Great lines of the day

Steve Gilliard writes about Iraq. First, why the Iraqi army is being left in the dust:

Why is the soldiering so low in most Iraqi units? Because the real soldiers are the ones fighting us, we've got the desperate and the unmotivated. We also have a military structure which continues the worst of the old Iraqi Army. The resistance is a meritocracy. Only the best and brightest can lead there. Rank matters little. There is little margin for error in guerilla warfare . . .

Second, why US politicians are being left in the dust:

People like Clinton and Biden will be left in the dust as the American people embrace an anti-war stand. They vilified Cindy Sheehan and failed. They attacked Jack Murtha and embarassed themselves. The next person they go after will turn people against the GOP. The war is over, we're only debating how we end it.

Emphasis mine.

Haggling about the price

There's an old joke that goes like this:

A fellow approaches an attractive girl and says "would you sleep with me for a million dollars?" and she says "Well, sure!" Then he says "Would you sleep with me for a dollar?" and she says "Certainly not! What do you think I am?" and he says "We already know what you are. We're just haggling about the price."

I thought of this joke when I read Digby's article about torture and what the current torture discussion demonstrates about America:

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo --- you didn't question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it's wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it's immoral --- and, more shockingly, whether it's a positive good . . . When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" he couldn't ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It's not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than "pain equavalent to organ failure." People no longer instinctively recoil at the word --- it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there. When the smoke finally clears, and we can see past that dramatic day on 9/11 and put the threat of islamic fundamentalism into its proper perspective, I wonder if we'll be able to go back to our old ethical framework? I'm not so sure we will even want to. It's not that it changed us so much as it revealed us, I think. A society that can so easily discard it's legal and ethical taboos against cruelty and barbarism, is an unstable society to begin with. At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them.

Emphasis mine.
I have a couple of thoughts about this. It makes me wonder just how synthetic was American democracy, that a single horrific event, 911, could produce such an hysterical overreaction of the Patriot Act, imprisonment without trial, loss of habeus corpus, the doctrine of preemptive war, Guantanamo, assertion of a Presidential 'divine right of kings', and now Vice President Cheney -- the Vice President! -- promoting torture as state policy.
Maybe it was just the bad luck that Bush and Cheney happened to be in power when 911 happened - they are bombastic, incompetent and fearful men whose every instinct takes them toward the dark side. But no one stepped up to stop them, not in Congress nor in the media.
Maybe there really is some basic difference between Canadians and Americans -- even though there is a lot of rhetoric in the United States about democracy and freedom, maybe we Canadians actually do value our freedom and democracy more because we're had to fight for it in our own quiet way. Maybe our democracy has been tested more, and has matured, so we wouldn't haggle it away in a fool's trade-off for mythical security. Over the last fifty years, Canada has acknowledged Aboriginal self-government, dealt with the FLQ and the October Crisis and the War Measures Act, met many of the challenges of Quebec separatism and western alientation, adopted bilingualism and multiculturalism, approved gay marriage. And even though it took us a few months, most Canadians were eventually outraged at Mahar Arar's ordeal and the abuse of civil liberties which it represented. We are still grappling with separatism, I know, but even if Canada eventually loses that battle, I don't think we would let our country degenerate into violence. We know what we are, and what we are worth.

Now there's something you don't see everyday*

I'll bet your local newspaper didn't cover this -- the world's largest motorized shopping cart:


The photo cutline reads: "This photo supplied by Guinness World Records shows Edd China talking to a shopper while driving his way into Guinness World Records book in Henley-upon-Thames, England,Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005, after engineering what the book calls the largest motorized shopping cart in the world. The 11.4 feet tall, 9.8 feet long and 5.9 feet wide cart was created to celebrate the book's self-proclaimed first ever Guinness World Records Day on Wednesday Nov. 9, 2005. Edd is also currently featured in the Guinness World Records 2006 edition book for his record for the World's Fastest Sofa."(AP Photo/Guinness World Records/Tim Anderson)
I would have liked to see a photo of the sofa, too.

*And yes, this is my favorite line from Ghostbusters, said by Bill Murray when the StayPuft Marshmallow Man makes his appearance.

Preparing to declare victory and leave

Well, looks like the strategy is changing again:

After fiercely defending his Iraq policy across Asia, President Bush abruptly toned down his attack on war critics Sunday and said there was nothing unpatriotic about opposing his strategy. 'People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq,' Bush said, three days after agreeing with Vice President Dick Cheney that the critics were 'reprehensible.' The president also praised Rep. John Murtha as 'a fine man' and a strong supporter of the military despite the congressman's call for troop withdrawal as soon as possible. Bush brought up the growing Iraq debate when he met reporters . . .

Bush brought it up himself? Sounds like the White House war room has realized that if you move too far along the road of branding Iraq questioners as "unpatriotic" then you leave Bush without enough wiggle room to pretend to be listening to the voice of the people, so that he can declare vistory and leave. And leave he will, before the congressional midterms.

Blame the Republicans

I just posted this as a diary at Kos:

Amid all the criticism of the Democrats for their role in voting to permit Bush to go to war in Iraq, it seems to me that the Republicans in congress are getting off the hook.
If ANYONE had even a faint hope of deflecting Bush and Co from the rush to war, it was the Republican congressmen, not the Democratic ones. These people didn't do their job, and they are even more to blame because they actually could have influenced the war decision much more than the Democrats ever could have.
Imagine if a significant block of Republican senators and representatives, say 10 or 15, had gone to Bush in October, 2002 and said, "stop this pell mell rush to war, you've got to let the inspections work. Listen to what the anti-war marchers are saying, listen to the Security Council, don't send our boys into an illegal war" -- why, that point of view, forcefully expressed, might have made a difference. Instead, they went along to get along.

Great line of the day

In The Salvadoran Option II, Billmon writes:

. . . the U.S. and U.K. embassies have been aware for some time that Iraq's Ministry of the Interior has been turned into what the old National Guard used to be in El Salvador, or the Presidential Intelligence Unit in Guatemala, or the National Directorate of Investigation in Honduras, which is to say: death squad central . . . so now we have Iranian-backed Shi'a death squads hunting their political enemies through the slums of Baghdad under the pretext of fighting the insurgency, while Sunni Baathists (and/or their jihadist allies) blow up Shi'a mosques at prayer time under the pretext of fighting the American occupation . . . Meanwhile, back here . . . the ruling party is reliving Joe McCarthy's glory years, while the leaders of the so-called opposition party try to hide their worthless carcasses behind an ex-Marine congressman who finally saw one too many broken bodies warehoused at Walter Reed and suffered a temporary fit of sanity, causing him to blurt out the ugly truth that the war is hopelessly lost . . . Truly, to quote Leonard -- the psychotic recruit in Full Metal Jacket -- we are in a world of shit.

Emphasis mine.

"Review of key objectives & critical success factors"

Hey, Lawyers, Guns and Money points out that today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
And here, in tribute, is one of the funniest things I have ever read, the Gettysburg address done as a powerpoint presentation. And don't miss the powerpoint essay that goes with it.

Good, bad, ugly

Good

Sandy Huffaker, Cagle Cartoons

Bad

Tab, Calgary Sun


Ugly

Daryl Cagle, Slate.com

Stupid is as stupid does

The mark of a stupid person is someone who just won't grow up: "An atheist who has spent four years trying to ban the Pledge of Allegiance from being recited in public schools is now challenging the motto printed on U.S. currency because it refers to God."
There have been too many of these kind of pointless junk lawsuits in the States, and in Canada too -- running to courts to stop harmless things like opening the school day with a prayer or singing a hymn at Christmas. Too often organizations like the ACLU get sucked into defending this kind of tripe. It doesn't do our society any good, and just contributes to giving 'liberals' a bad name.

Someday, Murtha will be proven right

Lawmakers Reject Immediate Iraq Withdrawal
You know what is really dumb about this?
If Republicans HAD used Murtha's motion, THEN the Democrats would really have found themselves in a quandry. But no, the Republicans had to get cute and write their own motion, which the Democrats then had no problem voting against.
Murtha's motion read:

Whereas [etc etc for seven 'whereas' clauses] . . . Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That:
Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.
Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S Marines shall be deployed in the region.
Section 3 The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

The GOP motion read:

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

Even Murtha himself could and did vote against this.
Sorta backfired, didn't it, especially because the one soundbite which will live in infamy from the debate was Jean Schmidt calling Murtha a coward and then having to retract it.
Of course, personally I wanted to see Murtha's motion pass. And someday it will.
Right after the debate, after all the republican pontificating about how the US has to "stay the course" and "win" in Irag, came this story:

The top U.S. commander in Iraq has submitted a plan to the Pentagon for withdrawing troops in Iraq . . . Gen. George Casey submitted the plan to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It includes numerous options and recommends that brigades -- usually made up of about 2,000 soldiers each -- begin pulling out of Iraq early next year.

And the US media may finally have jumped the shark. They may not be playing along anymore. Today in a very thoughtful piece on Kos, Hunter wrote:

When the only weapon the White House is capable of using is to impugn the very patriotism and Americanness of their opponents, what happens if the reactions to that attack change? What happens if the press decides that dissent is, after all, patriotic? And is it happening, just the twinges, because of the utter collapse of the poll numbers, because of the Plame indictment(s?), because of the continuing quagmire of the war, because of the 2,000 deaths mark, because of the other Republican investigations and indictments, seemingly raining down like hailstones anywhere Abramoff has brushed up against the woodwork of power, and/or simply because of the continuing Republican political schtick that works so well for dismissing a minority, but considerably less well when you are calling sixty percent of the country traitors for not dancing to the tune? . . . accountability is now a majority position in America. Accusing the American people of treason for demanding it is not simply cowardly -- it is also being met with decidedly more organized hostility than in previous Republican "campaigns" against the American citizenry.

I also think that the media is simply tired of being told that they have to play along to get along. The tipping point may well have been Bob Woodward and his 18 months of lies about the Plame investigation. OK, Judy Miller nobody in the working press had much respect for as a reporter anyway, not after all her discredited WMD 'scoops' and all the queening it around Iraq. But the dream of uncovering another Watergate has been a motivating force for 20-somethings to get into journalism for the last 35 years. So to see Watergate hero Bob Woodward pulling a Miller, destroying his journalistic reputation, ducking and weaving, apologizing and denying, all so that he can continue to help some self-important poohbah in the Bush administration cover up the illegal leak of a CIA agent's identity, well, this may have finally hit the US media's collective gag reflex. Now, when someone in the White House or the Pentagon or the State Department implies they aren't on the right team anymore if they don't spin the coverage, they will remember 'Boob' Woodward and how the mighty have fallen.

Canadian crabs

Yahoo provides this photo of Canadian crabs for sale at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, where restaurants are buying Canadian crabs due to a price dispute between American crab fishermen and processors. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
And I couldn't resist these photos of a few other Canadian crabs:

Bubbles

Want to read something fun?
Here's a story about a toy inventor's 11-year search for a coloured bubble.


From Popular Science magazine, via Crooks and Liars.

The ideology of information

This falls into a Great Line of the Day category though its a little long. On TPM Cafe, Mark Schmitt explains the deeper issues regarding what the Bush Administration did or did not know about WMD before the Iraq war began:

We're asking very traditional questions: Was information withheld? Was there deceit about the information? Those are the familiar Watergate/Iran-contra questions. But they overlook the Ideology of Information that the administration created. By this I mean the whole practice of evaluating all information going into the war not for its truth value, but for whether it promoted or hindered the administration's goal of being free to go to war. The President could have been given every bit of intelligence information available, and he and/or Cheney would have reached the same decision because they would have discarded, discounted, or disregarded most of it. Information that was Useful to that goal was put in one box, Not Useful put in another. Entire categories of information were assigned to the Not Useful box because their source was deemed an opponent of U.S. military action, or assumed to have some other motive. All information from the UN inspectors went into the Not Useful box because they were deemed war opponents, or because it was believed that giving any credence to the inspectors would lead back into the mid-1990s cycle of inspections and evasions of inspections. Any information from the CIA was considered Not Useful because they were deemed to have overlooked Saddam's arsenal in the 1990s . . . just a couple of stories that slipped through the cracks of The Ideology of Information: the yellowcake-from-Niger fraud, which had been debunked everywhere, and the question of the aluminum tubes not suitable for centrifuges . . . The White House didn't so much deceive itself or deceive others as close its eyes to the very possibility that there were any questions at issue, regarding not only WMD but also post-invasion planning. They did so in the name of preserving their freedom to act when and how they wished, and as a result got us trapped in a situation in which we no longer have any freedom of action.
It is important to call attention to the Ideology of Information promoted during that period because it is very much alive. It is inherent in the Plame leak and to this day in the criticisms of Wilson -- the argument that he was the one who revealed information in his op-ed. It is inherent in the Bush and Cheney speeches: criticism and second thoughts, reminders of alternative information are all deemed simply Not Useful. It's something much deeper and sicker than just withholding or manipulating information.

Emphasis mine. And of course this approach is still being taken today, to continue to insist that "progress" is being made in Iraq as long as the US continues to "stay the course" regardless of what anyone who has actually been there says. It also applies to Guantanamo and the secret prisons and all of the other illegal and immoral claptrap from the Bush administration.

I habe a code

I habe a code in the nose (and throat and etc) so I haven't been blogging -- and also, things are just too stupid to blog about.
Here's a story about the possible election -- which everyone has settled on calling on Nov 28 except maybe it will be earlier or maybe later or either or neither or both.
Now I ask you, how in the world am I supposed to pontificate about what would be best for the country, when apparently neither Harper nor Layton have a clue and Martin is sticking to his April date while the Bloc doesn't care about the country at all?

Deja vu all over again

So there's this new tag thing going around, and I got mine from Scott of Montreal, whereby you take a little stroll down Memory Lane and repost the fifth sentence of your 23rd blog post.
So here is mine, from March 9, 2004 -- and just to show that the Republicans are STILL recycling the SAME OLD talking points (or else how I am still writing about the same old stuff) this was a post about how some democratic politicians like John Kerry could have voted to support Bush going to war with Iraq and yet be opposed to the war itself.
As I said then -- and keep saying now -- ". . . what I remember is hearing Bush and everyone around him say repeatedly that they hadn't decided to go to war yet and they wouldn't go to war unless it was "necessary" -- they said it over and over, and, way back then, most people actually believed them (amazing, isn't it!)" and now here's my fifth sentence "But that's why millions of people around the world marched against the war, in the belief that their actions could make a difference, that Bush would listen to them and would consider their views when he made his decision -- more fools they, of course!"