by Chris Barrus
Choice quote from today’s news.
The US army’s senior ground commander in Iraq, General William Wallace, warned that long supply lines and Iraqi guerrilla-style tactics had reduced the chances of a swift military victory.
“The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against,” he told The Washington Post, in comments reported to have caused some unease in the Pentagon.
So do they still have the receipt for that war game? It’s obvious they need to take it back.
The House passed a resolution Thursday calling for a national day of humility, prayer and fasting in a time of war and terrorism.
The resolution, passed 346-49, says Americans should use the day of prayer “to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities, and to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our nation.”
OK, if the government goes ahead with this, it’s time to eat, drink, and party on that day.
Today’s Word Spy seems rather appropriate….
-dog watching TV
idiom. A person who is viewing or working with something without understanding what it is or what it does.Example citation:
“This was my first job in this command and I felt like the dog watching television,” he said. “I knew there was a lot going on around me. I just didn’t know what it was.”
Mac OS X Hints posts a fantastic shortcut for emailing Safari URLs via Mail.app.
Drag the following “url” (actually a javascript) to your bookmark bar:
javascript:location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+document.title+'&BODY='+escape(location.href)Call it whatever (say ‘e’). Since this is a bookmark (and not a folder), a hotkey is assigned to it (command-1 to command-9) by Safari.
Now whenever you need to send the page title and URL to someone, just press the hot key, and that’s it!! A mail message is created with the title of the page as the subject, the URL as the body, and the cursor active on the “To:” field.
OK, I’m going to see how far I can get today without blogging anything about The Current Situation…
This kinda got lost in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, but it’s some prime doublespeak.
But there are depths even Mr. Bush shouldn’t be allowed to plumb without rebuttal. This week, his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reached these limits. Pouring contempt on the UN’s record of inaction, Mr. Fleischer said on Monday that, “from the moral point of view, as the world witnessed in Rwanda . . . the UN Security Council will have failed to act once again.” In a literal sense, he is dead right; the Security Council did fail miserably in 1994. But his insinuation distorts what happened. With the ninth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide only weeks away, certain truths mustn’t become casualties of U.S. spin doctors.
To begin, Mr. Fleischer should review an interview between ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Mr. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign. When Mr. Donaldson asked him what he would do if “God forbid, another Rwanda should take place,” Mr. Bush replied: “We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our strategic interests. . . . I would not send the United States troops into Rwanda.”
Second, as Mr. Fleischer must surely know, the Security Council failed to intervene in Rwanda because Washington opposed any such intervention. This was the stance pushed by UN ambassador Madeleine Albright on behalf of the Clinton administration, and the position of Republicans in Congress. A rare moment of U.S. political consensus allowed a clique of Rwandan extremists to orchestrate one of the classical cases of genocide in the 20th century, annihilating some 800,000 Tutsis and thousands of moderate Hutus.
To highlight today’s moral irony, America’s efforts to prevent the Security Council from intervening in Rwanda was fervently seconded by none other than Britain, then led by John Major.”
Maureen Dowd points out a rather preemptive speech from Rumsfeld advisor Richard Perle that hints at things to come:
And he was already looking forward to giving makeovers to other rogue regimes. “I’m rather optimistic that we will see regime change in Iran without any use of military power by the United States,” he said.
Hmmm… Just like how easy the regime change in Iraq is going?
I just got done posting about the harassment of Canadian band Godspeed You! Black Emperor when these news articles come in…
Tom Tomorrow points to a Globe And Mail story about Washington’s veiled threats against Canada for not supporting the Iraq invasion
At a breakfast speech to the Economic Club of Canada, Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, said “there is a lot of disappointment in Washington and a lot of people are upset” about Canada’s refusal to join the United States in its efforts to depose Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Although the relationship between the two countries will endure in the long-term, he said, “there may be short-term strains here.”
When asked what those strains will be, Mr. Cellucci replied: “You’ll have to wait and see.” But he cryptically added that it is his government’s position that “security trumps trade,” implying possible ramifications for cross-border traffic.
And Wired News is running a story about CompAtlanta refusing to sell to Canadians.
On eBay, the highest bid wins — unless the item on sale is a laser printer from CompAtlanta and the bidder happens to be Canadian.
That’s what a tax consultant discovered last week when he tried to buy a printer on eBay, but was refused by the vendor when it was discovered he lived in Vancouver.
David Ingram received notification that his winning bid of $24.50 had been canceled, along with this message: “At the present time, we do not ship to, or accept bids from, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany or any other country that does not support the United States in our efforts to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. If you are not with us, you are against us.”
“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance and Germany doesn’t want to go to war.” – Anonymous
Canadian post-rock music collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor were held for questioning as possible terrorists at an Oklahoma gas station last weekend.
According to Tom Windish, a representative for the band at The Billions Corporation, the band pulled their two vans and white-panel truck, which they use for toting equipment, into an area gas station to refuel. Upon seeing the motley crew of nine musicians, the station’s attendant phoned the police, reporting the possibility that the band might be terrorists.
Before even having a chance to leave the station, the group was reportedly surrounded by police cars and FBI agents who, a representative for Chicago’s Abbey Pub, where the band played this weekend, said had guns drawn. The band was held for questioning for roughly three hours before finally being released as innocents. “They get hassled by The Man regularly,” said Bruce Adams, co-founder of the Chicago-based label Kranky. “Police pulling them over, anything you can imagine. It’s just the feeling in the country right now.”
“I just feel very lucky that we weren’t Pakistani or Korean,” Godspeed You! Black Emperor frontman Efrim Menuck told Pitchfork at the band’s Chicago performance on Friday night. “They detained 1,000 people in California, no one knows what happened to them. We’re just lucky we’re nice white kids from Canada. That’s what I feel lucky about.” Menuck was reluctant to further discuss the incident, citing that they had already told the story at a performance earlier in the week. Constellation Records, which the band presently records for, had no comment.