It's a beautiful day in Kansas City

Sweet Jesus, am I ever ready for winter to be over. It's almost fifty degrees, and since I can't take it any more and I have to go outside and get some fresh air and some exercise, I'm going to proclaim the day gorgeous and go away for a bit.

I think you should too. Before we all short circuit on outrage-overload.

Is our government learning anything?

I hate to bump Blue Girl down the page--the post she has that follows this one is excellent. You MUST read it and feel good about our chances this Fall.

But I have to break in with this tidbit:

A laptop computer with patient information on more than 2-thousand people was taken from a lab official at the National Institutes of Health.

It happened in February.

But the news is just now coming out, according to The Washington Post.

The laptop was swiped at a swim meet in Montgomery County.

NIH officials did not notify the media--or the patients involved--because of fears it would provoke undue alarm, the Post reported.

The information was not encrypted as is standing policy.

Goddamn it, what's it going to take? What's it going to take to get the people who control this administration to stop lying, stop blocking bad news, stop endangering the American people with their incompetence--and to start clearing out the fucking dead wood employees who can't use basic judgement?

And, hello, government employee who no doubt makes an excellent living that most Americans living throughout this country cannot imagine right now because their own standard of living is being driven into the toilet by stagnant wages, high prices and mortgage scams? Can you listen up for a sec? You took your government-issued NIH laptop to a fucking swim meet? You didn't just lock it in your fucking office or your fucking car like everyone else? You didn't spend twenty bucks and get a safety lock cable? And it had a lot of sensitive information about American citizens on it? And you didn't encrypt it, didn't detach the data by storing it on an encrypted and locked removeable drive, didn't fucking LOCK IT or safeguard it? You lost it a fucking swim meet? You just had to sit there and noodle around with it and look at stupid shit, didn't you? Well, aren't you too cool for school. Thanks for your service. What's it like to go through life like that dumbass, I wonder? No, I don't. I don't wonder. I just drop to one knee and shake my head, numb from embarrassment for what this country is turning into.

Pardon my francais, but what's it going to take? Seriously.

Pardon me for the ridicule and mockery, but I just can't muster any sympathy

The republican party is in trouble.

At a time when their candidate is going to need all the help he can get this fall, many state parties are struggling, unable to raise money from a demoralized and humiliated base, while many of the state organizations are carrying massive debts. Internecine squabbling and all those republican scandals have taken their toll as well, and coupled with Democratic turnout in record-smashing numbers, it has created a perfect storm and rendered many branches of the party irrelevant.

Across the nation, many GOP organizations are still picking up the pieces from the humiliating 2006 elections that saw the republican party hoisted on it's own petard, and prompting questions about just how effective the crippled and humiliated state organizations can be when it comes to delivering votes to their nominee.

But we aren't through with the schadenfreude yet. People are tripping over themselves to give money to Democrats, and McCain is going to face a better funded and better organized Democratic opponent who will be backed by an energized and motivated electorate that, for the most part, wants the entire republican party to crawl back under their rock and get busy evolving.

“After twelve years of being in power, you tend to get fat and lazy, and in some cases arrogant with respect to your positions,” said Saul Anuzis, chairman of the Michigan Republican party. “There is no doubt that we have had people who have gotten caught up in both illegal activities and immoral activities and none of that helps the party as a whole.

“If you go back to 2006 most people would agree that not only did we lose our brand, that we damaged our brand significantly,” Anuzis said. “We are clearly rebuilding.”

Case in point: California.

According to data collected by the California Secretary of State's office the number of people claiming affiliation with the republican party has dropped by over 200,000 since the 2006 election cycle. At the end of January the state party was in debt, with $3.4 million in obligations and assets of only $3.2 million. Conversely, the state Democratic party had $5.5 million in the bank and a mere $83,000 in debts.

Ah-nold described the situation in Hollywood terms: “We are dying at the box office. We are not filling the seats,” and the star of the "Last Action Hero" should know from dying at the box office.

Across the country in New York, the situation is equally bleak. The 2006 election cycle saw the first statewide sweep by the Democrats since 1938. The Democrats are a mere two seats away in the state senate from having complete control of state government for the first time since 1934. A state Board of Elections report filed in January showed the Democrats in the catbirds seat, with receipts of $491,302 and a closing balance of $1.4 million. In contrast, the republicans took in a paltry $26,000 and had a closing balance of only $395,000. In New York, the parties maintain separate "housekeeping" accounts to pay for office expenses and party-building activities. The state Democratic party had nearly a half-million dollars in that account, compared to the republican balance of $66,000.

No one is pretending that the republican nominee will be competitive in either California or New York - but a less elaborate production of the same play is unfolding in Ne3w Hampshire and Arkansas. In New Hampshire, the state Democratic organization raised four dollars to every dollar raised by the republicans in 2007. According to the most recent reports filed, the republicans had only about $64,000 in cash on hand. The state Democratic organization had liquid assets of about $159,000.

In Arkansas, the state party is in shambles after losing the governors mansion in 2006, and the statehouse is firmly under Democratic control with 3-to-1 margins in both chambers. State GOP chairman Dennis Milligan said he is facing defections and malaise. “Independent conservative individuals just said they were fed up and they said there is no difference [between the two parties],” Milligan said. “We have sent out the message that we are now different. We know it did not fall down in one day and it won’t be rebuilt in one day.”

(Yes, there is no difference, and that is why the republican party is hemorrhaging members and the Democratic ranks are swelling. I would say it is more likely that the "there is no difference" strawman has been torched and people are waking up, shaking off their hangovers and getting over their misplaced, media-produced fit of pique.)

But then again, 'ol Dennis doesn't appear to be none too sharp, and words certainly are not his friend. He is the dipshit who said this at the time he took over the state party: "At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country."

The outlook for the GOP nation wide is so dismal that state parties have started requiring loyalty oaths. Virginia republicans required persons voting in the states GOP presidential primary to sign an (unenforceable) oath that they would support the party nominee in November. They were just following the precedent set by the Kansas GOP, which started requiring them last summer, after Kathleen Sebelius waltzed to reelection with a GOP defector on her arm as a running mate.

No matter what a moron like Milligan might believe, there is a difference between the parties, and the American people have started figuring it out. Which is good news for Democrats and bad news for republicans. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of sociopaths. Now into the forest with you lot. It's sackcloth, ashes and self-flagellation for you feckless fools for at least a couple of decades, so be gone, foul neocon losers. And while you are down there, wallowing in your own detritus, do some god-damned self reflection and figure out where you went wrong, but afflict decent people no more with your fetid countenance.

Cliff May Reveals the Insanity of Modern Conservatives and the War

Get ready to see some goalposts moved around...

Five years ago this month, American troops liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Then came the hard part.

American intelligence had been wrong about Saddam’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction: They were nowhere to be found. Most academic experts had failed to perceive the currents of religious extremism and sectarianism running just beneath Iraq’s secular surface. State Department consultants and U.N. advisors proved unequal to the task of building democratic political institutions quickly from scratch.

The media had understated Saddam’s barbarism: It had been too risky to report in depth on the mass graves Saddam filled with dissidents; the tens of thousands of Kurds gassed to death in their villages; the camps where Saddam trained terrorists for assignments abroad. As a consequence, few anticipated how severely Iraqis had been traumatized.

First of all, Cliff May is insane. He is a neocon without a fucking soul. Any person with even a shred of self-awareness would shut up about these things and try to hide. The truth of the Iraq war is wrapped up in the fact that these people have gotten 4,000 Americans killed for their own fantasy of an oil-rich state in the heart of the Muslim world, adorned with permanent bases and run by corrupt sycophants.

Who publishes this crap? The reason why "State Department consultants and UN advisors" proved unequal was because Don Rumsfeld shut them completely and utterly out of the process and did not allow them to participate in any meaningful way. People from the State Department quit because the policy was flawed. Many more have retired rather than pound sand. A good number of people have bravely tried--many UN personnel have died trying to help the US in Iraq. They were not "unequal." They were unable to operate inside of the whirlwind of chaos created by the failed strategies of Don Rumsfeld. Second of all, everyone and their brother knew Saddam gassed the Kurds--it was widely disseminated information. Third, those "international terrorists" have never really materialized because they really didn't exist. It was all Pentagon propaganda to help grease the skids for war. All now disproven, of course, by a Pentagon that was forced to come clean.

And America’s military, so adept at bringing down a dictator, was unprepared for the “small war” that would follow: terrorist attacks on innocent Iraqis that the “international community” would blame not on the perpetrators - but on America.

Like most military strategists of the late 20th century, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld envisioned wars of the 21st century as akin to computer games. Advanced technology, more than blood and sweat, was supposed to be decisive. And in a place like Iraq, it was believed, the U.S. “footprint” should be as light as possible because close proximity to American soldiers would surely incite the natives to violence.

It's nice that May realizes the only way to get through this column is to throw Rumsfeld under the bus. But where does he talk about Feith, Wolfowitz and all of the other neocon chickenhawks who never served in the military or in combat? Where does he admit that a cabal of incompetent sons of bitches smashed our military on the rock of and Iraqi insurgency? Where does he talk about Richard Perle and Bill Kristol, who opined that the Sunni and Shia were secular and have always gotten along? All of the assembled thinkers on the right were WRONG. Utterly and completely. You don't get something this wrong very often. And they were as wrong as possible. And that doesn't matter?

The result of so many errors and misjudgments was catastrophic. Three years after the liberation of Iraq from Saddam, much of the country had been taken over by al-Qaeda. Other areas were under the sway of Iranian proxies, in chaos, or close to civil war.

Absolutely, totally and completely WRONG: al Qaeda in Iraq is a loosely affiliated organization that was created to engage the Americans in Iraq. It is not the same "al Qaeda" that hit us on 9/11 or in Africa. And it has NEVER been responsible for more than 10% of the attacks on the US. Our main opponents are Sunni insurgents and Shia militiamen.

Iraq’s military had been disbanded by the American envoy, L. Paul Bremer. America’s forces were cooped up in heavily guarded Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) waiting for actionable intelligence that seldom arrived. When it did, they would drive their vehicles to battle down roads their enemies had lined with bombs.

Finally, after the 2006 election rebuke to President Bush, a new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, was assigned to the Pentagon, and a new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, was deployed to the field of battle. American forces set out to liberate Iraq - for a second time.

Bremer had nothing to do with the "strategy" of disbanding the army or cooping up troops in bases. That was all Rumsfeld, Myers, Franks, Abizaid, Sanchez and Casey. They made the calls. And it was the Pentagon hacks like Feith and Wolfowitz who were the civilian controlling authorities that forced these policies onto the backs of the military commanders. Bremer was a stooge, nothing more. He didn't make a single decision that didn't have the stamp of approval from Washington DC. And it was those incompetent idealogues that staffed Bremer's CPA with young Republicans who didn't have a fucking clue as to what they were doing.

There have been dozens of generals who have fought in Iraq. And out of that group, Petraeus was a division commander far down the line who came back to Iraq to "train" the Iraqi police. And he failed at that. So after dismal failures and a wave of retirements from the men who fought in Iraq during the first two years, all they had left was Petraeus.

The Petraeus strategy was nothing if not counterintuitive: He gave the enemy more targets and assigned them to more vulnerable positions - outside the well-guarded FOBs and in the shadowy streets. But once the Iraqis understood why the Americans were there - to defend them from terrorists - they provided a wealth of intelligence. Before long, Americans and Iraqis were fighting side by side against their common Islamist enemies.

That was historic. It should have been big news. But the media were not much interested. As one well-known reporter told me: “It doesn’t matter.” The important action, he said, was taking place not in Baghdad but in Washington, where politicians were reading the polls and finding Americans discouraged and ready to cut their losses.

No, they weren't fighting "side by side" and they certainly won't ever again get that opportunity again--thanks to the fact that we've failed to pay the Sunnis their ten dollars a day. Too many of the Iraqis that have tried to fight alongside US troops have turned their weapons on our troops. Too many of them are militiamen in disguise. And far too many of them cannot organize themselves into units and sustain the fight for themselves. How many Iraqi battalions can stand up and fight on their own? We cannot know that number until it is briefed to us next month, if anyone remembers to ask at all. But for three years, one a handful of Iraqi battalions have ever reached that status and the number has actually declined.

What’s more, such groups as MoveOn.org - heavily invested in an American defeat they could blame on Bush, Cheney, and the “neo-cons” - had a well-funded plan, “Iraq Summer,” that was to make it politically untenable for members of Congress to continue to support the Iraq mission.

MoveOn.org doesn't have that kind of clout. Far more powerful was the group called the American voter that threw Republicans out of office. If the American people are savvy, they'll figure out that the only way to end the war--which they have wanted to do in overwhelming numbers--is to keep throwing Republicans out of office AND to elect better Democrats, like Donna Edwards. No question--Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid should pack it in and make way for new blood after just one year of setbacks and failures. But you cannot argue that a heretofore unheard of obstructionist Republican minority has mortgaged its own future by covering the President's ass.

What this perspective failed to take into account: the startlingly rapid progress that Petraeus and his troops would make against al-Qaeda and the Iranian backed militias. That was coupled with a battle of ideas on the home front: Tenacious pro-mission groups - e.g. Vets for Freedom, Families United, the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Move America Forward, Freedom’s Watch - formed a loose but effective coalition that matched MoveOn.org congressional contact for congressional contact, and told the stories most reporters would not.

One can say the invasion of Iraq was unwise. Before committing troops to battle, a president should have a realistic understanding of what can be achieved, in what time frame, and at what cost. One can say the occupation of Iraq was bungled.

Unwise? Try "the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of the United States of America." And that loose but INeffective coalition couldn't for air out of a paper bag. There is no pro-war movement or anti-war movement in this country. There are just a few thousand cranks on one side acting out their childish fantasies, in the face of a liberal anti-war group that organizes online as opposed to the streets of Washington DC.

What one can not say is that regime change in Iraq was unjustified: Not if you know Saddam’s record, his clearly stated intentions, and his ties to international terrorists - including, as a new Pentagon report reveals, a group headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s second-in-command.

Bullshit. There was no link between Iraq and al Qaeda. Already disproven, move along, nothing to see here. Just another wingnut dementia episode. Thanks for trying.

Nor can one say that the outcome in Iraq - the heart of the Muslim Middle East - will be inconsequential to the outcome of the wider war being waged by militant, supremacist Islamist movements intent on nothing less than the destruction of America and the West.

Really? Talk about a wingnut fantasy of Lord of the Rings proportions. And how are they going to destroy us? By invading America with their ten million man army of tanks and planes? With their non-existent nuclear weapons?

They don't have to try and destroy us. Thanks to wingnuts like Cliff May, our own government has already done more damage to the US than the Islamic militants ever could.