"More voters say the situation in Iraq will be extremely important in deciding their 2008 vote for president than any other issue, including terrorism, health care and the economy, according to the latest Fox News poll. In addition, more people cite disagreement on Iraq as a deal-breaker in their vote than the issues of abortion and gun control."Sincerely,
President Bush's approval rating is 34%, with 56% of voters disapproving.
As everyone predicted, the surge is an escalation. It's also an escalation without end:
This “second surge” of troops in Iraq, which is being executed by extending tours for brigades already there and by deploying more units, could boost the number of combat troops to as many as 98,000 (from 52,500) by the end of this year. When support troops are included, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 — the most ever — by the end of the year.That son-of-a-bitch in the Oval office lies as well as he talks.
Well, we knew it was coming. Doesn't mean I like it. I understand it, but it doesn't make me happy:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Toilet water. That's what it sucks.
President George W. Bush won a battle over funding the
Iraq war as congressional Democrats on Tuesday abandoned troop withdrawal efforts for now but pledged to fight with new legislation in July.
Senior congressional aides said a $100 billion war funding bill the U.S. Congress is trying to finish this week will not contain timetables for withdrawing most of the 147,000 U.S. troops from Iraq, as anti-war Democrats had hoped.
President Bush and his senior military and foreign policy advisers are beginning to discuss a "post-surge" strategy for Iraq that they hope could gain bipartisan political support. The new policy would focus on training and advising Iraqi troops rather than the broader goal of achieving a political reconciliation in Iraq, which senior officials recognize may be unachievable within the time available.Now I know that it's Bush's mission in life to personally drive me insane. And so far, he's done a fairly good job. But how can Iraq be solved without reconciliation, and haven't we been training Iraqi troops for, like, eons? From the time capsule:
The revamped policy, as outlined by senior administration officials, would be premised on the idea that, as the current surge of U.S. troops succeeds in reducing sectarian violence, America's role will be increasingly to help prepare the Iraqi military to take greater responsibility for securing the country.
AMMAN, Jordan - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Thursday that his country's forces would be able to assume security command by June 2007 — which could allow the United States to start withdrawing its troops.This is like existing in some kind of Salvador Dali painting! My head is going to explode! This policy is the equivalent of taking a difficult child, giving up on him/her, and simply using (or trying to use) force to keep the kid in the basement.
"I cannot answer on behalf of the U.S. administration but I can tell you that from our side our forces will be ready by June 2007," Maliki told ABC television after meeting President Bush on Thursday in Jordan.
Maliki was replying to a question about whether U.S. troops could start withdrawing at that time.
with corporate assistance.
The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files.Then, the criminals emptied their victims’ bank accounts.
Richard Guthrie, a 92-year-old Army veteran, was one of those victims. He ended up on scam artists’ lists because his name, like millions of others, was sold by large companies to telemarketing criminals, who then turned to major banks to steal his life’s savings.
source
Despite its elected government, Iraq is actually run by a small handful of movers and shakers. These include the two Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Then on the Shiite side you have al-Hakim and Da'wa Party leader Nuri al-Maliki. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and Sunni Arab vice president Tariq al-Hashimi are on the margins of the top Shiite/Kurdish club.At the very least it means that nothing is going to get done. At worst, is something up?
So of the central club, al-Hakim is now absent. And, Jalal Talabani is flying to the US to spend three weeks, allegedly in a bid to lose weight. I'm tempted to speculate that something is in the works such that someone thinks it desirable that Talabani be out of country, since the idea that Mam Jalal suddenly decided he needed to go to a fat farm in Minnesota strikes me as far-fetched. But I will control myself; speculation in the absence of information is not very useful.
The Chinese government is to use $3bn of its vast foreign exchange reserves to buy a 9.9 per cent stake in Blackstone, the US buy-out fund, in an unprecedented move that underlines Beijing's desire to tap into the private equity boom.Does this mean that in the near future you can not only lose your job to the Chinese but also your home?
source
Whywehatebush.com spells it out rather nicely.
IF YOU SUPPORTED BUSH, A YELLOW RIBBON WON'T MAKE UP FOR IT
You want to read something that will make you sick (pun intended)? Check out this post by Digby chronicling the final 90 minutes of a woman's life. It begins:
In the emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, Edith Isabel Rodriguez was seen as a complainer.Things go way downhill from there. And this is apparently not the first incident of this type.
"Thanks a lot, officers," an emergency room nurse told Los Angeles County police who brought in Rodriguez early May 9 after finding her in front of the Willowbrook hospital yelling for help. "This is her third time here."
The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from the emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three days for abdominal pain. She'd been given prescription medication and a doctor's appointment.
Turning to Rodriguez, the nurse said, "You have already been seen, and there is nothing we can do," according to a report by the county office of public safety, which provides security at the hospital.
As anyone who is a regular reader knows, I'm pessimistic about the long term American economy. It seems to me that the continued growth of credit and easy money cannot continue indefinitely and the longer it continues, the harder the fall.
Well, today on The Oil Drum they're having an interesting conversation on the subject. I found these comments to be particularly interesting and as representative of the two schools of thought that I've ever seen. Comment number one:
"I'm so tired of waiting for this impending implosion."Then there was this response:
What a great sentence!
I don't know how long you've been waiting, but some of us have been waiting since the 1970's....gas lines, hyper inflation, double digit interest rates and unemployment...of course, the era of "growth" was over, the book "Limits Of Growth" was written then, so was Treasury Secretary William Simmons book "A Time For Truth" that said if the U.S. ever went more than 1 trillion in the red, that was pretty much the end of the nation....
Of course, many who kept waiting for the "impending implosion" missed out on the biggest personal wealth building era in world history. And I have to love those who say, "well it's all fiat money, not the REAL thing". These folks are living in giant homes (REAL), on dozens of acres of paid for land (REAL), with big luxury cars (REAL), and their kids are by now graduated from REAL colleges and making nice incomes....., they have spent their lives eating REAL food at nice restuarants, going to REAL vacation spots, wearing REAL clothes and jewelry.....what wasn't REAL about it?
Oh, fuel costs....I'll give an example...I know a guy who just bought a big sport ute (I tried to talk him into one of the Diesel Benzes, but he said, "I'm not listening to that racket...(referring not to me, but to the Diesel engine clatter! :-) When I pressed him on the issue of fuel costs, he said, "let it go up, I can pay for the gas out of my energy investment dividends alone...."
I recently heard one of the "coming doom" debunkers say he didn't have time for it, he was going to enjoy life....the person speaking to him said, "but just you wait", to which he replied, "NO, you wait, I'll live.."
You know, you don't have to wait any longer for the disaster, you are allready right in it. You have to grasp the larger picture. Your rich friend, he eats supermarket-food, so even when he choses only the alleged healthy stuff (fruits and vegetables), he gets a lot less for his health as twenty or thirty years ago, because it is all produced industrially and so the healthy things (vitamins etc...) in it are almost gone (REAL). [and are much more expensive]Both have very good points and yet are somewhat discussing apples and oranges. Each are measuring "success" and "happiness" in far different terms. Personally, I'm trying to make positive choices for myself that mirror the second perspective, particularly in terms of quality of life. Financially, I'm doing some investing consistent with the first commentor (I do own a home and have some stocks) but I'm also investing consistent with the second commentor (highly rated bonds, commodities, oil, gold, silver). I guess I could be considered a classic hedger. My intelligence tells me it can't go on forever, but my experience says it's been going on a loooong time. So I live, and invest, according to both.
He works in a hyper-clean office and therefore has all kinds of allergies (REAL).
To displace himself, he uses his nice climatised car instead of walking or cycling, he doesn't know the weather, he doesn't meet someone accidentally, he gets fat (REAL).
To not get fat, he works out in a fittnes-club and pays 50€ a month (REAL).
In fact, he lives a complete sterile life. He follows the fashion and the offers he sees in the advertisement at 20:00, just when he comes home, he eats what they tell him, he wears what they tell him, he looks how they tell him, his girlfriend also, his flat or house, his insurrances, his „friends“, his opinion about everything, even his freetime, where he is supposed to be free, is stuffed to fulfill the wishes of the system. He is a slave to this system, that he is so happy that it functions so great. This is all REAL.
Your friend doesn't live while you wait, he is desperate (REAL) while you live, because you know what is going on (you read the oildrum), you can decide, he doesn't have a choice, until he in turn begins to wait, as he calls it.
David Corn met an interesting person last night:
Last night, at a Washington reception, I met Mohammed al-Daini, a member of the Iraqi parliament and the National Dialogue Front, a party with 11 seats in the Iraqi legislature. Daini is one of the 144 parliamentarians who are supporting legislation calling for the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraq. With 275 legislators in the parliament, the please-leave bloc is now a majority. The big question is, will this bill come up for a vote? And if it does and passes, how will George W. Bush and the Republicans respond?Corn quotes this Iraqi PM as saying that the votes are there to vote for a U.S. withdrawal and that it will happen. He further indicates that al Maliki does not have a veto. So what would al Maliki and the U.S. do if the lawful government of Iraq votes the U.S. off the island? Mitch McConnel is on record as saying that we would gladly comply if they vote us out. This may be a wild card in all the wait-until-September conventional wisdom.
If you want to know just how bad things are in our national government, you need only look at the fact that John Ashcroft is being viewed in some circles as a hero in his stand against the administration's wiretapping. It's astounding that one of the most conservative evangelical nutbars ever to serve in the Justice Dept. is being viewed in a positive light.
Arlen Specter is under the impression that Abu Gonzales will be gone before next weeks Senate no-confidence vote. I hope he's right but think he's wrong. The fact that Specter said it pushes me further in the direction that Abu will stay.
As I've said, I think any organized opposition to Abu will be met with further stonewalling from the White House. I'd put the odds on impeachment and conviction in the Senate as the only ways that Abu goes.
This was Bush three years ago today:President Bush sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his Iraq plan Thursday, saying Iraqis are ready to "take the training wheels off" by assuming some political power.
He warned that violence is likely to worsen as that transfer approaches, and after it passes.
Here's a classic Fox News Headline:
The wife of Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich could become the nation's first tongue-pierced first lady.Man! Stop the presses!
Juan Cole asks a very good question today. In his post, he notes that the new PM for Britain, Gordon Brown, has committed to the removal of all British forces from Iraq within two years. First, that sounds like America's closest ally has a timeline? But more importantly, if the British pull out, who will guarantee the supply lines from southern Iraq to the American forces in Baghdad (and in the north in general)? That which isn't flown in is trucked in from the southern port of Basra. Without the British, does anyone actually think the supply chain will be safe?
The naive among us might say that the U.S. will be out of Iraq by then. I hope so, but I'd wouldn't bet on it.
Barry Ritholtz, one of my favorite stock market observers/advisers, has uncovered a very interesting study. It's the kind of thing that, when you read it, you say to yourself "well duh". But yet, it's not the kind of thing that I would have thought of as an investor:
Here's an interesting thesis on how to beat the market: Buy Companies With High Customer Satisfaction Scores. The consumerist summarizes the findings:Well, duh.
Using a back-tested paper portfolio and an actual case, the authors of a study published in the Journal of Marketing found that companies at the top 20% of the the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) greatly outperformed the the stock market, generating a 40% return.The portfolio outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 93%, the S&P 500 by 201%, and NASDAQ by 335%.
I've not written much about the tainted Chinese food supplements coming into the U.S. This caught my attention:
For years, China has been flooding U.S. ports with tainted, toxic, and counterfeit foods, supplements and medicines. Government inspectors catch only a small fraction of these products – "filthy" juices and fruits, "poisonous" swordfish, prohibited products shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower." But change will be difficult, policy experts say, because tighter rules on Chinese imports could harm many American companies that rely on Chinese goods, and/or want a piece of the lucrative Chinese market for their own products.I had two thoughts on this. First, if we can't even regulate food coming into the country, what makes us think we can prevent a terrorist attack via imports? If al Qaeda had really wanted to attack the U.S., they would have by now. My other thought is that stories like this are all the more reason to eat locally. Aside from security considerations, it just doesn't make sense to eat petroleum subsidized food brought in from great distances. And with this occurring, who knows what someone decided to put into the food supply. Perhaps the Chinese are trying to poison us slowly to gain world domination?
If you ever wondered just what propping up a dictator looks like, it's this:
The little-known monthly support payments to Pakistan total $5.6 billion since the attacks of Sept. 11th, 2001. The Bush administration has no plans to cut off the cash or tie the payments to Pakistan's performance, despite the resurgence of terrorists in the past year, and growing evidence that the Pakistani military often looks the other way when Taliban fighters take refuge inside their country. Why? Unnamed officials tell the Times that Washington is fearful of further destabilizing President Pervez Musharraf.You know that a significant portion of this cash in being put into Swiss bank accounts by Musharraf and his supporters against the day when they're thrown out by a popular revolt. The cash certainly isn't going to fighting terrorism.
