De grr...

I'm told this says "The just and poised spit of the brave punk of the earth...of the grrr..."

Tee hee.

The Iranian government must have been reading anncoulter.org...

Iran's youth has now been warned: the Internet can jeopardise your bodily well-being, make you lose your friends and turn you into an anti-social, faithless and mentally damaged individual.

I wish that weren't so funny, but somehow it is.

My next post will not mention Ann Coulter!

So Tempting...

As I am now closer to 30 than 20, I have come to the realization that I must not be as much of an anarchy-driven Mohawk punkgrrl anymore.

For example, if the closer-to-twenty Vanessa found out that there are still a vast amount of tickets to be had (Ann, this is not exactly a place where views of your sort are popular) for the low low price to only 10 dollars, she would not have been able to resist the temptation to go, and, well...crash the party, so to speak. I'd think if I could get kicked out of the Ann Coulter spewfest, I'd be the coolest kid on the block, or something.

However, as the closer-to-thirty Vanessa, I'd rather go out for Indian food. (Seriously, if you're ever in Albuquerque, try the India Kitchen...double plus good!)

Although, I swear I didn't have anything to do with defacing her posters. I'm glad she got over her laryngitis, poor thing.

Finals Week

Bad News: busy cramming, little to no time to blog

Good News: after finals week, will be able to throw myself into several projects, including this blog, OSP, and perhaps even this as well!

The highest cost of war.

Look at these photos, or these photos. Then tell me how you can't be against the war and supportive of our troops at the same time.

This woman is my hero.

Not many women I know, from anywhere, would be this brave. Can you imagine one of those harpies on The View or something coming out with a story like this?

For that matter, why don't the screaming neocons who so desperately wanted to free the Iraqi people care that in a kingdom that's one of our closest allies in the war on terror, women don't have the right to vote?

Link via Body and Soul.

Wow

You know, I'd think I would be the last person to be impressed with a military record, and I know that a person's actions a zillion years ago really doesn't have any bearing on what they're capable of today, but I must say, wow.

He served two tours of duty, four months on the USS Gridley frigate off Vietnam's shore and nearly five months as a swiftboat commander in the Mekong Delta. He volunteered for the second tour and earned all his medals during the second stint.

John Kerry volunteers for a tour of duty in Vietnam during which he was wounded three times, and George W. Bush can't even manage to make it through some softcore flight training?

It's so cute, too, the desperate way the Bushies try to spin this one back in their direction.

Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager, accused Kerry's campaign of waffling on the release of his military records, saying the campaign's position on Tuesday to release the records in "due diligence" is contrary to Kerry's comments on "Meet the Press" that the records would be made public immediately.

"Senator Kerry's record of nondisclosure and his flip-flop on this issue should concern voters," Mehlman said.

The Kerry campaign said they would release the records...and then they released them! Well, apparently there's a new way to flip-flop that I don't know about.

Proof of what jerks we all are

I hereby require everyone to watch A&E's Airline, a show where a TV crew wanders around airports recording what assholes we all are to airline employees for posterity. Might make you think twice about mouthing off to some poor, harried, overworked ticket agent the next time the smallest thing doesn't go your way.

Why Israel and Palestine are so messed up

Reason number 3,458,721.

There's a picture on yahoo news today that's really set me off.

What did this old man do (slide show here) to deserve getting his house demolished?

Jacob Mirza, a Palestinian Christian, checks the damage to his house after Israeli troops attacked his neighbor's house looking for two Palestinian militants in Bethlehem April 15,2004.

Will the Israeli government be compensating him for the damage (in the photo there is a huge nearly completely collapsed wall, and sunlight seems to be coming in from somewhere. That's more than damage, that's destruction...)? Will they provide him with a temporary place to stay until its rebuilt? Will it even ever get repaired, or will he be forced to live in squalor? Was the attack on his neighbors carried out with any consideration as to the innocent people nearby? Most importantly, if this old man had been a young man, do you think the destruction of his home would increase or decrease the possibility of his becoming a suicide bomber?

This is a self-perpetuating situation. The roots of the Palestinian-Israeli problem lie, I think, in the ideas left over from European colonialism. (Most of the 'problem areas' of the world, Africa to the Middle East especially, can trace their problems back to European colonialism of the past two centuries.) However, as long as the violence is responded to with more violence it is a self-perpetuating situation, and will not end until everybody's dead.

When will the Israeli government learn that if you take away everything from someone, then they have nothing at all to lose, and that puts them in an incredible position of power over you. Like our own dumbass actions in Fallujah of late, the Israelis seem to doing all the recruiting for the terrorists.

For that matter, when will Hamas and Hezbollah and all those other fuckwads learn that the more they kill innocent people eating lunch, doing some shopping, or riding a bus on the way to work, the more the IDF will bring its heel down on the neck of their old men, their children, their women, their boys.

Truth be told, I don't think the leaders of either side of this conflict give a damn what happens to the people they're supposed to be representing. Their hearts are so blindly packed with hate for their enemy that they would sacrifice the lives of the people they surmise to represent. To paraphrase Medea, Hamas loathes Sharon more than they love the Palestinian children. And the same can be said for Sharon and his Likudniks.

This conflict makes me so frustrated that I literally want to scream or punch a wall or something. To me, the solution seems so simple. Personally I believe that it was the highest of arrogance to presume that it was okay to hand over a huge amount of land that was already occupied by other people (although not at all out of character with the history of colonialism, read the history of sub-saharan Africa of the past 150 years), but that's over and done with. We can't take that back at this point, and shouldn't. However, I think it's only fair to say that taking control of areas of land in a war is not cool. Saddam Hussein didn't get to do it, why does Israel? (Although with my own country's shameful history of "Manifest Destiny," I shouldn't really be talking, either.)

Feel free to flame me and call me anti-Semitic now. Tell me all about how I hate Jews and apologize for terrorists.

Deep down inside I think what really mystifies me is why there just can't be one big state with everyone living together like normal humans, and intermarry until everyone was an attractive cafe-au-lait color and there was an interesting syncretism of the religious beliefs. They could call it Palistael. Israstine. Whatever.

Or maybe Sharon and Arafat should be made to sit in the same room, fed Ecstasy, and forced to listen to first-hand accounts of Israeli mothers who had to itentify the shrapnel-ridden bodies of their teenage daughters in the morgue, and Palestinian children who had to watch as their mother was crushed to death under the collapsed roof of their home as bulldozes were tearing down their neighborhood. Maybe then they'd get some freaking empathy.

Humph. I'm just waiting for the Canaanites to show up and claim the whole area as their homeland, and exile the Israelis somewhere. I would definitely have to laugh.

I am so angry today.

Bush lied, this man died of a shot to the head.

The man asked him to take his family?five women and a multitude of small children?to relatives in Gurma. The women did not want to leave their father. They were crying, "We want to stay with you, we would rather die together." For half an hour this conversation continued, and then the father left them, promising to follow in a couple of hours. He walked back to his own car. Before he got to the car he was shot in the head.

Bush lied, this 70 year old man died of exhaustion.

In a tent outside relatives were mourning for Mushref Mohi, aged 70, who died of exhaustion during the eight hours that his family was kept waiting at US checkpoints as they fled the city.

"There was nothing much wrong with him and he usually liked to walk everywhere instead of driving," said his brother, Rabbia Mohi Maloud al-Daraji. "But they kept us waiting from 10am to 6.20pm because they searched every car for half an hour, and he could not take the strain."

Bush lied, a pregnant woman died.

HERE lies a baby who never saw the light" reads a stone slab in the Fallujah stadium, now turned into a makeshift cemetery.

The clumsily written inscription appears on a makeshift headstone for an eight-months' pregnant woman buried in the area where more than 100 Fallujah residents killed in this week's attack by US forces have been laid to rest.

Bush lied, 78 soldiers died in the last 12 days.

WASHINGTON - At least 78 U.S. troops were killed and 561 were wounded in Iraq in the first 12 days of April, a senior Army general said Tuesday.

It is quickly becoming the deadliest month since the Iraq war began in March 2003. Since then, at least 674 U.S. troops have died, according to the Pentagon's figures.

Bush lied, hundreds of civilians died.

"Among those killed were 160 women, 141 children and many elderly," he said, providing the first figures on the number of civilian deaths from the nearly week-long offensive.

I am so angry today. Not only did the Bush regime take us to war when they didn't need to, they've screwed up the post-war (although, it doesn't sound post-war at all to me) situation that we're now converting people to the enemie's cause for them.

Like this man,

In the Nazzal neighbourhood, resident Abu Omar points to a devastated house bombed by the US air force.

"We were four families living here. I evacuated everybody before the offensive. Two of my sons who had been guarding it were wounded," he says. "What were the Americans thinking? That I had chemical weapons? The 25 members of my family are unemployed and I do not see how we can survive now."

Wiping away a tear, he swears: "I will take my revenge with my own hands."

Or these people.

In Fallujah, the various resistance cells are now engaged in a massive recruiting drive. As they fight the Marines, these insurgents are creating new alliances, reorganizing their efforts and launching a large-scale defense of their city.

As for new recruits, the resistance owes much to the U.S. Marine Corps, which is halting all refugee convoys, allowing the women, children, and elderly to proceed, while turning back all "fighting age" men! It only gives these men greater incentive to head right back into an urban battleground of alleyways, rooftops and side streets, and join the ranks of insurgents who battle to defend the city.

Bush lied, and was fantastically incompetent at handling the consequences of his lie to boot. Right now it seems like we have in IRaq a masively messed-up situation that we can't in good conscience abandon at this point, but may be forced to if the situation gets much worse.

You almost feel bad for them.

Things look bad for the Bush regime. Between this:

But now the military has followed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's lead in appearing to lower expectations that a top fugitive would be unveiled during an election campaign in both the United States and Afghanistan.

And this:

In another videotape given to Al-Jazeera, the American civilian Hamill was shown in front of an Iraqi flag. A spokesman off camera demanded that U.S. troops end their siege of the city of Fallujah, where four American civilians were killed and mutilated last week.

"Our only demand is to remove the siege from the city of mosques," a spokesman said in a tape given to the Al-Jazeera television network. "If you don't respond within 12 hours ... he will be treated worse than those who were killed and burned in Fallujah."

Not to mention this:

The document, declassified Saturday, said that after President Clinton launched missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington." The memo cited intelligence from another country, but the White House blacked out the name of the country.

You almost feel bad for the poor dears. They have that Clintonesque "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," look of desperation in their eyes.

It's my birthday tomorrow.

Buy me presents. No Easter crap.

Black people are homeless, on welfare, have hordes of children, and are waiting to be saved by George W. Bush.

At least, that's the idea you get from looking at this photo gallery.

Sheesh, Dubya, you can keep that compassion. Black people do not exist just for your photo ops.

Link via Atrios.

Mission Accomplished!

I'm so glad the war in Iraq has been over this whole time, because things like this just don't happen unless there's a war.

NAJAF, Iraq - Coalition forces fought on two fronts Tuesday, battling a Shiite-inspired uprising in southern Iraq and Sunni insurgents in the violent city of Fallujah in clashes that have killed 20 American troops and at least 100 Iraqis since the weekend.

Hey, everybody, look over here! John Kerry has a flower on his shirt!

Revealing Quizilla etc, etc...


You are Paul Krugman! You're a brilliant economist
with a knack for both making sense of the
current economic situation and exposing the
Bush administration's lies about it. You
somehow came out as the best anti-war writer on
the Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate your
guts for selling out to the liberals. To hell
with 'em.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla



Hey, neat. I got what Ezra wanted. Link via Pandagon.

Saying what shouldn't need to be said, for the millionth time.

Al-Muhajabah has a series of posts regarding the killing and mutilation of the four US contractors (although, they sound like mercenaries to me) in Fallujah. Read, to see that Islam really condemns behaivor of this nature, and then scroll down to this post to see our own shameful history of lynching. Then read this post to see that Muslims don't support these actions, either.

On the same subject, it is pretty upsetting to me that these contractors are making 1,000 dollars a day when our armed forces don't have enough funds to get the body armor they need to protect themselves.

Of course that doesn't excuse what happened to them, naturally.

Some local theater

Anybody in the Albuquerque area, there is still a chance to see The Peculiar Case of Jose Padilla , a multi-media theatrical presentation by La Compania de Teatro de Albuquerque. It shows tonight at 8 and tomorrow at 2 pm.

Info here. These are some hard-working people, and I know they'd appreciate your support.

Someone send the Devil some hot cocoa...

...because Hell has just frozen over. Check out this smart, nuanced analysis of the Iraqi resurgence at abcnews.com.

Yet, U.S. commanders and officials paint an optimistic picture of the security situation and blame foreign-led Islamist fighters and small pockets of Hussein followers for most of the attacks.

...This official version does not consider the existence of an indigenous, Islamist-nationalist resistance within the Sunni Arab community that appears to be the driving force behind the insurgency. Establishing the extent of al Qaeda's involvement is important so long as it does not distort understanding of who are the real players in Iraq.

...By fixating on al Qaeda, Islamic extremists and desperate Hussein die-hard insurgents, the Bush administration underestimates the fundamental role played by Iraqi Sunni Islamists and nationalists in keeping the insurgency alive.

Could it be that our adversarial press has returned?