Clearly he's insane...

Great, just what we need: yet another damn speaking tour...

With anti-war protesters continuing their vigil outside President Bush's ranch, the commander in chief began a five-day push Saturday to tell Americans why he thinks U.S. troops must continue the fight in Iraq.

In his weekly radio address, Bush argued that the war in Iraq will keep Americans safe for generations to come. He'll try to drive the point home with speeches in upcoming days in Utah and Idaho. "Our troops know that they're fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy," the president said in the recorded broadcast. "They know that if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets, and they know that the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war, and they know we will prevail."

For the last time: you CANNOT simultaneously use the "Honeypot" arguement AND the Humanitarian arguement! The two are in direct conflict!

-If the point of the war in Iraq is to draw potential terrorists there to attack US soldiers, then a stable Iraq is a bad thing, because 1) chaos allows a freedom of movement conductive to frequent strikes and 2) stability would mean Iraq could solidify its government, and the 1st thing they would do upon that is say they want us gone. The best scenario from a "Honeypot" standpoint would be exactly what's going on right now -- Iraqi progress going clumsily if at all, and a loose border w/ a steady stream of jihadis coming in.

-If the point is as the Neo-Imperialists say, "spreading democracy", then every Radical Islamist that comes in represents a piece of a loss, ever so steadily adding up. Iraq cannot even hope to establish anything worth maintaining unless they have as tight a perimeter as can be managed, because while people are blowing stuff up the populace will be thinking about security and not freedom -- we oughta know, that's the reason our last couple elections went the way they did. For the Humanitarian view to actually work, Iraq would have to be a closed lab, so the borders would have to be tighter than spandex on an elephant. Say it with me now: Not-Enough-Troops...

There's a right way to do anything, even if it's wrong. We shouldn't have been there in the first place, but if we were going anyway there should've been double the force deployed, with the aim being to win the intial battle, crush the internal insurgency, then post up at the borders and kill anything that comes across while the Iraqi people made the sausage that is representative government. If I were Bush, Rumsfeld would've been out of work a year ago. This "lighter, sleeker war" thing may look neat on CNN w/ all the streaking lights and whatnot, but I get the feeling we should've stuck to the doctrine of overwhelming force.

By now it's no wonder that the american public is changing their minds. It's not that they're "anti-war" though, more accurately anti-wars-that-don't-seem-to-accomplish-anything. They're old-fashioned like that, they want a military that does one thing -- killing -- and does it really well, and doesn't concern itself with babysitting.

...Next week, the president will regain some of the spotlight with scheduled speeches to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Monday and a National Guard group on Wednesday.

As he has before when he has been challenged, Bush invoked the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in his radio address. "On that day, we learned that vast oceans and friendly neighbors no longer protect us from those who wish to harm our people," he said. "And since that day, we have taken the fight to the enemy."

Number of Iraqis that were 9/11 hijackers: Zero. So drop it.


If Bush's previous speaking tour is any indication, this is going to backfire huge. I get the feeling if he were to do a speaking tour in support of the War on Drugs the result would be demonstrations favoring legalization becoming mainstream-acceptable.


***Updated 4:27pm EST***
Speaking of the "Honeypot" arguement, Joe Gandelman spotted it being challenged -- by the Pentagon's own guys...

Article:

...Pentagon officials now fear those freshly trained terrorists are taking the deadly lessons they learn in Iraq to other countries. U.S. intelligence indicates many of the militants are returning home or slipping into Europe, where they may join existing terrorist groups or create and train new cells of their own.

That’s exactly the opposite of what the Bush administration had in mind when it invaded Iraq.

Joe:

If you look at this report that isn't from a partisan blogger, opinionated columnist or a talk show host on Air America, what do you see? You see sources clearly quoted by NBC's Pentagon reporter Pentagon Jim Miklaszewski saying (a)expect a big attack, it will likely happen, (b)the U.S. war has strengthened terrorism in Iraq, and c)the terrorists that flocked there have now allegedly become better trained to use the techniques learned there all the world.

Sean Hannity sometime in the future:

"Oh my God....The Pentagon has been infiltrated by left-wing anti-american liberals that hate america!!"

Me:

*click* (changing the channel)

Cheer up, US drivers!

After all, we could've been China...


Gas lines snaking up the street & cops having to patrol the stations ain't gangsta.

Well no duh....

Media reaction to Roberts' Reagan-era memos, recently released:

" *gasp*...he's a CONSERVATIVE!!!"

Funny thing is, the areas they mention actually don't strike me as that bad. For example:

The Supreme Court nominee Judge John G. Roberts Jr. denounced as ''indefensible" a 1985 Supreme Court ruling striking down a moment of silence in public schools, according to memos released yesterday from his years as a legal aide in the Reagan administration.

In a memo to his supervisor, then-White House counsel Fred Fielding, Roberts said he would support a constitutional amendment allowing silent reflection in the classroom, as some conservatives in Congress had proposed in response to the Supreme Court ruling.

Roberts wrote in the 1985 memo that ''the conclusion" in that Supreme Court case, that ''the Constitution prohibits such a moment of silent reflection -- or even silent 'prayer' -- seems indefensible."

Assuming that this is actually his opinion on the matter, if Roberts doesn't believe that the 1st Amendment requires hostility to religion that's fine, neither do I. The problem is government organization of religious activities or legislation that has no secular basis for enforcement, I'm not going to scream if some kid wants to pray before his mid-terms. Just because I don't like religion & feel its influence is too much does not mean that it should be relentlessly stamped out, I simply want there to be no recognized difference between their rights & the rights of us heathens.

Before anyone brings up the 10 commandments bit, a reminder: the reason I changed my mind to not allowing the displays is that the groups that want them argue themselves that the purpose of them is to christianify government. As long as they would object to de-emphasizing the religious aspect, whether by augmenting them so the ones w/ no secular relevance (i.e.: the Sabbath, recognizing a single diety) were not included in the display or by adding alongside them tributes to other examples of law throughout history (as is the case w/ the one at the Supreme Court), then they acknowledge there is a contradiction & have no one but themselves to blame.


Let's get to what matters. If they're going to go the blunt route & consider result more than the philosophy that would guide him to one, then here's the number one question that the Senate needs to ask him:

"Do you believe that the president has the authority to declare a US citizen an 'enemy combatant', hold them without charges, and deny them an actual trial?"

If he answers yes, then vote no.

Not so fast there

Cindy Sheehan has a legitimate beef. Whoever else surrounds her, though they may drag this whole conflict beyond the Iraq war and into the LoonyLeftyLand of being anti-any-war, Cindy strikes me as relatively well grounded. At least, that's my preliminary view. I've felt confident in this in the brief time I've followed this story.

Then, Chris Matthews swoops in to remind me, via an interview of Cindy herself, to take this with a grain of salt. Any emphasis is mine:

MATTHEWS: Can I ask you a tough question? A very tough question.

SHEEHAN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: All right. If your son had been killed in Afghanistan, would you have a different feeling?

SHEEHAN: I don't think so, Chris, because I believe that Afghanistan is almost the same thing. We're fighting terrorism. Or terrorists, we're saying. But they're not contained in a country. This is an ideology and not an enemy. And we know that Iraq, Iraq had no terrorism. They were no threat to the United States of America.

MATTHEWS: But Afghanistan was harboring, the Taliban was harboring al-Qaida which is the group that attacked us on 9/11.

SHEEHAN: Well then we should have gone after al-Qaida and maybe not after the country of Afghanistan.

MATTHEWS: But that's where they were being harbored. That's where they were headquartered. Shouldn't we go after their headquarters? Doesn't that make sense?

SHEEHAN: Well, but there were a lot of innocent people killed in that invasion, too. ... But I'm seeing that we're sending our ground troops in to invade countries where the entire country wasn't the problem. Especially Iraq. Iraq was no problem. And why do we send in invading armies to march into Afghanistan when we're looking for a select group of people in that country?

Um....yeah, the Taliban was going to just stand aside as we walked in and grabbed Osama & his crew, yeah, right. If they were that smart then they would've gave him over themselves. Hopefully this is just grief speaking.

Everywhere a whizz but here

How much further behind can we get?

The first urine-powered paper battery has been created by physicists in Singapore. The credit-card sized unit could be a useful power source for cheap healthcare test kits for diseases like diabetes, and could even be used in emergency situations to power a cellphone, they say....

The battery is made of a layer of filter paper steeped in copper chloride, sandwiched between strips of magnesium and copper. This “sandwich” is then laminated in plastic to hold the whole package together. The resulting battery is just 1 millimetre thick and 60 by 30 mm across – slightly smaller than a credit card.

To activate the battery, a drop of urine is added and soaks through the sandwiched filter paper. The chemicals dissolve and react to produce electricity. The magnesium layer acts as the anode, losing its electrons. And the copper chloride acts as the cathode, mopping up the electrons.

They're fueling batteries with piss now, come on....

Language says a lot

Yesterday I had an odd masochistic curiousity: "I wonder what's on FoxNews..."

Their media-analysis roundtable show "fox news watch" was on, and they were discussing the bit about Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose son died in Iraq who is protesting outside of Bush's ranch in Texas.

A little bit into the banter, Cal Thomas brings up something about other members of her family writing to Drudge (or Drudge seeing their letters, I didn't catch it completely) to say they support the war. But the way he said it was amusing. The following is roughly what he said within the barrage of voices:

"...her family wrote in, saying that they support the president, support the war, support the dead boy..."

"the dead boy"?

Now, I'm not one for sensitivity. But if I had a relative of mine die in a war like the one in Iraq, a war where the purpose fell apart a long time ago, and someone still in support of it casually referred to that relative as "the dead boy" on TV, I'd put a f*cking bullet through the screen.