Exam humour

See them all at They didn't study

Steve Gilliard is gone

I learned so much from reading Steve Gilliard over the years and I am grateful. Jane Hamsher provides a vivid portrait:

...An inveterate reader, he carried an enormous backpack filled with books and couldn't fathom that I was trying to negotiate New York City in a rental car. We spent the afternoon together eating antipasto and shellfish, wandering the streets looking for WiFi, drinking coffee and gabbing.
It was a crisp blue day, the five year anniversary of 9/11 and it made Steve extremely somber. He was very much affected by the experience of 9/11 and resented those who wanted to appropriate it for their own purposes, and didn't think that anyone who wasn't there that day could ever understand what it was like to have their whole existence shaken in such a profound way. Like many New Yorkers, he felt quite proprietary about that day and it very much shaped who he was and fueled his passion for blogging. He'd spent most of the morning grumbling online at those he felt could not possibly know what they were talking about.
Steve was unique, and it struck me as odd how someone could be such a pragmatist and a purist at the same time. He was eloquent, fierce, irascible, passionate, brilliant and brave. And I'll just shut up now before I let the cat out of the bag and tell everyone how gentle and caring he came across in person. He'd no doubt be furious with me for blowing his cover.
Eventually I had to get back to Connecticut and the last time I saw Steve he was walking away carrying that backpack, off to lay his hands on another military history book he hadn't been able to locate. I offered to drive him but Steve, being the consummate New Yorker, looked at me like I was insane and walked off into the chaos of the city that somehow seemed to center him.

Miss you, Steve.

Sgt. Pepper Day

People my age talk about when they first heard Sgt. Pepper, like we talk about where we were when we heard that John Lennon died.
Tristero explains why the Beatles made such an impact:

...to you kiddies out there who want to know what all the brouhaha about The Beatles was all about, I strongly suggest you - hell, everyone should have it - grab the four Complete Ed Sullivan Shows with The Beatles . Now here's the thing: you have to watch one a night, all the way through, including Miitzi Gaynor sing what she calls "real music," and Frank Gorshin doing Kirk Douglas impressions. You will learn two things. First of all, that life in mainstream white America in 1964 was bereft of any positive cultural merit whatsoever. And secondly, this is the ideal society your average Republican politician has in mind for America, sans Beatles of course. It truly is hard to believe. You must see these shows in their entirety to understand how much this country has changed.

Great line of the day

From Digby:

Chris Matthews reminds everyone daily that voters want to vote for the man who seems the manliest (competence is for eggheads) but I can't help but suspect that the rest of the country is no longer so convinced that the right way to pick a president is to ask yourself whether he resembles a member of the Village People. We've just spent six years with the fake cowboy and look how well that's turned out.

Get real

The Washington pundits have to get real. Now they're all excited about Fred Thompson, an actor who was senator for a few years. Last week, they were all excited about Rudy Guiliani, a lawyer who was a mayor for a few years.
Pathetic.
Just try to picture either of these guys standing at a podium on a stage next to Gore, or Obama, or Edwards, or even Hillary...

Just the flu

Well, I think I have survived.
On Friday morning, I woke up sick, sick, sick, with a persistent pain in my chest, spasms and impossible to keep anything down, even water. But over the course of the day it got better. Then last night it struck again, such pain I couldn't lie down or sleep, finally dozed a bit between 4 to 6, then violently ill again. So I went to see the doctor, and ended up spending the day in emergency getting checked for gall bladder attack. Luckily, it turned out that I did not have gallstones, just some kind of infection that led to this awful flu. And now finally the pain has faded -- I can breathlessly report that I can drink gingerale now, and I even had a cup of coffee!
The writer Jessamyn West talked about how endlessly fascinated we are with our own pain, how we calibrate it and, as it begins to lift, we anxiously poke at it "this hurt five minutes ago, does it still hurt now?" She was plagued by migraines, and she wrote about how the world disappeared as she dealt with the pain, then it gradually resumed focus and meaning as the pain went away. "The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate."

Kicking it down the road

One Friedman Unit after another.
Did someone say something about September being some sort of deadline for "progress" in Iraq? Why, perish the thought!
They're now kicking the Iraq "deadline" to 2008! Here's Bill Kristol this morning:

. . . Petraeus and Odierno assume that if they can sustain the surge through the beginning of 2008, at that point, maybe there will be enough Iraqi forces that we can begin to drawdown.

Or maybe they meant September, 2008 all along? Yeah, that's right...

Great line of the day

From Atrios:

A very frustrating thing over the past few years has been our elite leaders' failure to understand what was going on in Iraq. Bush had declared over and over again that leaving was losing, and it was crystal clear that Iraq was a complete disaster, yet they still clung to the belief that either the pony would appear or that Republicans would force George Bush to start getting out. Neither has happened, neither is going to happen, and those are perfectly obvious things to this dirty fucking hippie.

It is increasingly bizarre to see blogosphere debates like this one over how us Librulls will defend ourselves in the future for the disasters which will occur when the Democrats force Bush to leave Iraq precipitously.
The disasters which will occur because Bush stays don't seem to be discussed: war between Iran and Israel; war between the US and Iran; deaths of millions of Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria; destruction of the US fleet and/or US army by Iran's airforce; oil going to $150 a barrel; Kurds declaring independence and the Turks invading; Saudi Arabia invading southern Iraq; all of the above ...
And in the end of course, Republicans will blame all these on the Democrats, because after all, the Dems should have forced Bush to leave before all these disasters occurred ...

First time

..by which I mean, the first time somebody said something that implied you were "old".
Just heard from my daughter, who went to a huge rave in Toronto last weekend. She told some teenager there that she was 26, and this child said "You sure look good for 26!"
I remembered how I felt when, at the age of 35, I was referred to by some young chit as "women your age".
Yeah, yeah, I know, you're not getting older you're getting better, yada yada yada....

Liberating

Stupidest sentence of the day, from ABC News:

Just this week, the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill Lybrel, for the first time giving women the option not to have a period. Period.
It's unclear whether women will embrace this new pill. . .

Emphasis mine. And amid gales of derisive laughter, I ask -- unclear to whom?
ABC seems to think there is something emasculating about women not having periods anymore:

As 21st century women dominate the universities and continue to climb the executive ladder, and metro-sexual men explore their feminine side, it's harder to define what it means to be a woman.

Its not a zero-sum game, guys -- just because women become more "liberated" doesn't mean men are less "manly".
Besides, so what else is new? For years, decades, women have been taking birth control pills continuously to skip their periods, and getting their doctors to prescribe the pill for this purpose "off-label". Amanda and feministing have more.

The Seven-Day-In-May Scenario

No wonder US policy on Iran has seemed sort of schizoid lately. It is.
And is anyone surprised that Cheney is behind the game-playing? Steve Clemons at The Washington Note describes what has been going on. And it sounds uncomfortably close to a Seven-Days-In-May scenario:

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.
On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney's team and acolytes ...a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.
This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.
The thinking on Cheney's team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran's nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).
This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf -- which just became significantly larger -- as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.
. . . the official actually hopes that hawkish conservatives and neoconservatives share this information and then rally to this point of view . . . to help establish the policy and political pathway to bombing Iran.
. . . Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake by aligning himself with the policy course that Condoleezza Rice, Bob Gates, Michael Hayden and McConnell have sculpted.
According to this official, Cheney believes that Bush can not be counted on to make the "right decision" when it comes to dealing with Iran and thus Cheney believes that he must tie the President's hands . . . Cheney is saying that Bush is making a mistake and thus needs to have the choices before him narrowed.

You know, in any other American administration, this would be treason.
This type of thing has happened in the past -- Truman fired MacArthur for trying to pull the US into a war against China; Iran-Contra was about the Pentagon running a foreign policy against Congressional funding restrictions.
But this is far beyond Iran-Contra. This is the vice-president running a foreign policy against the President.
Can anyone imagine Lyndon Johnson sneaking around behind Kennedy's back, trying to get Mexico to start a war against Cuba?
Or does anyone think Daddy Bush would have tolerated for one second Dan Quayle muscling Columbia into starting a war against Venezuela?
But it doesn't take any imagination at all to think of Cheney pushing Israel to start a war against Iran, to cut off Bush's options for avoiding another war in the Middle East.
And does anyone think that Bush has the spine to deal with this? Or will we see another "My Pet Goat" moment, where Bush sits frozen in fear and indecision while Cheney takes over running the country?

Murtha's explanation

Finally, an explanation from the Democrats about the war funding bill that makes some sense. From John Murtha:

. . . Some have suggested that since the president refuses to compromise, Democrats should refuse to send him anything. I disagree. There is a point when the money for our troops in Iraq will run out, and when it does, our men and women serving courageously in Iraq will be the ones who will suffer, not this president.
Patience has run out and I feel a change in direction happening within the chambers of Congress. While we don't have the votes right now to change the president's policy, I believe that come September we will have the votes from both Democrats and Republicans to change policy and direction . . .

I don't know whether I agree with him, but he is putting the responsibility for continuing the Iraq War where it belongs, with the Republicans.
At least he's not implying that he's afraid Bush will call him names.

Discrimination

Echidne reports on a recent speech by Newt Gingrich:

"Basic fairness demands that religious beliefs deserve a chance to be heard," he said in the 26-minute speech. "It is wrong to single out those who believe in God for discrimination. Yet today, it is impossible to miss the discrimination against religious believers."

So nice of Gingrich to worry about the Wiccans and the Muslims, probably the two religions whose believers may face anti-religious discrimination in their daily lives in this country.

Photo of the day

From the Faces of Grief blog:

An Iraqi child looks through a shrapnel ridded glass shop window in Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, April 26, 2007 . . . (AP Photo/Adil al-Khazali)

Great line of the day

Bill Scher sums up the latest news that the Bush administration (ie Cheney and Elliot Abrams) are supporting, either directly or though Prince Bandar, Sunni Muslim groups targeting Shia Muslims in Lebannon and Iran:

...the Bush administration is supporting Sunni terrorist outfits with the goal of fostering sectarian violence -- a strategy that undermines any claim to promoting freedom and stability abroad.