A new episode of The Worst Wing - The Draft There's no reason to be scard of The Draft - it's going to be great fun! Just like that Full Metal Jacket movie!!!

The U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report.

”Poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah,” 35-year-old trader from Fallujah Abu Hammad told IPS. ”They used everything -- tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground.”

Hammad is from the Julan district of Fallujah where some of the heaviest fighting occurred. Other residents of that area report the use of illegal weapons.

”They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud,” Abu Sabah, another Fallujah refugee from the Julan area told IPS. ”Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.”

He said pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns. Phosphorous weapons as well as napalm are known to cause such effects. ”People suffered so much from these,” he said.

Kassem Mohammed Ahmed who escaped from Fallujah a little over a week ago told IPS he witnessed many atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the city.

”I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks,” he said. ”This happened so many times.”

Reprinted in more than a hundred newspapers, the Los Angeles Times photograph shows Miller "after more than 12 hours of nearly non-stop, deadly combat" in Falluja, his face coated in war paint, a bloody scratch on his nose, and a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips.

Gazing lovingly at Miller, the CBS News anchor Dan Rather informed his viewers: "For me, this one's personal. This is a warrior with his eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger. See it. Study it. Absorb it. Think about it. Then take a deep breath of pride. And if your eyes don't dampen, you're a better man or woman than I."

Miller is an icon and, as if to prove it, he has ignited his very own controversy. "Lots of children, particularly boys, play army, and like to imitate this young man. The clear message of the photo is that the way to relax after a battle is with a cigarette," wrote Daniel Maloney in a scolding letter to the Houston Chronicle. Linda Ortman made the same point to the editors of the Dallas Morning News: "Are there no photos of non-smoking soldiers?" A reader of the New York Post helpfully suggested more politically correct propaganda imagery: "Maybe showing a marine in a tank, helping another GI or drinking water would have a more positive impact on your readers."

Yes, that's right: letter writers from across the nation are united in their outrage - not that the steely-eyed, smoking soldier makes mass killing look cool, but that the laudable act of mass killing makes the grave crime of smoking look cool. Better to protect impressionable youngsters by showing soldiers taking a break from deadly combat by drinking water or, perhaps, since there is a severe potable water shortage in Iraq, Coke.

A new episode of The Worst Wing - Caesar! The inner George comes shining through once more. Don't ask what he had for breakfast. You really don't want to know... Thanks to all who helped me with the latin "veni, vidi, vici" quote - your help is greatly appreciated! If you want to know what it means, roll over the words on the cartoon, you'll see a rough translation).

A new cartoon by yours truly - Compassionate Conservatives! They simper about human rights, the whine about the poor people of Iraq, they brow beat and blather until your ears bleed... They're the bleeding heart conservatives, and they're coming for you!

Those of you who have emailed me and not heard a response (I have a 60% reply rate - depends on how dreary I feel on any given day) will know that I am the laziest/rudest bastard on the planet. Apologies. I'll get to the backlog one day. Nevertheless, I have managed to eke out another cartoony thingy! Here it is!

Researchers took into account not just income, but other factors considered important to people's satisfaction and well-being.

They included health, freedom, unemployment, family life, climate, political stability and security, gender equality and family and community life.

The Economist said: "Ireland wins because it successfully combines the most desirable elements of the new, such as low unemployment and political liberties, with the preservation of certain cosy elements of the old, such as stable family and community life."

• Health - sorry Bush, you'll never win on that one. I'd rather break my leg in Cuba than in the U.S.



• Freedom - freedom to be arrested or harassed by the FBI and CIA or whoever, or beaten up for peacefully demonstrating isn't freedom.



• Unemployment. HAHAHA. Dubya's the first president since the great depression to LOSE jobs over his 4 years. It's a good thing for W that just over half the U.S. electorate count as poorly as they read and think.



• Family life - we still have them! Mammies, Daddies, Grannies, Grandads, brothers, sisters, cousins, cousins, cousins, - feckless idle drunks to the last.



• Climate - well, Dubya's working on that, give him time. Kevin Costner will go floating past the window any day now.



• Political stability - how about this George - on the numerous occasions that I voted in Ireland, I never had to queue more than a few minutes. The sight of voters queing for 9 HOURS isn't something to be proud of, you freaking moron. I also had the luxury of knowing that my vote would be counted, regardless of who I voted for! Amazing!!!



• Security - well, we're not picking fights with countries that never attacked us. It's called a conservative foreign policy. I recommend it.



• Gender equality - our women are no longer chained to the kitchen sink, slavishly serving their husbands. OK, so you can't have everything.



• Community life ... yup. If you haven't lived in a real community, as opposed to the faux simulation of the suburbs, then you won't even understand why it's important.

   

that on the two banks of the Tigris and of the Euphrates
bad weeds should grow,
that no one should set out on the road,
that no one should seek out the highway,
that the city and its settled surroundings
should be razed to ruin-mounds;
that its numerous black-headed people should be slaughtered;
that the hoe should not attack the fertile fields,
that seed should not be planted in the ground,
that the melody of the cowherds' songs
should not resound in the open country,
that butter and cheese should not be made in the cattle-pen,
that dung should not be stacked on the ground,
that the shepherd should not enclose
the sacred sheepfold with a fence,
that the song of the churning should not resound in the sheepfold;

that on the two banks of the Tigris and of the Euphrates
There were corpses floating in the Euphrates,
brigands roamed the roads.
The father turned away from his wife
without saying "O my wife!"
The mother turned away from her child
without saying "O my child!"
He who had a productive estate neglected his estate
without saying "O my estate!"
The rich man took an unfamiliar path away from his possessions.
In those days the kingship of the Land was defiled.
The tiara and crown that had been on the king's head
were both spoiled.
The lands that had followed the same path were split into disunity.

In the city, those who had not been felled by weapons succumbed to hunger.
Hunger filled the city like water, it would not cease.
This hunger contorted people's faces, twisted their muscles.
Its people were as if drowning in a pond,
they gasped for breath.
Its king breathed heavily in his palace, all alone.
Its people dropped their weapons,
their weapons hit the ground.
They struck their necks with their hands and cried.
They sought counsel with each other,
they searched for clarification:
"Alas, what can we say about it?
What more can we add to it?
How long until we are finished off by this catastrophe?
Inside Urim there is death, outside it there is death.
Inside it we are to be finished off by famine.
Outside it we are to be finished off by Elamite weapons.
In Urim the enemy oppresses us, oh, we are finished."

The people took refuge behind the city walls.
They were united in fear.
The palace that was destroyed by onrushing water was defiled,
its doorbolts were torn out.
Elam, like a swelling flood wave, left only the ghosts.
In Urim people were smashed as if they were clay pots.
Its refugees were unable to flee,
they were trapped inside the walls.
Like fish living in a pond, they tried to escape.

Hussein moved from house to house dodging gunfire and reached the river.

"I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river."

He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands."

"I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards."

The hardcore Christians, and the Republicans who use them, have a massive advantage over secular humanists because they know and believe that man is an evil, base creature. They see his baseness everywhere, particularly if he is enjoying himself. Evangelical Christian philosophy is based on a simple hatred of man, hatred of life, hatred of pleasure, and hatred of everything beautiful on this planet, especially animals and forests. Earth to them is a wretched test, a dreadful obstacle on the path to Heaven; only money is good, not for the sake of enjoying money, but because the wealth, and the goods wealth buys, is a sign that they have been Blessed; the more sand niggers, endangered mammals, forests, property, and earthly culture they destroy on the path to wealth, the better chance there is getting to Jesus Christ's kingdom later on. They want to go to heaven, yet they want to live until they're 100 because longevity is proof that Jesus has blessed them (also they want to draw Social Security and leave nothing for succeeding generations, all the while lecturing their grandchildren about the sin of taking handouts). They are infinitely greedy, and like the petty misers they are, they do not enjoy a single thing they possess, and hate those who do.

At 10:28 a.m. the World Trade Center’s north tower collapses to the ground.

When it’s over 2645 more people will die in the doomed towers raising the death toll to a staggering 3016 not counting the 19 hijackers.

For the next several hours we hear much from New York, much from Washington, much from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California. It becomes clear that our nation has been attacked. But the messages come from newscasters, from Army generals, from anxious relatives waiting in Los Angeles and San Francisco for flights that never arrive. Finally we hear from the government. The Mayor of New York City has taken charge. Yet we hear nothing from our nation’s president. Who were the “folks” that attacked us? Where is Bush?

We do not know it yet, but George W. Bush is running for cover. He is taking orders from whomever is willing to give them. And there are plenty willing to give them. He is following. He is not leading. He is not FDR. He is not Winny. He is only W. And W is aWol again. He runs first to Louisiana. He runs then to a bunker under Nebraska. The nation be damned, Bush’s handlers are protecting their golden goose. Their dream of a new Pearl Harbor has just come true, and W is their willing key to wealth and power never before imagined. He will be kept safe in the red belly of America. He will be kept safe that he may return to loot his own people and use our money to kill more innocents still, more women, more children. More and more and more, and how many more we do not know even to this very bloody day.

Nine hours later. Nine hours later! Nine hours later George W. Bush emerges from his hole in Nebraska and returns to Washington.

Four days later still, he visits New York City. Four days! He stands upon the smoking heap of dead flesh and bone, and from this pulpit in Hell he lies to us all, and somehow, somehow he is a hero! Deserter, drunk, DUI, cokehead, liar, stock swindler, executioner, absentee president, hero. Not exactly the road most heroes follow, but of all these allegations - each and every one of them based upon more evidence than is “hero” - it is hero and hero alone that sticks.

America’s prolonged national descent into psychotic stupidity began with that single improbable conclusion: George W. Bush is our hero.

The credulous product of five decades of therapied neuroses and media-fed propaganda, our countrymen have become as a herd of cattle, uncritical in their thinking, easily stampeded by little more than their own stupidity, ignorance, and terror. America, and most of her people have presented and endorsed a nation wide behavior that remains nothing less than a profound disgrace to what we once were as a people, and will never be again in the eyes of the rest of humankind. Such behavior by our countrymen and those of their avaricious, manipulative, and patently dishonest leaders have subjected the remainder of us to the wrath, disdain, disrespect and laughter of an ever-more-rational, civilized, secular, educated, and anti-American world, this island, Earth.

In the tourist offices across Ireland, they are used to dealing with difficult questions.

But how were they expected to react when a foreign visitor arrived recently and asked:

"How long does the train from Dublin to London take?"...

Another tourist asked for a map showing the precise location of fairies, while others have enquired about where they can meet leprechauns.

Irish tourism officials and travel agents probably felt a twinge of sympathy this week for the tour guides' trade union in Rome. The Roman guides issued a statement complaining about foolish tourists asking idiotic questions such as: "Did Moses actually pose for Michelangelo?" or: "Where is the grave of Jesus Christ?"

Visitors to the Sistine Chapel in Rome have been known to ask: "If this is the 16 Chapel, where are the other 15?"

A visitor recently arrived in the tourist office in Dublin with an urn containing his mother's ashes. Hoping to scatter the remains on the old sod he asked: "Can you tell me the way to Glocca Morra?"

Baffled staff could not point him in the direction of the fictitious location from the film Finian's Rainbow. So, they sent him out to Glendalough instead.

A fan of the U2 album, The Joshua Tree, once asked in the tourist office: "Where is the Joshua Tree? How do I get there?"...

The tourist office receives numerous telephone queries from tourists searching for people that they have met in Dublin. A typical line of enquiry goes as follows: "I met this lovely guy called Mick, who lived beside a bookies. Would you be able to find his number for me?"

An American couple reportedly demanded a refund on their cruise-ship tickets because the midnight sun they saw in Scandinavia was precisely the same sun that they had in the USA. "We didn't travel to Norway to see our own sun," they said. The guide tried to explain what the midnight sun was, but the tourists were unimpressed.

"We've been cheated," they fumed, and demanded their money back.

Sources close to the Palestinian leadership said a bitter fight had broken out over who should control the ailing leader’s fortune estimated to be between $4.2 billion and $6.5 billion.

Sources said Arafat has written a will transferring control of his assets to members of his wife’s family. Some of his aides, including former Premier Mahmoud Abbas who has stepped in as interim leader, however, believe the fortune belongs to the “beit al-mal” (public treasury), and should be transferred to the Palestinian Authority.

I linked to this a year ago ... it's worth a second viewing - Steve Bell's cartoon showing Bush and Blair's commemoration of WW1. ''They shall not grow rich, as we that sent them there grow rich...''

Base Details (1918) - Siegfried Sassoon If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line to death. You'd see me with my puffy petulant face, Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel, Reading the Roll of Honour. "Poor young chap," I'd say -- "I used to know his father well; Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap." And when the war is done and youth stone dead, I'd toddle safely home and die -- in bed.

I asked them all what expectations they had had about the war, and a lot of their answers were really shocking. One soldier said he thought it would be fun, that he would be jumping out of planes. A couple of soldiers said they watched Desert Storm on TV as kids and thought it looked really cool. One soldier watched war movies as a kid and said American soldiers were always treated “awesome” in the world. He’s saying this and he doesn’t have a leg. That’s how “awesome” he was treated.

I also started asking them how they defined freedom and democracy, and some couldn’t even answer the question. For Jose, freedom was about being able to play video games or go to the movies. It was striking how simple these responses were, for soldiers being told that they were going to Iraq to liberate the people and bring them freedom and democracy...

...When soldiers say only other soldiers can understand, that’s what they’re talking about: what it means to kill. It’s not just the guys with the guns that are killing in Iraq, it’s the truck drivers who are coming back really messed up because their orders are to run over anything that doesn’t get out of the way. In a country with a big urban population, with lots of children, they are running over children. That’s the dark dirty little secret that people don’t want to talk about. Here are our wonderful innocent liberators over in Iraq killing people. Not just bad people, but all people.

For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March, the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey's prescription because she did not believe in birth control.

"I was shocked," says Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician."

Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions...

..."We have always understood that the battles about abortion were just the tip of a larger ideological iceberg, and that it's really birth control that they're after also," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation of America.

"The explosion in the number of legislative initiatives and the number of individuals who are just saying, 'We're not going to fill that prescription for you because we don't believe in it' is astonishing," she said.

Two issues - in many Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) areas there are more votes than registered voters. And, perhaps more importantly, in many areas there's a mismatch between the number of votes counted at the ward level, and the number of votes counted in the township/municipality level, of which the wards appear to subunits...

And, more interestingly, reader c sent in an interesting tidbit. If you look at the townships for which the subunits don't add up, there's a surprising degree of regularity in the numbers. Specifically, if you calculate the difference between the municipality total and the sum of all of the individual ward numbers, strange patterns emerge...

I did this quickly, so I may have missed something, but here are the results:

Highland Heights: 1385
Mayfield Village: 1385
Seven Hills: 2147
Broadview Height: 2540
Berea: 3146
Olmstead Falls: 3146
North Royalton: 4009
Maple Heights: 4744
Brook Park: 5295
Oakwood Village: 5460
Euclid: 5724
South Euclid: 5724
Cleveland Heights: 6007
East Cleveland: 6007
Garfield Heights: 6170
Lakewood: 6226
Middlebury Heights:
Parma: 7284
Bedford: 8553
Bedford Heights: 8553
Warrensville Heights: 8553
Bay Village: 9948
Fairview Park: 9948
North Olmstead: 9948
Rocky River: 9948
Westlake: 9948
Cleveland: 49324

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

Much of the suspicion about Bush possibly manipulating the vote totals has centered on touch-screen electronic voting machines made by Ohio-based Diebold, which has more than 75,000 electronic voting stations operating across the United States.

Diebold’s chief executive is Walden O’Dell, a major Bush fundraiser. In an invitation to one Bush fundraising event at his mansion in Columbus, O’Dell wrote that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president.” He later expressed regret at his choice of language.

Bobbie Jensen, 54, a Republican from Phoenix, said that while she understood how Bush's victory disturbed those who dislike him, Ground Zero is not the place to act on those emotions. "You can be upset about the war, about Bush, but this is a sacred place," she said. "You got to accept what happened and not kill yourself."

...for the millions of Americans who voted for Bush in the interior and South of this nation who have no healthcare, jobs disappearing faster than Ann Coulter's waistline post-purge and are watching their sons and daughters go fight a war in Iraq that will only get them killed and make us less safe, I can only think of a few words for you. You reap what you sow. I even took them from the Bible. That should make you warm and fuzzy.

Yes, you have probably made my life less secure because I live and work near Washington, and no suicide bomber is wasting their time planning an attack on Butte anytime soon. But in every other way, from financial security to family health to your kids not ending up in President Jacket Bulge's action figure wars, you have just fucked yourselves. Well done.

I will end this tirade with a not so bold prediction of our future. Enjoy watching as England sets up the largest stem cell laboratory in the world, scientists flee this fundamentalist backwoods and Europe, because of "reality based policies" most Democracies adhere to, takes its place at the head of the table again. But at least we'll have strong moral values exhibited daily by a having a pathalogical liar in the White House. Good voting America.

...the most Machiavellian view was set out recently in the Jordan Times. On the assumption that the war is unwinnable, the writer suggested that electing Kerry now will allow the neoconservatives to blame him for American failure in Iraq and to insist that everything would have worked out fine if only Bush had been given a bit longer...

...Far better, then, to keep Bush in power and make him reap the whirlwind. The Iraq quagmire may also explain why Hasan Rowhani and some other Iranian officials (though not, by any means, all of them) would like Bush to have a second term. So long as the US is bogged down in Iraq, it cannot seriously contemplate toppling the regime in Iran - or, for that matter, in Syria. Prospects for the US remaining bogged down look rather better under Bush than Kerry.

Great! 2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes This should cheer you up (although it's a week too late). Political halloween costumes for your liberal children. Dress your kid up as Nancy Reagan (in a black dress next to a flag draped coffin), or as a Western hostage in Iraq (in an orange jumpsuit). Wicked liberals - destroying the innocence of Halloween!

Bush will enter his second term with a flimsy mandate. He will preside over the global oil production peak and the widespread instabilities it will initiate, including ever-widening jihad. There is every indication that the US economy -- based on continual suburban development -- will crater under the circumstances of the next four years. Bush II is likely to become Herbert Hoover II.

A Bush victory will have two salutary political results. It will leave Republican conservatism discredited when the administration is overwhelmed by the problems described above. And it will force the Democratic party to either transform itself into a vehicle for meaningful ideas-and-action, or die.

Kerry was the perfect media creation for his time: tall, handsome, with great hair and a deep voice and beyond that an absolutely empty vessel. He was quite remarkably unable to articulate a coherent political point of view on the great problems of the day. I voted for him with the deepest displeasure. George W. Bush, for all his fumbling, made his position quite clear: keep on shoveling coal with him on a runaway train.

   

...in 2001 Cheney came to Washington as vice president and more importantly as the great power in Halliburton, the oil and gas people. Interested in making money for his firm and himself, he called in a meeting of leading geologists and people who know about oil reserves and natural gas, and he asked a question which is quite sensible, “How much longer do we, the world, have for fossil fuels?” And they did their experiments and said, “Well, it looks like it’s all over in 2020.” That is when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began. 9/11 was just a lucky trigger for somebody who had already decided to attack Iraq and get a hold of their oil fields, position himself and his buddies for a war on Iran which has, I think, even greater oil resources, or rather the Caspian Sea has, and those little republics that end in “stan.” Those are the greatest oil reserves in the world, greater than Saudi Arabia.

As you write in Imperial America, the military-industrial complex is such an entrenched part of America’s system of governance it is hard to imagine extracting ourselves from it. How can we break the vicious cycle?

By losing a war and by going broke. We’ve lost the Iraq war, no matter how long we stay in there. And secondly, we have no money. They were proposing about a year ago, merrily, that they, Rumsfeld etc., needed another 1-million-man army. Well there is not enough money in the entire country to pay for that. On the other hand, they do have a plus. There are 2 million jobs forever lost in the last four years, and that gives you at least 1 million men that you could put under arms by restoring the draft. It will probably come to that, because the ones that are in the field are getting irritable, perhaps even mutinous, and they know that they have been used and thrown away. There are hard days coming should the Bush regime continue. There are also hard days coming if Kerry’s in.

1. Learn how to use a gun (preferably an AK-47).
2. Start growing your own food.
3. You can't beat them. Flee. New Zealand or Iceland are good.
4. Keep your passport and "fuck you" money ready.
5. A person with a broken ankle can't be drafted. Hint.
6. Learn Mandarin Chinese.
7. Stockpile drinking water.
8. Learn to say "Do not kill me. I am Canadian!" in Arabic.
9. Accept Jesus H. Christ as your personal saviour.