read: “Terrorists Don’t Need States”
What I don’t understand is why the republican right, specifically the Bush White House, don’t understand the idea of non-state-sponsored terrorism. If there’s one thing they should get it’s privatization and faith-based initiatives….
The smear campaign against Richard Clarke continues. For a bit of perspective on the charges leveled at him by the 9/11 Commission, and in particular John Lehman (former secretary of the navy under Reagan), check out this excellent rebuttal from Juan Cole.
Juan links to a piece by Lehman he wrote for the Washington Post just after the Cole was bombed, in which claims the supposed al qaeda plot to bomb the cole is a fraud, that clearly this incredibly well executed act (driving a dinghy up to a big boat and pushing a big button) must have been done by the Iraqis.
Hmm. Who exactly entered the commission with an axe to grind?
Thanks to drudgereport.com for the link (via wonkette)
It’s all fucking propoganda.
for those of you busy watching Clarke on 60 minutes, check out a few of these:
a video of Eric Alterman (author of What Liberal Media?, The Book On Bush and Altercation) appearing on Dennis Miller’s soon to be doomed show. It speaks for itself. Can this guy get any more unprofessional?
Juan Cole says the initial plan for the Iraqi occupation was for sovereignty within 6 months, which was pushed back so the Bush administration could try a more heavy-handed approach to changing the fabric of the Iraqi economy. read here
Wow. Even AFTER the 9/11 attacks, the bush administration was slashing the FBI’s counter-terrorism budget. Bush: Weak on Terrorism.
Howard Stern continues to take on GWB and the republican establishment. Who thought taking a hard-right turn into the election (gay marriage amendment, FCC crackdowns…) would be smart, exactly?
Remember when a black reporter for the NY Times turned out to be fabricating quotes and stories? Now, let’s talk about how white evangelical christian reporters cannot be trusted and are there because of some special program…
The US National Guard is using a private security force for security detail because it’s so thin on forces with everyone in Iraq. This is disturbing enough from a force readiness standpoint, but is anybody else nervous that we’re privatizing our military this drastically? (link)
Two notes on clark. First, read this.
Bush approach to terrorism vs. Clinton.
Secondly, I tuned in Fox News (I can only take the orbital mind control lasers for a few minutes, but I tune it in once in a while to laugh at the buffoonery) tonight to see how they were covering Clarke. They did the typical left/right split, two no-name folks (it was a sunday night after all), and the anchor tried to hit the democrat with two variations on the classic “Isn’t saying that Bush is screwing up the war on terror an insult to our men and women in the armed forces?” Ironically, as the charges against Bush become more dramatic, the question gets closer and closer to that ultimately self-defeating phrasing. The fact of the matter is clear. Calling out Bush’s mistakes, whether his pre-9/11 errors (the most rediculous one to hang the “smearing the military” charge on), the non-essentiality of the war in iraq, the bungled occupations and post-war plans for iraq and afghanistan, or his Mars plan (I’m sure that calling that a political gambit is an insult to our proud ex-test-pilot astronauts) is not an insult to the military. Sending 125K american troops, 500 of them to die and 15000 of them to return injured, if done badly, isn’t that the real insult?
wxBlog is now very close to prime time. It doesn’t puke out exceptions all the time and it has some
semblence of sanity on how often it polls. There’s still no real preferences dialogs and there’s no automatic polling yet, but otherwise, go to town.
Click Here for more.
Bruce Eckles thinks Java Generics suck
And, upon reading what he’s said…. I think I agree. Having recently been studying C++ templating seriously for the first time… egads. Java 1.5 generics don’t come close.
I’m a dork, and am writing a small python application as an RSS/atom client.
Why?
1) mark pilgrim was kind enough to do almost all of the heavy lifting. (the only real rss-y thing i needed to write was something to merge the old feed with the new feed when I update something I’ve already loaded).
2) Straw, which is remotely tolerable on linux, completely sucks balls when you have to compile all the gnome libraries and their associated python bindings from source.
3) even then, straw doesn’t have folders.
things that still suck:
No automated polling.
it crashes on linux if you click on an entry that has an image in it and click to another entry before it finishes loading that image.
you can’t change the display name of a blog, it uses the title in the feed
you can’t reorder entries (on the plus side, you can delete a feed and re-add it somewhere else and it will remember everything about it. This will eventually be considered a bug).
You can’t rename folders either.
The HTML display is pretty weak overall. Even though I like wxWiidgets, I’m probably going to repurpose the data code I’ve written for a KDE specific app once PyKDE is up to date (I need khtml, so PyQt isn’t enough).
how to encap python in one simple easy step.
(in fact, there’s more than one way to do it, though I recommend option #2)
sitecustomize.py that consists ofimport sys
sys.path.append(‘/usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages’)
then when installing python packages (either way), do
% python setup.py build
# python setup.py install –prefix=/usr/local/encap/package-x.y
# epkg package
[sorry about the lame formatting, this is transcribed from internet chat]
the fact that the pentagon wanted to take out zarqawi and the NSC
shot it down because it would make the larger iraq war harder to
sell still boggles my mind.
step by step:
US patrols kurdish iraq, the northern no fly zone, keeping
saddam’s military out of the area
terrorist group moves into the power vacuum and sets up a training
camp
bush admin claims “al qaeda operates within iraq’s borders,
therefore we must bomb iraq”
the pentagon proposes, on three separate occasions between 9/11
and the start of the iraq war that they use the no fly zone patrols
to take out the small fortified positions the al-ansam guys were
holding on hills around their training camp, allowing the kurd
irregulars (the peshmerga) to overrun the camp and take out zarqawi
and crew, whom they do not like (a charge up the hill without those
positions being eliminated from the air would be stupid for them,
obviously)
the NSC rejects the request, on the grounds that (according to
pentagon sources), such an action would eliminate a reason for the
full iraqi invasion.
and make it harder to sell
US ground forces never invade from the north, thanks to turkish
truculence, so when they finally get to the camp late in the war
al-ansam is long gone
the kicker:
zarqawi is currently being blamed for the deaths of approximately
700 american civilians and military personnel, and several massive
terror campaigns in iraq, including the recent 200+ fatality attacks
on shia religious festivals
so, in short: we let a terrorist go free so we could get the
guy who tried to kill bush’s daddy
and now he’s still killing our people.
guess how many major news organizations have picked up this story
from NBC news since it first broke two days ago
“none?”
this should be front page news on CNN