Which is Limbaugh and which is bin Laden?
“they are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes”
“but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it’s not going to end”
Quotations and juxtaposition from Whiskey Bar.
“But both Clausewitz and Sherman were right: war is both a continuation of policy by other means, and all hell. It’s a terrible mistake to start a major military operation, regardless of the moral justification, unless you have very good reason to believe that the action will improve matters.”
— Excerpt from Paul Krugman’s column in Monday’s New York Times
News report: “More than 54 civilians, at least 34 of them children,
die in Lebanon ….”
Maureen Dowd begins Wednesday’s column:
It’s too bad President Bush spurns evolution — both in his view of the universe and his view of himself.
Scientists see more and more evidence that human evolution not only exists but is ongoing, as people adapt to changing circumstances with shifts in everything from skin color to the protein structure of sperm.
But with W., it’s more a matter of survival of the stubbornist.
Regarding the previous president, Dowd adds:
Bill Clinton, the Mutable Man par excellence, evolved four times a day; he had a tactical and even recreational attitude toward personal change.
“Estate tax lawyers are the most productive tax law enforcement personnel at the I.R.S., according to Mr. Brown. For each hour they work, they find an average of $2,200 of taxes that people owe the government.”
“Over the last five years, officials at both the I.R.S. and the Treasury have told Congress that cheating among the highest-income Americans is a major and growing problem.”
“The administration plans to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, in less than 70 days.”
Source: The New York Times (quotations out of sequence).
That it wasn’t the war we protested in the sixties. It was just the draft we didn’t like.
Because if we disliked war we sure as hell should be in the streets today protesting this war — not just Iraq, but our country’s acceptance and support for the destruction of Lebanon — watching while Israel throws the babies out with the bath water and our elected government rushes them more bombs.
Sorry, don’t mind me, it was just the photo of some poor Lebanese grandpa’s infant Sweetie with its head blown off that got to me.
Congressman Jim Kolbe of Arizona (though a Republican, he voted to override the president’s stem cell veto yesterday) has introduced legislation to eliminate the penny. Yahoo! News, among others, has the story.
Two things. One, why not make it easier all around and just eliminate the decimal place? That is, why not round-off to the nearest dime?
Two, I am reassured that eliminating the penny is a good thing not just because it costs more to make a penny than they’re worth, but because Kevin Federline (and Richard Branson — hello is he even an American) “threw a “Save the Penny” show in Times Square … to publicize the penny’s plight.” Plight!? Kevin Federline is a plight.*
Kolbe, by the way, probably likes the nickel because there is more copper (Arizona copper) in the nickel-coated copper nickel than there is in the copper-coated zinc penny.
* Plight = a dangerous, difficult or otherwise unfortunate situation.
From a column in today’s New York Times:
The second measures how squiggly the borders of a country are. Straight lines are usually the sign of an arbitrary colonial mapmaker. Natural barriers like rivers and mountains seldom look tidy. Taking the measures of partitioning and neat borders, their study compares the performance of countries with natural borders to those with artificial ones and finds, overwhelmingly, that artificial nations suffer terribly — lower income, horribly ineffective and corrupt governments, less respect for the law, low literacy, limited access to clean water, poor health care, you name it.
…Iraq, especially, is a straight-edged, ethnically partitioned nation wracked with internal strife. And having oil wealth is unlikely to save the day. Fragmented countries with natural resources often do worse because civil war rages over who gets to keep the money.
IT’S PERSONAL. It just so happens that I have a couple of really ugly-ass dogs in this fight over embryonic stem-cell research. Not many political issues are personal with me, but this one deeply is. I have watched slow death from neurological disease once too often in my life to be anything but furious when Sam Brownback, a United States senator to the everlasting embarrassment of that body, pulls out a child’s drawing of an embryo with a smiley-face in order to argue his position. Or when Tony Snow, that towering public fake, starts getting glib about “murder,” as though there isn’t enough blood lapping at the ankles of everyone in this White House to float a barge. Or when Snow’s boss, that tough-talkin’, crumb-spittin’, neck-rubbin’ international buckaroo, uses the first veto of his presidential career and then hides behind children while maundering incoherently about a “moral line” as though he’d recognize one if he fell over it. Is there any doubt that, if this guy got Parkinson’s Disease, he’d eat those little buggers out of the petri dish with a spoon, probably dribbling some of them on Tony Blair in the process? Sorry, Ez. I don’t give a damn how tactically brilliant this may be. I look at this action and this is what I know — that millions of Americans will die horrible deaths and the government of the United States doesn’t give a good goddamn about them. Period. And, no, Senator Obama, I don’t have to respect the deeply held beliefs of anyone who condemns their fellow human beings to miserable suffering on the basis of anthropomorphized blastocysts in the service of an anthropomorphized god. Were it in my power, I’d run all those former embryos out of government until they grew the hell up.
So we’ve got Israel attacking Lebanon. Israel attacking Palestine. Hezbollah attacking Israel. Palestinians attacking Israel. Israel threatening to attack Syria and Iran. Iran meddling in Iraq. The US meddling in Iraq. Lots of terrorists and insurgents targetting the US. The US threatening Iran. Sunnis attacking Shiites. Shiites attacking Sunnis. The US and NATO fighting a resurgant Taliban in Afghanistan. Kurds attacking Turks.
And now, as predicted back when this whole mess was brewing, Turkey threatens to invade Iraq.
Turkish officials signaled Tuesday they are prepared to send the army into northern Iraq if U.S. and Iraqi forces do not take steps to combat Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there _ a move that could put Turkey on a collision course with the United States.Turkey is facing increasing domestic pressure to act after 15 soldiers, police and guards were killed fighting the guerrillas in southeastern Turkey in the past week.
“President Bush was recorded using a four letter word at the G8 summit in Russia. At first everyone just thought he mispronounced the word ‘Shiite.’ But that wasn’t it.
“Kind of ironic. Bush is listening in on everyone else’s phone calls and now he’s the one who gets caught saying something he shouldn’t. Little payback there.”
Jay Leno Monday night
Even more ironic, Bush gets overheard using a word that would cost a broadcaster $325,000.
No matter what the trappings or the ceremonies require of the leader of the free world, he brings the same DKE diction, bearing and cadences, the same insouciance and smart-alecky attitude, the same simplistic approach — swearing, swaggering, talking to Tony Blair with his mouth full of buttered roll, and giving a startled Angela Merkel an impromptu shoulder rub. He can make even a global summit meeting seem like a kegger.
Maureen Dowd in a column titled “Animal House Summit”
Wouldn’t this be sexual harassment in any other workplace? That’s the German chancellor Angela Merkel and she doesn’t seem all that happy about the attention. Click either photo to see more.
This is worse than talking with your mouth full.
NewMexiKen thought this map from The New York Times was useful for seeing the proximity of Beirut, Tel Aviv, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, etc.
Click map to enlarge.
“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
Rear Admiral Joshua Painter in The Hunt for Red October as spoken by Fred Dalton Thompson
And as noted by Larry Johnson.
This lengthy post at Obsidian Wings seems to NewMexiKen to be a good statement of what’s happening in the current escalation in the Middle East. Here’s a key summary paragraph:
So the basic outlines of this, as I understand it are as follows: Hamas and Fatah were about to make some limited progress, involving Hamas backing down a bit from its refusal to recognize Israel, when the first soldier was abducted. Israel responded forcefully. Negotiations were about to secure an end to this crisis when two things happened: first, unnamed parties blocked the deal, and second, Hezbollah abducted two more soldiers. Now Israel has again responded forcefully, and the conflict has expanded into Lebanon.
And though many in the blogosphere dis him continually, NewMexiKen has reason to respect Tom Friedman, who had this to say in his column today:
The tiny militant wing of Hamas today is pulling all the strings of Palestinian politics, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah Shiite Islamic party is doing the same in Lebanon, even though it is a small minority in the cabinet, and so, too, are the Iranian-backed Shiite parties and militias in Iraq. They are not only showing who is boss inside each new democracy, but they are also competing with one another for regional influence.
As a result, the post-9/11 democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world is being hijacked.
…The world needs to understand what is going on here: the little flowers of democracy that were planted in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories are being crushed by the boots of Syrian-backed Islamist militias who are desperate to keep real democracy from taking hold in this region and Iranian-backed Islamist militias desperate to keep modernism from taking hold.
[I understand that people don’t come to NewMexiKen for insight or understanding on issues of the day. But every once in a while I feel I can contribute by bringing what seem to me to be coherent ideas to your attention. In any case, it helps me figure it out.]
Rep. Steve King (R-Idiot) shows us how to build a fence. (Click the image to see the video.)
Whiskey Bar hits one out.
From a report in The New York Times:
WASHINGTON, July 11 — It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”
But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the federal antiterrorism database.
The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.
The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.
“We don’t find it embarrassing,” said the department’s deputy press secretary, Jarrod Agen. “The list is a valuable tool.”
“Right now we are borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the most unstable region of the world, and to bring it here and burn it in ways that destroy the habitability of the planet. That is nuts! We have to change every aspect of that.”
— Al Gore in an interview with Rolling Stone.
Whom were you trying to target? The working class men who struggle for an inch of space in local trains? The working women who knit and cut vegetables in trains on their way home? Young, dreamy students discussing exams and love? The babies accompanying their mothers, smiling back at the women around them?
Darkness is fast falling. Its raining like it will not stop. Will the rains wash away the blood? Will tomorrow be a new day. Here’s to lost lifes and broken dreams.
At this writing, the death toll appears to be well more than 100, possibly 300.
From a report by The Gallup Poll:
While the issue of illegal immigration has attracted scrutiny from the media and political leaders, Americans’ views of immigration more generally have become increasingly positive. The poll finds most Americans, including majorities of non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Hispanics saying immigration is “a good thing for this country today.” In fact, the percentage of Americans who say this in the current poll, 67%, is the most positive viewpoint Gallup has measured since the question was first asked, in 2001.
Sixty-eight percent of whites, 60% of blacks, and 76% of Hispanics think immigration is good for the country today.
…Now, 42% of Americans say immigration should be kept at its present level and 39% say it should be decreased.
A must read essay from Tony Horwitz includes this:
This national amnesia isn’t new, but it’s glaring and supremely paradoxical at a moment when politicians warn of the threat posed to our culture and identity by an invasion of immigrants from across the Mexican border. If Americans hit the books, they’d find what Al Gore would call an inconvenient truth. The early history of what is now the United States was Spanish, not English, and our denial of this heritage is rooted in age-old stereotypes that still entangle today’s immigration debate.
Amen.
