For those of you tantalized by the prospect of a Gingrich Presidential run, Newt will be on Captain Ed’s radio show today. Might be worth a listen.
I can not think of anything that would destroy Republican chances in 2008 more than a Gingrich run.
by John Cole| 45 Comments
This post is in: Media, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
For those of you tantalized by the prospect of a Gingrich Presidential run, Newt will be on Captain Ed’s radio show today. Might be worth a listen.
I can not think of anything that would destroy Republican chances in 2008 more than a Gingrich run.
by John Cole| 68 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Previous Site Maintenance
Couldn’t sleep last night, so I ended up listening/watching/trying to fall asleep while watching the reruns of the Democratic Debate (normally I use C-Span on a 20 minute auto-timer shutoff on the tv, but the debates were on, so I said what the hell). Some observations:
1.) Kucinich has no chance at winning.
2.) Obama is not ready for primetime.
3.) Edwards seems almost to be trying too hard to be the outsider.
4.) It would not surprise me at all to hear Gavel, at some point in a future debate, yell “GET OFF MY GRASS.”
5.) I still like Dodd and Richardson.
6.) Biden came off better than usual last night, and had several moments of straightforward honesty (one thing he said that stuck me as true was when he was talking about Hillary having problems getting things done because she is Hillary and comes with all her baggage from the 90’s).
7.) Nothing is going to stop Hillary.
Consider this an open thread.
by Tim F| 91 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, War
Me, two days ago:
Does the Iraqi government have a home video showing mercenaries from the Blackwater firm firing wild into a crowd of Iraqi civilians? If so it could be very, very bad news. Words can inform but pictures, especially moving pictures, carry emotional impact in a way that written accounts almost never do. Fairly specific stories about what we did at abu Ghraib circulated from reporters like Seymour Hersh for quite some time before one CD of pictures blew the story wide open.
WaPo, today:
“This is a nightmare,” said a senior U.S. military official. “We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib…”
The Pentagon is furious, State has pushed the panic button and Condoleeza Rice finds herself inventing new privileges to dodge Congress. Read the whole scoop at TPM Muckraker.
Of the many lurid angles to this story, I keep coming back to Donald Rumsfeld’s abu Ghraib defense, which was to claim (falsely) that he knew nothink! and that he acted properly once it came to his attention. If the Blackwater scandal grows into another abu Ghraib-scale fuckup for America, I don’t think that Rice can even pretend to make that sort of defense. Rice plainly knows what happened and she knows that it keeps happening, yet (1) she steadfastly refuses to allow the faintest hint of oversight, (2) she openly refuses to allow consequences for the shooters, and (3) she goes on using Blackwater as if nothing has happened. When and if this story goes to hell Rice will be operating without Rumsfeld’s fig leaf of deniability.
Whether that even matters, though, is another story. An administration that kept Alberto Gonzales for months after most Republicans wrote him off can probably hang on to a disgraced Secretary of State for a surprisingly long time.
by Tim F| 27 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Flipping channels last night:
On CNN-HN, Glenn Beck and a blow-dried guest congratulate each other about how their gay-loving party sets us apart from Iran.
Sean Hannity on FOX: “Outrage building” over some San Francisco gay group using Christian iconography to promote a festival. Notice the impersonal verb, implying that outrage just sort of appears out of nowhere. No, Sean, outrage is “building” because homophobic media stars chase ratings by amplifying the hysterical fatwas of premodern nincompoops like the American Family Association.
Greenwald this morning: Texas Republicans still think that we should punish homosexuals with jail time.
Gosh. I hope that Beck doesn’t pull a tendon from all that back patting.
by Tim F| 83 Comments
This post is in: Politics
America still prefers Democrats, 54-39.
B-b-but! Doesn’t Congress have a lower approval rating than Bush? Yes indeedy. People hate Congress because, like me, we expected a hell of a lot more when we elected them in ’06. Think about what it means that Congress has a higher approval among Republicans than Democrats. And why not? Frist and Hastert delivered less on unrestricted government spying than Reid and Pelosi.
Also notice that the percent of Americans who support Republicans roughly overlaps the number (41%) who believe think Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11. If you still don’t think that FOX News plays an indispensable role in the GOP machine then, frankly, you’re nuts.
by Tim F| 33 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Let’s try a thread with none of those oppressive topic rules. Try not to go all Lord of the Flies.
by Tim F| 24 Comments
This post is in: War
So what happened to that Iraqi civil war? Apparently the factions all took up a life of crime.
On Sept. 1, the bullet-riddled bodies of four Iraqi men were found on a Baghdad street. Two days later, a single dead man, with one bullet in his head, was found on a different street. According to the U.S. military in Iraq, the solitary man was a victim of sectarian violence. The first four were not.
Such determinations are the building blocks for what the Bush administration has declared a downward trend in sectarian deaths and a sign that its war strategy is working. They are made by a specialized team of soldiers who spend their nights at computer terminals, sifting through data on the day’s civilian victims for clues to the motivations of killers.
The soldiers have a manual telling them what to look for. Signs of torture or a single shot to the head, corpses left in a “known body dump” — as the body of the Sunni man found on Sept. 3 was — spell sectarian violence, said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the team leader. Macomber, who has been at his job in Baghdad since February, rarely has to look it up anymore.
“If you were just a criminal and you just wanted to take somebody’s money, just wanted to discipline them, you’re not going to take the time to bind them up, burn their bodies, cut their arms off, cut their head off,” he explained. “You’re just going to shoot them in the body and get it over with.” That, the team judged, is what happened to the four Shiite men, sprayed with gunfire and left where they dropped.
Drive-by AK47 robberies – just like Detroit!
If I wanted to give this silly exercise the benefit of the doubt I would ask whether anybody bothers to check whether the bullet riddled “crime victims” still have their wallets. But let’s get real. The idea that a FOB computer ranger can divine the motives behind a killing based on an Excel spreadsheet is simply ludicrous. It took these people years to grasp the difference between Shiite and Sunni. Like so many that have come before, this story just lays bare the fundamental dishonesty of general Petraeus’s slick, hyper stage managed sales job.
But hey, thumbing the casualty counts only seems fitting for a war sold on the basis of slick, hyper-stage managed, consciously dishonest sales jobs. Or have we found those WMDs yet? No? Looks like Petraeus fits right in.