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...

Unbelievably, and I mean unbelievably, John Kerry won’t go the f*** away, and insists on harping about the issue that cost him the election (and Democrats Congress for over a decade) by criticizing the President on… wait for it… health care. John Kerry now joins the 9-11 Families among those I am telling to shut the f*** up already, you’ve done enough damage to this country. And what is Senator Kerry doing? You got it: picking random things he doesn’t like (like drug reimportation issues) and attacking the President, without offering his own reasonable, workable solution. What troubles me is...

On this interesting day where Condi Rice sailed through the senate 85-13 (the most “no” votes for a secretary of state in 180 years), and the bloodiest day for our troops in Iraq yet as over 30 U.S. Marines were killed in Iraq in a helicopter crash (bringing the American military dead in Iraq over 1,400), the President urged the American people (as if there was a choice) to “have patience” toward his handling of the abbatoir in Iraq from the comfort of his maximum security perch in the White House, and he urged the Iraqis to foolishly risk their...

The White House released its own estimates showing a budget deficit for fiscal 2005 in the range of, oh, well over $400 billion, a new record. The Congressional Budget Office predicts a 10-year deficit of around $800 billion, or so, which assumes that the GOP Congress WILL NOT “make the tax cuts permanent”, and that the Iraq war ends in fiscal 2005. Good luck on both; more realistic guesses are $2.3 trillion with a T. We’re now talking about numbers so high that, well, our creditors in Tokyo and Beijing will themselves likely run out of money to finance our...

Quietly, in the pleasant afterglow of the inaugural bacchanalia, the White House sent Congress its latest request for an additional $80 billion for ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, not in that order of course. This brings the acknolwedged cost of the Iraq fiasco (Afghanistan represents a small fraction of what we spend on Iraq– so small as actually not really effecting the number) to around $280 billion… and counting, most of which will make their way into private hands so that the appropriate kickbacks can be paid, etc. Nancy Pelosi, continuing to be the poster child for what is...