Sadly, No!

Thanks to KnaveRupe for making us aware of this:

Ah, dear old Tony “Snow“:

MR. SNOW: You know, it’s 130 degrees in Baghdad in August, I’ll pass on your recommendation.

Right… and: Sadly, No!

Baghdad, Iraq

Average High Temperature -- August
°F 108
°C 42

Highest Recorded Temperature -- August
°F 118
°C 47

BBC?

Month	Average Sunlight (hours)	Temperature				Discomfort from heat and humidity	Relative humidity		Average Precipitation (mm)	Wet Days (+0.25 mm)
		Average		Record
		Min	Max	Min	Max		am	pm
Jan	6	4	16	-8	25	–	84	51	23	4
Feb	7	6	18	-5	30	–	78	42	25	3
March	8	9	22	-3	32	–	73	36	28	4
April	9	14	29	3	40	Medium	64	34	13	3
May	10	19	36	11	44	Medium	47	19	3	1
June	12	23	41	14	48	High	34	13	0	0
July	11	24	43	17	49	High	32	12	0	0
Aug	11	24	43	18	49	High	33	13	0	0
Sept	11	21	40	11	47	High	38	15	0	0
Oct	9	16	33	4	42	Medium	49	22	3	1
Nov	7	11	25	-2	34	–	70	39	20	3
Dec	6	6	18	-7	26	–	84	52	25	5

That’s hot — but it ain’t 130 degrees.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Labor Secretary Elaine Chao:

You could lose your job to a foreign worker—not because he’s cheaper but because he has better workplace skills and discipline. That’s the message Labor Secretary Elaine Chao hears from U.S. executives who are worried about America’s competitive future. While losses are low thus far—one study estimates that only 280,000 jobs in the service industry out of 115 million are outsourced each year—that could change. Beyond the cheaper cost of labor, U.S. employers say that many workers abroad simply have a better attitude toward work. “American employees must be punctual, dress appropriately and have good personal hygiene,” says Chao. “They need anger-management and conflict-resolution skills, and they have to be able to accept direction. Too many young people bristle when a supervisor asks them to do something.”

I love when these assholes inadvertently tell the truth: they dislike employing Americans because we aren’t as pliant as some poor bastard from Latin America who can be threatened with deportation if he acts too uppity. Unbelievable.

Gavin adds: Ms. Chao (née Chao Hsiao-lan, Republic of China) is married, if that’s the word for it, to Senator Mitch “I Smell Clean” McConnell.

  
Above: It’s hard to be humble when you’re Cal Thomas

Noted moral scold Cal Thomas hangs his head in sorrow over the latest revelation of another moral scold being caught, almost literally, with his pants down:

Is there anything sadder than a child who no longer sees his father as having good character, or a wife whose trust has been shattered?

Okay, since you asked, pretty much every single story I’ve read or watched about Iraq for about four years is sadder than this one. For example, I saw one the other night on NBC Nightly News about a young woman from Queens, I think, whose husband was killed in Iraq. They met in second grade and had been sweethearts their entire lives — they’d probably built up a storehouse of inside jokes that would make you simultaneously cringe with embarrassment and swell with envy — and now he’s dead. She’s managing her grief, incidentally, by enlisting in the Army over the objections of her heartbroken parents. Shipped off to boot camp last week. Somehow, to me, the destruction of that sweet little marriage is sadder than a neglected wife and children having their suspicions about dad confirmed.

While sexual escapades have always been with us, we now seem to have a bipolar approach to such behavior.

“Now seem to”? My gosh, Cal. You refer to sex as “a lower nature” and “base behavior” throughout this column. You shouldn’t feel ashamed of enjoying sex. Sex is pretty awesome.

Some in Congress stand up for family values, while they lie down with prostitutes. Their rhetoric may add to the cultural debate, but their behavior nullifies any credibility they might expect to enjoy. Anyone who can’t impose morality on himself is unlikely to be successful in legislating it for others.

A half-season of Wife Swap adds more to our debate about family values than some twisted assholes working through their guilt by yelling at people. No, really. Imperfect as they are, most of the families on that show seem to really love each other.

Today in America, adultery is no longer regarded as a big deal, except for those hurt by a cheating partner.

And by Cal Thomas, circa 1998.

Laws have been so watered down in many states that while an adulterous partner in a marriage might sue for divorce on grounds of sexual infidelity, increasing numbers of family courts do not penalize the cheating partner when it comes to alimony and other financial considerations, or even child custody. Cheating wives can still win custody or joint custody of their children.

It’s telling that Thomas laments that cheating husbands escape punishment for their transgressions by — Oh. Right. Instead, Thomas frames his column by expressing ‘sadness’ for Senator Vitter (R), a married father who paid big bucks to squire a hooker around the town where he works and possibly risk passing on sexually diseases to his wife, assuming they still have sex with each other.

I guess that might be the telling part of the column.

… to knock down their doors in the middle of the night, pull them out of bed and destroy their homes.

The Nation:

“You want to catch them off guard,” Sergeant Bruhns ­ex­plained. “You want to catch them in their sleep.” About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.

Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:

“You run in. And if there’s lights, you turn them on–if the lights are working. If not, you’ve got flashlights…. You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that’s outside.

“You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you’ll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there’s no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

“You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you’ll ask the interpreter to ask him: ‘Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all–anything–anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?’

“Normally they’ll say no, because that’s normally the truth,” Sergeant Bruhns said. “So what you’ll do is you’ll take his sofa cushions and you’ll dump them. If he has a couch, you’ll turn the couch upside down. You’ll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you’ll throw everything on the floor, and you’ll take his drawers and you’ll dump them…. You’ll open up his closet and you’ll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

“And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes.”

Fuck yeah! We’re humiliating and terrorizing them over there, so we don’t have to, um, something something … mmm, Cheetos! … over here.

There’s plenty of stuff even more sad and stupid and terrible in the Nation piece, which documents the life-ruining charnel house that is Iraq as well as anything produced in major media to date. As much as Ol’ Perfesser has ruined the sentiment: Read it all.

Victor Davis Hanson today:

While few would believe there is any good news from Iraq, in fact, there is. Finally, we are mastering counter-insurgency, partly due to trial-and-error, partly due to the sheer exhaustion of the Iraqis who went through the embraces of Arab nationalism, ex-Baathism, and al-Qaedism that at various times fueled the insurgency. On occasion now, Sunni tribesmen for the first time are helping Americans and want a cessation of random violence. Kurdistan is by all accounts a success. The south will be infiltrated by Iran, given its Shiite population and proximity, but Iran itself is tottering and may be as destabilized by Iraq as it can destabilize Iraq.

In short, Gen. Petreus has gone right to the cancer in the Sunni Triangle, and for the first time we are starting to see real results.

“For the first time we are starting to see real results!” he writes. I guess he must have been insincere back when he wrote this in February 2006 (my emphasis):

Read the rest of this entry »

Above: We

Below: They:

But it was Friday. And that’s pizza night. So I went to the freezer and pulled out the Manhole of Promise, something I’d found at the grimy grocery store the other day: Geno’s East. I don’t want to get into pizza wars here… But for decades Geno’s has been the Ideal, the very definition of pizza. I had my first in 1975 when I visited a friend in Chicago. He was Italian, too, so he’d know about these things.

Above: wingnut James Lileks

Above: actual photo of Geno’s East pizza

It took 50 minutes to cook. It had a pop-up timer. Assuming as we must the diminished standards that apply to the genre, I have to say: worthy of the name. I almost wept after the first bite — a thick lake of sauce, aggressive sausage, perfect crust. I had a vision of myself weighing 300 pounds after a year-long diet consisting of nothing but three of these a day, fat and sweating and glistening with grease extruded through the pores, shunned by all except the dogs that gather to lick my fingers after I have finished with the first pass, and I thought: it would be worth it.

Above: destruction of Planet Earth

Good pizza.

Why we fight.

[Stab us again, Roy.]

Christy at FDL alerts us to an incredibly, incredibly important vote that will occur in the Senate tomorrow:

Please make some calls on the Habeas Restoration amendment today as well. (S.185 has morphed into S.2022 as a potential amendment to the defense bill currently under debate.) I am told through the Congressional grapevine that a vote on the amendment is likely for Tuesday — that’s tomorrow! — and that pressure needs to especially be applied to the following Senators: Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Hagel, Lugar, Craig, Collins, Snowe, Coleman, Voinavich, Sununu, Landrieu, Gordon Smith, and Alexander.

Please, call your own Senators and voice your support for the restoration of habeas rights and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. And throw in an extra call or two for the Senators on the waffling list above. For why this is important — and why it needs our support now — read here.

So to all you Mainiacs, Hoosiers, Nebraskans, etc., please take the time to call your respective senators and tell them to vote “YES” on the Habeas Restoration Act. We need to fix the damage that the Bush administration has inflicted on our country over the past six-plus years, and passing this act is a perfect place to start.

Cheney Speaks

Above: Powerline’s Scott Johnson, Esq.

• Candid and revealing is the official biography of 9/11 hero Dick Cheney, as penned by Weekly Standard scribe Stephen Hayes.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

I hope the Democrats are serious about this:

[T]he latest populist resurgence is deeply rooted in a view that current economic conditions are difficult and deteriorating for many people, analysts say, and it is now framing debates over tax policy, education, trade, energy and health care. Last week, Senate Democrats held hearings on proposals to raise taxes on some of the highest fliers on Wall Street, the people at the top of private equity and hedge fund firms.

In the House, Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Financial Services Committee, convened party leaders and economists for a searching discussion of “globalization, outsourcing and the American worker — what should government do?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, offered the participants some blunt marching orders: “The American people want to know what we’re doing about their economic security.”

Obviously, holding a panel on this stuff isn’t enough. The Dems really need to follow through with some serious reforms that will provide people with more economic security.

The most obvious place to begin is by dismantling the employer-based health insurance system- it provides a drag on businesses, it’s inefficient and it limits consumer choice. Additionally, people are changing jobs more frequently than they have in the past and will often go for prolonged periods of time without coverage. As someone who had to pay $150 for a simple doctor’s visit last year, I know what I’m talking about.

Other obvious things to do:

-More investment in public transportation to lessen peoples’ need to drive, thus saving them money on travel expenses.

-A temporary moratorium on any new trade deals until we have the infrastructure in place to help displaced workers. Denying Bush fast-track authority is a good place to start.

-Support unions. And if Bush sends you an anti-labor wingnut judge for confirmation, send him packing.

And that’s just the easy stuff. Doing the tough stuff- i.e., empowering workers around the globe to fight for better labor standards and higher wages- will take decades.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum points out another part of this problem:

THE NEW GILDED AGE….What a depressing story this is from Louis Uchitelle in the New York Times today. I mean, it’s nice to know that there are a few rich people who aren’t complete assholes, but it seems safe to say that the majority fall pretty safely into this category. Do they seriously believe that American executives in the 50s and 60s just coasted along on waves of cash while they not only had a world red in tooth and claw to tame, but were responsible for personally taming it without help from any other human being on the planet? Apparently so:

The new tycoons describe a history that gives them a heroic role. The American economy, they acknowledge, did grow more rapidly on average in the decades immediately after World War II than it is growing today. Incomes rose faster than inflation for most Americans and the spread between rich and poor was much less. But the United States was far and away the dominant economy, and government played a strong supporting role. In such a world, the new tycoons argue, business leaders needed only to be good managers.

….That changed with the arrival of “the technological age,” in [Lew] Frankfort’s view. Innovation became a requirement, in addition to good management skills — and innovation has played a role in Coach’s marketing success. “To be successful,” Mr. Frankfort said, “you now needed vision, lateral thinking, courage and an ability to see things, not the way they were but how they might be.”

Oy. Where do these people come from? I’m at least moderately sympathetic to this kind of argument when it comes from a genuine entrepreneur like Bill Gates or Sam Walton, but when it comes from some guy who thinks he practically risked life and limb by climbing to the top of the corporate ladder and then engineering a couple of big mergers, it almost makes me want to retch. These guys wouldn’t know risk if it hit them in the kneecaps with a two-by-four.

As I’ve said before, I have no problem with people getting rich. If someone works from the bottom up and makes a successful business, more power to ’em.

But lately, America has had less people like Bill Gates and more people like Paris Hilton. More and more, we’re becoming a nation of a permanent aristocracy where people at the bottom and middle rungs of the ladder have less hope of climbing than they did in the past. Thus, we see people at the top expressing the belief that they’re allegedly “better” than all those swarthy working-class people who just weren’t smart enough to get their MBAs at Columbia Business School. If not for the ultra-rich, they argue, the entire American economy would collapse, since everyone around them is a lazy fuck.