Open thread

Disco Saturday night. Read the rest of this post...

Nine more soldiers killed in Iraq

Another brutal day in a brutal month in the brutal war. This war has to end:

The Americans killed in Iraq included five who died in fighting Friday in Anbar province, three killed when a roadside bomb struck their patrol southeast of Baghdad and one killed in a separate roadside bombing south of the capital.

The deaths raised to 99 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died this month and at least 3,346 who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

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Might as well rename AP the Associated Pravda

Why does the media insist on repeating as truth whatever crap the Bush administration tells them? Yes, AP just published a story saying that military leaders now claim, magically, that the budget impasse over Iraq will hurt our troops right now (I'm not linking to the story - won't give the Bushies what they want, and sure as hell am not giving the AP's yellow journalism any publicity). Too bad that we already know this to be a total lie. And too bad that AP reporter Lolita Baldor didn't even bother putting in her story the fact that we already know DOD has enough money to last it a good several months.

Associated Press, real journalism is more than being a stenographer. You could hire Jeff Gannon for the crap that Lolita just published. So are you lazy, or just unwilling to tick off Karl lest you don't get invited to any more barbeques at Crawford? Read the rest of this post...

The Democrats should give Bush enough money for Iraq until September

Bush just gave us our solution. In the post below, Joe notes that Bush will now not consider whether we're making "progress" with the "surge" until September. Fine. Then here's what we do. After Bush vetoes the Iraq funding bill in the next week or two, Congress should pass a clean bill, giving Bush all the money he needs... until September. That way, when Bush finally starts paying attention to Iraq again in September, when he makes the assessment of whether the surge is doing anything at all, whether Iraq isn't still going downhill, Congress can at the same time revisit whether the American people fund, again, and again, and again, this disaster of a war.

John Murtha has proposed something similar to this. Give Bush the money he needs, enough money to get him through, say, September 30. Then we use Bush's own benchmark-date to revisit just how well the progress is really progressing. Let him veto that. Read the rest of this post...

Bush is changing his Iraq talking points. "Progress" is out.

"Progress" is no longer the operative word about Iraq coming from Bush and his lackeys. This should be an indication of just how bad things are in Iraq. The Bush team, which will lie about everything, can't even pretend that the situation is improving. George Bush's Iraq policy is a colossal failure:

The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush’s top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited, according to senior administration officials.

In interviews over the past week, the officials made clear that the White House is gradually scaling back its expectations for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The timelines they are now discussing suggest that the White House may maintain the increased numbers of American troops in Iraq well into next year.

That prospect would entail a dramatically longer commitment of frontline troops, patrolling the most dangerous neighborhoods of Baghdad, than the one envisioned in legislation that passed the House and Senate this week. That vote, largely symbolic because Democrats do not have the votes to override the promised presidential veto, set deadlines that would lead to the withdrawal of combat troops by the end of March 2008.

What is clear is that Bush has no plans to get the U.S. out of Iraq.

In today's Washington Post, we see further evidence that Iraq was always an obsession of the Bush administration:

White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war, according to a new book by former CIA director George J. Tenet.

From the first days, invading Iraq was in the cards. And, the current situation is what they've given us.

Bush and Cheney have been colossal failures for America. Read the rest of this post...

Saturday Morning Open Thread

Good Morning.

Bob Geiger has the compilation of the week's editorial cartoons. Bush gets pummeled, as do McCain and Gonzales.

The poem of the week is "Ode to a Lemon" by Pablo Neruda. It is an ode to a lemon.

Thread away. Read the rest of this post...

UK keeps up the pressure on wasteful packaging

The Independent started an awareness campaign earlier this year and the British public has rallied around the cause. Politicians everywhere tend to lag behind the public but now over 100 British MPs (Members of Parliament) have signed on to a motion to move this along under the law. As an outsider looking in, it's impressive to see so much green activity in the UK and the model that is working comes from consumer demand who are prompting retailers to act now or be forced later. This is in stark contrast to so many US companies who fight environmental change and smear environmentalists.

This says a lot about the British public and their ability to be level headed and build a consensus for the benefit of society both in the UK and the world. To me, that's pretty damned impressive. Read the rest of this post...

April temperatures in UK break records

It won't surprise me if France is up there as well. Worse still, it has been weeks since it last rained in Paris which is extremely rare for this time of the year. Since I spend time in my garden, I follow the weather closely enough and this year has been odd. In February, forsythias and camellias came into bloom a month early. Besides that, a number of flowers that should have died from the cold such as my fuchsia, survived the very mild winter. I usually start my watering system in mid to late May because of earlier rains but the last serious rain was weeks ago. Beyond my little garden, even the delicious and briefly available white asparagus arrived weeks in advance.

Everyone over here is asking, if this is April, what are we in for this summer? Read the rest of this post...