A Forum for Grinches and Ho-Ho-Hoes

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
You bring new meaning to the term "bleeding heart."

Hardly. I just happen to subscribe to the notion that you don't win hearts and minds by putting bullets through them. Sometimes you gotta kill a motherfucker, but you can't then expect his brother to be your friend.

I'm just sayin'...

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Do you have evidence that there are approved plans for a better armored vehicle . . .

Yes, Hank. My evidence is that they're upgrading the existing vehicles now and making new armored HMMVs according to some kind of government-approved plan.

If those plans weren't in place or approved before we invaded Iraq, I can only ask "why bilmore, why"?

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
. . . and that the Pentagon didn't move to get them, given the strictures of Government procurement law?

I don't know how quickly they moved to get armored HMMVs, Hank -- but it wasn't quickly enough. You see, IIRC, your basic HMMV is not an armored vehicle at all.

Planning for this war began in November, 2001, Hank. 18 months is more than enough time to "up-armor" a few thousand HMMVs even if they couldn't procure armored ones in that time period. The armed forces built entire bases, airstrips, docks, etc. in that time.

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Oh. So are you saying the Pentagon should bypass procurement requirements- or are you just throwing up outside your mouth here?

I'll omit the cheap shot about no-bid contracting, and just note that there are legal mechanisms by which one can bypass procurement requirements. We could have used them.

You should stick to topics you know something about (but then, it would get awfully quiet).

S_A_M

P.S. You're right, though, that the initial issue really wasn't one of lack of military funding due to the tax cuts. It was one of poor planning - and a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem at high levels. Fast, light, cheap. We win. Remember Rumsfeld insisting throughout the summer of 2003 that there was no insurgency?

I believe it had become an issue of funding since then, as the government simply hasn't done it as fast as possible, but kept those tax cuts going. Its all about choices.

Don't worry, though, Hank, the up-armoring is just about done now, so we hope not to have too many more kids missing limbs which could have been saved by the money Bush sent back to us taxpayers.

edited by Not Bob to fix quote tag.

[SlaveNoMore]

Sidd Finch
You're really not being fair to Bush. The initial chintzy response to the tsunami was not a result of bad judgment. There just weren't enough dollars being printed. It's a matter of physics.

This was cute. Nicely done.

[Adder]

Originally posted by Skeks in the city
How do you know there's adequate controls so that 75 or 80% of the money isn't stolen or wasted. It's better to do nothing than write a check for over $225 million to the local robber barrons and royals.

Really? Hundreds of thousands of lives at stake, and your qualm is that it might cost more than it initially seems to help them?

And aren't their pretty easy ways around this problem (NGOs)?

[Adder]

Originally posted by Skeks in the city
Regardless, I believe foreign aid AND war/military action is bad policy except to the extent the spending/action directly benefits US citizens. Judged on that basis, I think humanitarian aid to India is OK so long as some paranoid bastard is watching the money like a hawk so it's not ripped off by corrupt locals or pissed away by pie in the sky lefties. (By the same standard, the Iraq war was unjustifiable.)

Does anyone think that government funds should ever be spent other than for the benefit of US citizens? Isn't the disagreement entirely over how broadly you define "benefit?"

[Skeks in the city]

Club cops a feel?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Skeks in the city
caption please

hmmm a box with an X in it?

Oh I know. what did the Buchanan portion of Ty's ballot look like in 2000?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

From The Economist, January 1st-7th 2005 (registration required; oh just go out and buy the damn thing):

"There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hands, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sargeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: 'Back this bitch up, motherfucker!'

"The old man should have read the bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: 'Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied.' In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching with 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: 'If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,' says a bullish lieutenant. 'It's kind of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent people.'"

Kind of a shame, killing the people you're trying to democratize, but after awhile, says the same lieutenant, "It gets to the point where you can't wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody..."

With characteristic dry English understatement, The Economist's embedded reporter (Economist pieces are unbylined) notes, "[W]hen America's well-drilled and well-fed fighters attempt subtler tasks than killing people, problems arise." Their contempt for Iraqis is undisguised and dramatically expressed: a soldier, confronted by "jeering schoolchildren," fires canisters of buckshot from his grenade-launcher at them, and marines busting down doors in Ramadi scream at trembling middle-aged women: "Bitch, where's the guns?" Small wonder, ventures the correspondent, that "many Iraqis are probably more scared of American troops than of insurgents."

The last grafs of the report recount a big whoopy-do operation in the smugglers' haven of Baij involving a convoy of 1000 troops supported by Apache attack helicopters targeting three houses that had been linked to Zarquawi's terrorist band, according to a local informant.

There was no one in the houses except women and children. Rather than return to base empty, they pay homage to the last reel of Casablanca and round up the usual suspects.

"...they detained 70 men from districts indentified by their informant as 'bad.' In near-freezing conditions, they sat hooded and bound in their pyjamas. They shivered uncontrollably. One wetted himself in fear. Most had been detained at random; several had been held because they had a Kalashnikov rifle, which is legal. The evidence against one man was some anti-American literature, a meat cleaver, and a tin whistle. American intelligence officers moved through the ranks of detainees, raising their hoods to take mugshots: 'One, two, three, jihaaad!' A middle-tier officer commented on the mission: 'When we do this,' he said. 'We lose.'"

There's a Peter Cook-Dudley Moore routine, one of their woolgathering dialogues, where Dud asks Pete, "So would you say you've learned from your mistakes?" and Pete replies: "Oh yes, I'm certain I could repeat them exactly."

That seems to have been the Bush administration's approach to Iraq. Take the mistakes of Vietnam and repeat them exactly.

And at that you can't say they haven't succeeded.

James Wolcott

[Skeks in the city]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
hmmm a box with an X in it?

Oh I know. what did the Buchanan portion of Ty's ballot look like in 2000?

Hank, sorry you have a defective browser; try right clicking and "showing picture".

If that fails, click on the link: http://photos1.blogger.com/img/78/1172/400/1004.jpg

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Christmas at the Rumsfelds!

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Economist article.

Lovely article. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The Economist was one of the earliest supporters of invading Iraq. Even after it became obvious that there were no WMDs (and the Economist was calling Bush and Blair "Eager Deceivers"), the editors maintained that the invasion was the right thing to do.

Are they having second thoughts yet? Or still maintaining the illusion that you can evaluate a policy in the abstract, without considering how it is likely to be, and actually, implemented?

[sgtclub]

DUBAI, January 4 (Itar-Tass) - Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, whom the US occupation authorities declared to be the "target number one" in Iraq, has been arrested in the city of Baakuba, the Emirate newspaper al-Bayane reported on Tuesday referring to Kurdish sources. Al-Zarqawi, leader of the terrorist group Al-Tawhid Wa'al-Jihad, was recently appointed the director of the Al-Qaeda organisation in Iraq.

http://www.drudgereport.com/flashai.htm

[sgtclub]

• A new and provocative study on affirmative action, which will appear in the Stanford Law Review this month, is attracting such attention that there is a special click-through on the publication's Web site to field questions about it. The conclusions of the study, that racial preferences at law schools produce fewer rather than more black lawyers, is already generating controversy that is sure to only increase.
  
  The study, "A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," argues, using statistical analysis, that although total elimination of racial preferences would cause a 14 percent reduction in the number of blacks accepted to law school, there would be an 8 percent increase in the number of blacks actually becoming lawyers. The reason for this, according to the analysis in the 100-plus page study, is because of the improvement in grades, graduation rates, and rates in passing bar examinations that would result from color-blind admissions policies.
  
  The author of the study, Richard Sander, is a law professor at UCLA who is also trained as an economist. It is interesting to also note that, according to press profiles, Sander is a long-time liberal and advocate of race-conscious public policy. His apparent motive in doing the study was to provide rigorous analysis that would examine if indeed racial preferences produce the net benefit to blacks that are the alleged justification of these policies.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/S...20050104.shtml

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Skeks in the city
Hank, sorry you have a defective browser; try right clicking and "showing picture".

If that fails, click on the link: http://photos1.blogger.com/img/78/1172/400/1004.jpg

Hank's apparently not the only one. I clicked on your link and got this:

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/img/78/1172/400/1004.jpg

The following error was encountered:

Access Denied.
Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect.

Your cache administrator is root.



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Generated Tue, 04 Jan 2005 16:44:25 GMT by photos1.blogger.com (squid/2.5.STABLE3)

I'm still at a loss for a caption.

[ilikenewsocks]

Originally posted by sgtclub
http://www.drudgereport.com/flashai.htm

Now updated to say that U.S. officials are calling reports 'dubious'.

Is the Iraqi Information Minister back in the business?