This just in

“Baghdad falls: President Bush extends a heartfelt radio olive branch to Iraq’s proud population of newly-liberated, soon-to-be-christian, petroleum-pumpin’ eunuchs.”

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Officials oddly cautious about Iraq

Pentagon tempers joy with caution

“With the fall of Baghdad, top priorities for U.S. forces in Iraq now are recovering American POWS, securing the northern oil fields and unearthing illegal weapons, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday. Another must is to capture “or otherwise deal with” Saddam Hussein and his sons, he said.”

Blair reacts with relief and caution

“He said, “This conflict is not over yet. There are still some very difficult things to do and, as we speak, there is still resistance, not broad spread among the Iraqi people, but among those parts of Saddam’s regime that want to cling to power.”

DailyKos has more on this, pondering, among other things, now that the Kurds have taken Kirkuk, will they peacefully turn it over to the US?

Also, Baghdad has no power or potable water, and in a city of five million, that’s not good.

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Are Syria, Iran, and North Korea next?

Rumsfeld accuses Syria of aiding Saddam regime

“Citing “scraps of intelligence” at a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld also renewed his accusation that Syria provided Iraq with night-vision goggles and other military technology.”

Rumsfeld never does let facts and reality get in the way of his lies and propagandizing. And I of course would never stoop to pointing out that “scraps of intelligence”, are, in fact, what Rumsfeld has.

However, even the CIA says the night vision googles story has no basis.

“The CIA has no credible evidence that the government of Syria has had a role in the shipment of night-vision goggles and other military equipment to Iraq, according to an administration official familiar with U.S. intelligence in the region.”

Not that facts will stop the chickenhawks from plotting more  wars to make the world safe for ExxonMobil, whoops, how cynical of me, of course I meant to say these wars are solely and completely meant to liberate oppressed peoples and give them the gift of Democracy - um well, maybe after after several years of colonial rule by the US and the installation of a properly pliant puppet regime, then they get ‘Democracy’ - whoops, there goes my darned cynicism again…

So what’s next?

US Hawks Set Sights on Iran, Syria as Baghdad Falls

 ”Emboldened by the U.S. military’s apparent quick rout of Iraqi forces, conservative hawks in America are setting their sights on regime change in Iran and Syria.”

U.S. Tells Iran, Syria, N.Korea: Learn from Iraq

“United States on Wednesday warned countries it has accused of pursuing weapons of mass destruction, including Iran, Syria and North Korea, to “draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq.”

Sounds like a threat to me.

As for Iraq, this headline sums my views up

Liberation by murder: Baghdad falls to American invasion.

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The polls

I reported on this a while back, and it’s worth repeating. Polls are generally done by telephone. Polssters get lots of answering machines, and hangups. They never call cell phones, only land line phones, and they don’t call unlisted numbers. So, you can see, wide swaths of people get filtered out from pollster phone calls.

There’s lots of people pollsters never speak to, such as people who
1) aren’t home much.
2) use a cell phone as their main phone.
3) let the machine get it.
4) check the caller id before answering.
5) have an unlisted nunber.
6) don’t immediately hang up when getting an unsolicited phone call.
 
In short, among other groups, they’ve virtually eliminated from their polls, the highly mobile urban population, who might be expected to be more liberal.

No, it’s not a conspiracy, just changing technological times, with the pollsters quite aware of the current shortcomings of their methods - and not sure what to do about it.

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The Bus

Found via email, author unknown

The analogy of my nation as a bus keeps coming to me, as if in a dream.
 
It’s a big fancy bus, and it drives through some of the poorest sections of town. When it does, it splashes pedestrians, runs stop signs, sideswipes parked cars. The   passengers are a mixed bag, but the most vocal and aggressive ones seem to think they speak for everyone on the bus.
 
A while back, the passengers voted for a new driver, but some of the big tough guys stood in the front of the bus and collectively told the rest of the passengers that the
vote was so close, that they were going to put their own driver in, and we should all get over it. Then we started driving through the poor neighborhoods even faster,
running over kids’ pets, while the driver and the tough guys hooted and gave the bird to the folks scrambling to get out of the way.
 
One morning, some kids came running out of an alley and smashed a couple of windows on the bus. You could hear the other neighbors hooting and jeering. The bus pulled over, and a group of the tough guys chased after the kids. Whether they caught them, no one could tell, but they sure wailed on some of the other kids in the neighborhood. Then we drove to another poor area, but instead of passing
through, the bus stopped and the tough guys ran off and started beating up every kid who gave them a dirty look. They did the same thing in the next neighborhood. And the next.
 
Now they say they’re going to keep doing it until we can drive this bus the way we want, where we want, with no grief from the people whose neighborhoods we traverse. I have to ride this bus. I have always ridden this bus. I don’t feel safe walking through these parts of town. Used to be, when the bus driver took it a little slower and didn’t make such a ruckus going through town, everybody pretty much left each other alone. But now these tough guys are walking up and down the aisles, high-fiving it with each other, and there isn’t a run-down slum that doesn’t want to burn this bus and everybody on it.

It takes three times as long as before to make the drive, the fare has doubled, and everybody gets searched when they board. The tough guys keep yelling to the rest of the passengers that we are really kicking ass now, and we need to stick together until we see this thing through. I look at some of the other passengers, and like me, they are kind of hunched over in their seats, not wanting to be conspicuous, but not comfortable with their options– staying on the bus or walking through the angry ghetto.
 
I look out the window, and when some scrawny kid runs up behind one of our tough guys and whacks him with a board, I get angry, and I actually want the tough guys to teach him a lesson. But when a tough guy box-kicks his way through a bunch of preschoolers, I feel worse. I grip the back of the forward seat and look straight ahead, eyes slightly out of focus.
 
This was my bus. What happened?

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