Needlenose

Yelling at spitting at an 8-year old because she dresses immodestly – that’s just pitiful.  What’s worse is that we help fund these bozos.  Amazing that their country-mates put up with them – in a country surrounded by hostile nations with compulsory military service, these loons are exempt – presumably so they have more free time to scare the bemoishe out of little school kids who aren’t sufficiently holy.

Not surprising really, when you consider the little acts of terror in the ‘price tag’ campaign on the part of their ‘settler’ brethren (not that this is ‘news,’ price tag terror has been brewing for a few years now).  Fortunately, other than the official government randomly raining death and terror on the folks in Gaza when the Hezbollah become too uppity, the colonials haven’t been caught plotting anything as evil as the bombing of Arab schoolgirls for sometime – let’s hope their Reactionary government wakes up to the clear and present danger these various loons represent.

Back in ’03 I believed that all parties in the recently fractured Iraq would want to keep us around, the newly empowered Shi’ites in the ‘Coalition Government’ for protection, and the coalition of the Evil-Doers (former Baathists and jihadis) to have easy access to Americans to kill.  I posited that it wouldn’t take much for the latter to keep U.S. troops mired in the Quicksand of Iraq through acts of terror or sabotage.

Obama’s decision to close up shop in Iraq is already being sorely tested by the recent Coalition of the Evil-Doer’s massive terror attack, and of course is already being second-guessed by our home-grown warmongering reactionaries.  Of course if it were up to them, we would still be fighting in Vietnam.

Given that an overwhelming majority of Americans are pretty tired of hearing about a war that was only supposed to last a couple of weeks is now almost 9 years old, and that most of them probably don’t really care how many Iraqis die, the Coalition of the Evil-Doers will need to bump up the game and threaten the oil supply to keep around the American piñata – or in the words of Frank Herbert: “The Spice must flow!”

Dictators of the world, if you say you’re gonna fight to the last bullet, take this piece of advice for me – make sure you go down fighting.  Don’t believe me?  Take a look at what happened to these guys who said they’d fight to the death, then either hid in spider holes or tried to flee the battle (not for the faint of heart):

Gaddafi

Hussein

Prabhakaran

So sure you can live a few extra weeks by hiding out like a wuss, but do you really want to be remembered that way?  Go down fighting and maybe you’ll get a cult following of extremist youth in the next generation.

 

“I shure love the smell of napalm in the morning!”

Seems like only yesterday Shrubya was silently gloating over his secret plan to deceive American into invading Iraq.  But that was almost 10 long years ago and the costs of the Republican’s elective war have been extreme:

“More than 4,400 American military lives have been lost since the start of the war in March of 2003, and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, according to Iraq Body Count, which cross-checks news reports with hospital and other official data. As of March, the war had cost the U.S.$806 billion.”

Looks like Obama is finally going to get us out of it.  Send this to every Reactionary you know and remind them of how much they supported this war back in ’03 and ask them who really failed America.

During their 8-year Reign of Error, you’d think there wasn’t a war the Republican’s didn’t like.   However, there was much gnashing of teeth when Obama decided to join with our NATO allies and blast Qaddafi’s planes and tanks from the skies.  Now that the Libyan Action is pretty much concluded, let’s do a compare and contrast of Regime Change that Republicans like versus  what they find unacceptable:

By any measure, the Libyan Regime Change seems more effective, but there’s not a peep of support from the Wrong Wing.  Conclusion?  Republicans only like the wars they start, Democratic wars be damned!

Could President Obama actually be prepared to hold firm to some position this time in his upcoming round of negotiations with the Congressionals?  Or is he some sort of Republican Manchurian Candidate who will just appear to have some sort of plan or convictions and then cave in on demands to cut social programs (as he did recently with the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy)?  What with extending warrantless wiretapping, keeping Gitmo afloat, ‘surging’ troops in Afghanistan and keeping a sizeable number of troops in Iraq, Obama seems to be hell-bent on keeping the Bush Legacy alive!

*Update* California is a crazy bi-partisan microcosm of the Great American Stalemate.  However, under Jerry Brown’s stern governance, we’ve somehow managed to move forward on a budget before our bonds became Junk.  That’s a mixed omen, with a ray of light indicating that budget deals are possible, however the budget was largely an exercise in painful cuts to education and social services.  It wasn’t all bad, though, as it seems like Jerry was still able to piss off a few Reactionaries – some of the more radical counties want to split and form their own Hicksylvania.  I’d be all for it were it not for the creation of two more Repug Senators.

Remember the awful Total Information Awareness project and the great hullabaloo  that killed it (or more likely drove it underground)?

Spy buddy sends me this guest post on a similar ‘mass surveillance’ system used to spy on folks abroad:

Mass Surveillance by the US Intelligence Agencies

Here is a greatly disturbing post (sounds like the stuff my schizophrenic cousin would say when he wasn’t on his meds) that summarizes a portion of Project PM Wiki. Smith describes a mass intelligence surveillance program with no government oversight that is funded by the US government and operated by federal agencies and US companies called Romas/COIN. According to Smith, Aaron Barr had a leadership role in the putting together the team of companies that bid on this contract. (Remember Barr? He resigned from his own firm after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.)

Ms Smith describes a sophisticated mass surveillance campaign called Romas/COIN- soon to be replaced by a similar program known as Odyssey. For two years, the U.S. has been conducting mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world. What is interesting is that despite listening into phone calls, monitoring activities of individuals, and reading emails the Intelligence community was surprised by all the uprisings in the Arab world. Hmm, they really know how to use this stuff.

Most importantly Smith notes that this program was headed up by agencies, individuals and corporations who seem to have no government oversight-despite US taxpayer funding- while having carte blanche to monitoring the public.

…if it’s taken them so long to realize that weapons of mass destruction are readily available at gunshows across America.  Or maybe all the hoopla about ‘sleeper cells’ was total Bush bullshit, as I’ve suspected for years.  If there were any sleeper cells, and they had any brains, they’d do the next attack American style, driving Monster Trucks into Oil Refineries in Texas, with retrofitted fully automatics blazing.  At that point they may as well convert to Fundee Christianity and attack abortion clinics…then they’d have Palin and the rest of the Reactionaries rooting for them.

…the Iraqis apparently haven’t forgotten us.  Rocket attack kills 5 American soldiers on their compound.  American reactionaries are too busy gluing teabags to their hats and trading racist photoshops of Obama to put new ‘support our troops’ ribbons on their bumpers.

Please can we leave now?

Finally, a U.S. President talking some sense about the situation between Israel & the Palestinians.  Of course I think the two-state approach is not a viable solution, and of course he provides neither carrot nor stick to get either side to embrace his vision (e.g. cutting off the very liberal aid we dole out to both parties), but at least he spent a little of his “I Killed Osama” politcal capital on the issue!