I’d not have killed you
but for the deadline; you crashed,
I missed it, you died.
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A nobler machine
would have spared me the pain of
killing it myself

I haven’t had the stomach of late to visit the BushBlog much, but after reading Tim Noah’s bizarre little exercise over at Slate—it’s either the result of a bad meal or a random keyboard test that turned out to be printable—I resorted to the BB for relief. Sure enough, relief there was to be had.
The [...]

This is truly horrible. From French wire service AFP in Germany:
KASSEL, Germany : A self-confessed cannibal went on trial in Germany, accused of murdering a man who was apparently a willing accomplice in his videotaped death, dissection and consumption.
The guy and the victim got together via the web. I wish I hadn’t read the article [...]

In which Ann Coulter tells Ed Koch to look her up online because he doesn’t recognize her at a party. Apparently Ann would have regretted the demise of at least one Times columnist had she gotten her Timothy McVeigh wish.

The National Journal’s Stan Collender has a blistering assessment of the 2003 federal budgetary process.
The conclusion is as inescapable as it is unassailable: 2003 will go down as one of the absolute worst years for the federal budget in U.S. history.
The budget decisions made this year have been so monumentally and uniformly bad that in [...]

One set of eyewitnesses to the battle in Samarra says eight people died, including several civilians, and that dozens of other civilians were injured. Another set, the set that was under attack and responding with heavy weapons directed at anywhere they thought fire was coming from, says that 54 people were killed, none of them [...]

This is interesting …
The letter that follows takes us on a darkly imagined excursion into the future. A military coup has taken place in the United States–the year is 2012–and General Thomas E. T. Brutus, Commander-in-Chief of the Unified Armed Forces of the United States, now occupies the White House as permanent Military Plenipotentiary. His [...]

That could doom a lesser man’s career. Here’s the article, including a link to the full interview. Christopher Dickey gives good story.
That “Supreme Commander” moniker gives me the creeps.

The American Journalism Review has an article in the current issue looking at US reactions to the BBC’s coverage of the Iraq invasion. AJR is a bi-monthly with a fairly long lead time, so the article isn’t exactly current with such things as the final unraveling of the Jessica Lynch rescue story. What it does [...]

Former Congressman Bob Dornan, sweetheart of the aerospace industry and professional psycho, is threatening to run in the primary against equally conservative but demonstrably more sane Congressman Dana Rohrbacher. The LA Times has the story on the man whom Tip O’Neill once advised to get psychiatric help.

In a column devoted entirely to what he thinks Democrats have to do to win the 2004 presidential election and why Howard Dean can’t do those things, Kristoff manages to avoid mentioning a single policy issue. He also notes that the last four Democrats to win the popular vote have all been southerners, which begs [...]

“Bobwire” is what we called barbed wire where I grew up. This article describes how one town in Iraq (among several, apparently) is now surrounded by six miles of bobwire.
American officers here say their new hard-nosed approach reflects a more realistic appreciation of the military and political realities faced by soldiers in the so-called Sunni [...]

is involved in this administration’s Middle East adventures.
One result of the Iran-contra scandal was a decision by the C.I.A. that it could not trust Mr. Ghorbanifar. A 1987 Congressional report on Iran-contra said that after Mr. Ghorbanifar failed C.I.A.-administered polygraph examinations, the agency issued a rare “Fabricator Notice,” warning that he “should be regarded as [...]

From the BushBlog, Bono on Bush as quoted from an edition of CNN’s “Inside Politics:”
…And remember, this is the president who inspired not just people who are involved in this, these issues, but his critics around the world. His last State of the Union speech, when he said, ‘We will get the drugs to people [...]

Josh Marshall is thinking but not quite saying that utility infielder and Iran-Contra scoundrel Manucher Ghorbanifar, and possibly someone of but not in the Bush administration, may have cooked up the forged Niger-Iraq uranium documents. Follow his links to see whence his math arises. All these recipes for disaster…

Building a new computer, visitor from the lower forty-eight, battling the spawn of Bill Gates, etc. There is no news in the bubble. I must be the president. Back from the ranch in a moment…

According to CBS News:
For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.
“This is a very, very important part of history and we’ve got to tell it right,” said Thomas Kean. [...]

I thought I could catch up on the news I missed whilst playing the Bubble Boy, but it can’t be done. The last two weeks are a blank and so shall remain, except I would like to point out that the capture of Saddam Hussein hardly seems worth a few hundred billion dollars and some [...]

The US military has been studying Israeli Defense Force tactics in the occupied territories in hopes of learning how to deal tactically with an occupied people. Let’s hope the officials concerned study this assessment of those tactics as well.
JERUSALEM, Dec. 21 — Thirteen reservists from Israel’s elite military commando unit stated Sunday in a letter [...]

Editor & Publisher and the Los Angeles Times offer their respective versions of the press year in review, with the Times releasing it’s top ten list of bad stuff the press did, and E&P concentrating more on significant stuff within, sensibly enough, the worlds of editors and publishers. The LA Times guy excuses the New [...]

A few months ago I subscribed to the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News, which is another of those remarkable individual efforts at keeping tabs on one or another feckless aspect of government behavior. In this case, the individual is Steven Aftergood—one of those perfect names—and the near-daily stream of reports on efforts by the [...]

The editors of the Washington Post came down pretty solidly on the side of war, apparently because they believed the Bushies. The paper covered the objections of people such as former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni and others, but at least in my recollection it never put together in one article the objections of all [...]

Americans are known as a sympathetic crowd, but sympathy isn’t the same thing as empathy. Maybe that’s why so many Americans are having such a difficult time understanding the ingratitude of certain Iraqis and Afghanis. Le Monde has an article about the village in Afghanistan that was recently hosed by a couple of US A-20s, [...]

Troops loyal to Iraqi Governing Council honcho and Pentagon darling Ahmed Chalabi comprise a large chunk of the private security force hired to guard Iraq’s oilfields and production facilities. Troops loyal to Iraqi Governing Council honcho Ayad Allawi are undergoing paramilitary training in Jordan, whence they will return to form the spine of the new [...]

The American Enterprise institute has a compilation of polling (PDF document) done on terror- and Iraq-related subjects conducted between September 2001 and now. The most surprising thing about the effort is that according to the AEI website, it was last updated on December 26, 2003. Now, if they can only work on going in the [...]

Russia’s English-language dailies, The Moscow Times and The St. Petersburg Times, appear to have ended their prohibitively expensive flirtations with online subscription fees. One of the benefits, along with the opportunity to check in on the country whenever one feels like it, is that both papers carry “Global Eye” columnist Chris Floyd, whose acerbic [...]

The federal appeals court in Washington has suspended the implementation of the Bush Administration’s giveaway to polluters, or at least part of it.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A federal court on Wednesday halted a Bush administration plan to allow power plants, oil refineries and other industrial facilities to make upgrades to aging plants without installing costly new [...]

It’s fun and easy to play. Just pick one among Afghanistan’s unique collection of brutal warlords and Google him once a week or so. My personal pick is Rashid Dostum; if something’s going wrong over there, his name almost invariably pops up. Other good bets are former US sweetheart Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who got irritated with [...]

Bubble Boy made a bunch of recess appointments today, including that of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security. Inspectors general are the people who root out waste and fraud and other crimes perpetrated by government agencies against the taxpayers. Independence and integrity and some sense of moral purpose are ideal qualities for such [...]