Where’s the Outrage?

The latest in the Batman series - The Dark Knight has hauled in $66.4 million in its first day. Christian Bale did a great job in the last Batman picture. He created a Batman that was more like the later comic strip character. Batman is more melancholy which isn’t necessarily bad. Both Val Kilmer and Michael Keaton (in the 2nd Batman) were somewhat dark but Bale takes this a step further.

I haven’t seen it yet but I’m looking forward to Batman - the Dark Knight.

Update: This isn’t your mother’s Batman. This is upfront in your face violence. Godfather violence. The Joker is wonderful but so is everyone else in the movie. I highly recommend Batman with the warning that this is an adult movie. Not adult in the sense that there is sex or language in the movie. There is no sex and I can remember any offensive language. But it is very violent. For example, toward the beginning of this movie the Joker is showing this group of bad guys a trick. He jams a pencil in a table so the pencil stands straight up. One of the henchman in the room steps up to Joker to confront him, the Joker slams the guy’s head into the table and the guy falls on the floor, dead. The camera pans back to the table and the pencil is gone (into the guy’s head).

Although I liked Batman - the Dark Knight, I thought it was too violent. It was almost like one of those Alien-Predator movies where people and aliens die by the hundreds just cuz. I would hope that the next Batman would continue to be brooding, dark, thoughtful but less-violent.

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This has been one of all-time fun tunes ever since it was released over 20 years ago. Joe Walsh is performing his best tune with the Eagles. Life’s been good!

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I’m glad that someone is paying some attention to Afghanistan. We need to find the Taliban and kill or capture their leaders. We need to upgrade the country. Afghanistan is a country which lives without many of the things that you and I take for granted. Running clean water. Roads. Electricity. Sewage system. We need to help them get these things. Need to help them create an economy that is NOT based on heroin.

All of these things are possible if we put some money and resources into Afghanistan. Oh, and we can destroy Al Qaeda while we are over there.

Tags: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Election 2008, Pakistan // Add Comment »

This morning’s session with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and a surprise appearance by former Vice President Al Gore was outstanding.

Here is Nancy Pelosi with TPM (taking about withdrawal of our troops from Iraq):

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Somethings are too important to be left to the private sector. Voting is one of those things.

From RS:

A leading cyber-security expert and former adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says he has fresh evidence regarding election fraud on Diebold electronic voting machines during the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial and senatorial elections.

Stephen Spoonamore is the founder and until recently the CEO of Cybrinth LLC, an information technology policy and security firm that serves Fortune 100 companies. At a little noticed press conference in Columbus, Ohio Thursday, he discussed his investigation of a computer patch that was applied to Diebold Election Systems voting machines in Georgia right before that state’s November 2002 election.

(The story goes on to say…)

Spoonamore received the Diebold patch from a whistleblower close to the office of Cathy Cox, Georgia’s then-Secretary of State. In discussions with RAW STORY, the whistleblower — who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — said that he became suspicious of Diebold’s actions in Georgia for two reasons. The first red flag went up when the computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds. The source states that Cox was not privy to these changes until after the election and that she became particularly concerned over the patch being installed in just those two counties. (more… )

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Now, when you think about disco, you have to think of KC and the Sunshine Band. This was one of those 70’s tunes: Get Down Tonight.

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Friday night is trash day in politics. All of the stuff that a campaign, or even the White House, has to get out to the media but really doesn’t want covered is thrown out on Friday. Former Senator Phil Gramm’s resignation from Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign was announced this evening. It is widely believed Gramm was one of the chief architects of McCain’s economic plan.

Tags: Election 2008 // 1 Comment »

Don Siegelman, former Governor of Alabama, was interviewed by Sam Seder. If you are not familiar with Don Siegelman’s case, I have several posts (here, here and here).

Don Siegelman’s story is something that everyone would should know. If a former governor could be treated like this, then the rest of us are in serious trouble.

Don Siegelman has a new web site - www.contemptforrove.com. Please take some time and look at this site.

Tags: Legal, Party Politics // Add Comment »

A young woman I knew reasonably well died last year on a Texas road. She was not at fault in the accident. She was a smart young person and would have had a great life. As it was, she did plenty of good for others in the time she had.

In her death notice in the newspaper, and in the program at her service, her parents wrote, “(We) would like to encourage everyone to slow down and be careful on all the highways of life.”

I think of this everyday. It’s great advice.

Please slow down and be careful on all the highways of life.

Tags: General // 1 Comment »

Out of the thousands of terrible decisions that President George W. Bush and his administration have made, the worst has to be deciding to stop chasing the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. I guess that we can also lump in the decision not to send more troops into the Tora Bora mountains to encircle Bin Laden and kill or capture him at that time. Then there was the decision to push the Taliban and Bin Laden out of the capital city of Kabul instead of closing the city off and cornering all of Al Qaeda’s top leadership. All of these decisions were terrible. We are living with the consequences of these decisions now.

The Taliban attacked an American base in Eastern Afghanistan this week. Now, let’s ruminate over this for a second. American has the most powerful military in the world. Yet, the Taliban launched an coordinated offensive against us. They must have thought either they could win the battle and take the base or they could learn from the American response and use that knowledge in a future attack. Both scenarios are depressing. (They did overrun the base with their second attack.)

Over the last six years, the U.S. has spent billions of dollars in Afghanistan. What have we gotten for our investment? Heroin. Afghan farmers have produced more heroin under the Bush administration then they ever did under the Mullah Omar and the Taliban. Tons of this stuff have flooded the world market. Yet, the Bush administration has done next to nothing to stop it.

We are making the same mistake that former President Reagan made over 20 years ago. U.S. policy was to confront Russia everywhere, keeping the pressure on. When Russia invaded Afghanistan, we supplied weapons to the Afghan warlords and mujaheddin. Russia was pushed out. We declared victory and left. But we didn’t help rebuild the county. More fighting occurred. This time the fighting was basically a civil war. The Taliban won. We continued to ignore events until 9/11.

So, fast forward to late 2001 when we ran the Taliban out of Afghanistan. We left just enough troops to make sure that Kabul will not fall back into the hands of the Taliban as we went after those WMD’s. Afghanistan has been allowed to fester. We don’t have enough troops or money to build a society that respects the rule of law, much less a society that has telephones for commerce or roads to efficiently move produce to market. Six years after the Taliban were pushed out, they are back like Freddie Krueger.

Now the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is looking for more troops to send Freddie back to where he came from– but there aren’t any more troops. Unless Gates has the powers of Samantha Stevens, on the TV show Bewitched, twitching his nose is not going to produce any more troops. All of our combat units are either in Iraq or in Afghanistan or they have just come back from deployment. There are no good short term solutions.

I think that we need to pull a couple of combat units out of Iraq and send them to Afghanistan. We need to get control of this situation. We need to kill or capture the leadership of the Taliban and find Osama Bin Laden and end what he started.

I don’t think that I have said anything in this post that would be considered radical or left-wing or controversial. This should be the American stance but, as you know, it is not. Bush supporters somehow try to argue that Afghanistan really doesn’t matter. The really fight against terrorism is in Iraq.

Here’s Fred Barnes trying to make this case on Fox News Sunday:

Tags: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Military // Add Comment »

For the last three years, I have asserted that we need to get control of Afghanistan. We need to find the Taliban leaders and kill or capture them in order to destroy the Taliban. But, the Bush administration thought that a “surge” was not needed in Afghanistan but instead in Iraq. As a result, Afghanistan has been allowed to smolder while the Taliban has become more organized.

I find it interesting that the Taliban thought that they were strong enough to test an American military outpost. This is a bad sign of things to come. We need another 20 to 30 thousand troops in Afghanistan, now.

From the Washington Post:

Nine U.S. soldiers were killed in heavy fighting Sunday at a military base in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, according to a Western official. The attack was the deadliest against U.S. forces in the country since 2005.

The clash began when insurgents in a nearby village attacked a joint Afghan and American military outpost in Konar province early Sunday morning, NATO said in a statement. The insurgents fired on the base with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades for several hours, injuring 19 Afghan and NATO troops. (more… )

Update: I was going to post a whole new story but this is really a continuation. The Taliban has overrun this outpost (near the eastern town of Wanat). U.S. forces pulled out. We only had 25 soldiers at this post and nine were killed a couple of days ago. Still, we need to take the fight to the Taliban. We need more troops. NATO ain’t it. At least not right now. NATO, like the rest of the world, looks to us to lead. Once, we wake up and truly engage the Taliban then NATO forces will also wake up.

The Bush administration should be ashamed that we have 25 soldiers on an island. That just isn’t right.

Tags: Afghanistan // 3 Comments »

The great thing about being a trauma surgeon is that every day is different. It is never boring. The terrible thing about being a trauma surgeon is that every day is different and there is no predictability.

Because of one gunshot wound to the abdomen, my partner and I operated for the better part of two nights. The patient is looking better.

Now, off to Netroots.

Tags: Blogging issues // Add Comment »

A recent New York Times survey shows Senator Barack Obama leading Senator John McCain by 45 percent to 39 percent.

Okay, no surprise.

But in reading the polling data, one question did stand out. People were asked what percentage of the country was black.

The Census Bureau reports that in 2006, 12.8 percent of the American public was black. That number added up to about 38.3 million people. In the New York Times survey, 32 percent of all people said America was between 20 and 30 percent black. An additional 32 percent said the black population was between 30 and 40 percent. And 9 percent of respondents said America was a majority black nation.

Both a majority of black and white folks in the survey got the question wrong. I guess I should stop being surprised at what people don’t know, but I really don’t get how people can figure the nation is 30 percent or more black.

Do whites get it wrong out of a fear of being overrun? Are blacks looking for strength in numbers? In any case, I don’t get what people are thinking sometimes. Don’t folks have any sense of the world around them?

Here is BlackDemograhics.com with information on blacks in the United States.

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The above poster is from an exhibition of New Deal era Works Progress Administration posters on the web page of the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress.  

Here is a history of the Works Progress Administration.

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Virginia is a so-called swing state for the 2008 election. Polls show that the race in that state is very close.

Will Senator Barack Obama be able to carry Virgina in 2008? Doing so would make him the first Democrat to carry the state in a Presidential election since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Yes— Obama will win Virginia in 2008.

As the spirit of Richmond, Virginia, native Arthur Ashe will lead Obama to victory in Virginia.

Ashe lived from 1943 to 1993 when he died of AIDS that was likely acquired from a blood transfusion.

He was strong both on and off the tennis court. On the court, Ashe was elected to the Tennis Hall of Fame. Off the court, Ashe worked hard against South African apartheid, protested poor American treatment of Haitian boat people, addressed the United Nations General Assembly regarding AIDS, and served as Chairman of the American Heart Association.

When he died, Ashe’s body lay in state at the Governor’s Mansion in Richmond. He was first person to receive that honor since Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.

Ashe always hit the right note of keeping his own identity, while at the same time being a forceful advocate of welcoming and accepting all people. It was clear that when all was said and done, it was the whole human race he was most concerned with.

The spirit of Ashe will guide and inform Obama as he campaigns in Virginia, and will move the people of Virginia to follow the right course in voting for Obama on Election Day.

Tags: Election 2008, Sports // Add Comment »

I have a couple of computers in my home office. One is primarily for blogging and the other is for everything else. Well, the ‘everything else’ computer had a power supply/motherboard problem. Once I fixed those, it seemed had a hard drive issue also. Reloading everything that I had on that computer is taking some time. Some programs just are not working well for me. So, I’m reloading Windows.

I’m saying all of this as an excuse for not blogging as much as usual.

I will add one bit of news. The New York Times is reporting a new poll which shows that blacks, whites and Latinos perceive American race relations differently. No duh!!!

Oh, I have to add this interrogation video. It speaks for itself. I’ll look for other versions without a commentator yacking over it.

Here’s that interrogation video. This kid was reportedly 15 or 16 years old at the time of his video. He is a Canadian citizen.

Tags: Afghanistan, Blogging issues, Iran, Torture // Add Comment »

I have endlessly discussed the problems that Senator John McCain seems to have with his past. There seems to be no topic that McCain can’t distance himself from, well, himself. I’m not going to use the tired phrase “flip-flop.” Instead, I’ll say that in the year 2000, McCain really positioned himself as a maverick by taking positions that were not popular with the Right. It seems that he has changed his mind on most of those positions.

Rachael Maddow reviews how McCain loves being on the same page with President Bush on Iraq.

Tags: Election 2008, Iraq // 2 Comments »

 

The Reverend Jesse Jackson has suggested in the past few days that Senator Barack Obama be castrated. I oppose this suggestion.

I will say though that eunuchs have long played a role in government. In his classic three-volume work entitled The History of Government From Earliest Times, the late political scientist S.E. Finer made many references to eunuchs. 

( Above is 18th-century eunuch in some type of eunuch robe.)  

I count a total of 14 eunuch references in the index to the three volumes. They served in Rome, China, Persia and in other places.

From Finer—….Eunuchs, wherever we find them–in the late Roman and the Byzantine empires, in the Caliphate and Ottoman Empire, and in Imperial China—are humble menials, but some, more educated and talented then the rest rise to positions of influence….The Assyrian monarchs may have employed eunuchs extensively….If Herodotus is to be believed…Babylonia and Assyria had to supply the court with 500 boy-eunuchs a year….At first the ones mentioned by name are confidential emissaries, but from the time of Artaxerxes I the eunuchs appear in highly influential positions.

Why and how eunuchs could attain such importance is explained by Xenophon…”They are not made any less efficient horsemen…or less ambitious men…rather the contrary, and even if physically weaker ( which he doubts), steel makes the weak equal to the strong.”

[Read more →]

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This is one of the dumbest things that I have heard in quite a while. Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue thinks it would be great for Americans to carry guns in our airports.

Tags: Domestic Issues // 2 Comments »

I like to laugh as much, or more, than the next guy. I can laugh at myself– and my candidate. But, unfortunately, I think that the New Yorker has gone too far.

Senator Barack Obama and his supporters have fought hard to inform the American public that he is a Christian American. It shouldn’t matter what religion Obama is, but it does. That’s the reality of 2008. Racism and religion are touchy subjects, and New Yorker’s satire isn’t funny. Rather, it is insulting.

Update: I didn’t even notice the American flag burning in the fire place. This is all kinds of wrong.

Update II: 13% of Americans still believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

C&L has an excellent summary of progressive blogs.

Tags: Election 2008, Race, Religion // Add Comment »