Who's a respected leader?

From today's Salon: "In an email to reporters, Bush-Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt said that Giuliani is a trusted leader in the war on terrorism, and he offered some advice for John Kerry: 'Mind the stature gap, Senator.'"

Stature gap? Maybe El Commandante Busho and crew needs to be reminded that many of the deaths of police and firefighters at the WTC might have been avoided had they had equipment that worked and allowed them to communicate with each other. Isn't the mayor responsible for equipping them and making sure the departments were cooperating? Who was it that put NYC's emergency command post inside the WTC after the 1993 bombing attempt? Now that's leadership.

His popularity as a leader was lower than a snake's ass when disaster struck. Way to gain stature, have people die on your watch. Then there's Iraq.

RHIP

More Bush national guard documents have surface, provoking the usual debate. People seeking to understand all this should download a copy of Creedence Clearwater's "Fortunate Son" and play it several times.

John Fogerty's toured with Springsteen for America Coming Together.

And another thing.

So, OK, I first said the Bushites were stupid. Then I said they were arrogant. That is not a flip-flop. I have had one consistent position on the Busheronies from the start. They are arrogantly stupid.

Continuing that line of discussion, the NYT notes that Halliburton had a loss in its third quarter due to "charges from discontinued operations related to the settlement of asbestos and silica claims."

Wanna guess who the arrogantly stupid CEO of Halliburton was when they bought the company that actually caused the asbestos and silica lawsuits? If you said Darth Cheney, you would be correct.

Maintain your balance!

The good old bank check that gave us the three day "float" is dead. Very soon banks will be electronically transfering funds and making a digital copy of the check, which will count as a legal document. The downside of this is that the time it takes to process the check will go from somewhere around 72 hours to seconds. No more float.

Banks make a substantial amount of their profit from fees, so they can expect to improve their bottom line by charging for all those overdrafts and reduce their costs due to less physical processing of paper. Deposits won't, for some strange reason, clear instantly. That will be a slower, more deliberative process. If you're a small depositor expect to be taken advantage of. But you're used to that.

Correction

From today's Salon --

"Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the destructive consequences of the administration's failure to secure the site could be almost incalculable. 'This is thousands and thousands of potential terrorist attacks,' Cirincione told Salon. 'It's like they knocked off the Fort Knox of explosives.'"

Cirincione goes on to attribute the administration's screw ups to arrogance and not stupidity.

I stand corrected.

What's next?

I hadn't heard of the Nelson Report before but apparently it's responsible for breaking the story on the hundreds of tons (somewhere around 380) of high-tech explosives that disappeared from a large storage site at Al QaQaa in Iraq. This, of course, was after we were warned about it. It's likely that this stuff is now being used to kill our troops. It's also useful in making nuclear weapons. Oh, yeah -- the "dual use" technology Iraq had is missing to. Wonder where that went?

Another way Bush has made us safer.

I had it in my head that Rummy & Co. failed to protect Iraq's cultural and civic resources out of some perverse belief that they weren't worth saving. It appears that they weren't prepared to protect much of anything. With "shock and awe" and the joy of liberation the bad guys should have been cowed and the peasantry compliant.

It's been said: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." With this crew, stupidity has enormous explanatory value.

Note to Tommy Franks: Feith isn't the only dumb fuck out there. Oops, sorry -- you said he was the dumbest. I guess we could argue that too. Plenty of choices.

Robert Scheer has this piece on a report that's being sat on at the CIA and may only see the light of day after the elections. It supposedly names names and assesses blame for intelligence failures that led up to 9/11. Isn't it strange that the biggest intelligence failure since the Bay of Pigs that resulted in the most casulties since Pearl Harbor happened and no one has gotten fired? I wonder what Condi Rice got on her annual employee evaluation: "needs to pay more attention to detail"?

Short post!

Too much going on today to pontificate. I'll leave that to fellow countryman Zbignew Brzezinski, the anti-Kissinger, who has this Op-Ed piece in the NY Times.

Unfortunately for readers of the Times, Tom Friedman is back from his book writing leave and continues to wring his hands over the Iraq war (which he promoted) and Israel (being a member of the American chapter of the Likud party). Don't get me started on what Ted Rall cartooned as the "incredible lightness of Tom Friedman."

Not my homie, either.

Juan Cole devotes much space on his must read blog, Informed Comment, to Eminem of all people and the lyrics to Marshall's latest creation "Mosh."

The rapper reportedly told Rolling Stone that El Commandate Busho "ain't my homie" but that he hasn't yet made up his mind if he's voting for Kerry.

Hopefully, Dr. Cole will return to his detailed and incisive commentary on the Middle East.

Sinclair aired its Kerry sliming "newscast" last night, which means WGGB (Ch. 40, Springfield, MA) loses a viewer and I get to write more letters, I guess. I'm going to watch for when their license comes up for renewal as well.

Almost

Enough to make me believe in a higher power is this from The American Conservative. Add to that Jessie Ventura's and Eminem's endorsements and you may have a movement. I may experience a conversion next month. Stay tuned.

Here in Massachusetts things have been very quiet on the national level, with the exeception of the local Sinclair station (WGGB) protesting that it's owner is misunderstood. Locally, it's been laughable with Mitt Romney (our Governor, son of George Romney and former master of the takeover at Bain Capital) trying to field candidates against Democrats.

Massachusetts is an interesting state: 40% Catholic, yet we have gay marriage based on a ruling by a Repug majority Supreme Judicial Court. A reputation for high taxes that just ain't so. A state whose tax base made up of high tech industries involved in defense work. Then there's all those universities that impact on the state's economy: Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Brandeis, Boston University, Boston College, and a slew of "second tier" colleges that are really second to none. Then there's the University of Massachusetts, which manages to survive and produce good work in what is probably the most privatized state in the country. Oh -- and the state that elected John Kerry to the Senate a few times as well as that other guy: Ted Kennedy.

Now Let's Hear from Mayor McCheese

According to this piece in the NYT, Burger King is pulling its advertising from Sinclair stations. Seems the BK folks are not convinced that the revised programming planned by Sinclair won't be a hatchet job and wants to maintain its "neutrality" in the upcoming election.

Burger King got the message. Time to congradulate them.

My regret is that I didn't have a short interest in Sinclair stock when they first announced their plans.

Partial victory?

The Sinclair folks have apparently scaled back their plans to slime John Kerry. Another round of email, telephone calls and lettters to the editor seem to be in order.

By now just about everybody's seen the photo of Turd Blossom (aka Karl Rove) under Air Force One. No explanation of Rove's behavior has been forthcoming. Then again, I find that most of Rove's behavior defines explanation.

Boo!

Noodling around this morning I came across this graphic. Click around Karl and George -- some good stuff there!

An interesting social experiment.

Walk into a doctor's office, preferably a psychiatrist, but a family practice doc is fine. Tell the doctor that an invisible being who is quite powerful, actually all powerful, is telling you to do things. You believe that you're an instrument of this invisible being's will and must do as commanded. When you leave the doctor's office you're going to destroy evildoers wherever they may be. You will do whatever it takes to get them and as far as you're concerned, the doctor has only two choices: take your side or the side of the evildoers.

Will the doctor:

a. Call the police and/or psychiatric crisis services?
or
b. Write you a prescription for an anti-psychotic?
or
c. Say "I'm with you, Mr. President."?

Be afraid.

Fear is a theme that's been running rampant lately, fueled by the Confounder in Chief in his attempt to get elected (yes, I'm one of those who continue to insist that Gore won). There have been a slew of articles lately that put in print what's been obvious for the last three years: fear is a very useful tactic for maintaining support for the administration and puts anyone who might have contrary thoughts in a position that's equivalent of arguing against mom and apple pie. (Given carbophobia, another great fear, one can probably make a case against apple pie, but that's another story.)

It's amazing how people buy into this. As a kid, I learned there were communists everywhere. They went away, not because of an untenable political system, poor economy, and inept leadership but because Ron Raygun had a vision and "stood up" to them. He could insist that Gorbachev "tear down the wall" because it was ready to fall down anyway. Funny, of the three nations in the axis of evil, we happened to knock off the one without significant weapons systems. Remember the "mushroom cloud" smoking gun, the UAV's that were able to deliver WMD's to our shores, the alliance between Saddam and Usama?

Scary wasn't it? Not true, but scary. Besides it's much more effective than trying to frighten folks with visions of relics of the 60's engaged in a culture war. Right up there with the "homosexual agenda" to destroy family life as it's been for centuries. Not as messy as book burning.

5000 arrests and we've yet to turn up one of those "sleeper cells" or actually convict someone of being a card-carrying member of Al Qaeda in the commission of a terrorist act. Zero. Our success is paralleled by our staunch British allies, who've made over 660 arrests and ended up with 17 convictions: IRA members and militant Sikh types but no Qaeda's. Zero. There again, Blair likes to imitate Bush.

I don't doubt there are some mean, nasty, homicidal people out there (God's instruments, no less), I do doubt we're being told the whole truth. The Bush Administration firmly believes they can create their own reality. The sad part is that 50.1% of the population might buy it.

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Philoking

Philoking origins began as Philosopher King, a running joke between my kid and I, and morphed into a sometime internet name I use. I'm no relation to the Phillip O. King, Phillip King, or Phil King you think you know. They're not responsible. Really.

comments: philoking-at-comcast-dot-net

First observations

Welcome to South Blogania. The name comes from being Slavic, plus where I live now, and from an overexposure to Marx. In college I was a dedicated Marxist/Lennonist, spending much time studying the works of Groucho and John.

On to blogging...

I'm always fascinated by the sender's names and subject lines in the email caught by the spam blocker my cable company supplies. It appears spammers are largely concerned about reducing the cost of prescription drugs, getting an erection, providing something to get an erection over, refinancing property, and keeping spam other people send you from installing spyware.

Who would be dumb enough to respond to this stuff? What reasonable person would buy a prescription drug from someone who can't spell? Why would a nubile woman without tan lines who became 18 just days ago while living in southern California be attracted to a middle-aged, paunchy, semi-employed guy on the opposite coast? Can one really get below market rates mortgaging property not owned? How come a major cable company supplying broadband service to millions doesn't know about this magnificent software that will make scumware history?

We know from spamologist's studies that enough people do respond to this crap to keep the spammers in business. It doesn't take much: only one or two percent of the total recipients responding keeps these deviants churning out garbage. The spammers, that is.

Who, in heavens name, might these foolish respondents be?

The answer came from CNN and Mark Shields. You may recognize Shields as the ersatz liberal commentator on the News Hour, the guy who pretends that David Brooks has something meaningful to say (as do the producers at PBS). Shields reported that Repubs sent letters to voters in Alabama and West Virginia informing them that if "the liberals" (aka John Kerry) won in November the bible would be banned. Simple -- Kerry in, scriptures out. Never mind all the Federal Law stuff and other realities that would get in the way of such a silly gesture. Satan would once again triumph in the face of an omnipotent God.

So now you know. Voters identified by the Republican Party in Alabama and West Virginia are putatively dumb enough to respond to spam. Spammers could save themselves thousands of dollars by getting a copy of the Repubs mailing list and concentrating on that. But we know they won't, because the Repubs will charge an arm and a leg for the list, so its cheaper to spam the rest of us.

Not that country folk are alone. Someone in my previous workplace kept leaving notices around that Madeline Murray O'Hare, the infamous atheist, had managed to get CBS to take "Touched by an Angel" off the air. The fact that O'Hare died years before "Touched" was ever broadcast didn't make a difference to the mysterious leaflet leaver. Add the leaflet leaver to the list, if for no other reason to demonstrate that the liberal northeastern states have at least some residual dumbness present. Touched, all right.

Senator Robert Byrd, one of the few people in the country who's actually read the Constitution, insisted that the Repubs issue an apology to the good folks of West Virginia. Nobody from Alabama said anything. The Repubs haven't responded either. Karl Goebbels probably said not to.

But wait, there's more. How about the warning that an Iraqi terrorist's captured computer had floor plans of schools in it, including two in New Jersey (home to a bunch of Muslims). Turns out there was no threat, according to the Homeland Insecurity types. The laptop was seized months before the "threat" was announced and its owner was involved as a volunteer in rebuilding schools in Iraq. Some of the school systems with floor plans in the computer were notified, some were not. Go figure. Hey, no harm, no foul. Even in an election year.

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