Looks like a performance at NYU (where she was a student for a few years). She really can sing (though she has a few misses playing the piano). There’s talent there, covered these days in a blond wig/hairdo and heavy makeup. Do your best to ignore the goofy MC, if you can. 
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Unsurprising. This is wrong…
Mostly a reminder to me to read this later. I’m not one for hyperbole (no, really!), but you gotta wonder why no one in the White House is going to jail for some of this stuff. The last 8 years have been marked by the most blatantly incompetent government ever.
I’m glad he wasn’t hurt, but the photo is pretty amusing.
Read and wonder what could have been…
I’m reminded of Major General Smedley Butler’s famous quote:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
History repeats itself, and our military is fighting for big business once again. Give this a read.
Obama says, again, what he’s been saying since at least mid-2007, that he will being back all the troops within 16 months… this is a non-story, especially if our press wasn’t stupid.
Good rundown of some of the opportunity costs of the Iraq War, specifically dealing with Afghanistan.
I have to say, I had this image in my head of what good we could do when the Afghanistan war was fought. Improving communications, building better roads, improving farming and industry — with smart grassroots development projects similar to the billboard-based development projects that showed some success.
Instead, we did what the Russians did, fight a war to defeat an enemy but not win the people. We’re now going to pay the price in two countries.
While this makes sense to me, I’d hesitate to read too much into it. Polling has shown a tilt to coming home, but it’s a much more complicated picture than that. Of course, I agree that it’s good that stories like this get into the media stream. Too often we hear from politicians telling us what the troops want.
This seems like a technicality (McCain’s campaign said he “misspoke” and immediately corrected himself). Watch this, though. Joe Lieberman (Lieberman!) had to correct him in front of cameras because he kept making the same mistake in all the interviews while in Jordan. It wasn’t just one instance of mis-speaking. He has made this fundamental error repeatedly, and the political aspects of defeating terrorism are as important (or more important) than the military aspects of the campaign.
I’m with Kevin Drum, btw. Hillary has a golden opportunity to say that McCain isn’t qualified to answer the 3 A.M. call.
AW sends me this screen grab of Fox News, which is the headline on FoxNews.com right now.
The irony is that the military won’t comment without a unit designation and time frame, and Fox News spoke to the Captain that Obama cited and he confirms he told Obama’s campaign the story being referenced. Not only that, but other folks have looked into this and found out that this is a more common occurrence than people like to talk about. I give you Phil Carter, who’s actually served in our current mission, and he relates other anecdotes as well. ABC News also confirmed the story, though I was reluctant to link to them without other confirmation.
Update: I corrected one detail above, that the captain spoke to the campaign, not Obama himself, about this. As Obama himself said, he heard from a captain, but didn’t speak to him.
The moral high ground has been abandoned by the Bush administration and everyone has noticed. It’s pretty sad what 8 years with him as President has done to our country.
That’s not good news. Not sure what conventional threat will arrive that requires a massive ground force, but I guess the idea is that we should have something ready to go in case we get attacked somewhere.
When you sit around imagining the good that America could do in Afghanistan (and I had high hopes in 2002 that we could’ve brought Afghanistan forward a few decades), these are the kind of programs you imagine. Sadly, the Bush administration is cutting back on these programs and spending a ton of resources next door in Iraq. We could get a nice 2-for-1 return on the failed state lottery…
Via Kevin Drum, we find this posting by a college professor:
I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11.
The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.
The biggest single defining event of our time and people don’t know who was behind this. These are college students. The Bush administration has, I guess, done their job by confusing the world.
Do you know anyone who believes Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks? Please tell me this is a limited phenomenon…
I don’t have time to do this justice, so consider this an extended “wire” post. Basically, violence is trending downward, but it’s unclear whether this is a result of U.S. strategy or other events on the ground, namely ethnic cleansing being mostly complete or pacts between competing Shiite factions. So, we’ve got good news and reassuring trends. This could mean good things or it could mean nothing. I’m hoping for the best.
Without any more commentary, here are the links:
Good reading, and all full of good links to even more.
This is the RiverBendBlog, which is pretty well known (Iraqi girl/woman writing about her life).
I cried that night because for the first time in a long time, so far away from home, I felt the unity that had been stolen from us in 2003.
This whole situation is maddening, and it seems like we’re teeing up to do it again with Iran. What is wrong with our administration? Why can’t they figure out that war is a last resort?
Talking about the refuge crisis in Iraq.
The question is whether these people have any explanation for their continued inaction. Atrios has rounded up the quotes, you can read the various statements about how important September was for our Iraq policy.
So, watch the video, and then if you’re Iran, or any other country, imagine how you would interpret the stupidity involved. It’s a minor point, and I’m not claiming Iran is benevolent, but we should be accurate about our criticisms. Credibility matters.
This is so much easier than writing… 
Talks about the polls after Bush’s speech and how the President has lost the American people.
This has been coming for a few weeks, just between being super busy at work and at home, but I hit the wall this week on a couple of points. First, I don’t think I’m being all that interesting for everyone to read, in large part because my disappointment, confusion, or outrage at the various things the administration does is predictable and obvious. This is the worst White House in my lifetime, and not because of partisan issues. Everyone knows I think this, and nothing they do surprises anyone anymore anyway. So, that’s one reason.
The other reason is (ironically) that I’m more or less speechless about what’s happening right now in Congress, in the media, and in the world in general. We get told that September is a key month, that General Petraeus is going to give us a report, and when he reports that, “Well, nothing has actually changed, but I really, really believe it will” the President announces he’s going to continue on the same path he’s been following for the last 5 years. Literally, he changed nothing. That’s simply unbelievable. The fact that the rest of the world, including the media, Republicans in Congress, and the public, isn’t excoriating him makes it doubly frustrating.
But, what pushed my decision this morning was finally reading the lead editorial in this week’s Economist. As a magazine I traditionally have respected, even if I often don’t agree, I don’t expect the magazine to go stupid on me. This week, the Economist has gone stupid. I don’t know what else to say. In an issue with the cover boldly stating “Why They Should Stay,” the entire argument of why we should stay is the following:
If America removes its forces while Iraq remains in its present condition, the Iraqi future is indeed likely to be disastrous. For that reason above any other, and despite misgivings about the possibility of even modest success any time soon, our own view is that America (and Britain) ought to stay in Iraq until conditions improve.
In a thousand-word editorial, that is the entirety of their argument for staying. There is literally not one other paragraph in the entire thing that makes a case for staying. Not. One. Paragraph. None. Not a supporting fact. Nothing. The bulk of the editorial then explains why, yes maybe, the folks arguing for a departure might have a point. In fact, the section that closes out the editorial has the subhead: “Not a must, just an ought” Why did they even waste the ink?
It’s clear to me that this war, and politics in general, foreign policy in particular is no longer about being right, or making the right choices. I expect politics to play a part, even a significant part, but it shouldn’t be the only consideration. Making the right choices, or trying to understand what the right choices might be, has been what motivates me to care, the understanding that this nation, yes, even through government, has the ability to do good by being smart, creating good policy, and stepping back when the government isn’t needed. None of this matters in our debate, and none of it seems to have any effect on anyone’s opinion.
So, I’ll continue to care about this stuff, but silently for a while. I’ll still be blogging, but hopefully more technology stuff and also the link posts I do (like the ones below). Just don’t feel like writing about politics right now. Knowing me, this’ll probably last a week, but I am going to try to stick to it to see how it feels.
The guy doesn’t seem so smart anymore. Between this and the ARM comments a few years back… just makes you wonder.
A good rundown of the “report” and surrounding interviews.
Gosh, are those goal posts I see moving? This administration cannot be more dishonest. Congress, please, please, please call them on it. Listen to Senator Dodd.
Another lesson in how putting ideology over sound policy leads to poor results.
Turns out Gen. Petraeus isn’t going to write the report, nor will it be the exclusively or primarily the opinion of the General, the Ambassador, and folks on the ground in Iraq. Instead, it will reflect the opinion of the White House. Is there now any doubt that the report will show progress regardless of what’s actually happening?
Josh Marshall sums it up best:
It’s sort of obvious now that he said it. But I had not quite thought of it that way. The same people now continually raising the stakes on the price of redeployment from Iraq with increasingly lurid tales of genocide, ethnic cleansing and regional implosion are pretty much exactly the same people who gamed us into this mess in the first place with another bunch of fairy tales.
And WTF is up with Romney? Is this the best Mitt can do:
Please, will a serious Republican step up aside from Ron Paul?
