They're here, they're there, they're everywhere, so beware

It's "snakes bombs on a plane" season again.
So first we are told:

Anti-terrorist authorities in Britain and the United States declined to describe the bomb design in the foiled plot — whether it was primarily liquid or, more likely, contained liquids in a more complex ingredient list.

But as Peggy Noonan said in a different context, "Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to!"
So how many scary but incredible, unlikely and speculative bomb scenarios can AP pack into one little news story? Let's see:

...Even a battery-operated watch would provide enough power for a detonator. All you need is one shock ...
baby formula ...in powdered form, it can provide a good vehicle for masking crystallized explosives . . .
an Algerian man was convicted of possessing 25 computer disks detailing how to bring down an aircraft using, among other things, crystallized explosives hidden in a container of talcum powder.
During that trial, FBI explosives expert Donald Sachtleben testified he built and detonated three bombs based on the instructions found in the Algerian's home . . .
a likely terrorist scenario would involve a two- or three-member team boarding the same flight, each carrying a different part of the planned bomb . . .
Critical to conventional bombs is a power source to trigger a detonator. Clonan said cell phones could provide an ideal power-timer unit for a bomb . . .
to puncture an aircraft's fuselage would require an explosive charge "half the size of a cigarette packet," . . .
"liquid bombs" were not the most likely explosive. He said it was far more likely a terror cell would try to smuggle on an explosive in crystalline or powder form and to combine it with an acid-based compound . . .
terrorists might also construct an on-board incendiary bomb based on paraffin or gasoline, which if ignited in mid-Atlantic could destroy an aircraft before it could land . . .
Hands-on inspection is the only way to tell if a dark-plastic medicine vial really contains what it says on the label. "You'll have to carry your prescription and prove to security that the medicine really is what it is. But for 20 million people a year going through Heathrow? How do you do that?" Hatcher said, foreseeing a future airport arrivals hall with five-hour security checks.
Even that scenario, he said, could lead to terror attacks — detonating bombs in an airport terminal, not on a plane. "You can carry a bag into the center of an airport with thousands of people around you before you are ever screened. That, too, must change," he said.

Well, I guess we'll all just have to take the bus from now on. Er, maybe not ...

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore"

Here's something I just couldn't write about before on this blog because I felt it was just too negative -- though my slogan at the top hints at it.
I'm talking about "the dying of the light."
After the 2004 election, in my heart of hearts I believed that the United States was dying, that the light from the shining city on the hill was extinguished.
Now, I didn't feel this same despair about Harper becoming Prime Minister last winter, because even though I disagree with the Conservative party's policies, I do not feel they are aiming to destroy the Canadian parliamentary system and justice system and electoral system. Though Harper is stubborn and judgmental, he actually does mean well (I think) and he does listen (eventually).
But the Bush administration does not. They pride themselves on not paying any attention to people who disagree with them. And Bush himself is a mental case, not to mention Cheney...
So since 2004 I have believed that the re-election of Bush, even though by hook and by crook, showed that just too many Americans had drunk the neocon Koolaid.
And with another four years to consolidate the lies and ruin the civil service and start more wars and promote more divisiveness and hatred, I believed the Bush administration would by 2008 have such a stranglehold on the American psyche that ordinary Americans would, in a spasm of hopelessness and fear, willingly abandon two of the greatest and most inspirational documents ever written, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, without a backward glance in a pellmell rush toward the illusory safety of dictatorship.
And maybe this could still happen.
But beginning last summer, just one year ago, one grieving mother showed up Bush for a fool. Then a drowned city showed up the heartlessness of the whole Bush administration, the guys who had talked so big about being the grown-ups. Americans became increasingly uncomfortable about being spied on by incompetent religious zealots. After a century of thinking of themselves as the good guys, Americans also became increasingly uncomfortable about finding themselves on the bad guy side of torture and secret prisons and Guantanamo and judicial toadying and planted news stories. The Bush administration still hasn't found Bin Laden, and they still haven't won in Afghanistan. Finally -- and unforgiveably as far as Americans are concerned -- the Bush administration has blustered and talked big but has proven itself incapable of actually controlling or even influencing North Korea, or Venezuela , or Hezbollah, or Hamas, or Iran, or Israel. And the one country that America has tried to take control of directly, Iraq, has disintegrated into a grotesque horror show which is apparently only successful in turning American soldiers into inhuman monsters.
Today, 144,000 people in Connecticut said NO! "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take this anymore!"
It's not the end, or the beginning of the end. But perhaps it is the end of the beginning.

Great line of the day

From Billmon

Bye-Bye, mein Lieber Herr.
Farewell, mein Lieber Herr.
It was a fine affair,
But now it's over.
And though I used to care,
I need the open air.
You're better off without me,
Mein Herr.

From Cabaret

Ogden would have loved this photo

A one-L Lama is a priest.
A two-L Llama is a beast.
And I would bet a pink pajama
There's no such thing as a three-L Lama.

(AP photo)

Great line of the day

When I want military strategy analysis, I go to Galloping Beaver -- Dave sums up Israel's dilemma:

. . . they failed to assess the weaknesses of air power. The greatest of those weaknesses being that air strikes require high-grade intelligence to direct the pilot and the weapon to the proper target. And clearly, the intelligence isn't there, because if it was, the rockets which keep finding their way to northern Israel would have stopped long ago . . . It is now faced with another problem. It's army is much less prepared for a fight than it needs to be to take on Hezbollah . . . it appears the IDF relied less on good intelligence and more on the effect of less than accurate bombing in an attempt to bring Hezbollah to heel. All they have done is incur the wrath of the civilized world and driven large numbers of the Lebanese population into the arms of Hezbollah.

Emphasis mine.

Who's sorry now?

Billmon asks why Hezbollah is apparently ready to keep on fighting while it now appears that the US and Israel want to quit:

Two weeks ago Lebanon's Prime Minister was demanding an immediate cease fire while Shrub and company were insisting that only a "lasting cease fire," leading to a "permanent solution," would do. Now it's the other way around:

Speaking to reporters today at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., where he is on vacation, Mr. Bush said, “Everyone wants the violence to stop.’’
“People understand that there needs to be a cessation of hostilities in order for us to address the root causes of the problem,’’ he said . .
Mr. Siniora said he opposed the cease-fire resolution in its current form, saying it would not effectively halt the violence. “It barely leads to a cease-fire,’’ he said, with tears in his eyes. “We want a permanent and full cease-fire.’’

Obviously, something has changed -- that something being the completely unexpected outcome of the war (unexpected by everyone but Hizbullah I mean) . . .
Whether {turning down the truce agreement] is because Sheikh Nasrallah actually thinks his hand is so strong he can bluff the Israelis back across the border, or whether it's because he believes a long, drawn-out war of attrition with the IDF actually suits his interests even better than a ceasefire (and to hell with the agony and death it will inflict on the Lebanese people) I don't know . . . the spectacle of Israel's political and military establishment dancing anxiously on the diplomatic sidelines, hoping the U.N. Security Council will step in with a timely ceasefire, while their Arab enemy impassively declares his willingness to keep on fighting, is a sight I truly never expected to see.

Whenever anyone talks about who has the greater determination to keep fighting and willingness to die for a cause, I keep remembering of Robert X. Cringely's anecdote:

. . . [while in Teheran in 1986 for another story, Cringely] decided to go see the [Iraq-Iran] war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world.

Yes, I would say there is definitely a willingness to fight and die for a cause.

Great line of the day

This is what makes Duncan Black (Atrios) a great blogger -- short, pointed, vivid and right.
Here he is writing about a NYT editorial which says the Dems shouldn't abandon Iraq but instead should urge Bush to get help from the Europeans and other Arab nations.
[Short pause while my reader stops laughing so hard.]
Black says:

But the choice will never be between Bush's 'pretend everything is okay' plan and the New York Times 'Pony' Plan . . . The choice is between Bush's 'pretend everything ok' plan and the Democrats 'Bush is going to keep fucking this up so it's time to start heading home' plan.

Exactly.

T'was slithy

In his post titled The Portmanteau Resolution, Billmon provides an interesting analysis of the UN resolution which aims to end the Israel-Hezbolla war. It's too complex to summarize here, but this is a part of the world that Billmon has studied for several years, so I think I'll go with what he thinks.

Great line of the day

DemFromCT, writing at Daily Kos:

. . . "muscular" foreign policy has its limits when the muscleheads running the place try to implement subtlety via cruise missle. . .

A cautionary tale

Oh that darned Canadian medicare -- just so inefficient and bureaucratic!
I can hardly wait until some Canadian politician privatizes medicine again so Canadians can also get service like this:

. . . Kaiser is a very large and old HMO, with a huge presence in the Bay Area and northern California . . . in 2002, a transplant surgeon . . . proposed to Kaiser that it could save money, and increase the utilization of its hospitals’ surgical capacity, by bringing the kidney transplant program in-house . . . As of mid-2004, Kaiser patients on the waiting list were informed that they would no longer be covered for transplants at UCSF or UC Davis, though they were free to go ahead and have them if they could come up with the money (roughly $100,000) . . . then Kaiser completely screwed up the program . . . [the Kaiser patients] looked like new names on the list, and so all of their accumulated waiting time, one of the main determinants of priority, would vanish . . . Losing seniority on the transplant lists wasn’t the only problem. Kaiser did very few transplants, compared to the number of organs which were available . . . in part because of what seems to have been mis-placed perfectionism or caution. These combined to the point of repeatedly turning down “zero mismatch” kidneys, ones where the likely compatibility over-rode considerations of seniority. This happened several dozen times at least — twice for one patient alone. Again, needless to say, patients weren’t told about this. In a “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” moment, Kaiser initially attempted to defend its program by pointing out how few patients had died after transplants — since they’d done so few . . . In most kidney transplant programs about twice as many patients receive transplants as die while waiting; Kaiser managed to reverse that ratio . . .

So if anyone is thinking that privatized health care invariably results in efficient, top notch service to everyone who pays their premiums, think again.

Beirut then and now

You have to see it to believe it:



From here via Juan Cole.

I guess Iran won, and without firing a shot

Tonight on Countdown, I finally heard an American media outlet give a straight story about what has happened in Iraq.
And the news is, Iran won.
It was Olbermann who said it. The transcript hasn't been posted yet so I cannot quote directly, but here is the summary from my memory:

The Bush administration and the American neocons were sold a bill of goods about Iraq by their so-called friend Ahmed Chalabi. They thought they were going to gallop into Baghdad in 2003 and watch Iraqis install Chalabi as Prime Minister. Now it has become apparent that Chalabi was working for Iran all along. So Iran tricked America into taking out Saddam, thus allowing Iraq to become a Shiite Muslim nation and new Iranian ally.

Raw Story also highlights additional news coverage on this same point, quoting from a former US ambassador, Peter Galbraith (John Kenneth's son):

. . . Galbraith further argues that the invasion of Iraq destabilized the Middle East while inadvertently strengthening Iran. One of the administration's intentions in invading Iraq was to undermine Iran, but instead, the Iraqi occupation has given Tehran one of its greatest strategic triumphs in the last four centuries.
Once considered to be Iraq’s worst enemy, Iran has now created, financed and armed the Shiite Islamic movements within southern Iraq. Since the Iraqi Parliamentary elections of 2005, the Shiites have made considerable political gains and now have substantial influence over the country’s U.S.-created military, its police, and the central government in Baghdad. In addition, Iraq is developing economic ties with Iran that Galbraith believes could soon link the two countries’ strategic oil supplies.
Galbraith says that, “thanks to George W. Bush, Iran today has no closer ally in the world than the Iraq of the Ayatollahs.” As a result, he argues, sending U.S. forces into Iraq, has in effect, made them hostage to Iran and its Iraqi Shiite allies and left the U.S. without a viable military option to halt Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons.

This story also notes that Bush didn't know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni Muslim a month before the Iraq invasion. Well, neither did I, of course, but then I'm not the President of the United States....

The offense is against all of us

I've heard lots of criticism of Human Rights Commissions and overreach and all that, and to some extent I can sympathize. But I do believe these Commissions, with their authority to investigate and bring charges to tribunals, are the best way we have to stop people from continuing to do this kind of shit:

. . . Erica Sheppard and Debra Van Eijk were dedicated, hard-working employees, with 14 years of Burger King work between them. But shortly after Seacastle Enterprises took over the restaurant the women, both in their 20s, were fired. Their fellow workers later told the tribunal that one of the owners, Shawn Dhillon, stated women that age should be at home starting a family. The tribunal also heard Dhillon described other female employees as the "short, fat one," or the "short, ugly one." . . .

Sure, I know the women could sue individually for wrongful dismissal (if they can afford to, that is.)
But this kind of language and behaviour is an offense against all of us and against Canadian society, not just an offense against individuals.

Yeehaw! is not a foreign policy

This is what I have been afraid of -- that the Bush administration thinks Iraq and Afghanistan aren't enough. They want the whole Middle East up in flames.
John LeCarre said three years ago that the United States had gone mad. He was right.
And if the rest of the world doesn't tell them STOP, then we'll all go down in flames with them.
Sydney Blummenthal describes the nightmare scenario in Salon magazine:

. . . The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war . . . Rice's diplomacy in the Middle East has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for "restraint," to categorically opposing a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a cease-fire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a "cleansing war" with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush's beleaguered policy in the entire region. . . .

Emphasis mine.
See? A "cleansing war"? This is an insane concept developed by people who obviously watched too many TV commercials while they were growing up --You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pesodent! and Mr. Clean scours like a White Tornado! -- the very same people who have spent five years now losing wars.

Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is attempting to salvage its credibility by equating Israel's predicament with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see the latest risk to Israel's national security as a chance to scuttle U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize the fantasies of "A Clean Break."
By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences -- from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot.

The United States does not, of course, have the troops or the equipment or the airplanes or ships to fight such a large war. What they have are nuclear weapons. To "win", they will need to use them.

Operation Freedom Eh

Over at Daily Kos, "Bill in Portland Maine" has a suggestion -- and I sincerely hope that neither Rummy nor Steve read Bill's column:

Not that anyone asked, but, yes, I do know how to solve the Middle East crisis. Since our military is stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan, and two-thirds of our Army National Guard units are not ready for combat, we're out of the picture militarily. President "Yo" Bush and Condi Rice are preoccupied with their treadmills, so ixnay on the iplomacyday. That leaves one option which has the full backing of Bill Kristol and the service-dodging young Republicans:
The Pentagon must sub-contract Canada to invade Iran and Syria.
We did a little checking and concluded that this move is a slam dunk. According to our friends at Mightbeaccurateipedia, there are over 7 million Canadian males age 15-49 who are "fit for military service." With their 114 Leopard battle tanks and 98 fighter jets leading the charge, they could roll into Tehran by lunchtime and have the entire afternoon free to be greeted as liberators with sweets and flowers. But wait...it gets better.
Once parliamentary democracy takes root in 6 to 12 days, they can then roll across the Jeffersonian democracy of Iraq (we'll waive the tolls) and swoop into Damascus. Then, with the two main supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas effectively neutralized, the terrorists in Lebanon will flee into the Mediterranean Sea and drown themselves.
Best of all, Operation Freedom, Eh will only cost $1.7 billion. So c'mon, Canada...it's time to step up to the plate and help us turn a few more corners.

If they told Emerson they would re-write the softwood lumber deal to our liking, Steve might even go along with it.