Oceania Has Always Been At War with Eastasia

One of the odder aspect of the whole Iraq mess is the France (and general Europe) bashing that the right wing is throwing around. Yeah, France, Germany, and Russia didn't give us everything we asked for in the UN. So? Ce la vie. The Administration has played this as the Big Three being Eeeeevil; this plays well in our lapdog media, but has been disastrous everywhere outside the US. Looks to me like the most howlingly incompetent piece of diplomacy I can recall. Basically, Georgie Bush ended up losing a worldwide popularity contest to Saddam Hussein, of all people. And nobody likes Saddam.

So we have "cheese eating surrender monkeys". "Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion", and all those other cute little phrases that might have been funny the first time we heard them.

What's going on here? Georgie Bush has shown that he's capable of stopping hate campaigns. One of the few good things he's done in the post 9/11 world is to emphasize, early on, that this war is against terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular, and not against Islam or Muslims. The France-bashing is getting out of control, with vandalism against people and businesses perceived as being "French".

One oddity -- there is a chain of "French" cafeterias called "La Madeleine" that would seem to be an obvious target, but I haven't heard of any nastiness at all toward them. Couldn't possibly be that their corporate offices are in Texas ....

One result of this is that we are weakening NATO quite seriously. (Whether this is good or bad is another question. NATO was designed as defense against the Soviet Union, after all.) We need to think about this. Let's say that NATO breaks up and the Europeans form their own alliance. Without NATO, there's no reason for the US to have military bases in Europe at all. I don't know the leasing arrangements that we have -- if we have lease arangements for our bases in Europe like we do for Guantanamo, then we could be there for a long time, but the host countries could make things pretty miserable for us. (Food. Water. Power. Local Labor.)

So we have a military alliance among the "continental" powers. France. Germany. Russia. Perhaps also Italy and Spain (their governments are in a lot of trouble for "supporting" us in Iraq. ("Supporting" is in quotes because they didn't supply troops, money, or UN resolutions.) Since they can't rely on US support or weapons, they will have to build up their own military. One thing that seems to get lost in the jingoistic American discussions of military capabilities is that the European arms industry is quite advanced, and capable of a lot of quick improvement if it became a priority.

Another thing to keep in mind is that everybody in the world was watching what happened in Iraq. We put a lot of our toys on display, and they showed some serious weaknesses:

• It takes us at least six months to get enough force in position to move against even the weakest opponent.
• The Apache helicopter is so vulnerable to ground fire that it is useless unless protected by other aircraft.
• A10 "Warthogs" are vulnerable to shoulder-launched missiles
• The M1A1 tank is a lot more vulnerable than advertised. I saw reports that several were knocked out by well-placed RPGs. If this is true, and not just misinfornmation from incompetent reporters, this represents a serious weakness.
• US troops are lousy at police work (Duh!)

So we've showed off all our toys and put Europe on notice that we don't care squat about their interests. We're pushing France, Germany, and Russia toward a military alliance that would be independent of US supplies. Then there's this whole "global economy" thing. Europe's economy is considerably bigger than ours. Nukes? France and Russia have 'em too, and they have subs.

Oh, well. We become the World's Only Superpower, and what do we do? Try to convince our old allies that they should become another superpower. What's next? Give Japan nuclear weapons?

Time for lunch. I think I'll have a croissant.

Santorum. Yawn.

The bizarre AP interview with Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum seems to have a lot of people puzzled. Just Another Republican Bigot Eruption? Signs of insanity? Nope.

Catholic doctrine.

Santorum is nothing more or less than a good, conscientious, practicing Catholic. Santorum's remarks, bizarre as they may seem, are simply a statement of the doctrine referenced above, which describes the duties of a Catholic politician. Very poorly phrased. Why do we elect people who give such bad interviews? I'd think that Getting Interviewed would be a basic skill for a politician.

Catholics in the US have a very relaxed version of what the Church really wants from them. For example, American Catholics use birth control at about the same rate as people of other religions of the same social class, despite the fact that, officially, anybody using birth control is excommunicate. There was a big stink a while back when a Nebraska bishop yanked the chain on this:

It should be obvious that Catholics who practice birth control and those who cooperate with them in their immoral actions may not receive Holy Communion without committing sacrilege.

The way the Church handles sex is exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of celibate, geriatric men in a strictly hierarchical, male-only organization:

Don't

Don't have sex. If you must, do it only with someone that a priest has approved of, formally. Limit partners as drastically as possible -- if your approved partner is alive, it's him/her or nobody. Don't play with it, it's not a toy -- use it only for what God designed it for. RTFM. Abstinence is desirable in any case (and the only option if you don't want babies), and easy -- if you can't control your sexual urges, you must be pretty weak morally. If you do anything at all sexual, or even think about anything sexual, be sure to tell the priest all about it.

Backed up, of course, with the usual dose of "We have a pipeline to God. We're smarter than you, and we've been studying things like this for a very long time. Therefore, we're right. If you disagree with us, you're wrong, and probably Evil to boot."

Oh, well, it's just another Middle Eastern fertility cult. Actually, worship of Yog-Sothoth. Don't get me started.

More on the Laws (ha!) of Probability

Somebody looked up the domain jessicalynch.org. The interesting number is:

Domain Name:JESSICALYNCH.ORG
Created On:17-Mar-2003 19:57:52 UTC

<music_cue type="spooky"/>The date is five days before she was captured.

If folks had played this right, we could have had something as good as NASA's "fake" moon landing.

Unfortunately, nasty old facts tend to get in the way of some of the most lovely theories. Look here. Note the name. The date isn't on the page -- it's 15 February 2003.

(via Winds of Change. The link goes to the story, with a comment from the guy who registered the domain.)

The Difference Between Republicans and Democrats

The Republicans are (or at least pretend to be) a monolithic bloc. Remember in the 2000 Presidential campaign, how McCain, war hero extraordinare and all around Good Guy, got savaged by the Bush camp (including their talk-radio pit bulls)? The independant McCain had no real chance aginst the docile sock-puppet Bush, but the degree of hysteria was impressive. The ultimate Republican sin is stepping out of line and "compromise" is a dirty word. They have tiny majorities in both houses of Congress, and are behaving like they have a landslide mandate.

In Europe, the Democrats would be a loose coalition of splinter parties. The Democrats are a coalition; to get anything done, you have to create a consensus among a whole bunch of competing interests. Compromise is a way of life. Unfortunately, the Democrats expect the Republicans to play by the same rules. They don't. Republicans don't compromise and they feel no necessity to keep their promises.

The Democrats really need to grow a spine. Since the Republicans took over (and I use the term advisedly) in 2001, they have had one media and legislative success affer another, coupled with disasterous results of their policies (how is your pension plan doing?) Throughout this, the Democrats have been trying their usual keep-everything-calm rhetoric while trying to make deals. The Republicans just fire up the hate machine, take the concessions, and ignore the promises.

The Dems need to do three things:

1. Speak up. Get out the message of exactly what the Republicans are doing. Hit hard on the "look at what they do, not what they say" aspect. Yes, the Press is giving Georgie Bush a free ride. That just means you have to work harder.
2. Get to work. Filibuster the loony right-wingers that the Republicans are nominating as judges, just like the Republicans did to Clinton's nominees. Work against the phony "economic stimulous packages", "deregualtion", and "rationalizations" that are basically corporate/rich guys giveaways. Work against the erosion of personal liberties that has become the hallmark of the Bush administration.
3. Build bridges to the few remaining Republican moderates. It wouldn't take many defections to bring the whole Republican program to a screeching halt.

Hard work? Yes. The alternative is to just drop 'em, bend over and take what you get. Don't expect lube.

And don't forget who controls our fancy new computerized voting machines.

What Else Was Destroyed

Baghdad has been looted, not by the foreign conquerors, but by its own people. Most of the attention has gone to the National Museums and Libraries. There are rumors and reports that the museums were systematically raided for valuable artifacts and that the Library was deliberately torched. (We're ready for Phase 3 of the Coulter Program .) It makes me sick. I can't really think about it rationally; it's one of the worst cultural crimes in centuries.

But other things were destroyed too.

Hospitals

I've heard yammerings to the effect of "a bunch of old trash isn't worth the life of a single Iraqi baby". OK, so why didn't we protect the hospitals? If we were serious about any "humanitarian" intentions, we should have made protecting the hospitals, and getting supplies to them, a major priority. Now, the hospitals stand empty. The doctors and nurses are afraid to leave their homes for fear of looting, and the hospitals have been stripped to the walls. What has happened to the sick and injured? I don't know, but it ain't gonna be pretty. Last I heard, humanitarian aid still wasn't getting through.

Banks

We've managed to protect the vault of one bank -- it holds a billion dollars worth of gold bullion. The cash is less important than the financial records -- all of Iraq is effectively bankrupt now. Remember this "world economy" thing that we've been talking about for twenty years? It's run through the banks. It's all going to have to be rebuilt from records of Iraq's trading partners.I predict a rash of international con men proffering phony invoices. Many will be from "respectable" outfits. (Why did Halliburton spring to mind?)

Records

Who did what to who under Saddam? Well, we need to look at the records. You know, the ones that were in all those government buildings that burned? The "empty" buildings that we bombed at the start of the war? The Ba'ath Party headquarters that we bombed?

Assume, for the moment, that you're a Ba'ath Party official. The Americans have been saying all along that the Ba'ath Party will have no place in the Iraq of the future. In addition, you've done some things as part of the ruling party that you'd rather were forgotten. But nobody can do anything if they don't have the records. Therefore, it's very tempting to make sure that as much Government and Ba'ath Party paper as possible is destroyed. Easiest way to do this is to "loot" the buildings. The computers, of course, are the first to go. Then when the buildings have been stripped, all that incriminating paper makes a lovely fire. Get enough of it, and it will destroy things like computer backups. Actually, I suspect that Iraqis are no more clueful about backups than Americans.

With the Republican Guard, you have the same situation, with the twist that the Guard presumably kept their weapons. Gonna make things interesting for the new Government ....

So how are we going to tell who was naughty and who was nice? One bad sign so far is that we're trying to find as many former Baghdad cops as we can and put them back to work. The citizens of Baghdad are furious -- these were Saddam's enforcers, after all. And one of Saddam's main tricks for keeping power was to make sure that everybody, or as near as possible, was involved in his nastiness.

And the only records that we seem to be interested in are those in the hunt for <echo_chamber>Weapons of Mass Destruction</echo_chamber>. Actually, it makes sense -- they're the rationale for the invasion in the first place. And we know that Saddam had them, after all. We kept the receipts.

The Cardinal Sin

One of the cardinal sins in the current military is not being able to follow up on an unexpected advantage. Gen Franks and his staff obviously expected Baghdad to hold out for at least a couple of weeks. If the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard had chosen to fight, we would have had a nasty time of it, but we could have used the extra time to bring up more troops. The collapse left Franks with nothing that could be moved into place for the next phase of the operation. I rather suspect that he didn't have a plan for the occupation -- that's Somebody Else's Problem. Politicians tend to forget that soldiers are not cops and cops are not soldiers

The point remains, however, that Franks did not move in to secure the cities in a timely manner, and let the situation get completely out of hand. From what I've heard, Mosul is even worse than Baghdad. (That's Nineveh, for you historical types.) And as a result, we will not be able to complete one of our major objectives for this war -- the "de Ba'athification" of Iraq. We've allowed the evidence to be destroyed. In addition, while Franks was very good at preventing the destruction of Iraq's physical infrastructure (dams, especially), he stood by and watched the destruction of Iraq's medical and financial infrastructure.

We're talking court-martial here, folks. I don't expect to see one, for a couple of reasons:

1. The old military idea that a commander is responsible for what happens on his watch is going away. The bleat of "It's not my faaaault!!" that has infected the rest of our society is spreading to the military.
2. One of the requirements for success in the current military is the ability to cover one's arse. Franks is undoubtedly very good at it. Any "investigation" will undoubtedly "prove" that it was the fault of some captain or suchlike. Certainly nobody above the rank of colonel, if that. Remember My Lai?
3. I'm sure that any examination of Operation Iraqi Liberation Freedom would point lots of fingers at the civilian leaders in the Department of Defense. Given his reaction to the looting, I suspect that Rumsfeld himself is at least partially responsible for this mess.

In any case, everything will depend on the success of the occupation. If Iraq settles down fairly quickly, the Powers that Be will be inclined to overlook a lot of nastiness. However, if things go really wrong, they may be looking for scapegoats. Historically, though, when the Powers that Be need a scapegoat, they need him fast, and odd things tend to happen.

Too Much Information

I've been meaning ot write some stuff on The War, but there's just too much information. While combat was still going on, watching for dispatches was far more interesting than trying to figure out what is "really" going on. War is a horribly confused situation at the best of times; the current "fact" will be contradicted in ten minutes and forgotten in an hour. Things haven't come close to settling down, but they're moving a lot slower now. A few impressions:

The military side of things was carried out quite competently. The only problem was one of expectation; the DoD guys, led by Rumsfeld, predicted that the Iraqis would all run like rabbits. The resistance that they did put up was scattered and ineffective, but folks got discouraged when some of the Iraqi soldiers declined to line up and get slaughtered. Fortunately, the military had a Plan B ...

The hell-for-leather run from the Kuwati border to Baghdad would have been suicide if anybody halfway competent had been in charge of the defense, especially during "the mother of all sandstorms". However, the qualification is critical. With the possible exception of "Chemical Ali", anybody with the smallest military talent had been purged long since.

The amusing side of this was the Minister of Information Saeed al-Sahhaf's hallucinatory press briefings. Turned out that he was just telling the reporters the same information that Saddam Hussein (or his replacement) was getting. When you shoot generals for losing battles, people are really reluctant to give you the bad news ....

The Press did not cover themselves with glory. Aside from the odious Geraldo Rivera, the "embeds" did a pretty darn good job. But the guys back in the studio sometimes got as bad as "Comical Ali" (al-Sahhaf). Fox News was, as expected, the worst, but the others weren't much better. The worst one I saw on Fox was when we got the announcement of the discovery of a "chemical weapons factory". The talking heads at Fox discoursed at length as to the implications of finally finding "Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction". There never was a report of finding weapons; just a factory. Of course, the "chemical weapons factory" itself went away after a couple of days. Like I said, war is confusing. This kind of mistake has to be expected. But the talking heads should at least listen to the reports on their own newscasts.

It's the job of reporters to ask questions, especially the ones that the Powers that Be don't want to answer. This seems to have escaped the reporters covering the war, both at CENTCOM HQ in Qatar and in Washington. In particular, reporters seem to have forgotten the gentle art of the "followup question". Perhaps it's a result of limiting reporters to one question each. You have to have some limits, or a reporter will try to turn a press briefing into an interview, but you have to have some way of following up on unexpected answers.

The coverage of the destruction of the 507th Maintenance Company showed the press at its worst. Basically, the 507th got lost, wandered into downtown Nasiriyah, and got creamed. In particular:

• "Got lost"? Excuse me? They're in a convoy, with combat escorts. Also, rental cars from Hertz have GPS units; I would expect that every US vehicle in Iraq would have a GPS. This is one that the reporters never picked up on.
• The Iraqi TV "war crime". Iraqi TV showed the POWs. They looked scared shitless; to my mind, this is rational. They did not look like the'd been badly abused. The injuries that I saw were consistent with being too close to an RPG when it went off. Rumsfeld claimed that this was a "war crime"; looked to me like a good-faith effort by the Iraqis to let everybody know who the prisoners were and that they were (relatively) OK. Presumably Rumsfeld was honked off that Iraqi TV didn't clear their newsfeed with CENTCOM. And, of course, our media was showing zillions of pictures of Iraqi POWs.
• The Al Jazeera "war crime". Can't show our dead guys. Might give people the wrong idea about what goes on in a war .... It's interesting to combine this attitude with the level of graphic violence in movies and TV.
• "Saving Baby Private Jessica". In the future, textbooks will be written about this one. I rather suspect that the "facts" will never really be agreed on. In any case, it was an exciting rescue. Unfortunately, the way it was reported was disgusting. At first, it looked like the networks had turned the "society" reporters loose. PFC Lynch was "Jessica", and the pictures of her made her look about twelve years old. I don't know what triggered the change; perhaps Blogistan put enough moral pressure on the networks to get them to give her the respect due a soldier. Also, belatedly, we got some decent coverage of her tentmate, PFC Piestewa, first American servicewoman to be killed in action since WWII. And where did the Washington Post, of all people, come up with that story of her going down with guns blazing? Not with those injuries!

And that's just "the war". It's over now. Saddam Hussein is either dead or laying very, very low. And the media interest is fading fast.

Tax Day

This year was much less painful than last year. I used a different computer program, and it worked like a charm, without any of the idiocies that I ran into last year. Well, it did take a bit of effort to get around the "interview". But not too much. Suffice it to say, I plan on using it next year.

Nobody likes taxes. However, the vast majority of folks don't mind paying "their fair share". The majority of complaints are simple grousing; not at all the symptoms of an incipient rebellion. People also like to feel they're getting something for their money; European countries have sky-high tax rates, but the citizens feel that they're getting their money's worth.

So what's with the Bush administration's tax cuts? $350 billion last time I looked; the Republicans think they should be at least twice as much. Targeted at the rich to super-rich; most of the money will go to people making more than $300,000 per year. How much of your tax bill was due to taxes on dividends? The White House says that the tax cuts are to "increase productivity". This is the "supply side argument". To see what this means, we need to look at the economics of recession.

A Descent into Economics

The "classical" recession is now called a "demand-side" recession. Basically, people don't have enough money. Stuff piles up unsold, prices go down, suppliers go out of business because nobody is buying stuff. Cure is to pump money into the consumer economy. People use the money to buy stuff, business recovers, and Bob's your uncle.

The "supply-side" recession, popularized by the Reagan administration, is caused by the opposite problem. People have money, but businesses aren't making enough stuff. Prices go up and the economy stagnates. Cure is to pump money into business; they use it to increase production, people buy the new stuff, and, again, we be cool.

If you remember the supply-and-demand curves from Econ 102, a "demand stimulus" moves the demand curve to the right, while a "supply stimulus" moves the supply curve to the right.

So What's Going On Now?

The official Republican position is that the current, uh, slowdown, is a "supply-side recession", to be fixed by giving money to businesses, as represented by rich people. Idea is that, if you give money to poor people, they spend it, thus stimulating demand. If you give money to rich people, they invest it, thus stimulating supply. Unfortunately, this simply doesn't wash. Problems:

• The Fed is practically giving away money. If they try to lower the discount any further, the Federal Reserve will have to start giving away toasters.
• Assume that the rich folks "invest" their tax savings. How does that help productivity? Remember the Internet bubble? How does investing in a company that promises the computer equivalent of perpetual motion help anybody except con artists?
• A current economic fad among the rich and the corporate world is "offshore tax shelters". If Joe Rich Guy moves his wad to the Cayman Islands, how does that help anybody?
• Remember how this tax cut business got started? We had a budget surplus. The tax cuts were to "give back the surplus". Then the economy went into the toilet and suddenly we need the very same tax cuts to "stimulate the economy". Hmm.

What's really going on is a "crisis of confidence". After the bursting of the Internet bubble, we got hit with, in close succession, the Global Crossing, Enron, and WorldCom bankruptcies. All had engaged in practices that were at the very least unethical and very possibly illegal. All had boosted stock prices by "creative" accounting and growth estimates that are now seen to have been wildly optimistic. Aided and abetted at all points by greedy investors, of course. Don't expect them to admit any responsibility.

This sort of thing is simply not supposed to happen. The stockholders and the Board of Directors keep the CEO on the straight and narrow track of profits, the accountants make sure that Management has an accurate picture of the company finances, the auditors keep things honest, and the SEC steps in if anybody gets seriously out of line. However, here, every point has been compromised.

• The concept of "profitability" seems to be obsolete. The focus is on the stock price, at the expense of everything else. More and more, "profit" is simply the part of your cash flow that you have to pay taxes on.
• The accountants helped Management to build up the rosiest picture possible. Lotsa "paper money"; no "grocery money".
• The auditors were the same as the accountants. Essentially, they were auditing themselves. Arthur Anderson went out of business because of this. Good riddance.
• The SEC is drastically underfunded and staffed by refugees from the companies that they're regulating. Mainly, they seem to spend their time coming up with mindbogglingly complex regulations for things like "insider trading". Explain to me again what Martha Stewart did wrong. Her broker told her to sell. She sold. She's in trouble. Hunh??
• Doesn't help one little bit that one of the most influential people in the early Bush administration (especially before Bush took office) was Ken Lay, the "mastermind" of Enron. "Common wisdom" for the reason VP Cheney doesn’t want to release the notes on the development of the Administration's energy policy is that it was actually written by Ken Lay. Why isn't Lay in jail?

Basically, people are scared. Before we see any movement in the economy, we have to convince the people with the money that the things that they're investing in are not con games. Even more difficult, we have to convince them that things are going to be stable for long enough for them to make a reasonable return on their investments.

And right now, that is precisely what we are not getting. The SEC is even more toothless. Arthur Anderson is gone, but there is no assurance that other accounting firms aren't doing the same thing. CEOs and directors are still getting mindboggling salaries and bonuses. Explain to me why the CEO or the directors of a company that isn't making money, or that is actually shrinking, should get any bonus at all. And, of course, there's the "elephant in the living room", that causes a great deal of trouble but that no one will talk about: the war. We are sinking a serious hunk of cash in the Iraqi desert. It's gotta come from somewhere. And check out how much of it is going to Halliburton or its subsidiaries.

So Who Benefits from the Cuts?

I normally try to hedge my statements. There's very little absolute in this world. Remember up at the start, I said that "the vast majority of folks don't mind paying 'their fair share'"? Well, turns out that the people who don't want to pay their fair share are the ones getting the cuts. Of course, there's always room for debate on what "fair share" means. Practically everybody thinks that a graduated income tax is about as fair as you can get. Just about everybody has to pay something, but those who have more money pay more. We can argue about details essentially forever, but almost everybody agrees on the basic point. Those who disagree tend to be members of fringe groups, or rich. The fringe groups write blogs, the rich give big contributions to political groups. Guess who gets listened to?

The old fashioned term for the Bush tax cuts is "looting the treasury".

He Shoulda Said ...

I caught an interview with Gen. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Fox "News" yesterday. The Fox talking head (far as I'm concerned, they're almost all identical) asked a question to the effect of "Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who wants to be President, for cry'n out loud, said that we need 'regime change at home'. Should this kind of irresponsible statement be allowed In Time Of War? Isn't this irresponsible when Our Troops Are At Risk?"

Myers responded with about three minutes of Beltway doubletalk that translated as "    ".

Unfortunately, the tendency toward public doubletalk is ingrained in the folks at the policy level. Basically, you know that anything you say will be used against you later, so you say as little as humanly possible, while making it as difficult as possible for the questioner to break in with a question, like "Hunh??"

What he should have said:

So you're saying we should cancel the 2004 Presidential election? Or that Democrats shouldn't be allowed to campaign? What he said was, essentially, that a Democrat should win the 2004 election. Do you really expect a Democrat to say anything else? Politics in the US is conducted at a high volume; get used to it.

Remember, we're fighting for freedom of speech and free elections. There's no reason to give up our most fundamental feedoms because we're actively fighting for them for the Iraqi people.

Also, I find your implication that our fighting men and women would allow their performance to be affected by legitimate, peaceful protests to be the single most disrespectful statement I've heard in a long time. Saying that our troops will not perform at their peak levels because of a few protests impugns their character, intelligence, and professionalism. It's worse than the people who scream "baby killer!" at our troops. That's just an insult, and says more about their own anger and ignorance than anything else.

Too much to hope, I guess.

War Sites

I've added an extra link block over on the right for useful war sites. Problem is, there are a bazillion sites talking about the war (including this one!), and it's hard to figure out where to look for information. The sites here, I think, are a good starting place. Most of the usefiul stuff, of course, is in the links. The information comes from "conventional" media sites, but those sites are so poorly organized that it's almost impossible to figure out what is going on without spending a huge amount of time digging.

• Sean Paul Kelly (The Agonist) -- Grand Central Station. News as it happens, at least as long as Sean can stay awake. He makes a real effort to simply digest and report, without slant. IMHO, he does a darn sight better job than the conventional media. (Note -- this site is extremely popular. This link points to one of the mirror sites.)
• Kos -- Thoughtful, in depth analysis and discussion of various points, especially logistics. Center/left politics.
• Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing -- A military point of view. Again, people who know what they're talking about, without too much political baggage. Politics, what there is, is middle-of-the-road military.

These sites have comment sections that are very much worth the effort to check out. All have a policy of throwing out dribbling loons of all political stripes; sadly necessary.

Enough with the Omens, Already!

Okay. We've had the biggest snowstorm in many years. Iraq had its biggest sandstorm ever. We have a brand-new plague. Chicago got hit by a meteorite. And to top it all off, today the temperature in the Washington,DC area was in the mid 60s, with snow flurries.

Awright, already! Enough with the omens! We get the idea -- we know this war is a bad idea. Now how about some hints about what to do about it?

What to look for? Bird carrying a snake? Plague of frogs? Rooster crowing at midnight?

How about a burning bush ... ?