Rumsfeld is toast

From Seeing the Forest, comes this excellent analysis

“Apparently Rumsfeld has been chosen as the fall guy for Iraq, as this piece by Martin Sieff, “UPI Senior News Analyst” shows:

“Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3½ years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it’s payback time.

Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate.”

You can add a fourth basically-conservative institution to the anti-Rumsfeld list: the UPI, which is owned by Rev. Moon. As I understand, UPI is mostly a simple news-dissemination organization, and doesn’t normally do opinion like this. (Sieff is defnitely right-wing — he was originally from the Washington Times and has written for the National Review.)

It looks to me as if the neocons will be thrown overboard to try to save the Bush Presidency. It seems unlikely to me that anyone will abandon Bush himself, though Kerry has really done nothing to make it impossible for Sens. Hagel and Lugar (or other rational conservatives) to support him.”

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Watergate, where Nixon was forced to sacrifice knights, rooks and even the queen, in a losing attempt to protect the king.

From Slate

If today’s investigative shockers—Seymour Hersh’s latest article in The New Yorker and a three-part piece in Newsweek—are true, it’s hard to avoid concluding that responsibility for the Abu Ghraib atrocities goes straight to the top, both in the Pentagon and the White House, and that varying degrees of blame can be ascribed to officials up and down the chain of command.

Both stories are worth reading in full. The gist is that last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put in place a secret operation that, in Hersh’s words, “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”

No Comments »

Same-sex couples marry in Massachusetts!

Gay couples
began exchanging marriage vows in Massachusetts on Monday, marking the
first time a state has granted gays and lesbians the right to marry and
making the United States one of at least four countries where
homosexuals can legally wed.

The Attorney General of New York said NY will recognize Massachusetts gay marriages as legal.

The attorney generals of Connecticut and Rhode Island issued opinions implying their states would also recognize the marriages.

This
is a monumental victory, and the coming battles ahead will be like the
civil rights movement of the 60’s, because, after all, gay marriage is
a civil rights issue too. Today, the good guys won, and won big, and
the news of it circled the planet.

All of which makes me proud to have grown up in New England where one’s personal affairs are considered to be just that.

And why did a couple who have been together 49 years have to wait so long to get married?

No Comments »

Iraqi leader dies in suicide attack

US efforts to stabilise Iraq ahead of next month’s transfer of sovereignty were dealt a huge blow yesterday when the head of Iraq’s US-appointed governing council was killed by a suicide car bomber.

Targeted killings that demoralise Iraqi allies

The patterns are ever more clear, the targets carefully chosen.

Colleagues from the governing council also insist it was no coincidence that their president was singled out.

The message is clear, cooperate with those occupying our country and you are a target - which is precisely what the French Resistance did against Nazi invaders, what the IRA did against the Brits, and what any underground resistance fighting for their homeland does.

Again, I’m seeing that the US, despite all the puerile macho strutting and boasts of gittin’ tough, does not have the stomach, the will, or even the requisite knowledge and experience for a prolonged war against an increasingly determined underground resistance. Maybe Bush actually believes his own propaganda, it’s clear Iraqis don’t. US allies are starting to vanish, and the latest polls show a majority in the US now oppose the war.

Bring the troops home now.

No Comments »

Children of Bush’s America: Naomi Klein 

The torturers of Abu Ghraib were McWorkers who ended up in Iraq because they could no longer find decent jobs at home.

No Comments »

Spoofstick and phishing

You need Spoofstick. It installs to your browser and tells you what site you are really on, thus protecting you against sites pretending to be another site. It used to be, the browser address would always have the actual address, however browser addresses can be spoofed now.
 
Brian’s Buzz details this latest phishing attack, whereby a phishing site pretends to be a real site, and, say, asks for credit card and bank account numbers. This latest attack blocks the browser address bar with a graphic file that has a phoney address. It’s getting ugly out there folks.

Spoofstick can help here. It’s free, and works on Internet Explorer and, yes, Firefox!

No Comments »

Satellite photo of a giant pumpkin viewable from space

I couldn’t make this up, it’s too weird!

No Comments »

When the last oil well runs dry

Just as certain as death and taxes is the knowledge that we shall one day be forced to learn to live without oil.

Exactly when that day will dawn nobody knows, but people in middle age today can probably expect to be here for it.

Meanwhile, at the end of my block, self-serve regular is $2.31 a gallon. Grrr.

No Comments »