You people make me sick

via TPM.com

The president and his advisors insisted on a warplan that had far too few troops to secure even the key facilities in Iraq that were the reason for the invasion in the first place. Remember, many of the nuclear facilities were stripped bare too. This wasn't the fault of troops streaming through on their way to Baghdad, doing a quick check for chemical and biological weapons. The error was in the planning of the war itself -- planning that came from Rumsfeld's civilians and the White House over and against the advice of the generals.

[...]

Why was the mission so undermanned? Part of the explanation comes from Secretary Rumsfeld's and his staff's view of military transformation, one that puts a heavy emphasis on high-tech weaponry and airpower over ground forces.

That's not the biggest reason, though.

The biggest reason is that President Bush and his chief advisors knew that it would be much harder to get the country into Iraq if the electorate knew the full scope of the investment -- in dollars, deployments and casualties -- upfront. In other words, undermanning the operation was always part of the essential dishonesty and recklessness with which the president led the nation to war.

Uh, wait a minute...

via Wonkette

7:14 NBC. Today:
Rudy Giuliani actually blames the troops for Al-Qaqaa. "No matter how you try to blame it on the President, the actual responsibility for it should be on the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?" Later, he realizes he botched it and reverses course. Compares the Iraq war to the Civil War and WW2, says capturing Saddam Hussein makes it a remarkable success. Uses the word "nuisance" about 10,000 times. I Cannot Believe He Said: "I want to see us successfully finish what the terrorists started in New York City. George W. Bush will do that." Bush will knock down the rest of the skyscrapers in New York?

Toenail Status Report #4

Man, this toenail will not give it up. I thought it would be gone by now, but it shows no signs of letting go. It almost seems to be re-attaching itself.

Legendary radio DJ John Peel dies

Holy moly...

Bad Liars

via TPM.com

[...]

...[T]here's a relatively brief window of time we're talking about when this stuff could have been carted away -- specifically, from March 8th (when the IAEA last checked it) until April 4th when the first US troops appear to have arrived on the scene.

Certainly there would have been time enough to move the stuff. That's almost a month. But this would be a massive and quite visible undertaking. As the Times noted yesterday, moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives. And this was at a time -- the week before and then during the war -- when Iraq's skies were positively crawling with American aerial and satellite reconnaissance.

Considering that al Qaqaa was a major munitions installation where the US also suspected there might be WMD, it's difficult to believe that we wouldn't have noticed a convoy of forty huge trucks carting stuff away.

As the LA Times notes in Tuesday's paper, it's just not particularly credible ...

Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons.

"You don't just move this stuff in the middle of the night," said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.

If we had seen something like that happening, it's hard to figure we wouldn't have bombed the convoy, since the US had complete air superiority through the entire campaign. And if the thought that WMD might be on those trucks had prevented such an attack, certainly there would have been running surveillance of where the stuff was going and where it ended up.

My point here is not to say that this could not have occurred. What I am trying to show is that Pentagon appointees like Di Rita don't seem to have any clear idea what happened to this stuff. And in an attempt to push back the story, they're cooking up various theories, most with very short half-lives, that just don't seem credible to a lot of folks who follow these issues.

If you look at the multiple contradictions in the different stories administration officials told reporters over the course of Monday, it's hard not to get the sense that they're caught without a good explanation and they're just making this stuff up as they go along.

The folks who really understand this stuff don't seem to put much stock in what guys like Di Rita and Scott McClellan are saying. The LA Times piece, notes that one of them is former chief weapons inspector David Kay, that notorious bush-basher and left-winger. Kay thinks the stuff was carted off after the old regime was history. Kay told the Times he visited the site in May 2003 "and it was heavily looted at that time. Sometime between April and May, most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites."

Toenail Status Report #3

I gravely underestimated the fall-off time for this toenail. Having never lost a nail before, I thought the process would flow swiftly. However, the toenail clings to the toe, even though it is completely unmoored at the base of the nail. The left side is detached as well. One possible scenario is that the nail will gradually open from that side, like a book. Again, I've never gone through his before, so I don't know what to expect. I am frightened and excited all at once.

...

[...]

Mr. President, you gave me and my mother a folded flag instead of the beautiful boy who called us "Moms" and "Brookster." But worse than that, you sold my little brother a bill of goods. Not only did you cheat him of a long meaningful life, but you cheated him of a meaningful death. You are in my prayers, Mr. President, because I think that you need them more than anyone on the face of the planet. But you will never get my vote.

So to whom it may concern: Don't vote for Bush. No. Just don't do it. I would not be happy with you.

Sincerely,
Brooke M. Campbell
Atlanta, GA

The King of Hand-snapping

Sam Phillips, the king of hand-snapping, was born in Cleveland in 1956, and moved to Lakewood five years ago to raise his family in a community with strong values...

[...]

Most recently, Sam was invited to a hand snapping competition against his rival, Bobby Dirtyfingers. When Dirtyfingers claimed the hand-snapping crown for himself on The Howard Stern Show, Sam had no other choice. Our once-and-future-king explains, "I went on the Howard Stern show to promote the bands I'm in, and to defend my art." Though Stern was unable to declare a winner, Dirtyfingers was exposed as more of a gimmicky finger-snapper than a musical hand-snapper.

Sam likes to stay politically active and believes that his political outlook is reflected in his attitude towards the music business. Even in the competitive world of music, Sam maintains a positive attitude and stays away from business opportunities that seem a bit too cut throat. He argues, "A lot of artists don't stand up for what they believe in." Sam takes every precaution not to be overtly commercial while maintaining his musical integrity. He doesn't believe in overexposure and has decided to lay low for a little while after appearing on the Howard Stern Show. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno asked him to appear recently, but Sam turned down the opportunity and stood his ground.

Although Sam's fame comes mainly from his hand-snapping, he considers himself a percussionist above all. He recently released a new CD featuring his hand snapping as well as his drumming, called "Hands of Time." ...

Toenail Status Report #2

The toenail hangs on tenaciously. My estimate for a week-end fall off may be wrong. Though it knows it is doomed, the nail clings to the toe tip. You have much spirit, toenail! Go toenail, go!

Toenail Status Report

After mashing my big toe very badly, I thought I would surely lose the nail. However, after a few days of pain and swelling, the toe looked much better and I thought I would keep the nail. But the other day I was checking things out and I noticed fluid moving around under the base of the toenail, after which I discerned that the nail was only attached to the toe at the very tip. I anticipate losing the nail by this weekend. The toe is a little itchy, which I hope signals the growth of new skin and a nail underneath the old toenail. My fear now is that I damaged the nail bed and will never have a proper toenail there again.

Chutzpah

I fear things are going to get very dirty/dirtier very fast, so fast I doubt anyone will be able to react.

via Talking Points Memo

Leave no election fraudster behind!

As we told you a few days ago, six Republican party staffers and campaign workers in South Dakota resigned over a burgeoning voter fraud scandal. Chief among them was Larry Russell, head of the South Dakota GOP's get-out-the-vote operation, the Republican Victory Program.

To date, no criminal charges have been filed. But the state Attorney General says the investigation is "continuing."

Today comes news, however, that Russell -- still under investigation in South Dakota -- has been reassigned to run President Bush's get-out-the-vote operation in Ohio. Russell will now "lead the ground operations" for Bush in Ohio, according to an internal Republican party memo obtained by the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

And Russell's bringing along with him to Ohio three of the five other GOP staffers who had to resign in South Dakota and are similarly under investigation in that state.

-- Josh Marshall

SWIFT BOAT LIES

Kevin Drum, via Washington Monthly

...Unbelievable. The SBVT folks, hoping to dig up dirt on Kerry, interviewed these [Tran Thoi and Nha Vi] villagers six months ago and have known the truth all along.

It wasn't just a case of differing recollections in the heat of the battle. They knew the truth. But they went ahead and told their lies anyway.

What a revolting bunch of men. What a disgusting, repellent, sleazy operation. And now Sinclair Broadcasting is about to air their movie.

Even worse, we still have three weeks to go. I wonder how much lower the Bush team and their surrogates can sink in that time? And I wonder what decent Republicans are going to do about it after Bush drags them down to defeat in November?

Krugman: Checking the Facts, in Advance

"...By singling out Mr. Bush's lies and misrepresentations, am I saying that Mr. Kerry isn't equally at fault? Yes.

Mr. Kerry sometimes uses verbal shorthand that offers nitpickers things to complain about. He talks of 1.6 million lost jobs; that's the private-sector loss, partly offset by increased government employment. But the job record is indeed awful. He talks of the $200 billion cost of the Iraq war; actual spending is only $120 billion so far. But nobody doubts that the war will cost at least another $80 billion. The point is that Mr. Kerry can, at most, be accused of using loose language; the thrust of his statements is correct.

Mr. Bush's statements, on the other hand, are fundamentally dishonest. He is insisting that black is white, and that failure is success. Journalists who play it safe by spending equal time exposing his lies and parsing Mr. Kerry's choice of words are betraying their readers."

via NYTimes.com

Dirty tricks afoot...

Can we get the straight story on these computer disks containing photos and layouts of schools in the United States?

According to reports that ran yesterday the disks came from an "Iraqi insurgent captured in Baghdad last summer [who] had allegedly downloaded floor plans of elementary and high schools in Florida, Oregon, Georgia, New Jersey, Michigan and California."

But this CNN report from late this morning says that Department of Homeland Security officials say "the material was associated with a person in Iraq, and it could not be established that this person had any ties to terrorism. He did have a connection to civic groups doing planning for schools in Iraq."

So the guy with the disks was involved in setting up schools in Iraq? Sounds a little less worrisome than finding them in Zarqawi's butler's knapsack, right?

...And what's with the school plans being mainly from swing states? (ed: emphasis mine)

via Talking Points Memo

Liar, liar, pants on fire

In New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - From the beginning of the year, the White House has charted new ground with the sweep of its negative campaigning, starting with an $80 million wave of attack advertisements directed at Senator John Kerry that began the moment he effectively won his party's nomination last spring.

But the scathing indictment that Mr. Bush offered of Mr. Kerry over the past two days - on the eve of the second presidential debate and with polls showing the race tightening - took these attacks to a blistering new level. In the process, several analysts say, Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry's positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy.

...[A]nalysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.

"So much of what they are indicting is taken out of context," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a book on negative campaigning. "It's a matter of taking sentences out of context or parts of sentences out of context. And it's hard for journalists to write the context back in because it takes time.''

Scott Reed, who served as manager of Bob Dole's 1996 campaign for president, said, "They are going right up to the line and they are pushing it hard.''

...[A]sked whether he agreed with Mr. Bush's characterization of Mr. Kerry's view on pre-emptive war, Mr. Reed responded, "No.''

...On foreign policy, analysts said, many of Mr. Bush's assertions fall into a gray area between opinion and distortion.

via NYTimes.com

Did Cheney break the law on 9/11?

For months the Bush administration fiercely resisted having the president and vice president testify before the 9/11 Commission. It was only under intense public pressure that the two leaders eventually agreed to do so -- and then only under the conditions that they would testify jointly, would not speak to the commission under oath, and that there would be no written material or transcript allowed from the session.

It was clearly the behavior of leaders who aimed to keep an airtight grip on the narrative of their minute-by-minute actions on that fateful day. A new report in Vanity Fair magazine reveals why Bush and Cheney may have wanted to remain in firm control of their story...

via Salon.com

Moving out

While moving last week (which I do not recommend), I dropped a 2'x4' plywood tabletop on my big toe. It hurt. I was afraid to look so I kept on moving things, which was a mistake. At the end of the day I peeled my sock off and was horrified by my blue and black toe. It was touch and go for a few days, but I'm pretty sure I'll keep the toe. The toenail, though, will not be with me long.