Let's see, that's $200 million divided by 20 clinics over 2 years...so ten clinics per year at a cost of $10 million each and 122 that were never finished? 

Makes me wonder how the rebuilding of New Orleans is gonna go?

Update (4/4/06):  Christy Hardin Smith over at Firedoglake notes that Parsons is ranked no.2 in the amount of dollars received for contracts in Iraq in Afghanistan, after KBR/Halliburton, of course.

Atheist: America's most hated non-religious minority.

big picture:  Not always as promising as those who don't want to talk about the details would have you believe.

bombing campaigns:  Tend to be the next logical step when all other tactics have failed.

censure: One of the least consequential statements of Congressional displeasure.  Synonymous with "impeachment" as currently used.

civil war: You know it when you see it...except in cases where you need to officially deny it.

dead bodies:  Horrible.  Continue to get in the way of more favorable coverage of the situation in Iraq.

energy prices:  What goes up evidently stays up.

fiscal conservatism: Given a bad name by all those routinely referred to as "fiscal conservatives".

Hamas:  Inadvertent beneficiaries of "Democracy on the March" in the Middle East.  Terrorists. 

illegal:  Complicated issue.  Often confused with a situation in which one ignores or purposely breaks laws as enacted by Congress or other legislative bodies. 

immigration reform:  Evidently only applicable to undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Istanbul:  What Baghdad would look like if there weren't any car bombings and assassination attempts.  See "dead bodies" or "civil war".

John McCain: Always principled.  Evidently holds the only legitimate claim to term "bipartisanship" on Capitol Hill.  Media darling.

lobbying reform:  Another worthy effort undone by the reformers.

multi-generational commitment:  A term once reserved for social welfare programs but more recently describes the President's position on Iraq.

New Orleans:  Not as compelling a disaster as previously thought.  Current estimates of 25 years to rebuild a major American city put further strain on the term "American Ingenuity".

plagiarism:  Not as big a career killer as previously thought. 

progress:  Great buzzword.  Much kinder in the abstract as opposed to any actual effort at objective measure. 

radical base:  Commonly used to describe those passionate partisans who are pandered to come election time but avoided at all costs afterwards.  Not applicable to the Republican Party.

revisionism:  Inflammatory charge used to attack critics when a previously reported official version of events doesn't actually pan out.

sectarian violence:  Much more palatable description of "civil war", than "civil war".

strategic errors:  Not to be confused with the cumulation of thousands of "tactical" errors.  Think "big picture".

We need a peace settlement that isolates the al-Qaeda fighters from the rest of Iraq.  In other words, a deal with the Sunni resistance.

From Riverbend in Baghdad:

E. was sitting at the other end of the living room, taking apart a radio he later wouldn’t be able to put back together. I called him over with the words, “Come here and read this- I’m sure I misunderstood…” He stood in front of the television and watched the words about corpses and Americans and puppets scroll by and when the news item I was watching for appeared, I jumped up and pointed. E. and I read it in silence and E. looked as confused as I was feeling.

The line said:

وزارة الدفاع تدعو المواطنين الى عدم الانصياع لاوامر دوريات الجيش والشرطة الليلية اذا لم تكن برفقة قوات التحالف العاملة في تلك المنطقة

The translation:

“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

That’s how messed up the country is at this point.

I'm sitting here at my in-laws listening to CNN's Late Edition and they keep playing clips of President Bush saying that if he didn't believe we could succeed in Iraq he wouldn't have ordered the invasion or our troops wouldn't still be there or... well, you get the idea.  My response is that it really doesn't matter what the President "believes", the objective facts on the ground render what he "believes" a cheap rhetorical trick to avoid any sort of accountability for the results of his policies. 

Let's look at it another way, I'm sure that Mr. Bush wouldn't have gone into the oil business if he didn't "believe" that he would make a lot of money.  The results: four or five failed companies, a lot of investors who lost a lot of money and Mr. Bush still makes money as a tax write-off for Bush family friends who continually bail him out.  Looks pretty similar to me.... except I'm not sure about the family friends bailing him out of this one?

On the one hand, the United States declared today that we are done paying for the reconstruction of Iraq, on the other hand a Pentagon spokesman fielding a question about the requests for hundred's of millions of dollars that keep popping up in the federal budget for military base construction in Iraq states, "We're building permanent bases in Iraq for Iraqis." 

Now, the White House will point to the elimination of reconstruction funding for Iraq as an example of the new government's ability to take over the rebuilding of the country, however along the same lines the Iraqi government evidently lacks the funds or ability to build large military installations to garrison Iraqi troops?

Oddly enough, if one wanted to deny that we are building permanent US bases in Iraq, you too may have to keep going through these same odd leaps of logic....

As usual, Digby is able to cut throught the B.S. commonly referred to as "the administration's pushback strategy on Iraq":

"It's the violence, stupid. Until that stops, there is no good news."

For years I've shook my head at the multitude of horror stories of good, honest,  God-fearing Christian Americans (eg. true descendents of our Founding Fathers) being persecuted by a wicked society in the throes of radical secular humanism.  Maybe its being married to a Methodist minister or just an inkling that many conservative Christians want to feel persecuted so as to achieve the kind of unimpeachable moral authority and martyrdom that we associate with the Civil Rights movement of the 50's and 60's? 

No matter, it really comes down to something I realized several years ago watching various political campaigns; it is absolutely impossible for a political candidate in this country to run and win political office if they are an avowed atheist or proudly do not ascribe to any religious faith whatsoever.  One would think that if society was so cruel to Christians and other people of faith, that this wouldn't be the case.  Nevertheless, a University of Minnesota study suggests that self-avowed Atheists are somewhere between Dick Cheney and Islamic terrorists in terms of popularity...which is pretty low.  Kevin Drum tries to massage the numbers but it still looks bad for the non-believers among us.

Ben Domenech resigns.

Nothing.

Let me be more specific.  For years the GOP has made plenty of hay by pushing back against mis-characterized versions of the Democrats' party positions.  To take any kind of unified position on anything, especially Iraq is a serious tactical error. 

It is similar to assymetric warfare.  The Republicans' media machine is a finely tuned meatgrinder.  It whirrs into action when it detects anything it can push against.  The machine's existence is the sole reason a minority party whose positions differ widely from the majority of the American public remains in power. 

However, the GOP media machine can only push back.  Its inability to govern is now evident for all to see.  The Republican Party cannot run from its singularly atrocious record of governance.  The GOP can only hope that somehow they can change the subject. 

The worst thing the Democratic party can do now is to try and propose a major program on things which it did not create and cannot possibly hope to create solutions for.  Like Nixon's "Secret Plan" to end the war, this strategy relies on the fact that the election must be about the Republican's record in office, not the Democrats' own plans to fix the many broken windows around the house. 

This seems counterintuitive to many of those inside the Beltway, where I live.  But the simple fact is that the American public is fed up with grand plans and promises of glory.  They want a promise to govern well and that is all.