I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty damned happy that all the fevered discussion of Lady Starburst’s new book is drowning out some of the screaming that Obama is letting a super-genius criminal set foot on American soil.

But I’ve got to think that Palinpalooza would be even more attention-consuming if the Levi Johnston Playgirl issue was coming out right now, in the middle of Palin’s book tour. Why are they waiting til January? Isn’t that like rolling out a new product in August?

Mario Piperni, Solar Tristan.

cdcarr, Self Discovery.

Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.

Click on the photos for a link to the photographer’s website. To see all photo threads, click on ‘photo blogging’ at the bottom of the post.

If your computer cannot read our email links at top right, my email is (remove the zeroes): portus0jackson0ii at yahoo dot com.

How could you people laugh at earnest rightwing civil servants like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann? Just pause for a minute and think about the abuse dished out by cruel and terrible people.

The former governor, who in the book says her dream was to be a sportscaster alongside Howard Cosell, takes aim at ABC anchor Gibson, whose interview preceded Couric’s. He “peered skeptically” at her over his glasses, Palin writes, and had no interest in the substantive issues.

It must have felt especially galling to get peered at skeptically over glasses when so many reporters literally teabag John McCain.

GIBSON: The administration has said we’ve got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?

GIBSON: Would you favor putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO?

GIBSON: Let me turn to Iran. Do you consider a nuclear Iran to be an existential threat to Israel?

GIBSON: So what should we do about a nuclear Iran?

GIBSON: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

GIBSON: Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?

GIBSON: But, Governor, I’m asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

Without google, who are AC Wharton and John Peyton?

Answer: The mayors of Memphis and Jacksonville, respectively, both of whom govern cities with population sizes comparable to Alaska. I’m betting 99% of you have never heard of them.

So why are we going to spend the next few weeks listening to the lies of a grifter from up north who couldn’t even finish her term?

Hopefully being tried and then sent to prison for the rest of their lives, where they can rot to death next to the unabomber and Eric Rudolph:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday.

The decision, described by people familiar with the matter, is part of wider announcement planned on how to bring to justice detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay prison. It’s the first set of decisions before a Monday deadline on how to deal with the more than 200 prisoners remaining at the facility, which President Barack Obama has ordered closed.

The wingnut freakout over this will be predictable and amusing, because as we all know, real patriots have no faith in our judicial system and law enforcement officers.

*** Update ***

Literally, as I wrote this post, I got a Red State Action Alert:

Today Barack Obama is going to announce that the terrorist mastermind of September 11th, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be sent to New York City for a criminal trial in a civilian court.

In that trial, the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.

At best, this will be a show trial fit not for the American Republic, but a third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime. At worse, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will gain access to classified material he can then leak to other terrorists while New York yet again becomes a target for terrorists. We have already had occasions in this country where terrorists’ sympathetic lawyers have conveyed information, orders, and plans to other terrorists.

You can find more details here.

Call your Congressman and Senator right now. Tell them they should use every tool at their disposal to block this. The number to call is 202-224-3121.

Sincerely yours,

Erick Erickson
Editor, RedState.com

I love that his range of possible outcomes includes a “show trial” as the best possible outcome. Authoritarians simply have no faith in our Democracy whatsoever.

In for a Broder, in for a Brooks. Am I alone in thinking that “prairie background” sounds like a euphemism? And why do so many profiles of Republican presidential candidates read like soft-core gay male pornography (not that there’s anything wrong with that)?

As you may or may not know, Thune is the junior senator from South Dakota, the man who beat Tom Daschle in an epic campaign five years ago. The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome (John McCain jokes that if he had Thune’s face he’d be president right now). If you wanted a Republican with the same general body type and athletic grace as Barack Obama, you’d pick Thune.

[....]

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government.

Broder:

While House Democrats spent the week congratulating themselves for squeezing out the midnight passage of their version of health-care reform, neutral observers were reminding them: You’ve left the job half done.

I know some of you think that I spend too much time reading Broder. But “neutral observers”? This stuff is gold, readers, gold.

Bad Horse’s Filly writes:

I’m off with family, getting ready for my youngest brother’s wedding. I’ll be the one in the pretty bridesmaid dress, my 3-year-old niece and I playing princess in our matching dresses while mom and dad get hitched. But I didn’t forget you guys. I thought a fish recipe would be nice since we haven’t had one in a while. This fish is courtesy of my friend Alton Gunn.

On the board tonight:

1) Pico De Gallo Fish
2) Rice
3) Tomato-Avocado Chutney
4) Fresh Pineapple w/Ice Cream

Click on the blue highlight for recipes and shopping list.

(Enjoy your princess dress, BHF!)

Soonergrunt posted this late last week, and I’m just sorry it didn’t get front-paged sooner:

I don’t have all the answers. I have said before that I have very little faith in anybody who speaks about Afghanistan as if they know exactly what to do, or they have a single, un-nuanced answer.

Again, I write now strictly from my own experiences in the eastern and northeastern parts of the country, as well as some stuff that I have picked up in open source news. I was there last in 2006-2007 when things were really starting to heat up.

When I arrived in Afghanistan, there hadn’t been any activity in the Kabul region for over a year. By the time I had left, every base in the Kabul area had been directly attacked at least once. I was a member of an Embedded Training Team. I, and one other ETT (we were supposed to be in teams of four, but there weren’t enough of us) were embedded directly into an Afghan National Army Infantry company in the 201st Corps in the eastern and northeastern part of the country. This was my third combat deployment, my first in Afghanistan.

In my experience, as well as recent reporting from sources such as NPR, there is no fundamental difference between the Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban, and Al Quaeda.

As most of you know, the Taliban was financed and managed for years by ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. The ISI saw the Taliban as a way to control Afghanistan, keeping it out of the Indian orbit, as well as a place for Pakistani militias to train and get combat experience before going to fight in Kashmir. Al Quaeda was also deeply involved in this aspect of the taliban. I fought against all three groups, sometimes all at once. There were almost always Pakistanis mixed in with Afghan Talib and other AGM (Anti Government Militia).

When I first got there, it was routine for the Taliban to winter over in a place called the Korengal. Some of you may remember Richard Engle’s series on NBC last year following a US Army unit in the Korengal.

I helped build the road into the place and I helped build the Korengal Outpost, Camp Restreppo, and some of the other places you saw in that series. The Taliban would go there because the terrain was unpassable in the winter and they could hole up there and wait for spring. They did this until we built the Korengal Outpost, the KOP, or as the 10th Mountain guys called it, the Purple Heart Factory. I also worked in a place called the Tagab Valley, just east of Kabul and Bagram.

As an ETT, I spent a large amount of time going into villages and meeting with village elders and headmen. I did more and better counter-insurgency sitting on my ass drinking chai than I did actually shooting, and I shot an ass-load of ammunition. I went into villages on market day and bought stuff I didn’t need as an excuse to talk to the locals, and I had my trusted interpreter and a couple of ANA I trusted do the same. This is the way you win a counterinsurgency war. One village at a time. It’s fucking hard. The shortest, most glib way to describe it is to say that we want to show the people that we offer a better life than the other guys do.

What I know from that time, and this has only been reinforced by my study of the region and current events there since, is that we cannot simply leave these people to their fate. I’ve seen what the Taliban do to people who defy them. God knows that ISAF/US forces have made mistakes, and there have been western troops who have abused prisoners. We’re not perfect, and we’re not angels. But we don’t gut-shoot children to make a point, and we don’t burn teachers to death in front of their students. As I said earlier, I’ve been places in eastern Afghanistan where the capitol of Kabul was as foreign as Washington, D.C. Most of the Afghans I met couldn’t care less who was the president of Afghanistan. It has no bearing on their lives. The level of governance that actually affects people’s lives is at the district and provincial level. That’s where things get done. This is the main reason that the country was most successfully ran as a feudal state from the 1930s to the 1970s before the communist coup.

In the short term, we need to keep building up the Afghan National Army. When I was there, the unit to which I was attached was considered one of the better companies in the entire brigade, which was considered the best brigade in the corps. They and their parent Kandak (Battalion) could barely keep themselves supplied in the field. Logistics were at their bare minimum, and the we frequently used money from our petty cash fund to buy firewood good supplies for the ANA. When I left, they were a lot better, but still not what I would’ve considered reliable or capable. Their unit level tactics were vastly improved over the “everybody run towards the gunfire” level when I got there, but still left a lot to be desired.

Continue reading Afghanistan: Another Perspective

I read this earlier, but forgot about it, so thanks to D-Chance for reminding me about this abomination:

But because of one of his first pieces of legislation, Democrats now have their most brazen attack line of the emerging 2010 campaign season: that Republicans are insensitive to rape victims.

The charge stems from a Franken-sponsored amendment that would prohibit the Department of Defense from contracting with companies that require employees to resolve workplace complaints — including complaints of sexual assault — through private arbitration rather than the courts.

Thirty Senate Republicans voted against the amendment, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, liberal commentators and state Democratic Party chairs have been merciless.

***

But the campaign could also be detrimental for Franken, complicating his efforts to redefine himself as a low-profile pol who wants to work with Republicans to solve the nation’s problems.

“Franken’s amendment may make sense for national Democrats in laying down lines of attack heading into the 2010 campaign — but this is not what Franken needs to build a base in Minnesota,” said Larry Jacobs, an expert in state politics at the University of Minnesota. “Being a poster boy of a hard-hitting campaign against the Republican Party is the opposite of what he needs in Minnesota.”

Thirty Republicans are exposed and vulnerable with an objectively pro-rape voting record, and it is bad news for… the Democrats. We haven’t seen wankery like this since Mark Halperin claimed that McCain not knowing how many houses he owned during an economic meltdown was bad news for Obama.

You just can’t make this shit up. I’m adding the Politico to the blogs we monitor and mock category on the blogroll.

I’m hoping Anne Laurie will post the weekly recipe here, because I think I deleted it.

Via the comments, this jerk:

State Sen. David Schultheis said he didn’t intend for a Twitter post accusing President Barack Obama of “flying the U.S. plane right into the ground” and ending with “let’s roll” as a threat or a reference to United Flight 93, which crashed during the 2001 terrorist attacks.

“Let’s roll” reportedly were the last words of Todd Beamer before he and other passengers tried to gain control of their hijacked jet. The plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field short of its intended target.

The tweet stirred ire and some support for the Colorado Springs Republican, whose standard eschewal of political correctness has earned him criticism in the past.

Schultheis’ full tweet Tuesday was: “Don’t for a second think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s roll.”

***

Schultheis voted in February against a bill requiring pregnant women to be tested for AIDS to prevent spreading the disease to the children. He said then that infected children would set examples for women against sexual promiscuity.

Just another Colorado Springs evangelical, spreading God’s word.

I was going to write something about this syrupy ode to George Bush by Caroline Glick and this PUMA nonsense from the Hillbuzz, but Daniel Larison handles it so much better:

Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush’s foreign policy were his worst), but it’s offensive all the same. As tempting and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the worst Presidents of all time, I don’t assume that Bush did any of the things he did because he didn’t have “American values” or didn’t love his country. I don’t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe, Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love. Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.

Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.

Can a brother get an Amen?

I’m struck by how much Lou Dobbs’ quitting to go “beyond my role” sounds like Sarah Palin’s “choice is to take a stand and effect change” by quitting. And lest we forget, there are many who believe that the best way to fight Obamafascism is to go Galt.

This all makes me miss the days when people quit to spend more time with their families.