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rovegate
Karl Rove's America
by Paul Krugman
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John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.
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Rove's war
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This is Karl Rove's war. From his command post next to the Oval Office in the West Wing of the White House, he is furiously directing the order of battle. The Republican National Committee lobs its talking points across Washington, its chairman forays the no-man's-land of CNN. Rove's lawyer, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial board are sent over the top. Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay man the ramparts, defending Rove's character.
For two years, since the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the disclosure of the identity of an undercover CIA operative, President Bush and his press secretary, Scott McClellan, have repeatedly denied the involvement of anyone in the White House. "Have you talked to Karl and do you have confidence in him?" a reporter asked Bush on Sept. 30, 2003. "Listen, I know of nobody," he replied. "I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action."
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thanks to Talking Points Memo
TreasonGate: It's the Treason, Not the Lying
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The blogosphere is a buzzing with news that Karl Rove has been exposed as the source of the Plame leak. In the next week, we're going to hear a great deal about the timeline and the two-person rule, the former centering on the federal crime of outing an undercover agent and the later necessary to establish the bonus charge of perjury.
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thanks to daily KOS
Republican Leaders: We Support Plame's Outing
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Armando has already noted Ken Mehlman and other Republican reactions, but I want to re-emphasize it, because the "spin" really is contemptible, and demonstrates just how ethically corrupt the central "core" of the Republican machine has become.
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"You're in a bad spot here, Scott"
moto-porno
My friend Eric sent me a link to his pictures from the the Isle of Man TT. The TT is a week of mortorcycle madness in the Irish Sea — one of the great motorcycle road races. Eric and his wife Eva rode their Moto Guzzis.
Isle of Man 2005
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war against some terrorists
We Just Don’t Get It
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As I write this, it certainly occurs to me that many will think me heartless, uncaring. But consider this. Why will we be focusing on a few dozen deaths in England when, in the rest of the world including, Iraq, thousands are dying quietly and not so quietly as we speak? We will be focusing on this event for the same reason we focus on missing and crazy young white women. Our focus will be a product of our ethnocentrism, our racism, and our intellectual inability to focus on the big pictures, the things that have real importance when one is thinking about the future of humanity and the future of the planet and all its citizens, both human and nonhuman.
As far as terror, we’ve been there, done that. We’ve had all the commissions, all the hearings, and all the endless talk from policiticans about what needs to be done, what wasn’t done, and what is being done. We are spending billions on what is purported to be homeland security. And we will spend billions more. But at the end of the day, we will continue to have terrorist attacks. Terrorism will be part of what is the fundamental nature of the 21st century. And all the big problems that we choose to ignore will only exacerbate what is really the symptom of terrorism.
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The reality of this barbaric bombing
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us think insurgency won't come to us?
by Robert Fisk
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"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours." There you go, as they say. It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush's "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. We had, as they say, been warned. The G8 summit was obviously chosen, well in advance, as Attack Day.
And it's no use Mr Blair telling us yesterday that "they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear". "They" are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush's policies in the Middle East. The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush - and Spain's subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives - while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali.
It is easy for Tony Blair to call yesterdays bombings "barbaric" - of course they were - but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints? When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die, it is "barbaric terrorism".
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe insurgency won't come to us? One thing is certain: if Tony Blair really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more efficiently protect Britain - fight them there rather than let them come here, as Bush constantly says - this argument is no longer valid.
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The price of occupation
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Ever since 9/11, I have been arguing that the "war against terror" is immoral and counterproductive. It sanctions the use of state terror - bombing raids, torture, countless civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq - against Islamo-anarchists whose numbers are small, but whose reach is deadly. The solution then, as now, is political, not military. The British ruling elite understood this perfectly well in the case of Ireland. Security measures, anti-terror laws rushed through parliament, identity cards, a curtailment of civil liberties, will not solve the problem. If anything, they will push young Muslims in the direction of mindless violence. font>
The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Just because these three wars are reported sporadically and mean little to the everyday lives of most Europeans does not mean the anger and bitterness they arouse in the Muslim world and its diaspora is insignificant. As long as western politicians wage their wars and their colleagues in the Muslim world watch in silence, young people will be attracted to the groups who carry out random acts of revenge.
At the beginning of the G8, Blair suggested that "poverty was the cause of terrorism". It is not so. The principal cause of this violence is the violence being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world. And unless this is recognised, the horrors will continue.
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The Logic of Suicide Terrorism:It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism
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RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
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excuses, excuses. all the time excuses.
There haven't been any more trojan horse attacks since Sunday. Our ISP is ready with frequent backups and restores and I'm working like a crazy man trying to update my four sites to get rid of the offending scripts. Hasn't left much time for blogging. I am still alive and have been busy on some things that will reveal themselves later. The plus side of this extra work is some extra money and there are a couple of lenses on there way with, hopefully, a couple more to follow. I also ordered a box of 4x5 Efke 25 for shooting with the Burke and James. And a couple of rolls of 120 Efke25. Maybe I will actually be shooting some 4x5 soon! I will start out with the 210 G-Claron and the soon to arrive Graphic Kowa 150; both ultra-sharp process lens. And in about 11 days (who's counting) my son-in-law leaves Ramadi (not the Ramadi Inn) for Kuwait and home. Too much happening. A lot of it actually very good.
another gordy photo
bigger
gordy's image archive index
we have met the enemy and he is us
Up, down, up, down. The trojan horse infection at my ISP has slowed the blogging down. I've had several posts lost in restoring my site to an earlier version to get rid of the infection. This afternoon the web system administrator finally found out where the trojan horse was getting into the system. It was from a shopping cart script on some of my ecommerce websites. That was embarrassing. I don't use that script any more but some of my older sites still had it. The good news is that we at least know the problem and have a solution. My host is willing to put up with the attacks as long as I am working to get rid of the script. The script was last modified in 1998 and hasn't been updated. The bad news is that I am going to be real busy this week redoing those sites. I will try to get some new posts up. There is no shortage of interetesting things going on. Can you say Karl Rove? I've also been making progress on the photography front. Life has been a like drinking from a fire hose. Will somebody please turn the water off!?
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