Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has an absolutely hilarious story of a Republican Congressional staffer who tried to hire two hackers to change hi college grades. You’ve got to go see the pictures of the squirrels!
1 comment December 22nd, 2006
Here’s a detailed lesson on the process of writing Bush’s speech’s:
ANdy Dick as Bush’s speechwriter. [Thanks to Daily Kos for this.]
Add comment December 22nd, 2006
The International Relations Center has a simple flash video illustrating the choice facing the country and the world:
Add comment December 21st, 2006
In a brilliant attempt to avoid the total closing of Iraq’s university system where multiple faculty are often killed in a single day, Iraq’s Prime Minister al Maliki, safe in the Green Zone, has ordered attendance or face firing or expulsion, McClatchy reports. Al Maliki is, of course, going to do nothing about the terrible security situation at universities:
An odd thing has happened at Baghdad’s universities: the professors have begun hiding their education by donning ratty clothes, pulling on traditional Arab head scarves and driving to campus in beat-up cars.
It’s all part of an effort to keep from getting fired.
With the threat of violence emptying university campuses, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki took the rare step earlier this month of ordering students and professors back to class. Anyone who doesn’t obey could face dismissal or expulsion.
Maliki’s aides defend the order, saying that education is the lifeblood of Iraq and its collapse would threaten the government and the nation.
But those forced to obey the order complain that they’re risking their lives as unwilling pawns of a government that can’t guarantee their security. …
Iraq’s universities have been a target for insurgents and militias alike almost since the war began in 2003. Professors tell of armed gangs taking over buildings and classrooms and even issuing threats about grades. Thousands of students have requested transfers to campuses where their sects - Sunni Muslim or Shiite Muslim - are in the majority. Thousands of professors and students, seeking to avoid violence and threats, have fled the nation to pursue their studies in neighboring countries.
Around Baghdad, many campuses are desolate. Many families refuse to let their children, particularly women, finish their education for fear of what will happen either en route to class or once they get there.
According to the Iraq Students and Youth League, a university advocacy group, at least 10 violent incidents racked Baghdad’s two main universities in the first week of this month, when Maliki issued his order. Among them were attempted kidnappings in front of Iraqi police officers, who didn’t try to stop the attacks.
At Baghdad University, only 6 percent of student and professors attended in early December, the group found. The highest attendance level was 59 percent at private universities.
Ali Adeeb, a top Maliki adviser, said he recommended to the prime minister that he issue the order after a Sunni insurgent group, Ansar al Sunna, posted fliers around campuses threatening to kill students and professors for coming to campus. …
Badri, the professor, said it wasn’t fair to expect academics to defy violence when no one else in Iraq was forced to. He pointed out that the nation’s 275-member parliament often can’t meet because too many members don’t attend, sometimes because the roads leading to the heavily fortified Green Zone are too dangerous.
Presumably, al Maliki feels that Iraq will be better off when all the country’s professors are dead.
Add comment December 21st, 2006
Katie Melua sings Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds from the Sharon Osbourn Show:
Add comment December 21st, 2006
I have great respect for Jimmy Carter’s taking on defense of Palestinians and pushing for a bearable peace between Israel and the Palestinians. I say “bearable” because, as in so many negotiations, no agreement can possibly right the wrongs that have been done. What is needed is an agreement that both sides can live with, allowing the region to flourish rather than continue its slide into barbarism.
I am here posting Carter’s op ed from today’s Boston Globe as a brief summary of his position. We shouldn’t let the Israel-no-matter-what faction demonize and distort his thinking.
Reiterating the keys to peace
By Jimmy Carter | December 20, 2006
MY BOOK “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” was published last month, expressing my assessment of circumstances in the occupied territories and prescribing a course of action that offers a path to permanent peace for Israel and its neighbors. My knowledge of the subject is based on visits to the area during the past 33 years, my detailed study and personal involvement in peace talks as president, and my leadership role in monitoring the Palestinian elections of 1996, 2005, and 2006.
Some major points in the book are:
Multiple deaths of innocent civilians have occurred on both sides, and this violence and all terrorism must cease.
For 39 years, Israel has occupied Palestinian land, and has confiscated and colonized hundreds of choice sites.
Often excluded from their former homes, land, and places of worship, protesting Palestinians have been severely dominated and oppressed. There is forced segregation between Israeli settlers and Palestine’s citizens, with a complex pass system required for Arabs to traverse Israel’s multiple checkpoints.
An enormous wall snakes through populated areas of what is left of the West Bank, constructed on wide swaths of bulldozed trees and property of Arab families, obviously designed to acquire more territory and to protect the Israeli colonies already built. (Hamas declared a unilateral cease-fire in August 2004 as its candidates sought local and then national offices, which they claim is the reason for reductions in casualties to Israeli citizens.)
Combined with this wall, Israeli control of the Jordan River Valley will completely enclose Palestinians in their shrunken and divided territory. Gaza is surrounded by a similar barrier with only two openings, still controlled by Israel. The crowded citizens have no free access to the outside world by air, sea, or land.
The Palestinian people are now being deprived of the necessities of life by economic restrictions imposed on them by Israel and the United States because 42 percent voted for Hamas candidates in this year’s election. Teachers, nurses, policemen, firemen, and other employees cannot be paid, and the UN has reported food supplies in Gaza equivalent to those among the poorest families in sub-Sahara Africa, with half the families surviving on one meal a day.
Mahmoud Abbas, first as prime minister and now as president of the Palestinian National Authority and leader of the PLO, has sought to negotiate with Israel for almost six years, without success. Hamas leaders support such negotiations, promising to accept the results if approved by a Palestinian referendum.
UN Resolutions, the Camp David Accords of 1978, the Oslo Agreement of 1993, official US Policy, and the International Roadmap for Peace are all based on the premise that Israel withdraw from occupied territories. Also, Palestinians must accept the same commitment made by the 23 Arab nations in 2002: to recognize Israel’s right to live in peace within its legal borders. These are the two keys to peace.
Not surprisingly, an examination of the book reviews and published comments reveals that these points have rarely if ever been mentioned by detractors of the book, much less denied or refuted. Instead, there has been a pattern of ad hominem statements, alleging that I am a liar, plagiarist, anti-Semite, racist, bigot, ignorant, etc. There are frequent denunciations of fabricated “straw man” accusations: that I have claimed that apartheid exists within Israel; that the system of apartheid in Palestine is based on racism; and that Jews control and manipulate the news media of America.
As recommended by the Hamilton-Baker report, renewed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are a prime factor in promoting peace in the region. Although my book concentrates on the Palestinian territories, I noted that the report also recommended peace talks with Syria concerning the Golan Heights. Both recommendations have been rejected by Israel’s prime minister.
It is practically impossible for bitter antagonists to arrange a time, place, agenda, and procedures that are mutually acceptable, so an outside instigator/promoter is necessary. Successful peace talks were orchestrated by the United States in 1978-79 and by Norway in 1993. If the American government is reluctant to assume such a unilateral responsibility, then an alternative is the International Quartet (United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union) — still with American leadership.
An overwhelming majority of citizens of Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine want peace, with justice for all who live in the Holy Land. It will be a shame if the world community fails to help them reach this goal.
Former US president Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
1 comment December 20th, 2006
As the Administration and the Christian right push abstinence education for our youth, instead of teaching them the skills necessary to navigate the real world of sexuality and contemporary relationships, a new study gives further evidence of how truly silly this is. A new study combining data from interviews conducted from 1982 through 2002 found that 95% of Americans had had sex before marriage, including at least 88% of women born in the 1940’s. So not only are abstinence-only programs not teaching our children to live in the real world of today, they are not teaching them to live in the real worl of their parents. Presumably support comes from parents who want to maintain the fantasy that their children, unlike all other human beings, are truly pure.
EXCERPTS:
More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.
“This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades….”
The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people — about 33,000 of them women — in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer’s analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.
Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.
Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.
The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.
“The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds,” Finer said.
Under the Bush administration, such programs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
“It would be more effective,” Finer said, “to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active — which nearly everyone eventually will.”
Add comment December 20th, 2006
In a sign of how truly desperate the Iraqi situation is, behind the killings and bombings in Iraq, there is the relentless struggle for power. According to the New York Times, the rebels have lain siege to Baghdad, cutting off its electricity:
Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west.
The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to repair the damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the government falls further and further behind as it attempts to repair the lines.
And in a measure of the deep disunity and dysfunction of this nation, when the repair crews and security forces are slow to respond, skilled looters often arrive with heavy trucks that pull down more of the towers to steal as much of the valuable aluminum conducting material in the lines as possible. The aluminum is melted into ingots and sold….
In March, at most one or two of the lines were severed at any one time, but by the summer the typical number had risen to six or seven and had soared to a peak of 12 by early fall. Electricity officials say the decisive moment came July 6, when saboteurs mounted coordinated attacks across the country, gaining a lead in the battle that the government has not been able to reverse.
“They targeted all the lines at the same time, and they all came down,” Mr. Abbo said….
On Sunday, Mr. Abbo recited the most recent measures of the devastation. That day, 40 towers were down on a line running to Baghdad from one of the nation’s largest power plants in Baiji, in the insurgent-ridden north, and 42 more towers were down on a line connecting Baiji to a huge power plant in Kirkuk.
Towers were also down on two lines that pass through the “triangle of death” to connect Baghdad with a power plant to the south in Musayyib, and on four other lines in the Baghdad area or its environs. And the city was entirely cut off from the huge hydroelectric dam at Haditha, to the west in Anbar Province, the homeland of the Sunni insurgency.
Even the destruction of one tower generally shuts down a line.
Add comment December 19th, 2006
Join Gilbert Achcar, Howard Zinn, Michael Albert, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Ali Abunimah, Anthony Arnove, Kelly Dougherty, Eve Ensler, Eduardo Galeano, Rashid Khalidi, Camilo Mejía and many others in signing the new petition:
Why we stand for immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq
THE U.S. occupation of Iraq has not liberated the Iraqi people, but has made life worse for most Iraqis.
Tens of thousands of U.S. service people have been killed or maimed, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of the U.S. invasion in 2003, the ongoing occupation, and the violence unleashed by them.
Iraq’s infrastructure has been destroyed, and U.S. plans for reconstruction abandoned. There is less electricity, less clean drinking water, and more unemployment today than before the U.S. invasion.
All of the justifications initially provided by the U.S. for waging war on Iraq have been exposed as lies; the real reasons for the invasion — to control Iraq’s oil reserves and to increase U.S. strategic influence in the region — now stand revealed.
The Bush administration has insisted again and again that stability, democracy, and prosperity are around the next bend in the road. But with each day that the U.S. stays, the violence and lack of security facing Iraqis worsen. The U.S. says that it cannot withdraw its military because Iraq will collapse into civil war if it does. But the U.S. has deliberately stoked sectarian divisions in its ongoing attempt to install a U.S.-friendly regime, thus driving Iraq towards civil war.
The November elections in the United States sent a clear message that voters reject the Iraq war, and opinion polls show that seven in 10 Iraqis want the U.S. to leave sooner rather than later. Even most U.S. military and political leaders agree that staying the course in Iraq is a policy that is bound to fail.
Yet all the various alternative plans for Iraq now being discussed in Washington, including those proposed by House and Senate Democrats, aren’t about withdrawing the U.S. military from Iraq. Rather, these strategies are about continuing the pursuit of U.S. goals in Iraq and the larger Middle East using different means.
Even the proposal to redeploy U.S. troops outside of Iraq, a plan favored by many Democratic Party leaders, envisions continued U.S. intervention inside Iraq.
With former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger insisting that a military victory in Iraq is no longer possible and (Ret.) Lt. Gen. William Odom calling for “complete withdrawal” of all U.S. troops, the antiwar movement should demand no less than the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. military — as well as reparations to the Iraqi people, so they can rebuild their own society and genuinely determine their own future.
Add comment December 19th, 2006
Juan Cole today explains why the newest Bush coup, of turning an antiwar election into a plan for more troops, won’t work:
et me explain why it won’t work. It won’t work because Iraqis are now politically and socially mobilized. This means that they have the social preconditions for effective political and paramilitary action (they are largely urban, literate, connected by media, etc.) And they are politically savvy and well-connected. They are well armed, gaining in military experience, and well financed through petroleum and antiquities smuggling and through cash infusions from supporters abroad. The Mahdi Army fighters can be defeated by the US military, as happened twice in 2004. But they cannot be made to disappear, as they were not in 2004. That is because they are an organic movement springing from the Shiite poor, and are the paramilitary arm of a large social movement with a national network and ideology.
Attempts to crush popular movements once they have mobilized have most often failed. No attempts at counter-revolution in France in the 1790s were successful. Even powerful empires like Austria were helpless before the mobilized French infantry (who for the first time used large numbers of conscripts).
He goes on to give a couple of examples drawn from Iranian history. Then continues:
I am not saying that popular protests cannot be crushed. They can and have been. I am saying that when you have a whole country that is politically mobilized and has substantial resources, a crack-down is likely doomed unless it is almost genocidal (Saddam’s use of chemical weapons in 1988 and of helicopter gunships against civilians in 1991 are examples, as is Truman’s use of the atomic bomb against Japan).
The US is not going to commit the half a million troops it would take to have a chance of winning in Iraq. Nor is it going to use genocidal methods to strike absolute terror into the hearts of the Iraqi people.
The Iraq situation has gone beyond the point where 40,000 troops can retrieve it. And that is if we even had 40,000 troops to put into Iraq and keep them there any length of time, which we do not.
In fact, since most of the “coalition of the willing” troops have now left (Italy, Spain, etc.), one of the two US divisions would only be putting the number of Coalition soldiers back up to what it was earlier in the Occupation, when things were also not going well.
The fact is that if provincial elections were held today, the Sadr Movement would sweep to power in all the Shiite provinces (with the possible exception of Najaf itself). It is increasingly the most popular political party among Iraq’s Shiite majority. For the US to cut the Sadrists out of power in parliament and then fall on them militarily would just throw Iraq into turmoil. It would increase the popularity of the Sadrists, and ensure that they gain nationalist credentials that will ensconce them for perhaps decades.
He concludes:
Napoleon’s most prominent characteristic was his willingness to waste his troops’ lives lightly. On his return from Palestine in 1799, he even had some poisoned because they were ill with plague and he did not want to risk transporting them back to his HQ in Cairo. He took 54,000 men to Egypt in 1798; about half came back. His Russia campaign saw a similar dynamic, on a much larger scale.
Bush is the Napoleon of our age, trampling on whole peoples, a Jacobin Emperor mouthing the slogans of liberty and popular sovereignty while crushing and looting those he “liberated.” And Kagan and Kristol (playing Talleyrand 1798) and Emperor Bush are readying a further slaughter of our US troops, 24,000 of whom have been killed or wounded, and of innocent Iraqis, 600,000 of whom have been killed by criminal and political violence since spring of 2003.
And you thought a mere election would make a difference. No one had to elect the American Enterprise Institute. No one needs to crown the emperor, he can do it himself. Welcome to Year 1 of the Empire.
It’s been interesting to watch Cole’s evolution from his earlier calls for a more rational intervention, with strategic use of American air power, to his more recent calls for American withdrawal. Exposure to empire does strange things to people. In Cole’s case, since he is a man of principle, the effect has only been positive.
1 comment December 15th, 2006
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Nov | Jan » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |