meehawl

The US Army is planning an involuntary mobilization of thousands of reserve troops to maintain adequate force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan … the last time the Individual Ready Reserve, mainly made up of soldiers who have completed their active duty obligations, was mobilized in any significant numbers was during the 1991 Gulf War … “It would be an involuntary measure, an involuntary mobilization,” the Army official said. “It’s approximately 5,600.” … The defense official said that while soldiers in the Individual Ready Reserve have served their voluntary obligation in the Army they still can be mobilized involuntarily for several years after returning to civilian life. “Sometimes there’s a misperception by some of the individuals … that ‘I’ve done my obligation, I’ve been in the Army, thank you very much, and I’m done’. But you’re not done,” the official said.

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Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990’s to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the CIA … The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties … Ex-CIA officer Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period “blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed.”

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The insurgency took root during the occupation’s first few months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority seemed oddly disengaged from the problems of postwar anarchy. But what was Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., focused on? According to a Washington Post reporter who shared a flight with him last June, “Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold.”

U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer has issued a raft of edicts revising Iraq’s legal code and has appointed at least two dozen Iraqis to government jobs with multi-year terms in an attempt to promote his concepts of governance long after the planned handover of political authority on Wednesday.

If occupation chief Paul Bremer and his staff were capable of embarrassment, they might be a little sheepish about having spent only $3.2 billion of the $18.4 billion Congress allotted–the reason the reconstruction is so disastrously behind schedule. At first, Bremer said the money would be spent by the time Iraq was sovereign, but apparently someone had a better idea: Parcel it out over five years so Ambassador John Negroponte can use it as leverage. With $15 billion outstanding, how likely will Iraq’s politicians be to refuse US demands for military bases and economic “reforms”?

The US-controlled coalition in Baghdad is handing over power to an Iraqi government without having properly accounted for what it has done with some $20 billion of Iraq’s own money.

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Economists at HSBC on Friday waded into the debate over whether the U.S. housing market is overinflated, declaring a bubble exists, something the Federal Reserve has been reluctant to do … “Prices are 10 to 20% too high and can overshoot on the way down,” HSBC’s Morris said, most likely deflating gradually over a few years rather than crashing like stocks. “We think the party stops by mid-2005. A series of rate hikes will cause a reassessment of likely future house price risks and its associated debt, thereby triggering housing’s fall.”

Earlier here.

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[Oklahoma State judge Donald Thompson] frequently masturbated and used a device for enhancing erections while his court was in session … Thompson used a penis pump, a device billed as providing sexual pleasure and promising better erections and larger penis size, during trials and exposed himself to a court reporter several times while masturbating on the bench … “On one occasion, Ms. (Lisa) Foster (Thompson’s court reporter for 15 years), saw Judge Thompson holding his penis up and shaving underneath it with a disposable razor while on the bench” … Several witnesses, including jurors in Thompson’s court and police officers called to testify in trials, said in the petition they heard the “swooshing” sound of a penis pump during trials and saw the judge slumped in his chair, with his elbows on his knees, working the device.

Here’s the complaint.

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Some settler leaders see in the Palestinians the modern-day incarnation of the Amalekites, a mysterious Canaanite tribe that the Bible calls Israels eternal enemy. In the Book of Exodus, the Amalekites attacked the Children of Israel on their journey to the land of Israel. For this sin, God damned the Amalekites, commanding the Jews to wage a holy war to exterminate them. This is perhaps the most widely ignored command in the Bible. The rabbis who shaped Judaism could barely bring themselves to endorse the death penalty for murder, much less endorse genocide, and they ruled that the Amalekites no longer existed. But Moshe Feiglin, the Likud activist, told me, The Arabs engage in typical Amalek behavior. I cant prove this genetically, but this is the behavior of Amalek. When I asked Benzi Lieberman, the chairman of the council of settlementsthe umbrella group of all settlements in the West Bank and Gazaif he thought the Amalekites existed today, he said, The Palestinians are Amalek! Lieberman went on, We will destroy them. We wont kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.

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Cheney didn’t flinch, the [911] report said. “In about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing,” he gave the order to shoot it down, telling others the president had “signed off on the concept” during a brief phone chat … Then Joshua Bolten, after what he described in testimony as “a quiet moment,” spoke up. Bolten, the White House deputy chief of staff, asked the veep to get back in touch with the president to “confirm the engage order.” Bolten was clearly subordinate to Cheney, but “he had not heard any prior conversation on the subject with the president,” the 9/11 report notes. Nor did the real-time notes taken by two others in the room, Cheney’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libbywho is known for his meticulous record-keepingor Cheney’s wife, Lynne, reflect that such a phone call between Bush and Cheney occurred or that such a major decision as shooting down a U.S. airliner was discussed … The report concluded “there is no documentary evidence for this call.”

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This is too funny. Jeri Ryan, the fetish-clad Star Trek Voyager Borg Drone “Seven of Nine” ex-wife of “family values” Senatorial candidate Jack Ryan in Illinois (also a recent High School teacher), has described some typical family-values vacationing in their divorce papers. She describes in lurid detail how her virulently anti-homosexual and pro-traditional marriage-minded Republican ex-husband coerced her into attending sex clubs and tried to force her into having public sex, which apparently caused her great emotional distress.

On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, [Jack] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him … They were long weekends, supposed “romantic” getaways … The clubs in New York and Paris were explicity sex clubs … [one] was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. [Jack] wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. [Jack] asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset … during a trip to Paris he took me to a sex club, without telling me where we were going … I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. [Jack] became very upset with me, and said it was not a “turn on” for me to cry.

One of Ryan’s major campaign strategies has been to emphasize how frequently he attends Christian religious rituals (every day!), in apparent comparison to the no-doubt scandalously irreligious incumbent, Barack Obama.

Ryan, 44, a lifelong Roman Catholic and a big fan of Lewis, says he tries to get to church every day and, with rare exception, succeeds … every day, at some point, Ryan can be found in one of the back pews of a church, praying. “I believe in God,” he says. “The order of priorities is no revelation here: God, family, country. That’s how I try to think about my life, in that order.”

Jack Ryan’s issue list is revealing, focused on the essential nature of conventional marriage, the danger of homosexual normalization, and against the “breakdown of the family”.

I believe that marriage can only be defined as that union between one man and one woman. I am opposed to same-sex marriages, civil unions, and registries … The breakdown of the family over the past 35 years is one of the root causes of some of our societys most intractable social problems … my interest will be in promoting laws and educating people about the fundamental importance of the traditional family unit as the nucleus of our society.

Jack Ryan’s website features many Republican Party endorsements, but one from the sex-phobic nutjob and notorious gambling addict Bill Bennett really stands out. The fearless moral crusader Bennett was recently outed as procuring the services of a rather bizarrely pixellated muscular dominatrix named “Beautiful Domme Muse“. I can see how Bennett and Ryan would get along well together.

Ryan said he was fit for high public office, noting that the court documents reveal no violations of earthly or higher laws.”I think my character has been proven by this,” Ryan said in an interview on WBEZ-FM. “There’s no breaking of any laws. There’s no breaking of any marriage laws. There’s no breaking of the Ten Commandments anywhere.

So there you have it. As long as Moses didn’t specifically rule out sex clubs, then it’s okay by family values advocate Jack Ryan.

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For a while now I’ve been wondering why there were so many clickthroughs to this blog entry. Then I found out it’s the number one entry in Google for “porno ice skating“. Figures.

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Lots of other people have mentioned the second quote, but I did some digging and found this first quote:
George Bush, February 8, 2003

Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.

National Commission on terrorist Attacks on the United States, June 16th, 2004

We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States … they do not appear to have [been] in a collaborative relationship.

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