In this case, the Republicans are the victor, and the spoils are in the President’s “austerity” budget, which will slash and burn over 150 programs while still making the deficit worse. Spoils you say? Remember: the voters said that punishing people for being poor is just standing for good old Christian values. At least, that’s what somebody in the White House seems to think the voters said. Of course– simply freezing spending for one year and reversing the President’s tax cuts— in their entirety– as Howard Dean proposed (and was duly attacked and ridiculed by John Kerry, among others)– would...

A brief stop by to Beijing’s People’s Daily gives us this cryptic read of the even more cryptic article recently coauthored by former Republican Secretaries of State Henry “10 Most Evil Men of the Twentieth Century TM” Kissinger and George “Yes, I’m on the Board of Bechtel and you don’t want to know where else” Schultz. Their analysis: the United States as opened a big can o’ woop’ass in Iraq, and must decide between the wonderful rhetoric of “democracy” and “freedom”, or the less wonderful reality that the aforementioned will result in a pro-Iran, Shiite dominated Shiite axis from Tehran...

This pleasant reminder from our friend Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey writing in Pravda, who gives us this from East Asia about the United Nation’s World Health Organization telling us that avian flu jumping over to humans is now at an emergency state. For those wondering, the last time something like that happened on a grand scale (right after World War I), something like 20 to 30 million people died (let’s just say that given the then smaller world population at the time, a comparable pandemic would kill over 100,000,000 people these days… and since a lot of them would be White Americans…...

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, widely acknowledged as one of the principle architects of the underlying neo-conservative dogma that supplied the phisosophical underpinnings for “the end justifies the means and the means are lying, lying, lying” entry into the Iraq war, denied that that the insurgency represented some “nationalist” movement. The evidence of this, according to Wolfowitz, is the high turnout in the national elections on Sunday, which “proves” widespread popular support for the new Iraqi government. This, of course, is a yes-but situation. Yes, the turnout was very high– higher than American turnouts as percentages of registered voters– but...

DESIGN by Robert Frost I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth– Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth– A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of...

I guess the CIA does this sort of thing, but it announced that it is formally revising its pre-war WMD estimate in Iraq (“slam-dunk”) to the reality (nuttin’). What’s interesting in the attached link are the last three paragraphs: the first 80% is a discussion of just how wildly off the CIA estimates before the Iraq war were regarding the state of Iraq’s WMD programs and actual weapons. The last three paragraphs discuss Iran, and that Vice-President Vader has called Iran “our leading threat priority”, or some ominous term for the latest potential domino in “The Great Game As Played...

INAUGURATION DAY: JANUARY 1953 by Robert Lowell The snow had buried Stuyvesant. The subways drummed the vaults. I heard the El’s green girders charge on Third, Manhattan’s truss of adamant, that groaned in ermine, slummed on want. … Cyclonic zero of the word, God of our armies, who interred Cold Harbor’s blue immortals, Grant! Horseman, your sword is in the groove! Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move. Look, the fixed stars, all just alike as lack-land atoms, split apart, and the Republic summons Ike, the mausoleum in her heart. In 1952, the Republican Party, running on the “only a...

We’ll start our Sunday morning’s coverage of the Iraq election (polls closed at 1400 GMT… or a few minutes ago as I write this at 0930 EST) with this roundup from the Beeb. While the Iraqi election commission spouts figures like 75% turnout and 90% of Shiite turnout, there seems no possible way to verify this. Anecdotal reports are heavy Shiite and Kurdish turnout, and light Sunni turnout…. maybe VERY light. Election day violence killed 22; probably less than a typical day in Iraq… less than I would have guessed– I guess the shoot to kill curfew worked. But as...

That would be the biggest embassy of any country in the world, our American embassy to Iraq, which suffered a rocket attack today, killing two Americans. The Green Zone, as I am fond of reminding people, is several square miles– I suppose the size of Manhattan from 14th or 23rd Street all the way down to the Battery. It’s nice to see the insurgents including the Americans in what had mostly been an internal Iraqi celebration of their newfound democratic process. As I said elsewhere (such as over at American Street), if you wanted a formula on how not to...

It sure would seem that would be the only way the President could say with his usual cocksure certitude that the new Iraqi government would not ask American occupation forces to leave and take their heavy jackboot off of the chest of Iraq. Nonetheless, the President assured the Grey Lady that American forces, if asked by a new Iraqi government the President offered was “sovereign” and “back on its feet”, American forces would, in fact, leave. I suppose that this means the President has a pretty good handle on likely numbers and the identities of the expected winners, the Sistani...