Pretty amusing, to stumble across a missive I dispatched four years ago, and find that it had actually been published.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/writers/john_donovan/06/10/erstad.estrada/1.html
General McChrystal, our top military leader in Afghanistan, has asked for more troops to stave off ultimate failure.
And there’s a growing chorus of voices, mostly on the left, but some on the right as well, who look at history and see Afghanistan as the place where empires go to die. And rightfully so.
But, I would remind the naysayers of some simple differences between our situation and all the conquerors throughout history who met their match in that barren terrain.
We can’t change how we got there, nor what we’ve done and not done since we’ve gotten there. But there’s three key factors at play in Afghanistan today that will mark the difference between our victory and our defeat, as evidenced by an ongoing threat to American citizens, soil, and interests abroad by the very terrorism that led us to the Hindu Kush to begin with.
Each of these factors can only be harnessed if we follow through with enough troops to see the mission through.
Continue reading…
…and ThinkProgress has video.
RNC Chairman Michael Steele recently sent out a fundraising letter saying that President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress are attempting a “socialist power grab.” Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, host David Gregory pressed House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) on whether such language was appropriate. Boehner tried to dodge the question, insisting that “you can call it whatever you want,” but the fact is that Obama’s the one scaring the American public. Gregory continued to ask whether Boehner believes Obama is a socialist, to which he finally admitted he doesn’t.
FiveThirtyEight has an interesting piece up that was inspired by a suit recently filed contesting the legality of the present system of allocating Congressional representation in the House.
The suit roughly involves a concept in a “lost amendment” to the Constitution that would’ve capped the size of Congressional districts at just 30,000 people. While that would be absurd now –it’d leave us with a 30 million person House– the overall thinking behind it reveals some surprising inequalities in the present representation of the “several states” in the House.
The most populous district in America right now, according to the latest Census data, is Nevada’s 3rd District, where 960,000 people are represented in the House by just one member. All of Montana’s 958,000 people likewise have just one vote in the House. By contrast, 523,000 in Wyoming get the same voting power, as do the 527,000 in one of Rhode Island’s two districts and the 531,000 in the other.
I think you can officially lump the Washington Post into the “biased corporate media” category, with this inane anti-fluff piece by Dana Milbank.
Let’s say you’re preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don’t have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?
Here’s how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:
The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.
Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. “Now it’s time to buy some food,” she told several hundred people who came to watch. “Let’s shop!”
The piece, which made it to Drudge about five seconds later, makes a big show of pointing out the higher costs one can often find at a farmer’s market: Continue reading…
Ah, October 1990. I was in 7th grade, and the Reds went wire-to-wire to capture the NL West, winning 91 games to finish five games ahead of the 1988 World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers.
Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait a few months before, setting off the events that would result in the (first) Persian Gulf War. (Which until the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, would continue to be known primarily by its jingoistic “code name”, Operation Desert Shield/Storm.)
(Given that an entire generation has grown up in the interim between 1990 and 2009, I find the need for parenthetical comments such as the one above…or this one…to be aggravatingly necessary, as you’ll soon see…it’s surprising how much the world can change in just 20 years. Don’t even get me started on the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
Continue reading…
Interesting article here concerning the potential for storms that follow the lunar terminator. (The terminator is the dividing line between light and dark.)
The next time you see the moon, trace your finger along the terminator, the dividing line between lunar night and day. That’s where the storm is. It’s a long and skinny dust storm, stretching all the way from the north pole to the south pole, swirling across the surface, following the terminator as sunrise ceaselessly sweeps around the moon.
Never heard of it? Few have. But scientists are increasingly confident that the storm is real.
The evidence comes from an old Apollo experiment called LEAM, short for Lunar Ejecta and Meteorites. “Apollo 17 astronauts installed LEAM on the moon in 1972,” explains Timothy Stubbs of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It was designed to look for dust kicked up by small meteoroids hitting the moon’s surface.”
Very cool, of course, that old Apollo-era data is still providing new and useful science. It also helps illustrate the point that the only way for us to move forward as a species lies…..(cue Shatner voice)….out there.
The ever-reliable MediaMatters has released its findings regarding the ACORN “Prostitution” story:
Let us now turn to the content of the videos themselves. Again, it does appear that in certain cases, ACORN employees willfully broke the law, and they should be punished accordingly. But all of a sudden, these videos — four, thus far — are being promoted as unimpeachable proof that all of ACORN is equally corrupt — all 1,200 chapters and thousands of ACORN employees. This is literally the opposite of how a credible investigation is supposed to function. Sweeping conclusions should only be drawn after all the facts are in. By comparison, here, the conservative media has a few isolated facts but is willing to extrapolate an entire thesis from them.
MediaMatters is, of course, right, but they’re also wrong, or at least, failing to look at the wider picture in pursuit of defending a Democratic cause célèbre. Continue reading…
I’m not even going to bother thinking about this. This may well end up being the shortest post I ever write for this site. But Neil Boortz needs to be removed from the airwaves, because comparing the President of the United States to a pedophile is so far outside the realm of where political discourse should be –to say nothing of common decency– that it deserves absolutely no response, save for absolute and total censure.
So let me be the first to call for a boycott of Neil Boortz. Anyone who could go so far just to score a political point does NOT deserve to be carried on the public airwaves.
The term “Czar”, as applied to American politics, lost its meaning a long time ago, but has nonetheless generally represented a common shorthand term for “official appointed to oversee and advise Presidents on particular issues”. Until now, apparently.
Yglesias hits the nail on the head here:
If Kay Bailey Hutchison wants to claim that “A few of them have formal titles, but most are simply known as ‘czars’” then fine. Maybe she’s ignorant, or maybe she’s a huge liar. Either way, Amanda Terkel points out that this is completely false. There are zero officials in the Obama administration who lack formal titles and are simply known as czars. She’s totally wrong. Completely and utterly. Is she careless? Is she dishonest? Honestly, I don’t care.
On the other hand, I do care. But only insomuch as I’m disturbed that the use of the term “czar” has actually, some-damned-how, become an issue unto itself.
That said, this preposterous “czar” debate serves to illustrate, very effectively, some of the inherent problems with the mainstream media and the politics of the present era, and while I started writing this post as just a quickie, me-too affirmation of Yglesias’ post, I wound up reaching a much different, and much more satisfying conclusion as to what this silly “czar” dust-up actually represents: one more death cry of old media and old politics.
