Open Thread ..

III.

Run Dick, run!
Dicked Again

II.

.. the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Axis of Evil

I.

Considering Rummy’s track record, I’d feel a whole lot better if he was predicting civil war in Iraq.
The Rumsfeld Effect

Even Hammurabi did better than that. So what happened Monday night was simply and completely a dodge to put off new elections and allow Shrub to claim progress in his big Iraq War booster tour.

Word Salad

If I were a paranoid anti-Semite, I might expect the President of the
United States to go on Israeli television and make saber rattling
remarks about Iran — while carefully concealing any preparations for a
military strike from the American people …

Dying for Israel

Holiday Road

Another symbolic piece of news yesterday was the failure of the water supply in most of Baghdad, following an insurgent strike on a main power line that also slowed Iraq’s oil exports to a trickle. The gap between the narrow, sectarian concerns of the politicians inside the Green Zone and the chaos and poverty outside is already enormous, and it keeps getting wider all the time.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

maybe this was really about tagging Hillary Clinton with the soft-on-terrorism label — after all, she was married to the guy who appointed the woman who hired the woman who wrote the memo that is now being mischaracterized as the reason that the Pentagon didn’t give the information about Mohamed Atta that it now says it didn’t have to the FBI.

Disable Danger

Either way, an awful lot of people may have to die so that the president and his supporters can spend the next few days talking about the political "progress" being made in Iraq.

Squeeze Play

But "as long as I am alive" isn’t a very solid guarantee. Sistani is an old man, and SCIRI and the Iranians can afford to be patient. If tactical compromises have to be made — such as scrapping the proposed Shi’a state-within-a-state — they can do that. If, for the time being, they have to settle for half a Khomeinist constitution, they can do that, too. After all, it’s only a piece of paper.

Slouching Towards the Islamic Republic II

The Kurds are only playing by the same golden rule as everybody else in the Middle East: Do unto others before they do unto you

Of Kurds and Crips

All that’s left in the corporate till now are the lies that will now be used to obscure the birth (in all but name) of the Islamic Republic of Iraq.

Slouching Towards the Islamic Republic

Open Thread

Journalist Rose Aguilar is traveling through red America and interviews random people. She posts at Stories in America. Her recent "Conversations at the Gas Pump" are quite interesting, but her interview with Jerrie Morales is even more interesting. Some excerpts:

What issues interest you?

I want to know how women are dealing with the war. I know ..

Cont. reading: Start Building Communities Again

NASHVILLE (RBN) — Echoing similar comments from President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said "pastafarianism" should be taught in public schools alongside evolution.

Frist, R-Tenn., spoke to a Rotary Club meeting Friday and told reporters afterward that students need to be exposed to different ideas, including pastafarianism.

"I think today a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith," Frist said.

Frist, a doctor who graduated from Harvard Medical School, said exposing children to both evolution and pastafarianism "doesn’t force any particular theory on anyone. I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future."

The theory of pastafarianism says the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster and all evidence pointing towards evolution was put in place by His Noodly Appendage. Nearly all scientists dismiss it as a scientific theory, and critics say it’s nothing more than religion masquerading as science.

Bush recently told a group of Texas reporters that pastafarianism and evolution should both be taught in schools "so people can understand what the debate is about."

Frist says ‘Pastafarianism’ should be taught in schools

Two days ago the Washington Post and others reported on reinforcements to be send to Iraq:

Responding to an appeal for more forces in Iraq to help manage a rising number of detainees, the Pentagon is dispatching an additional 700 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, defense officials said yesterday.

The previously unscheduled deployment is intended specifically to bolster prison operations, the officials said. It is not part of a temporary increase in U.S. troop levels in Iraq that commanders have said is likely to enhance security for a planned constitutional referendum in October and governmental elections in December.

"The basic fact driving this deployment is the steady rise in the prison population," said Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman. "There need to be some additional resources devoted to this."

There was a fishy smell in the air when I read this.

The 82nd Airborne is a strategic force.

[It] provides the ability to begin executing a strategic airborne forcible entry into any area of the world within 18 hours of notification. Their primary mission is airfield and seaport seizure. Once on the ground, they provide the secured terrain and facilities to rapidly receive additional combat forces. The division is the nation’s strategic offensive force, maintaining the highest state of combat readiness.

The 82nd sends some of its core troops: the 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Its motto is "Strike Hold" – size a strategic place by air assault and hold it until reinforcements are in, or the objective is achieved. The battalion has been in action in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, Iraq I, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq II.

These are NOT prison guards, these are shock troops, the first on the front. They are to leave during the next two month. It is not specified when they might come back.

Wherever these paratroopers are going, they will not go there to guard prisons. Not even Rumsfeld will send the principal strategic assault force of the United States Army to do third degree tasks and to ferry around prisoners.

Either the situation in Iraq is much worse than we assume and elite combat troops are urgently needed there, or there is a mission in the Middle East theater coming up that demands air assault. Maybe something like an airfield or seaport seizure? But Basra is already in British hands. So where are theses troops going?

The Israelis understand, even if their American patrons do not, that they live in another country, one with its own national interests, its own strategic ambitions and its own enemies, none of which necessarily overlap with America’s.

The 51st State

In a Slate piece three Professors of Law, Stephen Gillers, David J. Luban, and Steven Lubet, find that Supreme Court candidate Roberts has violate federal law. Roberts did not recuse himself from the appeals court panel that was judging the case Salim Ahmed Hamdan vs. Bush while he was interviewed for the top job at the White House.

The case was about the legitimacy of the Guantanamo military tribunals. Roberts was interviewed for the SOCUS job by Alberto Gonzales on April 1. The appeal was argued on April 7. In May Roberts was interviewed by Cheney, Card, Rove Miers, Gonzales and Libby. On July 15, the appeals court panel of three judges, including Roberts, gave the Bush administration the victory about military commissions and Geneva Conventions application by ruling against the lower courts opinion. On July 19 Bush nominated Roberts for the Supreme Court.

The professors find:

"Federal law [on the disqualification of judges] deems public trust in the courts so critical that it requires judges to step aside if their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned," even if the judge is completely impartial as a matter of fact."

Is there a reason question a judge’s impartiality in a case against the heart of the administrations legal opinion when at at the same time the judge is offered the highest available legal job by the same administration at the same time? The professor think so.

There are also some vanishing archive papers with earlier Roberts opinions. There are also several opinions on equal pay, school prayer, "Abortion Tragedy" and others, that are outside the current legal mainstream. Roberts is a radical.

So why is Roberts Unlikely To Face Big Fight? What is the matter with the Dems in DC?

by Highlander

I’ve had the same wet dream as all liberals: someone starts up a viable third party over on the left, calling it something like the American Liberal Party, or the National New Populist Party. It would be a third party for all of us who are still brave (or just tired) enough to still call ourselves liberals, a party that hasn’t sold out to the moderates as comprehensively as the Democrats, a party that would run on truly progressive platform planks like a Worker’s Bill of Rights, and comprehensive gun control, and protecting the government from religious incursions, and all that other good left wing stuff that the Democrats have completely wimped out on over the past, oh, fifteen years or so, in order to remain viable in American national politics.

Cont. reading: We, The Liberal

News & views

I’d like to think that Fred Mattlage is the kind of prototypical Texan you read about in books like Lonesome Dove — not much of a talker maybe, but couragous, decent and fair — unlike his neighbor, the preppie poser from Kennebunkport.

Lone Star Rising