we can't do both. Something has to give and it has to give soon.
Make no mistake, none. This has been a month of defeats for the US. We had to stop outside Fallujah, stop outside Najaf and now face a blockade of Baghdad. We are actively losing this war and that will be clear as time goes on.
Atrios is running Big Media Matt's exculpation on why he supported our current folly in Iraq. His excuses are rather pathetic and ahistorical, but at least he admits they're wrong.
The idea among the pro-war liberals that we could save the brown people from themselves is as deeply racist and ingrained as belief in the Super Bowl as a national holiday. They listened to exiled Iraqis talk about how they would do better than nasty, evil Saddam and how we could enlighten the whole region, let women drive and have the vote.
What they missed, of course, was that Iraq under Saddam had granted more rights to women than any subsequent government would
They would never admit that they thought what those wogs needed was a little enlightenment. They thought the average Iraqi was like Kenan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear, the first popular book on Saddam and the reign of terror which was the Baath Party.
A lot of liberals recoiled when faced with the culture of the Arab world and thought a chance to remake it would bring their values to that part of the world. They can say now that they didn't want Bush to screw it up, but to be fair, George Marshall would have screwed it up. What pro-war liberals wanted was nothing less than a new culture to be implanted in Iraq, one which would meet their goals, and one which had no historical support.
For over a year, Kos and I wrote, repeatedly, that this wasn't going to happen. Societies faced with radical political change can go in many ways, some quite reactionary. What stunned me was the way that the pro-war liberals thought Iraqis would embrace our ideas of what their country should be with acceptance. After all, they listened to the same exiles who only knew the Iraq of their childhood, not the Iraq of war and privation.
No implantation, whether done by the inept Bush or a competant admistration, would have worked, because Iraqis have their own history and culture. They are a fiercely nationalistic people and one who would never accept outside change easily. They have also suffered a great deal since 1980. The idea that a bunch of well-heeled academics, traitors to Iraq and shady liars could be an effective government was a fantsy quickly rejected by the Iraqi people. Why liberals thought the most independent minded of Arab peoples would accept our lectures on how to live is beyond me.
There are other, practical, reasons on why our efforts in Iraq were doomed from day one. Very simply, the US forces supported no one with a base of support in Iraq. Chalabi was unknown in Iraq and when he was known, became quickly reviled as a con man and American puppet. SCIRI, the Hakim's organization, was reknowned for torturing Shia POW's to get them to join up. So when we get there and remove Saddam, the last men standing are the clerics, and they don't like the US much, forget any liberl ideas of remaking their society.
We tried to ignore Sadr, who's appeal is closer to the Black Panthers with vastly more guns and no drug dealing. Sadr's power comes from living and working with the oppressed. You can call him a thug all you want, and fairly so, but he's the voice of the poor and and his father lost his life standing up for them.
We tried to pretend that Sistani was a friend, when he would never let an American darken his door. No pictures with Viceroy Jerry for him. Unlike when Hirohito allowed pictures with MacArthur, giving the imprimature of support for the occupation, Sistani hs never allowed a CPA ofiicial to hold a meeting with him. He sits in Najaf, sends his aides out and keeps waiting for the CPA to hand him power.
What the liberals never got, and this goes deeper than the CPA's incompetance and bad management, was that we are neither trusted nor liked in the Middle East, and a major reason is our culture. Remaking Iraq, especially when we had no real allies, even the Kurds are gaming us, was impossible. Only a racist arrogance encouraged us to think it was possible. One, more than a few liberals bought into, thinking all Iraq needed was a dose of Western culture and not realizing they would kill to protect their own, no matter how we viewed it.
LOS ANGELES, April 16 — The nation's multibillion-dollar pornographic film industry virtually shut itself down this week after producers learned that at least two of its actors had been infected with the virus that causes AIDS.
Most of the major companies in the adult-movie industry, which turns out about 4,000 films and videos a year, agreed to halt filming for 60 days so that any of the performers who worked with the infected actors could be tested and re-tested for exposure to the virus, H.I.V.
Darren James, the first of the two performers known to have been infected, may have contracted the virus while shooting a film in Brazil, friends and associates said, and passed it on to at least one of the 12 actresses he worked with in Los Angeles after his return.
"That was kind of a downer," said Jill Kelly, a producer whose production house, which is named after her, normally turns out eight films a month. "People think this is something that happens all the time in this industry, but it really doesn't."
Mr. James appears to have infected a Canadian actress who is new to the business and goes by the stage name Lara Roxx, industry leaders said. About 65 performers have been identified as having had sex with either of the two actors or with someone else who did. All are being tested.
On Friday, preliminary test results on a second actress who worked with Mr. James raised fears that she too might have contracted H.I.V., Ms. Kelly said.
The last recorded H.I.V. infections in the pornography business here were in 1999.
"It hurts everyone's pocket, but we're talking about people's lives," Ms. Kelly said of the shutdown, which was initiated not by public health authorities but by the industry itself.
Leaders of the industry said the moratorium indicated the seriousness with which they handled health issues.
The reason this is news is that porn is an $11 billion dollar industry backed by the largest companies in America. While Ashcroft cam babble about HBO being porn, which is insane on it's face, he won't do much about it. Prosecutions and other federal action tend to backfire. The Meese Commission, which was liberally sprinked with Andrea Dworkin's psychotic rantings, was some of the best collections of porn ever created.
How potent is porn? Well, Netflix, the DVD rental service, is losing money. If it rented porn, it's profitiablity will be assured. Blockbuster and Walmart are entering the DVD by mail business, but they will all remain vunerable to the company which rents Hollywood and porn side by side. All of the major cable companies rent soft core porn, and most major hotel chains rent hard core porn as part of their profitability picture.
Sharon Mitchell pretty much forced the issue of HIV in porn, and the industry has been relatively successful in keeping it under control. But there is an essential conflict: people like to see their fantasies on film, but real people are having real sex on screen. There are no stunt anuses on camera in porn. When you see unsafe sex in porn, it's unsafe sex.
Also, people, even porn actors, have real sex lives with real partners. Which makes them just as vunerable as anyone else to HIV infection.
Considering that this is the first outbreak in five years and the industry's largest film producers eagerly shut down for sixty days, they've acted with far more speed than other industries have to save their business. Keep in mind, Vivid makes four films a day or at least 20 films a week. That's 160 films which won't be made. Now, it might not be fun to not get the next Kobe Tai or Jenna Jameson film for a couple of months, this is where real life intrudes on fantasy.
What needs to be considered is that this is the ONLY way porn producers protect their workers. Otherwise, it is an exploitative, generally sleazy industry which treats their workers like dirt. The legal brothels in Nevada have much better work rules, including mandatory condom use for ALL customers. Violate that rule and lose your business.
The reason the California porn industry has to worry about HIV is simple: customers want to see unprotected sex. All those cum shots are a risk for the actresses involved. But people's fantasy lives are often stronger than realistic constraints. If customers bought films where condoms were used in greater numbers, more producers would make those films.
The actresses are often young and naive, either working out issues in their personal life (Howard Stern usually asks porn actresses if they were abused as kids) or seeking a desperate sort of fame. They don't realize that only two actresses have crossed the line from doing porn to straight film in nearly 30 years. Jenna Jameson's fame is still that as a porn actress and she still works in the industry.
While I have nothing against porn, it's like a slaughterhouse, We all like beef, but few of us want to rip the innards out of a cow. Porn fills a sexual need for most men, but few of us want to think about how it's produced or the conditions the actors and actresses work under.
One of the most amazing things which Condoleeza Rice said during her public testimony is that the CIA and FBI don't communicate well with each other and that this was a "structural" problem.
Uh, no kidding. Any book about the CIA since Victor Marchetti's highly redacted 1973's The Cult of Intelligence has depicted a virtual cold war between the Agency and the Bureau. The OSS, the predecessor to the CIA, reportedly took pictures of J. Edgar Hoover screwing a bus boy in a Washington hotel, and passed the pictures on to the CIA. The FBI tried to strangle the OSS in its bed. Relations between the two agencies have ranged from icy cold to lukewarm. They have never been good.
There are cultural and political reasons for the hostility, but to act surprised that it exists is not only shocking, but insulting to any sentinent adult with ANY knowledge of national security issues.
There is talk of creating an American Surete or MI-5, but that would miss the point. It's moving in the wrong direction. The FBI, despite it's numerous flaws, spends most of it's budget on counterintelligence. What is needed is not an MI-5, but an agency dedicated to crime intelliegence and supporting local and state police forces. The function which needs to be removed from the FBI is not the murky world of spookdom, but the every day business of crime and investigation. Why? Because it is clear that the Bureau cannot do both, and the reputation of the FBI is dirt with most local police forces. A new agency dedicated not only to investigating crime on a national basis, but providing support to other law enforcement agencies would probably be a far wiser solution that building a new MI-5 for America.
While the FBI wants to protect their turf, it is clear that the two missions are incompatible. The FBI cannot be a one-stop shop for all domestic threats to America.
However, what is missing from this conversation is the role of the Defense Department in this. Most of the intelligence budget and operations are controlled by DOD. The CIA is the only major intelligence agency not controlled by DOD. How come the Defense Intelligence Agency missed links to Al Qaeda, they were heavily invested in Pakistan. Where was the National Security Agency's intercepts of AQ communications? The defense department agencies missed as much as the CIA and FBI, yet will now only get the scrutiny which is needed.
It is easy to blame Langley for what happened on 9/11 and share the blame with the FBI. That's an old and established habit. The missing link is DOD. It isn't as if one agency alone screwed up. They all missed something. But to act as if it was a mystery that the FBI and CIA refused to talk is an insult to common sense. Anyone who could pick up one of a hundred books could have figured that out. Unless Rice shares the reading habits of her boss, her ignorance of this is either disingenuous or shocking.
Read Juan Cole today. Sistani's top aide has said that if the US tries to take Najaf, he'll call the Shia into the street.
No one wants this confrontation. Even Sadr has had second and third thoughts between fits of paranoia. But the US is poised on creating anarchy if they launch attacks on either Kerbala or Najaf. Sistani woud have to order the defense of the city. Once that happens, Sadr City would explode as well.
At every turn, the US seems not to understand anything about Iraq. Asking Sadr to surrender to the collaborationist police and expecting to have people hand over their cousins.
I'm watching Gen. Kimmit telling the press that most people in Fallujah feel that they are "held hostage". Which is a joke, or would be if American teenagers weren't going to die. Now they're declaring highways no go zones. Of course, that makes the guerrillas job easier. No civilians in the way to be killed. Unless they take the wrong road and are shot by Americans.
Did it occur to anyone in the CPA that maybe they don't have the pulse of the Iraqi people? That maybe, just maybe, when poor Shia give their food to Sunnis, that the perception that the resistance in Fallujah doesn't have widespread support might be wrong.
I don't think anyone understands what we're running towards, which is anarchy. Order in Iraq isn't going to collapse slowly, but quickly. Once Sistani orders the defense of Najaf all hell will break lose. The Americans are saying "it's only Sadr." The Iraqis are saying "no, it's not." You already have one disaster in Fallujah, why in God's name would you invite another one in Najaf. And if anything happens in Najaf, Sadr City will not remain calm. So Coalition forces could face a three front war and supply lines threatened.
There is frightening lack of foresight here. Picking fights you cannot win is insane. We cannot fight the entire enraged Shia population. Saddam tried it and nearly lost and he had most of his army intact. His million man . We don't have a million men in Iraq.
Now, you have the shaky 1st Armored Division ready to attack Najaf. They are one bad day from a collapse in combat. Extending their tours was as braindead an act as possible. These guys have to feel that they're being sentenced to death after escaping a year in Iraq. That extra 120 days is a number in Washington, but it's the difference between life and death or injury in Iraq.
Here's a question: who will fight harder-Americans with low morale or Shia defending their holy sites?
Watching the incredibly unlucky Pfc. Keith Maupin on TV, it is easy to realize one thing: for all of Bush's tough talk, the Iraqis are meaner than us. Americans are good at remote killing, with bombs and rockets and cannon, but we cannot stare into a camera with hostages. At least for politics.
Have no illusions. The hostage takers, who are more than likely ex-Iraqi soldiers, will kill all 40 hostages to meet their goals, which is to get rid of Americans. Or they will hold them until their families are crying on TV and cursing Bush to do something. There is no Jessica Lynch-type rescue possible. All the movie dramatics don't apply here. Charlie Sheen will not be sliding down and crashing into a window, The point seems to be that hostages are free for the taking.
The Iraqis, despite the Americans myopia, keep raising the stakes. They can show how hard they truly are and how they can make Americans suffer while Bush watches and repeat his mantra of toughness. Maybe he thinks he's John Wayne. But the real world makes short work of John Waynes. Those who talk tough are soon forced to eat their words.
All of the blather eminating from CENTCOM and the White House can be defeated with the murders of American truck drivers. Burn a couple alive on tape and that will cut the heart out of the civilian workforce. As evil and as ghastly as it is, it will show exactly how tough the Iraqi resistance is. We are dealing with people who will do what is required to win. These are the same people who faced American B-52's and Iranian Revolutionary Guards as well as Saddam. These are tough people and they don't waste their time with cheap words.
Everyone wants the hostages to come home alive, which is what they are playing on. They want us to beg for their release. But at the same time, we better realize that they will kill them all if they have to. They will raise the level of pain well past what we can bear. And no matter what Bush says, we will break. Because they will match our tough words with their tough actions.
Every week, Scott Wilson drives to the Outback Steakhouse in Ellicott City, pulls his green truck to the curb and waits to pick up dinner for his family of five.
Inside, two takeout waitresses rush to take phone orders while another runs Wilson's food out to his Chevrolet.
This steakhouse, one of the chain's busiest outlets in the nation, logs 50 to 60 curbside takeout orders each weekday and 150 orders each weekend day, so workers try to keep traffic moving.
"It's very convenient," said Wilson, 47, a Marriottsville contractor.
Wilson, who paid $76 for his family's meal, is one of a growing crowd that is choosing to neither cook nor dine out but instead pick up restaurant meals curbside.
Customers say it's quick and allows them to eat higher-quality food at home with their families. For busy restaurants, the extra income from selling meals at the curb is irresistible. So, restaurants are racing to implement or increase their curbside service.
Chains like Applebee's and Chili's have joined Outback in tapping into this call for convenience.
I"m sorry, but $76 for Outback? Every week? Man, give me a grill and some decent cuts of meat and I'll kick Outback's ass. I can see that once in a while, but every week is a waste of money.
I'll admit I'm not Outback's biggest fan, but shit, their food is mediocre and a smart cook could blend takeout from the supermarket with prime grade steak and some quick deep frying and get a better meal.
I love the occasional steak or grilled chicken, but unless you're crashing through the door bone tired, 30 minutes can get you a better meal. I have to admit that their garlic mashed potatoes rule, but even the bloomin' onion leaves me cold.
I will say this, it is a step up from fast food. It might even be healthier. But it is nearly half of what a family spends on food in an average week. I cannot see dropping that kind of money on Outback or any chain without the resturant ambiance. Although with kids, that can be a pain in the ass.
My way of thinking is that if your kids all eat beef, you can do a Tuscan steak, which is a porterhouse (t-bone and filet minon) grilled and then sliced, medium, in 30 minutes on a grill. Steak cooks quickly. Frozen mashed potatoes can be cooked quickly and have garlic and parsely added.
Coconut shrimp can be pre-prepared and dipped into a fryer. A bloomin' onion is merely a whole onion breaded and deep fried. But to be honest, I'd spend $10-12 bucks on the sides there and cook the steak myself.
The drive for quick meals is not just a dietary one, but an economic one. I was watching Oprah one day and this woman left her 11 year home alone while she worked long hours. I was stunned that this woman's priorities was so out of wack. Economic success, for selfless reasons, had totally placed her family life secondary.
The reason someone can drop $76 at Outback and think this is a good idea is not for the food. The food is OK. It's about exhaustion and trying to recapture family time. It's easier to eat Outback than to cook for three kids. It makes daddy a hero to come in with restaurant food, and not just to the kids.
We should all have the time or the planning to do better than Outback, but in a society where you need two incomes to live decently, you can't.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni wondered aloud yesterday how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be caught off guard by the chaos in Iraq that has killed nearly 100 Americans in recent weeks and led to his announcement that 20,000 U.S. troops would be staying there instead of returning home as planned.
"I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus," said Zinni, a Marine for 39 years and the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. "Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?"
At a Pentagon news briefing yesterday, Rumsfeld said he could not have estimated how many troops would be killed in the past week.
Zinni made his comments during an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune before giving a speech last night at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice as part of its distinguished lecturer series.
For years Zinni said he cautioned U.S. officials that an Iraq without Saddam Hussein would likely be more dangerous to U.S. interests than one with him because of the ethnic and religious clashes that would be unleashed.
"I think that some heads should roll over Iraq," Zinni said. "I think the president got some bad advice."
Gee, just because Zinni was a former head of CENTCOM, what does he know about Iraq? He's just another liberal who is betraying our troops. Just like Eric Shinseki, Hugh Shelton and Wes Clark. Traitors one and all. They should shut up and support the troops. Which translates into shut up and support Bush, regardless how many dead teenagers come home.
I say let's really support the troops and bring them home, alive and able to defend this country against real threats, like Osama Bin Laden. Staying in Iraq is a suicide pact which will destroy the US Army and the Iraqi people.
Ralph Nader is running around campuses telling kids that Bush is going to reinstate the draft. My Congressman, Charles Rangel wants to reinstate the draft to "balance" who serves in the military.
Both are dead wrong.
First of all, the modern, lottery-based draft is no more fair that the exemption based draft which existed after WW II. Why?
It all breaks down to who serves and who takes the most risk. While a draft would have a flood of middle class kids, few would serve in the combat arms. The most balanced formation, in terms of social class, ever in US history is the modern National Guard infantry platoon. More middle class soldiers are serving in combat today than in any time in American history.
What a draft would do is simple. The poor kids who get advanced technical jobs in today's military would be shunted into the combat arms (infantry, artillery, armor, combat engineers). All those vaunted middle class kids would be, if they didn't get medical exemptions, given all those rear-area jobs, or join the Navy or Air Force, avoiding combat.
Besides the fact that Bush would be chased from office if he tried to pass a draft, and the fact that the military wants nothing to do with it, tthe draft is not a social leveler. It never has been. The most socially balanced US army was the Continental Army, which had nearly 25 percent black soldiers, percentages which it would not see again until Vietnam.
The composition of the infantry has remained remarkably consistant for over 250 years, according to Charles Moskos: the poor and lower middle class led by middle class officers. The US is one of the few nations on earth who's generals grew up either poor or working class. The reason many went to West Point is that it was the only way they could afford a college education.
The myth of the draft as a class leveller comes from WWII, where it was only true for about six months. And the reason for that was the ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program), which took oridnary soldiers and trained them in various skills in colleges. As infantry casualities hit 90 percent for units in Normandy, these programs were emptied out and stocked with these educated young men.
But for most of the war, the infanty was those unwanted by other branches.
The reason we think the draft was a social leveller comes from two sources. One is the GI Bill. We forget that the men who basically changed America were poor before the GI Bill and middle class after, with their low interest houses and college educations. The benefits were the same if you typed on Governor's Island, survived Bataan and years as a guerilla in the Philippiines or landed on Utah Beach. Everyone who served and was discharged honorably was eligible to participate. It literally created a middle class where none existed.
And while the middle class willingly served in the Cold War draft, most avoided service in the infantry. Why?
The Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). That one test, which determines the range of careers you're eligible for in the military, seperates the stupid from the smart. If you do poorly, well, I hope you like driving trucks, traditionally, the job of the stupid in the military. If you do well, any job you want is yours. The infantry requires some reasonable intelligence.
Also, many of the draftmongers don't get that the military can increase their ranks by changing enlistment requirements. The military is a third smaller than it was in 1991. This isn't the WW II or the Vietnam army where you can take people from the street and train them for a few months and send them into an infantry platoon. Infantry operations are far more complex these days and requires vastly more training.
A draft would do nothing for Iraq, because it would take two to three years to build a new division. If you think we'll be in Iraq in two to three years, fine, but it wouldn't help the current military. It would be, if a draft passed in 2005, churning in the second cohort of draftees into those new divisions in 2008. You would lose a cohort (the first draftees) in the formation of those divisions, and the second cohort would fill them out.
Also, the military wants nothing to do with a draft because of all the losers they would have to take. As it stands, if someone doesn't work out in the military, they can leave with little stigma, a draft army won't work that way. All the mental lightweights, social misfits and general losers who would now be shunted out of the military would have to be accepted.
Right now, anyone in an infantry unit volunteered to be there. There is always a pool of young men eager to see combat. The idea that policy would change because middle class kids are filing papers in division headquarters is silly. There will always be 18 year olds willing to shoot other people, at least until they actually have to.
Also, the job of the military is to provide national security, not make a fair, socially balanced military. If that was the case, the current reserves and National Guard provide that balance. Americans have never rushed to send their sons in the military. Not in any war. The Civil War was fought by the poor, working class and former slaves. Harvard and Yale had their boat race without a pause in 1864, while black former slaves served in the bloodiest battles of the war.
The draft is, for the most part, a tool of the past. Our military is too expensive to use the bodies created by the draft, the task of infantry combat too delicate to accept the unwilling in their ranks. Only the committed can do the most dangerous of jobs.
If you want social equality, fund schools equally. Nothing else, especially not a draft, will spread the burden of war across society. In reality, the military has served as tool of social promotion. The 7th Cavalry in 1876, the men who died at Little Big Horn, were mostly immigrants and ex-Confederates. The Army was the employer of last resort, even then.
The draft is technically possible, but the realities of it mean it would be less efficient than simply raising military salaries. Draft or not, the men who become 11 Bravos will not change. Rich kids, through education, medical care or luck, will avoid the burden of combat service, just like they have for nearly 250 years.
Our friend Sadr gets to have his militia kill Americans, avoid arrest and according to the NY Times, may well get to live in Tehran for a month or two.
The Iranians, eager to avoid the near-apocalyptic bloodbath which would come from an attack on Najaf, have tried to negotiate a settlement where Sadr escapes martyrdom and the US escapes engraging the Muslim world.
This is, without question, a complete and total victory for Sadr and a humilating defeat for the US. Our big talk strategy has ended with US forces looking impotent and ineffective. US forces are effectively stalemated in Fallujah, taking casualities and unable to control the city. Now, after demanding Sadr surrender, not only will his militia be "disbanded", which is semantics for sent home with their guns, he'll be allowed to escape.
He's been turned from a pest into a major player in Iraqi politics. His willingness to fight the Americans, force Sistani to defend him and serve as a voice for the poor, as well as having his militia kill Americans without sanction, has allowed him to win respect that he didn't have before. He may have been fading before two weeks ago, but now, no deal in Iraq can happen without him.
Even Chalabi was quoted as backing away, ever so slightly, from his American patrons over Sadr and Fallujah. This won't save his life when the mobs come for him on July 1, but it is a sign that this has all gone too far.
So does anyone think the Mahdi Army will stop their reign of terror with Sadr cooling his heels in Tehran? Not likely, since cell phones haven't been abolished. Sadr City will still be seen as a no-go zone for Americans and Sadr's lectures will be spread by tape and internet throughout Iraq.
Oh yeah, he's now a nationalist hero who wanted to avoid bloodshed from the crazy Americans. The Shis who stood by the Sunnis when the Americans attacked them.
If negotiations don't collapse, Sadr can laugh all the way to Tehran, knowing the Americans gave him status and prestige he never would have gotten on his own.
Now Viceroy Jerry looks like a fool unable to keep his word. If he can't bring in Sadr, dead or alive, much less pacify Fallujah, what can he do?
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen killed a high-ranking Iranian diplomat in Baghdad today, but it was unclear whether the killing was linked to Iranian efforts to mediate between U.S. forces and a radical Shiite cleric.
Khalil Naimi, the first secretary of the Iranian Embassy, was shot in the head while he was in his car near the embassy, Foreign Ministry official Mohammad Nouri told The Associated Press in Tehran.
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The killing came as a senior Iranian envoy visited Iraq to try to mediate an end to the U.S. standoff with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Asked whether the killing was linked to the envoy's visit, a embassy official said on condition of anonymity, ''There is some speculation, but we do not have a clear idea.''
The hood of Naimi's car was crumpled and bullet holes pockmarked the windshield. The diplomat's car had diplomatic plates but no symbols on it suggesting it was Iranian.
The Neocon Likudniks have their great victory. Bush endorsed Sharon's desperate land grab in the West Bank not realizing the blowback effects in Iraq. To any Arab, this is naked land theft. There is no hope for a Palestinian state with armed compounds in their midst, with the right of Israeli protection and no responsibility to the local government.
Instead of saying to Sharon that he needs to stop the killing, Bush gave him what he wanted and ruined any chance we could be seen as an honest broker. This one sided land theft makes it impossible for any Palestinian government to make a deal.
Of course, this is an insane burden for any Israeli government. Having to fortify the settlements and protect them from the inevitable blockade they would face. Their very existance would enrage Palestinians. And given the deep racism of many of the settlers, it would be like setting up Klan compounds in Baldwin Hills and demanding the LAPD protect them.
Sharon is a supremacist who holds Arabs in the deepest racist contempt. He made his name as an IDF officer for his efficiency in killing Arabs. Now, as he faces jail for corruption, he devises a plan which well could lead to an Israeli civil war. The moderate secularists are going to grow tired of paying for Israel's colonial adventure for a bunch of diehard anti-Arab bigots.
Bush's carefully crafted neocon endorsement of this insane plan which pisses off the right and the left leaves the US screwed. What does he think led on Al Arabiya tonight? The shafing of the Palestinians. What does that tell the Iraqis. Here comes the shaft. You better get used to President Chalabi and like it. But unlike the Palestinians, the Americans live far away.
Bush babbled on about a Palestinian state, but you can't have a state where your enemies can destabilize you at their will. Terriortorial integrity is a key aspect of nationhood, this violates it.
The Israelis expect the Palestinian Authority to end violence. But how can they do that when Bush and Sharon say openly that they endorse the theft of Palestinian land.
The neocons have worked long and hard to tie US policy to the Likudnik vision of the world. Kerry will have to abrogate this and change US policy because it is a shortsighted and dangerous plan. It also isolates us from the EU and UN, who oppose land theft.
Bush, once again, listened to the neocons, and heads face first into a disater. These settlements and this plan cannot stand. This is a plan for the colonization of the West Bank without having to pay for the occupation. There will be no peace as long as racists drive the need for settlements on the West Bank. Without their imput, there would be no settlements. The low rents, benefits for living on the West Bank, which drove many normal, non-ideological Israelis to these settlements, was a carefully designed racist policy to deny Palestinians their land. Expecting peace to be made on that basis is insane.
The cold hard fact is that if we have to wait for John Kerry to be elected, there won't be an Iraq to make policy for. No one, not pundits, not policy makers, realize that events are moving rapidly against us in Iraq. There are no secular politicians to make a deal with and the longer we remain, the worse the war gets.
First, the CPA needs to begin direct negotiations with Shia and Sunni clerics and the Kurdish parties on a handover of power. Let us admit who runs the country and lets cut a deal with them. We need to work out some kind of legitimate transfer of power under UN mandate
Second, US forces need to begin a phased withdrawal while they still can. There is too much blood shed to think we can be there a decade as if was Kosovo. The Iraqi Army should be reconstituted and given all security missions as the US withdraws. Iraqi security is an Iraqi problem, not one for American teenagers. All Iraqis, whether in party militias or the resistance be given a chance to rejoin their units or join new ones.
Third, with Iraqi approval, a UN mandate with peacekeeping and training forces should be established. Then, a mixed Arab League and NATO force should come in and work with the Iraqi Army. They would retrain the police and Army over time.
Fourth, most Western company contracts should be abrogated and Iraqis put back to work.
Fifth, basic criminal and civil law should be established to allow a real crackdown on criminal gangs and begin the restoration of security to Iraq.
Bush wanted to remake Iraq in the neocons image, one where a Chalabi could flourish. That isn't going to happen. We either deal with the realities of Iraq, and Kerry's suggestions are just as impracticable as Bush's, but for different reasons, or face a defeat which will ruin the Army, cripple foreign policy and kill many Iraqis in the resulting mayhem.
The US has to realize that this misguided war means no one will join us in Iraq, most of our partners will pull their troops after a year, and our position will be horribly exposed. It will not matter if Bush or Kerry asks the questions, no country who isn't in Iraq will join us. We have to deal with the people on the ground and get out of the way. If not, 83 dead will be one day's total, not two weeks.
After Bush's pathetic performance last night, all he could say was that "we have to stay the course." The fact that the course will be bloody and ultimately fail seems not to have penetrated the White House. It may not penetrate until the Shia and Sunni clerics are wandering around the CPA headquarters, picking through burned American documents as collaborators are shot in the streets for the pleasure of Al Arabiya and BBC cameras.
We have no friends in Iraq, no faction we can trust. As bad as the South Vietnamese government was, it was a government. There is no government in Iraq. The IGC isn't one, not with most Iraqis hating them. Even our puppet, Ahmed Chalabi, plays us like a naive girlfriend. Whatever lie he tells us, even bragging about his lies, we just accept it, saying he provides an "invaluable service".
The pace of war has changed, and all the negotiations prove this. The US overreached in Fallujah and talked themselves into a corner with Sadr. Comparing him to Hitler or Lenin is rhetorical overreach. He may run a bunch of thugs, but he's not trying to kill Sunnis or Kurds. Stating outright that we were going to arrest or kill him was mindbendingly stupid. That's what he and his followers want, martyrdom. Now, we have to either back down or go into Najaf and kick off the Shia rebellion.
From the first days, this has been a military-based rebellion. I honestly don't think that paying off the Army would have worked. Iraqi nationalism is too strong a force, and the combat refusals and defections we've seen would have happened anyway. What the army might have done is stop the crime explosion.
The WaPo has a nice piece on the resistance today by Tom Ricks.
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A01
FORWARD OPERATING BASE DUKE, Iraq, April 13 -- Insurgents fighting the U.S.-led occupation force have sharply increased the sophistication, coordination and aggressiveness of their tactics over the past week, Army officers and soldiers involved in combat here said.
Most dramatically, as several thousand U.S. troops pushed south this week from the Baghdad area to this new base in central Iraq, one highway bridge on their planned route was destroyed and two others were so heavily damaged that they could not be used by heavy Army trucks and armored vehicles.
Those attacks on convoy routes, which U.S. forces were using for the first time, revealed a previously unseen degree of coordination among insurgent groups, said Army Col. Dana J.H. Pittard, the commander of a brigade-size task force now assembling for possible combat operations against the forces of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr in or near the holy city of Najaf.
"The dropping of the bridges was very interesting, because it showed a regional or even a national level of organization," Pittard said in an interview. He said insurgents appeared to be sending information southward, communicating about routes being taken by U.S. forces and then getting sufficient amounts of explosives to key bridges ahead of the convoys.
With occupation forces battling Sadr's Shiite militiamen south and east of Baghdad and Sunni Muslim insurgents to the north and west, the timing of the Iraqis' tactical development is nearly as troubling for U.S. forces as its effect. But the explanation for the change is not yet clear, military commanders said.
Here in southern Iraq, which is overwhelmingly Shiite, U.S. officers say the best guess is that former soldiers who served under President Saddam Hussein have decided to lend their expertise and coordinating abilities to the untrained Shiite militiamen.
"It's a combination of Saddam loyalists and Shiite militias," Maj. Gen. John R. Batiste, commander of the 1st Infantry Division, said in a brief interview here at FOB Duke, where he was reviewing combat preparations.
Batiste said the influence of former Iraqi Republican Guard officers was especially apparent in the fighting in the Sunni town of Fallujah, where, he said, many veteran officers made their homes. "You could staff a division with the Iraqi officers living there," he said.
Maj. Kreg Schnell, Pittard's intelligence chief, agreed with Batiste's assessment. "There's been a marriage of convenience between Sadr's militia and Saddam loyalists," he said.
No. Schnell is wrong. The Iraqi Army was mostly Shia, except in the top ranks. There are plenty of Shia majors and colonels who were expert engineers. In fact, the Iraqi Army was reknowned for their engineering skills, which would place the bridge dropping campaign in good stead.
And they are not untrained militiamen. Most over 19 had military training. Iraq is chock full of combat vets. Their teeth to tail ratio is a lot lower than 13:1, as the US Army has. Most Iraqi soldiers were Shia, not Sunni.
These assumptions have cost 83 dead in 13 DAYS. That makes April the bloodiest month of the war, with a rate of 6.07 killed a day, according to the Iraq Casuality Count. That is twice as high as November, 2003.
It is absolutely criminal to pretend that this is some Red Brigades-type movement instead of a widely supported rebellion. The American Revolution only had the support of 1 out of three Americans. Over 50 percent of Iraqis want us gone. If ten percent of Iraqis opposed us, that's 2.6 million people. We have less that 200,000 Americans, civilian and military there. We cannot do anything in Iraq without the support of the people. Not their quiet indifference. Most Iraqis are neutral or leaning to oppose the US. That makes our position impossible. The sad fact is that the Nazis had more support in occupied France than we do in Iraq. We don't even have a decent puppet government.
It's been a year, Iraqis have been more than happy to kill Americans while their citizens watch and cluck their teeth. Why does Bush pretend that Iraqis actually give a damn if American teenagers die to make their country safer. They don't care and they resent our presence. It's also true that the American teenagers forced into making policy have shot and robbed their way across Iraq.
The fatal flaw in the occupation is a simple one: US citizens are above the law. Why have there been no rape or murder courtmartials of soldiers who have assaulted Iraqis? You mean no GI has assaulted an Iraqi in a year? No questionable shootings? Two Gi's staggered drunk into the Baghdad Zoo and shot it up. So what happened to them? Nothing much.
Unless you commit a crime where there are witnesses who care, nothing happens. Americans routinely disrespect Iraqis and get away with it. We're the occupying power, not the friends of Iraqis. Pretending that they support us is a murderous fiction.
Okay, didn't realize that Bush was on at 8:30 and not 9. Oh, well, at least I caught an old Star Trek: TNG episode that I actually never saw before--a true rarity.
What's NOT rare on TV tonight: Watching Bush choke.
Man, he looks AWFUL. He is stuttering. He looks like he woke up late. He is rambling. He is not answering questions. He is being FORCED to do this press conference, by whom, we shall find out soon, I suppose. He looks like a teenager at his shotgun wedding.
Ironically, I got a free issue of Craine's. It said that jobs were up in NYC--by a sliver.
Watch that number pitch now.
I can't believe the true depths of the lack of Bush's intelligence, in all ways.
Did anyone else catch his inability to admit that he made a mistake--ever, for ANY decision?
Wonder if Mrs. Kerry is hitting her Rolodex for a good interior decorator. She should; Monkey Boy is moving out soon.
Ooh, nice camera cut to Condi Rice--she looks about as comfortable as...oh, I dunno, someone really uncomfortable. Use Comments to put in your own snappy comparison!
Jesus, this is just AWFUL.
I weep for my country.
I think I'll just finish my eggy rice and go to bed.
By Karl Vick and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 13, 2004; Page A01
BAGHDAD, April 12 -- The U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah, designed to isolate and pursue a handful of extremists in a restive town, has produced a powerful backlash in the capital. Urged on by leaflets, sermons and freshly sprayed graffiti calling for jihad, young men are leaving Baghdad to join a fight that residents say has less to do with battlefield success than with a cause infused with righteousness and sacrifice.
"The fighting now is different than a year ago. Before, the Iraqis fought for nothing. Now, fighters from all over Iraq are going to sacrifice themselves," said a Fallujah native who gave his name as Abu Idris and claimed to be in contact with guerrillas who slip in and out of the besieged city three and four times daily.
He spoke in a mosque parking lot emptied moments earlier of more than a ton of donated foodstuffs destined for Fallujah -- heavy bags of rice, tea and flour loaded into long, yellow semitrailers by a cluster of men who, their work done, joined a spirited discussion about the need to take the fight to the enemy. They included a dentist, a prayer leader, a law student, a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi police and a man who until 10 days earlier had traveled with U.S. troops as a member of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
"Our brothers who went to Fallujah and came back say: 'Oh, God, it is heaven. Anyone who wants paradise should go to Fallujah,' " Abu Idris said.
The lopsided battle 35 miles to the west -- where 2,500 Marines have been deployed -- has had a profound impact here, redefining for many in Baghdad the nature of the campaign against U.S. troops.
Intense, sympathetic and often startlingly graphic coverage on Arab channels has deepened a vein of nationalism, stirred in part by still unconfirmed reports of high civilian casualties. Over the weekend, in the living room of a decidedly secular family, a woman wept over the images on a screen she finally leaned forward and kissed.
Headlines in Iraq's newly free press reinforce the video images: "Fallujah Wakes to a Grave Massacre" read the banner in Monday's edition of the daily Azzaman. Fresh graffiti sprayed in sweeping Arabic letters is turning up across the city. On one wall in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad, the messages were spaced 10 yards apart: "Long live Fallujah's heroes." "Down with America and long live the Mahdi Army," a Shiite militia. Then: "Long live the resistance in Fallujah." And finally, "Long live the resistance."
The popular response -- of Shiite and Sunni giving aid, shelter to refugees and even volunteers to the fight -- has pushed fears of an Iraqi civil war to the background. The fighters in Fallujah are said to include Mahdi Army militiamen loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr. A housewife in Baghdad's Salaam neighborhood told of a passionate argument with her husband, a Shiite who insisted on joining friends volunteering to fight in Fallujah.
"This is jihad," she quoted him as saying. She added: "It was the first time he ever slapped me."
Yeah, this is having the effect CENTCOM expected. The guerillas are getting reenforcements. Great. I'm sure they won't shoot down any more helicopters or take any more hostages.
I'm listening to Howard Stern tease Jon Favreau about playing Dungeons and Dragons in high school. An alumnus of Bronx High School of Science, it was pretty much a rite of passage. I played some D&D, but I liked Traveller a lot more. There was nothing better than seeing gauss rifles, which could penetrate armor, in action.
For those who remember, Traveller was a lot more flexible than D&D in that you could use the rules to play in any time period.
It sounds kind of silly now, all the dice rolling and character generation, but then, this has been transfered to computers, in both the stand alone version and the multiplayer version. Many of the fans created in childhood now play as adults, anonymously, shielded from the laughter of people like Stern, who while geeky, never got the joys of combating dragons.
I was slightly too old to play Magic and the other card games, but I have seen my nephew, who's eight, become addicted to Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh.
I have to admit that my knowledge of the military doesn't come from wargaming as much as model building. There, I would log hours in the library researching equipment and uniforms. Because wargames came self-contained, models don't. Right now, I'm researching Air America (the CIA Airline) to build a kit of one of their planes. It's therapy for my hands, and it amuses me in a snarky sort of way.
My favorite wargame in high school was Arab-Israeli Wars, probably the best title to deal with the subject. It was based on the Panzerblitz system from Avalon Hill. Not until Tanks was released for the PC by SSI did I find a game as entertaining.
Of course, the rise of Advanced Squad Leader changed everything. Complicated to play, filled with pieces, it was the sign that many of these things needed to be done off paper. I never got far with ASL, because it was expensive as hell. But it has its fans, even today, 20 years later. Curt Schilling, the Red Sox pitcher, runs a company which keeps the game alive. Personally, I converted to Steel Panthers a while back. The homebrewed conversions are still on my PC.
The thing about wargames is that they don't provide some magic insight to the concept of war. They're games, with rules and constraints. But if you think clearly, you can learn a lot about the kinds of decisions you might make in combat.
Take Fallujah. No matter how they gamed that out at CENTCOM, and they did, they forgot one thing, the weight of the opposition. If they drank their own kool-aid, then they thought it was a few hundred guerillas. The problem is that moving a mechanized army through a congested city leads to ambushes. You can see this when you play Steel Panthers:MBT, a homebrew version of the original SP series.
You move a tank into a town and you need infantry to protect them. In fact, you want to keep them as far back as possible to avoid them being ambushed. You lose visibility, range, all of the advantages that they have in the open. A city can eat up an attack like kids at McDonalds. One minute, you have a battalion crossing a few city blocks, and then a couple of hundred guys hold them up. Buildings, streets, all turn into death traps.
This translates into real life when you hear Marines say they will resume the offensive and it makes no sense. They're in the most open part of the city and stalled out. They go into a residential area and they're trapped. The Marines claimed they killed mostly guerillas, which is a fantasy. In a city, with civilians, and high powered rifles, most of the dead are the weak and the slow. Which means children and women, not teenage boys with rifles and their dads. Then, you have teenagers with rifles.
Philip Caputo, who wrote the first successful memoir about Vietnam, A Rumor of War, quoted his sergeant, who had served in Korea, and said he had seen his fellow Marines zero their rifles on Korean farmers. He told Caputo "there is no more dangerous thing than an American teenager with a rifle."
People don't realize that the round from an M-16 goes through clay and wood buildings. You could be sitting a block away from the fighting, drinking a Coke, and get wounded. Bullets travel and they don't have names on them. You could shoot a guerilla and depending on the weapon, wound someone not close to them. It's not the movies. It's not a game, where the bullets all go the right places.
Now, we're about to repeat this in Najaf, where the stakes are that much higher.
Thomas Hamill was a dairy farmer not long ago. But then he sold his farm and started driving trucks. Living in rural Mississippi, that didn't pay great. Then, of course, his wife had open heart surgery a couple of months back. With debts and a sick wife, he was looking for a better paying job. Kellogg, Brown and Root had one. Great pay, 10K a month, tax free. Benefits. Only one catch. It was in Iraq.
Which was fine until his convoy got hit and he became a hostage.
In a jobless economy, Halliburton's wages call like a siren song to the desperate. The problem is that the convoys come under gunfire.
Iraq is filled with America's economic vicitims. Mercenaries lured by action and money, soldiers who expected their duty would get them to college before a war would breakout, Now truck drivers and construction workers desperate for that tax free $100K a year, paid for by US taxpayers.
Kidnapping is nothing new in Iraq. Little girls have been snatched off the streets for about a year. Now, it's come to foriegners.
The Iraqi resistance knows that if you kidnap enough foreign workers, they will stop coming. No one wants to be the Hamill family. You don't have to even burn them alive, as they threatened to do with the Japanese captives, just scare them. Although I fear there will be dead captives, just to make a point.
Of course, this serves a wider strategic purpose. This cuts the supply lines. The US military needs those convoys, but can't protect the roads which brings them supplies. Throw in scared workers running home and the basic underpinnings of reconstruction are being destroyed.
The US expects Iraqis to stand up and stop the resistance. Which proves how clueless they truly are. Forget nationalism for a moment, since 1968, any Iraqi who objected to the bosses got either a trip into exile or a trip to Abu Gharib prison and a grave. The last mass uprising ended with 300K dead. Remember, these are the same people who fought Iraq and America for Saddam. All in the name of nationalism. The Iranians waited eight years for the Shia to turn on Saddam and it didn't happen.
They aren't going to risk anything for anyone at this point.
Besides, the Americans don't make it easy. They treat all Iraqis as suspects. And the Commonwealth press is filled with stories of bone ignorant GI's humiliating Iraqis. In British and Australian papers, the GI is seen as little better as a racist thug willing to murder at the drop of the hat.
You would think their bosses would act better, but when Marines say that 95% of their kills were guerillas, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. It reminds me of a line from Full Metal Jacket :"if they're dead, they're VC". That's the kind of lie which makes guerillas.
Of course, CENTCOM knows they're in trouble. They didn't add a third regiment and begin negotiations in Fallujah for appearances sake. Their supply lines are in danger and they're losing too many people to take more of the city.
Yet, the big talk never ends. The resistance keeps their mouth shut and confounds the Americans. The Americans bluster and threaten and fall short. The resistance may not have a formal umbrella organization, but they are going for the economic guts of reconstruction and winning.
Phil Carter takes alook at the Iraq security forces. While he does a nice job at explaining the issues around unit cohesion, he misses the larger political implications of the stateless Iraqi security forces.
The Iraqi forces represent no political force. The IGC is regarded as little better than a puppet government by most Iraqis. Those who work with it face a threat to their lives. Most members live outside the country and have not moved their families back. They represent who the Americans think should be in charge, not who Iraqis would choose. So while there is a need for security, when the Sadrist militias demand the police station, they have as much political legitimacy as the Americans. And they know where these people live. So the cops flee and wait for another day.
The failure of the security forces represents a larger failure of the politics of Iraq. Since the police and Civil Guard only represent themselves and some vague notion of Iraqi nationhood, the resistance has just as much a valid claim to the heart and minds of the Iraqi people. The cops can easily be seen as the collaborationist arm of the American occupiers. They don't have an Iraqi boss, they can't defy the Americans, much less arrest them, Why should the Iraqis respect them?
The only reason that they're allowed to exist, and just barely, is that Iraqis desperately need security.
The reason that they's so ineffective is simple: American racism. In yesterday's Daily Telegraph, British soldiers think the Americans treat the Iraqis like untermenschen, a damning comment from their fellow professionals. With the barely concealed contempt that Americans have for Iraqis, anyone working with them is not only risking their lives, but facing the hostility of Americans who have only one goal, going home alive.
The Americans also play with fire without realizing it. One of the two civilians killed a couple of weeks ago, who was not a former SEAL or Ranger, was an expert on woman's rights. Many Iraqis who have no love of the resistance may well participate in killing someone who they feel is defiling their culture. Her killers were Iraqi policemen. Anyone dealing in woman's rights is going to be a target in Iraq, regardless of politics. But except for a Nightline profile, outrage was muted.
The Americans simply don't realize that service in the security forces leaves Iraqis ripe for blackmail. Too many people, like Phil, see this as security issue and it's not. It's a political issue.
Crime and resistance often go hand in hand. The criminal gangs exist with the tolerance of the resistance and vice versa. The money made from theft and the black market often goes into anti-American activities. The Americans can get informants, and considering that Iraq was a Republic of Fear, informants were cheap, but they can't get the loyal police force that they need. Not loyal to the Americans, but to an Iraqi government. The IGC, roundly held in contempt, is not a suitable substitute.
The Iraqis are being asked to repress their fellow Iraqis for the promise of "democracy". At least Saddam offered real benefit and promotion to those who toed the line. You could be the most honest cop in Iraq, and your cousin could send your name to the local resistance cell as a traitor, and the Americans will do nothing to help you. What is often being missed is the incredible social pressure being placed on Iraqis to not aid the occupation.
Bremer sits there and lies about how most Iraqis support the occupation, but the reality is that anyone who works with the Coalition faces blackmail or death. This indicates that there is a vast number of Iraqis who cannot stomach the occupation. It only takes a few men to do sabotage, but it takes the widow in the shop window who lets the "boys" know when the cops are coming to keep the resistance alive.
If the occupation had real support, Shias would be flocking to be cops and soldiers. Instead, they stand on street corners and listen to Sadr and his fellow clerics. They also hold those who work with the Americans in deepest contempt. Anyone whon says they work with Americans can face assasination.
The Americans now act surprised that an Iraqi battalion wasn't going to march to Fallujah and join in the killing. Uh, didn't you get the hint that they have to wear masks to patrol. That if their families knew, they could face death. That there is a stigma in serving the Americans?
The French Milice, who fought the Resistance, could at least justify their treason by saying they were serving Marshal Petain. What can an Iraqi policeman say? I'm serving the IGC? Not likely, they don't deserve to be served. He could say he's serving the Iraqi people, but then, when the resistance comes, they have to betray the Americans.
Many Iraqi soldiers, when faced with fighting Iraqis or killing Americans, turned on their masters. That's far worse than a combat refusal. And even then, the Americans seem tone deaf. The Iraqis were saying : We are not traitors. We will not be your lackies and kill our fellow Iraqis because they resist you. Even Saddam gave us better reasons. The Americans sit around and wonder "why won't they follow orders?" Well, they only did it for the money and they knew if anyone found out they had fought with the Americans in Fallujah, not only would they be pariahs, not only would the resistance spies in their units tell, but their families would reject them.
Every security unit in Iraq is riddled with spies. All have their links to the resistance, for self-preservation if nothing else. They are not going to do any more than they have to, especially kill their cousins. They even have to lie to their families about working with the Americans.
The rhetoric coming from Washington is so misguided, and so contrary to the facts. The resistance is popular and widespread. While only a few have picked up guns, the popular sentiment supporting them is deep. Even if, intellectually, you want the freedoms Americans promised, culturally, the idea of serving the occupier offends you. So it's easy to spread word that Hamid is working for the Americans and then the local resistance cell finds out. So Hamid faces a choice, help the resistance or die.
We can pretend that this isn't the case, but too many ambushes and assasinations have happened for anything to be the fact. All it takes is random scraps of information and near constant observation for this to take place. You don 't need the Red Orchestra to determine when a convoy will pass by, just some bored kids.
Iraq was a clandestine culture for centuries. It doesn't take much for people to hide their intentions and keep secret links. Building resistance and avoiding informants has to be ingrained in the culture. And given the close family links, once the US lost the heart of the people, it could only grow.
We cannot expect Iraqi "security" forces to serve a phantom. There is no government, no political ideology for them to serve, no government to protect them. As long as that exists, the Iraqi security forces are going to remain a spy-ridden failure which could turn on the US at any moment.
I was reading the WaPo today when I saw this article by Laura Sessions Stepp, the woman who discovered her son's classmates were giving blowjobs in the back of schoolbuses. The reason that was of interest was that the kids were 13 at the time. Of course, the parents of her son's classmates turned on her and claimed she exagurated the whole thing, but that's more her editor's fault than her's. I mean, why was she writing about something which should have upset the hell out of her?
But I thought this article was cute, and worthy of comment.
Gabriella Robayo and her lunch date were seated at Bertucci's when her companion dropped a speck of butter on his pants. "I mean a speck. You couldn't even see it," Robayo says.
For the rest of lunch he whined about a stain the size of a pea on his beloved khakis. "He even said he was going over to the Gap after lunch to buy a new pair," says Robayo, a freshman at George Washington University. "I couldn't believe it."
That was deal-breaker No. 1. Deal-breaker No. 2 came the next day, when they stopped at Starbucks for coffee. When she went looking for sugar, he grabbed her cell phone and then read her messages in front of her. That did it. She split. And she wouldn't answer the next time he called.
Oh, the things that young women say have sent them packing before they've even set down their bags. There's the dumb remark, as in "I guess I should have told you I was a drug dealer." Or: "Do you know you have cellulite on your legs?" There's the boorish behavior, as in his sleepwalking nude into the bedroom of his date's mother -- while on a visit to the family cabin -- and saying "Donna, let's play poker!" There's the farewell kiss that imparts about as much feeling as kissing a melon.
..............
Yet one can't help but feel a bit sorry for the young men. In their muddled, gender-corrected world, they can never be sure what turns a young woman off -- or on. Meanwhile, popular culture has sold women on the possibility of the perfect mate; thus dating has become an exercise in intense scrutiny with little wiggle room.
Look, that last paragraph is a bunch of crap. Going up to a woman naked and asking her to fuck is going to get you hit, arrested or both. These guys are assholes and they know it. Groping, leering and being cheap are ways to end a date quickly.
What woman would want a guy who whined about his pants the way my seven year old niece whines about baths? Then he violated her privacy and thought it was funny. His male friends would have smacked the shit out of him for that. They would have understood the impulse, but if you're trying to impress a woman, why would you humiliate her?
Here's a hint: if you violate the security of a woman, she's going to get rid of you. If you want to hook up, go to a party or a bar and hit on women. If you want to go on a date, act like a gentleman, for God's sake. Which means paying for dinner or at least have the cash to pay for dinner and make the offer. Don't whine about butter stains. Don't limit your conversation to sports, sci-fi/comics and your exes. Women, unless you meet them in a sports bar, sci-fi convention or divorce court, want to know about you, not your hobby horses.
They never write articles like this about men, however. And there are plenty of things which drive men nuts:
* We don't care about your imperfections. Guys don't notice the allegedly crooked nose or extra 10 pounds or how your butt sits out crooked. We're with you , as you are. We're used to being imperfect.
* Your ex-boyfriends are dead to us. They're exes for a reason. Ok, an assumption of virginity is silly after 18, but we don't need to know every detail about what kind of guy he was. We won't like him anyway, and you dumped him, so....Oh yeah, we're NOT going to ask him how you were in bed, trust us. That subject can only be raised in one context, taunting before a fist fight. Otherwise, we'll find out on our own. If you need to send us a tip, have your girlfriends do it. We actually like to pretend your exes are scumbags who belong in jail for various crimes.
* We don't mind paying for dinner, really. We're not going to ask for a blowjob in repayment. Sometimes, it's just nice to treat. We don't want to be a bank for your meals, but acting like we're trying to lay claim to your body because of a sushi dinner is well, insane. That's what drinks are for. Besides, blowjobs should be given freely, regardless of who paid for dinner.
*Self-confidence is a wonderful thing. Yes, after we know you, explaining why your mom drives you crazy is fine. But we also want to hear about the things you do well. No one wants to be with a perpetual vicitim. We love stories about you standing up for yourself. Low self-esteem is not attractive. Asking why we're with you makes us feel stupid. What are we supposed to say? Well, you have big tits and are smart? Our reasons are not the ones you really want to hear aloud, really. The ones we put in cards and tell our friends are good enough.
* Please don't assume. It's really creepy to have you plan stuff for our family without asking. Just because we've gone out a few times doesn't mean we're exclusive and you're my girlfriend. In the modern world, you have to ask for exclusivity, you can't assume it. And until I promise to be faithful, dating is not cheating, sorry. It works both ways. You don't ask about other women, I won't ask about the booty call you keep around.
* Solve your problems. I don't really care about your girlfriend with the cheating boyfriend. I don't care what kind of dog he is. An occasional request for advice is one thing, All My Children is another. If you want drama, that's fine. I may want to pass on the subscription.
* If you're into chicks, please say so. If I'm the first guy you've dated in five years, say so. Look, most guy wants a threesome, but knows hitting the lottery is easier. We know that the odds are that we if ask for one, we're going to get hit. We know this. If this IS a possibility, please let us know. Or if you've been sleeping with your "best friend", it would be nice to know before we're at dinner one night and she gets all jealous.
Look, I know the odds are low, but it happens and there is nothing less fun than having someone turn into some jealous monster over your burger. If I'm in a competition, can I at least know we're playing for money before I sit down at the table?
*Most men make the mistake of placing women they like on a pedestool. Which is silly, they're human beings too. If you're not interested, don't act like we've commited a crime by being interested in you. We may not be the right guy, but humiliating us is wrong. Too many women, not all, act as if the wrong guy is not only wrong but malicious. Which usually isn't the case. Oh yeah, remember, the same thing will happen to you one day and kindness is always a virtue.
George Bush has spent 40 percent of his time as President on vacation. He wants to be considered a wartime president, yet has spent more time raising money and fishing than doing his job.
The Coalition forces in Iraq, by a series of miscalculations, has forced a crisis which will lead to the defeat of our military and the creation of a theocratic state. A complete and total reversal of our stated policy, yet possibly, the only outcome which could have happened after Saddam killed all his secular political opponents.
No one is saying this in the Beltway, and few even online, but the fact is that no Iraqi government could survive with US troops as even a security force and be considered independent. Any legitimate Iraqi government will be judged not on electricity or oil sales, but how many American soldiers are left. If the number is not zero, they will be deposed by force.
Does Bush adjust his strategy? Does he admit error? No. It's a zero defect government. No mistakes possible.
So instead of treating this crisis like a crisis, he's hiding in Texas, as disengaged as ever. The talk coming from the White House was so at varience with reality you could only scream at the TV screen. They have killed 58 Americans in 11 days. The Americans lost 82 in all of November. At this pace that's nearly 6 men a day. Multiply it out and that's 180 men killed at this rate. Saddam's army wasn't that effective.
Bush shouldn't have run back to DC, but video conferencing? Shouldn't he drag his secretaries down for a meeting? Why the managment by remote control when Iraq is dragging his presidency down the tubes? Does he live so isolated from reality that he thinks Iraq will get better?
LBJ was so misled by his intelligence, he missed what anyone watching TV could learn, which is that we were losing in Vietnam. By the time we hammered the NVA at Tet, public support was evaporating. Even our tactical victory looked messy and incomplete.
Bush has a NKVD HQ running Iraq, a rebellion which could turn from Sadr and the Sunnis to the Shias and the Sunnis at any minute and his response is to sit around Crawford and make phone calls.
Never has a president so misused the power of his office. Instead of dealing honestly with these issues, he repeats the same misguided mantra that the people fighting us in Iraq hate freedom. As if freedom can only be gained by servicing the US. What I mean is that a president has the power to go to the American people and level with them, tell them the truth. Not just patronizing slogans about the "war on terra".
If Bush had said he screwed up over 9/11, people would have forgiven him. Instead, he lies until he is exposed. He jokes about WMD. He shows neither sympathy for the dead nor recognition of their sacrifice. It is all rote statements, while his supporters contort themselves to deny the truth. And then, arrogantly sticks to a handover date no one believes will happen or is just a ruse to place Ahmed Chalabi in charge, Iraq's Vidkun Quisling.
I have no expectation that Bush will see a jail cell. But the next President should set the FBI on Chalabi and arrest him for fraud. His lies have killed Americans and he did it for money. He should spend his days in an American jail for what he did. I think given the tender mercies of Iraqis, a US jail cell might be a pleasant alternative.
Iraq isn't going to get better. The Americans have worn out their welcome in the most nationalistic of Arab countries. Iraqis have a sense of self which sees occupation as an insult. No matter what we offer, and it hasn't been much, eventually, they would have tired of us. With anarchy, death and violence as our gifts to Iraq, they want us gone that much sooner.
About 10 years ago or so, I was drinking in a cop bar with some friends. One of the guys, who was a cop, asked me if black people ate their easter dinners in McDonald's, because the place was packed on an Easter Sunday afternoon.
I said no, they were just getting lunch, because the kids were hungry after church. While a lot of churches serve food, people get hungry because Easter is the biggest church day in Black America. A lot of people don't go to church on Christmas, but easter? Well, that was the day to dress the kids up and drag them out. My younger sister holds to that tradition, my older sister's boys are too old to be dragged anywhere by a women who is their mom. I watched the chat shows and listened to the BBC.
When I was a kid, my father used to take us to the Auto Show, which was one of the treats of my childhood. We'd see the new cars and wander around. And take pictures, lots of pictures of us dressed up. For some reason, my cousin had some of these pictures her late mother had stolen.
We usually had ham most easters. To be honest, I am indifferent about ham. I only like one ham meal, which is cold thick sliced ham on bread with mayo. Personally, I prefer roast beef or lamb, but we're having roast chicken this year. Jen loves ham, she prefers it to other meat, but that's her, not me, and since she's not cooking a ham and I'm at home, well, I'll enjoy my roast chicken. Even when I ate ham regularly, I was never a fan of it. One day, I'll spring for a spiral cut or Virginia ham and she can feast on it. Me. I'll just make a medium roast beef.
When I was a kid, we used to have pot roast and leg of lamb frequently, so frequently, I used to call it gray meat. My mother likes her red meat, not that she eats it now, well done. As I have grown older, I realize what a crime that was. Well done is for burgers, I don't care what Jen or anyone else says.
When I was in high school, the local deli used to serve rare roast beef to make their sandwiches. I ate it, but never really liked it. It was too soft. I still don't. Medium rare to medium is more my speed. But it was great with brown mustard. Beef usually is.
If I had big easters, I would probably have a ham for my guests, but I'd be eating a medium hunk of lamb.
The reason Easter doesn't stand out in my mind was that the sides were ordinary, baked macaroni, rice, gravy, sweet potatoes, green beans. Easter was kind of "oh, it's a holiday, better get the ham" kind of deal than a real feast.
I think a decently cooked lamb has a great flavor, especially as a break from fowl and fish. I know people have turned beef into some kind of special event where they chow down on 16 oz super steaks, but lamb, which when cut well, can provide that interesting flavor missing from white meat, even pork. It is tender, but can be cooked so it still has flavor. Pork needs massive seasoning for flavor, hence ham, pulled pork, ribs, bacon. Without it, you need a truly light hand, like with chicken.
Lamb doesn't need that heavy handedness to have flavor. Some rosemary, thyme, mustard. I know people like yogurt with it, but I find yogurt vile. I rather toss on spices and mustard. Lamb chops make a nice dinner with potatoes and veggies.
I haven't tackled a leg of lamb in years, but when I do, probably for a party or something, I'll probably try to get it to medium and treat it like a pork roast, with a good rub and a gravy made of pan drippings with a mustard base, maybe some apples. Lamb is one of those meats, like pork, that needs something sweet to accompany it.
US Marines are sitting outside Fallujah, using a cease-fire to reenforce their two outnumbered battalions, and hoping that some Iraqis can decide to stop killing each other and them. Despite all the big talk of "surrender or die" US forces are essentially stuck a mile inside the city and unable to move father without calling in the big guns and air support.
If a regular Iraqi battalion held the town, US forces would make short work of them. But the fact is that this is as much political as military and all the resistance has to do is kill Americans and hold on. They have turned one of the most hated towns in Iraq into a nationalist symbol across the country. The commanders tell the reporters one story, their unit movements say another.
One exmple, the use of the AC-130. That plane is never used in offensive operations. It can kill a football field's worth of soldiers. No one can move forward when Spectre is above, unless they want to die. It is usually used when US forces are pinned down. Then, it can wipe an attacking enemy out. The fact that it was used in Fallujah indicates that their attack stalled out. Then, they had to call in more AF fighters, which means they were in serious trouble. Marines hate calling in the Air Force because they have a habit of killing Marines.
Then, of course, they bought up a third battalion. A full regiment of troops still stuck in that one mile area of Fallujah.
In no war game you could play, in no Lessons Learned, do you bring up another unit if your attack is going well. You do that when your other units are getting hammered.
What the US thought was that the guerillas would collapse and run deep in the city and the US can get the bad guys and call it a day. Well, the resistance in Fallujah turned out to be Iraqi Army vets who knew how to fight. Don't let the causality figures fool you. Many of the Iraqi dead are civilans. I wonder how many guerillas are being killed. Remember that they don't have helmets, body armor and armor. The fact that so many Americans are being killed is the stunner. 50 dead in one week is stunning. The guerillas are amazingly effective combatants.
Let me explain. The guerillas have taken out tanks, an Apache, killed 50, wounded hundreds heavy armored Americans in gun combat. The NVA would have loved a week like this in Tet. This means we are not facing some bunch of "terrorists" trained in dusty Afghan camps, but professional soldiers.
There is this myth that the Iraqi Army was made up of cowards who quit after the first gunshot. Which was a pernicious lie. The Iraqi Army withstood eight years of brutal combt against Iran. Complete with human wave attacks, gas and near defeat. These are competant soldiers. Then, there was the war against the Americans, the Kurds and the Shia. Iraq is packed with people who know how to not only use guns, like in Afghanistan, but have sound foundations in military tactics.
Guerillas cannot withstand regular troops with any regularity. The fact that they have held the Marines off for a week in Fallujah should indicate that the US soldiers are not facing armed teenagers, but fellow professionals in the mix. There may be teenagers, but the decisionmakers are professional soldiers. People who can use tactical intelligence and read maps. They drew the Marines into the city, negated their advantages, and then shot them up. Not an accident.
One scary factiod someone said is that a 10 year old with an RPG hit a tank. Well, here's something CENTCOM won't tell you. The minute you get into a city, a tank is almost useless. Not completely, almost. Especially a behemoth like the M-1 Abrams, turned into a mobile pillbox. Anyone with guts and an RPG can try to knock it out.
The Marines, by forcing their way into Fallujah, walked into urban fighting which they do not have the men, weapons or political support for.
We will never control Fallujah. We will use the cease-fire as a fig leaf to hide our defeat, and that's what this is, and shove some Iraqi cops and Civil Defense troops in as a shield.
Nor will more troops help, because they don't exist. We already have 24 brigades deployed out of 33, the rest are refitting and losing men who don't want a return to Iraq. No country is going to send men to put down an Iraqi rebellion at this point. The thousands of Pakistanis, Nigerians and Bangladeshis we used as our infantry will stay home and watch this debacle devolve. People think we mean NATO troops when we say adding troops to the coalition, we don't except in a symbolic way. We really want Egyptians, Nigerians, Pakistanis and even Indians, who have large battalions and brigades and who troops can walk around towns and have enough discipline to not rob the locals.
They are not going to send their troops to kill fellow Muslims for us and our vague goals of democracy.
Any attempt to expand the Army will come way too late to solve our troubles in Iraq. We need 3-500K men on the ground today, not three years from now. You don't send two battalions to take a city the size of Albany. You send a division to do that. You had a division in Fallujah, there would be sniping, not fighting and a cease-fire. We don't have a division to send there. We will not get a division to send there. We may have problems getting the First Marine Division home.
We need to negotiate with the clerics and leave Iraq. We cannot win there, the people are not on our side. If they were, these guerillas would have no support, no food, no ammo. Instead, they are embraced by the people. What is the US waiting for? A massacre of a rear area unit? Bremer's assassination? Every time Bremer speaks for the Iraqi people, he lies worse than Saddam.
There has been scant evidence that the Iraqi people want us to stay. Some want us to kill the criminals we unleashed, others just want us to leave, most are pissed that we haven't made them rich. The right doesn't get it. The Iraqis they get lied to by tell them that they want all these things. But the people in the street don't like us or want us there. If they did, the cops and ICDC wouldn't run at the first sign of conflict with the guerillas. They have killed Americans. Take that as a hint. Anyone who exposes themselves as working for the US, not just CPA, but media, risks assassination. Is that support for the US?
We are failing in Iraq. Our mission, our war, lies in shambles. How many more Americans and Iraqis have to die before we decide to walk away?
The Bush Administration lives by the motto of zero defects. No one is ever wrong, and they make no mistakes.
The ONLY reason Condoleeza Rice still has a job is that she's an attractive black woman. She is utterly incompetent at her job, if anyone had listened to her fawning, incredible explainations of her testimony. every aspect of her not doing her job was someone else's fault. The FBI didn't tell her, the CIA doesn't talk. You have a Ph.d and this is news to you? That's like saying firemen and cops don't get along.
She simply cannot bang heads together and that allows State, DOD, Justice and Homeland Security to make their own policies and go their own way. Rice should have reigned in Rumsfeld and the neocons once Iraq started to turn sour, which was about April 11, 2003. Instead, on every national security issue, from the transformation of the Army to North Korea, Rice has let then departments and Dick Cheney make policy while she sat by, watching this all go by. Her role seems to be mother hen to Bush and not his honest broker.
But, ultimately, her actions reflect her boss's utter disinterest in process. Clinton and Bush 41 were addicted to process. They wanted to know how things worked. Bush 43, like a good CEO, only wants to know the big picture. The problem is that he is so absent from the White House, between spending 40 percent of his time on vacation, and constant fund raising, he's a shadow presence. They know the divisions heads (DOD, State...) have nearly unlimted power to go their own way. Even worse, Cheney is so firmly implanted in their corner, no one can object.
When someone does, they are smeared and attacked with a ferocity which stuns most people.
Iraq is clearly spinning out of control. The response by CENTCOM is no better than lies. They still don't get that allying with the Americans is a death sentence for the average Iraqi. They have been looking for hopeful signs for a year and met with blank stares. Juan Cole says the IGC is falling apart as members flee back home, resign or both. This reliance on exiles was destined to fall apart. Is there no recognition that Sadr has vastly more credibility than the IGC members because he stuck around, as did his family?
Viceroy Jerry sits up there and talks about what Iraqis want and I listen to this and wonder how would he know what Iraqis think? He's ferried around by mercinaries who will kill anyone who poses even the slightest threat to him for $1000 a day. He is incredibly isolated from the lives of Iraqis and he claims to know what they need. When one member of the IGC objected to our "offensive" in Fallujah, he was fired. What message does that send to Iraqis, who already hold the ICG is contempt.
Notice, Rice, who is supposed to direct Iraq policy, has been spending the entire week saving her ass as Iraq burns. What drives me mad is the way that constant lies are being spouted by everyone involved, in contrvention of what you can see on TV.
What you are seeing, and it is not the entire picture, is a lot of poor young men with guns and military training taking to the streets. Not "former regime elements" and "foreign fighters". Do people not realize the element of humiliation occupation brings to these men? Forget the checkpoints and searches, just imagine the looks Iraqi women get from horny and lonely GI's? That's enough to set these guys, who don't have much else to think about, pissed. You get Sadr and his Sunni peers saying "the Americans are defiling your country" and it doesn't take much to set them off. They see the Americans oggling ther women and then they get smacked around and have their homes searched because of some informant.
Then, the Americans, genuinely confused at the simmering hatred most Iraqis have for them, wonder why they aren't getting widespread cooperation and being treated with respect.
First, Iraqis couldn't imagine the rich Americans could be so incompetent in rebuilding their country. Even the vaunted school rebuilding program is more scam than reality with Halliburton subcontractors tossing on a coat of paint. More importantly, the real issue is the kidnappers who lie in wait to get the schoolgirls, rape them and hold them for ransom. Everything in Iraq is tainted by security concerns. From daily life to running the country, security dominates.
Second, the US tried to rely on exiles to help them adminster the country. To the majority of citizens, who had seen their leaders killed for opposing Saddam, this was unacceptable. The London Iraqis were welcome to visit, but they were expected to go home and let the people who had stayed create their own future. Exiles are often poison to establishing a stable government, and while the IGC was portrayed as representative of Iraq, most Iraqis considered them cowards and Qusilings.
Most Iraqis do not want to relive 1920. They want to go on with their lives. But they are not going to watch Fallujah destroyed on their TV's. In reality, the Marines had to halt because they don't have the forces to control the city, but they have to make it look good.
There is no sense of responsibility in the Bush Administration, for anything. The worst of CEO accountability avoidance has migrated to national defense and foreign policy. No one is responsible, not for 3,000 dead or 650 dead or 10,000 dead. All of the graves created by Bush failures are explained away with a bodyguard of lies. But that bodyguard is being undone by the messy reality of facts.
PERSPECTIVE: You can see the World War II Memorial's Freedom Wall here. "[E]ach of the wall's 4,000 4 1/2 inch gold stars represents 100 American servicemen who died in the war."
Reader Chris Stacy observes:
Look at the single column of stars closest to you.
That single column of stars represents well over twice the number of American servicemen killed in Iraq in the past year.
That single column of stars represents the number of casualties we suffered roughly every six days -- week in, week out, for almost four years -- during WWII.
At the casualty rate we have suffered in Iraq over the past year, it would take well over 600 years to fill this wall with stars.
In your mind, line 62 of these walls up, end to end (that's somewhere
close to a mile long). That's roughly the number of people who live in Texas, New Mexico and Arkansas. That's the number of people that are no longer ruled over by Saddam Hussein.
For the benefit of the esteemed Mr. Blix, that wall could also represent the estimated number of Iraqi citizens that Saddam Hussein put into mass graves in the past 10 or 15 years.
For the benefit of the Hon. Sen. Kennedy from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the great multitude of journalists who cannot seem to free themselves from the grip of a 30 year old delusion -- at the casualty rate we have suffered in Iraq over the past year, it would take almost 90 years to surpass the number of American servicemen killed in the Vietnam conflict.
.......
Every death is a tragedy, every war a source of sadness. But when I see newspapers calling 12 deaths in a day "heavy casualties," I know that this war isn't anywhere close to the scale of past wars -- or of the war we're likely to see in the future if we falter in our efforts now.
Ok, let me put this absolutely vile statement in context. The US Army in WWII had 12 million men under arms, nearly 400,000 died, the exact number 357K. Obviously Instahack was too lazy to research or even call one of his collegues, but there are 134,000 soldiers in Iraq, not 12 million. There are 430K soldiers TOTAL in the US Army today, and about 50,000 infantrymen. The Marines have about 136K men and women.
So you have about 556K soldiers and Marines TOTAL. One 24th of the size of the WWII Army.
So, besides the fact that 12 dead is twelve families shattered, the fact is that the US Army today can take far fewer dead than the WWII Army. Twelve dead IS a significant loss. These scum don't figure the math right and justify their chickenhawk cheerleading.
Twelve dead is a Marine squad. When you lose a squad in MODERN combat, you've stopped a company cold. Glenn and his reader's vile calcuations ignore force strength and composition. That's a lot of dead for one day, with a force which can't afford a lot of dead.
But what is the larger point? That the dead is a lot smaller than Omaha Beach? No shit. But as these ignorant people forget, the Iraqis are not supposed to be the 352nd Division. We're supposed to be liberating them. They aren't supposed to be shooting at us. Instead, they're holding off Marine and Army battalions while our supposed allies desert to the other side.
This kind of cheap calculation angers me to no end. This isn't divisional combat against the Werhmacht, but urban guerilla warfare. Any loss is a big loss. Infantry replacements aren't sitting in some reple deple in Western France. We can't afford too many days losing eight and 12 men.
I hate when people abuse history. To compare Omaha Beach, where concrete embankments held a division of infantry to the streets of a city in a country we were supposedly liberating, is a vile insult to both the men that died and common sense.
I guess the chickenhawks like Glenn will dig up any vile excuse to justify this pointless war. Here's another WWII comparison: imagine if the French, tired of our military government and killing of civilians while fighting the Germans, rose up, Catholic and Protestant, and started ambushing US convoys and killing Americans. And we started bombing and shooting them.
That's Iraq today. Not some cheap and wildly offensive comparisons to WWII.
The sad fact about Iraq is that no one gets the scale of the tragedy. Not only are the theocrats going to win, but the scale of killing is vast. Over 40 Americans and 300 Iraqis have been killed in fighting.
There is this arrogant idea that all the US has to do is kill enough people and the resistance will end. Dan Barlett, the White House spokesman making the rounds of the morning shows, said "we're fighting evil".
When I heard that, my mouth fell open. Hasn't anyone in the White House noticed most Iraqis are on the fence, and many more have decided to oppose the occupation. They are not supporting us. They are not taking our side, except when we pay them. There isn't one pro-american group native to Iraq. No one cares about Chalabi's henchmen.
I heard a Lt. Col say "we're winning every firefight." So? Why are you in firefights? Why are people killing your Marines? Doesn't that speak of a massive policy failure. Now, I know he has to win a battle, but the idea that we're fighting in Iraq is insane. We were supposed to liberate these people, not have them turn on us.
Sistani is trying to split the difference and stop the killing. Well, that isn't going to work. Sadr is not the only Shia in arms. Iraqis are telling western reporters that they are sick of the incompetence and mishandling of Iraq. Iraqis have the most educated populace of the middle east, 130K engineers and architects, but the country is being rebuilt by Halliburton. Unemployment is 60-70 percent and not going down, the streets are unsafe.
Now, CNN is reporting that the Badr Brigade has been given permission to go after Sadr's Al-Mahdi Army. First of all, the Badr Brigade is deeply mistrusted by many Shia as being Iranian lackies. Second, this could spur an inter-Shia civil war where the Badr forces could come out second best. A lot of people may not like Sadr, but he has, according to Juan Cole, nearly 5 million supporters. Jumping in to kill Shia for the Americans might not be wise. Also, there have been reports that the Al Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades were cooperating.
Trusting any Iraqi militia is foolhardy. Too many Americans assume that what comes out of Iraqi mouths is something close to the truth. The right and the CPA quotes polls like they mean something. What Iraqi hasn't learned that telling the truth in politics could get you killed? The entire culture was based on telling people what they want to hear.
I don't trust any poll or survey from Iraq. I trust facts, like the spread of the rebellion, the way the police and Civil Guard turned turned on US troops and joined the insurgents. The fact that Sistani still will not meet with the Americans should indicate how much we're truly liked and admired in Iraq.
The whole CPA is a grotesque mistake, isolated from normal Iraqis, a big green target for the random mortar or rocket. It should be called NKVD HQ, because it is dominated by ideologues. Iraq is not Afghanistan, it is not a rural society dominated by tribal leaders. Yet, US policy has tried to run Iraq like Afghanistan, with utter and complete failure.
The US broke off the attack in Fallujah to negotiate, which in English means that they cannot get more than a mile into the city. Their attack has stalled and they don't have the reenforcements to unstall it. The food supplies are basically going to feed the guerillas, since there is scant seperation between the two. Scenes of nearly broke Shia sending their food to the Sunni heartland is both touching and scary.
This fight, which I think was pushed by Chalabi and his neocon buddies, to get the Sunnis under heel and Sadr out of the way, is a complete disaster. US troops, from now, until the day we leave Iraq, will face gunfire in Sadr City. Our supply lines will face random attacks. The Sunni tribal towns will never permit Coalition troops in their borders without a fight. Every Iraqi we kill is one who has to be avenged.
The US started a fight with people who don't quit. CENTCOM says "we control Iraq", well no, you don't and can't. So what if you took back Kut, the Al Mahdi boys just went home. They will be back. Maybe at night, when a convoy comes by. Maybe on the rail lines. They may back down from gun battles in the street, but we've just started the Shia insurgency. Shias have always opposed Americans, some joined the insurgency from day one. Now, the masses are deciding it's time to kick the Americans out.
What amazes me is that most Americans don't understand a simple point: not since March 21, 2003 have Americans in Iraq not been under fire. There has not been a single day where US troops have not been shot at or attacked in some way in some part of the country. While most Iraqis have sat on the fence, there have always been enough who so resented the occupation, they have sought to kill Americans and those who collaborated with them.
The war never ended, they just changed enemies. When Saddam left the field, the resistance took over. Of course, they might have fizzled out if the Army hadn't been fired and the ammo dumps secured, but that would have required common sense and planning.
David DeBatto served in Iraq as a counterintell NCO and was wounded in combat. He wrote about his experiences for soldiers for the truth.org, where he is a contributor.
I had the opportunity, because of circumstances that only God and war can produce, that allowed me to do things that most soldiers, myself included, only dream about. Things like attending feasts with high-ranking government officials on both sides of the conflict. I am talking about generals, governors, ministers and so forth. I was able to speak before governmental bodies in Iraq and assist with the reconstruction of councils and assemblies. In one case, I was even being asked to set the price of grain in a province that had their economic infrastructure destroyed by both Saddam and the black market that ensued after his regime collapsed.
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Yes, I also did have the joy (I guess a soldier can call it that) of capturing and throwing some Iraqi secret police and assassin types in jail and participating on many raids with M-1 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and even some helicopter gunships on occasion. All great fun and an adrenalin rush.
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Well, fast forward to today. All hell is breaking loose in Fallujah, AR Ramadi, Najaf and other hotspots all over Iraq. We are now taking some of the heaviest casualties since the end of hostilities officially ended last May, and with no end in sight. The June 30 handoff date is in jeopardy and the Pentagon is scrambling to come up with contingency plans to deal with the new “unexpected” insurgency they now have on their hands. In short, they are scared. When any governmental agency gets scared, they look for a scapegoat.
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Yesterday, that scapegoat was me.
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The Army has launched what I can only describe as a smear campaign against me by trying to destroy my credibility. They are claiming, among other things, that I am trying to present my self as an official Army or Pentagon spokesman (God forbid!) and that I have been trying to set national policy (I never realized I had that much authority). They are, of course, trying to minimize my experience and expertise by saying, in effect; I don’t know what I am talking about. Pretty standard stuff for a large agency trying to muzzle someone who is speaking the truth about them.
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Mind you, these accusations are being made primarily by men (I use the term loosely here) that either never served a day in Iraq or Afghanistan or spent their time in-theater in a nice, air-conditioned office with Internet and e-mail connections 24/7, showers, latrines, good food and never went over the wire except to re-deploy. This was done when soldiers like myself were going out, over the wire, on 3-4 mission a day, seven days a week and getting about 3-4 hours of sleep a day, if we were lucky.
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We took incoming from RPG’s, AK-47’s, and 60 and 80 mm mortars every day and night. We were also exposed to the very real danger of attack from the enormous crowds that circled us every time we would stop and dismount in a town or village. As for my team, a THT (Tactical HUMINT Team) for which I was the team leader, we were responsible for some of the biggest and most significant intelligence collection efforts in the central Sunni Triangle area in which we operated. I am very proud of my team and what they accomplished, usually under very difficult conditions; conditions made all the more difficult because of poor leadership at the 0-4 and 0-5 levels, some of the very same people now leveling baseless allegations against me.
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Here is how I see it. Some ticket punchers and wannabes are upset that I was able to do what I did in the Gulf and have the b**** to talk about it and what I see is happening over there right now. They are also getting pressure from above to shut me up. I understand. It’s an election year. The bottom line; I can look myself in the mirror every day with no problem. I know they can’t.
But how did he see so much action if Iraq was stable? After all, the Iraqis love freedom, right? Why were they trying to kill this poor man? The DOD says ridiculous things and people believe them. Which is a shame. But reality seems only to be fit for game shows.
Yes, I watched Condi Rice lie and obfuscate for three hours today, but frankly, it did nothing to convince me that she was actually competant at her job. There isn't really much to say about her performance which wouldn't be filled with disgust. However, I will point you to Sid Blumenthal's article in Salon today. He nails Rice's ineffectiveness far better than anyone has so far.
However, I did watch Fox's new show last night, The Swan. The horrifying concept of this show is to take two homely/average women and do a shitload of plastic surgery on them until they look like actresses or something.
The makeover show is all the rage on TV. From Monster House to Trading Spaces to Pimp My Ride, remaking the things you own is the new American fad. Which is fine. Monster House is pretty cool and Trading Spaces, despite their set designer tendencies, does nice things with paint. Pimp My Ride, the new MTV show, with the rapper Xhibit taking SoCal hoopties and upgrading them with 20K of auto parts, is amazing.
But as anyone who has ever trolled Home Depot knows, recreation is a good thing. The tips on these shows does make for interesting, even striking designs. While I was sick, my cousin rebuilt my bedroom. I'm happy with the changes, but I need to do a paintjob when I'm recovered. And having seen the bold colors on Trading Spaces, I'm inspired to use them.
But there is a vast change between adding a bookshelf and having someone carve up your face.
Between Extreme Makeover, I want a Famous Face and now the Swan, we have entered the American Freakshow. There were these two twins who wanted to look like Brad Pitt. I couldn't believe it. Not only were these guys ugly, they had no genetic connection to the Pitt family. They would never look like Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt's mom barely looks like Brad Pitt. His sisters are not runway models. No, that was a once in a generation jackpot. And the fact is that he basically cleans up well. For the most part, he looks like the Missouri farmboy he once was.
Another Famous Face victim wanted to look like Kate Winslet. Huh? She's got a nice face, but average body. This girl thought that Winslet lived in some magical fairy world. The one girl who seemed to be sane was a Britney Spears imitator who needed bigger tits. Which was OK. She actually looked like Spears naturally.
What is so sad about this spate of human makeovers is that all of these people need serious therapy. It's all about self-esteem and self-love. The one Brad Pitt twin had crush on a hottie who wanted to be friends. Well, he gets 20K of plastic surgery and the girl still wanted to be friends. Like his looks would change her feelings. Not that he looked like Pitt, or as someone said on VH1, he looked like Brad Pitt, "if he were ugly".
The Swan added a twist worthy of the Grimm Brothers. First, homely girl, or actually mentally ugly girl, gets surgery. Then she competes with another girl to go into a beauty pagent. Who would think of this? The Maquis de Sade? Laventi Beria? What sadist would take a women with dirt low self-esteem and then tell her she wasn't pretty enough for a beauty contest. Cruel isn't the word. Just because you carve on her like a Tuscan steak doesn't mean she had any more self-esteem now than before.
What makes this whole thing so freakish, so wrong is that these people think that their lives will magically change and they will be treated like a famous person, or that they will have their lives. It's criminal that doctors would treat these people with surgery instead of psychiatry. These people are using medicine when they need mental health treatment. Looking like Kate Winslet, something Kate Winslet had to get used to, is not going to make you a better person.
I look very different today than I did in December. I know what a radical transformation is like. But I don't think I changed mentally. All the surgery these poor people get will not make them new people. Only a self-examination can make you a new person. There are beautiful women who have severe self-esteem problems. Who feel disrepected and wish someone would treat them as the thoughtful, intelligent people they are.
If you are not stable mentally, no surgery will make you stable. When I was in rehab, I met fully paralyzed people, people who could barely more their necks. Others who had tumors on their neck and had them removed. I wish I had their mental toughness. It takes a great deal of will to live after you become a paraplegic. And then I see these people who don't much like themselves, and I wonder why are they changing their exteriors and not their interiors. Looking like a movie star is an illusion. They don't look like that in real life. No one does.
Americans like a quick fix and what is quicker than a new face and some liposuction. Too bad that it doesn't change your heart, soul or eliminates your insecurities.
WASHINGTON, April 7 — United States forces are confronting a broad-based Shiite uprising that goes well beyond supporters of one militant Islamic cleric who has been the focus of American counterinsurgency efforts, United States intelligence officials said Wednesday.
That assertion contradicts repeated statements by the Bush administration and American officials in Iraq. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that they did not believe the United States was facing a broad-based Shiite insurgency. Administration officials have portrayed Moktada al-Sadr, a rebel Shiite cleric who is wanted by American forces, as the catalyst of the rising violence within the Shiite community of Iraq.
But intelligence officials now say that there is evidence that the insurgency goes beyond Mr. Sadr and his militia, and that a much larger number of Shiites have turned against the American-led occupation of Iraq, even if they are not all actively aiding the uprising.
A year ago, many Shiites rejoiced at the American invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who had brutally repressed the Shiites for decades. But American intelligence officials now believe that hatred of the American occupation has spread rapidly among Shiites, and is now so large that Mr. Sadr and his forces represent just one element..
Meanwhile, American intelligence has not yet detected signs of coordination between the Sunni rebellion in Iraq's heartland and the Shiite insurgency. But United States intelligence says that the Sunni rebellion also goes far beyond former Baathist government members. Sunni tribal leaders, particularly in Al Anbar Province, home to Ramadi, the provincial capital, and Falluja, have turned against the United States and are helping to lead the Sunni rebellion, intelligence officials say.
The result is that the United States is facing two broad-based insurgencies that are now on parallel tracks.
No kidding. Gee, you mean it's not "former regime elements" and "foreign fighters" any more?
You mean the Badr Brigade and other Shia militias have tossed their lot in with Sadr? The "hothead" we were going to arrest, the one who should have surrendered?
This lack of planning is getting people killed. The half-assed way Bush is trying to toss Iraq to Chalabi, who will either need to hire half of Blackwater USA to save his ass, or faces near-immediate death, is revolting. From day one, we knew the Shia were going to play their hand. Which is why Al Qaeda blew Hakim away with a car bomb. Sistani is playing the fence, while Sadr has maintained a simple line from day one, Yankee go home.
We are no longer in Kansas, Dorothy, this is spiriling out of control and the civil war we're entering is one where the US and their collaborators are on one side and the careful Sunni/Shia alliance Sadr has been forging since last year is on the other.
This is turning into 1920, except the Shia and Sunnis are coordinating and talking. For the unaware, 1920 is the year of the nationwide rebellion against the British occupiers. Sadr was and is clever by stressing nationalism with a religious cloak. He is fast becoming a national hero for resisting the Americans.
What the US doesn't realize is that their Vichy government is roundly detested by Iraqis of all stripes. They may hate and fear the thugish theocracy Sadr would impose, but they revile the IGC and its handpicked exile collaborators. Cowards is the kindest words for them.
The US seems not to realize that the only loyalty Iraqis have to them is money. Which is why the insurgent-riddled police and Civil Guard have turned their backs on their American paymasters. There is no political figure working with the US who inspires any kind of loyalty. Why shouldn't they throw their lot in with the rebellion? They still have to live there and the Americans have been all too cavalier with their lives. Not enough weapons, protection, facilities.
Sadr, for all his flaws, inspires loyalty. They know he's suffered with them and paid a tremedous personal price because of Saddam. And he hasn't backed down to the Americans. As much as you can dislike his beliefs, and question his judgment, his character inspires people. It's not that Sistani and Hakim were wrong in trying to get an election out of the Americans. But too many people have been killed, robbed and abused by Americans for that to stand.
Sadr lost his entire family to Saddam. He's the last man standing and that carries a great deal of weight with people The Americans treated him like a pest until it was much too late. He was no pest, but the representative of the poor and disenfranchised. And because he helped them, they will help him.
Americans neither respect nor understand Iraqis and refuse to admit this. Anyone who knew the Iraqi character knew we would reach this day. The Iraqis were destined to chafe under US rule, even indirectly. Saddam had to kill 300,000 people to control Iraq. The Americans cannot do that. Iraqi nationalism is what held the country together and kept the Shia quiet for decades. The Army was held together by nationalism, not Saddam. It is that Army which has popped up from time to time, most recently in Ramadi. When they checked the dead, it was filled with middle aged men, people who had fought against the Iranians and Americans.
If middle age men are fighting the Americans, people with families and kids to support, our troubles in Iraq will soon be over. Because we will no longer be there.
Some employers say they're hiring workers in other countries - a trend known as "offshoring" - because they can pay lower wages, providing a much-needed competitive advantage. They say U.S. workers aren't forced to train replacements (known as "knowledge transfer"), but are given the choice whether to participate.
At WatchMark-Comnitel, a telecommunications software company in Bellevue, Wash., 17 employees in quality assurance were laid off in 2003, and replacements in India were hired. Sixteen U.S. workers helped train their replacements. Company officials say no workers were forced to do the training, but those who did got extra incentives.
"It was a voluntary choice they had to participate," says WatchMark-Comnitel spokeswoman Sherry Toly.
"Separation packages were offered whether they participated or not. We've been very happy (with the offshoring), and we feel we have a better product. Lower costs have transferred to an improved product."
But workers such as Myra Bronstein aren't convinced.
On a Friday in 2003, the former WatchMark software tester was part of a team of workers summoned to a meeting. There, she says, managers handed out letters explaining that the testing staff was being laid off. Managers then told the group that their replacements would be workers in India, she says. The workers were flying in and would be in the office Monday. She says she was instructed to train them.
Bronstein felt trapped. She says she believes that if she refused, she would have probably been fired without severance and would have been ineligible for unemployment benefits. If she quit, she says, she wouldn't have received severance or been eligible for unemployment.
The next week, she and the other employees facing layoffs were introduced to the workers who were taking their jobs. The workers from India, she says, would be earning a sixteenth of what she had been paid.
"I was staring hard at my shoes and trying not to cry. It was hideously awkward. I felt forced," says Bronstein, 48, of Mercer Island, Wash. She is still unemployed. "It was very deflating and dehumanizing to train your replacement. I felt sucker-punched. It was as if they handed us a shovel and said, 'Here, dig your own grave.' "
Jen ran across this article and asked me to post this. I was horrified after reading this. I would like some of the pundits who are so bland about the jobs being outsourced, forced to train their replacements from the Dawn and Times of India. See how they like it.
On a personal note, Jen wanted to say hi while she adapts to a new job. When she gets time I guess she'll drop in and say hello,
TORONTO—Army private Brandon Hughey got in his silver Mustang around midnight on March 2, rolled past the gates at Fort Hood in Texas, and headed northeast. All he had to guide him was a deepening dread and principled objection to the war in Iraq and a promise of help from a complete stranger he'd found on the Internet. His unit was deploying to the Middle East the next morning and, as Hughey, 18, wrote in a February 29 e-mail to the stranger, an anti-war activist, "I do not want to be a pawn in the government's war for oil, and have told my superiors that I want out of the military. They are not willing to chapter me out and tell me that I have no choice but to pack my bags and get ready to go to Iraq. This has led me to feel hopeless and I have thought about suicide several times."
His heart pounding to the hip-hop beat on his radio, Hughey drove for 17 hours straight, keeping an anxious eye on the speedometer, panicked that he might get pulled over. The activist met him on March 4 in southern Indiana, stashed the Mustang (with Hughey's dog tags in the trunk) in Indianapolis, and took the wheel behind his own car for a 500-mile trip to the bridge at Niagara Falls. He gave Hughey a New York Knicks cap to pull on over his crew cut so the guards at the Canadian border would believe they were on their way to see a Toronto Raptors game.
Hughey did watch New York shut down Toronto in a fourth-quarter comeback that night—but on TV from St. Catharines, Ontario, where a Quaker couple has taken him in. He is the second American soldier who opposes the war to have applied for refugee status in Canada. As the occupation in Iraq drags on, morale among soldiers plummets, and talk of a post-election draft heats up, their cases will determine whether Canada will once again welcome young Americans resisting a questionable war.
The first was Jeremy Hinzman, a private first class with the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, who arrived in Toronto on January 3 with his wife, Nga Nguyen, and their 21-month-old son, Liam. In contrast to Hughey, Hinzman engaged a lengthy process of pleading from within his unit for non-combat duty as a conscientious objector (C.O.). After his request was denied, Hinzman faced orders for Iraq. He and his wife crammed what they could into their Chevy Prizm and headed north, with their son, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Hinzman, 25, understood what he was risking: if he wins his case, never being able to visit the U.S. again; if he loses, being deported, going directly to jail with a harsh sentence. Desertion during wartime is a capital offense; though the last execution for a runaway soldier was in 1945, Hinzman worries that the penalty could be revived. "The Bush administration has done so many unprecedented things," he notes. Nonetheless, seeking sanctuary in Canada looked better than any alternative. Hinzman reasons, "I thought of refusing orders and turning myself in [as Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia did last month]. But because of how they had handled my C.O. application, I wasn't sure I would get a fair shake. Anyway, I don't feel I should be incarcerated for following my conscience."
To win refugee status, Hinzman and Hughey will have to demonstrate that they are fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution in the U.S.—an extremely tough claim. What's more, notes a former member of Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, refugee law specifies that "prosecution is not persecution": Punishment for breaking a law is not grounds for asylum unless the law itself—China's one-child policy, for instance—is deemed a form of persecution
Morale is not going to be getting higher with extended combat stays in Iraq, the first time the US military has done that since they extended the tours of bomber crews in WW II fromn 25 to 50 missions.
We'll see more of these stories in the weeks ahead.
Why the military doesn't release these guys, who are obviously not running a scam, is beyond me.
 By Sara Lin and Monte Morin, Times Staff Writers
A bid by the world's largest corporation to bypass uncooperative elected officials and take its aggressive expansion plans to voters failed Tuesday, as Inglewood residents overwhelmingly rejected Wal-Mart's proposal to build a colossal retail and grocery center without an environmental review or public hearings.
With all votes counted Tuesday evening, 4,575 Inglewood residents had voted in favor of Wal-Mart's plan, while 7,049 had voted against it.
Wal-Mart hopes to break into California's grocery business by opening 40 such Supercenters statewide. The one in Inglewood would have been Los Angeles County's first.
"It is a shame that a small number of voters have determined that more than 100,000 Inglewood residents will have to leave their community to enjoy the shopping opportunities that others have close to home," Wal-Mart officials said in a statement.
The company had spent more than $1 million on its campaign, and opponents had warned that if the company won, residents throughout California should gird for similar battles.
"What this shows is that Wal-Mart can't dupe people in this city to sign away their rights," said Mike Shimpock, a strategist for the campaign against the move. "If they spent $1 million here and lost by this margin, I doubt they'll try this elsewhere. They'll have to approach cities as equal partners."
Thwarted by officials in Inglewood and elsewhere, company strategists decided to take their proposal directly to voters, who the retailer said would be well served by new jobs, tax revenues and low prices.
The expansion encountered fierce opposition from organized labor, which insisted that Wal-Mart's aggressive business practices and anti-union employment policies would result in lost jobs and depressed wages ...
The arrogance of Walmart is amazing. They had a 71 page which exempted them from most local and state regulations. They thought they would offer the colored folks some jobs, make a lot of promises, none written down and they would fall all over themselves for thw work.
When they realized that Walmart's slave labor wages and practices would kill their downtown shopping district and impact their supermarkets, most people wanted nothing to do with it. Walmart ran a series of happy negro ads telling people how great the company was, as if they could ignore the news reports. Walmart sells crap and everyone knows it. They treat their workers like crap. They run virulent anti-union campaigns because they know the Bentonville Hillbillies make their billions by cheating hardworking, loyal workers out of a decent wage.
Walmart is a bad neighbor and everyone knows it. Don't people wonder why Target is regarded as both a better neighbor and a better place to shop? Would anyone choose the crap at Walmart over the crap at Target? The folks in Inglewood have big box stores, how could they not? Everyone drives in SoCal, they know Walmart.
What worked people's last nerve was the way Walmart decided to ignore the ruling of the council and go over their heads. Why deal with elected officials who don't rule your way? Instead, write a propostion which exempts you from every environmental and zoning law and hoodwink the coloreds into voting for it. They would have never tried it in any state where there is no iniative process.
Walmart deserved to lose this on the principles alone. Just because you're dealing with black and latino voters, don't think they don't value their local laws and would trade them away for a few low wage jobs.
While Dear Leader is spending his week at the pig ranch, there are Marines and soldiers fighting for their lives in Iraq. The fact that 12 Marines were killed in Ramadi should indicate two scary things: one, they were almost overrun by waves of trained infantry. Untrained guerillas don't mount up human wave attacks.
Second, that was a diversionary attack designed to prevent reenforcements to reach Fallujah. The scale and intensity of the attacks were not coincidental. They had to be organized, the attacks planned and designed to keep the Marines pinned down.
So, the First Marine Division had two major battles on their hands, which limited their ability to shift forces around. Without the attack on Ramadi, there would have been the shifting of at least another battalion to join in the attack. Instead, the Iraqi command, and this was planned by soldiers, not "terrorists", decided to go after the Marines as they were getting sucked into Fallujah.
Too many people believe in the superiority of American arms to get the point. If the Iraqi insurgents were weak, US firepower would have put down the rebellions by now. But the US doesn't have the kind of firepower advantages that most Western armies have had. There is clearly a pool of trained soldiers fighting the Americans. People who plan their actions and do not break under fire.
Already, they have forced the US to bring in gunships and kill civilians.
What people don't seem to understand is that if Sadr and the Sunni clerics coordinate their actions, the US is in trouble. All they have to do is overrun one base, and that was the attempt at Ramadi yesterday, drive up US casualities in a series of bloody battles, and they will gain support among the Iraqi people.
The US doesn't have the forces to fight two rebellions and Sadr's appeal is nationalist as much as religious.
What is misleading is citing that Sadr has 10,000 men. Well, he may have that many, but when the US rolls into these towns, the local men whip out their guns, acting as a force multiplier. Which is what happened in Ramadi. All you need is a bunch of teens acting as spotters and silent neighbors when the guerillas move around. Anyone who picks up a gun is a bonus.
Someone said that there were only 2,000 guerillas. Well, that's about the size of an Iraqi regiment. That's a lot of men. In a city of 300K or more, there has to be more men under arms. Which means the Marines are outnumbered.
There's this mantra which says "the US can defeat X guerillas because of their firepower". That's clearly not true, or Ramadi and Fallujah would have been bombed into rubble by the B-52's. There are political limits to the amount of force we can use against people we're suppposed to be liberating. The Iraqis have no such limits.
The casuality figures are misleading as well. While 12 Marines died in Ramadi, they say 66 Iraqis died. Considering the Iraqi attacks, and the fact they were on the offensive, it seems like an acceptable loss for the Iraqi guerillas. They largely lack body armor and helmets, so their casuality rate would be higher. This should scare people because it means Iraqis are going to take higher casualities to achieve their ends.
We can't take these cities by force. Unless we resort to city-leveling force, it won't happen. We need political solutions to end the combat. There are no workable military solutions here. We don't have enough soldiers to force our will, our allies will not intervene to save us and the Iraqis will not quit until we leave.
See, because the boys at Little Green Footballs have attacked Nathan Newman, someone I have never communicated with or linked to, I now must disavow him, like a good liberal.
See, once the LGF guys complained, there was no way I could stick up for his right to free speech. They were upset by his writing, and that was enough for me. So what if they were racist troglodites, and I had never read what Newman wrote or e-mailed him. He's evil and I must make my reputation by denoucing him. After all, if someone complains, he has to be in the wrong.
Therefore, a pox on you Newman, you controversal bad person . After all, no one would try to attack me through blogads. Nope. i'm safe and he needs to apologize for his dastardly deeds. That's how we deal with conservatives, by attacking anyone they complain about and denoucing them. Nathan, I hereby denounce you and those filthy words you wrote, no matter what they were. I need to cover my ass and have people like me, no matter what.
Oh yeah, I'd delink you, if we were linked, but we weren't.
So, if you were going to lay seige to a town filled with ex-soldiers, would you announce to the world you were going to do so? Our big mouths have gotten five Marines sent to their maker because of this, and now we're engaged in a pitched fight on the edges of Fallujah.
It couldn't be that any of the guerillas were ex-officers, had maps and guessed where the Marines would have to go. They don't have interior lines of comminucation, right? Or adequate weapons to defend themselves? The Marines think they can shoot their way through, but they are forgetting that these people are defending their homes and families. Fallujah isn't some dusty town with a few shacks, but a city comparable to Cinncinati. These are relatively well educated and intelligent people, and since they supported Saddam, home to a bunch of embittered mid-level officers who earned their stripes against Iran and the Kurds. So what makes anyone think they're going to just collapse when the Marines show up?
Sadr is a different kettle of fish. His boys have less military skill, but he's picking his ground carefully. Holing up in Najaf, while Sistani keeps his mouth shut, is slick. They've picked a place which crosses the US's line of communications. The Spanish are supposed to control the area, but US troops will have to launch their attacks there. But they can't attack the holy areas. Sadr deserves credit for being clever. Now, if the US unloaded the BUFF's, some armor and a few MLRS's, Sadr would be a memory, but so would the Imam Ali mosque. Sadr's people know this. The US will have to risk men to get him.
The US cannot afford two defeats and they are heading towards them. Fallujah is a serious problem and probably would need 10,000 men to pacify, or kill enough guerrilla to drive the rest back into lounging around and engaging in low-level sabotage. A thousand men and some shaky Iraqis is not nearly enough to do the job.
Storming into Najaf to get Sadr could tip the hand into massive Shia rebellion. They may not like Sadr and his youthful grandstanding, but they sure like the Imam Ali mosque and would deeply resent US troops lighting the place up.
All of this could have been avoided with more temperate talk and a less willingness to shoot up Iraqi cities. These are not military problems, but political ones. Sadr and the people of Fallujah have political grievences which can be solved by money and negotations, maybe a few courtmartials. But five Marines died avenging the four mercs in one day and we don't control the town. How can we with 1200 men? There are 260K+ people there. This isn't Starship Troopers or the Forever War. This is real life and the enemy knows their weapons and the ground. There are no gauss rifles or nuclear rpgs to bring them to heel. They have the same small arms we do.
For a year, the US, from the CPA palace to the grunts have treated Iraqis like subhumans, stupid little brown monkeys who need big white brother to lead them. That is patently not true. At every turn, they have either frustrated us or outwitted us, which Bush and his minions have not admitted. The nadir of this is the twin calls for revenge on Fallujah, unaware that the guerillas were planning for our return the minute we said we would, and an attempt to arrest Sadr by force. These aren't high risk moves, they are insanely risky moves.
The Iraqi guerillas may not be an army, but the people who lead them are not stupid. They can and will confront us on nearly equal terms when they can. If we continue to try and kill our way to a solution, more soldiers will die and our goals will be unmet.
April 5, 2004 Â |Â MILWAUKEE (AP) -- One schoolthat received millions of dollars through the nation's oldest and largest voucher program was founded by a convicted rapist. Another school reportedly entertained kids with Monopoly while cashing $330,000 in tuition checks for hundreds of no-show students.
The recent scandals have shocked politicians, angered parents and left even some voucher supporters demanding reforms.
The troubles have helped lead to passage of a state law requiring voucher schools to report more financial information to the state. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle signed it last month.
But so far, efforts to impose more rigorous academic standards on voucher schools have failed. Â
Milwaukee's 14-year-old voucher program has served as a model for others around the country. It doles out state money to allow poor parents to send their children to private schools. Wisconsin will spend $75 million this year on vouchers for more than 13,000 students.
The schools are required to report virtually nothing about their methods to the state, or to track their students' performance. Proponents say that frees the schools from onerous bureaucracy. But some say the lack of oversight makes them a prime target for abuse.
The voucher school is reflective of America's wider contempt for expertise. Americans have a native belief that any guy, with common sense, can do any job. Which is why we have barely educated parents home schooling their kids, using right-wing Christian books (often the only ones available). You just had a mother, who home schooled her kids, sent to the loonie bin after she brained two of them. The fact that dealing with small kids all day takes four years of education and extra training eludes most people. It's now understood that the earlier the kids are exposed to education, the more they learn and can retain. They don't need to be stuck at home becoming little anti-social freaks. School is only partly about education. It's also about socialization. You can be a genius, but if you can't hack school, life is gonna be that much harder.
Voucher schools were created by conservatives to destroy public education. Instead of increasing the flexibility of schools and allowing teachers to teach and principals to have real control of their school, this was a way to siphon money off and usher in a system of private schools where rich, white kids going to private schools would eventually get government money, and the rump public schools would have to take the loser kids, the cripples, the idiots and violent abused kids.
Now, the only kids affected by these scam voucher schools, and they showed one in Brooklyn in a storefront, are poor, black and desperate. Yet, they're literally thrown to the wolves without any educational support. Schools of education exist for a reason. And even if some teachers and some schools suck, ripping them apart and handing out the money to any hustler who talks a good game is an especially cruel hoax. Where did the idea that voucher schools needed to be exempt from the same rules that public schools come from? The right, blathering about market forces. Yet, they wouldn't let their precious prep schools be run without accountability. That's only suitable for poor kids.
If Milwaukee's parents want to stop the theft of their kids futures, they might want to sue to demand basic standards for voucher schools. Otherwise, it's a theft of the most precious thing they have, their children.
The rightwing nutjobs think all Iraq needs is a little asskicking, and then they'll love Uncle Sugar and embrace our Israeli friends. Well, I like fantasies as well, but they usually involve naked women.
The Iraqi resistance is going to win. They have more men, more weapons and control much of the country. Americans live in a fantasy world where we have incomplete knowledge of Iraq and allow our procounsel to act as if we give a damn about Iraqis.
Fact 1: US forces are woefully undermanned
The reality is that if Saddam needed 600K men to control Iraq, how can the US do it with 110,000? The Iraqi police and civil guard are filled with resistance members and have turned their guns on US forces more than once. The US is a day late and a dollar short when it comes to security. Things are so bad that we had to contract out Bremer's security. We haven't secured miles of open weapons dumps, which has killed more Americans than any single thing. Our inattentiveness to detail has killed our soldiers.
Yet, the right thinks once a few Americans show up, the ragheads will melt away. If these people had bothered to dig up a map and a demographic survey, they would know that holding Sadr City would be impossible. There are at least 2 million people there, maybe more. They can flood the green zone any day they want, just like they did to the Shah in 1979.
Fact 2: US troops are incredibly sloppy and unable to deal with the locals
How many Iraqi families have had their relatives killed by US troops, or their homes invaded? Thousands? How many of those now support the resistance? How many Americans understand Arabic? US fire discipline has been nightmarish. Hospitals, the handicapped, school children, journalists, all have fallen to US bullets without one court martial.
Steal money, go to jail, turn over a Humvee, go to jail. Kill an unarmed reporter, nothing happens. Kill an Iraqi, it might be a news story. But you won't be going to jail.
Does anyone think that you can invade a country, kill people, jail them on an informant's charge and remain unmolested? Idiots like Kathleen Parker think Americans live on a moral plain higher than Iraqis. Well, after our revolution, Americans tarred and feathered their neighbors. That may sound quaint, but the tar ripped the skin off of people. Then, they took those neighbors, who were Tories, marched them to the dock and gave them a one way ticket to Canada, while stealing their homes and property.
Billmon dug up some lynching photos, which are as gruesome as anything done in Fallujah. So this idea that Iraqis are animals and we aren't is just stupid. You jail people relatives, kill their kids, and see how they react. All of this driven by US ineptitude.
American troops always subcontracted the patrolling to Pakistanis and other swathy auxiliaries. Well, they aren't there and US lack of skill in dealing with people is evident. Shoot first may have worked when dealing with the Warsaw Pact, but it only fuels resentment in Iraq.
Fact 3: There is no government
The debate currently raging in the CPA is over who to turn the government to. Odds are on Ahmed "the convicted felon" Chalabi, an exile detested by the majority of Iraqis. Elections are impossible with all the violence. How can you vote when militias rule the street?
The CPA is a patronage mill for GOP campaign workers. It was set up as an ideological rampart to remake the middle east and it can't even build schools. It has few Arabic speakers and deals with Iraq from behind a walled compound. At least MACV had teams in the field. These are the most ideologically driven people since the NKVD ruled Eastern Europe. And their ideology is failing, badly.
Fact 4: The rebellion is widely supported
There is no Sunni triangle. That's a myth based on a misreading of demographic maps. It's like calling Boston the Irish Triangle. This is not 1920 (so far). Sunni, Shia and Kurds intermarry and live across the country. Mosul has plenty of Arab Sunnis as does Kirkuk, making Kurdish claims on both cities tenuous. Shias live through most of the area north of Baghdad. There is far less division than people think. Dividing the country ethnically would be a disaster. It's not Northern Ireland.
So the lies issued from CENTCOM, foreign fighters, Al Qaeda, make no sense. How can a Yemeni or Iranian survive in Iraq without massive local help? How could they eat, get money, care for their wounded? Are the Iraqis just standing by and watching others turn their country into a battleground? Not likely. Even the police and Civil Guard are penetrated by the resistance. Only five percent of the population has to pick up a gun to have a full-scale rebellion.
Fact 5: Tough talk is a sign of weakness
Every day Viceroy Jerry boasts of arresting people or pacifying some area, and fails, they have all been failures, we seem weaker. The talk from CENTCOM is like out of a bad movie. If the US was truly effective in controlling the resistance, you'd know it. The streets would be secure, elections would be on pace, and Sadr would have walked in and demanded a show trial. Instead, he's ready to throw down with a couple of US battalions and reach paradise.
Trying to arrest Sadr is more than about him. It's playing to Shia myths of martyrdom and redemption, not creating stability. He may have started out with a few supporters, but now, we're creating yet another Shia martyr, one who's entire family was murdered by Saddam. And we're giving him the chance to gain a complete and total martyrdom at the hands of US forces inside a mosque. Maybe the CPA thinks he's going to jail, but he's been given a chance to oppose the US and become a regional hero. If he dies at US hands, he joins Yassin and Osama as an anti-western hero.
The whole arrest thing is silly. Who would testify against him? How would he be convicted? The whole thing is ridiculous. Why not ship Chalabi to Jordan, where he faces a couple of decades in jail.
Instead, someone is creating a crisis which will kill dozen of Americans and either leave Sadr free or a dead martyr. Which to Shias is about the same thing politically.
The Associated Press
Monday, April 5, 2004; 3:37 PM
NEW YORK -- The Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting went to Anthony Shadid of The Washington Post, for what the board called his "extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril," the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended.
...........
The Los Angeles Times also won the Pulitzer in national reporting for its examination of the tactics that have made Wal-Mart the largest company in the world.
The prize for investigative reporting was awarded to Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss and Joe Mahr of The Blade, Toledo, Ohio, for their series on atrocities by Tiger Force, an elite U.S. Army platoon, during the Vietnam War
Shadid, unlike the WaPo's editorial page, not only didn't embarass himself, but turned out to crush the Times embarassing reporting, led by John "stenographer" Burns and Judy "Ahmed Chalabi is my friend" Miller. Time and again, he used his Arabic-speaking skills to get stories that simply went over the head of his peers. His most amazing story was about a family which executed a son for informing on his neighbors. The grim choice was either that or war between two villages. So many of his stories reflected a deeply conflicted Iraq missing from CPA briefings.
For every Miller and Nedra Pickler, who seem to push their agendas, there are Anthony Shadids who do their job. In a year when scum like Jayson Miller and Jack Kelley floated to the top of the pond, it's important to keep in mind not everyone wants to be one of the heathers.
The Toledo Blade also deserved their award for digging up a long forgotten series of atrocities in Vietnam. While larger papers ignored the story once it broke, the work the staff of the Blade did will not be forgotten. Americans like to pretend that we are better than other people. Stories like Tiger Force remind us that we aren't
The Pulitzers are as political as any other award, and this has been a crappy year for journalism. But, once in a while they get it right, and this is one of those years.
Crusing by atrios today, he linked to right-wing hack columnist Kathleen Parker, who advocated nuking Fallujah.
Does becoming a right-wing columnist make you retarded. I won't discuss the technical impossibilty of a nuclear strike, you can figure that out, but have these people gone insane? We're supposed to be liberating these people. If not, why is Saddam still in jail?
The fact is that isolating Fallujah is about the same as isolating Cinncinati with 4,000 Marines. Yeah, that's bound to work. Why not just shoot these guys and save the hassle of breaking into homes, looking for men long gone.
As if this wasn't enough, Paul Bremer has now declared Sadr an "outlaw" and have laid siege to his mosque. Which is scary stupid. What are we going to do? Go get him? Juan Cole compares him to David Koresh, but there were only 50 men in the Branch Davidian compound. Sadr's personal bodyguard is bigger than that.
The US will have to try and force their way into the mosque and that allows the Mahdi militia to set up defensive positions and cut US forces down. In a rolling street battle, they killed seven soldiers and wounded 24. In a set-piece defense like this, well, a lot more people could die.
Bremer is a cheap talking punk. He talks as if he can ensure justice and he sounds like an ill-mannered fool. Sadr wants to be a freaking outlaw, the young men following him want to be rebels against the infidels. Bremer talks like an action movie mayor when the people he's dealing with are as serious as cancer. Sure, Sadr had a big mouth and his paper was filled with lies, but it didn't kill anyone. They were waiting for a chance to kill Americans and Bremer handed it to them.
Now, we have a grim choice of killing Shias by the streetload or turning Sadr into a massive hero.
The pictures of American troops storming into a mosque is scary to me. It would be Osama's dream photo:look at the infidels delifing our religion. Coming out with a dead, martyred Sadr would be even worse.
Why are they doing this? We cannot deal with a Sunni innsurection. Why are we making Sadr into an American-killing hero? Leaving him alone was the only smart solution. Killing him would be dumb, jailing him would be worse.
What government could be formed in a situation of a dual rebellion. Sadr has been cultivating Sunni clerics for months, do you think they're going to abandon him now, when the Shia could join the rebellion. The CPA's lies are coming undone as we watch American teengers die for their mistakes.
This could have all be avoided. Instead, Bremer acts like he's got the 6th SS Panzer Army under his command, not 100K dispersed and outnumbered troops. "Arresting" Sadr is a pitched gun battle at best. Is anyone going to cry for the poor dead Shia we're killing? No.
Remember, Saddam didn't attack the Shia, they attacked him. We're doing one better.
By Sewell Chan and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 4, 2004; 5:30 PM
BAGHDAD, April 5--Seven U.S. soldiers were killed and more than 24 wounded in clashes in Sadr City, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in the northeastern part of the Iraqi capital, an Army spokesman said early Monday morning.
The deadly clash came hours after supporters of Moqtada Sadr, a fiery, young anti-American cleric, fought Sunday with a Spanish-led force at a military base in the southern Iraqi town of Kufa and as a week of protests and violence escalated across the country.
Master Sgt. David A. Melancon of the 1st Armored Division said in a statement Monday that the fighting in the capital began when "the militia of Moqtada Sadr's army -- Jaysh Mahdi or Mahdi Army -- attempted to interfere with security in Baghdad, intimidate Iraqi citizens and place them in danger. Specifically, the militia attempted to occupy and gain control of police stations and government buildings."
Militia members attacked soldiers and Iraqi law enforcement officers with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, according to Melancon. The U.S. and Iraqi forces, he added, "prevented this effort and reestablished security in Baghdad at the cost of seven U.S. soldiers killed and more than two dozen wounded."
In Kufa, at least 14 protesters and two soldiers, including one American, were killed and more than 100 were injured in fighting that witnesses said involved gunfire, mortars and an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter.
In addition to the U.S. solider, Spain's Defense Ministry in Madrid said, one solider from El Salvador was killed, the Reuters news services reported. Another nine soldiers were injured. (The Spanish ministry said its earlier report that four Salvadoran soldiers had been killed in Kufa was incorrect.)
So which battalion commander should be courtmartialed? Because the idea that US troops could go into freaking Sadr City and get out in one piece is delusional at best. Instead, 31 soldiers got lit up. Or a ratio of nearly one killed for three wounded. Which is a phenominal rate for a small unit action. That means a company was decimated by Shia militia men.
How can I draw that conclusion? Let's say the average mech company has 120 rifles on any given day. High casualities would be 3 killed and seven wounded. Crippling casualities would be 5 killed and 12 wounded. So what do we have? Seven dead and 24 wounded. A bunch of barely trained militiamen shut down the better part of a batallion today.
A battalion? Well, yeah. Because once you start losing men, you hunker down. Things got so bad, they had to call in air support. When one company started to take casualities, the dustoffs had to reach them. That stops offensive action, especially when you're taking fire from everywhere, which is what had to have happened here.
As best as I can guess, these guys rolled up into Sadr City, observed from the minute they rolled out of their base, got trapped in the streets and it was Mogo 2. Remember 18 died in Mogodishu over 24 hours when heavily outnumbered. Seven died in what seems to be a few hours. Extrapolate the numbers and it is this, not the bridge at Fallujah, which is the second Mogodishu.
What I don't understand is the fact that anyone could order any sized US force into Sadr City. There are at least 2 million people there. If you have 5,000 men with guns, they will outnumber any US force which enters there. Ordering US forces there is no better than sending them to die.
People see all those tanks and Apaches and think US soldiers are invincible. They aren't. They are matched, man for man, by the Iraqis. Many Shia are combat veterans and can handle their weapons. By the standards of a guerilla force, the Iraqis are lavishly equipped. They have automatic weapons, RPG's, light machine guns, all with enough ammo and training.
Tanks and Humvees are nearly useless in the crowded streets of Sadr City. If they unload all their firepower, they will kill civilians by the bushel load. It's a man for man fight and the US got hurt today. And tomorrow will not be any better.
This, of course, is the beginning of the end. We were baited into going after Sadr's top aide and now, there will be days of Shia funerals in Sadr City. How long will it be before other Shia clerics have to rally around Sadr because of these deaths? Once that happens, all our plans for Iraq are over. Now, we have a situation where the Shia have killed seven US soldiers, wounded 24 and driven a wedge between any deal we could have made with Sistani.
This makes Fallujah look like a walk in the park. And what excuses will CENTCOM come with now? Saddam loyalists? Foreign fighters? Nope, these were the Shia...our supposed allies. There are seven families who won't feel that they're our allies after they killed their teenaged sons.
If anyone had asked, I would have said I disagreed with Kos on mercenaries in Iraq. While I don't think they're an absolute evil, they are needed by private companies to protect their employees, not Paul Bremer. Once the USG hired them, they crossed a line. And while killing four contractors is definitely wrong, revenge isn't going to solve anything. It comes from a misreading of the situation in Fallujah, which thinks 4,000 Marines can control a city almost as large as Cinninnati.
Iraqi cities are large and hard to control and Saddam had the same problems the US has. Any attempt to punish Fallujah will get 18 year old Marines killed with no real result.
All this name calling and gutlessness is bullshit. If the Democratic Party expects to win, they better find a way to develop some balls, because this is just the start of what is going to happen. Given the amount of money Kos has raised for various Democratic organs, why did the Kerry campaign see this in isolation? It isn't. They're playing the same games with Move On.org and anyone who opposes the GOP. They're mean, they're nasty. Oh, please. I've worked for both parties and the differences on the ground are small. Begala and Carville nail it completely. If you were selling soda and could only change brands every four years, the commercials would be nastier than you could imagine.
Well, it's in the interest of the GOP, whether lone bloggers like Michael Friedman, who needs a lesson in free speech, or the party, to cut internet fundraising off at the source. Someone said none of Reynold's advertisers would pull out. As if I care? They still have to deal with the letters and the hassle. Which is the point. I think no one should boycott anyone. If you want to read the chickenhawks at LGF, go right ahead. Or the Nation of Islam. Read what you want and encourage everyone to have the same access online.
If a bunch of lefties wanted to block Instapundit or Andy Sullivan, I'd be just as vociferious in defending their right to free speech. You would think Reynolds would understand what happens to Kos today can happen to him tomorrow. Or me or anyone else. But apparently, he doesn't and making a cheap political point is more interesting to him. You start picking on sites for one day's comments, you're going to have to close down everyone. Robots don't write these sites, people do, and we all have bad days, emotions and opinions which don't stand the test of a few hours. That's life and we all need to accept it.
Oh, and to all the pissed off right-wing trolls, keep hitting my site. I can use the attention.
Anyway, there's a reason I don't raise money for pols and never will. It is simple: they will run at the first sign of trouble. Kos was raising money last year for the DNC when many people wanted to toss them in the drink. Yet, at the first sign of trouble, they run like gazelles from him, instead of asking what the deal is.
Oh, they'll kiss your ass when times are good, Unity dinners and all that. But who the hell needs friends when times are good? You need friends when shit goes wrong. The fact that people were wringing their hands and arguing the point disgusts me. It's about who side are you on, not if you agree with them. I know my friends are loyal, my two month absence from this site proved that. And I'll raise money for them in a heartbeat. They aren't going to run.
But politicians are a different story. Most are selfish bastards who will turn on you on a dime and not pay you what you're owed. Now, I think George Bush needs to be unemployed and I would never discourage anyone from contributing to Kerry or anyone else. But I won't ask you to, except in an ad and that's because I got paid for it.
Politics can be a disillusioning business and the people who you thought would stick by you sell you out in a heartbeat. The hypocrisy here is amusing. No one is going to refuse the money from Kos's readers. And in a month or so, or as soon as Iraq generates another tragedy, the Kerry campaign will be back on one of the web's most trafficked political sites.
What I find so silly, or outrageous, is that after a few e-mails, after all it was tourney weekend, Democratic candidates ran like little bitches. Oh, we got a few e-mails, we have to disassociate from this horrible person. Hell, if they had investigated the situation, they would have found out the worst thing about the guy is that he's a Cubs fan, which is a level of maschocism I can't imagine. And that the freaks at LGF wanted to stalk him. What Reynolds and the rest of the boycott fans don't get is that Bush/Cheney will do exactly the same thing to them.
Once you start raising money for them, you have to excuse things you don't support. I don't care how many Dems think Egyptians are going to serve in Iraq. That's not going to happen, We're going to lose Iraq, the only question is how many more people die in the process. John Kerry will never admit that, even if he thinks it privately. But if I were to raise money for him, without being paid for it, I couldn't go after him for that. As well as his nonsense about gay marriage.
I think everyone should support the candidates of their choice. But as Kos's travails have demonstrated, if you go beyond sending a check, you may get kicked in your ass, despite your best intentions. Don't ever expect a politican to support you the way you support them.
This way, if people don't like what I say, they don't have to come. They don't have to waste their time delinking and denouncing me.
I'm fine, and I know you guys were worried, but my DSL went down. After I called Verizon, it was fixed in 15 minutes. I was watching the NCAA's last night, fell asleep and left it to today. So unless you see a note from Jen or someone else, if I'm not online, assume it's a normal connection or mechanical problem. Add in the tourney, and well, I had good reasons for being offline.
I'm getting better each day, so no need to worry about a relapse:) It's just taking time. However, I'm not immune to computer and connection issues.:)
Glenn Reynolds, instapundit, thinks it's a good idea to harrass Kos's advertisers, or at least doesn't objects. Well, if he thinks it's a good idea for Kos, I think it's an excellent idea for him. As I have plenty of time, I think we could give him a dose of medicine he thinks is good.
Now, he may have some weasel claim that HE didn't call for a boycott or harassment, but you know, when you lie down with dogs, you pick up fleas. He wants to pass on a bad idea, well, he'll get to live with the consequences if Kos is affected. We're not going to lie down, excuse his actions or find a way to live with it. You fuck with one of us, we'll come back and play the same game. I don't like or believe in boycotts, for anyone. But there is no day I'll stand by and watch someone who helped me get their ass kicked.
So if Glenn, safely protected by tenure, wants to limit the free speech of someone else, even with a wink and a nod, well, we're gonna take a lesson from the White House. We're gonna blame HIM, not the guy he linked to. He's gonna be the one reading quotes back in his local paper and getting to deal with the hassles from nervous advertisers. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If he wants to play Bill O'Reilly, I'll sure play Al Franken and I won't be alone.
Glenn,
Do you really think it's wise to ask people to harass Kos's advertisers over his opinion. While not all of us have tenure, calling for a boycott is something which could be turned on any one of us.
After all, as a vet, he does have a right to his opinion about mercenaries, and that was what they were. Not contractors or any such bullshit. Their job was to kill Iraqis. And as a law professor, you must know US "contractors" in Iraq are not protected under the Geneva Convention, so what happened to them was as permissable as it was under Iraqi law. That doesn't make it right, but they were paid vastly more than US servicemen to take high risk assignments.
Another thing, which bothers me, if no one else, is that US Marines will die to "avenge" them. The same Marines who's families live on food stamps, Navy relief and help from home. Who's reserve members will come home to forclosed homes, lost jobs and lifetime injuries. Who on your side of the fence is crying for them?
And now, to add insult to injury, these same teenagers are being asked to go into Fallujah and die for men who were making $100K a year. If we were talking about fellow soldiers or Marines, at least they would have shared the same burden. Instead, you're cheering on an expedition which will kill teenagers fighting for their country to avenge men who were fighting for a paycheck.
Is that the kind of thing you want to endorse? Or have you even considered that? If there was a legal process in Iraq, the killers would belong in jail. But by that same standard, anyone killed by a mercenary would have the right to have them jailed. No matter how gruesome their deaths, these were men outside the law. Why should US Marines die to avenge them, when soldiers who were killed in similiar ways were left unavenged?
Are mercenaries lives more important than US soldiers? Two soldiers were dragged from their Humvee and stoned by a crowd in Mosul. Did you even know that happened? Did you call for revenge then, or did you need TV pictures for your outrage to mount?
This is a two-sided game. You want people to boycott Kos's advertisers, people can boycott yours. It may not be fair, but neither is life. I think it's best we all let each other speak freely and leave the boycotts and advertiser letters alone. But if you want to cripple his site, I'll personally write a letter to your advertisers, department heads, school newspaper and every other place I can find.
Why? Because in years of watching you write incredibly inaccurate and just wrong headed things, I never thought of doing the same, I thought the marketplace of ideas was wide enough for all of us. But if you think the rules should change, well, Kos won't be the only one affected.
Oh, and I have plenty of time to do this, since I'm recovering from open heart surgery, which has left me broke and determined.
But like I said, I think the best thing is argue ideas and leave all this silly talk of letters to advertisers alone. As you know, there is no law saying we all have to agree.
---Steve Gilliard
Steve Gilliard's News Blog
Note: Kos is already losing advertisers. If you don't react, the right is going to have a field day with him. I think Martin Frost (D-TX) was the first one. Well, he's gonna need a lot of help to run against Tom DeLay's lackey. You might want to remind his campaign staff that if they expect to raise a dime on line, they better stand by the people who have stood by them. If not, there are other campaigns to help.
These guys want to mess with your right to express yourself. I think they deserve the same. When I was sick, you guys stood by me. Now it's time to stand up for Kos and anyone else these people attack. And start with Instahack. He got the ball rolling, let him feel what it's like.
Two of my favorite things are salmon and eggs and spice rub.
Salmon and eggs is a simple meal which needs to be cooked carefully. The eggs have to be softly scrambled, and cooked in butter. Not oil, not margerine or bacon fat. The whole meal has to be rich. The eggs need to be scrambled in butter to the point where they taste buttery, You can add cream or salmon roe, for an upscale flavor. But I like onions and aparagus, for that super rich mouth feel with the salmon.
Most of meals are nothing like this, for obvious reasons, because it has too many calories.Well, not really, but you need the fat for mouth feel.
OK, you saute the onions in a thin coating of oil or butter, but to translucence, not carmelization. Then you add in cooked asparagus and cooked or smoked salmon. You just want them warm, not browning. Then toss in beaten eggs, two per person, and softly stir the eggs under low heat. Then add in some butter. The whole idea is to get a buttery mouth feel. Yes, there is some fat here, but you want this smooth, glistening buttery combination of asapargus, eggs and salmon. All go great with butter and enhance the taste.
This is not an every day meal, but is a quick way to impress someone. You marry these ingredients and they are so rich and its so simple to fix. It's really a good way to use leftovers in a way which will surprise. It's also a great brunch meal. Throw in a platter of bacon, some potatoes, fresh bread and you can feed several people cheaply. This is not a meal you need to gorge on. You can, but it can turn ordinary eggs into a sumptious meal with little effort. The more sides you have, the more it makes the eggs shine because they are so soft, rich and flavorful.
Spice rub is another thing which enhances meals. Now, most days, I have chicken or fish and salad for dinner. Spice rub is a great thing to add to anything.
Now, unlike barbecue spice rub, I don't add sugar and since I don't really like salt, I may add a pinch. But what I recommend is this: take the spices in your closet. You can do this to enhance vegetables, salads, eggs, anything, but especially, meat.
I like to use rosemary and thyme, which makes it more chicken favored, but you could use sage, or any spice you like.
OK, so you look at the spices, maybe you have some onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, paprika and oregano. What you want to do is balance the flavors. Paprika adds color and garlic can overwhelm, so you add more onion powder than garlic and limit the paprika to prevent burning. Salt and pepper are your base, maybe a third of the mix and then you add the other flavors as needed. If you want it more spicy, add ground chilies and cayenne. More herby, oregano, rosemary, thyme, sage, tarragon.
You can also use fading fresh spices in this mix, but you'll need to toast them.
One of my favorite additions is a bit of a sweet spice like ginger, cinnamon or nutmeg, just as an accent. Sugar burns, unless you're going out to the grill.
You can make it just as a mix, but I made a toasted version for Jen for last Christmas and she wouldn't shut up about it months later, she liked it so much. We'd be at dinner and she mentioned how she'd used it on fish or meat or veggies. I was impressed it was that versitile.
To toast, place the spice mix in a bone dry frying pan and heat it until warm and you can smell the fragrance. Taste. Place in jar, close.
You can use it like Mrs. Dash, or in fried foods, or on baked foods, either in a light shake or as a rub. This works especially well for roasts and other baked meats. This brings all kinds of flavors into meat without a lot of salt, which can dry out meats. Too many people use spices timidly. If you develop your own spice blend, cut back on the salt, you'll make the every day healthy meal, especially if you're doing Atkins, with it's protein heavy diet, a lot more tasty.
While everyone is chattering about mercinaries in Iraq, no one is drawing the obvious conclusion, American troops are going to get killed avenging mercenaries making 10 times more than they did for the same jobs. The poor grunts who have to go to Fallujah don't have fancy employment contracts and they don't walk around in civvies with M-4's. Yet, because some hired guns got killed, they're going to have to mount up for some dick swinging revenge raid.
Of course, the Mercs got killed because US troops have piss-poor discipline and killed women and children in panic. The Iraqis are not using fine distinctions. By the logic of normal people, the dead mercs should be revenged by their bosses. Or more intelligently, pay the tribesmen to leave them alone. Instead, some kid, probably by the time the NCAA's are on, will be getting a free trip to Bethesda for his new leg. Will Blackwater USA, the "security" company who hired the dead men, pay the Marines bills? Of course not.
What the DOD is doing is conflating private enterprise to be the same as government work. The mercs have no legal standing in warfare. The Iraqis can burn them as they like, serve them on pita or cut off their heads according to the Geneva Convention. What the US is doing is saying that mercs have a legal, protected status. One American Marines, making so little that their families get Food Stamps, must kill and die to protect.
What happens when these rent-a soldiers light up a town or shoot up some Iraqis. Is the DOD going to embrace them then , or pretend these guys are just employees with no ties to the USG. Which might sound pretty lame to the families of the dead Marines send to avenge the dead mercs.
The USG in Iraq has thought so little about the role of mercs that they don't seem to have a dividing line between the role of soldiers and contractors. And neither do the Iraqis.
One other point: there is no way to tell the difference between SF/SEAL troopers and mercs. They use the same cars, weapons and gear. They all wear civilian clothes as well. The Iraqis who ambushed the two cars could have thought they were going after a Special Operations team. There is no way to tell the difference without asking.If you want to know why this hasn't been a big story so far, the media in Iraq hires the same companies. Baghdad is so dangerous that any high profile Western reporter risks their lives without hired guns by their side. The USG is not their only client, by far.
There's also a big difference in the companies employed. There are the Ghurkas who protect buildings and facilities, Iraqis who serve as armed doormen, and the elite US/UK SOF troopers who do the dirty work. Iraq has become a Disneyland for ex-soldiers.
If the US is going to claim ignorance about the numbers of mercs, how can they ask Marines to risk their lives to avenge their deaths? These guys are mercenaries, they risked their lives for money, which is part of the job. Now, Marines will be expected to get killed because of that.
Here's a brief history of Vinnell Corporation, one of America's favored merc companies. They rebuilt the Croatian Army in 1995, protect the Sauds, and are training the Iraqi Army. Unlike Blackwater, they are more a private version of a military training team (MTT) than Special Ops surrogates.
The right has long wanted an American version of the French Foriegn Legion, able to impose American imperial will without the dead bodies of American teenagers involved. The problem is that mercs are regarded as persona non grata in most of the third world, especially in Africa, where they have caused untold instability. South Africa, once a home to mercs, outlawed the business in the '90's, just as Executive Outcomes was doing a booming business guarding the Angolan oil fields.
The use of companies like Blackwater allows this shadow army to exist, created by the low wages of US military service and the constant supply of action for those who become addicted to it. Running around with cammies and weapons can turn into a drug for some. The stupid levels of money and lack of rules attract others. After all, if you're a white supremacist, you're gonna find it hard to make your 20 in the US Army. But who cares what you think when you go solo.
What this creates is a force which turns every gripe regular soldiers had about special ops troopers and creates a nightmare. Mercs serve as a release valve for folks who might work for drug dealers, the Russian mob or anyone with cash. At the same time, like the four dead mercs in Iraq, they can create a major problem which requires American teenagers to bail them out. It's nice to call them disposable soldiers, but that's not the reality. They are a policy risk, because if the US conduct in Iraq is any indication, they are US soldiers without portfolio or protection.
The Associated Press has learned that after prolonged discussions with the Kerry Campaign, former consumer activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader will end his presidential campaign within the next week and endorse John Kerry.
"Look, it's all about ego in the end,"Nader said in an exclusive interview with AP. "Being president is about having a massive ego. I think I can redirect my efforts to electing a president which best represent my views."
Asked about his constant attacks on democrats over the years, Nader claimed he was shaping social progress by them.
"Democrats got too caught up in governing to actually look out for the people," he said from his Washington headquarters. "They were too ready to make deals to get laws passed to actually effect change.
"The Democrats were always in the pocket of big business and more concerned about jobs and revenues to make sure that there was a true progressive voice in America. Which is why I challenged them. Al Gore's environmental record was a joke and I felt obligated to oppose it."
When asked about Bush's environmental record, Nader said he didn't support it either.
"Come on, Bush didn't pretend to be an environmentalist. Gore did. He needed to be called to account on it, regardless of the consequences. Gore would have not done what was needed to fix the environment and people knew that and supported me."
Nader was asked why so many Republicans were supporting his campaign.
"They endorse my views of withdrawal from NATO and Iraq, higher,wealth based taxes, and economic equality, as well as limits on corporations," he said. "That's a conservative platform many can endorse, and do, like Ben Stein."
When asked if Stein didn't give more money to Bush, Nader replied "he's keeping his options open."
Nader said his decision to withdraw from the race was based on a series of agreements he and Kerry came up with over the last two weeks.
"Unlike Gore, Kerry listened to my ideas and has agreed to back them," he said. "He explained to me that our positions were closely aligned and if I didn't quit, he'd send Howard Dean to run me down like a dog. That he was no Al Gore and if I didn't get out of the way, he'd break my legs and dig up my financial records for a lark."
With such a persuasive argument, Nader said he was eager to get on the Democratic team.
"Kerry's killed people," he said. "He gets that look in his eye and you better say yes. Those vets around him are no Beltway think tank guys, they'll kick your a** if you f*** with their boy. They are not playing."
Nine Americans died in Iraq yesterday. Four, civilian contractees, or in reality, retired special ops guys, were blown up, burned, mutliated and dragged from their cars. A gruesome way to die.
The generals lied, saying this was about Saddam, while any sane person who could think would know the only person who cares about Saddam is his French lawyer. The deaths in Fallujah were personal. The US has messed with the local tribe and they will fight the US until we leave. Every time we go there, a gun battle erupts. The little mob action today was to drive that point home.
All they could talk about on Nightline is will the US "cut and run". That is the dumbest fucking question possible. The question should be why the hell are we in Iraq and are our policies working.
We have not had the big disaster yet in Iraq, where 30-40 people die at once, the one where you lose a platoon or an office. But we will.
The dishonesty circling Iraq is so thick it would blanket most cities in a fog. We're about to shove Chalabi the thief into some kind of office after we leave, which is begging for a popular uprising. Our effort to train the police is delusional, at best, criminal at worse. They were nowhere to be seen today and many are using US training to kill Americans.
The insurgents have excellent intelligence and will only grow in capability as time goes on. Yet, CENTCOM lies about this, claiming it's Saddam supporters doing the killing. It's Iraqis who hate occupation and they're not only Sunnis.
The point Americans should concentrate on is how do we leave Iraq, not if or when or in 2006. The Sunnis are at war with us, we're ignoring Kurdish expansionism, and the Shia are biding their time, while issuing anti-American sermons every week.
We are on the brink of disaster in Iraq, with elections about as possible as man-powered flight.
Talking about "staying the course" is as futile in 2004 as it was in 1971.
OK, this new "liberal" radio network is supposed to hit the air today on a series of channels and streaming online.
Air America Radio is supposed to stream from their website and it's supposed to be an ancedote to Rush and the right-wing hate radio now popular on our airwaves.
In a country bitterly divided, and who's leading radio celebrity has gone on the warpath against President Bush, his policies and allies, all the right-wing handwringing might be necessary. After all, who's more talented, the oxy-contin hack Rush Limbaugh, or the former SNL writer Al Franken. Being trapped listening to the mediocre talented Rush is worse then dealing with a room full of Republicans. Not only is he wrong, he's a shill for the GOP, which makes for dull radio. Franken has made people laugh since 1975 and has managed to get up Bill "thank God he's no cop" O'Reilly's ass.
Republican radio hgas dominated the airwaves on radio because it is the last bastion of ignorance and hate. Even Fox tries to put on an air of respectibility in between it's lies and pandering to the Bushies. Radio was the only place where bigotry could be unleashed without comment. In this environment, Howard Stern's formerly centrist politics was an exception, even if their audiences overlapped. Now that he's crossed over, more than a few people have to worry about what comes next.
Radio is a business, but Air America (named after my favorite CIA airline) should have no problem getting talent. You don't think conservatives program the Daily Show (which had a brilliant interview with Dick Clark yesterday). And let's face it, who thinks conservative comics are funny? Dennis Miller is pissing away his career on CNBC, while Bill Maher, liberterian, is a hero on HBO.
I'd take a listen and be paitent. These are talented people and while radio is a new medium, someone has to say something besides I love Bush.
Woman's Day recently did an interview with Former First Lady Barbara Bush. This unedited transcript was e-mailed to me last night. It gives a rather different picture of Mrs. Bush than what was seen in the media. Of course, this won't be seen in the SCLM version, but I decided to share.
Woman's Day: Mrs. Bush, thank you for letting us in your home (Kennebunkport, ME).
Barbara Bush: You betcha. Let's talk about that lying fuck Dick Clarke. You know Washington is filled with little faggots like that. My George certainly cared about that Bin Laden fellow. Why his uncle told George 41 that Osama always had a hair up his ass with that Koran business. When you have a bitter little attention queen like Dick Clarke lying about my George and that sweet little Condi, I'm shocked that so many people would believe him.
WD: You think Dick Clarke is lying?
BB: Of course. My George isn't stupid. Why he's President, like a Bush man should be, he has the right breeding. Of course he knows the scion of Saudi Arabia's second richest family is a loon. If we didn't know the Bin Laden's, how could they leave the country on 9/11? Don't be silly.
WD: So, you say your son was on top of the Al Qaeda threat?
BB: Well, that Xanax-taking bitch Laura and her slattern kids might have been a distraction. George does take that family thing a bit seriously. I mean, we've already paid for two abortions and bail for one of them. Yeesh, not that Jeb is any better. But he has an excuse, his wife is one of those brown ones. Even if they don't have public sex or become a coke addict, keeping them on the straight and narrow is hard. Have you been to LA or Dallas?
One of my great regrets is the wives my boys chose. No winners. At least Doro was smart enough to divorce that loser she married early on.
WD: You don't like them?
BB: Look, I had to bribe that Sharon to keep her mouth shut. So what if Neil got some strange. That's what Bush men do. She didn't have to whine to that dried up hag Kitty Kelley, much less try to write a book. Laura sits down, pops Xanax and smokes all day. What a fucking zombie. Thank God he has that sweet little Condi in his life. She'd be the perfect wife for him. Submissive, attentive. There isn't a week I don't wish he dumped Laura.
WD: What do you think about John Kerry?
BB: That little bitch? How dare he attack my son. He's a coward who will weaken his country.
WD: Didn't Sen. Kerry win a Silver Star in Vietnam? Didn't he win a Bronze Star for saving a man's life under fire?
BB:: Cheap theatrics. Is it my fault his parents couldn't keep him out of Vietnam? We made sure our George was safe, what was wrong with his parents. He went to Yale, for God's sake. What was he doing in Vietnam? Look, just because 3,000 Americans died on my son's watch, how could you trust the Democrats to protect this country. They're always looking to cut deals and run away. Even this so-called hero, Kerry.
WD: But didn't your family have extensive dealings with Saudi officials over the years.
BB: They're our friends. What's wrong with friends from Saudi Arabia? So what if they've made us rich and conflicted with US policy.
WD: How do you spend your days?
BB: Well, I wake up, read the papers, make George 41 get up and golf or something, so he's out of my hair, have Maisie serve me breakfast, and make a pitcher of these lovely orange martinis.
WD: Orange martinis?
BB: Yes, a few slices of orange, a bottle of Tanquerey, some vermouth, and a little Orange Hi-C.
WD: A bottle?
BB: Well, I don't drink the whole thing in a day. But you need a bottle to even things out. Besides, so we go through a case a month, big deal. We're retired and this makes things fun.
WD: You spend your days drunk?
BB: Of course not. That would take two bottles. We're Connecticut WASP's. One bottle of gin is like water. It just puts an edge on.
Claire Cozens, press and publishing correspondent
Tuesday March 30, 2004
 Tony Blair today led the tributes to the distinguished broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who died last night aged 95.
The prime minister described Cooke, who presented BBC Radio 4's Letter from America for more than 50 years, as "one of the greatest broadcasters of all time" and said he would be "deeply, deeply missed".
"He was really one of the greatest broadcasters of all time, and we shall feel his loss very, very keenly indeed.
"He was a remarkable man who was broadcasting the Letter from America right up to a few weeks ago. He will be deeply, deeply missed," said Mr Blair.
Cooke who retired just weeks ago after a journalistic career spanning 70 years, died last night at his home in New York.
A BBC spokesman said Cooke's daughter had contacted the broadcaster's biographer, Nick Clarke, with the news. He said that Alistair Cooke died at 12am local time at his home in New York.
The thing about Cooke, who became famous for his intros to Masterpiece Theater on PBS, is that he did his reports from New York for over 50 years every week. If you ever listened to him on the world service his insights were amazing. He did a piece on last year's blackout which I found charming. He basically discussed America to the world for half a century and explained it in a way which was charming and insightful.
However, I always wondered how long he could keep working, After all, he did his weekly reports for 50 years and was 95 when he quit. I was always captivated by his reports because he'd seen so much.You could always learn so much from him. I'll miss his reports.
WASHINGTON, March 29 — The chairman and vice chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Monday that they would ask Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath in any future questioning because of discrepancies between her statements and those made in sworn testimony by President Bush's former counterterrorism chief.
"I would like to have her testimony under the penalty of perjury," said the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, in comments that reflected the panel's exasperation with the White House and Ms. Rice, the president's national security adviser.
Ms. Rice has granted one private interview to the 10-member, bipartisan commission and has requested another. But the White House has cited executive privilege in refusing to allow her to testify before the commission in public or under oath, even as she has granted numerous interviews about its investigation
I guess they're tired of looking like idiots. She'll talk to Ed Bradley but not Tom Kean? Who is running the political operation in the WH? Can't be the boy genius Karl Rove? Jesus, this was insane politics, unless the purpose was to leave their former girl wonder hanging. She cannot talk to the media and ignore a Congressional commision.
I cannot believe the rank political ineptitude being displayed here. Attacking Richard Clarke so personally, now they're going into his sex life, was a mistake of epic proportions. He's what the Brit's call a permanent civil servant. He's the kind of guy who does his job in a fairly ideology-free way. All Bush had to do was disagree with his conclusions civilly and move on. Clarke had a narrow view, some ideas which were politically unsupportable, and didn't have ultimate decision making power. Instead, they call him a liar, a partisan and the dumbest things imaginable.
If Bush could deal with issues like an adult, Richard Clarke's conclusions would make for a nice speech at the National Press Club. Book or no book, he would have testified at the 9/11 Commission, because of his position in four White Houses.
The idea of the President attacking a former staffer should be revolting to most people.
All a smart White House had to do was disagree with his world view, because there are hundreds of Clarkes in Washington, bright men and women who think their pet issue needs more attention. They didn't have to turn it into a pissing contest between Rice and Clarke, one where Rice has everything to lose. Now, his allegations, which are backed by other sources published in 2002 and 3, are front and center.
The right is spending time and effort attacking the character of a man responsible for the nation's security. Do they not think this will come back to haunt them and their candidate? If Richard Clarke was so bad and evil, why did four presidents trust him? Instead of dealing with his conclusions, they want to deal with him and that isn 't going to work.
Note: Rice agrees to sworn, public testimony, while Bush and Cheney will meet with the entire commision in private.
Like they had a choice. Their refusal was insulting at best, and politically dimwitted at worst. They have acted like they had something to hide since day one.
The Pearl Harbor hearings, held in 1944, held people accountable. During wartime, no less. It might not have been comfortable, but someone
realized the country can stand accountabilty. Why should 9/11 be any different?
Bush, who has avoided accountabilty his entire life, is clearly mystified by the concept.
After watching Condi Rice stumble and lie for two weeks, it's time to say that she cannot do the job she was hired for.
She's not a good National Security Advisor. In fact, her entire career has relied on a bizarre combination of right-wing affirmative action and largess from the Bush Administrations. When Bob Novak asks if Richard Clarke had a problem with a black, female boss, I get angry. Because that isn't the issue. Her color is irrelevant. Her qualifications are paramount. If she could do the job, and there are 3,000 dead to say she can't, her color would be irrelevant. No one ever wondered if Colin Powell or Eric Shinseki could be capable leaders. You may disagree on policy with them, but they were competent. I wish Powell had the character to oppose Bush, but I think he can secure embassies without a problem.
Rice is just not competent. It's not her intelligence, but her academic work, would, if she was not an ideologue, have allowed her to teach at a second-rate state university or work at the CIA. She may be bright, but her degrees are, well, not that impressive. And given that she never worked for State, the Agency and never lived in Russia, well, she clearly had a helping hand.
Rice is crippled by a childhood and culture which doesn't allow her to stand up to men. She's what black folks call a "church lady". Someone who never marries, never has kids, but has a great job. All these women do is go to work, go to church and back to their tastefully decorated apartments. They are amazingly deferential to men and try to placate them. Exactly the wrong qualities needed in a National Security Advisor.
If you remember Anita Hill, well, she was the same kind of woman. I know a lot of women who would have smacked the piss out of Clarence Thomas, boss or no boss, if he made a joke about pubic hair to them. Hill needed the male approval, so she shut her mouth for years. Rice might have gotten huffy at such a joke, but challenge it? Nope.
She was a smart girl who grew up with an overprotective father and was quickly isolated from her peers. The only men she dealt with were mentors and family members. She pleased her parents with her piety and dedication.
The reality is that Rice is also unlikeable. She is a rigid person, eager to please her bosses, a pattern which began in childhood. She also cannot lie well. She's the ultimate "good girl", so that she can't form a lasting, mature relationship with anyone, because the job comes first, as does the approval which comes with it. She's also socially isolated because, like a "good girl", in the black church context, she won't date white men. Which in her work environment is an illogical decision at best.
So you have a person who couldn't even escape Stanford without making a ton of enemies now expected to knock heads and force decisions. Maybe they should have hired Maxine Waters instead, because Condi Rice can no more challenge a room full of men than fly. She's too rigid and too addicted to the need for male approval to pull that off.
Rice, like all incomptents, lies when challenged, but is so constitutionally unable to do it, she throws tells off like a bad poker player. Of course she didn't care about Al Qaeda, the men she dealt with cared about Iraq. And while Dick Clarke liked her, an unusual response to many, he had zero respect for her ability and he'd worked with her in Bush 41, before she quit.
You would think the President would hire a National Security Advisor who was clever and could smack people around. Rice clearly is not clever and clearly cannot smack superiors or peers around. Her whole manner is of a high school principal, prim and rigid.
Let's not forget that Rice has been placed in an unenviable position by the President. If she doesn't testify, she will be vilified by the 9/11 families and lose her credibility. But no sane person in the White House wants her to testify under oath. She can't lie well enough to fool anyone and Rice might well crack under serious interrogation. In a speech or formal setting, Rice is impressive. In a setting where her ass, not Bush's or some policy, is on the line, she's horrible.
She doesn't even realize that Bush is setting her up to be the fallguy for his failure. His " she can't testify" line leaves her not Bush, in the drink. It will be her legacy, one which makes it look like she couldn't do her job, which she couldn't, while Bush escapes blame, a lifeong pattern.
And considering the stakes her, she might want to testify instead. In a perfect world, she'd have been fired, but no one gets fired by Bush unless they tell the truth.
I was reading the comments section of Atrios when I tripped upon this lovely sight American Women Suck.
This trip into mysoginy is also a monmument to homophobia. These poor, delusional bastards think that the problem to their romantic issues lies overseas.
Of course, this is really a cover for their own issues with women. As if there is a difference between American women born here and those who live here for a decade.
One poster, Mr. Guitar, left this bon mot of wisdom:
if you go outside USA you'll be shock to know that how stud you are.
Especially for white men(no offence to other men) they treat you like a prince if you are less attractive 50yr old and bald.thanx to hollywood.
It's not just for finacial reasons.even if you are broke being white(especially if you are midwesterner blonde hair, blue eyes) ,to have white kids with them is also a major advantage for their society.they see white as a beautiful race since the world is occupied by darker skin.Since we have been givers to our women here,foreign women find it charming and gentamanly
I have news for him. You know when European women come to the US, they find the men very attractive. The same as what happens when American women go to Europe. Salon ran a series of stories of women who found Europeans achingly attractive, fucked them, and came back home.
My friends picked up so many au pairs it wasn't funny. They took no time to get naked. So if he thinks it's just European women, he's delusional. When you go on vacation, picking up women, or men, just gets easier. American or European.
Another poster, Knight 40, came up with this pearl of wisdom:
Yes, I see this ALL the time, just go to walmart, big bitch or other sizes, wimpy man, several screaming kids.
Also, good point, and the point is, I see no point in getting married. As I said earlier, american men have been sold a bill of goods, or should I say BS.
Over the years, I cannot point to one person I knew well, that was happily married, it is an oxymoron, You cannot be married and be happy, at least not inthe US to a typical american feminist, wich they virtually all are, with there baggage, equal rights crap, mr.mom stupidity, and all the rest of the supreme stupidity that typical US woman think of.
Besides, you should be happy/content with yourself, then you won't need to rely on anyone else to make you happy, which does not work anyhow.
It is all attachment.
Plus American women and some mens expectations are out of this universe. I think they read too many magazines and watch too many tv talk shows.
The expectations are enormous, so right away, people set themselves up for a letdown, then they want divorce.
When they get married, they find the other person has bad breath, burps, and the acting that started during courtship stops and the real person comes through.
There is more and deeper, but enough for now.
Funny, when I go into a big box store, I see a bunch of fat guys and their fat wives.
But what I find amusing about these losers, and they are losers, is that they blame their problems on women. Yes, women can be a pain in the ass, any guy who denies that is lying. But so can guys. And I bet the guys who are complaining about fat women aren't slim either.
They think some Russian or Filipina will solve their problems and take all their shit. Which is what this is really about. They want women who will tolerate their shit, their inability to dress, their abusivness, their cheapness. They want someone to be a doormat like most of them have been their entire lives.
My God, I hate these sites because they are so emblematic of a loser's mentality. Oh, I need a foreign woman, because I can't get an American woman to tolerate my loser ways. Why look at the way I dress, my grooming, my attitude towards life.
I mean these guys are admitting that they can't handle strong, independent women. What a bunch of crybaby losers. Oh, American women want respect and dignity, that's too much to me. Oh, and gay men are absolutely threatening to me, even though they have no relevance to my life.
I think, a lot of times, women do have unrealistic expectations. We're all only human, and if you want to be rich, you would do better to make your own money. Expecting a man to care for you financially usually ends with you raising the kids alone and selling real estate. Our economy doesn't work that way any more and living off credit cards doesn't get better results.
And guys, for the most part, even though they won't admit it, care more about your heart and spirit than your body. We don't see the extra five pounds or the mishapen nose. Once we start caring about you, that all fades away.
I've heard all the bitterness, on and off-line, and what it really comes from is you, not women. Guys chase women who don't like them and wonder why they don't get laid. They treat the women who do care about them like obsticles to some porn-inspired nirvana, which isn't real life.
These guys need to stop being bitter and treat women with respect and some humanity. Because all a site like this does is make you a worse person. And over the years, I've learned that it doesn't matter where a woman is from, but who she is and what's in her heart. These guys are looking for a quick fix which doesn't exist.
Dealing with other humans is hard. No matter where they come from. Thinking that American women suck is as silly as thinking they are uniformly great. As the sign says: your milage may vary. However, finding some Russian chick desperate to leave her crappy life and thinking she loves you is an act of high delusion. Believe me, if you were Russian, she wouldn't be as attractive.
I didn't want to write about food again, with the scrapple and cheese fries in one week, but I ran across this site Brunch.org which is dedicated to the perfect restaurant Eggs Benedict. It was so charming I had to share it.
As I have said, this is not my favorite breakfast, but it is my best friend's Dave's. When he eats out, this is what he orders. Not all the time, like zombie, he appreciates Waffle House, and all, but you know those diner mornings when you stare at the menu? Well, for Jen, who will eat anything, she'll choose an Irish Breakfast, me, I go for sausage and eggs over easy, but Dave, he'll go for the Eggs Benedict. None of us are food monomaniacs, I had a ham, sausage, bacon omlet I can't wait to have again from a local diner. But we all have our preferences.
Now, I like and make Eggs Benedict, because I think it's pretty easy. I never use Canadian Bacon because I have no guests and no other uses for it. I usually use honey turkey or sausage, but I'm lazy. It is an upscale meal which any idiot can fix.
Ok, let's get to the Hollandaise sauce. Fresh lemon (NEVER bottled), pepper, butter (ALWAYS) and a couple of egg yolks. You dump in the lemon, heat up the butter, and stir in the egg. In less than a minute, you have a tart, creamy sauce. If you have any inventiveness, add sugar and use it over poundcake or something, but not at the same time. Today, I added mushrooms because I wanted the mushroom flavor, but usually herbs like tarragon or parsley are the limit.
Sure, salmonella is a worry, if you leave your eggs out and don't heat the mixture through. But it a simple sauce if you do it right.
Why add it? Because otherwise you have an Egg McMuffin. It has a sublime flavor, a richness.
Poached eggs are easy. I like them in a frying pan with water for a simple reason. You can keep the yolks runny easier that way. When the whites congeal, just spoon some water over the yellow yolks and the albumen will turn white, and you have your runny eggs. I dumped the water in the pan I used to make spice rub in, so the eggs cooked in the leftover spices. It cleaned the pan and added a little flavor to the eggs. Poached eggs are underrated. Some days, you want a fried egg and toast, but the delicacy of poached eggs should be whipped out by cooks far more often, to eliminate fat and to have an egg which is perfect for a sandwich or a late meal.
I usually fix poached eggs when I get sick of oil. Same flavor and no fat.
The meat is usually whatever is around, except for American bacon. The more I think about it, the more I love cheesesteak steak. It would be perfect for this dish, thin slices of beef and mushroom on an English Muffin. American bacon is best alone slathered in yolk or in an omlette. Not in this. Leftover ham is OK, if you cut it thin enough. Proscuitto might be OK, if you use pesto, because Hollandaise is too strong. You want mild flavored meats here, not strong ones. Salamis, pastramis, Italian sausage, all work better with cheeses over the delicate flavor of Hollandaise. Prosciutto is usually so thin and salty, it's flavor cannot overwhelm. But when you move up there are other things to do with eggs and cured meat.
English muffins are supposed to be thick, but a lifetime of Thomas's has left me addicted to them. It's not right, technically, but life cannot be constrained by every rule in the book.
This is simple dish, anyone who can cook, can make it and look like a pro with freaking cold cuts, butter, eggs and English muffins. Hell, for the cooking impared, buy two Egg McMuffins with hash browns, replace their overcooked egg, splash on a Hollandaise sauce and you're a genius.
If you have minimal skill in the kitchen, I mean boiling eggs kind, this is boiled egg without the shell. Just don't overcook the yolk. If you're afraid of sauce, this is as simple as it gets, butter, lemon and egg yolk. Make it in the blender, for God's sake.
There are some dishes which are sublime (my new favorite word) because they are both elegant and simple. This is one of them. I wouldn't eat it every day, but I can make it and will eat it on occasion.
That's the title of John Dean's new book, but it reminds me of what Dean's collegues tried to do. Richard Clarke isn't lying, at least bgy any legaldefinition. Tim Russert had him on for an entire hour and his statements are remarkably consistant over time.
The desperation of the Bush Administration over this week was not only shameful, but a waste of our tax dollars. How ridiculous is their assault on Dick Clarke?
He was the chief expert on counterterrorism in FOUR White Houses. Four presidents vetted him and hired him. He's been doing this since most of the aides of the President were in school. If he was a pathological liar, it would have been exposed. The White House wants to make him out to nbe some clerk, instead of the policy expert he was. If the public understood how important his role was, Bush would resign in disgrace.
The Bush Administration, led by Rove, don't care. All they care about is reelection. Not that Clarke may be right, that we may have made mistakes. Bush cannot admit mistakes.
Bill Frist should change his name to Bob Dole, with his shameful defense ofg Bush on the Senate floor. Richard Clarke had every right to apologize because he didn't do his job and admits it. Which means he has more character than in the entire Bush White House. Just like Dole did for Nixon, Frist is defending the indefensable.
George Bush is not even as subtle as Nixon. The attempt to smear Daniel Ellsberg was a black bag job, It was secret. Bush admits to wanting to ruin Dick Clarke, something that isn't going to happen. But it makes Bush look small and evil. In a week of allegations, they never denied the substance of his charges, which is that the Bush Administration neglected to take terrorism as seriously as the last two administrations did. They tried to turn Clarke's words around on him, but do they think the MIT-trained, 30 year bureaucrat, is stupid enough to write a book at variance with previous sworn testimony?
Now, the lifelong security official is a partisan liar trying to elect John Kerry after spending half his career in Republican White Houses? If he wanted to do that, he could have joined the Kerry campaign, like his successor and friend, Rand Beers.
I find that part of the story is missing from the tale of Richard Clarke. The guy who took his job was so frustrated that he didn't just quit and write a book, he went to work for the opposition. It didn't make a big splash at the time, but that is remarkable.
These guys thought their problems came from Baghdad and the whole world knows that. The Bushies thought Saddam was some kind of mastermind, when in reality he could barely control his army, much less the local tribes. Terrorism was far too risky for him. After the Clarke-inspired attack on the secret police headquarters, Saddam got out of the terrorism business.
It is amazing how the neo-cons are still spinning how their hopeless war in Iraq has something to do with Al Qaeda? Richard Perle is lying right now on CNN. I hope he's consciously lying, because if he believes Saddam and AQ were linked, he's insane.
What is even more revolting is that Clarke knows all these people personally. He's socialized with them, gone to their homes and on a dime, they turn on him. The only one who wouldn't join in was Colin Powell. Why? Maybe he's covering his ass, or leaving Condi to hang out in the wind or as is more likely, Clarke did him a favor which Powell can't pretend didn't happen. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are ideologues, they care not for favors. But maybe Clarke's office saved some State people overseas. Or maybe Powell wants to retain some of his soul. Who knows?
Watergate was about Nixon's paranoia. But it didn't kill 600 soldiers and wound 3000. It was an insult to our democracy. But this, this is vile beyond belief. If Bush had character, the American people would have forgiven an admission of mistakes. Instead, he must run a zero defect government. He never does anything wrong and anyone who does, doesn't work for him.
If anyone is surprised by the press coverage of this, which I actually think is fair, because Clarke was a source for many of the reporters and they know him as an honest guy, they shouldn't be. When Watergate was discovered, it was by two junior reporters, one on his way out of the door, loitering around the courts and cop house.
Their reporting was challenged by both the political and national staffs inside the Post. Outside, they were ignored for months. When Nixon came hard at Katherine Graham, threatening her TV stations which kept the paper alive, there was deafening silence. There have always been Heathers in Washington and New York. David Halberstam and Peter Arnett were no heroes to their editors when they reported on Vietnam.
A lot of people will turn their back on the truth for various reasons, some selfish, some ideological, some just from disbelief. But if Dick Clarke is a pathological liar, as some claim, or a dangerous partisan distoring the truth, it means both Congress and four Presidents misplaced their trust in a man ensuring this country's security. Which is a far more serious indictment of this government than anything Clarke writes in his book. If his critics feel that way, he should be indicted and brought before a judge. Somehow, I doubt that is going to happen.
Kos is having a lively discussion about Nader taking money from Ben Stein and other GOP givers. Only the naive can confuse this as actual support for Nader. Instead, it is an attempt to undermine the Kerry campaign. Arguing the point is useless. These folks aren't giving money to Nader because they support him and his ideas, Withdrawal from Iraq and then NATO? Nope, sorry. It's an inderect way to support Bush.
The recent polling shows Kerry losing his lead to Nader. That 2-5 percent is cutting into his vote and to let it fester for months is stupid. As Jimmy Carter made the point so clearly, Nader needs to go home.
All those people looking to cut a deal or rationalize with the Nader folks are missing the point by a mile. It is essential for Kerry's campaign to cripple Nader as quickly possible. It's not about winning voters anymore, but making it impossible for Nader to influence the election, They may have to move from the Fredo approach, talking nice, to the Carlo approach, which is dealing him out of the picture. Nader is an obsticle to John Kerry within his base. All the arguments about policy don't mean anything any more.
The fact is that people tied to Nader will be leaned on to cut off the money, his petitions will be challenged, stories about his work practices and record, especially his milions and playing of the market, will come back.
Nader has had a free ride for a long, long time, The fact that people, even his longtime allies, didn't want him to run, will now expose him to the kind of scruitiny other politicians get. Nader gets the gullible because they're like the same people who take Pat Buchanan seriously. They want some radical reformation of government to reflect their viewpoint of the world.
American politics doesn't work like that. Bush runs the country controling all three branches and people still object to his ideas. Naderdoesn't want to be president, he wants to be a combination scold/dictator and oimpose policies no Congress would pass. His ideasd are as supremely anti-democratic as the worst rantings on the right. Nader's constant attacks on corporations is short sighted for a simple reason he doesn't consdider: people need them to provide jobs. They are not a uniform evil.
It's like the argunemt that it's OK for Nader to take GOP money because companies contribute to both Kerry and Bush. Well, no. Companies don't, people do. Individuals contribute and their companies are noted. It isn't OK to tske GOP money, knowing it's only given to harm Kerry. If he
actually lived by the ethics he espouses, he'd turn the money back.
I can assurre you that no one in the Kerry camp or DNC think's Nader is an ally.
Freelance Journalist Nir Rosen's adventures in Baghdad reflect a city in turmoil and extremely dangerous.
Rubaei street in Baghdad's Zayuna district is one of the city's unknown oases of normality, far away from the more famous Kindi street of Harthiya or 14 Ramadan street of Mansour in the center of the city. On either side of the wide and brightly lit boulevard good restaurants are open well into the night, the sidewalks are crowded with families and even young couples; expensive cars slowly cruise the street, young men gazing at the crowds of girls in tight clothes. I was sitting outside at dusk (staring at them too) with my Iraqi friend Rana in a fresh fruit juice and ice cream restaurant called Sandra. Rana ate imported ice cream, explaining that she did not eat the local ice cream for fear of nuclear contamination in the milk. She noted that the scene before us reminded her of the days before the war, when she would go out at night with her sisters, unafraid of the dangers that keep women sequestered in their homes today.
As she was waxing nostalgic about the good old days under Saddam, a refrain I am by now accustomed to hearing, and I was trying not to roll my eyes, two sharp gunshots cut her words short and returned her to reality. By now the sound of gun shots rarely distracts me, but this time it was too close, and too incongruent with the bustling nightlife. I saw two men walking hurriedly across the street in between the traffic, arms raised and pistols in the air. "They killed a man!" someone shouted. I got up and saw a man in a suit collapsed on the curb, blood spreading from beneath his head. The two men had walked up to him, shot him in the head, taken his pistol, then walked away laughing into a dark street.
The crowd grew and cars slowed down as their drivers gazed at the corpse. Soon about fifty men stood around silently, looking at the body then looking away guiltily. Someone tried calling the police but the call did not go through. Two men ran a few hundred meters away to the nearest police checkpoint, but were told by the policemen there that it was somebody else's jurisdiction. Two armed security guards from a building across the street returned panting, having failed to find the killers. They said they provided security for "an official" nearby. People told me the official was a judge. Someone from a nearby shop covered the body with a rug that failed to conceal the growing pool of blood. Half an hour after the shooting, Iraqi police began arriving, just as the several men in the crowd had turned over the body and were looking through his pockets for identification or a phone. When I returned to my hotel I told a photographer about what I had seen. He asked me if I had heard about the explosion in Fallujah. I asked him if he had heard about the deputy chief of police in Mosul getting assassinated.
"It's all small news, so you never hear of it," he said. "It's all small news but its all bad news."
And elections are supposed to be held in this environment?
In a large pot bring the water to a boil. Add beef liver and boil 10 minutes. Remove the liver and either run through a chopper or grab a knife and cut it in as small pieces as you can. Return chopped liver to the pot. Add the ground pork, a little at a time, and stir. Simmer for 20 minutes.
In a large bowl mix the buckwheat flour, corn meal, salt, and spices; add to meat and broth slowly, stirring constantly. Simmer gently for one hour, stirring frequently. Use lowest possible heat, as mixture scorches easily.
Pour into two greased loaf pans. Bounce the pans a couple of times so that the Scrapple settles, and let cool. Let the Scrapple set in the refrigerator overnight.
When you arise in the morning, remove the scrapple from the refrigerator and cut into to 3/8 inch slices.
To freeze, lay a sheet of waxed paper between slices, place in freezer bags.
To serve: Thaw slices and dust with flour. Fry in either bacon grease or lard until golden brown. Do not use a cooking spray. It will not taste right and ruin the scrapple.
Now, for me, scrapple was this thing to avoid while in an Atlantic City diner, but obviously, she's developed an affection for it. Don't ask me, I've never eaten scrapple in my life. Besides, it's Philly food, not New York.
If you want to order scrapple, you can do so here:
Habersett
Now, the scrapple belt ranges from South Jersey to Maryland, so if you walk into a diner there, they'll have it.
I never got people who didn't like breakfast. It's the easiest thing to fix and the most sublime meal of the day. Now, commerical breakfasts, like Sonic and McDonald's rely on fat and poorly cooked eggs to get them to be something like a meal. Eggs should be handled with care, gently and soft.
Once upon a time, breakfast was not a bagel and a cup of coffee. It was steak and chops and fish, served elegantly. Fish, especially salmon, is a wonderful breakfast with eggs. It was a multi-course meal which balanced bread and protein, sweet and savory, simple and complex. Now, you might see steak and eggs on a diner menu, where you may pay a premium for a steak not fit fot a sandwich. The best steak and eggs is a steak you had for dinner, cooked for dinner and didn't finish. Warmed up in a microwave or in a waterproof bag, served with eggs, and still keeping the pink, it doesn't get much better.
Otherwise, adding eggs to a cheese steak would work. Steak for breakfast should be tender.
My favorite breakfast is a low-country speciality, rice and eggs. It's bone simple. Heat up leftover rice in a skillet, add in onions and seasonings (pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, chili powder) and cook. If you want a matzohbrie-like crispy dish, let it cook until almost hard, if not, cook until onions are translucent. Then add two eggs per person, mixed in a bowl, unless you want seperate yolk and eggs, then crack them into the pan.
Add a little salt, not much, a pinch and only if you don't add anything.
You can do this with fried rice or add anything from canned salmon to peas. I'd recommend some sliced pork sausage, crumbled bacon, fried turkey slices, ham, shrimp.
It's a simple meal, and quick. You can also serve 6-8 people with enough rice. It's perfect for those Sunday mornings when you have relatives or friends over.
I love it because it has a wonderful flavor and is perfect for lazy mornings. It also doesn't punish you if the eggs slightly overcook or you have to rumish through the fridge. It also stretches the additives you have if you only have a few slices of ham or bacon.
My niece and nephew loved it when I served it to them and they thought the turkey was bacon. Which is great, since it limited their complaints. The one provisio is that you need to use white rice. Brown won't do.
Having been given two breakfast cookbooks by generous readers, I can say there is a world beyond Mcdonald's.
George Bush must live in a bubble. How could he think searching for WMD's in the White House could be a joke. People got killed looking for the non-exsistant WMD. Maybe a sociopath might find it funny, but I think there are 580 families who would find Bush's attempt at humor lame to say the least and offensive to say the most.
Bush shows an amazing indifference to others as a rule, but his little show at the Correspondent's dinner got overshawed by Dick Clarke's testimony. Clarke wasn't joking, he was apologizing, The Kerry campaign was quick to place Bush's awful judgment in context.
"How Out of Touch Can This President Be?
"George Bush insulted me as a veteran and as a friend to many still serving in Iraq. This act lowers the dialogue about weapons of mass destruction. War is the single most serious event that a President or government can carry its people into. No weapons of mass destruction have been found and that is no joke - this is for real. This cheapens the sacrifice that American soldiers and their families are dealing with every single day." -- Brad Owens (Iraqi War Veteran, US Army Reserves)
Speaking at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington last night, President George W. Bush showed a stunningly cavalier attitude toward the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the Administration's rush to war.
"Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," Bush mimicked, as a slide of the President looking under furniture in the Oval Office appeared on the screen.
That's supposed to be funny?
If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought. Unfortunately for the President, this is not a joke.
585 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the last year, 3,354 have been wounded, and there's no end in sight. Bush Turned White House Credibility into a Joke George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them, and now he thinks that's funny?
"George Bush didn't tell us the truth about the economy, about job loss, about the true cost of his deceptive prescription drug plan, or about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. There's nothing funny about that."
Meanwhile, the Army has just released a study detailing the high rate of suicides for soldiers serving in Iraq. Soldiers who would have probably been alive if they hadn't been sent off to search for Bush's little joke.
What kind of White House would allow the president to joke about the reason for a war which is killing Americans every day. I wonder why he didn't try those jokes out at Walter Reed's Ward 57, where the Iraq war amputees try to get their lives back.
It may be funny inside the Beltway, where their kids aren't being sent to Iraq, but to average Americans, who's familiy members wait on pins and needles for their loved ones to return in one piece, I think the humor is lost on them.
This is what Dick Clarke said before the 9/11 Commission today
Because I have submitted a written statement today, and I've previously testified before this commission for 15 hours, and before the Senate-House Joint Inquiry Committee for six hours, I have only a very brief opening statement.
I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurance.
I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11.
To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed.
And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness.
This is the only apology from a former or present Bush Administration official for the gross failures which let 9/11 happen. Despite the unseemly and desperate lies now emitting from the White House, Dick Clarke was the senior WH official handling terrorism, since 1990. All the backbiting and sleazy attempts at discrediting Clarke should be compared to his simple and eloquent statement accepting responsibility for his inability to stop Al Qaeda. Something the president has never deigned to do.
One of our trolls, AM, suggested that I eat cheese fries with gravy. Now, at a svelte 233, down from 300, I'm not going to eat that if you paid me. But even if I wanted cheese fries, I would never, ever add gravy to them, Why? You want cheese, eat cheese. You want gravy, have gravy, but mix the two? Never.
There's a lot of crap people eat that they don't realize simply sucks. Now fries, when done properly, are sublime, they can and simple toppings like mayo, russian dressing, mustard and the like. Melted cheese is also a good thing, although you really need a cheese dip to coat the fries properly.
It's the same thing with hot dogs. People add so much crap on them, they miss the point. Mustard, chili, that is about it. I know it's herecy to the Chicagoans here, but dill pickles? Give me a break. Deep dish pizza, yes, dill pickles and celery salt, no. A good hot dog should need no more than brown mustard and a spoonful or two of chili.
Now, hamburgers are a different thing. The quality of meat is usually so crappy that you need extras. Even when it isn't, most people want more on their hamburger than a bun and a little ketchup. I have to admit that my favorite cheese is Kraft's. It melts perfectly on beef. If you want to add more, well that's you.
The one thing I hate with burgers is the way some people add onions and peppers in the meat. If I wanted a meatloaf sandwich, I'd make a meatloaf. A burger is a pure thing, not to be trifled with, cooked well done. I like my steak medium rare, but my burgers need to be cooked. I don't want any red in my ground meat.
One can make a perfect set of fries and burger, if they take the time, and buy the right ingredients. I don't know how you make a perfect cheese fries with gravy, but I guess they discuss it at the cardiologist's waiting room.
The trick with burgers is meat. Get good meat, have the butcher grind it and you'll get good burgers. Fries need to be cooked twice and drained.
With hot dogs, you have to buy the commercial kind to get good ones, the supermarket ones suck. Personally, I rather make kielbasa and Italian sausages than hot dogs.
But, even at my heaviest, which was 375, I never ate cheese fries with gravy. Ever. I just don't see that as a decent meal. And I still like cheese fries and wings. I can't eat a ton of them, but I'd still have them in small proportions. And gravy fries aren't bad, but mix the two? Never.
However, with the new cookbooks I got, I'd rather eat real food, like making my own sausages and poached eggs in sauce. I mean, if you're eating cheese fries and gravy, the rest of your diet can't be much better. Besides, fresh food beats that crap for most meals anyway. Learning that before a heart attack is a good thing.
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 22, 2004; 3:27 PM
BAGHDAD, March 22 -- Iraq's most powerful Shiite Muslim cleric intensified his opposition to the country's interim constitution in a letter released Monday, threatening to boycott meetings with U.N. envoys who are expected to help chart the transition from American occupation if the constitution is endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.
The threat by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani marked another dramatic assertion of the reclusive, 73-year-old cleric's authority in the attempts to fashion a political arrangement after the U.S. administration of Iraq ends on June 30. While Sistani has already made clear his objections to the interim constitution, the letter was forceful in questioning its legitimacy, demanding that it be amended and warning of the consequences of not revising a document praised by its supporters as the most liberal in the Arab world.
The letter, which was dated Friday and bore the stamp of Sistani's office in the sacred Shiite city of Najaf, said flaws in the constitution "will lead to a dead end and bring the country into an unstable situation and perhaps lead to its partition and division."
The interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, was signed March 8 in what Iraqi and U.S. leaders praised as a landmark in Iraq's progress toward a democratic state. But the signing followed days of wrangling prompted by Sistani's objections, and within hours, Shiite members of Iraq's Governing Council insisted that parts of the document had to be revised.
The document calls for nationwide elections to be held by the end of January 2005 to choose a 275-member transitional assembly. That body will serve as a legislature, draft a permanent constitution and choose a president and two deputy presidents. By unanimous decision, the three-member executive will then choose a prime minister and cabinet to run the government.
At the time, Shiite members of the Governing Council said Sistani objected to two key provisions in the constitution: a clause that gave Kurds effective veto power over a permanent constitution and another that allows either of the deputy presidents -- likely a Kurd and a Sunni Arab -- to reject decisions of a Shiite president. While most groups in Iraq contest the precise figures, Shiites are believed to number about 60 percent of the population, with Sunni Arabs and Kurds the largest minorities.
In the letter released Monday, Sistani specifically mentioned only his objection to the three-member executive. He said it "lays the foundation for sectarianism in a future political system." Supporters of the arrangement have contended that the veto power of the deputy presidents was the most decisive way to protect the interests of minority Sunnis and Kurds. But it clearly curbs the authority of a Shiite president, and Sistani said he believed it would create deadlock that could only be broken by foreign intervention.
He who must not be displeased.
The US is making it clear that his road to power is pretty much being granted in terms of short-term expediency. No one can stand up to his demands for fear of launching a civil war, yet his demands will lead to a civil war. The Kurds are ready to blow the country for their own ideas of nationhood and the Shia and Sunni disagree on that one point, to the point of accusing the Kurds of treason.
Former Senator and New School President Bob Kerrey asked why the US didn't declare war against Al Qaeda in 1998.
Simple answer: Congress was too busy impeaching Bill Clinton to worry about AQ.
There was scant GOP suport for Clinton, who they mistakenly thought they had him on the ropes. They constantly called him a liar, even after Osama went on ABC to tell John Miller he wanted to kill Americans. Osama, or his translator, didn't stutter and if you needed help, he issued a translation of his fatwa in English. I saw the interview and was freaked. Here is this guy who telling the US he plans to kill Americans and this is a good thing. Yet, the reaction among the public and the US Congress was silence.
When Clinton acted, and Kerrey seems to forget the climate of the times, the GOP accused him of using the military for political purposes. This accusation didn't happen in the light of day, but as the B-52's were 30 minutes out from their target.
When the Sudan asprin plant turned up empty, darling of the right Christopher Hitchens accused Clinton of war crimes. At the time he was the darling of the left, but with someone possessing his morals, politics are just a label. No one got the point that AQ was a multinational organization which made the Arab terrorist groups of the '70's seem old fashioned.
There would have been zero support for invading Afghanistan. The GOP was running their lynch mob, they wouldn't have agreed to let Clinton go to war. And Kerrey forgets that Clinton didn't have the political support to go without asking Congress. The fact is that he didn't have enough of a cause to hunt Osama the way we do now. No Congress was going to send American boys into Afghanistan, lacking NATO support, for Bill Clinton.
Also, let's not forget Congress was in upheaval when presumptive speaker Bob Livingston was outted as some kind of pervert. Only at the last minute did Larry Flint withhold the details. The GOP's leadership's dirt was spilling out all over the papers. There was no climate for waging war against AQ or anyone else, as the papers discussed blow jobs and Clinton's moral character.
So Osama had three years to plan to kill three thousand Americans, because the GOP and the media were more interested in Clinton's lying than someone saying he planned to murder Americans for the greater good.
Dick Cheney ran to slander Dick Clarke on the pigboy racist junkie Limbaugh's show yesterday. Not that he had any choice, given the seriousness of the charges.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, he wasn't -- he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff. And I saw part of his interview last night, and he wasn't --
Does Cheney realize the implications of ths? That the head of counterterrorism had no idea of our post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy? That's an amazing statement pigboy missed. How could he not be in the loop? As someone said "he was the loop". What was the White House doing? Going behind his back?
Q He was demoted.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It was as though he clearly missed a lot of what was going on. For example, just three weeks after the -- after we got here, there was communication, for example, with the President of Pakistan, laying out our concerns about Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and the importance of going after the Taliban and getting them to end their support for the al Qaeda. This was, say, within three weeks of our arrival here.
But what was done? Nothing.
So I guess, the other thing I would say about Dick Clarke is that he was here throughout those eight years, going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center; and '98, when the embassies were hit in East Africa; in 2000, when the USS Cole was hit. And the question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?
Arresting terrorists and planning strikes against Al Qaeda. Or did he miss all those trials in Manhattan? Did he forget 1998?
Q Well, the media finally has what it wants -- I'm talking about the partisan media has what it wants. It's got an independent contractor, a man whose worked for both administrations, now launching full barrels at the President. And one of the claims that Clarke is making is that -- and you just countered it -- he said the President didn't treat al Qaeda as a serious threat before September 11th. He keeps harping on the fact that even before your administration assumed office, you guys wanted to go in and level Iraq.
Because they published the PNAC manifesto in 1996 while working for Likud and Dick Cheney was a charter member.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, that's -- again, that's just not the case. The fact is, what the President did not want to do is to have an ineffective response with respect to al Qaeda. And we felt that up until that point that much of what had been done vis-a-vis al Qaeda had been totally ineffective: some cruise missiles fired at some training camps in Afghanistan that basically didn't hit anything. And it made the U.S. look weak and ineffective. And he wanted a far more effective policy for trying to deal with that. And that process was in motion throughout the spring.
Didn't the GOP accuse Clinton of wagging the dog while the bombers were in the air? Didn't they claim it was a distraction? So do you think they would have supported more robust action, like a special ops raid?
Q Why do you think -- and he's not the first, Clarke is not the first -- why do you think so many opponents of the President -- and what do they hope to achieve by continually attacking Condoleezza Rice?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well -- (laughter) -- it's short-sighted. Condi, is well able to defend herself. She's done a superb job for us, and is extremely knowledgeable National Security Advisor.
Because she's amazingly incompetant at her job? That's my answer. It certainly isn't because she's a black woman like pigboy is hinting at.
Q Well, I guess what I'm getting at --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I've worked with a lot of them over the years. I suppose he may have a grudge to bear there since he probably wanted a more prominent position than she was prepared to give him.
Oh yeah, after 30 years of highly praised government service and a position teaching at Harvard, Dick Clarke has every reason to be bitter
Q Well, I guess what I'm getting at is that whenever it comes to the counterterrorism efforts, foreign policy in general, it seems that elements of the Democratic Party today and their allies attack Condoleezza Rice, which is a matter of real curiosity to me. And, of course, she can defend herself -- as she did today in The Washington Post. But it's just part of the -- what to me appears now to be an obvious attack machine at full throttle. You have this book coming out while John Kerry is on vacation so he doesn't have to say this stuff. The author of this book is associated with Kerry's foreign policy advisor, up at the Kennedy School. You have a Bob Woodward book that's coming in a few weeks from the same publisher. Despite all of these attacks, and by the way, I actually think, Mr. Vice President, if you'll permit me an editorial comment here, you have the Clinton administration -- if they had defended the country as eagerly and with as much fervor as they are attempting to defend themselves in all this, we might have -- and I don't expect you comment, I just -- we might have escaped some of the attacks that we've had.
Pigboy racist junkie lies again. The GOP ran Congress during the latter years of Clinton, they objected to action against Osama to undermine Clinton. Clarke is a registered Republican and an intelligence official who served Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton in important jobs. Now he's Paul Begala? I don't think so. He's not stumping for Kerry, he's not running for office. He's just saying something pigboy doesn't want to hear
But with this frontal assault, the President's poll numbers remain up. The administration remains focused. They haven't taken you off your game. What effect -- both in a governing sense and in a political sense -- is this full frontal assault having on all of you in the White House?
His poll numbers are what? Please. For an incumbent president, his ass is in trouble.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we've got to get on with our business. There's plenty of work to be done. The terrorist threat is very real. It continues out there every day. The President and I and Condi Rice, Andy Card begin our day six days a week meeting with the Director of the CIA and the Director of the FBI and reviewing intelligence, and working these problems. And you've got to be able to continue to do that, even if there is a campaign underway out there.
And I think we've done that fairly well. We can't let our guard down. We've got to remain vigilant. We've still got major issues, obviously, in the sense that terrorists have launched many attacks around the world since 9/11 in places like Madrid, most recently -- but Casablanca, Riyadh, Bali, Jakarta, Mombasa. It's a worldwide global problem, and it's got to be dealt with, I think, very aggressively -- just the way the President's dealt with it.
As Dick Clarke said, terrorism is worse now than before 9/11. Iraq is a terrorist paradise. Who created that mess? Yeah, aggresively. Eight months to capture Saddam, two years to ineffectively hunt Osama. Yeah, color me impressed.
The murder of Sheik Yassin, a sick old man in a wheelchair, didn't go down well in most of the world outside of the US Congress. There, Israel can do anything without question. But most people saw it for the tragic mistake it was.
The Sharon government has tried to kill it's way to peace for years and the result is a state of fear in Israel. Killing all of ones enemies is no solution and it remains to see what kind of revenge Hamas takes. A dead Israeli cabinet official should come as a shock to no one, now that Israel vows to kill all the Hamas leadership.
Once you ply assassination as your trade, both sides become vunerable to the murder of leaders.
Yassin was no saint. The man was evil as evil can be, but blowing him away solves nothing. Others will take his place, with even less need for restraint.
Israel is trying to have it both ways, steal Palestinian land and occupy the West Bank. Something has to give and it has to be Israel. The Palestinians are going to kill to protect their land and Israeli political discomfort at leaving the West Bank is not enough of an excuse to keep this pointless war going on. The settlements are killing Palestinian and Israeli alike, they are a literal death sentence for hundreds of people on both sides of the line.
A fence won't help, cooked up agreements won't help. Only jobs and a viable state for the Palestinians will make Israel safe. Palestinian kids have no future now, except martyrdom or poverty. Remove poverty, and a life in the hearafter won't be so appealing.
Israel is the democracy, it cannot resort to murder as a state solution. It cannot kill all its enemies. A state which resorts to murder can expect murder to be used against it. And having suffered one assasination, does Israel want to make that a habit?
Unless you live in a cave or live outside North America, surely you know the Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament took place this weekend and will continue for the next two, as 65 basketball teams become 1 and national champion.
Unlike the Super Bowl, America's national holiday of sport, the Tourney is unpredicatble. Already, two number one seeds are gone, proving the adage that any team can beat any other team on any given day. Now, we have schools like UAB and Xavier in the Sweet 16 and I just sit back after my four days of basketball immersion, and marvel at it all. Fair? Not really, considering the quality spread of the teams, but it fun.
Of course, with any sporting event, there comes gambling. In this case, the office pool. The pool requires you to predict how the tournament will come out, and if you get close enough, you win a few hundred dollars. If you're insane, you bet the individual games, but most people stick with pools and hope for the best.
There is a lot of gambling on the tourney, but it's the friendly, friction free kind that even novices can get involved in. What's $10 in an office pool?
However, it's a very different thing for students and alumni. I may not care if Wisconsin wins, but I don't go there. It must be hellish for people who care about the teams on a personal level, because no matter how good your school's team is, they have to win six games in a row against the best teams in the country, amped up to play you.
But for the rest of us, it's an orgy of sport, on most of the day, making you pick underdogs and winners on the spot. You get to enjoy the beauty of the game and your ability to pick winners. But sometimes you forget the pool and just enjoy the underdog winning. These small schools go out there with nothing to lose, and just beat a major program. And the best part about the tourney is that it always happens. You may not know who, but you know it will.
Unlike the Super Bowl, this isn 't a food/party thing. It doesn't matter what you eat, wings, whatever, it's about the basketball.
There are few things in life as fulfilling as seeing the unexpected. The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament provides the unexpected as a matter of course.
Scott McClellan got grilled today in the gaggle. It was highly amusing to see him slander Richard Clarke and get tripped up by his words and the facts. Kind of like seeing Ron Ziegler in the Watergate days.
Q Scott, a question about the Richard Clarke book. Why shouldn't his account of the war on terror in this administration and past administration's be believed?
MR. McCLELLAN: David, I think one, if you -- you can only look to some of the Senate Democratic leaders who were on some of the Sunday shows yesterday -- Senator Lieberman, Senator Biden -- and they certainly discounted some of his comments about Iraq. They said that -- and Senator Lieberman, I believe, said something to the effect that there was no basis in fact for that. I think that his assertions that there was something -- or his assertion that there was something we could have done to prevent the September 11th attacks from happening is deeply irresponsible, it's offensive, and it's flat-out false.
This administration made going after al Qaeda a top priority from very early on. It was something that was discussed during the transition. And very early on in this administration, Dr. Rice asked for -- requested from Dick Clarke that some of his ideas be presented. And I would remind you that the very first major policy directive of this administration was to develop a comprehensive strategy to eliminate al Qaeda -- not role it back, as some had previously called for, but to eliminate al Qaeda.
See how Lieberman is being used as a tool by the White House. What an idiot.
Q What would motivate him to engage in, as you say, offensive behavior -- what you call offensive, his charges here?
MR. McCLELLAN: It appears from what I've seen that he's been more focused on the process than the substance. It appears to be more about Dick Clarke than about the substance. For the President, it's more about the actions that we are taking to protect the American people. Mr. Clarke has been out there talking about what title he had; he's been out there talking about whether or not he was participating in certain meetings. So it appears to be more about the process than the actual actions we have taken.
You mean like invade Iraq and call it part of the war on terra?
Q That seems a little simple, doesn't it, Scott? I mean, the process matters when you work in the White House and have to get the attention of superiors who ultimately have the President's ear to make a decision. So isn't that a little disingenuous to dismiss it as a process complaint?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, wait a second here. This is a gentleman that left the administration one-and-a-half years ago. Certainly let's go to the facts. These threats did not happen overnight. These threats have been building for quite some time. Go back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Go back to the 1998 attacks on United States embassies. Go back to the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. These threats had been building for quite some time. Dick Clarke was here for some eight years. This administration was here for some 230 days before the attacks of September 11th.
Q Condi Rice made a similar point. Should we take from that that the President's view is that Dick Clarke was part of the problem, not part of the solution, since all of these things happened on his watch, when his primary job was counterterrorism?
MR. McCLELLAN: Actually, I think Dr. Rice pointed out earlier today that she requested that some of his ideas be presented to the administration. He presented some of the ideas. There were some that we took into account that were useful, and then there were others that we didn't find as useful. But this was talking about --
He doesn't have the balls to call him a failure. Interesting.
Q That doesn't answer my question.
MR. McCLELLAN: This was talking about rolling back al Qaeda. We were focused on eliminating al Qaeda.
Q Scott, you didn't answer my question, which is, by listing all those things that he was here for, is it the President's view that, in fact, he was part of the problem, not part of the solution?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, he was this administration's counterterrorism expert up until -- well, the time that the job was separated into a cyber security position and counterterrorism position, which was something that he had suggested happen.
Q But you still didn't answer the question, it doesn't seem to me, does it?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry?
Q Does that answer the question?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think it does. He was part of our efforts to go after al Qaeda. He was a member of this team for some two years, and we appreciate the service that he provided. But --
Uh, yeah. He sucks because he attacked the dear leader, but he's not some loser we should have fired.
Q Why do you think he's doing this?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let's look at the politics of it. His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy advisor to Senator Kerry's campaign. The Kerry campaign went out and immediately put these comments up on their website that Mr. Clarke made.
Q Of course, he says he did raise those concerns --
MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Mike. Go ahead, Mike.
Q He says he raised those concerns --
MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Mike.
Q -- in the administration.
MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Mike.
Q Scott, the whole point of his book is he says that he did raise these concerns and he was not listened to by his superiors.
Isn't this the same administration which slanders all opponents and threatened to fire an analyst for telling the truth?
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, and that's just flat-out wrong. Go back and look at what we said. It was very early on when Dr. Rice -- the first week of the administration, Dr. Rice asked for the ideas that Dick Clarke had in mind, or the previous policies of the previous administration. But we wanted to go beyond that. We didn't feel it was sufficient to simply roll back al Qaeda; we pursued a policy to eliminate al Qaeda. And that's what the NSC worked on from very early in this administration. We took the threats posed by al Qaeda very seriously. And we acted on those threats. Certainly, during that spring and summertime, there was a spike in the terrorist threat, and -- go ahead.
Q Some Democratic senators are asking today if, based on the revelations of this book, based on the proactive response you guys have had over the weekend, if Dr. Rice will reexamine her position on testifying before the 9/11 Commission.
MR. McCLELLAN: I think she's stated her position. Again, it's not something that's a matter of personal preference. It' a matter of separation of powers. It's a matter of principle. There are some issues involved here about White House staffers testifying before Congress, and they relate to separation of powers issues. However, she was more than happy to sit down with the 9/11 Commission and visit with them for more than four hours and answer all the questions that they had.
Q And what the Democrats say is that because this is an independent commission, that there are not separation of powers issues.
MR. McCLELLAN: This is a legislatively created commission. It is a legislative commission.
Go ahead.
Q Scott, this morning, you said the President didn't recall the conversation in the Situation Room on September 12th that Mr. Clarke said he had, where the President asked Dick Clarke three times to pursue links between 9/11 and Iraq. And you said he doesn't -- I had two questions. So did the President tell you or somebody in the White House over the weekend, he doesn't recall?
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, I talked to him. He doesn't recall that conversation or meeting.
Was he sober when you asked him?
Q And that was -- he said it this morning, or this weekend? When did he say that?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, this weekend and this morning, yes.
Q Okay. And secondly, Clarke now says that he has three eyewitnesses, and he repeated it again this morning, and he named them -- to the conversation.
MR. McCLELLAN: Let's just step backwards -- regardless, regardless, put that aside. There's no record of the President being in the Situation Room on that day that it was alleged to have happened, on the day of September the 12th. When the President is in the Situation Room, we keep track of that. But put all that aside, let's go to the heart of the matter. This was supposedly the day after the September 11th attacks. And, of course, you want to look at all possibilities of who might be responsible. It would be irresponsible not to consider all responsibilities.
And, in fact, I would point out that Mr. Clarke himself said in a "Frontline" interview, he emphasized the importance of officials having a very open mind. On the -- quote: "On the day of September 11th, then the day or two following, we had a very open mind." Those are words from Dick Clarke. He went on to say: "The CIA and FBI were asked, see if it's Hezbollah, see if it's Hamas, don't assume it's al Qaeda. Don't just assume it's al Qaeda." So I think that --
Q Well, so are you saying that while the President doesn't recall that conversation, are you leaving open the possibility that there's these three eyewitnesses that Clarke says, therefore it may have happened?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, but let's go even beyond that. One, in the immediate aftermath of an attack like that, you want to explore all possibilities. And that's what this administration did. Of course, you want to do that. But just days later, the President met with his National Security Council; the Director of Central Intelligence informed him that there was no link between the September 11th attacks and Iraq. And at the National Security Council meeting, what happened? There was a map that was unrolled on the table, and it was a map of Afghanistan. And what did the President do? The President directed that we go into Afghanistan, and we go after al Qaeda, and we go after and remove the Taliban from power so that al Qaeda would no longer have a safe harbor from which to plan and plot their attacks on the American people.
Let's ignore his proof and talk about my hastily constructed defense
Q Okay, Clarke is now saying that the -- your response this morning was an example of how the Bush administration just goes after -- just uses ad hominem attacks and tries to suppress the truth.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, when someone uses such charged rhetoric that is just not matched by the facts, it's important that we set the record straight. And that's what we're doing. If you look back at his past comments and his past actions, they contradict his current rhetoric. I talked to you all a little bit about that earlier today. Go back and look at exactly what he has said in the past and compare that with what he is saying today. And ask yourself why, one-and-a-half years later, after he left the administration, he's, all of a sudden, coming forward with these grave concerns? If he had had such grave concerns, why didn't he come out with them sooner?
What facts? We invaded Iraq, right?
Q Scott, two questions. So you're saying, because the President doesn't recall the conversation -- you're not saying he denies that that conversation happened?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm saying let's look at the heart of the matter, regardless of whether or not that took place. The President doesn't recollect it. But let's look at the heart of the matter. And that is, in the aftermath of an attack like that, the immediate aftermath, is it responsible to explore all possibilities? Of course, it is. And Dick Clarke said so, himself.
Q He's not denying that that conversation could have taken place?
MR. McCLELLAN: He doesn't have any recollection of it, and, again, it purportedly took place in the Situation Room. There's no record to indicate that happened.
Except for the two witnesses
Q And second, why do you feel it's a fair criticism to say that this is partisan politics that he's trying to promote a book? This is man who served 30 years in the government under Reagan; under Bush, Senior; Clinton; as well as this President. He was a registered Republican in 2000. Why do you believe that that is a fair way to judge him, that it's simply politics?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, let's look at the facts. Let's look at the timing. It's important to look at all those aspects. Let's look at his history there. This was someone who is now saying he was against the Department of Homeland Security, but we know that he actually sought to be the number two person at the Department of Homeland Security. He wanted to be the deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department after it was created. The fact of the matter is just a few months after that, he left the administration. He did not get that position, someone else was appointed to it. And now, all of a sudden, he's saying he's against the Department of Homeland Security.
And if someone is going to make these kind of serious allegations, it's important to look back at his past comments and his past actions, and compare that with what his current rhetoric is. It's also important to keep in mind -- I think Newsweek pointed this out this week -- who his best friend is. His best friend is Rand Beers, who is the principal advisor to the Kerry campaign. It's also important to keep in context -- we're in the heat of a presidential campaign right now and, all of a sudden, he comes out with a book that he is seeking to promote. He is actively going out there and putting himself on prime-time news shows and morning shows to promote this book. And he is making charges that simply did not happen.
Look back at the facts. To suggest that Iraq was the immediate priority in the aftermath of September 11th, that's just not the case. This President was focused on reassuring the American people; on making sure that there wasn't a follow-on attack that was coming; on making sure that we got our airlines back up and running in a secure fashion. There were a lot of immediate focuses -- focus that this administration had in the aftermath of September 11th.
The President also was focused on going in and taking the fight to the terrorists, going on the offensive, because September 11th taught us a lot of important lessons. And this President learned those lessons by the actions that we took, by implementing the Patriot Act to provide law enforcement with new tools to combat terrorism at home; by working on all fronts to go after the terrorists -- the military front, the diplomatic front, the financial front, the law enforcement and the intelligence fronts.
But his friend also worked for you and left in disgust. And then he went to work for Kerry. Why did he do that?
Q But, Scott, Dr. Rice said this morning the reason he was kept on was because he was so valuable in his counterterrorism expertise. Why is it that this administration and previous Republican administrations would keep him on if he didn't have any credibility, if he was just a partisan player?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think Dr. Rice said earlier that, obviously, he had been around for quite some time. Like I said, he had been around for some eight years before the September 11th attacks. This administration had been in place for some 230 days. Again, these threats did not develop overnight. They had been building for quite some time. And I think that's important to keep in perspective when we're having this discussion. But certainly al Qaeda was a top priority. We made that determination during the transition and immediately began acting on that priority when we came into office. And it was important to continue some of those policies until we were able to develop a new, comprehensive strategy to eliminate al Qaeda -- not roll it back, like was the previous policy.
Q You're really suggesting he's looking for a scapegoat now.
MR. McCLELLAN: Let me keep going. I'll come back to you. Go ahead, Jim.
Q But you're suggesting that he's a scapegoat and that he missed it for eight years, right?
MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Jim.
Q Would you go over the facts in this? I mean, he's clearly suggesting that he could not get the administration -- the President and his top national security aides -- to pay sufficient attention to the threat from al Qaeda. You just said that the determination was made during the transition that al Qaeda was the top threat. What set of facts would you point to from the transition on that would --
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, we were briefed on it during the transition. And then the very first week Dr. Rice requested information from some of the ideas that Mr. Clarke had, and requested that those be presented to her. And we began, very early on in this administration, to develop a new, comprehensive strategy to go after and eliminate al Qaeda, so that we could get rid of this threat.
Q When --
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, it was actually presented to the President -- or, actually, it was completed on September 4th, this new comprehensive strategy. That was the timing of it. Certainly there were -- there was a terrorist spike during the summer, as well. And all the focus was on threats overseas. And it's important to point out that Mr. Clarke is the one who made some assertions about the millennium plot on Los Angeles. And the question that should be asked of him is, what was done after that? Well, there wasn't any effort really to focus on the sleeper cells in the United States. The attention was still focused overseas.
Q Let me just clarify one thing. When did the administration begin its work on the comprehensive strategy to eliminate al Qaeda?
MR. McCLELLAN: We began very early on. I think it was actually the NSC deputies had met -- they met frequently between March and September of 2001 to decide and talk about many of the complex issues that were involved in the development of that strategy. And contrary to his assertion that he wasn't able to brief senior officials until late April, the first deputy level's meeting on al Qaeda was held on March 7th. And that's -- and Dick Clarke was the one who conducted the briefing. And the deputies agreed that the national security policy directive should be prepared at that point. And it was just less than six months later when the strategy was ready to go, on September 4th.
Q Scott, you, earlier, said that Clarke had refused orders to attend a certain number of meetings. You said that in the gaggle this morning. Can you tell me, what do you mean by that? Were there meetings he was supposed to attend that he didn't attend? Did he have to be ordered --
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, Dr. Rice --
Q -- and the timetable for --
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Dr. Rice, early on in the administration, started holding daily briefings with the senior directors of the National Security Council, of which he was one. But he refused to attend those meetings, and he was later asked to attend those meetings and he continued to refuse to attend those meetings. You would have to ask --
Q Why?
MR. McCLELLAN: You'd have to ask him why. But those, obviously, are important meetings, and meetings that are held on a daily basis by the National Security Advisor.
Q Didn't someone confront him and say, you work for the government, you have orders, and you're refusing to obey them?
MR. McCLELLAN: I just said that he was asked to attend those meetings, but he continued to refuse to do so.
Digging up anything they can find, aren't they.
This pathetic display of avoiding answers did entertain, but they better have more convincing answers after the 9/11 report comes out. The neo-cons, scared their power will wane, will attack Dick Clarke as everything short of a Russian spy in the next few days. Which is what happens when you tell the truth about Bush. I wonder how they finally did that intervention with him when he "stopped" drinking. The slanders must have been flying back then. These guys never admit error, no matter what, just like drunks and codependents.
Clarke's disputes with the White House are notable in part because his muscular national security views allied him often over the years with most of the leading figures advising Bush on terrorism and Iraq. As an assistant secretary of state in 1991, Clarke worked closely with Wolfowitz and then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney to marshal the 32-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Clarke sided with Wolfowitz -- against Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- in a losing argument to extend that war long enough to destroy Iraq's Republican Guard. Later, Clarke was principal author of the hawkish U.S. plan to rid Iraq of its nonconventional weapons under threat of further military force.
In his experience, Clarke writes, Bush's description by critics as "a dumb, lazy rich kid" is "somewhat off the mark." Bush has "a results-oriented mind, but he looked for the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem."
"Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary [for al Qaeda] by invading," Clarke writes. "What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more terrorists than we jail or shoot."
"It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq,' " Clarke writes.
If played right, and given the dunderhead Lierberman's response that is no guarantee, this should hurt Bush. Clarke is no low-level staffer, but someone who didn't drink the kool-aid, but was close to the issue. But a lot of people will have problems winding their mind around the idea Bush used 9/11 to further his own agenda, despite ample evidence.
