Okay so Operation Swarmer hasn't lived up to its billing.  No fighting, no shots fired, no airstrikes, most of the people detained were released, the uncovering of a few weapons caches is pretty common anywhere you go in Iraq and as Pat Lang notes an operation of a similar size during the Vietnam War wouldn't have even been given a name.  Chris Albritton suggests that airlifting a force of 1500 troops (700 Iraqis, 800 Americans) to a sparsely populated area was clearly a public relations stunt to give the media pictures of the Iraqi military in action so the White House can come up with a "non-timetable" timetable for withdrawing US troops from Iraq.  Albritton also notes that even if you believe the operation was intended as more than a media stunt it doesn't say much about the capabilities of Iraqi military intelligence and the interior ministry who supposedly provided the intelligence that prompted the operation. 

My only question is after three years in Iraq, why the hell are we still doing big sweep operations like this?  The uselessness of big "search and destroy" type sweep operations in combatting an indigenous insurgency was supposedly one of the lessons learned by the generation of military officers who cut their teeth in Vietnam and I was under the impression that made it into the US military tactics and fighting doctrine studied by every service academy plebe and officer school candidate yet every couple months brings a new one.

The Center for Public Integrity just put out a report saying John Boehner, who rose to House Majority leader as the reform candidate and then shot down his own party's reform package, loves corporate sponsored travel so much that he's spent the equivalence of six-months of the past six years on privately sponsored trips.

Six years after first being elected President, a curious reporter finally notes that Mr. Bush leans heavily on "strawman" arguments when giving speeches.  It will be interesting to see what other long obvious Bush traits will be uncovered in the coming months?

You mean we went through all the DP World crap and increased funding of port security and disaster preparedness still gets voted down along party lines?  Why???

Whatever anyone may say about her boobs, acting choices, love life, whatever, the fact remains I love Pam Anderson because she is speaking for those who can’t speak. Those we must protect because they can no longer protect themselves against us: animals of all stripes, environments and intellects.

Indeed, any faith we have asks us to do this, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu. Judeo-Christians: That man was given “dominion over the animals” means not that we are supposed to do as we please, but that we must accept our role as their king – thus words like “dominion” – will we be wicked or good kings?

Always, always, Pam is there for animals. I can think of few people I respect more. Like PETA, for whom she is celebrity spokesperson, she makes people think. A democracy needs to think.

This from Netscape News recently:

“Anderson is using her assets, so to speak, to further her anti-fur position. The New York Post's Page Six gossip column reports that last Friday Anderson attended a luncheon at the House of Flaunt in Hollywood Hills with the Japanese designers of the Sly fashion line. She staged a stand-in of sorts, refusing to sit down until everyone in the room had removed all animal pelts from her sight.

 

“It gets better. With that little task accomplished, the former Baywatch star then refused to take off her trench coat and model a very clingy, very low-cut wrap dress she assured them was underneath it until the Sly designers agreed to never use fur again. Guess what? They did! And then she took off her coat and gave them an eyeful. Page Six quotes Anderson as saying of her bust, ‘They're good for something.’"

Atrios linked earlier to a purported speech by John Howard.  Turns out its a fake. The actual URL for the PM of Australia is www.pm.gov.au  If you go to the official website of the PM, the speech is not there.  The website of the speech linked to is http://www.johnhowardpm.org/speech1817.html When one examines the structure of the site, It appears that each public pronouncement is numbered consecutively.  The numbers are split between the speeches and interviews.  Thus the last 4 speeches are numbered 1811, 1815, 1816, 1818 as the last part of the URL  See the speeches section at: http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/index.cfm.  The last four interviews are numbered 1809, 1810, 1814, 1817. See the inteviews section at: http://www.pm.gov.au/news/interviews/index.cfm  The url of the speech cited is not the official site of the PM and the number is not a speech number but one assigned to an interview with Neil Mitchell of Radio 3AW.The media releases are similary numbered.  The last four media releases are 1801, 1803, 1804, 1813. Thus the URL for the speech is not correct under any analysis.

I didn't think it would happen and DP World pulling out of the deal saved the President from looking like an even bigger idiot.  Yet for a man who supposedly stands so much for strength, integrity and principle he definitely talks a good (at this point, pretty "tired") game but in the end he really doesn't have the guts to pull the trigger on such a controversial losing proposal. 

What is interesting is how the White House massaged the President's stand-tough image up to the end: Get Karl Rove on the line with the people in Dubai, tell them to withdraw from the deal, send the President out the next morning to reiterate his intention to veto all the bills coming out Congress trying to overturn the deal, DP World announces its pull-out a little later that evening and the President gets to say its too bad but Congress wasn't going to go along the next day.  Classic Bush White House.

Did I miss something or doesn't he look bad either way?  Ahh leadership!

I know straw polls from the Southern Republican Leadership Conferences don't mean much now but let's hope this one has some traction!  Bill Frist?  A Party in disarray, indeed.

This Administration.  It never does settle down into normalcy, does it?  People will ask us what it was like to live in these times. 

Claude Allen.  The President's Assistant for Domestic Policy until an abrupt resignation last month.  Turns out he was about to be arrested for low-level retail return fraud.  This is a man who George W. Bush had nominated to sit on the Fourth Circuit.

George W. Bush.  A whirling ball of unlucky incompetence.

Guest writer Bill Leighly -- poet/prince of the Midwest -- logs in:

Turn Away from the Machine

I  got home from work yesterday and grabbed a busch light and turned on the news... preface this with the fact that I have been in intense pain since Wed. after having a fucked-up root canal, and that the right side of my face has swollen to the size of a moderate softball (yes I am now on strong antibiotics and I have some vicadin if necessary) and that my mood under severe pain and sleep-deprivation always swings into the intensely cynical... anyways I had walked home from work thru the rain, picked up some drugs at Walgreens and then a six-pack and some smokes at the Licka Stoh (no I am not an alcoholic... I only drink on certian days at certain times... the same goes for the smokes... actually I am a long-distance runner but somehow started smoking only while drinking beer, I now have a hard time separating the two activities)... so I had arrived at my decrepit flat, exhausted as hell from no sleep Wed. night (that night I spent moaning in misery and watching my face swell up while popping codeine pills every hour to absolutely no effect) and flipped on the goddamm tube... I don't watch too much T.V., hardly any in fact... but because I had arrived home early (leaving work due to the discomfort) I was in time to catch the World News on one of the networks (I don't have cable)... I believe it was NBC... I lit up a Camel and took a sip of beer and leaned back to relax... after absorbing 30 minutes of theWorld News on NBC I had come to the conclusion that it was nothing but propoganda interspersed with multitudinous automobile commercials... later that evening I headed out into the cold rain for a beer or two at my pub... there I watched more goddamm automobile commercials interspersed with a basketball game... anyways the purpose of this rambling blog is that I am FED UP with American middle class society, FED UP with the gluttony, the wastefulness, the materialism, the mindlessness that constitute its foundation... FED UP with this modern existence under the Empire where every original thought has been extracted as ruthlessly as the root from my throbbing tooth...so I shall turn away from the Machine...

Overlooked by probably every single casual male opponent of abortion:

I just realized that those nuts in South Dakota might be having an unanticipated effect. I am working today and this guy said to me over lunch, "I can't believe that these people are really serious." He's a bit of a putz and he admitted that he'd believed women were exaggerating the threat. I said "I hope you're ready to be daddies, boys. Last time abortion was illegal they didn't have DNA testing" and they all looked stunned.

Its an attack on men's liberty of intimate association too.  Especially when they go after birth control, which is next.