BottleOfBlog

Time To Go, Joe

Never mind your horrendous 55 and 42 record--in Division I football, at Penn State--since 2000, apparently, year in and year out, about ten percent of your team is suspended for something or other:

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) -- Penn State tight end Andrew Quarless was suspended indefinitely Wednesday for an unspecified violation of team rules, the sixth player suspended in the offseason.

Quarless could be the second coming of Kyle Brady. And, for some reason, he can't walk from College Avenue to Beaver Avenue without breaking six hundred unspecified team rules.

Now, I know, a college football team is made up of a bunch of young guys. And young people are stupid. And young people in college are stupid and they're drunk. So they're double stupid.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Lord knows, if there's ever a time to be drunk and stupid, it's when you're young enough to be that drunk and stupid and still be able to walk away, fully intact, from whatever it is that you've done.

But, Joe, a lot of your players aren't even doing that. They're winding up in jail.

Like Maurice Humphrey.

Some of your players--good players--are killing people.

So, if you aren't winning football games, and year in, year out, about ten percent of your team is suspended, indicted, or beating or murdering people...

It's not a failure of your Great Experiment.

It's just time for someone else to put the lab coat on.

You Can't Expect Good Gubment From A Party That Doesn't Believe Gubment Can Do Any Good

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Lawmakers grilled bank regulators Tuesday about why they didn't intervene as lax lending standards led to a meltdown in the mortgage market and a credit crunch that threaten the economy.

"Again and again the question has been asked over the past year as our credit markets have grown increasingly impaired: Where were the regulators?," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the banking committee. "Why didn't they do more? Were they asleep at the switch? And when the alarm went off, did they merely hit the snooze button?"

Yes, why didn't the regulators do more? Where were the regulators? It's so hard to understand!

I mean, we haven't had a hundred billion dollar banking crisis, which will surely require a taxpayer bailout, in almost twenty years!

Not since Reagan and Bush I de-regulated the Savings and Loan industry, while brave, straight talking, ethical Congressmen like John McCain leaned on regulators to back off from doing more.

Because, remember, as Sainted Ronny Rotten used to tell us: government is not a solution to our problems, government is the problem!

So Reagan and the Reagan Republicans took that pesky ol' gubment out of the Savings and Loan industry and let the miracle of the Free And Unfettered Market work its magic. And within a couple of years, taxpayers had to come up with one hundred and twenty billion dollars--and those are 1980s dollars--as a solution to our problem.

So how could this happen again?

Gee, let me think...

Hmmm...what's similar...

Could it be that once again Republicans were running the gubment? And that Republicans not only don't believe in gubment regulations but actively thwart them?

There's a reason we have all these regulations--all this interminable red-tape the insane Bush clown posse is always whining about:

In the very distant past called the twentieth century, the American People suffered horrible catastrophes. And the People learned hard lessons from these catastrophes, and They made rules and regulations so that these awful events could never, ever happen again.

And after the People made these rules, everything was fine for four or even eight years.

Until another Republican got into the White House and told the People that these rules and regulations weren't solving any problems--they were the problem!

And then a bunch of limp-dick Democrats let the Republicans get rid of the rules and regulations, predictable catastrophe ensued, and then gubment had to spend an ungodly amount of taxpayers money to solve the problem.

Hundreds of Congressmen and Women do not vote to pass laws or create agencies which will be contrary to the interests of their corporate sponsors just because Congress likes passing laws. Congress does that shit at gunpoint.

Congress only passes regulatory bills when things get so unbelievably fucked up that a veto proof majority of them are afraid that if they don't do something they'll all be out of their phoney baloney jobs and lose their awesome Government provided healthcare and benefits.

That's it. They never do it before the fact. It's always after the fact. It's always too little too late. And it's always something that is and was desperately needed.

Your FDA, your EPA, your FCC, your SEC, your FDIC, your SSA--all of that shit--all of it--came in response to catastrophic disasters that Congress just could not ignore, no matter how many corporate dollar bills it cost them. The People were that angry.

And your modern Gee Oh Pee doesn't want to do anything with gubment except get rid of all the answers to all the problems we've ever had so we can have all those problems all over again.

The modern Gee Oh Pee is proud of our American heritage and they long for a simpler time--a time of bank failures, and burning rivers, poisoned food, fake medicine, soup kitchens, and exploding automobiles.

And the only thing between the American People and that Republican Utopia is your federal gubment.

Government is the problem!

And that's why the regulators didn't do anything.

And when the gubment has to poney up a couple hundred billion dollars to bail out the banks again, your modern Gee Oh Pee will insanely say that just proves what they were saying all along.

Oh, No, Not Washington

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An investment executive who paid more than $20 million for an original, handwritten copy of the Magna Carta presented the ancient paper Monday to the media and plans to loan it to the National Archives…

The original Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Rubenstein's is one of four remaining copies of the document commissioned by the King of England in 1297 to establish basic human rights as part of English law.

Great.

How much you want to bet asshead shows up and tacks a "signing statement" onto it?

They had to bring it to Washington...

This Ought To Be Great! Or, At The Very Least, Surprising!

The world's longest, most expensive, least productive on-the-job training program goes on:

GAZA CITY (CNN) -- Israeli soldiers returned to southern Gaza on Tuesday hours after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared in the West Bank calling for Israelis and Palestinians promptly to resume peace talks…

Speaking in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Rice said Israelis and Palestinians should renew the talks sidetracked by a recent wave of violence "as soon as possible."

She added, "We must all must keep our eye on what we are trying to achieve, and what we are trying to achieve is indeed not easy -- and that is to conclude an agreement that can lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state, to conclude that agreement by the end of this year. I still believe that can be done."

Yes, we must all keep our eye on what we are trying to achieve. And what we are trying to achieve is not easy.

When you're an imbecile.

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’_”

The World's Most Incompetent Woman didn't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing!

Apparently, Condi Rice, like Harriet Miers, only knows one person.

George W. Bush.

Here are some other things Condi Rice was caught off guard by:

That al Qaeda was a very serious threat to our national security, despite being briefed by her own counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, in January of 2001 that al Qaeda was a very serious threat to our national security.

That an attack by al Qaeda was imminent, despite a June 21, 2001 meeting with George Tenet, in which his hair was described as being "on fire" and during which he said, "Something is going to happen."

That bin Laden intended to attack the United States, despite an August 6, 2001 PDB entitled: "bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside The United States".

That terrorists might possibly use airplanes as suicide weapons, despite a 1999 report for the National Intelligence Council that terrorists were planning to do exactly that--a report, by the way, that Ari Fleisher said everyone in the Bush administration was aware of, except, apparently, our National Security Advisor.

That terrorists might possibly use airplanes as suicide weapons, despite being told by the CIA that terrorists were training to use airplanes as suicide weapons.

That terrorists might possibly use airplanes as suicide weapons, despite FAA warnings in the Spring of 2001 that terrorists intended to use planes as suicide weapons.

That there were problems with the WMD allegations in the NIE the Bush Administration presented to Congress despite the many footnotes stating that there were problems with the WMD allegations.

That the aluminum tubes Bush cited as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program in his State of the Union address were not suited for uranium centrifuges, despite being told by the nation's foremost nuclear experts nearly a year before the State of the Union that the tubes were not suited for nuclear weapons.

That the troops being sent to Iraq were insufficient to stabilize a post war Iraq, despite a report prepared by the National Security Council and presented to the National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, stating that at least 300,000 troops would be required to prevent a second war.

I could go on all night.

I mean, honestly, is this the stupidest woman on God's green Earth, or what?

When she gets dressed in the morning, is she "caught off guard" when her hand pops out of her shirt sleeve?

When she's late for work, does she say, "No one could have imagined that there would be traffic on a Monday morning...at rush hour..."???

When she mixes alcohol with prescription drugs and sleeps through intelligence briefings, does she explain that the label warnings were very general and not specifically related to her becoming drowsy during intelligence briefings?

And then, afterwards, does Condi Rice lecture everyone she knows about the uncertain outcome of hands entering sleeves, the impossibility of predicting the exact number of motorists on our dangerous roadways, the uncertainty of how each individual will react to alcohol and prescription drugs?

I'm sure she does.

It's like each and every new day is the first day she ever walked upon the earth. Everything is new and surprising! No one knows anything! All outcomes are wildly unpredictable!

And she can hardly wait until tomorrow so that she can condescendingly explain to the rest of us mindless cretins all the hard learned lessons from her first day on Earth.

She seems totally oblivious to the fact that the rest of us have resided here for all of our lives, while she, every day of the year, just got here at sun up.

She's like our national Drew Barrymore in "50 First Dates".

There's so much about the Bush administration that's wrong, and stupid, and appalling.

But, for my money, Condi Rice is top of the list.

I mean, honestly, she could not do clerical work for me. She's that bad. She's that incompetent.

If she didn't work for the Bush administration, if she weren't a Republican, can you imagine this woman succeeding at anything?

And Here's What You Won!

BAGHDAD — It's a damning indication of how poorly things have gone for the United States during its five-year misadventure in Iraq that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can drive in broad daylight though this war-ravaged city and spend the night at the presidential palace, but George W. Bush can't._

Mr. Ahmadinejad was greeted with lavish ceremony yesterday as he became the first Iranian President to visit Baghdad, a trip some said reflected Iran's great and growing power in Iraq and how severely the U.S. effort to remake Iraq into a Western-friendly democracy has gone awry._

Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have died since the war began in 2003, but Iraq's U.S.-backed government warmly welcomed Washington's No. 1 enemy with flowers and a band.

Apparently ignoring repeated U.S. charges that Iran is destabilizing his country, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani smiled broadly as he greeted Mr. Ahmadinejad outside his palace. Hailing a new era in ties between their states, the two men clasped hands and exchanged traditional kisses on the cheeks before walking together down a red carpet to review an honour guard as a military band played the two national anthems.

Despite the presence of 157,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, the visit left the impression that Iran's President now feels more comfortable in Baghdad than his U.S. counterpart does.

Unlike Mr. Bush's cloak-and-dagger visits here — fly-in trips to heavily guarded U.S. military bases that only last a few hours, often with no advance notice given to even the Iraqi government — Mr. Ahmadinejad's schedule was announced days earlier…

Joost Hiltermann, a regional analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, noted that the groups now in power in Iraq, including key Shia and Kurdish political factions, are some of same groups that allied themselves with Tehran during the conflict while the United States was supporting Mr. Hussein. Many Iraqi Shia leaders lived in Iran during the war, while Mr. Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, speaks fluent Farsi.

"There was always a contradiction in American policy in Iraq," he said. "If you want to turn Iraq into a democracy, you're going to bring Iran's friends to power.

"If people in Washington are surprised [at the reception for Mr. Ahmadinejad] it's because they didn't understand what they were getting into."

Whether we can "win" or not, whether the "surge" is "working" or not, what will happen if we "lose"--these are all imbecilic questions.

They always have been.

The only important question, the only important consideration since this fiasco started five years ago has always been: what can we "win"?

What will "winning" look like?

And will "winning" be worth the cost?

Three trillion of your dollars. Four thousand dead American sons and daughters, and fathers and mothers. Over twenty thousand seriously wounded American soldiers.

And what did all that "win" you?

A mid-eastern country where the President of the United States can only fly in and out of in the dead of night, while the very nearly insane President of Iran gets greeted with flowers and marching bands.

Playing the Iranian national anthem.

And you paid for it.

And you'll pay for it for the rest of your lives.

And still, through dozens of Democratic and Republican debates, after millions of words in magazines and newspapers and on the Tee Vee, not one single "mainstream" journalist is asking the only question that ever should have been asked about this stupid, expensive, catastrophic, illegal war:

Just what exactly can we hope to "win"?

We Have Met The Enemy And It Is Not Us

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE - President Bush on Thursday stood by his demand for legal protection for phone companies that help the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists, saying he sees no prospect of a compromise with congressional Democrats…

If phone companies need legal protection for helping the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists, why on Earth doesn't Bush ask for that? Why is he asking for legal protection for phone companies who help the government eavesdrop on Americans???

Oh, that's right! I forgot.

Because he's the Worst President Evah and the least son of the Worst American Family.

In the meantime, a temporary surveillance law adopted by Congress last summer expired at midnight last Saturday. House Republicans and three dozen Democrats voted against extending it last week in hopes of pressuring House Democrats into adopting the Senate bill.

"It's positively Orwellian that the president forgets that he's the one who blocked an extension of the warrantless wiretapping program," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

Asked about a potential deal with Democrats, Bush said, "I would just tell you there's no compromise on whether these phone companies get liability protection." The administration says it needs the help of the phone companies for its post-Sept. 11, 2001, surveillance.

Bush said his strategy for breaking the deadlock on the surveillance bill will be to keep talking about why it should be passed on his terms. "The American people understand we need to be listening to the enemy," he said.

Yes, they do. They also understand that they are not The Enemy. And about eighty percent of Americans now understand that anyone trying to foist this bullshit on them might possibly be.

If Democrats don't stomp this lame-duck loser Gestapo horseshit back down into the dirt where it belongs, then they don't deserve to run the gubment any more than the pedophiles, and perverts, and drug addicts, and criminals who make up the modern Gee Oh Pee.

Please, Make That A Campaign Talking Point

It’s slightly counter-intuitive that Obama could sound more hawkish than McCain, but when it comes to Pakistan, that may be the case. Last night at his Wisconsin victory speech in Columbus, Ohio, McCain came out swinging against what he perceives as the Illinois senator’s naiveté of international affairs and world events.

Providing a potential sneak preview of his general election talking points, [McCain] asked, “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?” The likely nominee’s comments referenced a counter-terrorism policy speech that the presidential hopeful gave in August in Washington, DC….

Obama at the time was talking about attacking known al-Qaeda terrorist targets, not suggesting mounting an attack on the country or government of Pakistan. Still, he caught flak shortly thereafter from some on both sides of the aisle for discussing the merits of attacking a sovereign ally.

And McCain saw no distinction, while speaking with reporters, today. “That’s still bombing Pakistan,” he said when pressed on the topic.

What an idiot Obama is! How naive can this rube be??? Obama clearly knows nothing about international affairs or world events or about fighting terrorism! He certainly doesn't know anything about national security or military matters--those are things which only Republicans know about!

And John McCain, who is not only a Republican--so he automatically knows everything about national security--but is also a former member of the military--so he, even though he was a pilot, automatically knows everything about fighting guerillas in the mountains of Pakistan--would never do anything as stupid as bomb Pakistan!

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone's operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA's dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda's core leadership in two years…

Having requested the Pakistani government's official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval…

Officials say the incident was a model of how Washington often scores its rare victories these days in the fight against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan's national borders…

D'oh!

This shit is supposed to be one of McCain's strengths.

And he has no idea what he's talking about!

Gee, imagine how fucking stupid he is about stuff like economic policy which he admits he doesn't know anything about!

It's really amazing to me that, in the modern Gee Oh Pee, they can't come up with one single candidate--not one out of millions of party members--who isn't either a pervert, a criminal, undeniably grotesque, or an idiot.

And This Is Why Congress Polls Lower Than The Worst President Evah

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- who may be the most super delegate of all as chair of the Democratic national convention in Denver -- gave an interview with Bloomberg TV's Al Hunt in which she laid down the law for super delegates:

Don't veto the people's choice.

"I think there is a concern when the public speaks and there is a counter-decision made to that," she said, adding quickly, "I don't think that will happen."

She said the governors, lawmakers, DNC members and others picked as super delegates are chosen through a grassroots process and are accountable to the party's voters.

"I do think that they have a respect -- it's not just following the returns, it's also having a respect for what has been said by the people," Pelosi said. "It would be a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided."

Yes, it's a problem when the public speaks and there's a "counter-decision" made to that.

PRINCETON, NJ -- The latest USA Today/Gallup poll finds that a majority of Americans continue to express opposition to the war in Iraq, attitudes that are unchanged in the last two months. According to the Jan. 30-Feb. 2 poll, 57% of Americans say it was a mistake for the United States to send troops to Iraq, while 41% say it was not a mistake. Those numbers are identical to what Gallup measured in late November/early December.

Though, to be fair to our strong, principled House Speaker, you have to admit: at least 57% of Americans generally wear body paint with anarchist slogans like "Impeach Bush" just so they can build Bhuddas on public streets and hide behind ridiculously flimsy legal technicalities like the First Amendment to our Constitution, when they should all be held seriously accountable to the Rule of Law of upscale municipal public nuisance codes for trespassing on the gardens and angering the neighbors of our leaders.

So there's that. When our leaders take into account what the public has decided, they have to discount at least what sixty percent of us say.

More and more bullshit.

Have you ever in your life seen politicians afraid to do things that were politically popular?

What, on Earth, is really going on with this noble experiment of Ours?

Blanks For Our Bucks

It's time for our annual game: How much is really in the U.S. military budget?

As usual, it's about $200 billion more than most news stories are reporting. For the proposed fiscal year 2009 budget, which President Bush released today, the real size is not, as many news stories have reported, $515.4 billion—itself a staggering sum—but, rather, $713.1 billion…

…It is (adjusting for inflation) larger than any U.S. military budget since World War II.

It’s astonishing, isn’t it?

In 1952, the United States had 180,000 American soldiers and Marines fighting in Korea, against like a million Chinese. We had the entire 7th Fleet plus a bunch of other ships in constant combat. We had air forces in Japan and Korea flying day and night. And, to top it off, we had about 300,000 Americans in Europe to keep the Red Army in check.

The defense budget in 1952, adjusted for inflation?

About $500 billion.

In 1968, with 500,000 Americans serving in Vietnam. 300,000 still in Europe. SAC flying twenty four hours a day, ready and just aching to drop the Big One.

The defense budget in 1968. adjusted for inflation?

About $450 billion.

Today, with 130,000 troops in Iraq and another—what?—10,000 in Afghanistan and about seventy thousand in Europe and our defense budget is seven hundred and thirteen billion dollars?

Where in the great big Red, White and Blue fuck is the other two hundred billion dollars going???

We’re spending at least two hundred billion dollars more than we spent during the hottest years of Korea and Vietnam because 19 fucking lunatics, whose last known addresses were caves, hijacked a couple of planes???

Are you shitting me???

Christ Almighty, we could do what the Saudis do and just pay bin Laden directly a couple hundred million a year to not attack the United States and we’d save two hundred billion dollars.

And if that encouraged every single homicidal maniac in the world to also come calling with their hands out, we could pay all of them too and still save one hundred and ninety nine billion dollars.

What is the sense of this War On Terrorism???

I mean, honestly, for two hundred billion dollars a year, we could just cut each and every Palestinian—all nine million of them--a check for $20,000 a year. I don’t think that’s a great idea, but I bet it would do a hell of a lot more to prevent mid-eastern terrorists from attacking the United States. And zero Americans would come home in body bags or wheel chairs or back braces with screws in their foreheads.

But then again, getting value for your tax payer dollar is something fiscally conservative, Republicans can’t even begin to understand.

That’s why most of them still think that lowering something like 40 million Americans’ tax payments by an “average” of $1500 a year, while doubling the national debt was a tax cut.

But even worse than the multibillion dollar rip off is the inescapable rip off that’s coming, but most of us don’t even know it yet:

("National Defense," by the way, does not include programs in the Department of Homeland Security; that's another story.)

Why is this so bad? Because Homeland Security will be just like the Department of Defense when it comes to handing out dollar bills. And how are dollar bills handed out to the Department of Defense now?

Congress exposes this budget to virtually no scrutiny, fearing that any major cuts—any serious questions—will incite charges of being "soft on terror" and "soft on defense." But $536 billion of this budget—the Pentagon's base line plus the discretionary items for the Department of Energy and other agencies—has nothing to do with the war on terror. And it's safe to assume that a fair amount has little to do with defense. How much it does and doesn't is a matter of debate. Right now, nobody's even debating.

We could probably have a bigger, meaner, more effective military machine for half of what we pay every year for our bloated defense budget.

The Pentagon is and has been for at least fifty years the world’s biggest shopping bazarr. And it’s a monstrously corrupt, almost comically inefficient machine—for just a taste, I’d highly recommend reading this book, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War.

(And we can thank our lasting monumental military waste on the Sainted Ronny Rotten and his Reagan Republicans, who, just at the moment the Church Committee and the Military Reform Caucus, and the Pentagon reformers were gaining a bit of traction, spent the next eight years hysterically citing Team B reports and throwing billions of unnecessary dollars at totally inexistent threats. Our military has never recovered. It probably never will.)

And it’s political suicide for any Congress man or woman to object to anything the Department of Defense wants. Beyond that, it may even be political suicide for a politician to agree to what the Department of Defense wants—you all remember the Bush/Cheney ’04 ads accusing John Kerry of depriving the military of the Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters and F-16s it needed to combat the terrorism of men with plane tickets and plastic knives?

Oh, on September 11th, if only we had had more tanks flying from Boston to California!

That aside, Kerry voted for Defense cuts proposed by Dick Cheney! And he still got murdered for it! By Dick Cheney!

It’s insane!

And now we have a second Department of Defense—the Department of Homeland Security. Which was appallingly stupid and unnecessary from its retarded inception in dumbass Joe Lieberman’s war fevered little brain.

In like seven years, I think the only thing I ever agreed with Bush about was how we did not need a creepy, Orwellian sounding Department of Homeland Security. It didn't eliminate any government agencies. It just added one more level to them. And nothing ever gets more efficient by adding a gigantic whole new level of administrators.

Seriously, I was a big Bush backer on his one good decision, in seven years, to oppose that stupid thing.

But, then, Bush, , waffling, irresolute flip flopper that he was, caved because of politics—because stupid ass Joe Lieberman had the votes—and created a bigger monster than even Lieberman had envisioned in his wildest, stupidest, twisted little bobble-headed retarded garden gnomed dreams.

And, gee, guess what? Though, the Department of Homeland Security now gets a relatively small amount of our federal budget. It won’t be long before it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And it will face less and less scrutiny, as more and more Congress men and women become afraid of being called “weak on Homeland Security”. And more corporate Congressional lobbyists and donors, seek out those lucrative gubment Homeland Security contracts.

And soon, there won’t be any debate or scrutiny, or competitive bids on our brand new $700 billion Homeland Security budget.

And we’ll all get used to that.

Just like we’re used to spending outrageous and totally unjustified money for defense.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said recently that, quite apart from the wars, the nation should get used to spending 4 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. This isn't an unreasonable sum in terms of what the nation can afford. But the same could be said of many other functions of government. It has very little to do with what the nation needs. The $515.4 billion in the base line Defense Department budget amounts to 3.4 percent of GNP. Is that not enough? Should we throw in another $85 billion to boost it to 4 percent? The relevant question, in any case, should be not how much we spend, but what we buy.

Until the modern Gee Oh Pee hollows this country out like a gourd and totally bankrupts us, we will not have any intelligent discussion, with regard to defense or Homeland Security, about what we need.

If I believed in irony, I'd say it's ironic. The people who shout and scream the loudest about a strong military will, in the end, be the very people who wreck our American military.

Because when we finally do start talking about what we need, we’ll be so busted out and in debt, and hated and broke, we won’t have the money to pay for it.

Liberal Media Wonders Whatever Happened To The Man Who Wasn't There

…Edwards' boundless optimism and energy has his limits, and today he admitted what all the pundits and politicos have been saying for the past month: the Democratic contest is a two-person race, and Edwards is not one of them…

Yes, it is difficult to understand why, as Time Magazine wonders, John Edwards message never caught on with people when all the pundits and all the politicos have been saying for the past month that Edwards isn't even part of the Democratic primary.

When people turn on their TV sets, or open up a magazine or newspaper, or read the news on Al Gore's internets, and all the pundits and all the politicos therein tell them that there are basically two candidates for the Democratic nomination--Obama and Clinton--it sure is a big mystery why a third candidate, John Edwards, somehow couldn't appeal to more people.

Edwards' challenge from the beginning of his presidential quest was to stay relevant…

Yes, Edwards' big challenge was to stay relevant. But what Time Magazine doesn't tell you is that Edwards' big challenge was not to stay relevant to actual voters. No, Edwards' challenge was to stay relevant to Time Magazine.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its latest campaign coverage index for January 6-11, a study that does its damndest to try to quantify which political figures are sucking up the most media oxygen and why.

It found that Edwards only got 7% of political coverage during those days -- less than one-fifth of what Hillary earned, and less than one-forth of that accorded to Obama. Edwards even got less attention than Mike Huckabee, even though he, like Edwards, finished third in the New Hampshire primary…

For literally the past year we've been hearing justifications for the fact that Edwards, despite being competitive in Iowa polls, didn't get the attention that his Dem rivals got -- he didn't raise as much money; his candidacy isn't as historic as theirs; etc., etc. Indeed, the virtual media blackout of Edwards got so glaringly obvious that even New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt urged his paper to give Edwards more attention back in November. At a certain point we should just acknowledge that Edwards basically got screwed and that this shouldn't have happened to the extent that it did.

During the primaries, John Edwards, a former Vice Presidential candidate and totally viable candidate for the Presidency of the United States, got seven percent of the political coverage and Time Magazine is explaining to people now that Edwards problem was that he wasn't relevant to voters. Edwards problem was that his message never caught on.

He got one fifth of the press Clinton got and he beat her in Iowa. Can you imagine how well he might have done if he got five times as much press as he got?

Gee, it sure is a mystery worth explaining why his message never caught on with voters who never got to hear it.

[Edwards’ strategy] at first seemed shrewd: build on Edwards' surprisingly good showing in Iowa in 2004 and make his native South Carolina his firewall while garnering union support…

While he managed to pull out a surprising second-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, beating out Clinton, he placed a disappointing third in New Hampshire and his campaign was stunned when he garnered just 4% of the vote in the Nevada caucuses.

At first, Edwards' strategy seemed shrewd! His second place finish in Iowa was surprising! That's the kind of thing that can really breath life into a campaign. And we all remember how shrewd Edwards seemed and how surprising his second place finish was because of all the attention it got!

For instance, let's look at how CNN, a partner of Time Magazine, couldn't stop talking about Edwards' shrewd strategy that led to his surprising second place finish in Iowa!

DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama's victory Thursday in critical Democratic Iowa caucuses indicate voters saw him as a candidate of change, according to entrance polls…

The finish was a blow to Clinton -- the presumptive front-runner in the months leading up to this year's campaign who had hoped a win in Iowa would be the start of an uninterrupted run to the nomination….

"Just over half of Democratic caucus-goers said change was the No. 1 factor they were looking for in a candidate, and 51 percent of those voters chose Barack Obama," said CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider. "That compares to only 19 percent of 'change' caucus-goers who preferred Clinton..."

Twenty percent of Democrats said Clinton's campaign mantra -- experience -- was the most important attribute of a presidential candidate.

At Obama's caucus-night headquarters in Des Moines, the hall filled with people late Thursday in anticipation of the candidate's speech…

Obama's victory came despite Clinton's support from EMILY's List…

The Clinton campaign itself also contacted tens of thousands of Iowans who had never caucused…

Appearing in front of cheering supporters Thursday with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, at her side, Clinton refused to back down...

"I am so ready for the rest of this campaign and I am so ready to lead," she said, smiling.

And there's more. The whole article is about Obama--fine, he won--and Clinton, who came in third.

Edwards, who shrewdly and surprisingly finished second, gets mentioned four times with an entire twenty words devoted to him.

Half of those words were "and", "the", "a", "North Carolina" and "also".

John Edwards campaign, the one that pulled the Democratic party millimeters towards the left where most Americans interests and hearts reside, was killed by your Liberal Media.

They hated him, they ignored him, they buried his message, and wrote him right out of the simple and exciting narrative of a two candidate race between an establishment woman and a fresh faced black man. Which was the story they always wanted to tell and was waaaaaay more interesting to them than writing all that boring blah, blah, blah whatever about falling median incomes and jobs going to Whereeverstan and something stinks and poor people are Americans, too, and whatever!

Let's talk about what's really important in this campaign: is Hillary showing more milky white cleavage these days to counter the fact that most voters think black guys have big dicks? Or maybe she's going totally lesbo with her staffers to triangulate and negate the big, black dick factor!

John Edwards may not have been the best Democratic candidate. I thought he was. But that's a personal preference, and come November I'll gladly, gleefully pull the lever for either Obama or Clinton.

But the John Edwards' Presidency was not killed because of his campaign. It wasn't killed because his message didn't catch on. And it didn't die because of money or relevancy or hair cuts or mansions or any of that other bullshit.

His campaign died because all the pundits and all the politicos killed it. Because they hated it.

And his campaign died because, once again, the good people of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina--three states you'd have a hard time finding anyone else in the remaining 47 states saying are representative of America--got to have their ridiculously disproportionate say in who will be the next President of the United States.

For the Democrats, twenty three of the most populous states in the country have zero say in who is going to be the Democratic candidate until, election after election, the field is narrowed to two.

I live in one of the ten most populous states in the country, and, in the last twenty years, I have never been able to cast even a single vote in a Democratic primary.

But every four years, the people of Iowa have a slate of six or seven or eight candidates.

The people of New Hampshire can vote for any number of candidates.

The people of South Carolina get to cast the deciding votes on whoever's left from Iowa and New Hampshire.

And the other forty seven states have to go along.

Otherwise, their delegates get stripped and they have to go along, anyway.

And afterwards, Time Magazine explains to you that the vote that 98% of you never got to cast for the candidate you never got to see 93% of the time was a clear indication that some message you never got to hear just didn't resonate with Americans.