America is Israel’s Bitch

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 2 2007 6:52 utc | 3

from b’s #2

“We have a saying in Farsi: When a child walks in darkness, he starts singing or making loud noises because he’s afraid of the dark. The Americans are afraid to negotiate with Iran, and that’s why they’re making a lot of loud noises.”

that really does describe the knuckleheads to a tee. a whole lot of bluster and bravado from their keyboards in mom’s basement but really pissing their pants at every loud noise. kinda pathetic, aint it?

Posted by: dan of steele | Jul 2 2007 7:22 utc | 5

Joey Lieberman apparently recommended on tv (Sunday?) that threats to America could be decreased by “extended use of video surveillance cameras”.
ABC news is reporting that AQ is/could be targeting America this summer. Like the pre 9/11 days…. As we’ve said, if NeoNuts want to attack Iran, they’ll have to attack America (& Europe) first…

Posted by: jj | Jul 2 2007 9:35 utc | 7

New NSA Whistleblower Speaks

A former member of U.S. military intelligence has decided to reveal what she knows about warrantless spying on Americans and about the fixing of intelligence in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 2 2007 10:51 utc | 9

Annals of Enlightend Government: Riley says pray for rain to fall from heavensWith the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.

Posted by: b | Jul 2 2007 19:16 utc | 11

libby the louse doesnt get to be a lag

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 2 2007 22:12 utc | 13

Re: Scooter Libby….Thank you, Gerald Ford.
SCHICK v. REED, 419 U.S. 256 (1974) is the commutation authority.

Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 2 2007 23:26 utc | 15

For Rgiap: Fire The Grid is coming to Nantes on July 5 at La commune de Sallertaine
Brewster

Posted by: brewster_north | Jul 3 2007 2:09 utc | 17

Dang.
Libby story here.

Posted by: Jake | Jul 3 2007 4:07 utc | 19

Here’s the reason for commutation instead of pardon. Since only the sentence was commuted, Libby can still appeal his conviction. While under appeal, Libby can still take the 5th amendment. There is no way to force him to testify before congress. The appeal could last another couple of years. If Bush had pardoned Libby, he would be up in front of a congressional committee tomorrow under oath answering questions about Cheney. This is a beautiful and deliberate two-fer. Libby is hushed up and doesn’t have to testify.
Also, amongst the libby crap don’t let this get by you…
Hush-Hush: Rove’s Security Clearance Renewal.
and also, a PSA:
The following sites and resources are “insanely useful Web sites” for government transparency. They provide a broad range of information available to track government and legislative information, campaign contributions and the role of money in politics.
Insanely Useful Websites

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 3 2007 5:10 utc | 21

Uri Avnery

With the air of a Sultan throwing coins to the paupers in the street, Olmert announced his intention of releasing some Fatah prisoners. 250 coins, 250 prisoners. That was the “generous gift” that was to make the Palestinians jump for joy, “strengthen” Abbas and awaken to new life the dry bones of his organization.
If Olmert had not been sitting so far away from Abbas, he could just as well have spat in his face.
The sole winner was Olmert. The conference has proved that Mubarak’s and Abdallah’s influence on Israel is nil, and that Abbas’ position is even worse.
…
To eliminate any doubt about this, Olmert sent the army at once into the kasbah of Nablus, the heart of Abbas’ virtual kingdom, in order to “arrest” the leaders of the military arm of Fatah. They put up determined resistance, wounding several soldiers. A lieutenant lost a hand and a leg. In another incursion, this time into Gaza, 13 Palestinians were killed, including a boy of 9. According to the official version, the aim was to throw the militants off balance so that they would feel hunted.
…
INTO THIS reality Tony Blair is now stepping.
He is being sent by the Quartet – something that does not really exist, a diplomatic fiction of four that are one.
Europe does not exist as far as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned, except as a financial instrument of the White House. When the President of the USA wants it, Europe sends alms to the Palestinians (and arms to Israel). When the President of the USA wants to starve the Palestinians, Europe imposes a blockade on them.
The UN has long ago become an instrument of the US Department of State, especially in the Middle East. When the American drill sergeant shouts, the UN jumps to attention or stands at ease.

Posted by: ww | Jul 3 2007 9:02 utc | 23

Nothing to be hoped from British leftists.
One best-blog is Lenin’s tomb, impeccable on historical analysis, left theory, worker support, feminism, or practically whatever whatever one wants to drag up.
But ::
He persists in explaining or (almost) excusing ‘terrorists’ with the mantra, no wonder they, the Ayrabs or whomever, are outraged, we do then so much harm backlash is inevitable. (Chomsky is an idol.)
On the recent UK ‘bombers’ –
The current batch of British jihadis, if this is what they are, are failing to match the competition. They are the underachievers of global terrorism.
(Note the hidden assumptions)
link
Their actions are mirrored to State actions:
Terrorist attack: 100 dead. This refers to Iraq.
link
In this way, all forces are ideologically equalized, all are ‘terrorists’, the ‘wars’ are comprehensible and legitimate, or true horror, damnable and devastating. Both. One can’t quite decide.
Tortuous contradictions, and much blindness, often follows. There are Arab workers as well. They are not mentioned often.
Muslims are terrorists.
Right.
They are, even if it is our fault.

Posted by: Noirette | Jul 3 2007 21:05 utc | 25

slothrop – “The motivation was an obsession with the idea of an Anglo-Saxon plot to oust France from the region.” idea? heh. the article makes it sound like this was something in mitterrand’s head that nobody could talk him out of. funny that there’s not one mention of the actual ‘anglo-saxon plot’ to wrest the great lakes region from the french or those actors’ complicities.

Posted by: b real | Jul 3 2007 22:25 utc | 27

I’m liking the new and improved Al Jazeera less and less. Look at this news piece about Mexico:
Mexico poll loser rallies followers

The losing candidate in Mexico’s closest presidential election has rallied hundreds of thousands of supporters in Mexico City’s main square, aiming to re-ignite a flagging movement that could split the left.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who still insists he won the election a year ago, threatened to rouse the masses if the government tried to privatise the country’s state-owned oil industry.
He called for “zero negotiation” with Felipe Calderon, the man who beat him at the polls.
“Zero negotiation. I repeat, zero negotiation” with the government, he told the rally on Sunday, which was somewhat smaller than the ones he called last year after narrowly losing the July 2, 2006 elections, a defeat he blamed on fraud.
Lopez Obrador has refused to recognise Calderon – who won the five-way 2006 election by a margin of less than 1 per cent – and has mounted his own parallel “government”, with himself as “legitimate president”.
(snip)

How many ways can you say “loser, loser, sore loser”, really? And only after that ridiculous intro does the piece get around to what was supposed to be the news.

Posted by: Alamet | Jul 4 2007 0:08 utc | 29

woo hoo! the site counter is now over a million. not too shabby. drinks all around!

Posted by: dan of steele | Jul 4 2007 8:29 utc | 31

Message in a Bottle

We’re moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That’s a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It’s so heavy you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water–you have to leave empty space.)
Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to people who really are thirsty.
A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it’s just a bottle of water–modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don’t need–when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation–it’s worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is. And if you do ask, if you trace both the water and the business back to where they came from, you find a story more complicated, more bemusing, and ultimately more sobering than the bottles we tote everywhere suggest.
…

Posted by: b | Jul 4 2007 15:28 utc | 33

The Death of the RMA

What Israel’s Defeat in Lebanon Means for Defense Industry Fat Cats
By WILLIAM S. LIND

Hopefully this obituary covers the SWS featured in my link above, though I’m still worried about what sort of real life tests they’ll want to conduct to calibrate their system.

Posted by: Alamet | Jul 4 2007 21:28 utc | 35

After subduing the insurgents and reporting back to their superiors, Marines were told to quickly move to another location to help colleagues engaged in a firefight.
Helms said Wednesday that when the Marines radioed to their superiors that they were still holding prisoners, the response was, “They’re still alive?”
“That was taken to mean, ‘Whack those dudes.’ So they whacked them and moved on,” Helms said. Minutes later an airstrike demolished the house, burying the bodies in rubble.

Marines face scrutiny in Iraqi deaths

Posted by: b | Jul 5 2007 11:31 utc | 37

Collective punishment – ‘Israel ruining economy in Gaza Strip’

The virtually total closure imposed on the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s takeover in June has almost destroyed the Palestinian economy and threatens to turn its 1.4 million residents into charity cases, Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, charged in a report released Wednesday.
…
Seventy-five percent of Gaza’s factories have shut down because of the closure. The rest are operating on borrowed time, until the stocks of raw materials are exhausted.
Eighty-five percent of the population is already dependent on food aid from international organizations and the number is growing.
There is a severe shortage of raw materials including flour and sugar for domestic and industrial consumption. The price of flour has increased by 34 percent, powdered milk by 30% and rice by 20%.
Israel has erased from its computers the customs code used to identify goods entering Gaza and issued orders not to release them until further notice. This policy has cost Palestinian importers $1.5 million in the first two weeks of the closure, including fines paid for the use of rented containers, breach of contracts and damage to goods stored in warehouses for extended periods of time, the organization said.

Posted by: b | Jul 5 2007 14:45 utc | 39

The Washington Post reports:
U.S. diplomats in Iraq, increasingly fearful over their personal safety after recent mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, are pointing to new delays and mistakes in the U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad as signs that their vulnerability could grow in the months ahead.
A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards’ base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a vast $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world.
The main builder of the sprawling, 21-building embassy is First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting Co., a Middle Eastern firm that is already under Justice Department scrutiny over alleged labor abuses. First Kuwaiti also erected the guard base, prompting some State Department officials in Washington and Baghdad to worry that the problems exposed in the camp suggest trouble lurking ahead for the rest of the embassy complex.
The first signs of trouble, according to the cable, emerged when the kitchen staff tried to cook the inaugural meal in the new guard base on May 15. Some appliances did not work. Workers began to get electric shocks. Then a burning smell enveloped the kitchen as the wiring began to melt.
All the food from the old guard camp — a collection of tents — had been carted to the new facility, in the expectation that the 1,200 guards would begin moving in the next day. But according to the cable, the electrical meltdown was just the first problem in a series of construction mistakes that soon left the base uninhabitable, including wiring problems, fuel leaks and noxious fumes in the sleeping trailers.
“Poor quality construction . . . life safety issues . . . left [the embassy] with no recourse but to shut the camp down, in spite of the blistering heat in Baghdad,” the May 29 cable informed Washington.
Such challenges with construction contracts inside the fortified enclave known as the Green Zone reflect the broader problems that have thwarted reconstruction efforts throughout war-torn Iraq.
***************************************************************************
It is a serious matter, and an infuriating one as well for many reasons, but it brought back a memory I’d long forgotten about. When I was in grad school I remember taking the daylong “Part II” of the Foreign Service entry exam. I had aced the initial written test. Part II was a series of different types of interviews and role-plays, all of which I did at least ok on, except for the final one.
The last thing was role-playing where my assigned role was an embassy contracting or administrative officer who had to confront a local contractor who had failed to deliver for a major building project in one of our middle eastern embassies in a country that was an important ally to the U.S. The scene was that now the contractor had actually shown up wanting to be paid, notwithstanding the failure to deliver fully and the screw-ups and shoddy work done to date on what little had actually been done so far, and my challenge in this little scenario was how would I handle this.
I basically took the straight forward approach, read the riot act to this foreign service officer who was role-playing the part of the shifty local businessman, and told him in no uncertain terms that payment would most definitely NOT be forthcoming until the problems were resolved. He wheedled, he flattered, he whined, he threatened, etc. and even though he was hamming it up, it actually faintly reminded me of trying to buy something in an Indian bazaar! But I held firm, politely, throughout, and he left without a penny. And I left without a foreign service job. On the written results I got in the mail some time later, I had done reasonably well on the other parts of the day, but got a failing score on the role-playing interview. Someone had hand written in, next to my score of zero, “no cross-cultural sensitivity.”
I was incredibly disappointed at the time, not realizing that by nature I was not born to have a career in a place like the State Department. But seeing this article today brought it all back, and made me reflect on what they really mean by “cross cultural sensitivity.”
I guess invading and subjecting a country to occupation without cause and then proceeding to ruin its economy and society is ok, but trying to make sure that contractors do a good job and the taxpayer doesn’t get ripped off is “insensitive”.

Posted by: Maxcrat | Jul 6 2007 0:30 utc | 41

Sale and rent back
Stretched homeowners seek new options to stay in their properties.

[snip]
With millions of homeowners burdened by debt, sale and rent back is becoming big business.
[snip]

Posted by: Rick | Jul 6 2007 2:09 utc | 43

The reason why I decided to always use “U.S.” not “American” …
From the editors for the Web site of the French daily Le Monde
There’s a Word for People Like You

“Américain” (in French the ethnonym is capitalized, the adjective is lower case) is a word with many meanings, depending on context: “américains” applies to all Américains (from the United States), yet all Américains (from North and South America) are not necessarily américains.
…
Helpfully, though, in Quebec about six decades ago the word États-Unien, derived from the French for United States, États-Unis, was born. Its spread was modest at first, but today it’s frequent in the news media, and there’s even a radio program here that uses it exclusively. In ordinary conversation, though, the French still say “Américains.” A recent occurrence of “États-Uniens” (though far from the first) on the Web site of our newspaper, Le Monde, provoked the ire of readers who saw anti-American and anti-globalist sentiment behind it.
When we published a note on our language blog defending the use of États-Uniens — the word is neither pretty nor musical, but it answers a certain need — we had an outpouring of responses. They ranged from absolute opposition to the word (because of its supposed anti-Americanism, its ugliness, its snobbishness, its sarcastic tone, its lack of usefulness for anyone but academics — and because it sounds like space aliens) to enthusiastic approval, notably as a counter to the “imperialist” appropriation of a whole continent by one country’s ethnonym.
…
One reader even declared, “The United States of America is the only country in the world that doesn’t have a name: the first two words define its political organization, the last the continent it sits on.”

Posted by: b | Jul 6 2007 5:42 utc | 45

Fake Terror and Instability in North Africa

Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Philippines and Lebanon aren’t the only fronts in the “global war on terror.” Although it remains largely out of the public eye, the U.S. has also sought to open up a north-African front in its fight against al-Qaeda, with equally unappreciated consequences.
Regional powers have been emboldened to repress both their own peoples and to meddle in weaker neighboring countries. The predatory activities of mining and oil interests have been shielded by the perceived need to pursue international “jihadists” while the labeling of regional groups as “terrorists” has promoted instability.
…

Posted by: b | Jul 6 2007 11:19 utc | 47

Gary Hart, Lynne Cheney, and War with China

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.
The same thing happened at the second meeting — discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.
Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.
“Her name was Lynne Cheney,” Hart said. “I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today.” Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office.

Posted by: b | Jul 6 2007 12:00 utc | 49