Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova - “Falling Slowly”

From the film Once. What are you waiting for? Go see it, already!

Last two days in Iraq

21-Jun-2007 6 | US: 6 | UK: 0 | Other: 0
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (northern part) Hostile - hostile fire - RPG attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (northeastern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (northeastern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (northeastern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (northeastern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (northeastern part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
20-Jun-2007 9 | US: 8 | UK: 1 | Other: 0
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (western part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (western part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (western part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad (western part) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Al Anbar Province Hostile - hostile fire
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Al Anbar Province Hostile - hostile fire
US Sergeant 1st Class William A. Zapfe Baghdad (Muhammad al Ali) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US Private 1st Class Joshua S. Modgling Baghdad (Muhammad al Ali) Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
UK NAME NOT RELEASED YET Basra - Basrah Hostile - hostile fire - indirect fire

The scary thing about this…….has anything they’ve done since going into Iraq NOT turned out “worst case scenario?” I guess our service members better prepare themselves for even longer deployments.

From Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he does not anticipate extending U.S. troop deployments in Iraq beyond 15 months, calling the idea a “worst-case scenario.”

And no doubt this will turn out “worse case scenario” too.

Gates endorsed the military’s efforts to work with some Iraqi insurgents who initially fought against U.S. forces. That may be the only way to bring peace to the bitterly divided nation, he said

Oh not to worry….they’ve asked Fredo to investigate. ha!!!

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democrats on Thursday denounced Vice President Dick Cheney’s idea of abolishing a government office charged with safeguarding national security information — and criticized him for refusing to cooperate with the agency.
Cheney’s office — over the objections of the National Archives — has exempted itself from a presidential executive order that seeks to protect national security information generated by the government, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Under the order, executive branch offices are required to give the Information Security Oversight Office at the archives data on how much material it has classified and declassified.
Cheney’s office provided the information in 2001 and 2002, then stopped. Henry Waxman, chairman of the committee, said Cheney’s office claims it need not comply with the executive order because it is not an “entity within the executive branch.”
“Your decision to except your office from the president’s order is problematic because it could place national security secrets at risk,” Waxman wrote in a letter to Cheney on Thursday.
Megan McGinn, a spokeswoman for the vice president, said Cheney’s office was not breaking the law, but did not elaborate.
“We are confident that we are conducting the office properly under the law,” she said.
The Information Security Oversight Office has asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resolve the legal dispute over whether the order applies to Cheney’s office. So far, the Justice Department has not ruled on the issue.

More at GovExec.com

It’s ok if you lie, just like Hollywood you can do a retake!

Like most Hollywood sequels, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty’s return to Capitol Hill today was not quite the blockbuster its producers (the House Judiciary Committee) had hoped it would be.

Appearing in the committee room he once ruled as a top staffer in the 1990s, McNulty spent more than two hours explaining how little he knew about the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Referred to as the “caboose” by one panel member, McNulty said that he never even spoke directly to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the pending mass firings until a Nov. 27, 2006 meeting at which the plan was finalized. “I was consulted in this process at the end of what we now know to be the process,” he explained.

McNulty said he knew nothing of an order that placed much hiring and firing authority inside the attorney general’s office, including a notation not to let the “DAG” see the order, until he saw a report on it in National Journal. “I still don’t know to this day why that was the case,” he said.

More at the Washington Post

Imagine how non-officials are feeling. The citizens of Iraq.

By Joshua Partlow and Robin Wright
Washington Post Foreign Service

BAGHDAD, June 20 — Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a senior Shiite politician often mentioned as a potential prime minister, tendered his resignation last week in a move that reflects deepening frustration inside the Iraqi government with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Other senior Iraqi officials have considered resigning in recent weeks over the failures of their government to make progress after more than a year in power, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Abdul Mahdi said he was provoked by the second bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra on June 13, in which he said corrupt police abetted Sunni insurgents. “The two minarets were as important to us as September 11, and we should be accountable to the people,” Abdul Mahdi said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “We should be doing more to move in a positive direction — on corruption, accountability and defending the important sites.”

Abdul Mahdi’s attempted resignation, which has been held at bay by promises of action, is also a sign of growing disarray among the Shiites who lead the government.

More at the Washington Post

US Congress Votes to Outsource Presidency

Washington, DC (AP) — Congress today announced that the office of President of the United States of America will be outsourced to India as of July 1, 2007.

The move is being made in order to save the President’s $500,000 yearly salary, and also a record $521 trillion in deficit expenditures and related overhead the office has incurred during the last 5 years.

“We believe this is a wise move financially. The cost savings should be significant,” stated Congressman Thomas Reynolds (R-WA). “We cannot expect to remain competitive on the world stage with the current level of cash outlay,” Reynolds noted.

Mr. Bush was informed by e-mail this morning of his termination. Preparations for the job move have been underway for some time.

Gurvinder Singh of Indus Teleservices, Mumbai,India will be assuming the office of President as of July 1, 2007.

Mr. Singh was born in the United States while his Indian parents were vacationing at Niagara Falls , thus making him eligible for the position. He will receive a salary of $320 (USD) a month but with no health coverage or other benefits.

It is believed that Mr. Singh will be able to handle his job responsibilities without a support staff. Due to the time difference between the US and India, he will be working primarily at night, when few offices of the US Government will be open. “Working nights will allow me to keep my day job at the Dell Computer call center,” stated Mr. Singh in an exclusive interview. “I am excited about this position. I always hoped I would be President.”

A Congressional spokesperson noted that while Mr. Singh may not be fully aware of all the issues involved in the office of President, this should not be a problem as President Bush was not familiar with the issues either.

Mr. Singh will rely upon a script tree that will enable him to respond effectively to most topics of concern. Using these canned responses, he can address common concerns without having to understand the underlying issue at all. “We know these scripting tools work,” stated the spokesperson. “President Bush has used them successfully for years.”

Bush will receive health coverage, expenses, and salary until his final day of employment. Following a two week waiting period, he will be eligible for $140 a week unemployment for 13 weeks. Unfortunately he will not be eligible for Medicaid, as his unemployment benefits will exceed the allowed limit.

Mr. Bush has been provided the outplacement services of Manpower, Inc. to help him write a resume and prepare for his upcoming job
transition.

According to Manpower, Mr. Bush may have difficulties in securing a new position due to limited practical or successful work experience. A Greeter position at Wal-Mart was suggested due to Bush’s extensiv experience shaking hands, as well as his goofy smile.

H/T Bro for this one!

My first question: who profits? Profits will go to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has spearheaded litigation on behalf of Guantanamo detainees. Preordering my copy!

Poems written by Guantanamo prisoners about their lives as captives of the United States have been compiled in a book that will be published this summer with an endorsement from a former U.S. poet laureate.

“Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak” is being published by the University of Iowa Press and will hit the shelves by August, the publisher said. The 84-page volume was assembled by lawyers representing captives held as suspected terrorists at the much-criticized U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

Marc Falkoff, an assistant law professor at Northern Illinois University who has represented 17 Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo, compiled the poems. He said most expressed religious faith, nostalgia for childhood homes or yearning for family.

Others are angry, disillusioned or questioning, like one written as a conversation with the surrounding sea.

More at Reuters

Time to go to the mattresses……until the meatheads in Washington listen to us!!!

From Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Twelve U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the past 48 hours, the U.S. military said on Thursday.

In the single worst incident, five soldiers, three Iraqi civilians and an Iraqi interpreter were killed on Thursday when a roadside bomb exploded near their vehicle in a northeastern district of the capital, the U.S. military said.

A six soldier was killed and three wounded on Thursday when a rocket propelled grenade hit their vehicle in northern Baghdad.

Four U.S. soldiers were killed when their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb in western Baghdad on Wednesday, the military said.

Thousands of U.S. troops have been deployed in Baghdad for a major crackdown aimed at curbing sectarian violence that threatens civil war. The troops have set up combat outposts in the city, raising their visibility and making them more vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks.

The U.S. military has launched a major offensive in areas bordering the capital in the past few days in a bid to wipe out car bomb networks.

In western Anbar province, two Marines were killed in combat on Wednesday, the military said, giving no further details.

He intends to let the American people know what’s going on. Well we can’t have that!!!

By Ken Kaye
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

DEERFIELD BEACH Bill Proenza is hunting for a new home in South Broward County. That’s because he intends to remain the director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami-Dade County for at least five years, he said Wednesday.

Yet during a news conference, he was besieged by questions as to whether he might be fired after receiving a stern letter last week from a top National Weather Service official, saying he had violated a number of federal protocols.

Among those, was publicly criticizing his superiors in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for failing to plan a replacement for the QuikSCAT satellite, which has helped provide accurate storm forecasts but is doomed to die soon.

On Wednesday, Proenza said he has no fear of losing his job.

He said he has the support of several members of Congress - including U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., - as well as the general public.

“I’m encouraged,” he said, adding that he plans to continue his public campaign to get a next-generation weather satellite launched as soon as possible. “I intend to be very upfront and make sure the American people know what’s going on.”

More at the Sun Sentinel

By Dan Ackman
from Political Mavens.com

Mike Bloomberg’s departure from the Republican Party-convenient for a while, but no longer’sets the stage for his presidential bid. Of course, no third party or independent candidate has ever won the presidency. Only Teddy Roosevelt, a former president, has ever come close and that was in 1912.

But Bloomberg has a shot. The first and most obvious reason is that with a personal fortune tagged at anywhere from $5 billion to $20 billion, Bloomberg could outspend either party by writing himself a check for $500 million or $1 billion and not even notice the money was gone. This is how he became mayor-though if it was not for 9/11, Mark Green would have won in 2001. Even in Manhattan, it is possible to live off the interest of just $4 billion.

The real interesting question is what he could do with all that money. Ross Perot, for all his 19% of the popular vote, was not close to winning a single electoral vote. But he spent only $65 million. The key is not to win a large share of the popular vote, but a large enough share to win some electoral votes.

In the last two presidential elections, the winner scored just a thin margin of the electoral votes-Bush had 15 to spare in 2004. If the race between the major party candidates is similarly close in 2008, Bloomberg would need to win just a state or two to deny anyone else a majority in the Electoral College. If no one wins a majority, under the Constitution, the new House of Representative would pick the president.

For Bloomberg to win the House’s support, he-d certainly need a plurality of the popular and electoral vote. His charm, record, and media budget will have to take care of the former. Bloomberg could rack up 181 electoral votes (a plurality of 540) by winning California, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Washington-that’s a total of 199. These are either liberal states, or big swing states where the parties are neck and neck. It could happen.

by John Lanchester
The New Yorker

Book review - “The Diana Chronicles” (Doubleday; $27.50); Brown, Tina

At the time of her death, on August 31, 1997, Princess Diana had come to have no privacy whatsoever. Take this recording of a private phone conversation with James Gilbey. The lovers- chat featured the following exchange:

GILBEY: I haven-t played with myself . . . for a full forty-eight hours. (musingly) Not for a full forty-eight hours. . . .

DIANA (sounding vague): I watched “East Enders” today.

The tape in question seems to have been rebroadcast on a cellular frequency, where amateur scanners could encounter it, and several copies were handed to the newspapers. It has been argued that the recording must have been made by members of the British security services, as part of a P.R. battle shaping up between Diana and her husband, Prince Charles. Its release may even have been occasioned by the fact that Charles, too, had had an embarrassing recording made of him-the famous conversation with his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles, in which he spoke of his wish to be reincarnated as a tampon. And all this was in the early nineties, when the “war of the Waleses,” as it came to be called, was just heating up.

That P.R. battle and the lack of privacy were partly Diana’s fault; much of what is in the public domain was put there by her. Before her death, she invaded her own privacy with a book (”Diana: Her True Story,” written by Andrew Morton with her coöperation) and a television interview (the “Panorama” conversation with Martin Bashir, in which she uttered the line about wanting to be “the Queen of people’s hearts”). The revelations-about the Windsors- coldness, Charles’s love for Camilla Parker Bowles, and Diana’s bulimia-were explosive for the Royal Family, and disastrous for Diana, too, since they did nothing to discourage the hacks on the royal beat, who range from the merely avid through the unscrupulous to the outright criminal. (A former royal editor of the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid, was jailed this year for conspiring to hack into telephone messages.)

By now, there have been dozens of books, by everyone from her butler and her housekeeper to her private secretary, as well as the release of tapes she made when talking about intimate matters with her speech coach, and tapes she made when she was helping Morton with his book (help she later vehemently denied having given). Ten years after her death, it seems, we know everything about Diana.

With other modern icons who died young-Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, J.F.K.-the posthumous accumulation of data has led to a broader and more complex sense of who they were. Not so with Diana. Although we now have Total Information Awareness about her, the gist of what we know hasn-t changed since she first went public with her story. Both the Morton book and the Bashir interview allowed a full view of Diana’s faults-a much fuller one than she realized. Diana was clearly a mythomaniac, a fantasist, a fibber, a manipulator, and a world-class actress, with a particular talent for delivering well-rehearsed, weapons-grade zingers with an air of absolute innocence. (”There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”) But the nub of what she said had the feeling of truth, and has it still: Diana married too young, her husband never loved her, and the Royal Family gave her no support. We now know all sorts of details: that, by the second day of the honeymoon, Charles was calling Camilla, and wrote her a tormented three-page letter; that, later on the honeymoon, Diana found him wearing cufflinks that Camilla had given him; that, soon into their marriage, Diana caught Charles telling Camilla over the phone, “Whatever happens, I will always love you.” Yet the basic portrait has not changed.

read more at The New Yorker

By Sandy Grady
USA TODAY

One evening this summer, Barry Bonds will end his cheerless trudge to immortality. Bonds will smite home run No. 756 that eclipses Henry Aaron’s lifetime record. Polls show Americans conflicted: Some will cheer; many will boo.

Me, I’m not going to watch. No thanks, I’ll take a pass.

Surely there’s a clause in the Constitution about my inalienable right to avoid a sports event I think to be fake.

Let the TV networks feature Bonds’ record smash, with fireworks exploding while his godfather, Willie Mays, plus assorted politicians and glitterati greet him at home plate. Click, off. That’s why the remote control was invented. Replays on ESPN? Click, click.

I doubt I’m alone in Bonds Apathy. There doesn’t seem outrage or exultation over his impending feat, merely resigned indifference toward Bonds. To twist the Simon and Garfunkel lyrics in The Graduate movie: Our cynical nation turns its eyes from you.

Snubbing Bonds’ record should have little to do with his sullen, bristling, boorish personality. The Hall of Fame is full of ball yard heroes who weren’t Mr. Sunshine. And despite some black vs. white polls, anti-pathy toward Bonds definitely shouldn’t be based on race. Last time I looked, Aaron was also an African-American. Unlike Bonds, Aaron came from a dirt-poor background. He was an earnest, working-man player with steel-band wrists. He set his record amid racist taunts and death threats that make Bonds’ march look like a waltz.

No, there’s only one reason to avert your eyes from Bonds’ unsavory moment. That’s the deeply held suspicion, based on mounting circumstantial evidence, that his burst of late-career homers was achieved by performance-enhancing drugs.

read more at USA TODAY

by David Corn
from “The Nation”

One spoke to the heart. One spoke to the head. But both presidential candidates had the same mission: to prevent Senator Hillary Clinton from claiming the soul of their party.

On Tuesday, at the annual Take Back America conference–a three-day gathering in Washington, DC, of thousands of progressive activists–Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards, each an aspirant for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, delivered back-to-back speeches that delineated the stark difference in their political courtship styles.

Obama went first. He started with his own story, talking about his days as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, when he was paid $12,000 a year by church groups to help establish job training and after’school programs in a neighborhood hit hard by a steel plant closing. He described his subsequent entry into local politics and decried a Washington dominated by special interests where “all you see…is another scandal, or a petty argument, or the persistent stubbornness of a President who refuses to end this war in Iraq.” Blasting lobbyists for oil and pharmaceutical companies, he exclaimed, “They write the checks and you get stuck with the bills, they get the access while you get to write a letter, they think they own this government, but we;re here to tell them it’s not for sale.”

That was a good applause line. The cynical ways of Washington, he said, are of no use to an Iowa couple he met who own a small business and cannot longer afford health care coverage. Pay-to-play politics in Washington, he pointed out, does not help the workers of Newton, Iowa, who lost their jobs when Maytag closed their plant and shipped their jobs overseas; nor does it do much for the still-homeless in New Orleans, the 45 million Americans without health insurance, and the 15 million American children living in poverty. “The time for the can’t-do, won’t-do, won’t-even-try style of politics is over,” Obama proclaimed. “It’s time to turn the page.”

read more at THE NATION

from The Pew Research Center

Since 1999, support for the idea of banning “books with dangerous ideas” from public school libraries has declined from 55% to 46% and has now fallen to the lowest level of support of the past 20 years, in contrast with the modest increase observed in concerns about pornographic material in magazines and movies.

But even in the early 1990s, as few as 48% had supported banning such books. While there are relatively modest partisan differences in opinions about banning dangerous books, there are divisions within parties, especially among Democrats.

Two-thirds of liberal Democrats (67%) disagree that dangerous books should be banned — and 52% completely disagree.

By comparison, most conservative and moderate Democrats (56%) agree with the banning of dangerous books (and a relatively large proportion — 37% — completely agrees).

Republicans are somewhat less divided, although 52% of conservative Republicans favor a ban on such books compared with 40% of moderate and liberal Republicans.