Currently on Sabbatical

Sick

With this damn cold, cough, fever deal. I didn't make it to morning class, and I don't intend on going to my evening class either.



Sudafed to the rescue


Oh and for all you with hot Valentines dates, Happy V-Day. Unfortunately I will not be partaking in the festivities this year, maybe next year.

Crazee Eyed Killa

All jesting aside, the whole Dick Cheney shooting his hunting buddy story is a nonstarter, except it once again reinforces the notion that Cheney just doesn't care about the press corps, and in general, the public's right to know. Waiting an entire day before releasing the information (and having the owner of the ranch be responsible for the release) is just absurd. Speculation about the actual events of the incident is futile until more information is released, but the Cheney's staffers mishandling of the situation is very unprofessional.

Crazee Eyed Killa

All You Need To Know

Don't Do Meth

From a Meth User and someone who likes and continues to do meth. The most telling words are those involving friends.

So would you recommend meth to a friend?
No fucking way. I’ve even tried to get my friends to clean up. This shit is bad all the way around.

More convincing to me than any amount of drug research, testimonials, etc. If you wouldn't want your friends to ever start it or try it, it's not good.

So Uh Mr. Republican

Tim Russert: What's your response to Ann Coulter calling Muslims ragheads?

Will Russert ask any Repubs this question? Or is it only appropriate that he ask Dems loaded questions?

The Problem With the Entire Response to the Cartoon Controversy

Is that it has made the image of Mohammed with a bomb on top of his turban, a truly vile image, into some sort of symbol of free speech. One conservative shirt maker is selling damn t-shirts with the cartoon on them.

I will defend the right of any organization, corporation, individual, etc. to print, say, etc. any sort of message they want, but that hardly means I support the message. It's one thing to print the image in a newspaper publication in order to inform readers and viewers about what the controversy is about, but to print it up on shirts, and market it under the guise that it is a symbol of free speech is disgusting, and I would further add that anyone who buys such a shirt is a hatemongering bastard.

Gopher Politicians: Shameful

Josh Marshall reports that our dumbass Sen. Coleman (R) somehow managed to get his ass kicked by the utterly incompetent ex-FEMA director Brownie during the Senate hearings.

It's that damn Minnesota nice. We can't even grill Brownie properly.

Our Military Hero President

And his new bust dedicated to his service in the National Guard. Bush didn't really want to talk about his military career and he only thanked the person who raised money for it and the sculptor.



But he seemed so natural wearing the flight suit.



How the hell did Bush get away with that and Dukakis didn't?

Head of Shin Bet

Yuval Diskin

When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos. I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam

The head of Israelis internal security force is somehow claiming that a man who paid families of Palestinian suicide bombers and author of countless atrocities and massacres is better for Israel than the current status of Iraq, no matter how chaotic? I disagree.

Balance for the Sake of Balance

So I go to Drudge and what do I see but a massive headline screaming that Harry Reid Aided Abramoff clients from the AP.

Of course its misleading and blowing smoke on the whole issue.

Reid represents Nevada so its not hard to comprehend that he doesn't want Indian casinos expanding off their reservations and potentially cutting into Vegas and the rest of Nevada's healthy casino revenue.

And the whole part about the Marianas Islands is just ridiculous and an attempt by traditional media companies to seem "balanced" in the face of this overwhelmingly Republican scandal.

Middle Eastern Governments and Cartoons

Of course they fanned the flames for their own political purposes.

As leaders of the world's 57 Muslim nations gathered for a summit meeting in Mecca in December, issues like religious extremism dominated the official agenda. But much of the talk in the hallways was of a wholly different issue: Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

..........

"It was no big deal until the Islamic conference when the O.I.C. took a stance against it," said Muhammad el-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said that for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam.

He said the demonstrations "started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, 'Look, this is the democracy they're talking about.' "

The protests also allowed governments to outflank a growing challenge from Islamic opposition movements by defending Islam.

Basically you've got illegitimate secular autocrats or corrupt and very un-Islamic religious authorities ruling over the all countries in the Middle East who always have to meet challenges from the Islamists who oppose their inept governing style and/or claim their regimes are not "Islamic" enough. The people generally dislike the ruling elite and for a variety of reasons, but oftentimes oppose the elite on their lack of religious credentials, which then generally leads to the governments attempting to placate and co-opt the religious elite in their countries in order to maintain some semblance of support for their rule. Obviously their are exceptions to this system including the Algerian governments war with the Islamists in the mid 90s, or Syria's problems with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 80s, or Egypt's supression of the Muslim Brotherhood, but basic fact remains that Middle Eastern governments more often than not (even the secular ones) want to be viewed as pious Muslims.

So for the cartoon. Well it's a twofold benefit for the governments because not only can they "defend Islam", but they can stick a finger in the collective eye of the West, and both actions are beneficial because it deflects criticism.

As for the violence, deaths, and rioting I can only assume that this entire situation has spun outside of the government's ability to control in Beirut and Damascus.

As always read someone else, Abu Aardvark or Juan Cole

Good News in Afghanistan Category

US, Russia, and Germany cancel the massive debt that the Afghanis owed. Common sense policies initiatives are usually the way to go.

3 Killed 27 Hurt in Demonstrations in Afghanistan

People dying over a damn cartoon is absolutely absurd.
NY Times

Why the Boston Phoenix Won't Print the Mohammed Cartoon

Boston Phoenix Reason 1 out of 3:

1) Out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year publishing history.

This is the most honest reason imaginable.
Via Romenesko

The Stupidest Night Ever

Ala Choose your own adventure.

Hunger Strike

Rawstory

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

I don't feel too sorry for those individuals that deserve to be in Gitmo for legitimate reasons, but I must assume that some of the detainees that are being held indefinitely instead of being force feed should probably be given access to lawyers and a judicial hearing or even for starters charged with a crime. Just that nagging 5th amendment.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Gas Guzzling Ourselves to Death

Weaning ourselves off foreign oil is near impossible when you have oil men running the government.
Thomas Friedman

Listen to Mr. Cheney's answer when the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham asked him how he reacted to my urgings for a gasoline tax to push all Americans to drive energy-saving vehicles and make us energy-independent — now.

"Well, I don't agree with that," Mr. Cheney said. "I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. ... But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. ... This notion that we have to 'impose pain,' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there."

What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It's controlled by the world's largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.

..........

Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.

Those poor suffering at the verge of financial ruin oil companies really need some more subsidies. Exxon only made what 10.71 billion dollars in profit, the largest profit in US history, for the last quarter of 2005? Other oil companies haven't been doing too shabby either.

Last week, Chevron Corp. reported that its fourth-quarter profit was up 20 percent from the year before. Also last week, ConocoPhillips reported a 51 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit and Marathon Oil Corp. said that its fourth-quarter profit nearly tripled. Oil giants BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC have yet to report their profits.

And then there's Bush's SOTU speech which explicitly called for the US to reduce Mideast oil imports 75% by 2025. Which was an outright misrepresentation of the facts.

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

..............
"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

Our energy policy is atrocious. And Bush certainly isn't going to make it any better. And while I believe that even ignoring his "misrepresentation" of oil consumption from the Middle East, it looks like reducing worldwide oil imports isn't off to a good start.

President Bush's latest spending plan is unlikely to substantially reduce US oil consumption in the short term because it slashes $100 million from federal programs promoting conservation and falls short of the commitment in last year's energy bill to make vast new investments in renewable and emerging technologies, like hydrogen fuel and solar power.

Despite Bush's ambitious goal of cutting Middle East oil imports by 75 percent within 20 years -- outlined in his State of the Union address a week ago -- the president's budget calls for an 18 percent cut in programs aimed at reducing energy consumption, like financial aid to help needy families better insulate their homes and research to make cars use fuel more efficiently.

...............
''The reality in no way meets the rhetoric," said Dan W. Reicher, president of New Energy Capital, a Vermont-based renewable energy company. Reicher, deputy energy secretary under President Clinton, said the White House budget cuts ''energy efficiency and other vital programs in order to pay for renewable-energy increases. It's hard to see that we reach the goals the president has set."

.............

Though Bush's budget calls for a $381 million increase in spending on renewable energy technologies, some fear the money set aside for renewable energy isn't enough to make a real difference, while others say it depends too much on nuclear power.

The extra money for renewable energy is still 22 percent less than the commitments laid out in the energy bill signed by Bush last year, according to an analysis conducted by Democratic staff members on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The $195.8 million the president wants for hydrogen research, for example, is barely a third of the total authorized by the energy bill.

More money for foreign oil means more money to Saudi Arabia which means more money to extremist Whabbist charities which means more money for terrorists. So the response to this is... less money than proposed for reducing energy consumption, but maintaining tax cuts. Once and oil man always an oil man.

Clash

Reading items such as this article by Lee Harris always makes me shake my head at the utter foolishness purported by pundits and academics that are infatuated with this grandiose idea of "a civilization of people" implying that all people within a "civilization" share common values whether they be religious, social, economic, cultural, etc. and that each "civilization" acts in a coherent manner and are often at odds with other civilizations. In short it's an awful generalization.

The behavior of the Danish government does not suggest that we are in the midst of a clash of civilizations, but, rather, that we are watching a civilization that has lost its sense of purpose capitulating before a civilization that continues to believe, and to believe fanatically, in its own mission. A civilization that no longer believes in itself, and in its values and traditions, is no longer in a position to defend itself from the onslaught of a civilization that does. It is only in a position to appease.

It is hardly fair or even logical to extrapolate from the violent reaction of a small number of Islamic Arabs that they reflect a widespread consensus on the part of all "Arabic civilization" (whatever that is) that violence is an acceptable and encouraged response. Those men and women burning down embassies, calling for the deaths of the Danish editors, and rioting violently in the streets are religious zealots. Period. They hardly speak for all Arabs and to portray the actions of a few onto a wider population is ridiculous. And equating the Danish government's response, which hardly was as bad as Harris makes it seem, with some sort of capitulation on the part of the Western world is inane. Putting aside my feelings about "civilizations" I would hardly consider the Danes representatives of the West. Perhaps more fuss should have been raised about the cartoons in Western newspapers about the controversy but it wasn't. The lack of response doesn't imply surrender to fundamentalists and it's not a harbinger of the decline of the West, it just means the news media had other priorities. This entire "controversy" is so unbelievably stupid.

Random Stuff

At the Gonzales hearings today, which unfortunately I did not watch, even the Repubs were getting in on the action, and laying it down on the Attorney General.

Polemicist Christopher Hitchens and his case for mocking religion.

The Philly Inquirer is one of the few US news organizations, whether it be print or broadcast, to show the controversial cartoons depicting Mohammad. Huuzzza. It is a news organizations' duty to the community to inform and advise, and presenting the offensive cartoon to readers is an integral step in reporting the entire cartoon controversy.

Galloping donkeys. The Dems horsies are looking better than the Repubs in the '06 elections. What could be the cause, pray tell. War+Spying+Bush's domestic policy initiatives=favorable climate for Dem takeover. Problem= no $.

Tragic news: two planes collide outside my hometown city of Milwaukee.

"Beware the ides of March."Anti-War's William Lind purports that something crazy's going to happen to change the complexion of the Iraq War. He mentions three possibilities. First, that bin Laden is poised and ready to strike at the US based on Osama's message of truce. The next scenario being that the Shittes will turn against the US forces in Iraq and start raising hell, and finally that Israel will move to strike Iran's nascent nuclear program.

Real World+Road Rules= Even Worse Television

The Village Voice.

Genocide in Sudan

Ny TImes columnist Nicolas Kristof on the genocide in Darfur.
Ny Books

During the Holocaust, the world looked the other way. Allied leaders turned down repeated pleas to bomb the Nazi extermination camps or the rail lines leading to them, and the slaughter attracted little attention. My newspaper, The New York Times, provided meticulous coverage of World War II, but of 24,000 front-page stories published in that period only six referred on page one directly to the Nazi assault on the Jewish population of Europe. Only afterward did many people mourn the death of Anne Frank, construct Holocaust museums, and vow: Never Again.

The same paralysis occurred as Rwandans were being slaughtered in 1994. Officials from Europe to the US to the UN headquarters all responded by temporizing and then, at most, by holding meetings. The only thing President Clinton did for Rwandan genocide victims was issue a magnificent apology after they were dead.

Much the same has been true of the Western response to the Armenian genocide of 1915, the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, and the Bosnian massacres of the 1990s. In each case, we have wrung our hands afterward and offered the lame excuse that it all happened too fast, or that we didn't fully comprehend the carnage when it was still under way.

And now the same tragedy is unfolding in Darfur, but this time we don't even have any sort of excuse. In Darfur genocide is taking place in slow motion, and there is vast documentary proof of the atrocities. Some of the evidence can be seen in the photo reproduced with this essay, which was leaked from an African Union archive containing thousands of other such photos. And now, the latest proof comes in the form of two new books that tell the sorry tale of Darfur: it's appalling that the publishing industry manages to respond more quickly to genocide than the UN and world leaders do.

How many more times will we say "never again?"

Uh-heeeukkk huk

Po' rural Southerner Bill Frist talking like the "people."

"My job is to herd these Republicans," Frist says. "And if I have too many frogs jumping out of the wheelbarrow as I'm moving down the field, it means I've gotta be putting people back in."

Thank the Lord our once vapid Senate majority leader has finally put to rest his Princeton and Harvard pompous bastard days and now truly can look a man square in the eye and speak to his soul using the language of the common folk.