Dead presidents

Senator Mel “why bother” Martinez

Big shout out to the Democrats in Congress for attempting to do what they’re supposed to do when the majority of American people oppose a war that the president won’t stop waging. Yay for finally effectively exercising the power of the purse in our name and spinning shut the tap: we [...]

The Petraeus show

Gen. Petraeus says we should stay in Iraq, warning against the effects of a “quick pullback” (ie, a considered withdrawal from combat operations).
It would have been news if he said this instead: “Ladies and gentleman, we’ve got to get the hell out of there immediately. Our being in Iraq is a shit-storm of a [...]

Cheney 1.0

Thanks to Salon’s ace Video Dog team for posting this from Scott Bateman. These are Cheney’s thoughts in 1994 on the wisdom of invading Iraq in order to oust Saddam Hussein back in the Desert Storm days, in 1990, when Cheney was working for the first President Bush. The reasoned nature of the comments, the [...]

run for your life!

After a 5-year study in 11 countries, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Organization for Standardization have concluded that the above sign has the ability to scare the sh*t out of anybody, regardless of linguistic, cultural, religious, international or planetary differences.
Admittedly, a major improvement on the three-cornered trefoil.
Still, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is unphased. [...]

‘we’re in jail, dude’

Via BBC via Murdoch’s Sun, a British tabloid. Surprising how long it took for this to break, but ol’ Rupes is just that kind of player.
The Sun newspaper says it has obtained the cockpit video at the centre of a row over the “friendly-fire” death of a British soldier in Iraq.
An inquest into the [...]

The Mundy Round Up

After a week-long layoff, it’s time to get back on my cyber-grind, so to speak. So here it is - a melange of news stories that I have found interesting, illuminating, or most expedient when assembling my blog entry. I also saw Children of Men (for a second time), and would highly recommend it to [...]

lara logan’s plea from baghdad

CBS News’ Baghdad Correspondent Lara Logan recently sent out an e-mail pleading for friends and colleagues to push CBS to air her “Battle of Haifa Street” report on any of their news programs. They have thus far agreed only to post the video on their Web site. Watch it here and you’ll see why they’re [...]

iraq is like…

Here in the reality-based world, its tough to imagine the situation on the ground in Iraq and how the president’s new “way forward” could possibly be any more effective than the past four years of “staying the course.”
Fortunately, a few high-ranking defense officials and pundits recently provided us with better context for understanding the road [...]

show U.S. the dignity

Sec. State Condoleezza Rice’s voice trembled as she was inclined to sort-of apologize for the lack of “dignity given to the accused” at a news conference in Egypt today. Perhaps the shakiness of her comment can be pinned to its sickening irony.
Saddam Hussein and two of his aides were executed by the Iraqi government within [...]

Merry Xmas, You Satanic Hippie!

The last turkey sandwiches have been choked down, and Christmas is all around. Snow on the ground, holiday music in the air, mistletoe-flavored coffee at Starbucks … and neighbors at each other’s throats. Break out the eggnogg!
Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign
Some neighbors in Colorado are up in arms over one resident’s [...]

a cartoon world

Here’s more evidence that graphic-comic is becoming the contemporary masterpiece genre of the visual arts:
Columbian artist Fernando Botero is known for painting like a cartoonist, creating huge canvases and sculptures of whimsical thick-limbed frolicking people, figures that seem to be pulled from the magic-realist novels of fellow Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Last year Botero completed [...]

the volunteer state

He’s a bible-thumping, anti-gay marriage, privileged son of the south. He’s Harold Ford Jr, and he’s the key to the midterm elections and a barometer in many ways for the future of the country.
He wants to change course in Iraq, proposing to divide the country, former-Yugoslavia-style, into three roughly independent cantons or states. He attacks [...]

our CEO president

What comes of government streamlining? Private firms get hired to act in the government’s place. That arrangement has a nice ring in the mouths of small government “let the market decide” advocates, but it doesn’t always work out so smoothly in practice. Our tax-payer billions have bought us an inefficient mess of a War on [...]

spinning Iraq, again and again

It is no wonder this guy wore a “Bullshit Protector” over his ear during the president’s address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars this week. We’re going to need a lot more of these things.
In the run up to the first Gulf War, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as Nayirah provided tearful testimony before [...]

Anybody in There?

The recently foiled terrorist attacks and the escalating violence in Iraq have given a cringing world another blast of the president’s vapid sound-bite foreign relations analysis that sounds more like the comments of a jilted lover than the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. Comments like “They hate us because they hate our freedom” [...]