brainrow

Political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow gives us neocon regrets after five years of war in Iraq.

The beat goes on.

This is why I could never be president. I was never any good at sports.

Update: Major League Baseball claimed copyright and made YouTube take the video down. Way to go, Major League Baseball!

These folks claim to run a test of the amount of cussing on a website, but I don’t think this score truly captures the seething rage that fuels this blog. I guess I’m keeping it bottled up. I could blow sky-high at any moment.

(Via A Blog Around the Clock.)

Colorado Jyms is feeling down:

[F]rom time to time the facts seem to stack up and I cannot put a positive spin on the things I see.

1) Oil prices continue to climb which in all likelihood means we have past ‘peak oil’ and there is no more cheap oil for us to drill.

2) Even if there was cheap oil to be found, having a chunk of Antarctica the size of 7 Manhattans drop into the water is a good indication that we have already past the point of easy remedies.

3) The party that is supposed to save the day by a landslide of votes indicating the country is truly ready for change, ready to stop the war in Iraq, to start making real environmental progress cannot find a candidate to run for president.

4) The country is spiraling into a recession.

5) Do I really need to find any more reasons? Climate change, end of cheap oil, recession, no savior to save the day. That pretty much sums it up.

Game over.

I posted a comment on Jyms’ site, and I’ll repeat it here:

I’ve been in this same mood lately, myself. It’s not useful.

It’s true we’re facing serious problems. President Kennedy famously said, “When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

Did you notice how Barack Obama, confronted with embarrassing video of inflammatory remarks by his pastor, didn’t act just to limit the political damage to himself? He confronted danger, and he seized opportunity: he moved the ball down the field on the issue of race in America.

The Democrats have found a candidate to run for president. You’ll see.

This is going to be a tough century here on planet earth. Terrible things are going to happen. Terrible things have happened throughout history, and humans have always found a way to turn crisis into opportunity, and build a new world on the ruins of the old. They don’t wait for a savior to save the day; they step up and save it themselves. Leaders emerge. Years later, they’re remembered as saviors. In the moment, they’re just struggling along with everyone else.

You’re right about “game over,” though. The old game is over. As you said, we’re past the point of easy remedies. All the choices now are tough ones. We can’t afford to play around anymore. There’s work to be done.

Maureen Dowd wonders whether the Clinton strategy is Hillary or Nobody:

Even some Clinton loyalists are wondering aloud if the win-at-all-costs strategy of Hillary and Bill — which continued Tuesday when Hillary tried to drag Rev. Wright back into the spotlight — is designed to rough up Obama so badly and leave the party so riven that Obama will lose in November to John McCain.

If McCain only served one term, Hillary would have one last shot. On Election Day in 2012, she’d be 65.

Why else would Hillary suggest that McCain would be a better commander in chief than Obama, and why else would Bill imply that Obama was less patriotic — and attended by more static — than McCain?

Sure. Another four years of war in Iraq, another four years of right-wing judicial appointments, another four years of inaction on health care, another four years of “millionaires first” tax cuts and ruinous deficits — all those are a small price to pay to get the Clintons back into the White House. Wreck the party! Wreck the country! Wreck the whole planet! Hillary must rule!

Hillary Clinton on Jeremiah Wright:

“I think given all we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said in a news conference in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

Well, of course he wouldn’t.

Wherever Hillary Clinton goes, whoever she meets, whatever she says or does, there is one thought always foremost in her mind: How will this play in Peoria?

If she picks her friends based on whether they can help her politically, don’t you suppose she would pick her pastor the same way?

Hey, that’s why she voted to authorize the War in Iraq. Who cared whether Saddam really had the WMDs? The war looked quick and easy, and it was popular as hell at the time, so there was no need to actually look at the National Intelligence Estimate. Gallup had all the necessary intelligence for Clinton’s decision.

When polls showed Americans turning against the war, so did she. If she wins the Democratic nomination, you can rest assured that she will continue to oppose the war for as long as the political winds are blowing that way — at least, until Election Day.

Via Cartoon Brew, this may be the real story of humanity.

It’s tough to break the cycle. Just look at Mr. Gandhi, Dr. King, Mr. Christ…

At the end of a PBS American Experience program about photographer Ansel Adams, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope summed up:

Well, Ansel’s life encompasses the long national debate — the debate that, I think, began ten years before he was born with the release of the Census of 1890, the declaration that the frontier had closed, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous challenge to the American people: who were we going to be now that we didn’t have a frontier anymore?

And Ansel’s life occupied almost exactly a century in which Americans debated that question, and at the end of the century came to Ansel’s answer, which was that while the frontier as a statistically measured artifact of the Census Bureau might have ended, wildness did not end with the frontier, and that what it was to be an American was to respect and cherish wildness.

…

I think Ansel captured in film that opportunity, that possibility which Americans spent all of his lifetime debating whether to value. And then, really almost at the end of his life, Americans decided that we wanted to be Americans. We did not want a second Europe. We wanted a place that was still wild.

The difficulty with protecting wild places is that you can’t win the victory once and for all. Every day, there is pressure to allow logging or drilling or other exploitation of wilderness lands. We can turn the developers away a hundred times, but they’ll be back, over and over, until there are no wild places anywhere.

Such things, once lost, can never be recovered. Never.

We’ve reached another milestone in Iraq:

The number of United States military personnel killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion five years ago has passed the 4,000 mark.

The latest to die were four soldiers whose patrol vehicle was blown up by a bomb in southern Baghdad on Sunday.

President George W Bush offered his “deepest sympathies” to the families of US military personnel killed in Iraq.

Separately, the bodies of two US security contractors kidnapped in Iraq more than a year ago have been found.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had recovered the remains of Ronald Withrow, who was seized in January 2007, and John Roy Young, abducted in November 2006.

On Sunday, insurgent attacks and military operations left at least 47 people dead across Iraq.

The bloodshed comes despite an overall reduction in violence since last June, following the US deployment of an extra 30,000 troops in violence-hit areas – the so-called “troop surge”.

Another hundred years of this war, as John McCain suggests, and this won’t seem so bad.

Update: The New York Times has a database of the lost lives. Each pixel represents one soldier. Click to see different faces.

James Carville on Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Barack Obama:

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

Oooh! Classy!

Carville was one of the upstart political geniuses who ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. Two years after the Clinton political brain trust took over the national Democratic Party, the Republicans won substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. From then until 2006, the best Democratic showing in Congressional elections came in 2000, when they won a 50-50 tie with Republicans in the Senate — a tie that was immediately broken in favor of Republicans by Dick Cheney.

In 2006, Democratic strategists considered how best to fight their way back. Clinton-aligned strategists like Carville and Rahm Emanuel argued that Democrats had to concentrate their limited resources on a small handful of races where Democratic chances looked best. Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, had a different idea: give the Republicans a fight for every seat. It might produce some surprises, and even in districts and states where Democrats were defeated, the fact that the party was in there fighting might plant some seeds that would bear fruit in years to come.

Dean’s strategy helped Democrats regain control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections. Immediately, Carville called for Dean’s resignation, saying “I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its incompetence.”

Really? Democrats win Congress for the first time in 12 years, and you say the guy responsible is incompetent?

You know, I don’t think Carville has any business calling anyone Judas.

Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. The Daily Show reviews the first five years of the War in Iraq:

Perhaps, to view this war as a success, we have to look at it the way the president does: backwards.

And they bring us “Dick Cheney, International Man of Misery.”

The great British actor Paul Scofield has died. Here’s a short scene from A Man for All Seasons, in which Scofield played Sir Thomas More.

Roper: So, now you give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

Obama calls for a national dialogue on race. Jon Stewart looks at how the cable news channels respond.

This video contains bad language. Normally, I wouldn’t post it on this blog, but in this case, the bad language is used to make a serious point about 90% of our political discourse.

My cable TV was knocked out all day yesterday. That meant I lost internet access, too.

I knew Barack Obama was scheduled to make an important speech on race and religion, but I couldn’t watch it on TV. I couldn’t read a transcript. I couldn’t hear or read what anyone was saying about the speech. I was fidgety all day. When a friend called late last night to ask whether I had seen Obama’s incredible speech, he just made the withdrawal symptoms worse.

The cable guy restored my service this morning.

I found the text of the speech:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the OJ trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina — or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

…

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.

…

It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Here’s the entire speech:

That guy looks like a President of the United States. And a pretty good one, too.