Not much I can add here:

WASHINGTON – When a team of FBI agents lands in Baghdad this week to probe Blackwater security contractors for murder, it will be protected by bodyguards from the very same firm, the Daily News has learned.
Half a dozen FBI criminal investigators based in Washington are scheduled to travel to Iraq to gather evidence and interview witnesses about a Sept. 16 shooting spree that left at least 11 Iraqi civilians dead.
The agents plan to interview witnesses within the relative safety of the fortified Green Zone, but they will be transported outside the compound by Blackwater armored convoys, a source briefed on the FBI mission said.
“What happens when the FBI team decides to go visit the crime scene? Blackwater is going to have to take them there,” the senior U.S. official told The News.

According to Reuters,

Iraq has emerged as the world’s second most unstable country, behind Sudan, more than four years afterPresident George W. Bush ordered the U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, according to a survey released on Monday.
The 2007 Failed States Index, produced by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, said Iraq suffered a third straight year of deterioration in 2006 with diminished results across a range of social, economic, political and military indicators. Iraq ranked fourth last year.

I’m a little late on posting this, but security expert Bruce Schneier tells it like it is:

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots — and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse — is wrong.

Remember, folks, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t be scared of something that, statistically speiaking, barely even makes the list of things likely to hurt or kill you.

This just makes my head hurt. Get the whole story from Pam’s House Blend.

via Slacktivist

So, a Vietnam war veteran decides to give his Purple Heart to President Bush:

Thomas said he and his wife came up with the unprecedented idea to present the president with the Purple Heart over breakfast one morning a few months ago as they discussed the verbal attacks, both foreign and domestic, the commander in chief has withstood during his time in office.
“We feel like emotional wounds and scars are as hard to carry as physical wounds,” Thomas said.

OK, it’s a free country. Whatever. The surreal thing is that President Bush invited Mr. Thomas to the White House to present him the medal.
Mr. Thomas’ remark after the ceremony: “He said he didn’t feel like he had earned it.”
Gee, ya think?

President Bush has nominated Sam Fox, who donated $50,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans in 2004, for an ambassador post, and of course, he has to be approved by the senate. John Kerry questions him about his donation. A summary:
Fox starts off by stating that 527 organizations are wrong:

[L]et me just say this: I’m against 527s, I’ve always been against 527s. I think, again, they’re mean and destructive, I think they’ve hurt a lot of good, decent people.

He knows what’s coming, because he immediately, and without specific prompting, tries to butter up Kerry:

And, Senator Kerry, I very much respect your dedicated service to this country. I know that you were not drafted — you volunteered. You went to Vietnam. You were wounded. Highly decorated. Senator, you’re a hero. And there isn’t anybody or anything that’s going to take that away from you.

So, Kerry asks him why the hell he donated $50,000 to one of the meanest 527 organizations of the time. He expounds at length on two weasel reasons.
Excuse #1: He gives to so many organizations, he can’t keep track of them all:

I do not know who asked me. If you were to take my 1,000 contributions and go right down the list, I bet you I couldn’t give you five percent of them… Of who asked me.

Senator, if I had reason to believe and if I were convinced that the money was going to be used to, in any untruthful or false way, knowingly, I would not give.

Excuse #2: This is my favorite. Since the other side was funding smear campaigns via 527s, his side could not afford not to:

All of the 527s were smearing lies…I think if one side is giving then the other side almost has to and I think that the real responsibility should rest with the Congress to either ban 527s or to certainly curtail and regulate them. That’s the problem.

Kerry goes on to justifiably rip Fox a new one. Remember, someone with these kinds of morals is being appointed as representative of our country.

Now that we have a Democratic majority in Congress again, I’m glad to see that the issue of health care is back in the news. President Bush has decided to propose addressing the unequal health care in this country via the tax code: his proposal would provide a tax deduction for people who buy individual health insurance, and tax ‘high end’ corporate health coverage. It’s that second part that is controversial.
I’ve long held that it would not be possible to bring everyone in the U.S. up to the high standard of health care that some enjoy thanks to generous corporate benefits. But nobody wants to reduce their current level of health care.
Though I’m not sure what I think about the means he’s chosen, I do think Bush’s intention with his tax on high end benefits is to help the recipients of those benefits realize how good they have it, and, in some small way, to get them to reduce their level of health care.
Or, it could just be an excuse for big companies to lower the amount they spend on employee health insurance.

Fred Clark’s blog post A Surge of ‘More’ is, to my mind, a brilliant insight into the mind of people who still support President Bush and his actions with regard to Iraq. Go read it.

I live in suburban Austin, Texas–a long way from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the days and months after that date, it made me really angry whenever I heard someone state that “Everything is different now” or “Things will never be the same again.” My anger was due to my belief that for pretty much everyone in America–save, perhaps, some in NYC or Washington–things were, in fact, very much the same. We’ll be freaked out for a while, but then life will go on pretty much like it was before. And I felt that life should go on like before, as most Americans’ chances of being directly affected by another possible attack were slim at best.
Fred Clark recently linked to a blog post by Athenae that offers an explanation for these declarations that irritated me so much. Athenae writes:

An awful lot of people, good people, nice people, people living what you’d call normal lives, are just sort of ambling around trying to figure out what the fuck they’re doing here. They have jobs they hate and families that drive them nuts and leisure time that feels more like work than work does, what with travel indignities and the rush and bustle of theme parks. They’re miserable in a low-level kind of way, quiet desperation and all, and church isn’t doing it for them, and drugs are too destructive, and most of them aren’t living the lives they wanted to live. Not at all.
…
And so, when George W. Bush came along and made a good speech, . . . they jumped on the bandwagon because really, any bandwagon would have done. It had nothing to do with George Bush and nothing really to do with Sept. 11. It had everything to do with a hunger in suburbia for the kind of purpose their parents had as young people in the 1960s, the kind of purpose America had when it was led by real men and not hucksters and thieves. The kind of purpose World War II necessitated . . . and the civil rights movement engendered, back when the people writing editorials today sincerely believed they could change the world.

I’d like to think that I’m just smarter than the masses, but if nothing else, I have a strong aversion to mindlessly pledging allegiance. It angered me that so many were declaring common cause where, to my mind, none existed.

Over at Making Light, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden has a long post about the Bush administration’s poor showing in New Orleans a year after Katrina. This is my favorite part of this excellent post:

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said, “The president has set the federal government on the course to fulfill its obligations.” You know the guy in the meeting who, when asked to report on the progress he’s made on his part of the project, says “I’ve made some preliminary phone calls”? You know how that actually means he hasn’t done a damned thing since the previous meeting? “Setting the federal government on the course to fulfill its obligations” is just like that.

I think this guy used to work with me! Ha!