ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE – White House officials waged an extraordinary campaign during an 11-hour Air Force One flight to put a positive spin on the outcome of Sunday’s summit talks between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Four times on the long flight back to Washington from Sochi, Russia, Bush aides trooped back to the press cabin to make the case that the summit had turned out well, particularly on missile defenses.
It was the heaviest lobbying campaign veteran reporters could recall ever occurring on the president’s plane. Press accounts of the summit had been sent to Bush’s plane and administration officials thought they were too negative. Clearly, Bush’s aides were disappointed.
Because of course, it’s only the lipstick that matters.
We’re going to hear a lot of crap in the next week out of the Administration and their spinners, and robots like Cokie are going to lap it up because, you know, “Americans would prefer to win.” That’s just an ignorant and dismissive remark, and it sadly represents the depth of understanding of the tragedy in Iraq inside The Village. Of course, Cokie’s just repeating what “real Americans” think; that it happens to line up with establishment opinion and helps provide cover for their epic mistake of going along with the initial invasion is just a nice perk.
On the best of days, John McCain’s fanboys rival 12 year old girls screaming themselves faint in the front row of a Jonas Brothers concert, but this rush to ensure that that mean Barack Obama didn’t “get away” with using McCain’s own words against him on the stump was a profile in Xtreme Flyboy-love. Once again, McCain is excused for saying something completely shocking because his scribbling sycophants are sure he “didn’t really mean it.” One can only imagine what it would be like if all candidates were given the benefit of the doubt on such matters.(I’m sorry Jay, but this proves once again that they have not learned any lessons from their irresponsible behavior of the past few years.)
Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.
Our nation’s coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable. The proof that the Regular People are interested in these things is that… the journalists themselves chatter about it endlessly.
According to the latest wire reports, the verdict is in: even (and perhaps especially) he who would be the next Bush doesn’t know crap about Iran. This is unfortunate; one would think the disastrous invasion of Mesopotamia would’ve reminded us that we’re talking about a region of the world that breaks empires as a matter of course.
Tonight’s historiorant seeks to address just one of the lessons that needn’t have cost us 4000+ of our own soldiers’ lives to learn: that failing to accurately assess an enemy’s capabilities frequently plays a major role in victories and defeats in Southwest Asia. Marcus Licinius Crassus didn’t appreciate that fact, nor did Hulagu Khan centuries later. Join in the Cave of the Moonbat, and we’ll see if we can’t help to educate our misguided Republican brethren before they foist yet another hotheaded dumbass upon the American citizenry – and hopefully forestall our getting enmeshed in yet another Carrhae, Ain Jalut, or Chaldiran.
There are two ways to put hyperlinks in your articles or comments.
These examples will display your link as blue colored clickable hyperlink text.
1) Bracket method. SoapBlox sites like this one (& Scoop sites like DailyKos) provide an easy shorthand method.
To embed a hyperlink, type both the URL and the text you want to display as a link, enclosed in square brackets, and separate them with at least one space.
2) HTML method. Other sites require HTML tags to display a hyperlink. This method will also work here. The HTML code begins with the <A HREF=> tag and ends with the </A> tag as shown below. The URL of the page you are linking to should be included in quotes immediately after <A HREF=>. The text that you want to appear in the link should be between the <A HREF=> and </A> tags.
To italicize, surround the text you want to italicize with <i> on the left and </i> on the right.
To bold, surround the text you want in bold with <b> on the left and </b> on the right.
To underline, surround the text you want underlined with <u> on the left and </u> on the right.
To blockquote, surround the text you want to blockquote with <blockquote> on the left and </blockquote> on the right.
To strike out text with a line through it, surround the text you want to strike out with <strike> on the left and </strike> on the right.
To center text on a page, surround the text you want to center with <center> on the left and </center> on the right.
To create a gray divider line in your article, like the gray lines between the sections of this Formatting Tips page, place an <hr> tag where you want the gray line to appear. The <hr> tag can be used by itself and is one of the few HTML tags that does not require a closing </hr> tag.
To create a line feed use a <br> tag. You can use two <br> tags in succession (<br><br>) to create a blank line, or multiple <br> tags in succession to create multiple blank lines. Like <hr> tags, <br> tags do not require closing </br> tags.
— POSTING PICTURES —
To post a picture in your article, you’ll need the URL (web address) of the picture.
It’s best practice to upload pictures to Flickr or Photobucket or other image hosts rather than linking directly to a picture on someone else’s site (aka Hot Linking). The image hosts make it easy to copy & paste the URLs of the pictures into your comment or essay. Below each picture you will find the HTML code to include with your post. There will be a box that says “copy/paste this code to your website” or something to that effect.
Also be aware of copyright issues. If you use someone else’s picture, provide a link to the page you found it on, if possible.
The following line of code will display a picture in your article. Replace the URL in this example with the URL of the picture you want to display, and adjust the width to your preference (use “preview” to make adjustments). The height will be auto-calculated proportionally – you do not need to specify it.
You can set the “align” parameter to “left” or “right”, to display your picture on either side of the article page.
NOTE: Please don’t post pictures wider than 500px. Images larger than 500px wide may be removed by Site Admins as they may adversely affect some browser displays.
— WRAPPING TEXT AROUND PICTURES —
TO MAKE YOUR ARTICLE TEXT “WRAP”, (display BESIDE and BELOW your picture), begin typing the text of your article immediately following the image code:
<img src="http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u65/Hillobama.jpg” width="200" align=”left”>START TYPING YOUR ARTICLE TEXT HERE…..
TO CENTER YOUR PICTURE and display your article text BELOW it, REMOVE the “align” parameter from the image code line, and enclose the entire image code line in center tags:
YouTube videos are the most popular video format but there are others that will allow you to embed as well. When you find a YouTube video that you’d like to post, obtain the “embed” code for that video by clicking on the YouTube logo at the bottom right corner of the video which will take you to the YouTube page for that video. Or click on “Menu” in the lower right corner of the video and it will display the embed code for you in the video image.
To the right of the video on the YouTube page you’ll see a box with the title “embed” beside it. Copy the code from that box and paste it into your essay or comment.
For example, most if not all of Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments” on the MSNBC Countdown program are available at YouTube normally within a day or so of broadcast.
There is a search box at YouTube to help you find videos by searching by name or subject or keyword.
Here is Olbermann’s Special Comment on July 03, 2007 calling on George W. Bush to resign:
The “embed” code for that video (available by clicking the YouTube logo) looks like this, and if pasted into your article will display the video aligned against the left margin, as above:
To post a video in your article centered on the page, simply enclose the “embed” code in center tags (the same as centering pictures, as described above):
Posting that code in your article will display the video centered on the page:
You can also shrink videos by removing the height parameter in both places where it appears in the code and setting the width to a smaller amount of pixels.
“I believe in a sacred contract between our country and America’s veterans and military families. We must stand by those who stand by us. When our service men and women sacrifice so much to defend our freedom and secure peace around the world, we have a moral obligation to take care of them and their families.” – John Edwards
Yes, I know, John Edwards is not in the race for president any longer. But that does not diminish the power of his efforts to ensure that we treat our military with the respect they deserve — the active military and their families and the veterans.
As we find out more about the bombing of the FARC base in Ecuador, it becomes clear that we weren’t being told the whole truth about the situation. Surprised, aren’t you?
though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.
The Coming Revolution in Africa, is how G. Pascal Zachary titles his piece for the Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2008, Vol. XXXII, no. 1, pp. 50-66.{1}) …
… and yes, it takes a journalist to see the coming Revolution clearly, since so much of the so-called “development” profession has a conflict of interest. As Pascal notes well into his piece:
Even as a steady diet of stories about “urgent” food crises in Africa dominated public discussion, these successes became impossible to ignore. In 2004, the International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) published a series of papers titled “Successes in African Agriculture”. The papers both reflected and provoked a revolution in thinking about African farming. They also ended a long conspiracy of silence among aid agencies and professional Africanists. For decades the “food mafia,” led by the World Food program and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, had refused to acknowledge any good news about African farming out of fear that evidence of bright spots would reduce the flow of charitable donations to the UN’s massive “famine” bureaucracy, designed to feed the hungry.
A rain of mortars and artillery rockets has commenced on the Green Zone, the headquarters of the US occupation authorities in Iraq. Rumors have circulated that US embassy personnel have withdrawn from the Green Zone to undisclosed locations. What is now in question is the fate of the colossal, newly-constructed US embassy compound. The half-billion-dollar complex of massive buildings has never been fully occupied, because of numerous construction flaws, but there is now a larger issue.
How well does a complex of office buildings hold up under daily mortar and rocket fire? Although the buildings are heavily reinforced, all structures have weak points. The air conditioning, water, and electrical systems are all potentially vulnerable to damage or disruption through incoming rocket fire. The insurgent rockets are inaccurate, but the embassy complex is a huge target. Day by day, it is likely that serious damage is being done. Unless the rockets are stopped, the embassy is doomed. Even if it is not physically destroyed, if the grounds of the embassy become so dangerous that vehicles and helicopters cannot safely approach it, the embassy becomes useless, and is functionally nullified.
America made a huge error is constructing this enormous symbol of occupation power in the heart of Baghdad. It was like putting up a huge “come and get us” sign to the insurgents. Now Al Sadr’s insurgents are pounding away, and the dearth of news coverage of damage in the Green Zone suggests that things are not going well there.
A few days ago, I posted on the untimely death one of our blogging brethren, New Orleans native Dr. Ashley Morris
For those of you unfamiliar with Ashley’s work, here is, IMHO, the finest rant I have ever read. He posted this the November after Katrina hit New Orleans. It has become something of a legend on the Gulf Coast, and it is now known simply as FYYFF:
Londoners awoke on a lazy, snowy Sunday morning to images of protest flooding their television screens, including one moment when a protester was almost successful in dousing the Olympic flame as it was carried by British celebrity Konnie Huq:
Excerpted from