If you ever had any respect for Mickey Kaus, you won’t after you watch this Blogging Heads episode where he smirks and grins his way through statements like “If torture were to accidentally happen.”
Total jackass. (via Sullivan)
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®, General Stupidity
If you ever had any respect for Mickey Kaus, you won’t after you watch this Blogging Heads episode where he smirks and grins his way through statements like “If torture were to accidentally happen.”
Total jackass. (via Sullivan)
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
What do you all want to talk about?
by Tim F| 41 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Judge Walton orders I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to go directly to jail pending appeals. More when stories hit the wire.
***Update***
The federal judge presiding over the trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby today ordered Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff to report to prison within weeks to begin serving a 30-month sentence for lying to federal investigators about his role in disclosing a covert CIA officer’s identity to the media.
Walton will let Scooter self-report, which means that Libby won’t have to frog march if he doesn’t want to. Oh well.
by John Cole| 92 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Things like this make me very uneasy:
BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, published yesterday, appears to show that the world still has enough “proven” reserves to provide 40 years of consumption at current rates. The assessment, based on officially reported figures, has once again pushed back the estimate of when the world will run dry.
However, scientists led by the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, say that global production of oil is set to peak in the next four years before entering a steepening decline which will have massive consequences for the world economy and the way that we live our lives.
According to “peak oil” theory our consumption of oil will catch, then outstrip our discovery of new reserves and we will begin to deplete known reserves.
Colin Campbell, the head of the depletion centre, said: “It’s quite a simple theory and one that any beer drinker understands. The glass starts full and ends empty and the faster you drink it the quicker it’s gone.”
Despite the obvious problems that will be caused when an oil-dependent world runs out of oil, the bloody wars that will no doubt spring up for control of remaining resources should also be considered.
by Tim F| 43 Comments
This post is in: War
An email from a friend who works with the military:
Just had an interesting conversation with a fellow who just returned from the theater and I mentioned my theory about the Prez going nucular about the supplemental funding resolution and its pullout dates because he was going to pull a lot of troops out next summer (the same timeframe) and claim it was because of “success.” He busted out laughing saying “of course that’s why” and its openly spoken of by the troops and leadership in Iraq.
He said KBR (Halliburton) has already started closing things down, cutting back the nice to haves, and letting go all their non-American employees (mostly eastern European guys). Clearly they’ve gotten the word to scale things way back.
Our side needs to be prepared to counter the propaganda that will be driving this. I know it’s politics as usual, but the soldiers who die in the meantime are pawns and should not be forgotten in the calculation. The military leadership, while always biased to conservatism, is particular craven in its failure to speak the truth and in its collusion in this charade.
The soldiers are generally not stupid, but many still feel somehow that they are fighting for American freedoms. It’s that loyalty and patriotism that is tapped by the venal jerks on the neo-con right and exploited. I am not ashamed of the soldiers or my former career as an officer, just the generals and culture that have become hypocritical and duplicitous in the un-American and undemocratic times we find ourselves.
You can put an “X” on your calendar next summer when “success” miraculously happens in Iraq.
Although plenty of reasons exist to feel cynical about any withdrawal talk, some very real limitations exist on how much longer we can keep lots of American troops in Iraq. The new (improved!) fifteen-month tours are an obvious sign of desperation, the National Guard commitments are unsustainable and ongoing stories about sailors and airmen training for street combat suggest how ridiculously overcommitted we have become. Safe withdrawal takes time and careful planning to keep it from turning it into a rout, wait too long that window will close.
I suppose we should feel marginally grateful for signs that our leaders are just hacks who play politics with American lives, repeatedly, rather than the reality-denying loons that they themselves insist they are.
***
One ancillary thought. Assuming that this accurately reflects Bushie thinking, do you suppose they bothered to clue in Joe Lieberman?
by Tim F| 24 Comments
This post is in: War, General Stupidity
It’s late, I’m watching Colbert and it occurs to me that neither of the following two news items surprises me in the least:
* Despite a massive, overwhelming “surge” totaling 20% more troops the violence in Iraq has moved from Baghdad to other provinces without decreasing at all. Of course Baghdad remains plenty violent. Unless we scoot the goalposts all the way back to the line of scrimmage and declare our “surge” a success as long as we don’t lose yards, someone needs to put a fork in this war and get the troops out.
* When you take away oversight and grant law enforcement officers a vague, open-ended set of new powers, they will overstep the law. In this way FBI agents are like every other group of people on the planet.
It ought to depress the hell out of me that our army is bleeding to death in the mideast without accomplishing a thing while the FBI has started getting cozy with its J. Edgar Hoover roots. We live in the crazy black helicopter land that used to exist only in Tim McVeigh’s fevered imagination, but with extra incompetence abroad. Governmentally speaking it’s like living in some parody of a Michael Bay disaster movie where sixteen existential crises happen all at once. And the whole time I get to enjoy the sight of Joe Klein and David Broder tut tutting about the terrible unseemliness of the Democrats if they make too big a deal about that asteroid thing. It’s surreal.
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Politics
You:
Schools, doctors and police often do not share information about potentially dangerous students because they can’t figure out complicated and overlapping privacy laws, according to a report released Wednesday on the Virginia Tech shooting.
“This confusion and differing interpretations about state and federal privacy laws and regulations impede appropriate information sharing,” the study’s authors wrote.
As a result, information that could be used to get troubled students counseling or prevent them from buying handguns never makes it to the appropriate agency, the report by three Cabinet agencies said.
The message we will get over the next few weeks/months is that all those messy privacy laws to protect you killed those kids. When you demand your privacy, you are endangering your fellow citizens.
Some of you might think I am being hysterical about this, but after the creep we have seen with the War On Drugs and the absolute abuses we have seen during this administration ostensibly to support the War on Terror, I think a little hysterics are in order. The result of this report will not be that they work to coordinate information sharing in a sensible manner. It will be a move to simply rewrite privacy laws, centralize them, and remove the part where they actually protect your privacy.
Want to bet?