As has been noted all over the internets and news media, the Republican Party has finally settled on a mid-term campaign strategy: demonize the Democrats. Liberals, Progressives, poor, middle class, Muslims and all dark people, as well as most non-country-club-women (commonly known as not “Stepford Wives.) The term they’ve settled upon is “fascist.”

We saw the small-market strategy test earlier this year (“Islamofascists”) but so many top-tier Republican politicians and operatives suffer from a tongue-tied defect that it was decided to go with the slightly more ponderous “Islamic Fascists” term. (Snickering commentary that the tongue-tied problem is caused by overdoses of booze and drugs have been indignantly denied by those politicians and operatives still able to stand up and speak after 7 PM.)

We take pride in the fact that we started all this, calling the crime-ridden Republican Party the “Fascist Party” well over two years ago as a commenter on Jo Fish’s blog, Democratic Veteran.

Now that the criminals are trying to tar all those they hate and fear with this term it’s about time to roll out part two of our counter-attack campaign.

Today we officially announce the opening of the “WPS” attack. That’s not a reference to MicroShaft’s “Works”, the third-rate word processor they package with every boat anchor they sell. WPS stands for Winger Projection Syndrome, a condition that occurs when liars and criminals realize one of their own basic moral, ethical or psychological shortcomings and in a burst of self-loathing try to dishonestly paint the “evil demon” of the day with the same failing in an attempt to lessen their psychic guilt.

We’d like to take credit for coining the term but it actually originates somewhere deep in the bowels of the Mighty Corrente Building where it is officially known as the “Lexicon of Liberal Invective.”

It’s uncertain just who started the ball rolling on this handy glossary, but there are some pearls of great wisdom. One of our personal favorites is ”DCOW” which stands for Don’t Click on Wingers. When you click on a wingnut website you just add to the fool’s pagecount, and that, my friends, only encourages them. One example of this is our determined refusal to ever provide a link to a Washington Post story. Fred Hiatt, the Editorial page Editor, has demeaned that once great newspaper and dragged it into the gutter in an attempt to replace the Washington Times as the official house newspaper of the Fascist Party. This was a deliberate, conscious effort on his part. Once Fred Hiatt has resigned in disgrace, we’ll start linking to that paper’s articles again, unless he’s replaced by an even more mendacious enabler of the Fascist Party.

Speaking of enablers, another of our personal favorites is “Centrist” which is the term for any Republican Party enabler, or Republican mole. A prime example would be “Joe Lieberman is a centrist.”

It’s possible that Mr Rumsfeld is due to be replaced, and this was a grand gesture on his part to regain the approval of the nomenklatura to let him stay in his post. He has been loyal, after all, intentionally crippling the Army by shorting it the supplies and personnel it needed for the war Mr Bu$h and Mr Cheney needed. He’s refused to consider asking for a draft, knowing that such a move would be the final step that would cause sleeping Americans to wake up and demand political changes. And, anyway, chaos always provides the best opportunities for looting.

Say, what did happen to that unaccounted for $9 billion missing from the CPA in Iraq?

The internets tubes are all clogged up today with commentary about Keith Olberman’s public dressing down last night of our august and apparentlly insane Secretary of Defense, Mr Rumsfeld, who seems to think time stopped somewhere around November, 1945.

Crooks and Liars has the video in all its magnificent Democratic splendor, as Mr Olberman discusses the madness of Mr Rumsfeld.

There are transcripts all over the place, but I think the video carries more emphasis because Mr Olberman has a way of presenting truth and facts that escapes the other talking heads on TV. He is about the only positive aspect to MSNBC’s current lineup, and is at his best when poking sharp sticks inside the cages of Fascists like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, mAn Coulter (and Mr Rumsfeld, for that matter.)

Spencer Ackerman also discusses Mr Rumsfeld’s assault on 67% of the American people and their values over at The New Republic’s online blog today. Since a subscription is required (and it’s a shortie) we’ll just pass it along.

In mid-1967, Robert McNamara recognized the Vietnam war, which he had argued for so vociferously and prosecuted with such zeal, was unwinnable. Yet the war continued. When Lyndon Johnson, the following year, fired him as defense secretary and appointed him to the World Bank presidency, McNamara, feeling the burden of what he had done to the country, cried at his press conference. One looks at Donald Rumsfeld's spittle-flecked speech calling millions of antiwar Americans traitors and Nazi-appeasers, and thinks: At least Robert McNamara had a sense of shame.

(NB: As always, the most sublime comment on Donald Rumsfeld belongs to Tom Toles.)

UPDATE It's been reported by Antichrist S. Coulter that Paul Begala has coined a new political campaign phrase"

Well slap the dog and spit in the far

First off, this is, without a doubt, the best quote OF THE WEEK!!! On The Situation Room on CNN, Democratic Strategist Paul Begala (?)(it's not in the transcript yet), after they'd discussed Rumsfeld's frothing-at-the-mouth flagellation of "fascism" (his new definition of the "war on terra") (and yet again, they co-opt another word and utterly corrupt the meaning) --- Paul says, timing it perfectly before the break:

"There are probably four or five venereal diseases that are more popular right now than Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush!"

Tip of the way-too-small Kevlar helmet to Kevin Hayden of The American Street for the update news.

USMCCowboy has a diary entry up on Daily Kos. There's too much to extract, or even comment on, other than it's interesting and I think John Keegan and the Cowboy could have an interesting discussion about why men fight.

The Boston Globe had a compelling story about one way the Maine Army National Guard is trying to support the families of members serving overseas.

Guard families cope in two dimensions
`Flat Daddy' cutouts ease longing

By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff | August 30, 2006

Maine National Guard members in Iraq and Afghanistan are never far from the thoughts of their loved ones.

Welcome to the "Flat Daddy" and "Flat Mommy" phenomenon, in which life-size cutouts of deployed service members are given by the Maine National Guard to spouses, children, and relatives back home.

The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist, and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.

"I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket," said Kay Judkins of Caribou, whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan. "The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I've tricked several people by that. They think he's home again."

At the request of relatives, about 200 Flat Daddy and Flat Mommy photos have been enlarged and printed at the state National Guard headquarters in Augusta. The families cut out the photos, which show the Guard members from the waist up, and glue them to a $2 piece of foam board.

Sergeant First Class Barbara Claudel, the state family-support director who began the program, said the response from Guard families has been giddily enthusiastic.

"If there's something we can do to make it a little easier on the families, then that's our job and our responsibility. It brings them a little bit closer and might help them somewhere down the line," Claudel said yesterday.

"You know, this is my motto: `Deployment isn't a big thing, it's a million little things.' These families go through a lot."

While most families stay in touch with their guardsmen by e-mail, snapshots, and videophone, the cutouts are unusual.

"It's a novel approach," said John Goheen, spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States, a Washington-based lobbying group. "It's to remind the kids that this guy and this woman is still part of your life, that this is what they look like, and this is how big they are."

Claudel said she heard about the Flat Daddy idea while attending a national conference for the Guard. In Maine, the initiative began about eight months ago when Flat Daddies were offered as part of the deployment of B Company, Third Battalion, 172d Mountain Infantry, which is based in Brewer.

Now, when units are mobilized, the Guard organizes Flat Daddy parties, in which families can meet one another while receiving instructions on assembling the photos.

Judkins said the cutout has been a comfort since her husband was deployed in January.

"He goes everywhere with me. Every day he comes to work with me," said Judkins, who works in a dentist's office. "I just bought a new table from the Amish community, and he sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does."

In the car, her husband's image sits behind the driver's seat so Judkins can keep an eye on him. A third-grade class writes to him as their "adopted" guardsman. And Judkins even brought her husband's cutout -- which she calls Slim Jim, because he's not -- to confession at the local church.

When asked what her husband had to confess, Judkins laughed. "That's private," she said.

Jim Judkins had at least one precarious moment as a cutout. When cousins tried to stuff him into a suitcase to take on a cruise, they broke his neck. But instead of expensive surgery, all the cutout needed was a little duct tape, Judkins said.

Cindy Branscom of Hallowell, whose husband, Colonel John Branscom, is in Afghanistan, said spouses of service members in the 240th Engineer Group often bring their Flat Daddies to monthly support meetings and group barbecues. She said one spouse, Mary Holbrook of Hermon, has been seen in the company of her cutout husband, Lieutenant Colonel Randall Holbrook.

"Mary has taken Randy to different events," Branscom said.

But then again, that's almost expected.

"I think it's wonderful," Branscom said. "My Flat Daddy sits in my dining room all the time. He even went to Easter dinner with us at my family's house."

You’re not “supposed” to reproduce an entire article because there’s this copyright thing, but I thought you should read all of it. If the Boston Globe has a problem, they can contact me.

As far as I can remember this is the first positive thing I’ve ever seen the Army do to support the families of members fighting this crappy war Mr Bu$h and Mr Cheney forced on the world.

Kudos to SFC CLaudel. As far as I’m concerned she’s more than earned her promotion to MSG by giving family members something tangible to remember their loved ones.

I hope and pray all of them come home safe and healthy and they never have to deploy again.

Billmon has a fascinating little article up, quoting Ralph Peters, who we’ve discussed before.

No society that oppresses women, denies advancement on merit even to men, indulges in fantastic hypocrisy, wallows in corruption, undervalues secular learning, reduces its god to a nasty disciplinarian and comforts itself with conspiracy theories will ever compete with us.

No, no, no… Mr Peters is not writing about the US. He’s writing about Iraq.

Nor is he writing about the Texas GOP’s Party Platform, as Billmon is quick to tell us.

Quoting Peters further:

We did the right thing by deposing Saddam Hussein. The Arab Middle East needed one last chance. Iraq is it. If Iraqi democracy fails, there will be no hope, whatsoever, for the Arab world.

Somebody contact Mr Cheney and tell him Ralph Peters says there is no chance of successfully conquering Iran.

It’ll be short and sporadic blogging today, since I’ll be spending significant portions of the day boarding up the house in anticipation of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Ernesto, which is supposed to start crawling up the Florida peninsula during the day today. It doesn’t look to be very serious, but since “global warning is just a myth” who knows?

Now that there is no more legitimate suspected Jon Benet Ramsey killer to hyperventilate about 24/7, it will be all-Ernesto, all the time, until late Wednesday or early Thursday, because you just can’t sell soap powder unless there is some sort of hysteria to drive the sheeple to the stores.

Those of us on the left side of Planet Earth, who breathe oxygen, are fast approaching outrage overload because of the insanity the Fascist Party is visiting upon a helpless United States. But when I saw this story on the overnight wires I couldn’t even begin to formulate an adequate response:

WASHINGTON -- Despite assuring Congress that career military lawyers are helping design new trials for accused terrorists, the Bush administration has limited their input on their key request, that any tribunals must give detainees the right to see the evidence against them, officials said.

After the Supreme Court struck down the White House's military tribunals system in June, government lawyers began drafting legislation that would set new rules for trials of terrorist suspects. A central issue is whether prosecutors will be allowed to introduce secret evidence, which detainees would not be able to defend against.

You read that right. Secret evidence. Now you can be locked up, held in solitary confinement for four or five years, incommunicado, mind you – no lawyer for you, Ahmed, and then brought before a military tribunal. That’s when you’ll meet your lawyer, an overworked SJA lawyer, for the first time, as the prosecuting attorney will present secret evidence to the tribunal while you’re not even in the room to defend against it.

Most military lawyers strongly oppose allowing secret evidence, arguing that such a plan would probably violate the Geneva Conventions and create a precedent for enemies of the United States to use show-trials for captured Americans. But administration lawyers maintain that classified evidence may be crucial to a case, and revealing it would compromise national security.

Members of Congress have pressured the White House to listen to the military lawyers as it drafts the legislation, and on Aug. 2, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told lawmakers that ``our deliberations have included detailed discussion" with military attorneys whose ``multiple rounds of comments . . . will be reflected in the legislative package."

But the issue of secret evidence, officials said, has been off the table for all of those discussions with the exception of one meeting between Gonzales and the top military lawyers in late July. The session ended in an impasse, and the issue has not been raised again, they said.

I’ve been having a brief discussion on another blog with an attorney who seems to feel that Abu Gonzalez is acting in good faith when he says George Bush has the authority to do any fucking thing that enters his allegedly coke and booze-damaged brain. I wonder how he’ll feel about this little gem. Since the single “discussion” ended in an impasse, you know Gonzalez has absolutely no intention whatsoever of allowing any semblance at all of fair trials.

Sometimes I wonder why they even want to bother with the façade of a trial? Just lock the poor bastards away like Eustache Dauger, and ignore him to death.

The NY Times has a very disturbing story today about reservists who deserted:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 (AP) — The Pentagon has done little to recover about $900,000 mistakenly paid to 75 Army reservists who have not reported for duty since late 2001, Congressional investigators said in a report on Monday.

Fewer than two dozen of the deserters have surrendered or been arrested, the report said.

We discussed the military’s desertion problem three weeks ago.

In response to a commenter on the deserter story I mentioned how back during the recent unpleasantness in SouthEast Asia we’d occasionally see riflemen re-up. We’d shake our heads in surprise and disappointment, even when they’d tell us they did it for the VRB. (The Variable Reenlistment Bonus was a program that paid differing amounts of cash, in a lump sum, to troops who re-upped, depending on how scarce their MOS was and how long a term they signed up for. Scarce and desperately needed MOS’s got $ Serious Money, as it was considered in the late 60s.) Now, if you were nearing the end of your term of enlistment in Nam, and re-upped you got a free (non-chargable) 30 day leave in the States, and collected your VRB passing through Ft Ord or Ft Lewis on the way in.

It took a while for the Army to figure out that a lot of these guys just never showed up at the end of their 30 day leave. Sometimes they were nice about it and sent the Pentagon a post card from Canada telling them where they’d dumped their fatigues.

The number of improper payments and the money involved was probably significantly understated, the investigators said. The report said the Army and the Army National Guard and Reserve had acknowledged being unaware of the extent of the problem because there is no system to track such records.

Now, isn’t that interesting. The Army and National Guard have become very Republicanized (and therefore quite sloppy and incompetent in keeping track of things that belong on lists.) So they had no idea there was a problem, lied to DOD about the magnitude of the problem, and couldn’t be bothered to keep track of missing soldiers and the money paid to them. The article doesn’t say whether the money was for travel and pay or bonuses of some kind.

The G.A.O. first reported the payment errors in 2004. It contacted Pentagon officials again this year to determine whether the money had been repaid or the deserters found.

A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Maka, said officials were still reviewing the report and its recommendations.

They’re still trying to work out some kind of cover story.

I’ll bet somehow it will involve either The Clenis(TM) or some Democrat who screwed up.

They're consistent, if nothing else:

For at least a year, the soldiers had survived one of the most dangerous jobs in the world: driving trucks on the violent roads of Iraq for the US Army. Half the company had been at it nearly two years.

But when the 150 soldiers in the Massachusetts-based 220th Transportation Company , 94th Regional Readiness Command , arrived at Camp Atterbury in Indiana just after midnight Friday for demobilization, they were told they would have to take the bus home -- an 18- to 20-hour ride.

I suppose by now we’re hardly surprised at how Republicans shit on the troops every chance they get, It’s just a never-ending story, isn’t it? No plans for success, inadequate armor, not enough food, not enough water, not enough ammunition, not enough forethought, not enough troops.

Not enough.

Not enough.

The only thing Republicans give enough of is photo opportunities, and spin lies. They have enough contempt for the Constitution, Federal and state laws, the American citizens, the troops, and their tame lapdogs, the American Media.

Furious families of the soldiers called the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy , a Massachusetts Democrat and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

``I was absolutely outraged," Kennedy said in a phone interview yesterday. ``These are men and women who have worn our uniform that bears the flag of the United States of America. They deserve a hero's welcome."

The senator dashed off a letter to Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey , pointing out that the Indianapolis International Airport was 38 miles from Camp Atterbury .

WTF? Has Senator Kennedy being pissing around with the Beltway crowd for so long he’s lost his reason? A letter?

We have this thing – kind of new, Senator. Called a telephone. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Pick it up and you can actually talk to someone. Of course, to be honest, I imagine if a ball-less Democrat called a Fascist Party apparatchik, he probably would find the Army Secretary was out – permanently – whenever he phoned.

Let’s face it. Would you have any respect for the DC Democrats? Would you be in the office and available when one of them called?

If I was “absolutely outraged” to quote “Senator Kennedy, I’d have been on that phone faster than flies on shit. And the first thing I’d say to Secretary Harvey’s phone minder would be, “I have to talk to Harvey fast – before the scandal becomes public.” That’s one of the two things you say to a phone minder when some guy is ducking you. The other is, “I want to know what he’s going to do about my wife.”

(Of course, nowadays, when calling a Fascist, “I need to talk to him before the FBI gets there” works, too.)

Senator Kennedy’s last comment in the Boston.com story:

``This is a demobilization," he said. ``They're on their way home, they served in Iraq and to be told . . . there are not enough resources in the Defense Department budget to treat people first-class is indefensible, unwarranted, and outrageous."

The Fascist Party response:

“Army officials said they could not confirm plans for a flight.”

Steve Gilliard has an article based on a subscriber/reader article in the Eureka, CA hometown paper, The Eureka Reporter

The wars in the Middle East grind on. The situation looks grimmer than ever. The United States and Iran appear perilously close to war.

In spite of all this death and destruction, not everyone is unhappy. One young former Humboldt County resident named Anthony Mantova is about to get the war he has publicly wished for, even if he does not intend to personally participate.

Mantova is an ambitious young neo-conservative activist, ardent supporter of the global war on terror, Fortuna Union High School graduate, and a past Eureka Reporter columnist.

A couple of years ago, after The Eureka Reporter first started, I contacted Mantova after reading one of his columns titled, “It is Time to Invade Iran.”

Since he is such a fan of aggressive military solutions to solve the world’s problems, he should be eager to enlist. Mantova flatly refused to concede to serving the United States in the military.

The money quote from these conversations came when Mantova berated me for what he said was my “hillbilly, intellectually vacant and morally repugnant belief that ‘those who call for war must serve.’”

All right. Just my kind of hero: a citizen activist/reporter who actually asks the tough questions. I’ll bet it was a shock for this little war-pimp Montova to be challenged on the honesty of his beliefs.

A 24-year-old, healthy man, Mantova — hypothetically at least — believes in “personal responsibility” and strongly defending America. He’s an outstanding candidate for military service. He simply lacks the heart to sign up.

These days, Anthony Mantova is a young fellow on the rise in GOP politics. He is the national field director for an organization called The Leadership Institute.

Based in Arlington, Va., The Leadership Institute is a 501c3 advocacy foundation. Created by longtime GOP operative Morton Blackwell, “The Leadership Institutes mission is to identify, recruit, train and place conservatives in politics, government and the media.”

The Leadership Institute is purportedly, nonpartisan; however, everyone associated with the leadership institute appears to be a far-right Republican. It’s a finishing school for right–wing political operators.

Good stuff. A local paper giving lots of space to a citizen, pointing out the fraudulence and hypocrisy of tomorrows “leaders” of the Fascist Party.

Marshall Whitman, the Bullshit Moose, who is the Republican Party’s mole inside the DLC, has an opinion about Independence:

What is Nicco's great "sin" that has so inflamed the puerile keyboarders of the left? He has earned their scorn for signing on with the potential Presidential campaign of John McCain. Allow Nicco explain his move,

"After Sen. McCain lost the Republican primary in 2000, I traveled with him as part of a group of campaign finance reform staffers as we criss-crossed the country working to secure support for the McCain-Feingold bill. I have long admired Sen. McCain'’s work on campaign finance reform and his independent streak. If Sen. McCain runs for president, he'’s got my support."

One would think that Nicco's explanation would win the accolades of progressives who supposedly shared his desire to clean up the campaign finance system. But no, these so called liberal and open minded commissars are convening a nutroot inquisition for his alleged apostasy.

Apparently, Mr Whitman‘s opinion about Independence is that it’s only for Republicans, and not Democrats, Liberals, or Progressives.

When Israel went to war in Lebanon against Hezbollah it quickly asked the US for more munitions, since the plan agreed upon last year between the IDF and Mr Rumsfeld’s Defense Department provided for a month-long bombing campaign in order to attrite Hezbollah and to destroy as much as possible of the infrastructure of south Lebanon. And Israel immediately asked for more bombs, a request that was approved by Mr Rumsfeld with almost obscene haste.

It turns out that Israel wanted quite a few M-26 cluster rockets for their MRLS launchers.

Reuters writes that “the rockets, while likely effective against hidden missile launchers, would also likely cause civilian casualties if used against targets in populated areas.” That’s because each rocket contains multiple grenades that are dispersed over a wide area before they explode.

These weapons are blunt instruments, used to wreak death and destruction over a large area with imprecise targeting. Wherever Israel uses them, civilians who are nearby will be killed.

Some State Department officials are trying to block the sale because these weapons are so particularly prone to creating high numbers of civilian deaths, but as a whole, the Bush Administration is pushing to get the weapons to Israel as soon as possible. A note would come along with the weapons, urging Israel to be careful with them.

Unsurprisingly, Billmon has an opinion on the matter:

Hypocrisy, thy name is Uncle Sam

The first major hurricane of the season is apparently threatening the Gulf Coast.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- What was to have been a weekend of remembrance of Hurricane Katrina's destruction became a weekend of worry as Tropical Storm Ernesto gathered strength in the Caribbean.

The National Hurricane Center said Ernesto could grow into a Category 3 hurricane by Thursday, menacing a broad swath of the Gulf Coast. Katrina was a Category 3 storm when it ravaged New Orleans a year ago Tuesday.

So, we’ve had a year to prepare for this. A competent manager would have ensured that repair efforts began two days after the hurricane passed through, and work should have gone on six days a week, right?

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said state officials were keeping an eye on Ernesto, and the Army Corps of Engineers was carefully tracking the storm's movement, said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, head of the Army Corps.

It was too early to tell whether Ernesto would provide an early test for the city's levee system, which Strock conceded may not yet be strong enough to withstand a large storm surge.

Strock said he was confident the Corps had done all it could to repair and reinforce 220 miles of levee walls, but said many variables would determine whether the levees could withstand a major hurricane. Gov. Kathleen Blanco said state officials were keeping an eye on Ernesto, and the Army Corps of Engineers was carefully tracking the storm's movement, said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, head of the Army Corps.

It was too early to tell whether Ernesto would provide an early test for the city's levee system, which Strock conceded may not yet be strong enough to withstand a large storm surge.

Strock said he was confident the Corps had done all it could to repair and reinforce 220 miles of levee walls, but said many variables would determine whether the levees could withstand a major hurricane.

THEY’RE NOT READY!! They’re not sure what they’ve done will withstand a Category 3 storm.

I wonder what variables have to be considered? Whether the storm hit New Orleans or 200 miles away? Whether the materials supplied for the levee repairs came from a company owned by a Republican or a Democrat? Whether the workers, many of them “guest workers” from Central America working for below-industry level wages actually performed properly? (Let’s not forget that in his eagerness to rebuild the Gulf Coast, Mr Bush quickly suspended the Davis-Bacon Act requiring an industry-standard wage level in rebuilding efforts.)

[T]he White House said it was suspending in the disaster area so-called Davis-Bacon rules requiring prevailing wages be paid to workers on federal contracts. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050908-5.html) Republicans praised the executive order temporarily waiving the rules, which they said would fuel job growth in the hurricane region, but Democrats and their organized-labor allies accused the White House of exploiting the tragedy to accomplish a conservative goal.

But, no worries, because Mr Bush made sure that the insiders got a good taste of the Katrina stew, in addition to giving them cheap labor.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced yesterday that it was awarding contracts to Bechtel National Inc. of San Francisco and Fluor Corp. of Aliso Veijo, Calif., both of which are involved in Iraq. The other companies awarded FEMA work are Shaw Group of Baton Rouge, La., Denver-based CH2M Hill, which is providing housing in Alabama, and Dewberry Technologies of Fairfax, Va., which is providing planning and reporting tools to help guide the efforts.

The enormous amounts of federal money beginning to pour into hard-hit areas across the Southeastern U.S. are beginning to set off a gold rush reminiscent of corporate America's efforts to profit from the reconstruction of Iraq, and many companies winning Katrina-related contracts also have multibillion-dollar contracts there. White House and congressional officials are working to finalize a new $51.8 billion aid package that would push the total amount of federal money dedicated to relief efforts to more than $62 billion.

Cheap labor, more than $62 billion in taxpayer money and they’re not sure the levees will hold. I certainly hope the levees hold but if they don’t I wonder how they’re going to make the failure the fault of the Democrats?

Thanks to John at AMERICAblog for the tip

Just for a change of pace I wanted to bring something new to your attention. Florida is known for many different life forms. We’re world famous for our sport fishing, of course; Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea after an exhausting fishing trip in the Florida Channel, between the Keys and Cuba. In our waters you can find dolphin, grouper, sea bass, snook, several varieties of snapper, soft gentle rays gliding mysteriously through our coastal waters, their skin velvet-smooth.

We have lots of birds: swallows, flycatchers, starlings, warblers, ibises, herons – the list goes on and on. One bird that most people don’t associate with Florida is the eagle. When my wife and first moved to Florida we fell in love with the Keys. Those beautiful islets run south from the tip of Florida, arcing out into the Channel, like a string of pearls, green and lush with vegetation, bordered by brilliant white sandy beaches, washed by the blue waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. On the way south, along the road known variously as US Highway 1 and the Florida Overseas Highway, if you were very sharp-eyed, you’d see eagles’ nests on the top of cement large telephone poles sunk into the ocean. Now and then, while trapped waiting for the drawbridge at Plantation Key you would be lucky enough to watch an eagle with a fish in its beak, landing in its nest; for young eaglets, it’s always delivery.

The mainland has eagles, too, although that’s not as well known. We try to keep that secret. About 120 miles north of where I live, in Port St Lucie, a developer, The Ginn Company, has set up expensive webcams just so people can watch eafgles.

Although the eagles above Tesoro were poised for their first starring role on the Web last year, nature-lovers were disappointed to learn their feathered friends had moved to a new perch across the lake from where live "eagle cams" were aimed.

Some researchers wonder whether the birds sensed danger ahead at the old digs, which were damaged in Wilma along with two high-resolution Sony cameras mounted to record their every move.

The Ginn Co., developers of Tesoro, had so much interest in the project they decided to follow the eagles across the lake.

Two new cameras — one is powerful enough to read a book at 200 yards — were mounted in camouflaged, weatherproof housing 5 to 9 feet above and 30 feet away from the nest. They should allow what should be an even better bird's-eye view this year, officials said.

Webcams are both a fascination and a plague. I’m sure you’ve gotten email telling you that Janie, Dallas Debbie, or Crazy Mary had a brand new webcam and wanted to show you how well it worked. Now you have a chance to see Eddie Eagle’s webcam..

After news of last year's broadcast spread, hundreds of e-mails and phone calls streamed into the offices of Audubon of Florida, which can change the focus and angle of the images remotely from Orlando. Audubon's Tim Bachmeyer heard from school teachers, nature-lovers and others from across the country wondering when the national symbols of freedom would appear on their computer screens.

He's hoping not to disappoint this year.

"We had so much interest from all over, we couldn't possibly not try again this year," Bachmeyer said. "What a rare thing, to get a close-up view of an eagle family 24-7. Educating the next generation of kids about nature and birds of prey is priceless."

Tesoro's birds are expected to return to their winter home in Port St. Lucie any day, and Audubon hopes to activate its Web link by mid-September.

Just a couple of weeks more…..

http://www.audubonofflorida.org/friendsoftheeagle/

In today’s NY Times Mark Mazzetti has written a strange article. It seems that our national intelligence organs aren’t delivering the right intelligence about Iran:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States. Some policy makers have accused intelligence agencies of playing down Iran’s role in Hezbollah’s recent attacks against Israel and overestimating the time it would take for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

It’s a basic political trick. Down at the polls? Facing a wholesale turn out in the elections? Start a war. And, of course, now that Iraq has been such a terrific success, it’s time to move on to new horizons.

The complaints, expressed privately in recent weeks, surfaced in a Congressional report about Iran released Wednesday. They echo the tensions that divided the administration and the Central Intelligence Agency during the prelude to the war in Iraq.

That would be the same CIA that was gutted by Mr Goss in the aftermath of the Agency’s remarkable reluctance to provide the intelligence about Iraq that Mr Cheney wanted. Mr Goss did his masters’ bidding and fired or drove out all the experienced managers and supervising field operatives with a long history of dedicated service. It has been rumored that a similar winnowing occurred within the ranks of experienced analysts, partially as revenge for not falling in line with Bu$hCo’s concept of pre-emptive war as a valid foreign policy. As the amazing Billmon wrote:

As George Packer writes in this week's New Yorker, there isn't any such thing as bipartisanship in U.S. foreign policy anymore, which unfortunately doesn't mean such subjects are now exposed to full and open democratic debate (that'll be the day) but does mean the Cheney administration feels perfectly free to treat the CIA the way Tom DeLay used to treat the Department of Homeland Security -- as its private political fiefdom. And it was by that standard that Goss wasn't getting the job done. He wasn't canned for gutting the nation's most important intelligence agency -- that was the job he was sent there to do -- he was fired because he'd become a political liability, and was threatening to become a much, much bigger one.

We have a tamed intelligence community now, one compliant to the whims of the rulers: Messers Cheney, Bolton, and their neocon friends and advisors. Like a back room forgery shop churning out fake IDs for gangsters and illegal immigrants, Langley was gutted, many of the skilled employees fired in order to provide ‘intelligence’ required to produce the next step in the plan to gain control of all the Middle East oil and make Israel safe.

And yet, the tamed eagle in the cage is still not performing as demanded, even though the compass rose spokes all lead to Mr Cheney’s office:

The new report, from the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, portrayed Iran as a growing threat and criticized American spy agencies for cautious assessments about Iran’s weapons programs. “Intelligence community managers and analysts must provide their best analytical judgments about Iranian W.M.D. programs and not shy away from provocative conclusions or bury disagreements in consensus assessments,” the report said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction like nuclear arms.

“Best analytical judgments” being Mr Cheney’s demand for fabricated “proof” that Iran will have a nuclear weapon within two months and we must act now – NOW - NOW!!! because we don’t want the smoking gun to be mushroom clouds.

Badtux the penguin had an interesting passage in an article yesterday:

[T]heir uranium enrichment program isn't particularly important to their nuclear weapons program. A uranium bomb is too heavy to put onto a missile warhead, and the resulting bomb has relatively little power compared to modern thermonuclear devices. The core of Iran's nuclear program is their plutonium extraction process, which in turn is based around the heavy water reactor that they are building near the heavy water plant that they just finished building -- a heavy water plant, I might add, which is identical to the one Pakistan used as part of their nuclear weapons program, and the satellite photos I've seen of the reactor under construction seem to show it's identical to Pakistan's weapons reactor also. But I forget, these are being built with our "ally's" help (Pakistan's help), so Dear Leader must focus on the civilian nuclear program to distract attention from the fact that it is our "friends" who are giving Iran the bomb...

The civilian program (the light water reactor and the uranium enrichment program) is important to Iran's long-term weapons program, but only as a means of gaining experience with nuclear technology. Their actual weapons program is elsewhere, being built with the help of our "friends", an inconvenient fact that nobody seems willing to point out.

Because, for now, Pakistan is an ally. No need to worry about them until after Iran and Syria are disposed of.

Note to Gordo and others with a defined sense of the macabre: this is an official liquid alert.

Did you know Mr Bush reads books? No, seriously, stop that! It’s rude to laugh that way. And for heaven’s sake get up off the floor before the cats think you’re some kind of chew toy. It’s bad enough you use that cologne that smells like catnip.

Not only does he read books, but we’re breathlessly advised by some career-conscious gnome in Republican Lies, Inc that he has been reading Camus! (I guess next they’re going to tell us that his next book will be Jean-Paul Sartre’s L'Être et le Néant in the original! I doubt he’ll enjoy Sartre, because he had this life-long thing going on with Simone de Beauuvoir and they did that ‘living in sin’ thing. That sort of thing does not play well with his knuckle dragging base. (Let’s not even talk about the non-monogamous form of the relationship because that is ‘right to the down elevator and burn in hell for all eternity you sinner.’)

US President George W. Bush quoted French existential writer Albert Camus to European leaders a year and a half ago, and now he's read one of his most famous works: "The Stranger." White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer's 1946 novel -- in English.

The US president often spoofed as an intellectual lightweight, quoted Camus in a February 21, 2005 speech in Brussels praising the US-Europe alliance and urging other nations to help Washington spread democracy in the world.

Now some of us traitor lefties might make the assumption that, actually, it was decided to try and spiff up Mr Bush’s reputation with some very heavy asterisks, since he is practically catatonic unless he is reading a script. A cynical man might put that inability to speak ex tempore down to a looong ‘youth’ spent inside a bottle and a coke vial.

They are so desperate at this late date to portray Mr Bush as an intellectual that there was this gem flushed down the MSM bowl.

Maybe it was the influence of his wife, Laura, a former librarian, or his mother, Barbara, a longtime promoter of literacy. Or perhaps he was just eager to dispel his image as an intellectual lightweight. But President Bush now wants it known that he is a man of letters. In fact, Bush has entered a book-reading competition with Karl Rove, his political adviser. White House aides say the president has read 60 books so far this year (while the brainy Rove, to Bush's competitive delight, has racked up only 50).

But the title of the USNews article tells the truth:

A Humbled Presidency

These guys never stop lying - ever.

When this latest propaganda campaign was selected, someone pointed (Mr Rove?) at one of the WH speechwriters and said, “Pick some obscure intellectual writer and then a really weird quote, and stick it in the next speech.. Then he added, “Better yet, let’s give him a real long list of books he’s read this year.”

Here’s a partial list, according to CSPAN2:

And a partial list, according to USNews:

Is anyone surprised that Mr Bush is alleged to have 20% read more books that Mr Rove? I guess the implication is that Mr Bush is 20% smarter than Mr Rove? Or maybe that he has 20% more free time than Mr Rove?

As always the clever Mr Atta J. Turk has the best answer:

59 copies of "Archie Comics" and one copy of "Juggs" do not 5 dozen books make.

Forget Snakes on a Plane. According to Professor Thomas B Edsall, watching reptiles play poker is the real gut-wrencher.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060828&s=diarist082806 (subs req) [gorevidal/gorevidal]

A commenter in a previous thread pointed this out, linked from Josh Marshall’s TPM:

Ze'ev Schiff, writing in Ha'aretz:

One of the main conclusions of the war against Hezbollah will be the fact that the fighting abilities of the ground forces deployed by the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon have been blunted by years of police action in the territories.

Most units, in their training and operations, followed fighting doctrines of police forces and not of standing armies. Hezbollah trains, fights and is equip[p]ed as an army, utilizing some of the most advanced anti-tank missiles and other weapons

This is a vital “lesson learned” that will be taught everywhere forward thinking military forces plan for tomorrow’s wars. Unfortunately, it won’t be taught in Israel, nor in the US, or at least in a US controlled by a Republican Party. To do that would be to admit that the neocons, whose first loyalty is to changing the Middle East so that Israel is no longer surrounded by enemies, erred in their imperially ambitious Project for the New American Century.

The character of the IDF - known for its blitzkrieg methods, encircling movements deep inside enemy territory, and the ability to bring about a quick and decisive conclusion to the fighting - has been spoiled by years of involvement in operations that tied it down, emotionally and politically.

This included missions to stop terrorist cells, dealing with suicide bombings, the use of light weapons for the most part, and closures and sieges imposed on large population centers. Many of the IDF's reservists operate alongside the Shin Bet security service personnel to carry out arrests of wanted Palestinians. Battalions of reservists stood guard over Palestinians in detention centers.

If the West is to defeat the specter of non-state actors conducting war by terrorism, it will have to come to grips with the truth that terrorism, the “4th generation” warfare isn’t a classic war of combat. It requires good intelligence and skilled police work. This is not a “hammer and nail” challenge.

The West must learn this truth in order to survive as healthy, functioning democracies.

Well-trained and well-led fighting troops make damned poor policemen. Just look what has happened in Iraq.

Note: I am not saying that the US forces in Iraq have not been well-led. At the company level, all in all, they've probably been well-served by their leaders. But at battalion and brigade level I have the impression that careerism has left the troops holding the wet brown end of the stick.

Abu Ghraib is certainly one example, and our repeated trips to Ramadi and Fallujah are others. (I'm not suggesting that if, for instance, we had leveled those cities, killed every living thing and then salted the earth we'd have been right.) But it's pretty well accepted by now that we didn't have the horsepower we needed to accomplish Mr Bush's little exercise in ego-enhancement. Let's review the "Rule of the 6 P's" shall we?

Proper Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.

Planning. There was great operational planning before Mr Bush's illegal war, although canceling the planned attack from Turkey of the 4th ID certainly hurt. We went in without the advantage of the classic pincer attack. Further, the armor-heavy 4th would have provided a more calming influence, I think.

Proper Planning. The JCS told the neocons what was needed to take and, most important, to hold the ground. There was no followup planning. The only thing defended was the Oil Ministry, which pretty well tells the story of our priorities.

Piss-Poor Performance. Where to begin? In the heady days after the collapse of the Baathist government in Iraq, the US troops were welcomed by the Iraqis. But the combat troops overstayed their welcome because there was no planned followup by MPs to maintain civic order, trained Civil Affairs specialists to immediately re-institute a government so as to project a sense of law and order, and no stream of engineering specialists to repair power and water purification plants, and yes, even to repair and repaint schools.

All we had was the protected Oil Ministry, and Mr Rumsfeld insisting that that one damned vase kept getting looted, again and again.

People have been avidly discussing the decision of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who ruled that the warrantless NSA wiretapping is illegal without FISA Court approval. Many legal “experts” have come to the fore in order to lambaste her legal logic. As always, Glen Greenwald is an excellent source for explaining judicial decisions for those with no legal training.

Greenwald discusses and dissects the opinion here and in subsequent posts. The post also includes hot links to the decision and the subsequent injunction. (Warning: .pdf format for these two papers,)

I have read the opinion. Here is my immediate analysis of it. It is a very strong opinion in some places, weak in others, but is rather straightforward -- and sometimes eloquent -- in its almost always unequivocal rejection of the Bush administration's arguments.

Those alleged experts who have taken issue with the soundness or quality of Judge Diggs Taylor’s reasoning are, of course, participating in the oncoming swift-boating of the Judge’s decision. Whether or not the reasoning is up to snuff in the eyes of various observers is really kind of secondary because it’s the decision that is important. One of the more laughable points that our wrongnuts have been putting forward is that Judge Taylor was appointed to the bench in 1979. So, is she too old? Too female? Too black? Or is it just because President Carter appointed her?

Now, some of the experts are innocent of the usual mendacious VRWC tactic of muddying the waters with obfuscation, misstatement, misdirection and outright lies in every sentence, including “the” “and” and “but”. They are honestly commenting on the legal reasoning, and while they may or may not agree with the decision, their motives are pure. Others are merely earning their paycheck by attacking anything that is even slightly anti-Bu$h. (As I was writing this I realized that those folks have really had to earn their money the last six months.)

The NSA broke the law in using “wiretaps” without prior approval of the FISA court. The FISA law is written in such a prosecution-friendly manner that it’s possible to discover a problem, initiate the wiretap and then apply for the warrant. The 72-hour window allows for this eventuality. The fact that the Bu$h malAdministration claims pretends that the 72 hour post-action window is too difficult is specious, as is the case with all Bu$hCo actions. Filling out a pre-formatted application is easier than an anti-Bu$h article, for heaven‘s sake. They use a template, just like we did back in the day when we typed particulars onto a Blumberg form.

This is the point: George Bu$h came into the White House determined to enact a very aggressive (and regressive) social and political agenda. All his actions, and those of his co-conspirators associates and followers. have been bent to the goal of creating a “unitary executive.” Secondary goals were the removal of as much taxation as possible on his own income and inheritance, and the destruction of as much progressive legislation as possible. The fact that others also benefited is merely serendipitous because it only encouraged others to support his ideas.

One of the tools in creating that dictatorship unitary executive was political espionage. It was vital to know what his political opponents (Democrats – no, not you, Joe, you can sit down) and political dissenters were doing and saying. The objective, of course, was to collect as much private dirt as possible in order to silence opposition. The fact that the NSA was capable of monitoring overseas communication is a benefit in the “War of Terror” which he has so magnificently enabled by attacking Iraq. But he was determined to attack Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein, even before his election.

This is not some wild internet theory; Mr Bush is on the public record in his desire to “finish the job” that he believes his father was not “man enough” to do. Mr Bush has always had a burning need to prove to his mother that he was not only his father’s equal, but actually more “manly” than Bu$h pere.

No matter what is said, the central point is that Mr Bu$h and his associates have tried at all costs to avoid a judicial review of their NSA wiretapping spying. They knew it was illegal and unconstitutional. They just didn’t care. They were determined to do it anyway.

It’s fascinating the things you find when looking for information on the impact of religious beliefs on medical healing:

Kidney donor cries foul when recipient ditches Christianity

TUPELO — Aleta Smith, who donated her kidney to a 20-year-old college student last year, wants it back now that the student has changed religions.

Smith, a self-described "on-fire Christian," gave her kidney to Hannah Felks, a Lutheran and regular Christian camp counselor, last year after seeing Felks on the local news.

"She was going to die unless she got a kidney," Smith says, sitting on the porch at her home. "They portrayed her as this nice Christian girl who works with kids. I saw it as a great opportunity to help a sister in the Lord."

The surgery grabbed headlines and Smith was lauded for her selflessness. But shortly after the surgery, Felks embarked on a "spiritual journey" to try out other religions, and settled on a blend of Pagan and Hindu beliefs.

"I wanted to get away from the belief system I was raised in and find the truth for myself," she says. She took a semester off to travel the world visiting spiritualists on three continents.

Ut-oh. I smell trouble. A back-sliding Christian is a concern to the faithful.

Smith was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks to re-convert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses. "I feel helpless," she says. "Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who's going to hell."

When I read this I had to stop and reflect. It seems Christianity, as practiced in some parts of Tupelo, may not be the religion of love and forgiveness. And Miss Smith wants her kidney back? Has anyone explained there are no mulligans in organ transplant? And as I’ve stated before, the only person Jesus specifically guaranteed a place in Heaven was St Dismas. I imagine Jesus might be likely to reunite Miss Smith and her Hindu kidney in Hell as a punishment for her pretensions.

Smith suffers nightmares of her former organ filtering "strange Asian teas, pig blood and witch doctor brews in Africa," she says. She wonders if the Lord really wanted her to donate the kidney, or if she acted on a "triple-espresso high" she had that morning. She is also concerned that when her body is resurrected, it might be incomplete.

Good grief. The top of my desk is broken and I have a splitting headache. I have to lie down.

Perhaps my 20 or so readers remember the name DHB Industries. I wrote about it here, and here, and here. David H Brooks and his amazing deep-pockets Bush donor armor is in the news again:

Former executives of US body armor firm arrested

U.S. authorities arrested two former top executives of a major body armor supplier to the U.S. military and law enforcement agencies on Thursday and charged them with criminal securities fraud and insider trading.

Federal prosecutors alleged former Chief Financial Officer Dawn Schlegel and former Chief Operating Officer Sandra Hatfield manipulated DHB Industries Inc.'s books "to reap millions of dollars of profits through insider trading."

The lawsuit was a fresh blow to DHB. The U.S. military last year recalled thousands of protective vests sold by DHB's Point Blank Body Armor Inc. unit on quality concerns.

The company was recently delisted from the American Stock Exchange. Last month it placed Chief Executive David Brooks on indefinite leave pending the outcome of investigations.

Shares in Pompano Beach, Florida,-based DHB were down 2.6 percent at $3.00 each at midday in Pink Sheets trading.

To get delisted and posted to the pink sheets – the “penny stocks” is like driving Clemenza and his cannolis down to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn. Now, you can make money on penny stocks. I just cashed an $1100 dividend check from some 450 odd shares of stocks that I bought back in 1982. For me, that was a 400% profit, the sweetness somewhat lessened by the 24 year wait. I’d forgotten I owned the beast. Buying into the pink sheets is for folks who like to roll dice, bt can't afford the $10 bus ride to Atlantic City.

But Mr Brooks seems to have weathered it all somehow:

Even if 2004 wasn't the best year for your portfolio, it sure was for a lot of U.S. corporate executives and insiders. According to Thomson Financial data, last year was the second most lucrative on record for insiders as they sold $41 billion worth of their shares to the public, a figure that was up 40% from 2003. … Among the biggest sellers were…David H. Brooks of armor maker DHB Industries [who] sent $106 million worth of his shares to the open market on Dec. 29. The stock is off about 20% since that sale.

Gee, a 2004 sale. He certainly was lucky, wasn’t he? Or prescient. It almost looks like he sold off his shares in anticipation of…

There’s a form online, dated Aug 3, 2006, a mandatory filing for the SEC, Form 8-K which explains how Mr Brooks had his feet held to the fire by the SEC. Basically, they forced him to liquidate some of his go-go option bonus and return it to an escrow account to settle a class action lawsuit and a shareholders’ derivative lawsuit. To get out from under the lawsuits, Brooksie had to hand over about $21,825,000 in the settlement, if my math is right. Additionally, he was placed on “indefinite leave” pending the resolution of the lawsuits.

I hope you all realize that these two women were “bad apples” operating all by themselves. Don’t take the example of Enron and apply it to this case. Just because the Feds started with the lower down executives, and worked their way up the corporate ladder doesn’t mean that will happen in this case.

Of course not. Anyone who will be surprised if Mr Brooks suffers an unexpected heart attack right after his conviction, please raise your hands.

Thanks to Susie Madrak, the Uber Blonde, for the tip.

Weariness about Bu$hCo depredations against the middle class and poor, and a somewhat slow news cycle drove me to the Drudge Report* where I learned through Breitbart that a monster roaming southeastern Maine:

Residents are wondering if an animal found dead over the weekend may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation.

The animal was found near power lines along Route 4 on Saturday, apparently struck by a car while chasing a cat. The carcass was photographed and inspected by several people who live in the area, but nobody is sure exactly what it is.

Michelle O'Donnell of Turner spotted the animal near her yard about a week before it was killed. She called it a "hybrid mutant of something."

"It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget," she told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. "We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I've lived in Maine my whole life and I've never seen anything like it."

Hello. A Stephen King moment. After all, he does live up there, in Bangor. This sounds like fun. Lots of Maine is pretty undeveloped, with rich wooded hills and dales. (Do they have dales in Maine? I know they have them in Minnesota, out near Lake Woebegon.) The photo looks like a dark haired Chow mix.

http://www.drudgereport.com/hb.jpg

For the past 15 years, residents across Androscoggin County have reported seeing and hearing a mysterious animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night. The animal has been blamed for attacking and killing a Doberman pinscher and a Rottweiler the past couple of years.

Fifteen years? How is it we haven’t heard about this before? It sounds like something Leonard Nimoy should have been in search of.

Wildlife officials and animal control officers declined to go to Turner to examine the remains. By Tuesday, the carcass had been picked clean by vultures and there was not much left of the dead animal.

Loren Coleman, a Portland author and cryptozoologist, said it's unlikely that the animal was anybody's pet.

After reviewing photos of the carcass, Coleman said he was bothered by the animal's ears and snout. It reminded him of a case years ago in northern Maine in which an animal shot by a hunter could not be identified. In the end, wildlife officials got a DNA analysis that showed the animal was a rare wolf-dog hybrid, he said.

Someone had better alert Sen Santorum. It sounds like there are gay people in Maine, and this is the sort of thing he’s afraid of where teh gay live.

It was charcoal gray, weighed between 40 and 50 pounds and had a bushy tail, a short snout, short ears and curled fangs hanging over its lips, he said. It looked like "something out of a Stephen King story."

"This is something I've never seen before. It's an evil-looking thing," he said.

Ahah! I knew Stephen King was involved, somehow. We know the elephant is the symbol of the Outer Party, but what animal is the symbol if the Inner Party? I used to speculate that it was Desmodus rotundus, the vampire bat, but maybe I was wrong.

This could be very apt, symbolically, since we’ve heard a lot of polls talking about a seismic shift in political power in the upcoming mind-term elections.

Many different polls all seem to indicate that the American people have suddenly woken from their six year nap and, despite a pandering, bootlicking and fellating national press, seem to understand the Fascist Party is the greatest threat facing America today.

The thought that the secret symbol of the Republicans (A RICO organization if I’ve ever seen one,) was killed in a common traffic accident is calming.

I’ll tell you how I really know there’s a seachange:

Washington lobbying firms, trade associations and corporate offices are moving to hire more well-connected Democrats in response to rising prospects that the opposition party will wrest control of at least one chamber of Congress from Republicans in the November elections.

In what lobbyists are calling a harbinger of possible upheaval on Capitol Hill, many who make a living influencing government have gone from mostly shunning Democrats to aggressively recruiting them as lobbyists over the past six months or so.

* As Gordo from Alternate Brain would say, “Bleach, eyes. Repeat.”

People have been commenting on the fact that Hezbollah seems to be the effective government entity in southern Lebanon, and that is somehow, wrong. Ian Welsh has a good reply over at the Agonist:

One of the things that constantly amazes me is the inability of some people to imagine themselves in the shoes of a Hezbollah supporter and to whinge about how Hezbollah doesn't respect Lebanon's authority.

The fact that Hezbollah is not under Lebanese government control is indeed a problem for Lebanon. But then, when Israel invaded, the other Lebanese didn't help the Shia in the occupied territories, did they? And what did the Lebanese army do?

You can't sep[a]rate these things from history. Other groups may worry about Hezbollah, but Hezbollah knows that they are the only thing defending their people. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time understanding this.

Put yourself in their shoes - you spent EIGHTEEN YEARS occupied by a foreign power. The people who didn't help you, indeed who fought a civil war against you at the same time - the Christians, Druze and Sunni, want you to disarm? The ones who live north of the Litani, and won't be occupied if Israel invades again?

The Americans want you to disarm? The ones who sent in Marines, then used their navy to shell your villages, then whined that you were terrorists when you killed their troops and their spy chief? The French want you to disarm - the French who did nothing to stop Israel's invasions either time except spin uselessly around in the UN?

Think about how crazy that sounds. Really, think about it. If Hezbollah disarms what's to stop Israel from invading again? If Hezbollah is destroyed, who is going to run the hospitals, pick up the garbage, take care of the orphans and run the schools? If you're a poor southern Shia who hasn't seen government services in over a generation, why would you trust the government to take care of you?

I wouldn't disarm if I were Hezbollah. And if someone - Israel, the US, the UN, or the Lebanese who were shooting me in the back when I was fighting Israel in the 80's and 90's wants me to disarm, they can take my gun over my dead body.

We briefly commented on Hezbollah as a state-within-a-state here. And in response to a comment on this thread we suggested the amalgamation of the Hezbollah Army into Lebanon’s armed forces might provide an answer to the current situation. Let’s always remember that Hezbollah, a political party, has representation in the Lebanese Parliament with slightly more than 10% of the seats. One has to separate Hezbollah the political party from Hezbollah the army even though the two are related in several ways. It’s not exactly clear whether Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, has much input into operations of HA. The armed elements have shown quite a degree of independence in resisting the Israeli incursion and effectively bleeding the IDF until it stopped in place while waiting for the UN cease fire to kick in Monday morning. This is the result of arduous training and long-term planning.

If you look at things just on the basis of raw power and government services I will tell you this - Hezbollah looks more like a government and a state to me than Lebanon does. And if Lebanon wants to become a real country again, a real state, and not a fractious doormat which can be invaded by its neighbours, whether Syria or Israel, any time they feel like it, they had better figure out how to graft Hezbollah into the body politic in a way that preserves everyone's rights. But y'know what - I'm actually optimistic. Israel actually unified Lebanon during its invasion. Amazing, but true - polls show massive support across religious, ethnic and political lines, for fighting Israel. If that sense of unity can be used to integrate Hezbollah's armed wing into the military (really, pragmatically, that would mean the opposite); if it can be used to create a mission of rebuilding Lebanon for everyone, no matter Christian, Druze, Sunni or Shia, then one day Lebanon may be a real country with a real deterrent, able to both control force in its own territory and to defend itself from outside ag[g]essors.

As Ian Welsh points out, they’re highly motivated, having an 18 year history of fighting Israel, and I doubt they’re going to lay down their arms and meekly return to the fold of Lebanese sheep awaiting the next visit of the IDF. If it were possible to change Hezbollah’s motivation from “Israel must die” to “Lebanon must live” I think they’d be a strong influence in dragging Lebanon back from the rubble heap of war victim and in rebuilding the Pearl of the Levant. The social services arm of Hezbollah has been admirable in its efforts to help the poor and afflicted in southern Lebanon. But Israel must give strong assurances that it has no territorial designs on southern Lebanon, including the Litani river water. Perhaps the next Israeli Prime Minister, who should be elected within a month to replace the disgraced and inept Olmert will be a peace monger?

If I were a hypothetical madman determined to own or control all the Middle East mineral wealth, including the oil, and wanted to keep it for my best friends in the price-gouging oil industry, or at least keep the Russians, Chinese and Indians from getting at the oil I’d want to control Iran. If I had the advice of some folks who’ve spent most of their adult lives planning how to overturn all the Middle East Arab and Muslim governments and make them tame, so as not to threaten Israel, I’d want to pick out the most central and weakest country in that region and take it on first. I wouldn’t necessarily have to have it humming like a top; there is a theory in political science that internal chaos would keep such a country fractured, weak, unable to stop a strong armed force from maintaining a meaningful military presence there in order to forestall opportunistic neighbors. Or as a springboard for further regional attacks.

The biggest unfriendly country in the region is Iran. There is some evidence that Iran has been supporting the Shiites in their ongoing civil war against the Sunnis in Iraq. Both groups, being opportunistic, take a quick shot at Americans when they get a chance, too. (Or is it the unreconstructed Baathists and members of the foolishly spurned Army that do that?) From a local standpoint does it matter? The chaos exists.

Laura Rozen, writing in today’s Boston Globe, makes a good point about Hezbollah:

President Bush has declared the current conflict in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah to be part of the US-led global war on terror. ``The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East," Bush said in Miami last month. But there are practical reasons not to collapse Al Qaeda and Hezbollah into the same mold. Although Hezbollah has the capability and a history of killing Americans, that group is not currently trying to kill Americans. Al Qaeda and its imitators are -- as is evident from the exposure Thursday of a London-based conspiracy, possibly linked to Al Qaeda, to blow up transatlantic jetliners.

Al Quaeda has an ideological allegiance to two concepts: anti-Western and specifically anti-American influences, and the idea of Pan-Islamic unity. Osama bin-Laden, the guiding spirit of al Quaeda, envisions an Islamic crescent, from the eastern end of North Africa, right through the Middle East and via the Islamic republics that were once part of the USSR, to Pakistan, and Kashmir, bypassing India (for now) out to the Islamic countries on the southern Pacific Rim. The capital of this crescent would be Saudi Arabia, of course, because Mecca, Holiest of all Muslim shrines, is in that country. The House of Saud would have to go away because they are tainted by their business dealings with the West, especially the Bush family, (the ruling clan of the West in Islamic terms.)

Al Quaeda doesn’t really have a strong position on the Sunni/Shiite conflict as far as I’ve been able to learn. They think brothers should unite to fight the Great Satan, and the Lesser Satan.

Since the mid 80s, Hezbollah, supplied and guided by Iran hasn’t been trying to kill Americans, much more content to strike at the Lesser Satan, just across the border from southern Lebanon. And they’ve been doing a good job, not just maintaining a strong guerrilla army assailing Israel at every opportunity, but also creating a very active infrastructure in Lebanon, supplying social services that the central government on Beirut is too weak to handle.

Recent US intelligence community analyses raise the question: What would change Hezbollah's current posture of standing on the sidelines and not actively targeting Americans? In April , the community produced a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism, which, according to people who have read it , says that Hezbollah is the only major terrorist group with global reach currently not trying to kill Americans. The document also raised the intelligence community's concern that, if the United States were to attack Iran over its nuclear program, Iran might use Hezbollah to strike US targets once again.

So, if I were that hypothetical madman, it would make sense for me to encourage a regional partner to attack (or counter-attack) Hezbollah so that they could attrite the HA and make it just weak enough that it would be unable to mount a serious counter-attack against the US when it was decided to attack Iran. From a military standpoint, rehearsals are always preferred before a major operation. They used to be done on sand tables. Now the computer provides real time wargaming possibilities. But you don’t usually get a chance to have a dress rehearsal, even if a junior partner is conducting it.

According to former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, Hezbollah has a larger presence in the United States than Al Qaeda does. Nevertheless, experts say the group will continue to exercise restraint against Americans. ``I don't see much prospect of Hezbollah attacking US targets," [counterterrorism expert Neil] Koch says . ``They've got their hands full with the war against Israel, and this is their winner."

When the current Lebanese unpleasantness finally ends, whether it’s tomorrow as per the UN resolution brokered by the US and France, or at some later date, both Israel and Hezbollah will have to catch their breath, and re-arm for the next round. If Hezbollah is not sufficiently shattered as a functional organization, an attack on Iran by our hypothetical madman will produce a lot of casualties here in the US.

I’d feel a lot safer if our hypothetical madman had shown more interest in saving American lives over the last few years.

Hattip to Laura's teaser at War and Piece for leading me to her most engaging analysis.

Ha’aretz is reporting an article by Ari Shavit timed at 1931 hrs (1731 GMT) today that says Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is standing on a banana peel:

Ehud Olmert may decide to accept the French proposal for a cease-fire and unconditional surrender to Hezbollah. That is his privilege. Olmert is a prime minister whom journalists invented, journalists protected, and whose rule journalists preserved. Now the journalists are saying run away. That's legitimate. Unwise, but legitimate.

However, one thing should be clear: If Olmert runs away now from the war he initiated, he will not be able to remain prime minister for even one more day. Chutzpah has its limits. You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power. You cannot bury 120 Israelis in cemeteries, keep a million Israelis in shelters for a month, wear down deterrent power, bring the next war very close, and then say - oops, I made a mistake. That was not the intention. Pass me a cigar, please.

There is no mistake Ehud Olmert did not make this past month. He went to war hastily, without properly gauging the outcome. He blindly followed the military without asking the necessary questions. He mistakenly gambled on air operations, was strangely late with the ground operation, and failed to implement the army's original plan, much more daring and sophisticated than that which was implemented. And after arrogantly and hastily bursting into war, Olmert managed it hesitantly, unfocused and limp. He neglected the home front and abandoned the residents of the north. He also failed shamefully on the diplomatic front.

Still, if Olmert had come to his senses as Golda Meir did during the Yom Kippur War, if he had become a leader, established a war cabinet and called the nation to a supreme effort that would change the face of the battle, a penetrating discussion of his failures could be postponed. But in blinking first over the past 24 hours, he has become an incorrigible political personality. Therefore, the day Nasrallah comes out of his bunker and declares victory to the whole world, Olmert must not be in the prime minister's office. Post-war battered and bleeding Israel needs a new start and a new leader. It needs a real prime minister.

I don’t know much about Shavit other than that he’s a fairly skilled reporter and writer. He’s had works published in a number of English language publications, and he appears to bring a gun to a knife fight most times. Whether that would make him a neocon (neo-Zionist in Israeli terms) is probably a subjective judgment made by the reader. However this article is pure opinion and he’s breathing fire. Interestingly, published readers’ responses agree with him, and quite a few believe the entire Kadima government must go, too. More on this later in this piece.

Before today I wasn’t aware that Olmert had had military experience and in fact had been badly wounded in the 1967 war. In earlier pieces I had ascribed his woolly-headedness to a lack of military experience. I was wrong as it turns out, but it appears that Olmert has been listening to the wrong advisers. Earlier today I wrote:

Since the Israeli onslaught developed from a plan finalized over a year ago in consultation with the US Defense Department, it’s a good bet that the killings and captures occurred in south Lebanon.

Unspoken in that paragraph is the presumption that the Israeli plan was “tweaked” by someone (cough, cough) at the Defense Department. If you think that someone wears a uniform you’re wrong. There are a lot of knowables when discussing Israel, and quite a few unknowables, as well as a host of unknown unknowables, if you get my drift and I bet you do.

Let’s unwrap that quote from earlier today and go to the source, a fascinating article at SFGate, the webpage for the San Francisco Chronicle. The writer, Matt Kalman, gets a lot of good information because he’s proven he understands the complexities of international diplomacy and politics, and most of all keeps his word. (Note to Messers Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld: when you tell the truth, and keep your word, people start to trust you. Before you know it, they confide in you.)

Briefly, Kalman’s article points out that a “senior Israeli Army officer" started handing around a Power Point presentation about their plans to deal with Hezbollah “…on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks…” Kalman doesn’t mention the fact that the plan was first presented to Messersr Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby and Hadley, then at the NSC. The fact is that Mr Rumsfeld adores Power Point, and no briefer who ever expects to get promoted would use any other format.

Since Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld effectively think they’re paying the bill personally, they added certain flourishes to the plan because this was to be only one step in the “transformation of the Middle East” to a region of “emerging democracies.” Messers Rumsfeld and Cheney, of course, are paying the bill with your grandchildren’s college education, but after six years association with Mr Bush, you can understand why they think of the US Government and Treasury as “cosa nostra” – “our thing.”

As we have seen the tweaks were failures. Too much air power, too little ground forces, and too late at that. Now Mr Olmert and his Kadima party must pay got another of Mr Rumsfeld’s follies.

Next up at bat: Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, one of the original neocons, or neo-Zionists as they’re thought of in Eretz Israel. William Kristol will be insufferable tomorrow on the talking head shows. He’ll be smiling and drooling all over the place as he contemplates the mushroom clouds over Iran and Syria. Maybe someone should warn Mrs Kristol that she should take some Xanax because she’s in for a rough couple of days until the aphrodisiac of irradiated Muslims wears off.

Israel is a parliamentary democracy, a system like Great Britain has. I’ve always admired that form of government, because it’s so easy to turn out an incompetent government.

The latest Israeli military adventure is beginning to resemble an Agatha Christie mystery, with many false leads, dead-end conclusions, and an underlying sense of great menace for the reader. The UN Security Council has finally arrived at a peace resolution to bring about a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. It’s quite remarkable in a way because Hezbollah, a “non-state actor,” has no standing before the UN.

Notwithstanding, the Security Council adopted a unanimous resolution to stop the fighting. It isn’t quite a peace treaty, or agreement (Hezbollah being a non-state actor and all) but a rose by any other name, etc. It seems the French and New Zealand have agreed in principle to join the new UN peace-keeping force.

Billmon has been on top if this mishegos from the get-go, and is still the go-to source for good interpretation of the Levant Lolapalooza:

Ehud Olmert's office said late Friday that the expanded incursion into Lebanon would continue "for the time being," despite agreeing to a cease-fire resolution drafted by the United Nations Security Council. Senior Israel Defense Forces officers said that the IDF is "continuing forward at full power. . . "

This, of course, is 100% kosher bullshit -- nobody in their right mind would start a major offensive at "full power" knowing full well it will all have to be shut down within 48 or at most 72 hours. So it looks like the big push was just a big fraud all along -- a desperate attempt by Olmert and his bedraggled colleagues to try to kick a little dust in the eyes of their domestic constituents. But the message -- "Yeah, boy, if they had'na stopped me I would have kicked Hizbullah's ass but good -- isn't very original or at this point even slightly believable.

The ludicrousness of Israel’s position will not serve her well in the Middle East. By over-reacting to a Hezbollah provocation – the capture of two soldiers and the killing of 6 (or eight) others. No one seems to quite know whether this happened in Israel of Lebanon. There’s a lot of uncertainty about all this because, just like their Big Brother sponsors the US, public reporting by the government is chaotic, contradictory, and most likely based on the same level of fact as Bu$hCo announcements.

Since the Israeli onslaught developed from a plan finalized over a year ago in consultation with the US Defense Department, it’s a good bet that the killings and captures occurred in south Lebanon

One of the causes of this lack of, shall we say, reality stems from the infusion of neocon evil that permeates both governments. When you have a group of advisors who produce a policy of naked military aggression against unarmed nations, you’re dealing with evil. And when those same advisors produce a policy of unlimited bombing of civilians it’s the same evil. People who advocate unrestricted bombing of civilian populations (Guernica, Ramadi, Falluja, Lebanon) are monsters. I can’t think of a stronger term within the bounds of civility.

David Rifkin and Lee Casey, writing in Saturday’s Ha’aretz:

Israel has been cautious in Lebanon, fearing not only for the lives of its soldiers, but also that an overly aggressive military campaign will alienate world opinion and force its hand diplomatically at the UN. However, Israeli leaders ought to worry more about a different scenario, one in which American policymakers, analyzing the Israel Defense Forces' failure to defeat Hezbollah after 30 days effort, lose their faith in Israel's ability to "get the job done" on issues of shared strategic interest.

Should the IDF lose its aura of invincibility in American eyes, Israel's perceived value as an ally could decline sharply. This reassessment in Washington, when combined with a continuing and even heightened determination by Arab states and jihadists to destroy Israel, would be catastrophic for its security.

America’s fascist neocons despise a loser (unless that loser is Joe SORELOSERman, George Bush, or the Republican Party.) If the IDF can’t destroy Hezbollah, then what are their chances against an announced enemy like Iran, who’s equipped with a full suite of anti-air weaponry, unlike Hezbollah? Because of political opposition, Mr Bush can’t start another illegal war, this time against Iran, without a very strong excuse. Even if one has to be invented, like in Iraq. But backing up Israel would have been a concept that might have been accepted by the 67% of Americans who now apparently can’t wait to see Mr Bush’s back end board Air Force 1 for the last, final flight to Crawford.

The long knives are out -- for Olmert, for Peretz (the ward boss and ex-"peace" activist turned defense minister) for Halutz and the commander of the Northern Front (who was effectively sacked in the middle of the war) and for that matter probably half of entire IDF general staff -- if they don't sink daggers into each other's backs first. Losing is never pretty, and the post-war settling of accounts after this loss is going to be even less so.

We’ve discussed Olmert’s vulnerability before:

Since Olmert is the first Israeli PM to have grown up in a “safe” country, with no practical military experience (as far as I know he never served on active duty in the military,) he might well have felt the need to prove his chops, and was just waiting for an excuse to over-react to a provocation by someone.

As a side note, Olmert did in fact serve in the Israeli army, apparently in the 1967 war and in fact was severely wounded. We regret the previous error and, unlike the Fascist Party, are happy to correct the record.

Olmert is a member of the Kadima political party, and is on public record for advocating the creation of a Palestinian state, and relinquishing control of parts of the West Bank. In Israeli politics as practiced in the Knesset this would be like Mr Bush announcing he was in favor or repealing all the tax cuts he insisted upon. Kadima hold less than 25% of seats in the Knesset, which shows how weak it could be in the face of determined opposition from the Labour (19 seats) Likud (12 seats) and Shas (12 seats) parties.

Coalition politics is always a chancy matter and a perceived failure in Lebanon could well cause a Knesset revolt against Kadima and bring a very hardliner like Benjamin Netanyahu to head a new government. That, in turn would most likely overthrow Israel’s acceptance of this UN cease-fire resolution.

(The title with many apologies to Hal Davis who partnered with Burt Bacharach to create the song that defined the 70s)

The fighting in Lebanon between Israeli forces and Hezbollah continues today, seemingly unabated. Meanwhile, the US and French governments continue to try to hash out a deal that could ultimatley lead to a cease-fire in the region. With the continued bombing of southern Lebanon, there is a growing need for humanitarian intervention.

The problem is that Israeli forces continue to refuse to grant authorization to UN forces to deliver food and aid to those who desperately need it. This seems to confirm theories circulating on the Internet that Israel is not just interested in getting their two soldiers released by Hezbollah, but rather their desire to "punish" the Lebanese people for the actions of a few terrorists. Much has been said already concerning the disproportionate response by Israeli forces and the almost total destruction of several Lebanese towns. Beirut continues to targeted by the IDF in the form of bombs and artillery shelling. If the fighting continues without a cease-fire resolution, there is the potential for several thousand more deaths of Lebanese civilians. Those not already killed by the shelling of Beirut and other towns are now dying of starvation, lack of medical care, and lack of water.

The growing humanitarian crisis in south Lebanon needs decisive leadership from the US to stop the fighting at all costs. I wholly reject Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's assertion that we need to let the fighting continue until a "comprehensive, long-term" cease-fire agreement is reached. People are dying in this region of the Middle East. Israeli civilians are dying as well, however at much lower numbers than Lebanese civilians. Our country's first priority needs to be to stop the fighting at all costs. A comprehensive solution to the current situation can be negotiated at a later date. If nothing else, President Bush and Secretary Rice need to use their influence to at least allow UN aid convoys into the area to feed and provide medical care to those who need it most. This conflict has grown in size from being about 2 kidnapped soldiers into a possible illegal occupation of Lebanon by Israeli forces.

I remember back in 1991, just a few months before I enlisted in the Marine Corps, a certain Middle Eastern country's leader took it upon himself to invade a sovereign nation. Back then, the US response was swift and decisive. For the most part, we accomplished our goal of forcing that country's army to pull back from the country it invaded. Of course, the conflict back then involved oil, but it could have just as easily been lied about spun to be about kidnapped soliders. This analogy is slightly flawed though, and I acknowledge that. But my point is that Israel has violated Lebanon's sovereignty by invading their airspace and advancing into the country. The response to this by other countries in the world has been less than apropriate if you ask me.

Something needs to be done to help the innocent in this conflict. Will the US be the ones to do it, or will we shirk our responsibility for helping to advance human rights and continue blindly supporting Israel?

More of Bulldog's rants can be found at The Bulldog Says...