Category: Politics

Just as a reminder:

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?

— Robin Cook, March 18th, 2003

Bush neglected to add funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to the budget. Again.

That’s a little unfair of me, since in the one case we’re talking military funding and in the other we’re talking human aid. Still, either way he’s avoiding the true cost of the war. “The White House expects to cover the war costs with supplemental funds after next fall’s elections.” Indeed.

Westwood One Radio Network is owned by Infinity, a subsidiary of Viacom. Viacom’s other properties include CBS. CBS just refused to run issue advertisements during the Super Bowl.

Oddly, on the Westwood One pregame Super Bowl show, I just heard two advertisements for LDS Family Services. I didn’t find either of them objectionable; they were both pro-adoption ads designed to encourage people to give unwanted children up for adoption. I’m pretty sure they both counted as issue ads.

CBS is making up policies as it goes along.

Suicide bombers killed or wounded 200 Kurds today in Arbil. The targets were the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. No news yet on the affiliation of the bombers.

This represents a significant step towards civil war. The question is whether or not the Kurds get to run Kirkuk and Mosul, the big northern oil cities. The Kurds would like to be in charge of these important resources; the Sunnis tend to disagree.

We’re trying hard to get out of Iraq by the elections. If that becomes our main priority, we will almost certainly leave the country in a worse state than it was in when we showed up. Saddam was a monster; he is not the only monster.

If the base political form of mockery known as fisking was generally of this quality, I’d be all for it. James Fallows, a former presidential speechwriter, goes over the State of the Union line by line. He’s partisan, but it’s not a partisan set of annotations. He’s coming at it from the point of view of a craftsman. (Via ceej.)

If you start here and read forward, you’ll get an elegant insightful view of the Democratic nomination battle from January 14th to the current moment. Al Giordano predicted Kerry’s surge ages ago, and he was dead on accurate. His insight into the surge as it happened was fascinating.

You don’t really need to go any further than the first paragraph of this story (via Talking Points Memo) to get pissed off:

Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

Apparently the Republicans have forgotten Watergate. Stealing memos, as it turns out, is wrong.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there’s some sort of white supremacist conspiracy that means to stealthily advance its views into the mainstream. We should believe it. They’re targeting the Sierra Club right now.

“Latin Americans have shown a positive disregard for environmentalism as evidenced by their tendency toward littering and driving smog-belching old junkers.” (Steve Sailer, "Green Gag.")

The leaders of several anti-immigration organizations funded by Richard Mellon Scaife have put together a slate of six candidates for the Sierra Club Board of Directors. The Sierra Club is a target because, as a liberal group, it provides a path for expressing racist views in a manner that doesn’t set off alarm bells. From John Tanton, one of the people behind this effort, in a 1986 memo:

[T]he issues we’re touching on here must be broached by liberals. . . . The conservatives simply cannot do it without tainting the whole subject.

They intend to use the Sierra Club as a method of injecting extremist views into the mainstream. The claim that immigration is an ecological issue is somewhat convincing at first glance, but consider the mission of the Sierra Club. They are global in focus, albeit based in the US; they recognize that ecology doesn’t care about national borders. Limiting immigration, and thus limiting US population does not have any effect on the rest of the world — it just shifts the problem around.

And, if there’s any doubt about the character of the people behind this takeover, read this. But not if you mind seeing swastikas.

(Via Orcinus.)

Do not mess with Boston political workers during campaigns. See also John Sasso, who may well have lost Dukakis the 1988 election when he was forced to leave the campaign; but either way, the first link in this post is good reading.

About the belief that we invaded Iraq for the sake of civil rights:

Iraq’s Interim Governing Council is in fact regressing on civil rights. Protests ensued.

Note that this would not be a regression if marriage was a purely religious institution, with civil unions functioning as the political equivalent. However, since the spiritual institution of marriage has legal force, it’s pretty harsh.