Well, it appears that Michigan will move up its primary to January 15.
That pushes New Hampshire to January 8, and Iowa likely to 2007. This is out of hand.
This is an artifact of the movement, which really got rolling in 1988, to create “super Tuesdays”. The original purpose was to nominate a Southerner (remember Good Ole Boy Michael “Scooter” Dukakkis nominated in 1988?), but it has served to render any primary outside of the first month following Iowa irrelevant.
This is a VERY good OP/ED in the New York Times, The War as We Saw It, written by recent Iraq war vets in the 82nd Airborne. Their point is that , “Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence.”
You may recall that I posted about how Japan’s request for the F-22 constituted a major change in their until now pacifist military posture.
I also sent a letter to the editor to Aviation Week and Space Technology about this, since it was in response to their article.
It just got published in AW&ST. Woot!
Update, if you have a subscription, it’s the 3rd letter down here.
Ya mother’s calling from Yenta Tones.
Good stuff.
Well, it appears that the US Air Force will be requiring a fixed price bid in for their new tanker program.
Seeing as how Boeing and Aribus are going at it hammer and tongs about this, you want to get a large number of aircraft bid out at a fixed price before you make the award.
The Pentagon has it right here.
As a result of Bush sanctions against Venezuela, including the denial of spares on the F-16 fleet, Chávez has moved toward acquiring Russian equipment.
Now, he is purchasing a large quantity of Dragunov sniper rifles.
The Dragunov is a derived for the AK-47 with a scope, and while it underperforms designed from scratch sniper rifles, it is simple, more accurate than an assault rifle, and more powerful (it uses a full rifle round). Realistic use is out to about 600m according to wiki.
“Sales like this, and other sales of military equipment and arms to Venezuela, don’t seem consistent with Venezuela’s needs,” David J. Kramer, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said by telephone.
“It does raise questions about their ultimate use,” he added. “We’re not sure what their purpose would be.”
It took me 5 seconds to realize that this is intended to for a number of things:
Of course, I’m not a blithering idiot Bush administration official, so I can spot the obvious.
Mark Joyce, the Americas editor for Jane’s Country Risk, part of Jane’s Information Group, said that a purchase of thousands of sniper rifles would fit with the continuing military reorganization in Venezuela under Mr. Chávez.
The changes emphasize large civilian reserve forces, which bypass the traditional military chain of command and report directly to Mr. Chávez and could become the core of a domestic guerrilla force if Venezuela were invaded.
Not sure what it means, except that perhaps the two countries are far closer than when it was the USSR across the border.
…
The exercises take place against a backdrop of mounting rivalry between the West, and Russia and China for influence over Central Asia, a strategic region that has huge oil, gas and mineral resources.
That being said, I think that much of the world is looking for some sort of return to a bipolar world.
The Serbian Government is calling to reinsert its troops back into Kosovo. You know, the folks who committed genocide?
Enough is enough. I know that the Russians will veto any UN resolution giving Kosovo independence, but this does not prevent the US, UK, France, etc. from recognizing the nation.
It should be remembered the Serbian authorities are not victims, but rather perpetrators of unspeakable acts, and because of this, they lack any moral claim over the region.
I commented on it briefly, and the stocks recovered, the Murdoch Dow ending down only 15 points, after being down more than 300 points.
Well, now I know why: the Fed cut the discount rate by 50 basis points. An surprise half a percent rate cut has a way of getting people to buy stocks.
I don’t think that it will mean much in the long term. As Nouriel Roubini says, “Given the serious insolvency – rather than just illiquidity– among many economic agents (many mortgage-burdened households, dozens of mortgage lenders, homebuilders, some hedge funds and financial institutions, some distressed corporates) a formal 25bps cut will not make much of the difference as you cannot solve an insolvency problem by throwing liquidity at it.“
It should be noted that McClatchy was pretty good before the invasion too. They were pretty much alone on covering the claims of Bush and His Evil Minions™ and comparing them to reality.
This article follows this course. It not so subtly calls the Whitehouse and Pentagon Liars.
And while top U.S. officials insist that 50 percent of the capital is now under effective U.S. or government control, compared with 8 percent in February, statistics indicate that the improvement in violence is at best mixed.
U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don’t support the claim.
More at the story.
Dean Baker has a good take on the general cluelessness of NPR’s financial correspondent Adam Davidson about the credit crunch. They seem to think that it’s all the “subprime meltdown”, when it’s a more systemic problem.
I would generalize further regarding the press.
At this point in time, almost all of the Financial reporters are well behind the curve. We don’t have a problem with a small segment of the home mortgage market. We have a situation where credit is drying up because people cannot determine risk in any meaningful way.
Kevin Poulsen was live blogging the two NSA wiretap suits in San Francisco.
One is the generic warrentless surveillance case, the other involving wiretapping privileged communications between a lawyer and a client, where the wiretap was inadvertently revealed to the lawyers in a document dump (the FBI subsequently confiscated the document).
At one point, in response to the government’s assertion that they could not proceed on the basis of the lawyer’s recollections of the inadvertently disclosed document, and that the government could not release the document one of the Judges, Judge McKeown, said, “I feel like I’m in Alice and Wonderland.”
No, my dear man, this is Kafka.
It appears that the good Senator Collins is objecting to the Tom Allen campaign sending a staffer to follow her public appearances and video what she says.
Standard operating procedure for campaigns these days, and a great way of showing how a candidate talks out of both sides of their mouth.
Collins’ problem is that she’s been Bush’s bitch. When push comes to shove, she’s never voted against him. Her “bipartisanship” consists of joint pressers with Lieberman.
That’s how she guarantees no real opposition to her in the primaries (all of Bush’s support is from the party faithful), but she can’t go and talk to small wingnut audiences and tell them what a loyal Bushie she is if those speeches end up on Youtube.
It’s funny…Cold and tasteless, but funny.
(H/t trappmountain for finding this)
When one goes to trade shows, one tends to come back with “schwag”…The free stuff that they hand out at the tables….Typically, this is things like pencils, erasers, calendars, water bottles, etc. all with a logo on them.
Some times, the vendors can get creative, as one did at the recent Force Protection Equipment Demonstration:
Words fail me.
Way down right now, though for some reason the $US is up relative to the Euro.
My only advice: Don’t trade now, things are panicked.
Unqualified offerings has a great post on a zero effort terrorist scenario, titled, “Does Al Qaeda just say “Boo!” and laugh?“. (Hat tip to ECop for the finding this.)
Basically, any two mooks can have a conversation about an untenable attack plan, and within 3 weeks, it will be on CNN, and people will be buying duct tape.
You know how all of Bush and His Evil Minions™ have been talking about David Petraeus’s report on progress in Iraq? It now appears that there is no such thing as the Petraeus Report. Instead, “Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.”
But it gets EVEN BETTER. It appears that the Bush administration won’t even let Petraeus testify before congress at a public hearing. “Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration’s progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.”
I guess that they are afraid that the good General might tell the truth.
Well, the owner of allofmp3.com just got acquitted in Russia. This is not surprising. While the IP laws in Russia are not what the record distributors would want, it has always been fairly clear that Denis Kvasov was operating within those laws.
The question now is whether Putin finds more advantage in joining the WTO, or giving Washington the finger.
One thing that needs to be said though, this dispute does not affect the amount of money that performers get for their recordings by one cent. That number is still zero. I’ve yet to hear of a performer who has actually received royalties, due to corrupt record company accounting.
The USAF is attempting to take control over all UAV systems that operate above 5000 feet. This is about the USAF wanting new toys, not any special skills or abilities to handle the programs in a better manner.
….
“I think this is a case of the Air Force having too much time on its hands,” said John Pike, who runs the Arlington, Va.-based military think tank GlobalSecurity.org. “They seem to be striving for purpose as a military service and this is a way to go about that.”
….
Army leaders have said losing the UAV mission could endanger soldiers because of delays in Air Force close-air support to troops in combat.
“The service chiefs and our (U.S. House) committee met in a closed session,” Cramer said, “and I asked them directly if the Air Force could perform as well and support troops on the ground, specifically Army troops on the ground, as well as the Army could.
“The Army and Marine chiefs said no, they did not believe it based on past performance.
….