A Spork in the Drawer

Fun With Conservapedia!

Cubism:

Cubism is a type of painting (school of art) in which normal shapes of people or other subjects are painted in geometic forms.

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St. John

Breaking news:

John McCain will officially enter the presidential race — his second run after a bitter loss to George W. Bush in 2000 — with a formal announcement in early April.

I'm all a-tingle.

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The Tooth Fairy...

...is as real as health care for all:

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.

Yeah, I know this has been all over the Blogosphere since this morning but the mere idea that something like this could happen in the World's Richest Nation™ beggars the imagination.

Three-quarters of a billion dollars for war and we don't have $80 to pull a tooth.

God bless America.

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Here We Go Again

In a replay of 2000 the NYT's Maureen Dowd selectively edits an interview with Al Gore in order to make him look bad.

It looks like MoDo is sharpening her claws in case Gore decides to run. I can't figure out what her problem is; did Gore run over her puppy or something? Abandon her on a date? Or is Dowd just the High School Queen Bitch of the pundit class?

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And A Thousand Wingnut Heads Explode

Semper Fi:

Once a Marine, always a Marine. That pretty much sums up the life of retired Sgt. Eric Alva, who was sworn into the Marine Corps at 19, stationed in Somalia and Japan and lost his right leg when he stepped on a land mine on March 21, 2003, the first day of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As the war's first injured soldier, Alva was an instant celebrity. He was on "Oprah." President Bush awarded him the Purple Heart. Donald Rumsfeld visited. And strangers in Alva's native San Antonio still insist on paying for his dinner at Chili's. Last fall Alva, 36, contacted the Human Rights Campaign, the gay rights group, and asked to be involved in its lobbying effort. Today he'll stand alongside Rep. Martin Meehan (D-Mass.) when he introduces a bill to repeal the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay, lesbian and bisexual military personnel.

It goes without saying that Alva's heroism and sacrifice mean nothing because he's TEH GAY!

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg rips open another bag of Cheetoh's™.

[Via Aravosis.]

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Vile Sub-Human

VA Secretary Jim Nicholson:

WOODRUFF: You have mental disorders — 73,000; diseases of nervous system — 61,000; symtpoms, signs of ill-defined conditions — 7,000; diseases of musculoskeletal system — 87,000. These are numbers beyond the 23,000.

NICHOLSON: A lot of them come in for dental problems, others come in for a lot of the normal things that people have. We’re providing their healthcare. Some I suppose are because of their service over there. But they weren’t evacuated for that.

WOODRUFF: But they got some kind of injury, some kind of problem because of the war.

NICHOLSON: That’s possible, yes.

"That's possible, yes."

Everyone associated with this administration ought to be chucked into prison for the rest of their lives.

Video at link if you can stomach it.

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Incisive Analysis

Deep thoughts from the Daily Scaife:

That Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," a political screed on global warming, won an Oscar for "best documentary feature" shows how the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences knows the meaning of neither "documentary" nor "science."

Yes, that's the entire entry.

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Costs

The WaPo's Robert Samuelson:

To be sure, the war's costs have been huge. Since September 2001, Congress has provided $503 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan and related activities, says the Congressional Budget Office. The administration's request for fiscal 2007 (ending in September) and fiscal 2008 would bring the total to $746 billion. Iraq represents about 70 percent of that. By contrast, my original column put the cost of an Iraq war at up to $80 billion. That was based on the cost then of the war in Afghanistan ($10 billion), the cost of the Persian Gulf War ($61 billion) and the expectation that another invasion would involve fewer troops (it did).

This reminds me of former White House economic adviser Larry Lindsay:

When White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey stumbled off message in September 2002 with his prediction that war could cost $100 billion to $200 billion, the administration flew into crisis mode. Budget Director Mitch Daniels was trotted out to label the estimate "very, very high." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz opined -- in testimony to Congress, no less -- that reconstruction would cost virtually nothing in light of Iraq's promising oil revenues. Daniels proffered an estimate in the $50 billion to $60 billion range, substantially less than the $80 billion inflation-adjusted cost of the Persian Gulf War. Lindsey, famously, was soon after fired -- for his troublesome cost estimates and, reportedly, the President's annoyance at his poor personal fitness habits.

Ah, yes, for the innocent days of 2002-2003 when everything was about to come up roses (flowers and sweets!) and those of us who said "hey, wait a minute" were at best ignored and called "traitors" at worst. Happily, those people learned from their mistakes.

Right?

RIGHT!?

(And I had forgotten about George's disgust with Lindsay's "poor personal fitness habits." Our president is a loon, y'know.)

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Diplomacy!?

From BushCo™?

The United States agreed yesterday to join high-level talks with Iran and Syria on the future of Iraq, an abrupt shift in policy that opens the door to diplomatic dealings the White House had shunned in recent months despite mounting criticism.

[...]

The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.

Field Marshal von Rumsfeld, since tossed overboard, infamously said, "we don't do diplomacy." But that was then.

Robert Parry:

But one source told me that the resistance – from the Pentagon, Blair and even Democrats in Congress – appears to be having an effect on Bush’s decision-making. This source said he believed Bush had planned to launch an attack on Iran, possibly as early as this week, but was getting “weak knees.”

If this is true it's worth noting that Delusional Dick is overseas and thus not able to whisper into George's ear. Maybe he'll stay gone.

As Churchill said, to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

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Wednesday Boot

Well well well, this week Max is feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders. Given that there's a lot of invading and occupying to do he's sad that our allies - especially Perfidious Albion - just don't have that martial spirit:

TONY BLAIR'S decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from Iraq is understandable. The prime minister had to make a difficult decision about where to allocate Britain's scarce resources, and he decided, reasonably enough, that the top priority was to send reinforcements to Afghanistan, where 5,500 British troops are struggling to hold back a Taliban onslaught.

The tragedy is that he had to rob Peter to pay Paul because Britain can't maintain 7,000 troops in Iraq and 7,000 in Afghanistan. Those are hardly huge numbers for a country of 60 million with the fifth-largest national economy in the world. Yet even as Britain has continued to play a leading role in world affairs, it has allowed its defenses to molder.

[...]

Even worse hit is the Royal Navy, which is at its smallest size since the 1500s. Now, British newspapers report, of the remaining 44 warships, at least 13 and possibly as many as 19 will be mothballed. If these cuts go through, Britain's fleet will be about the same size as those of Indonesia and Turkey and smaller than that of its age-old rival, France.

Y'see, Max, the UK is no longer an empire. They don't need a huge military. Unless Argentina invades the Falkland Islands again it's unlikely the Brits will go to war except out of some misguided loyalty to the US.

This shortfall has serious repercussions not only for those countries but for the United States. With about 165,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and more on the way, we are seriously overstretched ourselves. We need as much help as we can get, but there isn't much more that our allies could do, even if they wanted to.

[...]

Unless the other NATO members are willing to step up their spending — and what are the odds of that? — there is scant chance that their gripes about American unilateralism will ever be rectified. We act alone, or almost alone, not out of choice but out of necessity.

Our armed forces are "seriously overstretched" because of one man's daddy issues. That's a job for a psychologist not the Royal Army. And the complaints about American unilateralism have more to do with our imperial ambitions than with "necessity."

But shoulders slumping and a great weight on his mind Max soldiers on alone...so alone....

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