Pay No Attention to MY Increased Usage of Resources...

Most people are just plain stupid! One third of this country believes the government had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. You can stand on a street corner and shout out the most idiotic notion in the world and there will be people lining up to follow. Such is the case with AlGore. What a dolt, and what fools he must think we are. His lifestyle goes unchanged (or accelerates), while he expects everyone else to ride a bicycle to work. Then he lies about his utility usage (which has only continued to increase). If he REALLY was trying to save the environment, he would be scaling back, not creating a ponzi scheme to fool the idiots into believing that he has purchased "carbon offsets" that render his usage as zero. Bullshit! He is buying these credits from a company HE formed. So, you might say he is acutally going to be making money off these "offsets". He is definitely "offsetting".

Thirty years ago it was the coming Ice Age (See NewsWeek 1975 complete with graphs), today it's Global Warming. The real problem is global scientists who are seeking funding for research projects. Create an emergency that only can be solved via massive governmental funding every few years. My study of this issue says that if everyone in the US parked their cars and started walking it wouldn't have an impact on global warming. How about this notion. . . weather cycles!

Update (by Gonzo)
From the Chicago Tribute, April 2001:

The 4,000-square-foot house is a model of environmental rectitude.

Geothermal heat pumps located in a central closet circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet deep in the ground where the temperature is a constant 67 degrees; the water heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. Systems such as the one in this "eco-friendly" dwelling use about 25% of the electricity that traditional heating and cooling systems utilize.

A 25,000-gallon underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof runs; wastewater from sinks, toilets and showers goes into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is used to irrigate the landscaping surrounding the four-bedroom home. Plants and flowers native to the high prairie area blend the structure into the
surrounding ecosystem.

No, this is not the home of some eccentrically wealthy eco-freak trying to shame his fellow citizens into following the pristineness of his self-righteous example. And no, it is not the wilderness retreat of the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council, a haven where tree-huggers plot political strategy.

This is President George W. Bush's "Texas White House" outside the small town of Crawford

Swift Boat funder nominated to ambassadorship

But first, he has to be questioned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. :-)

Kerry: Did you miss this: In September of 2004, Vice Admiral Ruth, with the Navy Inspector General, wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy that was made public -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, every major newspaper in the country carried, saying their examination found that the existing documentation regarding my medals was legitimate.

Did you miss that too?

Fox: I don’t remember those, but I'm certain at the time I must have read them.

Kerry: Do you think this should matter to me?

Fox: I'm sorry?

Kerry: Do you think this should matter to me?

Fox: Yes, I do.

About Dick Cheney

From IMAO...

After Cheney was targeted by terrorists while in Afghanistan, numerous urban legends about him have surfaced, some old and some new. Here's the facts sorted from the fiction:

Claim: Cheney could have been hurt in the bomb attack in Afghanistan.
Status: False

Cheney is invulnerable to conventional weaponry. According to DoD reports, Cheney can only be harmed by a direct nuclear blast or by magical attacks. Bomb blasts only anger him.

Claim: After the attack, Cheney was rushed to safety.
Status: False

Reportedly, Cheney formed a one man death squad after the attack, killing anyone he suspected had anything to do with the attack or may have known anyone involved with the attack. Everyone in a nearby village was found dead, all having been blasted in the face with a shotgun. In the center of the village was Cheney's usual calling card: a strangled puppy.

Claim: Despite his gruff demeanor, Cheney is a compassionate man.
Status: False

Cheney is a merciless killing machine and knows no emotion. According to Cheney's staff, he wants to kill you right now. When asked for a reason, the only answer given was, "Because he's Dick Cheney."

Claim: To protect his health after numerous heart attacks, Cheney follows a strict, healthy diet.
Status: False

Cheney's heart was reconstructed in a sole-source Halliburton contract, and Cheney needs to bite the heads off live kittens for fuel. The alternative fuel source is whiskey.

Claim: Cheney divorced all financial ties to Halliburton by insuring his pension.
Status: False

Halliburton continues to pay Cheney money out of fear. The amount is based on how much pain and suffering he causes in the world.

Claim: Cheney received five draft deferments to keep him out of the Vietnam War.
Status: False

The U.S. government decided not deploy Cheney in the Vietnam War to avoid charges of war crimes.

Claim: Cheney swallows small children whole.
Status: False

He chews first.

The Big Bang of Primaries

Dick Morris on the change in presidential primary dates. Bummer conclusion.

Only strong will survive this Big Bang

Nineteen states or more, with half of America’s population, are moving to hold their presidential nominating primaries on Feb. 5, 2008, a mere three weeks after the Iowa caucuses and two weeks after the New Hampshire primary. In effect, we will now have a national primary and the presidential nominating season will last only three weeks from start to finish.

The effect of this gigantic sea change will be that whoever is the frontrunner in each party by the fall of 2007 will be virtually certain to win the nomination because only the frontrunner can possibly hope to amass enough money to compete in half the country at once. Nobody but the likely winner in each party will be able to compete at that level on Feb. 5.

Money will now be king. Nothing else will count very much. If you can afford to run a national campaign three weeks after the first caucus, you will win. If you can’t, you’re doomed. And the polling that designates a frontrunner now will do much to determine the nominee.

Big states, including California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and North Carolina, are moving their primaries up to Feb. 5. They are going to be joined by a dozen smaller states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Kansas, Missouri, Nevada (GOP only), New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah. With half of the country — these states have a combined population of 145 million — voting on Feb. 5, many other states are sure to join the move and vote on that early date. After all, which state legislature wants to consign its voters to political irrelevance by voting in April or May? Before we are done, we will have America’s first national primary on Feb. 5.

The financial demands of competing in each of these states are so onerous that only the richest of candidates can hope to win. That kind of money only goes to frontrunners. As a result, the process will be sufficiently top-heavy that the candidates who enjoy clear leads in the polls after the summer of 2007 will have a virtual lock on the nomination before anybody has cast a vote on anything in any state!

The danger, of course, is that the frontrunner will have been anointed without ever actually holding a primary. The effect will be to strip the primary process of its power — for the first time since it became the central way of selecting candidates in the aftermath of the 1972 reforms — and give the power to designate candidates to national public-opinion polls conducted among random representative samples of the voters. It is the triumph of the pollsters and fundraisers.

So how will we choose who are the frontrunners before anyone has voted? How will candidates impact the polls in order to swell their coffers? The early primary date means that the virtual primaries that will designate the frontrunners will be held on cable television, the Internet, and talk radio. The Republican Virtual Primary will be held on Fox News, the Limbaugh, Hannity, and other conservative talk radio shows, and the right-wing websites. The Democratic Virtual Primary will be held on National Public Radio, PBS, a handful of liberal talk shows, the network news programs, and websites like MoveOn.org where liberals congregate.

But what happens if the candidate chosen by this instant virtual lottery has feet of clay that only become evident when he or she actually runs for office in a real election? The testing, seasoning, vetting, and whittling-down of the field, which used to take five or six months, cannot now take place at all. We will never know how the candidates of each party will perform in an actual election. Voters in each party will be buying a car without being able to take it for a drive.

In 2004, when the process was so truncated that Kerry was chosen as the nominee in March, the Democratic Party found itself saddled with a deeply flawed candidate whose shortcomings were not evident until after the Democratic Convention had nominated him. Throughout the fall of 2004, Kerry’s inability as a candidate became so glaringly obvious that Democrats didn’t give him a second look when he sought their nomination again this year.

The early primary dates would seem, at the moment, to confer an enormous advantage on the frontrunners in each party: Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. Their current leads in the polls and their consequent fundraising advantage make them stronger favorites than they might be if they had to run in a succession of primaries week after week.

So the new process, bequeathed to us by the advancing of the primary dates, will reward the rich, the pollsters, and the talk shows. And politics will never be the same again.

http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/DickMorris/022807.html

Gen. Kiley knew about vets' outpatient scandal

Posting this for Susan:

Gen. Kiley knew about vets' outpatient scandal
Veterans groups told the Army surgeon general about the shockingly bad mental health treatment at Walter Reed two months before the latest exposé, but there's no evidence he followed up.
By Mark Benjamin

Feb. 27, 2007 | Though he has since dodged the question in a television interview, the officer in charge of medical care for the U.S. Army was told more than two months ago that the Army's outpatient medical care program was dysfunctional, yet he apparently took no action in response. The Army's outpatient services include the substandard treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that has been the subject of a number of recent articles in the Washington Post and a series of stories in Salon in 2005.

At a meeting last Dec. 20, a group of veterans advocates informed Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, former commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and now the Army surgeon general, that soldiers returning from Iraq were routinely struggling for outpatient treatment and getting tangled in the military's byzantine disability compensation system -- and that their families were suffering along with them.

"We are here to tell you that our soldiers and our veterans, and some of their families, are falling through the cracks," Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, told Kiley at a meeting of the Department of Defense Health Board Task Force on Mental Health. Kiley co-chairs the panel, which was created by Congress to probe military mental-healthcare capabilities. "Hundreds and potentially thousands of soldiers are facing barriers to mental healthcare," said Robinson, "and are facing improper discharges" because of the Army's complex discharge and compensation system.

Robinson also warned Kiley, who ran Walter Reed from 2002 through 2004 and still has responsibility for it as Army surgeon general, that the scandalous situation threatened to become a media firestorm. "If we identify something," said Robinson, "we would much rather bring it to the chain of command than see it reported in [CBS'] '60 Minutes.'"

Kiley called the veterans' remarks "very important testimony," and allowed speakers to go beyond their allotted time limits, but there's no evidence that he has followed up. Since the Post stories broke, Kiley has mostly insisted that the outpatient problems are confined to poor building maintenance, and has denied any evidence of poor healthcare treatment.

Kiley's office did not respond to an e-mail asking him to discuss what steps he may have taken to address the shortfalls described to him last December. Robinson, from Veterans for America and a retired Army Ranger, said Kiley should have acted after that briefing. "I took this as an opportunity to testify before Kiley and put on the record that we knew what was going on and we wanted him to do something about it," Robinson said in a telephone interview. "It was that the system was broke."

Georg-Andreas Pogany, who is a retired Army sgt. 1st class, gave Kiley a similarly stern admonition at the December meeting. Pogany advised Kiley that for outpatient mental-healthcare treatment, there were "barriers to treatment on the ground, in the companies, at the battalion level, and in the barracks." Pogany said he had been frustrated while trying to help soldiers extract proper treatment compensation from the Army for their disabilities, a bureaucratic process that can take months or years. "After careful and thorough review of each soldier's medical and military service record, I am faced with the sobering reality of the enormous gaps in the systems of services and safeguards to prevent service members from falling through the cracks."

In a telephone interview, Pogany said these kinds of healthcare failures have been evident in the military throughout the war. "This is something Kiley should have taken care of some time ago," Pogany said. "Soldiers that are in the medical process are being treated as a disposable commodity."

Yet on Wednesday, Feb. 21, when both Steve Robinson and Lt. Gen. Kiley appeared on PBS television's "NewsHour," Kiley wouldn't give a direct answer to interviewer Judy Woodruff when she asked what he knew and when he knew it.

WOODRUFF: General Kiley, you just heard Mr. Robinson saying he met with you, he met with others in your office, and, yet, the officials were saying today that they didn't know this was going on. Can you square that for us?

LT. GEN. KEVIN KILEY: Well, you've got to look at the timelines and what we meant. I don't disagree with Mr. Robinson that the challenges that the leadership at Walter Reed have had -- frankly, since I took command in 2002 -- in support of the global war on terrorism and taking care of soldiers has required us to continually reevaluate how we care for soldiers, how we process the MEB-PEB process, the medical boarding process.

Kiley goes on to say, "This is a very complex set of problems, because the soldiers have got complex issues, mental, emotional, and physical."

The very next day, however, Kiley told assembled press at Walter Reed, "I guarantee you that the healthcare here is of the very highest order and has been. The issues ... have been about the quality of life, specifically some of the issues in Building 18, and and then the bureaucracy, which is not a function of letting soldiers languish. We're not letting soldiers languish ... Those great, young Americans deserve nothing but the very best healthcare, which I believe they're getting."

The heads-up that Kiley received in December focused on troops' neglected psychological wounds, including post-traumatic stress disorder. In vivid language and detail, the advocates depicted a widespread breakdown in which soldiers were unable to get adequate outpatient mental healthcare and were getting bogged down -- and sometimes treated unfairly -- in the complex compensation system that is supposed to remunerate them for their injuries. Those failures, Kiley was told, were stranding some soldiers with what can be life-threatening conditions without proper treatment or fair compensation. According to the presentations that day, these shortcomings are spread sporadically throughout the military healthcare system, as opposed to showing up as an isolated scourge at a place like Walter Reed.

Top Pentagon officials so far have mostly reacted with shock, professing ignorance of the problems prior to the Washington Post articles. "This news caught me -- as it did many other people -- completely by surprise," Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. said at a press conference on Feb. 21. Winkenwerder, Kiley's superior, also suggested that the foul-ups were not healthcare issues, calling the problems at Walter Reed "quality of life experience" shortfalls. (The White House announced plans to replace Winkenwerder the next day, Feb. 22, for what was described as a previously planned departure.)

If Kiley has not done much to address the problems he heard about last December, it would stand in stark contrast to the outrage other Army officials have articulated since they learned about problems at Walter Reed. "This is too important and cannot wait for a report to be finished or a review to be completed," Army Secretary Francis Harvey said in a statement last week. "We'll fix as we go. We'll fix as we find things wrong."


-- By Mark Benjamin



http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/27/kiley/index.html?source=newsletter

Commentary on Malkin

Yes, why does the WaPo cover Malkin when she bashes it so much?

Interesting speech

here.

Edit: sorry, I should have given more context.

With the numbers of our enemies mounting, it is fortunate that our military power remains without match. The United States' armed forces are the most competent and lethal in history. And so they are likely to remain for decades to come. Our humbling on the battlegrounds of the Middle East does not reflect military inadequacy; it is rather the result of the absence of strategy and its political handmaiden -- diplomacy. We are learning the hard way that old allies will not aid us and new allies will not stick with us if we ignore their interests, deride their advice, impugn their motives, and denigrate their capabilities. Friends will not walk with us into either danger or opportunity if we injure their interests and brush aside their objections to our doing so. Those with whom we have professed friendship in the past cannot sustain their receptivity to our counsel if we demand that they adopt secular norms of the European Enlightenment that we no longer exemplify, while loudly disparaging their religious beliefs and traditions. Diplomacy-free foreign policy does not work any better than strategy-free warfare.

Army Refiles Against Watada

As well they should. Here's a quote from the article

"Watada is the first Army officer to face court-martial for refusing to serve in Iraq, and his case has drawn international attention as the Hawaiian-born officer has allied himself with peace groups and repeatedly attacked the Bush administration's conduct of the war."

The guy doesn't deploy with his unit....courtmartial for sure.

How to explain things to libertarians

Chris Clarke, over at Pandagon, points out what he sees as the issues with Libertarianism as it currently stands. Don't know if I agree with everything he says, but a couple of the points look telling.

Gore called it, five years ago

This man should have been president. At the Commonwealth club in 2002, he gave a speech that clearly articulated the problems with what we were doing, and what the results would be.

I want to talk about the relationship between America's war against terrorism and America's proposed war against Iraq. Like most Americans I've been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend itself from the kind of focused, intense and evil attack that we suffered a year ago, September 11. We ought to assume that the forces responsible for that attack are even now attempting to plan another attack against us.

I'm speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country, which I sincerely believe would be better for our country than the policy that is now being pursued by President Bush. Specifically, I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century....

I believe that we are perfectly capable of staying the course in our war against Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network, while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international coalition to join us in taking on Saddam Hussein in a timely fashion. If you're going after Jesse James, you ought to organize the posse first. Especially if you're in the middle of a gunfight with somebody who's out after you.

I don't think we should allow anything to diminish our focus on the necessity for avenging the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling the network of terrorists that we know were responsible for it. The fact that we don't know where they are should not cause us to focus instead on some other enemy whose location may be easier to identify. We have other enemies, but we should focus first and foremost as our top priority on winning the war against terrorism....

I believe this proposed foreshortening of deliberation in the Congress robs the country of the time it needs for careful analysis of exactly what may lie before us. Such consideration is all the more important because the administration has failed thus far to lay out an assessment of how it thinks the course of a war will run - even while it has given free run to persons both within and close to the administration to suggest at every opportunity that this will be a pretty easy matter. And it may well be, but the administration has not said much of anything to clarify its idea of what would follow regime change or the degree of engagement that it is prepared to accept for the United States in Iraq in the months and years after a regime change has taken place.

I believe that this is unfortunate, because in the immediate aftermath of September 11, more than a year ago, we had an enormous reservoir of goodwill and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do. My point is not that they are right to feel that way, but that they do feel that way. And that has consequences for us. Squandering all that goodwill and replacing it with anxiety in a year's time is similar to what was done by turning a hundred-billion-dollar surplus into a two-hundred-billion-dollar deficit in a year's time....

I just think that if we end the war in Iraq the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could very well be worse off than we are today. When you ask the administration about this, what's their intention in the aftermath of a war, Secretary Rumsfeld was asked recently about what our responsibility would be for re-stabilizing Iraq in the aftermath of an invasion, and his answer was, "That's for the Iraqis to come together and decide." On the surface you can understand the logic behind that, and this is not an afterthought. This is based on administration policy. I vividly remember that during one of the campaign debates in 2000, Jim Lehrer asked then-Governor Bush whether or not America, after being involved with military action, should engage in any form of nation building. The answer was, "I don't think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. We're going to have kind of a nation-building corps in America? Absolutely not."...

One final word on this proposed doctrine of preemption; this goes far beyond the situation in Iraq. It would affect the basic relationship between the United States and the rest of the world community. Article 51 of the United Nations charter approved here recognizes the right of any nation to defend itself, including the right to take preemptive actions in order to deal with imminent threats. President Bush now asserts that we will take preemptive action even if the threat we perceive is not imminent. If other nations assert that same right, then the rule of law will quickly be replaced by the reign of fear. Any nation that perceives circumstances that could eventually lead to an imminent threat would be justified under this approach in taking military action against another nation. In other words, President Bush is presenting our country with a proposition that contains within itself one of the most fateful decisions in our history; a decision to abandon what we have thought was America's mission in the world - a world in which nations are guided by a common ethic codified in the form of international law, if we want to survive.

Edit: fixed year, link.

1000 of pictures worth 16 words...

Lessons from Vietnam

Rick Perlstein sees lots of parallels between the 60s and today.

McGovern-Hatfield failed because of presidential intimidation, in the face of overwhelming public support. Nixon and Nixon surrogates pinioned legislators inclined to vote for it with the same old threats. A surviving document recording the talking points had them say they would be giving "aid and comfort" to an enemy seeking to "kill more Americans," and, yes, "stab our men in the back," and "must assume responsibility for all subsequent deaths" if they succeeded in "tying the president's hands through a Congressional Appropriations route."

But isn't that interesting: There wouldn't have been subsequent deaths if they had had the fortitude to stand up to the threats.

Every time congressional war critics made Congress the bulwark of opposition to a war-mongering president, they galvanized public opinion against the war.

Dick Cheney helping Al Queda?

Read this article by Hunter@DailyKos, and see if you can honestly disagree.

Like most Americans, I considered American actions in Afghanistan to be a dismal but necessary act. An attack on United States soil requires, unequivocally, a disproportionate response; a valid military response in this case would have indeed been a removal of the Taliban from power, the complete and total removal of al Qaeda from Afghanistan and in any other countries in which they had found refuge, and a generous reconstruction of Afghanistan in such a fashion as to ensure al Qaeda's continued inability to function there, thus demonstrating that terrorism against the United States would both fail in its purpose, and would result in disproportionate damage to the terrorists and hostile nations responsible. That's how you prevent terrorism: you make the consequences worse than the possible upside.