Ted Stevens Home becomes historic site with latest huge embarrasing scandal.

Ted Stevens home was raided today...He's the "The internet is a series of tubes" guy who got elected as senator from, you guessed it, Alaska or Florida. My questions are: When will some of these guys start having to leave office, and how many of them have to be forced out before we can impeach the President?

The answer to the first question is unknown and probably disappointing. The answer t the second question is. If anyone knows the answer to this question, please contact me immediately.

I'm really hoping there's some language/translation problems between my ears and the Iraqi parlaiment

Check this article on the absenteeism of the Iraqi parliament in the days leading up to their month-long vacation in August:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-missing27jul27,0,4508518.story?coll=la-home-center

First of all, it's just shocking that they would take a month-long break right now. That's already been beaten to death in the media and on blogs for months. They had to cancel the first month of that vacation under heavy protests. But now I read, in this article, that a lot of the delegates don't show up for the sessions, at least in part because they are resistant to US pressure in setting them an agenda to talk about. That's fucking balls, right there.

The reason I reference a translation problem is because the quotes from these delegates makes them come off like Paris Hilton. It's absurd how they sound. Consider:

"The Americans don't understand," (Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker) said. "The more they insist, the more there will be opposition and we will never pass it."

Uhhh...what? Are you a five year old sitting on the at the dinner table refusing to eat something he likes just because his mother told him to eat it? The US isn't trying to ram some ridiculous proposal down their throats, it's trying to make them take steps that represent the only hope for their fledgling country.

Let me just say that I HATE US policy in Iraq. I hate it. And I acknowledge that it isn't Othman's (or any of the other delegates) fault that this situation was created. It is our fault, America's fault. We should have left Saddam Hussein in power, evil as he was, but we didn't. This is the situation now. And the simple fact that those delegates have accepted the positions they have (and the $65,000 a year, by the way. More than twice as much money as I make), makes them responsible, not for the situation, but for trying to find a way out of it. To shirk that responsibility by failing to work hard, as a response to perceived US influence, borders on the criminal.

Also, let's remember what is actually at stake here. It isn't the security of the US, at least not directly. The latest wargames estimates show that Al Qaeda won't take over in Iraq if we leave. We'll probably be better off, actually, because once we leave we can go to Pakistan and take care of the real enemy in short order. Now there's an invasion I could get behind.

All that will happen if we leave is that Iraq will burn itself to the ground. Tens of thousands of people will die, if not hundreds. Torture, religious, and ethnic cleansing will be the order of the day, and sometime far down the line, a rough, three-state scenario will emerge.

That's all we're trying to prevent. The Iraqi Parliament had better wake up and help us, because I can unequivocally say that the patience of this country is running out. We ARE leaving, and the amount of work they are able to get done before we do will directly influence the amount of Iraqi blood that is shed in the next ten years.

The very thought of a Gonzales Perjury investigation makes my stomach churn

I should have been ecstatic over the prospect of a perjury investigation into Alberto Gonzales like the one proposed in this article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070726/congress-gonzales/

Instead I am lukewarm at best, and deep down I am dreading it because I already know nothing will ever come of it. The problem is that we've let these obvious liars and villains reach such strongholds of power, they can't be investigated or stopped by any traditional means.

For example, Congress has issued Contempt of Court citations for Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers, two of Bush's top political aides, for their refusal to even APPEAR to testify with regard to the politically motivated firings at the Justice Department. That doesn't matter, though, because that same justice department has already said they will refuse to enforce the citations. So the ones we are trying to investigate are the same ones whose help we need to execute an investigation. How well is this going to work?

In a similar way, how are we going to try Alberto Gonzales for perjury? The guy is the top of the heap as far as prosecutions are concerned. He is supposed to be the most gung-ho prosecutor in the entire country, yet now he is blatantly violating the laws in a ridiculous effort to defend the leader of the free world. What are we supposed to do?

Michael Vick...worse than a child molester?

This is a sampling of one article on the Michael Vick dog-fighting case that I chose more or less at random:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/26/vick.dogfighting/index.html

The thing to notice here is that one of the lawyers involved said of the protests going on outside the courtroom that they were the most extreme he has ever seen. Really? The most extreme he's ever seen? I'm pretty sure that guy has been around some HUMAN murder trials, pedophilia trials, etc, in his time.

Now I'm not making the slightest excuse for Vick. Animal cruelty laws are on the books for a reason, and he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of them. But this is a striking trend that I've noticed happening in a number of animal-related cases.

For example, when I was in High School in Oregon, a kid in the area tied a cat to the roof of a shed and set it on fire. Now that's awful. The local papers and the kid's lawyer (full disclosure: the kid's lawyer was my dad) received hundreds of letters suggesting that the kid, a victim himself of systematic abuse, should be burned to death in turn. The outpouring of hatred and bile in the direction of this kid was incredible. That same week, my Dad took a case involving a five and a three year old kid. Those kids' parents were meth heads, who made extra money by inviting people over, and forcing the kids to run back and forth across the living room while paying customers shot at them with paintball and pellet guns. There were no letters sent in this case, no press coverage, no nothing. The parents got off on a technicality.

What does this have to do with Michael Vick's case? There is a war going on right now that claims innocent human lives every, single day. Atrocities are committed on people all over the world with shocking regularity. In our own country, children are abused EVERY SINGLE DAY. Where is the public outcry for this? I look out my window, or I turn on the news every night, and I don't see people protesting the War in Iraq (I have gone to a few protests myself). Why do we in this country seem to love animals and hate people so much?

I realize that Vick's high profile makes this a national case (shouldn't, but does), and I realize that dog-fighting is a bad thing. It's cruel, it's inhumane, and it's criminal. At issue here isn't whether Vick ought to be let off the hook or not. Nobody is suggesting he should. My point is that, with all the horrific things going on in the world, I think people with extra energy to burn on protests could find better outlets.

I'm back

Okay, I've been at a family reunion since Friday, so no updates. I'll be back at it tomorrow full bore...stay tuned, there have been serious developments.

Shocking News from the capitol

In a shocking development, and one that I in no way predicted two days ago in a post on this very blog, the senate has filibustered the vote on ending the war in Iraq. Turns out that despite the all nighter, the Dems didn't have the votes. Oh well, at least I didn't waste my time and stay up until 4 am watching meaningless debate.

Damn that's a lotta C-Span

I've been watching C-Span for a really long time. This is by far the most C-Span I have ever watched in one sitting. It's in first place and the race isn't even close. Here are a few thoughts:

First, I don't think John McCain or anyone else who supports the war should be able to refer to "the opinion of the generals" ever again. Let's just look at a little history lesson. Remember when there were other generals, before Petraeus, who said the surge was a shit idea? Then remember when you got rid of those generals and put in Petraeus, because he subscribed to the neocon strategy? Okay, at that point you stopped being able to refer to the opinion of the generals as a way to prove that we should do what you want to do. In fact, it's dishonest to refer to "the opinion of the generals" as if that opinion is one unified thing. There are a whole bunch of generals that agree with the democrats. They think we should end this war as soon as possible and get all our troops out or Iraq post haste. So don't sit here and try to say that we need to respect the opinion of the generals, because they don't really have any idea of what is going on either.

Second, the Democrats need to get off their ass and stop being such slaves to decorum. Some dipshit GOP senator got up and gave some bullshit, swiss cheese justification, and then Hillary got up there (she looked like warmed over death, by the way. Clearly these people are not used to being up until 5 am.) and started off her spiel with "I'd like to thank my friend and colleague from the great state of blah blah blah... Screw that. If you're going to stay up all night and keep my ass up all night, at least have a goddamn DEBATE. Get up there and point out the ten obvious flaws in his argument. It's not hard. I was sitting here in my living room doing it in real time. And you should be smarter than me.

Third, I'd just like to say that the procedures followed in the damn senate are at least 75% fluff. They have spent the last 20 minutes doing a "Quorum call" and some sort of procedural vote to GET ALL THE SENATORS IN THE CHAMBER. What?!?! We're taking up time with all this debate and the other senators are out of the chamber? Are they getting high? (Okay, obviously Ted Kennedy is getting high, and drinking a bottle of blue label, but still...) Get their asses in there and let's have us a real debate, or better yet, let's get a vote going. I can't take this shit anymore, I'm going to bed. I'm not getting any money out of this, I'm not going to be a live blogger for C-Span while nothing is happening...

Vick indictment by far most interesting thing going on today

Atlanta Falcons Quarterback uber-bust Michael Vick was indicted today on charges relating to a dog-fighting ring he was running out of his mansion. Wow. Just...wow. Honestly, these charges seem too weird not to be true. Like if I was going to make up some fake charges to try and discredit a black superstar athlete, I don't think my go-to move would be "running an illegal dog-fighting ring". I'd just say the guy stabbed somebody, probably his wife or girlfriend, like they usually do, and that would be that. But dog-fighting? Is this the 1800's? Did Michael Vick somehow become embroiled in the plot of "The Great Train Robbery?"

As you can see, it's a somewhat slow news day. The only interesting thing happening other than this is a plane crash in Brazil, which is tragic but fairly cut and dried. And, oh yeah, the senate is going to meet all night tonight to discuss a renewed vote on the Iraq war. Look guys, nobody would be happier with a renewed war vote than I would, but the bottom line is that it takes sixty votes to get around a filibuster. So either you have the sixty votes or you don't. It doesn't take all night to figure that out. You just count the votes and either move to the resolution stage, or you go home, wait for a couple hundred more soldiers, and a couple thousand more Iraqis to die, then come back and see if anyone else has woken up and decided to listen to reason. All this debate and crap is just ego-stroking for Harry Reid and the rest of the politic hacks on Capitol Hill. We get it, you hate the war, it's a bad idea. Two thirds plus of the country agrees with you, and the other third still thinks Saddam Hussein was flying one of the planes that hit us on 9/11, and thinks those planes contained biological weapons. They're idiots. Who are you trying to convince? How about the 41 or so idiots in congress like Lindsay Graham, who I could happily condemn to death? The problem is that those fucks won't be convinced by debate on the issues. Staying up all night fighting about it isn't helping anything. They need the political heat of dead soldiers in order to change their minds. That's all that will get it done.

The press has failed us...

I saw Bush today say that "The same people bombing innocent people in Iraq are the ones who attacked us on 9/11". Now, that is bullshit, not to put too fine a point on it. Two weeks ago, Bush admitted that Al Qaeda accounts for less than a quarter of the violence and fighters in Iraq. And even those fighters don't work for Osama bin Laden, they are Al Qaeda in name only. But here's the thing -- Nobody pointed that out to Bush. The reporters present at the time just sat there and nodded like idiots. Nobody said anything. If nobody is going to say anything, OF COURSE he's just going to keep spouting that unadulterated bullshit. It is totally absurd. Fuck the press, fuck the government, they are in this together as far as I am concerned. What happened to the muckraking, take no shit, call everyone's bullshit of journalists past. Ed Murrow, we hardly knew ye...

Palestine...Lost in the shadow of Iraq, but still with lessons for us.

I just saw this really interesting guy named Dennis Ross on Charlie Rose. He's an author and a think tank guy on the middle east. He made some interesting statements about the elections in 2005 (the ones in which Hammas took power, and directly after which the world cut off foreign aid to the region). This guy claimed that those elections should never have taken place, because Hammas refused to abide by the election criteria established during the previous elections in 1996. Apparently, the Bush administration pushed for these elections to take place anyways, and were the first to condemn them when Hammas won power.

There is an interesting parallel here between the kind of faith-based decision making that Ross describes, and the kind of faith-based decision making that has gotten us into such incredible trouble in Iraq. That is, Bush pushed for elections in Palestine because he had faith that free elections were a prescriptive wunderkind that would solve problems in any context. Now, from his own janky election victory, he should have known categorically this was not true. At least as importantly, he should have seen that with Fatah (the party opposed to Hammas in those elections) in shambles at the time, the better organization and message discipline of Hammas would allow them to triumph in spite of being in fact a minority party. After that happened, Bush (and much of the democratic world) was left in the awkward position of opposing a duly elected democratic regime, because of human rights violations and explicitly religious values.

Similarly, in Iraq, faith based decision making has gotten us in trouble across the board. We had faith that Iraqis cared more about freedom than they did about religion. To put it another way, we had faith that Iraqis cared more about being Iraqis than they did about being Sunni or Shia Muslims.

We also had too much faith in the superiority of US troops and firepower. My best friend is a US Marine, and I have as much respect for their capability as anyone, but they were tasked to use less than a quarter million troops to pacify a nation of more than twenty million. And to do so on that nation's home turf, more than a quarter world away from home. There simply aren't enough bodies to occupy that much space. US troops can achieve any specific tactical objective, but they cannot be present in the entire country at once. It's like trying to sop up twenty gallons of liquid with a single rag. There's no question the rag can absorb water, but at the same time, there's no question there is more liquid than a single rag can absorb.

At the core, the Bush administration is guilty of the same faith based error as the general in the Kubrick film "Full Metal Jacket". The general confronts Joker wearing ambivalent imagery on his uniform, and says that the US must prevail in Vietman because "Inside of every Gook there is a red-blooded American trying to get out." Replace "Gook" with "Iraqi" (or with "Towelhead", if the slur must stick), and you have a pretty accurate description of the Bush attitude towards the middle east. We are finding out, to our detriment, just like to the film's General, that this is simply not the case. Whether Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere else in the Middle East, Muslims are simply, categorically, and finally different than us. They care about different things, they live in different ways. The only way they are like us is that they are willing to fight and die for their families and their beliefs.

So many scandals its actually muddying the water

The Bush administration may have come up with a new tactic: Create so many scandals at once that none of them gets extreme coverage, and then claim that none of them are such a big deal, and wait for them to start dropping off the national radar. There's so many freaking scandals now that every time there's a new development in one of them, I kind of have to jog my memory of exactly what it was all about. It's really incredible how this guy can still be in office. I don't think he's gone more than a few weeks without a major scandal in months.

$282 Million sounds like a lot until you put it in perspective...

I saw a huge front page story today about how a bank in Baghdad got robbed to the tune of $282 million dollars. Sure seems like a huge heist, right? Sure seems like terrorists are gonna end up with that money, right? Let me just point out two things.

First, what the hell is $282 US Dollars in cash doing in a bank in Iraq? That country is in the middle of a civil war. The only real surprise is that it took this long to get robbed. For that matter, along the same line, what the hell is a bank doing open for business in Baghdad? That city in under seige by multiple armies of desperate men. See above for the completion of this point.

Second, $282 million is a huge heist. Hell, that's bigger than the heist in "Ocean's 11", and that one was just cooked up by some screenwriter who could have said anything he wanted. He could have had Clooney say "Let's steal eleventy billion dollars from Terry Benedict", yet even at the limits of his imagination, that writer chose less than the REAL heist in Baghdad.

Yet let's think about the dollar amount the US spends in Iraq (not even counting the lives lost every day). The figure is ten billion a month. Break that down and you get...$333 million a day. So they stole less than one day's treasure in a war that has lasted more than five years. Ouch.

What the hell does "Mixed Bag" even mean?

It never ceases to amaze me how Bush will take language that seems meant to describe a round of golf and apply it to the war in Iraq. Today he issued a progress report on Iraq that said the government there had made satisfactory progress on about half their benchmarks, and called the results there a "mixed bag". You know, a mixed bag, like "I hit a few birdies, a few too many bogies, I was in the rough a lot off the tee, but I putted pretty well." That's a mixed bag. "We quelled the resistance in Al-Anbar at the cost of hundreds of dead Americans and thousands of dead Iraqis, but Baghdad is still hostile despite the mass death there." That's not a mixed bag. That's an unmitigated disaster.

This administration's willingness to use rhetoric, and this President's ability to use his supposedly "simple" grasp of language to minimize problems is truly incredible. But what is really shocking is the way the mainstream press just reports this bullshit. Every single paper who reported this White House update as if it were factual in any way should be ashamed. In fact, the administration should not be allowed to report on the state of the war at all. It's like a parent telling a five year old to clean her room, and then taking her word that it's done instead of opening up the door and looking for themselves. Gee, I wonder if she's going to say she's made more progress than she really has.

What it is really like, though, is the Enron case. It's like during the trial, Enron issued an internal report saying that there was reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt. And then, in the middle of the trial, Enron's defense lawyers pulled out the report and said, "See, this report says there's doubt, so they can't be guilty." And then the jurors (played here by the media) said "Well, they must be right, look, it's right there in that report." People are such GD idiots.

Okay I'm back

Hi Everybody, I'm back at it full swing as of today. I got all the footage I need for my movie, and with Bush releasing this BS progress report in Iraq and again calling it a "mixed bag", I just can't keep my mouth shut any more. Here goes...

This has nothing to do with the news

News update, everything is still turning slowly into shit. I just finished my first day of shooting on my first short film. Holy shit, it was awesome. This is totally out of context for this blog, but fuck it. I'm not reporting the news to you, my few but faithful readers, because there is too much shit going on in my personal life. We shot interiors today, and I don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. It went fabulously today, I couldn't have asked for more. Our insurance is fucked up, I'm not sure how we're going to get our exterior shots, but I'm living the dream, and I'm happy. For today, at least, I'm happy.

Scooter Libby gets what's coming to him

Bush did it. I knew it was coming, but this halfway bullshit doesn't fool me at all. Scooter Libby got a pardon, whether they call it that or not. He got two and a half years of his life back, and as for the fine? As for the loss of reputation? I'll bet anybody a million dollars that Scooter Libby doesn't have any trouble getting a job somewhere, and I'll bet he makes waaaay more than a quarter million dollars (the amount of his fine) in the next thirty months.

I actually don't have a problem with Scooter getting a pardon. In fact, Bush SHOULD have pardoned him, since Scooter was clearly doing exactly what Bush wanted. If he hadn't pardoned him, it would have been a supreme act of disloyalty. What I have a problem with is Bush pardoning him, in the context of Bush's unwavering support for tough sentences and mandatory minimums. I've written on this blog about the kid who got a DECADE in prison for having consensual sex with a fifteen year old girl when he was seventeen. Bush took a look at that case and decided not to intervene with a pardon. But now less than three years is too much for a guy who perjured himself to obfuscate the process by which this country was led into a war has resulted in thousands of deaths. Seems a little strange to me.

The question this raises is whether Scooter was, as I just heard someone so eloquently put it, a "designated defendant" for Bush and Cheney. It is interesting how quickly Libby changed his tune about putting Cheney on the stand in his trial. He just kind of took his lumps...almost as if he knew he was going to get off the hot seat when it came down to it.

So although Bush has the power to pardon anybody he wants, isn't it fair to say there's a conflict of interest here? The guy was supposed to go to prison for protecting Bush. Now Bush is pardoning him. So you know what? I think that's what they call a flaw in the system.

All the coverage in the world doesn't change policy

Washington Post has a profile of Bush today, and it crystallized something that had been nagging me for a while. There's no shortage of administration coverage out there. Quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that every story I read diagnoses the same problem. It just diagnoses the same set of incorrect decisions and refusals the change, over and over and over. There is never a prescription for a set of concrete steps that would fix any of these problems.

Now by "these problems" I don't mean specific issues. There are plenty of articles and Op-Ed pieces on what to do about immigration, or the war in Iraq, Social Security, whatever. I mean what to do about the problem of the prospect of the next year and a half with a President that is an embarrassment and a danger to himself and others.

The article today on WaPost quotes some pundit as saying that Bush has "a knack for not looking in the rearview mirror". He reads some limited newspapers, but he doesn't really read about himself or his failings that much, and he considers the stubborn support of his positions a virtue.

The logical end of this line of thinking is that talking about how shitty Bush is will simply not have the desired effect. I want to see an article about what we, outside of the President's purview, can do to change policy. Basically, I want somebody to start talking about impeaching this guy. Why did Nancy Pelosi say that is off the table? What the fuck is her problem? I want this guy gone. Not in 18 months. Now.