Random Stuff

Today's required reading: The Death of U.S. Strategy in Iraq.

Also, if you are in the mood for a miserable slog, there is The Shame of Gitmo.

This just in: 36.000 Iowans homeless due to catastrophic flooding. MSNBC continues to use its airtime to say, Tim Russert Still Dead!

I can't even fathom what the good folks of that midwest state are going through right now. I wonder what impact this will have on food prices. In any event, my best wishes go out to those suffering from this calamity.

A U.S. soldier has refused to report for Iraq duty. You can't blame him. The Bush administration has absolutely exhausted out military, doing something that neither the Germans, the Japanese or the Soviet Union couldn't. One sometimes wonder if Bush is a mole for our enemies.

In more pleasant news, the GOP is writing off two open Senate seats while The Cook Report keeps moving into the toss up column Republican-held House seats and the yellow elephants are having fundraising troubles. It is going to be a Democrat landslide in November.

Call him Barackpossible in light of the fact that women are now beginning to coalesce behind him.
But Virgina Governor Mark Warner won't accept VP nod in order to clobber Republican douchebag Jim Gilmore in the fall. The Wall Street Journal has Warner as the favorite in the race.

The FCC has finally approved the Sirius-XM satellite radio merger and it is well overdue. The union has brought opposition from consumer groups, but this was tremendously shortsighted since both firms were bleeding money, leading to the eventual likelihood that there would be no satellite radio in the future at all.

It is also true that if people don't like what they program on whatever the new merged company will be called they can unsubscribe and directly hurt them. So since they will have to appeal to a broad market, I don't see how this is a loss for media reform.

New competitors, of course, could also arise.

Is this good news for American politics or bad news? People are increasingly turning to the web to help them decide who they should vote for.

In that connection comes news about the Associated Press' attempts to crack down on bloggers who use their articles. AP asserts that some bloggers go overboard in the length with which they quote that company's reportage. You can't realy disagree with them in one sense: Yahoo News and major newspapers pay to carry AP while bloggers don't fork over anything.

By the same token, with today's hyperactive news cycle, where articles are sent out to millions before they have been fact checked, sometimes it is necessary to quote an AP featurette point by point, especially since they once had John Solomon, a pathological liar who is now the executive editor of the Moonie Herald (you call it the Washington Times), which should tell you something about his distortional capability.

Has been Newt Gingrich asserted Monday that Louisiana Governor Bobby "The Exorcist" Jindal is the best choice to be John McCain's VP. Cue Tubular Bells. Does anyone listen to that pompous philandering, prevaricating hosebag anymore?

And since I mentioned to McCain, the lovely and talented John Aravosis over at Americablog has posted a video of bloopers. by the old codger.

Would he consider the crazy man in the political basement Ross Perot (!!!) as his VP?

Midland, Texas Republicans to McCain: drop dead!

The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that roots for Ebenezer Scrooge in the Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and which once decried the scrutiny that now disgraced former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had exerted on the financial community, is now calling for an investigation into the breaks several Democratic politicians received on their mortgages through Countrywide. Fucking hilarious.

I think that as long as they're so concerned about public integrity of our elected officials, how about using some of that to also examine why Exxon has a private army culled from the Indonesian military?

Former Phillies and Mets outfielder Dosing (steroids) Lenny Dykstra, at the center of a stock picking controversy with Forbes. Lenny is an uber attention whore, so I'm sure he is loving it.

Doesn't it strike anyone else as curious how much of a hot potato the attempted hostile takeover of Budweiser has become while there is little media interest in how U.S. defense contractors are moving offshore to avoid taxes or how much of our weapons technology is manufactured by foreign firms, including China.

Why the Democrats haven't made defense manufacturing self-sufficiency an issue is beyond me. Accusing the Republicans of hurting our military capability by favoring non-American firms would put them back on their heels, the recent giving of an air tanker contract to Boeing rival Airbus being just one example.

RIAA gets spanked by a federal district court in promo cd case. One thing the feds might want to look into is how record executives donate promotional cd's in order to get a tax break even though they didn't pay for the cds they donated. They got them gratis as promos. A lot of record store managers and radio station program directors do this as well.

In addition, record executives often trade promo cds of their artists to executives of other labels for free cds from those competing outfits. So while the RIAA goes out and sues consumers for trading mp3 files, they are, in effect, conducting an illicit underground market in music they didn't themselves pay for. It seems to me that the IRS needs to look into this.

Airlines charging for the wrong baggage?

New York to feel global warming in a big way.

Did you know that there are 6,000 Ugandans working as security guards for the U.S. in Iraq? I just hope we aren't helping to foster the next Idi Amin.