Day: January 9, 2007

Sen. Johnson Upgraded to ‘Fair’ Condition

Jon Ponder

Forbes.com:

Sen. Tim Johnson’s condition has been upgraded from critical to fair, four weeks after he was hospitalized for a brain hemorrhage, his office said Tuesday.

The South Dakota Democrat, who was rushed to the hospital on Dec. 13 and underwent emergency surgery, remains in intensive care, said his spokeswoman, Julianne Fisher.

“The senator continues to make progress,” Fisher said. “The next step would be rehabilitation and we hope that would happen within the week.”

Words to Live by in 2007

Buck Banks

Fab vocab: It’s a new year. We need some new words to deal with it. Advertising Age’s Media Guy, Simon Dumenco, offers some terms for our times.

VIRAL VIDIOT: Anybody who thinks she or he can be the next Lonelygirl15.

GOOGLE EARTH: An animated mapping service from Google. Also: what the planet Earth will be renamed circa 2009 when Google executives look at their cash balance sheet and decide to make an impulse real-estate buy.

HUFFINGTON PEST: Common household pest that’s attracted to warm, bright places, such as computers and TV studios.

WIKI: Hawaiian for “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” See also: user-generated content.

FIREFOXY: What most bloggers aren’t. Sample usage: “Is Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing, like, the only Firefoxy blogger in the world?”

ZUNE: Microsoft’s new music player. Also [slang]: a poseur; a wannabe. Usage: “Dude, you look like such a Zune in that shirt.”

VISTA: Microsoft’s new operating system. Also: a scenic view populated with bugs and security holes.

MASH-UP: When one thing that’s not good enough on its own joins up with another thing that’s not good enough on its own — and they, like, make out and have babies and stuff. Usage: “Zune should think about doing a mash-up with the new Adam Sandler movie.”

MICROSOFT: What Bill Gates feels in his pants when he thinks about Sergey Brin, Larry Page and/or Steve Jobs.

Read the entire list here.

Bush: Lamest of the Lame Ducks Limps Toward Irrelevance

Buck Banks

Lonely at the bottom of the top: As the Democrats enjoy their newfound ascendancy in the Congress, the president is finding less and less to enjoy in the waning years of his second term. Indeed, if he wasn’t such an arrogant and ignorant bastard, one could almost be tempted to feel a little bit sorry for him. Congressional Quarterly’s Craig Crawford offers a snapshot of the Bush administration in decline.

With a new Congress that’s run by Democrats, a restive public that’s pining for change and a government in Iraq that’s descending into chaos, the way forward in Washington might not include George W. Bush.

It seems the president is positioning himself as just another spectator on the outskirts of power — firing off letters to the editor. Perhaps he should start his own blog.

Despite the power he has to ramp up his use of the veto, and his tenacious hold on his powers as commander in chief, Bush faces a tough challenge to remain relevant in the waning 24 months of his presidency. Indeed, if not for his war-making clout, this president might be the lamest lame duck ever.

There was something almost sad about Bush putting his own name on an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal that laid out his legislative agenda on the eve of the formal Democratic takeover of Capitol Hill. Clearly gone are the days when Vice President Dick Cheney could use a private meeting with Republican lawmakers to set the congressional priorities list. Now, it seems, the president is positioning himself as just another spectator on the outskirts of power — firing off letters to the editor. Perhaps he should start his own blog.

Democrats are making the most of returning to power at the Capitol after a dozen years on the outs. Armed with a midterm election mandate widely seen as a repudiation of Bush, they are talking tough about dealing with the White House. For symbolic starters, Cheney was compelled to give up his ornate office just off the House floor to Charles B. Rangel, the New York Democrat who is now chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

As the clock ticks past the three-quarters mark on the Bush presidency, it is the new, 110th Congress and its crop of 65 new faces that will appear the fresher and more promising, garnering the lion’s share of news media attention — while administration figures come across more and more as yesterday’s news.

In response to the political test posed by that dynamic, Bush is calling for bipartisanship. Funny how the losing side in an election almost always ends up being the one to call for magnanimity. After 12 years of being made almost invisible, especially in the House, Democrats appear in no mood to do anything but pay lip service to the current calls for collaboration. Although careful not to say so publicly, congressional Democrats are champing at the bit for payback. Evicting Cheney from his office was just the beginning.
[…]

Poll: GOP in Military Drops below Half

Jon Ponder

President Bush is having a disastrous effect on his party, including separating it from one of its more reliable constituencies:

The Military Times released its annual poll of active-duty service members, and the results showed something virtually unprecedented: a one-year decline of 10 percentage points in the number of military personnel identifying themselves as Republicans. In the 2004 poll, the percentage of military respondents who characterized themselves as Republicans stood at 60 percent. By the end of 2005, that had dropped to 56 percent. And by the end of 2006, the percentage of military Republicans plummeted to 46 percent.

The drop in Republican Party identification among active-duty personnel is a sharp reversal of a 30-year trend toward the “Republicanization” of the U.S. military, and it could mark a sea change in the nature of the military — and the nature of public debates about national security issues.

The de-Republicanization of the military as a result of Bush’s incompetent leadership is actually a benefit to the nation. It is dangerous for our military to be under the control of a political party, especially one that is run by delusional demagogues.

After Botched Execution, Saddam Becomes a Sunni Martyr

Jon Ponder
Bush’s incompetence has turned Saddam Hussein into the last thing we wanted him to be: a martyr for Iraq’s Sunni minority.

What has Pres. Bush accomplished in Iraq? Until last week he had one notch on his holster: The capture and trial of Saddam Hussein. Now, in the wake of the former dictator’s botched execution, even the capture of Saddam has turned into a fiasco.

After grainy cell-phone video of the dictator’s final moments was released, the world sees his death as a lynching by the Shia-controlled Iraqi government — and it has turned Saddam into the last thing we wanted him to be: a martyr for Iraq’s Sunni minority.

Saddam’s martyrdom will undoubtedly grow over the next weeks and months now that a new video showing the condition of the dicator’s corpse immediately after his death has been released:

The 27-second video was posted on an Iraqi news Web site that is known to support Saddam’s outlawed Baath Party.

“A new film of the late immortal martyr, President Saddam Hussein,” the web site said in a headline over a link to the video.

The footage is gruesome:

The second clandestine video from Saddam Hussein’s execution appeared on the Internet Tuesday, showing the deposed Iraqi leader’s corpse, with a gaping neck wound, after his hanging.

The video appeared to have been taken with a camera phone, like the graphic video of the hanging which showed guards taunting Saddam in the final moments of his life.

The footage pans up the shrouded body of the former leader from the feet. It apparently was taken shortly after Saddam was executed and placed on a gurney. He was hanged shortly before dawn on Dec. 30.

As the panning shot reaches the head region, the white shroud is pulled back and reveals Saddam’s head and neck.

His head is unnaturally twisted at a 90 degree angle to his right. It shows a gaping bloody wound, circular in shape, about an inch below his jaw line on the left side of his neck. His left cheek is marked with red blotches, and there is blood on the shroud where it covered his head.

In the era of George Bush, we ask a lot of what-ifs: What if he’d inspired courage among Americans after 9/11 instead of fear. What if he’d sent the military into New Orleans in the first hours after Katrina. What if he’d kept us out of the Iraq quagmire instead of creating it.

Now we have another one: What if Saddam Hussein had been sent to the Hague for his war crimes trial, as other brutal dictators have been. Or, at the very least, what if Saddam had been executed in private, under tightly controlled circumstances — you know, the way we kill criminals in the United States.