How Do We Know If It Is A Surge?

Its now been 2 years since the last National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, and intelligence czar John Negroponte seems in no real hurry to deliver a new one to Congress. NIEs are “the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue” according to the CIA, severely needed as the last one was completed in 2004. According to this report Negroponte is dragging his feet as this NIE would be "deeply pessimistic" and embarrassing to the President.

So how do we know if the 20,000 troop surge will be enough if we're operating off of 2 year old data? And is it really putting the lives of another 20,000 troops in danger to avoid embarrassing the President?

So Does This Mean Peyton And Snoop Dogg Roll Together?

I think its safe to say Rush Limbaugh is unraveling pretty fast. Maybe he's back on the Oxy, or caught something in Costa Rica, or he's simply deeply depressed about the election, but quotes like this have to make you wonder if its safe to allow him to roam the streets:

"Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it."

Doesn't he know NFL stands for the "No Fun League?" Is he trying to tell me that Rex Grossman's play is an attempt at a drive buy on the Bears? That when Peyton is changing the play at the line he's throwing gang signs? I'm honestly not even sure what he means when he says this.

Looks Like Somebody Is Full Of All Kinds Of Stupid Ideas These Days

So basically the President realized that he hadn't done anything to help insurance screw consumers, so now he wants to tax people who receive health insurance from their company.

"Today, the tax code unfairly penalizes people who do not get health insurance through their job," Bush said. "It unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans. The result is that insurance premiums rise and many Americans cannot afford the coverage they need."

First off, their is nothing gold plated about health insurance in America other then the name plaques on the doors of the insurance executives offices, and denying employees savings of buying group plans, will only add to that. Reducing buying power will not improve any one's health, and will instead lead to another increase in the already high rate of medical cost induced bankruptcies as lower middle class families will be forced to buy plans without adequate catastrophic coverage, as these will be the only plans they can afford when forced to price plans individually.

Well this Should End a Lot of those Rumors About Condi

Sure nobody is shocked to hear Condi say she loves Fox News, but the fact that anybody actually knows who Harry Smith is at this point was a surprise.

I wonder how long it'll take FNC to turn that clip into an ad?

Hide and Go-Seek

What to do when faced with releasing embarrassing information? Hand it over and take your lumps? Dump it on Friday and spin? Nah, that's for Boy Scots, when you the Bush White House you just make it all go away.

On 29 (and counting) occasions the Bush administration has removed embarrassing information, failed to produce reports required by Congress, or classified records. The latest involves the White House visitors logs, logs that would detail how ofter Jack Abramoff. Previously they were considered property of the Secret Service and open to FOIA requests. Now suddenly they are considered White House documents and are sealed. But that's not all:

* In March, the administration announced it would no longer produce the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which identifies which programs best assist low-income families, while also tracking health insurance coverage and child support.

* In 2005, after a government report showed an increase in terrorism around the world, the administration announced it would stop publishing its annual report on international terrorism.

* After the Bureau of Labor Statistics uncovered discouraging data about factory closings in the U.S., the administration announced it would stop publishing information about factory closings.

* When an annual report called “Budget Information for States” showed the federal government shortchanging states in the midst of fiscal crises, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget announced it was discontinuing the report, which some said was the only source for comprehensive data on state funding from the federal government.

* When Bush’s Department of Education found that charter schools were underperforming, the administration said it would sharply cut back on the information it collects about charter schools.

Probably the Only Thing Dick Cheney and I Will Ever Agree On

With the death of President Ford it seems the nation is revisiting his pardon of Nixon. Many on the left link Bush's near absolute power in the bungling of Iraq, and there is a connection there. Those on the right like Cheney view the pardon as an act of national healing, a way to cleanse the national psyche. If that had occurred, we wouldn't be discussing it still today, but it was the right thing to do.

What Ford did was preserve the Presidency, if Nixon had gone on to do prison time it would have minimized the Presidency for decades. Quite possibly it wouldn't have regained its stature until September 11th, you could argue that it would have required an attack on such large proportions to bring the presidency back to relevancy. Whether or not that would have happened, the country would have been a quasi-parliamentary government for 25 plus years. Do you really think Denny Hastert would've been a better leader then Bush? Me neither.

What the left misses when it says that Ford beget Bush is this, if Ford had allowed Nixon to go through the legal system, if he had allowed the nation to accept that the Office of President could be convicted along with the man who had held it, then Bill Clinton would have surely been impeached and convicted. Once you've been down that road it is so much easier to go down it again, and there were plenty of Republicans who would have loved to see Clinton go down, to become the disgraced poster boy of all the thing the "Moral Majority" says we stand for in the Democratic Party. You think there favorite phrase is "Yeah but Clinton..." now, just imagine if they had removed him from office.

So while Cheney thanks Ford for allowing him and the President to expand the powers of the Executive Branch to an overwhelming degree, I thank him for preserving the relevancy of the Presidency, we'll undue the damage of Bush more quickly then we would've undone the damage of an irrelevant President.

What Can Big Blue do for You? Apparently Not Much.

A lot has been said about the failure of Texas' efforts to privatize their welfare system under Accenture. So how has IBM faired at privatization?


"An $80 million contract to build a gigantic data repository for over 1 million students and teachers in North Carolina has ended acrimoniously, turning into a war of words between contractor IBM Corp. and state officials.
“We have told IBM that we’re terminating the project for failure to perform,” says Vanessa Jeter, public information officer at the state’s Department of Public Instruction. She would not reveal specific details.
The initiative, called the North Carolina Window of Information on Student Education (NC WISE), is a Web-based system for collating and analyzing student data, such as report cards and transcripts. But the system -- developed by IBM -- has been dogged by systems crashes and major delays."

Mitch can talk about incompetence and fraud within FSSA all he wants, but replacing it with privatized incompetence and fraud isn't a solution. And for what its worth, all these "dirty" departments of state government that Mitch railed against, what has he done to clean them up?

Ask the Joint Chiefs

Its telling that less then a week after Rumsfeld's last day that the Joint Chiefs are telling the President that a major departure from our current Iraq strategy is required. Telling because its hard to believe that they just though of it this week, but its the first time we've heard anything about current thinking among the Joint Chiefs in quite some time. For all Rumsfeld's talk about rebuilding and modernizing the military, in the end he'll be remembered for his autocratic and stubborn refusal to adept to the realities of the civil war raging in Iraq.

More pressing for the future is a somewhat ominous note at the end of this article:

A constant subtext in the meeting yesterday, and in the ongoing White House
review, is the Joint Chiefs' growing concern about the erosion of the U.S.
military's ability to deal with other crises around the world because of the
heavy commitment in Iraq and the stress on troops and equipment, said officials
familiar with the review. The chiefs planned to tell Bush of the significantly
increased risk to readiness in the event of a new emergency, rather than push
for a timeline to leave Iraq.

An undercurrent of the conflict over the last six months is the toll it is taking on our battle readiness, and the administration's unwillingness to acknowledge this. While this isn't new, to hear that the Chiefs have begun to press this issue would lead one to believe that the situation is more dire then we think.

He's the Snake to My Mongoose, or the Mongoose to My Snake.

E.J. Dionne argues in his column in the Washington Post that a Barak Obama candidacy is good for Hillary Clinton, as well as Sen Bayh. The concept is that instead of a Hillary/ anti-Hillary primary, Democrats would be treated to a primary where candidates would need to define themselves, and more importantly take chances.

The idea that caught my attention was his comparison of Obama to the Bill Clinton of 1991/92.

In 1991 Gov. Bill Clinton railed against politicians who "have divided us
against each other, pitting rich against poor, playing for the emotions of the
middle class, white against black, women against men, creating a country in
which we no longer recognize that we are all in this together."
In his New
Hampshire debut over the weekend, Obama said that we had "come to be consumed
by" the "24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative-ad, bickering, small-minded politics
that doesn't move us forward. . . . There's no sense that they are coming
together in a common-sense, practical, non-ideological way to solve the problems
that we face."

Cloak, Dagger and... Google?

Recently when the Bush Administration went to the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement with Iran's nuclear program the CIA refused saying there sources were to valuable to expose. So what did they do when rebuffed? They googled it.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer
to find the names another way -- by using Google. Those with the most hits under
search terms such as "Iran and nuclear," three officials said, became targets for
international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United
Nations.

The results? About what you'd expect when you try and replace a clandestine intelligence network with an internet search engine.

There is nothing that proves involvement in a clandestine weapons program,
and there is very little out there at all that even connects people to a
clandestine weapons program," said one official familiar with the intelligence
on Iran. Like others interviewed for this story, the official insisted on
anonymity when discussing the use of intelligence.

So what was the purpose, to try and look tough? To pointedly rebuke the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that they negotiate with Iran? To show the world how impotent the civil war in Iraq has made us?