Yesterday, Mitt Romney blubbered so boldly: “We’re going to win this thing with all of our passion and strength…”

Is he another Newt Gingrich?

Newt early last month: “They’re not going to be the nominee…I’m going to be the nominee. It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls, and think, odds are very high, I’m going to be the nominee.”
And yesterday: “I don’t think I’m going to win. I think if you look at the numbers, I think that volume of negativity has done enough damage.”
Maybe he’s talking about all those nabobs of negativity culled from his own antics.

And through the last few months, each of these clowns had their time in the prime — Michele Bachmann, the early obvious nominee; then Rick Perry, but oops; then Herman Cain and his wonderful way with females; then Newt with intellectual history punching the airwaves and odds so high it’s way-hard to see the ground; and now the guy nobody wants — Romney.

However, they have attempted with much success to ignore a huge, nasty-faced elephant in the room — the last Republican in the White House.
In all the mindless squawk on taxes, war, and President Obama during all the ludicrous campaigning, the entire GOP apparatus has maintained a blissful silence on the guy who near-single-handily put the planet in the shitty spot it is now — George Jr.

One thing Republicans are hoping for is a giant, collective memory loss by US peoples.
Under George Jr.’s tenure, the whole show went to shit in a wire basket and the GOP seeks to put that whole episode in the way-background and focus on Obama, but will the trick play out among the 99 percent who saw their lives shattered by eight years of arrogant incompetence.

The problem, though, is what George Jr. did created such a enormous gap in any kind of GOP reasoning that one could easily drive an entire herd of elephants through with room to spare.

(Illustration found here).

Just take the money and run.
From the New York Times:

In 2001, President George W. Bush inherited a surplus, with projections by the Congressional Budget Office for ever-increasing surpluses, assuming continuation of the good economy and President Bill Clinton’s policies.
But every year starting in 2002, the budget fell into deficit.
In January 2009, just before President Obama took office, the budget office projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009 and deficits in subsequent years, based on continuing Mr. Bush’s policies and the effects of recession.
Mr. Obama’s policies in 2009 and 2010, including the stimulus package, added to the deficits in those years but are largely temporary.
…
First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect.
If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.

And those mangled, horrible wars?
Bob Gates said it all: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
Hundreds of thousands dead, at least two counties — Afghanistan and Iraq — have been for all purposes destroyed and literally trillions of dollars flushed down the graveyard drain.
As this political season starts to heat up, all Obama has to do is point to George Jr. and say, ‘Remember and Beware.’

Never has so, so few caused so much damage.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Republicans talk a lot about losing their way during the last decade, and when they do they’re talking about the Bush years,” said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont-McKenna College.
“For Republicans, the Bush administration has become the `yadda yadda yadda’ period of American history.”
…
The former president himself has been all but invisible since leaving office in 2009 with a Gallup approval rating of just 34 percent.
His predecessor, Democrat Bill Clinton, had a 66 percent approval rating in early 2001 when he stepped down after two terms marred by a sex scandal and impeachment.
In a presidential contest dominated by concerns over the weak economy, government spending and the $15 trillion federal debt, the Republican candidates have been loath to acknowledge the extent to which Bush administration policies contributed to those problems.
Republicans also controlled Congress for six of the eight years Bush was in the White House, clearing the way for many of his policies to be enacted.
…
Bush still has loyal supporters who believe his legacy will be vindicated by history.
But even they say the GOP field won’t be embracing him anytime soon.
“Sad to say, they’re looking at polling data that indicates they’re better off not bringing him into the campaign,” former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
“I think President Bush has made America a safer nation and better nation and I’m proud of it.
But politics isn’t about what’s fair, it’s about winning.”

In other words, little Ari, it’s okay to cheat, lie and don’t speak ill of even a criminal.

“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
– US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, June 5, 2008

Despite the obvious, none of George Jr.’s entourage has ever even been threatened with criminal prosecution.

(Illustration found here).

In a new view of the Iraqi horror is the word, “bugsplat:” One definition is a software for scanning your computer for registry errors; another is the lack of humanity in warfare.
The US military’s invasion was a nasty example of the latter.
In fact, ‘Bugsplat‘ was the name of a computer program in 2003 used to determine collateral damage inflicted by American bombs.
HaHaHaHa — bugsplat, anyone/anything squashed on the US windshield.

Robert Koehler took a look at this line of bullshit yesterday morning at the Baltimore Sun:

“But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians,” journalist Allan Nairn told Amy Goodman in a “Democracy Now!” interview last year.
“The Pentagon has a word for that, too,” he went on.
“They call it ‘bugsplat.’
In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid.
On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that 22 of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat — that is, more than 30 civilian deaths per raid.
Franks said, ‘Go ahead. We’re doing all 22.’”
And this is the foundation of our national security.

Koehler concludes:

Project Bugsplat is the name of every war, at least from the planners’ point of view.
A winnable war is waged from above, invisibly, with godlike impunity.
Such wars, especially in today’s political order, cannot be effectively opposed with acts of equally brutal counterforce; they can only be prolonged.
“Bugsplat” is a term of ultimate disrespect and indifference, and it begins with a state of mind.
The global Occupy movement, with its humane and nonviolent core certainty, is tipping the balance. Finally it comes down to this: Occupy consciousness.

Without such, death comes by indifference.

This indifference can be applied to the US MSM — news organizations who have turned its eyes and ears away from exposing a rot now fully grown within the American soul.
Watch and listen here to the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter’s emotional outrage at the Iraqi war — he expresses horror at his own country (the UK) for being involved with such a crime.
And despite the US supposedly being gone, the blood still flows – from Bloomberg on a new report from London-based Iraq Body Count:

“The rate of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led coalition forces has declined steadily from 2009, while the rate caused by Iraqi state forces has increased,” the group said in an e-mailed news release.
Recent trends point to a “persistent low-level conflict in Iraq that will continue to kill civilians at a similar rate for years to come,” Iraq Body Count said.
“Time will tell whether the withdrawal of U.S. forces will have an effect on casualty levels,” the group said.

The US media, however, has been most quiet about any bad vibes coming off a war that tore apart the world’s thin fabric and left a country in a position beyond misery – a verbal snapshot of one Iraqi woman seems to sum it up: “Today is better than tomorrow.”

And tomorrow is the Iowa caucuses where the war party starts its machine rolling — horror of ugly horrors, though Newt Gingrich whined and took a bugsplat: “No, I feel ‘Romney-boated.”

The dogs of war fight amongst themselves — bug splatting everybody.

In reality, a picture is indeed worth a shitload of words.

One haunting face, that 4-year-old Iraqi kid — the above photo has been on Google Images for years, and has always caused me to hurt whenever I spotted it (used it a couple of times on blog posts to epitomize, or something like that, of a simple-impact of war-reality) and as a parent, always felt an intense, emotional near-freak-out in seeing a child’s innocence near-saturated by fear.
The little boy over her shoulder, held by the woman in black, appears still clueless.
She’s not.

The US is horribly shamed, only if by once having any shame.
America’s history ain’t pretty — from the get-go in using the term, “massacre,” in waging war against against the native population (near-genocide); slavery as a national economic institution; deliberately infecting sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis and gonorrhea to some unfortunate citizens of Guatemala; and so forth…
And now one can add the current, though, long-time running, US near-destroying Iraq — though, in this particular case, the cost for everybody on the planet is near-about incomprehensible.
Since March 2003 and through December 2011, between 106,000 and nearly 114,000 Iraqi civilians have either directly/indirectly been killed (via Iraq Body Count), with some estimates much higher — in 2006, a survey was published online by British medical journal, The Lancet, which reported 655,000 Iraqis or more than 500 people a day (have been killed) since the U.S.-led invasion.
George Jr. dismissed the numbers: “I don’t consider it a credible report.”
Of course, a year later George Jr. would also deny the onset of the current financial chaos.

The number is Iraqi children killed, separate from the rest, is hard to pin down, there’s just no list somewhere — I tried Googling all kinds of ways, but no real substance, and a guess would be in the thousands or more.
Last July, UNICEF said in a report marking the “Day of the Iraqi Child,” 900 children were killed in violence between 2008 and 2010 and more than 3,200 wounded — children accounted for 8.1 percent of all casualties in attacks during that period.
Not much info, but no surprise — Tommy Franks blubbered at the outset, “We don’t do body counts,” and left it at that.

However, even before March 2003, Iraq children were dying in droves.
The sanctions imposed by the US-led UN in the early 1990s claimed half a million children under the age of 5 — in 1996, Lesley Stahl of CBS‘ 60 Minutes asked Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the UN, about this:

“We have heard that a half million children have died,” Stahl said.
“I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And — and you know, is the price worth it?”
Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

Such US compassion.

And of the children of US peoples?
In 2008, the median age of US serviceman/woman was 28, though, almost 50 percent was between 22 and 30 — reportedly, the last GI killed in Iraq was a 23-year-old North Carolina boy.
These guys paid the local price.

Beyond the immoral, hard-to-grasp 4,484 US GIs killed, the more than 33,000 wounded, there’s the hardcase reality of a military that’s near busted — at least in its flesh and blood, the drones, of course, will continue to fly.
Due to Don Rumsfeld’s arrogant — “You go to war with the Army you have…,” and sorry about the inconvenience, war is war, “You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up…” — bullshit, the US military got blind-sided/ass-wiped by Iraq.
And in turn, blind-sided/ass-wiped the planet.

Not everyone was blind — Iraq was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration – eight months before Sept. 11 for George Jr., who although handled cabinet meetings “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people,” near-immediately after the WTC attack wanted to bomb IRAQ.
From a CBS interview with Richard Clarke, former top White House anti-terrorism advisor and directly after 9/11:

“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’
Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’
But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind.
There’s no connection.’
“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’
And in a very intimidating way.
I mean that we should come back with that answer.
We wrote a report.”

Rumsfeld appeared surrealistic during meetings, like a horror-outtake from Monty Python:

“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl.
“And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan.
We need to bomb Afghanistan.
And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq.
I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.
“I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we’ve looked at this issue for years.
For years we’ve looked and there’s just no connection.”

A little more than 18 months later, the US rolled into Iraq.

And out came a worn-down military machine with lots of burned-out cogs.
Due to the puzzlement of George Jr.’s crowd of incompetent people on what to do after the fall of Baghdad, the GI suffered, and suffered, dragging in the poor National Guard, 37,000 of which served in Iraq, where they were one-third more likely to be killed in combat than regular soldiers.
In Iraq, 140 Guardsmen were killed: A total of 94 Army National Guardsmen and no reservists were killed out of 58,209 U.S. deaths in Vietnam. (A reason the Guard was a ticket to safety in them days).

(Illustration found here).

And with current veterans — a reality figure of 800,000 — one in five — suffer from PTSD (although only 46 percent seek medical help), which might account for a higher-than norm suicide rate.

And the shit is so bad: “The four-legged, wet-nosed troops used to sniff out mines, track down enemy fighters and clear buildings are struggling with the mental strains of combat nearly as much as their human counterparts. By some estimates, more than 5 percent of the approximately 650 military dogs deployed by American combat forces are developing canine PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder].”
Dogs of an illegal and much-bungled war — a war which made the world a much-more dangerous place.

And Saturday morning, the last of US troops rumbled out of Iraq and into Kuwait in a 123-truck convey while a drone circled quietly overhead — the operative word, ‘quietly‘, no shock and awe here.
In its wake, a country shot to shit and back.
Iraq nowadays is a contradictory nightmare — despite economic growth at a China-like 9.6 per cent and about the same forecast for the next five years, Iraqi peoples get just 7.6 hours a day of electricity; only 30 per cent of homes are connected to sewerage; just 38 per cent of households rate availability of drinking water as “good” or “very good”; and one in eight Iraqis who dealt with a civil servant over the past year was obliged to pay a bribe; and this from Firas Naeem, a 37-year-old owner of a clothing store in central Baghdad’s busy Karrada Out shopping street: “…but anyone who is honest has to admit that life for ordinary people is still harder now than it was before (the invasion in) 2003.”
Another man-made horror.

Chris Floyd, who can be passionate, got so in a post on Friday concerning the Iraqi catastrophe:

This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin.
It is the only reality; there is no other.
And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly.
Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen.
It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.
Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children — the infants, the toddlers, the schoolkids — whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.
This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality.
These children — these thousands of children — are dead, and will always be dead, as a direct result of the unprovoked act of military aggression launched and sustained by the American power structure.
Killing these children, creating and maintaining the conditions that led to the slaughter of these children, was precisely what the armed forces of the United States were doing in Iraq.
Without the invasion, without the occupation, without the 1.5 million members of the American volunteer army who surrendered their moral agency to “just follow orders” and carry out their leaders’ agenda of aggression, those children would not have died — would not have been torn, eviscerated, shot, burned and destroyed.
This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; you cannot make it otherwise.
It has already happened; it always will have happened.
You cannot undo it.

One would also like to bring George Jr. and all his lackeys to justice — it’s obvious to anyone with walking around sense they’re war criminals.
No way, however.
Instead of the real culprits, President Obama is going balls-to-the-wall after Julian Assange via a sad US serviceman, Bradley Manning, whose first court appearance was on Friday.
Read about Manning’s inhumane trip here, and the secrecy bullshit here.
In reality, all to make an example: Other young soldiers thinking of telling the truth about America’s wars must by now have surely gotten the message: if you see something, don’t say something. Meanwhile, Manning couldn’t be faulted for wondering why he did not just take a cue from his commander-in-chief and kill some innocent foreigners like a good American boy. Instead of facing a lifetime in prison, he might have been up for a medal.

Reality ain’t fragile.

The US ended its military misadventure on Iraq yesterday awash in bullshit.
Leon Panetta has got to be one of the most disingenuous and hypocritical assholes this side of Newt Gingrich, claiming the Iraqi debacle was worth the price in blood and money because it set Iraq on a path to democracy.

“You will leave with great pride – lasting pride,” Mr Panetta told the troops.
“Secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to begin a new chapter in history.”

No wonder the US is disliked by so much of the planet.

(Illustration found here).

Worth it, Leon?

The UK’s The Guardian has a good overview this morning of the ‘worth’ in the Iraqi horror story:

• The US has lost 4,484 military personnel since 2003 in Iraq – the vast majority of the 4,802 coalition casualties. This year has seen casualties too – 54 people have been killed, although that is much lower than the 2007 peak of 904. (Reportedly, my state, California, seemed to carry a big burden — 388 of the state’s people were killed).
  Thousands more have been wounded in Iraq – 32,200 at last count, 22,490 of them in the Army, followed by 8,622 US Marines.

• The war in Iraq has cost the US $823.2bn since 2003 – and in 2011 cost $49.3bn, only $4bn less than 2003 when the invasion happened.

• Civilians have suffered enormously in Iraq — the data above comes from Iraq Body Count, which monitors reported deaths and reckons up to 113,728 Iraqis have died.
  Recently, IBC reported that at least 1,003 suicide bombings caused civilian casualties in Iraq from 2003 to 2010.
  The Wikileaks data showed how many died, particularly in the violent sectarian aftermath of the war, with murders as the main cause.
  That database recorded 109,032 deaths , 66,081 of them civilians, 23,984 insurgents and 15,196 Iraqi security forces.
  The worst place for deaths was Baghdad, with 45,497.

And that’s just a quick look — a closer view makes for a grim read.

One of those is a small slice of the horror — the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha in Anbar Province.
From TruthOut:

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq.
At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”
The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq.
Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad.
An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.
Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.
But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand.
In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine.

And from the testimony of Major Gen Steve Johnson, then-commander of US forces in Anbar Province:

“There were other — this was November — so we had been at it since March.
And examples of many civilians being killed at a given time were precedent for that.
It happened all the time, not necessarily in the west all the time, but throughout the whole country.
…
But at that point in time, I felt that that was — had been, for whatever reason, part of that engagement and felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement.”

Killing a guy in a wheelchair, and babies?
Cost of doing business…

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis.
This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld memorandum, Nov. 6, 2006

(Illustration found here).

In the annuals of world history there’s near-about no match for the horror of the US invasion of Iraq and all its far-flung ugly consequences.
Despite any rational reasoning beyond greed, George Jr.’s little party tipped the world into the hellish crevasse it now finds itself and murdered thousands of Iraqi innocents in the process — and despite the guffaws, a tribunal in Malaysia right-recently found George Jr. and his suck-buddy, Tony Blair, guilty of war crimes for their instigation of the slaughter: The Malaysian tribunal judges ruled that the decision to wage war against Iraq by the two former heads of government was a flagrant abuse of law and an act of aggression that led to large-scale massacres of the Iraqi people.
Why hasn’t the rest of the world jumped?

Nobel Peace Prize nominee, political scientist Michael Haas on  just the noncompliance of rational, humane justice:

First, however, it is useful to recall that when the Afghan War began, General Tommy Franks ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions on October 17, 2001.
On November 13 he was countermanded by an executive order in the form of a military order from President George W. Bush regarding prisoners who were then being collected, though no specific mention was made of the Geneva Conventions.
When the first prisoners arrived at the Naval Base on January 11, 2002, the commanding general, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
His order was then rescinded on February 7 by another executive order signed by George W. Bush making specific reference to the inapplicability of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 but not the 1929 Geneva Convention.

On Guantanamo alone George Jr. and ‘The Dick‘ Cheney should be jailed with the keys thrown into the muddy Potomac River.

And so today, in fanfare and a shitload of lying bullshit, the US ended its “official” military presence in Iraq with a so-called flag-casing ceremony in Baghdad — US defence honcho Leon Panetta added his body weight in bullshit, too.
From Aljazeera English:

Nearly nine years after the start of the controversial invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and sparked years of violence, Panetta told Iraqis “Your children will have a better future”, and said the US and Iraq would have “a new relationship rooted in mutual interest and mutual respect”.
“We are not about turn our backs on all that has been sacrificed and accomplished in Iraq,” Panetta said.
“Iraq will be tested in the days ahead by terrorism, by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues … by the demands of democracy itself,” he said, while adding that the US would be a “committed friend and … partner” to the country.
General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US forces in Iraq, said that the country would be “a source of stability and inspiration in the region”.

And the locals?

“If the Americans have achieved anything, they have achieved it to their own benefit in the first place.
They are the ones who get benefits from this issue.
As for Iraqis, maybe they have the change they have been waiting for, but they paid high price for it as you can see the killings, devastation and sectarian violence.
And up to now the situation is still unstable,” said Qassim Abdullah, an Iraqi citizen.

What benefits?

The Iraqi people see the benefit — a yearly celebration of the US departure.
Via Pakistan’s Daily Times:

Shouting slogans in support of the “resistance,” the demonstrators held up banners and placards inscribed with phrases like, “Now we are free” and “Fallujah is the flame of the resistance.”
In the centre of the city surrounded by the Iraqi army, demonstrators carried posters bearing photos of apparent insurgents, faces covered and carrying weapons.
They also held up pictures of US soldiers killed and military vehicles destroyed in the two major offensives against the city in 2004.
The demonstration was dubbed the first annual “festival to celebrate the role of the resistance.”

In the place of flowers.

President Obama traveled yesterday to Fort Bragg, N.C., to add his two-cents worth to the madness, claiming the Iraqi adventure “an extraordinary achievement,” and let it go at that.

And, of course, the US will continue to have a presence in country: The embassy compound is by far the largest the world has ever seen, at one and a half square miles, big enough for 94 football fields. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build (coming in about $150 million over budget). Inside its high walls, guard towers and machine-gun emplacements lie not just the embassy itself, but more than 20 other buildings, including residential quarters, a gym and swimming pool, commercial facilities, a power station and a water-treatment plant.
Along with all this shit, a staff of 16,000.

Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama Al Nujaifi has called that high number of personnel “illogical.”

Not by warped, horrifying US logic, however.
Again, one wonders, why the jails aren’t full of George Jr.’s lackeys.

My youngest daughter came down out of the mountains a week or so ago just finishing up a bad cold, and promptly gave it to me, thank-you very much!
Now after plying myself with homeopathic medicines – Oscillococcinum from France and Airborne from the US — and healthy doses of BC powders (845 mg of aspirin), I don’t feel quite like dog-shit anymore.
Maybe more like cat/chicken/ or some smaller-animal shit.

My illness, though, don’t come close to this planet’s health — a sickness on the level of bloated elephant shit.

(Illustration found here).

Despite being sick, the news keep churning forward and a lot of it is nutcase, bat-shit crazy.
Wonder the difference between, say, chickenshit, dogshit, batshit, and the human condition — all animals them.
We never say: ‘I feel like human shit,’ when we don’t feel good or we get mad, i.e., ‘You chickenshit asshole!,’ however, ‘You’re nothing more than human shit,” does have a certain ring to it.
Just wondering.

The big news this Sunday morning — beyond the bizarre double-earthquake yesterday in Oklahoma, the first a 4.7 early Saturday, then last night, 5.6-magnitude quake, the biggest in OK history — is still coming from Europe and the Greek financial tragedy.
Reportedly, blustering, nit-twit Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou expected to resign after putting together some form of coalition government to keep that Euro-bailout of $178 billion on collision course with destiny.
From CNN:

Taxi driver Irene Tsikimi, who has been driving a cab for five years, says business has shrunk, but the conversations she has with her clients all follow similar lines.
“They say there are no politicians they can believe in,” she explains.
“They don’t know who to vote for.
It feels like it’s a dead end.
I wouldn’t mind going into bankruptcy; the country’s lost anyway.”
She says that austerity has impacted her, and her customers, a lot.
“Now, not even rich people use taxis,” she says, “or just very few.
The middle class just don’t take taxis anymore.
It’s a job that doesn’t have a future here. “
…
The real Greek tragedy plays out behind closed doors, in the home of the pensioners who can’t afford to fill their fridge, the public sector parents struggling to pay the bills, or the 820,000 unemployed — from a nation of around eight million — scouring the Internet for jobs.
Most people have enough to survive but not to live the life they’d hoped for.
This is not yet about a nation of people on the bread line, but about a people whose dreams and future have been taken away from them.

All that does have an American echo, huh?
And this on Friday on the eve of Bank Transfer Day: U.S. regulators closed two more banks on Friday — one in Utah and another in Nebraska — bringing the total number this year to 87…Most of the banks that have failed so far this year had less than $1 billion in assets, illustrating the problems facing small banks. Many of community banks continue to be hit hard by the sluggish economy and their exposure to the troubled commercial real estate market.
From a frying pan into a fire — a no-winning environment.

Meanwhile, Herm ‘The No-Sperm’ Cain, is battling reality’s syrup by not fighting.
Cain got his panties in a bind last night during a dumb-ass Lincoln-Douglas style debate with Newt Gingrich (why would one even consider watching these two ‘debate’?), which within itself was clueless, but only when the narrative got jagged did the proceedings show a much-clearer, and enlightened perspective.
From ABC News:

“Don’t even go there,” Cain interrupted when a Washington Post reporter began asking a question about the sexual harassment allegations at a press conference following the two-man debate.
“Where’s my chief of staff?
Please send him the Journalistic Code of Ethics.”
Reporters pressed Cain as he tried to leave the room, asking him why he was avoiding answering questions about the accusations, but aides shouted over reporters, yelling “No gossip.”
“Are you not going to answer any questions ever again, Mr. Cain, this sexual harassment stuff, is that what you’re saying,” one reporter asked.
“You got it,” Cain said with a smile.
“How can you run a presidential campaign and be a frontrunner when you won’t answer questions about this?” another reporter asked.
“If you all just listen for 30 seconds, I will explain this one time,” Cain said to reporters before leaving the room.
“We are getting back on message, end of story.
Back on message, read all of the other accounts, read all of the other accounts, where everything has been answered.
End of story.
We’re getting back on message, OK?”

Cain ain’t got a lick of sense — he’s even dumber then Newt, but don’t believe he’s yet showed to be as dumb as Perry.
What a nasty crowd clawing for the White House.

Cain should be made to man up.
The best reason — power.
Todd Kelly at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen (h/t The Dish):

But sexual harassment isn’t the same as infidelity.
Sexual harassment, at the end of the day, is about the abuse of power.
What’s more, it’s about a particularly denigrating and malicious abuse of power.
I would go so far as to say that if someone has a pattern of perpetrating sexual harassment, he is the last person you want in power over others — and you should vote accordingly.

And with apparently the GOP base not giving a shit, and Cain still high in polls and cash-raising, the whole notion will most likely just blow away — the MSM sucks!

And people in the UK are having a time keeping vehicles apart.
For the second time in three days: Police said the crash involved seven cars and four lorries and happened close to junction 29, near Leyland, south of Preston, at about 01:40 GMT. One person was trapped in a lorry and had to be released by firefighters. Police said none of the injuries was life-threatening.
On Friday, 34 vehicles piled up in one giant crash, killing seven and injuring 51.

In the speed zone of a different whack and news item of the weekend — from Russia’s rt.com:

Dozens of cars wrecked, an army of traffic cops called to the scene — a taxi driver’s erratic odyssey brought chaos to Moscow’s roads at the weekend.
The cabbie, who was stark naked, told police, “I was flying on the wings of love.”
Moscow traffic police had to mobilize all its forces in a bid to capture the street racer in a taxi cab who managed to evade capture for some time. In the course of the chase, the suspect narrowly missed a bus packed with children.
…
Only after police opened fire on the car did the driver stop.
But this was only the prelude to the show proper.
As the man emerged from his vehicle, it became apparent that he was stark naked.
When pushed to the ground, he began chanting Save and Protect, passing on to the Russian national anthem, LifeNews.ru reported on Monday.
Not a drop of alcohol had passed his lips, as blood tests later proved.
So what lay behind the driver’s risky race?
A bleeding heart, the driver stated. “I was flying on the wings of love”, he said.
“My lover said she was not ready for a serious relationship, and I went to talk to her,” he explained.
…
Vitaly Grodic, a Moldavian national, insists he never drinks nor even smokes.
He proclaimed himself a Messiah, and promised to change the world for the better.
“When I was in the dark,” Grodic said, “Evil came and took my lover.
I wanted nothing but good.
But he took my lover.
Now I want to give birth to new life on this planet.
There will be no wars anymore because I’ve come.”
Mr. Grodic said there was no other God than him, and that he would fight against evil.
Those dozens cars that he ploughed into during the pursuit were all evil, naturally, the driver explained, and he could not but hit them.
The detained taxi driver has now been sent for psychiatric tests.
If proven to be of sound mind — which seems more than improbable — he may face charges of causing 17 traffic accidents and resisting arrest.
The policemen who prevented Grodic from crashing into children’s bus will receive state awards for their braveness.

Just can’t be my sickness — ain’t the world seemingly gone whale-shit crazy?

“The issue is not whether the Iraqi people will greet U.S. soldiers as their liberators, but what will they do six months after that.
I find it naive and disingenuous to claim that you can create democracy in Iraq any time soon.
The administration has already assured us that the U.S. will not stay there for very long, and, if that is the case, then the goal of establishing a constitutional system in Iraq is a joke.”
– Gen. William Odom, February 2003

The late Gen. Odom was my most-favorite commentator on the whole messed-up adventure in Iraq — he pulled no punches and was a welcome sight on PBS.
Of course, the network and cable news outlets wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole — they had the Pentagon’s generals to provide biased-color commentary on the Iraqi business.
Odom called the real deal: “The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”
An ugly joke with one long, asshole-of-a-punchline.

(Illustration found here).

The latest bit of shit to come out of Iraq — beyond President Obama’s phoney-baloney announcement that ‘all’ US troops will be out of that destroyed country by this year’s end — is a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) on another disaster within the greater disaster.
The lede graph in the CNN story tells the tale:

As the U.S. military heads towards the exits in Iraq, a new report released Sunday on a major reconstruction project there reads like a critique of the war in general — poorly planned, unexpectedly costly, years behind schedule and with an uncertain future.

The project in question is the Fallujah Waste Water System, an operation that should have raised alarms at its very conception, but back in those days, no one with any sense at all was in charge.
Another example of wasted lives and treasure — the system was supposed to handle 100,000 Iraqi homes, but up to last month, only 6,000 have been connected, and the project was suppose to cost $35 million, but now its cost is $100 million with no end in sight.
In fact:

“In the end, it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy.”
“Coupled with the fact that the outcome achieved was a wastewater treatment system operating at levels far below what was anticipated, it is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the $100 million investment and the many lives lost.”

Gen. Odom would turn over in his grave with shame.

As the so-called last of US troops get ready to depart, they will leave in their wake a country that’s not only dangerous, but completely screwed.
Also included in that SIGIR report was comments from Lt. Gen. Babakir Zebari, Iraq’s defense chief, who says that the Iraqi military won’t be able to operate on its own until sometime between 2020 and 2024.
WTF!
Until then what happens?

Gen. Odom underestimated the horror — beyond the US tragedy (4,481 GIs killed, more than 32,000 wounded, and more than 30 percent of all US armed forces have some form of PTSD) the death and destruction to the Iraqi nation is near impossible to grasp.
From The Nation last week:

The Brookings Institute estimates that 115,250 Iraqi civilians were killed during the war.
Iraq Body Count puts the figure at between 103,158 and 112,724 people.
Other estimates of excess deaths from the war, such as the Lancet survey and the Opinion Research Business survey, are substantially higher, but it is enough here to grapple with the most conservative estimates.
…
But that comparison understates how devastating the war has been to Iraq, because it ignores Iraqi combatants who’ve been killed, and neither does it address displaced persons.
By a conservative estimate, 3,700,000 Iraqis have been displaced from their homes by the war.
By way of comparison, a year after Hurricane Katrina, the population of a devastated New Orleans had shrunk by 378,000 people.
Or put another way, if you cleared every last person out of Los Angeles, you could fill the city back up to its current population with displaced Iraqis.

And further to inflame an out-of-control fire, 40 percent of Iraqi professionals have left the country since 2003, and Iraq had 34,000 physicians before the invasion, now have about 12,000.
A shitty life there, and it’s George Jr.’s fault — why isn’t he in jail?

The financial cost of the Iraqi war keeps piling up — for a never-ending dial, see Cost of War — the amount this morning is $801,234,070…and climbing by the second.
The Christian Science Monitor remembers this: When President George W. Bush launched the war, charging incorrectly that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion. Economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey got in hot water at the White House when he guessed in public the war could cost as much as $200 billion.
Ha!

I’m not joking — If I was joking, it’d go something like this: Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, “Why the long face?”

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
“To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.
“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
– Walter Cronkite, February 27, 1968

Uncle Walter could have most-easily been talking about Afghanistan, where yesterday 12 US peoples were killed in Kabul when a suicide bomber struck a vehicle in a NATO military convoy.
Four Afghans, including two students, were also killed.

In the US, at least a baker’s dozen of mothers will be weeping in unimaginable sorrow — a continuing grief that apparently has no end, even as a big majority of Americans now oppose the Afghan war, a conflict which started right, but has become a beyond-Halloween horror show.

(Illustration of Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman I‘ found here).

The Afghan war has morphed into a terrible stalemate, the dying of more US military service people will continue unabated if the war continues on its current path, and there ain’t no indication it won’t.
According to the CNN story, four US GIs and eight US contractors were killed in the blast — first reports told of five American soldiers dying, but later released word one of those was Canadian.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the incident — a suicide driver/bomber drove a Toyota packed with 1,800 pounds of explosives into an armored bus, called a RhinoRunner (typically a 13-ton vehicle described by its builder as “The Toughest Bus on Planet Earth”).
Well, not so much against a Toyota packed with exploding shit.
And WTF this: Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Kabul, said the incident is indicative of an attack where a suicide bomber will “drive up and down the roads waiting for a target.”
Apparently, an opportunity kind of approach.

Also on Saturday, 10 Australian soldiers were fired upon by a trainee Afghan soldier in Kandahar Province, killing three and wounding seven — an interpreter was also killed.
The shooting occurred at a morning parade, and despite it all, the shooter was said to be a rogue soldier, yet he had been in the army for three years.
Meanwhile, one incident didn’t pan out when a female suicide bomber was stopped outside a branch of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in northeaster Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan, and then detonated her package, injuring five people, two civilians and three security officials — she was the only fatality and had awaited for hours at a nearby female-only bus stop before attacking.
A casual-like oddity, huh?
And this was just Saturday.

The whole theater of war has become infected — some ‘major‘ incidents:

– Sept. 20: An insurgent with a bomb wrapped in his turban assassinates former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading a government effort to broker peace with the Taliban.
The explosion kills four bodyguards and also wounds of a key presidential adviser working to lure Taliban fighters off the battlefield.
— Sept. 13: Taliban insurgents fire rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and other buildings, killing seven Afghans in the coordinated daylight attack.
No embassy or NATO staff members were hurt.
— Aug. 19: Taliban suicide bombers storm the British Council, the U.K.’s international cultural relations body, killing eight people during an eight-hour firefight as two English language teachers and their bodyguard hid in a locked panic room on the anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain.
— Aug. 6: A CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashes in eastern Wardak province after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, killing 30 U.S. special operation troops, a translator, and seven Afghan commandos.
— June 29: Nine insurgents armed with explosive vests, rifles and rocket launchers storm the InterContinental Hotel in Kabul, killing at least 12 people and holding off NATO and Afghan forces for five hours.
…
— Feb. 26: Suicide attackers strike two residential hotels in Kabul, killing 20 people, including seven Indian nationals.

And in September, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of US training for the Afghan military reported (from Wired‘s Danger Room blog): Two years of an accelerated effort to train Afghans to take over that fight, at an annual cost of $6 billion. And not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from U.S. or allied units.
Which would explain why the guy who shot and killed the Australians, supposedly a three-year veteran, was still considered a trainee.
Not only that, 1.4 percent of Afghan cops and 2.3 percent of Afghan soldiers walk off the job every month, which led Caldwell to say that if “left unchecked [attrition] could undo much of the progress made to date.”

Instead of truth, US peoples get bullshit.
From Time magazine:

Last week, the Pentagon sent Congress its required semi-annual assessment that said a “firm foundation” exists to shift responsibility for defending the country from foreign to Afghan troops.
“After five consecutive years where enemy-initiated attacks and overall violence increased sharply each year (example, up 88 percent in 2010 over 2009),” the report noted, “such attacks began to decrease in May 2011 compared to the previous year and continue to decline.”

In the latest CNN/ORC International Poll released Friday, 63 percent of US respondents opposed the war:

But that opposition is not a reflection of the original decision to get involved in Afghanistan a decade ago,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
“It’s what Afghanistan has turned into in the subsequent decade that has soured Americans on the war effort there.”
The survey indicates that 57 percent say it was not a mistake to send military forces to Afghanistan in October 2001, several weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
But according to the poll, 58 percent now say that the war in Afghanistan has turned into a situation like the U.S. faced in Vietnam, six points higher than the number who felt that way a year ago.

The horror is that ordinary US peoples can’t do a thing about it.

Nowadays, we’re not as naive and ignorant as we were in February 1968, when Cronkite gave his grim assessment of the Vietnam war — LBJ’s supposedly infamous retort: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America” — but then again, there wasn’t a Fox News in them days either.
The situation in Vietnam had been highly-altered in 1968 by the Tet Offensive, which was just winding down when Uncle Walter rendered his editorial, and had changed the landscape of how US peoples viewed the grinding conflict.
From Gallop polling via PBS, Americans responded to the question, “In view of developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?”
The results — in August 1961, 61 percent had said “no,” it was not a mistake, and by February 1968, that number had dropped to 42 percent, and by May 1971, only 28 percent.
And most-telling from those polls, however, was from a secondary question of ‘Proportion classifying themselves as “hawks”‘ — before the Tet offensive, the amount was 60 percent, after Tet, them hawks had flown down to 41 percent.
Disaster compounded by lies will change attitudes.

And with that current CNN poll of 63 percent of respondents opposing the Afghan war, it led to UK’s ultra-right-wing The Daily Mail dishing President Obama for both the war, and, the floundering health care system, comparing the two to a horrific 2012 election: It is difficult to imagine the re-election of a president whose No. 1 foreign policy and No. 1 domestic policy both flopped while unemployment rose.
Of course, no one on the right ever, never brings up the Iraqi war, which actually doomed the Afghan effort and put the US in the quagmire it finds itself today.

Ten years ago today, George Jr. signed into law the infamous USA/Patriot Act, a move which revealed the end game for the great American experiment in democracy — nowadays the US is closer to George Orwell than George Washington.

And although George Jr. originally started it, the supposedly big change-master, President Obama, has signed re-authorization bills three times during his tenure so far, and has continually pushed not for transparency in government (as he campaigned), but if documents requested by the public are exempt from freedom of information laws, federal agencies should be able to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

(Illustration found here).

Pretty-much everyone knows the Act is shitty (except the government).
In 2007, two parts of the Patriot Act was found to be unconstitutional: Search and intelligence gathering was a bit too much.
From CNN four years ago:

“It is critical that we, as a democratic nation, pay close attention to traditional Fourth Amendment principles,” wrote Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in her 44-page decision.
“The Fourth Amendment has served this nation well for 220 years, through many other perils.”

The case came from a lawsuit filed by Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer thought to be involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombings — wrong!

The federal government later apologized to Mayfield and settled part of Mayfield’s lawsuit for $2 million. But Mayfield was permitted to keep pursuing the portions of his lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.
Mayfield claimed in the suit that his home and law offices were secretly broken into by the FBI, his clients’ files at his office were searched, his business and personal computers were secretly copied, his telephone was wiretapped and his home was bugged.
Mayfield said he was “excited and happy” with the ruling.
“This, to me, is not so much personal,” he said.
“I think it’s just the right thing to do.
It was the right thing to continue to challenge the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.”

And to be even more nasty, Nicholas Merrill, in a piece in the Washington Post yesterday, wrote of the actual, nefarious operation of the Patriot Act, and how if left alone, the US government will greatly f*ck over each and every US person without blinking an all-seeing eye.
Merrill, an owner of a small Internet provider, described the FBI seeking information on one of his clients in 2004, and (this is the big-ludicrous part) he was totally forbidden from telling “any person” the G-men had even contacted him.
Instead, to his credit, Merrill went to the ALCU.
He reflects now:

A decade later, much of the government’s surveillance policy remains shrouded in secrecy, making it impossible for the American public to engage in a meaningful debate on the effectiveness or wisdom of various practices.
The government has used NSLs to collect private information on hundreds of thousands of people.
I am the only person from the telecommunications industry who received one to ever challenge in court the legality of the warrantless NSL searches and the associated gag order and to be subsequently (partially) un-gagged.
…
For years, the government implausibly claimed that if I were able to identify myself as the plaintiff in the case, irreparable damage to national security would result.
But I did not believe then, nor do I believe now, that the FBI’s gag order was motivated by legitimate national security concerns.
It was motivated by a desire to insulate the FBI from public criticism and oversight.

The standard bullshit line — damage to national security.
Hey, kiss the ass of all US peoples.

Then absolutely no one should be surprised at the latest New York Times/CBS News poll: Not only do 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing, but 74 percent say the country is on the wrong track and 84 percent disapprove of Congress — warnings for Democrats and Republicans alike.

Hard to believe, huh?
Nearly 90 percent of US peoples don’t trust Washington, DC — of course, the economy is the front-burner pot on fire, but in the back of everybody’s mind is that even if you’re unemployed and your home is underwater, you  still need to be watched just in case you go crazy and run off to join al-Qaeda.
Crazed all over.

And what did the most-wonderful Patriot Act actually help do?
Nothing less than create a humongous intelligence-gathering apparatus, which turned out to be completely incompetent — a more than $2 trillion waste.
In a Washington Post review of the book, “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, comes this bottom line view: If a large chunk of the federal government is disappearing down a black hole, that hole leaks. In this, as in many other instances supplied by Priest and Arkin, “one of the greatest secrets of Top Secret America is its disturbing dysfunction.”

In line with all this shit..
Much, much more of this ‘national security’ crap — from allgov.com:

Established by Congress to investigate and expose government waste, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan has decided to not reveal its volumes of materials to the public for another two decades.
After three years of work, the commission officially shut down last week, having concluded that the U.S. misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion in contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But it won’t allow its records to be opened for public review at the National Archives until 2031, because some of the documents contain “sensitive information,” according to one official.
Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Wall Street Journal that the 20-year term “seems like a long period of time, particularly for a commission whose whole purpose is to improve accountability and expose waste.”

In the shadow: “Sanity is not statistical.”

(Illustration found here).

I hope the graph is readable — if not, it originates from Spiegel Online at the link just above.
One can readily see George Jr. did more than his fair share, but to all those big-yapped GOPers, the real shit didn’t start until Saint Ronnie opened the floodgates — compared to the nowadays, the debt before Ronnie was pocket change.
Barry Ritholtz rightfully adds: Whatever your political or economic views are, it is not up to me to tell you what to believe. However, you need to be intellectually consistent and not merely grab whatever ideological bullet point that suits your purposes at the moment. If you do so, you best be prepared to be charged with being intellectually dishonest, and to be categorized as called a political hack. Or worse.
Maybe…you’d be a lying asshole.

And the mass-popular appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement is reflected in all that debt that no one but the guys/gals marching in the streets will end up paying — US peoples live in a financial climate that’s worse than Ghana.
To make it worse, income in the last few years has become even more way-one-sided.
The bottom 99 percent income level registered a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, but then those incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007.
However, in those same boom years, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.
Pissed off a lot of peoples, huh?

Not only that, the housing bubble bust struck the average American way-more than it did the wealthy: In 2007, the bottom 60 percent of Americans had 65 percent of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1 percent, in contrast, had just 10 percent.
And home ownership, the bedrock of the Great American Dream (Fantasy) is busted bad — home ownership rate fell to 65.1 percent last year, and measured by race, the homeownership gap between whites and blacks is now at its widest since 1960, wiping out more than 40 years of gains.

And this from War in Context and the last near-60 years:

Wall Street has cannibalized itself.
Still hungry, feeling the pangs of their greed, they’ve now come to the government for their daily meal.
And still, without a hint of irony, a spokesman for this ravenous tribe, mounts a soapbox and has the temerity to rail against the evils of socialism.
Turns out, the socialism is for them, the capitalism is for us.
Abbie Hoffman once baited these banksters by throwing cash onto the floor of the NYSE.
To no one’s astonishment, they demonstrated their insatiable greed.
The gluttons couldn’t help themselves, they stopped trading and got on their knees and swept up the free loot.

Title of the post?
“The Dirty Fucking Hippies…Were Right!”

Oh yeah!