Category: Politics

Jobs in 2004

Daily Kos has a good one about the job situation and how it will impact the coming election. The bottom line? There are fewer jobs in the United States today than there were in March 2001.

Of course this is not good news to someone who has just quit her job, but I’ll worry about that some other time. The really good news is, if the Kerry campaign handles this information correctly it could be a huge help in pushing BushCo out of the White House.

I just hope they don’t screw it up. Watching Kerry in the run-up to the convention has not been inspiring.

Ann Coulter is Still a Raving Loon

I’m still more or less staying out of the Iraqi prison mess but caught this quote of Ann Coulter’s today & thought it worth citing: “this is yet another lesson in why women shouldn’t be in the military.”

It boggles the mind how of all the lessons that could possibly be drawn from this catastrophic mess, that is the one less Coulter draws? Crazy, I tell you.

Some reports out there include reports of rapes on Iraqi prisoners. Ann will have to figure out how that too is the fault of women in the military.

Chuckle of the day

Found over at liberamediaconspiracy. Enjoy!

Truman: The buck stops here.

Bush: The buck stops anywhere but here.

Rumsfeld: The buck never made it to my desk.

Rice: The buck had no silver bullet.

Perle: The buck is the closest thing American politics has to a terrorist.

Ashcroft: The buck is under surveillance and may be seized at any time, without right to an attorney nor the right to hear the evidence against it.

Cheney: The buck is in a secure, undisclosed location.

Hughes: The buck, like the terrorists, does not value human life.

Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News, et al: The buck stops with Clinton.

Little Green Fascists: Why does the buck hate America?

Ann Coulter: The buck is a traitor.

Michael Kelly: The buck is objectively pro-terrorist.

Ahmad Chalabi: The buck? So what? We are in Baghdad now.

PS – What exactly does ‘snarky’ mean?

The Price we Pay

Since Vietnam, presidents have been concerned (and rightfully so) that their military antics would lose support once the public started to see the bodies of US soldiers arriving home in flag-draped caskets.

The Bush administration installed a simple solution: It ended the public broadcast of those images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings.

Well, thanks Matt Drudge, and screw the Bushies. This is the price we’re paying for the Bush/Cheney fixation on Iraq:

PS – the person who originally took those photos has lost her job.

Quagmire

American troop deaths in Iraq this month now number more than 90, and there’s still 11 days to go before the month ends. Yet in just 10 weeks, the US is supposed to hand over sovereignty of Iraq over — although to whom is far from clear.

This would all be funny if it weren’t so terrible. It makes me feel like we’re trapped, like a mouse caught on a glue trap, nothing to choose from except bad alternatives, and what’s worse is that it all could have been prevented.

And now people like Paul Bremer, as well as most of the military in Iraq, seem to think that only more violence is going to break this bad cycle and fix things. Have they learned nothing from the history of the Middle East this past 100 years? Increasing the violence is only going to breed more violence.

This is the kind of crap that makes me feel bad to be an American.

A rare POTUS Press Conference

I was going to blog about President Bush’s press conference last night — his total unwillingness to give a straight answer to any question being just the least of it — but as I reviewed a transcript this morning prior to posting, I decided why bother. It’s too depressing and today’s my day off, I want to enjoy myself.

I’ll just link to a recent Paul Krugman column on the Iraq mess that I find particularly apt.