Can You Hear Me Now?
A Tale of Two Pictures at Shakespeare’s Sister
The Newshog’s Instahoglets
The American Street on SCOTUS
Fearguth on Coulter
eRobin on the corruption of Electronic Voting
political, political cartoons, cartoons,Mallard Fillmore, parody, satire, Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan, Support the Troops, Veteran/’s Benefits
Why I can’t defend PGH Council
The recent flurry of proposals to shrink Pittsburgh City Council are something that I want to oppose. As it is, the districts seem to be about the right size to a little bit large for effective retail contact between the councilor and the constituents, and thus empowering the machine. The city is divided into almost ninety neighborhoods that actually are fairly distinctive communities with their own seperate interests. Even dividing the city into ‘meta’ neighborhoods leads to at least a good seven or eight sections of the city. I really want to defend the City Council structurally at the very least, but they make it too difficult to do this with a straight face.
Via Jonathan Potts, the Tribune Review reports about the outstanding quality of representation on council:
Detective Brian Nicholas, who works in the city police’s narcotics investigation unit, was traveling nearby and responded. The two officers are brothers.
As police tried to calm fans, Koch pushed Joe Nicholas and said that Gary Bevan shouldn’t be arrested, police said.
Bryan Nicholas pushed Koch back, and the councilman tripped over a garbage can and fell onto a hillside, police said.
Combine this with Opie, the mayor of Shadyside, showing up for a party at 2:37AM to get his groove on, and the argument that Carslisle should not be impeached because there is no good replacement in the district, and it becomes real tough to defend the structure of council.
I must remind myself to read the Angry Drunk Bureaucrat’s Rules more often, most notably the following one:
Rule #16: “Politicians are not smarter than you.”
Milhous Fillmore
E Pluribush Unum! Circus Cyaneus araucaria heterophylla janissary hydrocele! Hemroidacus! Testaclees!
political, political cartoons, cartoons, Mallard Fillmore, parody, satire, Rush Limbaugh, Viagra, Pro-Spleen Wisdom, Jeff Gannon, Cock
The New World Odor
Thermate, with a pen tip to Peter at Blondesense… Many people don’t want to address the issue of what really happened on September 11,2001, or they will dismiss any questioning as ” tinfoil hat conspiracy theories”. However, The fact remains that there sure are lots of interesting questions that remain largely unexamined by the Corporate Media Conglomerates. Hey! Look over there! Isn’t that Natalie Holloway try to kidnap Britany Spears baby?!?
political, political cartoons, cartoons, Bush, satire, Apocalypse Now, parody, 9/11, September 11th
Pessimism on the 28 pt plan for peace
The Maliki plan for reconciliation in Iraq is a 28 point plan that tries to sidestep several deal breakers by handwaving and pushing off the decisions that need to be made to someone else at some undefined point in the future. In short, he is doing what has become the norm in the Iraqi political process for the past three years; pass the buck and duck from the incoming RPG fire.
The major point of contention is US forces — the plan is that there will some vague, undefinable success metric that will allow the US to pull out completely, or at least pull out the combat brigades, as the Iraqi military is designed to be a dysfunctional joke if it is forced to self-sustain for more than a couple of days of combat operations. And here is the problem.
The Sunni Arab insurgency has fought the US military and the Iraqi military to an operational draw over the past three years; they have achieved a continued downward spiral to fail statehood as they have exercised the one veto option that they have — armed resistance to the Baghdad central government. One of their primary intermediate goals is to get the US out of Iraq in all shapes and forms. This has prompted the major Sunni Arab insurgent groups to reject this overture. If the US leaves, they greatly increase their influence with internal ‘political’ processes.
The Shi’ite government knows this, and knows that their military has been repeatedly shown to be deadmeat against the insurgents and that the military has questionable and divided loyalties. For this reason, they need US troops in country and conducting combat operations for as long as possible. Therefore we have an almost unsolvable dilemna — the Shi;ite government needs to make an anti-US forces in country stand for the benefit of Sadr and his movement of Shi’ite nationalists and centralists, but they need several US divisions to hold onto power. Therefore the political process is still a joke in my mind.
I hope to be proven wrong, but punt the ball and pray for a deux ex machina intervention one or two friedmans later to solve the avoided and difficult problems has not been a successful problem solving strategy.
UPDATE Read this London Times article on the internal governmental tensions leading to hardlining the proposal before it is even officially released…
Bush to Employ "Jedi Mind Trick" Against North Korean Missile
This is the tale of two news stories - one involves the hard facts of REALITY, the other pure FANTASY.
The stark light of reality regarding the horrible conditions in Iraq broke through this last week in the form of a leaked memo from the American Ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, to the State Department. It was shocking for its detailed description of the dangerous and freedom-lacking lives Iraqi embassy employees faced outside the Green Zone. I won’t go into detail as I assume most of you have read it on the liberal blogosphere (if you haven’t, you can access it here), but let’s just say that if I were wearing the new khaki shorts my wife and kids gave my for Father’s Day in Baghdad, I would be a good candidate for a bullet.
While receiving large play in the liberal blogosphere, the mainstream media was relatively quiet about the Khalilzad memo.
The media has not been so shy about covering our second tale. The second tale involves the Bush administration’s chest-thumping claim of the possibility of using our “missle defense system” to shoot down any long range missile launched as a result of North Korea’s threatened test. This story is pure Bush PR spin and involves a tale that simply is not going to happen. North Korea is unlikely to launch a long range missile anywhere near us and, even if they did, we will NOT seek to intercept it and expose that our missile defense has a 0% chance of success. It has NEVER succeeded - not once - under real world circumstances and has an abysmal success rate even under the most meticulously fixed settings.
The “Jedi Mind Trick” has as much chance of success in taking down the North Korean missile.
2006-2007 Iraq Troop Rotations
The optimistic case as I have blogged before for US troop levels for the end of 2006 to the fall of 2007 was that the US could drop the occupation force to six brigades, all of which are fairly light brigades, and allow the Iraqi Army and Interior Ministry do the bloody and difficult task of day to day counter-insurgency, while the US provided the over the horizon intervention force and protected Iraqi borders. That was the optimistic view.
This optimistic view required peace to break out immediately after the December elections. It would have allowed the US to have a breather in the deployment schedule and actually rest the National Guard. However peace has not broken out, and the political decision is to do more of the same and hope for better results.
The DoD has announced an additional four Army brigades to the rotation. This is a heavier roster of forces than the first announcement with at least two heavy brigades. Some of these units (1st Cavalry Division) were deployed in Iraq from March 2004 to March/April 2005, and they will be going back on eighteen months rest. This is a pace faster than the desired reconstitution rate by roughly 25%.
So right now ten brigades are in the next rotation. This fits in with the mildly optimistic scenario. That scenario assumed an increasing ability for US forces to clear a town and Iraqi forces to hold it for ink blot counter-insurgency. That really is not happening that much, as US forces are retreating to their fire bases or are tasked primarily for self-sustainment.
It is important to note that so far no Marine brigades have been notified that they are being deployed. The II Marine Expeditionary Force has been alerted that it will be sent to Iraq for the next rotation. An MEF tends to be a division and support elements, but it is a flexible force, so we could see two or three Marine infantry regiments, but this has not been made explicit yet.
So we are looking at twelve or thirteen brigade equivalants being mobilized for the next rotation as of this morning, and it is probble that we will see more units notified for future deployment. This is the muddling through force. It is not a decisive force, it is not an invisible support force. It is a noticable target that so far its near peers have not been able to reverse or at least slow down the slide of central Iraq into a pre-modern state.
Bush & Zubaydah: The "Clear Vision" Problem
Kevin Drum points us today toward this incredible tidbit contained in Barton Gellman’s review of Ron Suskind’s new book:
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be….Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics….And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”
[Other unrelated bungling described, all of which is worth clicking the link to read.]
Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
This is the problem with Dubya’s inability to ever admit a mistake. To do so would require changing your path to fit the circumstances. Here, it appears, it was more important to continue down a path that involved torturing a mentally ill man (though one who probably had done some heinous things) and, more importantly, wasting time and resources chasing down every utterance being coerced out of this literal whackjob’s mouth.
Better that than admitting that Zubaydah’s value was overstated by the President.
Watch Bush’s Southern Strategy Supporters’ Heads Explode
Via Cernig and his wonderful readers, I came across the following video put out by the Bush campaign in 2000 in his attempt to woo Hispanic supporters. I’m outsourcing my commentary with full endorsement to what Cernig said, but I am just hosting the feed as a source of record:
Impeachment as an appropriate remedy?
Via 2 Political Junkies is the following from a Post-Gazette article :
It takes only 20 signatures from registered voters in a Pittsburgh City
Council district to launch impeachment proceedings against a council member.
According to today’s Post-Gazette, Homewood resident Phillip Martin began
circulating his impeachment petition against Councilwoman
Twanda Carlisle in the morning and had 17 signers by lunch that same day.
The P-G goes into more details about the mechanics of the impeachment procedure for a city official. It is an interesting read, but the most important detail for me is the following: Carlisle is up for re-election next year.
I am no longer a city resident, so I have fairly low direct stakes in this discussion, but I am a progressive who believes in clean government. The question I have is whether or not impeachment is the appropriate response to her behavior which can be recapped under the following points:
1. Misspending her walking around money to pay off supporters and family friends
2. Accepting dishonest plagarism as a sound deliverable from one of her WAM friends
3. Being “less than competent” as a council member
She has created at the very least an aura of impropiety with her conflicts of interest in giving out her discretionary spending. She has demonstrated very poor policy and political judgement in this area. I have no dispute about that. However, she is already up for investigation by the DA and ethics investigation as it is for these two areas. She is also due for a primary campaign in eleven months.
The City Council of Pittsburgh has a whole lot less power this year than it did three years ago because its spending authority is greatly restricted by the ACT 47 and IGC boards. There is not a whole lot of damage that can be done by any one council member to its reputation as it is already shot. Nor is she greatly embarrassing compared to her peers. Finally, we have seen some structural reforms put into place to reduce the influence of city WAM.
I don’t think that an impeachment is worthwhile to pursue if she only has eleven months left. It may be a useful political tactic for whomever is running against her in the district to push in order to differentiate and embarrass her, but I don’t think removing her from council, having a special election for a temporary replacement, and then a primary four or five months later greatly aids the democratic process.
I think that my opinion would change if she would hold the office for a couple of years until the next election, but given the time constraints, impeachment of the councilwoman is not a worthwhile endeavor in my view.
Bums Over Baghdad
That would be White House appartchiks - Tony Snow and Dan Bartlett - having a Dukakis moment while flying over Iraq.
The boss was allegedly squirreled away somewhere far from the cameras, curled up in the fetal position.
SNL Weekend Update
The HeretiK on Zarqawi’s nine lives
Don Davis learns that the GOP is abandoning flag burning and gay marriage amendments, and instead seeks a return to slavery!
Ron at Why Are We Back In Iraq calls bullshit on Ellen Knickmeyer at the Washington Post for refering to military documents as “critics”.
Who Hijacked Our Country writes about the bogus “Pharmacist Rights Movement”
Shakespeare’s Sister wishes you a Happy Jesus Day
As Always, The Progressive Blog Digest has a good roundup of links.
The Newshog wants the question asked: “Will you, if elected, pledge to roll back the Bush vision of total Presidential executive power?”
Last Left Before Hooterville spent an evening with Greg Palast
The Dark Wraith has spoken!
political, political cartoons, cartoons, satire, parody, Saturday Night Live, Zarqawi, Generalisimo Francisco Franco, Weekend Update
Extended Thoughts on Zarqawi, Iraq and moving forward
As I stated earlier this week, I am very glad that Zarqawi was killed, along with several members of Al-Quaida in Iraq/Ansar al Islam’s leadership cadre. As TigerHawk points out, there is a great deal of value in killing, capturing and or discouraging senior leadership of a terrorist or criminal group from returning to action. It is an iterative process where hopefully the counter-insurgent force can force less and less qualified people to rise more quickly to lower levels of their own incompetence. This is how the FBI routinely takes down Mafia families and drug rings.
However, I do not think that this takedown of a significant portion of Al-Quaida in Iraq will have significant long term effects for a couple of reasons. The most important reason is that the Iraqi insurgency has always had the vast majority of its manpower and fighting power provided by native Iraqis. Foreign jihadis have been very good cannon fodder and suicide car bomb drivers, as well as money men and propagandists, but they are not and never have been the majority of fighters that actually shutting down the Iraqi oil sector and inflicting a steady drip of casualties against US and UK forces.
Secondly, Zarqawi et al were removed from operational control of Al-Quaida in Iraq operations in January. Other Sunni Arab insurgent groups thought that his tactics of mass civilian slaughter were counter-productive and I think that they are right. The Sunni Arab nationalist insurgents believe that their anti-US nationalism is shared by many Shi’ite Arabs (Sadrists most notably) but any operational alliances or tacit agreements to be mutual Sargeant Schultz’s for each other were overridden by Zarqawi’s desire for sectarian war, which he successfully seeded.
There is also quite a bit of evidence that the impact of Zarqawi and his followers were overinflated by all interested parties. The US motivation is the typical motivation of American thinking of needing a villian instead of examining systemic problems (see the same pronouncement for the capture of Hussein), the Sunni nationalist insurgent motivation to overcredit the foreign Al-Quaeda elements is that it allowed them to get extremely nasty while publicly blaming the foreigners, and the Shi’ite motivation to not blow the lid on this overselling was to allow for a communal focus against an extremist instead of against their neighbors.
So killing Zarqawi and rolling up a decent chunk of his network is a good thing, but I do not think that the US will see any significant drop in the surge of violence that is Iraq right now. The insurgency is too wide spread, and has too many different groups with varying motivations ranging from ideological (Al-Quaeda in Iraq) to nationalistic and primary loyalty inspired pride to revanchistic to basic economic crime or smuggling. Most groups intermix and mingle their motives for violence.
The Boston Globe reported on May 31, 2006, that the Pentagon reports that insurgent attacks against US, coalition and government forces have been increasing, and during the three months from Feb 11 to May 12, attacks averaged 600/week, an increase from roughly 400/week at the third magical transition point of transferring sovereignity to the interim Iraqi government in the summer of 2004. During this time frame, US casualties as a whole have gone down, but fatalities have stabilized or increased as shown in this graph:
So this information is showing an insurgency that is getting deadlier to US forces and far deadlier against Iraqi government forces despite seeing a flood of quasi-competent Iraqi government units entering the battlespace. As of last week, the US’s action of sending deployment orders to the 2cd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division to get ready for Iraq after that brigade had been told it may be put on hold, is an indicator that the situation in Iraq is not improving. The Army had wanted to hold this brigade back and keep the brigade from the 1st Armored Division in Kuwait in order to buy some breathing space in their rotation schedules if possible. Despite this additional committment of a brigade for the next deployment cylce, we are soon approaching the point of peak anti-insurgent combat effectiveness equivilancy as the Iraqi Army is almost entirely in the field, and the US is running out of units that it can commit to Iraq without destroying the rest and reconstitution schedules.
The foreign component of the insurgency has never been attributed by serious analysts to be more than 10% of the total attacks and manpower, albiet more spectacular attacks. So even if one is to assume that 10% of all attacks are conducted by foreigners, and all foreigners are aligned with Zarqawi’s Al-Quaeda in Iraq and that AQI will soon be a hollow and ineffective shell that can not tie its own shoes or steal candy from a baby due to it being successfully rolled up in an operation that started two weeks ago and continues forward for the next couple of weeks, we’ll see, all else being equal, 550 or so attacks per week. This is a level that is more than sufficient to cause the effective shut down of modern society in central and western Iraq, while depriving the government of a monopoly on violence. The only hope is the StratFor scenario in which Zarqawi et al were tossed aside by the Sunni Arabs as part of a comprehensive political settlement.
If this successful rolling up of AQI by the US via the Sunni Arab nationalist component of the insurgency selling him and his followers our is actually the case, and it is part of a comprehensive political settlement, then this will be one hell of a good thing. However, I do not think that this is the case, as the Sunni Arab nationalist insurgency has only increased in strength and they can read US force cycle and reconstitution timeframes better than I can — time still favors them, so delaying a deal is to their advantage.
17 Channels
Via the Carpetbagger is this little tidbit:
The FCC says that the average household watches only 17 channels
So what channels do I watch with anything that vaguely approaches regularity:
Comedy Central
ESPN
CNN
ABC
NBC
CBS
Fox
Weather Channel
Discovery Science
Discovery Times
Food Networks
VH-1
C-Span
PBS
TNT
TBS
A&E
So what channels do you watch with any regularity?
Global Warming Insurance
3. I can imagine Manhattan and other major cities taking protective action against rising water levels, much as the Dutch do today. I recall reading that the Dutch spend about as a high a percentage of their gdp defending themselves from water as the U.S. does on national defense. That is quite a burden, but it is better than forsaking economic growth.
4. Like Arnold Kling, I do not much trust climate models. Perhaps I have spent too much time doing macro, and the experience carries over. Nonetheless uncertainty about final effects gives us more to worry about, not less. It is the worst-case scenarios for global warming which worry me, not the middling scenarios. Variance is our enemy in this matter.
8. If we could relocate all the losers-to-be into freer and richer countries, should we consider this a satisfactory solution? Or are we still massive and unjustified aggressors if they are crying to us: "Don’t let it happen, don’t let it happen!"?
Gay Marriage Ban Amendment
political,
political cartoons,
cartoons, satire,
Bush, Gay Marriage, Mallard Fillmore, parody, Constitution
Iraq’s New Dance Craze: The Mailki Misstep
While Bush is out bashing gays …
Iraq continues its downward spiral into anarchy. Over the weekend, the heads of 8 Sunnis (including a cleric) showed up in banana boxes. This was followed the next day by a group of thugs pulling a busload of folks over, including many high school kids, separating the Shiites from the Sunnis, and executing the more than 20 Shiites. And those are just two examples from a lengthy list of violent death being perpetrated day-in and day-out.
This all despite the fact that Bush has hailed the new “unity” government as a turning point. But just within weeks of Bush’s statement, the new government is displaying troubling signs of incompetent leadership.
Bush’s new man in Iraq is Prime Minister ____ Al Maliki [I'll look up his first name if he lasts out the year]. He, of course, follows in the line of earlier saviors named Garner, Bremer, Allawi and Al Jafaari. Maliki has promised to be a strongman who places priority on “security, security, security.” But just this last week, he committed two major blunders that undercut his credibility as a leader.
His over-the-top generalizations of American troops committing regular human rights abuses was shocking to Americans. Maliki needs our soldiers but many must wonder about supplying such support to a man whose rhetoric puts our troops at greater danger.
More damaging may be his failure to fulfill his bold promise to nominate new leaders for the vacant spots atop the Interior and Defense ministrys. He inadvisedly set himself a deadline for putting forth the names and then failed to meet it when he could not bridge the broad sectarian divide on the issue. This certainly does not come across as a sign of strength and fosters the danger that future ultimatums will be viewed as insincere and then ignored.
I’ll be candid. I don’t think anyone can step into this morass and govern the whole of Iraq. But I still find it stunning that this is the best that the Bushies and their Iraqi partners can come up with.