The Lieberman campaign has now acknowledged to us that they produced the flyer, which was distributed in and around black churches. A Lamont spokesperson blasted Lieberman for the flyer, saying the Lamont campaign was "disappointed" with the tactic.
"People have reported to us that it was distributed at churches in the minority community," Lamont spokesperson Liz Dupont-Diehl told Election Central.
The flyer contains a picture of Joe Lieberman clasping arms with Bill Clinton. It hails Lieberman's record on civil rights while blasting Lamont's record on race. It questions why he resigned from an exclusive country club only just before beginning his Senate campaign, and includes a couple quotes from Lamont about his decision in a New York Times story from July.
"According to Lamont: He didn't pay as much attention to race...until he got into the Senate race," the flyer reads. "Stand by the guy who has stood by us and always will. Vote for Joe Lieberman for U.S. Senate."
Dan Gerstein, an adviser to Lieberman speaking on behalf of the campaign, confirmed that the campaign was behind the flyer and defended the tactic.
"We're surprised that the Lamont campaign wants to make an issue of this," Gerstein told Election Central. "This flyer simply states the facts, and in particular repeates a very questionable statement Mr. Lamont made which raises many questions he has yet to answer. If he's so concerned about discrimination, why didn't he resign from this club before he became candidate for u.s. senate? Also, what are the policies at the club and why won't he answer that question?"
I bet the house that Dan "the DLC hitman" Gerstein and Sean "low info voter" Smith were the masterminds behind this racist smear campaign in the first place. How can anyone have any respect for Joe Lieberman is beyond me at this point. Using race baiting to smear someone like Ned Lamont is beyond disgusting.
AGAIN, WHERE IS THE FUCKING MEDIA ON THIS!!! Christ, how can you guys in the media allow the Lieberman campaign to get away with this type of shit?!? You guys in the local media was aware of this crap for weeks yet you haven't done ONE report of this OBVIOUS race baiting tactic while allowing Lieberman to dodge not answering relevant questions.
That the hell is going on here? How did the media allow Lieberman to get so off the topic of the issues regarding this primary race? Can someone ANYONE from the media e-mail me and explain this to me? With over 2500+ Americans dead and tens of thousands injured in Iraq, you guys allow Joe to babble about Ned's holdings and don't hold Lieberman's campaign accountable for their OBVIOUS race-baiting flyer (for God sakes, the bloggers and a reporter from OUT-OF STATE had to break this story).
To add insult to injury, "psycho" Marion and the rest of the goons at Lieberman central lied about Ned's statement.
Sargent gets it right and knocks it out of the park.
In the flyer the Lieberman camp left out a couple other of Lamont's quotes in the July Times story, which read as follows:
"It's not as diverse as it should be," Mr. Lamont said. "I didn't pay as much attention to that before the race began, to tell you the truth.
"They don't have any discriminatory policies," he added.
Again, is it too much for the media to stop allowing themselves to get fooled by Lieberman's bullshit tactics and call him out on crap like this? At this point, you're doing a disservice to the voters of Connecticut by not holding the Lieberman campaign accountable for this type of garbage and not asking Lieberman the relevant questions that placed him in the primary race in the first place.
Where's the question on Schiavo?
Where are the questions about Iraq?
Where are the questions about the current state of affairs in the Middle East?
Where is the follow question from Mark Davis regarding Lieberman's Halliburton holdings.
Where are the questions surrounding Lieberman's refusal to announce his events (or hold ANY public events).
Where are the questions regarding Joe's refusal to answer any questions from THE PUBLIC (while holding phony photo-ops and using kids from his campaign as props).
Enough is enough!
BTW: You so-called Democrats who support this jerk have no heart and at this point, I question you loyality to the party as Democrats should NEVER stoop to this level of campaigning (against a good man like Ned). The Lieberman campaign is running a whisper smear campaign in the inner cities of Connecticut for God sakes! At what point do you walk away from Joe?
By ANGELA MONTEFINISE and ELIZABETH WOLFF July 30, 2006 -- Just 12 hours before yesterday's heartbreaking funeral for Jennifer Moore, another young woman, who'd been boozing it up on the same Chelsea block as the slain teen, lay collapsed on the pavement.
At around 4 a.m., cops stood by her limp body - as she lay drooling and shoeless - for 35 minutes until an ambulance came to take her away.
Up and down West 27th Street between 10th and 11th avenues, a block teeming with more than 5,000 club kids on an average weekend night, teens and 20-somethings can be found stumbling and vomiting and passed out.
Just three days earlier, Moore, 18, left Guest House here on West 27th at about 2:30 a.m. and stumbled to a West Side impound lot - where her 18-year-old friend Talia Kenan passed out and had to be taken away in an ambulance.
Moore then wandered off and was allegedly picked up by Draymond Coleman, 34, who cops say took her to Jersey, raped and killed her.
And while many of the underage revelers on West 27th Thursday and Friday nights said they were spooked by Moore's murder, it hasn't kept them from going wild.
A 20-year-old named Melissa, also from New Jersey, told her mom she was going to a slumber party on Thursday night.
But at 3 a.m. Friday, the college student was wandering down 27th Street on the heels of her stumbling-drunk friend Jessica, a strawberry-blond 18-year-old from Paramus, weaving through the throng of young bodies.
Jessica and Melissa said they hit the clubs on 27th Street twice a week in the summer, flashing IDs belonging to older relatives and dropping names of promoters and others who work in the clubs in order to get inside.
"These are the clubs we see on 'Sex and the City.' It's the whole image. It feels cool to be there, like you're really part of the city circle," Melissa said. "You learn where to go and who to talk to."
Weeknights are the easiest times to get in, she said.
"There's such a rush when you get to the door and actually get in. These places are exclusive, lots of cool people," said Melissa, who didn't want to reveal her last name.
"There's nothing to do in Jersey," she laughs. "Everyone's here."
Jessica insisted that she was "just fine" and "a little buzzed," but Melissa had to find her keys and stuff them in her Coach bag.
"We'll have to take a cab. Seriously, you can't drive," Melissa said.
She said her friends "usually have a designated driver" to take them home to Jersey, but "things got a little out of hand tonight, so we'll have to cab it."
Just then, there was a commotion down the block.
A bouncer had to carry a drunken woman to the backseat of her friend's car because she'd twisted her ankle trying to leave.
A few feet away, 21-year-old Luke from Mineola, L.I., threw up on the sidewalk, smiled and said, "That's a good night."
On both 10th and 11th avenues, traffic was bumper to bumper until 5 a.m.
It gets so bad on weekends that police set up barricades blocking cars and pedestrians from 27th Street.
Earlier in the night, crowds swelled as bouncers wait until they have a big line outside their club before letting anyone in. That way the first people to come won't be in an empty club - and the crowd outside attracts more people.
Outside club Marquee, a red Lamborghini is parked as men honk from Range Rovers asking girls to come "for a good time."
Just down the block at Guest House - where Moore spent her last night alive - a bouncer took $20 from a clubgoer trying to get in, then demanded, "Give me double that."
Down the street, a group of people waiting to get inside Bungalow 8 cheered as a couple slammed themselves up against a storefront and started making out.
People sat on the sidewalk, smoking and holding their heads in their hands.
"Just last week, I saw three girls sleeping on the street corner from 2 to 5 in the morning," said Omar Ellonzi, the owner of a popular food truck that sells sausages and gyros to people leaving the clubs.
"Girls, boys, they're always drunk. Crazy," he said.
The crowds usually start to clear on out Fridays by 5 a.m.
But that's when the block turned even more raucous. .........................
Courtney Siegel, 19, who has been an insider in the Chelsea club scene since she was 14, said suburban youngsters treat 27th Street like "a big night out."
"The guys'll spend more, the girls'll get dolled up and the bouncers can take advantage of that, because getting inside means everything," she said.
Siegel said promoters with e-mail lists 10,000 names long tell their underage clientele to meet at 11 p.m. so the promoters can escort the bulk of teens through the door, no IDs, no questions asked. ............................... "A lot of teenagers come and use fake IDs," said Moss. "It's easier in some places than others. But when you're 18, you want to be in places like this."
The kids usually learn about club parties by word of mouth and online promotions. Rachel - a 19-year-old Columbia University student with a realistic-looking fake ID - said she loves clubbing during the summer as a break from her studies.
"Pretty much, if you go clubbing you get to know people who let you know where to go on any given night," she said.
Chelsea is crawling with the bridge-and-tunnel crowd in the summer, Rachel said - and it's a totally different crowd.
"The commuters go crazy," she said. "They go to the extremes. It's not real life to them. It's a game."
The "game" turned deadly last week, when Moore was raped and killed after leaving Guest House.
Either Moore or her friend Kenan may have known the DJ at the club, which helped get them in.
............................
Jen
WHY THE FUCK WAS SHE GETTING DRUNK ANYWHERE when she's only 18. WHY this has not been mentioned by ANYONE in the MSM is beyond me. The whole reason why she was wandering alone was that her friend was so shitfaced that she needed to get in an ambulence. She was drunk enough that even though she had a cell phone she didn't call for help--she called her boyfriend but not the cops? She didn't just stick around at the tow yard after that and get transport home from there?
Also it begs the question--where were the parents? Did this girl even have a valid night-time license yet to drive? If so, why was a newbie driver tooling around Manhattan? I did the drive from the burbs to NYC for years and it is NOT an easy haul sober, in broad daylight, on a dry day.
Everyone was all over the Falls like stink on shit (rightfully so) after St. Guillen was killed. Why no outrage here over a place that is apparently known for serving up scads of underaged drinkers every weekend?
PS--this is why I hate big name clubs, by the way--a LOT of them look like Daycare with Booze crowdwise. It makes me really miss the old days of MotherNYC in the Meat Packing District. Minimum door age was 25, and average age was 30ish. People with jobs, and lives, who just needed a place to do shit like dress up.
My friends own bars, they let in kids, they're in court.
Kids are bad for business, they fight, they screw each other in bathrooms, they get way too drunk. A smart business doesn't want kids.
This is a bar closing infraction kind of thing. When Immette St. Guillen was found dead, the scumbag Dorian family had the cops all in their shit. But the people who own this club haven't even been interviewed.
I don't believe for one second that an "adult" bought them drinks. I think the bartender served them and serves anyone who comes in. The bouncers don't give a shit and the owners love the crowd, and they don't give a shit either.
The Moore family should sue the owners for letting their underage daughter in and serving her alcohol. Because that's a clear violation of New York law.
But what bothers me more is that she left her friend. Even today, I never leave my friends without letting them know. I have seen teenage girls do this time and again. If your friend is passed out, why would you leave her? What could you possibly be thinking?
I am looking for someone to help me develop sites based around this national guard recruiting affiliate program. I am already registered with the program and passed all their recruiting tests. All I need to do now is start feeding it leads. You make $2,000K for every soldier that enlists and goes to basic training. Really not that hard as most soldiers gather information about joining the Army National Guard through the net. Advertising would be cheap as there is not much competition here (just do a search on Google for National Guard). There are NO limitations on how many people you can get to sign up, and from where you can get them to sign up from. Im thinking getting 100 people a year to sign up is not impossible. Thats $100K. Expenses would be very minimal. However, the catch is that all of you guys/gals won't be able to join this affiliate program because your not currently in the national guard. If you want to join let me know, I've been in for four years and I am currently an army officer; I can give you the low down. Anyhow, any developers and webmasters out there that are interested in making some of the sickest affiliate commisions in the world. Let me know. The beauty of this is that the army does all the work for you. Once you generate the lead, it's left up to a professional recruiter to close the deal, and you get paid the money. You simply have to connect the recuiter with the lead. A form capture website would do the trick. The information can then be sent off to a army recruiter in that persons area. I will do 50/50 with the right partner. Let me know ASAP as I will be posting this offer on other forums. I want to give my WickedFire.com brothers and sisters first stab at it. Please PM me on this, or email me at onlinebizplans@gmail.com if you are interested. I really believe this would be easy to set-up and make sick cash. I currently have too many projects going to do this full time. I'm looking for someone to do site development, I can handle advertising.
__________________
Who would do this?
Doesn't this scumbag have enough friends to make money off of?
So, the idea is that you dig up your friends, send them off to Iraq, and make money off of it.
Yeah, great. Why not get them drunk first, like the pressgangs used to do.
You know, the racist contempt for the black voter, voters that they have needed to reach to be reelected, on the part of the Lieberman campaign is amazing. The top flier reminds people that Joerus the heretic marched with Martin Luther King. Well, it's 40 years later, what have you done for us lately.
Let's see, support the Iraq war.
Support school vouchers
Oppose affirmative action.
He liked helping black people when they were to be pitied, but when they had the same rights as whites, Lieberman walked away. I wonder how many black people are on his staff? After all, he had to hire an "expert" on urban voting to run his campaign. He hasn't had one living black politician of note campaign for him. Martin Luther King is dead, has been dead since April 4, 1968. Died in Memphis, TN.
Meanwhile, country club Ned Lamont has had Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters campaign for him. Waters came twice to walk with him. I'm sure he bribed them with memberships.
Look, Lieberman belongs to a club with one black member and it didn't seem to bother him. Lieberman hasn't been any kind of advocate of african americans in a long time. Like his stand on the Vietnam War, it's part of his past, not his present.
As much as we respect Dr. King's legacy, it is a legacy and not the present. And it isn't Joe Lieberman's or Bill Clinton's to hijack.
We need to understand something, Joe Lieberman has NO RESPECT FOR BLACK VOTERS. He thinks they can be manipulated and conned. Oh, Marse Bill is coming for ol' Joe. We's got to vote for him. He doesn't talk to them the way he talks to white voters, he has no respect for their intellect and grasp of the issues. He thinks he can drag up 40 year old shit and black folks are supposed to have a Pavolvian reaction when they hear King's name. We're not talking Moses here. Walking with King doesn't get you lifetime absolution.
Well, black people want to hear about the economy, Iraq and other issues of the day. They want to be appealed to intellectually, not emotionally.
The Lieberman campaign and his expert want to appeal to black voters on emotion without offering them anything. It's a racist insult of the worst kind, far more hurtful than tar baby or nigger. Because you show you think blacks are emotional children with no capacity for rational thought or action.
And to add insult to injury, he hires mostly white kids from suburban Jersey, kids his staff would be comfortable with, to do his field operations. Ignoring the pleading from the local pol to hire her people, the known persuaders, stick some money in their pocket, nope. Not gonna hook them up, they had white people to hire instead. And that is going to be remembered by the people his team screwed.
"We do it like this in Jersey" is bullshit. They don't do it that way in Hudson or Essex County and win. Cory Booker tried that in 2002 and lost.
Lieberman is supposed to be a moral man. Bullshit, he's running a campaign of the most obvious racial contempt run by anyone since Rudy Giuliani. Lieberman thinks blacks are emotional morons, easily swayed by a few names and emotional arguments.
I don't know Ned Lamont, but I know if Shapton, Waters and others are going to march with him, and I really think Lieberman will regret his constant harping on King and his legacy, I know he's not a racist. And he doesn't need to drag up the past to make his point.
Republican candidate for Ohio governor Ken Blackwell decided last week that he wouldn’t show his income tax return to voters, something even wealthy, low-rated incumbent Republican Gov. Bob Taft did in both his runs for the state's highest office. This is a political mistake. The refusal becomes the story. Voters wonder why. It is better to open up all information, which only election junkies would look at, thus getting it out of the way of real issues.
Meanwhile, Democrat candidate Ted Strickland says he will release his tax returns. Of course, this will be a lot easier for the Southern Ohio congressman, since he doesn’t have as much as his opponent. Blackwell is a millionaire, with most of the money presumably coming from the sale of a string of radio stations he owned with other investors.
This Blackwell political gaffe was exacerbated when his political mouthpiece, Carlo LoParo, said this to the Dayton Daily News: “... If Ted Strickland wants to highlight the fact that he lives paycheck to paycheck on a congressman’s salary, that’s his right. My understanding is he doesn’t have any investment income and it’s a pretty simple return."
If LoParo was trying to make his candidate more attractive to some rich voters, that was a pretty good statement. The problem is those voters already were voting for him. The last time I looked, the wealthy were in the minority in Ohio, and since their votes don’t increase with their portfolios, perhaps LoParo should have held back on the cheap shot.
It’s one vote, whether you have a million or you have a buck. Since many, many Ohioans live paycheck to paycheck, like LoParo says Strickland does, the Republican spokesman probably helped the Democrat candidate.
Maybe this all is irrelevant. I don’t usually make political predictions this early, but I've been watching this race, and I think it is over. Unless he commits some enormous political blunder, Strickland wins with about 54 percent of the vote this November.
I'm sure the hillbillies will be happy to have Blackwell's income tossed in their face. It should also help the black voters be reminded of who he is.
What an ignorant comment to make in an election.
54 percent? No, I think Strickland will come closer to 60.
There's nothing working class white people dislike more than a black man lording his riches over them. Blackwell's base is working class whites.
-NEW HAVEN — Bill Clinton’s name is mentioned so often in the U.S. Senate race these days, it’s almost as if it’s the 1990s and he is still leading the country.
.............
Smith said they now have between 200 and 300 volunteers and paid staff, to canvass daily. Democratic workers in New Haven said the campaign told them it hopes to hire up to 4,000 workers by Election Day.
Over at the Lamont camp, campaign staff said they have been in the field for several weeks already and have a higher ratio of volunteers to paid workers, although they would not talk numbers. Meanwhile, New Haven Alderwoman Jacqueline James, D-3, said a young, mostly white staff from New Jersey was in charge of canvassing for Lieberman, and that hundreds of people were turned away July 22 after being told the campaign was looking for 16- to 21-year-olds.
The alderwoman estimated 56 young people were hired out of about 500 people who showed up, attracted by the $60 a day fee, or about $800 for the duration.
She said LGS does not know the demographics of the city at all. James suggested that they match inexperienced teens with more savvy workers, but this was rejected.
"They kept saying this is how we do it in New Jersey. I kept telling them, ‘This is not New Jersey,’" said James, who no longer volunteers for Lieberman.
Smith said an age cutoff was not a policy of the campaign.
"Anyone who wants to come and work and volunteer for Joe Liberman, we don’t turn anyone away. In fact, the supervisor who was telling people that (about the age cutoff) is no longer with the campaign, if in fact he was telling people that," Smith said.
The emphasis on youthful workers was apparent at the Palace Theater rally with scores working the hall, passing out balloons and Lieberman signs, as well as at the start of Lieberman’s 10-day bus tour of the state Friday, as they lined up behind the senator.
How stupid can they be? She wanted her people to get paid. And not only did they embarass her, they made a whole bunch of new Lamont voters.
They desperately need black voters, so they turn away the local persuaders and send out white kids from Jersey?
I think it was Stephen Glass who showed how little the New Republic mattered.
Sure, he slunk off into sociopathy land, but in the end, his story was a dull movie, now cable filler, but it already confirmed that TNR wasn't exactly relevant. It was the extention of the Harvard Club for the moderately talented. But there was no great scandal, completely making up stories. But it just didn't matter, because TNR didn't matter.
But like armies runs by old generals, they rarely know how badly they've been beaten until they get beaten.
They had been Joe Lieberman's ideological home as moderates moved to the left and conservatives to the right. They sat in the yellow stripe middle when there was no appeal for it.
But, misjudging their audience completely, their army-aged writers signed on for the Iraq war, from their desks. And the worse the war got, the sillier they looked.
Then, of course, they realized the blogs were coming after them, hard. They didn't like the scruffy blogs, and tried to ignore them. Then they realized Kos and Atrios had more readers than they did and more influence. So what did they do? Attack.
Like a cornered rat, they lunged at Kos. Not at first, but after Yearly Kos, they shit the bed. Kos had to be on the take, he had to be doing something wrong. So what did they dig up? A six year old SEC complain against the non-Kos Jerome Armstrong. And they created some conspiracy around that.
Until they ran an e-mail I didn't write. Whoever sent it to them is a bed shitting moron, but the fact that they ran it without checking, was amazing. Not only was it bad journalism, it was stupid. I can make my case, Kos can make his case, and the people who read us like us more than them. And our readers send letters. Which means don't lie about me in print. I don't have take it like some peon.
Now, I don't fault Frank Foer in this. He should have fired Jason Zengerle, but I think he'll eventually have the chance to do the right thing. The fact that he didn't burn his source was disappointing, but now every word TNR publishes is suspect, it's management a joke, it's word questionable. Sure, it was gutless to not burn their source, but sometimes a man has to eat.
What they didn't understand is that the blogs can fight back, and they thought they had the upper hand. They didn't then and don't now.
But the reason I bring this up, besides mild pleasure, is to tie them into the collapse of Lieberman. Within the next few days, his black vote strategy is going to collapse. Al Sharpton is campaigning with Lamont, and that's going to be a problem for Lieberman. Because while white voters may not like him, if this race is about black voters, Sharpton is a credible figure. Sharpton is joining Maxine Waters and other, local Dems in supporting Lamont.
However, TNR has tied their publication closely to Lieberman. If Lieberman loses, it bodes ill for the current editorial direction of the rag. They will be facing bloggers who have no tolerance or time for their appeasement politics. They will be on the wrong side of American politics and doomed.
Will Marty Peretz see reality and dump the appeasers, or will he soldier on, running an irrelevant freak show, which has lower journalistic standards than the National Enquirer. After all, they have a financial stake in the truth.
Among the most nervous people on August 8th will be the staff of the New Republic. Because if Joerus the heretic goes, they may well be next
BY LESLIE CASIMIR and CELESTE KATZ DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
A young marine whose journey to a new life in the United States ended in death during a battle in an Iraqi war zone was mourned yesterday by scores of loved ones in Queens.
Marine Cpl. Julian Ramon, 22, a Colombian immigrant who lived in Flushing, was fatally injured July 20 by an explosion during combat operations in Iraq's Anbar Province, an area rife with insurgent activity.
"He was a good son, a good cousin, a good nephew, a good grandson. He was great with all his family members," said Ramon's cousin Maria Camilla Mutis.
"Since he died on the independence day of Colombia, he will be liberated from this world and from all pain," she added.
"The smile that he always gave to his family members will always stay in our hearts."
Mourners brushed tears from their eyes during the solemn service at St. Michael's Church, which featured a Mass celebrated in Spanish.
Ramon came to the United States at age 4.
After graduating from John Bowne High School in Jamaica and working briefly at an Off-Track Betting parlor, he enlisted in the Marines, hoping later to attend college and have a career in criminal justice.
We don't run many of these, because they seem to happen once a week in New York. Guardsmen, active duty Army, Marines. They keep dying while Bush's body man goes to Harvard Business School without a BA, and Barbara conducts tours at the Cooper-Hewitt.
For some odd reason, that just doesn't seem fair, or just.
By SALLY BUZBEE, Associated Press Writer Sun Jul 30, 4:41 PM ET
CAIRO, Egypt - It's hard to defeat a group of extremists who can mingle among civilian supporters and are pros at propaganda.
Israel's military faces the same conundrum the United States has encountered elsewhere — finding that airstrikes are costly in civilian deaths and public support, while ground attacks are risky for soldiers.
That does not mean Hezbollah is winning militarily. But the guerrilla group has so far avoided a knockout by Israel, even as international pressure for a cease-fire has grown. And in the war of perceptions, Hezbollah has only to look strong against Israel and make Israel look bad to win across much of the Arab world, many analysts say.
That was brought into stark focus Sunday when an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in southern Lebanon, killing at least 56 people, mostly women and children. Israel apologized for the deaths and blamed Hezbollah, accusing it of using civilians as human shields.
But the backlash against Israel and its ally America was swift: Lebanese officials reacted in fury and Beirut protesters attacked a U.N. building and burned American flags. At an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was "deeply dismayed" his previous calls for a cease-fire had been ignored.
The United States knows this scenario well from Iraq and elsewhere: Pictures of dead children and women killed in airstrikes can hurt support even among friends.
Yet the alternative for Israel, if it wants to push back Hezbollah, is either a full-scale ground war or a lengthy series of smaller-scale incursions to eliminate the group's positions along the Israeli-Lebanese border.
For now, Israel says it has no plans for a big land invasion, still leery from its costly occupation of south Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. But the smaller incursions have brought relatively high Israeli casualties and low apparent impact: U.N. observers in south Lebanon say Hezbollah's supply of rockets remains adequate to fight, and most of its leaders have survived.
Israel has privately told the United States it needs 10 days to two weeks to accomplish what it wants.
First, they DON'T hide among the population. They avoid the population, at least the military wing does, and the faces of the IDF grunts coming off the line indicate they are in the fight of their lives.
Qana is the result of the IDF's overreliance on air power and the refusal to get in the bunker clearing business. They were repulsed from Bin Jebail, they didn't leave it. They couldn't hold the town without taking Pacific War like losses, and the IDF cannot take heavy losses. Which Hezbollah can.
This is a massive military defeat for Israel. Not only have they been shown down by a Hezbollah Army far better trained and led than they knew, they have been surprised at every turn. From missiles to bunkers to mined roads.
The problem for Israel is that they have revealed that they cannot beat Hezbollah or control land occupied by Hezbollah without taking unacceptable casualities. When dealing with Hezbollah, victory can only come with a clear, concise defeat. Anything less is a massive defeat.
What is even worse for Israel is that their attack on Lebanon has created massive sympathy for Arabs in the West, making Israel a bad guy and discreting their legitimate security arguments, even in the United States.
Bush did a very foolish thing in not stopping the Israelis. Cheney, despite ALL evidence, wanted to take a second bite at the apple in beating down Iran and Syria and not only did it fail, it made Hezbollah stronger, and even worse, established them as the defenders of Lebanon. When the chips were down, it was the Shia of Hezbollah who faced down the IDF while the Army sat impotent.
I can't stress enough how badly this has gone. The IAF has become reknowned for blowing up hospitals. The IDF cannot take a Lebanese town without getting shot up, one with bunkers their intel and special ops never came across. One their spies never heard of.
You can only maintain that level of security when you do not have civilians around. A professional army attacking a neighboring state is surprised? Uh, what does your intelligence service do?
Now, after the inevitable errant bomb, Israel is shamed before the world. Not exactly what Olmert had planned. He thought he'd be a hero for getting rid of Hezbollah and pressuring Iran and Syria. Now he's the man who bombs women and children in hospitals. And classlessly blames Hezbollah for hiding behind women and children when they bombed and killed them.
Hezbollah has not been much better, but Israel lost the battle of equivency when they tore up gas stations and red cross convoys. Now, Hezbollah's rockets are a footnote to Israel's bombs. Why the Bushies couldn't see this coming is beyond me.
I wish Mel Gibson well in dealing with his alcoholism, but alcoholism does not excuse racism and anti-Semitism. It is one thing when marginal figures with no credibility make anti-Semitic statements. It is a completely different thing when a figure of Mel Gibson's stature does so. Even when he sobers up and apologizes.
According to the handwritten report of the deputy who pulled Gibson over, published by TMZ.com, after he was arrested Gibson launched into an anti-Semitic tirade, saying: "Fucking Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"
At a time of escalating tensions in the world, the entertainment industry cannot idly stand by and allow Mel Gibson to get away with such tragically inflammatory statements. When The Passion of the Christ came out, Gibson was quoted as categorically denying any anti-Semitism attributed to him: "For me, it goes against the tenets of my faith, to be racist in any form. To be anti-Semitic is a sin. It's been condemned by one Papal Council after another. There's encyclicals on it, which is, you know -- to be anti-Semitic is to be unchristian, and I'm not."
Now we know the truth. And no amount of publicist-approved contrition can paper it over. People in the entertainment community, whether Jew or gentile, need to demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him, even if it means a sacrifice to their bottom line.
There are times in history when standing up against bigotry and racism is more important than money.
Ever see Entourage? Well Jeremy Piven's character is based on the author of this piece.
OK, Jen's been a bit frazzled at work lately, so I wanted to post up some possible solutions to her problems. And since she likes pictures of cuddly appearing animals.......
Imagine strolling around the office with one of these on a leash. Late reports? Well, not after Timmy the Tiger lunges at coworkers. Those fangs and claws will keep the workforce in line, if they don't want to be tiger chow
That pool party will never be the same when the baby hippo rampages. Your coworkers will live in mortal terror of an invite to your home, and the baby hippo. And maybe that will inspire them to work all the harder. One rampage is more than enough for most people. If they live.
Charlie the chimp has a warm inviting smile, and seven times the strength of a human. So when Charlie starts flinging office supplies around and wheeling around the office, locking the door is no retreat. He can smash the door. Maybe a banana will calm his simian rage, or timely reports. I don't know, I don't plan on being around an enraged Charlie
Kenny the Koala. He's so cute, but his razor sharp claws make for a perfect letter opener. Or weapon against a lazy, sloppy staff. You cannot run from Kenny, you can try, but you shouldn't hope for much success, as his claws rip your clothes from your flesh.
Well, they are expensive to keep up, but they can keep a staff of slackers in line..........or else.
What? A Brown shirt. an armband. what's the big deal?
Nikki Finke, who is an insanely well connected Hollywood reporter, , is saying Gibson is in real trouble here. And if she's saying it, I'd place credence in it .The New Yorker did a story on the Pelicano case, which may gut Hollywood over wiretaps, which started when he threatened her over a story which suggested that Steven Segal made a movie with mob money
.............................
Among the allegations within TMZ.com's four pages, Gibson "angrily stated" that "'My life is fucked'" and "became fixated on his notoriety and concern that the incident was going to be publicized." The celebrity became "belligerent' and "threatened" the deputy, saying "'I'm going to fuck you. You're going to regret you ever did this to me.'" Then, Gibson "blurted out a barrage of anti-Semitic remarks about 'Fucking Jews.' Yelled out 'The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.' Then asked, 'Are you a Jew.' Conduct concerned and frightened me to a point. I called ahead to the station requesting a sergeant meet the arrival of my patrol car in the station parking lot..."
As soon as TMZ's Internet pages surfaced about Gibson's alleged anti-Semitic slurs, Hollywood's entertainment leaders began phoning one another asking if it could possibly be true. (Already this morning, I personally spoke with several prominent players wanting to know more.) Now, with my confirmation from Lt. Smith that those pages are similar to the official Sheriff's reports, showbiz moguls are certain to be shocked and angry. Still, to be fair, whether any person should be held responsible for what may have been under-the-influence ramblings is certainly debatable. But Gibson is a special case because his worldwide mega-hit The Passion of the Christ was criticized by some Jewish leaders as anti-Semitic, and Gibson's father, a local religious leader, has said that the Holocaust did not happen. Hutton Gibson in statements has decried the Holocaust as "fiction" and claimed there were more Jews in Europe after World War II than before. Mel Gibson, however, has repeatedly denied his movie Passion was anti-Semitic. But the actor/director's views about his father's Holocaust denial have been under scrutiny. When asked by an interviewer in early 2004 whether the Holocaust happened, the actor / director / producer responded that some of his best friends ''have numbers on their arms,'' then added: ''Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps.'' But in the same interview, Gibson said his father, Hutton Gibson, had ''never lied to me in his life,'' and Holocaust scholars have cited those and other statements as evidence that he has failed to disassociate himself clearly from his father's views. Perhaps to counter that, Gibson late last year announced he was developing a nonfiction mini-series about the Holocaust for ABC. His TV production company will base the four-hour miniseries for ABC on the self-published memoir of Flory A. Van Beek, a Dutch Jew whose gentile neighbors hid her from the Nazis but who lost several relatives in concentration camps. Gibson was not expected to act in the mini-series, nor was it certain that his name, rather than his company's, will be publicly attached to the final product, according to The New York Times. But Quinn Taylor, ABC's senior vice president for movies for television, told the paper at the time that the attention-getting value of having Gibson attached to a Holocaust project was a factor. ''Controversy's publicity, and vice versa,'' Taylor was quoted as saying. Now it remains to be seen whether the contents of these LA County Sheriff's Department arrest reports will make Gibson's Holocaust project too hot to handle for the network.
ABC's parent company, Disney, is distributing Gibson's latest Hollywood movie project, Apocalypto, through its Buena Vista Pictures Distribution arm. The action epic set before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central America about the bloody decline of the ancient Mayan civilization (filmed in their language) wrapped production earlier this year and planned for a Dec. 8 opening. In his most recent act of controversy, Gibson recently compared the fearmongering and human sacrifice of the Mayans to President George W. Bush's political actions. Previously, the Bush administration, Christian religious leaders, and conservative politicos had embraced Gibson for making The Passion of the Christ despite the overwhelmingly negative response to the film inside Jewish circles.
Hollywood, especially its Jewish moguls, has simultaneously rejected and embraced Gibson before, during and after Passion. Right before the movie was released, several top Hollywood Jewish executives saw an anti-Semitic subtext in the religious movie and pledged privately never to work with Gibson because of it. But once Passion became a surprise hit at the box office, and rang up humongous $611 million theatrical grosses worldwide, much of the heated criticism of Gibson began to cool inside Hollywood circles. And, in some quarters, the actor / director / producer began to be hailed as a genius for tapping into the zeitgest of those spiritual moviegoers often ignored by Hollywood moviemakers.
Given today's confirmation by the Sheriff's Office that Gibson's alleged anti-Semitic tirade is in his DUI arrest reports, the debate will rage anew in Hollywood and Jewish circles about Gibson's true feelings about Jews. The actor / director / producer works closely with many Jewish VIPs in the entertainment business at talent agencies, in law firms, and at the studios. Now, with Gibson's statement, this incident is very, very difficult to explain away.
" I came over here because I wanted to kill people."
Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.' "
He shrugged.
"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "
At the time, the soldier's matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like him -- mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the exceptions who wasn't afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.
But the private was Steven D. Green.
The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked.
When I met Green, I knew nothing about his background -- his troubled youth and family life, his apparent problems with drugs and alcohol, his petty criminal record. I just saw and heard a blunt-talking kid. Now that I know the charges against Green, his words take on an utterly different context for me. But when I met him then, his comments didn't seem nearly as chilling as they do now. ............................
Morale took another nosedive soon after, when the hastily rigged electrical wiring system caught fire and burned down the Americans' living quarters. The soldiers watched as the early-morning blaze destroyed all reminders of home: the family photographs, the iPods and the video games that provide brief escapes from combat. When I got there a week later, a chow-hall storage room, packed with radios and satellite maps, was serving as the base command center. The sergeants were still passing out toothbrushes and clean socks to the young troops who had lost everything.
The company commander in charge of Green's unit told me that the situation was so stressful that he himself had "almost had a nervous breakdown" and had been sent to a hotel-style compound in Baghdad for three days of "freedom rest" before resuming his command.
And yet despite the horrific conditions in which they were daily being tested, I found extraordinary camaraderie among the soldiers in Mahmudiyah. They were among the friendliest troops I met in Iraq.
Green was one of several soldiers I sat down with in the chow hall one night not long after my arrival. We talked over dinner served on cardboard trays. I asked them how it was going out there, and to tell me about some of their most harrowing moments. When they began talking about the December death of Sgt. Kenith Casica, my interview zeroed in on Green.
He described how after an attack on their traffic checkpoint, he and several others pushed one wounded man into the back seat of a Humvee and put Casica, who had a bullet wound in his throat, on the truck's hood. Green flung himself across Casica to keep the dying soldier from falling off as they sped back to the base.
"We were going, like, 55 miles an hour and I was hanging on to him. I was like, 'Sgt. Casica, Sgt. Casica.' He just moved his eyes a little bit," Green related with a breezy candor. "I was just laying on top of him, listening to him breathing, telling him he's okay. I was rubbing his chest. I was looking at the tattoo on his arm. He had his little girl's name tattooed on his arm.
"I was just talking to him. Listening to his heartbeat. It was weird -- I drooled on him a little bit and I was, like, wiping it off. It's weird that I was worried about stupid [expletive] like that.
"Then I heard him stop breathing," Green said. "We got back and everyone was like, 'Oh [expletive], get him off the truck.' But I knew he was dead. You could look in his eyes and there wasn't nothing in his eyes. I knew what was going on there."
He paused and looked away. "He was the nicest man I ever met," he said. "I never saw him yell at anybody. That was the worst time, that was my worst time since I've been in Iraq."
Green had been in country only four months at that point, a volunteer in a war he now saw as pointless.
"I gotta be here for a year and there ain't [expletive] I can do about it," he said. "I just want to go home alive. I don't give a [expletive] about the whole Iraq thing. I don't care.
"See, this war is different from all the ones that our fathers and grandfathers fought. Those wars were for something. This war is for nothing."
.............................
Green knew a few words of Arabic, and along with bits of broken English, some hand gestures and smiles, he joked around with the Iraqis as he sipped their tea. Most U.S. soldiers didn't hang out on this side of the base with the Iraqis.
I asked Green whether he went there a lot. He did, he said, because he liked to get away from the Americans "who are always telling me what to do."
"These guys are cool," he said, referring to the Iraqis.
"But," he added with a shrug, "I wouldn't really care if all these guys got waxed."
As we talked, Green complained about his frustration with the Army brass that urged young soldiers to exercise caution even in the most terrifying and life-threatening circumstances.
"We're out here getting attacked all the time and we're in trouble when somebody accidentally gets shot?" he said, referring to infantrymen like himself throughout Iraq. "We're pawns for the [expletive] politicians, for people that don't give a [expletive] about us and don't know anything about what it's like to be out here on the line."
The soldiers who fought alongside Green lived in conditions of near-constant violence -- violence committed by them, and against them.
......................................
In the end, I never included Green's comments in any of the handful of stories I wrote from Mahmudiyah for Stars and Stripes. When he said he was inured to death and killing, it seemed to me -- in that place and at that time -- a reasonable thing to say. While in Iraq, I also saw people bleed and die. And there was something unspeakably underwhelming about it. It's not a Hollywood action movie -- there are no rapid edits, no adrenaline-pumping soundtracks, no logical narratives that help make sense of it. Bits of lead fly through the air, put holes in people and their bodily fluids leak out and they die. Those who knew them mourn and move on.
But no level of combat stress is an excuse for the kind of brutal acts Green allegedly committed. I suppose I will always look back on our conversations in Mahmudiyah and wonder: Just what did he mean?
I wonder how old and experienced this reporter is. Because it's one thing to be blunt, it is another to be indifferent to the people you kill. It is almost taboo to tell strangers you joined the Army to kill people. His "honesty" was really psychopathic behavior. He killed someone and felt nothing is not honesty. It is a sign of deep sociopathy.
I mean, he didn't like people telling him what to do, hung out with Iraqis, yet didn't care if they all died. Uh, Mr. Reporter Man, he's a fucking psycho.
Most people feel some serious, life altering guilt at killing other human beings. The idea of Green being diasppointed in killing should have scared people shitless. This reporter should have realized that Green was not just being cool, but was so ill he should have never made it out of Benning.
Black voters in Maryland yesterday said Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele's run for U.S. Senate was not hurt -- and might have been helped -- by his recently publicized criticism of President Bush.
"Just because Michael Steele disagrees with Bush, I'd probably vote for him," said Bjorn A. Fingal, 19, a pizza-delivery driver and registered Democrat from Mount Rainier. "We're anti-Bush where I'm from."
Johnny Jones, a retired federal worker from Silver Spring, said he didn't think anybody was swayed by the flurry of news reports about Mr. Steele, a black Republican who said he does not want Mr. Bush campaigning for him and that his party affiliation is like a "scarlet letter" in Maryland, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1.
"He just speaks the truth," said Mr. Jones, 69, a registered Democrat. "He is a Republican, but he doesn't like everything the Republicans are doing. That doesn't mean I'll vote for him. I'll probably vote Democrat."
More than 150 news organization around the world have reported on Mr. Steele's remarks, which originally appeared Tuesday in a column in The Washington Post. The remarks were based on an off-the-record interview, and the column did not attribute the comments to Mr. Steele.
Mr. Steele almost immediately took responsibility for the remarks, including his criticism of the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq -- positions he has often taken publicly since entering the Senate race nine months ago.
Mr. Steele is expected to win the Republican nomination in the Sept. 12 primary, then face either Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin or former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader Kweisi Mfume, the front-runners for the Democratic nomination for senator.
Mr. Steele also reiterated his support for the president and said Mr. Bush was a "homeboy," in the days following the column.
He has not hidden his close ties to the Bush administration, which was instrumental in recruiting him for the Senate race.
Mr. Steele has campaigned with Vice President Dick Cheney and former President George H.W. Bush. Last month, he held a fundraising event with White House senior adviser Karl Rove.
Tyrone Powers, host of a radio news journal on WEAA-FM in Baltimore that focuses on black issues, said black voters are torn between applauding Mr. Steele and dismissing his remarks as rhetoric to win votes. "African-Americans are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt," he said. "They want an African-American in the Senate."
So what will Cardin or Mfume do? Show how close Steele is to Bush.
Steele only owned up to the comments when the WaPo had him on tape.
I mean the article showed that 90 percent of black Marylanders oppose Bush. Once they show how close Steele is to Bush and his minions, well, you can forget about that vote.
The problem Steele had with those quotes is that his backers didn't appreciate him disrespecting the family.
Come meet Senator Lieberman and bring out your dead
Fantasy
Dear Supporter,
The campaign keeps on rolling. Literally. Yesterday marked day one of a ten-day bus tour around the state. ‘Joe’s Tomorrow Tour’ will be all over the Nutmeg State these next few weeks. As the Senator said at the tour kick-off, there has been too much talk in this race by the media and the pundits about him and his opponent. That’s why Lieberman is taking the race back to the voters.
This race is about your future and your children’s future—and that is what Joe Lieberman is going to focus on for the remainder of the campaign. As Lieberman said, "For 30 years, I have fought for the core Democratic values of equal rights, civil rights, equal opportunity and a real shot at the American Dream for all our families." This is what this election is about.
Yesterday, "Joe's Tomorrow Tour" stopped in Meriden, Naugatuck, Seymour, Ansonia, Shelton and Orange. The senator met with voters at local eateries and gathering places in each one of these communities. Lieberman was received with great enthusiasm everywhere he went. The excitement surrounding our campaign is catching on all around Connecticut. It’s an exciting time to be a Democrat.
This is still a tough race and we continue to need your support. We urge you to volunteer during the next week and a half and we urge you to remind everyone you know to get to the polls on August 8th and pull the lever for Joe.
While Michael Schaivo was holding a press conference to remind everyone what a sanctimonious, meddling, holier-than-thou, politically opportunistic tin-eared prick Joe Lieberman was during the difficult last days of his wife’s life Joe was touring Connecticut on a campaign bus.
Almost nobody showed up to meet Joe, so it must have been comforting to find that the Kiss Float was trailing him along the way.
The Kiss Float and the Lieberman parade caravaned from Naugutuck to Seymour to Ansonia. While Joe would walk into diners that were virtually empty, the Kiss float provided a wonderful distraction for bored journalists who otherwise would’ve had precious little to cover.
As TrueBlueCT says, "It was Photo op after photo op, but nobody’s turning out for him — no supporters whatsoever. Why go around on this bus tour if he’s not going to connect with the people?" (Although former congressman Jim Maloney was one of the 11 or so people who turned up the entire day to pay homage to Holy Joe. Nice to see someone besides Bubba isn’t afraid to coat their political career with LieberCooties.)
Speaking of Bubba, Lieberman staffer Marion Slimefels was passing out big bags of "hug" buttons showing a precious moment between Lieberman and Clinton, reminding everyone that Joe’s favorite position is always playing the Little Woman to men more powerful than he is. Then someone noticed that the buttons didin’t have the union bug, and the campaign people quickly began denying they had anything to do with them. My that AFL-CIO endorement from Little Jimmy Olsen, Cub Labor Leader sure is starting to lose its luster.
At "Bar" Pizza one of the few people who showed up spontanously chewed out Joe over the war. This tour is supposed to last through the week. Wonder if Holy Joe’s sense of entitlement can carrying him through such a sea of apathy on the part of the little people?
Boys, the Imperium is with us, attack, attack attack!!!!!!
Lieberman campaigned hard for the Times endorsement, because to lose it is a disaster. It is a clear sign that the pro-Lieberman and anti-blogger arguments failed.
This is most valuable local endorsement available, and Gail Collins didn't just endorse Lamont, she ripped into the Lieberman philosophy of government. She basically called him an appeaser to Bush in a way none of us in left blogoland have said. Not even high commander Kos has been as brutal as that editorial. Collins said, in a few words, every argument we made, and she read, and threw them at the heretic like an indictment.
Lieberman's hug with Bill Clinton may be an attempt to impress the negroes, but the Times endorsement not only hurts him with upscale Dem voters, but with independents. This is a blocking move on an independent run as well. And considering that she jumped on Giuliani for trying to extend his term, similarly brutal treatment is awaiting Lieberman.
And then she says this isn't about Lamont, but getting rid of Lieberman.
Make no mistake, Lieberman's campaign is reeling from this. It is a disaster of the first order. Instead of smacking us blogofascists down, she's basically repeated our arguments and validated them in the most public way possible. This is going to make some people decide to jump ship, because it's becoming clear that Lieberman's campaign is a last hurrah.
Now, the Lamont people are nervous, they think they're in a dogfight until the end, and it would be stupid for them to think otherwise
But looking on from the outside, it would take Lamont being arrested for Lieberman to win and what people are really begining to debate is the degree of loss Lieberman will suffer.
The problem is that Lieberman is being held to account for his support of the war and his too close alliance with the GOP. And his friends did him no favors. Hannity? Brooks? Shit, to any thinking person, they're the reason for a Senator Lamont.
The fact is that Lieberman is running into empty crowds and almost no friendly ones. The Lamont people are dogging him all day, every day. His campaign won't discuss Iraq and he's losing supporters every day, while Lamont gains them. Lieberman has tried to shift the focus to his opponent, but it isn't working. His paid staff is more handicap than help at this point as the Lamont team focuses on the fine points of GOTV.
There have been some shitty campaigns this year, Steele, Harris, but for pure ineptitude, the Lieberman campaign is the worst. He had high name recognition, but squandered it. Now, every one knows him , and they don't like what he's done.
The worst part of the Times editorial is that it will probably sway fence sitters to Lamont.
Earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s seat seemed so secure that — legend has it — some people at the Republican nominating convention in Connecticut started making bleating noises when the party picked a presumed sacrificial lamb to run against the three-term senator, who has been a fixture in Connecticut politics for more than 35 years.
But Mr. Lieberman is now in a tough Democratic primary against a little-known challenger, Ned Lamont. The race has taken on a national character. Mr. Lieberman’s friends see it as an attempt by hysterical antiwar bloggers to oust a giant of the Senate for the crime of bipartisanship. Lamont backers — most of whom seem more passionate about being Lieberman opponents — say that as one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq war, Mr. Lieberman has betrayed his party by cozying up to President Bush.
This primary would never have happened absent Iraq. It’s true that Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass. But if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum. He has voted with his party in opposing the destructive Bush tax cuts, and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose. He has been one of the Senate’s most creative thinkers about the environment and energy conservation.
•
But this race is not about résumés. The United States is at a critical point in its history, and Mr. Lieberman has chosen a controversial role to play. The voters in Connecticut will have to judge whether it is the right one.
As Mr. Lieberman sees it, this is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party — his moderate fair-mindedness against a partisan radicalism that alienates most Americans. “What kind of Democratic Party are we going to have?” he asked in an interview with New York magazine. “You’ve got to agree 100 percent, or you’re not a good Democrat?”
That’s far from the issue. Mr. Lieberman is not just a senator who works well with members of the other party. And there is a reason that while other Democrats supported the war, he has become the only target. In his effort to appear above the partisan fray, he has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates.
Citing national security, Mr. Bush continually tries to undermine restraints on the executive branch: the system of checks and balances, international accords on the treatment of prisoners, the nation’s longtime principles of justice. His administration has depicted any questions or criticism of his policies as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. And Mr. Lieberman has helped that effort. He once denounced Democrats who were “more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq” than on supporting the war’s progress.
At this moment, with a Republican president intent on drastically expanding his powers with the support of the Republican House and Senate, it is critical that the minority party serve as a responsible, but vigorous, watchdog. That does not require shrillness or absolutism. But this is no time for a man with Mr. Lieberman’s ability to command Republicans’ attention to become their enabler, and embrace a role as the president’s defender.
•
On the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Lieberman has left it to Republicans like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to investigate the administration’s actions. In 2004, Mr. Lieberman praised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for expressing regret about Abu Ghraib, then added: “I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized.” To suggest even rhetorically that the American military could be held to the same standard of behavior as terrorists is outrageous, and a good example of how avidly the senator has adopted the Bush spin and helped the administration avoid accounting for Abu Ghraib.
Mr. Lieberman prides himself on being a legal thinker and a champion of civil liberties. But he appointed himself defender of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the administration’s policy of holding hundreds of foreign citizens in prison without any due process. He seconded Mr. Gonzales’s sneering reference to the “quaint” provisions of the Geneva Conventions. He has shown no interest in prodding his Republican friends into investigating how the administration misled the nation about Iraq’s weapons. There is no use having a senator famous for getting along with Republicans if he never challenges them on issues of profound importance.
If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.
Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.
The pillar of northeast establishment, the NY Times and its editorial board, will be endorsing Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman tomorrow.
That report comes from Adam Nagourney, writing about Lieberman's troubles in taking Lamont seriously from the get-go.
The New York Times, in an editorial published on Sunday, endorsed Mr. Lamont over Mr. Lieberman, arguing that the senator had offered the nation a "warped version of bipartisanship" in his dealings with President Bush on national security.
The problem that Joe has had in painting Lamont supporters as far-left blogger-driven fringe people is that just about none of it is true. In an earlier post today, I referenced many of the quotes from local voters who have many issues with Joe from a long-standing and general lack of attention to CT issues, to his stance on nationalizing Terri Schiavo's case, school vouchers, and the Alito confirmation in addition to his stance on the Iraq War (which is becoming less defensible every day - the claim about Iraq being better off than a year ago that he made in the debate is hurting him badly, as is everything else he's previously said about Iraq).
It becomes harder still to make this a blogger-driven campaign with the Times endorsement. The fact is that the issues that are driving CT voters to the polls are mainstream issues that the rest of the country will have to deal with in due time.
The NY Times endorsement doesn't guarantee a win for Lamont any more than Bill Clinton's appearance guarantees a win for Lieberman. Both sides will need to get their people to the polls, an unprecedented task for an August primary this meaningful. But it does mean that the issues driving the primary will get even more of a hearing than they currently are. These are issues of interest to all the readers of the Times, both locally and nationally. It will be most interesting to read the endorsement in more detail when the link is available, but I think it's safe to say that mainstream opposition to Bush's foreign policy debacles (substituting surprise visits in a war zone for substance) just got turned up a notch. And although we've known it for a while (we read the polls), that's now a mainstream point of view.
TMZ has learned that Mel Gibson went on a rampage when he was arrested Friday on suspicion of drunk driving, hurling religious epithets. TMZ has also learned that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's department had the initial report doctored to keep the real story under wraps.
TMZ has four pages of the original report prepared by the arresting officer in the case, L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy James Mee. According to the report, Gibson became agitated after he was stopped on Pacific Coast Highway and told he was to be detained for drunk driving Friday morning in Malibu. The actor began swearing uncontrollably. Gibson repeatedly said, "My life is f****d." Law enforcement sources say the deputy, worried that Gibson might become violent, told the actor that he was supposed to cuff him but would not, as long as Gibson cooperated. As the two stood next to the hood of the patrol car, the deputy asked Gibson to get inside. Deputy Mee then walked over to the passenger door and opened it. The report says Gibson then said, "I'm not going to get in your car," and bolted to his car. The deputy quickly subdued Gibson, cuffed him and put him inside the patrol car. ............................................. Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, "You mother f****r. I'm going to f*** you." The report also says "Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me."
The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"
The deputy became alarmed as Gibson's tirade escalated, and called ahead for a sergeant to meet them when they arrived at the station. When they arrived, a sergeant began videotaping Gibson, who noticed the camera and then said, "What the f*** do you think you're doing?"
A law enforcement source says Gibson then noticed another female sergeant and yelled, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?"
We're told Gibson took two blood alcohol tests, which were videotaped, and continued saying how "f****d" he was and how he was going to "f***" Deputy Mee.
............................................
Deputy Mee then wrote an eight-page report detailing Gibson's rampage and comments. Sources say the sergeant on duty felt it was too "inflammatory." A lieutenant and captain then got involved and calls were made to Sheriff's headquarters. Sources say Mee was told Gibson's comments would incite a lot of "Jewish hatred," that the situation in Israel was "way too inflammatory." It was mentioned several times that Gibson, who wrote, directed, and produced 2004's "The Passion of the Christ," had incited "anti-Jewish sentiment" and "For a drunk driving arrest, is this really worth all that?"
We're told Deputy Mee was then ordered to write another report, leaving out the incendiary comments and conduct. Sources say Deputy Mee was told the sanitized report would eventually end up in the media and that he could write a supplemental report that contained the redacted information -- a report that would be locked in the watch commander's safe.
..................... Nothing will be sanitized. There was absolutely no favoritism shown to this suspect or any other. When this file is presented to the Los Angeles County District Attorney, it will contain everything. Nothing will be left out."
On Saturday, Gibson released the following statement:
............................................ I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said. Also, I take this opportunity to apologize to the deputies involved for my belligerent behavior. They have always been there for me in my community and indeed probably saved me from myself. ..................................
I've been drunk. I've been in drunken brawls. I have been sober and angry at people who were Jewish.
I cannot imagine any circumstance where those words would come from my mouth. That's pure fucking hate, and it's what he thinks, drunk or sober. That's not something you say when you're angry. That's something you say when you hate people.
Drunk or not, that's part of who he is. He can deny it, but that's who he is in his heart. Because it couldn't come out of his mouth otherwise.
Well, that's the end of his career.
I mean, he could have been caught sucking some guy off in MacArthur Park, people would accept his story. He could have been fucking a 17 year old, people could believe it. He could be screwing multiple hookers in Vegas, ok. Even beating his wife would allow some people to accept him after a period of time.
But not this. Not in Hollywood.
I don't think it's unreasonable for Hollywood's Jewish community to refuse to work with an open Jew hater. I mean, he's hid it well for years, kept it away from the public. But every bigot slips in the end. And this was his slip.
They could pretend that The Passion of the Christ wasn't an anti-semitic screed. They could say they wanted to work with him.
Now, they can't. They've seen the man revealed for who he is.
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
In other words, as Kurtz memorably wrote, "Exterminate all the brutes." And then Podhoretz asks:
If you can't imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?
Why yes, John, I can. Commander Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement would be more than happy to issue such an order. He writes:
It is of tantamount [sic] importance, that each and every one of us as White Patriots be of steel will and determination! I will refer to a quote by a great American NS martyr, Capt. Joseph Tommassi "We must prepare to seize the day". Our Aryan peoples have triumphed throughout history!
A few examples: in Germany we had Adolf Hitler who fought Communism and Jewry (one and the same), in Romania the great Vlad Dracul (who drove the Turks out of his land), in Serbia the great Prince Lazar who repelled the mongrel invaders out of Kosovo, etc.
We are of the Race that drove Genghis Khan and the Huns from Europe, the Race that claimed America, and nearly rid it of the pestilence of the American Indians, the Race that drove the mongrel Mexicans out during the Mexican-American war, and many other glorious accomplishments throughout history!
We have a lot to live up to, as today's White Racial Patriots! ...
Thinking back to what I wrote about being timid, when duty calls. I am not trying to dwell on the issue, I just do not understand the rational [sic]. The will to protect and defend one's own, should be a natural instinct! ...
Whether Movement veteran, or fresh new enlistments, we all must put the collective Racial, and National whole, above self.
An assault on one of us, must be viewed as an assault on all, regardless of Rank, position, group affiliation, etc.
They also have some very groovy desktops John can download for his computer.
Of course, we'd have to persuade Commander Jeff to exterminate young Arabs. He is, after all, a proud anti-Semite but I think that once it's explained to him that Arabs are also not Aryan - and, in fact, Semites - he'll get with the program.
Hat tip to Anonymous in comments, who finds Podhoretz, I'm not kidding here, "insightful."
[UPDATE: Seymour Paine in comments notes that "anti-Semite" was coined specifically to refer to Jews, not *all* folks who speak a Semitic language. He also says that Nazis and Arabs have, historically, been quite friendly. Irregardless and notwithstanding,* once we explain to Commander Jeff why he shouldn't discriminate among kinds of Semites, John Podhoretz will have precisely the kind of American leader he so desperately craves.
Marion couldn't wait to hand Trueblue one of the Brand New "Hug Buttons" picturing Joe Lieberman and Bill Clinton hugging which the Liebermam Campaign debuted today.This Button was created as a way to counter the Now famous "Kiss Button" which inspired the "Kiss Float" which is Follwing the Liebermans Bus tour today.To Everyones amazement THERE IS NO UNION BUG ON THE HUG BUTTON.
Heres a message for John Olsen,The AFL-CIO and every union member in CT:
Joe Lieberman,His Staff and his Campaign just gave you the Biggest F*#K You anyone who runs as a Democrat can. They think so little of you and the entire Labor Movement that having a union Shop make their "Hug Buttons" wasn't important enough to even think about.Your endorsement was the only thing that mattered,not your workers not your families and not the Quality of work union workers guarentee.
PS-Every Dump Joe Bumper sticker and "Kiss Button" has a union Bug. WHY? Because it was that important to us that we made sure of it.
In a campaign of mistakes, this is the biggest mistake imaginable. Every campaign in a union heavy state uses Union shops for ALL lit. Not using a union shop is unimaginable.
How in the fuck could the Lieberman campaign, with their paid staff and DC consultant make a mistake that a local councilman wouldn't. When I did campaigns, the first thing you did was check the lit for the bug. No bug, you didn't use it.
It seems like a small thing, but it's not a mistake a pro makes. Never. In a union state, you use a union shop. ALWAYS.
I will say this: Lieberman is in massive trouble. He's got amateurs working for him. Pure amateurs. They hired people, but it's real late to hire good people. And he didn't hire them.
It's not the thing political reporters notice, but if you've ever worked on a campaign, this is one of the main things you take away. No lit drop goes without a union bug.
Poor Ann Coulter, thinking because Bill Clinton likes to have sex with women, lots of women, that he's a latent homosexual.
I guess she must have seen MASH where the dentist wants to kill himself because he thinks he has Don Juan syndrome.
Jesus Christ, you don't get much crazier than that.
But Coulter is no idiot, however we wish her to be.
In an era where Clinton is the most popular ex-president in some time, calling him a potenital cocksucker is a way to further demonize him. Now, Donny Deutsch, who's usual guest IS a professional cocksucker, of the female variety, may be a good businessman, but he doesn't handle cognitive dissodence all that well. Colbert or Stewart would have told her to shut the fuck up with her crazy talk. He let her prattle on for a few minutes.
If Clinton is gay, even latenly, so is George Clooney, and for that, you can sign me up. Because it means I get to fuck Lucy Liu and a bunch of other hot women.
Maybe it was revenge for the man Coulter jokes or the birth certificate searches, but there was something more to it.
The hard right has a sex-negative agenda and has used Bill Clinton as their whipping boy since 1992. The voters they rely on are scared of sex and would like to go back to a never never land of ignorance and myth, which is why so many abstinance programs are failed exercises in bullshit.
The irony is that one of their democratic allies is Hillary Clinton. She has always been far less comfortable than her husband with sex as a political issue. Now she blathers on about middle grounds on abortion and video games. What do you expect from a woman who wouldn't let her daughter ride a bike a few blocks to the library?
Clinton still doesn't get that the right uses her as the icon for everything they fear. I mean, homosexual slurs against the Clintons have a 15 year history here,mostly directed towards her. Hillary Clinton's sexuality has long been a football, and you can tell that, if nothing else, got to her. Why? Because she is an innately conservative person. While some of the other girls at Wellesley were playing slap and tickle, she was dreaming about her perfect husband. I'm more of a lesbian than Hillary Clinton.
Even if she had those feelings, she's probably more scared of them than Lynne Cheney, no Sisters for her.
So to tie Clinton into the last demonized group was no accident by Crazy Ann, no matter how nuts it seems. Hillary Clinton, who intellectually knows that her enemies have attacked her sexuality at every level, still cannot deal with it politically.
Which makes the Clinton's bizarre alliance with Joe Lieberman all the more perplexing. Lieberman is a liberal in the technical sense, but on social issues, he's far to the right of the Democrats. I know they've been friends for 36 years more or less, but Lieberman was all too comfortable in serving as the pointman on a host of issues.
Lieberman is clearly sex phobic, which is why he launches jerimads against the popular media. When he talks about "violence" in video games, he's really talking about sex and free expression. He doesn't talk about birth control with the same fervor, because, at heart, he's a moralist, and so is Hillary Clinton. They are comfortable in a world of moral certainties.
Only problem is that it bolsters Clinton's enemies.
Instead of backing Lieberman, they should have embraced Lamont with passion and went full bore after Lieberman for his idiocy. Even more than the personal betrayal, which at the time was spun as some act of loyalty, Lieberman's fuddy duddy approach to the modern world is poison to Clinton's further ambitions. Not that Lamont was some perfect candidate, but Hillary Clinton desperately needs to shed the soccer mom approach to politics. No one gives a shit about video games. They're rated, that's it. Leave it alone and tell people to mind their own kids.
Because while Lieberman wears it well, it reads like phony bullshit to most people.
What Hillary Clinton never got is that her enemies want to destroy her. They don't want to merely see her defeated, they think she and her husband are evil and want them banished from American life. Coulter's little rant is about shoving that along. She may have been inept in doing so, but it was no accident. It was about aligning Bill Clinton with America's newest despised group.
Cletus "I heard that Bill Clinton was a dirty cocksucking faggot"
Buford "Yep, saw it on the TV. Is there nothing that sick bastard won't stop at, raping women, now sucking cock. First he runs with the niggers, now the faggots. They oughta cut his dick off".
Hillary Clinton says all the right things about sexuality, but she isn't comfortable with free expression either. And that means she's not aware of how the right is going to demonize her on those issues. Wait until she's hit with the anti-homo offensive, going after her on gay rights and asking again if she's a married lesbian. Because it's coming, and Crazy Annie just sent up the warning flare.
It's a dog whistle attack and after all this time, the Clintons don't get that by sticking close to Lieberman, who is going to be one bitter SOB when he's turned out on his ass, it can only hurt them. Becuase the closer she sticks to a moralistic view of sex and culture, she's alienated from many potential supporters offended at the seeming hypocrisy of her stand.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 28 — The two armored vans left a branch of the Warka Bank on Thursday around noon, loaded with 1.191 billion dinars, or nearly $800,000. Almost immediately, on a busy street near the Baghdad zoo, the drivers spotted an oncoming Iraqi Army convoy, led by a shiny new Humvee. They followed standard procedure and pulled over.
But the convoy stopped, and an officer politely ordered the surprised drivers and guards to lay down their guns while his men searched the vans for bombs.
Within minutes all eight drivers and guards had been handcuffed and locked in the back of one of the vans on a suffocating 120-degree day, the cash had been stolen by the men in the convoy — whoever they were — and the Iraqi banking system marked another day of its slow slide into oblivion.
The only thing atypical about Thursday’s robbery, which was described by bank and Interior Ministry officials, is that most private banks try to avoid using armored vans, because they draw too much attention, and instead toss sacks of cash into ordinary cars for furtive dashes through the streets of Baghdad.
However the cash goes out, it risks being lost in the wash of robbery, kidnapping and intrigue that now plagues the system.
Praised by the United States as a success story as recently as a few months ago, that system has quickly become a wild landscape of clandestine cash runs, huge hauls by robbers dressed as police officers and soldiers, kidnappings of bank executives with ransoms as high as $6 million, American allegations of tie-ins with insurgent financiers, and legitimate customers turned away when they go to pick up their savings and flee the country.
“It is a crisis,” said Wisam K. Jamil, managing director of Iraq’s oldest private bank, the Bank of Baghdad, which lost $1.5 million in a literal case of highway robbery by men wearing police uniforms last December.
Because of that robbery, the bank lost much of its insurance coverage. Even more galling for Mr. Jamil, the insurance policy had a standard disclaimer saying that losses due to acts of war or terrorism were not covered, and as the Warka holdup on Thursday illustrated, no one can say if a theft in Iraq is committed by insurgents, bandits or genuine members of the security forces. So the insurance company has not paid Mr. Jamil’s claim.
The difficulty in moving cash has pushed Iraqi banks into business practices seen in few other places.
On a recent day in the basement of the Iraqi Middle East Investment Bank, Rahim al-Abadie, a bent, gnomelike man who has worked in banking for 54 years, shuffled into the cage next to his little desk and checked 100-pound sacks of cash to be loaded in an unmarked car and sped to its destination, which he declined to disclose. Just one of the bigger sacks held 1 billion dinars (about $650,000) in bank notes, Mr. Abadie explained, chuckling darkly.
They weren't criminals dressed up as the Army.
They were the damn Army and they wanted to get paid.
By JIM RUTENBERG and HELENE COOPER Published: July 29, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 28 — President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said Friday that they would present a plan to end hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah at the United Nations next week as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice headed into an urgent round of weekend meetings in the Middle East to hash out the details.
Facing pressure from Arab and European allies to end the violence, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, at a joint White House appearance, painted the broad outlines of a plan in which an international peacekeeping force would insert itself between the warring sides and help the weak Lebanese military take control of the southern region controlled by Hezbollah.
But aides acknowledged that the hard work of figuring out what Lebanon and Israel would accept, and how an international force would be composed, lay ahead.
Israel wants to weaken Hezbollah and push it well away from the border, and may not be ready to call off its campaign, especially when it has serious doubts that an international force would be strong enough to contain Hezbollah. And Hezbollah, which built its reputation on its willingness to fight Israel, has always rejected calls to disarm, and seems to have a flow of military and financial support from Syria and Iran
Hezbollah has agreed to a cease-fire, even though they don't like the international troops. But I think the Israelis will be disappointed, because Hezbollah will not give anyone a cause to attack them.
As far as disarmament goes, every Israeli bomb makes that less likely.
"If this war is so God damn important, why aren't the Bush twins over there in Iraq helping to fight it?"
I hear this complaint all the time in off-the-record discussions about the Iraq War. It personalizes the war. It cuts to the quick about why this war has lost all credibility.
You can argue all day with a die-hard (no pun intended) Republican about the shifting justifications for the war--the 9/11 connection; Saddam's "gathering" threat; the elusive WMD's; liberating the Iraqi people; the preemption of greater conflict; foreign policy confrontation instead of containment; fighting terrorists "over there" instead of "over here"; promoting democracy and freedom; oil; permanent military bases in the Mideast; finishing the mission whatever the hell it is--but you probably won't make any headway: Blah, blah, blah.
But if someone brings up the 24-year-old twins, Jenna and Barbara Bush, watch people squirm.
Mainstream news sources will occasionally provide updates on the Bush twins. Jenna, who was graduated from the University of Texas in May 2004, has been teaching third-graders English and Spanish at the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School in the D.C. area. Barbara, a 2004 Yale graduate, works in education programming at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City. We sometimes read gossip about parties they've recently attended, along with the color of the cocktail dresses worn on that particular night. You don't, however, hear reporters and national commentators ask the above question (at least not aloud). Why?
I don't think it is an unfair or "cheap shot" question. Or impolite. We've got a war going on. President Bush has billed this war as a noble and supremely necessary cause, rather than a war of choice. Valiant young men and women have trusted the President about the importance of the war. They have responded to his call. They have put their very lives on the line. This war has impacted a lot of families. Jenna and Barbara are able-bodied citizens well within the age of enlistment. Yet they have conspicuously not followed their father's leadership on this urgent life-and-death matter. Why the silence about the twins' not volunteering for military service?
Journalistic protocol deems it out-of-bounds to peer and press into the lives of presidential children while they are minors. But Jenna and Barbara are no longer children. They enjoyed relative privacy throughout their college days, except for some well-publicized drinking incidents. Upon graduation from college, the Washington Post announced that the "kidgloves" treatment was coming off. Yet no one asks Tony Snow the above question (the White House conveniently maintains a strict "no comment" policy on the twins). More important, no one asks Jenna and Barbara the above question.
What would be the excuses? Not their skill-sets? Not their priority at this time? Laura Bush forbids it? I'd like to hear the answers. Yes, teaching public school and programming museum education are worthy pursuits and not to be denigrated. But we're at war, and Jenna and Barbara's father happens to be the Commander-in-Chief. Like it or not, they are public figures in a very public war (compare their tongue-tied detachment with, for instance, the outspoken protests of Dana Olmert, the daughter of Israel's Prime Minister.) Don't Jenna and Barbara owe other young Americans an explanation of some kind? This isn't a "private" matter, to be shoved under the rug. As their father reminds all of us, good American soldiers are dying so that others can live free.
It's beyond spin control and stonewalling. It's a whispered and angry question that just won't go away as this war drags on and on (unless Jenna and Barbara actually enlist):
"If this war is so God damn important, why aren't the Bush twins over there in Iraq helping to fight it?"
A related note: Mary Cheney says (and writes in her book) that 9/11 changed everything, so that she had to support the Republican ticket in 2004, despite its gay-bashing platforms and proclivities. By my calculations, she was, in 2004, still age-eligible for enlistment in the active components of the military (35 years old) and well under the maximum age of enlistment for volunteering in the reserves (39 years old). Talk the talk, walk the walk. Or, was it the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that held her back from serving her country, an ironic twist that resulted in forcing her hand to vote Republican? What goes around, comes around
I wish someone would remind people how other presidents and their children served in combat. There isn't a week without a casuality from the war in my local papers.
This is deadly serious and Bush needs to be asked why no one in his family, not just his kids, has enlisted while other Americans die.
GEORGETOWN, Del. — After her family moved to this small town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich, 39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought up her two children as Jews.
For years, she and her daughter, Samantha, listened to Christian prayers at public school potlucks, award dinners and parent-teacher group meetings, she said. But at Samantha’s high school graduation in June 2004, a minister’s prayer proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth nudged Mrs. Dobrich to act.
“It was as if no matter how much hard work, no matter how good a person you are, the only way you’ll ever be anything is through Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Dobrich said. “He said those words, and I saw Sam’s head snap and her start looking around, like, ‘Where’s my mom? Where’s my mom?’ And all I wanted to do was run up and take her in my arms.”
After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus.
“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.
After receiving several threats, Mrs. Dobrich took her son, Alex, to Wilmington in the fall of 2004, planning to stay until the controversy blew over. It never has.
The Dobriches eventually sued the Indian River School District, challenging what they asserted was the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking financial damages. They have been joined by “the Does,” a family still in the school district who have remained anonymous because of the response against the Dobriches.
Meanwhile, a Muslim family in another school district here in Sussex County has filed suit, alleging proselytizing in the schools and the harassment of their daughters.
The move to Wilmington, the Dobriches said, wrecked them financially, leading them to sell their house and their daughter to drop out of Columbia University.
The dispute here underscores the rising tensions over religion in public schools.
“We don’t have data on the number of lawsuits, but anecdotally, people think it has never been so active — the degree to which these conflicts erupt in schools and the degree to which they are litigated,” said Tom Hutton, a staff lawyer at the National School Boards Association.
More religion probably exists in schools now than in decades because of the role religious conservatives play in politics and the passage of certain education laws over the last 25 years, including the Equal Access Act in 1984, said Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, a research and education group.
“There are communities largely of one faith, and despite all the court rulings and Supreme Court decisions, they continue to promote one faith,” Mr. Haynes said. “They don’t much care what the minority complains about. They’re just convinced that what they are doing is good for kids and what America is all about.”
Dr. Donald G. Hattier, a member of the Indian River school board, said the district had changed many policies in response to Mrs. Dobrich’s initial complaints. But the board unanimously rejected a proposed settlement of the Dobriches’ lawsuit.
“There were a couple of provisions that were unacceptable to the board,” said Jason Gosselin, a lawyer for the board. “The parties are working in good faith to move closer to settlement.”
Until recently, it was safe to assume that everyone in the Indian River district was Christian, said the Rev. Mark Harris, an Episcopal priest at St. Peter’s Church in Lewes.
But much has changed in Sussex County over the last 30 years. The county, in southern Delaware, has resort enclaves like Rehoboth Beach, to which outsiders bring their cash and, often, liberal values. Inland, in the area of Georgetown, the county seat, the land is still a lush patchwork of corn and soybean fields, with a few poultry plants. But developers are turning more fields into tracts of rambling homes. The Hispanic population is booming. There are enough Reform Jews, Muslims and Quakers to set up their own centers and groups, Mr. Harris said.
Mel Gibson was arrested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in Malibu, Calif. early this morning for suspicion of DUI. Bail was set at $5,000.
He was pulled over for speeding in his 2006 Lexus as he was heading eastbound on the Pacific Coast Highway and a Breathalyzer test was administered. The arrest report lists the time of arrest as 2:36AM and the time booked as 4:06AM. Gibson was released at 9:45 a.m.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles Country Sheriff's Department told TMZ, "Mel Gibson was arrested for suspicion of driving under the influence. He was released later this morning. The investigation was still ongoing, just like it would be with any other person."
A rep for Gibson tells TMZ they are "checking into" the matter.
EXCLUSIVE UPDATE: A sheriff's official told TMZ Gibson had a blood alcohol level of .12. The legal limit in the state of California is .08.
Gibson was a bad drunk early in his career, well, Australian, you take your pick. Anyway, he was caught in a hotel room in London with a couple of women. Only problem, he's been married since he was 20.
I mean he has his own church. So maybe he's taken up drinking like a priest
After years of struggling to define their own approach to post-Sept. 11 foreign policy, Democrats seem finally to have hit on one. It's called pandering. In those rare cases when George W. Bush shows genuine sensitivity to America's allies and propounds a broader, more enlightened view of the national interest, Democrats will make him pay. It's jingoism with a liberal face.
The latest example came this week when Democratic senators and House members demanded that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki either retract his criticisms of Israel or forfeit his chance to address Congress. Great idea. Maliki -- who runs a government propped up by U.S. troops -- is desperate to show Iraqis that he is not Washington's puppet. And the United States desperately needs him to succeed because, unless he gains political credibility at home, his government will have no hope of surviving on its own.
Maliki took a small step in that direction this week when he articulated a view of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict quite different from that of the Bush administration. His views were hardly surprising: Iraq is not only a majority-Arab country; it is a majority-Shiite Arab country. And in a democracy, leaders usually reflect public opinion. Maliki's forthright disagreement with the United States was a sign of political strength, one the Bush administration wisely indulged.
But not congressional Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid demanded that Maliki eat his words or be disinvited from addressing Congress. "Your failure to condemn Hezbollah's aggression and recognize Israel's right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East," wrote Reid and fellow Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin and Charles E. Schumer on July 24.
How, exactly, publicly humiliating Maliki and making him look like an American and Israeli stooge would enhance his "leadership" was never explained in the missive. But of course Reid's letter wasn't really about strengthening the Iraqi government at all; that's George W. Bush's problem. It was about appearing more pro-Israel than the White House and thus pandering to Jewish voters.
So, the Democrats should have remained silent on the fact that the US's puppet was really an Hezbollah-supporting Jew Hater?
I guess according ot PNAC-bitch Beinart, that's what Congress should have done.
"Shhhhh, don't tell anyone he's asshole buddies with Nasrallah"
Maliki worked for Hezbollah in the 1980's, when they killed 241 Marines. Remember them? The most Marines killed in a single operation since WWII?
See, Beinart want the war he will not fight in to succeed at all costs, even if we install a rabidly Jew hating goverment in Baghdad, and make no mistake, Iraqis detest Jews. Maliki was doing what he needed to do to survive. But the Dems pointed out who we were supporting, people who would love to see the last Jew turn out the lights and sail away.
Of course it is ridiculous to expect him to denounce Hezbollah and live. If he did, he would die in the Green Zone at the hand of his own people.
But remember, he is backed by Sadr and his Mahdi Army, the people who killed Casey Sheehan and other First Cav troopers in a firefight in 2004.
So PNAC-bitch Beinart, the coward who will not fight, wants us to ignore the kind of people we support in Iraq.
Gnarls Barkley-Free Keane-Is it Any Wonder Nelly Furtado-Promiscious Girl Pearl Jam-Worldwide Suicide Leonard Cohen-Thousand Kisses Deep U2 -The Electric Co/Pride
Arctic Monkeys Kaiser Chiefs KT Tunstall Liz Phair
If I hadn't been looking care fully for it, I might have overlooked the blue-and-white "Blackwell for Governor" poster in the clutter of signs on the Buckeye Road storefronts.
But I found it, tucked in the bottom-left corner of the plate-glass window at Coffeehouse.com, an Internet-and-java joint near East 118th Street.
This is one of Cleveland's most densely populated black neighborhoods, where nearly nine out of 10 African-American voters punch ballots for Democrats only.
What's up with the Blackwell sign? Maybe the Republican candidate has made stealth gains, suggesting that race might trump party loyalty come November.
So I stopped in and asked to speak to the coffee shop owner about the sign.
None of the four men admitted to owning the place. The barista behind the counter was a black man with shoulder-length dreadlocks. He didn't want to tell me his name, but said he is voting for Ken Blackwell.
"How could I not vote for the most qualified black man running for governor?" he asked.
With great prodding, another man who said I should call him John admitted to being the owner, but didn't want his real name in the paper because doing so would be bad for business.
"I've already had one customer come in here and say that as long as we've got that Blackwell sign up, he wouldn't spend any money in my shop," he said.
Sipping on his smoothie, Eric Jones listened to all this with escalating disbelief.
Only a few minutes earlier, the men in the store had been loud and strong in their support for Blackwell's campaign, Eric said.
But now, given an opportunity to share them with a world outside their cozy club, they were mute. They didn't even know their own names.
"I can't believe you," Eric exploded in mock outrage. "Be a man. Be a proud black man. Stand up and say what you believe."
Eric wasn't ashamed to put his name on his politics.
"I'm the only one in this room who doesn't want to see Blackwell elected governor," he said.
"But these brothers are Blackwellians - that's what whey call themselves," he said, shouting over the men's groans. "They won't tell you the truth.
"But let me tell you what's going on here: This is the East Side Blackwell campaign headquarters. They hold secret strategy meetings here to get more black support for their man. Just a minute or two ago, they were hitting me up for a $1,000 campaign contribution."
When I read this, I couldn't stop laughing. They didn't even want to admit that they supported the man. The owner already lost one customer, and I bet after East Side residents saw this, they didn't have to guess who this was.
I think it's safe to say Blackwell isn't popular with black voters. Sure, like the idiot barista, some black folks vote on race. But most people see Blackwell, and they see someone who opposes them.
Which is why they meet in secret and don't want their names in the paper.
Dana Milbank's piece on the "mystery senate candidate" who considered his "R" label a scarlet letter was far less interesting once the subject of the interview was revealed -- Maryland's Michael Steele. Republicans are never in friendly territory in statewide Maryland races, so the piece had none of the potency it might've carried had, say, DeWine been the mystery candidate.
In any case, once Steele's identity was revealed (and it took like 2.5 seconds for that to happen), Steele's campaign claimed it was all a big setup by the Big Bad Washington Post:
In an exclusive interview on WBAL's "The Buzz", Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele says his comments about President Bush and the Republican Party were taken out of context in a story in The Washington Post [...]
Steele said it was an "off the record" meeting with the reporters and the Washington Post is the only paper that did a story on what was said in the meeting.
Except that, oops, there's an email that totally contradicts Steele's CYA maneouver.
Today, the Maryland Democratic Party sent Political Wire a copy of an email between Steele's communications director and Millbank giving approval for use of Steele's quotes and discussing the terms of the story. The email makes clear Steele's campaign knew about the story in advance and was even given the opportunity to approve the quotes in the story.
Hapless. It looks like the WaPo wasn't in the mood to take the blame for Steele's big mouth.
Fuck it. What can I say?
Now I know I promised to put him in blackface again, but come on, he's doing it himself. To pile on would be like beating a puppy for sport.
I mean, what a total lack of character. Hiding behind the WaPo, not discussing issues. Shit, Al Sharpton could beat him for Senate. A debate between the two would be considered child abuse.
LAS VEGAS, July 21 — Gail Sacco pulled green grapes, bread, lunch meat and, of course in this blazing heat, bottles of water from a cardboard box. A dozen homeless people rose from shady spots in the surrounding city park and snatched the handouts from her.
Recipients of Ms. Sacco’s handouts say that they are far from shelters and that they get little public assistance.
Ms. Sacco, an advocate for the homeless, scoffed at a city ordinance that goes into effect Friday making it illegal to offer so much as a biscuit to a poor person in a city park.
Las Vegas, whose homeless population has doubled in the past decade to about 12,000 people in and around the city, joins several other cities across the country that have adopted or considered ordinances limiting the distribution of charitable meals in parks. Most have restricted the time and place of such handouts, hoping to discourage homeless people from congregating and, in the view of officials, ruining efforts to beautify downtowns and neighborhoods.
But the Las Vegas ordinance is believed to be the first to explicitly make it an offense to feed “the indigent.”
The ordinance does not apply to the famous Las Vegas Strip, which lies mostly in unincorporated Clark County, but it demonstrates both the growing pains the city has endured as tourism has boomed, and the steps Las Vegas is taking to regulate where entrenched populations of homeless people can gather. And eat.
“The government here doesn’t care about anybody,” said one homeless woman, Linda Norman, 55, taking a bottle of water and already perspiring in morning heat approaching 100 degrees at Huntridge Circle Park, a manicured, well-watered three-acre patch of green in a residential area near downtown. “We just want to eat.”
Las Vegas officials said the ordinance was not aimed at casual handouts from good Samaritans. Instead, they said it would be enforced against people like Ms. Sacco, whose regular offerings, they said, have lured the homeless to parks and have led to complaints by residents about crime, public drunkenness and litter.
“Families are scared to go to the park,” said Gary Reese, the mayor pro tem and a City Council member who represents the area around Huntridge Circle Park. The city, Mr. Reese added, had just spent $1.7 million in landscaping and other improvements there.
“I don’t think anybody in America wants people to starve to death,” Mr. Reese said. “But if you want to help somebody, people can go to McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken and give them a meal.”
It costs $75 to get a work ID, essential for any decent job in Las Vegas.More than one person has moved there to get a job, only to not have the money for an ID. No ID no job.
DAMASCUS, Syria, July 27 — At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.
Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.
The Saudi royal family and King Abdullah II of Jordan, who were initially more worried about the rising power of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor, are scrambling to distance themselves from Washington.
An outpouring of newspaper columns, cartoons, blogs and public poetry readings have showered praise on Hezbollah while attacking the United States and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for trumpeting American plans for a “new Middle East” that they say has led only to violence and repression.
Even Al Qaeda, run by violent Sunni Muslim extremists normally hostile to all Shiites, has gotten into the act, with its deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, releasing a taped message saying that through its fighting in Iraq, his organization was also trying to liberate Palestine.
Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst in Amman, Jordan, with the International Crisis Group, said, “The Arab-Israeli conflict remains the most potent issue in this part of the world.”
Distinctive changes in tone are audible throughout the Sunni world. This week, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt emphasized his attempts to arrange a cease-fire to protect all sects in Lebanon, while the Jordanian king announced that his country was dispatching medical teams “for the victims of Israeli aggression.” Both countries have peace treaties with Israel.
The Saudi royal court has issued a dire warning that its 2002 peace plan — offering Israel full recognition by all Arab states in exchange for returning to the borders that predated the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — could well perish.
“If the peace option is rejected due to the Israeli arrogance,” it said, “then only the war option remains, and no one knows the repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one, including those whose military power is now tempting them to play with fire.”
The Saudis were putting the West on notice that they would not exert pressure on anyone in the Arab world until Washington did something to halt the destruction of Lebanon, Saudi commentators said.
Look at this building. How many men can you hide, how many mines can you toss around?
A lot of men could die trying to take this one building.
The IDF is facing a brutal dilemma.
They are faced with trying to destroy an enemy with bunkers and tunnels and that can be a costly, brutal business.
......
Although Okinawa was strongly defended by more than 100,000 troops, the Japanese chose not to defend the beaches. The uncontested landings of 01 April were part of the overall Japanese strategy to avoid casualties defending the beach against overwhelming Allied firepower. A system of defense in depth, especially in the southern portion of the island, would permit the 100,000-man-strong Japanese 32nd Army under General Ushijima to fight a protracted battle that would put both the attacking amphibious forces and naval armada at risk. The Japanese dug into caves and tunnels on the high ground away from the beaches in an attempt to negate the Allies' superior sea and air power.
The battle proceeded in four phases: first, the advance to the eastern coast (April 1-4); second, the clearing of the northern part of the island (April 5-18); third, the occupation of the outlying islands (April 10 - June 26); and fourth, the main battle against the dug in elements of the 32nd Army which began on 06 April and did not end until 21 June. Although the first three phases encountered only mild opposition, the final phase proved extremely difficult because the Japanese were well entrenched in and naval gunfire support was ineffective.
..............................
By 19 April soldiers and marines of the US Tenth Army under LGEN Buckner USA were engaged in a fierce battle along a fortified front which represented the outer ring of the Shuri Line. This fighting contrasted dramatically with the unopposed landings and initial rapid advances of the previous weeks. The Shuri defenses were deeply dug into the limestone cliffs and boasted mutually supporting positions as well as a wealth of artillery of various calibers. As the battle dragged on, American casualties mounted. This delay in securing the island caused great consternation among the naval commanders since the fleet of almost 1,600 ships was exposed to heavy enemy air attacks. The most damage from the Japanese attacks came from operation Ten-Go (Heavenly Operation) which employed mass deployment of the fearsome kamikaze.
American losses mounted as soldiers and marines assaulted points on the Shuri line with the deceptive names of Sugar Loaf, Chocolate Drop, Conical Hill, Strawberry Hill, and Sugar Hill. During the course of the battle American forces were informed of two pieces of dramatic news, one tragic and the other joyous. The first was the death of president Franklin Roosevelt on 12 April and the latter the surrender of Nazi Germany on 8 May.
By the end of May monsoon rains which turned contested slopes and roads into a morass exacerbated both the tactical and medical situations. The ground advance began to resemble a World War I battlefield as troops became mired in mud and flooded roads greatly inhibited evacuation of wounded to the rear. Troops lived on a field sodden by rain, part garbage dump and part graveyard. Unburied Japanese bodies decayed, sank in the mud, and became part of a noxious stew. Anyone sliding down the greasy slopes could easily find their pockets full of maggots at the end of the journey.
Heavy pressure on the Shuri Line finally convinced GEN Ushijima to withdraw southward to his final defensive positions on the Kiyamu Peninsula. His troops began moving out on the night of 23 May but were careful to leave behind rear guard elements that continued to slow the American advance. Japanese soldiers too wounded to travel were given lethal injections of morphine or simply left behind to die. By the first week of June, US forces had captured only 465 enemy troops while claiming 62,548 killed. It would take 2 more weeks of hard fighting and an additional 2 weeks of "mopping up " operations pitting explosives and flamethrowers against determined pockets of resistance before the battle would finally be over. The so called "mopping up" fighting between 23 and 29 June netted an additional 9,000 enemy dead and 3,800 captured. Among the Japanese, the incidence of suicide soared during the final days. An examination of enemy dead revealed that, rather than surrender, many had held grenades against their stomachs, ending their personal war in that manner. General Ushijima committed ritual suicide (hara-kiri) on 16 June, convinced that he done his duty in service to the Emperor.
Does the IDF want to do this? Because Hezbollah certainly has them lined up to fight bunker to bunker for weeks, if not months.
The Israelis have never met a competent Arab army and Hezbollah knew this. And instead of running special ops and maping the towns with long range obseration teams, they just assumed that they would roll over Hezbollah like Hamas.
But I think the first time I saw Hezbollah soldiers with helmets, I would have spent a half hour puking. Guerrillas don't use helmets, soldiers do. And Israel should have realized that this was a cat of a different color.
Hezbollah has studied the Japanese, the Vietnamese and the Iranians on how to fortify towns and hide bunkers. This was not just thunk up and done, this took a military mind. For all the hype about the Mossad, they didn't perform their primary function and give the IDF accurate intel on Hezbollah capabilities. When IDF commanders say they were surprised by a network of bunkers in a town they have a million pictures of, someone failed.
A Lebanese border town should hold no secrets for the IDF. The fact that it did, much less the fighting style of Hezbollah shows a fatal level of arrogance on the part of the IDF.
Not one thing Hezbollah did should have been a surprise.
And it was.
Now, they want to shell and bomb buildings designed to withstand this, and even better create rubble. Well, defenders love rubble
General Vasily Chuikov came up with this name to describe a soldier's adaptation to the tactics that led to survival in the Battle of Stalingrad. Graduates stood a chance of surviving one of the most brutal and grinding battles in history; slow learners all died. The Germans called the style of battle Rattenkrieg, or rat war. All told, the battle cost an estimated 1.5 million lives.
................................
Use wreckage to your advantage
Self-propelled artillery (big guns on treads) and, particularly, tanks were key to Nazi Germany's early successes in World War II. They could mount fast-moving, devastating attacks on less agile enemy units, breaking through the opposing lines and encircling the soldiers who manned them. Such tactics worked best in fields and on the open steppe of the western Soviet Union; they were almost useless amid the collapsed walls and blocked roads inside Stalingrad.
When defending against an attack by German armour, Chuikov ordered his troops, stay hidden behind rubble until the enemy tanks are right in front of you. If possible, booby-trap tank routes to seal them off once enemy tanks are already committed to the battle, so they can't move or retreat.
The Soviets learned to attack tanks from above, on building floors higher than their turrets could aim. They blew holes in the walls of cellars for added manouvrability. They threw grenades onto the floors above German defenders, bringing stone ceilings down upon them.
Dig in close to enemy positions
Another of the Germans' major technological advantages was the Luftwaffe, which could swoop in with dozens or hundreds of planes to "soften up" targets with bombs and strafing attacks long before a German infantryman even put his boots on.
Chuikov ordered his soldiers to set up as close to the Germans as possible, sometimes mere yards away, so any German air attack would kill as many Germans as Soviets.
Keep moving
German soldiers' gear -- steel helmets, steel-shod boots -- was heavy; the Wehrmacht depended on vehicles when it needed to move quickly. Chuikov's troops could turn their relative lack of equipment to their advantage by staying on the move at all times, attacking from unexpected angles and denying German guns stationary targets. He also advised his troops to move on all fours most of the time and on their bellies if necessary, both for cover and for stability in the rubble.
Shoot first and constantly
The Soviets had no shortage of ammunition and Chuikov told his troops to use whatever they needed. He issued as many submachine guns as he could get, hoping to get one in the hands of every soldier (instead of into one out of every five or six as had been standard). The Soviets threw grenades into any room, cellar, or rubble-cave of which they were even slightly suspicious, since gratuitous rubble worked to their advantage. Chuikov's "hand-grenade rule" held that no soldier should move without throwing a grenade first, and never move farther at a time than he could throw another one. His troops used flamethrowers without hesitation.
They also attacked at night, when the Luftwaffe was of even less use to the Germans. The Soviets aimed to deny the Germans sleep and comfort, in addition to the tactical advantage.
Forget conventional units
Chuikov dispensed with conventional notions of platoons and companies, creating a unit called a "shock group." One shock group included three sub-units: a storm group, a reinforcement group, and a reserve group, in a structure intended to take advantage of the tactics already described. The storm group had eight to ten soldiers, armed with machine guns, grenades, daggers and shovels (used as axes or clubs as necessary). Its task -- usually starting from a very close position -- was to hit the enemy hard and fast, attacking silently and with no artillery salvo. Once the advantage of surprise was used up, they'd use a flare to signal for the reinforcements to mop up the survivors, and bring in the reserve as necessary.
The key was speed. The entire attack, from first assault to consolidation of the position, was supposed to take only three minutes.
* * *
These days, such urban-warfare tactics seem almost trivial, but World War II was the first war to feature both explosive munitions and large-scale fighting in city streets. In 1942, this was all new. Given the importance of the Battle of Stalingrad in turning the tide, it's no exaggeration to say that the training at Chuikov's Stalingrad Academy of Street-fighting was vital to the Allies' defeat of the Germans in World War II.
Chuikov was also on the scene as the Soviets blasted their way into Berlin in the early spring of 1945, and veterans of the Battle of Stalingrad were instrumental in taking the German capital.
Back in Stalingrad, it wasn't long before the academy metaphor had achieved a certain grim literalness: soldiers on launches crossing the Volga into perhaps the closest thing to Hell yet seen on Earth were given a physical piece of paper with the lessons summarized on it. This was their training, these green officer cadets, these boys drafted from hardscrabble farms in Kazakhstan, these sailors transferred from their ships in Vladivostok. Crawl fast, shoot whenever possible, sneak up and club with a shovel when necessary. Not one step back. Now go.
Don't you think Hezbollah has learned these lessons, and of course, had it amplified by their trainers experience in the Iran-Iraq war?
Israel is in towns and valleys, perfect places for ambushes. Every road sited, mines planned for years, mortars and machineguns covering every approach from a concealed position. The more Israel bombs, the more they shell and rocket, the better Hezbollah's cover gets.
Waiting to Get Blown Up' Some Troops in Baghdad Express Frustration With the War and Their Mission
By Joshua Partlow Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 27, 2006; A01
BAGHDAD, July 26 Army Staff Sgt. Jose Sixtos considered the simple question about morale for more than an hour. But not until his convoy of armored Humvees had finally rumbled back into the Baghdad military base, and the soldiers emptied the ammunition from their machine guns, and passed off the bomb-detecting robot to another patrol, did he turn around in his seat and give his answer.
"Think of what you hate most about your job. Then think of doing what you hate most for five straight hours, every single day, sometimes twice a day, in 120-degree heat," he said. "Then ask how morale is."
Frustrated? "You have no idea," he said.
As President Bush plans to deploy more troops in Baghdad, U.S. soldiers who have been patrolling the capital for months describe a deadly and infuriating mission in which the enemy is elusive and success hard to find. Each day, convoys of Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles leave Forward Operating Base Falcon in southern Baghdad with the goal of stopping violence between warring Iraqi religious sects, training the Iraqi army and police to take over the duty, and reporting back on the availability of basic services for Iraqi civilians.
But some soldiers in the 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, 1st Armored Division -- interviewed over four days on base and on patrols -- say they have grown increasingly disillusioned about their ability to quell the violence and their reason for fighting. The battalion of more than 750 people arrived in Baghdad from Kuwait in March, and since then, six soldiers have been killed and 21 wounded.
"It sucks. Honestly, it just feels like we're driving around waiting to get blown up. That's the most honest answer I could give you," said Spec. Tim Ivey, 28, of San Antonio, a muscular former backup fullback for Baylor University. "You lose a couple friends and it gets hard."
"No one wants to be here, you know, no one is truly enthused about what we do," said Sgt. Christopher Dugger, the squad leader. "We were excited, but then it just wears on you -- there's only so much you can take. Like me, personally, I want to fight in a war like World War II. I want to fight an enemy. And this, out here," he said, motioning around the scorched sand-and-gravel base, the rows of Humvees and barracks, toward the trash-strewn streets of Baghdad outside, "there is no enemy, it's a faceless enemy. He's out there, but he's hiding."
"We're trained as an Army to fight and destroy the enemy and then take over," added Dugger, 26, of Reno, Nev. "But I don't think we're trained enough to push along a country, and that's what we're actually doing out here."
"It's frustrating, but we are definitely a help to these people," he said. "I'm out here with the guys that I know so well, and I couldn't picture myself being anywhere else." 'Never-Ending Battle'
After a five-hour patrol on Saturday through southern Baghdad neighborhoods, soldiers from the 1st Platoon sat on wooden benches in an enclosed porch outside their barracks. Faces flushed and dirty from the grit and a beating sun, they smoked cigarettes and tossed them at a rusted can that said "Butts."
The commanders in Baghdad and the Pentagon are "looking at the big picture all the time, but for us, we don't see no big picture, it's just always another bomb out here," said Spec. Joshua Steffey, 24, of Asheville, N.C. The company's commanding officer, Capt. Douglas A. DiCenzo of Plymouth, N.H., and his gunner, Spec. Robert E. Blair of Ocala, Fla., were killed by a roadside bomb in May.
Steffey said he wished "somebody would explain to us, 'Hey, this is what we're working for.' " With a stream of expletives, he said he could not care less "if Iraq's free" or "if they're a democracy."
"The first time somebody you know dies, the first thing you ask yourself is, 'Well, what did he die for?' "
"At this point, it seems like the war on drugs in America," added Spec. David Fulcher, 22, a medic from Lynchburg, Va., who sat alongside Steffey. "It's like this never-ending battle, like, we find one IED, if we do find it before it hits us, so what? You know it's just like if the cops make a big bust, next week the next higher-up puts more back out there."
"My personal opinion, I don't speak for the rest of anybody, I just speak for me personally, I think civil war is going to happen regardless," Steffey responded. "Maybe this country needs it: One side has to win. Be it Sunni, be it Shiite, one side has to win. It's apparent, these people have made it obvious they can't live in unity."
It was dark now save for one fluorescent light and the cigarette tips glowing red.
"I mean, if you compare the casualty count from this war to, say, World War II, you know obviously it doesn't even compare," Fulcher said. "But World War II, the big picture was clear -- you know you're fighting because somebody was trying to take over the world, basically. This is like, what did we invade here for?"
"How did it become, 'Well, now we have to rebuild this place from the ground up'?" Fulcher asked.
He kept talking. "They say we're here and we've given them freedom, but really what is that? You know, what is freedom? You've got kids here who can't go to school. You've got people here who don't have jobs anymore. You've got people here who don't have power," he said. "You know, so yeah, they've got freedom now, but when they didn't have freedom, everybody had a job."
Steffey got up to leave the porch and go to bed.
"You know, the point is we've lost too many Americans here already, we're committed now. So whatever the [expletive] end-state is, whatever it is, we need to achieve it -- that way they didn't die for nothing," he said. "We're far too deep in this now."
1968 – Collapse of morale Up until 1968 the desertion rate for U.S. troops in Vietnam was still lower than in previous wars. But by 1969 the desertion rate had increased fourfold. This wasn’t limited to Southeast Asia; desertion rates among GIs were on the increase worldwide. For soldiers in the combat zone, insubordination became an important part of avoiding horrible injury or death. As early as mid-1969, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, a rifle company from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division flatly refused - on CBS TV - to advance down a dangerous trail. In the following 12 months the 1st Air Cavalry notched up 35 combat refusals.
The period from 1968 to 1970 was a period of rapid disintegration of morale and widespread rebelliousness within the U.S. military. There were a variety of causes contributing to this development. By this time the war had become vastly unpopular in the general society, anti-war demonstrations were large and to some degree respectable, and prominent politicians were speaking out against the continuation of the war. For a youth entering the military in these years the war was already a questionable proposition, and with the ground war raging and coffins coming home every day very few new recruits were enthusiastic about their situation. In addition, the rising level of black consciousness and the rapidly spreading dope culture both served to alienate new recruits from military authority. Thus, GIs came into uniform in this period with a fairly negative predisposition.
Their experience in the military and in the war transformed this negative pre-disposition into outright hostility. The nature of the war certainly accelerated this disaffection; a seemingly endless ground war against an often invisible enemy, with the mass of people often openly hostile, in support of a government both unpopular and corrupt. The Vietnamese revolutionaries also made attempts to reach out to American GIs, with some impact.
From mild forms of political protest and disobedience of war orders, the resistance among the ground troops grew into a massive and widespread “quasi-mutiny” by 1970 and 1971. Soldiers went on “search and avoid” missions, intentionally skirting clashes with the Vietnamese, and often holding three-day-long pot parties instead of fighting.
Morale is dropping, we already have alleged atrocities, what's next?
This Army is getting to the point where it cannot function in the field. Not enough men, too many of the wrong men replacing them, no sense of progress. And the assclown neo cons want to invade Syria and Iran? Please.
I know about birth pangs, Condi. Oh, do I know. Condi in Diplomatic Disneyland Viewpoint: The Secretary of State tells the Lebanese that the blood they're seeing represents the birth of a brave new order. She's convincing nobody By TONY KARON SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR
Posted Wednesday, Jul. 26, 2006
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice faced a thankless, all but impossible task in trying to sell the Arab world on the U.S. policy of delaying a cease-fire so that the Israeli military can continue its anti-Hizballah campaign. But her case was hardly helped when she explained that the violence that has already killed more than 400 Lebanese and turned more than a half million into refugees represents the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." Phrases like that — and her rejection of the call for an immediate cease-fire on the grounds that "whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East" — carry a revolutionary ring that scares the hell out of America's allies in the region. It was revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao, after all, who rationalized violence and suffering as the wages of progress, in the way a doctor might rationalize surgery — painful, bloody, even risking the life of the patient, but ultimately necessary. Social engineering is not surgery, however, and its victims find little comfort in the homilies of its authors.
Arab leaders, moreover, have learned to be suspicious of Rice's revolutionary ambitions — just a year ago, she spoke of spreading "creative chaos" in the region. Iraq, after all, is Exhibit A of the Bush Administration's "New Middle East," and it's a bloody mess that is growing worse by the day. Now, for Act 2, the Arabs are being told to sit quietly while Israel tears Lebanon apart, after months of watching it slowly throttle Gaza through a U.S.-backed economic blockade, and then bomb it for weeks on end. Hardly surprising that the Arabs — from the U.S.-backed autocrats to the beleaguered liberal democrats and the rising Islamists — see little to cheer in the Bush Administration's "new Middle East."
Rice's midguided revolutionary rhetoric is only one of the mistakes the Secretary of State made on her ill-fated mission to the MIdeast.
This is insane. This kind of crap led to Trotsky's exile. No one wants their soldiers to die in "creative chaos" or what we call a fuck up.
Under the heading “Butt Out Markos,” clueless Andy highlights an email from an equally clueless reader:
Reading the interview with Kos made me want to throw up. As a Connecticut native (and Lieberman supporter), I wonder where he gets off trying to play God in our elections. He says, “I don’t think Joe Lieberman would have anything to worry about had he tended to his constituents back home. His job is to represent the people of Connecticut.” What kind of view of Connecticut’s politics does he think he has from San Francisco, exactly? Representing “the people of Connecticut” is exactly what Lieberman has been doing, which is why he is crushing Lamont and the GOP candidate in a 3-way general election with over 50% of the vote. What Kos wants, of course, is for Lieberman to represent his vision of what the Democratic Party should be. He goes on to say that Lieberman would not be abiding “by the democratic will of the people of Connecticut” if he loses the primary and wins the general election. Right, because “people of Connecticut” = “20% of Connecticut’s registered Democrats who turn out for the closed primary in the middle of the summer.” Spare me.
A couple of thoughts about this.
To start off: This isn’t “playing God.” Playing God involves humanoid creatures stitched together from body parts stolen from the cemetery, towers on craggy peaks, and lightning storms late at night. Oh yes, and near hysterical cries of “IT’S ALIVE!”
This is just, you know, politics.
Sure, Markos and Atrios and Jane Hamsher and other out-of-staters have been supporting Lamont’s run (along with quite a few Connecticut bloggers). So what? I mean, is anyone really so naive as to believe that Senate races are purely local affairs? The 100 individuals in the U.S. Senate have a huge impact on the lives of everyone in the country, not just their own constituents. Joe Lieberman’s backers certainly understand this — 80% of his campaign contributions come from out of state.
(Let me reiterate that for the slower-witted among us, such as Andy’s correspondent: EIGHTY PERCENT OF JOE LIEBERMAN’S CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS COME FROM OUT OF STATE.)
Also, the last I checked, Bill Clinton — who came up and stumped for Lieberman the other day — is not himself a resident of the state of Connecticut.
But opposition to Lieberman runs deeper than some out-of-state bloggers. Drive around this state, Lamont yard signs seem to outnumber those of Lieberman by maybe twenty to one. You see them everywhere, even hanging from clotheslines:
And I’m second-hand sourcing this one, but according to a friend-of-a-friend who is deeply involved in local party politics, resentment of Joe within the Democratic machine here runs deep and long. Joe’s just annoyed too many people over the years, and there’s apparently a sense among local politicos that he’s spent too much time in DC sucking up to the Bushies the last few years, and far too little at home. (In other words, as Markos correctly notes, he hasn’t been tending to his constituents.)
This could all be nonsense, of course. But if Lieberman loses on August 8, watch and see if there’s not a sudden and enthusiastic outpouring of support for Lamont from local Democrats who have been forced to bite their tongues up to now.
I know that this is contrary to the official media narrative of the moment, but Lamont’s unexpectedly strong showing has a lot more to do with Connecticut Democrats being tired of Joe, and finally having a credible alternative, than it has to do with a handful of out of state bloggers.
One last thing: you hear a lot from lazy media types about how very popular Joe is here in Connecticut. Well, here’s a small reality check: in the 2004 Super Tuesday presidential primary in Connecticut, John Kerry got 58% of the vote. John Edwards came in second with a respectable 24%.
Joe Lieberman, meanwhile, came in third with five percent of the vote, here in the state in which he is so very popular.
(As for Lieberman “crushing” Lamont in a three-way race, check out these numbers from a 7/20 Rasmussen poll of likely voters: Lieberman 40, Lamont 40, Schlesinger 13. I have no idea how a three-way race would really play out, of course, but if I were Lieberman I wouldn’t start planning the victory celebration quite yet.)
Tom points out the obvious, that this is a home grown rebellion like the 1919-1922 Irish fight for independence. Sure, Kos and a few other people have pitched in on the ground, but the fact is that the locals are pissed and they get to vote. We don't.
If Lamont didn't have massive local support, then he wouldn't have a chance of beating an entrenched Senator.
And that letter writer is an asshole. Everyone can vote. If they don't vote for Commander Joe, then he should retire with dignity at the end of the year. Not try to take another bite of the Apple. It's called Democracy and if you don't like it, Cuba isn't going anywhere. Joe Lieberman is for Joe Lieberman, not Connecticut and not the Democratic Party.
Yeah, when I was sucking Bill Clinton off, I always thought he wanted a guy, because I don't have any curves or any obvious femnine appeal. I'm a gamin waif, almost boyish.
You can only bash 9/11 widows for so long before your book starts slip-sliding down the charts. Solution: Call Bill Clinton gay. A source from “The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch” handed us this transcript from tonight’s 10 pm ET show, during which Deutsch notes that Coulter was talking about Bill Clinton off the air and goads her into repeating what she said.
Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.
DEUTSCH: OK, I think you need to say that again. That Bill Clinton, you think on some level, has — is a latent homosexual, is that what you’re saying? Ms. COULTER: Yeah.
The rest of this history-changing exchange is below the fold.
DEUTSCH: Before we’re off the air, you were talking about Bill Clinton. Is there anything you want to say about Clinton? No?
Ms. ANN COULTER: No.
DEUTSCH: OK. All right. Did you find him attractive? Was that what it was?
Ms. COULTER: No!
DEUTSCH: You don’t find him attractive?
Ms. COULTER: No. OK, fine, I’ll say it on air.
DEUTSCH: Most women find him attractive.
Ms. COULTER: No.
DEUTSCH: OK, say it on air.
Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.
DEUTSCH: OK, I think you need to say that again. That Bill Clinton, you think on some level, has — is a latent homosexual, is that what you’re saying? Ms. COULTER: Yeah. I mean, not sort of just completely anonymous — I don’t know if you read the Starr report, the rest of us were glued to it, I have many passages memorized. No, there was more plot and dialogue in a porno movie.
The conversation swings a bit before Deutsch moves it back to Big Gay Bill.
DEUTSCH: I’m not paying any attention. I’m still stuck on Bill Clinton. Don’t — now, isn’t that an example of mean-spirted? Isn’t that just a mean-spirited low blow? No pun intended.
Ms. COULTER: No. Which part of what I said?
DEUTSCH: I think this…
Ms. COULTER: Well, you can read high crimes and misdemeanors if he wants some low blows.
DEUTSCH: OK. No, no. Here’s a — here’s a president of the United States…
Ms. COULTER: There’s merely a comment.
DEUTSCH: …a former president of the United States, and just saying, `You know what? I think he has latent homosexual tendencies.’
Ms. COULTER: No. I think anyone with that level of promiscuity where, you know, you — I mean, he didn’t know Monica’s name until their sixth sexual encounter. There is something that is — that is of the bathhouse about that.
DEUTSCH: But what is the homosexual — that’s — you could say somebody who maybe doesn’t celebrate women the way he should or just is that he’s a hound dog?
Ms. COULTER: No. It’s just random, is this obsession with his…
DEUTSCH: But where’s the — but where’s the homosexual part of that? I’m — once again, I’m speechless here.
Ms. COULTER: It’s reminiscent of a bathhouse. It’s just this obsession with your own — with your own essence.
DEUTSCH: But why is that homosexual? You could say narcissistic.
Ms. COULTER: Right.
DEUTSCH: You could say nymphomaniac. Ms. COULTER: Well, there is something narcissistic about homosexuality. Right? Because you’re in love with someone who looks like you. I’m not breaking new territory here, why are you looking at me like that?
AP Photo/David Guttenfelder) Israeli troops wave captured Hezbollah and Lebanese national flags as they cross the border into Lebanon Thursday July 27, 2006.
AVIVIM, Israel - The deadly fight began before dawn Wednesday, as Israel's famed Golani Brigade slipped among the apartment blocks on the edge of Bint Jbail.
Among the nation's most elite unit, the Golani had been chosen to clear out the last Hezbollah fighters from a deserted city of 20,000. Israeli forces had controlled the hills around the town for days, but their intelligence services believed that as many as 50 fighters remained, hiding in basements, waiting. Military spokesmen said they were thought to be preparing a final, glorious attack.
"They weren't looking to survive," said Israeli Capt. Doron Spielman.
Still, the Israelis weren't ready for what hit them. As they entered a manmade canyon, gunfire rained down from the ridge and from the upper stories of empty apartment buildings. Mortar rounds poured in. Closer to the ground, Hezbollah fighters launched rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles. It would later be described as a hornets' nest.
"Overnight, the Hezbollah strength had at least doubled, and there were perhaps as many as 150," said Maj. Zvika Golan. "The attack came from all sides."
In the first minutes of the battle, at least eight Israeli soldiers were killed. Many more were wounded. Israeli officials said it was an hour before others were able to start evacuating the dead and wounded because the barrage was so fierce.
In fact, Golan said it was an hour before the brigade figured out where the fire was coming from and could return fire.
The deaths of the eight soldiers and that of another soldier in a town nearby made Wednesday the deadliest day of the two-week-old war for the Israeli military.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Mitch Pilcer called the attack "highly coordinated. Rockets, gunfire, mortars, they all began at once."
He said Israeli soldiers had to move their dead and wounded about a mile away from the fighting so that helicopters could land safely and evacuate them.
Hezbollah has trained for this, they have trained to take on the IDF in enclosed spaces and that tunnel network is out of Cu Chi. The IDF has no clue what they're facing.
By KRISTEN WYATT, Associated Press Writer Wed Jul 26, 7:18 PM ET
ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Republican Senate candidate Michael Steele on Wednesday called President Bush his "homeboy," reversed course on having the president campaign for him and said he was joking when he described his Republican affiliation as a scarlet letter.
The Maryland lieutenant governor, under fire for his comments, told WBAL radio that his remarks were supposed to be off the record with a handful of reporters. Instead, Steele's campaign confirmed Tuesday that he was the unnamed Senate candidate who had assailed the Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress in a story in The Washington Post.
"I've been quoted as calling the president my homeboy, you know. And that's how I feel. ... It's a term of affection and respect for his leadership of our country in a difficult time," Steele, who is black, said in the radio interview. ...................
Steele also said he probably wouldn't want Bush campaigning for him in Maryland and that he considers his party affiliation a scarlet letter. The White House said Wednesday that Bush still is backing Steele in his Senate race.
Steele said Wednesday: "If the president wanted to come and help me in Maryland, he is more than welcome, because I'm not going to turn my back on a friend. I'm not gonna do that."
In the radio interview, Steele said he has been campaigning and traveling, and in the process getting a different perspective.
"We want to be very, very clear that I'm not trying to 'dis' the president. I'm not trying to distance myself from the president. I'm trying to show those lines where, you know what, I have a different perspective," he said.
Asked about the scarlet letter remark, Steele said: "So I was making a joke about the fact that in this political climate, in Maryland, being a Republican is like wearing a scarlet letter. That's all it is."
At the White House, Bush spokesman Tony Snow said the president understands what politics is about, "and he wants Michael Steele to be elected as senator." Snow declined to say how the president responded when told what Steele had said. "I could, but I won't," Snow said. But he remarked dryly, "I think the comments have come to his attention."
Steele also told the listeners of "The Chip Franklin Show" that he made positive comments about Bush during the meeting that weren't reported, noting that unemployment among blacks is down and black homeownership is up.
He also said his independence makes him best suited for the job.
"The president doesn't want a sycophant in the United States Senate. He wants an honest broker for the people of Maryland. He doesn't want a 'yes' man. He wants someone who's going to be genuine in his approach to solving the problems. And that's me," Steele said.
In Maryland, Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich said Wednesday that Steele's independent streak makes him a good candidate.
"He speaks his mind. He's always going to speak his mind, which is why we have such a strong friendship," said Ehrlich, who faces a tough re-election this November. He added, "He's running a great campaign."
Asked whether he agreed with Steele, Ehrlich said, "I'm not going to get into any of that."
Oh Jesus.
This is just embarassing
He got talked to, quickly.
I can guess how Bush reacted
"Karl, you get that black motherfucker on the phone and tell him what be better do to get another fucking dime from us. Fuck him. What does he know, he's a fucking Lt. Gov."
But this just shows how little character Steele has. He's just an embarssment, not just to the race, but to politics. Mfume or Cardin would eat him alive in a debate.
John Lei for The New York Times Start with protein, like chicken. Then add a little crunch — lettuce is a favorite. Then sprinkle crumbled cheese. Finally, add salsa for another layer of flavor.
YOU may never have had a really terrific taco, especially if you live on the East Coast. There are a lot of tacos around, certainly, and many of them can be satisfying enough. But the genuine article is often hard to come by — except in Mexico, on the West Coast and in the Southwest, where taco passion runs deep. And when the Westerners travel east, they frequently fall into despair.
Skirt steak tacos in corn tortillas are a far cry from supermarket taco-in-a-box kits.
They sit around over coffee or tequila, complaining, sharing tips on where they heard there might be a good taco hiding.
Just about anything can be called a taco, which essentially means “sandwich.” You take a tortilla and you put some stuff in it and you eat it; that’s a taco. (If you roll the tortilla, it’s a burrito, which appears to have been created in the American Southwest; if you layer food on top of it, it’s an enchilada; if you crisp it up and use it as a kind of plate, it’s a tostada; if you cut it into pieces and bake or fry it, it’s a chip; and so on.) But taco aficionados have a particular taste, a particular feel in mind. It’s about the ingredients, as high quality and as fresh as possible.
The good news is that without too much effort you can, believe it or not, create an admirable taco at home. What that means is not crisp-fried tortillas loaded with some weird ground beef mixture, lettuce and rice, but corn tortillas with some spicy slivered pork, grilled beef or maybe fish or chicken.
Turkey would probably be most traditional; the native Americans of what is now Mexico not only hybridized corn as we know it but also raised turkeys.
The best tacos start with corn tortillas; flour is a recent adaptation and, while it is not always inappropriate or scorned, there is nothing like a corn tortilla. These are made from the same base as tamales, a slurry of kernels that have been treated with lime (calcium hydroxide, not the fruit) and then cooked and ground into a dough. At that point they are pressed into tortillas of many sizes, at one time by hand and now usually by machine. (Quite popular in both Mexico and Southern California are those that are just three inches across; you can eat 10 of these at a sitting.)
........................
More commonly, a good taco is loaded with several components: something crunchy (lettuce or cabbage usually, but chopped onion or salted radish are also good); the protein; some moisture — crema, sour cream or guacamole will do nicely; and maybe cheese. Many people add salsa for brightness as well.
To make tacos for a crowd, you can’t do better than to begin with slow-roasted pork, called carnitas. If you start with a piece of shoulder (especially from a well-raised pig), you won’t go wrong; the high fat content makes it self-basting, and almost any combination of spices and heat will produce something delicious. Slow, indirect grilling is ideal, but you don’t lose much by cooking the pork in the oven, using moderate heat.
Chicken thighs — again, from a good chicken rather than a super-mass-produced one — are another good option, and can be quickly simmered in a flavorful braising liquid that will turn them super-tender and leave them quite moist. Here again, the seasonings can be varied as you like. I see the spice mixtures here as suggestions rather than ironclad recipes to follow.
Then there is carne asada, which means “grilled meat,” which in turn means pretty much anything. But skirt steak is what you most often see made into carne asada (and in many Los Angeles supermarkets, skirt steak is actually called carne asada). Because of its high fat content, it’s perfect here. Rub it with a few spices, grill it for a few minutes and pile it into tortillas with a couple of other ingredients to make a legitimate and near-perfect taco.
We can now get real tacos in New York. I live up the block from a place which makes kick ass tacos. Right off the spit and covered in chilies. Real tacos are the shit.
If you don't know who this is, go read some history. Please
Cliff May, in a recent post, tried to equate blogging with walking point in Iraq.
Which is why I laugh when people worry about the right taking to the streets. People like May are heroes with words, not deeds.
But he said something which annoyed me to no end, which was the comparison of the American right to Churchill and that was insane.
It is the total rewriting of history.
So let's make some corrections.
Churchill was widely mistrusted by both right and left in the mid-1930's. He had switched parties too often for the right and his breaking of the 1926 General Strike made him an enemy of Labour.
So the idea that Churchill was widely heeded in the 30's is wrong. He had a string of failures behind him, from Gallipoli to the general strike. In 1940, he was appointed First Lord of the Admirality, the job he had held for the early part of the First World War. He had also, to the utter irritation of the King, supported, Edward VII VIII in his abdication struggle.
So when he came to government in 1940, it was unclear who would be the next Prime Minister, the appeaser Lord Halifax or Churchill. It was Labour who made it clear that they wouldn't serve in a Halifax government.
What May so convienently forgets is that the opposition to Churchil came from the right. The Labour left had learned from Spain that Hitler was not going to be stopped. It wasn't the loony right, like Mosley, who was cooling his heels in jail, but the respectable right like Lloyd George and Halifax, who were willing to deal with Hitler. People like Lindburgh and Nye in the US, the right, some of who admired Hitler, some of whom, like Joe Kennedy, thought it was the way of the future and far better than communism.
If anyone deserves credit for getting Churchill into the war cabinet and to PM, it is Bevan and Attlee, the Labour leaders. They were the ones who made it clear Halifax was unacceptable They knew Churchill wasn't going to make a deal with Hitler, who he openly despised.
For May and people on the American right , they need to deify Churchill to cover up their own sins. People on the right opposed Churchill and sought peace with Hitler. Joe Kennedy's cowardice and Charles Lindburgh's anti-semitism was only the tip of the iceberg. The American right's love affair with Nazism lasted past WWII and into slandering the soldiers who survived Malmedy and the Army prosecutors of the killers.
So of course they embrace Churchill, who fought the appeasement right even at the cost of being exiled from government.
Churchill was unpopular because he didn't accept appeasement as a strategy as the right did. It was Labour and Churchill who stood against the real threat to the west, not finding a way to accomodate it.
Now, I know May and the rest of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders want to think of themselves as mini-Churchills, fighting the good fight. Instead, they're more like mini-Joe Kennedys, personal cowards, embracing failure and defeat of American values.
After months of fevered lobbying and bitter debate, the Chicago City Council passed a ground-breaking ordinance yesterday requiring “big box” stores, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, to pay a minimum wage of $10 an hour by 2010, along with at least $3 an hour worth of benefits.
The ordinance, imposing the requirement on stores that occupy more than 90,000 square feet and are part of companies grossing more than $1 billion annually, would be the first in the country to single out large retailers for wage rules.
A gallery packed with supporters of the bill broke into cheers as the measure passed, by a vote of 35 to 14, after four hours of intense speeches and debate.
“This is a great day for the working men and women of Chicago,” said Alderman Joseph A. Moore, the measure’s chief sponsor. Mr. Moore said he had had inquiries about the ordinance from officials in several other cities.
An Illinois retailers’ group said it would challenge the measure in court, and Wal-Mart’s response was swift and blunt.
“It’s sad — this puts politics ahead of working men and women,” John Simley, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said in a telephone interview. “It means that Chicago is closed to business.”
Wal-Mart will still open its nearly completed branch on Chicago’s West Side this September — the company’s first store in the city — but any future plans “will likely change,” Mr. Simley said.
In arguing that Wal-Mart and other companies can easily afford to meet the new standards, proponents of the measure pointed to Costco, which says it already pays at least $10 an hour plus benefits to starting workers around the country.
In existing stores in the Chicago area, Wal-Mart pays entry-level wages of about $7.25 an hour but its average pay is $11 an hour, a company spokesman told The Chicago Tribune. The company has not revealed details of its benefits.
With this ordinance, Chicago has opened a contentious front in the growing national movement, led by labor and poverty groups, to raise the incomes of bottom-rung workers through local minimum wage and “living wage” legislation. Some economists say such measures will only stifle development and deprive consumers of access to cheap goods, but many poverty experts say that local efforts elsewhere to raise wages have not choked off growth and that the expanding, low-paying retail sector can be safely pressed to raise pay.
“We’re very confident that retailers want and need to be in Chicago, and the question for the city is what kinds of jobs they will bring,” said Annette Bernhardt of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, which helped to draft the Chicago bill and has done economic studies of its likely impact.
The Illinois Retail Merchants Association condemned the measure as likely to hamper job creation and a form of illegal discrimination, and said it would challenge it in court.
The measure was opposed by Mayor Richard M. Daley, who said it could impede growth and tax revenues. He did not say if he would veto the ordinance, but he would have to persuade two aldermen to switch their votes to avoid an override.
Walmart bought up a bunch of ministers and sold them on the job creation bullshit. Now, people are wondering how you live in Chicago on $7.25 an hour, because you can't.
Walmart is being targeted because it is a shitty corporate citizen.It treats its workers poorly. Walmart hasn't come to New York because the unions made it clear they would run a unionization drive at any store they built.
When people do case studies about Walmart in the future, it's inability to adapt to the demands of urban America will be it's downfall.
Strickland far ahead, early poll indicates Democrat strong across board; Brown maintains 8-point edge over DeWine in Senate race Sunday, July 23, 2006 Darrel Rowland THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Democrat Ted Strickland has surged to a surprising lead of 20 percentage points in the first Dispatch Poll on Ohio’s Nov. 7 race for governor.
Meanwhile, Democrat Sherrod Brown holds an 8-point edge in his bid to unseat two-term Republican Sen. Mike DeWine.
Strickland’s 47-to-27 advantage over GOP rival J. Kenneth Blackwell is fueled by a more than 3-to-1 lead among independent voters, combined with Blackwell’s inability to sell himself to Ohio Republicans.
"I kind of feel like the Republican Party has run the state government like an old boys club for a long time" and it is time for a change, said poll participant Stuart Hinnefeld, 53, a federal worker from the Cincinnati area who backs De-Wine but not Blackwell.
Respondent Barbara Wardlow, a 70-year-old Republican from Clarksville near Cincinnati, said she’s never voted for a Democrat, but that may change this fall.
She said she doesn’t like Blackwell but wants to learn more about Strickland before deciding.
Republicans’ tepid response to Blackwell, despite the secretary of state’s comfortable victory in the May 2 primary, shows up in several ways:
• Overall, 61 percent of Republicans are backing Blackwell, compared with the 81 percent support Strickland is receiving from Democrats.
• Just 53 percent of the respondents who said they voted for President Bush in 2004 are lining up behind Blackwell. There are 28 percent who remain undecided, but 18 percent are ready to vote for Strickland. Less than a majority of those who said they voted for Republican Gov. Bob Taft four years ago want Blackwell in the office. Taft voters are split 46 to 28 between Blackwell and Strickland. Strickland is winning the battle among those who said they voted for Democrat Tim Hagan in 2002 by 81 to 3.
Blackwell’s campaign, of course, is not without means to turn the race around:
• Despite Strickland’s impressive lead, his percentage still falls short of a majority. Almost 1 in 4 respondents remain undecided. Since the congressman from Lisbon is still relatively unknown in much of the Buckeye State, he could be vulnerable to an aggressive GOP campaign to define him as out of touch with Ohioans’ values.
• It’s still early, with more than 100 days before the election. Ohioans have yet to see the gubernatorial campaigns’ fall TV ads, which often are influential. A personal appeal from Bush — already coming to Ohio for an Aug. 2 Blackwell fundraiser near Cleveland — could push many of the president’s supporters into Blackwell’s camp. A series of debates this fall also could change many minds.
• The Ohio Republican Party is a proven master at raising money and getting out the vote. It’s been 20 years since they lost a governor’s race and 14 since they lost a statewide nonjudicial contest of any kind.
Still, many key factors are out of Blackwell’s control. Perhaps foremost is that 2006 appears to be shaping up as a Democratic year, with scandals in GOP-controlled state and federal government, an unpopular president, seemingly unending Middle East violence, high gas prices, etc. A somewhat higher than normal percentage of Democrats answered this poll, compared with other Dispatch surveys in recent years.
Ohio voters could receive visible reminders of the state scandals just before going to the polls. A federal trial is set for late September of two brokers involved with the scandals at the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. A state trial of former coin dealer and GOP moneyman Thomas W. Noe is scheduled for October and could last through Election Day.
The mail poll of 1,654 randomly selected registered Ohio voters was conducted July 11 through Thursday. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
The scandals were on the minds of many who took part in the poll.
"Taft and his Republican Party have pretty much ruined the state of Ohio, and it’s time for a Democrat to see if they can fix what has been done," said independent Jenna Justen-Green of Brunswick, a sergeant in the Army National Guard who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
But Justen-Green, 32, whose husband is still in Iraq, is less certain about the Senate race. She said she is leaning toward Brown, a Democratic congressman from Avon, because "this country needs something other than Republicans right now."
Oh, give me a fucking break. White Republicans are running from Blackwell as fast as they can. Partly because he's black, partly because the Ohio GOP is corrupt. But when you factor in the Bradley effect, Blackwell is going to lose in a landslide.
The woman who has been a lifelong Republican suddenly "doesn't like Blackwell", another is supporting DeWine, but "not Blackwell".
At every measure, Blackwell gets far less support than DeWine or any former GOP candidate. Why? He's a stone wingnut. He's a party insider. He's loyal to Bush.
Gee, I wonder what could be driving so many loyal Republicans away from Blackman, Blackwell?
This is from a letter Senator Barbara Boxer sent to Democracy For America members.
Dear Chris,
Thank you for writing to me about the hotly contested Connecticut primary for Senate.
I am traveling to many states throughout the summer and fall to help Democrats take back the Senate and House. I started yesterday morning at a campaign stop for Senator Menendez and then made appearances for Joe Lieberman in Connecticut before he left for a Bill Clinton rally.
So why did I go to Connecticut? When Joe asked me to tell his constituents about our work together on the environment and choice, I told him I would.
I realize this decision has deeply disappointed you. I completely understand your position and only hope that you will come to understand mine.
For 14 years, Joe Lieberman and I have shared an alliance on a range of progressive issues, especially two that are central to my public service -- the environment and choice.
We have worked side by side on the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. When Bill Clinton was President, the stakes weren't nearly as high. But within hours of President Bush taking office, the environment was under attack.
Believe me, it has not been easy to fight the Bush Administration and the Republicans on this committee who try to undermine the environment, and its supporters, at every turn.
I know that's not news to you. But what you might not know about is the critical role that Joe has played in this battle.
The fact is, on every single fight I have waged on that committee -- from arsenic in the water, to air pollution, to pesticide testing on infants and children, to global warming, to Superfund and much more -- Joe has been a stalwart partner and leader.
Joe was the first author of legislation to permanently protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He was one of the first Senators to try to tackle the global warming challenge. The Republicans laughed at his efforts and refused to admit that we were right on this issue. But Joe was undeterred.
And it's the same with women's rights, especially choice. Each and every time a woman's right to choose has come to the Senate floor -- including late term emergency abortions -- I've had a reliable partner in Joe.
He is one of a small handful of Senators who has joined with me both times I have introduced the Freedom of Choice Act, the most strongly pro-choice piece of legislation in the U.S. Senate.
Because of his long record on choice and other important progressive issues, Joe has won the endorsement of organizations such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL, AFL-CIO, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Human Rights Campaign.
Of course, as you rightly point out, Joe and I don't agree on everything. And nothing has deeply disappointed me more than our complete disagreement on the Iraq War.
The fact is, I disagree with many of my usual allies on the war since my bill to redeploy troops out of Iraq by the end of THIS year is the toughest redeployment bill out there. As far as I'm concerned, I will stand alone to end this war.
Joe and I have virtually no common ground on Iraq except for one thing -- we have teamed up to provide comprehensive mental health care for our troops. Our amendment will ensure that our soldiers will not be sent into combat if they have mental health problems, including post traumatic stress, and that they will be able to get mental health help within 72 hours if they need it.
Again, this may sound easy, but the truth is, we had to work very hard to get our mental health amendment to pass the Senate, which it did.
I do not minimize the differences I have on the war with Joe -- or any of my colleagues -- but as I said, I also have a 14-year alliance on other progressive issues that are important to us, to California, and our country.
I understand that you disagree vehemently with my decision, as is your right. But, on August 8, the Democrats of Connecticut will make their voices heard on Joe's candidacy, and I will have deep respect for their decision.
Until then, I only hope that you will weigh our differences about this primary campaign against everything that ties us together, and please know that I will continue to work as hard as I can to earn your trust and support.
Best,
Barbara Boxer
Haven't we seen this kind of thing before. That pained e-mail from your friend justifying their stupidity.
Amy,
Sorry I haven't gotten back to you after standing you up last week, but Joe needed me.
I know you don't like or trust him, especially after he cheated on me with that Georgina wench and talked bad about me, but he's about to lose his job. It seems he pissed off the bosses and they were going to bring in someone else for his job.
You know how long he's been there, how hard he's worked. Just because the CEO of that other company kissed him in public and his repeated criticism of our company, I couldn't just let Joe go out that way, it wouldn't be right.
It's not like I love Joe any more, but I couldn't let him go out that way.
He's been in my life for so long and done me so many favors, that I couldn't imagine letting him just get run from the company like a dog. Not like that. I had to stick up for him one more time. I warned him this would happen, I warned him this would be the result of his actions, but he didn't believe me. Now it's here and I just can't walk away from him like that bitch Hillary. I would never do that to anyone. When I needed help, Joe was there. Now, I know why people are pissed at him, but 14 years is a long time. You just can't let go that easily.
And Hillary has been all over him, constantly doing shit with him, and when he needs her most, she's invisible. I told him about her. I told him.
Amy, I know I'm stupid, I know I let my heart think instead of my head, but you love who you love, even if they don't deserve it.
Yes, I know Joe is a bastard and an asshole, but when I needed someone to help me, he did. Oh and you know he was the best when it counted (wink, wink).
I know I could have never married him, but he's still a friend. Even when wrong. And you don't leave friends hanging, even if some people think they deserve it.
by Matt Stoller, Wed Jul 26, 2006 at 01:38:25 PM EST
Apparently, Bill Clinton's face is going to be all over the airwaves in Connecticut. And Lieberman's field campaign is ramping up, big time.
His campaign is currently producing a TV commercial from video shot at yesterday's rally with Bill Clinton but his campaign has pulled back on TV ads this week.
"We're going to have money on TV but we're also going to have money in other areas of voter contact, including door to door canvassing and turning people out to vote," says Sean Smith, Lieberman Campaign Manager.
The increase in staff is very noticeable at Lieberman's Rocky Hill headquarters. Lieberman now has twice as many paid campaign staff as Ned Lamont.
This is now a fight between whether Lieberman can lie and snooker enough reporters to reprint his lies, or whether Connecticut voters will have the opportunity to vote on Joe Lieberman's war. The whole Democratic machine from DC is helping Lieberman, including ex-President Clinton and lobbyists galore.
Lieberman's meltdown has stopped. This is going to be a dogfight from here on out.
Paid staff with a bad strategy is not the same as volunteers with a good strategy. Lamont's team needs to whip out footage of Lieberman chiding Clinton, to remind people of how untrustworthy he is and use the war against him. And then with Bush
Lieberman waited awfully late to whip this strategy out. I mean, really late. He can spend money, but he should have started that July 1. What he wants people to do is to forget that he's been allied with Bush.
Clinton's popularity is seriously overrated when it comes to elections. Now, if he had opposed the war and his wife had opposed the war, Lamont might have an insurmountable problem. But as Iraq spins out of control, he has the wedge issue he needs to win. It isn't entirely about the war, but when it comes to a yes or no vote on Lieberman, it does come down to the war.
I'd love to get that letter writer's father or mother to do a Lamont ad, hell, anyone who Lieberman didn't help. We'll see by next week if the ad buy is moving voters. But the fact is that once an establish pol loses supporters, they don't go back. Because the reasons they're leaving him are serious. Lamont should not have ever led Lieberman. Now, if Lieberman can gain ground, ok, but I think that the whole Clinton thing is directed towards one voting block: black voters, especially middle aged and elderly black voters.
His people think they see an opening because Lamont is a WASP millionaire. And the people his campaign are giving street money to are being sold that bill of goods.
What's street money? As I explained to the nice young woman who asked me last week, it's the money campaigns hand out to locals for everything from leaflet drops to GOTV. Someone has to pay for the vans who go from the Senior Center to the polling place.
And their consultant is an "expert" on getting out the urban, black vote. So Lieberman's last polling hope are black voters, who he hopes will stick with him.
Antoine Yates - who famously kept a 425-pound tiger in an apartment in a Harlem housing project - hasn't stopped fantasizing about a reunion with Ming.
"Not a day goes by that I don't think of Ming," Yates said. "I'm still hurting, hurting every day."
In October 2003, cops staged a commando raid to pull the Bengal tiger out of the Drew Hamilton Houses, where Yates' menagerie also included Al the caiman and a kitten named Shadow.
The bizarre animal adventure made headlines internationally, eventually landed Yates in Rikers Island and sent the striped beast packing to an animal preserve in Ohio.
Yates has not seen the big cat since 2003, but he remains on probation for charges related to his tiger tale. Still living in Harlem, Yates has traded down for a cat and an African gray parrot.
"I'm teaching the parrot tricks," he said. "He's learning how to ride a bike."
But Yates, 32, refuses to give up on seeing Ming again. Days after being separated from the tiger he calls "my best friend," Yates roared, "I love you Ming!" outside Manhattan Criminal Court.
More recently, he has taken his Free Ming campaign to the silver screen, where he was the subject of "Harlem Tigerman," a documentary featured last month at the Hollywood Black Film Festival.
And he has no doubt that, even after all this time, the tiger would still recognize him.
"For sure he would," said Yates, who bought Ming as an 8-week-old cub from a Minnesota wildlife park. "It would be like a cub reuniting with his mother." ...........................
"We live in the ghetto, and the only exotic animals I saw were in the zoo," Yates said. "So I brought the zoo to the ghetto."
.........................................
However far-fetched it may be, Yates keeps alive his dream of someday running a zoo in Pennsylvania - where, naturally, Ming would be the star attraction.
"Yes, he's a tiger, but he's really just a big house cat," Yates said. "I'll never give up on seeing Ming again."
No, he isn't.
This guy had a tiger in a project apartment. He'd even walk him around. Now, unless you have millions to spend, a New York apartment is not tiger-friendly. Crazy is a kind word for a man who would keep a tiger in an apartment.
He didn't seem to understand that the tiger might eat his entire family. The concept of tiger-human consumption eluded him.
As Chris Rock said of the tiger who attacked Roy of Siegfried and Roy said the tiger wasn't acting crazy, he was acting like a tiger. It was doing those tricks which made him seem crazy.
I am a registered Democrat and a soldier currently serving in Afghanistan with the 1-102 Infantry Battalion of the Connecticut National Guard. Last week I received some newspaper clippings in the mail that sparked my interest: Senator Joseph I. Lieberman has been successfully challenged and forced into a primary that will take place in August.
As some readers may have heard, in January my battalion was issued substandard equipment for our deployment to Afghanistan. Originally, we were issued M-16s rather than M-4 carbines, rifles with shorter barrels and collapsible butt stocks. As a politically active member of the battalion, I began to get in touch with Representative DeLauro and Representative Simmons, who both responded quickly and enthusiastically. Senator Dodd also responded quickly and gave me prompts on how to further validate my request for weapons.
However, I did not receive a response from Senator Lieberman's office. I continued to leave messages for both him and his military aide, now senior counselor, Fred Downey, who represented Sen. Lieberman at the Battalion's send off ceremony on Jan. 4. After several messages, I finally received a return phone call. However, I was not met with the same enthusiasms expressed by other legislators; I was immediately confronted with an inquisition that seemed to have the purpose of dispelling the belief that the battalion was ill equipped. Rather than listen to our specific concerns, the "benefits" of the M16 were highlighted and the advantages of the M4 were downplayed.
Lieberman's office left the impression that they believed we had the equipment we needed, despite the contrasting beliefs of soldiers in my battalion, some who have been on as many as five deployments. The others in Washington were not so quick to abandon us.
Lieberman has never hesitated to voice his support for the war, and recently voted against pulling troops out of Iraq, so where was he when over 500 of his own constituents were being sent overseas to fight on behalf of his great country? It appears the senator was so concerned with climbing the political ladder, he forget what his job is really about: the people.
When my absentee ballot returns to the States next month, Lamont's name, not Lieberman's, will bear the check when August 8 arrives, will you stand for the hypocrisy?
Sincerely,
Colin D. Halloran
The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of the 1-102 Infantry Battalion, CTARNG, the Department of the Army or the members thereof (disclaimer in the paper).
AP Photo: A resident stands in front of his collapsed apartment building in the southern suburbs...
Juan Cole talks about his visit to Beirut last month ...........................
I was in Beirut briefly in mid-June. I went downtown in the evening, where big LCD displays had been set up outside at the cafes, and thousands of people were enjoying the World Cup games. The young Lebanese, in jeans, were dancing to the new pop music of stars like Nancy Ajram and Amal Hijazi. Some had painted their faces with Brazilian flags. They were rooting for Brazil. The shops were full of fashionable clothing and jewelry, the restaurants tastefully decorated, the gourmet Lebanese food tantalizing. The bookstores were full of probing studies and intelligent commentary. The Syrians were gone and there was a lighthearted atmosphere. The snooty nightclubs at places like Monot street were choosy about who could get in.
I went to see publishers about my project, of publishing the works of great American thinkers in Arabic. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King. They mentioned about how the US did not have a good reputation and maybe not many readers would be interested. I said, maybe that is changing. Washington supports the new government, after all. We are your well-wishers.
Meanwhile, while Nancy was singing and Brazil was scoring, Halutz and Olmert were putting the final touches on their long-planned bombing campaign. They would go up and hit Tripoli's port, a Sunni area. They would hit the port at Jounieh, the trendy Christian city near Beirut. They would hit Beirut's port and its new shiny airport. They would hit the milk factory, the telecom towers, the roads, the bridges, and some clinics and hospitals for good measure. They would hit the fuel depots. It would be a total war on the Lebanese civilian population, setting 800,000 out of 3.8 million out from their homes or the rubble of their former homes, forcing them to other cities as homeless refugees, or abroad to Syria or Cyprus. They would reduce al-Dahiyah al-Janubiyah, the teeming Shiite slum to the south, to rubble and stray bloody fingers, feet and noses. They would say that these were all military targets, but they lied. Hizbullah is a political party with 14 MPs in parliament. It has political party offices, soup kitchens, clinics, in those Shiite slums. A lot of times it seems to be these that the Israelis hit. They lied and said that missiles were launched from Beirut, when they never were.
Israel's present policy toward Lebanon, of striking at so many civilian targets as to hold the entire civilian population hostage, is unspeakable.
I haven't complained about the Israeli border war with Hizbullah. I'm not sure it is wise, and I don't know how many Israelis Hizbullah even killed in, say, the year 2005. Is it really worth it? But I don't deny that Hizbullah went too far when it shelled dozens of civilian towns and cities and killed over a dozen innocent civilians, even in reprisal for the Israeli bombing campaign. (You can't target civilians. That is a prosecutable crime.) That is a clear casus belli, and I'd like to see Nasrallah tried at the Hague for all those civilian deaths he ordered. The fighting at Maroun al-Ra's and Bint Jbeil was horrible on all sides, but it was understandable, even justifiable. The fighting itself isn't going to lead anywwhere useful, though, and it is time for a ceasefire and political negotiations--the only way to actually settle such disputes.
What was done to Lebanon as a whole is among the most horrible war crimes of the young 21st century. And that it was done tells me that there is something sick in the heart of the Israeli military and political elite, a sickness of the soul that had better be faced and remedied before our entire world catches the contagion.
I mean, who talks like that? "if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land." . . . “Nothing is safe, as simple as that.” If they are the good guys, why do they talk like James Bond villains?
Yes, yes, Nasrallah and his shock troops are also evil. They are also sick in the soul. We have established that. Halutz can have the 5,000 fighters and the 12,000 rockets to do as he pleases to them. I have been to Haifa, too, and the city means a lot to me. I mind deeply when I hear that the mad bombers around Nasrallah have killed people there and done substantial damage.
But you will note that 800,000 Israelis are not homeless, that the ports are still operating, that Tel Aviv airport is open, that over 400 Israeli civilians aren't dead in two weeks, that factories, roads, bridges, telecom towers are still there. In fact, you will note that no flotilla of international vessels had to come to evacuate tens of thousands of foreigners from Israel. It is suffering, and that is wrong. It is not suffering what Lebanon is.
(Whips out pair of spoons; starts to play them against his knees)
Dem bones, dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones! (Laughs.)
Sheeeeeee-it, boys, from this here podium looking down at all that glistening Jeri Curl, it looks like an NBA game in reverse! (Laughs.)
AUDIENCE: (Silence.)
THE PRESIDENT: Anyway, thanks for having me today. I know, I know: you kept inviting me, and I kept blowing you off.
AUDIENCE: (Murmurs of Assent.)
THE PRESIDENT: Niggaz, puh-leeze. We both know if I had actually come here before the 2004 election, you black folks would have just busted my chops for the cameras so the lib media would have plenty of nasty clips to run that week. And so I made a little political gamble instead: I bet Condi a whole dollar that I could flat-out flip the bird to every other darkie in America, and still win re-selection. And I did! (Thumbs Up)
AUDIENCE: (Silence.)
THE PRESIDENT: Well, as you might have heard, things have changed for me and the GOP in the past two years. Specifically, far too many white folks seem to have acquired the uniquely Negro talent for calling bullshit on the Republican party's cheap veneer of populism and inclusiveness. So out of embarrassingly obvious pre-election desperation, I figured now's the time to come to the NAACP and extend an olive branch – or a chicken bone, as the case may be. (Produces bucket of KFC, proceeds to chuck thighs, drumsticks, wings into crowd.)
And I understand that many African Americans distrust my political party.
AUDIENCE: Yes! (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: They say how the GOP hasn't done squat for Negroes, unless you count free prison cells and doing away with that racist "affirmative action" stuff.
AUDIENCE: Yes! (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Well guess what? It's not true. There's at least three or four other things we've done. For instance, Karl Rove gave that rich Uncle Tom Armstrong Williams a quarter million dollars to convince you people how awesomely things are going in your communities' crumbling, violent, and under-performing schools! How great is that?
AUDIENCE: (Silence.)
THE PRESIDENT: OK, then how about after Hurricane Katrina, when I sent my own momma Bar to offer moral support to all those poor homeless blacks living large at the Houston Astrodome?
AUDIENCE: (Scattered Hissing.)
THE PRESIDENT: Alright, I got it: how about when my Attorney General swept into Miami to shut down that colored terror cell that was gonna give you folks such a bad name once they finally got off their lazy welfare asses and delivered on some FBI-conceived evildoing?
AUDIENCE: (Loud Hissing.)
THE PRESIDENT: Yeesh. Tough crowd. Soooo... How about that Dr. Martin Lawrence King, Jr.? He was real important and all. Not important like a President or nothing, but they tell me you like to get reminded about him and... uhhhhh... let me check my notes here. Oh yeah, and that Rosie O'Parks lady from the bus station lunch counter, right?
AUDIENCE: (Loud Hissing.)
THE PRESIDENT: Oh for shit's sake! I can't catch a break here. Let's be honest for the briefest possible moments, OK? The GOP is ruled, run, and bought by the American South, a sensitive part of the country that is still smarting over the whole "Civil War" thing and then later, the whole "Voting Rights" deal. Old, evil habits die hard, y'know? Like how the French are all about liberty and equality but deep down they hate the fuck out of hook-nose Jews and A-rabs? Same thing.
So just hear me out, y'hear? Hear me out and maybe I can prove how inside, we're all green. Otherwise, next time flood waters, terrorist bombs, or CIA-grade crack cocaine flood the trash-strewn ghettos of Negroburg, FEMA really won't show up. At all.
Hear me? Good. So let's cut to the chase: Look around this room, and what do you see? Only the most richest and most fabulous coloreds in America, right? And you KNOW that you people are about as representative of regular black folk as my lilly-white Skull & Bones brothers are of your typical piss-ignorant red state crackers. The difference is that you actually bother to pretend like you care about your race's lower-classed losers, while we treat ours like shit, but scare them into voting for us by painting super-spooky portraits of bridezilla homos and crack-addled, hubcap-stealing nigras buying houses nextdoor and– oh, wait, forget that last part.
For the record, there's a List of Racial Importance I hold to fast. And you blackoids are at the top! Because y'all didn't want to come here, but you did. And hundreds of years later that barbaric investment on our part paid off – and I'm talking Motown! After you are the Hispano-Ricans, who actually do some work. Then come the lesser brown people who drive cabs, and sell cigarettes, and fix computers. Then we got Injuns, without whom the midwest's oldsters would have nowhere to go to gamble their Social Security checks. Then there are some folk I don't even KNOW about. Then the Asians, who are like short, hairless Jews.
Anyways, here's the take-away: you may not believe it, but there IS room for coloreds in the Republican party. That's because t he GOP has one PRIMARY value that trumps all of its lesser values like racism, xenophobia, quasi-fascism, and hubris – and my ghetto-fabulous friends, that value is GREED. And since you all are RICH, that means that just like every white rich person, your number one priority is to get RICHER.
So vote GOP in November. You're in the right income bracket, and if there's one thing in America that I've made sure is truly color blind, it's a tax return. (Winks.)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. congressional Democrats voiced alarm on Tuesday over Iraq's denunciation of Israel in the Middle East conflict, and some said Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's upcoming address to Congress should be canceled unless he apologizes.
A group of House of Representatives Democrats was circulating a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert urging the Illinois Republican to secure an apology from Maliki or cancel the address on Wednesday to a joint meeting of Congress.
A number of Senate and House Democrats said they planned to protest Maliki's speech by not attending, or were waiting first to hear if he apologized.
Ron Bonjean, Hastert's spokesman, said there was no intention of canceling Maliki's speech, and he accused Democrats of "political gamesmanship during an election year."
Iraq's U.S.-backed government on Saturday denounced Israel's raids on Lebanon and Gaza. Maliki last week called for "the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression."
Senate Democratic leaders in a letter asked Maliki to clarify his remarks before addressing Congress. They said his failure to condemn Hizbollah's "aggression and recognize Israel's right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East."
With more than 2,500 U.S. service members killed in the Iraq conflict, more than 18,000 wounded and more than $300 billion in U.S. tax dollars spent, the Senate Democrats said, "Americans deserve to know whether Iraq is an ally in these fights
."
Are they fucking kidding?
Who the fuck do they think we're dealing with in Iraq?
Buy a clue, folks. The Dawa party is in hock to Sadr. Sadr loves Hezbollah. If Maliki was to do something as braindead as condemn them, he would probably collapse the government and be forced into exile in the US.
And NONE of them likes Israel. Not Sadr, SCIRI or any of the other non-Kurd parties in the parliment.
Anti-semitism is alive and well in Iraq. So to think our puppet can condemn the friends of his backer is well, insane. If he were to recognize the right of Israel to exist, his life would be worth less than a mafia snitch. Too many people think that these guys have to play by our rules. They don't and can't if they want to live.
The strategic bombing survey was conducted after WWII to see the effectiveness of allied bombing. Here are the sections on civilians from the European and Pacific sections
word should perhaps be added on the effect of the air war on the German civilian and on the civilian economy. Germany began the war after several years of full employment and after the civilian standard of living had reached its highest level in German history. In the early years of the war -- the soft war period for Germany -- civilian consumption remained high. Germans continued to try for both guns and butter. The German people entered the period of the air war well stocked with clothing and other consumer goods. Although most consumer goods became increasingly difficult to obtain, Survey studies show that fairly adequate supplies of clothing were available for those who had been bombed out until the last stages of disorganization. Food, though strictly rationed, was in nutritionally adequate supply throughout the war. The Germans' diet had about the same calories as the British.
German civilian defense was examined by Survey representatives familiar with U. S. and British defenses. The German system had been devised as protection against relatively small and isolated attacks. The organization had to be substantially revised when the attacks grew to saturation proportions. In particular, arrangements were made by which a heavily bombed community might call on the fire-fighting and other defensive resources of surrounding communities and, as a final resort, on mobile reserves deployed by the central government
through the more vulnerable areas. In the attacks on German cities incendiary bombs, ton for ton, were found to have been between four and five times as destructive as high explosive. German fire defenses lacked adequate static and other water reserves replenished by mains independent of the more vulnerable central water supply. However, in the more serious fire raids, any fire-fighting equipment was found to have been of little avail. Fire storms occurred, the widespread fires generating a violent hurricane-like draft, which fed other fires and made all attempts at control hopeless.
German shelters, so far as they were available, were excellent. In England the policy was to build a large number of shelters which protected those taking refuge from bombs falling in the area and from falling and flying debris but which were not secure against a direct hit. The Germans, by contrast, built concrete bunkers, some of enormous size, both above and below ground, designed to protect those taking shelter even against a direct hit. One such shelter in Hamburg, named the "Holy Ghost" for its location on Holy Ghost Plaza, sheltered as many as 60,000 people. There were not, however, enough such shelters; at the close of the war shelter accommodation was available for only about eight million people. The remainder sheltered in basements, and casualties in these places of refuge were heavy. After raids the Germans did not attempt systematic recovery of all bodies or even of all trapped persons. Those that could not readily be removed were left.
Official German statistics place total casualties from air attack -- including German civilians, foreigners, and members of the armed forces in cities that were being attacked -- at 250,253 killed for the period from January 1, 1943, to January 31, 1945, and 305,455 wounded badly enough to require hospitalization, during the period from October 1, 1943, to January 31, 1945. A careful examination of these data, together with checks against the records of individual cities that were attacked, indicates that they are too low. A revised estimate prepared by the Survey (which is also a minimum) places total casualties for the entire period of the war at 305,000 killed and 780,000 wounded. More reliable statistics are available on damage to housing. According to these, 485,000 residential buildings were totally destroyed by air attack and 415,000 were heavily damaged, making a total of 20 percent of all dwelling units in Germany. In some 50 cities that were primary targets of the air attack, the proportion of destroyed or heavily damaged dwelling units is about 40 percent. The result of all these attacks was to render homeless some 7,500,000 German civilians.
It is interesting to note some of the effects of air attack upon medical care and military casualties during the war. The aerial warfare against Germany forced the German military and civilian authorities to recognize that national health and medical problems were a joint responsibility. The destruction of hospital equipment, pharmaceutical production, and medical supplies, incident to area raids, forced a dispersal of medical supply installations and the removal of hospitals from city to suburban and country sites. This program came in late 1943 at a time when air raids on cities were causing increased casualties among civilians and resulted in shortages in ether, plasters, serums, textiles, and other medical supplies. At the same time the increased tempo of tactical air action was having an effect on military casualty rates, and is reflected in the fact that, according to German reports, war casualties from aerial weapons moved from third place in 1942 to first place in late 1943, 1944, and 1945, followed in order by artillery fire and infantry weapons. The casualty effects of air action are shown by the fact that the proportion of wounded to killed shifted from a ratio of eight to one in 1940 and 1941 to a ratio of three to one in 1944 and 1945. Personnel wounded by air action suffered as a rule multiple wounds and shock, resulting in longer periods of hospitalization and convalescence, and in a decided reduction in the number of patients who could be returned to either full or limited military duty.
The sad part is that Air Force proponents ignore the conclusions here to this day
Total civilian casualties in Japan, as a result of 9 months of air attack, including those from the atomic bombs, were approximately 806,000. Of these, approximately 330,000 were fatalities. These casualties probably exceeded Japan's combat casualties which the Japanese estimate as having totaled approximately 780,000 during the entire war. The principal cause of civilian death or injury was burns. Of the total casualties approximately 185,000 were suffered in the initial attack on Tokyo of 9 March 1945. Casualties in many extremely destructive attacks were comparatively low. Yokahoma, a city of 900,000 population, was 47 percent destroyed in a single attack lasting less than an hour. The fatalities suffered were less than 5,000.
The Japanese had constructed extensive firebreaks by tearing down all houses along selected streets or natural barriers. The total number of buildings torn down in this program, as reported by the Japanese, amounted to 615,000 as against 2,510,000 destroyed by the air attacks themselves. These firebreaks did not effectively stop the spread of fire, as incendiaries were dropped on both sides of the breaks. They did, however, constitute avenues of escape for the civilian population.
The Japanese instituted a civilian-defense organization prior to the war. It was not until the summer of 1944, however, that effective steps were taken to reduce the vulnerability of Japan's civilian population to air attacks. By that time, the shortage of steel, concrete and other construction materials was such that adequate air-raid shelters could no longer be built. Each family was given the obligation of providing itself with some kind of an excavation covered with bamboo and a little dirt. In addition, tunnels were dug into the sides of hills wherever the topography permitted.
Japanese planning and the means for carrying out the plans were thus deficient for a first-class civilian defense program. In spite of these limitations, such civilian defense measures as they were able to put through contributed substantially in minimizing casualties. School children and other nonessential urban dwellers were evacuated to the country. Those who remained were organized to combat fires and to provide mutual assistance. The air raid warning system was generally efficient. The weight of the individual attacks was, however, far heavier than the Japanese had envisaged or were able to cope with. In the major fire attacks, the civilian defense organizations were simply overwhelmed.
The growing food shortage was the principal factor affecting the health and vigor of the Japanese people. Prior to Pearl Harbor the average per capita caloric intake of the Japanese people was about 2,000 calories as against 3,400 in the United States. The acreage of arable land in Japan is only 3 percent of that of the United States to support a population over half as large. In order to provide the prewar diet, this arable acreage was more intensively cultivated, using more manpower and larger quantities of fertilizer than in any other country in the world; fishing was developed into a major industry; and rice, soybeans and other foodstuffs amounting to 19 percent of the caloric intake were imported. Despite the rationing of food beginning in April 1941 the food situation became critical. As the war progressed, imports became more and more difficult, the waters available to the fishing fleet and the ships and fuel oil for its use became increasingly restricted. Domestic food production itself was affected by the drafting of the younger males and by an increasing shortage of fertilizers.
By 1944, the average per capita caloric intake had declined to approximately 1,900 calories. By the summer of 1945 it was about 1,680 calories per
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capita. Coal miners and heavy industrial workers received higher-than-average rations, the remaining populace, less. The average diet suffered even more drastically from reductions in fats, vitamins and minerals required for balance and adversely affected rates of recovery and mortality from disease and bomb injuries.
Undernourishment produced a major increase in the incidence of beriberi and tuberculosis. It also had an important effect on the efficiency and morale of the people, and contributed to absenteeism among workers.
Survey interrogation of a scientifically designed cross-section sample of the Japanese civilian population revealed a high degree of uniformity as between city and rural sectors of the population and as between various economic and social strata in their psychological reaction to the war. A uniformly high percentage considered Japan's greatest weaknesses to have been in the material realm, either lack of resources, productive plant or modern weapons, and her greatest strength to have been in the Yamato spirit of the Japanese people, their willingness to make every personal sacrifice, including that of life itself, for the Emperor or Japan.
The Japanese people reacted to news of the attack against the United States and its Allies with mingled feelings of fear, insecurity and hope. To a people wearied by 10 years of war in China, it was clear that this would be a major war and not an "incident". The early Japanese military successes, particularly the capture of Singapore and the southern regions, were followed by a wave of optimism and high confidence. Subsequent defeats were studiously withheld from the people or disguised as strategic withdrawals. Prior to the loss of Saipan confidence in eventual victory remained high in spite of exhausting work, poor nutrition and rising black market prices. In June 1944 approximately two percent of the population believed that Japan faced the probability of defeat. The fall of Saipan could not be kept from the Japanese people. Even though the psychological effect of this disaster was far greater on the Japanese leaders and intellectuals than on the mass of the population, all indices of Japanese morale began thereafter to decline. By December 1944 air attacks from the Marianas against the home islands had begun, defeats in the Philippines had been suffered, and the food situation had deteriorated; 10 percent of the people believed Japan could not achieve victory. By March 1945, when the night incendiary attacks began and the food ration was reduced, this percentage had risen to 19 percent. In June it was 46 percent, and just prior to surrender, 68 percent. Of those who had come to this belief over one-half attributed the principal cause to air attacks, other than the atomic bombing attacks, and one-third to military defeats.
Sixty-four percent of the population stated that they had reached a point prior to surrender where they felt personally unable to go on with the war. Of these, less than one-tenth attributed the cause to military defeats, one-quarter attributed the cause to shortages of food and civilian supplies, the largest part to air attack.
A striking aspect of the air attack was the pervasiveness with which its impact on morale blanketed Japan. Roughly one-quarter of all people in cities fled or were evacuated, and these evacuees, who themselves were of singularly low morale, helped spread discouragement and disaffection for the war throughout the islands. This mass migration from the cities included an estimated 8,500,000 persons. Throughout the Japanese islands, whose people had always thought themselves remote from attack, United States planes crisscrossed the skies with no effective Japanese air or antiaircraft opposition. That this was an indication of impending defeat became as obvious to the rural as to the urban population.
Progressively lowered morale was characterized by loss of faith in both military and civilian leaders, loss of confidence in Japan's military might and increasing distrust of government news releases and propaganda. People became short-tempered and more outspoken in their criticism of the government, the war and affairs in general. Until the end, however, national traditions of obedience and conformity, reinforced by the police organization, remained effective in controlling the behavior of the population. The Emperor largely escaped the criticism which was directed at other leaders, and retained the people's faith in him. It is probable that most Japanese would have passively faced death in a continuation of the hopeless struggle, had the Emperor so ordered. When the Emperor announced the unconditional surrender the first reaction of the people was one of regret and surprise, followed shortly by relief.
The interrelation of military, economic and morale
factors was complex. To a certain extent each reacted on the other. In the final analysis the Japanese military machine had lost its purpose when it could no longer protect the Japanese people from destruction by air attack. General Takashima, when asked by the Survey as to his reaction to the Imperial Rescript, stated that surrender had become unavoidable; the Army, even should it repel invasion, could no longer protect the Japanese people from extermination
That is the bizarre rationale behind those who seek to justify the leveling of southern Lebanon by Israel. If Israel, the "logic" goes, can demonstrate that merely living close to a Hezbollah office can get your children killed by an Israeli bomb, support for Hezbollah will dry up.
Riiiiiiiiiight.
In supporting the attacks, Samuel Freedman doesn't bother to focus on the enormous human cost to the Lebanese civilians who, in many instances reported on NPR and elsewhere, appear to have been deliberately targeted by Israeli missile attacks (there's a word to describe deliberate attacks on civilians designed to terrorize them: the word is terrorism). To Freedman, such unfortunate deaths are collateral damage in pursuit of a higher gain. To me, these deaths are clearly immoral and can only serve as a catalyst for further radicalization, endangering Israel's future as a nation.
Some other highlights of Freedman's article include the assumption that Israel really isn't at war with Hezbollah, but Iran. Using that logic, Hezbollah and Israel aren't fighting at all. It's a proxy war between the US and Iran. All of this dovetails very nicely with an insane PNAC fantasy: "we" can eliminate evil (a la Perle/Frum's The End of Evil) if only we are brave enough to use our Kristol balls and tackle the "root causes" of terrorism.* And sure enough, on CNN this weekend, an earnest discussion was held under the caption: "Iran: The Root of Evil?"
Nevermind that the situation is far more complicated than a mere proxy war. You get nowhwere, and fast, unless you immediately, and directly, address the proximate issues. In this case, they are (1) The outrageous kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah; (2) The outrageous and counterproductive destruction of Southern Lebanon by Israel; and (3) the unconsionable and wholesale slaughter, on both sides, of utterly innocent civiilians.
The fighting should stop. Now. A United States foreign policy that does not make that central and absolutely clear is not only immoral. It is insane. It is close to an open declaration of war against Iran and Syria. And if Bush persists, it will be a war that will last a generation and will accomplish nothing good for the US.
As for Israel, it is a dangerous illusion to think that turning Syria and Iran into Hobbesian dystopias similar to Afghanistan and Iraq will somehow make Israel safer. Any genuine friend of Israel should demand an immediate, total cease-fire.
Freedman writes:
Maybe the people so ready to assail Israel now should have been watching more closely a few months ago when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran convened a conference devoted to the exterminatory premise of a "world without Zionism." Maybe they should have been listening more closely when Ahmadinejad declared his desire to "wipe Israel off the map."
Oh, we listened closely, all right and you needn't tell us how obscene it was. But what else could you expect? Unfortunately, you, Samuel Freedman, didn't listen closely when a few years before that, an American president in one of the most important speeches in the modern world, declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an Axis of Evil. If Hezbollah equals Iran, then Israel equals the US. Given Bush's incredibly stoopid (spelled appropriately) words and action, it can only appear to Iran's leader as if eliminating Israel will remove a real, imminent, threat to Iran's very existence.
Israel has every right to protect itself. Therefore, it should immediately stand down, withdraw all troops from Lebanese territority, and put plenty of political distance between itself and those nuts, including the US president, urging them to tickle the Iranian dragon. To call the present course of action increasingly dangerous is to indulge in gross understaement.
---
*And let's not forget that the infamous PNAC paper outlining the conquest of Iraq, "A Clean Break," was written for Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, in order to solicit proposals to make Israel, not the US, safer.
By LIZ SIDOTI The Associated Press Tuesday, July 25, 2006; 4:40 PM
WASHINGTON -- A Republican in a competitive Senate race called his party affiliation "an impediment," said he'd "probably not" want President Bush to campaign for him and the GOP-controlled Congress should "just shut up and get something done."
Michael Steele's campaign confirmed Tuesday that the Maryland lieutenant governor was the Senate candidate who made the comments a day earlier on the condition reporters not identify him. However, the campaign said his remarks were only a sampling of the wide-ranging, 90-minute interview that it said also included praise for the president.
"It's an impediment. It's a hurdle I have to overcome," Steele, who is running in a Democratic-leaning state, said of his GOP label, according to Tuesday's edition of The Washington Post. "I've got an 'R' here, a scarlet letter."
The Associated Press was not invited to the lunch with Steele at a Capitol Hill steakhouse. The Washington Post said nine reporters from newspapers, magazines and the networks attended and asked the campaign to allow them to use Steele's name. The newspaper said the campaign considered the request but ultimately refused.
It quoted the unnamed candidate as saying the Iraq war "didn't work" and "we didn't prepare for the peace," that the response to Hurricane Katrina was "a monumental failure of government," and that "there's a palpable frustration right now in the country."
Of Republicans who control Congress, the candidate said: "We've lost our way, we've gone to the well and we drank the water, and we shouldn't have."
"You don't go to Congress to become the party that you've been fighting for 40 years," he said, lamenting "the spending, the finger-pointing, not getting the bills passed" and counseled: "just shut up and get something done."
Asked if he wanted Bush to campaign for him, the candidate initially said, "well, you know, I don't know" and then, noting the president's low popularity in his state, said: "To be honest with you, probably not."
Doug Heye, a spokesman for Steele, said the candidate, who is black, also praised Bush's recent speech before the NAACP, economic growth and unemployment numbers among African-Americans.
"Obviously those positive comments didn't make it into the story," said Heye, who also disputed the notion that Steele berated the president.
Rep. Ben Cardin and former congressman Kweisi Mfume are the top Democrats competing for the chance to face Steele in November for the Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Paul Sarbanes. The primary is Sept. 12.
In a state that favors Democrats, Steele could benefit by distancing himself from the president and his policies but also upset Republican voters.
"Lt. Gov. Steele has always been an independent-minded leader for Maryland. He's somebody who calls it like he sees it, and the people of Maryland respect him for that," Heye said.
Democrats pounced.
"If Steele won't take on Bush's failures during a lunch with reporters, you can be sure that he won't do so as a member of the United States Senate," Terry Lierman, chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party, said in a statement.
Steele is a wimp and a moron.
First, he can't unsay that shit. It will dog him until November.
Second, he attached his name to it, and we know how the Bushies feel about loyalty. Watch for his funding problems to explode. Because the people he's been raising money from do not like uppity negroes. And they will see this as going against the family.
Right now, when the fighting is at its peak, it is necessary to deal with the series of failures that have afflicted the Israel Defense Forces. These failings have not only exposed poor soldiering skills, flawed intelligence and officers' arrogance - but may also affect the way the IDF's enemies come to view it, and influence their decision on whether to embark on war in the future, or to launch their missiles against Israel's home front.
The IDF will not be defeated in war against the Hezbollah because of the failures in recent weeks, but their shadow will loom large over the results of the ongoing military campaign in Lebanon. And because this is a war that is being fought not only by killing enemy fighters and destroying their arms, but is also over impressions and symbols - it is all the more important to make perfectly clear that the IDF is not ignoring the shortcomings, is handling them and learning its lessons. In the meantime, it appears, this is not being done.
It is puzzling that, after an in-depth examination of the events surrounding the abduction of Cpl. Gilad Shalit produced a grave report by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland - which concluded that the whole affair was an "operational failure" - no one was found responsible for it. Eiland's hint that he "does not think any of the commanders needs to be dismissed, especially since these officers are now participating in fighting in the Gaza Strip," only deepens the sense of unease. After all, once the fighting is over, no one will deal with the failures of the past, and it will be argued that the focus must now be on the future.
An even more troubling message was sent when the army appointed Brig. Gen. Avi Ashkenazi, who commands a reserve division in the Northern Command, to examine the ambush of an IDF patrol was ambushed by a Hezbollah force, in which two soldiers were abducted and a tank that subsequently entered Lebanon was destroyed by a large mine, killing its crew of four. One cannot expect an officer whose troops serve in the north and who is partly responsible for that front, to be able to carry out an objective and comprehensive examination of the functioning of his fellow officers, or that of his immediate superiors.
Ashkenazi's appointment is reminiscent to large extent of that of an investigative officer in the Kafr Kana affair - in which an IDF shell, during Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, killed more than 100 Lebanese civilians. Who was then appointed to examine that operational failure? Brig. Gen.Dan Harel, head of the Artillery Corps, commander of the soldiers who fired the deadly shell.
Senior IDF officers are not accustomed to criticism originating outside the army's ranks, and normally enjoy great immunity from having to take responsibility for their failings. But there have been too many shortcomings and failures in recent weeks for them to be ignored. It is possible that this has been a matter of bad luck, but until the incidents are examined seriously by elements external to the IDF, there is an unpleasant feeling of a whitewash operation going on - and concern that something fundamentally bad is going on in the army.
Because what began at Kerem Shalom repeated itself on the Lebanese border: The IDF was again caught off guard, this time in a well-planned Hezbollah ambush. The intelligence failure and the complacency of the men in the patrol and of their officers had grave results. The entry of the tank into Lebanon, in an attempt to delay the escape of the kidnappers of the two soldiers, was also flawed. It is unclear why, at command levels, they did not anticipate that Hezbollah had laid mines to delay the advance of tanks. It also turned out that the tank in question lacked sufficient protection.
The problem is that the IDF has to crush Hezbollah and anything less is a defeat.
By STEVEN ERLANGER and THOM SHANKER Published: July 26, 2006
JERUSALEM, July 25 — A week ago, Israeli officials said their military had knocked out up to half of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers and suggested that another week or two would finish the job of incapacitating the Lebanese militia. That talk has largely stopped.
Hezbollah is still launching 100 rockets a day at Israel, nearly as many as it did at the start of the war. Soldiers return from forays into Lebanon saying the network of bunkers and tunnels is more sophisticated than expected. And Iranian-made long-range missiles apparently capable of hitting Tel Aviv remain in the Hezbollah arsenal.
“Two weeks after Israel set out to defeat Hezbollah, its military achievements are pretty limited,” lamented Yoel Marcus, a columnist and supporter of the war, in the daily Haaretz on Tuesday.
Israeli military commanders say they are not surprised. The struggle is so difficult, they say, because Hezbollah is an organized, well-trained and well-equipped force and is fighting hard.
“Hezbollah is organized more like an army than the Palestinian militias, and they are supported with some of the best weapons systems that Iran and Syria have,” said Yaakov Amidror, an Israeli major general, now in the reserves, who headed the research and assessment branch of Israeli military intelligence.
“Never before in history has a terrorist organization had such state-ofthe-art military equipment,” from medium-range rockets and laser-guided antitank missiles to well-designed explosive mines that can cripple an advanced tank, General Amidror said.
At the same time, Hezbollah has no armor or easily visible storehouses or logistics lines, the Israelis say, and its members live among the civilian population of southern Lebanon, storing their weaponry in civilian buildings.
That is why Israel’s top commanders say this operation may take many weeks.
That is a judgment supported in Washington by Henry A. Crumpton, the former director of the C.I.A.’s campaign in Afghanistan in 2001-02 and now the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism.
Hezbollah has “been able to build pretty stalwart defenses, pretty elaborate bunker systems, and they are fighting hard right now,” he said Tuesday, adding, “So it will take a while for the Israelis to get in there and deny that space.”
At the Pentagon, senior military planners cast the conflict as a localized example of America’s broader campaign against global terrorism and said any faltering by Israel could harm the American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hezbollah “has features of a stateless terrorist organization, but it also holds territory — and is quite dug in there — and is able to hold at risk the population of the regional superpower in the way that only national militaries once could,” said a senior military officer with experience in Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.
The people at DOD are fucking morons. Why the fuck would you be quoted saying that? If this article is accurate, Hezbollah is by far the best trained and led force the IDF has ever faced. The Israelis have already been surprised once. They're now facing a mobile, well-trained and armed army, and success, at least on Israeli terms, is unlikely.
By linking Israel's invasion to our war in Iraq, that gives Sadr the perfect moment to call for a Shia uprising,hell, a general uprising. These people act as if they're on the brink of success and not the chasm of failure. Who's running this country, Ferdinand of Austria? Could you choose more failed strategies? They failed to isolate Iran by invading Iraq. Now it's let's get rid of Iran and Syria through Hezbollah.
They blew to shit the only democracy they managed to create and now has turned Hezbollah into supra-national heroes.
It's as if they lost at blackjack and then went on to play Texas Hold 'Em with the same flawed betting strategy.
Bush is never wrong and Olmert seems to be following in his footsteps.
What happens when no one joins the Hezbollah hunting force? The Germans were game, but that didn't go down so well in Israel.
Israel wil survive, but the US is likely to find a cold reception for any plan to save the bombers of Beirut. In the end, the US is so weak that they can't force an agreement.
On Friday, the National Review’s Katherine Jean Lopez wrote a rather innocuous review of the new Oliver Stone movie, United 93. Lopez wrote the movie was “about why we fight.”
But Cliff May, another National Review blogger and prominent right-wing pundit, objected. May insisted that Lopez, by blogging for the National Review was “fighting a war” and this war was “equally consequential” with the wars that are fought by the U.S. military. An excerpt:
There is a war of arms. And there is a war of ideas. They are not just inter-related, they are interdependent. They are equally consequential.
…Let’s take just one example: In the 1930s, Churchill fought a war of ideas. He tried to warn the world about Hitler; tried to warn Europe and America that Hitler’s hatred and ambition had to be checked. But most people did not listen. Churchill’s ideas did not prevail. They called Churchill a “war monger.”
…So yes, Kathryn, you are fighting a war. And your e-mailer is ignorant about how wars are fought, about how wars are won and lost, and about the way the world actually works.
To be fair, there is some truth in what May is saying. Arguments about ideas can have real consequences. But blogging on the National Review (or ThinkProgress, for that matter) is not the equivalent of Churchill warning the world about Hitler. And blogging is not “equally consequential” to the wars fought by members of the United States military, who put their lives at risk every day.
U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Eliamar Trapp U.S. Army Pfc. Cindra Smith of C Company clears her weapon before entering the barracks after physical training. She joined the Army to become an explosive ordnance disposal specialist after her daughter was injured in Iraq during an IED attack.
REDSTONE ARSENAL, Ala., July 12, 2006 — Having volunteered with the Red Cross, Cindra Smith knew there was something wrong when she arrived home from work late one night and had a Red Cross message on her machine.
“When I called them back I was told to wait by the phone and expect a call,” she said. “When I got the phone call they said my daughter had been shot in the back during an IED attack in Iraq.”
Pvt. Tracy Branton, Smith’s oldest daughter, was a heavy wheel mechanic on a convoy in Iraq when it was hit by IEDs. When Branton and her fellow soldiers got out of the vehicles to inspect the area, she was shot in the back. Now 21, Branton is 70 percent disabled and has a slight paralysis because of the injuries caused by the shooting.
“I remember being angry,” Smith said. “As parents, we always try and look for someone to blame. But knowing that she was doing something she believed in and wanted to do helped me get over that.”
After Branton was injured, Smith’s 20-year-old son, James Pritchard, decided to join the Army to become an infantryman. He attended basic and advanced individual training at Fort Benning, Ga., and is serving in Iraq with the 1st Infantry Division.
When the Army raised its acceptance age from 35 to 40 and then to 42, Smith made a life-changing move. Two weeks away from her 40th birthday, she is now known as Pfc. Cindra Smith, a soldier in C Company, 832nd Ordnance Battalion, 59th Ordnance Brigade, where she is attending AIT to become an explosive ordnance disposal specialist.
“If I can save another parent from getting the same phone call I did, then I would have done everything I came in to do,” Smith said.
Smith said joining the Army has given her a better understanding of what her children have been through. Her journey through initial entry training, however, was harder than it is for most. While attempting to rappel off Victory Tower, a 65-foot obstacle, Smith fell and fractured her hip in five places.
“I only missed one training event after I fell,” she said. “I completed all the road marches and ran with my company for PT. I might not have been the first one in, but I finished all the company runs.”
But the biggest obstacle Smith faced was an emotional one – after fighting cancer for more than two years, Smith’s mother died.
“I had been taking care of my mother for more than two years before I came into the Army,” Smith said. “When the time came for me to join, my mother and I had a long conversation and she supported my decision. We made the agreement that I would not be called if she passed away while I was in basic so my training would not be interrupted.”
Smith learned about her mother’s death during a call home a week and a half afterward ............................... “I’m looking forward to (deploying),” Smith said. “I believe it will give me a better understanding of what my children have experienced. Also, there are so many new IEDs being found out there every day. I commend those soldiers who have been putting their lives on the line each day for our country. It would be an honor for me to dismantle IEDs with them. I could be saving the life of someone’s father, daughter or mother.”
With the support of her husband, a retired firefighter, and her three children, Smith hopes to complete phase one of EOD training in August, then move to Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., to complete phase two of her training and graduate as an EOD specialist.
This woman is looking for revenge. As is her son.
Now, she's picked an odd way to go about it, but this woman doesn't belong in the Army. She fractured her hip, at 40, and they didn't chapter her out because of her MOS. She needed a shrink. Anyone who would rather train to defuse IED's over being with her dying mother is acting out a psychodrama I'd want no part of.
Instead of helping her daughter with everything from her pension to dealing with the VA, she's gonna go get some Iraqi bomb makers.
I mean, she's so wracked with guilt, she's engaged in some fantasy about saving other people instead of her family. Someone said in another post that she's trying not to go postal, but who the hell wants to serve with Josey Wales? Because this is about revenge and a desperate Army. It's a lot easier to deal with IED's than a broken 21 year old. A lot easier to let your son sign up for the Infantry to get revenge. I think if she could have gone 11X, she would have as well.
It is a hard thing to walk into the VA or a military hospital. Harder to deal with your guilt. But to train over being with your mother while she dies? To seek to deploy after a broken hip? This reeks of revenge and revenge does not belong in combat because it gets people killed.
WATERBURY, Conn., July 24 — Former President Bill Clinton issued a broad appeal for Democratic Party unity in defense of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman on Monday, praising him as a “good Democrat” who deserves to win next month’s primary. The senator’s surprisingly strong challenger has accused Mr. Lieberman of being too close to President Bush.
The challenger, Ned Lamont, a wealthy cable television executive, has pulled even with Mr. Lieberman in recent polls largely by attacking Mr. Lieberman for steadfastly supporting the war in Iraq.
But by appearing alongside not only the former president but also California Senator Barbara Boxer, who has spoken out against the war, Mr. Lieberman was clearly attempting to bolster his Democratic credentials. Monday’s rally also underscored the contrasting approach of the two campaigns in recent days. Mr. Lamont, despite trying to broaden his message beyond Iraq, campaigned over the weekend with California Rep. Maxine Waters, who called the war the most important issue facing the nation.
But Mr. Clinton emphasized the importance of party unity in spite of the disagreements over Iraq that have caused bitter conflicts between antiwar liberals and centrists like Mr. Lieberman. For much of his speech, Mr. Clinton recalled Mr. Lieberman’s support for an array of Mr. Clinton’s presidential initiatives, including education, health care and energy programs.
“We Democrats have a bad habit, we’re prone to think, and when people are thinking they sometimes disagree,” Mr. Clinton said. “That’s the way we are. If we fight together we should go forward together.”
Many of the people who attended the raucous rally at a theater in this working-class city said that they were on the fence about the Aug. 8 primary, expressing respect for Mr. Lieberman, who is in his third term, but skepticism about his support of the Iraq war, among other issues.
Both campaigns are concentrating renewed efforts on middle-class voters, whom they view as a critical swing group in the primary. ....................................
Calling the war the “pink elephant” in the room, Mr. Clinton said, “The real issue is, whether you were for it or against it, what are we going to do now.”
He added, “No Democrat is responsible for the mistakes that have been made since the fall of Saddam Hussein that have brought us to this point.” .......................................
But the two have also parted ways: Mr. Lieberman denounced Mr. Clinton’s conduct in the Lewinsky affair as “disgraceful” and “immoral” in a speech from the Senate floor in 1998.
On Monday, Mr. Lieberman heaped praise on Mr. Clinton. “He left America somewhere else we haven’t been since, unfortunately, admired and even liked throughout the world,” he said.
In line with the more aggressive tack he has taken recently, the senator also criticized the Bush administration several times, adding that Mr. Lamont was “peddling a big lie that I am not a real Democrat.” .......................................
Also on Monday, Mr. Lamont announced his endorsement by two of Mr. Lieberman’s former supporters, asserting that he was attracting disaffected Democrats who are growing increasingly frustrated with their party.
One of those endorsements came from Irving Stolberg, the former speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives and a longtime friend of Mr. Lieberman. At a news conference in New Haven, he spoke of his support of Mr. Lamont.
“I’ve supported Joe in every election until this one,” Mr. Stolberg said. “It’s very hard in politics to go against an old friend and a good friend. In Ned, I have found a new friend who is right on target on the most important issues facing our nation and the world today.”
........................................
Several thousand people attended the Lieberman rally, though a few dozen seats at the theater were empty. Not all of those who attended, however, were convinced by Mr. Clinton.
“It’s time for Democrats to stand up for true principles and stop caving to conservatives,” said John Szablewicz, a lifelong Democrat from the nearby town of Woodbury. He said he would vote for Mr. Lamont but was eager to see Mr. Clinton.
“When we try to be like Republicans,” Mr. Szablewicz said, “that’s when we lose.
So what would you have to do to Clinton to be a bad Democrat? Bang his daughter and put the pictures online? Slander his wife? What is his standard?
Because it doesn't have anything to do with personal betrayal. The media was expecting for Lieberman to call for Clinton's resignation.
The public is against the war, Democrats are against the war. So when do you deal with the pink elephant, when he's being chased to Basra through Shia human wave attacks and Iranian artillery?
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 24 — When Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki visits the White House on Tuesday for the first time, he is expected to make requests that clash sharply with President Bush’s foreign policy, Iraqi officials say, signaling a widening gap between the Iraqis and the Americans on crucial issues.
The requests will include asking President Bush to allow American-led troops in Iraq to be tried under Iraqi law, and to call for a halt to Israeli attacks on Lebanon, according to several Iraqi politicians, and to a senior member of Mr. Maliki’s party who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the prime minister.
Mr. Maliki is also expected to demand more autonomy for Iraqi forces, though he will not ask for a quick withdrawal of the 134,000 American troops here, the officials say.
The growing differences between Iraqi and American policies reflect an increasing disenchantment with American power among politicians and ordinary Iraqis, according to several politicians, academics and clerics. Sectarian violence has soared despite the presence of the Americans, and recent cases where American troops have been accused of killing civilians or raping Iraqi women have infuriated the public.
Mr. Maliki and other top Shiite leaders also want to maintain strong ties to Iran, whose influence is rising across the Middle East, officials say.
Mr. Maliki, who was installed in May, presides over a relatively weak government, divided among Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish blocs that oppose one another on important issues. There are even deep splits within the leading Shiite bloc and Mr. Maliki’s political party, Dawa.
To forge unity and win the confidence of the Iraqis, officials say, he has to take some stands that conflict with those of the White House, while relying on the American military to ward off the Sunni-led insurgency.
But in Washington, administration officials said they viewed Mr. Maliki’s public breaks with American policy positions as proof that he was his own man leading his own government, and was not a prop of the Americans.
So what happens when he doesn't get anything in return?
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and STEVEN ERLANGER Published: July 25, 2006
PARIS, July 24 — Support is building quickly for an international military force to be placed in southern Lebanon, but there remains a small problem: where will the troops come from?
The United States has ruled out its soldiers’ participating, NATO says it is overstretched, Britain feels its troops are overcommitted and Germany says it is willing to participate only if Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that it would police, agrees to it, a highly unlikely development.
“All the politicians are saying, ‘Great, great’ to the idea of a force, but no one is saying whose soldiers will be on the ground,” said one senior European official. “Everyone will volunteer to be in charge of the logistics in Cyprus.”
There has been strong verbal support for such a force in public, but also private concerns that soldiers would be seen as allied to Israel and would have to fight Hezbollah guerrillas who do not want foreigners, let alone the Lebanese Army, coming between them and the Israelis.
There is also the burden of history. France — which has called the idea of a force premature — and the United States are haunted by their last participation in a multinational force in Lebanon, after the Israeli invasion in 1982, when they became belligerents in the Lebanese civil war and tangled fatally with Hezbollah.
They withdrew in defeat after Hezbollah’s suicide bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, which killed 241 American service members and 58 French paratroopers.
Israel’s own public position toward an international force has been welcoming, but skeptical, insisting that it be capable of military missions, not just peacekeeping.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert suggested that the force could be made up of soldiers from both European and Arab states, while his defense minister, Amir Peretz, spoke of soldiers from NATO countries.
But Israel senses no great willingness among leading European countries to take part, and Israeli officials emphasize that they will not accept an end to hostilities until clear policy goals are met.
For the moment, at least, Israel is laying out an ambitious, if perhaps unrealistic, view of what the force would do. Israel wants it to keep Hezbollah away from the border, allow the Lebanese government and army to take control over all of its territory, and monitor Lebanon’s borders to ensure that Hezbollah is not resupplied with weapons.
And this is a way of pandering to the West, while knowing nothing will be done. Like in Iraq, if Arab countries participate in the supression of Hezbollah, their governments might fall.
Israel isn't going to get the EU to wage war on Hezbollah for them and they are reaching their limit of what they can do.
With the president at their side, three immigrant soldiers badly injured by homemade bombs in Iraq were sworn in at a naturalization ceremony Monday at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. From left, Specialist Sergio Lopez, Specialist Noe Santos-Dilone and Pfc. Eduardo Leal-Cardenas.
WASHINGTON, July 24 — President Bush presided over a citizenship ceremony Monday for three foreign-born soldiers wounded in Iraq and renewed his call for Congress to pass legislation overhauling immigration law.
“We are stronger and more dynamic when we welcome new citizens like these,’’ Mr. Bush said at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, adding, “As the nation debates the future of our immigration policies, we must remember the contribution of these good men.’’
More than 33,000 noncitizens serve in the United States military. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Bush signed an executive order making them immediately eligible for citizenship when they serve on active duty.
Now, with the House and the Senate at odds on the president’s immigration proposal, the immigrant troops have become part of a national political debate.
Two weeks ago the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a hearing on the importance of the military and how immigration law changes might affect its future. The session, in Miami, brought forth emotional testimony from Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who choked up as he talked about the struggles of his Italian immigrant parents.
The Senate session, like Monday’s presidential appearance at Walter Reed, was intended to promote what Mr. Bush calls “comprehensive immigration reform,’’ a bill that would both impose tough border security measures and put most illegal immigrants already in the country on a path to legalization. The House has rejected that approach in favor of a measure addressing border security only.
As in the past, Mr. Bush said in his remarks Monday that the United States “can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time.’’ He said this was “a joyful day’’ for himself and for the three soldiers: Specialist Noe Santos-Dilone, 21, originally from the Dominican Republic and now of Brooklyn, and two natives of Mexico, Specialist Sergio Lopez, 24, of Bolingbrook, Ill., and Pfc. Eduardo Leal-Cardenas, 21, of Los Angeles.
I guess they aren't as patriotic as some skinhead or fat slob minuteman. Hey, what have they given this country except a limb or two.
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- Fox News Channel chairman and CEO Roger Ailes responded to Keith Olbermann's latest critical volley against Bill O'Reilly on Monday, saying the MSNBC host's behavior ''is over the line.''
Ailes, appearing Monday at the summer meeting of the Television Critics Association, was referring to a weekend incident at the gathering in which Olbermann whipped out a mask of O'Reilly and gave a Nazi salute.
Ailes said Olbermann picks on Fox's O'Reilly to boost his ratings.
''Clearly he has no viewers except those he gets when he attacks Fox News,'' Ailes said.
Of Saturday's incident, Ailes said, ''I really think that's over the line.''
As opposed to O'Reilly's anti-semitic comments and threatening listerners? Molesting staffers?
Glen Walker, a professional sports bettor in North Carolina who places up to 70 bets a week of $2,000 to $5,000 each during football season, does not think so. “They’re not going to stop the offshore sports books,” Mr. Walker said. A crackdown will “just force it back to the black market.”
Last week, one such wagering site, BetOnSports.com, a publicly traded company in Britain, became the focal point of an American crackdown on offshore casinos, where gamblers anywhere in the world can use the highly profitable sites to place wagers on sporting events. They can also play casino games like blackjack and poker from their personal computers.
Federal agents arrested the British chief executive of BetOnSports, David Carruthers, who was in the United States on a flight layover. He is in custody in Fort Worth; the betting site has temporarily suspended operations to satisfy a temporary restraining order that prohibits the company from taking bets from United States residents. Mr. Carruthers is awaiting a hearing on his detention.
In Washington, the House overwhelmingly approved legislation recently that would clamp down on Internet casinos in part by restricting the ability of American financial institutions to process wagers.
The legislative-prosecutorial one-two punch appears to be the most concerted effort yet by the federal government to undermine Internet gambling in an era of well-organized, publicly owned offshore casinos. For the first time, Washington has succeeded in temporarily shutting down a publicly owned site and its effort has gained the attention of the operators, whose share prices plummeted last week.
Still, few experts expect the crackdown to do anything more than dent the industry. Sebastian Sinclair, an analyst with Christiansen Capital Advisors, which tracks online gambling trends, said offshore gambling could be “curtailed but it cannot be stopped.”
Other experts see the recent moves as little more than an elaborate cat-and-mouse game serving only to benefit Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos, along with Indian gambling operations, rather than seriously protecting Americans from falling prey to excessive gambling.
Some eight million Americans like Mr. Walker wager $6 billion annually through the Internet, many making bets on their favorite sports team or the N.C.A.A. basketball pool. About half of all online wagers come from the United States.
Critics say that online gambling is the equivalent of putting a slot machine in every home, providing an easy chance to lose money with a few mouse clicks, all without the social controls at a bricks-and-mortar casino.
Mr. Walker disagrees. “We’re not doing anything immoral or illegal,’’ he insisted. “I just don’t see that I’m harming anyone.”
While prosecutors argue that Internet casinos violate the law, there is no federal prohibition against actually placing a bet. So how much success the federal push can have “is a very profound question,” said Representative Jim Leach, Republican of Iowa, the co-author of the legislation, who says the gambling is detrimental to families and the economy ........................
The issue has fueled a political fire in Britain, where the United States recently extradited several white-collar suspects in an effort to prosecute them for actions that Britain did not consider illegal, or that British courts chose not to prosecute.
Opponents say that United States prosecutors are reaching outside their boundaries and the opponents are lobbying the British government to protect its own citizens.
But Mr. Walters said prosecutors might be able to mitigate the jurisdictional challenges because they also brought charges against BetOnSports’ founder, Gary Kaplan, and several of his relatives, who worked for the company and are American citizens.
The government could argue that the company has a fundamentally American origin and continuing ties, he said.
The case could dictate how much breadth and power prosecutors have to enforce gambling laws. It “could be a chance to clear up the gray area that’s always existed” as to the legality of offshore casinos, said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for BetOnSports.
................................................
Yet this is not the first effort to cut off payment methods. In November 2001, many major banks that issue credit cards began voluntarily refusing to process credit card payments for gambling. That gave rise to new overseas payment processors, like Neteller and FirePay, in which customers can deposit money to be forwarded to offshore casinos.
Having new overseas processors can spring up does present a problem, Mr. Leach said. But if the bill becomes law, it would also prohibit American financial institutions from transferring money to overseas payment processors known to do a lot of business with casinos. In turn, it could make people work harder to place bets.
“It could quite effectively reduce impulse betting,” Mr. Leach said. “It might be a slightly less-effective barrier to some of the poker kinds of games. I aspire to total curtailment. But I cannot guarantee that will occur.”
This is about one thing, and it isn't online poker.
Look, people can play any number of programs and replicate poker, they can travel to casinos, and there are hundreds of them in the US now.
What is the one thing which is exclusive to Vegas?
Sportsbetting.
Why? Because the NFL won't let it's teams be located in a place where there is a sports book. And the casinos want to keep them happy.
Online betting breaks down that rule. Once you have online sports books, the wall of Vegas is shattered and there is real incentive to influence games
Betting scandals have been a serious problen in Europe, so this isn't just a theoretical concern
So, I paid all my bills for July. For what may the first time in my adult life, everything says "Current Balance Due: $0.00". Well, with the exception of my student loans, which I will be paying until I die. But other than that, I’m caught up, zeroed out, solvent, with a little bit of money to spare. So, I decided to treat myself to something.
I came to the world of cell phones only reluctantly, and only as recently as February of this year. Up to that point, I had thought people were being a bit silly about their cell phones. EVERYBODY has to have one and they’re using them ALL THE TIME. But then I ended up in a few of those situations. You know the ones. You’re supposed to meet a friend at their house and you get there and their car is there and it looks like they’re home, but they can’t seem to hear you knocking. You’ve knocked and knocked. The doors are locked. If you had a cell phone, you could call them and see what’s up. Otherwise, you have to go allllll the way back home and call them from there.
Or:
You’ve volunteered to go get dinner for you and a friend. The place you’ve gone is closed or doesn’t have what your friend wants. A change of plans is necessary. With no cell phone? You’ve got to go back and re-convene. Or guess.
Or finally:
You, like me, drive an old used car that exists in a permanent state of questionable health. You’re driving between towns in the middle of the night and the headlights suddenly seem…dimmer. Then the air-conditioner cuts out. Your ALTERNATOR is dying! With no cell phone? You’re stuck on the side of the road waving your arms hoping to flag down someone who DOES have a cell phone.
So, yeah. Right around six months ago, it occured to me that yes, if fact, it might be time to get a cell phone.
Trouble is, they’re so damn ugly.
Remember the dawning days of the digital watch?
Mmmmm. Clunky.
This is kind of where I feel like we are with the cell phone. There’s a bunch of different companies, and yet their products seem to be so impressed with themselves for being phones at all that they’re content to do just that while being about as aesthetically appealing as a cold sore.
Which is what has made Motorola’s RAZR phone the most sought-after little piece of status technology in the country. It’s a cell phone that actually seems to have been designed to look cool. It’s matte. It’s compact. It’s kind of sexy. And for now, in spite of the fact that it’s notoriously fragile, user-unfriendly, and has dodgy speakers, it’s Number One.
And yeah, okay, they’re kind of cool. If you want the Same Cool Phone that Everybody Else Has.
And here’s where my truly obsessive nature comes in. I wanted a new cell phone. I wanted a cool cell phone. Not a Crackberry multiple-use interface, not a home video center and editing suite, not an MP3 player and fax machine. Just something that works and has a little style to boot. I looked at the options for upgrading through my cell provider.
Ick. No thanks. They’re all RAZR’s, home video editing suites, or what look like especially fugly pieces of extreme sports equipment.
So, I started just randomly browsing cell phone companies to see what I could find. And learned some very interesting things along the way, which is really the whole point of this post.
Nokia lost major market share to Motorola and an influx of new brands like Korea’s LG and the emergence of brands like Samsung in the cell phone market. Nokia’s original response was to see if they could design the next big Must-Have Luxury Item. Design head Frank Nuovo supervised the roll-out of Nokia’s super-thin, all-stainless, slide screen 8800 model. The phone? Lovely. Ring tones composed by Japanese avant-garde musician Riyuichi Sakamoto. Carefully integrated deluxe features. The price? $700. And there’s the problem. Nuovo seems to think elitist is good. In fact, he sounds like kind of a snotty prick in this 2005 NPR interview. If he’d said the word "premium" one more time, he would have sounded like a gas station cashier.
The phone was a mild success, but mostly tanked. Too expensive. Nuovo was taken out as design head and replaced by Alastair Curtis, a Royal College of Art graduate who brought in new designers and a fresh set of priorities. Meanwhile, inexplicably, the 8800 suddenly took off with a surprise population. The Russian mafia.
One of the things we observed [with the 8800] was the huge uptake in Russia. So we saw an opportunity to say, okay, why don’t we look at refreshing the product and making something very exclusive to Russia, understanding there is a desire in certain parts of Russia to express their newfound wealth. [As a result, Nokia created an all-black version of the 8800.] It’s been hugely successful.
"Certain parts of Russia" equalling "the Mafia parts" also known as "the only people in Russia who have any money at all".
Here’s the 8800, by the way:
(silver)
(Russian mafia black)
Both of these phones are available on eBay if you have an extra $700 to kick around. I know, riiiiiiiight. If you had that kind of money, you’d be a Republican.
Clearly, the 8800 was a little rich for my blood. I do kind of wish I could buy my brother the black one, though.
And then I feel deeply, miserably, headlong in love. With up and coming Nokia designer Liisa Puolaaka, the company’s Head of Brand Visual and Sensorial Experiences, the person responsible for bringing you (well, not yet American customers) this phone, which she describes as "a souvenir from the future":
On the review board where I saw this one, all the commenters were saying, "UGH!! Horrible!! What’s with the keys being on the sides like that? It’s too much! Ridicuous!" Except for one person who, in fact, owns the phone, who said, "Actually, having the keypad set up like that, after a short learning curve, makes dialing and texting much easier."
Puolaaka says:
Even today my work is still very much involved in understanding and recognising trends and the way people or societies are changing. One of the important things is to realise the difference between ‘long-term’ societal trends and ‘short-term’ lifestyle trends, but also to understand that some short-term trends have the potential to cross into the mainstream of society, where they become much more influential.
So a lot of my early work involved collaborating with product designers to incorporate that thinking into the starting point of their work, coming up with a design theme based on an understanding of the target consumer and the trends that would be influencing them.
(snip)
In talking about trends you’ve described how Nokia studies them and reacts to them as they emerge. But isn’t there a risk that you end up copying trends rather than setting them yourself?
I think it’s an oxymoron to say any one person actually sets a trend. Everyone is affected by the same things that happen around us, it’s just that some people pick up on those things before others. The trick is to be inspired, rather than to copy, and to know where to look - at the leading edges of art, society, culture. Maybe that’s why a lot of people in this field come from the fashion industry, because fashion has always been very open and accepting of the notion of being inspired by what’s ‘out there’ and then translating it into product ideas. What’s important is a sensitivity to what’s going on, observational skills, and the creativity to distill those observations into stories, themes and product possibilities.
Now, is this starting to sound familiar to you at all? It’s called "Experience Design" and doesn’t it sound a little like, maybe, BLOGGING?! And how it’s affecting the political discourse now?
We’ll come back to that. First, I want to show you a couple of gorgeous phones.
Now, if I had $400, I would have gotten a 7370, which is a spin phone, which means it goes like this:
This is what happens when a company like Samsung does it:
Ho hum. Doesn’t that just scream "Armitron!" at you?
Here’s the Nokia version:
In warm amber on the left (for the ladies, I suspect) or manly coffee brown on the right.
Oooooooooh.
Ahhhhhhhhh.
Puolaaka’s team studied Japanese ceramics, engravings, different finishes of leather and steel. They want the phones to work well, but also to look good and even smell good. It’s part of creating brand loyalty and inspiring consumers to seek more out of their choices, to find things they love rather than something that’ll do.
You can also get phones with no keypad, which you control with buttons and a wheel like an iPod:
Or you can get one like I got, which is up at the top of this post, the 7260. Of course, it wasn’t issued in America, so I had to chase around all over the Internets to order one, and I’m taking my chances with buying a warranty, cos otherwise it isn’t supported in the US by Nokia. GAWD!! Why isn’t it here?! I ordered it more than 50 hours ago!!
The waiting is KILLING ME!!
If I’d had just a little more cash (and no need for things like gasoline and groceries), I would have splurged and gone for the dark brown 7370. It’s just so lovely. Still, until I get that big book deal, the 7260 is a very smart-looking little phone and I hope to give it a good and loving home.
My point with all this is really, "Oooooh, look. Preeeettyyyy…" but also to point out that Nokia is doing what most of us deeply wish the Democratic party and its calcified system of do-nothing strategists and media advisors would do. ASK THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT. And then give it to them. Supposedly liberal politicos are still campaigning like it’s 2003. They think the Feingold Iraq resolution is some lefty extremist position, when actually 60% of the American people back it.
I predict great things for Nokia in the years to because they’re thinking ahead, trying to anticipate what will be best for their customers and making it for them. They’re not taking former design head Frank Nuovo’s tack of dictating from on high what will be the Next Big Thing for us lowly proles. You see how that worked out. You end up only hitting it big with the Russian mafia.
Maybe Joe Lieberman could learn a thing or two from this. People like it better when you ask them what they think rather then telling them what to think.
Let’s roll that Puolaaka quote again:
I think it’s an oxymoron to say any one person actually sets a trend. Everyone is affected by the same things that happen around us, it’s just that some people pick up on those things before others. The trick is to be inspired, rather than to copy, and to know where to look - at the leading edges of art, society, culture.
By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, July 24, 2006; A01
From its first days in Iraq in April 2003, the Army's 4th Infantry Division made an impression on soldiers from other units -- the wrong one.
"We slowly drove past 4th Infantry guys looking mean and ugly," recalled Sgt. Kayla Williams, then a military intelligence specialist in the 101st Airborne. "They stood on top of their trucks, their weapons pointed directly at civilians. . . . What could these locals possibly have done? Why was this intimidation necessary? No one explained anything, but it looked weird and felt wrong."
Today, the 4th Infantry and its commander, Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, are best remembered for capturing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, one of the high points of the U.S. occupation. But in the late summer of 2003, as senior U.S. commanders tried to counter the growing insurgency with indiscriminate cordon-and-sweep operations, the 4th Infantry was known for aggressive tactics that may have appeared to pacify the northern Sunni Triangle in the short term but that, according to numerous Army internal reports and interviews with military commanders, alienated large parts of the population.
The unit, a heavy armored division despite its name, was known for "grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not," according to a subsequent investigation of the 4th Infantry Division's detainee operations by the Army inspector general's office. Its indiscriminate detention of Iraqis filled Abu Ghraib prison, swamped the U.S. interrogation system and overwhelmed the U.S. soldiers guarding the prison.
Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry Division and was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, said the division's approach was indiscriminate. "With the brigade and battalion commanders, it became a philosophy: 'Round up all the military-age males, because we don't know who's good or bad.' " Col. Alan King, a civil affairs officer working at the Coalition Provisional Authority, had a similar impression of the 4th Infantry's approach.
"Every male from 16 to 60" that the 4th Infantry could catch was detained, he said. "And when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency."
The unit's tactics were no accident, given its commanding general, according to his critics. "Odierno, he hammered everyone," said Joseph K. Kellogg Jr., a retired Army general who was at Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led occupation agency.
But that criticism hasn't hurt Odierno's subsequent career. When he returned to the United States in mid-2004, Odierno was promoted to be the military assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He recently took command over III Corps at Fort Hood, Tex., and is scheduled at the end of this year to return to Iraq to become the No. 2 U.S. commander there, overseeing the day-to-day operations of U.S. forces.
In an interview, Odierno mounted a strenuous defense of his division's performance, and said any implication that "all we did was kill people wantonly and abuse prisoners -- in my opinion, that's totally false."
Odierno said that he had made detainee operations a major focus of his command after it became clear in the summer of 2003 that the division would have to hold prisoners. "That's what bothers me about this" discussion of the 4th Infantry. "I spent so much time on this. It was important to me that we did this right."
Two years ago at a meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army, Odierno explained that his aggressive tactics were born of experience. "We'd go in, do a raid on a house, and we wouldn't search any of the families, and as we were leaving, they would hand weapons from under their dresses to their men, who would shoot at us."
So, he said, "yeah, initially, we probably made some mistakes." But, he continued, "we adapted quickly."
First Combat in Decades
Unlike most Army divisions, the 4th Infantry hadn't been deployed for decades, missing out on Panama, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. At its home base of Fort Hood, Tex., it sometimes was mocked as the second team, taking a back seat to its neighbor, the 1st Cavalry Division.
The unit was initially given the role of invading Iraq from the north in spring 2003, but its assignment was changed after the Turkish government declined to permit the movement of U.S. troops through its territory. The 4th Infantry's equipment was shipped to Kuwait, and it entered Iraq from there after the invasion was over. In mid-April, the division was assigned to relieve the Marines who had briefly occupied Hussein's home town of Tikrit. In language unusual for an officially produced document, the history of the operation produced by the Marines 1st Division is disapproving, even contemptuous, of what it calls the 4th Infantry Division's "very aggressive" posture as the unit came into Iraq.
The history dryly noted that the Marines, "despite some misgivings," turned over the area to the 4th Infantry Division and departed April 21. "Stores that had re-opened quickly closed back up as the people once again evacuated the streets, adjusting to the new security tactics," the final draft of the history reported. "A budding cooperative environment between the citizens and American forces was quickly snuffed out. The new adversarial relationship would become a major source of trouble in the coming months."
In July, a member of a psychological operations team attached to the 4th's artillery brigade, which was known as Task Force Iron Gunner, filed a formal complaint about how its soldiers treated Iraqis.
"Few of the raids and detentions executed by Task Force Iron Gunner have resulted in the capture of any anti-coalition members or the seizure of illegal weapons," wrote the soldier, whose name was blacked out from documents released by the Army. .................................... Another instance of abuse in the 4th Infantry carried no such ambiguity. On Sept. 11, 2003, a soldier shot handcuffed Iraqi detainee, Obeed Radad, in an isolation cell in a detention center in Camp Packhorse near Tikrit, supposedly when the Iraqi attempted to cross a barbed-wire fence. Radad had turned himself in nine days earlier, after learning that U.S. forces were looking for him. The bullet passed through his forearm and lodged in his stomach.
Eighteen hours later, an Army investigator began to look into the incident, according to an internal Army summary. Maj. Frank Rangel Jr., the executive officer of a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry, was assigned to investigate. He didn't believe the soldier's account that Radad was trying to escape. "I thought the suspect might have committed negligent homicide" and lesser offenses, Rangel said later. Lt. Col. Poirier, Rangel's commanding officer, thought the shooter should be court-martialed. "This soldier had committed murder," Poirier said.
But Odierno overruled that recommendation, and ultimately the soldier was simply discharged from the Army for the good of the service. "I made the decision to dishonorably discharge him because of mitigating circumstances," Odierno said in an interview. "He was a cook, he didn't get proper training, and this detainee was very aggressive, a bad guy." ................................. Sassaman left the Army about the same time as Poirier. He made his departure defiantly, taking a swipe at Odierno, whose division had been headquartered in one of Hussein's former palaces in Tikrit.
"If I were to do it all over again, I would do the exact same thing, and I've thought about this long and hard," Sassaman testified. "I was taught in the Army to win, and I was trying to win all the way, and I just disagreed -- deeply disagreed -- with my superior commanders on the actions that they thought should be taken with these individuals [charged in the Tigris bridge case]. And you have to understand, the legal community, my senior commanders, were not fighting in the streets of Samarra. They were living in a palace in Tikrit."
Billmon has his breathless comments from 2003-2004
But as I noted in 2003, Odierno had a couple of battalion commanders who were fucking nuts and should have been relieved. One ran his Humvees on nightly patrol and then went on about how religious he was.
It was clear in 2003 that the leadership of the 4thID had issues and now, after the fact, Ricks tells a different story. It's the same story some of us had been telling since 2003. One Guardian story had snipers from the 4th ID blowing a bird selling kid away. But this commander was a good story to a naive press.
The enemy is the same,' a Shiite group says of the Jewish state and its main supporter, the U.S. By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer July 24, 2006
BAGHDAD — Though embroiled in a bloody war over the future shape and identity of their country, Iraq's Sunni Arabs, Shiites, Kurds and even Christians have unified in condemning Israel over its fighting in Lebanon against the Hezbollah militia.
Condemnation of Israel's actions in Lebanon and of the United States as the Jewish state's backer has emerged as a rare bridge issue, cutting across political, ethnic and religious lines.
Demonstrators loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr marched through the city center of Najaf on Sunday evening in support of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, chanting "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!"
Across the city, more moderate Shiite clerics loyal to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a statement urging support for the Islamist militia in Lebanon and condemning the U.S. and Israel.
"The enemy is the same," said a statement issued by the Hawza, the network of seminaries in Najaf. "Their aim is to enslave and humiliate us. What's happening today in Lebanon is part of a bigger scheme to crush the blessed [Islamic] nation."
Vice President Tariq Hashimi, a Sunni Muslim Arab, expressed his "extreme concern over the Zionist aggression against" the Lebanese as well as Palestinians.
"Iraq's stance has been known through history, and the issue of supporting Arabs and Muslims has never changed," he said in a statement.
There were signs that the unconditional U.S. support for Israel's offensive following Hezbollah's cross-border raid resulting in the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the death of eight others was ratcheting up anti-American sentiment.
In a rambling round table with journalists, the Sunni Arab speaker of Iraq's parliament, Mahmoud Mashadani, continued his frequent criticism of Israel, Jews, Zionism and the United States.
Saying that the U.S. seeks to control oil fields in southern Iraq, Mashadani added, "America didn't come to the country for our sake. America came with a pure Zionist agenda."
The Shiite-run Al Furat satellite television channel launched a nationwide initiative to raise funds for Lebanese humanitarian and reconstruction efforts. The channel has been flooded with pledges, with Iraqis living abroad also calling in to donate.
"The donors are coming from all sects," said Ahmad Kadhim, a station spokesman. "Shiites, Sunnis and even Christians."
.........................
Some Shiites within Maliki's coalition have demanded that he cancel the trip to protest U.S. support of Israel, but the prime minister refused, saying he would push the Lebanese cause in Washington.
Even the puppet government is rebelling against Shock and Awe in Lebanon. How long is it before they turn on us?
(AP Photo/Tina Fineberg) Damage to the underground network in Queens turned out to be greater than the utility company originally imagined when it said the electrical failures affected just a couple thousand private and business customers in the neighborhood. On Friday, Con Ed provided a new estimate of 25,000 customers, or as many as 100,000 people.
Power has been restored to 22,000 of the estimated 25,000 Con Ed customers who lost power during last week's heat wave, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today.
Con Ed thinks it can restore power to most of the 3,000 remaining customers without power today, Bloomberg said. A customer, though, can represent an entire apartment building.
"We are optimistic," he said, "but we aren't going to really know where we stand until the end of the day."
The mayor also said that the utility is planning to give the city an initial report on the electrical failure on Aug. 2.
"There's no reason to believe that Con Ed caused this deliberately," said Bloomberg. The mayor blamed a combination of natural disasters for the power failure.
While he noted that it's not the best situation to have the power utility investigating itself, he said the city had little choice since Con Ed knows its network best.
"It's their company, their network and they've got to go in and fix that," said Bloomberg. "And to go in and go after their CEO just because you want someone to blame doesn't make sense."
The mayor also cautioned that residents who do have power should strive to conserve, even as the weather gets muggier this week.
Bloomberg noted that many Con Ed employees have been working 12- to 16-hour days to get the power back on. One worker suffered burns in a manhole fire, but was treated and released from the hospital.
Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Joseph Bruno said Con Edison is "doing a good job," and he encouraged residents to support workers and say "hello" to them.
Yesterday, angry residents and politicians called on officials to declare parts of the borough a disaster area.
"I have to sleep in the car, because of the heat, with my kids," said Rosa Morales, 46, a housekeeper who was one of the 50,000 residents still without power Sunday evening.
Con Edison was still finding damage as they inspected manholes, the utility's chief executive Kevin Burke said Sunday.
"It's very difficult to give a timetable, but like I said, we're getting back customers every hour," he said.
Burke dodged questions about calls by politicans for him to step down. "I think we've been communicating with the public with the best info we had," he said.
Meanwhile, Queens leaders, including Rep. Joe Crowley, D-Queens/Bronx, called on Gov. George Pataki to designate the neighborhoods, which include Astoria, Woodside and Sunnyside, a federal disaster area.
"Anywhere else it would be," he said. "If this were an area of 100,000 people in upstate New York, the governor would have declared it a disaster area."
Bloomberg took days to get out to Astoria, even as there were transformer fires, then generator fires.
If this was last year, Bloomberg would have lost his job over this. Even hampered by days of torrential rains, Con Ed's performance was dillatory. Astoria is packed with restaurants and food stores and the losses to their owners, forget the residents, has been tremendous. Jen's block had power, but across the street didn't. Oh, yeah, she had a couple of fires on her block.
Disaster area designation would be a good idea.So of course, Pataki wants nothing to do with it.
KANEOHE, Hawaii -- Teens looking to hook up with a friend on the popular Web community MySpace may bump into an unexpected buddy: the U.S. Marine Corps.
So far, over 12,000 Web surfers have signed on as friends of the Corps in response to the latest military recruiting tactic. Other military branches may follow.
MySpace.Com, the Internet's most popular social networking site with over 94 million registered users, has helped redefine the way a generation communicates. Users, many in their teens and 20s, post personal profiles and accumulate lists of friends and contacts with common interests.
The Marine Corps MySpace profile -- featuring streaming video of barking drill sergeants, fresh recruits enduring boot camp and Marines storming beaches -- underscores the growing importance of the Internet to advertisers as a medium for reaching America's youth.
"That's definitely the new wave," said Gunnery Sgt. Brian Lancioni at a Hawaii recruiting event. "Everything's technical with these kids, and the Internet is a great way to show what the Marine Corps has to offer."
Patrick Baldwin, an 18-year-old recruit from Saratoga, N.Y., who linked his profile to the Marines' site after hearing about it from a friend, said MySpace was a good place for interested teens to start learning more about the Marines.
"The more information you have the better off you are," said Baldwin, who left for boot camp a few weeks ago.
The Army, which originally balked at advertising on MySpace because of well-publicized incidents of child predators using the site to meet kids, plans to soon set up its own profile page.
"It is where prospects are," said Louise Eaton, media and Web chief for the U.S. Army Accession Command. "We go to where they are to try to inform them of the opportunities we offer."
Recruiters say MySpace is good for advertising, but they would never sign someone up to join the Marines unless they've met him or her in an old-fashioned, face-to-face meeting.
Web surfers who open the Marines' MySpace page can click on a tab titled "Contact a Recruiter." This directs them to the Marines.com site where they are prompted to fill out a form with their name, address and phone number so recruiters can arrange to meet them.
So far over 430 people have asked to contact a Marine recruiter through the site in the five months since the page went up, including some 170 who are considered "leads" or prospective Marine recruits. ......................
Steve Morse with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors is critical of recruiters using MySpace profiles. But Morse said they don't surprise him because the Iraq war has forced the military to search "under every bush" for recruits.
"It's kind of obnoxious of them to be using something that's sort of like a youth domain, to kind of come in and really sucker youth into something they're not really explaining fully," Morse said
"Steve" Stephenson, head of the Indiana Klan in the 1920's
At the regular left bloggers barbecue and conspiracy meeting tonight, it was mentioned that some right wing idiot mentioned his list of the 10 worst Americans and it started with Bill Clinton.
I disagree. Here is my list in no particular order:
Twelve days in, and even Ralph Peters thinks the Israelis are losing:
Israel is losing this war. For a lifelong Israel supporter, that's a painful thing to write. But it's true. And the situation's worsening each day.
Now Ralph is the guy who spent a few days back in March riding around the safer parts of Baghdad (when such places still existed) and then came back and told his fellow true believers that the war in Iraq was as good as won. So if he now says the Israelis are losing, I would ordinarily expect the IDF to be accepting Hizbollah's unconditional surrender some time tomorrow morning.
But it's clear from many other sources that things aren't going so well with Operation Midwife:
The Israeli Army -- which dashed across the Sinai in two days in 1967, and surrounded an entire Egyptian army in 1973, has spent the past three days trying to secure Maroun al-Ras, a village about 500 meters inside Lebanon.
Securing that modest objective (and it may not be secure even yet) has cost the Israelis at least 20 soldiers KIA.
The number of rockets falling on northern Israel has been reduced only minimally, if at all, and Israeli civilians are still dying, despite 11 days of bombing and round-the-clock Israeli air cover over southern Lebanon.
U.S. military sources say that IDF claims to have destroyed a significant percentage of Hizbollah's missiles are significantly "overstated."
Jane's Weeklyreports that Hizbollah has emulated the Viet Cong and honeycombed the border area with underground tunnels and command posts that are virtually impervious to artillery fire and the Israeli Air Force's existing stock of bombs. (It looks like those "precision" munitions the Pentagon is rushing to the front may be bunker busters.)
At least so far, it appears the Israelis have set extremely limited objectives for their ground forces. (This is one of Peters' big gripes.) According to the Washington Post, the goal of the current operation is to secure four villages and a strip of territory six miles wide and 2.5 miles deep along the border. The significance of those villages and that particular piece of land is not stated. Nor is it explained how clearing them, and only them, will prevent Hizbollah from continuing to rain rockets on Israeli towns and cities -- much less force the organization to disarm.
No doubt the answers to those questions are somewhere in the war plan, which the Israelis are said to have been working on for the past six years. Unfortunately, Hizbollah's fighters haven't had a chance to read the plan, and so they aren't following it:
"They're not fighting like we thought they would," one soldier said. "They're fighting harder. They're good on their own ground."
One soldier said the guerrillas wore olive green army uniforms "to confuse us" because Israelis wear the same. Others said Hezbollah hid underground in reinforced bunkers until they thought it safe to come out and attack. The Israelis prefer to stay away from those bunkers, the soldiers said, instead calling in coordinates so forces massed behind the border can hit them with guided missiles.
The IDF high command, meanwhile, is starting to sound pretty, well, defensive about its big offensive push, with the Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (an air force man through and through) complaining that he needs more time, dammit, to show what all his cool toys can do:
Halutz admitted the IDF would not be able to "bring the rocket fire to a complete stop. There will always be some terrorist to fire a missile. But I believe we'll be able to push them north and reduce the accuracy of their fire."
As one unnamed Israeli officer put it, somewhat plaintively: “I believe in air power. I believe in our ability to destroy Hezbollah without going into Lebanon again the way we did in 1982." This, of course, is the same promise Air Force generals have been making to their bosses since World War I, but which none of them have ever been able to keep. There's a first time for everything, I suppose, but it doesn't look like the second Lebanon War is going to be it.
............................
The historical reality of air power is that it doesn't work to eliminate armies.
Wow, olive green uniforms are confusing. They hide in bunkers.
Uh, folks, this ain't the PLO. They paid attention and now fight like they did. Israel bet they could undo the Hezbollah and they can't.
Why?
The one weakness of Arab armies was not their fighting ability, but the politics which dominated their armies. Remove the politics and the theorizing, and they can fight. Hezbollah promotes on merit and the best men get commands. Which means they are not the same as the Arab armies Israel blew away. They will fight to the death if they have to and the IDF can't.
Harlem to Clinton: you're ruining us Gentrification since former president moved in sees rents rise by 100 per cent, forcing poor black families out By Nicholas Wapshott in New York Published: 23 July 2006
Bill Clinton's decision to site his office in the largely black Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem, as a gesture of solidarity with African-Americans, appears to have backfired.
Dozens of angry blacks demonstrated last week outside the building that houses the former president's staff, claiming that his move had led to the gentrification of the area and increased the price of homes beyond their reach.
...............................
But his move to Harlem, known as the Black Capital of America, has had unintended consequences. The protest march by 40 mainly elderly people to 125th Street was organised by the Harlem Tenants Council to protest at property prices, which have rocketed since Mr Clinton moved in.
The booming American economy and the enormous demand for Manhattan property has already caused Harlem and other New York areas previously the preserve of blacks and Hispanics to soar. Rents have nearly doubled in Harlem since 2000, when Mr Clinton left the White House to support his wife, Hillary, and her career as the junior senator for New York. A one-bedroom flat which used to rent six years ago for $800 a month now costs $1,400, according to Valerie Orridge, president of the Savoy Park Tenants Association.
The Washington Post records that the top price for a brownstone terrace house in Harlem in 2001 was $400,000 (£215,000). Now a fully renovated townhouse costs as much as $4m. Even this is a relative bargain: 30 blocks south, similar houses which need considerable renovation start at $5m.
Harlem is home to young black professionals who can afford the inflated prices and are undeterred by the noise and late-night roistering of Harlem street life. As prices rise sharply, the area is fast becoming more staid and crime is falling.
Which is why the simplistic view of black people loving Clinton without reservation is really not true. The relationship is far more complex.
But Clinton didn't start gentrification in Harlem, it was already being gentrified when he got there. The begining of the revival of 125th St was in the early 90's when the street vendors drew people to what had been a dead commercial strip for 20 years. The store owners, in what was a brain dead move, demanded Guiliani force them from the strip and down to 116th St. Which he did. Only problem, what could have been a bulkwark against the large stores moving in, they were gone. Once the street vendors were gone, it was open season on stores. Everything from Old Navy to Blockbuster sprung up.
The biggest fight was over the Pathmark between the slowly developing eastern edge of 125th Street. Dominican supermarket owners bitterly opposed the opening of the store, and had some pull, despite their miserable hiring records, often crappy food and high prices. When Giuliani made the deal to build the Pathmark with the Abyssinian Baptist Church, that was the real start of the gentrification of Harlem.
The State Office Building had been built to trigger such a change, but didn't.
The real reason is that Harlem has the last undeveloped housing stock in Harlem. And despite the article's suggestion, most of the streets in Harlem are quiet. The numerous brownstones and easy access to transportation make it attractive to many black professionals. The sign that Harlem is changing are the numerous boutiques and small restaurants opening along the avenues, mostly by black professionals starting their own businesses.
The fact is that the gentrification was delayed by high crime rates, but is to some degree inevitable. The problem comes in with greedy landlords who see vast profits and illegally try to evict these people.
Will buying a TV set one day involve choosing between full, queen and king sizes?
Panasonic said last week that it would begin selling a 103-inch flat-panel plasma television in the United States in time for the holiday season. The TV, about as big as a queen-size bed and, Panasonic says, the largest on the market, will sell for $70,000.
The previous record-holder for the largest flat-screen TV is a 84-inch model, which is sold by several manufacturers.
Needless to say, the new Panasonic is expected to be a niche product.
“Sales will be limited in scope because of its weight and size,” said Andrew Nelkin, vice president of the display group at Panasonic Consumer Electronics.
The screen’s 90-inch length and 48-inch height makes it equivalent in size to four 50-inch TV’s, the company said. With the frame and speakers, it measures nearly nine feet by six feet. It weighs about 450 pounds and has to be shipped in a box with a specially designed suspension system.
The 103-inch TV will go on sale in Japan in September. Panasonic, whose smallest TV has a 23-inch liquid-crystal display, is the North American unit of the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company of Japan. The big set’s screen resolution is 1080p, which amounts to about two million pixels or twice the resolution of the most recent standard for high-definition TVs.
As my nephew says, you need a big TV to watch sports.
Seriously, this is the new status item for rappers.
"Yo,my crib gots the 103 Matsushita, baby. It's like being IN Madden 2007"
Oh, and if you don't have a TV, please don't use this thread to proclaim your willful ignorance. If you didn't read books or listen to the radio, you wouldn't share that with us, would you?
By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writers 34 minutes ago
SIDON, Lebanon - Mideast diplomats were pressing Syria to stop backing Hezbollah as the guerrillas fired more deadly rockets onto Israel's third-largest city Sunday. Israel faced tougher-than-expected ground battles and bombarded targets in southern Lebanon, hitting a convoy of refugees.
Israel's defense minister said his country would accept an international force, preferably NATO, on its border after it drives back or weakens Hezbollah. But his troops described the militants they encountered as a smart, well-organized and ruthless guerrilla force whose fighters do not seem afraid to die.
Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview published Monday that an Israeli ground invasion would not prevent the Shiite militant group from firing rockets into Israel. But he said he was open to discussing initiatives.
Israeli ground forces made another foray into Lebanon at daybreak Monday, taking control of the area around the town of Bint Jbail — known as a stronghold of Hezbollah guerrillas — after a heavy overnight artillery barrage in the area, the army said.
Several soldiers were wounded in the fighting, the military said, giving no further details. Israeli media reports said a number of guerrillas were also wounded.
With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arriving in Israel on Monday, both the Arabs and Israelis appeared to be trying to set out positions ahead of Washington's first diplomatic mission to the region since the fighting began. Rice said Sunday the United States' poor relationship with Syria is overstated and indicated an openness to working with Damascus to resolve the crisis.
The United States backs Israel's refusal to talk about a cease-fire until it completes the military campaign against Hezbollah, but is under increasing pressure to foster a plan to end the growing suffering and destruction in Lebanon.
Still, daily casualty figures appeared to be falling — about nine confirmed Sunday by Lebanese security officials, compared with dozens each day earlier in the week. The decrease could be a result of the exodus from the hardest-hit areas or because of the difficulty in getting figures from the war zone.
In the 12th day of fighting, guerrillas launched more than a dozen rockets at the Israeli city of Haifa, killing two people. Israeli missiles struck a convoy of fleeing Lebanese, killing four people, including a journalist.
In the far south, fighting with Hezbollah raged around the Israeli military's foothold in Lebanon — the border village of Maroun al-Ras, where the Israeli army has maintained a significant presence since Saturday. But so far they were not advancing. Hezbollah reported three of its fighters killed.
Israeli military officials said their forces captured two Hezbollah guerrillas on Sunday. Israel Army Radio said they were the first prisoners Israel has taken in this offensive.
Arab heavyweights Egypt and Saudi Arabia were pushing Syria to end its support for the guerrillas, Arab diplomats in Cairo said.
A loss of Syria's support would deeply weaken Hezbollah, though its other ally, Iran, gives it a large part of its money and weapons. The two moderate Arab governments were prepared to spend heavily from Egypt's political capital in the region and Saudi Arabia's vast financial reserves to break Damascus from the guerrillas and Iran, the diplomats said.
Syria said it will press for a cease-fire to end the fighting — but only in the framework of a broader Middle East peace initiative that would include the return of the Golan Heights. Israel was unlikely to accept such terms but it was the first indication of Syria's willingness to be involved in efforts to defuse the crisis.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Israel was interested in a NATO-led force, and the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, spoke of one consisting of European Union members with combat experience and the authority to take control of Lebanon’s border and crossing points.
American officials said they were open to the idea but did not expect American troops to be part of the force. “It’s a new idea, we’ll certainly take it seriously,” John R. Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN’s “Late Edition.”
In Washington, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with a delegation from Saudi Arabia, and officials on both sides said the makeup of a potential international peacekeeping force was discussed. [Page A8.]
Israel and the United States initially responded skeptically to the idea of an international force, first proposed last Monday by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations.
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany and Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy of France were in Israel on Sunday and Ms. Rice was scheduled to arrive Monday. She is expected to go to Rome later in the week for a conference aimed at ending the fighting.
While the Israelis and Americans seemed increasingly focused on a multinational force for southern Lebanon that would work with the Lebanese Army to remove the risk to Israel of Hezbollah, it remained unclear how the European countries whose forces would participate would react and how Arab countries viewed the idea.
Wow, Hezbollah is hard to defeat. I mean, it's not like they're fighting a sworn enemy on their home ground or anything after years of training.
Didn't anyone in the IDF think that Hezbollah has been waiting for this moment to fight Israel to a standstill, or at least kill a bunch of IDF soldiers? Now will people realize shock and awe is like every other Air Force war plan, highly flawed against ground troops.
It's called getting something for nothing. The fact is that Syria might like a deal, but Egypt is facing opposition from it's own people about Israel's shock and awe in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia has to fear some of those same missiles coming from Iran. But the reality is that neither country can protect them from Israel or US bombs and Iran can.
They bomb Syria, the US in Iraq suddenly faces a Shia uprising, courtesy of Iran. Besides, Iraq isn't going to be a US ally much longer.
no one seems to remember this anymore, but syria was considered to be an ally in the "war on terra" in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. the syrians shared intelligence with the u.s. about al qaeda and the u.s. rendered suspected al qaeda members to syria to be tortured. the falling out between the u.s. and syria wasn't over israel, or syria's support for anti-israeli groups like hamas or hezbollah, it was the iraq war.
syria long had a strained relationship with saddam's iraq. it was the only arab country to side with iran in the iran-iraq war. in the gulf war, syria contributed 17,000 troops to fight iraq. unlike other arab coalition members (like the saudis and egyptians), who did more support work for other coalition members, syrian divisions actually invaded iraq, crossing the border along the euphrates river valley to make a second front while the bulk of coalition forces came from the south through kuwait. when the iraq war was planned, the u.s. initially assumed that syria would, once again, not pass up a chance to beat up on saddam. but syria refused to cooperate and did not support the war.
ever since then syria has been on the administration's shit list. they've been blamed for virtually everything that's gone wrong in iraq, from foreign fighters to missing WMDs. syria, meanwhile, has been trying to get back into the u.s.' good graces. syria turned over members of saddam's family to the u.s. and has periodically clamped down on its border. but no matter what they do, the u.s. government has not been interested in hearing from them. i suspect the bush administration would rather not give up its scapegoat for problems in iraq.
just before i arrived in damascus last september, the syrian government announced that it had raided an insurgent safehouse near the iraqi border. what exactly happened is still not clear. some of the people i met in damascus were convinced that the syrian government staged the raid to show the u.s. government that it was cracking down on insurgents. in my mind, both scenarios are equally plausible: the syrian government could have raided a real iraqi insurgent safehouse, or they could have staged it to put on a good show for the americans. but either way, the story demonstrates that syria would like to have improved relations with the u.s.
so the bush administration's decision to engage syria is not stupid. syrian cooperation with the u.s. on regional security is not dependent on the return of the golan heights. golan wasn't returned in 2001-2002 when they were an american ally against al qaeda, nor was it returned in 1998 when warren christopher shuttled between beirut, damascus and jerusalem and got hezbollah to stop an earlier series of missile attacks against israel.
what is stupid is for the u.s. to insist on dealing with syria only through intermediaries. syria doesn't just want golan, it wants a restoration of normal relations with the u.s. that is something we can actually use to influence them. but it doesn't do any good unless we deal with them directly.
(note: this is putting aside the issue of whether syria really can stop hezbollah. i'm not so convinced that it can. hezbollah is supported by syria, but that doesn't make them syrian puppets)
More than half of Japan's citizens do not want their next prime minister to visit the controversial Yasukuni war shrine, according to two recent polls.
About 54% of respondents to a Mainichi newspaper survey said the next premier should not visit the shrine.
A similar poll in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun found 53% of participants opposed such visits.
Current Premier Junichiro Koizumi, who is due to step down in September, has been to the shrine five times.
The visits anger China and South Korea, which say the shrine honours Japan's militarist past.
They object to the fact that 14 Class A war criminals are among the 2.5 million people commemorated at the shrine.
By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER Published: July 23, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 22 — As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads to Israel on Sunday, Bush administration officials say they recognize Syria is central to any plans to resolve the crisis in the Middle East, and they are seeking ways to peel Syria away from its alliance of convenience with Iran.
In interviews, senior administration officials said they had no plans right now to resume direct talks with the Syrian government. President Bush recalled his ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister, in February 2005. Since then, America’s contacts with Damascus have been few, and the administration has imposed an array of sanctions on Syria’s government and banks, and frozen the assets of Syrian officials implicated in Mr. Hariri’s killing.
But officials said this week that they were at the beginning stages of a plan to encourage Saudi Arabia and Egypt to make the case to the Syrians that they must turn against Hezbollah. With the crisis at such a pivotal stage, officials who are involved in the delicate negotiations to end it agreed to speak about their expectations only if they were not quoted by name.
“We think that the Syrians will listen to their Arab neighbors on this rather than us,’’ a senior official said, “so it’s all a question of how well that can be orchestrated.’’
There are several substantial hurdles to success. The effort risks seeming to encourage Syria to reclaim some of the influence on Lebanon that it lost after its troops were forced to withdraw last year. It is not clear how forcefully Arab countries would push a cause seen to benefit the United States and Israel. Many Middle Eastern analysts are skeptical that a lasting settlement can be achieved without direct talks between Syria and the United States.
The effort begins Sunday afternoon in the Oval Office, where President Bush is to meet the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, and the chief of the Saudi national security council, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Prince Bandar was the Saudi ambassador to Washington until late last year and often speaks of his deep connections to the Bush family and to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Ms. Rice is delaying her departure to the Middle East until after the meeting, which she is also expected to attend, along with Mr. Cheney and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser. The session was requested by the Saudis, American officials said.
The expected outcome of the session is unclear. “We don’t know how patient the Saudis will be with the Israeli military action,’’ said a senior official said. “They want to see Hezbollah wiped out, and they’d like to set back the Iranians.”
But in the Arab world, the official added, “they can’t been seen to be doing that too enthusiastically.’’
Several of Mr. Bush’s top aides said the plan was for Mr. Bush and other senior officials to press both Saudi Arabia and Egypt to prod Syria into giving up its links with Hezbollah, and with Iran. The administration, aside from its differences with Iran over nuclear programs and with Syria over its role in Lebanon, has also objected to both nations’ behavior toward their common neighbor, Iraq.
“They have to make the point to them that if things go bad in the Mideast, the Iranians are not going to be a reliable lifeline,’’ one of the administration officials said.
Another said, “There is a presumption that the Syrians have more at stake here than the Iranians, and they are more exposed.”
The American officials are calculating that pressure from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan may help to get Syria on board.
But so far, there appears to be little discussion of offering American incentives to the Syrians to abandon Hezbollah, or even to stop arming it. The Bush administration has been deeply reluctant to make such offers, whether it is negotiating with Damascus or with the governments of Iran or North Korea
So, Israel is giving back the Golan Heights?
No?
The corrupt Egyptians, the weak feckless Saudis, and the weak, feckless Jordanians are going to influence Syria? To help Israel?
What the fuck are these people thinking?
Syria has a bottom line demand, the Golan Heights. No Heights, no deal.
What the fuck is Rice thinking, everyone is as stupid as Bush? Oh yeah, there's the Kurd problem and the out of control Iraq problem. And the dead Syrian border guards and their little issue with Task Force 20. Yeah.
Iran is a better ally that Egypt at this point, because Iraq is under Iranian influence.
By JOHN KIFNER and TIMOTHY EGAN Published: July 23, 2006
SEATTLE — When First Lt. Ehren K. Watada of the Army shipped out for a tour of duty in South Korea two years ago, he was a promising young officer rated among the best by his superiors. Like many young men after Sept. 11, he had volunteered “out of a desire to protect our country,” he said, even paying $800 for a medical test to prove he qualified despite childhood asthma.
Now Lieutenant Watada, 28, is working behind a desk at Fort Lewis just south of Seattle, one of only a handful of Army officers who have refused to serve in Iraq, an Army spokesman said, and apparently the first facing the prospect of a court-martial for doing so.
“I was still willing to go until I started reading,” Lieutenant Watada said in an interview one recent evening.
A long and deliberate buildup led to Lieutenant Watada’s decision to refuse deployment to Iraq. He reached out to antiwar groups, and they, in turn, embraced his cause, raising money for his legal defense, selling posters and T-shirts, and circulating a petition on his behalf.
Critics say the lieutenant’s move is an orchestrated act of defiance that will cause chaos in the military if repeated by others. But Lieutenant Watada said he arrived at his decision after much soul-searching and research.
On Jan. 25, “with deep regret,” he delivered a passionate two-page letter to his brigade commander, Col. Stephen J. Townsend, asking to resign his commission. “Simply put, I am wholeheartedly opposed to the continued war in Iraq, the deception used to wage this war, and the lawlessness that has pervaded every aspect of our civilian leadership,” Lieutenant Watada wrote.
At 2:30 a.m. on June 22, when the Third Stryker Brigade of the Second Infantry Division set off for Iraq, Lieutenant Watada was not on the plane. He has since been charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with one count of missing movement, for not deploying, two counts of contempt toward officials and three counts of conduct unbecoming an officer.
Lieutenant Watada’s about-face came as a shock to his parents, his fellow soldiers and his superiors. In retrospect, though, there may have been one ominous note in the praise heaped on him in his various military fitness reports: he was cited as having an “insatiable appetite for knowledge.”
Lieutenant Watada said that when he reported to Fort Lewis in June 2005, in preparation for deployment to Iraq, he was beginning to have doubts. “I was still prepared to go, still willing to go to Iraq,” he said. “I thought it was my responsibility to learn about the present situation. At that time, I never conceived our government would deceive the Army or deceive the people.”
He was not asking for leave as a conscientious objector, Lieutenant Watada said, a status assigned to those who oppose all military service because of moral objections to war. It was only the Iraq war that he said he opposed.
Military historians say it is rare in the era of the all-voluntary Army for officers to do what Lieutenant Watada has done.
“Certainly it’s far from unusual in the annals of war for this to happen,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in military affairs at the Brookings Institution. “But it is pretty obscure since the draft ended.”
Mr. O’Hanlon said that if other officers followed suit, it would be nearly impossible to run the military. “The idea that any individual officer can decide which war to fight doesn’t really pass the common-sense test,” he said.
People were quick to defend him, but this has bothered me for one reason. An officer is responsible for the lives of other people. When he enlisted, when he took that oath, he knew that. Now, it's easy to say that he's resisting the evil Bush war machine, but what about that unit he was supposed to lead? What about those men who could have used his leadership.
It is clearly a moral thing to do. But Watada doesn't fall into any neat catagory. He didn't go AWOL, but he's never served in Iraq either. Most of the military opponents to the Iraq War actually served there, like Paul Hackett. Watada is not basing his opposition on personal experience.
I doubt the Army wants to jail him for seven years, because then he becomes a martyr. But I just wonder when the obligation to himself overrides the obligation to the men he was supposed to lead.
Now, to some people, that doesn't matter. But I think it should. He made a choice to place his concerns over that of his duty. Which may be the moral thing to do, but it is not a simple or easy decision.
A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows Ned Lamont (D) beating Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) in the primary, 51% to 41%.
Here's the stunning finding: In the general election, Lieberman and Lamont are tied with 40% with Alan Schlesinger (R) trailing behind with 13%.
Why so much attention to the Ct. Senate race? Why is every iteration of the contest bloggable?
There are a couple of reasons and the blogs are the smallest part of it.
The first thing is that polling cannot be ignored forever. Polls since last year have wanted a more active, anti-Bush Congress. The Beltway is way out of step with America, and Democratic voters. This should have been seen coming from a mile away. Lieberman wasn't seen as particularly vunerable, but he was hit with a perfect storm of events.
Combine a bad campaign, diverging from issues with the voters, and longtime resentment against poor consitutent service, any Dem could have stepped in and challenged Lieberman and gained ground. He's been in trouble far longer than anyone realized. That kiss and his blind support of the war were noted.
Washington insiders act like bloggers are Martians on temporary duty on earth and not concerned citizens. They have spoken for us for so long that they think they know what we think when they have no idea. Blogs can only reflect discontent or support, they can't create it. But it can reflect it in a way that the cossetted Washington Dems haven't seen before. They didn't get that Howard Dean winning the chair of the DNC meant business as usual was over.
Now they act like Joe Lieberman, who defends Bush in a state where only 26 percent of the people support him, is being lynched. No, he's beoing held accountable.
What is so interesting about this race is how Lieberman is losing ground and the powerlessness of the DC crowd to stop it.
They never seem to realize that they live in the only Western country where the national capital is openly disdained. As races go, Lamont is running like he was an established pol, not a newcomer to statewide politics. This is no Hackett or Webb, this is a statewide race with an unknown who is managing to gain nationwide support.
What is even more astonishing is the inability of Lieberman to rally people around him. The state party is walking away from him and leaving him without bodies, which is unheard of.
This could be a sea change election, like 1980 in New York, when the aging Jacob Javits tried to hang on to his seat and lost to Al D'amato, who kept it for 18 years. This could signal a change in the party from the center to the center left. What people didn't want to get back then was that people were tired of Rockefeller Republicans and were embracing Reaganism.
People forget how the Dems didn't adapt to Reagan, didn't challenge him, while his wing of the GOP turned into the definers of the party.
Now, in their most desperate moments, after years of veiled hostility, he reaches out to the black community, almost seemingly unaware that they hate the war and have litte good to say about Bush, who is regarded as more of an enemy than Clinton is a friend.
This is a fascinating race in the end, because it's like what people have expected from their politics, a movement of ordinary people to make change against entrenched power, and that is not because people write on their computers.
Yes, free, and here, as I promised, is another irony: she considers it a perk, granted to her because of her long and faithful service and her position as a team leader.
Here's how it works: The Corporation sets strict guidelines for the operation of individual locations. Through the arcane ministrations and dictates of their legion of bishop like CPAs they pass along regular fiats regarding every aspect of management to the bottom tier of the organization.
If the head CPA wizard says that food costs must not rise above 35%, or labor costs will not exceed 18% then those commandments are carved in stone tablets and placed around the neck of the individual store manager. It is holy writ from on high, and woe unto any lowly slug of a manager whose budget shows abnormally high expenditures for fried okra or dinner rolls.
But labor is another thing. States generally don't pass laws about how a restaurant spends money on food or beverage, but they do, for the good of all of us, regulate the number of hours that an employees can be required to work before they must be compensated with a premium rate of pay their efforts.
In Ohio the limit is forty hours in one week and after that the employee must be paid at their hourly rate plus one half.
In Jane's case this would make her wages of $2.36 per hour skyrocket to an astronomical and potentially, economy wrecking $3.54 per hour for every hour she works over forty.
This would be an egregious and possibly catastrophic violation of the holy writ on food costs which might turn the entire restaurant industry on it's ear and cannot be permitted.
Restaurant's must be fully staffed in order to meet the expectations of their customers or the customers will leave and become someone Else's customers. Diners tend to be picky about slow service, cold food and other un niceties affecting their dining out experience.
Restaurants also experience a high volume of employee turn over (one wonders why) and there are vacation schedules and illnesses, family emergencies, broken cars, dogs swallowing car keys, plain old garden variety hangovers or sometimes just a lack of interest in reporting for such a crummy job and well ...even ... lies, anyway, a great variety of reasons why employees call off work.
But someone must be there to serve the fried okra and the dinner rolls to an ever voracious public, hence on many a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, when Jane's compliment of weekly hours has been filled, when clocking any additional time will require paying her over time, her phone rings with a request to fill in for Marie or Rose or Belle or Jerry and she dutifully irons a uniform, cancels whatever plans she had for her day off and reports in, to cover the hole in the battle lines of the fried okra frontier.
"Big Flo's," is of course, filled with gratitude at this selfless exhibition of dedication and loyalty and happily reciprocates by paying her ... nothing.
Nothing ...... Nothing and no/100s. Zippola.
Were she to be paid, her pay would have to be at the rate of time and a half because the extra shift puts her over forty hours for the week.
To pay her over time would threaten the holy writ regarding labor as a percentage of overhead, violate that entire relevant chapter of the gospel according to CPAs and possibly throw the entire food service industry into turmoil, at the least, certainly, manager's heads would roll all the way to the district level.
No, the only sound business solution, and the only fair way to handle this and not threaten the sanctity of the bottom line is for Jane to work for free, to come in, cover the shift, not clock in, not receive compensation from a company of over twenty five thousand employees, to work for tips only, and she does it at least twice a month, because, "I need the extra money."
You know the drill, the car needs a new battery, behind on the gas bill, a Grand child's birthday, saving a few bucks for Christmas, whatever.
In addition, she also knows that to refuse or to complain might cause her to lose her position as "Team Leader" and have her hours cut back to twenty four as well as suffer an hourly reduction which might just be the difference between her small but comfortable apartment in a nice area or some hellhole in subsidized low income housing.
That old "Big Flo's," they're a "family" oriented company and pride themselves on their old fashioned American values of God and Country, of loyalty, dedication and hard work. Why. many of it's executives are Christian men who sit in the front rows of their churches.
Well, a couple of years back a few employees (commies no doubt, hell, probably even liberals) sued "Big Flo's" for violations of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act specifically for the kind of criminal behavior described above. Given the nature of our pointy headed activist court system poor old "Big Flo's" was forced to settle, for millions. No criminal charges, no admission of guilt, no public scorn or ridicule, our pointy headed courts aren't that pointy headed.
No one is allowed to discuss the settlement though. By corporate fiat, managers are forbidden from discussing it with the help and the help is forbidden from asking management about the settlement.
They have however provided claim forms that employees can send in to corporate if they want to share in the award for claims for unpaid overtime or other abuses.
Jane showed me her claim form, she's had it for a year, I don't think she's going to file, she depends on her job, to stay alive, in America.
The phone still rings on Saturday or Sunday and Jane, ever loyal, ever diligent still covers the battle lines in the okra wars.
For Tips only.
Many of you are thinking Jane is a fucking idiot. Low wage moron, should have gone to school.
Well, techie, this is YOU, except you sit in an office and maybe if you're good, they 'll let you decorate your cube.
How many of you put in unpaid overtime? How many of you gave up vacation time for a project? How many hours do you work?
Jane serves food, you work on code, but the only difference is you make more money. You are treated exactly the same as Jane is, even if you have Star Wars figurines and astroturf on the floor of your cube.
And the bullshit some of you were tossing made Jen and I laugh. It was the evil east coast, it's soul killing to not turn your cube into a second home.
I am going to explain the one fact of life I learned at NetSlaves, you get nothing for free. If your boss has a chef and a dog walker for you, or lets you bring the beastie into the office, it's not because he's a nice guy.
It's because you're not going home.
Back in the day, you didn't get anything as real as tips, you got options, some of which is now worth less than toilet paper.
At least Jane has a clue she's being screwed.
Any company which hire's a high school dropout and doesn't insist they get more education is not your friend. You might want to consider them an exploitative enemy. Why? Because you can believe all the bullshit you want about degrees, but the reality is without them, no matter how brilliant you are, you do not get in the door.
A good company, which cared about you and your career, would get you into school so they could promote you. A company which could give a shit would use you until you hit 30 or so, and then you're gonna get canned. Maybe at 35, but if you're lucky, it would be 30. Then you're on your own with your education.
What I don't think people got from the cube post was this: Jen and I are not against individual expression. But we're all for keeping your job, maybe being promoted. And the goofier you are, the less likely that is to happen. Anything which tells your boss you would rather be at home is bad. And you need to wonder WHY he would let you make it feel like home. The most common reason is that you won't be seeing yours.
Then of course, people were talking around the real reason for the failure of the dotcoms: spending
People can talk about east coast-west coast and all that bullshit, but the reality is that companies run on OPM fail.
Microsoft and Apple were grown from their creators pockets. They didn't invest in fancy office buildings or fast cars or the Concorde. They started small, reinvested and expanded to meet the market. They didn't swagger into an office building and acted like they had their shit together when they had no clue.
Let's take Boo.com. The founders were jetsetting, taking the Concorde, and their site didn't work on Macs. Ooops.
You had one company founded by a conman who threw a party in Vegas with the Who, and was later found to have a record as long as your arm.
When you talk about some West Coast magic, I wonder if that includes Wired's mid-90's Thanksgiving firings? The week before Thanksgiving, people would be fired. If a real company did that,they would be vilified in the press.
But that's the wrong issue anyway. This is about an industry more worried about appearances than reality. Sure, a lot of people made money from the IPO's and the rest. The only problem is that they made that money from people who had little clue what they were doing.
I remember a 1996 documentary on the stock boom. You had people cheering companies on, one guy put all his down payment money for his new house in Iomega stock. I nearly shit myself when I saw that. The guy thought he'd hit the jackpot. Instead he was risking his future. I won't even go into the nightmare of Day Trading and its bastard son, the Forex infomercial.
When people talk about the vast sums made in the Valley, they need to realize it came from somewhere and while the VC's got out, a lot of people, hard working, decent people lost money. One guy who sunk his money into a dotcom had to continue working because his retirement money went poof. Too bad he had cancer.
Yes, Wall Street is to blame. There is a special circle of hell for Henry Blodget and Frank Quattrone. But to sit here, after the wreckage of millions of lives and the loss of trillions, and to just blame Wall Street is intellectual dishonesty of the worst kind. The snake oil salesmen didn't only live in New York. The people who sold failed solution after failed solution should be beaten with sticks, not living in mansions .
But back to Jane. Jen and I decided a while back we like companies with rules. Some of those rules may suck, but you know, they also have the habit of paying you a couple of times a month. Jane lives in a ruleless world, but at least she goes home at night. Companies which allow you to play Barbie playhouse, doesn't care about your further education or works you all hours are the kind of company which tends not to pay.
You never have much warning, unless you look. The cutbacks start small, but then, one day, the division is gone, the company sold, whatever, but it's gone and so is your job.
Companies don't let you express yourself unless there's something in it for them. People who forgot that wound up as baristas and back in their parent's basement.
(silver)
(Russian mafia black)
