Bush’s Op-Ed

Ken AshfordBush & Co.Leave a Comment

Bush took out his box of Crayola’s and penned an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal>  Some highlights:

Together, we have a chance to serve the American people by solving the complex problems that many don’t expect us to tackle, let alone solve, in the partisan environment of today’s Washington. To do that, however, we can’t play politics as usual.

You see, when the Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House, all is fine.  When Democrats control Congress, it is "partisan".  Note to George: the 2006 elections was a signal from the electorate that they are through with "politics as usual".

Our priorities begin with defeating the terrorists who killed thousands of innocent Americans on September 11, 2001–and who are working hard to attack us again. These terrorists are part of a broader extremist movement that is now doing everything it can to defeat us in Iraq.

The extremist movement is broader now because we went into Iraq, George.

In the days ahead, I will be addressing our nation about a new strategy to help the Iraqi people gain control of the security situation and hasten the day when the Iraqi government gains full control over its affairs. Ultimately, Iraqis must resolve the most pressing issues facing them. We can’t do it for them.

Which is why you’re going to send in even more U.S. troops?

It is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues.

The economy is growing but only the wealthiest are benefiting from it, George.

One important message I took away from the election is that people want to end the secretive process by which Washington insiders are able to slip into legislation billions of dollars of pork-barrel projects that have never been reviewed or voted on by Congress.

There was another important message from the 2006 election, and it had to do with Iraq.  Did you get that?

Our Founders believed in the wisdom of the American people to choose their leaders and provided for the concept of divided and effective government. The majority party in Congress gets to pass the bills it wants. The minority party, especially where the margins are close, has a strong say in the form bills take. And the Constitution leaves it to the president to use his judgment whether they should be signed into law.

Somebody’s been watching Schoolhouse Rock.  Good for you, Mr President.

That gives us a clear challenge and an opportunity. If the Congress chooses to pass bills that are simply political statements, they will have chosen stalemate. If a different approach is taken, the next two years can be fruitful ones for our nation.

*cough*Terri Schiavo*cough*

Obama And Cocaine

Ken AshfordElection 20081 Comment

The Washington Post is reporting about Barack Obama’s "youthful indescretions", which include cocaine use in high school and college.

Prediction: This will become a major campaign issue.  Obama is a Democrat.  (Former coke users who are Republicans — i.e., Bush 43 — get a free pass on this issue).

Constitutional Crisis

Ken AshfordConstitution, Courts/LawLeave a Comment

The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court says we are experiencing a "Constitutional crisis".  That’s very very serious.  The last time I heard that phrase was during Watergate.

But what exactly is the constitutional crisis he’s talking about?  This:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made judicial pay the sole topic of his second annual report, issued on Sunday, declaring that the failure by Congress to raise federal judges’ salaries in recent years has become a “constitutional crisis” that puts the future of the federal courts in jeopardy.

No no no no.  That’s not a "constitutional crisis", Johnny.

Questions To Ponder

Ken AshfordRandom MusingsLeave a Comment

Why do we press harder on a remote control when we know the batteries are getting weak?

Why do banks charge a fee on "insufficient funds" when they know there is not enough money in the account to pay the first charge let alone any additionaL ones?

Why does someone believe you when you say there are four billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?

Why do they use sterilized needles for death by lethal injection?

Why doesn’t Tarzan have a beard?

Why does Superman stop bullets with his chest, but duck when a revolver is thrown at him?

Why do Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

Whose bright idea was it to put an "S" in the word "lisp"?

Why is it that no matter what color bubble bath you use the bubbles are always white?

Is there ever a day that mattresses are not on sale?

Why do people constantly return to the refrigerator with hopes that something new to eat will have materialized?

Why do people keep running over a string a dozen times with their vacuum cleaner, then reach down, pick it up, examine it, then put it down to give the vacuum one more chance ?

How do those dead bugs get into those enclosed light fixtures?

When we are in the supermarket and someone rams our ankle with a shopping cart then apologizes for doing so, why do we say, "It’s all right?" Well, it isn’t all right, so why don’t we say, "That hurt, you stupid idiot?"

Why is it that whenever you attempt to catch something that’s falling off the table you always manage to knock something else over?

In winter why do we try to keep the house as warm as it was in summer when we complained about the heat?

How come you never hear father-in-law jokes?

What Attytood Said

Ken AshfordIraqLeave a Comment

On U.S. casualities in Iraq:

The AP has a story out looking at the issue of America’s reaction to Iraq casualties — some folks are not happy with the article, because there’s some anger over the idea that people shouldn’t be upset because it’s so many less than any other "major" U.S. war, including Vietnam and Korea. It’s a complicated issue, but the answer can be provided in a few words: When the war is a mistake from Day One, then "1" U.S. military death is too many. World War II’s got nothing to do with it.

Yup.

Orange Bowl Random Thoughts

Ken AshfordPopular CultureLeave a Comment

Electricfootball_2_14_06_1I’m watching the Big Faceless Corporation Orange Bowl because Wake is playing and I live in Winston-Salem, so it’s the law.  Normally, I couldn’t care less about college football.  In fact, I can hardly muster caring about this.  Nevertheless, some thoughts:

(1)  Good God.  Leave Muhammed Ali alone.  If you’re going to wheel him out in public, then it should be at an affair where he’s the center of attention and nobody turns their back on him.  He’s earned it.  (Yes, Arnold Palmer, I’m looking at you.)

(2)  Somebody needs to tell Wake Forest that you’re supposed to run forward when the ball is handed to you.  When you run it backwards, you tend to lose yards, and that makes it harder to achieve first down.

(3)  In fact, this entire game looks like those electric football games where the players vibrate and go any old which way.

(4)  Taylor Hicks at halftime?  Kewl.

(5)  Yes, please tell me the backstory about the Wake quarterback who lost his two younger brothers in a car accident last February.  By the way, there’s some cosmic connection between Wake Forest students and car accidents.  It’s sad, but those students can’t seem to go off-campus without smashing into telephone poles.  It seems that nearly every morning on my way to work, I drive by the emergency service crews as they scrape dead Wake Forest students off the road.  Very tragic.

(6)  What’s with all the cute-sie plays ("gadgets" they’re called?)??  You guys aren’t in Cirque De Soliel.

(7)  Also, note to Wake Forest: when you find a play that actually causes you to gain yards, don’t run the same play four or five times in a row.  The defense usually figures it out by the third time.

(8)  Did I say these teams are playing like one of those electric football games?  More like two squads of Muhammad Ali’s.

(9)  Taylor, Gladys Knight out-souled you.  Sorry.

(10)  Okay, the second half much more closely resembles the game I know as "football".  Sadly, I’m too tired to watch the rest of it.  Even though it’s a tie now, I suspect Wake Forest will lose.

MORNING UPDATE:  They did.

Kirk (“Growing Pains”) Cameron Disproves Evolution

Ken AshfordEducation, Godstuff1 Comment

Here’s how:

The logic of and support for evolution also was questioned in a stunt the two [Kirk Cameron and fellow evangelical Ray Comfort] did for their television show, when they let "evolutionists hang themselves with their own words."

"We called eight airlines (on camera) and asked if they would let us bring a ‘relative’ on the plane. We said that he needed a wheelchair because he had problems with his feet, and after getting approval we told them the ‘relative’ was an orangutan," Comfort said.

You see the logic?  Because the "evolutionist" airlines refused to seat a big monkey, evolution must be false! Q.E.D.

Lynching, Not Hanging

Ken AshfordIraq1 Comment

I don’t know if you have bothered to see the "video" footage of Saddam’s "hanging" (the leaded footage clearly isn’t the official footage, but rather, something shot from a cell phone), but it is disturbing.

It’s not the execution itself, nor the fact that Saddam was executed, that is distrubing.  It is the manner in which it is carried out.

In this country, when we execute someone — even the most despicable serial murderer — we do with dignity and solemnity.  Nobody dances; nobody shouts chants.  The prisoner is given a last meal; he is given spiritual advice.

In the video I saw, Saddam’s executioners appear like the Islamic equivalents of a mob lynching a black man.  They start chanting religious slogans with the names of Moqtada al Sadr (the head of the Mahdi army, accused of organizing death squads against Sunnis) and Baqr al Sadr (the father-in-law of Moqtada).  As Saddam says his final words (including a prayer to Muhammad), the impatient executor opens the trap door in mid-sentence, cutting off his words.  Cheers go up.

The most dignified man in the room is Saddam, and you can’t watch the video without thinking that this was not an execution that came about from due process of justice.  Instead, this appears as an act of revenge by Sunnis Shi-ites — a symbolic lynching in continual drama of sectarian violence.

Shameful.

Baghdad Burning (a blogger in Iraq) has more thoughts.

Just another data point in the continuing mess in Iraq, along with the fact that the U.S. death toll just passed 3,000, and December was the worst month in 2006.

RELATED:  Conventional wisdom says that the troops in Iraq support the war and Bush.  Conventional wisdom is wrong wrong wrong.  A massive poll of U.S. troops in Iraq was conducted by Military Times.  The results?

Barely one in three service members approve of the way the president is handling the war, according to the new poll for the four papers (Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Times). In another startling finding, only 41% now feel it was the right idea to go to war in Iraq in the first place.

And the number who feel success there is likely has shrunk from 83% in 2004 to about 50% today. A surprising 13% say there should be no U.S. troops in Iraq at all.

This comes even though only about one in ten called their overall political views "liberal."

Our Melting World

Ken AshfordEnvironment & Global Warming & EnergyLeave a Comment

Don’t tell me there’s no such thing as global warming:

Ancient ice shelf breaks free in Canadian Arctic

Breakaway may ‘signal the onset of accelerated change,’ researchers say

TORONTO – A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a “major” reason for the event.

The Ayles Ice Shelf — all 41 square miles of it — broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists discovered the event by using satellite imagery. Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and couldn’t believe what he saw.

“This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years,” Vincent said. “We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead.”

***

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as seismic data — the event registered on earthquake monitors 155 miles away — Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

Copland said the speed with which climate change has effected the ice shelves has surprised scientists.

“Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly,” he said.

Hanging Hussein

Ken AshfordIraqLeave a Comment

Stg_hz_nodelay_940a_1I’m sorry, but I just can’t get worked up over this.  So maybe he’ll be executed within 24 hours, or maybe in a month.  But who cares?  Either way, it’s really a footnote to current events and the War on Terror in my opinion. 

It’s ironic how this one person — the former boogeyman of the Bush Administration three years ago — has been reduced to an inconsequentiality.

UPDATE:  I think Josh hits the nail on the head:

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It’s a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

***

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing’s a mess and that they’re going to be remembered for it — defined by it — for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president’s issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off — so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic ‘So There!’

…This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right.

I think decades from now, people will look back on Bush’s War and think: "The only thing we did right was get Saddam Hussein.  But it wasn’t worth the billions of dollars and thousands of American lives.  Not at all." 

In the present, however, the neo-cons — who have little to cheer about — are gloating in triumph, as if THIS will make the entire Iraq debacle worthwhile.  Malkin is having a freakin’ orgasm over it.  And while acknowledging that we’re civilized and not at all like the gleeful-in-killing dictator himself, Buckley can’t help express his "pleasure".  I think they’re going to start a letter campaign to ask that Saddam be executed on New Year’s Day, just as the big ball in Times Square drops.  And they’ll want it televised, too.  Call it "Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Middle-East-Dictator-Executin’ New Year’s Eve Party Fun Bash (with special performances by Penn and Teller, The Foo Fighters, and Celine Dion)"

Frankenfood

Ken AshfordHealth Care1 Comment

TboneI’m with Greg at The Talent Show.  I don’t see anything wrong with cloned meat. 

Yes, I realize that the FDA has a history of approving things, and then we find out ten years later that the product approved was not really all that safe.  But meat and milk from cloned cows?  No big deal.

The truth is that we have been playing God with animals for years.  Our meat products already derived from engineered animals — animals created with in vitro fertilization and pumped with steroids.  Cloning is just another step.

But (as Greg points out) it’s the word "cloning" itself that gives people the heebee jeebees.  It has the science fictiony feel to it, creating the sense that it is something bad and sinister to be avoided — even though we cannot articulate the danger.

Yet, nobody can identify the danger of eating a hamburger made from a cloned cow (other than, of course, the regular dangers that come from eating meat).  So what are we scared of?

However, Greg also points to something to think about — not in terms of health, but in terms of agro-economic policy:

The cloned meat is just fine to eat, but that doesn’t mean cloning isn’t a danger. What happens when 90% of the animals in North American are only 5 genotypes? They might all be susceptible to the same disease, and then all will die. Whereas now, some are susceptible, but others (maybe not such good milkers) are immune.

We’ve already seen this in corn – the obsession with having uniform farming meant that som 70% or more of American corn was destroyed by the same disease in the 1970s, and the American corn industry had to be bailed out by Mexican corn, because they believe in having more variety in maize there.

If we start cloning animals, we have so much to lose in terms of genetic diversity. We’ll also lose traits that might not seem important now, but might be important in the future. Right now, we want maximum milk or maximum meat production in cattle, but what if in 100 years we want hardiness to drought? We will have bred all the variety right out of the cattle, which will make it so much harder to change our breeding programs.

We need to protect diversity in our farm products – everyone loves to talk about biodiversity in the Amazon, but it’s all the more important to us and our immediate survival that we have biodiversity in our agricultural plants and animals, because that is what keeps us alive. We can’t afford to let the quick buck now destroy the wealth of genetic diversity which we have, and which we have bred into our plants and animals.

Something to think about.  Maybe it’s not necessary to worry about — or even label — cloned food, but we should think about setting limits on the number of cloned animals to make sure we have sufficient biodiversity.

Americans Really Don’t Like Bush

Ken AshfordBush & Co.Leave a Comment

Wow.  We really don’t:

Appollvillain

You know it’s bad when you get more votes that the Devil himself.

To be fair, Bush also was polled highest as the "Top Hero of 2006", but only with 13%.  Still, he beat out the U.S. Troops (6%), as well as Jesus Christ, Barack Obama, and Oprah Winfrey (all of whom got 3%).