Memnison Journal

HBO production and presently running on that network.  My take on it is that it’s a once-funny;  I have a hard time watching gangster movies because I really don’t get off on people beating and killing each other, especially if the people involved doing the beating are serious scum.   This is SOPRANOS GO BAGHDAD; [...]

He also mooted the possibility that the Russian government would buy some of its metal products to shore up falling demand.
At under $50 a barrel, the Russian government is taking a beating, because their Big Ticket was oil and gas.   The entire economy was not based on industrial production, but in raking in petrodollars.   [...]

Details after the cut.

4/07 - MRS. BUSH:
Oh, I know that very much. And believe me, no one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this, and certainly the commander in chief, who has asked our military to go into harm’s way.

4/07:  BUSH, interviewed by Charlie Rose on Maliki possibly wanting the US to leave [...]

The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, [...]

After the last week of major screwups from McCain, including the whole “surge is when I say it is, ignore history business”, and things like accusing Obama of being responsible for the rise in gas prices and willing to ‘lose the Iraq war deliberately in order to win the 2008 election’, it looks as if [...]

McCain: And not only, that, but Obama’s chicken to go to Iraqi like I did.  Chick-en!  Bgawk!
Obama: Wha?
Army: Do we need to get all those armed guards ready again for the trip through the marketplace?
McCain: (makes more chicken noises, flaps around)
Obama: Cripes, what a loon.  What the heck, let’s go.
Various Foreign Leaders: Wow, an American [...]

Bushco: Ok, just sign here that we can stay as long as we like, do whatever we want in Iraq without being bothered, and sign over all your oil to our pals for development.
Iraqi PM Maliki: Screw that noise. No deal.
Bushco: Dude, we own you.  For good.
Iraqi PM Maliki: ‘Fraid not. Hey, Salim?
Assistant: [...]

…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.
Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and [...]

The ugly truth about what happens when you send people to a war zone who aren’t up for the situation; they get turned into the contents of a coffin. A waste, an utter stinking waste. But the recruiters can fill their quotas, and the President can play with men’s lives.
And once again, the [...]

Hydrogen, stupidity and incompetence. I swear to gawd, folks, I sometimes cannot imagine how we ever got this idea that George W. Bush, the first President with a MBA (from Harvard, yet) would run a tight, disciplined and competent organization that would - oh, how did that line go - “restore honor [...]

I know that there are people out there who have a bunch of questions about Obama’s stance on the military and the war.  I decided to look up his initial statement in 2002 as an Illinois State Senator - a speech where he said what his feelings about war and the military were.
I work about [...]

…well, sometimes.
I watched the TODAY show and the very good COUNTDOWN / Olbermann interview of Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary for Bush, and I’m listening to the audio version of his book, and I came to a couple of conclusions.

He’s an honest-to-god idealist in politics, whose entire life has centered around political-civics-way-to-improve-things; [...]

The Veteran’s Affairs Department’s head of mental health states that there’s no suicide epidemic amongst returning Iraqi War vets - and gets caught with top-secret internal emails that admit that the stated amounts are BS, and that around 1000 suicide attempts a month take place:
But in this e-mail to his top media advisor, written two [...]

Fascinating study of an ancient religious culture that is being beaten to death in modern Iraq:
The evidence is overwhelming: there is no future for the Mandaean community in its ancient homeland. Right now the focus isn’t on maintaining the Mandaean community in Iraq it’s on getting them out so they have a chance of survival. [...]