"Why do they hate us?"

Hmm. I wonder. Could it be because of this?

They're finally getting it

Our troops in Iraq are asking--of themselves now, but, hopefully, of their commanders, including their commander-in-chief--"Why are we here? Who is the enemy?"

Job has nothing on the Iraqis

Now we learn that the Tigris River is poisonous--dead fish and dead birds floating along, covering the banks of the river north of Baghdad. And of course the river is a main source of drinking water for Iraqis--and flows south.

WTF?

Some posts ago I wondered "who's on first?" Now, with this latest madness among the Iraqi power structure, I wonder, "who's at bat?"

Pot and kettle

During the first three days of October, seventeen US soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Now that's an horrific average daily death toll--more than twice the average over the three-plus years of the war--but an even more horrific raw figure. Seventeen dead GI's. If a helicopter carrying that many troops went down outside of Atlanta, Georgia (or somewhere), the event would bounce every other story off the front page, at least for one news cycle.

But not over the last few days. The seventeen GI died unnoticed, the news of the carnage swamped by stories of Congressman Foley's folly.

Not that I'm not enjoying watching the Republicans twist and squirm, but in truth the left-wingers, including all AirAmerica radio hosts, have given time to only that one story, mimicking the right commentators during the Clinton scandal. So--Al Franken, Randi Rhodes, all you folks--don't for a moment think you've got the high ground on yellow talk. You're no different from the Limbaugh's and Hannity's. You're all in the entertainment business, pure and simple.

I missed my calling

I shoulda been a headline writer, so I could come up with lines like this. Wonderful.

If you wrote a novel with these developments

you'd be ridiculed as a sci-fi author. An eleventh-hour scandal about a Republican Congressman, soliciting sex from a teenage intern while heading up House's Internet solicitation committee; a growing unrest about foreign wars; a hard-headed president, with hard-headed advisors, resisting all. And now, we learn that the Senate is up for grabs, headed for a dead heat which, of course, would leave any significant political votes in that chamber tied--and with Cheney, the most hard-headed of all, able to cast the deciding vote.

Condi, you're a lying bitch

This monster has been given a free ride for too long. Now, less than a day after she denied meeting on July 10, 2001, with Tenet and Cofer Black about an imminent al Qaida attack, it turns out, oops, that meeting did indeed happen.

A new movement

Take a minute or two, and make your whole day.

McCain, as in Abel

This essay nails it. The "maverick" senator from Arizona is no moderate, no maverick. He's dangerous, and he's a media darling. Sound like some sitting president you know?

Who's on first?

When Iraqi police attempt to assasinate the governor of a province, you gotta ask yourself.

Flipping burgers

That used to be the job reserved for the high school dropout, the lowest rung on the service-industry poll. Well, if you scroll down (or, if you can handle reading) this lengthy analysis of how "free trade" is wrecking the American job market, you'll find this paragraph.

"According to Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, even McDonald jobs are on the way offshore. Augustine reports that McDonald is experimenting with replacing error-prone order takers with a system that transmits orders via satellite to a central location and from there to the person preparing the order. The technology lets the orders be taken in India or China at costs below the U.S. minimum wage and without the liabilities of U.S. employees."

The prospect of leaving my newly-arrive grandchild a third-world (or lower) economy is truly frightening--as is this article.

You know you've got construction problems

When a ceiling light fixture fills with fecal matter seeping through the floor above.

In case you wondered...

Here's what's going on in Iraq lately. The author of this blog, an Iraqi journalist, keeps track of the ongoing carnage throughout the country, not just the latest car bomb in Baghdad. It makes for tough reading, but it's necessary to get a true picture of how ugly it is, day after day, in that sorry nation.

The looming debacle

Here's why I got out of the stock market.

The Congress nobody wanted

Yesterday I suggested that Democrats may not want to take control of Congress, to allow the Republicans to stew in their own juice. Now, it seems, some Republicans don't want to control Congress either.

Who's in charge?

I thought we had a free press in America (not really, lately, but I still enjoy saying it), but now I know different. Newsweek has dropped both its cover and its cover story about the lost war in Afghanistan. Too tough for its American readership, but not too tough for the rest of the world. Could it be that Newsweek as self-editing on the eve of the midterm elections? Oh, no. Say it isn't so.

Should the Democrats lose the mid-term elections on purpose?

I've lately read a couple of essays (can't find them just now to link to) proposing that Democrats ought not take control of Congress in 2006, so that the ongoing misery and madness of the Republicans may continue unabated for two more years. This, the theory goes, would so demolish them that a wholesale revolt in 2008 would sweep in the Democrats to govern for the next decade or more. Further, the Democrats would avoid having to make the tough choices that are necessary to clean up the Republicans' mess of wars, deficits and so on, at least until they had a free hand to do so, while able to blame the Republicans for the mess, without equivocation.

As awful a prospect as it seems right now, it does have at least one redeeming feature. It lets Bush fester in the warmaking of his own making, in particular, to wallow in a decision whether to allow Iran to continue enriching uranium, after North Korea succeeded in getting the bomb. He would thereby have made two ruinous wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) and failed to disarm two of three of the members of the "axis of evil" he declared when he took office.

It's a breathtaking prospect. Two more years of madness, followed by a true takeover of the nation by peaceloving, fairminded souls who would govern in the best interests of all Americans, of all citizens of the planet.

Nevermind. I was crazy to imagine such a thing could happen, in 2008 or ever. So--elect a Democratic Congress six weeks, and impeach Bush/Cheney as soon as possible. It's already too late, but it would sure save the ratings of CNN.

Right on

Tom Tomorrow has got it right, absolutely. If Bush wants to call it a war on terror, the terrorists are surely winning. They're surely inflicting more terror on us than we are on them.

Chavez the publicist

Ya gotta love it.