Obsidian Wings

Endorsements and advisories.

...I actually had to do real work today, so my usual Must Blog About This Post-it note stash is seriously depleted. Gotta delete that spambot and that's about it, at least as far as my scribbles go. We'll combine the two other items:

First, North Georgia Dogma has confirmed our worst fears: Cynthia McKinney is going to run for her old Congressional seat. She's being opposed in the Democratic primary by Cathy Woolard; I suspect that Ricky didn't take any more time than I did in deciding to endorse her candidacy. There are viral colonies that would be better candidates for Congress than McKinney; a local politician will do just fine, and I wish Woolard the best of luck, both here and in her opposition to Georgia's proposed gay marriage ban.

Second, Ralph Nader has advised Senator Kerry to 'loosen up'. This part of the post was once much longer, and much meaner to Nader - but what's the point, really? I can't stand him, most of you can't stand him, heck, most of the political spectrum can't stand him. I mean, when magazines like Counterpunch compare you to their current favorite devil figure (not to mention wistfully-yet-deniably muse about how neat it would be if you would just douse yourself with gasoline and light a match), the possibility should be considered that your message may not be all that well received.

To put it mildly.

Moe

Broken Record Watch, Part II

More:

Suspected insurgents killed four American civilian contractors in a grenade attack Wednesday in central Iraq, U.S. officials said.

Cheering residents in Fallujah pulled charred bodies from burning vehicles and hung them from a Euphrates River bridge.

"Barbarous savages," says Tacitus. True. Our principle enemies in Iraq are bad guys. They're thugs, assassins, terrorists, criminals. They're the remnants of a regime that tortured, gassed, and mutilated its own people, and followers of a religious ideology that favors death and oppression over life and freedom. Give them no quarter, for we will receive none.

Don't forget any of this in your rush to point out (as some have to Tac) that all cultures and peoples can behave horribly. Of course they can; this doesn't deprive us of the ability to condemn evil where we find it. Iraq is now our cause and our war, whether we would have chosen it or not. We haven't yet won. We may not win.

Is that a gun? No, it's a gas pump.

Not that you can tell the difference much lately.

Gas prices in some stations in New York City are over $2.00/gallon. OPEC announces it's cutting production targets.

But don't worry, Bush knows how to handle this. When running for President in 2000, he said:

it was the president's job to "jawbone" OPEC producers by getting "on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots."

Phew! That's reassuring. Come on Mr. President...do your stuff!

er, yeah...

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush was concerned about the prices paid by U.S. consumers, but declined to criticize OPEC's decision to cut crude oil production by 1 million barrels per day in April, a move that will tighten global supplies even more and may drive prices higher.

What reason could Bush possibly have for breaking this promise? Why, the same reason he uses to defend all his broken promises...it's all about the terror of course...

The White House, for now, opposes such a move. McClellan cited "independent analysts" as saying it would have a "negligible impact" on prices, and possibly compromise national security.

So, finally, we find the White House asking for that personal sacrifice that all Americans can make in the War on Terror. Pay more at the pump....if not to help fight terror, at least so Bush doesn't need to make any uncomfortable phone calls.

Broken Record Watch

Save for the hands, feet, and (possibly) genitalia, I am a broken record on Iraq. But I seem to be a lonely broken record in the blogosphere, so let's spin it around once more:

We are in danger of losing Iraq. Today's
bombing -- though hardly encouraging -- is not the reason for my concern. Rather, this announcement (which appears to have been lost amidst Clarke's flotsam) is:

. . . U.S. Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer told local officials Monday that it will take at least a year for the country to hire, equip and train enough police and border guards to meet its needs.

"There is no way to speed it up; it simply can't be done," he said. "And it's going to take another year. We just have to be honest about that." . . . .

In response to Gov. Abdulah Hassan Rasheed's plea for more police officers in his province of 1.2 million people, Bremer said: "The key is to have professional police, not just to add people who aren't trained. Many of these people who are already in the police force are corrupt, they don't understand human rights and some of them are engaging in attacks on the coalition."

He added sharply: "We're not going to bring in any more untrained police. It's not going to happen." . . . .

The meeting also focused on border security, a sore point among Iraqis, who wonder why the coalition hasn't been able to stem the flow of foreign terrorists into their country. Foreigners are thought to have planned and carried out many of the suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Iraqis. . . . .

Coalition plans call for 16,000 border guards by next year, but the officials and Bremer agreed that 25,000 were needed.

The foundation of a free society -- or even a moderately non-terroristic society -- is the rule of law. There is no rule of law without the police. As I've written before, "Until Iraq's police start policing (spending all your time investigating the mass-murder of your fellow officers and trying to stay alive yourself, btw, does not count) we haven't yet won in Iraq."

This problem, like other problems in Iraq, can only be solved through repeated payments of time, money, and American lives. Yet, no schedule of payments has been presented for the years to come -- for understandable political reasons, Bush and Kerry both fear the repercussions of being the first to stick his neck out. I don't blame them, but we can't just move on. As Bush said back in November 2003:

[Iraq] is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed[.]

Here's to waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.

Perhaps he can't throw his voice that far...

OK, so I know I shouldn't make fun of this, as it deals with the 9/11 Commission and, well ,the truth of the matter is the country is not best served by partisan bickering over the testimony or even the path to it (i.e., Dr. Rice is going to testify now...give her all the credit she's due for doing so).

However, via Marshall, and oddly enough no where else that I read, I've learned that part of the conditions for the President and Vice President to appear before the commission again is that they must testify together. Marshall offers three possible (decidedly unflattering) explanations for this seemingly unnecessary demand (paraphrased here):

1. It's to limit the amount of time they will need to testify. By doing it simultaneously, (three hours have been promised), they're both out of there in 3 hours, as opposed to potentially 6 if they testify separately.
2. It helps them not contradict each other.
3. It keeps the president from "getting himself into trouble, either by contradicting what his staff says, or getting some key point wrong, or letting some key fact slip."

Again, none of these are particularly flattering to the President, but I can't imagine another reason they'd insist on this.

With an attitude like that, I'm shocked that they're going out of business.

It's not usually my habit to post before going to work, but I have a little time and this unintentionally hilarious (in a not-happy-shiny way) rant about the death of books was too interesting to let pass. I understand that losing one's business is traumatic, and that people in the grips of strong emotions do things that they regret, such as reprint twelve-point manifestos that lay the blame for one's mercantile failure squarely at the metaphorical feet of the observable universe (minus, of course, the bits consisting of the person writing/quoting the manifesto).

I'm not exaggerating by all that much.

(Via Amygdala)

Moe

Pro Choice Debate

In the previous entry I pointed out how many pro-life advocates muddy the waters of the abortion debate, and gave advice about how to avoid doing that. Since I am pro-life myself, I won't be so rude as to give advice to the pro-choice side about how they should argue. That won't stop me from identifying how some of them poison the well of the debate. If some pro-choice advocates want to use that to steer their compatriots to a more civil debate, I'm not opposed. The polling data on abortion reflects a large amount of unease on the part of the US public. You may believe that the best way to deal with that unease is to use the techniques which I outline below. I suspect (or maybe hope) that such tactics will eventually alienate some voters in the middle, which may cause a sudden shift in abortion politics at some point in the future. If that is true, it may be to your advantage to manage such perceptions so that you have some control over the shift.

To me, my loyal minions!

...Oh, right, I don't have actually have any. Oh, well, so much for that evil notion of everybody going out on April Fool's Day and posting/commenting as their Spock-has-a-beard Evil Twin*; we'll instead just use this as an thread for relating classic April Fool's gags that you, you know, heard about somebody else doing once, nothing to do with you, you weren't even in Belize that week...

Moe

*Not an over-the-top version, mind: anybody can do burlesque. True art lies in posting in a manner that instead causes people to stop what they're doing five minutes later, go back to the site, check the name, check the post, scratch their heads and uneasily wonder about giant pods in the basement.

If this were happening, of course. But it's not. So there.

A minisurvey of what people want re the UN.

Richard Cohen wants to be able to make a citizen's UN Resolution so that there can be an official condemnation of Palestinian terrorism, especially the practive of using children as suicide bombers; he also wants everybody not willing to sign such a resolution to shut the hell up. James Joyner wants more Gomer Pyle at the UN, on the principle that this would be an improvement on the delegates running things there now. Roger Simon and William Safire want to know exactly who cooked the books on the Oil for Food program, for how much and how badly. Joe Katzman wants a Congressional investigation about that bit of corruption. And Glenn Reynolds wants to throw a rock.

Me? I was going to say that I wanted a rock to wind a piece of string around, but Glenn sort of got that one already, and the only other geekreference alternative is problematical: I suspect that people might tend to get a tad alarmed if rhetoric started appearing about having the heads of UN officials cut off and stuck on a pike as a warning for the next ten generations that some favors come at too high a price, so it's a good thing that it's not being said, huh?

Honey, not vinegar.

Lt. Smash demonstrates how to bend elected officials to one's will - or at least get them to listen attentively for a couple of minutes. Amazingly enough, his technique didn't require schoolbuses, crowds of demonstrators, flocks of signs and rhyming protests to work; there wasn't even any violations of private property or abuse hurled at the person that he was trying to sway. I don't know if his idea will sprout in the soil that he planted it in*, but I'd give better odds of success to him than to these... folks. Good luck on that, Smash.

Moe

*On the one hand, he seems really positive about the reaction he got; on the other hand, I wasn't there. For that matter, a law penalizing companies that discriminate against returning veterans does sound like the sort of thing that could make it through Congress, so who knows?