That's right, we have another edition.
In this case, it's about how the media gasbags are all acting like Alan Greenspans's proclamation that the Iraq war was about oil is like a big duh. The fact is that when the DFH said it, they couldn't grasp and clutch at their pearls fast enough.
Glenn Greenwald makes the case for why Michael Mukasey will get through the nomination process and become Attorney General.
The short version is he's quite conservative, but apparently "independent minded".
We'll see.
Kevin Drum writes a post echoing what I said the other day.
There's simply no political constituents for an end to the war .... except for the soldiers and their families that is.
But hey. What do they matter? Right?
Hillary will release a health care plan today that will "preserve a large role for private insurers".
Clinton aides said her plan would preserve a large role for private insurance companies; would promote the use of health information technology and low-cost generic drugs; and would create a public-private institute to evaluate and compare drugs, devices and medical treatments.Didn't Hillary Clinton used to be a liberal? She's been drinking the DLC kool-aid too long.
It appears that our alternative military, Blackwater, got into a bit of trouble in Iraq:The Iraqi Interior Ministry is pulling the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm, after the company was “allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of civilians during an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade.” “We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory,” Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.
Should be interesting to see if the Iraqi's can make this stick. Interestingly, Walter Pincus just wrote something that makes me think that the American military will probably "pull some strings" to allow them to stay:A week ago today, Gen. David H. Petraeus started his rounds on Capitol Hill, reporting that security in Iraq was improving to the point that a small number of troops could begin coming home by year's end.
Huh? Increased insurgent activity? That can't be right. The good General told us that things were improving.
But 10 days ago, his commanders in Baghdad began advertising for private contractors to work in combat-supply warehouses on U.S. bases throughout Iraq because half the soldiers who had been working in the warehouses were needed for patrols, combat and protection of U.S. forces.
"With the increased insurgent activity, unit supply personnel must continue to pull force protection along with convoy escort and patrol duties," according to a statement of work that accompanied the Sept. 7 request for bidders from Multi-National Force-Iraq.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a Blackwater surge over the next several months despite the Iraqi governments protestations. What are the Iraqi's going to do .... declare war on Blackwater?
Other than O.J. in the can again, and Sally Field being censored by Fox at the Emmy's last night, there's really not much going on. A lot of buzz about the Petraeus ad campaign ....
... but not much else.
I'm still waiting to see the Democrats response to the last weeks charade. Bush's campaign to shore up Republican support seems to have worked ... at least somewhat according to polls. Dems are saying that they see through it, but there's not yet been anything put forward. Meanwhile in Iraq, the meltdown continues although you won't see much about it in the media with O.J. back around.
I guess we just wait and see the next move.
Albright: Bush ‘must think we’re all idiots.’It's common for we humans to see others as just like us.
Yesterday in Iowa, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that Iraq will “go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy. That means that I am acknowledging it is worse than Vietnam.” She added, “I don’t think I have ever seen the world in such a mess.”
Now that Gen. Petraeus has come down from the mount and delivered the Iraq message from god Bush, we can move on to the future of Iraq. I predicted this a couple of weeks ago. Now we see officials putting into the public consciousness. Don't be surprised to see it happen:Today on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos challenged President Bush’s assertion that the troop drawdown is because of “success” in Iraq. He asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “Wasn’t the drawdown a matter of military necessity?”
Or how about the scenario where Iraq is no different-slightly worse. We'll need more troops there to support the Petraeus doctrine now won't we?
Gates insisted that the military was not broken, noting the large size of the armed forces: “After all, we’ve got 2.1 million men and women in the United States armed forces. If the circumstances required it, other choices could have been made.”
Stephanopoulos continued to push Gates, asking, “So if General Petraeus comes back in March and says we’re making some progress, but we can’t continue to draw down right now, where would the troops come from?” Gates tried to back away from answering a “hypothetical,” but eventually conceded that they would potentially have to deploy more National Guard and Reserve forces.
If Bush wants it, the Pentagon will provide the bodies (literally and figuratively). All the CW about "we have to drawdown because we don't have the troops" is nonsense.
"You have an unpopular President going onto prime time television, interrupting Americans' TV programs, to remind them of why they don't like him."
-- A "frustrated Capitol Hill Republican strategist with ties to the G.O.P. leadership," quoted by Time magazine, on President Bush's recent address on Iraq.
What's funny about this quote is that Congressional Republicans continue to fall for Bush's crap .... which is likely why this strategist is frustrated.
Big Al Greenspan is really rockin' and rollin' these days. His new memoir may actually make some money as the tight-lipped word-juggling Big Al comes out firing:AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
Wu-who. You go Big Al. We're gonna make a liberal out of you yet what with you lovin you some Bill Clinton, hatin' Bush and taking this radical line with oil!
In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.
However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.
Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.
This may be the biggest story last week that you didn't hear anything about:
There was a very large bank run in London. The mortgage banking firm Northern Rock is suffering from the mortgage/credit/housing debacle and investors demanded their money .... in very large numbers .... in lines extending around the block. Some call that a "bank run".
Why is this a big story for us? Well, financial failure has a way of becoming like falling dominoes, affecting other institutions and other economies. It's perceived as a big enough problem that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson flew over to London on an emergency trip to try and help sort the mess out.Experts warn that a decade-long borrowing binge has left Britain dangerously exposed to the fallout from the global liquidity crisis. US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson flies in to London tomorrow to discuss the worsening global credit crisis with Chancellor Alistair Darling, as fears intensify that the lending squeeze could be the last straw for Britain's buy-now-pay-later economy.
I suspect the big money boys will bail Northern Rock out. We all better hope so.
City economists warned that a decade-long borrowing binge had left the UK economy dangerously exposed to the fallout from the credit crunch. 'I think the UK is extremely vulnerable to this,' said Danny Gabay, director of consultants Fathom. 'The UK has a double vulnerability. We are vulnerable because of our hugely over extended consumer sector, and because of our large financial services sector.
'This is a financial market event; but the longer it goes on, the greater the risk that it becomes a real economy event - and I think we are at a tipping point.'
Added: It's pretty bad when a mortgage company (in this case an American mortgage company) sends out property tax checks and they bounce.
Alan Greenspan, former Fed Head, is about to publish his memoirs. Excerpts are leaking out everywhere in which he blasts Bush while embracing Clinton.
What I've found most interesting thus far is his proclaimed cluelessness about the subprime meltdown. He claims that he didn't think all those borrowers who were getting "liar loans" and no income loans or any of the other shenanigans involved in the recent lending bubble were of any real concern.
As the former leader of the world's economy, he's either shockingly and disturbingly stupid or he's lying.
There's no other way.
It's a doosy:It's become clear in the last few years that right wingers are psychologically unfit to lead the nation. Vast numbers of them are "conservative" not due to philosophy but to cover up for serious personal issues with sexuality, masculinity, oedipal complexes and worse. In fact, it's so pervasive that one must now assume that conservative political leaders are driven by a complicated desire to compensate for psychological problems rather than the usual political mix of ambition, ego and drive to power. There are just too many examples of disturbed, neurotic, secretive GOP hypocrites out there. It's a feature not a bug.
Digby discussing the rumors of Condi being gay.
Knowing as I do that most of Congress reads my blog .... I thought I'd pass on this bit of wisdom by Mark Kleiman (via Digby)on what Congress should do now with the Iraq war:Anything that can be ridden on the Defense Appropriations bill (or on a continuing resolution) doesn't need 60 votes in the Senate. It needs 51 votes in the Senate, or 218 in the House, that will stand firm.
Please note that none of this requires a filibuster proof vote. A simple majority can pass amendments to the appropriations bill. All this strategy takes is confidence, cohesiveness and messaging.
Take, for example, the Webb Amendment, forbidding troops from being required to serve tours in Iraq longer than the spells between tours. If passed, it would force a troop drawdown by spring.
The Democrats should offer the Webb Amendment when the Defense Appropriation comes up. If the Republicans want to filibuster, fine. Don't pull the amendment. Just let them keep filibustering. As long as the amendment is on the floor, there can be no vote on the bill itself. Keep calling cloture votes, one per day. After a few days, start asking how long the Republicans intend to withhold money to fund troops in the field in order to pursue their petty partisan agenda.
If the Republicans in the Senate hold firm, it's their stubbornness that's holding up the bill. If they fold, and the bill gets to the President's desk and he vetoes it, then pass the same damned bill again. And start asking how long the President intends to block funding for troops in the field in order to pursue his petty partisan agenda.
As of October 1, there's no money to fund the war. So the usual move is to pass a continuing resolution, which keeps the money flowing until the appropriation passes. Fine. Pass a continuing resolution with the Webb Amendment attached. If the CR runs into a filibuster or a veto, ask how long ...
Cumon Congress. Show some guts.
More corraboration of the Lancet studies that gazillions of Iraqi's have died .... many more than is admitted by the U.S.
But nevermind ... move along.
Fubar has a great post up at Needlenose on an economics principle applied to Iraq:Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a "dollar auction." The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.
Fubar asks the inevitable question, who is Bush's competing bidder? It's a killer question with the answer being a phantom al Qaeda meanace. Bush and the American leadership are in a bidding game with their own ego's, using a straw man to keep the stakes growing.
The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.
These types of things seem as phony as a three dollar bill to me, but they seem to work on a lot of voters:WASHINGTON — Eight months after President Bush made public a plan he hailed as the "New Way Forward" in Iraq, he's announced a new plan, this one called "Return on Success."
Sheesh. Which one are we in now?
The new plan was reminiscent of last year's "Operation Together Forward," which called for U.S. troops to secure neighborhoods in Baghdad and hand them over to Iraqi security forces. It bore similarities to an even older plan commonly articulated with the catchphrase "as they stand up, we'll stand down."
This is an excerpt from an AP report on the impact of Bush's policy on Iraqi politicians:BAGHDAD (AP) — The debate in Washington over troop numbers is intense. But in Baghdad, there's been little sense of alarm or urgency among the Iraqi politicians who would have the most to lose if the United States decides to begin a major pull back.
This seems about right. Think about it. What is the constituency for a withdrawal? I submit there isn't much of one. A very few leaders in Iraq can use the extra time to siphon off more money while continuing to position themselves for an inevitable American withdrawal.
Both Sunni and Shiite leaders have been largely convinced for weeks that President Bush would press to keep forces in Iraq until he turns the White House over to a successor.
That has set up one of the grand ironies of the troop build-up that began early this year.
Washington threw more personnel and firepower into Iraq to give the Iraqi leadership more room to settle disputes and adopt U.S.-backed reforms.
But the signals this week of just modest troop withdrawals ahead — perhaps back to pre-surge levels of about 130,000 — mean the Shiite-led government feels little pressure to accelerate work toward true political reconciliation.
Instead, they are focusing their energy on shoring up their positions: outflanking political challengers, leaning on more-radical Shiite factions to behave and flirting with Sunni sheiks to build personal alliances.
In a larger context, the Sunni's can use a continued presence to recruit, train and equip fighters for a coming battle for power. They have the leadership history, the technology and the command/control abilities. Shiites can use a continued presence to also recruit, train and equip using the Americans as their posters for recruitment. Shiites have less of the technology to fight, but they have the numbers. Internationally, our enemies love seeing us bogged down in Iraq. It takes the heat off them.
Put in this context, there really isn't much of an Iraqi constituency for a withdrawal. The majority of American voters want a withdrawal, but they are apathetic enough to allow our own leadership to continue to bathe their ego's in denial. Thus, the war continues and the people continue to die for nothing but the fact that people powerful enough to stop it simply don't.
