Body Counts - Resurected

Excerpted from an essay by Tom Engelhardt
on AntiWar.com



In his VFW speech, the president finally got to salve his own frustration. "In Iraq," he told his audience, "our troops are taking the fight to the extremists and radicals and murderers all throughout the country. Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year."

Forgetting the absurdity of the figure (which, if accurate, would essentially mean al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia has been wiped out), let's just note that, as with the Vietnam analogy itself, the body count in administration hands arrives not as a substitute for victory, but as a way of staving off thoughts of defeat. The president, that is, picked up not where the body count started in Vietnam, but where those Five o'clock Follies left off.

In its own strange way, Bush's speech was an admission of defeat. Somehow, Vietnam, the American nightmare, had finally bested the man who spent his youth avoiding it and his presidency evading it. The president had finally mounted the tiger you are always advised not to ride and had officially entered the dead zone, where the bodies pile high and victory never appears, taking the rest of the country with him. It's clear that, barring some stunning development in Iraq (or perhaps an assault on Iran), whatever the "progress reports," whatever the debates, that's where we'll be until January 2009 when it will automatically become Hillary's or Barack's or Mitt's or Giuliani's war. (From the Vietnam years, we also know what happens when a president, who inherits a war, fears being labeled the person who "lost" it; we know just how hard it is to get out then.)



Find all of the piece here ...

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You can track the Iraqi body count here. There are other sources that offer higher estimates. Iraq Body Count is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 invasion. The count encompasses non-combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and the breakdown in civil security following the invasion.

Data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures to produce a credible record of known deaths and incidents.

Scott Ritter speaks

Scott Ritter was born into a military family in 1961. He graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a Bachelor of Arts in the history of the Soviet Union and with departmental honors.

He was first in the U.S. Army serving as a Private in 1980. He was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps in May 1984. He served in this capacity for twelve years. He initially served as the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq War.

During Desert Storm, he served as a ballistic missile adviser to General Norman Schwartzkopf. Ritter later worked as a security and military consultant.

William Scott Ritter, Jr. is noted for his role as a chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and later for his criticism of United States foreign policy in the Middle East.

Prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, Ritter publicly argued that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). He became a popular anti-war figure and talk show commentator as a result of his stance.

It seems he has some pretty good credentials. Here's what he has to say.

Of course, given his opinions (and ignoring his military record) he's probably just another loud-mouthed, hippy, pinko, commie-bastard, libertard who wants to see America loose.

The Death of Conservatism

Richard Belzer on Huffington Post


Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679)

The heartless, spiritually bankrupt intellectual frauds who openly court -- and are disturbingly non-judgmental of -- the most intolerant loathsome elements of the political landscape (who, for some unconscionable reason, have been consulted about virtually everything our government has been doing or undoing for the past six plus agonizing years) -- these are the fruits of a particular strain of conservative ideologues with a shared affinity for the Hobbesian view of humanity, which postulates that people are essentially evil and the role of the ruling class, the government, was to have a standing army and police presence and little else. Essentially that the "people" were totally on their own, frontier-style with no public services, health care, college grants, head start, maintenance of roads and bridges, public defenders, job training programs, Medicare, Medicaid; you get the picture.

Also violently opposed to the Jeffersonian assertion that people were basically good and part of a government's function is to engender the conditions where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are possible through education, hard work and a sense of community, whereas conservatives have only contempt for the notion of a fair playing field.

Conservatism is in its last throes if you will, twisting in the wind, dying like communism did because neither philosophy works by definition -- they both operate from the fraudulent premise built around contempt for and control of the people.

The rest of the piece is here ...

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All I can say is that it sounds like there's an echo in here.

The Republicans created a wedge issue ...

... now its got them all jammed up.

Rep. Mike Simpson (R) condemned Senate GOP leaders on Thursday for their treatment of fellow Idahoan Sen. Larry Craig (R), accusing them of hypocrisy.

“I hope I never stub my toe and they throw me under the bus,” Simpson said of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republican leaders. “It kind of makes you wonder what party you want to be a member of.”

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They spend a lifetime in politics trying to vilify and marginalize one group or another (gays, hispanics, blacks, non-evangelicals just to name a few) and then they look in the mirror.

The more I watch politics the more I'm convinced that the Republican Party couldn't win an election on policy. If it weren't for their constant attacks on the character of others (using Willie Horton, The Swiftboaters, and hounding the life out of Clinton just to name a few) they couldn't get any votes worth counting.

By distracting from the real issues, they distract from the consequences and implications of their policy proposals. The dirty tricks that Rove learned from his time on the Nixon campaign and the Republicans have been pursuing ever since is that the ad hominem argument works. People fall for it. You can fool some of the people all of the time! You can make yourself look better by sliming the other guy, even if it isn't ethical and you're a hypocrite. Unfortunately, though it may win elections, it does nothing for the nation except provide us with a never ending parade of incompetents (like the one we have currently occupying the White House). I'm not saying that the Democrats are immune from hypocracy or from engaging in dirty tricks. They're certainly not. It's just become terribly obvious over the years that they're no where near as good at it as the Republican side of the aisle ... and you have to have morals and ethics like rubber bands to be as good at it as the Republicans have become ... from Nixon on.


The picture of hypocracy.

I honestly believe that, through Republican "ethics", hypocracy and the constant misdirection to these made-up character issues and away from the real issues that effect us all, the Republican Party has done irreparable harm to itself from which it will take a generation to recover. Drunk on the sense of power that came from their almost impeachment of a sitting president on the basis of bogus charges they've overstepped them selves and betrayed the trust that the American people had put in them.

Now, the real problems with the economy are starting to surface and their support of the never-ending war are catching the attention of the electorate. Their hypocracy of labeling themselves the "Family Values Party" while acting out like debauched Romans at an orgy has caught the attention of the religious Right, whom hey saw as their base and their base is not pleased.

I'm sure their strategists had hoped none of this would surface, at least until after the next election when it could all be blamed on someone else ... but they've opened Pandoras Box and it cannot be close again. They've been caught in the process and there's no one else to blame.

They dreamed of a permanent Republican majority. Irony of ironies, it was theirs to loose and they've been working overtime to loose their chance.

"Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake." - Napoleon

Just Another Blast from the Past

Arthur Lee and Love
(We were all so much thinner then.)

My Little Red Book (Bacharach-David)

Verse 1:

I just got out my little red book
The minute that you said goodbye
I thumbed right through my little red book
I wasn't gonna sit and cry
And I went from A to Z
I took out every pretty girl in town
They danced with me and as I held them

Chorus:

All I did was talk about you
Hear your name and I'd start to cry
There's just no getting over you... oh, no...

Verse 2:

There ain't no girl in my little red book
Who could ever replace your charms
And each girl in my little red book
Knows you're the one I'm thinkin' of
Oh won't you please come back
Without your precious love I can't go on
Where can love be I need you so much

[repeat chorus]

Verse 3:

[lead guitar (as per intro, doubled w/scat vocal, 2X) replaces first
four lines]

Oh won't you please come back
Without your precious love I can't go on
It's haunting me I need you so much

Chorus 3:

All I did was talk and talk about you
Hear your name and I'd start to cry
There's just no getting over you
All I did was talk and talk about you
Hear your name and I'd start to cry
There's just no getting over you... oh no

Coda:

Tambourine, 8 beats

Bass (4X, as per intro; drums enter on 8th beat, 1st time;
rhythm guitar enters on 8th beat, 2nd time; lead guitar
doubles rhythm guitar, 4th time; end cold on Am)

-- another ace 60's tab from Andrew Rogers

Bush Throws Bremer Under the Bus - Bremer Protests

How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army

By L. PAUL BREMER III


In happier times ... when the mission was still accomplished
... before the mission came apart like a cheap suit ... before
they started pointing fingers at each other.

“The Iraqi Army of the future cannot be an extension of the present army, which has been made into a tool of dictatorship.” — Report by the Department of State’s Future of Iraq Project, May 2002

It has become conventional wisdom that the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s army was a mistake, was contrary to American prewar planning and was a decision I made on my own. In fact the policy was carefully considered by top civilian and military members of the American government. And it was the right decision.

By the time Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, the Iraqi Army had simply dissolved. On April 17 Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy commander of the Army’s Central Command, reported in a video briefing to officials in Washington that “there are no organized Iraqi military units left.” The disappearance of Saddam Hussein’s old army rendered irrelevant any prewar plans to use that army. So the question was whether the Coalition Provisional Authority should try to recall it or to build a new one open to both vetted members of the old army and new recruits. General Abizaid favored the second approach.

In the weeks after General Abizaid’s recommendation, the coalition’s national security adviser, Walter Slocombe, discussed options with top officials in the Pentagon, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They recognized that to recall the former army was a practical impossibility because postwar looting had destroyed all the bases.

Read the rest ...

A Little about the Real Rudy

Video is here, too.

Dawkins on Hitchens

There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists ("Of course I don't believe in a God with a long white beard, but . . ."). I hadn't met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and me, he concluded, ". . . and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style".

Grayling's engaging caricature misses Hitchens's ability to temper his pugnacity with old-fashioned courtesy. And "spray" suggests a scattershot fusillade, which underestimates the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and "theologians" ruefully discovered this during Hitchens's barnstorming book tour around the United States.

With characteristic effrontery, he took his tour through the Bible Belt states – the reptilian brain of southern and middle America, rather than the easier pickings of the country's cerebral cortex to the north and down the coasts. The plaudits he received were all the more gratifying. Something is stirring in that great country. America is far from the know-nothing theocracy that two terms of Bush, and various misleading polls, had led us to fear. Does the buckle of the Bible Belt conceal some real guts? Are the ranks of the thoughtful coming out of the closet and standing up to be counted? Yes, and Hitchens's atheist colleagues on the American bestseller list have equally encouraging tales to tell.

Read the rest here ...

Also here if you have trouble with the link above (I did).

Another Strike for the Patriot Act

AP via Yahoo

NEW YORK - A federal judge struck down a key part of the USA Patriot Act on Thursday in a ruling that defended the need for judicial oversight of laws and bashed Congress for passing a law that makes possible "far-reaching invasions of liberty."

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero immediately stayed the effect of his ruling, allowing the government time to appeal. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said: "We are reviewing the decision and considering our options at this time."

The ruling handed the American Civil Liberties Union a major victory in its challenge of the post-Sept. 11 law that gave broader investigative powers to law enforcement.

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One can only hope this is among the first in a series of defeats for some of the patently unconstitutional provisions of the so-called Patriot Act. Like the Clean Air Act and No Child Left Behind, the branding is deceptive.

The Patriot Act has nothing to do with patriotism, particularly if one has respect for the Constitution of the United States of America just as the Clean Air Act has nothing to do with cleaning any part of the environment unless you mean several corporations get to clean up windfall profits at the expense of the general public. As for no Child Left Behind, great numbers of them are being left behind, excluded, and uncounted.

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Let's Deregulate and the Disasters will Go Away

Frustrated lawmakers lashed out at the nation's mine safety chief Wednesday over his handling of last month's deadly collapse at a Utah coal mine, saying the agency had yet to learn from four major disasters in the nation's coal mines over the past two years.

Senators grew increasingly exasperated with Mine Safety and Health Administration chief Richard Stickler as he struggled to provide answers as to why possible warning signs at the Utah mine were ignored - including a previous seismic bump 900 feet from the collapse site. Lawmakers also wanted to know why the rescue operation suffered so many setbacks, despite a recent major overhaul of the nation's mine safety laws.

"What the hell does it take to shake up this agency?" asked Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., to the applause of union members in the audience. "What is the problem at MSHA? What the hell is the problem at MSHA?"

The rest is here ...

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Just a guess, but I think I know the answer to that.

This fiasco is what happens when you put people in charge of government functions who believe in their heart of hearts that "GOVERNMENT is the PROBLEM".

If you believe that government is the problem, then you have no vested interest in fixing it. You want to do away with it as much as possible. You want to do away with regulations because they impede corporations. But the mine disaster in Utah is what happens when mine safety is left to the corporations.

I've said it before and I am compelled to say it again: there's a big difference between "there are problems with government" and "government is the problem". The difference is that the former is the approach of the left side of the aisle, progressives, liberals and Democrats (in general) while the latter is the attitude of the right, conservatives, and libertarians who feel that the elimination of government all functions is a positive.

When you put people in charge of government who truly believe "government is the problem" then you get Katrina, the Sago Mine Disaster and Giuliani judgments that place New York City's disaster command center in the most likely "ground zero". You get "My Pet Goat" responses to crisis situations.

ABA - How are we doing on the prosecution of terrorism cases?

If you want to know how well the justice system is combating terrorism, you’ve got to talk to the lawyers involved.

So we asked 50 defense attorneys who’ve worked on federal terrorism cases since 9/11 their opinions of the legal war on terror. (We also asked 50 prosecutors, but U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Dean Boyd told assistant U.S. attorneys across the country not to participate. He declined to tell us his reason.) prosecution

Check out the charts and graphs that outline the responses ... and take the interactive poll yourself.

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Interesting that the DoJ declined to participate in an American Bar Association poll. After all, it's not some lefty, libertard group of wankers or some neo-Nazi blog asking. It's the American Bar Association that gave Samuel Alito a "well qualified" rating.

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Headlines we imagine we'll be seeing soon

• God - The Dyslexic Canine

• Book Early for Paradise - al Qaeda

• Atheism - No added ingredients

• Stones to be washed and recycled says Islamic Eco group

• Suffer the little children - Pope bans condoms in Africa

• Official - Turin Shroud 11,000 years old - ooops

• Jesus Saves - Terms and Conditions Apply

• Bush in Brain Tumor Scare - Brain infecting his tumor says doctor

• Miracle! Man Saved in Tsunami! - 10,000 die

• Selfish Gene to Blame for Angry Atheists

Talking Points

As I blister through my news reader I often come across editorial and opinion pieces that hold my attention. The test is 30 seconds, because I don't think most things are worth reading in their entirety. If it holds my attention for more than 30 seconds I add it to my news reader "shared" list (that appears in the upper left corner of my blog - but doesn't show in the daily e-mail).

In any case, I've accumulated a number of pieces that I haven't commented on elsewhere ... pieces that I think make important points ... so I'll share them here as well. Here's a chance to catch up on what I've been reading.

Zero in on the things I think are significant.

You ARE what you read. Pity those who read nothing at all.

TED Talks

One of the most wonderful aspects of the new technologies in general and the Internet in particular is the sudden emerging possibility for one to continue one's education at the highest level with input from some of the greatest thinkers on the planet as one's instructors. not only is it possible to read their works, one can now attend their lectures at will!

If you're of a mind to stretch that gray matter between your ears just a little bit and haven't tripped over TED Talks yet, you're in for a great treat.

From their site:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

I highly recommend you pour yourself a drink, kick back in front of the monitor and listen to one or two of these riveting talks and great performances by great contemporary thinkers and discussing ideas worth considering and providing quality entertainment you won't find on TV.

TED Talks

False Ads: There Oughta Be A Law! - Or Maybe Not

By Brooks Jackson

(This article was originally posted June 3, 2004. We are reissuing it now, updated only to fix bad links and such. Politicians still can lie legally, and the high volume of ads expected in 2008 campaigns makes it likely that voters will be exposed to more deception than ever. —B.J.)



Here's a fact that may surprise you: Candidates have a legal right to lie to voters just about as much as they want.

That comes as a shock to many. After all, consumers have been protected for decades from false ads for commercial products. Shouldn't there be "truth-in-advertising" laws to protect voters, too?

Turns out, that's a tougher question than you might imagine.

For one thing, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech," and that applies to candidates for office especially. And secondly, in the few states that have enacted laws against false political ads, they haven't been very effective.

The rest of the article is here -