The Six Saga: Guess What I Got For My Birthday?

I haven't made a diary entry in a long time, and since some have been asking, thought I'd park it all here....

Cooked books, concealed reports, phony PR; gov't is like private business

For most of my lifetime, there has been a segment of the population that wanted to know "why can't the U.S. government be run like a private business?"  Well my super-capitalist friends, good news!!!!! It damn well is.

Anatomy Of A Disaster

As I recuperate from surgery, it's given me some time to collect some thoughts on many things, among them, well, to understand where I'm going with this, you have to take a short course in flying an airplane...

The new permanent detention facility at Guantanamo

It's a rather odd story, part military news, part media blackout, part public relations event; publicly announced a month ago, yet reported in foreign press sources as new news, and basically ignored by the American media:

The U.S. is building a new, permanent detention camp at Guantanamo, at the very time that the international community calls for closing the Gitmo detention facilities altogether, and despite President Bush's recently announced desire to, maybe, sort of, do just that.

Rove to Ohio Repubs: "it's time to bring it back and do it again in 2006"

When Karl Rove tells $100-a-plate Ohio repubs that "it's time to ...do it again in 2006," I get real worried. Of course the Ohio polls look grim for Repubs, but we know that polls don't mean much in an era when electronic voting machine security resembles firm Swiss cheese.

How's that for a scary thought, huh?

Trade higher (but inadequate) minimum wage for estate tax reduction?

That group of pandering wealth-o-philes known as the Republicans in the House of Representatives has outdone itself this time.

Ohio voter: "this country needs something other than Republicans right now"

A Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch poll on the coming election is more grim news for our cast of Republican radicals.

Military lowered recruiting standards, but is not "sacrificing quality"

In a very typical bureaucratic press release a couple of weeks ago, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, David S. C. Chu, said the military has been able to fill its ranks without sacrificing quality.

"Parent's Day." The Warm & Fuzzy Holiday You May Have Missed

As has apparently happened every year since 1994, President Bush proclaimed July 23 as "Parent's Day."

Parent's Day?  Why? Don't we already have Mother's Day and Father's Day?  Is there some other kind of parent that needs acknowledging?

Your tour is up...almost...hang on just a while, okay?

Continuing what I consider to be its abuse of the military contract between the government and its soldiers, "anonymous officials" in Washington are saying that the administration is, once again, considering the possibility of temporarily beefing up the forces in Iraq by extending the tours of some U.S. soldiers.