BunkBlog

Isn’t this shocking?

bq. At least seven former prisoners of the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have returned to terrorism, despite gaining their freedom by signing pledges to renounce violence.

Gee, they promised they were going to stop shooting at people, and then they went and shot at people? If you can’t take the word of a fundamentalist extremist, whose word can you believe?

Libertarian and Green presidential candidate arrested

bq. On October 8th at 9PM, two third party candidates were arrested for attempting to enter the Washington University complex holding the second presidential debate. The candidates, Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and David Cobb of the Green Party, chose civil disobedience to fight the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Over half of Americans believe third party candidates should be included, yet politicians continue to funnel public funds into the bi-partisan Commission.

According to the CIA, there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq at the time of our latest war. *None*

bq. “[Saddam] wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted,” a summary of the report says.

I’m sure the neocons will take that one line and decide that they were right. We’ve gone from saying he had weapons, to saying he had weapons programs, to saying he had weapons-related programs. What’s the harm in changing that to “the intention to someday once again have weapons-related programs maybe”? What’s a little truth and accuracy between ideologues anyway?

The VP debate wasn’t as intense as the Presidential debate last week, but it was decent enough. Considering it preempted everything else, it was hard to miss.

I was surprised by both candidates performance last night. Cheney actually seemed sane and reasonable, a feat he doesn’t seem capable of on the campaign trail. Edwards, for his first debate ever, turned in a good performance as well. Of course, since he’s had lots of practice in court rooms, I’d expect him to be a decent orator and quick to respond to questions. But, he didn’t let Cheney rattle him, which might be difficult considering some of the personal attacks the VP slid into the debate while sounding reasonable.

Both of them made good points, and I don’t think this debate really ended up with one of them as the clear winner. Edwards spent too much time belaboring Halliburton, but then it is an enormous scandal – or would be if the media actually spent any time at all doing a decent analysis of the whole mess. Cheney, for his part, didn’t beat any one horse which may end up making Edwards’s speaking more memorable to the public. We’ll see.

Regardless, the VP debate doesn’t really make much difference, unless you have a narcoleptic admiral on the podium.

SecDef Rumsfeld says his statement has been misunderstood to mean that Iraq and al Qaeda did not have any links. What might that statement have been? Well, let’s see…

“To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”

Gee, where would someone get the idea that he said there was no evidence of a link between them? That’s such an ambiguous statement, I can see how he might be misunderstood. Much as when the President said the war on terra is unwinnable. Very confusing statements – it’s a good thing they came back later to contradict themselves, isn’t it?

OK, maybe not fun. Easy to make fun of?

I don’t know how many times the “deer in the headlights” look appeared on the President’s face last night, but it was quite a few. I’ve never seen someone founder so badly while groping for an answer.

I like the way Bush was able to turn every question about Afghanistan into an answer about Iraq. “The enemy attacked us, so we took the fight to them in Iraq” seemed to be his attitude throughout the debate. Apparently nobody has told him the hijackers were mostly Saudi citizens who trained in Afghanistan. You’d think after three years he would know this, wouldn’t you?

In case you needed another reason to slam Microsoft, the Windows OS has been used by the Air Traffic Control folks in LA, rather than the Unix systems that worked for decades. It hasn’t been pretty.

The servers are timed to automatically shut themselves off every 49 days, because otherwise they’d crash. Are these the kind of high-reliability systems we should be using for something as essential as keeping track of multi-ton flying bombs filled with people? Just a thought.

The so-called Marriage Protection Amendment comes before the House on Wednesday. Please let your congresscritter know that it’s a stupid thing to enshrine discrimination in the Constitution.

Slashdot has an article about the new World Wind software from NASA. Naturally, this causes NASA’s servers to choke from the load of trying to serve up a 200+ megabyte file to every geekboy on the planet.

Solution? Several bittorrent files have been posted. Now I’m grabbing this monster file in under 30 minutes, instead of looking at a day. Good thing Orrin Hatch hasn’t gotten this Peer to Peer stuff outlawed yet. I wonder if there is some other substantial non-infringing use out there? 🙂

ABCNEWS.com : Stevens Returns to U.K. After Detention

bq. During a visit in May he met with officials of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives “to talk about philanthropic work,” according to White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan.

That’s classic. He is cozying up to the controversial Faith-Based Initiatives office, yet not allowed to come back to the States? What the hell?

Teacher Arrested After Bookmark Called Concealed Weapon

bq. Harrington said she’ll never again carry her bookmark into an airport.

Guess she learned her lesson. Just think, you could have been mauled by a 50-something schoolteacher and her bookmark!

Some soldiers at Third Brigade Combat Team have been told that they need to reenlist for present duty assignment or go to Iraq which means they’ll get stoplossed and their enlistments will be extended indefinitely anyway. Althought they aren’t literally being told this, it is implied.

bq. “There’s probably a lot of places on post where they could put those folks (who don’t re-enlist) until their time expires. But I don’t want to rule out the possibility that they could go to a unit that might deploy,” said Healy.

So, they just might get sent to Iraq, there’s just no way to be sure. But, hey, we’ve got an offer you can’t refuse. Reenlist for Third Brigade and you won’t have to go to Iraq (so far as we have planned right now). Then, when the global war on terror is over (surely in less than three years, right?), you’ll be free to get out with no more Stop Loss looming.

Citing Effort to Fight Terror, Vladimir Putin has put forth a plan to return to the days of Soviets choosing the political leaders of each country, and each Soviet answerable only to the President rather than to the citizenry.

Under Mr. Putin’s proposals, which he said required only legislative approval and not constitutional amendments, the governors or presidents of the country’s 89 regions would no longer be elected by popular vote but rather by local parliaments — and only on the president’s recommendation.

Sounds an awful lot like a return to pre-1992 to me…

Kerry says failure to deal with regime led to nuclear threats…as if Clinton dealt with the DPRK any better? Or Bush 41 or Reagan? For whatever combinations of reasons, we haven’t had a consistent policy dealing with North Korea in the past 20 years; I wonder what Kerry supposed we should do about them.

This analysis of CBS’s documents seems pretty thorough and convincing. The superscript and completely different signatures are interesting. Not to mention, the document used as a “proof” of forgery was done with Word’s default settings: 1.5 inch margins. Normal margins are 1 inch per side; even assuming the document was created on the old mil-standard paper, that leaves a half-inch anomaly for any clerk worth his salt in 1973. Wonder if the people who created these apparent forgeries are working for the Left or the Right. If the Left, they should not be trusted with anything ever again; if the Right, congratulations and well-played.

Now, if someone would please get the political discourse back to something that resembles current issues, please? Like I give a rat’s azz about what either of these two twits did in 1968 or 1973. Geez.

Reuters reports on the latest Congressional Budget Office findings, which show a 200 billion dollar increase in the projected long-term deficit compared to reports just six months ago. I’m sure this will be attacked and trumpeted by the two candidates in the next couple weeks.

Bush blames the 2001 recession, the costs of the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the war on terror for the growing budget shortfall.

Yeah, I’m sure the tax cut didn’t do anything at all to reduce our total budgetary inputs. Do you suppose the politicians who run our country can even balance their checkbooks?

If you saw the RNC at all, you know the podium had a less-than-subtle cross on it. Some people objected.

Karl Rove told CNN he did not think the podium’s decorative woodwork looked like a cross.
“My God, where do they come up with this stuff?” he said. “Does it look to you like it’s a cross? I don’t think so.”

Yeah, right.

Kerry now claims that Bush is Unfit to Lead, a sharp change to his earlier approach. I still wonder at the ability to focus on the Vietnam War as the most important issue of this election.

Why has Kerry not explained why he was so credulous as to quote discredited reports about military abuses 30 years ago? Why has he not brought up any details of his 20 years in the Senate? And are all of his speeches filled with vague promises, or just every one I’ve seen or heard a piece of?

On the other side of the political fence today, was the Republican Convention just a chance to bash the Dems or what? It’s an interesting contrast – the DNC stressed Democratic party people and issues; the RNC stressed Democratic party people and Republican issues. Very vitriolic this week. Looking like an ugly election.

I love Tom Tomorrow. Check out This Modern World for an entertaining glimpse at the logic of the Dubya.

About 3/4 of the way down this page, the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, makes an ass of himself on national television.

On “Fox News Sunday,” the Illinois Republican insinuated that billionaire financier George Soros, who’s funding an independent media campaign to dislodge President Bush, is getting his big bucks from shady sources. “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where – if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from,” Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: “Excuse me?” The Speaker went on: “Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years – George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there.” Wallace: “You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?” Hastert: “I’m saying I don’t know where groups – could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know.”

We just don’t know. That’s the Karl Rove approach to smearing people – make it ambiguous. Maybe Ann Richards is gay; we just don’t know. Maybe John Kerry shot himself to get a purple heart; we just don’t know. Maybe George W. Bush screwed a goat on his ranch last week; we just don’t know.

There are a lot of things we don’t know. Speculating wildly about things with absolutely zero evidence is not the way we should expect our elected leaders to behave. But maybe we just don’t know.