Warning

It appears that my hosting company may be coming under another DDOS attack. I rather doubt I am the focus but there has been an appalling barrage of comment spam. The last time this happened, it became very difficult to reach the Crabitat.

I really wish these people would go away…..

It’s Kind Of Ironic

It's one of those trite little phrases that everyone knows and uses all the time. A hoary, old phrase that, while over-used to the point of tears, still has a ring of truth that makes it indispensable to describe some situations.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

And so it is with George Bush. He has been absolutely excoriated for his "cowboy" diplomacy. He has been sworn at and screamed at, mocked, demonized, belittled, bullied and cajoled. His critics charge he didn't work with allies, he shunned the international community and he was a unilateralist hegemon. Hell, to some, he's the evil genius (yet somehow thoroughly stupid) who has robbed America of every bit of international credibility that Clinton built up by judicious lip biting.

So now, when he tries to go the route so many damned him for not taking before, he is hearing catcalls and shrieks of, "Ha ha!". And now the insinuation that this is yet another plot.

Let's imagine, and this is purely hypothetical, that President Bush has already decided that he will not leave office in January 2009 without a satisfactory resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem. Let's imagine that he has already determined that if he cannot obtain Iran's agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons program voluntarily and verifiably, then he will order some form of military action to destroy as much of that program as possible before he leaves. Let's imagine that he has resolved not to end his two terms in office the way Bill Clinton ended his, by leaving every major international crisis — from Iraq to Iran to North Korea to al-Qaeda — for his successor.

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Bush had made such a decision. What would he be doing right now? The answer is that he might be doing exactly what he is doing.

He might be engaging in a prodigious and extended diplomatic effort to bring together the international community and, failing that, America's leading democratic allies in a unified effort to convince the Iranians that they should voluntarily give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

And he would have learned from his Iraq experience that, to be successful in the present, profoundly unserious international environment, a diplomatic effort requires two things: evident sincerity and almost infinite patience.

That's right. It's all an evil set-up. A ploy to give Bush a military option right at the end of his presidency. To secure his legacy, you see. It's funny, but the only presidents I have seen really worried about their "legacy" before they left office were Carter and Clinton. The others pretty well didn't really seem to care or, in the case of Johnson and Nixon, already knew how he would be portrayed. But the "legacy" thing is extraordinarily important to reporters for some reason.

But Kagan spins his little yarn, ignoring that there's a little thing called Congress that might feel differently about letting a lame-duck president start a shooting war.

Doubts

The Washington Post has an article about Hillary Clinton that doesn't exactly communicate enthusiasm for a presidential run.

"I think she's a little hard," she said. "She may be strong, but at the same time, if you're driven sometimes you're perceived as not having sympathy. And perception is reality for most of us."

It is a reality that Clinton's advisers are confronting as they seek to position the former first lady for a possible 2008 presidential run. They expect that any campaign would begin after this fall's election, in which Clinton, a Democrat, is running for a second Senate term from New York.

Never has a politician stepped onto a presidential stage before an audience of voters who already have so many strong and personal opinions about her, or amid arguments that revolve around the intangibles of personality and the ways people react to it.

Clinton's assets are formidable: an unrivaled ability to generate publicity and money, and approval ratings that are notably strong, given her polarizing reputation and the controversies she has weathered over 15 years in the national eye. In recent public opinion polls, she handily leads potential Democratic rivals.

Beneath these positives, however, there is evidence of unease — about her personal history, demeanor and motives — among the very Democratic and independent voters she would need to win the presidency.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll highlighted the paradox. Fifty-four percent of those responding view her favorably, and a significant majority give her high marks for leadership (68 percent), strong family values (65 percent), and being open and friendly (58 percent). At the same time, only 37 percent of Democrats in the poll say they would definitely vote for her for president.

A Gallup poll from last summer also highlighted a perception that she is too divisive, with 53 percent of respondents saying they do not view her as someone who would "unite the country and not divide it."

Basically, Hillary has a problem. The left thinks she's too far to the right, the right thinks she's much too left and the center thinks there is something packaged about her. So by trying to skate the middle course, she looks phony to the voters she most needs to win. That's not a good sign, I think. Add to that the dismal record Senators have for getting elected president, and I am really not sure how far past Iowa Hillary would get.

Human Shields

One thing I have always found to be personally offensive is the taking of hostages. To me, it is a mark of a coward, or of a barbarian. The use of other people as human shields should be, I think, wrong in everyone's mind. Think on this a moment. How would you feel if an armed individual took one of your loved ones and held a gun to his or her head? No matter the cause the gunman espouses, how would you feel?

Now, even lower on the spectrum is someone who would hold his own family as a hostage. We've all seen it on the news. Someone holds their own family hostage. I always think that is beneath contempt. Maybe I'm judgmental that way. If so, I have no apologies to make for believing that. It is both how I was raised and what I believe from what I have learned through the years.

So it is with absolute disgust that I hear that a well known, wanted terrorist - who knew full well he was a target for the Israeli military - arranged a strategy meeting with other terrorists in his own home with his family all around him. Using your own family in hopes it would provide you a human shield is a hideous violation of what being a husband and father is supposed to be about.

A Hamas militant leader who has topped Israel's most-wanted list for a decade was badly wounded and underwent four hours of spinal surgery Wednesday after being wounded in an Israeli airstrike, security officials said.

The top fugitive, Mohammed Deif, could end up paralyzed, Palestinian security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss his condition. Wednesday's blast marked the army's fourth attempt to kill Deif, held responsible for suicide bombings in Israel. In a 2002 missile strike, he lost an eye.

At least 23 Palestinians were killed in Gaza on Wednesday. And an Israeli airstrike early Thursday destroyed the building housing the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Foreign Ministry.

Nine members of one family were killed in Wednesday's airstrike, with an Israeli F-16 warplane dropping a quarter-ton bomb on a home in a crowded Gaza City neighborhood. The strike was by far the deadliest in Israel's 15-day military campaign in Gaza, launched after Hamas-allied militants kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

Israel's air force targeted the two-story house of Nabil Abu Salmiyeh, a Hamas activist and university lecturer, after getting intelligence information that the leaders of Hamas' military wing, responsible for the abduction of the soldier, were meeting there. Palestinian security officials said seven or eight top Hamas officials were present.

The blast wounded 37 people, three critically, said Health Minister Bassem Naim. Hospital officials said Raed Saad, a top Hamas operative, was among the wounded, but details of his condition weren't released.

Putting your family around you in hopes they will shield you from retribution is not the work of a father or husband or a hero. It is the work of a coward and a barbarian.

Please do not comment if you are going to try to make some sort of moral equivalency. There really is none.

Putting your family around you in hopes they will shield you from retribution is not the work of a father or husband or a hero. It is the work of a coward and a barbarian.

Please do not comment if you are going to try to make some sort of moral equivalency. There really is none.

Sausages In Space!

A converted Cold War era Russian ballistic missile launched an experimental inflatable spacecraft into space today. The craft is a test of a number of technologies that it's backers hope will one day be a commercial space station.

The Genesis I satellite flew aboard a converted Cold War ballistic missile from Russia's southern Ural Mountains at 6:53 p.m. Moscow time. It was boosted about 320 miles above Earth minutes after launch, according to the Russian Strategic Missile Forces.

The launch was a first for the startup Bigelow Aerospace, founded by Bigelow, who owns the Budget Suites of America hotel chain. Bigelow is among several entrepreneurs attempting to break into the fledgling manned commercial spaceflight business.

Mission controllers began communicating with Genesis about seven hours after liftoff. Early indications showed that the spacecraft was behaving as planned, according to a statement by the company.

The spacecraft's internal battery was at full charge, meaning that it had deployed its solar panels, the statement said.

Despite the successful launch, significant hurdles remain.

Mission controllers will continue to download information from the spacecraft over the next several hours to determine its health. Once that's confirmed, it will begin the tricky job of ballooning itself to twice its pre-launch width in a process that could last several hours.

Bigelow hopes to use inflation technology to build an expandable orbital outpost made up of several Genesis-like modules strung together like sausage links that could serve as a space hotel, science lab or even a sports arena.

"We're ecstatic. We're just elated," Bigelow said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas. "We have a sense of being on a great adventure."

Bigelow has committed $500 million toward building a commercial space station by 2015. So far, $75 million has been spent on the project.

Sports in space! Nah - never work. A good head butt could get you ejected all right. Right into space!

Twenty Seconds Equals

Twenty seconds equals millions of words of newsprint.

Twenty seconds equals millions of hours arguing.

Twenty seconds equals gazillions of bytes of data on blogs.

Twenty seconds equals thousands of pounds of stomach lining eaten by excess acid.

Twenty seconds equals 85 days in jail for a reporter.

Twenty seconds equals millions upon millions of dollars in tax money thrown away.

Twenty seconds is how long Robert Novak spoke with Karl Rove about Valerie Plame.

The Novak-Rove conversation became a focus of the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald into who leaked Plame's identity to the news media. A month ago, the prosecutor said he doesn't anticipate seeking criminal charges against Rove.

Novak said he called Rove in July 2003 to talk about a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa by Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson pertaining to an alleged Iraqi deal to acquire yellowcake uranium from the government of Niger. Wilson, who is Plame's husband, had accused the Bush administration a few days earlier of manipulating prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

Regarding Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip, Novak said he told Rove, "I understand that his wife works at the CIA and she initiated the mission." The columnist said Rove replied, "Oh, you know that, too."

"I took that as a confirmation that she worked with the CIA and initiated" her husband's mission to Africa, Novak said. "I really distinctly remember him saying, 'You know that, too.'"

"We talked about Joe Wilson's wife for about maybe 20 seconds," Novak said.

According to Rove's legal team, the White House political adviser recalls the conversation regarding Wilson's wife differently, saying that he replied to Novak that "I've heard that, too" rather than "You know that, too."

Was it worth it?

101st Blog Of The Day

Today, my ongoing mission to visit one member of the fighting 101st each day took me over to Blogger Beer. Marcus Aurelius has an interesting observation: how many uninjured Palestinian children need to be rushed to the hospital after an attack by the IDF on the Palestinian Foreign Ministry building? Isn't Pallywood interesting?

Attention North Dakota!

Get your children inside! Warn everybody you know! There is a fearsome creature on the loose near Bismark. A Krazed Killer Kangaroo is on the loose! Well, ok, we don't know for sure he's a killer, but we can't be too certain when he'll revert to his ancestor's habits, either!

BISMARCK, N.D. - Law enforcement authorities on the lookout for criminals also are keeping an eye out for a missing kangaroo. Corey Botner, who lives southwest of Bismarck, said he was feeding his pet wallaroo, a member of the kangaroo family, when it got away Tuesday night.

Botner said the wallaroo, named Joe, was frightened by his new St. Bernard puppy. Joe is about a year old, around 4 feet tall with brown and black hair.

Lynn Jacobs, an animal warden at the Bismarck Police Department, said someone reported seeing a kangaroo Monday night. She worried that people might not believe what they see.

"They might think they got a whiff of something," she said.

Hah! Wait'll they go out to get a newspaper and a gator attacks them! Or go for a swim and meet a piranha. (That one was in North Dakota, too!)

Although, I'd have to say, if I was driving along and spotted a kangaroo, I'd like as not head for the eye doctor….

Israel Striking Deeply Inside Lebanon

Israeli forces have attacked a number of targets deep within Lebanon including a Palestinian base just South of Beirut. Israeli civilians in the North have been ordered into bomb shelters.

In a series of air strikes late Wednesday evening, IAF aircraft bombed Kfar Shuba and Sheba Farms in Lebanon. The communications infrastructure connecting Beirut to the south of the country was also damaged by IAF strikes.

The strikes followed an attack by IAF warplanes and navy gunboats on a Palestinian terrorist base south of Beirut late Wednesday in the closest raid to the Lebanese capital since fighting erupted in southern Lebanon after the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers.

….

All residents along Israel's northern border from Nahariya in the west to Kiryat Shmona in the east were ordered into bomb shelters on Wednesday night.

"This is a new situation. The residents of Israel need to know that we are going into a period that would require resilience," Minister Issac Herzog said after the emergency cabinet meeting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert convened on Wednesday night in Tel Aviv in light of the events on the northern border.

According to Herzog, Israel is holding Lebanon responsible for the attack, which was carried out from its territory.

Omar at Iraq the Model has an analysis of what is going on right now that is fascinating:

I don't know for sure what made Hizbollah do what they did this morning but I can make some guesses starting from the fact that Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizbollah collectively form one big axis of evil in the Middle East with connected interests and shared goals so the abduction of the two Israeli soldiers looks like an act planned to serve the interests of the members of the axis without the least regard to the harm it can bring upon Lebanon.

For example, the foreign ministers of the 5 UNSC countries and Germany were meeting today to discuss how to respond to Iran's position regarding the nuclear issue, so this could be an attempt to distract the international community and especially Israel and America from the Iranian nuclear threat. And if that's the case, then their plan has just failed. But this will also mean they (the axis) will try other measures and will cause more trouble to distract the international community from focusing on the Iranian nuclear threat.

Meanwhile, Hizbollah itself is under continuous pressure from other parties inside Lebanon regarding the disarmament of the party's militia; therefore maybe Nesrallah thought that putting Lebanon in such an embarrassing de facto situation would relieve some of that pressure and give him an upper hand in the negotiations.

Another possibility is that the operation was conducted in the hope that it could lower the Israeli pressure on Hizbollah's allies in Hamas and slow the ongoing military operation in Gaza.

Actually it could be all of the above reasons because they all serve the common interest of the axis members and are all three possibilities fall in the category of putting the international community, America and Israel in a position where they have to fight (militarily or politically) on more than one front.

I think Omar may have missed one other obvious connection. The sudden burst of sectarian violence in Baghdad is probably also related to the situation. It is almost certainly Iran pulling the strings on that as well.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing: Can Israel regain the initiative?

UPDATE: The Scratching Post has uncovered the real plot behind all this. Kourtesy of the Koz Kidz.

Kos Krash?

Noel Sheppard has an interesting article up over at Real Clear Politics about all the negative attention Kos has been getting recently. He also examines signs of internal dissent.

As reported here on June 30, revelations about Kos's friend and former business partner Jerome Armstrong - from stock fraud allegations to accepting consulting fees from not so liberal candidates - have cast a cloud over the blog and its leader. This pall has also undermined the stellar relationship Kos has had with the traditional media up to this point.

Yet, maybe more important, these revelations - along with the way Markos and his Kossacks reacted to them - have caused some prominent DKos bloggers to question the behavior of Zuniga and his devotees. Such a civil war within the liberal blogosphere certainly has the potential to further discredit it, while likely making the mainstream media as well as the candidates they revere less apt to associate with this developing train wreck.

I've posted about the dust-up with TNR and other major media, but hadn't really mentioned the number of fairly well known left-wing people who have expressed negativity about what is happening at Kos lately.

Sounds like real world Machiavellian politics have crashed the gates, doesn't it? Yet, O'Connor is not the only Kossack having such doubts. The day before she posted her personal revelations, Richard Silverstein wrote another blog - this one conspicuously not posted at DKos - entitled "Don't Cross the 'Cult of Kos' or You'll Live to Regret It." In it, Silverstein raised a very important question:

[H]ow does a political blogger who endorses candidates at his site create a transparent environment when he may also be consulting for-or have some other undisclosed relationship with-some of these same candidates?

So, trouble in paradise or a tempest in a teapot? Hard to say. All I know is that I stay off the Kos site as much as humanly possible because the level of vitriol is so high. I don't know if Kos will survive, implode or simply fade away. My crystal ball is on the fritz today. But I think there are some cracks showing. Part of that is that nothing survives long in a corrosive atmosphere.

Miracles

Sometimes, all the bad news of the day needs a bit of a break. That's one reason I try to put up at least a few humorous items each day. Also items about things that are a bit different. And every once in a while, it's nice to have a real miracle. A team of scientists have announced the first success in the development of a device to give hope to people who are paralyzed. Using electrodes and sensors, a paralyzed man has been able to move a computer cursor, open email and control a robotic device just by thinking about it.

LONDON (Reuters) - A Paralyzed man using a new brain sensor has been able to move a computer cursor, open e-mail and control a robotic device simply by thinking about doing it, a team of scientists said on Wednesday.

They believe the BrainGate sensor, which involves implanting electrodes in the brain, could offer new hope to people Paralyzed by injuries or illnesses.

"This is the first step in an ongoing clinical trial of a device that is encouraging for its potential to help people with paralysis," Dr Leigh Hochberg, of Massachusetts General Hospital, said in an interview.

The 25-year-old man who suffered paralysis of all four limbs three years earlier completed tasks such moving a cursor on a screen and controlling a robotic arm.

He is the first of four patients with spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, stroke or motor neurone disease testing the brain-to-movement system developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc in Massachusetts.

"This is the dawn of major neurotechnology where the ability to take signals out of the brain has taken a big step forward. We have the ability to put signals into the brain but getting signals out is a real challenge. I think this represents a landmark event," said Professor John Donoghue of Brown University in Rhode Island and the chief scientific officer of Cyberkinetics.

The scientists implanted a tiny silicon chip with 100 electrodes into an area of the brain responsible for movement. The activity of the cells was recorded and sent to a computer which translated the commands and enabled the patient to move and control the external device.

"This part of the brain, the motor cortex, which usually sends its signals down the spinal cord and out to the limbs to control movement, can still be used by this participant to control an external device, even after years had gone by since his spinal cord injury," added Hochberg, a co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.

There have been other demonstrations of this type of technology, but this is the most advanced to date.

Absolutely Disgusting

RedState has a video from the DCCC that is absolutely obscene.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a new fundraising pitch going out. It uses September 11th and our troops to raise money. But, instead of using those images to show Democrats would be tougher on terrorists and make America more secure, it uses pictures of dead soldiers in their flag draped coffins and the subtle threat of harm from September 11th to make a threat to the GOP. See the outrage for yourself here.

In an email from Rahm Emanuel, he links to a new video from the DCCC that shows the flag draped coffins of American soldiers and a standing gun supporting the helmet of one of our fallen — images of dead American soldiers — to raise money for the DCCC.

There is more. But that's enough for me. This is a foul, foul thing to do. It is foul beyond belief. The utter lack of common human decency is appalling.

Permanent Members Vote To Send Iran To Security Council

Russia and China have stopped their blocking tactics and have voted with the other permanent UN Security Council members to refer Iran to the full UNSC.

The United States and other permanent members of the powerful U.N. body said Iran has had long enough to say whether it will meet the world's terms to open bargaining that would give Tehran economic and energy incentives in exchange for giving up suspicious activities.

"The Iranians have given no indication at all that they are ready to engage seriously on the substance of our proposals," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said on behalf the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China, the five permanent Security Council members, plus Germany and the European Union.

Now we know why the Hezbollah attacks came when they did.

Two Front War Opens

Israel is calling up reserves, this is becoming a very bad situation very quickly.

Seven Israel Defense Forces soldiers were killed and two others were abducted Wednesday in attacks by guerillas from the militant Hezbollah organization.

Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said Wednesday evening that a prisoner exchange was the only way to secure the release of the soldiers, who he said were being held in a "secure and remote" location.

"No military operation will return them," Nasrallah told a news conference in Beirut. "The prisoners will not be returned except through one way: indirect negotiations and a trade."

The militants attacked two IDF armored Hummer jeeps patrolling along the border with gunfire and explosives, in the midst of massive shelling attacks on Israel's north. Three soldiers were killed in the attack and two were taken hostage.

Later in the day, four IDF soldiers were apparently killed when their tank hit a mine some 6 kilometers inside Lebanese territory.

The army withheld news of the deaths for several hours while the soldiers' families were notified.

The IDF had Wednesday afternoon sent troops across the border to search for the missing soldiers, marking the first incursion into Lebanon since the withdrawal in May 2000.

Army Radio reported large numbers of troops, as well as aircraft, were taking part in searches on the Lebanese side of the border.

According to Channel 10 television, the IDF later said that it had lost all hope of retrieving the abducted soldiers with ground forces.

….

Reserve troops called up
In the wake of the attack, IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz headed into the military's war room at the Defense Ministry complex in Tel Aviv, Channel 10 television reported.

During consultations, senior IDF officers called for an end to the restraint against Hezbollah and said Lebanon should be made to pay a heavy price.

Halutz ordered the IDF to mobilize a reserve infantry division that was expected to be sent to the northern border. General Staff exercises held over the past several years tested a number of possible responses to kidnapping scenarios.

One of these responses involves the massive incursion of IDF ground forces into Lebanese territory. Military sources told Haaretz that Israel is liable to act with the aim of "altering the rules of the game on the northern front."

It's getting ugly. This is quite obviously a coordinated effort between Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran's hand is in there as well.

UPDATE: Israel Matzav reports rumors that Israel may make a declaration of war. Still only a rumor.

Brainster Comes Through

It's been kind of busy, so I missed these as they went up, but Brainster has come through and made the Cindy Sheehan fast diaries a regular item!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

There are the links to the first four entries. Thanks, Pat!