So, I’m reading about this elaborate, extravagant erection to GW Bush’s ego being built in Iraq—

The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush’s intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale.

Rising from the dust of the city’s Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.

—sure, it’s got a movie theater, a swimming pool, a mansion, and all kinds of bomb-proof walls, but none of the important construction details are given. Is there a helipad on every roof? Are the stairs to the roof wide, sturdy, and sheltered from sniper fire? Are there provisions for rapid transport of essential documents to the roof? How about self-destruct mechanisms to clean up any confidential materials that have to be left behind?

I hope there are also some very strict standards on what kind of art is on display in the embassy. It’s so embarrassing when new tenants come along and laugh at your “psychotic porn”.

No, I didn’t watch it.

So, tell me…did anyone ask them if they did not believe in evolution? Did anyone raise their hands?

Which one am I most likely going to have to vote for in the next election?

Errm, why haven’t we started the impeachment proceedings on George W. Bush yet?

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”

Is it because the Democratic Party is so gutless they can’t even legislate against an unpopular war, making a despised president untouchable?

Suddenly, it makes sense. Schizophrenia is a methodology. Now we also know who is watching.

If you’re concerned about the military appropriation of an important fossil site, here’s more information. It’s not just some old rocks, it’s a historical and ecologically significant site that’s about to be overrun by a bloated military.

The Picket Wire Canyonlands hold not only the largest dinosaur track site in North America, but the ruins of the Dolores Mission, its graveyard, the ruins of an early ranch, and Native American petroglyphs. The historical, scientific and archaeological value of the canyon cannot be overstated. It is simply priceless and, because entire towns and families are about to vanish, it has been somewhat overlooked. I think it’s time to champion both causes — no expansion into the fragile shortgrass praries of the Comanche Grasslands, no expansion into the Picket Wire Canyon, and no expansion into the ranches and towns that have occupied this region for 150 years. The best way of stopping the expansion altogether is to gain the support of the presidency, and the only way of doing that (since the current president is as amenable to reason and argument as a petrified cabbage) is to get through to the current candidates.

There are also lots of useful links at that site to give you more background.

I’m not a fanatic about gun control—guns are dangerous tools, but so are chainsaws—but sometimes…man, sometimes I think we ought to put more restrictions on them to keep them out of the hands of dangerously stupid people. Take this story, for instance. A police officer hears a noise in his basement, suspects it’s an intruder, and the idiot takes a shot at whoever it is. Unfortunately, it turns out to be his 18 year old daughter sneaking into the house after a late night out.

So basically this guy was firing a handgun in his house at someone he hadn’t even tried to identify, using deadly force before he was at all confident it was necessary. He’s an incompetent boob, a danger to his family, and he shouldn’t be employed in a position where we have an expectation of responsible weapon use. Now that bozo is a walking argument for gun control.

Fortunately, the tragedy was minimized here because he only took out his daughter’s knee rather than slaughtering her.

(via lolife)

Orac has the latest news on the Tripoli Six, the health care workers who were falsely accused of spreading AIDS in a Libyan hospital and were sentenced to death. The good news is that they aren’t dead yet, the Libyan government is still wheedling for reparations, and they’re showing some signs of backing off from a hard line position. Nothing’s certain, but at least the negotiations are creaking along slowly in the right direction.

You’ve probably all read Glenn Greenwald’s withering dissection of a mock scandal ginned up by right-wing bloggers. If you haven’t, you should—the short story is that the fact of a war falling into ignominious failure is driving the apologists to desperate acts of rationalization, and the latest effort to save face involved a fairly inconsequential memo from Iraq that mentioned some temporary difficulties. That memo had to be discredited—I don’t quite see why, even if we were winning I’d expect occasional setbacks—and they turned to their usual tactic of peering at the profane text intently until they could find something that would justify their suspicions—in this case it was the discovery that the logo looked like a picture of a Hummel figurine found on the internet.

Like an entire cast of Keystone Kops, some of the loudest voices on the right-wing side of the blogosphere stumbled all over themselves to crow triumphantly over this ‘victory’…and then the U.S. Embassy in Iraq cheerfully revealed that the memo was authentic. It would be embarrassing for them if they had any shame.

Personally, I wouldn’t give a damn if that piece of paper were real or fake. The reality of the war does not hinge on the words in one memo or a thousand — the military produces memos like a blizzard produces snowflakes — but on the fact that people are dying. The dead do not walk nor are the wounded made whole if only some far right cheerleader for destruction can find vindication in a scrap of paper. It’s as if they hope their myopia gets even more severe, so the blood in the background will blur out of focus and text on a screen becomes the only reality.

In California, the state’s spending on prisons is about to exceed their spending on universities. They’re about to spend $7.4 billion on new facilities, with an operating budget over $10 billion.

I wonder how much of that budget is consumed in ridiculous efforts to punish non-violent drug users, or in the zealous application of three strikes laws?