The Strident Centrist Blog

Last evening Keith Olbermann closed his cable news show with a commentary on Rumsfeld’s recent American Legion speech that is to our times what Edward R. Murrow’s famous ripping of a new one for Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954 was for his. This is a frontal assault on the Bush-Cheney-neocon administration like no one in the mainstream media, whether print or broadcast, has dreamed of launching. That it came on MSNBC, a network owned by the tightly Republican-connected General Electric Co., is amazing.
Here is the full transcript on Steve Clemons’ site, and here is the video clip on Crooks & Liars, in either Windows Media or Apple Quick Time.

Mother Jones magazine has uploaded to its website a cool graphic tool through which you can follow the historical milestones leading up to the Iraq War. It begins in August of 1990 and runs through the March, 2003, start of the war. Of course a lot of those milestones are the Bush administration’s spinning of the Iraq war Lie by Lie, providing Mother Jones with the name of their creation. Navigate by using the slider to move among the years, then point to highlighted months to show what happened then. A warning to you with thin pipes: this thing takes a while to download.

I’ve already noticed a significant omission. February, 2003, has no entry in spite of the fact that on the 25th of that month General Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that he thought it would take “several hundred thousand” troops to handle the occupation after the war. He was immediately denounced and ridiculed by senior administration officials for that assessment.

Via PZ Myers comes this gem: ” . . a woman donates one of her kidneys to another woman in need. Later, the recipient leaves the Christian faith. Now the donor wants her organ back.”

Smith was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks to re-convert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses.

“I feel helpless,” she says. “Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who’s going to hell.”

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Smith suffers nightmares of her former organ filtering “strange Asian teas, pig blood and witch doctor brews in Africa,” she says. She wonders if the Lord really wanted her to donate the kidney, or if she acted on a “triple-espresso high” she had that morning. She is also concerned that when her body is resurrected, it might be incomplete.

As PZ says “There’s some freaking weird theology going on here.”

While on his photo-op tour of New Orleans President met Mayor Ray Nagin for breakfast at Betsy’s Pancake House:

As Bush tried to squeeze his way through narrow spaces between tables, waitress Joyce Labruzzo asked him: “Mister President, are you going to turn your back on me?”

“No, ma’am,” Bush said, with a laugh and a pause. “Not again.”

The whole story on Yahoo News. (Link from Firedoglake)

Helena Cobban of Just World News put up a post Sunday evening about Hizbulloh leader Hassan Nasrallah’s TV interview earlier that day. More than a few commentators interpreted some of his comments as an apology for the July 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that began the month-long war in Lebanon and northern Israel. Not so, says Mouin Rabbani, a contributing editor of the Middle East Report. Here is Cobban’s report of his response to her post.

So in my view his statement was anything but a mea culpa. One can choose to accept his explanation at face value or not. But the overall (in significant part unstated) message Nasrallah sought to convey, I think, was the following:

– An Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006 was a certainty irrespective of Hizballah’s actions, because of Israeli and US intentions. Hizballah’s error was that, while it concluded already in 2000 that Israel would eventually return to Lebanon to wipe out the stain of its defeat and while Hizballah had been preparing for this for the past six years, it didn’t realise the moment was so close at hand. Thus, although it had no idea 12 July would lead to war, and would not have authorised the attack if it did, with hindsight the fact that the war occured when and how it did saved Lebanon from a much bigger - more or less imminent - calamity.

– Because Hizballah did not believe 12 July would result in war and would not have launched the attack if it did, it is out of the question that it was acting on behalf of Iran or Syria. It was an Israeli war, and could not possibly have been a Hizballah/Syrian/Iranian one, for the simple reason that it was unanticipated.

Additionally, given the extent to which Nasrallah has been presenting this as a strategic victory, I think it is highly unlikely that he intended his words to be understood as an apology or admission of a strategic error on Hizballah’s part. Seen in their full context, I think Nasrallah was claiming that 1) Hizballah does not play chess with the lives of Lebanese or the interests of the state, 2) while an error was made, it turned out to Hizballah as well as Lebanon’s advantage.

Here is Cobban’s original Sunday post.

I don’t know if the meme “Fugitive Girl Act” (aka Child Custody Protection Act) is original with Paul Loeb, but by calling forth the historical memory of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 it could help place the issue in the frame it belongs. Loeb has some worthwhile observations as well.

Isolation is also the goal of the benignly named Child Custody Protection Act, which will become law if the House and Senate work out their differences. It targets girls who already feel they cannot talk to their parents without risking disaster. It leaves them on their own, because those who might have tried to help them will face jail if they do. Whether a sister, an aunt, a grandmother, counselor, or friend, anyone could be imprisoned for intervening to help. Meanwhile, the same Senators who backed it voted down an amendment that would have increased support for programs offering contraception and sex education–including abstinence education.

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The House version goes further still, allowing parents to sue doctors who perform these out-of-state abortions. Both bills let the states with the harshest anti-abortion laws (and the least social support for women with children) control the actions of citizens in states with fewer restraints. They trample core federalist traditions, letting states with the most draconian laws impose their will on others. They even raise the prospect of similar federal or state laws prohibiting adult women from traveling to overcome state abortion bans–like a bill now pending in the Ohio House that bans abortion without exception, while making it illegal to transport or help women of any age to receive abortions in other states. This would seem to violate numerous judicial decisions affirming the right to travel and prohibiting one state from unilaterally extending its laws to another. But with Bush’s recent court appointments, all sorts of longstanding precedents risk being subordinated to a hard-right ideology.

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But all of these arguments [in favor of the Act] abstract the actual lives of the young girls who are pregnant. We’re not talking about idealized families where trust and harmony prevails. We’re talking about situations where trust has broken down to the point where a girl fears to tell her parents that she’s pregnant. The reason could be incest, physical violence, or pervasive verbal abuse. It could be a tone of unremitting judgment that makes a girl fear condemnation no matter what choice she makes. It could simply be the certainty that her parents will force her to have a child while she is still unready.

Wired News has the skinny on how lithium ion batteries can go bad.

Abraham said the biggest threat is the possible penetration of the thin barrier made of synthetic material — about as thick as a sheet of paper — that separates the two electrodes and prevents the quick release of energy.

If a particle — such as a speck of metal — breaches the protective membrane during manufacturing, the particles worm through the opening and collide with the electrode, causing the device to short-circuit.

“There is still room to grow in terms of the amount of energy we can squeeze form a lithium-ion battery,” he said. “The technology can be improved, but we’re so much in a hurry to come out with these consumer products, shortcomings can occur in the finer details of the battery construction.”

Per Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis:

“This 29 page retort from the House Intelligence Committee is so obvious a “stage setter” for another attack on the credibility of the Intelligence Community that this is just absurd.

“The intelligence products that were used to justify the Iraq War were truly an intelligence failure as were the failed policy decisions and pressure that led to those documents.

“What went wrong in the Intelligence Community?

1-Rotten leadership at the top that was both political and self-serving. (Tenet and Jacoby)

2-Unremitting neocon pressure on analysts and intelligence managers to “support policy” by finding evidence, however flimsy, to support PR campaigns against the American citizenry.”

From the London Times Online here’s a piece summarizing a recent report put out by The Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatam House entitled Iran, Its Neighbors and the Regional Crisis.

“There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the War on Terror in the Middle East,” says the report from Chatham House’s Middle East Programme.

“The United States, with coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran’s regional rival governments - the Taleban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in April 2003 - but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures.”

This in a nutshell is the strategic fiasco that the Bush-Cheney administration has foisted upon us. From the report’s Executive Summary:

“Iran views Iraq as its own backyard and has now superseded the US as the most influential power there; this affords it a key role in Iraq’s future. Iran is also a prominent presence in its other war-torn neighbour with close social ties, Afghanistan. The Sunni Arab states of Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf are wary of Iran yet feel compelled by its strength to maintain largely cordial relations while Iran embarrasses their Western-leaning governments through its stance against the US.”

Here’s a link to the full report (in pdf).

“Writing as someone who has delivered, and raised, three healthy children (thank G-d), and as someone who knows the difference between “birth pangs” and an abortion, I feel I need to tell Condoleezza Rice (no known kids, no known abortions) that what Israel has been doing in Lebanon and occupied Palestine with the so far unquestioning support of the US government is much more like a series of abortions of democracy than like any “birth pangs” of democracy.”

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“In recent weeks, a total of 40 of the elected Palestinian legislators (out of 128) and five government ministers have been arrested by Israel, and today an Israeli court brought some very evidently politicized charges against the previously arrested speaker of the Palestinian legislature, Dr. Abdel-Aziz Dweik.”

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“Maybe someone needs to take Condi aside and discuss the facts of gynecological life with her? Or gosh, do you think maybe the administration’s commitment to “democratization” for Muslim and Arab people might be only skin deep??”