Krugman ia spot on, again.

Hired Gun Fetish

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as “useless and dangerous” more than four centuries ago.

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Yet even among the contractors, Blackwater has the worst reputation. On Christmas Eve 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee reportedly shot and killed a guard of the Iraqi vice president. (The employee was flown out of the country, and has not been charged.) In May 2007, Blackwater employees reportedly shot an employee of Iraq’s Interior Ministry, leading to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police.

Iraqis aren’t the only victims of this behavior. Of the nearly 4,000 American service members who have died in Iraq, scores if not hundreds would surely still be alive if it weren’t for the hatred such incidents engender.

Which raises the question, why are Blackwater and other mercenary outfits still playing such a big role in Iraq?

Don’t tell me that they are irreplaceable. The Iraq war has now gone on for four and a half years — longer than American participation in World War II. There has been plenty of time for the Bush administration to find a way to do without mercenaries, if it wanted to.

…..

But it’s also worth noting that the Bush administration has tried to privatize every aspect of the U.S. government it can, using taxpayers’ money to give lucrative contracts to its friends — people like Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, who has strong Republican connections. You might think that national security would take precedence over the fetish for privatization — but remember, President Bush tried to keep airport security in private hands, even after 9/11.

So the privatization of war — no matter how badly it works — is just part of the pattern.

Emphasis mine.

Jewish High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah.

Posted via sms from my mobile, so it may take a while to hit my blog, sorry.

You have to love this, a police officer arrested and charged a woman with serving him an excessively salty burger.

This man is a pig, period, full stop.

OOPS!!!!

Me bad…It’s not an Imam, Rev. Wiley S. Drake, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Buena Park, California, who is calling for his parishioners to pray for vengeance and misfortune against his enemies.

Well, where is the outrage in the right wing blogosphere? What about public condemnations from the faces of the religious right? Their silence is clearly assent.

Well, that’s what the right wing pundits would say if it had been an Imam.

Under the heading, “HOW TO PRAY,” he listed all 31 verses of Psalm 109, in which King David appeals to divine justice. Drake provided his congregation the King James Version of the psalm, including Verse 9, which says: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

On the advice of his attorneys, Drake has declined to be interviewed.

Regarding my prior ADL post, a clarification:

I think that their mealy mouth nod to genocide is insufficient, and that their position opposing the congressional resolution is morally reprehensible, and tantamount to denying the genocide.

Had they made no statement on the congressional resolution, and it’s clearly outside of their purview, I would have had no issue, but given that they have, they need to reverse themselves, and formally endorse this resolution.

The USAF is attempting to take control over all UAV systems that operate above 5000 feet. This is about the USAF wanting new toys, not any special skills or abilities to handle the programs in a better manner.

….

“I think this is a case of the Air Force having too much time on its hands,” said John Pike, who runs the Arlington, Va.-based military think tank GlobalSecurity.org. “They seem to be striving for purpose as a military service and this is a way to go about that.”

….

Army leaders have said losing the UAV mission could endanger soldiers because of delays in Air Force close-air support to troops in combat.

“The service chiefs and our (U.S. House) committee met in a closed session,” Cramer said, “and I asked them directly if the Air Force could perform as well and support troops on the ground, specifically Army troops on the ground, as well as the Army could.

“The Army and Marine chiefs said no, they did not believe it based on past performance.
….

This is kind of neat. It’s an MP3 Player that converts into a CD player.
It looks like an MP3 player:

And it plays CDs:

If it can rip MP3s this way, that would be particularly neat

Unlike Bush’s Poodle, Gordon Brown is asking for 5 detained British citizens to be released from our Gitmo Gulag.

I don’t think that this is the UK turning away from the (largely one way) special relationship that it has with the US, but rather an acknowledgment of the realities of UK politics, and the fact that the policies of GW Bush will not outlast his term.

I came across a very interesting red/blue voting map.

Each pixel is 2500 votes for Bush, Kerry, or Nader.

Suddenly, those state by state maps that the wingers use don’t seem to make as much sense, do they?

A patent troll’s request for an injunction has been denied by a federal court.

The new standards put in place when the supreme court slapped down the patent court over it’s “enjoin everything and everything is novel” standards are starting to have an effect.

It now appears that the patent troll’s suit against ebay over “buy it now” is one of the first impacted by the new standards.>

Ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit whether an injunction is necessary in the long-running spat, U.S. District Judge Jerome Friedman in Norfolk, Va., ruled Friday that awarding monetary damages alone to MercExchange is enough to compensate any harms it experienced as a result of eBay’s infringement.

That’s in large part because the two-man Virginia company has shown public willingness to license its patents to eBay before, during and after the trial, suggesting money is its primary motive, Friedman wrote.

“MercExchange’s modus operandi appears to be to seek out companies that are already market participants that are infringing, or potentially infringing, on MercExchange’s patents and negotiate to maximize the value of a license, entered into as a settlement to, or avoidance of, litigation,” Friedman wrote.

He also added that the firm “has utilized its patents as a sword to extract money rather than as a shield to protect its right to exclude or its market-share, reputation, goodwill, or name recognition, as MercExchange appears to possess none of these.”

I love that little slam against MercExchange when the judge says it has no reputation or goodwill.

It’s nice to see a bit of sanity returning to IP. Folks like MercExchange are pirates in the old school sense that they sit across trade routes and steal from people who take them.

“Preparation I” (impeachment). There is no substitute.
Washington Post-ABC News Poll July 23, 2007

Bush’s net disapproval is 65%, Cheney, 59. It’s 33 and 34 respectively for approval.

Nixon got as low as 66% disapproval, but only for about a week before he resigned.

Typical headline, Microsoft, Feds, and Chinese authorities seize $2bn in pirated software. It’s a typical lie. One that could be revealed in 10 minutes with paper and pencil, 5 minutes with a calculator.

Both software and drug busts suffer from the same inflated reporting.

Assuming Microsoft products have a value of $500 each, which is generous considering discounts, site licenses, bulk discounts, etc, that would say that they seized 4 million, that’s right 4 followed by 6 zeros copies of their software.

A CD is about 1-½ mm thick, 4 million would stack over 3-½ miles high.

My guess is that they are using the bogus $50-100K/copy number that comes up in copyright cases.

It’s like those drug busts during my college days, they would quote a street value for the pot that was 10-20x what I paid retail.

Seriously.

You would think that two groups of American hating Islamic fundamentalists would be able to work together, but this is not so.

Al-Qaeda is threatening war against Iran.

Can’t we all just get along?

The leader of an al-Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq, who was thought to have beeen killed by US forces, has threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting Shias in Iraq within two months

In what I can only describe as a case of a someone being hoist on their own petard, an Irish book maker, paddypower.com has had to pay off on Albert Gore III’s DWI arrest.

They had to pay out $13,600 on 14-1 odds on the oddball bet that Al Gore would be the next celebrity arrested.

Former vice president, Albert Gore, Jr. has not been arrested, but his son, Albert Gore III was recently.

You play with the bull, you get the horns.

Fred Thompson leaking information to the Nixon White House?

Not all would put a heroic sheen on Thompson’s Watergate role

The Senate Watergate Committee chief counsel, Samuel Dash, crouched to confer with Fred Thompson (left) minority counsel, and Senator Howard Baker during a July 1973 hearing. (James Atherton/ Washington Post/ File)

BTW, what the is up with that hair? Looks like the 1970s were not a great time for hair (my picture on my profial there is circa 1979)

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | July 4, 2007

WASHINGTON — The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight — asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system — he telephoned Nixon’s lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, “At That Point in Time,” Thompson said he acted with “no authority” in divulging the committee’s knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon’s resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson’s actions.

“Thompson was a mole for the White House,” Armstrong said in an interview. “Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was.”

Asked about the matter this week, Thompson — who is preparing to run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination — responded via e-mail without addressing the specific charge of being a Nixon mole: “I’m glad all of this has finally caused someone to read my Watergate book, even though it’s taken them over thirty years.”

The view of Thompson as a Nixon mole is strikingly at odds with the former Tennessee senator’s longtime image as an independent-minded prosecutor who helped bring down the president he admired. Indeed, the website of Thompson’s presidential exploratory committee boasts that he “gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office.” It is an image that has been solidified by Thompson’s portrayal of a tough-talking prosecutor in the television series “Law and Order.”

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I’ll work cheap? Heck, I’ll lose weight, hit the gym, and wear a rug….I’ll even shave my body hair if required.

Doctor Who recruits new sidekick
Martha Jones off to Torchwood
By Lester Haines
Doctor Who will gain a new companion for the next 13-episode series of the cult show, the BBC reports.

…..

To cover the temporary redeployment, the good Doctor will be accompanied on his travels by an as-yet-unnamed newcomer. His or her identity will be “announced shortly”. ®

For your information, here is the link

AV-Comparatives – Independent comparatives for Anti-Virus software

The folks at Flight International are correct. This is serious Bond Villian Chic.

Pictures: BMW presents Bond-style 787 cabin concept for Russian tycoon

He is impassioned, vocal, and wrong.

Standard Bushie industry flak.

Bush official goes nuclear in Net Neut row

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco
Published Friday 22nd June 2007 01:00 GMT

Supernova 2007 A San Francisco tech show degenerated into a shouting match today, after a pugnacious Bush commerce official squared off with heated supporters of net neutrality.

John Kneuer, the assistant secretary for communications and information, quickly lost his temper and began shouting back at Supernova 2007 attendees after taking flack for saying the free market – not government intervention – would protect internet innovation and access.

Taking a brief time out from shouting his responses at delegates who’d rejected his claims the free market has ensured consumer choice in US broadband internet access, Kneuer remarked in an aside: “I started out very politely.”

That came seconds after he told delegates what they really wanted was for the government to mandate terms and conditions of internet service in the US.

“That’s absolutely what you are asking for!” he shouted to counter-shots of “no!” and “there is no market place!”, referring to the fact a handful of phone and cable companies control the lion share of broadband internet access and service in the US.

Increasingly, it seems, those companies will be allowed by the Government to charge for different levels of internet service – ending net neutrality.

Kneuer, who previously served with a Washington DC law firm representing telecoms companies, had fueled the crowd’s anger during a short Supernova presentation.

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This cat was found injured by a veterinarian and taken care of. It us recovered completely from its injuries.
Click on the pic for more information.