News item: “An internal White House document outlining President Bush’s re-election agenda starts with “War on terrorism (Con’t)” and homeland security,” reports the Associated Press…
News item: “The Bush administration waited until after the holiday to issue the orders, which alert units across the United States and possibly overseas to prepare for deployment to the Persian Gulf, officials said. . . .”
My question: Did they wait to allow thousands of American families to enjoy a less anxious holiday season . . . or to keep from (further) depressing Christmas retail sales?
How long does this give us until the actual shooting starts, anyway?
News item: Impoverished, backward North Korea engages in a series of provocative actions related to developing nuclear capabilities, just as the United States publicly boasts its determination to unleash pre-emptive military strikes to prevent rogue nations from developing weapons of mass destruction.
Mouse That Roared, The (1959)
Stars: Peter Sellers, Jean Seberg
Directed by: Jack Arnold
Writing credits: Roger MacDougall, Stanley Mann III
Genre: Comedy / War
Plot Outline: An impoverished, backward nation declares a war on the United States of America, hoping to lose and accept foreign aid.
Only really stupid terrorists would unleash germs on an enemy – and terrorists are usually crazy, not stupid.The as-yet-unexplained anthrax spore attacks following September 11th had an effect missing from the twin towers event – they struck terror in the heart of Main Street U.S.A. The Al Qaeda attacks, horrific as they were, seemed isolated, freakish, and…obvious. The anthrax attacks were spread across several states, with seemingly random casualties. But how seriously should we take the threat of germ-based bioterror?
Don’t be ridiculous, we can’t take it seriously at all. Bioweapons are games for superpowers. But even if a motley gang of terrorists were given something like a souped-up weaponized smallpox, why would they use it? Sure, they’d give the Great Satan a black eye, killing a few hundred thousand or even a million people - but the West has groups like the CDC and modern infrastructure.
The major die-off would be in the third-world – in those failed or failing states where the terrorists and their extended families live. In the earliest moments of a super plague, people would be jumping on planes and spreading the pathogen across the globe.
Terrorists may be crazy, but I wouldn’t call them stupid.
A crypto-rascist is more dangerous than an overt rascist.I’m gonna miss Trent Lott as leader of the Senate. Now don’t get me wrong, I deeply abhor his politics and beliefs. But at least he’s made it pretty clear where he stands. Contrast that with the new Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist. Until he ran for senator in 1994, Bill was a member of the (at that time) whites-only Belle Meade country club in Nashville Tennessee. I find his claims that he knew nothing of the policy and that he retired from the club to focus on his election campaign disingenuous in the extreme. How much time and energy does driving around the golf greens take? And how could he not notice the total absence of any minorities in the club?
So look for more of the same attacks on affirmative action and minority rights from the upcoming Republican-majority senate and its new leader, although with fewer overt rascist statements. And, in a worst-of-both worlds scenario, Trent Lott is still on Capitol Hill, operating in the shadows.
Hint: It’s a potential presidential candidate.
“They’ve tried to suppress black voting, they’ve ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina. And from top to bottom, the Republicans supported it. So I don’t see what they’re jumping on Trent Lott about… that’s the Republican policy. How do they think they got a majority in the South anyway?”
(Full text of Clinton’s comments here)
A nice overview on the topic by B.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, and a report on “the latest chapter” by Eric Alterman in The Nation.
Greenie, do you know anything about this??
I’ve been struggling to find something new and interesting to say about something that’s rapidly becoming old news – the Information Awareness Office and its project to construct a massive database containing tremendous amounts of personal detail on the lives of everyday Americans. Unfortunately, I can’t really add anything to the great analysis and resistance efforts of =http://www.warblogging.com/tiaGeorge Paine at Warblogging.com[/url] …except perhaps to launch the Needlenose Database of People Behaving Badly and to note the amazing similarity between the IAO logo and the cover art of Robert Anton Wilson’s ultimate pulp conspiracy novel “The Illuminatus! Trilogy Part 1: The Eye of the Pyramid.