So it has been a long time since I have posted here - my team met another milestone and after last night's debate I had to post something.

The whole thing was a complete shame and an utter waste of time.  One hour about a  lapel-pin, Bitter-gate, Wright-gate and Ayers - no wonder you don't "need a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing..."

This morning I was reviewing Andrew Sullivan's recap on the debate and I feel he was spot on:

"I think the United States is in deep trouble. In massive debt, bogged down in a $3 trillion war in Iraq with no end in sight, its moral reputation globally in tatters, its Constitution undermined from within, America desperately needs a substantive, honest debate about the future, a root-and-branch review of foreign policy, of tax policy, of environmental policy, of torture and terror policies and of entitlements. And we do not have the luxury of using elections in this climate as a way to fight over cultural conflicts originating in this instance from the boomer civil war stemming from the 1960s.."

"Last night was not Obama's finest hour. But when you look back and see what he has already accomplished by the manner and content and care of his campaign, he is obviously on the right side. Key elements of the MSM establishment, the political establishment and the ideological right and cynical left know how big a threat he is to them. That's why Hannity can join forces with Stephanopoulos and Clinton can channel Rove. Because in this issue, they are all on the same side.

If you want to keep playing that game while this country nose-dives, go ahead. Vote Clinton. If you understand how important this is, the candidacy of Barack Obama has never been so worth supporting. We need to turn this debacle into a renewed determination to get rid of the forces strangling this country's capacity to right itself.

Not one question about health care
Not one question about the subprime crisis
Not one question about Iran
Not one question about poverty
Not one question about global warming or any environment issues
Not one question about what’s going on in Annapolis
Not one question about the mess in Pakistan
Not one question about the reconstruction of New Orleans
Not one question about the fall of the dollar

So it has been a long time since I have posted here - but my team released another update to our product so I had a minute to raise my head above the trench line.

I have been following our "featless leader" drumbeat and came across two very interesting items.  The first was an article by Rosa Brooks in this morning's LA Times entitled: "Straitjacket Bush:  The president's warmongering remarks on the Iranian threat suggest he is psychotic.  Really."

In the article Ms Brooks makes the following observation:

"Exhibit A: We're in the middle of a disastrous war in Iraq, the military and political situation in Afghanistan is steadily worsening, and the administration's interrogation and detention tactics have inflamed anti-Americanism and fueled extremist movements around the globe. Sane people, confronting such a situation, do their best to tamp down tensions, rebuild shattered alliances, find common ground with hostile parties and give our military a little breathing space. But crazy people? They look around and decide it's a great time to start another war."

"On Tuesday, Bush insisted on the need 'to defend Europe against the emerging Iranian threat.' Huh? Iran is now a major threat to Europe? The Iranians are going to launch a nuclear missile (that they don't yet possess) against Europe (for reasons unknown because, as far as we know, they're not mad at anyone in Europe)? This is lunacy in action."

"...the American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. . . . Iran has an economy the size of Finland's. . . . It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are . . . allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?"

First it was Newsweek and now it's Time Magazine.  In the April 2 issue of Time, there are different cover stories for the US market and for the rest of the world.  The global editions report on the situation in Pakistan just next too Afghanistan entitled "The Truth About Talibanistan"

"...young religious extremists have overrun scores of towns and villages in the border areas, with the intention of imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on a population unable to fight back."

Should the Holy Book be taught in public schools? Yes. It's the bedrock of Western culture. And when taught right, it's even constitutional.

Terrific! The Bible in schools - ironic the juxtaposition don't you think? 

Hmmm... could it be that marketing is getting in the way of the serious news in the U.S.? Or is the media afraid to tell Americans what they don't want to hear? Only Time can tell.

The so-called "Western Business Roundtable" (an energy lobby run by a former employee of Vice President Cheney who did PR for him on the energy bill) has sent out an email warning of the “major new threat to all businesses/industries” if the polar bear is added to the endangered species list:

Environmental extremists and activist lawyers are pushing the federal government to add the Polar Bear to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) list. Such a listing would have major negative implications for virtually every business and industry operation in the United States. The ESA is a very powerful law and could subject virtually any human activity in ALL 50 STATES to review and regulation by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bureaucrats if the Polar Bear is listed as threatened or endangered. This will essentially declare “open season” for environmental lawyers to sue to block virtually any project that involves carbon dioxide emissions.

Wonder how many polar bears there are in say Florida?!

To support listing the polar bear and getting more information click here.

Excellent article in this month's New Yorker magazine by George Packer entitled "Betrayed:  The Iraqis who trusted America the most"
The irony is that these people are the very ones which you hear all of the supporters of the war will focus on and they are the ones who at the end of the day have the highest risk, the most fatalities and the least supported and forgotten.

Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country’s religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America’s project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it may constitute Iraq’s smallest minority. I came across them in every city: the young man in Mosul who loved Metallica and signed up to be a translator at a U.S. Army base; the DVD salesman in Najaf whose plans to study medicine were crushed by Baath Party favoritism, and who offered his services to the first American Humvee that entered his city.

The arc from hope to betrayal that traverses the Iraq war is nowhere more vivid than in the lives of these Iraqis. America’s failure to understand, trust, and protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the larger history of defeat.

The photo above taken by James Nachtwey is of an Iraqi interpreter who must wear a mask to conceal his identity while he assists a soldier delivering an invitation to an Imam for a meeting with an American colonel.

It's nearly impossible to get a sense of what the situation in Iraq is really like from press reports which tend to be brief snippets of the daily carnage.  I have always maintained that without being there it is really hard to grasp what life is like for the average Iraqi.  Sure in my own mind image I can imagine and with 2M refugees its not a big leap but NBC's Richard Engle, who in my opinion along with CNN's Michael Ware provides the best war coverage on television, has put together a video diary of his time in country which gives us a sobering (and horrific) perspective of what is really happening.

The entire thing is truly worth watching and I'm sure MSNBC will be rerunning it frequently. Check your local listings here. 

I'm only bummed its not on NBC...

I'm an avid reader of the Globalist which is a online service that daily covers issues and trends related to the global economy, politics and culture.  The most recent issue had an intriguing article written by Brent Ranalli which compared the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with the Athenian campaign against Sicily during the Peloponnesian War in 415 B.C.

Ranalli essentially came up with 10 ways in which the Iraq war resembles this ancient conflict:

1) Motives as a parallel
2) Unilateralism.
3) Inadequate preparation
4) Guerilla warfare
5) Inability to secure borders and supply chains.
6) The hearts and minds
7) Taking advantage of a weak enemy
8) Creating foes out of friends
9) Waiting too long
10) Loss of faith.

The last had an interesting outcome as Ranalli points out:

Now, exhausted and demoralized after a crushing defeat in an unnecessary war, with the Spartans camped outside their walls, the Athenians lost faith in their own democratic institutions. They threw over their constitution as an expedient and embraced a police state.

The authoritarian regime was short-lived, but the moral damage was done. Athens never attained greatness again — except in philosophy and tourism. Even its eventual capitulation to Sparta, seven years after the coup, seems almost anticlimactic by comparison.

Unlike them, the United States is not in danger of catastrophic military defeat, or even of democratic self-liquidation. But it is nevertheless in danger of losing its soul.

The creeping authoritarian measures of the so-called War on Terror, the moral culpability for a “preemptive” war based on false pretenses — and the crushing costs of the war in human trauma and in debt that will be borne for generations: These could easily cause a nation to turn sour of itself and its ideals.

Part One and Part Two

“I don’t oppose all wars. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

“Even a successful war against Iraq, will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

"I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda."

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

- Excerpts from Senator Barack Obama's speech on October 2002 at the Federal Plaza in Chicago.

“Nine months before agreeing to let ConocoPhillips delay a half-billion-dollar pollution cleanup, the government’s top environmental prosecutor [Sue Ellen Wooldridge] bought a $1 million vacation home with the company’s top lobbyist, [Donald Duncan] Also in on the Kiawah Island, S.C., house deal was former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles, the highest-ranking Bush administration official targeted for criminal prosecution in the Jack Abramoff corruption probe.”

Griles, now an oil and gas lobbyist, began dating Wooldridge while he was her boss at Interior. He was the department’s No. 2 official from July 2001 to January 2005, behind only former Secretary Gale Norton. He and Duncan, a ConocoPhillips vice president who runs the company’s Washington office, both served on President Bush’s presidential transition team, Griles for the Interior Department, Duncan for the Energy Department.

Bush later appointed Wooldridge to head the Justice Department's environment division, representing virtually every federal agency, and she began working there in November 2005.

Duncan has played a major role in getting the Bush administration’s backing for a proposed $25 billion natural gas pipeline reaching from Alaska to Midwest markets.

Quite the couple...

Our Supreme Leader's "independent" has come up with a novel and rather interesting idea.  On Tuesday "Connecticut Joe" Lieberman called for a new tax to pay for the astronomical cost of the Iraq conflict by proposing  a "war on terrorism tax" at a Senate hearing during which he said the Pentagon's $622 billion defense budget proposal for fiscal 2008 threatened to crowd out funds for domestic programs.

You think?

Link

Half of them are [Mahdi Army]. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night. People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory."

-1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division, referring to the infiltration of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in the Iraqi Police forces and Army.



Also if you have not yet seen the Michael Ware (CNN Baghdad bureau chief) hour-long interview with Anderson Cooper called "Iraq:  The Hidden Wars" you really should take the time.  It is an excellent overview of the complex situation told in Ware's straightforward journalistic style.  He outlines from his personal experience **exactly** what the dynamics are on the ground.  At one point Ware recounts how close he came to loosing his life to insurgents which if you click on the picture will take you to the CNN site for just that portion of the interview.  The complete interview is below available from YouTube.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

A component of our Supreme Leader's plan relies on thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga militia being deployed into Baghdad and today as part of the Iraqi government's security operation.  The Kurds, while Sunni Muslim in religion, consider themselves ethnically distinct from Arabs, a group that includes most Shiite and Sunni Iraqis. While many of their officers speak some Arabic, most of the troops do not. Their government flies the Kurdish, not Iraqi, flag, desires independence and say they are from Kurdistan rather than Iraq.

Quoting from Salam al-Midi, a Kurd and former US military translator, said that the use of peshmerga in the city of Mosul, where Kurds and Arabs have long fought for political dominance, has only increased tensions there.

"They don't know the language, the Arabic language, it's hard. It's one of the major difficulties they will face," Midi said. "Second, they are Kurds. Comparing Kurds and Arabs is like comparing apples and oranges. They cannot work together. For sure, terrorist organizations are going to react, and their reactions are going to be bad. And at the same time the Kurdish side will want to take revenge on the Arabs, the Iraqi people."

It is important to note that North of Baghdad, in oil-rich Kirkuk, peshmerga troops have been fighting for more than a year against Shiite militiamen linked to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Sadr's group is supporting Shiites being forced from the city by Kurds interested in their autonomous region annexing Kirkuk.  It will be interesting to see given all the sectarian striff how this new element plays into the equation.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good overview of the various issues here

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

Helps to keep it all in perspective and what all these decisions mean...

Link

I came across this relatively new website (with RSS feed) called "World Politics Watch" which is a daily web publication featuring news and commentary on foreign policy, national security and international affairs.

In addition to the daily roundup and commentary they also have a blog both of which I find to be quite interesting and worth a subscription.

Home's Deport's chief Robert Nardelli resigned last week with an exit package, which includes $20 million cash severance as well as a pension, deferred stock awards and stock options.  When compared to the people he ultimately managed, this equals the annual incomes of about 10,000 retail stock clerks making an average $21,000 a year!

Link

Oh and yes there is a connection with our Supreme Leader - Nardelli was selected to serve on the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation which no doubt was his reward for raising $3.2M during the 2004 election.  Our Supreme Leader's little "stopover" to Home Depot's facility (photo above) is chronicled here along with his relationship with Nardelli and connection to Home Depot.

The new talking point from our "Supreme Leader" is coming - "Sacrifice"

Last night Keith Olbermann had an entirely different perspective on the introduction of yet another of this administration's infamous buzz words.  It's a bit long for my normal posts but on point:

If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene?

Would you at least protest?

What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them?

What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them — and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?

This is where we stand tonight with the BBC report of President Bush's "new Iraq strategy" and his impending speech to the nation, which it quotes a senior American official, will be about troop increases and "sacrifice."

The President has delayed, dawdled, and deferred for the month since the release of the Iraq Study Group.

He has seemingly heard out everybody… and listened to none of them.

If the BBC is right — and we can only pray it is not — he has settled on the only solution all the true experts agree, cannot possibly work: more American personnel in Iraq, not as trainers for Iraqi troops, but as part of some flabby plan for "sacrifice."

Sacrifice!

More American servicemen and women will have their lives risked.

More American servicemen and women will have their lives ended.

More American families will have to bear the unbearable, and rationalize the unforgivable — "sacrifice" — sacrifice now, sacrifice tomorrow, sacrifice forever.

And more Americans — more even than the two-thirds who already believe we need fewer troops in Iraq, not more — will have to conclude the President does not have any idea what he's doing - and that other Americans will have to die for that reason.

It must now be branded as propaganda — for even the President cannot truly feel that very many people still believe him to be competent in this area, let alone "the decider."

But from our impeccable reporter at the Pentagon, Jim Miklaszewski, tonight comes confirmation of something called "surge and accelerate" — as many as 20-thousand additional troops — for "political purposes"…

This, in line with what we had previously heard, that this will be proclaimed a short-term measure, for the stated purpose of increasing security in and around Baghdad, and giving an Iraqi government a chance to establish some kind of order.

This is palpable nonsense, Mr. Bush.

If this is your intention — if the centerpiece of your announcement next week will be "sacrifice" — sacrifice your intention, not more American lives!

As Senator Biden has pointed out, the new troops might improve the ratio our forces, face relative to those living in Baghdad (friend and foe), from 200 to 1, to just 100 to 1.

"Sacrifice?"

No.

A drop in the bucket.

The additional men and women you have sentenced to go there, sir, will serve only as targets.

They will not be there "short-term," Mr. Bush; for many it will mean a year or more in death's shadow.

This is not temporary, Mr. Bush.

For the Americans who will die because of you… it will be as permanent as it gets.

The various rationales for what Mr. Bush will reportedly re-christen "sacrifice," constitute a very thin gruel, indeed.

The former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, says Senator McCain told him that the "surge" would help the "morale" of the troops already in Iraq.

If Mr. McCain truly said that, and truly believes it, he has either forgotten completely his own experience in Vietnam… or he is unaware of the recent Military Times poll indicating only 38 percent of our active military want to see more troops sent… or Mr. McCain has departed from reality.

Then there is the argument that to take any steps towards reducing troop numbers would show weakness to the enemy in Iraq, or to the terrorists around the world.

This simplistic logic ignores the inescapable fact that we have indeed already showed weakness to the enemy, and to the terrorists.

We have shown them that we will let our own people be killed, for no good reason.

We have now shown them that we will continue to do so.

We have shown them our stupidity.

Mr. Bush, your judgment about Iraq — and now about "sacrifice" — is at variance with your people's, to the point of delusion.

Your most respected generals see no value in a "surge" — they could not possibly see it in this madness of "sacrifice."

The Iraq Study Group told you it would be a mistake.

Perhaps dozens more have told you it would be a mistake.

And you threw their wisdom back, until you finally heard what you wanted to hear, like some child drawing straws and then saying "best two out of three… best three out of five… Hundredth one counts."

Your citizens, the people for whom you work, have told you they do not want this, and more over, they do not want you to do this.

Yet once again, sir, you have ignored all of us.

Mr. Bush, you do not own this country!

To those Republicans who have not broken free from the slavery of partisanship — those bonded still, to this President and this Administration — and now bonded to this "sacrifice" — proceed at your own peril.

John McCain may still hear the applause of small crowds — he has somehow inured himself to the hypocrisy, and the tragedy, of a man who considers himself the ultimate realist, courting the votes of those who support the government telling visitors to the Grand Canyon that it was caused by the Great Flood.

That Mr. McCain is selling himself off to the irrational Right, parcel by parcel, like some great landowner facing bankruptcy, seems to be obvious to everybody but himself.

Or, maybe it is obvious to him — and he simply no longer cares.

But to the rest of you in the Republican Party.

We need you to speak up, right now, in defense of your country's most precious assets — the lives of its citizens who are in harm's way.

If you do not, you are not serving this nation's interests — nor your own.

Last November should have told you this.

The opening of the new Congress tomorrow and Thursday, should tell you this.

Next time, those missing Republicans, will be you.

And to the Democrats now yoked to the helm of this sinking ship, you proceed at your own peril, as well.

President Bush may not be very good at reality, but he and Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rove are still gifted at letting American troops be killed, and then turning their deaths to their own political advantage.

The equation is simple. This country does not want more troops in Iraq.

It wants fewer.

Go and make it happen, or go and look for other work.

Yet you Democrats must assume that even if you take the most obvious of courses, and cut off funding for the war… Mr. Bush will ignore you as long as possible, or will find the money elsewhere, or will spend the money meant to protect the troops, and re-purpose it to keep as many troops there as long as he can keep them there.

Because that's what this is all about, is it not, Mr. Bush?

That is what this "sacrifice" has been for.

To continue this senseless, endless war.

You have dressed it up in the clothing, first of a hunt for weapons of mass destruction, then of liberation… then of regional imperative… then of oil prices… and now in these new terms of "sacrifice" — it's like a damned game of Colorforms, isn't it, sir?

This senseless, endless war.

But it has not been senseless in two ways.

It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

It has gotten many of us, used to the idea — the virtual "white noise" — of conflict far away, of the deaths of young Americans, of vague "sacrifice" for some fluid cause, too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important sounding, but ultimately meaningless phrase, "the war on terror."

And the war's second accomplishment — your second accomplishment, sir - is to have taken money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield, and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers.

Because if you sell the Army a thousand Humvees, you can't sell them any more, until the first thousand have been destroyed.

The service men and women are ancillary to the equation.

This is about the planned obsolescence of ordnance, isn't, Mr. Bush? And the building of detention centers? And the design of a 125-million dollar courtroom complex at Gitmo complete with restaurants.

At least the war profiteers have made their money, sir.

And we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

You have insisted, Mr. Bush, that we must not lose in Iraq, that if we don't fight them there we will fight them here — as if the corollary were somehow true, that if by fighting them there we will not have to fight them here.

And yet you have re-made our country, and not re-made it for the better, on the premise that we need to be ready to "fight them here," anyway, and always.

In point of fact even if the Civil War in Iraq somehow ended tomorrow, and the risk to Americans there ended with it, we would have already suffered a defeat — not fatal, not world-changing, not, but for the lives lost, of enduring consequence.

But this country has already lost in Iraq, sir.

Your policy in Iraq has already had its crushing impact on our safety here.

You have already fomented new terrorism and new terrorists.

You have already stoked paranoia.

You have already pitted Americans, one against the other.

We… will have to live with it.

We… will have to live with what — of the fabric of our nation — you have already "sacrificed."

The only object still admissible in this debate, is the quickest and safest exit for our people there.

But you — and soon, Mr. Bush, it will be you and you alone – still insist otherwise.

And our sons and daughters and fathers and mothers will be sacrificed there tonight, Sir, so that you can say you did not "lose in Iraq."

Our policy in Iraq has been criticized for being indescribable, for being inscrutable, for being ineffable.

But it is all too easily understood now.

First, we sent Americans to their deaths for your lie, Mr. Bush.

Now we are sending them to their deaths for your ego.

If what is reported is true — if your decision is made and the "sacrifice" is ordered — take a page instead from the man at whose funeral you so eloquently spoke this morning — Gerald Ford: Put pragmatism and the healing of a nation, ahead of some kind of misguided vision.

Atone.

Sacrifice, Mr. Bush?

No, sir, this is not "sacrifice." This has now become "human sacrifice."

And it must stop.

And you can stop it.

Next week, make us all look wrong.

Our meaningless sacrifice in Iraq must stop.

And you must stop it.

We were told “that only six people in the 1,000-person embassy in Baghdad can speak Arabic fluently.”

Beginning in January, Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat who will become House majority leader and who is writing the schedule for the next Congress, said members should expect longer hours than the brief week they have grown accustomed to.  Next year, members of the House will be expected in the Capitol for votes each week by 6:30 p.m. Monday and will finish their business about 2 p.m. Friday.

Here are a couple of comments from members:

"Keeping us up here eats away at families," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. "Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families -- that's what this says."

and

The new schedule poses a headache for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who runs her 7-year-old daughter's Brownie troop meetings on Monday afternoons in Weston, Fla. "I'll have to talk to the other mothers and see if we can move it to the weekend," she said.

"Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know," Rumsfeld told a news briefing.

"We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

His legacy...