politics

How do things look for democracy? Overall 57 percent of Iraqis prefer democracy to either strongman rule or an Islamic state. That's a pretty slim majority for such an important idea. It's bad enough that 43% of the people don't prefer rule by the people, but it's even worse that the pro-democracy side makes a majority only because of strong favorable number in Kurdish and in mixed Shiite/Sunni areas. In Shiite areas and Sunni areas, only a minority (45 and 38 percent respectively) prefer democracy.

Remember that the 9/11 murders killed fewer than 3,000 Americans. And remember that Iraq has a population of only about 1/10 that of the U.S. In proportion, then, Bush's illegal, immoral, and stupid invasion has inflicted between 100 and 300 9/11s worth of deaths on Iraq (and about 2/3rd of a 9/11 on American troops).

As previously noted, despite her appointment by the media as a front-runner, Hillary Clinton is very unlikely to be elected president.

Given her refusal to resist the invasion and occupation of Iraq, that doesn't bother me at all, I've just been hoping that the Democrats will get serious and find a better candidate. (Both for president and for her Senate seat.)

Comes now news that makes me want to see her off the scene even more: she's co-sponsoring yet another attempt to make an end-run around the First Amendment in the form of a "flag protection" act. We can do without yet another Republican in Democrat's clothing.

>Columnist Richard Reeves considers the question: is W the worst U.S. president ever?

The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record. Four hundred and fifteen, about a third of those contacted, answered -- maybe they were all crazed liberals -- making the project as unofficial as it was interesting. These were the results: 338 said they believed Bush was failing, while 77 said he was succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever.

BTW, I find it helps take a tiny little bit of the sting out of enduring this administration if you say "worst president ever" in a Comic Book Guy voice...try it and see if you don't feel just a little better.

I'm still not sure how such an... interesting... religion as "Christian
Science" gets a newspaper as generally level-headed as the
Christian Science Monitor, but they've
got a nice

editorial on the Cunningham case and state of corruption in Congress:

Either way, money still talks in Washington and the legal/illegal
distinction gets easily blurred in all the backroom dealings with private
interests until, that is, a brazen case of bribery pops up. Then

Al Gore says he has no intention of running for President again. Kind of a shame, he's saying all the right things on the issues now. (Al, where was your voice in the 2000 election?)

Much is being made of Senator Hillary Clinton as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2008. That would be a suicidal path for the Democratic party - not (or not just) because Clinton is a controversial figure and woman to boot, but simply because the American people do not elect Senators to the Presidency.

Of the ten men elected president since WWII, four were former Vice-Presidents. Of the remainder, four were former governors, and the other two were war heroes.

Tim Kreider, of The Pain - When Will it End?, gives the best description I've ever heard of the problem with most of the religious right in his artist's statement for last week's strip, in which he says of George W. Bush, "He was a mean drunk who got arrested for driving under the influence and threatened to beat up his father, and he was born again as a mean Christian who knew all about the apocalypse but not the Beatitudes."

Next time some hate-monger claims to be a Christian, quiz 'em on it; ask them to recite the Beatitudes, the heart of the teachings of Jeshua ben Joseph. (I can't, but then I don't claim to be a Christian.)

Something I posted to a Slashdot thread today (material in italics is from the post I'm replying to), addressing a common pro-war attitude:

As a side benefit, the people of Iraq have a chance at self-rule

Well, the 100,000+ dead don't have any chance at self rule, no...and those left have more chance of falling into civil war that, at best, ends up in a theocracy, than of ending up with a stable democracy.

After the way the neocons have fucked things up over there, the very very best we can hope for over there is that in 50 years or so, after a few hundred thousand more people have been killed in the fighting, things will be as nice and stable in Iraq as they are in Northern Ireland now.

The Guardian reports - and they don't seem to be making this up - that three dozen armed dolphins may have been set loose in the Gulf of Mexico when their compound, believed to be near Lake Pontchartrain, was breached by Hurricane Katrina.

Experts familiar with the U.S. navy's program believe that the military trained the dolphins to shoot underwater terrorists with dart guns. The Navy has refused to confirm that any of its cetacean agents are AWOL.

I'm just enough of a comics fan to get some laughs from the bizarre covers and outrageous outtakes at Superdickery.com. In their discussion of propaganda in comics, they linked to a contemporary bizarre right-wing comic:

It is the year 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It is up to an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North to thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden's plans to nuke New York City ...And wake the world from an Orwellian nightmare of United Nations-dominated ultra-liberalism.