Billmon:
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. War with Iran is not inevitable. (Frum: Hah. We’ll see about that.) But if war does come, don’t expect to the price of a gallon of gas (or a loaf of bread) come down any time soon. After all, we heard similiar promises voiced (albeit usually sub rosa) by similar sources before Shrub’s first preventative war. Look how well that worked out.
Warhogs
ORCC – Operation Regime Change Cuba:
The report by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, co-chaired
by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Cuban-American Secretary
of Commerce, Carlos Gutierrez, makes recommendations to hasten the end
of the island’s communist government and assist the transition.
…
However, officials cautioned that the final version of the report, which includes a classified annex, could change before it landed on Bush’s hands.
Cuba transition report presented to President Bush
The report urges Bush to allocate $80 million to end Cuba’s Communist government. It says that the U.S. should get ready to intervene once Castro dies.
…
Last May the Organization of American States’ secretary general, the Chilean José Miguel Insulza, asked an obvious question: Why has Bush created an office to coordinate a transition in Cuba?
Talking about Bush Insulza said: "There is no transition [in Cuba] and it is not his country." Who are you, he asked the President, to propose a transition in a country that is not yours?
U.S. should let Cuba decide its own future
Here is the quite simple answer to compadre Insulza’s question:
"The drilling has ended and the Spanish company is assessing the results. We don’t know if there is good quality oil yet. We expect to be informed in two weeks," the Cuban official, who spoke on the condition he was not identified, said on Saturday evening.
The oil industry is watching closely the first ever well sunk in Cuba’s 43,000-square-mile exclusive economic zone in the Gulf, which may hold large quantities of medium-grade crude.
Exploratory Oil Drilling Done Off Cuba
(emphasis’ added)
Billmon:
[I]t looks like someone in the White House propaganda department has figured out that Bush is no longer a credible salesman for his own war. He badly needs product endorsements — and who better to give them than the men and women at his back, standing silently where they were ordered to stand?
Chameleon
Billmon:
It’s easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there.
A House Divided
Billmon:
This time around, though, I do strongly doubt the possibility of White House interference, partly because I don’t think a shuttle launch is a big enough PR opportunity for the Rovians to bother with any more, and partly because after Columbia, they must understand that propaganda risks could be much, much greater than the rewards.
Lighting the Candle
"I have loyalties that are greater than those to my party."
—
Loyalty: Etymology and semantics
The word functioned in the special feudal sense of one who has full legal rights, a legalis homo being opposed to the "outlaw". Thence in the sense of "faithful", it meant one who kept faithful allegiance to his feudal lord, and so loyal to the ultimate temporal power.
Billmon:
I would have thought David would have more important things to do with his time: running his rat lines into the Middle East Studies Association, tracing the sinister links between Harry Belafonte and Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman — above all, figuring out new and nasty ways to draw media attention to himself.
But apparently not. I guess even the slander business has its slow nights.
Uncle Ho
by jonku
A day or so ago Canada celebrated the beginning of our 140th year as a
confederation, and commemorated our history of 139 years.
After singing
the national anthem, Oh Canada, I
reflected on its meaning. It is a song to the country, beginning "Oh Canada, our
home and native land."
Cont. reading: Anthems
Billmon:
[N]ow that the conservative movement has been revealed as a criminal conspiracy, and an extremely powerful one at that, is it unreasonable to argue that extraconstitutional means may be both necessary and justified to bring the conspirators to justice?
I don’t really mean that. I know enough about history to know where that kind of thinking leads. But I wouldn’t mind if the right wingers think I mean it.
The Totalitarian Temptation
Billmon:
[S]omebody really ought to do something about those terrorist loving traitors at NewsMax.
Vigilante Justice
