Great line of the day

Digby describes how the American government is war-gaming against the "terro-hippies" -- peace activists, anti-globalization radicals, eco-freaks, animal rights activitists and all the other long-haired weirdos who first exposed themselves at Woodstock and have been threatening the very foundations of civilization ever since:

. . . it's only a matter of time until one of these terro-hippies gets around to killing you in your beds and writing Helter Skelter in organic beet juice on the bedroom walls.

Calling Blair, Harper, Merkel and Abdullah

It is time for the leaders of the world to step up to the plate and do something to stop George Bush from bombing Iran.
There must be a few world leaders that George Bush still gets along with and still might listen to -- the four I can think of are Tony Blair, Stephen Harper, Angela Merkel and King Abdullah.
Glenn Greenwald describes why neither American public opinion nor a congressional vote will stop the delusional Bush administration from attacking Iran if they want to.
Probably they will also ignore the 21 former US generals, diplomats and national security officials who are releasing a letter about how Iran is "not a crisis". A few other leaders have apparently spoken out so far as well: Hans Blix and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
So what is everyone else going to say? For most of the countries of the world, it doesn't matter because Bush and Cheney don't care what they think either. The Bush administration will ignore the Security Council, Russia, China, France, Mexico, Central and South America, Japan, the rest of the Middle East and the Far East. Even Olmert, having lost to Hezbollah, will have lost Bush's respect.
But I do think perhaps there is a chance that if Bush hears advice to back off Iran from the few world leaders with whom he still gets along -- I'm thinking of Tony Blair, Stephen Harper, Angela Merkel, and maybe also King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia -- that he might hold back.
Its a small chance, I agree, but it's likely the only one we've got.

Adapting to "alternatives other than democracy"

So is the US going to "win" in Iraq by "adapting" to dictatorship?
Stay tuned.
When you read a New York Times story about the Iraq war, you can usually get the real news just by reading the last paragraphs first. Here's today's example.
The story begins with 18 paragraphs about how awful things are in Iraq for the American military.
Paragraph 19 contains the news that even more American troops are going to die in Iraq next month because that's when the new street-by-street fighting in Baghdad is actually going to begin:

The Pentagon has decided to rush more American troops into the capital, and the new military operation to restore security there is expected to begin in earnest next month.

Hmmm - a Baghdad offensive in September? Just before the congressional mid-terms? I wouldn't put it past Rove to try to spin the increased casualties into a demand for support for their "bloody but unbowed" Commander-in-Chief.
But be that as it may, here's the bombshell revelation that I started this post to write about, the final paragraphs of the story:

. . . some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not survive.
“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month . . .

So maybe Chalabi will finally get himself installed as Dictator of Iraq after all?
I think it would be pretty hard for Bush to spin this one as just another part of the Bush administration's new "win by adapting" stragegy. But then again, "up-is-downism" is back, and Bush can convince himself of just about anything.

Teach your children well

Here are some photos from Yahoo news showing children of southern Lebannon -- who, with their families, appear to have ended the war just as supportive of Hezbollah as their parents are.
This doesn't bode well, I don't think, for the Israeli/Bush administration idea that the people of Lebanon will turn against Hezbollah as a result of the war. The photo cutlines in italic are from Yahoo News:


Aya Hussein Hayder, accompanied by her sister Mona, leaves the rubble that was her grandfather's house with a salvaged poster of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.


A Lebanese boy at the funeral procession of Hezbollah militant Moustafa Kamal Rakein.


Another Lebanese boy crying during this procession.


Children pictured in the back of a car flying a Hezbollah flag just metres from the Israel-Lebanon border.


A Lebanese girl waves a Hizbollah flag as she returns home with her family following the ceasefire, in the city of Tyre.


A Lebanese boy carries a Hizbollah flag as he walks along a road . . .


Three Lebanese youth sit in the street in front their destroyed building in the Hezbollah stronghold of the southern suburbs of Beirut.


A young boy recovers a Koran and a stuffed animal from the ruins of a house destroyed in the Israeli bombardment of Kfar Sir, a village near Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon.


A displaced Lebanese man carrying his son speaks with Hezbollah fighter in the Hezbollah strongholds of the southern suburbs of Beirut.


Lebanese people walk through a destroyed street, next to an anti-U.S banner, in the Hezbollah strongholds of the southern suburbs of Beirut.


A family drives past a destroyed building in a car decorated with Hizbollah and Lebanese flags in Beirut's southern suburbs.
Note from Cathie: See the professional quality of the printing on the "Made in USA" banners placed on these ruins. Nobody has to teach Hezbollah anything about PR and framing the debate, do they? And its not just in Beirut, either ---


An anti-US banner decorates the rubble of a building destroyed during the month-long Israeli offensive against Hezbollah, in the southern village of Abbassiyeh, close to the port city of Tyre.

And who is there, helping these people out? Why, Hezbollah ...

Lebanese Hezbollah supporters sweep the street in a destroyed residential area in the southern suburbs of Beirut.


Hezbollah social workers take information from residents in Beirut's southern suburbs . . . Hundreds of people went to Haret Hreik Public High School Wednesday to register the damage caused by Israel's one-month bombing and which the militant Hezbollah group promised to rebuild.

And on the Israeli side:

An Israeli man takes a picture of his son posing next to Israeli army tanks being loaded onto trucks at an army staging area near the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona.

Great line of the day

Well, its about time. Glenn Greenwald says Americans are finally realizing that terrorism is a law enforcement issue.

If George Will can come out and say that John Kerry was right about how best to approach terrorism and the Bush approach does nothing but increases it, then perhaps we can soon reach the point where national journalists will understand that there is nothing "strong" about wanting more and more wars, and nothing "weak" about opposing warmongering and advocating more substantive, rational and responsible methods for combating terrorism.

You know, the law enforcement approach isn't very romantic.
But even a cursory glance at history would seem to indicate that the nations which try to make war on terrorists, like Russia with the Chechnyans or China with Falon Gong, principally succeed in making a lot of martyrs, while nations which pass democratic laws and gather evidence and build legal cases can be successfull in putting enough terrorists in jail to give the country enough time to deal with "root causes" so that terrorist tactics lose their appeal.

Great lines of the day

Juan Cole quotes Patrick McGreevy:

VL Day?
It’s 11 pm in Beirut, and honking cars and motorbikes are cruising the Corniche while their occupants discharge Kalashnikovs into the black air shouting “Allahu Akbar.” If only we had electricity and lights, the triumph might be more believable.
. . . The Battle of Lebanon was a rude little war that played like a blockbuster summer film. This, perhaps, was the fundamental mistake that Israel and its US backers made: they underestimated the articulateness of Lebanon—a multilingual country, connected to a global diaspora, with a history so compelling that novice and seasoned journalists are drawn to its stories by instinct.
Hezbollah’s tactics countered Israel’s brilliantly before the world’s gaze. As the vastly more powerful force, the IDF could have crushed Hezbollah, but only by conducting a genocide on the Shiite people of southern Lebanon who support its resistance. And genocide, on global TV, is the one sin Israel cannot survive. Hezbollah is a designer resistance force, shaped by repeated Israeli blows against Arabs—designed not simply to counter its powerful adversary’s field techniques, but to infiltrate its soul and seek its deepest pain. It finds this pain like a heat-seeking missile finds its warm target because Hezbollah’s resistance, too, is born of pain. This is the madness we confront.

And the winner is . . .

Bush is arguing that Israel defeated Hezbollah. But that's not what his former supporters think. Glenn Greenwald finds these quotes:

National Review Editors- In addition to winning in Lebanon, Iran has the upper hand both in Iraq and in the contest over whether it will be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. If current trends continue, the Bush administration’s project in the Middle East will require the same sort of expedient we have just seen in the Israel–Lebanon conflict: a papering over of what is essentially a failure.
Dan Riehl So, it turns out the lofty anti-terrorism rhetoric of Bush was little more than what some speech writer wrote to be read from a screen. . . . This will embolden the opposition in Iraq and could lead ultimately to the destruction of Israel. Our war President has turned out to be a disgrace.
Paul Mirgenoff, Powerline Blog Over at NRO's corner, John Podhoretz contends that this would mean the end of the Olmert government. I'm tempted to suggest that our government, having seemingly lost its will to oppose (or even to let others oppose) our deadliest enemies, deserves the same fate.
Michelle Malkin Israel and the West surrender to Hizballah.Terrorists and the U.N. win.
Peter Brookes, Senior Fellow, Heritage Foundation, NRO Symposium If there is a clear winner in this war, it’s Iran.
Soshana Bryen, NRO Symposium Thus far, the U.S. and Israel lose; Iran wins.
Anne Bayefsky, NRO Symposium Kofi Annan’s wide grin, as he stood side-by-side with Secretary Rice on Friday, said it all. He won. But America and freedom’s cause lost.
Jeff Goldstein Israel and the US have been defeated. Hizballah will grow emboldened. As will Iran.
Pamela "Atlas" Oshry, interviewer to John Bolton Bush Administration Betrays Israel and America
Daily Pundit [in a post recommended by Instapundit] . . . Bush's proud words of five years ago stand revealed as hollow and meaningless. What happened? What happened was one of the biggest failures of leadership in Presidential history. Bush supporters will claim that Bush was done in by a liberal media and the ferocious hatred of liberals and leftwingers, but that is one of the things true leadership is all about: Managing and overcoming opposition in order to achieve the necessary goals - in this case, the destruction of world Islamist terrorism and the regimes that support it.Bush turned out to be singularly ill-equipped for this task, both by skill and by temperament. His public relations management was curiously hesitant and badly timed, and, of course, his inabilty to speak effectively in public was a gigantic handicap. His temperament, it eventually became clear, was hesitant, overly calculating, timid, and "compassionate." Compassion has its place, but not in warfighting. The Bush we know would not have pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He abdicated the hard decisions in favor of political maneuvering and meaningless gestures.

Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer both said this weekend on Fox that Hezbollah won and Iran has been strengthened.

Ouch! With friends like these...
Of course, these wingnuts want to see some warmonger like Cheney elected in 2008 -- someone who will gleefully "pull the trigger" on nuclear warfare just to kill a few hundred or thousand Arab teenagers and religious zealots who the American wingnuts have inflated into some kind of worse-than-the-Nazis-and-the-Cold-War- all-together threat to the very foundations of our civilization and to life as we know it, etc etc.
Actually, when I read these quotes, I was somewhat relieved that maybe, just maybe, Bush is NOT going to plunge the West into war with Iran. But likely I am living in a fool's paradise -- Seymour Hersch says the whole Israel-Hezbollah war was a dry run for a coming US-Iran war. Ths Israeli loss may delay this, but only if the Bush administration agrees that Israel actually did lose:

". . . the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that [other Arab] nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war . . . some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”

And thus we come full circle, back to my first reference to Bush believing that Israel won.
So when will the rest of the world step up and declare that the US/British plan to attack Iran is both criminal and insane?

"Criminal" rates of interest

Considering the profits being made by Canadian banks, they should be helping out in our low-income neighbourhoods instead of just abandoning poor Canadians to companies like this:

A B.C. Supreme Court judge says a B.C. payday loan company was charging 'criminal' rates of interest to clients borrowing to make it through to their next paycheque . . . 21 per cent interest rate and a processing fee of $9.50 for every $50 borrowed . . . $75 fee if a cheque is returned and if the borrower wants put off a loan payment, [a fee of] $25 for every $100 deferred.

I'm not surprised that the judge said this was criminal. I know companies are not in business for their health, but this is abuse, because these customers don't have any other options.

"The average Canadian has only one testicle"

It's an example of how misleading it is to average polling answers -- half of Canadians (the men) have two testicles, while the other half of Canadians (the women) have none. So when you average them, you get the ridiculous "answer" that the average Canadian has one testicle.
This news story uses this example to describe a critique of recent polling results about Canadian attitude toward the Israel-Hezbollah war.
Here's the dispute:

. . . the Strategic Counsel firm is standing by a recent survey that suggested only one-third of Canadians shared Harper's staunch pro-Israel stand. In the other corner, the head of the Compas firm says the prime minister enjoys twice that much support and accused his rivals Monday of conducting a "misleading anti-Harper poll.". . . . . . Compas said its rival invited an anti-Harper response by asking about "Israeli actions" - a term it decried as a hostile-sounding statement that swayed respondents.
. . . But the Strategic Counsel defended its two-week-old findings, and several other industry observers agreed the company had conducted a solid survey.

You be the judge:

Compas arrived at its conclusion that Canadians supported Harper after asking the following four questions:
-Does Israel have a right to defend itself? (82 per cent responded in the affirmative)
-Was Iran wrong to arm Hezbollah and call for the destruction of Israel? (69 per cent agreed)
-Was Syria wrong to arm Hezbollah and disobey the United Nations resolution requiring Syria to keep guns out of Lebanon? (68 per cent agreed)
-Did Hezbollah in Lebanon start the war? (Just 38 per cent agreed)
Compas then took those four responses, averaged them out, and concluded that 64 per cent of Canadians supported Harper's policy.
One industry insider sneered at that methodology. "That's certainly stacking the deck," he said. "Those four policies can't be (averaged). That's like saying the average Canadian has only one testicle." . . .
The Strategic Counsel concluded that only 19 per cent of Canadians believed Harper's position was a principled one, while 53 thought it was designed to mimic the U.S. stand.
Compas came to a very different conclusion. The firm asked respondents whether they believed the government's policy was designed because:
-It wanted to earn U.S. goodwill and protect Canada's economic interests. (21 per cent agreed)
-President Bush is a role model (12 per cent)
-Israel has a right to defend itself (19 per cent)
-Arab extremism is a problem (12 per cent)
-Hezbollah is terrorist (12 per cent)
-Syria and Iran are problems (4 per cent)
Compas then proceeded to add up the final three of those responses and come up with the figure 28 per cent - while leaving separate the President Bush/U.S. responses, which would have reached 33 per cent had they been lumped together.
Butler concurred with the industry insider's view that such methodology was unorthodox: "I agree with that remark entirely," he said.

The other problem is that the Compas poll didn't survey as many people:

The Compas poll of 500 respondents is deemed accurate to within 4.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The Strategic Counsel polled 1,000 Canadians between July 27 and 30, and its findings are considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

I wonder which firm will be hired by the Conservatives to do their next survey?

Canada in the 2007 Rugby World Cup

Hooray!

Canada earned a berth in the 2007 Rugby World Cup in France with an all-encompassing, 56-7, win over the USA Eagles in St. John’s Newfoundland on Saturday in front of 5000 passionate fans.
Canada took command of the game from the opening kick-off and never let the foot off the pedal until it had recorded its biggest win ever over the Eagles in this, the 41st meeting between the two.

Great line of the day

The Green Knight has a list of things I've learned on the internet(s). Here's one I liked:

Andy Warhol was wrong: everyone is not famous for fifteen minutes. Rather, everyone is Hitler for fifteen minutes.

Great line of the day

Cliff at AMERICAblog notes that the Republicans, Washington blowhards and pearl-clutching media pundits are quick to rail against the incivility of the public discourse . . .

. . . except when they’re smearing Ned Lamont, his father, ideas offered by people who’ve actually won an election, Daily Kos, those who were right all along about Iraq, Michael Moore, African Americans, George McGovern, George Soros, Moveon.org, Howard Dean, liberals, Connecticut voters, 60% of the country who oppose the war in Iraq and those of us who don’t need to project our middle-aged “issues” into support for firing rock-hard projectiles at people to prove we've still got it . . .

What a jerk!

That's our Steve!:

. . . on a recent trip, the Prime Minister was asked by a flight attendant to turn off his cellphone and BlackBerry. Mr. Harper declined. The pilot then made a request, saying it was for safety purposes. The PM relented. But, at the end of the journey, one of his staffers gave the pilot some news: His services would no longer be required on prime ministerial trips.

I'm sure the pilot was just as happy not to be flying with him anymore. So the pilot and crew are supposed to risk losing their nagivation instruments during landing, just so Steve can check his next appointment? Does he think the laws of physics will suspend themselves at his whim?
What a jerk!
H/T to The Galloping Beaver

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.