Category: Stupid

Democracy Taken to Stupid Extremes

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Ummm…This has fiasco written all over it.

On the other hand, Shatner and Nimoy are sure to get Knighthoods.

Brown calls for e-petitions to get debated in Parliament
By Chris Williams
Published Wednesday 4th July 2007 15:22 GMT

Gordon Brown has thrown caution to the web, and called for a new e-petitions system which would force Parliament to debate issues popular with internet users.

Buried in a wide-ranging parliamentary statement on constitutional reform yesterday, he said: “I also encourage this House to agree a new process for ensuring consideration of petitions from members of the public.”

In a later briefing with journalists, the Prime Minister’s spokesman explained that a consultation would be held on setting the threshold figure at which a parliamentary debate would be triggered by petitions.

As evidence for the consultation, we’d submit the fact that according to the 2001 census, 390,000 Britons claim to belong to the Jedi religion. Perhaps quite a high threshold would be best, then.

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Morons Who Get Elected:EU Edition

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Well, it looks like the US hasn’t cornered the market on stupid.

EC wants to suppress internet bomb-making guides
By Lewis Page
Published Wednesday 4th July 2007 13:49 GMT

The European Commission (EC) has announced plans to frustrate terrorism by suppressing online guides on bomb-making.

“It should simply not be possible to leave people free to instruct other people on the internet on how to make a bomb – that has nothing to do with freedom of expression,” EC vice president Franco Frattini said yesterday.
Mr Frattini is “responsible for Freedom, Security and Justice.”

If this guy were responsible for generating electricity from George Orwell spinning in his grave, he’d be doing his job well.

His current job? …. Not so much.

When asked how the EC planned to suppress web bomb manufacture instructions hosted outside EU borders, it appeared that officials planned to act at the level of ISPs in Europe.

The Times quoted a commission spokesman as saying: “You always need a provider here that gives you access to websites. They can decide technically which websites to allow. Otherwise, how would China block internet sites? There are no technological obstacles, only legal ones.”
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Holding up China as a model of internet access????? Puhleeze.

Starting World War III By Mistake

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Let’s see the problems here:

  • This makes a conventional attack indistinguishable from a nuclear one, increasing the possibility of a nuclear response.

  • It makes arms control agreements next to impossible to enforce, though that might be the goal of Bush and his evil minions™, they have always opposed arms control agreements.

Navy, Air Force Explore Conventional Strike Options (Subscription Required)

Aviation Week & Space Technology
07/02/2007, page 32

Amy Butler
Los Angeles and Sunnyvale, Calif.

The Pentagon is looking for non-nuclear strike options, prompting new demos

Printed headline: Hardly Conventional

The U.S. Air Force and Navy are preparing different approaches to solving a gap in the nation’s ability to deliver a conventional payload to strike any target on the globe within one hour of a go-ahead.

The Navy is looking to its Trident II D5 submarine-launched missile, while the Air Force is considering a land-based design using decommissioned Peacekeeper and Minuteman rocket motors on a Minotaur launch vehicle tipped with a conventional munition.

U.S. Strategic Command chief, Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright–the White House’s pick for the next vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff–says he needs this capability to react to a variety of threats without having to rely on basing rights or nuclear weapons. The target set could include anything from activities deserving of a preemptive strike–such as an anti-satellite threat–or a reaction to real-time intelligence on terrorist elements.

And this makes it even worse:

The Navy notionally plans to dedicate two of 24 tubes in each of 14 Ohio-class submarines to the conventional Trident mission. The remaining tubes would continue to carry the nuclear-armed versions.

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There is a sub launched ballistic missile headed toward you. You have nukes. Is it targeting you, or someone else? Is it conventional or nuclear?

You have 5 minutes to choose a response.

NASA Boondoggle

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If useful work were being done there, they would be fighting applicants off with a stick.

They are begging for people to find uses for that white elephant.

NASA Seeks Outside ISS Users (Subscription Required)
NASA Seeks Outside ISS Users
Aviation Week & Space Technology
07/02/2007, page 24

Frank Morring, Jr.
Washington

Half of U.S. rack space on station unfilled; NASA seeks outside users

Printed headline: Space Available

NASA is giving away half of its space on the International Space Station. The question is whether anyone will be able to get there to use it.

As the ISS enters the final stretch of its buildout to completion before the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010, NASA managers are offering the use of roughly 11 refrigerator-sized experiment racks inside the station’s pressurized modules, and perhaps four external sites, free of charge. The catch is that users will have to get their experiments to the ISS at their own expense.

“We’re not going to require users of the station to pay a fee for access to the laboratories,” says Mark Uhran, assistant associate administrator for ISS in NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. “What we expect the new entities to cover is the cost of their own research, the cost of the payload devices. We’re still working the challenges with the transportation costs because obviously we don’t know precisely what those transportation costs are going to be.”

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Just When I Thought That They Could Not Get Any Stupider

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Un-Dirtyword-believable.

This is so stupid, it shocks me, and I though I had become inured to stupidity flowing from Shrub’s mouth.

Bush cites Israel as model for Iraq

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 3 minutes ago

President Bush held up Israel as a model for defining success in Iraq Thursday, saying the U.S. goal there is not to eliminate attacks but to enable a democracy that can function despite violence.

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Still, he laid out in some of his plainest terms yet how to define when the U.S. presence in Iraq has achieved its goals.

“Our success in Iraq must not be measured by the enemy’s ability to get a car bombing in the evening news,” he said. “No matter how good the security, terrorists will always be able to explode a bomb on a crowded street.”

He suggested Israel as a model.

There, Bush said, “Terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it’s not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that’s a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq.”

It was likely to be controversial — and possibly even explosive — for Bush to set out Israel as a model for a Muslim Middle Eastern nation. Israel has been locked for decades in an intractable dispute with Palestinians in the neighboring occupied territories, a conflict that is viewed as a major recruiting tool for Islamic extremist groups like al-Qaida.

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Iraqi Ally Takes Money and Runs

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Courtesy of Abu Aardvark.

Abu Aardvark: Anbar Salvation Council head skips town?

This story from al-Malaf is currently the talk of the forums: Sitar Abu Risha, head of the Anbar Salvation Council, has allegedly fled Iraq with $75 million that the Americans had given him to fight al-Qaeda.

The article is in Arabic, which I cannot read, but it matches my cynicism.

We can’t even f&^%ing bribe people competently.

What a mess.

What Mr. Willis said

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One of the nice things about the blogosphere is that you can always find someone who makes the point you wanted to make better than you ever could.

In this case, it’s Oliver Willis (like Kryptonite to stupid).

Margaret Carlson Had A Column To Fill
A long time ago I used to believe that a lot of these people were just talking over my head, their discourse too lofty for a regular guy like myself. But that isn’t true. They’re just stupid.

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The Military’s Criminal Gang Problem

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This is what Iraq is doing to our military.

We are not just scraping the bottom of the barrel, we are training members of criminal gangs, and they will bring their skills back home.

Gangs of Iraq
Desperate to shore up its flagging ranks, the military is quietly enlisting thousands of active gang members and shipping them to Iraq. Will a brutal murder finally wake up the Pentagon?
By Seamus McGraw

e was groggy, thirsty, and in terrible pain. His bowels and kidneys felt like they were about to explode. Faint bruises, some the size of a soldier’s fist, others the size of a military-issue combat boot, were already forming on Sergeant Juwan Johnson’s skin. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.

It was almost a miracle he was able to stand, some of the soldiers who were with him that night would later recall. They were amazed he still had the blue bandanna clutched tightly in his fist. Things had gotten out of hand.

A ghost army of gangbangers presents a terrifying challenge for the military. It is “setting the stage for a disaster,” says one longtime military advisorOnly a few guys were supposed to be beating him—maybe three or four, definitely no more than six. They were men Johnson knew and trusted, soldiers he had fought with in Iraq. The beating was only supposed to go on for a minute or so. After all, they weren’t trying to kill him. They were trying to make him one of their own.

All he had to do was hold onto the blue rag and silently suffer through the slaps and kicks and punches. When it was over, he would become an official member of the Gangster Disciples, a man with connections all over the United States. Hell, all over the world.

But something had gone awry on that summer night at the Kaiserslautern Army Base in Germany. It seemed like everybody in that secluded pavilion, a grill house not far from the barracks, had taken turns pummeling the small young sergeant from Baltimore. In the frenzy, no one even knew for sure how long the assault had lasted.

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News Flash, Harvard Graduates a Complete Moron

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Let us just say that the writers at the Register are more deliciously snarkalicious than I ever could be.

Phyllis Schlafley, you raised a moron.

Need hard facts? Try Conservapedia

By Lester Haines
Published Wednesday 20th June 2007 10:50 GMT

The Wikipedians among you should take note that your days of punting liberal bias may be numbered. Enter stage right Conservapedia, a “conservative encyclopedia you can trust”, which has been enjoying a certain amount of attention stateside for its unashamedly and decidedly non-liberal content.

Conservapedia (Motto: “The truth shall set you free”) is the brainchild of Andy Schlafly, who was moved to act when “teaching a history class to home-schooled teens” and confronted with the term “BCE”, or “before the common era”, in one student’s assignment. “Where did that come from?” he asked, only to receive the chilling reply: “Wikipedia.”

At this moment, according to the LA Times, Schlafly “knew he had to act”. While Wikipedia was “written and edited by self-appointed experts worldwide” and “riddled with liberal bias”, it was also drier than a nun’s chuff in the Jesus Christ Our Lord department.

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Brits, meanwhile, will doubtless enjoy the entry on our very own Iron Lady, described as “a strong supporter of the the United States”, who was “a good friend of President Ronald Reagan”, and who united with him “in actions against the Communists”. Whether the latter is a reference to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government or the National Union of Mineworkers is not noted.

You have to love the snark on Maggie.

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The Stegosaurus, for example, was “a dinosaur with plates on its back and spines on its tail”. The entry continues: “Some creationists believe the spines on its tail were to stop other dinosaurs from treading on it before the Fall.”

Hmmm. Here’s more:

Young Earth Creationists believe, based primarily on Biblical sources, that dinosaurs were created on day 6 of the creation week, approximately 6,000 years ago, along with other land animals, and therefore co-existed with humans. As such, they reject the Theory of Evolution and the beliefs of evolutionary scientists about the age of the earth.

Bootnote

We at El Reg are looking forward to the final, Ragnarök (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k)-style confrontation between Conservapedia, RationalWiki and Wikipedia. The outcome of this titanic battle will be decided by either natural selection or according to God’s will, depending on which one of them is really telling the truth.

Texas cops taser diabetic seizure man

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What the hell is wrong with these cops?

Texas cops taser diabetic seizure man

By Lester Haines
Published Wednesday 20th June 2007 12:25 GMT

A Texas man who called 911 to request medical assistance for a diabetic seizure earned a tasering from local cops for his trouble, the Waxahachie Daily Light reports.

Allen Nelms, 52, was suffering said seizure “during the early morning hours of April 28 when his girlfriend, Josie Edwards, called 911 to request paramedics”.

A police officer duly turned up at the house on Waxahachie’s east side, “inquired as to what was going on”, then called for back-up. Shortly after, and as Nelms was “in his bed in the couple’s bedroom”, cops “burst in with their guns drawn and yelling at him to get on the floor”.

Edwards recalled “about six or seven police officers kicked the front door in and stormed the back bedroom where she said she could hear one telling Nelms to get on the floor”. Her statement, which forms part of an written complaint made by Nelms to the Waxahachie police department, says: “Allen was shouting, ‘Please don’t do me like this. I just need help.’ Next thing I heard some ‘zing’ noise and Allen was shouting. I asked what were they doing to him. One policeman replied, ‘We just took care of him.’ … After they did their shooting and laughing, they came out [of] the rooms. The paramedics had to pull out the Tasers.”

Nelms claims he was “struck by Taser barbs on his left side, his back and his shoulder” as he went to roll over, and subsequently handcuffed, with “paramedics intervening when the officers began trying to yank the Taser barbs from his skin”. The paramedics removed the barbs, checked Nelms’ blood sugar level, and the cuffs came off. He was neither arrested nor charged.

In an interview with the Daily Light, Nelms added: “One of the officers said I ‘lunged’ at him. I asked him, ‘How can I lunge at you from my back and on my bed?'” He said he had “never had a problem in calling for paramedics before, and there is no history of his becoming violent when he is having a diabetic seizure”.

Edwards’ statement says: “Of the 16 years that we [have] lived here and called for paramedics, police decide to come and take over and try to almost kill the man. They never asked any questions [like] did he have a heart pacer, they just wanted to have fun by shooting Tasers and handcuffing the man after he was shot.”

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School Administrators are Morons.

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13 Year olds are not adults, but this is infantilizing them, and possibly creating sociopaths out of them.

People need physical human contact, perhaps even more so children.

Va. School’s No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject

By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 18, 2007; Page B01

Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office.

Among his crimes: hugging.

All touching — not only fighting or inappropriate touching — is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: “NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!”

School officials say the rule helps keep crowded hallways and lunchrooms safe and orderly, and ensures that all students are comfortable. But Hal, 13, and his parents think the school’s hands-off approach goes too far, and they are lobbying for a change.

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Deborah Hernandez, Kilmer’s principal, said the rule makes sense in a school that was built for 850 students but houses 1,100. She said that students should have their personal space protected and that many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.

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No, you are just an uptight bitch.

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Hal’s troubles began one day in March when he got up from his assigned cafeteria table and went to a nearby table where his then-girlfriend was sitting. He admits he broke one rule — getting up from his assigned table without permission — and he accepts a reprimand for that. “The table thing, I’m guilty,” he said.

Assigned tables? Jesus H. Christ on a f%$#ing cracker!!!!! What the hell is wrong with these people.

These people won’t be satisfied until they have extracted every gram of humanity from their students.

These Morons Won’t Be Satisfied Until they Restart the Arms Race.

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Impeach them all now.

Dispute delays arms-control talks with Moscow

By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Wrangling between Bush administration aides and U.S. intelligence agencies is holding up talks with Moscow on future monitoring of the thousands of nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia still aim at one another.

The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) established the elaborate scheme of inspections, data sharing, advance missile test notifications and satellite surveillance. But the accord will expire in December 2009, and the U.S. spy satellites that locate and count Russian missile sites are stretched thin by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, concerns about North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs and other threats, current and former U.S. officials and experts said.

Administration policymakers argue that the monitoring system is an outdated vestige of the Cold War that restricts the Pentagon’s ability to respond to new threats. They want to replace it with an informal system of looser inspections that would allow the United States to do things such as replacing nuclear warheads with conventional warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry makes strict verification unnecessary, and the START monitoring methods aren’t foolproof, anyway, said senior administration official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Could members of the press Please stop using anonymous sources anonymity when they are spouting the admin line???

Really.

The end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry makes strict verification unnecessary, and the START monitoring methods aren’t foolproof, anyway, said senior administration official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

“We both (Moscow and Washington) want to understand the general trends and directions of each other’s forces. But we don’t need to know everything all the time,” the official said.

Alarmed by the stress on the limited fleet of U.S. spy satellites, however, U.S. intelligence agencies oppose weakening the on-site inspections and other means that give U.S. officials a window into the only nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the United States.

What they are saying here is that between, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and the DPRK (North Korea), their resources are stretched thin.

If it’s not replaced, Moscow and Washington will lose the most reliable means of monitoring each others’ compliance with the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which calls for both sides to reduce the number of warheads on their bombers, long-range missiles and submarines to 2,200 by Dec. 31, 2012. After that, neither side will be bound by limits on its arsenal.

Moreover, because the SORT treaty doesn’t require the destruction of warheads, those removed from service and stored in reserve stockpiles could be redeployed rapidly.

So this is even More destabilizing than it appears at first glance.

Russia wants a legally binding treaty mandating deeper weapons reductions. The United States favors an informal deal, opposes new weapons cuts and wants to eliminate strict verification measures.

So now we’re acting like the old Soviets.

John Bolton, who served as the administration’s top arms control official until August 2005, said it would be better to increase spending on U.S. intelligence than to rely on START-type verification to monitor Russia’s nuclear forces.

If John Bolton is for something, you won’t ever lose money going the other way. The man is a moron.

Impeach Antonin Scalia

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Impeach him now.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

With real, and counter productive, torture going on RIGHT NOW, authorized at the highest levels of government, this twit has to use a bit of schlock TV, because he just wants to torture people.

What would Jack Bauer do?
Canadian jurist prompts international justice panel to debate TV drama 24’s use of torture

COLIN FREEZE

June 16, 2007

OTTAWA — Justice Antonin Scalia is one of the most powerful judges on the planet.

The job of the veteran U.S. Supreme Court judge is to ensure that the superpower lives up to its Constitution. But in his free time, he is a fan of 24, the popular TV drama where the maverick federal agent Jack Bauer routinely tortures terrorists to save American lives. This much was made clear at a legal conference in Ottawa this week.

Senior judges from North America and Europe were in the midst of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, when a Canadian judge’s passing remark – ‘Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’ ‘ – got the legal bulldog in Judge Scalia barking.”

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.
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Bloomberg Leaving Republican Party

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Great. Now we get to see Another exercise in political masturbation.

Seeing as we have a large number of people who won’t be able to bring themselves to vote Republithug this time around, this gives them a way NOT to vote Democratic.

Wanker.

Bloomberg Leaving Republican Party
By Sewell Chan
UPDATED, 8:01 p.m.

Michael R. Bloomberg, a longtime Democrat who switched to the Republican Party to run for mayor of New York City in 2001, announced this evening that he is changing his party status and registering as an independent. His office released this statement at 6:05 p.m. (EST):

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This guy is Too Stupid to Cut His Own Meat

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In fact, I’d be worried if he knows how to consume oatmeal.

Never heard of Rand McNally, huh. Or the fact that this imagery is available through third parties for less than the cost of a air of expensive chows.

Why the hell is he a Democrat? It’s too f&^%ing stupid to be a Democrat.

There are real issues of privace with some of the stuff that Google is doing, like it’s new “Street” program, and they seem have lost the word “Don’t” from their motto*, but this objection is just asinine.

Google Maps aids terrorists, NY lawmaker warns

‘It’s only a matter of time’
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Monday 11th June 2007 20:24 GMT

Adding to the chorus of critics who say detailed images on Google Earth can aid and abet terrorists and snoops, a New York state lawmaker is calling on the company to blur potential terrorist targets.

The plea from Assemblyman Mike Gianaris follows the alleged discovery earlier this month of a plot by a Muslim terrorist cell to blow up fuel tanks and a jet fuel pipeline at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Some of the suspects planning the attack had used Google-produced images clearly depicting airport infrastructure after surveillance video they secured proved inadequate, according to an indictment in the case.

“It’s only a matter of time before someone uses the information Google Earth provides to do this country harm,” Gianaris was quoted as saying in an article in the New York Post. He objects to the satellite images carried on Google Earth and Google Maps that gives detailed views of skyscrapers, airports and other potential terror targets.

Gianaris is only the latest individual to criticize Google for making available images that have the potential to violate national security, privacy or other vital interests. In addition to officials in the US, Australia, India and South Korea complaining about sensitive facilities being clearly visible in online mapping services, other critics warn the rich detail could trample civil liberties.

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*“Don’t be evil.” Is the Google motto.

Whiskey Fire: What Ther Said!

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What Thers says:

Buzzards and Dreadful Crows

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This is all my balls. Ezra Klein is perfectly right to judge people writing on foreign policy primarily on their stances towards real world issues. A discussion of “underlying beliefs or theories” in this context is absurd, given the horror of the Iraq debacle. If your “underlying beliefs or theories” made you stick your dick in the blender, even “reluctantly,” and you haven’t thoroughly reassessed these concepts, I frankly don’t want to hear your advice about what to do with the weed whacker.

The essay is crazy. The guy thinks the primary debate about foreign policy is between “pacifists” and “militarists” — as if the primary reason anyone opposed the war in Iraq was from a position of committed pacifism. Well, maybe a small minority did, and good for them. But most of us opposed the war in Iraq because it was obviously a stupid fucking idea. The administration was clearly spouting bullshit about why it was necessary and how much it would cost in money and lives.

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Anti-Hacking Laws Put Security at Risk

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This does not protect companies. Openness is the route to computer security. Security through obscurity is a sham.

Anti-hacking laws ‘can hobble net security’

Good Samaritans discouraged by threat of prosecution
By Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus
Published Monday 18th June 2007 09:52 GMT
Mobile computing: Opportunities and risk – Free whitepaper

Jeremiah Grossman has long stopped looking for vulnerabilities in specific websites, and even if he suspects a site to have a critical flaw that could be compromised by an attacker, he’s decided to keep quiet.

The silence weighs heavily on the web security researcher. While ideally he would like to find flaws, and help companies eliminate them, the act of discovering a vulnerability in any site on the internet almost always entails gaining unauthorised access to someone else’s server – a crime that prosecutors have been all too willing to pursue.

“I have long since curtailed my research,” said Grossman, who serves as the chief technology officer for website security firm WhiteHat Security. “Any web security researcher that has been around long enough will notice vulnerabilities without doing anything. When that happens, I don’t tell anyone, rather than risk reputational damage to myself and my company.”

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Ad Nags at it Again.

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Oh God! Ad Nags is at it again.

It seems to be endemic at the top of the Journalism food chain, like the NY Times, that any populism must be either political opportunism, or insanity.

They are over paid, and not generally threatened with outsourcing to India. We really need to change that. They are too fat and happy to cover the news honestly.

For John Edwards, he chooses opportunism, despite the fact that Edwards has been talking about this since before his LAST run for prez.

Asswipe.

Staking His Campaign on Iowa, Edwards Makes a Populist Pitch to the Left

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

TIPTON, Iowa, June 16 — Four years ago — facing what seemed to be a certain defeat in the Iowa Democratic caucuses — John Edwards recast his presidential campaign with weeks to go before the vote, unveiling an emotionally powerful speech about poverty that he delivered relentlessly across the state. Mr. Edwards came within a few thousand votes of victory. To this day, he tells associates he would have won with another week.

This year, Mr. Edwards has picked up where he left off in 2004. He visited 14 places in Iowa in the course of three days this weekend, an itinerary reflecting just how much he has settled on this state as the place where his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination will rise or fall.

Mr. Edwards’s latest trip here offered evidence of just how much he studied the lessons of his Iowa defeat last time, though he would prefer to view it as a near victory. It also suggests the extent to which the rhythms of Iowa Democratic politics have shaped Mr. Edwards’s decidedly different candidacy this time around.

This time, he is a candidate of the left in a state marked by a strong antiwar and liberal streak, filling a vacancy created as Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have campaigned from the center. Mr. Edwards has shown a new eagerness to draw contrasts with his opponents on issues like the war in Iraq and health care, in no small part motivated by his struggle not to get lost in a field of big names. And he has gone from the boyish, easygoing one-time senator from North Carolina to a candidate displaying an urgently engaging manner as likely to seize as to charm an audience, an approach that appears to be particularly effective in the close-quarter meetings that fill his days here.

Beyond that, Mr. Edwards is seeking to quell one line of criticism of him from 2004: that he was inexperienced and intellectually light. At every opportunity, he fairly leaps to offer a detailed response to a question, intended as much to provide a contrast to other candidates as to address any concerns about his own depth.

“Here’s what I think,” Mr. Edwards proclaimed repeatedly as he answered a welter of questions throughout the day, an introductory phrase that signaled a lengthy discussion on his opposition to the war in Iraq, his call for national health care or his view of terrorism.

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US Arming Sunni Insurgents In Iraq

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What is going on here is desparation as the situation collapses faster than the World Trade Centers did on September 11, 2001.

Gen. Petraeus concerned about US arming insurgents

06/17/2007 @ 11:34 am
Filed by David Edwards and Josh Catone

On Fox News Sunday General David H. Petraeus expressed concern about the new US plan to arm Iraqi Sunnis who promise only to fight al Qaeda.

“How do you know, or do you worry, that they are going to end up using those weapons to either attack US forces or to fight their civil war against the Shiites?” asked host Chris Wallace.

“Those are legitimate concerns,” replied Petraeus, but said that the US was taking precautions to prevent that from happening.

The Iraqi government has strongly objected to to the US strategy of arming Sunni insurgents. In a Newsweek interview published Saturday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blasted that strategy, saying that it “will create new militias.”

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BTW, the reason that al-Maliki objects is because it’s HIS militias, particularly those in Iraqi security forces uniforms, and not al Sadr’s that are engaging in most of the ethnic cleansing, and he is afraid that this will become more difficult because of arming the Sunnis.