General Dismay

If *any* number of egregious errors of Rumsfeld et. al., as reported by the Generals of our nation's military forces, could *possibly* make the administration's defenders change their mind, I'd like to know how much more it would take than these critics:

• Major General John Batiste, commander of a division in Iraq - "I believe we need a fresh part in the Pentagon."
  
• Marine Lt. General Gregory Newbold, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff - "We need fresh ideas and fresh faces. That means, as a first step, replacing Rumsfeld .."
  
• Army Major General Paul Eaton, overseer of training of Iraqi troops - "Rumsfeld must step down."
  
• General Charles Swannack, Commander 82nd Airborne - "We need a new secretary of defense."
  
• Marine General Anthony Zinni, CENTCOM commander - Asked who should step down "The Secretary of defense to begin with."
  
• Major General Jon Riggs - ">“They only need the military advice when it satisfies their agenda. I think that’s a mistake, and that’s why I think he should resign.”
  
• Army General Eric Shinseki
  

You can dismiss complaints from Pete, as a partisan against Bush. But I'd urge anyone who cares more about the country and our military men and women to read the extent and breadth of the comments below from generals of our military forces, and tell me then if they don't think Rumsfeld et. al. are a serious, serious problem.

• 'For that reason, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent statement that "we" made the "right strategic decisions" but made thousands of "tactical errors" is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting the blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it.' (Newbold)
  
• I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq - which could happen if this isn't done carefully - is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now ... I don't think these questions have been thought through or answered," (Zinni)
  
• "The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood. We need fresh ideas and fresh faces, and that means as a first step, replacing Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach." (Newbold)
  
• "In sum, he has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to America's mission in Iraq. Rumsfeld must step down." (Eaton)
  
• "I think we are paying the price for the lack of credible planning, or the lack of a plan. We're throwing away 10 years worth of planning, in effect, for underestimating the situation we were going to get into, for not adhering to the advice that was being given to us by others, and, I think, getting distracted from Afghanistan and the war on terrorism that we were committed to when we took on this adventure." (Zinni)
  
• "I think we need senior military leaders who understand the principles of war and apply them ruthlessly, and when the time comes, they need to call it like it is. (Swannack)
  
• "We grow up in a culture where accountability, learning to accept responsibility, admitting mistakes and learning from them was critical to us. When we don't see that happening it worries us. (Zinni)
  
• "I think that our executive and legislative branches of government have a responsibility to mobilize this country for war. They frankly have not done so. We're mortgaging our future, our children, $8 to $9 billion a month." (Batiste)
  
• "And I believe he has culpability associated with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and, so, rather than admitting these mistakes, he continually justifies them to the press ... and that really disallows him from moving our strategy forward." (Swannack)
  
• "Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his Cold Warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower. As a result, the U.S. Army finds itself severely undermanned - cut to 10 active divisions but asked by the administration to support a foreign policy that requires at least 12 or 14." (Eaton)
  
• We just heard the secretary of state say these were tactical mistakes. They were not tactical mistakes. These were strategic mistakes, mistakes of policies made back here." (Zinni)
  
• When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military's effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war. Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent. The consequence of the military's quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort. (Batiste)
  
• "Only General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff when President George W. Bush was elected, had the courage to challenge the downsizing plans. So Rumsfeld retaliated by naming Shinseki's successor more than a year before his scheduled retirement, effectively undercutting his authority. The rest of the senior brass got the message, and nobody has complained since." (Eaton)
  
• "Everyone pretty much thinks Rumsfeld and the bunch around him should be cleared out.” (Riggs)
  
• "I think America's media is being made a scapegoat for what's going on out there. At last count, I think something like 80 journalists have been killed in Iraq." (Zinni)
  
• Rumsfeld himself, responding to Generals saying it would take 200,000 troops to control Iraq after Saddam's downfall: "wildly off the mark...I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down."
  
• "Donald Rumsfeld is not competent to lead America's armed forces." (Eaton)
  

Selling the Soul of America to the Devil

That's what conservative, fundamentalist Christians have done, in the name of electing an administration and congress that would support their specific religious agendas of anti-abortion and removal of the wall between church and state. Oh, if those outcomes were the only thing they bought for our soul, I might even make the trade! Instead, they have sold our souls for tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of wounded, corruption as far as the eye can see in the Republican congress, a deficit that has surpassed our ability, EVER, to repay it, global warming run rampant, failed diplomacy and loss of respect around the world, and an incompetent, lying baffoon sitting in the oval office with his finger on the button.

Well, thank you very much. I hope you're happy. And all to get yourselves two more seats on the Supreme Court. Congratulations. It really must be worth it, eh? If I and those like me bear the blame for Bill Clinton and his weanie, you bear the blame for all this.

Here's a question: Do you really think GOD is happy about all this? Really? REALLY? God wants to melt the polar ice caps? God wants 71 innocent Iraqis blown up in a mosque while worshiping him? God likes it when our leaders lie? For shame.

Spot the Changes!

World's Largest Satanic Society to Meet

ST. LOUIS (AP) - If a satanic issue has made headlines, chances are that satanists will be talking about it as the world's largest satanic society meets in St. Louis.

The American Association for the Advancement of Satanism expects up to 9,000 satanists, journalists, policy makers and citizens to converge here and examine issues including Katrina, stem cell research, evolution and global warming. About 200 meetings and lectures are planned during the five-day meeting, which was scheduled to begin Thursday night.

Dr. Gilbert Omenn, president of AAAS, said the public's understanding of satanism is a crucial element of heated political, social, religious and technical debates.

"Satanic thinking is absolutely essential to preserving democracy," Omenn said.

Cheney Bares it all on Fox News

Well, Pete, it wasn't on Rush's show, and Brit never leveled a question to Cheney about how the liberal press was blowing the whole thing out of proportion, but Cheney did manage to slip this in:

CHENEY: Well, Scott does a great job and it's a tough job. It's especially a tough job under these conditions and circumstances. I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times. But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major story in south Texas.

HUME: Well, perhaps so....

Complete transcript at:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,185012,00.html

And don't stop after that part, at the very end of the interview, Hume asks Cheney probably the most interesting question of the day. You can tell right away that Hume is setting Cheney up to offer an alibi in case Cheney is indicted for leaking classified information (on Plame or whatever):

HUME: Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a vice president has the authority to declassify information?

CHENEY: There is an executive order to that effect.

HUME: There is.

CHENEY: Yes.

HUME: Have you done it?

CHENEY: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --

HUME: You ever done it unilaterally?

CHENEY: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president.

The Official List of Bands that SUCK

The list of Grammy winners is now up on Grammy.com, and it lets me see who definitely SUCKS this year. Also, note that I only care about the Pop/Rock categories.

As a first reminder, the Evans Law of Grammy Awards states, "If your band wins a Grammy, you suck." There are no exceptions to this law, which is why it's a law, not a theory. If you disagree with the law, too bad. You might as well try disagreeing with gravity. If you really, really disagree with the law, you should know that you are mistaken.

Second, the Evans Law of Grammy Awards only applies to a band's CURRENT work (that which has been nominated). So, for example, if the Rolling Stones win a Grammy this year, it does not mean they sucked in 1964, just now (and mostly since 1973).

Third, the Evans Law of Grammy Awards does not work in reverse. That is, if your band, though nominated, does NOT win a Grammy, that does NOT mean you DON'T suck. Of course, it doesn't mean you DO suck either.

So here are my observations on the winners:

For Record of the Year, Green Day and their album, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" SUCK. My son will probably disagree, but there you have it.

For Album of the Year, U2 and their "How to Dismantel an Atomic Bomb" SUCK. See below for more U2 sucking.

For Song of the Year, U2 also SUCKS.

For Best New Artist, somebody named John Legend SUCKS.

For Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, Kelly Clarkson SUCKS. Sheryl Crow, however, does not necessarily suck.

For Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Stevie Wonder SUCKS, though Paul McCartney may not.

For Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal, Maroon 5 SUCKS. The White Stripes narrowly escaped sucking here (though they aren't so lucky later on).

For Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals, it turns out that Gorillaz (featuring De La Soul) SUCK. This was a surprise to me, as I actually like the song, "Feel Good Inc." Still, the LAW is the LAW. I must be mistaken about it. It really must SUCK. (See how this works?)

The next couple of awards are for pop instrumentals, but I don't care about those. Skipping ahead...

For Best Pop Vocal Album, the SUCKER is... Kelly Clarkson ("Breakaway"). See? THE LAW KNOWS ALL!

Dance and Traditional Pop? Who cares.

Here we go:

For Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance, Bruce Springsteen SUCKS, but Neil Young may not.

For Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal, U2 SUCKS.

To save time, U2 also sucks for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Album. Again! The Law works!

Here's one that really shook me to the core: For Best Hard Rock Performance, System of a Down SUCKS. Now I know, this is hard to accept. But think of it this way: Grammys are awarded to bands that have, in some way, appeased the faceless corporate taskmasters who rule modern music distribution. In some way, System of a Down has, therefore, demeaned itself. It has sunk to the zipper-level of corporate greed, so to speak, and performed its duty. I don't like to say that. I like every single song I've ever heard from SOD, but there you go. In this category, you can look upon the other nominees as having dodged a bullet. They include Audioslave, Nine Inch Nails, Robert Plant, and Queens of the Stoneage. Chris Cornell of Audioslave knows all about this. Soundgarden's big album of the nineties, "Superunknown," won a Grammy. That was a clear signal that Soundgarden had moved too close to the mainstream. To their credit, they broke up soon after. THE LAW AFFECTS ALL!

Next, for Best Metal Performance, Slipknot SUCKS.

Another shocker: For Best Alternative Music Album, The White Stripes SUCK. See my lament for System of a Down, above. The message is equally as clear for the Stripes: Get away from the center! BEWARE THE LAW!

The rest of the awards are for R&B, rap, and other musical categories that I just don't listen to.

Some Larger Questions Behind the Bush Abuses

About three years ago, while my team was working on an e-mail system for a large financial corporation, we met with the makers of a product that made responding to customer e-mail more efficient by applying fancy logic to automatically match the customer's e-mail to our set of pre-defined answers. The package applied Natural Language Programming (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) logic to the e-mail text, and would continually learn, as human beings -- customers and call center agents -- confirmed or disconfirmed its guesses. The result was that the application could find relevant information where humans would not have guessed -- e.g. sometimes as little as the tense or conjugations used could be relevant factors in understanding what the customer wanted to know.

During this particular meeting, the CEO and founder of the company, an ex-Israeli Intelligence agent, dropped the fact that their product was used by one nation's government to monitor large amounts of e-mail, looking for clues to anti-government activities. Of course he would not tell us which nation, though my friend Sudhir, who is much better at reading between the lines than I, later told me with some confidence that it was the Phillipines. In any case, it went without saying that it must be a relatively totalitarian regime -- one without anything like the civil rights protections and concern for individual liberties of the United States.

Since then we have learned that similar systems are being used to monitor thousands of communications of Americans with persons overseas without a warrant. The Bush administration has tried to lead citizens to believe that these are only calls involving al Qaeda suspects, but we can logically conclude that the surveillance has extended well beyond the kind of linkages we would normally associate with such phrases, let alone the legal definition of "probable cause." Further, this sort of data minining is aimed less at monitoring known suspects and more at *identifying* suspects -- from data trends human beings alone would normally not notice. Putting aside, for the moment, the apparent lack of productiveness of this NSA tapping and the administration's self-serving deceptions, there *should* be a robust debate about this topic, involving the administration, the Congress, and ultimately, the American people.

That is, given that we can have in place checks and balances consistent with the Constitution and a reasonable barrier to abuse, how willing should we be to let software cull vast numbers of communications for patterns -- *before* the communicating parties are likely suspects in any criminal behaviors -- in order to diminish the odds of egregious crimes? What kind of "hit rate" would be needed to justify the intrusion? If no human looked at particular message (and the old "corpus" of messages would eventually be destroyed) until computer analysis revealed that at least party was 40% likely to be involved in planning terrorist activities, would it be acceptable for the computers to monitor *all* voice and email communications? 60% likely? 90% likely? If the system could identify an estimated 2 terrorist planners a year, would that justify computers sifting through everyone's electronic communications? How should we modify the laws (or even the Constitution?) to deal with these scenarios?

One thing that I hope we all agree upon is that we should not simply give the President the ability to describe some scenario as being "at war" and subsequently ignoring any laws or checks as long as he simply tells us it's in the interest of national security. But we should be making some open decisions based on a slippery continua of rights and safety. Where would you draw the line?