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Blogorrhoea
on various subjects:

My Blog Hero, Tim Dunlop, is periodically obliged to resist
accusations that he just plain detests Dubya. I don’t. Resist the accusation, that is. I detest John
Howard, too. And Tony Blair. I think they’re murderers. I think the PNAC mob are wall-biting mad
idealogues, too. I think cosmetic democracy, economic crisis, corporatism, mercantilism, cultural
exceptionalism, lap- dog media, militarism, imperialism, expansionism and xenophobic paranoia all combine
to constitute a political system worthy of the tag ‘fascism’. I think the USA is currently on that road and
am left wondering what exits are left available to it. And us.

Democratic Veteran pays some attention to the envirnoment and the loons making environmental policies:

If our environmental policy is being rewritten by wealthy corporate clones like this guy, our planet may soon look like the arid, oxygen-free dustball that has been envisioned by science fiction writers for generations. Unfortunately, the sci-fi authors always used the premise that the eventual destruction of this planet was the impetus for a diaspora to the stars. With the current state of NASA and manned space program research and funding, we’d be lucky to get a vessel to take us all to Johnny Rockets in the mall, much less Alpha Centauri or something.

This insane belief that all science done before the 1600 Crew came to power is somehow “junk science” or “incomplete work” is as dangerous to us all as the Patriot Act and its proposed sequel, just less well known. It’s something that bears watching and might be yet another way to get the ‘greens’ onboard.

Calpundit takes a look at Afghanistan and
finds that it does not auger well for Iraq:

I realize that we can’t be expected to keep a huge occupation force in Afghanistan forever, but we have
less than 10,000 troops there right now, we’re planning to pull out within a year, and our financial
commitment isn’t very impressive either. It doesn’t bode well.

And am I the only one who finds it peculiar that we’re “optimistic” about the UN doing a sterling job in
Afghanistan, but convinced that they would bring nothing but infighting and corruption to nation building
in Iraq? What exactly is the difference here?

President Bush keeps saying that we’ll be in Iraq “for as long as it takes,” but our increasingly weak
commitment to Afghanistan makes that increasingly hard to believe. We should be watching closely to see if
Bush’s famed resoluteness extends beyond dramatic gestures to the hard, messy work of actually seeing
things through to the end.

Free Pie on the
Palestinification of Iraq:

The Bush administration has a secret. We are not leaving Iraq. Not for a very, very long time. We were
never planning to.

Jay Garner is living in a palace, and has the title of viceroy (“king.”) Our troops are breaking
international law by taking over schools, and leaving walls scrawled with “I love pork,” “eat shit Iraq,”
or pictures of “sexual organs.” (Apparently some of our men are 12 years old.) Our soldiers are returning
gunfire (or rocks thrown, or celebratory gunshots into the air, or a sandal thrown, or nothing at all but a
gathering in protest) with machine gun fire. They are permitted to “fire at will,” at anyone, or even
execute prisoners, without sanctions.

In the mean time we are hampering humanitarian efforts.

MaxSpeak on whether Democratic presidential
hopeful Dennis Kucinich is really as kooky as some think:

KOOK’S TOUR. Interesting that the predominant reaction to Kucinich over at Daily Kos, because of his policy positions,
is fear. What in other eras were perfectly ordinary Democratic Party positions — Harry Truman supported
national health insurance, other Democrats are critical of so-called “free trade” — have been successfully
defined by the Right as out of bounds, so people say whoa, Kucinich is out of bounds.

Wasn’t it Lieberman who talked about ‘buy American’? If anything is kooky, as any kind of remedy for the
decline of U.S. manfacturing, that would be it. Obviously it doesn’t square with “free trade,” and under
the WTO it is probably illegal.

Electing Kucinich would not be easy, to put it mildly, but Democrats’ deride his positions at their peril,
since they will be helpful in light of real problems facing the country. A good parallel is the successful
Republican effort to wreck the Forbes campaign by killing one of their best ideas — the flat tax. (Best
from a conservative standpoint.)