Hot Blackwater Psychokiller Action

Blimey! Me first embedded YouTube viddie. Viddie and hot shots of Blackwater-in-Action! Click + watch!

The Superior Insights And Knowledge Of Our Leaders

Okay, seven years in in running -- excuse me, having an involvement at the higher levels of foreign policy-making -- the administration's foreign policy, does this woman really first realize this crap now? When did anyone really believe Russia is a democracy or that its leaders want it to be a democracy? It certainly has done a fabulous job of creating a plutocracy.

I mean, on one hand, one hopes this is just some silly public pronouncement, a sending of a message, or maybe just a show for the base, as it were... I don't know....

The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow's commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.

"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

"I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

Or as it was put at TalkingPointsMemo, is there not a bit of irony here?

Rightist Spew

Some crap from Faux Nooz:

Time political analyst Mark Halperin asserted that if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY), Sen. Barack Obama (IL), or former Sen. John Edwards (NC) "get[s] in" to the White House, "I think they're going to have a come-to-Jesus moment where they sit down with Dick Cheney and George Bush." Host Bill O'Reilly interjected, "And change their minds." Halperin continued: "And get a little bit of an eye-opening about just what's on the line every day in that job now, post 9-11 -- how hard it is."

What is this crap supposed to mean? That no one can be president because it's so hard post-9/11? Or only Dems can't but any Republican can? And what's so much harder since 9/11? One would think it's the Iraq fandango (and the silliness in Afghanistan) that's made it harder. Or is Halperin sort of, kind of referencing all the myriad screw-ups of Our Leaders?

No, what it is is specious crap, nonsense some of the feeble-minded will tke seriously....

Sub-Saharan Africa; What's The Story?

I mean, other than depressing. Why does it so lag much of the rest of the world? Overly corrupt leaders? Insufficient education? No meaningful investment? What's going on there that the people can't see what's happening in the rest of the worl and find it enticing? Too long too much the outsiders?

Talk about inscrutable.

For example look at this and see if you can figure out why this is so. South Africa became a majority-led state under the best circumstances and inside of what, 10, 20, years, it's come to this.... Why?

The Radical Leftist Agenda

Greenwald:

[Quoting Bill O'Reilly: W]ould you support President John Edwards? Remember, no coerced interrogation, civilian lawyers in courts for captured overseas terrorists, no branding the Iranian guards terrorists, and no phone surveillance without a specific warrant.

Who could even fathom an America plagued by habeas corpus, search warrants, and a military that fails to beat, freeze and mock-execute its detainees?

[more]

What a Goddam shame it would be for our nation to embrace, well, these former American policies....

The Large Man That Is Our Beloved Leader

Actually, this has been an administration of... well, I could use the C word but why diss all women? Less just say Our Leaders' machoness is actually the bully-like bleating of the manque, not real men. They are so not the real deal. Pols are per se unmanly and these guys hit a new low for that low standard even as they, and their enablers, mouth off.

So here's what a big man Our Beloved Leader is, the largeness of Our Beloved Leader, via the War Room:

Over the course of the last year, George W. Bush has offered his personal congratulations to the 2007 Presidential Scholars, the Super Bowl-winning Indianapolis Colts, the 2007 Scripps Spelling Bee champion, the owner of the World Series-winning St. Louis Cardinals, the NBA champion Miami Heat, the Stanley Cup-winning Carolina Hurricanes and the NCAA champions from 21 universities.

So, a reporter asked deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto today, will the president be calling Al Gore to congratulate him for winning the Nobel Peace Prize? Fratto's response: "I don't know of any plans to make calls to any of the winners at this point."

Retire From The Military, Become A Traitor

From the Now He Tells Us Dept.:

In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Of course, as the rightwing bullshit machine would say in its faith-based way, What does he know?

A More Typical News Story, Reminiscent of Judy Miller

(Of course, in honor of my new obsession with Maggie Q, maybe I'll start refering to her as Judy M....)

This is more typical of the Times: How it relies on the thinnest straw to support a loony assertion of an alleged major sea-change:

In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology.

The hardening Shiite feeling in Baghdad opens an opportunity for the American military, which has long struggled against the Mahdi Army, as American commanders rely increasingly on tribes and local leaders in their prosecution of the war.

***

In interviews, 10 Shiites from four neighborhoods in eastern and western Baghdad described a pattern in which militia members, looking for new sources of income, turned on Shiites.

The pattern appears less frequently in neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shiites are still struggling for territory. Sadr City, the largest Shiite neighborhood, where the Mahdi Army’s face is more political than military, has largely escaped the wave of criminality.

Link.

Victory, it would seem is just around the corner.... Of course, the byline was a clue that the article was silly bullshit. If it was Dexter Filkins, then there would have been credibility to it... well, actually, so speciously sourced, it wouldn't have even been reported by him because it would have been too bogus....

Something, I Don't Know, Touching, Inspirational....

With death breathing down your neck, what can one do but keep on moving, one step at a time....

From the frigging Times (remember, when it's good, it's pretty Goddam good*):

Forty minutes before the start of the New York Marathon, Victor Navarra has always been in the same place, perched in the bucket of a rescue truck, surveying the starting line and sending down orders from 85 feet in the air.

“It’s like being God for a day,” said Navarra, 55, a retired Fire Department lieutenant who has coordinated the start of the race for 25 years. “I say something on the radio and it just happens.”

Each year, as the runners inched toward the race’s three starting lines, Navarra made last-minute adjustments so that the field, now numbering about 40,000, could safely leave Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island and set off across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Now, in the buildup to his 26th New York City Marathon, Navarra’s biggest challenge will not be making sure that instructions to the runners are broadcast in seven languages or that 28,000 cups of coffee are ready for them. It will be living long enough to attend this year’s race.

He was diagnosed in 2005 as having malignant tumors next to his sinuses, a condition he attributes to volunteering at ground zero in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In April of this year, Navarra said his doctors estimated he had three months to live after multiple operations to remove the tumors failed to eliminate the cancer. In July, he gathered his wife, two daughters and two grandchildren to celebrate Christmas early. By then, he had already planned his funeral. And last week, even though the tumors have taken away his eyesight, he was on conference calls with the New York Road Runners, going over minute details for the start of the Nov. 4 race.

“His faculties aren’t failing him when it comes to the marathon,” said Mary Wittenberg, the director of the marathon. “It’s been a rock for him as much as he’s been a rock for us.”

The mutual dependency is not lost on Navarra.

“I’m not a doctor, but the fact that I have a reason to get up keeps me going,” he said. “I wake up every day and I say: ‘I’m alive. That’s a good start.’”

Although he can barely stand and a tumor the size of an orange inside his mouth has impaired his speech, he still tells stories about the races he has seen since he began volunteering with the New York Marathon in 1976.

“The setup at the start was about six card tables,” Navarra said. “We’d cut a hole in the fence and send the runners onto the bridge with arrows painted on pieces of wood to tell them where to go.”

As the race grew from 2,000 runners to nearly 20 times that, he learned to innovate and is now credited with inventing the modern method to kick off a major marathon.

Now, on race day, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is closed to traffic shortly after midnight, leaving the organizers barely enough time to set up three separate starting corrals, each with its own athlete village that includes food, massage tents and the world’s longest urinal (285 feet). “You can make a mistake once,” Navarra said of setting up. “But you don’t do it again.”

Those six hours, between the time the bridge is closed and the time runners begin arriving at Fort Wadsworth, require a year of preparation. At every turn, Navarra said, a dozen things can and do go wrong. “I love challenges,” Navarra said. “If nothing went wrong, it would boring.”

He recalled the time, in 1993, when Mayor David N. Dinkins came to the start to watch the race’s founder, Fred Lebow, who was then dying of cancer, begin his last marathon. According to Navarra, Dinkins wanted a photograph of himself pretending to start the race.

“So, with 52 seconds to go before the start,” Navarra said, “Dinkins raises the air horn for the picture. All the cops saw this and they got nervous. The motorcycles start moving and adios. The runners started going out.”

It was his worst marathon moment. “When you work the whole year for that one second and lose it, I bawled my eyes out,” he said.

Navarra and Joanne, his wife of 37 years, have worked as a team to organize races throughout the country. But as much as Navarra enjoys the smaller events — he once did 22 in one year — New York is closest to his heart. That is why in 25 years, the marathon has become an afterthought to Navarra only once — on Sept. 11, 2001.

After 21 years of serving in the city’s Fire Department, Navarra had been retired for four years. “I got my family together, hugged them and made sure they were O.K.,” he said. “The next thing I had to do was go to the firehouse because I needed to know that I didn’t stay home and watch television. I had to do something for my brothers.”

His firehouse, Engine 40 and Ladder 35 at 66th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, was one of the hardest hit. Twenty-six men from the firehouse where he spent 11 years as a lieutenant set out that morning. Thirteen did not return.

“That’s my other family,” Navarra said. “I can never look through the list without falling apart. I can’t deal with it.”

On Sept. 12, Navarra was back in his fire gear and working the bucket brigades at ground zero, clearing debris and looking for survivors.

“Over the course of the next few weeks, I basically lived there, doing all sorts of things,” he said in his living room in Staten Island. “When I arrived, it was bedlam.”

Whether he was searching for his friends at ground zero or dealing with the countless donations that poured into the station, he tried not to let a second go to waste. He knew he also had a job to do for the marathon, which was only weeks away. Sleeping two or three hours a night, Navarra coordinated the start, and on the day of the race, with F-16s circling overhead and snipers on every roof, he was perched above Fort Wadsworth to make sure it went off without a hitch.

Navarra said he was convinced his exposure to ground zero’s noxious fumes and sweltering heat caused the cancer that left him blind and unable to walk.

He said he had been receiving regular examinations from the department’s 9/11 medical monitoring program and that commission doctors certified his condition as affected by the toxins at the site. For privacy reasons, Jim Long, a Fire Department spokesman, said he could not discuss or confirm medical records. Officials at the Uniformed Firefighters Association said they did not have access to medical records.

“I know I’m not going to live,” Navarra said. “How long I have, I don’t know. But I know that I’m never going to see my granddaughter get married.”

Still, Navarra has made a career of planning ahead, and he does not think now is a time to stop. He has already started thinking about the 2008 race. And even though he will probably not be there, his wife will continue the family tradition, hovering 85 feet above 40,000 runners.

(*It's just that it's rarer and rarer....)

A Little Nightmare for the Wingnuts

Wanted the Nobel Peace Prize to go to General Betray-Us.

Got President Gore instead.

Another Moral Exemplar....

An Illinois man who worked as a "Christian clown" named Klutzo was arrested yesterday on child pornography charges for allegedly taking naked photographs of young boys at a Philippines orphanage.

Yet Ann Coulter believes Christians are perfect. How do we reconcile the two...?

Under Our Leaders, America is Greater than Ever

(Illo link.)

The inference is, Jesus, maybe, uncontrolled, unchecked capitalism maybe isn't healthy for democracy.... And talk about an economy that ever-healthier reflects a distortion created by the growth of extreme wealth (but the, Our Leaders do not believe in facts or even reality).

Fox Bidness Journal:

The richest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.

***

The data highlight the political challenge facing Mr. Bush and the Republican contenders for president. They have sought to play up the strength of the economy since 2003 and low unemployment, and the role of Mr. Bush's tax cuts in both. But many Americans think the economy is in or near a recession. The IRS data show that the median tax filer's income -- half earn less than the median, half earn more -- fell 2% between 2000 and 2005 when adjusted for inflation, to $30,881. At the same time, the income level for the tax filer just inside the top 1% grew 3%, to $364,657.

Why We Love Micro$oft

"I'm one of those early adopters of Vista," said Yvonne Genovese, an analyst who was interviewing Ballmer along with fellow analyst David Smith on stage at a conference forum. "My daughter comes in one day and says, 'Hey Mom, my friend has Vista, and it has these neat little things called gadgets -- I need those.'"

Said Ballmer: "I love your daughter."

"You're not going to like her mom in about two minutes," said Genovese, while the crowd laughed.

She went on to explain that she installed Vista for her daughter -- and two days later went right back to using the XP operating system. "It's safe, it works, all the hardware is fine, and everything is great," she said of XP.

Genovese also argued that her experience with Vista is broadly shared: "What we're seeing and what we're hearing from users is a very similar thing. It's difficult to implement. What should we be seeing that we're not seeing?"

"Let's start with the end user. Your daughter saw a lot of value," said Ballmer.

"She's 13," Genovese shot back.

***

"I think there is a lot of value in Vista," he said. Ballmer went on to argue that the real issue for some customers is ensuring that everything they need to support the operating system -- such as device drivers -- is ready before they make the transition to Vista.

"When we initially shipped, fewer device drivers were ready for Vista than I would have liked, but we constantly worked with the device vendors to get new drivers available and implemented through our Windows update service," he said. And because of the changes made to the operating system to improve security, there were things some applications that vendors needed to update as well, according to Ballmer.

He then listed a number of a number of corporations that have installed Vista, including Citibank and Continental Airlines Inc. "We are in, from ... a corporate and enterprise side, an early adoption cycle," said Ballmer.

Service Pack 1 is in beta "and addresses a lot of the customer feedback," said Ballmer. Moreover, because of the "instrumentation" built into Vista, Microsoft knows what problems people are facing, what drivers are missing and what application compatibility problems they are having, he said.

Ballmer also said that Vista is bigger than XP, and "for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well."

"Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me," said Genovese.

Link.

Why We Love The Times

War Room tells us why:

The New York Times on Democratic voters in rural Iowa: They may be racist, but they're also too stupid to do anything about it.

From the Times' piece this morning on Bill Richardson:

"In Iowa, he is taking a page from Mr. Edwards's playbook and courting rural Iowans -- who, under the complicated rules of the caucus, have disproportionate power and who may be uncomfortable supporting a woman or a black man.

"For these conservative voters, even though Mr. Richardson is the first Hispanic to seek the presidency, his name does not give that away, and Mr. Richardson does not define himself as the 'Hispanic candidate.'"

Why Is This Man Laughing?

Because he shits on you all the time.

(Photo link.)

What Mortgage Crisis?

Fox Bidness Journal:

The mortgage mess is claiming a new group of victims: renters.

Across the country, a rising number of landlords are falling behind on mortgage payments, sending their properties into foreclosure, according to legal-services attorneys, local officials and financial experts -- and in many cases, their tenants are being forced out of their homes. Often, the tenants' first inkling of trouble occurs when they get a letter from the bank directing them to leave the premises.

[more]

(Photo credit.)

The Leadership of Our Leaders: A Class Act

Now do you believe that they hate us, that they only believe we're there to be used by them?

From the War Room, Our Leaders' compassion:

Two words for Rush Limbaugh, right-wing bloggers and other Republicans who say the family of a 12-year-old boy the Democrats have used as a poster child for expanding SCHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) is too rich to deserve government help with medical care: Tony Snow.

When Snow announced in August that he was leaving his job as White House press secretary, he said he was doing so because he "ran out of money." Snow made $168,000 at the White House and presumably received health insurance as a federal employee. Snow said that he'd made "more money" in his "previous career" working for Fox News, and that he didn't want to dip into what he'd managed to put away before coming to the White House just so that he could keep working there. "I made the decision not to say to my wife and kids, 'You know, we've finally saved up all this money and done these things, and you're just going to have to give them away so Daddy can work at the White House,'" Snow explained. "We took out a loan when I came to the White House, and that loan is now gone. So I'm going to have to pay the bills."

The clear implication: The $168,000 Snow was making at the White House wasn't enough to handle month-to-month expenses for Snow, his wife and their three kids.

So how about that 12-year-old? His family of six -- one kid bigger than Snow's -- has an annual income of about $45,000. Without SCHIP -- and without health insurance subsidized by an employer -- the family's only route to medical insurance for the kids would have been to buy it themselves on the open market, if they could have gotten it; they apparently tried but were refused because of preexisting conditions.

Yes, the family has equity in a house and a commercial property worth about $160,000, but anyone want to guess how long even a few hundred thousand dollars in equity would last if you had to pay out of pocket -- as the kid's family would have if not for SCHIP -- for the medical care for two children who suffered severe brain injuries in a car crash? And anyone want to explain how a family that makes $45,000 a year could afford the payments on the home equity loan that would have been needed to extract that equity in the first place?

Tony? You out there?

For Those Who Don't Learn From History, A Little History

Prof. Krugman's lecture of the day (and I thought Our Leaders were sort of unique...):

There have been a number of articles recently that portray President Bush as someone who strayed from the path of true conservatism. Republicans, these articles say, need to return to their roots.

Well, I don’t know what true conservatism is, but while doing research for my forthcoming book I spent a lot of time studying the history of the American political movement that calls itself conservatism — and Mr. Bush hasn’t strayed from the path at all. On the contrary, he’s the very model of a modern movement conservative.

For example, people claim to be shocked that Mr. Bush cut taxes while waging an expensive war. But Ronald Reagan also cut taxes while embarking on a huge military buildup.

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.

But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”

People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

People claim to be shocked that the Bush Justice Department, making a mockery of the Constitution, issued a secret opinion authorizing torture despite instructions by Congress and the courts that the practice should stop. But remember Iran-Contra? The Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, violating a legal embargo, and used the proceeds to support the Nicaraguan contras, defying an explicit Congressional ban on such support.

Oh, and if you think Iran-Contra was a rogue operation, rather than something done with the full knowledge and approval of people at the top — who were then protected by a careful cover-up, including convenient presidential pardons — I’ve got a letter from Niger you might want to buy.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s efforts to disenfranchise minority groups, under the pretense of combating voting fraud. But Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act, and as late as 1980 he described it as “humiliating to the South.”

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts — which, for a time, were all too successful — to intimidate the press. But this administration’s media tactics, and to a large extent the people implementing those tactics, come straight out of the Nixon administration. Dick Cheney wanted to search Seymour Hersh’s apartment, not last week, but in 1975. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, was Nixon’s media adviser.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts to equate dissent with treason. But Goldwater — who, like Reagan, has been reinvented as an icon of conservative purity but was a much less attractive figure in real life — staunchly supported Joseph McCarthy, and was one of only 22 senators who voted against a motion censuring the demagogue.

Above all, people claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s authoritarianism, its disdain for the rule of law. But a full half-century has passed since The National Review proclaimed that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail,” and dismissed as irrelevant objections that might be raised after “consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal” — presumably a reference to the document known as the Constitution of the United States.

Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”

But their movement is the same as it ever was. And Mr. Bush is movement conservatism’s true, loyal heir.

Moral Leadership

Minister dies, accidentally suffocated, tied up and wearing two wet suits, with a dildo... (read about it all here).

Query: Did his sermons reflect or reference his outside interest??

Where is the Honor?

Not here:

Two weeks ago, the Democratic radio address was delivered by a 12-year old Maryland boy named Graeme Frost. Graeme told his story of being involved in a severe car accident three years ago, and having received access to medical care because of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He said:

If it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today. … We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program. But there are millions of kids out there who don’t have CHIP, and they wouldn’t get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. … I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me.

The right-wing immediately condemned Democrats for daring to put a human face on the SCHIP program at a time when Bush was proposing a “diminishment of the number of children covered.” Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) — who has posed with children to advance his own political agenda — claimed Graeme was being used “as a human shield.”

Conservatives have more recently turned their targets on young Graeme Frost himself. A poster at the Free Republic propagated information alleging that Frost was actually a rich kid being pampered by the government. Among other bits of information, the post by the Freeper “icwhatudo” asserts that Graeme and his sister Gemma attend wealthy schools that cost “nearly $40,000 per year for tuition” and live in a well-off home.

The smear attack against Graeme has taken firm hold in the right-wing blogosphere. The National Review, Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Powerline, and the Weekly Standard blog have all launched assaults on the Frost family. The story is slowly working its way into traditional media outlets as well.

Here are the facts that the right-wing distorted in order to attack young Graeme:

1) Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.

2) His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.

3) They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.

4) Last year, the Frosts made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.

5) The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.

Desperate to defend Bush’s decision to cut off millions of children from health care, the right wing has stooped to launching baseless and uninformed attacks against a 12 year old child and his family.

Right wing bloggers have been harassing the Frosts, calling their home numerous times to get information about their private lives. Compassionate conservatism indeed.

Link.