It's amazing the degree to which the actual mechanics of winning the primary contests are ignored in favor of how various outcomes impact press narratives that the press is somehow powerless to control.
The absurdity of everything continues. It's just impossible for common sense and facts to penetrate our contemporary discourse anymore. I have no idea whether weapons are coming from Iran - whether from inside its borders or as some sort of organized plot by the Iranian state or elements of it - but this notion that any IED which is an EFP comes from Iran, which is how Saint Petraeus and his press stenographers portray it, is just flat out false. But he's Joe Klein's source, so we know he wouldn't lie. Just like Pete Hoekstra.
"During the first half of January there were as many IEDs (improvised explosive devices) as there were in all of December," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters aboard a plane after a visit in Charleston, South Carolina.
Gates' military adviser, Peter Chiarelli, said later the secretary was actually referring to explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which US officials say Iran has been supplying to insurgents in Iraq.
General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, said Wednesday that EFP attacks had dropped in recent months but increased at the start of January.
"The signature attacks that employ Iranian-provided weapons have decreased substantially," he told a small group of reporters accompanying him on his visit to the Iraq-Iran border post at Zurbitiyah.
"Signature attacks." Because those stupid Arabs who until recently had Weapons of Mass Destruction which were an existential threat to the United States couldn't possibly make these bombs. Only the wily Persians could, as directed to by their leader Mullah Hitler VI.
Bleichwehl said troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches.
Still if someone's killed by a bomb that's Al Qaeda. And if it's a "special" bomb it's Sunni Al Qaeda being armed by Shia Iran, because al Qaeda, the Greatest Enemy Ever, can't make bombs and has to get tem from Shiites who are happy to supply them with bombs that AQ uses to kill Shiites. If none of this makes any sense it's because none of this makes any fucking sense. All hail Saint Petraeus!
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Members of an obscure messianic cult fought pitched battles Friday with Iraqi security forces in two southern cities, leaving at least 80 people dead, injuring scores and spreading panic among worshipers marking Shiite Islam's holiest holiday.
Especially if (like me) one of your senators is running for president. Leadership, Hillary & Barack, leadership. Show it. NO on retroactive telecom immunity for domestic spying.
NO. Yelling at these people helps. And if Hillary's your senator, go here. And if Barack's your senator, go here.
Be polite but be heard. NO to retroactive immunity: YES to the Constitution.
This really is a major issue, and a chance for two of the major candidates for the Democratic nomination to show their mettle in a fight over something that matters -- not just a soundbite joust. Let them know we're watching. Very, very closely.
If Ambac and MBIA lose their top ratings, billions of dollars of muni bonds will be downgraded, and the guarantees that have been sold on mortgage-related securities such as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, will lose value. "The destruction of the bond insurers would likely bring write-downs at major banks and financial institutions that would put current write-downs to shame," Tamara Kravec, an analyst at Banc of America Securities, wrote in a note Friday. Kravec cut her rating on Ambac and MBIA on Friday because she thinks that ratings downgrades are "highly probable" now.
I guess as with Lee Siegel's intellectual peer, Jonah, it's all the same to him.
...how stupid is our discourse that you can successfully pitch a book proposal based on the notion that people on the internets were mean to you after you acted like the biggest tosser in history.
WASHINGTON - Sen. Joe Lieberman — stalwart supporter of the invasion of Iraq — as the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee?
Unthinkable? In retrospect, yes, but according to the Gallup Poll of 438 Democrats in April 2003 — at a point about where we now are in the 2008 presidential campaign cycle — Lieberman was the Democratic frontrunner.
He got 23 percent of Democrats in the Gallup survey, defeating Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who placed second, and an array of other Democrats.
That article's from last Spring, so we aren't at the same point in the campaign now.
BAGHDAD — For the second time in two days, a suicide bomber struck outside a Shiite mosque in Diyala Province north of Baghdad on Thursday, as worshipers prepared for one of the most important days in the Shiite calendar. The police and witnesses said at least 11 people were killed.
The bomber attacked a civilian checkpoint near the Shafta mosque in Baquba during the ceremony of Ashura, which commemorates the seventh-century slaying of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson and a revered figure to Shiites.
Witnesses said that moments before the blast a policeman named Baseem seized the bomber and began shouting, “stranger,” but was too late to stop the explosion, which killed both men and at least nine other people. Fifteen people were wounded.
Call me cynical, but I'll be very surprised if the White House doesn't spend a few days telling the country everyone's gonna get an $800 check and then demand some bullshit in the bill which the Dems, frightened, will cave on...
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Struggling bond insurer ACA Financial Guaranty Corp is set to ask trading partners for more time to unwind its insurance contracts, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Standard & Poor's in December cut ACA Financial Guaranty's credit rating to junk.
...
Friday's report, quoting people familiar with the matter, said ACA is likely to announce an extension to give it more time to work out arrangements.
One possible solution would be a rescue plan giving the counterparties stakes in a restructured bond-insurance company, while another was a capital infusion, it said.
Essentially this would mean that those who bought insurance would fork over money to the insurance company to maintain the fiction that they're actually insured.
It's akin to bailing water from the port side of the boat to the starboard side in an attempt to prevent it from sinking.
LIDDY: Well, I -- in the first place, I think it's envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he's in his flight suit, he's striding across the deck, and he's wearing his parachute harness, you know -- and I've worn those because I parachute -- and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those -- run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman's vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn't count -- they're all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.
One thing that doesn't get talked about enough is that people in Washington are pretty out of touch with the basic economic picture in the United States. Not in the usual, pat, pseudo-populist "oh you're out of touch" sense but in a pretty literal one -- the DC metro area is both quite affluent and economically unusual; much of our region is experiencing a war-driven boom that doesn't have much to do with the experience of other areas (though parts of the southwest are, I believe, the same way).
This true, but it's even worse than this. Aside from general cluelessness about those lovable "heartland"* voters they claim to speak for, part of the long-running conservative campaign to trumpet the myth of the liberal media has been to go on the attack every time a news outlet actually writes about poor people or economic misfortune. Economic difficulty just isn't covered in a comprehensive sense.
*I use the term heartland not in its geographic sense but in the amorphous "real Americans who live somewhere outside the Beltway but probably not NYC or California" sense that reporters mean when they throw it around.
... CNN just now: "It's not the people in autos and steel like past recessions. We've got financial services people being laid off, people in the retailing sector and everything that flows out of housing...
...this is a time when there are still jobs, so even though you're a young executive, you might want to go out and get a weekend job as a waitress, in the evening, something like that..."
Sprint Nextel, the No. 3 U.S. mobile service, said it would cut about 4,000 jobs within the company, close 125 stores and reduce its use of outsourced services to improve its financial performance.
Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- MBIA Inc. and Ambac Financial Group Inc., the two biggest bond insurers, have a more than 70 percent chance of going bankrupt, credit-default swaps show.
Prices for contracts that pay investors if Armonk, New York- based MBIA can't meet its debt obligations imply a 71 percent chance the company will default in the next five years, according to a JPMorgan Chase & Co. valuation model. For New York-based Ambac, credit-default swaps show the odds are 73 percent.
...
The bond insurers place their AAA stamp on $2.4 trillion of debt sold by thousands of municipalities across the country, as well as subprime-mortgage securities. Losing those rankings may cost borrowers and investors as much as $200 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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