One Utah

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come up with a terrific GOP strategy: shut down the government like they did in 1995.
What’s Gingrich mad about now? Congress hasn’t voted to lift a moratorium on new offshore oil drilling, which is a favor owed to the oil companies by the congressmen who took campaign [...]

Read the sad story in The New York Times about the Georgian retreat from South Ossetia, and you have to admit this fiasco is partly our fault– i.e. President George Bush’s fault.
One soldier, his face a mask of exhaustion, cradled a Kalashnikov.
“We killed as many of them as we could,” he said. “But [...]

It’s important to observe that the USA is not fighting a war in Iraq. The reason I say that is that it’s an occupation, and the fighting that takes place involving the U.S. military is all in support of the occupation. As far as I can tell, the Iraqis who are fighting Americans [...]

Russian T-90 tanks advancing on Tskhinvali in South Ossetia.
This is going to go down in history as one of those miscalculations that led straight to disaster. Here’s the story in brief, based on a well-written article in The Telegraph and a column by Edward Lucas in The Times:
Following the dissolution of the Soviet [...]

I could post a lot of words about how the presidential campaign is coming along, who’s ahead in the Electoral College, whether or not Obama flip-flopped as badly as McCain on offshore oil leasing, stuff like that. But I like graphs. Graphs are good.

Spencer Ackerman tackles the Bush administration’s Orwellian assault on the English language as it applies to Iraq:

Few governments have relied more on euphemism than the Bush administration. Euphemism is different from spin. Spin puts the best face forward on a given policy; euphemism uses its opposite to describe itself. Hence the Clear Skies Initiative to [...]

On Capitol Hill, GOP partisans representing Big Oil are staging political theater in support of more offshore petroleum leasing. Senator John McCain opposed offshore oil production for years but changed his position a few weeks ago in exchange for $1.1 million in campaign contributions. Never mind that market speculation and the Bush administration’s [...]

At “Camp Justice” in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the U.S. military is currently conducting the first American war crimes trial since World War II — of Salim Hamdan, a citizen of Yemen and a former driver for Osama bin Laden.
To call this proceeding a kangaroo court would run the risk of insulting marsupials everywhere.
From Glenn [...]

From Think Progress:
This morning, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) held a press conference to express their “pleasure” about President Bush’s statement this morning regarding what he described as “encouraging news from Iraq” and “the success of the surge.”

Warning! - malarkey levels unsafe for logical comprehension:
LIEBERMAN: That’s why Senator Graham and I [...]

President Bush now wants a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. I assumed you would read this while sitting, otherwise I apologize and I’ll give you a moment to get up off the floor…

“Kilroy was here”

Remember when anyone who favored withdrawal was accused of wanting to “surrender,” and betray the troops?
Senator [...]

USAF A-10 Warthog over Afghanistan
Via Think Progress:
According to statistics provided in a new report from the United States Institute of Peace, the use of air power in Afghanistan by U.S. and NATO allies increased from 5,000 pounds of munitions per month in 2005 to 168,000 pounds in December 2007. The result is that “civilian casualties [...]

I don’t know how many times we have to tell you people. The idea of fighting terrorism with law enforcement agencies belongs to an outmoded, naive September 10 mentality. People who think that Al Qaeda’s attacks on the USA could have been stopped by the FBI (if the top brass listened to their [...]