General Petraeus has a boss, CENTCOM Commander Admiral William Fallon, and he told his subordinate in March that, “[Petraeus, you're] an ass-kissing little chickenshit. I hate people like that.” ~~ Two suicide bombings that killed (at least) 50 people in Algeria last weekend were carried out by the North Africa wing of al-Qaeda. ~~ Senator Obama (campaign speech): “I opposed this war from the beginning. I opposed the war in 2002. I opposed it in 2003. I opposed it in 2004. I opposed it in 2005. I opposed it in 2006. I introduced a plan in January to remove all of our combat brigades by next March. And I am here to say that we have to begin to end this war now.” ~~ Since 2001, health insurance premiums for US families are up 78%. ~~ In pill-popping news, a study based on data from a National Center for Health Statistics survey discovered that, “the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 4000% from 1994-2003.” ~~ “The Department of Justice’s Voting Section is pressuring 10 states to purge voter rolls before the 2008 election based on statistics that former Voting Section attorneys and other experts say are flawed and do not confirm that those states have more voter registrations than eligible voters, as the department alleges.” ~~ A study showed that in 38 states, “conservative columns reach more readers in total than progressive columns.” ~~ And finally, for all those folks who like to complain about ‘liberal academia’ – Erwin Chemerinsky (Legal Affairs magazine named him one of the ‘top 20 legal thinkers in America’ in 2005), hired as the dean of a new law school at the University of California at Irvine a week ago, and has now been fired by the chancellor because, “he had not been aware of how Chemerinsky’s political views would make him a target for criticism from conservatives”; Chemerinsky replies, “I’m angry because I don’t believe anyone liberal or conservative should be denied a position like this because of political views.”
Eric the Midget Returns!
Howard: “Eric, you’ve got to know that it’s not proper to be calling Diana Degarmo’s mother at her house and constantly asking to meet with her daughter.”
My brother emailed me earlier today with a message titled – HE’S BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK – which read, “Make sure you grab the show tomorrow, Eric was back on today. He’s apparently been stalking another American idol chick but has been calling the ladies mom all day trying to get through to her… it’s a riot!”
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Eric the Midget, and his participation on Howard Stern’s show, I’ll try to fill you in. He’s a tiny guy in a wheelchair who loves American Idol, and has a tendency to get roped into bit after bit when he calls in. The song parodies they’ve churned out using his voice are all hillarious, but the genius of all this is how he’s compelled to call in, usually pissed off and ready to cut all ties, only to get diverted onto another topic, always funny…like one time he called in after not showing up for an Idol taping, where Howard had reached out to Jimmy Kimmell to score tickets for him and a friend. The explaination of why he didn’t show up, and how it’s bad for Howard to be asking for favors only to Eric make him look bad, is a great 15 minutes of radio, and then while that’s going on, a porn star who runs a web site that Eric pays $30 bucks a month to be a member of is suddenly on the line, and she has phone sex with him…the bit is only funny if you can hear his voice, but this is a scenario that will play out in real time over the radio.
He’d finally had enough a month or two ago and posted on the message board that he wasn’t ever going to call in again. The guy cracked, and it’s all over the fact that he’s suddenly decided to become a writer and has been stalking an American Idol contestant, hoping they’d agree to host Eric and his parents down in Atlanta for some kind of an interview. The point in posting this here, is that for some reason today and yesterday I’d been in a very un-creative mood, which is frustrating. A lack of sleep is part of it, but not the sole cause of it. Anyways, I started listening to the show tonight, and almost immediately I’m back in business. My mood has done a 180. Comedy is medicine in times like these.
Petraeus the Magnificent – Day One Review
The books are cooked, and Petraeus is going to be looking bad once this week is through. He’ll attempt to babble through his inquisitor’s time in the next two days, but it will only get tougher tomorrow. I watched a good chunk of the hearing today, and what stood out more than anything, was the Republican members either using their time to talk about how Islamofascism is the enemy in Iraq, how MoveOn.org clowned on their Petraeus love-fest (considered below the belt, and of course, their first concern is the reputation of the general…with that in mind, has anyone ever heard of a selfish Republican?), and/or their finest memory of when they met the general in Iraq, what they ate that day, how many neat-o military things they saw, the number of t-shirts they brought back with them, etc. Rep. Lantos steals the show in my opinion, if you only watch one clip, make sure it’s this first one!
Chairman Tom Lantos of the Foreign Affairs Committee gives opening remarks:
John Rove:When did it become patrioticly incorrect to speak the truth?
General Petraeus is a lying sack of excrement; Moveon.org has the facts here, http://pol.moveon.org/petraeus.html. Right wing pundits don’t even seem to care that he is lying but they seem to spend a lot of time whining that someone had to nerve to question their latest hero. In a time of war, especially when that war is going badly, the truth should be more important than the image of a general who is obviously not getting the job done.
Petraeus Stands By Disputed 2004 Op-Ed (I remember reading this, and in hindsight, it was a crock of shit and he knows it. Just like his stats and most of what else he has to say about the fact that he’s a whore for a draft-dodging rich kid whose used up people like him since the day he took office.)
Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Lloyd Doggett discussed the White House’s reporting this morning on the House floor:
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) didn’t have much success in getting Gen. Petraeus to go into more detail about how he’s derived his statistics for civilian casualties and sectarian attacks.
Open Football thread
For the AFC right now it looks like New England is the favorite and if Randy Moss does not turn into Randy Moss they should stay that way. With Indianapolis as the likely runner-up and maybe San Diego has a chance to crash the party.
The NFC is wide open, with maybe Dallas as a favorite, if TO doesn’t figure out a way to destroy the team. (Al here - I had to repost this picture)
Michael Jackson – Rock With You
(h/t The Largest Minority) From his ‘Off the Wall’ album…anyone want to argue that this album isn’t in the top 5 of all time? Even after I was 100% convinced he was a child molester, this album still remained in the ‘must have no hand’ rotation, and probably goes into the stereo about once a month at least. With the kids especially (disgusting irony), this one and Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ are a guaranteed good time.
A legal victory for republicans everywhere
A Fresno man’s conviction for soliciting sex from a sheriff’s deputy in a Roeding Park restroom nearly five years ago was overturned by a three-judge panel, it was announced Thursday.But the ruling, which threw out the conviction of Stephen Lake, 51, did not address whether the bathroom stings were discriminatory because they targeted only homosexual activity. Instead, judges Donald Black, Kent Levis and Debra Kazanjian ruled that prosecutors did not establish that someone was likely to be present who would have been offended by Lake’s conduct, an element needed to prove a crime took place.
Petraeus the Magnificent
In the United States, as opposed to Pakistan or some banana republic south of Texas, the military is told what to do by civilians, and that dynamic alone, established well before wars in Korea and Iraq could have been imagined, has kept this form of government legitimate throughout several quagmires like the one we’re in now. The reasons for setting it up like this are many, but whoever’s not acquainted with the concept, read up on Rome and how Caesar came to power. By their very nature, warriors are accustomed to getting their own way, and unless there’s enough muscle within the capital to keep it from happening, the military so cherished today, can and will cut off a government’s head for the sake of winning an argument tomorrow.
When I hear about General Petraeus, as Republicans tell it, the guy is definitely the first officer to have a clue of what he’s doing over in Iraq, and when he speaks, it’s like being one of those people who were lucky enough to see John Lennon sing before he was murdered. So saith Petraeus, on right-wing radio, satellite feeds and scribbled inside the Trapper Keepers of all these pathetic clowns calling themselves Republicans today. The emperor having been naked for a couple years, is now content to fondle himself until 2009, these cowards are literally lining up for a chance to shine this General’s shoes. How far we’ve fallen, when the party of Eisenhower turns into this, a group of confused cyborgs yearning to be taken advantage of by a strong, authoritative man wearing a uniform.
Now there was a President who was hip to the flip, and well understood the fact that if you allowed a military general to waltz into DC with the type of clout being handed to Patraeus, it was like hiring junkies to run methadone clinics. Indeed, you’ll inspect the place one day and half the employees aren’t well enough to work, half of the drugs have gone missing, the paperwork is impossible to decipher and the one in charge is telling you to take it easy, calm down, it’s not that bad. What else would they tell you? The recent headline said that Patraeus might be able to let go of 4,000 troops by next spring.
So the question now is, whether or not there are some Democrats who are prepared to put this guy in his place. I doubt there are, but I am holding out hope for Russ Feingold or Chuck Hagel to rise above the middle-management funk crippling the Senate so far in 2007. Carl Levin and Harry Reid are perfect examples, a couple of guys who would definitely buy timeshares from Shelly Levine. Tweedle-dumbfuck and tweedle-dumberfuck, blocking for all their “good friends” who decided to run for President, like this is a student council meeting over when to hold the bake sale. The whole situation is to history what diarea is to a toilet bowl.
What’s left is Petraeus himself, a wanna-be cut from the same cloth as Peter Pace. Never able to appreciate that while given a whole lot of lip service by the President, it’s still a situation where too much has to be done with not enough, just like it was from the start. A ridiculous war put on the credit card by a handful of stupid people, all of whom Petraeus voluntarily covers for, lies for. In fact, the only people who understand the role of a General are occupying the White House, and it shows. Watch this idiot take one for the team he’ll never be a part of next week, at the expense of a team he actually does belong to! You know, that Army we used to have.
Portfolio Update
Interesting times, of which I’ve got plenty of opinions, but actions speak louder than words, and so I sold all of my position in Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) and shifted all of that into gold (IAU). My five stocks fared very well in comparison with the market overall, both during the correction and in the recovery since then.
So now it’s looking like this:
$245,364-ENERGY-CNQ-Canadian Natural Resources
$246,283-ENERGY-PBR-PetrolBrazil
$245,583-TECH-ORCL-Oracle
$298,532-GOLD-IAU-iShares Gold
$100,344-HEALTHCARE-RMD-Resmed
I don’t have time to break it all out, but here’s the last update prior to this one (Sell and Buy as of last night’s closing prices for BAM and IAU) – Around 3% right now over 6 months, but I’m confident in this strategy…we’ll see.
An Inconvenient Truth
by Andrew Cockburn – published in The Nation magazine (excerpts):
In September 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell descended on the town to inaugurate a newly completed museum commemorating the 5,000 victims, making emotional reference to the “choking mothers [who] died holding their choking babies to their chests.” Inside, tasteful displays featured dioramas of huddled corpses and other evocative memorabilia, including the empty casings of mustard and nerve gas bombs now painted up in bright colors…Saddam never lacked for partners. He had launched his original ill-fated attack on Iran in September 1980 after garnering an indirect endorsement from Washington via the Saudis. The best the UN Security Council could do in the face of this act of unprovoked aggression was to issue a statement appealing to both parties to “desist from all armed activity.” Two years later, US official complacency was jarred by the unexpected revival of Iranian military fortunes and consequent Iraqi retreats. As a result, for the rest of the war US policy was geared toward preventing an Iraqi defeat by any means necessary.Iraq first resorted to chemical weapons in the mountains of the Kurdish north. In July 1983, the Iranians attacked at Haj Omran, a strategic mountain pass in the far northeast of Iraq. In a telling example of the ethnic and political complexities of that part of the world, the attacking force included elements of the Badr Corps, Iraqi Shiite prisoners recruited from POW camps, along with anti-Saddam Kurds from the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Masoud Barzani. Opposing this force were units of other Iraqi Kurds from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), headed by Jalal Talabani, who between 1983 and 1984 was allied with Saddam against the Iranians. The attackers were initially successful, until Iraqi planes swooped overhead and dropped bombs. Fighters in the area suddenly smelled garlic and soon afterward developed breathing problems and skin lesions, symptoms that inexorably spread to those lower on the mountain as the gas–sulphur mustard developed during World War I–drifted downhill…
To convince the Iraqi leader that we really were his friends, the Administration dispatched the President’s Special Middle East Envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, bearing a gift for Saddam from Reagan: a pair of golden spurs. In much of the Middle East, Rumsfeld was an unpopular figure–the US Ambassador in Damascus would leave town, after locking up the liquor cabinet in the residence, whenever he heard the envoy was on his way. But Rummy was popular in Baghdad, where Saddam’s men enthused that they regarded him as “a good listener” and “liked him as a person.” Rumsfeld did not spoil the party by giving chemical weapons more than a passing mention; instead he spent much of his private time with Saddam trying to sell his host on the idea of an Iraqi oil pipeline to Israel.
The following March, when news of Iraq’s revival of poison gas as a weapon finally surfaced in the press, the State Department condemned “the prohibited use of chemical weapons wherever it occurs,” while Rumsfeld was sent back to Baghdad to pass the word that the condemnation had been essentially pro forma and that the American desire to improve relations “at a pace of Iraq’s choosing remain[s] undiminished.” Meanwhile, US diplomats worked to quash discussion of the issue at international forums. No wonder Saddam exulted later that year over what he called “the beautiful atmosphere between us.” The “beautiful atmosphere” soured for a period when it emerged that the United States had been simultaneously selling arms to Iran…
The memorial inaugurated by Powell six months after the invasion was a priority project for Kurdish officials, built, so locals concluded, for the benefit of visiting dignitaries who came to view the exhibit and grieve accordingly. Halabjans, chafing at their neglect by their supposed representatives, were not impressed. On March 16, 2006, the eighteenth anniversary of the attack, they marched to the building and torched it. “Many delegations went to that monument,” one of the locals was quoted as saying. “They were paying a visit to the dead people, but neglecting the living.”