Our big bloggy world

Anybody want to see what a blog written in Greek looks like, here you go.

Anybody else got links to other blogs in other languages? Might be kid of fun to have a list just for fun - or if they're really good blogs, I might even add em to our blog roll. Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

What's tomorrow's news? Do we know yet? Read the rest of this post...

Bush's first veto will be on stem cell legislation

According to Rove, Bush is "emphatic" about vetoing the stem cell bill -- which means he's emphatic about making sure that science doesn't advance, that diseases aren't cured and that lives aren't saved. That should help the GOP in November. Read the rest of this post...

Iraq wants UN to end immunity for US troops

Okay, this is getting serious. The accumulation of atrocities against Iraqi citizens is forcing their government to act:

Iraq will ask the United Nations to end immunity from local law for U.S. troops, the government said on Monday, as the U.S. military named five soldiers charged in a rape-murder case that has outraged Iraqis.

In an interview a week after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded a review of foreign troops' immunity, Human Rights Minister Wigdan Michael said work on it was now under way and a request could be ready by next month to go to the U.N. Security Council, under whose mandate U.S.-led forces operate in Iraq.

"We're very serious about this," she said, adding a lack of enforcement of U.S. military law in the past had encouraged soldiers to commit crimes against Iraqi civilians.

"We formed a committee last week to prepare reports and put it before the cabinet in three weeks. After that, Maliki will present it to the Security Council. We will ask them to lift the immunity," Michael said.

So, this is going to be a challenge for Bush, Condi and Bolton at the UN. They used the Security Council to invade Iraq. Now, Iraq wants to use the UN against us. Read the rest of this post...

Congressional Republicans on verge of passing bill to promote online horse-race gambling in the name of "family values"

Ah those Republican family values. This time, under the guise of passing an "anti-gambling" bill, the Republicans are really passing legislation that makes it legal to gamble on horse races online.

They are about to ban every other kind of online gambling in the same legislation BUT horse-racing. Why? Because the horse-racing lobbyists have been all over the Republicans. I've read the documentation, you should see the horse-racing lobbyists crowing about how they got the Republicans to carve them a nifty little exemption in this supposed "family values" bill.

Other critics complain that the bill doesn't cover all forms of gambling. They point to exemptions they say would allow online lotteries and Internet betting on horse racing to flourish while cracking down on other kinds of sports betting, casino games and card games like poker.

"If you're going to support legislation that is supposed to 'prohibit gambling,' you should not have carve-outs," said Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the conservative Traditional Values Coalition.

Perhaps the Bible says that all gambling is immoral EXCEPT horse-race gambling. Yeah, that must be it.

These bozos haven't even gotten to legislation dealing with $3.50 a gallon gas prices, with insurance reform, with drug pricing, with fixing the now-illegal military tribunals Bush was planning on using to try supposed terrorists. They haven't deal with our US ports that Bush is trying to sell to the Middle East. With our international cargo coming into the US that still isn't all being checked for nuclear bombs.

Instead, the Republicans are shoving through special interest legislation to promote horse-race gambling because they've been bought off by special gambling interests. And we all know how clean those folks are. The epitome of family values.

Maybe they'll name the legislation after Bill Bennett. Read the rest of this post...

Lieberman names his new party for himself

No kidding. Lieberman had to name a new party for his independent bid. He named it for himself. It's called "Connecticut for Lieberman." Read the rest of this post...

Raid on Jefferson's office was constitutional

What a concept. Members of Congress aren't above the law. That's probably news to a lot of them:

Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan said members of Congress are not above the law. He rejected requests from lawmakers and Democratic Rep. William Jefferson to return material seized by the FBI in a May 20-21 search of Jefferson's office.

In a 28-page opinion, Hogan dismissed arguments that the first-ever raid on a congressman's office violated the Constitution's protections against intimidation of elected officials.

Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

There's so much to discuss...none of it good. Read the rest of this post...

GOP keeping corruption safe and "legal"

DeLay's thinking comeback now that he can't get off the ballot -- and reform is looking dead in Congress. Coincidence?:

Efforts to tighten lobbying rules have stalled in the months since a series of corruption scandals, creating potential trouble for Republicans who vowed to institute tough ethics reform.

With the August recess approaching, and then the campaign season when many lawmakers pay scant attention to policy matters, negotiators have little time to resolve differences between bills in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and come up with legislation President George W. Bush can sign.

According to the experts, the GOP reform plan doesn't do much anyway. They're so locked in to the culture of corruption that they won't pass even a watered down bill. Read the rest of this post...

The death of neoconservatism?

I've mostly talked about Iraq in this space, but recent developments in U.S. foreign policy are worth looking at from a broader perspective. TIME's cover story this week discusses the drastic difference between stated Bush foreign policy strategy and actual action. The greatest problem -- among many -- with neoconservative foreign policy is the insistence upon dealing with the world as neocons would like it to be, rather than what it is. This ideology-based approach has been an unmitigated failure. TIME explains:

A grinding and unpopular war in Iraq, a growing insurgency in Afghanistan, an impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions, brewing war between Israel and the Palestinians -- the litany of global crises would test the fortitude of any president, let alone a second-termer with an approval rating mired in Warren Harding territory. And there's no relief in sight.

These problems did not occur in a vacuum: The Iraq war is the centerpiece of the neoconservative foreign policy movement, Afghanistan was put on the back burner because of its (perceived) lack of strategic import, Iran pushed ahead with its nuclear program in part because of U.S. refusals to engage in negotiations and in part because it knows many neocons want to head east from Iraq, and the U.S. has abandoned any constructive role with Israel and the Palestinians. Not to mention North Korea, with whom Bush flatly refuses bilateral negotiations as it launches test missiles towards the West Coast.

Just failure upon failure, not advancing American interests and certainly not promoting democracy. While Secretary Rice steers the ship of State back towards realism, neoconservatism is dying a slow (if generally unacknowledged) death. There's not enough space in the whole internets to properly caveat my disagreements with Andrew Sullivan, but he gets this:

[Y]ou see the strange, almost surreal disconnection between the president’s words and his actions. He has indeed described the current conflict between civilisation and terror masters armed with WMDs as the equivalent of the third world war.

And yet [... among other things ...] He won’t confront Saudi Arabia over its continued financing of Wahhabist terror. He hasn’t captured Osama Bin Laden, and he’s content to pursue multilateral blather against a real nuclear threat from one of the vilest dictatorships on the planet.

As someone who backed the resolution and analysis of this president in the run-up to war against Saddam, and who still hopes for the best in Iraq, I can only say I feel somewhat conned.

Perhaps if the president had publicly announced that he had miscalculated the Iraq risk, had now abandoned the Cheney doctrine, and, by the sheer weight of experience, was now a Kissingerian realist, able to tolerate the risk of the unthinkable, I could adjust. But he hasn’t. He has just behaved according to one assumption for four years and is now behaving according to another one.

The failure of some conservatives to recognize the wheels coming off the neocon bandwagon is bizarre, and I think it differentiates the conservatives from the cultists (this one somehow manages to blame Carter for North Korea). The vast majority of Americans don't care what the U.S. calls its foreign policy strategy. But they should know that it's not just Iraq -- the Republicans in charge can't be trusted with any foreign policy. Democratic Congress. Oversight. Accountability. Change the course. Read the rest of this post...

Washington, DC is becoming "A Clockwork Orange"

UPDATE: I realized on the plane back from Chicago that I forgot to mention a number of other crimes that happened in the past few months near my relatively 'safe' neighborhood (well, safe in DC terms). A month ago, our friend John had his house burglarized. Two weeks ago, my friend David had his home alarm go off, the alarm company contacted him and asked if he wanted them to call the police, he said "well, yeah," so they did. The cops never showed up. Nice - a burglar alarm goes off at your house, the cops are called, and they never show up. Then Joe was jogging the other day near Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's house, where there is 24-hour security, and he sees a guy who tells him he got mugged the night before right by Rummy's house. He asks Joe if that's normal for this neighborhood, and Joe says, well, it's getting that way. Then there was the guy murdered on 18th street, the strip with all the bars and restaurants, just a month or so ago. And the gay bashing several months back on 18th street, where the fast-food pizza owner refused to even call the cops while the gay guy lay nearly unconscious on the floor in the middle of the line so people were now stepping over him, and where the cops eventually threatened the gay victim for trying to get the video of the attack from the store owner because the cops refused to get it. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few recent attacks involving friends and contacts in our neighborhood, but you get the picture. Oh yeah, one more. A couple months ago, about a block away, a neighbor is walking his extremely large, black poodle (one of the large imposing kinds, not the small yippy kinds), and several guys jump out of a van and pull a gun on him. Fortunately the dog lunged for the gun and the guys fled. But we're talking people who don't care if you have a large dog with you, they still attack you. They don't care if you're 6 foot 5 (read below), they still attack you. Get the picture of our sweet little Washington?

If you never saw the movie "A Clockwork Orange," it's about... well... I don't even remember what it's about, I saw it so long ago. All I remember from the movie was an incredibly graphic and violent scene of some thugs breaking into a woman's home. The rest was so violent and nasty, it still sticks in my head some 30+ years later.

That is what Washington, DC is now becoming, a city of gratuitous and graphic violence. I'm serious, the city is dangerous folks. Visit or live here at your own peril.

I say this as someone who is rather an expert on DC crime. I got mugged a few years back, quite violently in front of my own apartment (8 o'clock at night, fully lit area, right by a 7-11 where all the cops hang out, on a really busy street) - none of that stopped two kids from jumping me from behind and trying to strangle me to death. They didn't want my money, they just wanted to stop me from breathing. And for a while, they did.

Well, long story short, the cops were not very obliging to me when I reported the crime - hell, I handed them one of the accomplices, who was still at the scene, and they let him go - so I launched an Internet campaign against the DC police and the mayor, and it caused quite a bit of hell. So, I know a lot about DC crime.

These kind of senseless crimes - and I mean senseless in the sense that the crimes are only about violence, they're not about robbery or vengeance or anything else, just pure violence - have been building over the past several years. But over the past year or so, it's built to a crescendo of violence. A New York Times reporter is attacked and murdered simply walking near his home - why? Who knows. A friend of my friend Cate is brutally murdered while walking his dog, they don't even take his wallet - why? Who knows. A series of women are attacked, violently, just a block from house and it gets so bad that the police email the neighborhood to warn us - the woman are simply being beaten up on the street. Just a month ago, a friend of mine who is 6 foot 5 inches tall - yeah, he's THAT big - and 24 years old, gets jumped by 3 or 4 guys who seemingly just wanted to beat the crap out of him, no attempted robberty, nothing. And all of these happened in "nice" neighborhoods where yuppies pay lots and lots of money for new condos.

And oh yeah, we recently had a series of attacks on the National Mall, a place where nobody ever gets attacked.

Then we have this past weekend. A British aspiring politico is walking his girlfriend home in Georgetown - quite possibly the most expensive and ritziest part of DC - and several guys walk up to them, slit the boyfriend's throat (he dies) and then drag the girlfriend to the alley to rape her. (To the cops' credit, they think they caught the guys who did this.)

This is Georgetown, folks. It's like getting murdered and raped in Beverly Hills. As much as the cops and the politicians try to tell you that "shit happens" in big cities, it doesn't happen on a regular basis in the "good" neighborhoods, and it sure doesn't happen on a regular basis where I grew up. We've even had several shootings and murders in my neighborhood in DC and the surrounding neighborhoods, and they're pretty damn nice, well, compared to the neighborhoods next door.

Washington, DC, for all of its economic improvement over the past several years, is still a terribly dangerous city, and increasingly so over the past few years. The Chief of Police has no clue what to do about the problem, and honestly, he's loathe to admit there even is a problem, or even tell the truth when he does "admit" it. He prefer to talks about the level of poverty and all the "LA gangs" that have infiltrated DC - as if DC is the first city in America to suffer from gangs and poverty. Our Mayor has no interest in anything other than baseball. And our city council talks a good talk, but when push comes to shove, they do nothing to ameliorate the problem. They're afraid of the chief of police, and seemingly of their own power.

It's a conspiracy of incompetence, or at best, indifference.

Before you go plopping down half a million dollars to live in some new condo in a neighborhood that was a ghetto just a year ago (and still really is), you might want to take a hard look through the newspapers. Even the best neighborhoods in DC are now seeing random rapes and murders, and our politicians are telling us this is quite "normal" for any big city (it hadn't been "normal" in my neighborhood for the past ten years or so that I recall). And the neighborhoods all the young well-off kids are moving in to make my neighborhood (which is nice, but still edgy), look like Bel Air.

DC has become "A Clockwork Orange." The rumors of it being crime-ridden are well deserved. Read the rest of this post...

Iraqi lawmaker kidnapping causing political upheaval

The fallout from the kidnapping of Ms. Tayseer Najah al-Mashhadani, a Sunni member of parliament, continues to rage. The Iraqi Accord Front (IAF), the primary Sunni party (in which Mashadani is a member), is continuing its boycott of parliament for the second straight week and is also apparently contemplating withdrawing its several Cabinet members and Ministry heads.

Realistically, the government will continue to function unless the parliament passes a vote of no confidence by an absolute majority (138 of 275), which the Sunnis don't have, even if joined by the secularists and independents. The Kurds aren't going to overthrow their Shia allies, and Sunnis have repeatedly used boycotts and threats of a pullout to elicit political compromise. The government will almost certainly survive. However, the so-called "national unity government" is on the verge of collapse, if it ever really existed (that moniker was more theory than reality since the government formed). And the disruption demonstrates both the fragility of the extant compromises and the continued tendency of Iraqi politicians to bicker while the country descends into open warfare.

It's also creating a pretty ironic situation wherein Sunnis are appealing to the U.S. to help them against the Shia. "'The Iraqi people ask the Americans for an iron fist to crush the Sadr militia in Baghdad,' Mr. Jubouri [an IAF official] said in an interview, referring to the volatile militia commanded by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr." For those keeping score at home, that's the venomously anti-U.S. (Sunni) IAF asking the U.S. to crush the venomously anti-U.S. (Shia) Mahdi Militia. The danger of Coalition troops getting in the middle of this sectarian conflict -- whether intentionally or accidentally -- continues to grow. Read the rest of this post...

Rove: Plame leaker should be fired

If Rove thinks the person who leaked Plame's name should be fired, it would indicate that the leaker still works at the White House. The only staff person besides Scooter Libby implicated in the leak is Karl Rove. Libby doesn't work there anymore. Can he fire himself?:

As for the Plame affair, Rove stumbled and then refused to answer.

Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent whose identity administration sources revealed to conservative columnist Robert Novak after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly challenged the administration's claims about Iraq's nuclear program. Her career with the CIA ended, and some of her sources may have been in jeopardy as a result of the leak.

Isaacson posed the question in the same way [President Bill] Clinton had Friday night. Issacson, parroting Clinton, pointed out that if a member of the Clinton administration had outed a CIA officer, "You'd be sending people to demand impeachment. You'd be playing it better than the Democrats can play it against you."

Rove then said that after a "careful, thoughtful, aggressive investigation," then the person responsible should be fired.

"Have confidence in the process," he said.

But Isaacson continued pressing on the issue asking, "Don't you have some regrets about that? That was [a] regrettable event."

"I'm going to respect the fact that there's an ongoing case," Rove said, again to hissing from the audience.

Clinton nailed it, as usual.


(Thanks to Today's ThinkFast AM at Think Progress) Read the rest of this post...

The GOP talking point: We're corrupt failures

Not only has the GOP fostered the culture of corruption, they've overseen a failed legislative agenda:

The legislative year is littered with failed or stalled Republican priorities. Some, such as an immigration overhaul, repealing estate taxes and changing rules on lobbying in response to several ethics scandals, are disappointments for many in the GOP and for Bush.

For the most part, it's not a bad thing that their hate-filled agenda is failing. But corrupt failures is hardly a winning campaign strategy. Read the rest of this post...

Baghdad erupts in mob violence

Victory is ours. Read the rest of this post...

Monday Morning Open Thread

It's ugly out there. The violence in Iraq is mounting....NBC's reporter said it's been extremely violent even for Iraq. And, gas prices have surged in the past two weeks.

Fun way to start the week. Read the rest of this post...

Do-It-Againistan

Can this administration do anything without botching the job? Read the rest of this post...

Les Bleus go down in defeat

Despite plenty of chances to knock off Italy, who went flat after the first half, France just couldn't connect with the goal. After Zizou have a momentary lapse of judgment and was sent off, Les Bleus just couldn't recover and Italy was perfect in the Penalty Kick phase of the tie-breaker. It turned out to be a fantastic World Cup anyway for France, doing much better than most fans expected though I just wish title matches could be decided by playing the game and not penalty kicks. I think we could hear Italy celebrating from Paris. What a finish for Italy. Read the rest of this post...

Carmela the bunny killer

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Carmela went from adorable puppy to cold-blooded killer. And as best we know, the transition occurred last night during my nephew's college graduation party, when Carmela was seen being chased around the yard with a young bunny squealing in her mouth. They finally got Carmela, got her to drop the bunny, and then put the now-injured animal back in its hole. But not to be outdone, Carmela repeated the episode this morning, and again this evening (no word on whether that makes 3 bunnies, or one very traumatized sole bunny).

We have a certifiable killer on our hands.

Now, my mom would say: good. The bunnies have apparently been eating all of her plants. My sis is less happy about the new bloodlust in her previously precious sidekick. And I have to admit, when Carmela licked me goodbye tonight, right on the mouth, cute suddenly went to gross.

Not sure why I'm sharing this, just thought I would. Good night. Read the rest of this post...