Remember

As we mourn the passing of the 4,000 men and women who have given their lives in Iraq, It’s important to remember who allowed this to happen.  I remember Sen. Robert Byrd, attempted to mount a filibuster against the resolution to allow the war but he was cut off on a 75 to 25 vote.

Byrd had argued the resolution amounted to a "blank check" for the White House.

"This is the Tonkin Gulf resolution all over again," Byrd said. "Let us stop, look and listen. Let us not give this president or any president unchecked power. Remember the Constitution.  As the senior Senator he made a powerful speech to call out fellow democrats to say no to the vote to go to war.

Here was the longest serving human being in the history of the United States Senate. Nine times elected to a six year term. He stood up during this resolution, and he begged his colleagues. And he begged the people.  All to no avail.  And look where we are now.  He was right.

And here is what Senator Clinton did:

Link to Full speech

You tube video full speech link

Damn the Chicken-hawks to Hell!

After just returning from burying an amazing grandparent who influenced the lives -- positively -- of over 50 members of a family, I return home to the news that over 4,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq.

Anger does not capture the anguish I feel.

Frustration, alienation, hatred does not begin to compare to how I feel about the murderous treasonous thugs of the Bush misadministration.

The man we buried a few days ago lived to be 92. Had lived in a house he built with family for over 50 years!  We told stories about him and his life until 2am. 

What kind of stories are the parents and loved ones of these soldiers going to be able to tell? 

  (picture from USA Today)

Damn this war. 

Damn the ones who lied, cheated, and killed to get it.

A Complete Part of a Healthy Breakfast

Comes with a side of bypass:



Found here.

One of the commenters there had the best response:

I’m surprised he hasn’t tried Deep-Fried Cigarettes.

Meanwhile, in the Bush War Prototype

Taking one's eye off the ball continues to pay dividends:

Nearly 40 trucks carrying fuel to U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan have been destroyed in two bomb attacks on the Pakistani border. Officials say about 100 people have been injured.

Local government official Muhammad Iqbal Khan said the blasts late Sunday were from two bombs planted in a parking lot on the Pakistani side of the Torkham customs post.

Hey, Lou Dobbs, Suck. On. This.

While Lou Dobbs and a whole host of Neanderthals bash immigrants, even in foolish wars that should never have been fought, those immigrants pay a greater costs than they ever have.

A young, ambitious immigrant from Guatemala who dreamed of becoming an architect. A Nigerian medic. A soldier from China who boasted he would one day become an American general. An Indian native whose headstone displays the first Khanda, emblem of the Sikh faith, to appear in Arlington National Cemetery.

These were among more than 100 foreign-born members of the U.S. military who earned American citizenship by dying in Iraq.

All for the vanity of old men.

4,000

Dead American's, mostly young, killed in Iraq. All for the vanity of people like George Bush & John McCain. And perpetuated by the political calculus of many Democrats as well.

That's a lot of punctuation.

Sunday Art Blogging

"Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel" ca. 1805

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (March 30, 1746 – April 16, 1828)

Bonus Goya: "The Nude Maja," ca. 1800

Oh, whoopee!

The awesomeness of the "Surge" continues:

A suicide car bomber penetrated tight security to strike an Iraqi military base on Sunday in the deadliest of a series of attacks that killed at least 42 people across Iraq. In Baghdad, the U.S.-protected Green Zone came under heavy fire by rockets or mortar rounds.

Seven people also were killed and 14 wounded in a suicide car bombing in the Shiite area of Shula in the capital.

A Very Pam Eastuh (2008 Edition)

In just a few weeks, A Very Pam Passover will be upon us once again. But today is that other sacred holiday, A Very Pam Eastuh.

Yeah, I just had to re-run this, because I'm nutty about that dress, which was last seen on a 6' 10" black man in four-inch, size thirteen Manolo Blahnick stillettos dancing on a bar 4AM and belting out "I Will Survive." Today, as all the little kids exit church sporting their Easter finery and jonesing for their fix of chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, and Peeps, they'll glimpse the crazy neighbor lady across the way arriving home from her big night on the town in the dress she took off that poor drag queen in a bet that she wouldn't vlog her next OB/GYN appointment. And when those kids see all that pink they're gonna dive like savages for the biggest Eastuh egg the Five Towns has ever seen.

Happy Eastuh!

What have the Kagan's been Wrong about Now?

You know how I love that family -- they're like the Flying Wallendas of Wankery and criminal appeasement.

Asked on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show earlier this week about “how fragile” the surge in Iraq is, surge architect and American Enterprise Institute “military analyst” Frederick Kagan declared that “the situation in Iraq today is, I think, not that fragile.” He then added that he believed Iraq would be “fragile” if America made “the mistake of pulling out prematurely.” ...

This, of course, contradicts Iraqi Jesus:

Kagan’s bold claim about the surge’s lack of fragility is directly contradicted by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who told CBS News this week that “while military progress has been made with a ’surge’ of U.S. forces, ‘progress in Iraq is fragile, it is tenuous.’”

In fact, the very next day following Kagan’s remarks, the Guardian reported on one key aspect of the surge’s strategy that is quite fragile: the reliabilty of U.S. alliances with Sunni militia. The report noted that “Sunni militia employed by the US to fight al-Qaida are warning of a national strike because they are not being paid regularly”

You won't be able to reach Fred today. He gets up about 4:30 in the morning to get in line for Easter Brunch at the local Radisson.

So he may not have noticed this:

Smoke rises from the U.S. protected Green Zone in central Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, March 23, 2008, after it was targeted by a series of rockets or mortars. Some 10 blasts were heard in the sprawling area in central Baghdad starting shortly before 6 a.m. U.S. officials said there was no indication of casualties. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed).

Some 10 blasts were heard starting shortly before 6 a.m in the sprawling area in central Baghdad, which houses the U.S. and British embassies, the Iraqi government headquarters and thousands of American troops.

I'm passing it on

It's from Fubar:



The man said to pass it on.

Ooooooooooookay

I swear this is the real caption:


A policeman drives a motorcycle over police graduates as they demonstrate their skills during a graduation ceremony in Baghdad March 20, 2008. About 900 policemen graduated from the national police school in Baghdad after finishing their training on Thursday.
REUTERS/Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud(IRAQ)

I did not know metaphors constituted a skill-set.

(via Fubar)

Rosemary Woods Vista

Everyone anticipated:

Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.

Typical Wankers.

Le Spitzer français?

I wish I had mad photoshop skillz like Attaturk or watertiger or driftglass, because if I did, I might morph President Bling-Bling into (now former) Governor Ding-Dong. Sure, the former's self-destructive tendencies are have not reached Spitzeresque proportion, but at the rate he's going, all Sarko needs is time.

(Speaking of the Empire State of Fornication, on and on it goes.)

Photo: Agence France-Presse

Alert Bill Orally

John McCain loves him some French over 'Muricans

What the hell's goin' on out here?

First I link favorably to a post at the Corner, and now Brian Kilmeade refuses to spew right-wing bullshit at FoxNews.

Turd Blossom

Think Progress:

In an interview with Newsbusters, former Bush adviser Karl Rove claimed that the conservative blogosphere “has much better quality and quantity” than the progressive blogosphere. Calling left-leaning blogs “unpersuasive,” Rove said “they are, most of them are hate-filled, obscenity-clogged rants of anger and hatred.”

That's bullshit and you know it, and by the way:

Fuck you!




Oh and "Hate-filled hatred"?

What other kind is there asshole?

This is the only time

I've ever linked to The Corner gladly without snark being involved. I disagree with much of the last paragraph, but that's fair, Charles Murray's conservative and I'm not. (And yes "the Bell Curve" is a terrible and sloppily done book, this is certainly not an endorsement of that)

But the rest of his analysis of Obama's speech is fantastic.

Whether you vote for him or not, it was an amazing and searing speech on racism, the long-standing curse of this country.

[T]he problem generalizes to everyone who tries to be honest about race, and now it has happened to Barack Obama. Take, for example, the treatment of his reference to his white grandmother. Of course you can go after him in all the ways that people have gone after him—if what you want to do is go after him. But suppose you approach Obama’s text under the twin assumptions that (a) he is trying to communicate with you, and, (b) your obligation is to make a good-faith effort to understand his meaning. I read what he said about his grandmother, and his words left me in no doubt about two things: He really loves his grandmother, and he was saying something important about race that I recognized from my own experience. I bet many of the people who have slammed him recognize it from their own experience too. The guy was being honest, and he was being right. What the hell more do you want?

Ah, but he was trashing his grandmother for political purposes, he was equating what she said with the much more terrible things that Rev. Wright said, blah, blah, blah. Yes—if you insist on interpreting what he said purely as an exercise in political positioning. No, if you go to his text with the intention of trying to understand what Obama thinks about race.

I understand how naïve it is to read a presidential candidate’s speech as if it were anything except political positioning, but that leads me to my final point: It’s about time that people who disagree with Obama’s politics recognize that he is genuinely different. When he talks, he sounds like a real human being, not a politician. I’m not referring to the speechifying, but to the way he comes across all the time. We’ve had lots of charming politicians. I cannot think of another politician in my lifetime who conveys so much sense of talking to individuals, and talking to them in ways that he sees as one side of a dialogue. Conservatives who insist that he’s nothing but an even slicker Bill Clinton are missing a reality about him, and at their peril.

I can’t vote for him. He is an honest-to-God lefty. He apparently has learned nothing from the 1960s. His Supreme Court nominees would be disasters. And maybe he is too green and has lived too much of his adult life in a politically correct bubble. But the other day he talked about race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more insight than any other major politician possesses. Not bad.

The surge

What the American Media isn't telling you...it's in big danger of collapsing.

Sums it all up

Truly:

Friday, March 21, 2008

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq has defeated terrorism and is well on the road to recovery after five years of war, a confident Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Thursday.

Then the lights went out.

Maliki, known for his steely nerves, tried to continue his speech. But his bodyguards would have none of that.

They hustled him off the stage,, possibly fearing that the power failure might be part of a plot against the prime minister.

Maliki's speech was an attempt to boost his nation's morale on the anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. But its abrupt end was a reminder of the obstacles ahead.

Iraqis must cope with frequent power outages, lack of clean drinking water, rampant joblessness — and the ever-present fear of violent death. Five years of bombs, bullets and sectarian slaughter have sapped much of the spirit from this troubled nation. Despite signs of progress, many Iraqis hold out little hope for a quick end to their suffering.

"The situation is very unstable," said Jassim Mohammed, 40, a Sunni employee of the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad. "I simply do not see any light at the end of this dark tunnel."

(via Holden)