Unqualified Offerings

Remember back in March when I said the real blog retrospectives should have been Feb 2003 and June 2003? Cause I remembered. Jumping the gun a little bit, I wrote the following four years and two days ago:
We can be sure of the following: the men and women of 3ID, like the rest of us, […]

Just over four years ago, Loyal Reader Melinda Haire sent me a link to a story about Baghdad’s first metal band. (You never know what you’re going to find in your archives.) It turns out the band still exists and someone’s been making a documentary about them. Needless to say, like all bands, they have […]

General Odierno announces that US commanders at all levels are putting out feelers about ceasefires with pretty much any group of insurgents that wants to enter into one. This is smart thinking for a couple of years ago. It’s also unlikely to produce any enduring peace because the bedrock demand of any group d/b/a The […]

George Bush’s popularity is now at the Margin of Crazification discussed on Kung Fu Monkey back in 2005 and again early this year:
John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is –
Tyrone: 27%.
John: … you said […]

By Mona
Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush is deeply worried about “hot looking chicks dressed up in brazen sexuality and singing songs suggestive of a willingness to get horizontal.” And so, Mark wants us to do something, and “swiftly”:

Unless and until we do stand up, what will happen is an […]

By Mona
Neanderthal-in-a-suit neoconservative sage and documented liar, Michael Ledeen, asserts that it is impossible for almost everyone to say how things are going in Iraq, my emphasis.

It is important for people, even Professors, to understand how quickly things can change in Iraq….Very few people know enough about Iraq to make […]

By Thoreau
Can anybody clue me in on some basic issues of Iraqi oil production? I read various things that may or may not be true in various news sources, and I don’t know what to trust. Here’s what I’m specifically wondering about:
1) Is Iraq producing much oil these days? A while […]

Got to spit back up what they once digested.

Joe Lieberman talks to The Troops. The troops talk back.

By Thoreau
I’m going to offer a possible defense of the Democrats. I’m not sure that I believe a word of it, but I want to explore this idea. So, criticize away, that’s what I’m tossing it out for, but don’t extrapolate anything from my other posts to this post, or vice versa.
There is […]

By Mona
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This may be a harbinger of the warmongers’ new talking point. Iraq is no longer comparable with WWII, and certainly not with Vietnam.
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Iraq=Korea. And with that settled:

It will be interesting to see how the left plays this. How can anyone wish less than the success of South Korea for the […]

I picked up Scott Ritter’s new book and have really just started it.
The premise is that the peace movement, such as it is, can learn a lot from the great military strategists. I don’t doubt that, but so far I’m having two problems with the book. First, he seems to suggest that the key to […]

Heironymous Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights action figures. The Stiftung is inspired:
In all seriousness, the pieces do seem to be somewhat well done, and when collected might inspire one to build a mighty think tank yet to be. Interns, research fellows, the senior fellows and of course thoe with endowed chairs.

Phil Carter last week explained the logistics of a complete pullout from Iraq. It could be completed in weeks. There would of course be larger issues to manage that are outside the scope of his article.

Mona gives us just the facts, ma’am, below. Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert officer at the time several Bush Administration officials burned her, and had traveled overseas repeatedly in the recent past, under cover every time. (pdf of the Patrick Fitzgerald sentencing brief.) So let’s engage in irresponsible speculation, shall we!
A common right-wing talking […]

By Thoreau
A little while ago on CNN I saw some footage of Adam Gadahn, the Al Qaeda spokesman who grew up in southern California. He seemed like a real loser just from his demeanor (and the fact that he chose the Al Qaeda career path sure confirms that). So I just checked out […]

By Mona
I’ve been studiously agnostic on Plamegate, which ends today. The idea that Patrick Fitzgerald would make court filings pertaining to the Scooter Libby sentencing that are false is preposterous, and as Larry Johnson sums it up, Fitz sez:

Valerie Wilson was an operations officer working in the Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) […]

By Thoreau
One final item of science blogging.  A guest columnist in The Onion writes that “I believe in evolution, except for the Triassic Period.”
We need to get the Triassic period expunged from our public schools’ evolutionary textbooks. I don’t want my children to be exposed to this blasphemous Triassic garbage, and I assume you don’t […]

By Thoreau
A new paper in the Public Library of Science (open access, with a layman’s description here) suggests that if we suffer mass outbreaks of bird flu among humans, the initial survivors might hold the key to saving people subsequently infected:
For the new study, researchers at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh […]

By Thoreau
Most of the extrasolar planets that have been found thus far have been very close to their parent star. That’s a problem for finding life if the parent star is bright, but it may not be such a problem if the star is dim. And the most common stars in our galaxy […]

by BruceB (Thanks, Patrick, name now added at the top.)
For me, at least, one of the hardest things about the Iraq occupation has been the loss of a basic confidence in my right to be considered one of the good guys. I raised to believe in my potential to do good, and in the appropriateness […]

By Mona
Childish rhetoric such as calling the President “Bushitler,” and the like, hasn’t been my style. It may be time to reconsider. Andrew Sullivan, has some historical documents from the Nazi regime:
What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been […]

In the course of an article on the manifold flaws of Nour al-Maliki, Spencer Ackerman sees some new cross-sectarian alliances brewing. What lies behind them is the real hope for outfoxing Brand al-Qaeda. The US shot itself in the foot with the invasion and occupation of Iraq - it did incredible harm to the American […]

Colby Cosh switches over from manual blog-coding to . . . Movable Type?? Is the Wayback Machine leaking tachyons again?

By the way, Article II Section 8 utterly eviscerates the expansive claims Republican lawyers and politicos have made about the scope of the commander-in-chief power this century. Consider John Yoo’s baby:
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no […]

Downblog they’re talking about the absurd notion that cutting off funds for the Iraq War means “stranding the troops” in the desert with whatever happens to be in the HMMV at the time. DA Ridgely’s contributions are particularly insightful about the exact statutory authority that guarantees that the Pentagon can spend the money needed to […]

In the midst of a post about “George Bush’s War,” Atrios nevertheless sees the pointlessness of waiting out the next twenty months so that then we can make everything all better (”fix Iraq” in the parlance):
And 20 months from now when President Wise and Benevolent Democrat takes office there will be no political interest in […]

IOZ. Relates, actually, to Ackerman.
There’s a funny passage early in The Guns of August that I have to paraphrase because I don’t have the book handy. Tuchman writes about the understanding of the coming conflict at the footsoldier level, recounting that a reporter asked one Tommy if he knew why he was shipping out for […]

By Thoreau
Glenn Greenwald reports something I was not aware of: Despite solid public support for withdrawal from Iraq, a majority of the public believes that cutting off funding would leave troops stranded in the field with no ammo, no food, no water, and no plane ticket home.  The public is in favor of Congress ordering […]

I just did two hours on the fluid trainer and boy are my cheeks tired . . .
And sore! And my neck is stiff, you know? Grumble grumble.
Today’s workout is my longest of the season in any discipline and my longest in almost two years, fwiw. Boy do I have to get real tri shorts, […]

By Thoreau
My wife and I just saw Ron Paul on CNN.  She liked what he had to say and so I told her “He’s also against torture.”  She said “Really?  That’s good.”
And then I realized that we live in the sort of country where you actually have to check whether a candidate is opposed to […]

By Mona
This cretin is still ranting that the librul Emm Ess Emm has been hiding the existence of an Al Qaeda torture manual (and quotes another inanity from Glenn Reynolds on the subject), when it has been shown that CNN broke the story. But worse, and disgustingly, he likens our efforts to […]

By Mona
Newsweek uncovers in an extraordinary piece that in March of 2004 up to 30 arch-conservative Bush loyalists in the Dept. of Justice — including director of the FBI, Robert Mueller — were poised to resign, en masse, over Bush’s lawlessness and attempts to secure a signature endorsing the Administration’s illegalities […]

Couple weeks ago the New York Sun’s Eli Lake treated us to “a counterterrorism win for us,” about an interrogation by Iraqi security forces in Diyala province in which, at the climactic moment, up jumped the US representative with the crucial fact that kept an innocent man from detention:
It turns out that the Expray test […]

Speaking of Jim Lobe, a few days ago he had an interesting chronicle of the eternal recurrence of Elliott Abrams.
If that scenario [recent feelers and spoilers involving Syria] sounds familiar, your foreign policy memory dates back at least to 1987, when, despite intensified regional peace-making efforts for which Costa Rican President Oscar Arias won that […]

By Thoreau
Jim blogged some of Andrew Bacevich’s comments on the death of his son in Iraq. There are a few other things worth noting in the article that he wrote, immediately prior to the part quoted by Jim:
After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express […]

By Thoreau
This is probably old news to some, but I only learned yesterday that Stanley Miller, who performed the classic experiment of generating amino acids from a “primordial soup”, passed away on May 20 at the age of 77.  His experiments set the ball rolling on a line of research that continues to this day, […]

Jim Lobe has a blog now. Lobe has been an acute analyst of American foreign policy for years, on behalf of Inter Press Service. And now he blogs. This is good.
Via Washington Note via Antiwar.com blog.

I’ve seen a couple of headlines about Tony Blair’s proposals for sweeping new police prerogative, and they each have at least one true reading:
Police to get tough new terror powers
Yup. That has the right of it. (Via OTB.)
More stop and quiz terror powers
This one too can be read in an accurate way. (Via Crooked Timber.) […]