A great question

From the L.A. Times. 
In response to the “recommendation” from General Petraeus that the U.S. should keep 130,000+ troops in Iraq until at least July and spend another $100 billion. 
What else could the United States do with a guesstimated $100 billion to reduce the strength and the appeal of Islamist terrorist groups worldwide?
If you think about [...]

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We’re winning the Iraq War Surge Media Campaign in the U.S. But still losing the war.

Greg Sargent has an excellent breakdown of the public relations campaign to make it look like the surge is working and how the media has enabled it.  This sort of thing really is a life or death issue.  The longer this type of crap goes on, the more we’re dying over there. 
This is not a [...]

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Um, Mr. President?

Remember that question (asked of Miss Teen USA South Carolina) about how American students were having trouble finding the United States on the map? 
(Via David Kurtz at TPM) Here’s President Bush talking about Southern Louisiana: 
“[T]he taxpayers and people from all around the country have got to understand the people of this part of the world [...]

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Yo quero Hispanic Vote?

In yet another exercise in political suicide, the Republicans seem to be conceding the Hispanic vote to the Dems this election cycle.  With the exception of John McCain, all of the Republican candidates are encountering “scheduling” conflicts on the date of the Spanish language Univision debate. 
 Here’s Kos: 
What’s obviously happening is that they don’t want to [...]

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Your local news with the latest on the weather, traffic, and how to solicit gay sex in public restrooms

CBS13 Sacremento in covering the Larry Craig gay sex scandal actually roleplays how to solicit gay sex in a public bathroom.  Hilarious.  God bless local news. 

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Katrina Retrospective

There’s been a ton of Katrina articles the past few days and I wanted to highlight without comment some of the best ones I’ve read. 
Doug Brinkley writes about the feckless rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and what it says about the priorities of the Bush Administration, the local politicians, and the future of the area. 
Newsweek [...]

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Attacking Iran Part 2

Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films produced a video which illustrates a point I was making in the comments of an earlier post. 
Here’s what the reader Martin Sims wrote in part: 
Here we are once again considering the terrorist nation of Iran. A nation that controls Palestine through Hamas, Lebanon and Syria though [...]

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The Blunder – Hoagland’s excellent op-ed on Bush, Iraq, and the Vietnam analogy

Pretty much the short version of this post is “what he says.” 
 But let me add a couple thoughts which I have been chewing on for awhile.
1. This “Blame Maliki” movement is completely self-serving.  I have absolutely no doubt the guy isn’t what we hoped he would be.  But I think that says more about our [...]

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The Forest – What Bush-style governing really looks like

There were two more stories yesterday and today about executive overreach by the Bush administration. 
The first is about the as-of-yet unknown details of the NSA wiretap program.  The Office of the Vice President has acknowledged now that it is holding key documents about the program and is claiming Congress cannot reach into the Vice President’s [...]

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The Political Brain

My professor told us this story (which I am now going to promptly butcher) about his time on the campaign trail. In 2004, he was going door-to-door campaigning deep in the backwoods of rural Mississippi (or Arkansas, or Louisiana, I forget which, but you get the gist). They were in a particularly poor neighborhood one [...]

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Another primary moving up

Michigan is moving up its primaries to January. 
Pretty soon every state will move up their primaries and we’ll be back where we started, only everything will start earlier.  Except that since the nomination will get decided so early, there will be a serious lull in campaigning between the clinching of the nomination and the convention.  
For the [...]

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New Mexico and Medical Mary J

Looks like Governor (and Democratic Presidential Candidate) Bill Richardson is going through all the motions necessary to implement a state sponsored medical marijuana program without actually doing it. 
Gov. Bill Richardson ordered the state Health Department on Friday to resume planning of a medical marijuana program despite the agency’s worries about possible federal prosecution.
However, the governor [...]

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Katrina Tax Breaks go to Bama Stadium Luxury Condos

Although there are thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims still living in Katrinatowns, real estate investors are buying up and developing luxury condos in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and qualifying for tax breaks and incentives meant for Katrina victims as part of the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005.
With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane [...]

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