Obama and Chavez

The right wing blogs are going crazy over the picture of President Obama shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. Apparently this will lead to a complete and total dismantling of democracy and capitalism. The United States of America is done. Kaput.


But, any meetings with our "enemies" in the past are OK.

Nixon and Mao

Nixon and Brezhnev

Ford and Brezhnev

And my favorite, The Dishonorable Donald Rumsfeld and his buddy Saddam Hussein.

Iraq was using chemical weapons on their foe at the time, Iran.

What a Son of a Bitch

Wrapping up a nine-day overseas trip to Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, about the effect on the nation of today's grim milestone of at least 4,000 U.S. deaths over the five-year Iraq war.

Noting the burden placed on military families, the Vice President said the biggest burden is carried by President Bush, and reminded ABC news that the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan volunteered for duty.

Dick, I guess that they don't matter to you one fucking bit, do they?

Good Friday's Quick Quiz

For all of you that 1. love to hate the Dubya and/or 2. just like to take a quiz every now and then, here is are a few questions about what got us into this thing called Iraq.

The Surge

Apparently the "surge" is working. This press release from the Department of Defense explains one of the positive results.

Soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division’s 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, are working with Iraqi chicken farmers to help them improve their farms’ capabilities.

This Date in History

March 6, 2003: President held a news conference concerning Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Editor and Publisher has a column about that press conference.
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The small explosion at a Times Square military recruiting station has given the media something other than the election campaign to talk and write about today. This recruiting station cost you and I $1,000,000 for 520 feet of floor space and a bathroom. Or nearly $1925/square foot. I want one in my town!

$2,000,000,000,000

That's a whole bunch of zeroes isn't it? That is also what Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist and Robert Hormats, of Goldman Sachs International, project it will cost American taxpayers for the Iraq War (or the Intervention of Iraq, to save us from those nasty WMDs).

Bob Herbert of the New York Times explores this in a bit more detail here. An excerpt:

Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.