Bobo on art

Bobo Brooks has a few things to say about American art. (Not that anyone gives a fuck) One Nation, Under One Roof:

That's because around 1960 the art world and much of the intellectual world lost faith in the idea that history has a storyline and that America has a distinct role in it. This week, Blake Gopnik spoke for the art establishment in his review of the museums in The Washington Post, arguing that there is no essentially American culture — no transcendent thing we Americans share simply because we happen to inhabit the same nation-state.

So the artists have gone off to have a conversation about themselves.

Huh? I think Pearl hit him in the head too many times.

And today, when America is unpopular and the whole concept of Americanness is encrusted with clichés and conspiracy theories, they'll feel thrilled to get back and touch the real America, the real conversation, which has been so triumphantly presented in the old Patent Office Building in downtown D.C.

Perhaps we could all celebrate with a trip to Red Lobster. After we get through un-crusting our clichés.

late night extra plush

Maxx's fans are so demanding.

tiger babies

For absolutely no reason at all. Except that they're Watertiger's pipples.

9/11 Changed History

Via Attaturk, past sound bites updated for chimpy's america. 9/11 Really has changed everything.

A sampling:

"Fuck Liberty, I want to live!!!"
--Patrick Henry

Go see the rest.

Political Gerrymandering is Just Swell

The Supreme assholes have said that it's perfectly okay for political parties to gerrymander election maps even though they're plainly designed to marginalize and effectively eliminate votes of the opposition party. Justices Back Most GOP Changes to Texas Districts.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld most of the Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay but threw out part, saying some of the new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights.

The fractured decision was a small victory for Democratic and minority groups who accused Republicans of an unconstitutional power grab in drawing boundaries that booted four Democratic incumbents out of office.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said Hispanics do not have a chance to elect a candidate of their choosing under the plan.

Guess what, as a democrat living in Austin, TX, I don't have a chance to elect a candidate of my choosing either. The justices may be right under the law, but they're morally wrong. When the texas GOP carved up the Austin democratic voting block and plunked those voters into republican districts they effectively wiped out my vote and denied me the representation of my choice.

Gerrymandering is wrong whichever party does it. Districts in every state should be drawn on demographics without regard to party affiliation. I suppose that would put too much power in the hands of the voters, eh? Can't have that.

Feh, a pox on all of them.

Maxx and his minion

Lion kitty Maxx and his minion "Peeper" continue their blogofascist assault on the Eiffel Tower. Oh, the perfidity!!

Bad Treason!! Bad!!

Billmon helpfully explains the difference between Good treason and bad.

The National Review on the bad treason:

President Bush, who said on Monday morning that the exposure “does great harm to the United States of America,” must demand that the New York Times pay a price for its costly, arrogant defiance . . . Publications such as the Times, which act irresponsibly when given access to secrets on which national security depends, should have their access to government reduced. Their press credentials should be withdrawn. Reporting is surely a right, but press credentials are a privilege. This kind of conduct ought not be rewarded with privileged access.

And the National Review on the good treason:

The cable was classified, but contained nothing sensitive to national security, just a politically embarrassing policy recommendation. A whistleblower leaked the cable to Mr. Mowbray. He reported on the memo on National Review Online on Wednesday morning . . . [When detained] Mowbray appropriately refused to identify the whistle-blower who had given him the document in the interest of having the public fully informed . . .
The only reason, then, to hold Mr. Mowbray against his will in the building must have been to intimidate a young reporter who had made your life difficult. I regret to say that I have found your conduct in this entire visa controversy, slipshod, deceptive, and, now, even thuggish.

I ask for a personal assurance from you that Mr. Mowbray will be allowed to continue his reporting at the State Department with no risk of similar incidents in the future, and indeed without any harassment at all.

Any questions?

Well, no. Glad we cleared that up.

I wish someone would explain to TNR about electronic archives.

Help America Not Vote

It's pretty much as we thought- a new study concludes that electronic voting systems are fairly easy to hack, and without paper ballots and regular audits, the hack will be undetectable. The WAPO has the details, A Single Person Could Swing An Election:

To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It's the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines.

Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams's conspirators thought, "How easily can we manipulate the election results?"

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting.

The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.

No wonder the republicans fight this issue so hard.

If democrats don't get on the ball and make this a national issue, we can kiss honest elections in this country goodbye. Forever. That is, if we haven't already.

Little socialist squirrel

This little liberal accosted me and demanded a free meal.

The Face of blogofacism

The horror!! Look at the narrowed eyes, the cruel paws, the way he has crushed the peep beneath him! No wonder the right wing is all a-twitter!

Other species plush

AFP/Valentina Petrova

"Arny and Bessie : A one month old Eurasian Lynx named Arny (L) cuddles up to her mother Bessy at the Sofia Zoo, in Sofia. Arny is the first Lynx born in the Bulgarian Zoo."

Teh cute.

Polar Bear Porn™

AFP/Maxim Marmur

My, my. What will we tell the children?

Monday plush

By request.

How much is enough?

Frank Herbert has a question in his column today (sadly, subscription required), Playing Politics With Iraq:

I wonder whether Americans will ever become fed up with the loathsome politicking, the fear-mongering, the dissembling and the gruesome incompetence of this crowd. From the Bush-Rove perspective, General Casey's plan is not a serious strategic proposal. It's a straw in the political wind.

I wonder too. He goes on:

We've had enough clownish debates on the Senate floor and elsewhere. We've had enough muscle-flexing in the White House and on Capitol Hill by guys who ran and hid when they were young and their country was at war. And it's time to stop using generals and their forces under fire in the field for cheap partisan political purposes.

The question that needs to be answered, honestly and urgently (and without regard to partisan politics), is how best to extricate overstretched American troops — some of them serving their third or fourth tours — from the flaming quicksand of an unwinnable war.

He's right, the country has had more than enough of these clowns. I fervently hope that the country has finally wised up to their antics and will throw the mofos out.

OT, but how can a newspaper that has the brilliant columnists Frank Herbert and Frank Rich give space to a nimrod like Bobo?

Perhaps a mummy ate it

I despair that Billmon will ever take pity on me and post the conclusion of his adventures in Luxor.

Woe is me.

Okay, so I'm whining. But don't we need some distractions this summer? I know I do.

Spinners

Billmon has an interesting post up about how the AP is trying to report on reality, while not straying too far from the approved narrative of, "Bush had a really good two weeks!! huzzah!!" Making the News Fit the Spin. The important part of the post comes at the end, where Billmon sums up just what is wrong with our media.

My purpose here is not to rag on the AP, or the reporter in question, who's far from the worst of the bunch. As Juan Cole says, he is trying to correct the record -- he's just not being very direct about it. But all that only goes to show how thoroughly the official propaganda continues to shape the coverage -- even when the journalists involved understand that the propaganda is misleading or flat wrong.

Breaking the cycle would require the herd to challenge the spin and disinformation they're being fed, instead of letting it become the baseline that has to be timidly corrected later as the facts come to light. The burden of proof, in other words, would have to be put on the spinners, instead of reality. And it would have to be put there by the journalistic herd as a whole -- or at least, by the dominant group within the herd -- and not just by a few mavericks and dissidents.

But of course we no longer have that kind of journalism in this country -- and never really did, other than for a few brief years after Vietnam and Watergate. An experiment in journalistic truth telling (or at least, lie debunking) that today's corporate media bosses and the watchdogs of the authoritarian right are both determined never to allow again.

I suspect he's right. Depressing, isn't it?

Wankiferousness of the highest sort

So Jason Zengerle admits that his source fed him a bogus email and yet he refuses to divulge who the source is.

Steve Gilliard claims that he did not write the email I attributed to him in this post. After doing some further investigating, I'm afraid to say that he is correct. He did not write that email. I apologize to Gilliard for not checking with him before publishing my post, and I regret the error.

Gee, damn fine journamalism ya go going there. You guys got spun, and badly. You participated in a smear campaign and the best you can say is, "so sorry, old chaps. Nothing to see here, move along"?

Regretting the error isn't good enough. You may think this is a "minor error" but we do not. Either tell us all or get the fuck out of journalism. That goes for your editor, Franklin Foer, as well. (Frankly, I expect better of him.) Your whole operation is an embarrassment.

(Via Atrios)

By popular demand

....your saturday night plush.

Plushy after dark

A little bonus lion kitty to start the weekend off right.

How's that progress going?

AP/Hadi Mizban
Someone in the new unity government apparently didn't get the WH talking points. Today, the Iraqi government imposed a curfew on pedestrian and vehicular traffic in Baghdad. This is after declaring a "state of emergency" yesterday.

BAGHDAD, June 23 -- Adding a new layer of confusion to the security crackdown gripping Baghdad, the Iraqi government today imposed a last-minute ban on pedestrian as well as vehicular traffic throughout the city.

The 2 p.m. curfew was announced late in the morning, after many people were already traveling to work or to mosques for weekly Friday prayers. Originally, it was supposed to last all night. But hours later, a bulletin on Iraqi television announced the curfew would end at 5 p.m. (9 a.m. in Washington).

Under a security crackdown launched last week, vehicle traffic already was banned in the capital from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath, when midday mosque attendance -- and the potential for violence -- is especially high.

The government gave no explanation for the additional restrictive measures, but they followed violent clashes reported in several Baghdad neighborhoods this morning. Three insurgents were killed and six wounded in fighting near the Haifa Street neighborhood, according to Ahmed Al-Nuaimi, an interior ministry official.

That doesn't sound like "last throes" to me. I'm glad the new government is trying to get a handle on the deteriorating state of affairs there. I wonder, how long until they publicly say what anyone with sense knows, that our presence is fueling the insurrgency?

And how long until they politely ask us to get the hell out? What will the Cheney administration do then?

With his world view, I'd be surprised if they didn't just say, "sorry, but it's not in American interests for us to withdraw at this time." Hey, you didn't think they were building those permanent bases just to turn them over to the Iraqis, did you?

Friday morning plushy

Kind of an "awwwwww" picture. Mr. Plushy, sleeping on my desk with his peep.

Mr. Plushy isn't pleased

Maxx is irritated with the barking corgi next store too.

In Iraq Permanently

Like Josh and Atrios, I'm a little baffled at why the republicans think endless war in Iraq is a good thing. Josh sez:

I'm a bit confused. I'm hearing a lot of reports about Republicans chanting about staying in Iraq forever, the danger of ever withdrawing our troops. There's Cheney. There's Frist. I can't say I've done a systematic scan of all media. I'm just saying what I've happened across during a day of work. And I'm not seeing any Dems. Not hearing any clear message.

What Republicans want is More of the Same.

That's the motto. More of the Same.

The president says he wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. Virtually every Republican agrees. Three more years. They approve the course the president has set.

They're for More of the Same. They don't have a plan. They just want to stay indefinitely.

They're just for More of the Same.

Then again, just what do we think those permanent bases are for?

I agree with Josh though- dems need to get on TV, radio, a soap box, fucking WHATEVER, and scream about this at the top of their lungs.

Republicans want endless war. Want us out of Iraq? then start by throwing the bums out.

The persistence of delusion

Go read Billmon's post "Kabul Follies" about how we're managing to lose two wars simultaneously on the same continent. He links to William S. Lind's latest post at Defense and the National Interest:

At present, the bombing is largely tied to the latest Somme-like “Big Push,” Operation Mountain Thrust, in which more than 10,000 U.S.-led troops are trying another failed approach to guerrilla war, the sweep. I have no doubt it would break the Mullah Omar Line, if it existed, which it doesn’t. Even the Brits seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid this time, with the June 19 Washington Times reporting that “British commanders declared for the first time yesterday that their troops were enjoying success in the restive south of Afghanistan after pushing faster than expected into rebel territory.” Should be in Berlin by September, old chap.

For those of you who don't know him, Lind is director of The Free Congress Foundation, a very conservative think tank. Uh, oh.

Lind offers a short refresher course in Guerilla Warfare 101:

• Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren’t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mortars.

• Big, noisy, offensives, launched with lots of warning, achieve nothing. The enemy just goes to ground while you pass on through, and he’s still there when you leave. Big Pushes are the opposite of the “ink blot” strategy, which is the only thing that works, when anything can.

• Putting the Big Push together with lots of bombing in Afghanistan’s Pashtun country means we end up fighting most if not all of the Pashtun. In Afghan wars, the Pashtun always win in the end.

• Quisling governments fail because they cannot achieve legitimacy.

• You need closure, but your guerilla enemy doesn’t. He not only can fight until Doomsday, he intends to do just that—if not you, then someone else.

• The bigger the operations you have to undertake, the more surely your enemy is winning.

Of course the geniuses at the WH haven't a clue about warfare or any kind, guerilla or not.

Billmon draws the obvious parallel to Vietnam, when US generals would regularly trot out and give glowing reports of the "progress" complete with body counts. (I'm old enough to remember them). I watched "The Fog of War" again this weekend, the excellent, if chilling, documentary about Robert McNamara.

I was struck all over about how history repeats itself, and how stupidity appears to always win out. In LBJ's time, we had a war against "tyranny" and "aggression." These days we have a war against "terror."

The only thing that's changed is the style of uniform the dead soldiers are wearing.

Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine, is #1 on Amazon.com again today.

Buy it here: The One Percent Doctrine

Help it debut at number on on the NY Times bestseller list on Sunday. Make evil hag Ann Coulter cry.

Happy Birthday Yesterday Uncle Jeffraham!!

Maxx sends you belated purrrrrrrs.

War Hags

AFP/Mark Wilson

The GOP, or the war hag party, is having a grand old time this week painting the democrats as the party of "retreat and defeat." Really, have you ever seen a bunch of old geezers that enjoys the thought of death and destruction more? I wish they could all look at this photograph and try to remember that every headstone represents one family who has been shattered by the death of a soldier. As Atrios says this morning, it's all about using the soldiers as props in an election year.

How cynical. How utterly appalling. The NY Times has the details of the GOP's rush to embrace the clusterfuck resulting from Bush's disastrous war in Iraq;

But people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

White House officials including the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, outlined ways in which Republican lawmakers could speak more forcefully about the war. Participants also included Mr. Bush's top political and communications advisers: his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove; his political director, Sara Taylor; and the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett. Mr. Rove is newly freed from the threat of indictment in the C.I.A. leak case, and leaders of both parties see his reinvigorated hand in the strategy.

The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

Two points. First, we're going to hand the US a defeat? Bush has done that with his astoundingly incompetent handling of the war. Second point, what the fuck is the pentagon doing using our tax dollars to produce what's essentially a political document?

Instead of running from this issue, democrats should embrace it and hang it around every republican running for office like a two-ton anchor. The argument should be, "do you really want to keep spending $8 billion a month and killing american soldiers in this endless mis-adventure? The president says the troops are never coming home as long as they're in charge. Do you want the troops home? Then you must vote these incompetent and delusional clowns out of office."

They are standing with the president to a man.

Let's make them pay for it.

Mid-evening plushy

Lion kitty and I are pretty bored with the whole Kos brou-ha-ha.

Gratuitous mid-day plush

Just because sometimes I need a plushy fix too.

Pony Blow gets smacked

Josh at Talking Points Memo properly smacks Pony Blow about the head and shoulders for his assine statements about the Battle of the Bulge last week:

"Okay, back on Monday we discussed Tony Snow's comments about how if polls had been taken during World War II's Bulge of the Bulge people would probably have been pushing for a change in the course of the war as they are now in Iraq.

That's actually an insult to the American people generally, as well as the men who fought World War II and those who supported them on the homefront.

In any case, Snow clearly believes he can get away with this malarkey because he thinks polls weren't taken at the time.

But he's wrong. They were taking them. And they pretty clearly belie Snow's whole point.

My great friend and former graduate student colleague James Sparrow dropped me a line last night to tell me that "Hadley Cantril, at Princeton, did secret polling for FDR throughout the war on public support for the war, and specifically focused on trendlines, noting shifts from event to event."

Read the whole post here. Okay, I'm not going to fault Tony Snow for not knowing that there actually was polling done during WWII, but the idea that the American people didn't support the war in 1944 is beyond ludicrous.

The WH should quit pulling garbage out of their collective asses to defend this disastrous and unpopular war. And they should stop making ridiculous and insulting references to try to paint democrats as the bad guys. I mean, what's next? "If democrats had been present at the big bang, they'd have prevented it from happening, causing all of the universe to fail to form!"?

I suspect that part of this is a willful effort on the WH's part to both conflate chimpy with a great president AND to paint the democrats as cowardly traitors.

But I also think part of the story is that Pony Blow is dumb as a fucking rock.

Who me?

AP Rudi Blaha

"Torture? I don't actually run the US government. That's my boy Cheney."

"Yes, it's true...

AP/Charles Dharapak

... my dick really is that little. Why do you think I'm such an asshole?"

What Billmon says....

Billmon comments on the shameless republican congress who, less that a week after giving themselves a pay raise, voted today to kill legislation to raise the minimum wage for the first time in ten years. The Wages of Sin.

The piglets must assume that no matter how bad the juxtaposition of the two items above may look in June, by November it will just be another half-remembered trivia question -- like the infamous Dubai ports deal, which is being quietly resurrected now that all the fuss has died down.

They're probably right: There no longer seems to be any limit on what the devious and the dishonest can get away with in this country, as long as they're willing to be patient about it.

Sadly, I'm afraid he's probably right.

Your tuesday plush

Mr. Plushy and I are watching Frontline, "The Dark Side"

It's not making us happy, precious, no, not happy at all.

Bush Knew about Torture

And don't you let his flunkeys tell you he didn't. Hell, he encouraged it. Via Froomkin, in today's White House Briefing, more Suskind:

Bush 'was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,' Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, 'Do some of these harsh methods really work?' Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning.

So let's not hear any more of this nonsense that interrogators "got out of hand."

The Hague. He should go directly to, without passing GO.

Ntodd's pipples

That's Mex on the left, and Kayla, newly adopted, on the right. May she bring much joy and laughter to Ntodd's life- god knows he could use a little joy this year.

Best wishes to all the critters at chez Ntodd from lion kitty Maxx and fourlegsgood.

The Money Quote

There is is, the quote that any dem running for office in the next few years should use to hang about the neck of any republican running for re-election. Via the NYTIMES:

President Bush spoke similarly at a Republican fund-raiser here Monday night. "An early withdrawal would embolden the terrorists — an early withdrawal would embolden Al Qaeda and bin Laden," Mr. Bush said. "There will be no early withdrawal so long as we run the Congress and occupy the White House."

Article here: Senators Debating Iraq Measure

Do you want the troops home? You cannot vote for a republican. As long as they're in charge, the war goes on.

It's as simple as that.

I just hope someone got audio.

RIP

Who didn't see this coming? The two missing GI's have been found, apparently tortured and then brutally killed. Missing G.I.'s Are Found Dead in Iraq

BAGHDAD, June 20 — The Iraqi military said today that the bodies of two American soldiers missing since Friday were found this morning outside the town where they were captured and that the two bodies had marks showing that they had been brutally tortured.

The two bodies were found in the village of Jarf as-Sakhr, which is on the outskirts of Yusufiya.
An American military spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that the remains believed to be those of the missing soldiers were spotted last night in the vicinity of an electrical plant in Yusufiya, but due to the "unstable condition" of the area they were not retrieved until this morning.

While General Caldwell provided few specifics about the conditions of the remains, an Iraqi military official, Major General Abdul Aziz Mohammed, said that they had been "killed in a brutal way and tortured.

My deepest sympathies to the families of these young soldiers. And my deepest contempt to the architects of this illegal clusterfuck and the policies that have made it open season on american soldiers.

There's a reason we signed the Geneva Conventions. It's not just to protect enemy POWs, it's to shield our own soldiers from torture and inhumane treatment should they be captured. The responsibility for this lies directly with Bush.

Oh, and a big fuck you to assrocket for trashing the uncle of one of the soldiers. I know it's tough for you, but try to show a little respect. I'll bet that dead soldier would like to kick your chickenhawk ass from beyond the grave for dissing his uncle.

Rare Rainbow

Via National Geographic, this photo is of a rare rainbow photographed on June 3rd in Idaho.

June 19, 2006—It looks like a rainbow that's been set on fire, but this phenomenon is as cold as ice.

Known in the weather world as a circumhorizontal arc, this rare sight was caught on film on June 3 as it hung over northern Idaho near the Washington State border (map of Idaho).

The arc isn't a rainbow in the traditional sense—it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58° above the horizon). What's more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground.

When light enters through a vertical side face of such an ice crystal and leaves from the bottom face, it refracts, or bends, in the same way that light passes through a prism. If a cirrus's crystals are aligned just right, the whole cloud lights up in a spectrum of colors.

This particular arc spanned several hundred square miles of sky and lasted for about an hour, according to the London Daily Mail.

Lovely.

Plushy pic of the day

The plushy one cavorts with his peep.

The One Percent Solution, er, Doctrine

Froomkin, in today's White House Briefing discusses Ron Suskind's new book "The One Percent Doctrine" and how Cheney is running the foreign policy show:

But the longer-term significance of Suskind's new book -- his second major expose of the Bush White House in three years -- will likely be how it documents Vice President Cheney's singularly dominant role in the foreign policy and national security decisions typically attributed to President Bush.

Where other journalists smarmily imply that Cheney is in charge, or credulously relate White House assurances that he's not, Suskind appears to have gotten people with first-hand experience to actually describe how Cheney operates -- and what he has wrought.

-snip-

Writes Suskind on his Web site : "What is the guiding principle of the world's most powerful nation as it searches for enemies at home and abroad? The One Percent Doctrine is the deeply secretive core of America's real playbook: a default strategy, designed by Dick Cheney, that separates America from its moorings, and has driven everything -- from war in Afghanistan to war in Iraq to the global search for jihadists."

-snip-

"Absorbing the possibility that al-Qaeda was trying to acquire a nuclear weapon, Cheney remarked that America had to deal with a new type of threat -- what he called a 'low-probability, high-impact event' -- and the U.S. had to do it 'in a way we haven't yet defined,' writes author Ron Suskind in his new book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11.

"And then Cheney defined it: 'If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis . . . It's about our response.' Suskind writes, 'So, now spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the Administration for years to come.' "

Allow me to point out that this idea is crack-head crazy. And yet this crack-pot idea has shaped foreign policy for the past few years. Why doesn't our media find this the least bit controversial? We've apparently made the calculation that american lives are so much more precious than the rest of the world's, that we reserve the right to respond even if there's only a 1% chance that we're right.

That's appalling. The reason to be judicious and careful is that military responses kill people. And as we've seen the past several years, military responses frequently kill innocent people.

I watched the news this evening, and Froomkin is correct, all the attention is on the aborted cyanide plot. The news that Cheney is dictating foreign policy with crack-head ideas? It barely caused a ripple.

Buy Suskind's book here: The One Percent Doctrine

Hell Cracked Open

Oh, god. Wolcott links to the Sunday TIme's story by Hala Jaber on the horror that is Baghdad today. Horror Shows Iraq's Descent.

The single-storey Al-Tub al-Adli morgue, whose nondescript appearance belies the horrors within, has become synonymous with the seemingly unstoppable violence that has turned Baghdad into the most frightening city on earth.

It is here that bodies from the nightly slaughter are dumped each morning. The stench of decaying flesh, mingled with disinfectant, hits you at the checkpoint 100 yards away.

Each corpse tells a different story about the terrors of Iraq. Some bodies are pocked with holes inflicted by torturers with power drills. Some show signs of strangulation; others, with hands tied behind the back, bear bullet wounds. Many are charred and dismembered.

So far this year, according to health ministry figures, the mortuary has processed the bodies of about 6,000 people, most of whom died violently. Some were killed in American military action but many more were the victims of the sectarian violence that US and Iraqi forces are struggling to contain.

For all the coalition’s recent successes in securing elections that brought a new government to power and in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the morgue remains a chilling reminder of the scale of the challenge ahead.

It receives 20 to 30 bodies on a quiet day. Last month it processed a record 1,384. Most autopsies have been cancelled; there are simply not enough doctors or officials to cope.

For Iraqis who suffer the loss of a family member, a dreaded ritual ensues. Everyone knows there is no point in reporting a missing person to the police — no action will be taken. The first stop is always the morgue. The lucky ones find a body straight away. For others, the morning walk past the coffins has to be repeated. Their search can last for days.

As a former trauma specialist in a hospital casualty department, Dr Baker Siddique, 29, thought he was inured to scenes of carnage. But nothing he had witnessed prepared him for a visit to a pathologist friend working at the mortuary.

“I saw a street packed with people and coffins standing up vertically,” he said. “There wasn’t enough room to lie them horizontally.”

His voice faltered and his eyes filled with tears as he recounted the agony of a woman in black who discovered the bodies of her four sons that day.

“I have never heard screams of pain like that,” he said. The woman collapsed on the floor, throwing dirt over her head — a gesture of grief and helplessness that has become tragically commonplace in Iraq.

I wonder if that woman thinks the price is worth it? I'm going to guess no.

Reality sucks, so we must ignore it

So sayeth the beltway crowd. The Washington Post obtained a cable from the US ambassador in Iraq, detailing the deteriorating and frightening conditions in Iraq. Via Editor and Publisher, 'Wash Post' Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Details Increasing Danger and Hardship:

NEW YORK The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says show that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."

This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."

It's actually far worse than that, as the details published below indicate, which include references to abductions, threats to women's rights, and "ethnic cleansing."

A PDF copy of the cable shows that it was sent to the SecState in Washington, D.C. from "AMEmbassy Baghdad" on June 6. The typed name at the very bottom is Khalilzad -- the name of the U.S. Ambassador, though it is not known if this means he wrote the memo or merely approved it.

The subject of the memo is: "Snapshots from the Office -- Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord."

As a footnote in one of the 23 sections, the embassy relates, "An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militiast are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq."

Ethnic cleansing. Women losing their rights. Charming.

The Bush administration has had the memo since June 6th, but that didn't stop them from staging Bush's little photo-op in Baghdad. Or from pretending that al-Zarqawi was more important than he actually was. It hasn't stopped them from marching out in public everyday and citing the "progress" occuring in Iraq. Everything, and I mean everything, is PR to them.

And yet this shocking report is getting very little play. I guess it interferes with their narrative that Bush is rebounding. Can't let a little reality get in the way of a good story.

Saturday plushy

Sometimes I just walk into a room, and there he is, being ridiculously cute.

Bonus kitties

Here is.... ummm, I don't know his name, but he's the homely kitty that lives upstairs and comes down to hang out with Maxx.
He's taken to coming in the apartment, which Maxx actually tolerates, though he does make sure homely kitty knows exactly whose house it is.



And of course here's lion kitty Maxx, demonstrating why he's the plushiest kitty of them all.

Friday Plush

Maxx spends a lot of time playing with his particle accelerator these days.

Atri-kitty!!!

I'm sorry, but I had to steal this from Atrios. Gizmo looks like he just saw Ann Coulter.

Oh, my. Jack "motherfucking" BURKMAN!!!

Via Atrios who links to Wonkette, we learn that Jack Burkman is a slime sucking pig.

It’s getting so that a couple nice young girls can’t drive up to DC for the Pride parade without getting openly propositioned by Republican Strategists who give them their real names and business cards these days. Take, for example, the MySpace blog of one such lady, whose sordid tale is reprinted (as a warning to the well-endowed) below:
The initial proposition:

afterward, we got a snazzy hotel room at the mayflower downtown. on the way over there, this really hot business man in a pinstriped suit walked past me, said hello, and doubled back. he asked me my name and introduced himself (jack burkman, government relations strategies), asked where i went to school, etc, gave me his card, and asked me to call him. i later texted him and never could get rid of him again. he thought he talked to me on the phone several times, but he never did. i always made kat or kristin be me. he told kristin about how he really enjoyed my outfit (TITS GALORE) and that i was beautiful, etc. by the end of the night (5 am or so), he was offering to pay for our room and give us a thousand dollars if two of us would fuck him. oh, jack burkman. his card is my DC souvenir.

Is this a surprise? why, no!! Jack Burkman is the odious, putrescent, smirking piece of crap who made the charge on Scarborough that the 9/11 widows hired literary agents within 48 hours of their husband's deaths. (see Media Matters story). Not surprisingly, he's a close friend and defender of Ann Coulter. Dead, rotting carrion eating birds of a feather decompose together, I suppose.

The young lady in question got curious and googled Burkman. What. An. Idiot. He gave her his real name and business card. Republican strategists, too stupid to live.

One thing does shock me.... this girl thought Burkman was "hot"??? Quelle horreur!!

Condolences

NTodd's mother passed away this morning after a long illness. Please visit Dohiyir Mir and give him your support.

Lion kitty and I extend our deepest sympathies for his loss.

Sleepy kitten

Sometimes kittens are the only antidote.

Camouflage Kitty

Just because.

2500

AFP/Azher Shallal

The number of american war dead is now 2,500. At the White House, Tony Blow remarked, "It's a number." He added that Bush "feels very deeply the pain that the families feel." Yes, I'm sure. Glad you can count, asswipe.

In the meantime, the Senate has rejected setting any time tables for a pull out of US troops.

In the house, republicans engineered a daylong debate in the House, where Republicans defended the war as key to winning the global struggle against terrorism while Democrats excoriated President Bush and his policies.

Chief republican house asshat Denny Hastert said, "We must stand firm in our commitment to fight terrorism and the evil it inflicts throughout the world. We must renew our resolve that the actions of evildoers will not dictate American policy."

That's funny, since the republican party is in charge, doesn't that mean that the evil doers are already dictating American policy?

It's my guess that the woman in the photograph would disagree with fat Denny. The bloodstained clothing she holds belonged to her late husband. American soldiers killed killed him on June 12th. At least 3,800 iraqi civilians have died so far this year in war-related violence.

Can someone tell me how making everyone on the fucking planet hate our guts is going to make me safer? I thought not.

Police State

A Brookly judge ruled yesterday that the US goverment has broad powers to detain non-citizens indefinitely. Without explanation. The NY TImes has details here: Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely

A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that the government has wide latitude under immigration law to detain noncitizens on the basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation.

The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants detained after 9/11, and it dismissed several key claims the detainees had made against the government. But the judge, John Gleeson of United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, allowed the lawsuit to continue on other claims, mostly that the conditions of confinement were abusive and unconstitutional. Judge Gleeson's decision requires top federal officials, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, to answer to those accusations under oath.

Silly me, thinking US laws and the constitution applied to everyone, not just citizens. And how kind of the judge to let the suit continue, on the grounds that the confinement was "abusive."

I suppose it's okay to deprive people of their freedom as long as we're nice about it.

Disgusting.

Thersites' deepest wish granted

I know that Thersites weeps at night because he does not have a lion kitty of his own. But weep no more my friend, help is at hand. Via National Geographic, Hypoallergenic" Cats For Sale, U.S. Firm Announces.

The world's first hypoallergenic cats may soon be curling up and purring in the laps of allergy sufferers, a U.S. company announced yesterday.

Allerca, Inc., a biotechnology firm in San Diego, California, is now taking orders for its Allerca Gene Divergence (GD) kittens.

Lion kitty Maxx is so happy for you.

Your daily Plush

Lion kitty Maxx has generously offered to donate his image to the Gore 2008 campaign.

Good kitty!

Iraq is still broken...

Reuters/Ceerwan Aziz

AP/Khalid Mohammed

...in spite of chimpy's heroic visit yesterday. Try to imagine living in this chaos. Feh.

Pasty is a Cock Obsessed Nutter

Holy Crap. Sadly, No! takes Pasty, AKA Jeff Goldstein, to task for being, well, pretty much insane. The smackdown is a thing of beauty.

Go read the whole thing here: Wingnut All-Star: Jeff Goldstein (Part I).

I guarantee you'll be fascinated, repulsed and amazed.

Celebrating his neo-birfday

Somebody decided to celebrate his neo-birthday by getting silly with his particle accelerator.

Happy Birthday Flory!!

It's the fabulous Flory's birthday today!!! Maxx sends her many, many purrrrs and offers to share his birthday paté with her. What a nice kitty.

Evil Ratfucker

I'd like to link to the original, but it's slashdotted. So here's a link to Atrios' post on the odious Karl Rove.

Karl Rove Taking Bullets?


Never one to let the facts or delicious irony stand in the way of a vicious political smear, today Karl Rove took a swipe at war heros Sen. John Kerry and Rep. John Murtha, stating, "They may be with you for the first few bullets but they won't be there for the last tough battles." Rove, of course, never served in battle, dodging the draft for nearly three years of the Vietnam War. He's in good company, though-- the Vice President received five deferments from going into battle himself.


"Unfortunately for the American military, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and their merry band of draft-dodgers won't be with you for the first few bullets, the last tough battles, or anywhere along the way," said Christy Setzer, Communications Director, Senate Majority Project.

Perhaps Karl would like to tell america's war veterans what it feels like to actually go to battle? Oh wait, he can't, can he? He is the most despicable man on the face of this earth. Truly.

And I'm with Eli on the "non-indictment" issue. In spite of Jane's postmortem of the day's events, I'm disgusted. Rove helping to get rid of Cheney? Somehow that only seems like it will help the republican establishment.

I know some high level republican operatives here in Austin. They all know Karl Rove really, really well. To a man, they hate him. As one of them told me, "He's brilliant, but he's the most evil, amoral motherfucker I've ever met in my life." The bastard has made a career out of lying, and has been richly rewarded for it.

I will never be satisfied until that evil, fat fuck gets everything that's coming to him.

What all the smart kitties are reading

No comment necessary. Follow Hidey's example and get a copy.

Happy Birthday, Maxx!

Maxx's first birthday card of the day.

This video was made by Jeffraham and Curly- what excellent friends we have!! thanks guys.

Carrots

We prefer carrots to pumpkins anytime.

More plushy noir

For you black and white afficianados. I think Maxx is beautiful in any color palette. (but then I'm prejudiced)

Rules of Engagement

What actually happened at Haditha, and why?

Last night the Washington Post published an account laying out the soldier's side of the story: Marine Says Rules Were Followed. I've been thinking about this for a few weeks, and I went to see what I could find out. What exactly are the "Rules of Engagement" in Iraq? A lengthy Lexis Nexis search turns up next to nothing. In disputed incidents going back to Fallujah, the army and the marines frequently cite ROE and state that they've been followed, without ever disclosing what exactly they are.

The WAPO's account of Haditha gives us a window into what is really going on, and it's not pretty:

A sergeant who led a squad of Marines during the incident in Haditha, Iraq, that left as many as 24 civilians dead said his unit did not intentionally target any civilians, followed military rules of engagement and never tried to cover up the shootings, his attorney said.

Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, 26, told his attorney that several civilians were killed Nov. 19 when his squad went after insurgents who were firing at them from inside a house. The Marine said there was no vengeful massacre, but he described a house-to-house hunt that went tragically awry in the middle of a chaotic battlefield.

-snip-

Wuterich told his attorney in initial interviews over nearly 12 hours last week that the shootings were the unfortunate result of a methodical sweep for enemies in a firefight. Two attorneys for other Marines involved in the incident said Wuterich's account is consistent with those they had heard from their clients.

Kevin B. McDermott, who is representing Capt. Lucas M. McConnell, the Kilo Company commander, said Wuterich and other Marines informed McConnell on the day of the incident that at least 15 civilians were killed by "a mixture of small-arms fire and shrapnel as a result of grenades" after the Marines responded to an attack from a house.

So there it is. The marines felt threatened, and the ROEs, as they understand them, allow them to "clear houses" and with an apparent disregard for any civilians in the way. Another marine agrees:

Gary Myers, a civilian attorney for a Marine who was with Wuterich that day, said the Marines followed standard operating procedures when they "cleared" the houses, using fragmentation grenades and gunshots to respond to an immediate threat.

-snip-

The defense attorneys said the rules of engagement -- which vary depending on the mission, level of danger and other factors -- are likely to become a central element of their cases because those rules guide how troops can use deadly force on the battlefield. One Marine official said such rules usually require positive identification of a target before shooting but noted that the rules are often circumstantial.

"Once you go back over it, you have to determine if they applied the rules," the Marine official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the Marine Corps does not discuss rules of engagement. "Did they feel threatened? Did they perceive hostile intent or hostile action?"

The article goes on to describe just what "clearing a house" entails:

A four-man team of Marines, including Wuterich, kicked in the door and found a series of empty rooms, noticing quickly that there was one room with a closed door and people rustling behind it, Puckett said. They then kicked in that door, tossed a fragmentation grenade into the room, and one Marine fired a series of "clearing rounds" through the dust and smoke, killing several people, Puckett said.

Although it was almost immediately apparent to the Marines that the people dead in the room were men, women and children -- most likely civilians -- they also noticed a back door ajar and believed that insurgents had slipped through to a house nearby, Puckett said. The Marines stealthily moved to the second house, kicking in the door, killing one man inside and then using a frag grenade and more gunfire to clear another room full of people, he said.

Iraqi survivors disagree with this account, but isn't this account bad enough? Even if they were following the "rules," this is hideous and barbaric. At least some marines agree.

Marine Reserve Lt. Jonathan Morgenstein, who served in Anbar province from August 2004 to March 2005, said that the account offered by Wuterich's attorney surprised him a bit.

"When I was in Iraq," Morgenstein said, "the Anbar-wide ROEs [rules of engagement] did not say we had the authority to knock down any door, throw in a hand grenade and kill everyone." Still, he said, if someone in a house in Haditha was shooting at them, the Marines' response may have been within procedure. "If they felt they took fire from that house, then that may be authorized."

A Marine who served near Haditha in November said it was not unusual for Marines to respond to attacks "running and gunning" and that it was standard practice to spray rooms with gunfire when threatened. "It may be a bad tactic, but it works," he said. "It keeps you alive."

If the american public is in the dark, you can bet that the iraqis are as well. Imagine, you're an iraqi living in a small village and an IED goes off nearby killing an american soldier. The patrol dismounts and storms into your village. What do you do? The soldiers are coming, do you run? Iraqis who did that died. Do you stay indoors with your family, keeping your head down? People that did this died as well, blown to bits when american frag grenades were tossed into their homes.

As I'm typing this, Wuterich's attorney, Puckett, is on CNN giving this same account. He asserts that Wuterich followed instruction from instructors and higher ups in the chain of command and that these ROEs are no different that what was in effect for Falluja. And that all the civilian deaths can be chalked up to "the fog of war." Really? Listen to what he's saying- the army and the marines have made a clear calculation that civilian casualties, while unfortunate, are part of the price. And that american lives are clearly more precious than iraqi lives.

It would have been nice to ask the iraqi public if they were willing to pay this price before we went in and blew the fuck out of their country.

Spooky House part deux

By request- Eli wanted to see the spooky house photo in black and white. I'll let you all be the judge of which version you prefer. I like them both, though I think the black and white version is more ominous.

Hibiscus

My new hibiscus plant exploded in blooms overnight. It must be a liberal plant- no conservative plant would ever indulge in such a wanton, decadent, riotous display of color!