Elvis Costello
Shipbuilding

This 6:30 start time just doesn’t work for some of us. No doubt, it’s all about the money. More time for more hype and more commercials. I liked the earlier start time much better. But nice start!!! Enjoy the game!!!

To get you ready for the Super Bowl, here are some sets, appearances and skits from Frank Caliendo, one of the best impressionists working today. I’ve long been a fan. Here’s his site.

As John Madden on Letterman, 10/5/06:

As Madden, 12/18/06:

As Madden, 1/24/07:

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This is one of Caliendo’s first sketches as Madden (if not the first) from the underrated Mad TV:

But this sketch features perhaps the worst pairing of product and spokesperson ever:

Just like those Super Bowl nachos - it’s hard to stop at just one!

This has nothing to do with him being a “threat to democracies in the region.” It has to do with him taking majority control of the oil projects in the Orinoco River basin by May 1. Are we looking at another conflict to protect the interests of British Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips?

WASHINGTON: High-ranking US officials and lawmakers are pressuring the State Department to take a more punishing tone with Venezuela, at the risk of tossing “red meat” to President Hugo Chavez, who now rules by decree, experts told Agence France-Presse.

The US State Department’s top Latin-America diplomat, Tom Shannon, who for the past year has taken a moderate tack with Venezuela “is under pressure from within the administration and from Congress,” said Michael Shifter, vice-president of the Inter American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.

“Frustration is high in Washington about what Chavez is doing,” said Shifter, after the incoming number two at the State Department, John Negroponte, broke with Shannon’s diplomatic tack on Tuesday to hit out at Chavez.

Negroponte said Chavez “has been trying to export his kind of radical populism and I think that his behavior is threatening to democracies in the region.”

Daniel Restrepo, of the Center for American Prog­ress, said that pressure on Venezuela would rise with Negroponte in the State Department, and that members of Congress of both parties are also looking “for a way to challenge Chavez.”

Even before Negroponte’s statements on Tuesday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Chavez a threat to the United States, alongside al-Qaeda, Iran and North Korea.

Continue reading here

Feb. 4, 2007 - The price tag for the Iraq War is now estimated at $700 billion in direct costs and perhaps twice that much when indirect expenditures are included. Cost estimates vary - Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost at more than $2 trillion - but let’s be conservative and say it’s only $1 trillion (in today’s dollars).

As a number of other commentators have recently written, this number - a 1 followed by 12 zeroes - can be put into perspective in various ways. Given how large the war looms, it doesn’t hurt to repeat this simple exercise with other examples and in other ways.

Different Monetary Units

There are many comparisons that might be made, and devising new governmental monetary units is one way to make them. Consider, for example, that the value of one EPA, the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century’s worth of EPA spending (in today’s dollars), almost 130 EPAs, only a small handful of which would probably have been sufficient to clean up Superfund sites around the country.

Or note that the annual budget for the Department of Education is about $55 billion, which puts the price tag for Iraq at about 18 EDs. Just a few of these EDs would certainly have put muscle into the slogan “No child left behind.”

And since the annual budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute are $6 billion and $5 billion, respectively, the $1 trillion war cost is equivalent to 170 NSFs and 200 NCIs. No doubt a couple of those NSFs could have been used to develop cheap hybrid cars and alternative fuels. Scientific progress is by its nature unpredictable, but some extra NCIs might also have lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

The cost of the war can also be expressed as approximately 28 HS’s, where HS, the annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, is about $35 billion. Really securing the ports and chemical plants would have only eaten up a few of these HS’s. A few more could have been usefully spent in Afghanistan.

Read more here

A first grade teacher explains to her class that she
is an Indianapolis Colts fan. She asks her students
to raise their hands if they are Colts fans, too. Not
really knowing what a Colt fan was, but wanting to be
liked by their teacher, their hands flew into the air.

There is, however, one exception. Susie has not gone
along with the crowd. The teacher asks her why she has
decided to be different. “Because I’m not a Colts
fan” she reports.

“Then,” asks the teacher, “what are you?”
“I’m a Chicago Bears fan,” boasts the little
girl. The teacher asks Susie why she is a Bears fan.
“Well, my Dad and Mom are Bears fans, so I’m a Bears
fan, too” she responds.

“That’s no reason,” the teacher says. “What if your
mom was a moron, and your dad was an idiot. What would
you be then?”

Susie smiles and says, “Then I’d be an Indianapolis Colts fan.”

Deja vu

WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials acknowledged Friday that they had yet to compile evidence strong enough to back up publicly their claims that Iran is fomenting violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

Administration officials have long complained that Iran was supplying Shiite Muslim militants with lethal explosives and other materiel used to kill U.S. military personnel. But despite several pledges to make the evidence public, the administration has twice postponed the release - most recently, a briefing by military officials scheduled for last Tuesday in Baghdad.

“The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing overstated, and we sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts,” national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley said Friday.

The acknowledgment comes amid shifting administration messages on Iran. After several weeks of saber rattling that included a stiff warning by President Bush and the dispatch of two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Persian Gulf, near Iran, the administration has insisted in recent days that it does not want to escalate tensions or to invade Iran.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates seemed to concede Friday that U.S. officials can’t say for sure whether the Iranian government is involved in assisting the attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq.

“I don’t know that we know the answer to that question,” Gates said.

Earlier this week, U.S. officials acknowledged that they were uncertain about the strength of their evidence and were reluctant to issue potentially questionable data in the wake of the intelligence failures and erroneous assessments that preceded the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Read more here

But what do they know, eh? I mean Bush and Cheney know much better than them that this troop surge is going to be a success! Victory! Victory! Victory!

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Army 1st Lt. Antonio Hardy took a slow look around the east Baghdad neighborhood that he and his men were patrolling. He grimaced at the sound of gunshots in the distance. A machine gunner on top of a Humvee scanned the rooftops for snipers. Some of Hardy’s men wondered aloud if they’d get hit by a roadside bomb on the way back to their base.

“To be honest, it’s going to be like this for a long time to come, no matter what we do,” said Hardy, 25, of Atlanta. “I think some people in America don’t want to know about all this violence, about all the killings. The people back home are shielded from it; they get it sugar-coated.”

While senior military officials and the Bush administration say the president’s decision to send more American troops to pacify Baghdad will succeed, many of the soldiers who’re already there say it’s a lost cause.

“What is victory supposed to look like? Every time we turn around and go in a new area there’s somebody new waiting to kill us,” said Sgt. 1st Class Herbert Gill, 29, of Pulaski, Tenn., as his Humvee rumbled down a dark Baghdad highway one evening last week. “Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for thousands of years, and we’re not going to change that overnight.”

“Once more raids start happening, they’ll (insurgents) melt away,” said Gill, who serves with the 1st Infantry Division in east Baghdad. “And then two or three months later, when we leave and say it was a success, they’ll come back.”

Continue reading here

12 U.S. deaths in 4 days. And if we leave, things will turn chaotic. Riggghhhttt.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The Iraqi Interior Ministry estimates that about 1,000 people have been killed throughout Iraq in the past week due to gunbattles, drive-by shootings and bomb attacks, a ministry official said Sunday.

The figure includes members of militia and terrorist groups, civilians and Iraqi security forces. The official said the data was gathered by Iraq’s Interior, Health and Defense ministries.

The grim estimate came just a day after a bloody bomb attack on a crowded market in central Baghdad that killed 128 people and wounded 343 others Saturday, according to a Health Ministry official.

The incident, which also destroyed cars and surrounding stores, occurred in Sedriya, a mixed district of Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds.

The Health Ministry official said he expected the death toll from that attack to rise. Already, it is the deadliest attack in Iraq since November 23, when Shiites were targeted by coordinated car bomb attacks in Sadr City. At least 200 civilians were killed in those attacks.

Jihad Jabri, head of the Interior Ministry’s bomb squad, said a Mercedes truck used in Saturday’s blast contained a ton of explosives.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed the attack on Saddam Hussein loyalists and Sunni extremists.

Read more at CNN.com

The Blammmmmmme Game…….. Condi Condi bo Bondi Banana Fanana Fo Fandi Fe Fi Fo Mondi……..Connnnnnndi. Condi’s turn…….
The woman IS useless…….but damn she has some nice shoes!!!

WASHINGTON: For six years, first as national security adviser and then as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice worked under the cover of a very effective shield: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was during that time the administration’s lightning rod for criticism over its handling of Iraq.

But in recent weeks, with Rumsfeld gone, Rice has faced increased, and somewhat unfamiliar, criticism. At a Senate hearing on Jan. 11, she confronted a wall of opposition from Republicans as well as Democrats. During three days of hearings last week on Iraq, several of her predecessors were pointed in their disapproval of her job performance.

Former Secretary of State James Baker took issue with Rice’s refusal to engage Syria diplomatically. Back in his day, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “we practiced diplomacy full time, and it paid off.”

Last week, Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, released three letters demanding that Rice make public the administration’s requirements for actions to be taken by the Iraqi government to earn continued U.S. support. Along with the letters, and Rice’s reply - which indicated that the Iraqis had already missed most of the benchmarks - the senators also released an irate statement.

“Secretary Rice finally provided a response” to the senators’ repeated requests, the statement said. “What Secretary Rice’s letter makes abundantly clear is that the administration does not intend to attach meaningful consequences for the Iraqis continuing to fail to meet their commitments.”

Read more at the International Herald Tribune