Me: Frank Lynch

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These are my mundane daily ramblings.
For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes).

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I always heard you should do the break up in a nice restaurant, where she'd be too intimidated to make a scene. But Bush does it one better: supposedly he fired Rove while they were in church.

Jesus famously threw the money lenders out of the temple; I wonder how much tolerance he would show for this kind of activity.
Link | | | 9:43 PM | Home
 

Who the hell do they think they are? Iraq is a sovereign nation. We know that, because we handed them their sovereignty. And they had better not forget it.

Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed "status of forces" agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.

Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.

The ingrates. How quickly they forget that Saddam Hussein was a bad man. He was bad.
Link | | | 9:17 PM | Home

Say it ain't so, George. More and more it's looking like Jack Abramoff had an "in" with the White House...

E-mails uncovered by the oversight committee show that White House aides eliminated the job of a state department negotiator in 2001 after Abramoff associates complained about his support for labour reform in the Mariana Islands, the Pacific manufacturing hotspot.

"I'm trying to figure out what is the best way to go about [sacking the negotiator]," one White House official wrote at the time. "I don't want a firing scandal on our hands."

More here.
Link | | | 8:06 PM | Home

Major CYA activity. According to a military defense lawyer, Guantanamo interrogators destroyed notes with evidence of (whisper) t o r t u r e under instructions from the Pentagon. Video tapes, emails, you name it... What part of "obstruction of justice" doesn't the Bush administration practice?
Link | | | 7:05 AM | Home
 

And ANOTHER thing about John McCain. Apparently he's collecting $58,000 a year in disability income from the Federal Government. A spokesperson says he technically qualifies, because his disability resulted from his being tortured.

Hmm. Summon the Swift Boat Vets!
Link | | | 2:46 PM | Home
 

Vacuum your refrigerator coils. If you can't remember the last time you did it, it's certainly overdue. And if you can remember, it could still be overdue. Just do it: I don't have to remind you how much juice those babies consume, and with summer upon us and energy prices climbing...
Link | | | 8:30 PM | Home
 

Verdict: Bush and Cheney Lied. Not just "relied on faulty intelligence," the formulaic salve which too many on the Right have resorted to, to excuse insufficient inquisiteveness and skepticism, but lied. As in, knew what they were saying wasn't justified:

It's long been known that the administration's claims in the runup to the Iraq war, from Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al Qaida to whether Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, were incorrect, and White House spokeswoman Dana Perino suggested the problems were faulty intelligence.

"We had the intelligence that we had fully vetted, but it was wrong," she said. "We certainly regret that and we've taken measures to fix it."

But the Senate report, the first official examination of whether the president and vice president knew that their claims were incorrect at the time that they made them, reached a different conclusion.

"There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate," Rockefeller said in a statement.

Of course, it would be very narrow and cavalier to limit the conclusion to whether or not Bush and Cheney lied, since their lies did not occur in a vacuum. As of this post, Iraq Coalition Casualties tallies the coalition deaths at 4,405, of which 4,092 are Americans. And tens of thousands of Iraqis.

So it's not that far a stretch to say that the willful distortion of the available evidence points to Bush and Cheney as murderers: they may not have pulled the trigger, but they loaded the gun and knowingly put it in action.

The Right, doubtless, will act like this is all in the past, and it's senseless to talk any longer about how we got into Iraq, the point is to plot the best course from here on in.

But one doesn't preclude the other, and the ongoing tragedy actually makes it more important that justice be served.

Of course, those of us who are awake are not overwhelmed by the "news" of Rockefeller's committee's conclusions. An example I frequently cite is Cheney's statement on Meet the Press, before the invasion, that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons. It was all the news in the following days, and he couldn't have been oblivious to it. Yet in September, many months after the invasion, he accepted Tim Russert's suggestion that it was merely a misstatement. One left uncorrected until after the invasion, and a strong piece of evidence that Cheney was well aware of the implications of every. thing. he. said.

Liars. And killers. And they should be put on trial, first in the Senate and then in the Courts.
Link | | | 8:42 PM | Home

A "hawk" in other arenas, but an opponent to the war in Iraq. William Odom, Reagan's head of the National Security Agency, has died. The NYT obituary quotes him telling the Washington Post, prior to the invasion,

"The issue is not whether the Iraqi people will greet U.S. soldiers as their liberators, but what will they do six months after that," Mr. Odom told The Washington Post in February 2003. "I find it naïve and disingenuous to claim that you can create democracy in Iraq any time soon."

"The administration has already assured us that the U.S. will not stay there for very long," he added, "and, if that is the case, then the goal of establishing a constitutional system in Iraq is a joke."

So the second premise, that we'd only be there six months, is wrong. Maybe under McCain's 100 year design we will be there long enough to see a real democracy develop... And maybe the war's defenders are too quick to point to "all the intelligence" (wrong in itself) and ignore all the wisdom which was around and available for free.
Link | | | 7:27 AM | Home
 

It's not all a bowl of cherries for mass transit agencies. Sure, ridership is up, and it's a golden opportunity for lasting change, as people re-acquaint themselves with mass transit. Think of it, in an era of "I can take my whole music library with me" and "I can read my email," transit is serving its mission in a completely different context.

Unfortunately, agencies are being squeezed, thanks to increasing energy prices and shrinking local subsidies.

(Disclosure: I work at Abt SRBI, and many of the clients my group serves are in mass transit.)
Link | | | 9:34 PM | Home
 

Who are the true elitists? Speaking to the National Press Club, and answering a question about his being a distant cousin to Barack Obama, VP Dick Cheney later discussed genealogical research which showed there were Cheneys on both his mother's side of the family and his fathers:

"So I had Cheneys on both sides of the family and we don't even live in West Virginia," Cheney quipped.

Even though a spokesperson later issued a statement indicating Cheney reconsidered the remark, and apologizing to the people of West Virginia, it's not like Cheney decided to be someone completely different when he first made his little incest joke. It had to be inside him, and the Devil did not make him do it.

Add it up, America.
Link | | | 7:20 AM | Home
 

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