God, get a load of this damn hippie screaming about Iraq:

Just ask yourself: Given that Iran is the real looming threat in that region, are we better placed now to deal with that threat than we would have been absent an Iraq war? If we could ask President Ahmadinejad whether he thinks we are better placed, what would his honest answer be?

We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of. It’s not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it’s not likely. The place we are at is surely not a place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at—not even Vic Davis Hanson.

Let 'em have it Hippie!

We are stuck there in that wretched place with no way out that would not involve massive loss of geostrategic face. Getting on for 3,000 of our troops have been killed, and close to 20,000 maimed. We’ve spent untold billions of dollars. For what?

What?  That's John Derbyshire?  The National Review Corner?  wow.  Another member of the Cut and Run Club. . .

We report, you decide...

A truly bad man is finally dead and good riddance.  Unfortunately, its difficult to say how much of an impact it will have on events in Iraq.  Most assessments this morning have been pretty sober which is understandable given how many similar corners we've turned in the last four years.  Nor is it really going to be easy to assess the effects of Zarqawi's death given that the Pentagon purposely inflated his role in the ongoing violence to heights not seen probably since Emmanuel Goldstein graced the pages of 1984.  What is clear is the sectarian violence he sought to inflame has taken on a life of its own and truly hampers the prospects for peace, reconciliation and rebuilding. 

Yes, Zarqawi was our boogeyman, at times responsible for everything while more recently painted as inept, but its hard not to also wonder what other evil-mastermind we'd be talking about if we hadn't passed up three clear opportunities to kill Zarqawi back in 2002.  That's a lot of dead Americans and Iraqis racked up for the sake of not undercutting the political rationale for invading Iraq.

Zarqawi is dead, let's hope his replacement isn't worse.

Joe is having a hard time of it up there in Connecticut.  Seems Ned Lamont is giving him a surprise challenge for the Democratic nomination. 

Joe's reaction?  He's going negative.  In June.  In a primary.  What does Lieberman know that we don't?

Joe has apparently pushed the panic button.

He has "gone negative" with two TV ads that are harsh and mean spirited.

Usually incumbent senators regard primary challengers with Olympian detachment and bemusement. (At least that is the public pose.)

Lieberman is trying to take Lamont out.

Whose gonna pay for the massive deficits which have plauged Bush's America?  You are:

Of course, the most critical link in the system is the United States and its mounting deficits, which have reached a staggering 7 percent of GDP. Pessimists have been warning about this for years to no avail. But after the April 22 meeting of the Group of Seven top industrial countries, the concluding statement had a surprise: the leaders acknowledged for the first time that currencies have to adjust to help rebalance the world economy. Put simply, the United States needs a cheaper dollar to pay its dollar debts. The rule of thumb is that the dollar has to fall 10 percent to cut the current account deficit by 1 percentage point of GDP, which means another 30 to 40 percent to cut the deficit in half. The trick will be for the markets and policymakers to produce a smooth decline, not a mad scramble out of the dollar. "We need to suck out liquidity without slipping into recession," warns Joseph Quinlan, chief market strategist for Bank of America.

That's right.  They want to pay their dollar debts by making the dollar in your hand worth less.

The number of civilians being shot and killed at U.S. military checkpoints in Iraq has dropped significantly in the last year from 7 deaths per week in July 2005 to 1 death per week in May 2006.  Evidently no one kept any statisitics on this before July 2005 so we have to assume these numbers are another example of steady progress in Iraq.

Since we looked at 2006 violent death/homicide statistics for our two newsworthy capital cities a couple weeks ago maybe its time to update.

May 2006:

Washington D.C.      15 homicides

Baghdad, Iraq          1,398 violent deaths

What, there's a problem of scale between the two?  Well lets try Los Angeles, then.

May 2006:

Los Angele, CA         41 homicides

Baghdad, Iraq           1, 398 violent deaths

Can we cut the crap, now?

Click.

That's the sound of the latest Bush attempt to energize his base for the purpose of saving the Republican Congress.  Iran warmongering?  Click.  Immigration?  Click.  Gay Marriage?  Click.  Today after too little too late complaints from conservatives (Joe Scarborough called it pandering), Bush moved his media event supporting the Constitutional Amendment on gay marriage from the high-profile Rose Garden to the Old Executive Office Building.   And Bush apparently walked off without commenting at all.  Can't wait for that subpoena power.

Wow!  Well put, Jamison, well put!

Not to denigrate Mr. Sensenbrenner's exceedingly large ego and very conservative politics, but I think it'd probably be more accurate to change the line "known as an especially cantakerous conservative" to "known as the biggest jerk on Capitol Hill", especially now that Tom Delay is leaving town.

If history serves as any guide, the President will probably express regret for this incident sometime in January 2009.

An interesting new statistical argument has been rolled out recently to help buttress conservative claims that all is well in Iraq and the violence and death there is actually not as bad as say the statistics from several major American cities.  While not as clever as Brit Hume comparing U.S. casualties in Iraq to homicide rates in California, this argument was first advanced by Rep. Steve King (R-IA), pride of Storm Lake, IA who I'm certain knows more about price supports for corn than foreign policy, and then moved along by Rush Limbaugh and a host other right wing commentators.  The argument goes something like this:

I happened to catch Rep. Steve King, a Republican of Iowa, on C-span last week and he rattled off some startling figures that demonstrate how off-base journalists are when it comes to reporting on the war in Iraq. According to Mr. King, the violent death rate in Iraq is 25.71 per 100,000. That may sound high, but not when you compare it to places like Colombia (61.7), South Africa (49.6), Jamaica (32.4), and Venezuela (31.6). How about the violent death rates in American cities? New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was 53.1. FBI statistics for 2004-05 have Washington at 45.9, Baltimore at 37.7, and Atlanta at 34.9.

You see Rep. King is trying to make the point that the news media is just blowing things out of proportion when they "dwell" on massive suicide bombings, dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis, sectarian violence, or even waves of execution style deaths happening in Iraq, but its interesting how he picks his statistics.  I would think that if you're going to talk about aggregate national violent death statistics (homicides? suicides? what are we talking about?)  it doesn't make sense to compare them to homicide rates in individual major U.S. cities, does it?  Wouldn't you want to compare say the rate of violent deaths per 100,000 of Baghdad to that of Washington D.C. instead of D.C. to the entire country of Iraq so that maybe you were dealing with the same thing or category?  That seems pretty logical but I'm not sure it advances the purposes of Rep. King and others. 

Now what if we do compare Baghdad to D.C.?  I don't have any current death rate statistics for 2006 but if you look at Washington D.C. homicide statistics through April of this year you'll find there were 47 homicides.  Now let's look at numbers from Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The number of violent deaths in Baghdad from January to March 2006 was 3,472 deaths.  Now lets add another 1,091 deaths in April and you have a total of 4,563 violent deaths in Baghdad to 47 in our nation's capital over the same time period.  If we adjust for the fact that Bagdad has 10 times more people and multiply the D.C. numbers by 10 then if D.C. was Baghdad we would see 470 deaths at this point, not 47.  Where does that leave us?  I might be wrong but by my calculations the D.C. violent death rate is roughly 9.4 per 100,000 and Baghdad's is about 91.26 per 100,000 through the month of April.  Seems like a big difference to me?

I'm not sure it gets any better if we compare New Orleans to Haditha or Baltimore to Tikrit but I'll guarantee that if hundreds are killed everyday in bombings in Baltimore or the bodies of fifty people with bound hands, killed execution style, were dumped everyday only blocks away from the White House that 1.) the media would cover it extensively, 2.) most people would move far away from any of those places until that type of extreme violence ended, and 3.) most of the rest of the world would be wondering what the hell is going on in the U.S.?

Laura Rozen asks a good question:  If the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill is so worked up over the FBI raid on Rep. Jefferson's office, why the hell aren't congressional committees going into action threatening both Justice and the FBI with oversight hearings or introducing legislation cutting budgets, etc?  Either they're not as concerned as they've said or they really don't have any idea how Congress works and what their role is in the whole scheme of things and thus don't know how to express Congressional perogatives anymore.  After the past six years of much greater abuses of power by the executive branch its quite amazing to see Bill Frist and Denny Hastert so worked up over this.