Time for another Friedman Unit

(Updated below)

Since the January Friedman Unit is about over, it's time time to start talking about the next one:

Sigh. Here we do NOT go again:

"Over the course of the next three to four months, we'll have some idea how well the plan's working. . . . By the time we get to September or October, members are going to want to know how well this is working, and if it isn't, what's Plan B?"

Sure they will. This is deja vu all over again:

I think it will be rather clear in the next 60 to 90 days as to whether this plan is going to work. . . . We need to know, as we . . . move through these benchmarks, that the Iraqis are doing what they have to do. -Boehner, 1/23/07

Meanwhile, some of the nice folks out in the red states that have been devastated by tornadoes over the past week are realizing that their national guard might be of some use back home about now. Maybe this is some of the sacrifice that Dubya has spoken of.

I'm not suggesting that these people are responsible for their national guardsmen being over in Iraq because of their blind support for George Bush and his disastrous war of choice, but I am suggesting that some of them might want to reevaluate their position now that they see the real world consequences. Oh, and the whole middle of the country still doesn't look too good, weather-wise.

UPDATE:

From Crooks & Liars:

More on the Kansas National Guard Equipment Problems

John Amato adds: "We can only hope Mother Nature is a little kinder to us in the future."

Greed and indifference have been our guiding principles for the past 100+ years with respect to nature. Relying on hope at this point with all the evidence indicating Mother Nature is really pissed off might not be the best strategy (not that hope ever is a strategy).

How subjective the truth?

It's interesting to me how conservatives and liberals both constantly accuse each other of lying about everything. The liberals call themselves "the reality-based community." The conservatives call them that also, but they're just being sarcastic. They think the "moonbats" are the liars. I mean, what really gives here?

I've been reading political blogs for about 4 years now. The whole reason I started was because I didn't feel like corporate media was providing a complete or accurate picture of what was going on in the world. Everything seemed to have a surreal quality to it, like something just wasn't right. Some of the news sounded more like propaganda than journalism. A lot of things didn't seem to make sense any more. One day I got fed up. I googled for alternative news sites and came across a few blogs.

The sites that I read religiously (see my blog roll) all strike me as being run by honest, intelligent people with loads of integrity. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but they acknowledge their mistakes and print a correction every time one has been pointed out. I've seen some arguments stretched a bit at times, too (at least in my opinion), but they really care about being accurate. The few times I tried to read major conservative sites, like redstate.com, littlegreenfootballs, and michelle malkin, I could only take a few minutes before either getting pissed off or feeling ill. They just seem to create their own facts. Even when they are proven wrong, which has been almost always (remember Captain Jamil Hussein?), they never own up to their screw ups.

What I'm really curious about is this: are the conservatives who claim liberals are serial liars being ingenuous with their claims? Do they believe what they're saying? Does the world outside their windows really look that different than it does outside mine? I just can't see how two people can look at the same event yet produce such different sets of facts unless one of them is lying. Is the truth really that subjective?

I would like to be able to hold an honest, intelligent, non-emotional conversation with a conservative to try to understand why we see everything so differently. I'm not talking about a debate here, just a conversation. I have little faith that it could happen without turning into a huge ad hominem fest, but I would like to at least try. (And no, I don't sit in my room and hit myself in the head with a hammer, either.)

On Digby on Woodward On Tenet

From Digby quoting Bob Woodward:

In his remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir, George Tenet, the former CIA chief, describes a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In much more vivid and emotional detail than previously reported, Tenet writes that he had received intelligence that day, July 10, 2001, about the threat from al-Qaeda that "literally made my hair stand on end."

According to At the Center of the Storm, Tenet picked up the phone, insisted on meeting with Rice about the threat from al-Qaeda, and raced to the White House with his counter-terrorism deputy, Cofer Black, and a briefer known only as "Rich B."

"There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months," Rich B. told Rice, and the attack would be "spectacular." Black added, "This country needs to go on a war footing now." He said that President Bush should give the CIA new covert action authorities to go after Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. After the meeting, Tenet's briefer and deputy "congratulated each other," Tenet writes. "At last, they felt, we had gotten the full attention of the administration."

Is it me, or does this fish keep getting bigger? I know Tenet is just being a self-serving finger pointer here like the kid who rats out the others to try to get out of detention, and Condi does not dispute that he told her, but this story gets better every time he tells it. He's trying to throw Condi under the bus for hanging him out to dry on the infamous 17 words, but he ends up making himself look foolish also.

Woodward wonders why he didn't take it directly to the President. As Digby points out, though, there is no reason to believe Bush would've listened since he already blew off the CIA for telling him the same thing by famously saying, "All right, you've covered your ass, now."

With the serial lies that come out of this administration, it's hard to tell who's the more full of shit.

Saturday Funnies

Bob Geiger's weekly round-up of political cartoons.

It's not terrorism if you're white

The Maryland dead tree edition of The Examiner reported today that a counter protester was arrested at an immigration rally in Washington, DC this past Tuesday (May 1^st) following a confrontation with several protesters. Prior to physically challenging some of the protesters, 24-year-old Tyler Joseph Froatz was distributing fliers that read, "The only way to stop a flood is to cut off the flow" and displayed cartoon drawings of tanks and soldiers gunning down people crossing into the US from Mexico. When police arrested him after he assaulted the event's organizer, they found him armed with a hammer, taser, a loaded flare gun, and two knives including a 12-inch dagger. A search of his nearby Jeep turned up a loaded M-1 rifle, ammunition, and a map of a local embassy. Police later searched his apartment and found "at least 15 guns, a Molotov cocktail, a hand grenade, and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition." Froatz is a former Eagle scout and self-proclaimed Herndon Minuteman. He was denied bail by a DC Superior Court judge this afternoon over concerns that he may pose a threat to the area.

Ya think?

This is the first I've heard of this story, so I assume that it hasn't been widely reported by corporate media. A quick search on "the Google" turned up only a couple of local stories and a few blog accounts.

Imagine if Tyler Joseph Froatz was named Tayib Jamal Farahani and was of Middle Eastern decent. To say that this would have generated some national interest is a bit of an understatement. This would have been splattered all over CNN for hours. Fox would have had a field day. The wingnut blogs would have been on this like ugly on an ape for weeks. Michael Chertoff would have made a public statement raising the terra level to blinking red. Dick Cheney would've booked all the Sunday talking head shows. And Dubya would've said something incredibly stupid. But since it was just Bubba from Podunk, the MSM and assorted right tards not only couldn't care less, many of them wish he would've succeeded.

When a foreigner gets caught plotting to kill Americans, it's new$. When a white conservative gets busted? Not so much. Welcome to the United States of Bigotry.

The Reagan Love Fest

(Updated twice below)

Over at Fire Dog Lake, Scarecrow nicely summarizes the Republican talking point dissemination forum being passed off as a debate. Reality denial appears to be alive and well within the Republican ranks. About the only debating that occurred was over who is most like Ronald Reagan and who could blame Clinton the most.

If you listen to these men, it appears we do not have a credibility problem with the rest of the world, so we don’t need to worry about how we will restore America’s honor or prestige or repair alliances or international institutions. Torture was not mentioned, nor the Military Commissions Act, with its denial of habeas corpus (except for Paul), nor restrictions on attorneys, nor use of secret evidence or evidence extracted through torture. Kidnapping and renditions weren’t mentioned either, so I guess Canada, Europe and the Middle East are not upset about that; there was no mention of secret prisons, nor Guantanamo, nor indefinite detention without charges or trials, nor warrantless wiretapping, misuse of national security letters by the FBI, and so on. Only Paul, now just a curious anachronism in his own party, a true believer in the limited government credo of what used to be the Republican Party but not longer is, could offer a few lines about the continuing expansion of executive powers — and then only in reference to Terry Schiavo.

No one brought up problems at the Justice Department, nor concerns about politicizing justice, or interfering with prosecutions. Matthews asked about Karl Rove, but no one took the opportunity to say anything bad about Karl. When asked which of the Bush mistakes (unnamed) he would avoid, Huckabee said he’d avoid sending US jobs overseas.

[...]

According to these men, the President’s tax cuts for the rich are fine and can be made permanent, and there were many proposals to cut different taxes further. But those Democrats need to be stopped from pork barrel spending, because the budget is out of control. Drunken sailors came in for praise by comparison. There was no support for increasing revenues, even to pay for their glorious war.

[...]

After the “debate,” MSNBC’s panelists tried to hype the disagreements, but the[y] missed the fact that these men share a common mind. These people do not live on the same planet as the rest of us. When they wake up and look out the window, they do no[t] see what we see.

They do not see a nation angry at them about the war nor shamed by a government that sanctions torture. With their Reaganesque optimism, they do not see families struggling with health care costs, job security, retirement security, and college tuition. They don’t seem to worry whether the government is doing enough to protect us from unsafe working conditions, unsafe products, unsafe foods and drugs. They apparently don’t see global warming as a national security or economic threat. American democracy is not threatened; the Constitution is not under siege, and Americans don’t hate the Bush regime for what it has done to our liberties (Paul excepted). Attacks on the rights of women, gays, and immigrants and anyone who looks like the “enemy” are non-issues.

The collective denial shown by these men was even more surprising because one of the first questions asked concerned the fact that about only 22 percent of the American people think the country is on the right track, but you’d never know it from listening to these men. And because they seem to completely disconnected from what the American people believe, there is no possibility that any of these men could successfully address the nation’s concerns. Last night, the Republican Party declared itself to be in denial and irrelevant except as an out of touch opposition party with no ideas left for any of the hard questions of governance.

This country can't survive another Republican presidency.

UPDATE: When this is the best the wingnut cheerleaders can come up with, you know they've got nothin'. Glenn Greenwald, on the other hand, has got plenty.

UPDATE II: As much as Republicans and their enablers have heaped praise upon Bush (to the point of ejaculation in a few instances) for the first six years of his presidentizing right up until the mid-term elections, it's curious that they now avoid mentioning his name at all. In fact, his name was mentioned exactly once during the debate last night, and even then it was only because one of the softball questions explicitly asked about him. He is their creation and the embodiment of everything they stand for. They all even sound like him. Why would they seek to distance themselves from someone they so wish to emulate?

A Little Schadenfreude

I don't know about anyone else, but I am truly enjoying watching Paul Wolfowitz make a complete idiot out of himself in front of the entire world. It couldn't happen to a nicer neocon.

In a last ditch to save his neck or may be anticipating what the Ad Hoc committee would propose, Wolfowitz blames Bank rules for mix up. After directing the blame on staff who know the rules of the Bank, now he has a change of heart and is pointing the finger at confusion and miscommunication - and this three days after he has been crying that he has been unfairly judged.

This is Supporting the Troops

Supporting the troops John Mellencamp style.



This isn't from his performance at Walter Reed; just showing the man some love.

Why Science Doesn't Suck - Reason #84,727,589

The religious right wants everyone to believe that the study of science will turn people into amoral, emotionless automatons who see no purpose to life. Here is but one reason that science is so important to us all.

London: Scientists yesterday revealed the world's first genetic cure that could give the blind their sight back.

The next time you hear some religious whacko railing against science, please tell them that their opinion might be different if their knowledge of the world spanned more than a single book (and that is probably being generous). Or you could just tell them to STFU since you can't reason with someone who doesn't believe in logic and reasoning.

As Expected, Bush Vetoes Iraq Spending Bill

Junior amazed nobody today with his veto of the Iraq supplemental spending bill. His speech following the veto started with:

Twelve weeks ago, I asked the Congress to pass an emergency war spending bill that would provide our brave men and women in uniform with the funds and flexibility they need. Instead, members of the House and the Senate passed a bill that substitutes the opinions of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders. So a few minutes ago, I vetoed the bill.

We've heard a number of retired generals who served in the Iraq war blasting Bush and his inept crew's policies within the past six months. The most critical condemnation to date appeared today. Having grown up in a military family, I just cannot fathom this happening under any other president commander guy.

May 1, 2007

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

Today, in your veto message regarding the bipartisan legislation just passed on Operation Iraqi Freedom, you asserted that you so decided because you listen to your commanders on the ground.

Respectfully, as your former commander on the ground, your administration did not listen to our best advice. In fact, a number of my fellow Generals were forced out of their jobs, because they did not tell you what you wanted to hear -- most notably General Eric Shinseki, whose foresight regarding troop levels was advice you rejected, at our troops' peril.

The legislation you vetoed today represented a course of action that is long overdue. This war can no longer be won by the military alone. We must bring to bear the entire array of national power - military, diplomatic and economic. The situation demands a surge in diplomacy, and pressure on the Iraqi government to fix its internal affairs. Further, the Army and Marine Corps are on the verge of breaking - or have been broken already - by the length and intensity of this war. This tempo is not sustainable - and you have failed to grow the ground forces to meet national security needs. We must begin the process of bringing troops home, and repairing and growing our military, if we are ever to have a combat-ready force for the long war on terror ahead of us.

The bill you rejected today sets benchmarks for success that the Iraqis would have to meet, and puts us on a course to redeploy our troops. It stresses the need for sending troops into battle only when they are rested, trained and equipped. In my view, and in the view of many others in the military that I know, that is the best course of action for our security.

As someone who served this nation for decades, I have the utmost respect for the office you hold. However, as a man of conscience, I could not sit idly by as you told the American people today that your veto was based on the recommendations of military men. Your administration ignored the advice of our military's finest minds before, and I see no evidence that you are listening to them now.

I urge you to reconsider your position, and work with Congress to pass a bill that achieves the goals laid out above.

Respectfully,

Major General Paul D. Eaton, USA, Retired

Powerful stuff. It's clear the entire military has lost all respect for their Commander in Chief. How much longer will he let this go on?