Category: Politics

Lighter, faster, cheaper?

From Stars & Stripes:

One serving officer, who asked not to be identified, said Rumsfeld “didn’t even let us go to war with the Army we had; he made us leave half our armored vehicles at home in pursuit of lighter, faster and cheaper.”

Apparantly, we had a lot of Bradleys and similar APCs, and never deployed them. That’s almost forgiveable in the initial invasion, but c’mon – it’s only happening NOW, 19 months later? How about in the first month or two…?

Oh, and that quote was the last paragraph of the article. Can we say “burying the lead” boys and girls?

via The Isle of Balta

“That’s all he has, and he knows it.”

I am going to make this short but sweet: The only weapons Pres. George W Bush has in his intellectual arsenal are book burning, brainwashing, and intimidation. That’s all he has, and he knows it. For complete details, I refer you to my forthcoming book on the subject. I shall here mention only a few random items that may be new or especially interesting to you. For instance, it is more than a purely historical question to ask, “How did his reign of terror start?” or even the more urgent question, “How might it end?”. No, we must ask, “Why does he want to inflict more death and destruction than Genghis Khan’s hordes?” Here’s the answer, albeit in a somewhat circuitous and roundabout style: He possesses no significant intellectual skills whatsoever and has no interest in erudition. Heck, he can’t even spell or define “erudition”, much less achieve it. To deny that Pres. Bush bases his treatises on the belief that the most valuable skill one can have is to be able to lie convincingly is effrontive nonsense and political irresponsibility. It is nonsense because the horny and testy nature of his prank phone calls should indicate to us that something needs to be done. And it is irresponsible because someone has to be willing to summon up the courage to take a proactive, rather than a reactive, stance. Even if it’s not polite to do so. Even if it hurts a lot of people’s feelings. Even if everyone else is pretending that the cure for evil is more evil.

It’s amazing how apt an automatic complaint generator can be, in this case.

See Scott Pakin’s automatic complaint-letter generator or generate one specifically about our idiot-in-chief (I don’t recommend going to the White House web page and emailing it, though.)

New “Visit America” tourist slogans

Pretty funny…

Now that the Bush administration’s mandate has been extended for another four years, President Bush has indicated that improving our image abroad will rank very high on his list of priorities. To that effect, he has commissioned the Department of Homeland Security to increase the flow of foreign tourism by adopting a catchy slogan for our country. A highly-placed source at the DHS, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the highly confidential list of options being considered at the present time.

10. Come see where your job used to live.

9. Our religious nuts only rarely kill people for violating their own particular interpretation of scripture.

8. How much weaker does the dollar need to get for you to visit? (no really, tell us)

7. Come for the loose morals, stay for the systematic erosion of civil liberties.

6. Give us your spry, your wealthy, your huddled masses yearning to buy commemorative shot glasses. And for God’s sake,
keep the Mexicans.

5. Visit America, or we’ll send our army to visit you.

4. America: Because you miss hereditary monarchies.

3. Forcing the world to adopt democracy since 1776.

2. Baby, I didn’t mean it… The CIA told me to do it.

1. America, byotch!

Sadly, this was from an unattributed forwarded email. If you know the origin of this, please let me know in the comments.

Why we need a bigger House of Representatives…

See primarily Thirty-thousand.org (after the Constitutionally minimum size of a Congressional district)

See also this diary on DailyKOS and this post on DailyKOS

These in turn seem to be spurred on by a Boston Globe article:

Divide Iraq’s 25 million people by the number of members in the new parliament (275), and the result is one legislator for every 91,000 people. That will make Iraq’s government almost exactly as representative as Great Britain’s — each member of the House of Commons also represents, on average, about 91,000 citizens. Other democracies are comparable. The ratio for Italy’s Chamber of Deputies is 1 to 92,000. For the French National Assembly, 1 to 104,000. For Canada’s House of Commons, 1 to 105,000. For Germany’s Bundestag, 1 to 136,000.

But in the US House of Representatives, each lawmaker represents, on average, a staggering 674,000 citizens. That makes the “people’s house” in Washington one of the least democratic bodies of its kind in the world.

Whatever the impetus, this is a heck of a good idea, and one which does not require a change to the Constitution.

OK, in my case this is just gloating…

…and to be honest, my original post was mostly “look at these silly red-stater’s” but according to this news article, Virginia HB 1677 has been withdrawn largely thanks to blog publicity:

“I’ve never been blogged before,” he said. “The tone of the e-mails has been disgusting. It’s, ‘You’re a horrible person. You ought to be crucified.’ And those were the nice ones.”

(via AMERICAblog)

A veiled attacks on abortion rights?

Dunno, but scary legislation all the same.

From: Democracy for Virginia

Guess what? You just earned yourself up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine. Why? Because you failed to call the cops and report your miscarriage within 12 hours.

True? Not yet. But if Delegate John Cosgrove (R-78) has his way, HB1677 will become law in a few short months, and this scenario will be reality for many women in Virginia.

Incredulous? Outraged? Read on below the jump for more information on this odious bill.

Worth a read. Via Atrios

To any readers in California…

On TPM, Josh Marshall notes a great deal of ambiguity in Senator Feinstein’s position on Social Security privatization. Please take a moment to read his article, and then consider writing an email to her (as I’ve done) urging her to take a strong public position against privatization.

To readers not in California, I doubt writing to our CA senator would help much, but do consider following the issue (Talking Points Memo is doing an excellent job of covering it) and consider taking the time to contact your own Senators and Representatives with your concern and opposition. This is especially important if they’re Democrats who may side with the President on this, but it’s probably also worthwhile if you’ve got a more loyal Democrat, or if you have a Republican.

My response to “Kerry Sucked.”

This was my comment on “Kerry Sucked” on AMERICAblog:

Face it. He was a shitty candidate. My question is why it’s ok to talk about everyone else who screwed up but not Kerry?

OK, count me in the “unwilling to turn on Kerry” column. I don’t agree that he sucked… unless, of course, we as Democrats also sucked by choosing him.

I mean, I rather liked that he was something of an intellectual and had some pretty good foreign policy credentials. But he was also a relatively stiff and colorless moderate… out of a field of candidates where I saw little to be enthusiastic for. In the initial debates, the only candidate with any real fire was Sharpton… who was no just “not electable” but well, genuinely unelectable.

Frankly, given that I actually went so far as to consider voting for former-Republican Wes Clark should indicate just how bad I felt our field of “electable” candidates was.

In the end, by the time the primaries got to California, it didn’t really matter. I voted for Kucinich, since despite the lack of a real shot at it at least he didn’t announce that he was dropping out and he was a genuine liberal.

Didn’t matter, of course. The tide of Kerry victories carried on by “electability” concerns continued.

And we got what we asked for… and “electable” colorless moderate, who got beaten – though closely – by one the worst Presidents since Buchanan.

In light of all the “Attack on Christmas” crud

There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about the right-wingers’ claims of an “Attack on Christmas” and frankly it seems to be entirely hot air … to the point where I’m not sure whether the discussion of it at all in the left-wing blogosphere isn’t simply giving them undeserved attention. Or maybe it’s something that needs a response… I don’t know.

See this note on Americablog for an example.

Well, while I don’t know what to make of the current issue, if you haven’t seen it in past years, you MUST go and check out Saturnalia, a comic strip at e-Sheep which pretty much is the response I’d like to make to all the “Attack on Christmas” types.

For the record, I personally celebrate an entirely secular holiday which happens to also be called “Christmas” but which simultaneously celebrates crass consumerism and an annual mini-family-reunion… and which I think is far more dangerous to any remaining shreds of a Christian holiday than a generic “Winter Holiday.” After all, how much “Christ” is there left in such a “Christmas” when practiced by a mostly-agnostic/vaguely-deist-at-times and totally non-practicing Jewish guy?