Iraq: Jihad University
Feel safer?WASHINGTON - Islamic militants in Iraq are providing military training and other assistance to Taliban and al Qaida fighters from eastern and southern Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas, U.S. intelligence officials told Knight Ridder.
A small number of Pakistani and Afghan militants are receiving military training in Iraq; Iraqi fighters have met with Afghan and Pakistani extremists in Pakistan; and militants in Afghanistan increasingly are using homemade bombs, suicide attacks and other tactics honed in Iraq, said U.S. intelligence officials and others who track the issue.
Several Afghan and Pakistani "exchange students" volunteered to join the fight against American and Iraqi forces in Iraq, but were told to return to Afghanistan and Pakistan to train other militants there, two U.S. intelligence officials said. They and other officials spoke only on condition of anonymity because the intelligence is highly classified.
The intelligence suggests that if the trend continues, American forces, already contending with escalating violence in Iraq, could face the same thing in Afghanistan in the coming months, further complicating the Bush administration's plans to withdraw some troops.
All here. It really is like flypaper, except without the stickum.
Why we quit reading Richard Cohen
Irrelevant
Ignore him, eventually he'll go away:BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A letter from President Bush to Iraq's supreme Shiite spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was hand-delivered earlier this week but sits unread and untranslated in the top religious figure's office, a key al-Sistani aide told The Associated Press on Thursday.
After he wrecked their country, W's even less popular in Iraq than he is here. Why would Sistani care what he has to say about anything?
Bush knew
This Murray Waas story in National Journal says W knew, when he cited in his 2003 SOTU those aluminum tubes Iraq had tried to buy, that whether they were intended for nuclear arms centrifuges was disputed. Apparently the news hook is that Karl Rove tried to cover up the fact that W knew until after the election. But we recall watching that speech and thinking, that's bullshit!, when he mentioned the tubes. So it had been reported at least somewhere that they were more likely conventional rocket bodies.
Frist
He's been a crappy majority leader. He thinks that qualifies him to be president? He should forget it. We hope he wins the nomination.
What would the wingnuts do ...
Five years, 10 months
For Abramoff, Kidan in SunCruz fraud. Also, $21 million in restitution.
'War on Christians'
As members of the reality-based community living in a wingnut-controlled nation, we are continually mystified how Christians -- despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- can always manage to reassure themselves that they're an endangered species. This persecution complex must be a throwback to biblical times, we suppose.
Lyons, Conason
Gene writes about one of W's latest lies, the media and Iraq. Uncharacteristically, his column has two minor factual errors: Mohamed ElBaradei is Egyptian, not Moroccan, and the Alterman piece wasn't in The American Prospect, but on the Center for American Progress site.Joe recaps Nino Scalia's latest gaffes.
Did ABC News hire Ben Domenech?
Read this
An open letter to the media re: immigration. The GOP thinks this will be a good wedge issue for the midterms, and while it might fire up their xenophobic base, it's going to create a backlash. These bigots apparently think all Hispanic/Latin Americans are here illegally.via Atrios.UPDATE: Reuters elaborates.
They're stealing his material
Please:WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush warned the U.S. Congress against fearmongering on Monday as the Senate tackled immigration reform, an issue that has split his Republican party and spurred huge protests.
Fearmongering is an exclusive executive branch function.
Good news, bad news
Optimism:WASHINGTON (AP) -- Echoing military commanders, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday the U.S. could withdraw a significant number of troops from Iraq this year if Iraqi forces are able to assume greater control of the country's security.
Reality:BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The Iraqi army said Sunday it had dispatched troops to investigate a report of 30 beheaded corpses in a village north of Baghdad, but the soldiers turned back before reaching the site, apparently fearing an insurgent ambush.
Nope
This is a terrible idea -- the last two minute part, anyway. Some of the TV timeouts do seem like they last about five minutes, though.
Cooler heads prevail
Good for them:KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- An Afghan court on Sunday dismissed a case against a man who converted from Islam to Christianity because of a lack of evidence and he will be released soon, officials said.
He probably will be the target of a fatwa; he should think about emigrating.
The difference between Shiites, Sunnis in Iraq
The march of folly
Robert Fisk:It is the march of folly. In 1914, the British, French, and Germans thought they would be home by Christmas. On the 9th of April 2003, corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th US Marine Regiment - the very first American to enter Baghdad - borrowed my satellite phone to call his home in Michigan. "Hi you guys, I'm in Baghdad," he told his mother. "I'm ringing to say 'Hi, I love you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys.' The war will be over in a few days. I'll see you all soon."
They were tough, those marines, big-boned men with muck on their faces and ferocity in their eyes - they had been fighting for days without sleep - but they too were on the same lonely journey of despair that the Old Contemptables and the Frenchpoilus and the Bavarian infantry embarked upon almost a century ago.
We never learn.
Blaming the media for losing the war
W, Bigtime, Rummy and their acolytes have already started. Knight Ridder slaps 'em down.
Plagiarism
Will washingtonpost.com tolerate this, and this, and this? Just to clarify: The lifted material did not appear on the post site, but in The Flat Hat, the William and Mary student paper.
Ben Domenech
So washingtonpost.com, apparently to "balance" the perceived leftiness of Dan Froomkin, has hired this home-schooled 24-year-old wingnut to blog on their site. We don't have time for right-wing bloggers, but many others on the left get loads of material to ridicule from the right, and Ben has stepped up to the plate. Atrios has the links. We can't remember the left side of the blogosphere having this much fun since Talk Like Bill O'Reilly Day.
'American Idol'
Saw this, but didn't get a close enough look to verify it. Some very good performances last night, including Kellie Pickler, who couldn't handle Stevie last week, but redeemed herself with Patsy Cline. But it will be a miscarriage of justice if Bucky survives; he botched a Buddy Holly tune. Chis Daughtry's "I Walk the Line" was great.
A true wingnut
We know the type:KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- An Afghan man facing a possible death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity may be mentally unfit to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.
Abdul Rahman, 41, has been charged with rejecting Islam, a crime under this country's Islamic laws. His trial started last week and he confessed to becoming a Christian 16 years ago. If convicted, he could be executed.
But prosecutor Sarinwal Zamari said questions have been raised about his mental fitness.
"We think he could be mad. He is not a normal person. He doesn't talk like a normal person," he told The Associated Press.
Heh.
Conservatives: constantly victimized
Funny:Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.
At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals. The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.
But the new results are worth a look.
Here they are.
Sorry we asked
Of course, it was a rhetorical question:WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush held out the possibility on Tuesday of a U.S. troop presence in Iraq for many years, saying a full withdrawal would depend on decisions by future U.S. presidents and Iraqi governments.
Bush, struggling to rebound from low job approval ratings that he blamed largely on the war, was asked at a news conference if there would come a time when no U.S. troops are in Iraq.
"That, of course, is an objective. And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq," said Bush, who will be president until January 2009.
These pressers get weirder every time.
Here we go
This could be interesting:NEW YORK (Reuters) - The 2006 hurricane season will be more active than normal and could bring a devastating storm to the U.S. Northeast, private forecaster AccuWeather said on Monday.
... "The Northeast is staring down the barrel of a gun," said Joe Bastardi, AccuWeather.com's chief hurricane forecaster.
The current storm cycle and above-normal water temperatures in the Atlantic are reminiscent of the pattern that produced the 1938 hurricane that struck Providence, Rhode Island, killing 600 people, Bastardi said.
Hurricane season officially starts June 1.
Warrantless physical searches?
Right here. Let's see. Does the Fifth Amendment become the new Fourth Amendment or do we just skip from the Third to the Fifth?
Huck
Over at Kos' place, georgia10 catches our governor consorting with his fellow wingnuts at their confab in Florida. Would the GOP really nominate a Baptist preacher for president to turn out "the base?" Or will the unscrupulous, corporate-greed power brokers in the party swiftboat him? Is there any difference? These people are an enigma. Many Republican politicians, we're convinced, are hypocrites who pretend to be religious just to sucker "the base" into voting for them. Do Americans want to live in a theocracy? Because that's where we're headed.
Militias
They're here. These folks seem like the traditional, anti-tax, anti-immigration types. But given the authoritarian nature of the Cheney junta, it might have been worthwhile asking them about what ideology they share -- pro-school prayer, anti-gun control -- and where they differ. Wonder how they feel about warrantless wiretapping?
Ideology keeps them from governing effectively
NYT:With a strong directive from the Bush administration, Congress set out more than a year ago to fashion legislation that would protect America's private pension system, tightening the rules to make sure companies set aside enough money to make good on their promises to employees.
Then the political horse-trading began, with lawmakers, companies and lobbyists, representing everything from big Wall Street firms to tiny rural electric cooperatives, weighing in on the particulars of the Bush administration's blueprint.
In the end, lawmakers modified many of the proposed rules, allowing companies more time to cover pension shortfalls, to make more forgiving estimates about how much they will owe workers in the future, and even sometimes to assume that their workers will die younger than the rest of the population.
On top of those changes, companies also persuaded lawmakers to add dozens of specific measures, including a multibillion-dollar escape clause for the nation's airlines and a special exemption for the makers of Smithfield Farms hams.
As a result, the bill now being completed in a House-Senate conference committee, rather than strengthening the pension system, would actually weaken it, according to a little-noticed analysis by the government's pension agency. The agency's report projects that the House and Senate bills would lower corporate contributions to the already underfinanced pension system by $140 billion to $160 billion in the next three years.
It never ends, as long as the lunatics rule us.
A tangled web
Let's hope the new McClatchy Washington bureau keeps this up:WASHINGTON - A Pentagon intelligence agency that kept files on American anti-war activists hired one of the contractors who bribed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., to help it collect data on houses of worship, schools, power plants and other locations in the United States.
MZM Inc., headed by Mitchell Wade, also received three contracts totaling more than $250,000 to provide unspecified "intelligence services" to the White House, according to documents obtained by Knight Ridder. The White House didn't respond to an inquiry about what those intelligence services entailed.
Josh is the vanguard on this subject.
A vortex of unintended consequences
The Washington bureau formerly known as Knight Ridder:WASHINGTON - Three years after the United States invaded Iraq in pursuit of a freer, more stable Middle East, the country's deepening ethnic conflict is spreading tension across Iraq's borders, fueling terrorism and nurturing gloom about the future.
President Bush cited Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to international terrorism - neither of which turned out to exist - when he ordered a pre-emptive war that began March 19, 2003. He predicted payoffs for the wider Middle East: spreading democracy, deterred enemies, more secure oil flows, a less hostile environment for Israel.
None of that has happened, at least not yet.
Instead, said officials and analysts in the United States, Arab countries, Israel and Europe, the invasion has produced a vortex of unintended consequences.
Read it all. Speaking of Knight Ridder, this is encouraging.
Bummer
The Hogs who lost all those close games during the regular season -- before finally winning some good ones at the end -- showed up in Dallas. No second-round game for us. Go Bison.
Tweety
"A television news anchor with remarkable depth of experience" finally learns:MATTHEWS: I always thought Bush was more popular than his policies. I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong on this. Bush is not popular. I'm amazed when 50 percent of the people don't like him -- just don't like this guy.
Imagine that
Dog smells dogs:LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A San Diego arena was evacuated for about two hours on Thursday, delaying a first-round game in the hugely popular national college basketball championship, after a hot dog cart attracted the attention of a bomb-sniffing dog.
Guess they can't take any chances.
Delusional
Welcome to her world:MIAMI, March 15 — Representative Katherine Harris announced late Wednesday that she would not end her flagging campaign for the Senate, saying she would instead invest her $10 million fortune in the race.
She's feeling that Joementum.
A walk down memory lane
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting revisits the Iraq-war cheerleaders. Example:"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?" (Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)
This guy wants to be president?
Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee:"When you have one party in power exclusively, it is not a good thing, and what it led to in this state was wholesale corruption," Huckabee said after remarks at the fundraiser held at the Peabody Hotel.
He's absolutely correct. He must think Democrats will retake the U.S. House and Senate by 2008 (we hope). Otherwise, if he gets the GOP nomination (he won't), expect to see this statement in the Democratic nominee's ads.
'Jimmy Kimmel Live'
Unintended (but, we'd hope, not unrecognized) irony: Juvenile performs ...
We'd characterize it more generously as sophomoric.
No political agenda?
Pace didn't get the RNC talking points:WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. military officer said on Tuesday the United States does not have proof that Iran's government is responsible for Iranians smuggling weapons and military personnel into Iraq.
President George W. Bush said on Monday components from Iran were being used in powerful roadside bombs used in Iraq, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel had been inside Iraq.
Asked whether the United States has proof that Iran's government was behind these developments, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon briefing, "I do not, sir."
Doesn't he know that the Iranians are the new Saddam?
Uranium from Africa redux
W:"Coalition forces have seized IEDs and components that were clearly produced in Iran."
Sound familiar? This is their strategy for the midterms: Iran, the new Iraq.
RIP Knight Ridder
McClatchy's the winning bidder. They will sell off a dozen KR dailies, including the Merc-News, the Inky and the Pi-Press, apparently keeping Miami and Charlotte. Unclear what fate will befall the Washington bureau and foreign reporting.
Unacceptable
A big-ass storm ripped across Benton County tonight from about 9:30 to 11:00 -- huge hail, big, persistent tornado(es), homes destroyed. About 10:20 KNWA Channel 51's broadcast signal vanished. At 11:00 it was still AWOL.11:15: They're back.
