All Politics Are Local Fucked

Healing Iraq is one of my new favorite blogs, written by a 24-year-old dentist in Baghdad who was recently interviewed on NPR. Most of the news I hear from Iraq seems random to me, in part I think because I have no way to place the information. That's why I especially like Dr Zeyad's maps, such as the one above, picturing the incidence of mass abductions in Baghdad.

Support for the Great Adventure continues to erode. One advisor who rarely met a bomb he didn't like has doubts about this one, and the Lap Dog may have said something about a disaster. The Rats continue to jump ship, and apparently even the True Believers are thinking maybe they got on the wrong boat.Every indication is that both the foreign Bush and the domestic Bush are firmly ensconced in their hardened plastic bubble. Seymour Hersh continues to report that the Administration plans to attack Iran in spite of teh intelligence. Amnesty International is reporting that the military wants to spend $75-125 million on a legal compound at Gitmo where they can conduct trials which the Supreme Court has already declared illegal. At home, the USDA has reclassified the 11 million Americans who go hungry as suffering from "very low food security": 12 percent of Americans — 35 million people — cannot not put food on the table at least part of last year. The Pentagon has just reclassified homosexuality from a mental disorder to a defect, similar to bedwetting and a fear of flying. (Presumably this will make gays strong enough for Today's Army.)

The insurgents realists may be making headway though. (See if you can tell the difference between the real news story and the parody.) And of course, there's always the Nucular Option.

White rednecks…didn’t show up to vote for us."Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL)

Bush is bragging about how he allowed elections to take place, but he seems to have missed maybe what the voters were saying. Just days after the elections, for example, Eric Keroack, a Marblehead, Massachusetts, obstetrician and gynecologist, was appointed to oversee the federal Office of Population Affairs. Keroack currently is medical director of A Woman's Concern, a Christian nonprofit organization that works to "help women escape the temptation and violence of abortion" and opposes contraception, saying its use increases out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion rates. (Note to Bush: the anti-realist wingnuts lost.)

"There's something painfully ironic about Trent Lott being named 'minority whip'." Robert A. George

We also got the bad news that the former shit-faced Senator from Pennsylvania won't be running for President in 2008, which leaves us only one choir boy left to mock —for now — mole-lipped Adonis John Edwards.

Of course, 2008 is nothing compared to 2010 .

Real hope does remain. Last weekend, 22,000 at the gates of Fort Benning, human rights activists arrested for taking the protest to close the School of the Americas onto the military base. “We’re training Iraqis to attack us,” said Jesus Bocanegra, a veteran of the Iraq war, relating that many of the Iraqi insurgents learn new military tactics in similar training schools to the SOA that the U.S. military has established for the Iraqi army, and then use them against US forces.